Insmouse no Yakata (VB, 1995)

Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: emulated audio, YouTube

Credits

Sound Composers: Yoshiyuki Ishii, Dota Ando Sound Programmer: 廣瀬高志

Info

This is a first-person maze crawling game where you gotta escape from a spooky house as quickly as possible to get the good ending, while occasionally shooting monsters with awkward controls. It’s based on the fake town of Innsmouth from H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, so you’ll usually see this game called Innsmouth no Yakata (or Innsmouth Mansion), but they spelled it “Insmouse” on the game’s box because transferring phonetic representations between languages is hard, and so I’ll be calling it Insmouse because I’m like that.

The audio was done by Yoshiyuki Ishii and Dota Ando, who both show up together in a few other games by the developer Betop before later joining Yasuko Yamada’s new audio production company Reeb in 1996 or 1997. This has a got a pretty straightforward horror sound you might expect, with some ambient-leaning foreboding music featuring dissonance and uncomfortable noises, with some slightly lighter music for endings and such. It’s fine for what it is, nothing super fancy but gets the job done.

Recommended tracks:

  • Opening 2” has a weird panning 16ths pattern through the whole thing that reminded me a little bit of “Twilit Battle” from Twilight Princess (though it’s nowhere near that weird)

  • Floor BGM 1” starts off kinda sounding like quirky Wario music before just blasting you with dissonance at 0:43

  • Floor Clear” has a funky syncopated high riff in it that I like

  • Floor BGM 2” really sounds like a Game Boy Zelda dungeon theme or something

(track titles are unofficial)

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