Game info: Steam
Listening: iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon, Steam
Info
I had some Nintendo store credits expiring at the end of this month, and I noticed this game on my wishlist was on sale so I decided to finally pick it up. It’s not bad! ElecHead is a short and cute puzzle platformer about electricity; I’ve seen it called a Metroidvania or Metroidbrainia, which isn’t technically incorrect, but it’s really more of a linear game with optional side puzzles.
The music is by Tsuyomi, a Japanese composer of indie game soundtracks and free-to-use music who also has a track in Taiko no Tatsujin thanks to one of their open submission contests. The soundtrack is mostly chiptune, with a few tracks incorporating higher-fidelity percussion, clanking noises, strings, and piano. It does that thing where almost every single track is an arrangement of the same main theme, ranging from actiony Mega Man music to chill exploration music to ambient, though it’s just a short soundtrack for a puzzle game so it never gets particularly wild with it. I’m not a super big fan of the theme, though some of the versions have nice chords or otherwise do something cool with it.
A little trivia: there’s a Japanese writer about game music, Kazeno Iona, who used to have a column on 4Gamer.net called Music from Game World, and at the end of December he’d ask a bunch of game composers what their favorite game album of the year was. A lot of the responses would rather boringly just be something they worked on, but a number of composers would actually pick something interesting, and in 2021, extremely cool guy Mitsuhiro Kaneda picked this soundtrack of all things! I definitely don’t think this was anywhere close to the best soundtrack of the year, but I can see why he might have been drawn to the rhythmic and harmonic writing in one track and particular, and also he said that he enjoyed the game a lot so I think he just wanted to spread the love a bit.
Recommended tracks:
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“Area 3 & 4” is my favorite version of the theme, with some really good chords and a bumpy hemiola rhythm
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“Area 5 & 6” starts off with some peaceful vibes before switching into an electronica-like mode at 1:13
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“Bonus track 2 Unreleased Area 7 & 8” slips in a nice 5+6+5+8 part at 0:25
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