Game info: website
Listening: SoundCloud (incomplete), extracted audio
Info
The sequel to 2013’s game of a year Crypt Worlds: Your Darkest Desires, Come True was officially released last month after eight years of development! Collect a bunch of random garbage in a bunch of strange, overstimulating environments! Piss on kings and CEOs until they explode! Launch yourself upwards with such high velocity that it takes actual minutes for you to stop ascending, and there’s nothing you can do but wait it out because your momentum is conserved when you quick warp so if you go somewhere else you’ll instantly just clip past the ceiling of the new location and keep rising! It’s pretty great.
The original composer of Worlds, ella guro, wasn’t available to work on Underworld, so the new composer was someone I’ve never heard of before, ESPer99 (formerly neotenomie). Music’s pretty weird? Well, like, obviously, a game like this is going to have weird music. There’s flavors of vaporwave and nightcore mixed with ambient and Baffling Nonsense, so expect a bunch of chopped, sometimes tempo-shifted and sometimes reversed samples along with lots of synth noises and sound effects. They said in a stray SoundCloud comment years ago that they “try not to make any distinction” between serious and joke because a lot of their favorite art doesn’t, which aside from being a good worldview generally is also fairly appropriate for this game in particular. In the soundtrack there’s serious, there’s joke, there’s serious and joke at the same time, and they all mostly live together without feeling too much like every track transition is a huge tonal shift (the crossover tracks probably help to unify them overall).
There’s no real soundtrack release of the game yet, and I have no idea if one is planned. ESPer99 uploaded 10 tracks to SoundCloud years ago, which includes extended versions of a couple of pieces that are shorter in-game and some that I don’t think were actually used.
Recommended tracks:
-
“cool mall” vapors some waves, sampling Warren Hill apparently
-
“heaven” is deep and warm, and the chord at 0:54 is a really big feeling
-
“lonely area” is more unambiguously on the joke side of things
-
“frog palace (broken)” is an undulating tapestry of layers constructed from another piece
-
“leyline” is a medium-strength ambient track
(final track’s title is taken from its filename)
Leave a Reply