Game info: Steam
Listening: extracted audio
Credits
Music: Vahid Ghaderi
Sound: Nemo Ghasemi
Info
Here’s an interesting point-and-click made by a group of Iranian developers, directly inspired by the works of Haruki Murakami. It’s got that atmosphere where a bunch of weird things happen with little to no relevance to anything else and very few of them are actually resolved in a meaningful way. This of course extends to the puzzle design, so there’s plenty of the kind of stuff where you need to randomly try to combine every item in your inventory or walk around every screen in the game and recheck every background object to find the one that previously seemed useless but is suddenly now relevant an hour later. If you’re an old gamer, you know how that goes.
The soundtrack is generally ambient jazz, sometimes more ambient and sometimes more jazz. The instrumentation has a lot of piano, upright bass, winds, and jazz drumkit mixed with a tasty amount of electronic noises and effects; the sound reminded me a little superficially of Tomáš Dvořák (Floex), if you’ve heard something like Machinarium or Samorost 2 before, although it’s not quite as rich as Dvořák’s music gets. It’s all very calm music to accompany you along some laid back, low stakes adventuring, though a number of tracks have somewhat weird or sinister undertones because some weird or sinister things do happen in the game. I liked it!
There’s no soundtrack released for this game anywhere, but the music files can just be copied right out of the game data. The lead designer of the game, Sahand Saedi, made a SoundCloud account in 2016 to preview six tracks from the game, although three of them (“Good Morning,” “Fix The Machine,” and “Remembering The Past”) don’t seem to have actually been used in the final product. The unused tracks are in a similar vein to the rest of the music, I think they’re worth checking out too.
Recommended tracks:
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“Inventing the DTMF” has some nice, thematically-relevant phone-ish noises and a 5/8 mallet figure that pops in to say hi every once in a while
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“Doll Maker’s House” is one of the creepiest tracks in the game, because dolls are always creepy I guess
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“Counselor” builds up a few different oddly-timed rhythmic elements
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“Ending” has this ploonky figure that shows up at 0:52 and other places that I really like
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“Good Morning” is one of the unused(?) tracks, very ambient with cool synth effects, my favorite being the scratchy beeping that starts at 1:40
(“Doll Maker’s House,” “Counselor,” and “Ending” are unofficial titles based on the filenames and in-game usage)
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