Game info: website
Listening/music info: Bandcamp, Steam
Info
New Joel Schoch video game soundtrack! I’m extremely on top of new video game releases so I had absolutely no idea until two weeks ago that Okomotive, the developers of FAR: Lone Sails and FAR: Changing Tides, were coming out with a new game. This one’s a bit different: rather than micromanaging the operation of a vehicle, you’re instead guiding a herd of cute creatures that I’m sure nothing horrible will ever happen to; in motion the trailer made it look a little like Journey, if that game was also kinda Pikmin.
Unlike Schoch’s previous two soundtracks for the FAR games, Herdling features a full orchestra, though most of the time you’ll be hearing some strings- and winds-heavy music with some electronic enhancement, which is the same kinda FAR sound palette. The more noticeable difference is that Herdling’s music features a range of random folk instruments from all around that are less common to hear in VGM: we’ve got stuff from the Middle East (kamancheh), the Baltics (kantele), south Asia (ektara), north Africa (qraqeb), etc. The instrumentation gives it a more rustic feeling that you’d expect a game about herding to have, without necessarily evoking a specific region in its sound beyond a generic “the highlands.”
The writing is a bit similar to the Changing Tides soundtrack, in that a lot of the pieces are on the shorter side and feature minimalist or ambient compositions. I haven’t listened to the Changing Tides soundtrack in full in a bit so I may be misremembering, but the orchestration felt a little denser than in past works, with a lot of active writing in the winds in particular. The overall feel I got from it was a little less directly “Steve Reich minimalism” and a little more “ensemble that just like jamming out to repeating figures a lot,” if that distinction makes sense and doesn’t sound completely arbitrary.
Emotionally the soundtrack hits a lot of the same beats as the FAR games’: very calm and tender, but also rather lonely. As noted, though, this is a herding game, so there’s also some music here that’s more lively and optimistic to evoke a herd of critters charging triumphantly ahead. All in all it’s another cool soundtrack that makes feel a lot of the same things that Schoch’s other work does; Herdling isn’t related to the earlier games as far as I know, but it sure sounds like it is from the music.
Recommended tracks:
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“Stampede” has a fun layered keyboard riff at 0:12 that I loop like five times whenever I listen to it
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“Thaw” is mostly just a bunch of slow wind chords
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“Leaves Dancing” switches back and forth between 4 and 7
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“Ridge” was a nice echoing riff that starts fading in at 0:06, I think it’s a synth but maybe it’s an acoustic instrument that’s super processed
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“Glacier” is one of the spooky, scratchy ambient tracks
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“Home” has a nice chord change at 1:44
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