Game info: Steam
Listening/music info: soundtrack album
Info
Here’s some kind of hack-and-slash roguelike platformer themed around old slasher films. I have never seen anyone at all talk about this game, so imagine my surprise when I went to look up what the heck it is and found out it’s by noted auteurs Suda51 and SWERY???? Do I live under a rock? I probably live under a rock.
The sound director was Yuji Takenouchi, and it seems the way he collected the composer team was to call up some random folks he knew, so the music was written by a bunch of random folks and it sure sounds like it was written by a bunch of random folks.
- Takenouchi himself wrote just two tracks: a short jingle and then a twisted piece that turns a Chopin prelude into horror music.
- Takako Yumishima, like Takenouchi, used to work at Konami, where she worked mostly if not entirely on sports games. For HOTEL BARCELONA she mostly wrote either some fairly standard lounge jazz or some dark SNES-ish music that was pretty good actually.
- Junya Nakano also used to work at Konami, and unlike Yumishima was actually a contemporary of Takenouchi. His pieces here are either weird, dark, sometimes ambient electronic pieces that are cool, or metal, which I didn’t know he wrote!
- Takahiro Izutani used to work for Norihiko Hibino’s production company GEM Impact for a while, where he worked on stuff like the Bayonetta and Metal Gear Solid series, but more importantly he’s part of the Japanese avant-prog band Happy Family (which unfortunately doesn’t really end up influencing his VGM super overtly). He also wrote some metal, which I liked a little more than Nakano’s, and a couple of AAA game-style electronic orchestra pieces.
- Shota Nakama runs Boston’s Video Game Orchestra and does a lot of orchestration and orchestral coordination work through that and other ensembles, as well as some geetar playing. For this he wrote a couple of punk rock vocals, a style which I have never particularly liked, and I didn’t think these were super remarkable even for the style so I very much did not care for these at all.
So I wasn’t an incredibly big fan of this, though my feelings are a bit polarized: most of the soundtrack I didn’t like very much, but the parts of it I did like, which was generally the dark tension side (of course), I enjoyed quite a bit.
Recommended tracks:
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“Welcome to the Hotel Barcelona” (Takenouchi, orig. Chopin) is that hehe funne Chopin corruption, starting off with a strings rendition of his “Raindrop” prelude that quickly turns into some horror sound design
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“Voices in My Head” (Nakano) has some nice bits of minimalism in it
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“Rust & Gore” (Izutani) was the more effects-heavy of Izutani’s tracks
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“Creeping Darkness” (Nakano) starts getting real farty around 0:56
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“Surely Coming” (Yumishima) was my favorite of the SNES-ish tracks, love the transposition abuse this starts with
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“Ball of Doom” (Izutani) was the metal track I liked the most
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