Listening: Steam (included with game)
Credits
Music: Ben Babbitt
Sound Design: Jake Elliott (Act I), Ben Babbitt (Acts II-V)
Info
Kentucky Route Zero, that magical realist visual novel—am I going to get arrested if I call it a VN? Come get me, coppers—about community, capitalism, liminal spaces, addiction, and rural decay, just updated last week with some graphical stuff and bugfixes and whatever, not a brand new content update or anything. However, they did slip in a bonus: a “new mp3 care package courtesy of composer & sound designer Ben Babbitt.”
It turns out that this is a new folder in your install directory named “KRZ SFX COLLECTION” with 75 untagged MP3s inside it, divided into six groups. Some of these are unambiguously sound effects, like the entire “Footsteps” directory and most of the “OneShots” directory save for a couple of instrumental stings, and some of these are environmental noises, like most of the files in the “Ambiences” and “Loops” directories. That leaves two other folders, “Drones” and “Music,” which unsurprisingly are mostly musical with a couple of environmental noise exceptions.
The majority of Kentucky Route Zero’s background music is already synthy drone ambience, using lots of pretty sounds and not being afraid of throwing dense/clashing chords at you, so the idea of this game having a separate “Drones” folder is kind of funny to me. It turns out that this audio is indeed more drone-y than the background music released on the game’s soundtracks; the sound design is the same but these pieces tend to have a bit less going on in them vertically, usually having only one or two layers of synths doing ambient noises instead of being more densely layered soundscapes. As a result I don’t think these tracks are all quite as good as the stuff they released on the actual soundtracks, but the sound design is still nice and a few of them do have some cool synth manipulation or musical moments in them.
That leaves the “Music” folder, which is in fact a bit more actively “musicky” than the “Drones” folder. This folder features a mix of distorted old timey jazz, tracks that more prominently use distinct pitches (sometimes arranged into a melody!), and a couple a cappella tracks I don’t remember the context of. I do also enjoy some of the ambient tunes in here too, but like the “Drones” folder, I do think the commercially-released tracks are by and large a bit more interesting than these.
Recommended tracks:
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HOTMKFire_Ambience was one of the two ambience tracks with a musical component, slowly fading in a warpy synth which then kinda just hovers threatningly in the background for a while before fading out
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PulsingMurkey_Drone was the most interesting drone track to me, having some choppy synth manipulation and a bit more going on in the background than usual
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WhiskeyOminous is certainly ominous alright
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