Puck Rush
Puck Rush is a free, fully blind-accessible audio game. There are no graphics: it is played entirely by ear, through stereo sound and speech, with your screen reader.
It is air hockey. You have a paddle at your end of the table, your opponent has one at theirs, and a puck goes back and forth between you until somebody misses.
What you hear is the puck: further left or right in the stereo image the further from the middle it is, quieter the further away it is, and the wall it just bounced off tells you by its pitch how far down the table that happened. You also hear your opponent moving, so a good player listens to where they are standing before choosing where to aim.
Every hit makes the puck faster and the angles wider, so a long rally becomes genuinely hard to read. Serve with space, hold left or right as you serve to angle it, and be quick: sit on a serve for fifteen seconds and the point goes to the other player.
Arcade mode
The classic game is the classic game. Arcade mode rolls dice on every paddle hit and sometimes adds one of two things: a shield that appears behind one player and bounces the puck back for ten seconds, or an invisible puck, where the rolling sound cuts out completely until the next hit and you are playing on memory and timing alone.
Ways to play
- Against the computer, at six difficulty levels.
- Two people on one keyboard.
- Over your own network. Games announce themselves, so joining usually needs no typing at all.
- Online, on this site's server, with accounts, a lobby that is also a chat room, games you host yourself, ranking and live spectating.
Online
Make an account with a name, a password and a real e-mail address. A six digit code arrives to confirm it, and after that the game remembers you and signs you in with one keypress.
Signing in puts you in a room. Not a menu you sit in - an actual room you can walk around with the arrow keys while you wait for somebody, where you hear your own footsteps and everyone else's from wherever they happen to be walking. The walls stop you.
Enter opens the menu from anywhere in the room: games, who is online, a match against the computer, the ranking, your statistics and your account. C says where you are standing, P who else is in the room and how far off they are, semicolon talks to everybody.
A game belongs to whoever made it: the host picks who plays, starts the match when everyone is ready, and can put a password on the game if it is a private one. Everyone else in a game can listen to the match live.
Getting around
Arrows, enter and escape, and that is the whole interface. A few things worth knowing:
- Left and right arrows move your paddle, space serves and hits.
- S reads the score, X reads where everything is.
- Semicolon chats, in the lobby, in a game, and mid-match.
- Page up and page down set the music volume from anywhere, and it is remembered.
- F7 says how long the server has been up.
- F1 opens the match menu. Every key can be rebound.
The game is in English and Polish.
Download
Download Puck Rush for Windows. Unzip it anywhere and run PuckRush.exe. There is nothing to install, and your settings live in your own AppData folder rather than in the game folder.
The game checks for updates when you ask it to, from the main menu, and can download and install them itself.
The server
Online play runs on this site's server. If it is ever down, the rest of the game carries on working: the computer opponent, two players on one keyboard and network games do not need it.