Objective
Every floor has voice recorders with a blinking red light. Hold E to take one. Each recorder plays a few seconds of what the last crew found. When you have them all, call the lift, wait for it, and walk in.
- B1 · Service Corridor (easy): 3 recorders, most lamps still on, one slow Listener.
- B2 · Pump Hall: 4 recorders, water on the floor, flickering lamps, a faster Listener.
- B3 · The Sump (very hard): 5 recorders, no lamps at all, two Listeners.
Three stars on a floor: get out, never get hunted, and beat the par time.
Controls
- WASD: walk. Mouse: look (click the game to lock the mouse).
- Shift: run. Loud. Uses your breath.
- C: crouch on or off. Slow and silent.
- F: torch. Q: night mode.
- G: throw a bolt. Hold E: take a recorder, call the lift.
- P / Esc: pause. Graphics can be changed there.
- Touch: left thumb moves, drag on the right to look, and use the buttons.
The Listener
- It is blind. Your torch is safe. It can walk past you while you stand in the light.
- It hears. Running carries a long way. Walking is heard up close. Crouching and standing still make no sound.
- You can't see it with your eyes or your torch. It only shows on night mode (Q).
- Night mode whines. It hears that too, so take short looks. The charge refills while it is off.
- It goes to the last sound. If it is coming for you, make a sound somewhere else, then move away quietly.
- If it bumps into you, it has you. Don't stand in the middle of a corridor.
Reading the camera
- SIGNAL: more bars and faster beeps mean the next recorder is close. It is stronger when you face the right way. After the last recorder it points at the lift.
- NOISE: SILENT, WALKING or LOUD. That is what it can hear right now.
- Static and tearing: the picture breaks up when a Listener is near. The worse it gets, the closer it is.
- Clicking: it clicks to hear the echo. Slow clicks, it is wandering. Fast clicks, it heard something.
Useful strategy
- Walk when the picture is clean. Crouch as soon as you see static.
- Taking a recorder makes a loud click. Grab it, then leave the room.
- You get three or four bolts a floor. Throw one down a side corridor before you cross a room it is standing in.
- The lift is the loudest thing in the building. Call it, back off around a corner, and wait for the ding.
- Green LIFT signs and yellow floor arrows point the way to the lift.
- On B3, keep the torch on. It can't see it, and you can't see anything without it.
How it looks like that
Dead Air runs on a new renderer written for this game, with no game engine and no downloaded textures.
- The wet floor shows a real reflection of the room, drawn a second time upside down.
- Every lamp is blocked by walls, so light stops at corners and spills through doorways.
- The torch beam lights up the dust in the air, and pillars cut shadows through it.
- The picture goes through a body-camera lens: fisheye bend, sensor grain, motion blur and exposure that takes a moment to adjust.
- All the concrete, block walls, rust and puddles are made by code when the game loads.
