Sound/music required to solve?

[H2G]

Does this game require listening to the music or sounds to solve the puzzle?

I’d like to know if this is suitable for hearing impaired and deaf as I’m hearing impaired myself, and I have yet to decide whether to get this game. I can see that it has subtitles though but just wanted to make sure :)

[Korgor]

For the great majority yes, it would be suitable - there is the odd bit where it might help to know someone sounds Welsh or something, but I wouldn't say it was essential

[glitterbear]

You should be able to solve everything without hearing the audio. The transcripts of what's being said are often more useful, because they mark certain lines with an "X" to tell you the identity of at least one speaker. (I don't want to spoil anything at all, but if you're okay with an extremely minor interface spoiler: "X" denotes the person who's dying in that scene.)

I'm not d/Deaf or hard of hearing myself, but I'm autistic, and that affects my ear -> brain connections. What this means in the context of the game is that:

1) I hear things, but they don't stay in my brain for longer than 2 seconds. During the scene might be like "yeah, he sounds Irish" but after that? It's gone, unless I wrote it down (and I didn't bother to write down accents at all).

2) I can't remember what people sounded like from another scene. So if it's not obvious from the scene itself who's talking, then I have no idea.

I didn't have a problem solving anything despite that.

I think the main issue would be that different speakers aren't indicated visually, apart from the one case I mentioned earlier. I may not be able to remember people from scene to scene, but I can still tell within the scene that Person 1 is speaking this line, and Person 2 is speaking that line, and Person 3 is speaking the other line.

The other things that could matter somewhat are the direction/distance of voices, the speaker's tone of voice, the age or sex of the speaker, etc.

I can't remember any situations where the lack of those things would make the puzzle impossible to solve, but I could see it getting confusing. Then again, it might depend on what you're used to. I'm used to hearing those cues in everyday life, so it would be weird if I couldn't hear them in the game. I don't know your level of hearing impairment, but if those auditory cues aren't really part of the way you interact with the world to begin with, it might not be as confusing for you as it would be for me?

The most glaring omission is the lack of subtitles for non-verbal sounds, like [screaming], [sound of gunshot], and so on. Again, this won't affect your ability to solve the puzzles, that I know of. But there are these moments when the screen is just blank, and I'm hearing [sound of explosion], [grunting], [screaming], [crashing noise], and thinking that this really doesn't seem fair to d/Deaf/HoH players.

I really should go suggest that those captions be added, at least as an optional setting.

The visuals of the scene will be more than enough for you to tell what happened - in fact, that's the point. The audio is played before we see the visuals, because the audio is from the last few seconds before the freeze-frame that we get to explore. But the audio builds suspense, because we're sitting there like "... uh... what even is that noise???" and imagining what kind of crazy stuff is going on that we didn't get to see yet (and won't ever get to see in motion).

Whether or not that's a dealbreaker is obviously up to you. I can't think of any cases offhand where it's necessary or even that helpful for solving the puzzle (I'm planning on writing an analysis of the logic behind every answer, and I'm going to keep track of whether or not auditory clues not in subtitles are a part of that). But as a hearing person, I really enjoyed those moments. Well, if "enjoyed" is the right word for things like [person vomiting] or [stabbing sound] followed by [gurgling noise], lol.

I know it's extremely rude to just tell people that they "don't need" to hear something, so that's why I'm trying to explain in detail what you might be missing, even if it doesn't affect the puzzle itself. Plus if you do have hearing aids or a CI, I figure you'd want to know if there's any reason to bother using them with the game.

Feel free to ask me for clarification, or about anything else that I may not have thought of.