Slipstream

Main menu

Everything in this game can be played with the screen off. If this is your first visit, start with the sound tour — it teaches you the cues in about fifteen minutes.

Storage: checking

Choose a car

Difficulty is about how much the vehicle tells you, not just how fast it is. The Pico talks constantly; the Zenith barely says a word. Choosing one takes you to the circuits. Every vehicle has a button to hear it first.

Choose a circuit

Level one is two straights and two open curves. Level five is ice, or rain, or both hands full for the whole lap. Choosing a track takes you to the race settings.

Race settings

Race

Message log

Paused

The race is held exactly where it is. Nothing is lost.

This is an ordinary page, so browse it however you normally would. Escape goes straight back to the race.

Result

Race other people

Two ways to do this. Shared rooms need no server at all and update about once a second, which is enough because the cars are dead-reckoned in between. Your own server gives real-time racing — there is a small relay in the download that you can run anywhere.

Times and ghosts

A ghost is a recorded lap replayed beside you. It is placed in 3D exactly like a live rival, so you hear where you are losing time rather than reading it afterwards.

Sound tour

Each item runs the real audio engine, not a recording of it. Start with the mix check and set your sliders there.

Settings

The mix matters more here than in most games, because the mix is the interface. Push up whichever channel you are navigating by.

How to play

You are driving a track you cannot see. Five things tell you where you are: the engine note, the tyres, the brakes, the corner cues, and the world going past.

Driving

A gamepad works too: left stick steers, right trigger accelerates, left trigger brakes, A is the handbrake, X is the horn, and the shoulder buttons change gear.

Status keys

Cues, and switching them off

Reading the road

Corner cues pip towards the next corner. They are panned to the side it turns, they get faster as it arrives, and their pitch tells you about your braking: steady means you are on the curve, rising and hard means you are carrying too much speed. A single high tick marks the apex.

The edge beacon is silent while you are near the middle of the road, then chimes towards the side you are drifting to, with the pitch and the rate both climbing as the edge nears. The kerb has its own falling two-note figure an octave down. After that comes grass, gravel, sand or ice, and each sounds completely different, which is the point.

The drive selector sits on I and works like a real one. Neutral lets the engine rev freely, which is how you check an engine you cannot see. Reverse is refused above walking pace and capped at 27 km/h, and the working vehicles have a reversing alarm. Sport appears only where the gearbox could actually offer it, and holds gears to the limiter. K is separate: it decides whether you or the car chooses the gears.

The handbrake on H locks the rear wheels and nothing else. Locked tyres brake worse than rolling ones, so it will not stop you faster than the pedal, and it is not meant to. It is for rotating the car into a slow corner, and how far it rotates depends on how much lock you have on. The lever clicks so you always know its state.

The brakes talk too. Pad squeal is nearly a musical note, and its pitch falls with the discs, so the descent tells you how much speed you have actually scrubbed rather than making you infer it from the engine. It is deliberately tonal so it is never confused with the broadband hiss of a sliding tyre. Close to locking, a judder comes in underneath it. Every vehicle sounds different here, and not by hand: pad resonance falls as the disc grows, the rumble grows with the mass being stopped, and the friction material decides how tonal it is. Carbon on the prototype sings up near 4 kHz; the van's drums groan at 300; the bus has air brakes that hiss on release.

On a phone or tablet

Set How you drive to touch in Settings, then choose who does the talking.

With VoiceOver or TalkBack on, driving uses on-screen buttons. Double tap and hold accelerate, brake or a steering button to keep it pressed. Everything else is a single button: horn, gear changes, drive selector, and five status buttons.

With them off, the app speaks for itself and takes the whole screen. Hold the phone in landscape. Your left thumb steers and your right thumb is the pedals: push up for throttle, pull down to brake. Wherever you first put a thumb becomes the centre, so you never have to find a fixed spot on a piece of glass you cannot see. In the menus, swipe right and left to move, double tap to choose, swipe up and down to change a value, and two-finger tap to stop it talking, which is deliberately the same as VoiceOver.

When it goes wrong

Contact is graded by how fast you are travelling into the barrier, not by your speed. Brushing a wall almost parallel at 200 is a scrape; arriving at a barrier at 60 pointing straight at it is an accident. A scrape costs paint and a little time. A heavy hit spins you and takes a second or so to gather up. A real crash stops you, and marshals put you back on the road after a few seconds, counted down aloud. You are never stranded, and R always cuts the wait short.

Damage does not just make you slower. A punctured tyre thumps once per wheel revolution, bent bodywork adds wind roar, and a damaged engine misfires, so your rev reading stops being trustworthy. All three are still speed cues; they are simply worse ones. Status key 7 tells you what is broken and which end of the car is sliding.

A car stopped ahead is called as a local yellow, with a pip panned to where it is sitting, so you hear it coming instead of finding it.

Pace notes are rally-style. Lower numbers are tighter: hairpin, one, two, three, four, five, six. "Left four, into right two long" means an easy left, then almost immediately a tight, long right.

Rivals are placed in real 3D. On headphones you can hear a car sitting on your inside line, and you can hear the moment it clears your front wing. Nothing announces it — that is the game.

The slipstream is audible as a drop in wind noise when you tuck in behind someone. Stay in it down the straight, then pull out.

Learning a circuit

Landmarks sit at fixed points and are placed in 3D like everything else. On Kranji Hills the waterfall is always just before the second hairpin. On Riverside the tunnel changes the voice of the whole car for four hundred metres. Once you know a track by its landmarks you can stop relying on the cues, and that is where the lap time is.