Listening: Bandcamp
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Well the yearly Desert Bus for Hope charity marathon just finished up this afternoon, so now that I don’t have a livestream going in the background at all times, let’s get back into some music. Here’s a release that slipped by me last week: more music from UFO 50! There might be some meta shenanigans or otherwise hidden stuff inside the game, and this might be music from that! I don’t know! Legitimately don’t know, since I’d like to play this someday if it gets a Switch port or something and so I’m intentionally not looking up exactly what the deal is.
Every single track is named after a kind of room, almost all of which you’d find in an office building with a couple of weird exceptions, and arranged in alphabetical order for maximum crypticness. These tracks are also a bit shorter on average than the rest of the soundtrack, with most being under a minute and all of them being under two. It has the exact same chiptune instrumentation as the main soundtrack and doesn’t have a single overarching style, instead randomly drawing from a bunch of what we heard earlier like chill jazz, weird ambient, and so on. A fun game to play is to guess what genre of music you’re going to get from the room name, which is an impossible challenge because there’s very little obvious stylistic theming between the two.
Something probably hinting at metagame significance is that a lot of these tracks are off-kilter alternate versions of pieces from other games, infusing them with a bit of dissonance or other weirdness that the original doesn’t possess. This makes up a little bit for them not quite being as developed on average as other tracks because of their short length, gives them a bit of a disconcerting feeling, as all office buildings have. The music is otherwise pretty much cut from the same cloth as the rest of the soundtrack, so if you enjoyed the chords and sound programming of the main game like I did, then you might also enjoy these extra tracks like I did!
Recommended tracks:
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“Bathroom” gets a little weird at 0:22
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“Executive Office” sounds like it’s just this close to completely falling apart
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“Kitchen” is in a really bizarre, shambling rhythm
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“Roof Access” has a nice metallic ringing noise in it at 0:11 and 0:17
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“Upper Stairwell” is one of the most blatantly distorted tracks in this set
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