‎Shadows of The Circuit

With all due respect to the work of this developer, in my opinion the application is not worth it’s cost.
Specifically, although I take great pride to my hearing ability as do most folks like me, I can’t discern where the sound is coming from when playing this game. There is no such thing as 3D audio here, like in other games such as audio wizards, fair etc..

And I think @Panais could have a beginning of an explanation.

I mean in my opinion the game is unplayable in its current state. Stay away for the time being.

I've asked for a refund and have just gotten my money back.

I had this game on my iPhone a few days ago. Tried playing it and literally got nowhere. from my own experience, I couldn't get it to work with VoiceOver.

Hello, apologies for the late response. I just noticed this thread.

- Ensure you are using a headset as the game uses 3D spatial audio and might be tricky if you don't have a headset
- The game works seamlessly with VoiceOver, I haven't had anyone complain about that , did you have issues with navigating the menus
- You can use the practice mode to understand navigating the sectors.

I can confirm the game uses full 3D spatial audio, this can be easily noticeable from the main menu background music, you should hear the audio source moving 360 degrees around you.

As regards navigating the game, it is an exploration game and requires you to move around and find the chest, when you use the Echo Locator you should distinctly hear from which direction the audio cues are coming from, again you really need an headset for this as you might not be able to solely rely on hearing directional cues. The last audio cue you hear, which is repeated 4 times is the location of the Chest which is what you need to find while avoiding the drones.
You can use the game summary to get info about which direction you are facing, that should also help with navigation.

Apologies for the late reply. Just noticed this thread.

I have uploaded a short gameplay video here.
https://youtu.be/UCuKM7Ob1mI

Shadows of The Circuit is a stealth game that needs exploration, avoidance, mastering and predicting sound cues relative to your current position.
Please read the Intel notes in the main menu, Gestures explain navigation and some other accessibility only gestures that should come in handy, Mission Briefing would help you understand what to do, significant items are also explained in the intel menu and you can click on "Sound" which will play the corresponding audio cue that those items make in the game.
For example if you goto Intel, and swipe to the Drone section, it explains drones, how drones behave, how to avoid detection and suggestions on counter measures. Also if you swipe to its "Sound" and click that, you will hear an audio cue which is the same audio cue that drones will make when you use the "Echo Locator" upgrade while playing.

We aim to deliver standard gaming experience without nerfing the difficulty, the goal is to make it accessible and still deliver immersive feeling, your feedbacks will ensure this. So if you have any feedback on the gameplay or navigation, feel free to share them or join our Discord community. https://discord.gg/RUG2dRpKuZ

The game is also being shared to sighted gamers forums as it features complete visual experience, this particular thread must have slipped through, which made the response to this post late.

We hope you enjoy exploring The Circuit.

I really appreciate you taking the time and providing the link to the gameplay video. This made things more clear for me, and I was able to clear 2 sectors. I know I will get better over time. I think this is going to be a really fun game.

I tried both the IOS and PC versions. I found the IOS version a little harder to control consistently with touch gestures, and found the PC version a little easier, both due to keyboard controls and using a better headset I use with my PC. The game is currently available through Itch.io for PC, and I released a video for that version yesterday on the IllegallySighted YouTube channel. There are still some things that could be more clear, but I hope my video helps players and the developer.

First let me start by stating that the only experience that I have with this game is from passively listening to the two videos that I came across so far, with one of them being during the development process.

I generally like the concept of the game, but like I said in one of my comments to the first video that I listened, I do think that the audio is strongly lacking in terms of immersion, being only a little better than the panned stereo audio in DOOM, and that's only because DOOM played 8-bit PCM and its polyphony was limited to 8 voices in the original MS-DOS version. While that was definitely a high-end audio experience, since very few people even had sound cards in 1994 so the only thing we could hope for were some beeps with some games actually hacking the hardware to produce very low quality PCM through the PC speaker, I find that totally unacceptable in 2026.

Today's platforms themselves already provide true spatial audio functionality with all the complex audio engineering abstracted away and ready to be used, among many other features like head position tracking on supported headphones, that can easily make a virtual environment truly immersive. Imagine using AirPods, or any other kind of compatible device, to control the game not by performing panning gestures on a touchscreen but by just turning around standing in a room or just sitting on an office chair. Now imagine integrating even more functionality using a second device, such as the Siri Remote on Apple TV, just targeting wearables like the Apple Watch, or at the very least using the accelerometer and gyroscope on iPhone, so that certain physical gestures could actually trigger intuitive actions in the virtual world. These are the kinds of ideas that can make a game truly stand out in terms of immersion, and even have some chance of getting blessed with free advertisement from Apple for promoting their products, which I would explore myself if I was feeling like making games for a living. However since I'm not greedy, since my interest is in a different field, since I don't have enough time in just one life to realize anything even remotely close to my full potential, and since even if I was to actually develop games for a living I would be implementing other ideas that go far beyond this simple stuff, I don't mind sharing any of this, and am even making myself available to produce sample code if there's interest, as I also did in one of my replies to the first video that I listened, because as I said none of this is exactly rocket surgery.