Game info: Wikipedia
Listening: iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon, Steam
Info
Just beat this game for the first time, pretty good! It’s a cozy, warm-hearted adventure game in an unfeeling, unfair universe filled with a wide variety of objects you can crash your spaceship into. Some trees, a geyser, an observatory, a black hole, a giant column of sand, the sun, the ocean, an island, an island that’s currently in outer space for some reason, a big space gun, some spiky vines, an angry fish, many such possibilities.
The soundtrack has three main modes. You, the player, hail from a rustic, wooded planet, so the music associated with you and your people has a folky, campfire feeling with acoustic guitar or banjo as the main instrument. The solar system was previously inhabited by a species that mysteriously all died, the Nomai, and music associated with their ruins tends to be a little more solemn and have piano in it. And since this is a sci-fi game, naturally there’s a lot of synthy music with electronic effects, ranging from drone ambient to more driving tunes; this does frequently overlap with music from the first two categories, as sci-fi suffuses the game after all.
The music fits the aesthetic and narrative themes of the game well, and “space folk” isn’t something we have a whole lot of in these parts, but I didn’t care for the soundtrack altogether that much as a standalone thing. Compositionally it never gets especially farfetched and the sound design isn’t super exotic, though a few tracks get a bit noisy and super bendy and I definitely appreciate those.
In between the tracks “Morning” and “A Terrible Fate,” the soundtrack album includes four trailer themes that aren’t explicitly marked as being so; you may notice these do reuse some bits and pieces of other tracks.
Recommended tracks:
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“The Museum” is one of the least melodic of the guitar tracks, featuring more ambient background noodling
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“The Sun Station” is one of the loudest area themes, hitting you with a wall of sound
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“The Uncertainty Principle” is the most hostile of the bendy ambient tracks
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“The Nomai” is one of the piano tracks, featuring some nice ploonks and synth sparkles in the first section
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“14.3 Billion Years” is the credits theme and fittingly unifies all three of those musical aspects I identified; it also adds an instrument unheard in the soundtrack until now, bowed strings, which does have narrative significance as the incorporation of a new element
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