This week, we’re covering games made for last weekend’s Ludum Dare, an online game development competition wherein contestants have exactly 48 hours to make a video game from scratch. Ludum Dare 17′s theme was “Islands”.

Terry Cavanagh’s Radio Silence is an abstract and highly atmospheric first person platformer that, compared to his previous work, bears much more in common with Don’t Look Back than VVVVVV. In the game, you move around a monochromatic island chain above a black ocean collecting and silencing radios. Each of the radios, usually placed just out of the player’s line of site,  produce a unique ambient sound that you’ll follow to hunt the things down. (Note: you’ll probably want to play this one with headphones.)

Radio Silence is a dark little game, both literally and figuratively. The sparse but eerie visuals, deliberate pace, and dissonant sounds all give the game a distinctly Lynchian vibe. Art game aspirations aside, though, there’s something highly satisfying and therapeutic about disabling the titular radios, which, by the time you have them within eyeshot, can be pretty damn loud.

In short, if you’re the type of person who lets out a gentle sigh of relief every time you mute a television commercial, you’ll find some sort of joy within the ominous world of Radio Silence.

Play Radio Silence in your web browser here, or download the Windows and OSX versions here.

What did you think of Radio Silence? Let us know in the comments!