Thoughts of a Dragon

A collection of cool random stuff

Audio Gaming in Linux

January 26, 2021 — Billy

One of the first things new Linux users often ask is “What games are available?” There is no shortage of games, both open and closed source, that run in Linux. For a long time though, there was a large gap. There were nearly no games for blind people.

Fortunately, now, that is changing. More and more audio games are supporting the Linux operating system. Here are some of the available games with a short description. Note that because of multiple package managers across multiple distributions, installation instructions are not included. Please refer to your distributions documentation, or the documentation for the game itself to get things up and running.

This article covers games for the graphical user interface, GUI. The command line, or CLI has always had a lot of games that are completely accessible to blind players. They will be covered in a separate article.


2MB Games

The games to date are Horseshoes and MineRacer. In Horseshoes, you play the classic game of throwing a horseshoe at a goal. The game features computer opponents, player verses player, and computer verses computer. There are a few difficulty level options so the challenge of the game can be adjusted to meet your needs.

MineRacer is a fast paced race through a mine filled with dangers like stalactites which you must avoid by ducking beneath them, and pits that require jumping. Collect coins along the way to increase your score.

Be the Wumpus

Some of you may remember, or still play the game Wumpus available in BSD Games. In this version, the hunters have become the hunted. From its Sourceforge page:

You are a wumpus, a blind, cave dwelling creature who subsists on meals of unlucky cave wanderers.

Code Dungeon

From its itch.io page:

Code Dungeon is a short atmospheric dungeon crawler hack-n-slash game where you fight your way up a tower through hordes of enemies.

unfortunately when I tried the Linux version I could not get it to work. I assume that development is on going and it will work as expected soon.

Onslaught

Onslaught has the feel of a modernized Space Invaders or Asteroids style game. From it’s itch.io page:

Frag asteroids and blast aliens in this fast-paced audio-only space shooter.

The download for Linux is an appimage, so to launch it just open the downloaded file.

soundStrider

From it’s itch.io page:

soundStrider is a psychedelic exploration game, walking simulator, music generator, and relaxation tool.

When you launch the game, you will need to put orca in focus mode to interact with it. For reference, this is numpad insert+a in desktop layout or capslock+a in laptop mode.

Storm Games

Storm Games offers a couple of stand-alone GUI based games called Monkey Spank, a Beavis and Butthead themed Bop It style game and Numnastics, a puzzle game. In Monkey Spank, you have to press the arrows in the direction of the sound, and if you are quick enough, you can press space when Butthead taunts you to “kick him in the nads!”

Numnastics is a randomly ordered set of numbers which you have to arrange from 1 to 9 in order. You can press enter on a number and it as well as all the numbers to the right of it will be reversed. Although the game contains numbers, it is not a math skill game but requires logic to put the numbers in order using only the ability to reverse parts of the list.

Storm Games also offers the Audiogame Manager which makes it easy to play your favorite Windows based games in Linux using Wine. There is more information on the Storm Games website.

I plan on keeping this article growing. As I learn about more games I will add them here, so if you don’t see anything you are interested in keep checking back. If you know of something that should be here please get in touch and I will be happy to add it.

Composed to the sound of Archspire - Relentless Mutation - A Dark Horizontal

Tags: gaming, linux