#In sound mind vinyl records how to#
#In sound mind vinyl records upgrade#

Inside each home will be your next tape which must then be taken back to your office to listen to and complete.ĭesmond can upgrade his stats to an extent. New doors leading to patient’s homes are hidden throughout the starting building and accessing them will require clever use of your items. Each item is absolutely essential to progression, with the first item – the gun – being hidden in the building itself, with everything else being found within a tape. Thankfully, I was only honestly worried about running out of battery in one level, as I constantly had to use my flashlight to keep a monster at bay as I explored.Īs you explore you’ll find a gun followed by a shard of glass which can be used as a makeshift knife to attack enemies, unveil secrets, and to cut your way through obstacles a gas mask to help you survive contaminated rooms a flare gun to clear away particularly strong areas of darkness a shotgun to keep packs of enemies at bay pills which can grant health, lure enemies away, and dispose of chemical spills and a radio which can be used to hack control panels and as a weapon when low on ammo. That said, the game is dark, and purposefully so, forcing you to use the flashlight more than you’d like unless you turn up the game’s brightness to compensate. No worries though, as scattered throughout the rundown building and levels are tons of batteries, ensuring that you are almost never engulfed in total darkness. This is a setting ripe for exploration, allowing each setting to feel distinct, culminating with each patient’s inner demon serving as the level’s boss, while also adding surprising depth to what could have been a routine horror game.ĭesmond begins with little more than a flashlight, which is a battery hog and must be used sparingly. In between each patient he must explore the building in a pseudo-Metroidvania style, using tools found in each tape.

#In sound mind vinyl records how to#

The gist of the story is simple – Desmond is a psychologist in Milton Haven who must find tapes documenting his conversations with his patients and then enter that tape to fight through his patients’ inner demons and free them from their torment, all while figuring out why he is in his current situation and how to escape. He leaves his apartment and heads back to his office, where he places the tape in a tape deck and is instantly transported into the mind of his patient. Inside is a tape bearing the name of one of his patients. He opens it to find – his apartment? But how? His apartment is nowhere near his work. Who locked him in here? How does he escape? Eventually he stumbles upon a lit up door. A mysterious entity is on the other line – berating him, mocking him, tormenting him – but why? As he explores the run down building he finds sarcastic notes, making fun of his situation. The front door is boarded up, and he is unable to leave. Outside, water is rising quickly, already engulfing a few smaller buildings. The building he’s in houses his psychology practice and still looks familiar, but is greatly dilapidated. After all, there's music to be listened to.Desmond Wales is trapped. It's worth bearing in mind the ingenuity at play when you next carefully place the tip of your stylus into the groove of a LP – but don't dwell on it for all that long. So rather than the witchcraft we always sort-of suspected it must be, getting a sound from a vinyl disc turns out to be nothing more than fiendishly clever.

Cartridge signals can be as low as a thousandth of a volt (CD’s output is specified at 2V) so the signal has to be amplified massively before the line-level stage of an amplifier can take over. The result should be a tonally even presentation.Ī phono stage is also an amplifier. If you’ve ever plugged a turntable directly into a line-level input you know you get a very quiet sound – and also one that is thin and bright, with no bass frequencies to speak of.Įvery phono stage has the reverse response built into it – one that boosts bass and flattens treble to exactly the right degree. The curve that governs this equalisation was set by the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) years ago.

What exactly does a phono stage do? The physical limitations of vinyl mean that the original signal has to be altered before it can be recorded – low frequencies are reduced in level and the highs are boosted.