Five minutes with Hollow Lantern, and why sound matters

I first tried Hollow Lantern with the phone speaker on a noisy train and thought it was fine. Then I played it again that night with headphones, and it became a completely different experience — tense, lonely, genuinely affecting.

Mobile games often treat audio as an afterthought, something to mute. Adventure games can't afford that. In Hollow Lantern the distant bells and creaking doors do half the storytelling, hinting at what happened to the town long before any text does.

If you play story-driven mobile games, try this: next time, use headphones and turn the brightness down. It sounds trivial, but it changes how much you let a small screen pull you in. A lot of indie developers are putting real craft into sound, and it deserves to be heard.