Flickers is a 2D platformer, but not in the traditional sense. You play as a green sphere hopping between floating sparks of light in a twilit world (the titular Flickers) on your long journey to the moon. The game’s abstract take on storytelling–relying on its painterly backdrops, dynamic audio, and gameplay rather than any dialogue–manages to wring emotional depth out of a very unconventional kind of “narrative.”
Given Flickers’ abstract premise and visuals, the student team put extra care and attention into the game’s audio, knowing it would be doing a lot of the narrative lifting. The score tracks closely to the player’s movement throughout the game, shifting as they progress through levels, foregrounding and backgrounding melodies and textures to match the shifting mood, and dropping out completely at dramatic moments.
