Sonar: Dark Maze

Sonar is a maze game you play mostly with your ears. The maze is pitch dark. You can't see the walls, you can't see the exit, and you can't see the thing walking toward you. You have one tool: a sonar ping. Press the button and a wave rolls out from you, lights the corridors for a moment, and dies. Until the next ping, that picture is everything you know. That makes it a blind maze more than a running game — a puzzle game you solve with your ears instead of your eyes. The exit gives itself away with sound. It signals at a steady rhythm, and that sound carries much further than its light. Long before you see it, you can hear whether you're getting closer. Distance is measured through the corridors, not as the crow flies: with a wall between you, the exit sounds far away even when it's a few steps off. Find the exit by walking toward the sound that grows. Your ping cuts both ways. The moment your wave touches an enemy, it notices you and comes. The wave ignores walls, so something in the next corridor sees it too. Every ping is information and a confession at the same time. Most players settle into flash and dash: one ping, memorise the corridor, run, stay evasive, and ping again only when the map in your head runs out. Five kinds of things live in the dark: - Hunter: waits in place with a slow, pulsing light. Comes for you if it sees you or your ping reaches it. - Patrol: walks its corridor end to end. Its light pulses faster but smaller. - Tower: charges its light and fires a ring of its own. If the ring touches you, the tower and the hunters around it all come. Hit the ring with your own ping and it breaks. - Silent Hunter: almost no light, no sound, moving like a ghost. Ignores your ping. Only comes if it sees you. - Mimic: glows like the exit and sounds like the exit. But its colour leans a little green, its rhythm stutters, its voice is a bit lower. A careful ear can tell. One promise: if you don't ping, every level has at least one path to the exit that stays clear of every enemy. Each maze is built around that rule. If you can find it. Level 1 is a small maze with a single hunter that's slower than you. By level 50 the maze is 30x30 rooms, there are 20 enemies, and all of them are faster than you. From 51 on it's 24 enemies at that same difficulty, and the levels never run out. Every level is a freshly generated dungeon maze, so no two runs share a layout. Headphones make a real difference. The 3D audio puts every sound where it belongs: something on your left sounds like it's on your left, and the exit rises as the walk gets shorter. There's no tutorial screen. The first levels teach you. This is not a dark horror game with jump scares. It's quieter than that: a dark dungeon, a held breath, and the sound of something that has noticed you. The darkness does the work. In short: - A dark maze built around 3D audio and brief flashes of light - An audio game: the exit, the enemies and the walls all have a voice - Five enemy types that each behave differently - Procedurally generated mazes, a new one every level - Difficulty ramps across 50 levels, then keeps going without a limit - An offline game, playable with no connection - Your progress follows your Google Play Games account across devices - Free, contains ads If you came looking for an escape game in the dark, a darkness game with no map, or an escape room where someone turned the lights off, this is that. Put headphones on and turn the lights off.