Game info: Steam
Listening: Bandcamp
Info
New Thommaz Kauffmann soundtrack, it’s a good day! Kauffmann is a Brazilian composer who wrote the music to Dandara and its Trials of Fear expansion, an achingly beautiful and threatening soundtrack that mixes organic and synthetic textures into a thickly atmospheric, rhythmically intricate tapestry of a decayed world. He’s been quiet on the music release front for the last five years since then; turns out he’s been working on Hell Clock the whole time! (Also another game, Mind Over Magic, which doesn’t have a soundtrack release at the moment.)
Hell Clock is a Path of Exile-ish dark fantasy action RPG with some of the combat and progression structure of a Hades-like roguelite. The game is inspired by a conflict that took place in the 1890s during the first Brazilian Republic that ended in the slaughter of a bunch of civilians, though the real War of Canudos didn’t involve descending into hell to rescue someone’s soul. I mean, probably? I’m far from an expert on Brazilian history, but I feel like it didn’t.
The soundtrack’s signature instrument is the Caipira viola, a Brazilian ten-string guitar with a bit of that metallic mandolin sound that automatically infuses it with some folkiness/country-ness. There’s also a lot of choir vocals, orchestration (generally in the background), and percussion, with a little bit of electronic noises and production here and there. The music is dark but a calm, unnerving dark rather than an oppressive, violent dark. Overall the soundtrack is less stylistically to my taste than Dandara, so I didn’t like it quite as much overall, but you can definitely hear Kauffmann’s compositional voice from that game in the layered writing and so on, so I still enjoyed a fair amount of it.
The game is split into three acts. Act I (tracks 1-17) focuses pretty heavily on the Caipira viola, orchestra, and choir; this was probably my least favorite of the three acts musically, though some of the orchestration is really nice and several tracks have surprising chord movement to keep me on my toes. Act II starts at track 18 with the Dry Road and there’s an immediate shift here as the soundtrack changes to more Dandara-style atmospheric music; it gets more synthetic and dissonant here and I like it a lot. Act III starts at track 34 with the Subway (which sounds anachronistic???) and brings back the orchestra more strongly along with some harpsichord while staying electronic and dissonant; this is the spookiest section of the soundtrack in its instrumentation and composition.
Recommended tracks:
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“Quixeramobim (Quixeramobim)” is the hub town theme and has some of the spooky chord jumps you can hear throughout the soundtrack
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“Os Cantos da Caverna (Lower Caves Section B)” was the Act I track that captured me the most with its layered orchestration
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“O Solo do meu Sertão (Dry Road Section A)” has some real nice wind instrument frills and metallic rustling
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“25 mil (João Abade Death)” is one of the more emotional tracks in the game, which seems fitting given the apparent usage, and I like the clashing dissonance in this
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“Canudos em Chamas (Ravaged Canudos Section B)” switches up the rhythmic grouping between 3-3 and 2-2-2 a lot for a subtle stumbling feel
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“O Ritmo muda, a Opressão não (Subway Section B)” has a synth chime riff and electronic percussion that you could lay some rap verses over (which Kauffmann actually did in the boss theme version)
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“O Laboratório (The Laboratory Section A)” hits you with that spooky tonality right out of the gate
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