Brain Pipe
Developer: Digital Eel
Nomination: Excellence in Audio
Platform: Windows (Free demo, $15 full version available)
Game Website
Description: A first-person perspective game where you navigate through a curvy pipe avoiding bad things and picking up good things.

Adam’s Thoughts:
Brain Pipe is up for the sound award, and you can tell. Racing through the eponymous pipe surrounds you with a chaotic bubbling that fits the psychadelic landscape while keeping you apprised of upcoming and passing obstacles. It’s a little more abstract than Audiosurf, and a little less transparent than Rez, but it carries on that spirit of fusing sound and motion.

The obstacle-avoidance gameplay isn’t anything new, but it starts fast and ratchets up to blindingly fast. The only goal is to survive and collect more points than the next player on the list, so it has that arcade feel. Don’t be surprised if your play sessions are short and demanding, but it’s a good game if you’re looking for a flow state that blocks out the world.

Katie’s Thoughts:
While racing though an increasingly complex obstacle course can be fun as long as you’re beating out your friends in the scoreboard, Brain Pipe’s gameplay isn’t fundamentally much different than playing a first person racing game. What makes the game interesting is the fundamental integration of the audio with the gameplay. Each obstacle comes with its own associated noise, which is triggered as you pass it and whose volume is determined by how closely you pass the obstacle. Therefore, as the game puts together basic obstacles to create complex, evil, multi-part obstacles, it creates a complex sound pattern though which you have to navigate. The sounds and background music are also remarkable because they fit so well with the visual and gameplay feel of the game: psychedelic.

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