Game info: website, Wikipedia
Listening: Bandcamp, Steam
Info
Just finished playing this game on stream, after I was scrolling through my games on Steam looking for something to play and landed on this. It’s a weird, cryptic Zeldalike with a lot of strange settings and characters that are never clearly explained. If you want to fight a wall face that acts like an overbearing older relative who’s just worried about the direction your life’s going, this may be a game to check out!
The music’s by Melos Han-Tani, a cool composer who was the game’s programmer/designer/etc. He has a YouTube channel where he posts about video game music he likes, usually pretty obscure, and if you read my posts for some reason you’d probably be into the stuff he uploads. Anodyne has an old gamey presentation sitting vaguely in the SNES area, and the music follows suit with lo-fi instruments and sparse arrangements in pieces that often aren’t super long. A very strong sense of dreaminess, sometimes warm and inviting and sometimes unsettling and offputting, permeates the soundtrack, which makes sense given the game takes place in a subconscious dream world formed by the experiences of the protagonist or something. I tend to like the more ambient tracks on the soundtrack, which are a bit reminscent of the later work All Our Asias (another dream world game!).
Both the Bandcamp and Steam releases include a number of bonus tracks: early prototypes/rejected versions of tracks and some trailer themes. The bonus tracks are flagged as hidden on Bandcamp so you can’t view them from the album page, but on the flipside you can click through most tracks to view a little bit of commentary on them.
Recommended tracks:
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“Nexus” never feels like it comes into focus
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“Woods” is some strange, metallic ambiance for the woods
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“Temple” is very whole tone
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“Hotel” mixes a bouncy 7 rhythm with spooky noir jazz
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“Terminal” is a small, crumbling tune for a small, crumbling area
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“Challenge” is a late boss theme that goes a lot of places
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