Ravensburger echoes

This app crashes when you select to solve a chapter and use the camera to select the images. Works fine when you type it in though.

The new Ravensburger Echoes series, a publisher better known for its high quality puzzles, released an audio book board/app game. Purpose of the game is to sort audio segments together to a coherent story. The free app co-exists with the Echoes card games that are about $10 per title. The game features 24 cards, and each card has an audio segment attached, that can be played with the app. The audio segment might be just a noise, a voice, background action, or a conversation. 6 of the cards serve as chapter markers. The remaining Item cards, are sorted in-order towards the chapters, three for each chapter. The app tells whether the cards are sorted to the correct chapter or whether they are in order. All it takes to play a card, is to hold the camera over the card. The image recognition works flawless on the iPhone or iPad. After all Item cards are sorted towards chapters, the chapters are sorted among each other. The whole story can be played after that. The game can be played alone or with multiple players. The practical limit of players is the number of people who feasibly are able to work together on the solution. The app can be concurrently used on multiple devices so that multiple players can play segments concurrently, one app will be the master to solve the puzzle. The quality of the audio segments is excellent, comparable to many high quality audio book plays. What I personally liked most about the game is that it can play back in various languages. Currently, English, French, German, and Czech are supported. (Another app that does this is Kosmos’ Exit series.) Each title can be only played once by the same set of players, because the players may remember the solution. However, the game can be passed on after that. The price appears fair.

I haven’t actually gotten through gameplay beyond the intro music and the first chapter’s beginning prologue. I mostly wanted to give folks a heads up that you NEED to take your phone off its silent mode setting or you won’t hear the game’s audio. I saw the only other reviewer gave 1 star because they couldn’t hear any sound and I don’t want anyone else to feel like they just flat-out wasted their money. Seems like the game will be neat and spooky though, so excellent timing for Halloween.