Game info: website
Listening: Bandcamp, LinkFire
Info
The newest game by Prague-based developer Amanita Design just came out! They typically make point-and-click puzzle adventures with a lot of character and interesting and lush visual direction and Phonopolis sure looks like that, with a storyline this time about fighting authoritarianism or something. The soundtrack was done by Czech electroacoustic musician Tomáš “Floex” Dvořák[1], who’s their most common composer, though the last few Amanita soundtracks have been by some other folks instead so this is his first appearance in the composer field in six years.
The Phonopolis soundtrack has Dvořák’s standard Amanita style: a richly textured and slightly quirky mix of acoustic instrumentation—particularly piano, strings, winds, and percussion—with synths and lavish electronic noises and effects. If you’ve heard stuff like Samorost 2 and 3 and Machinarium, you’ll recognize the sound immediately; there isn’t really anyone else out there with quite the same techno-organic collage sound collage that he has. Stylistically it tends toward moody, atmospheric ambient music with some splashes of minimalism and folk music mixed in there, occasionally verging into more downtempo, trip hop, or even EDM-ish territory; it’s been a while since I properly listened to one of his soundtracks so I might be misremembering but this one felt the most actively EDM-y one overall, though large chunks of it aren’t. There’s also a progressivity to a lot of the tracks, with many of them developing over five minutes or more, which makes sense for a game where you’re spending a lot of time on the same screens solving puzzles.
Pretty good! This hits all the checkboxes for “a nice Floex soundtrack” and therefore it’s a nice Floex soundtrack. I need to also coach this next sentence with an “I might be misremembering” caveat, but Phonopolis felt a little weirder to me than his Amanita soundtracks usually get. Not excessively weird, but a little more weird electronic glitching or dissonance or chord changes I think, particularly in the back half of the album. Took me a little by surprise, and I love it when soundtracks take me by surprise.
Recommended tracks:
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“Prison Escape” has a nice ambient first minute before settling down into a more of a downtempo groove
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“A Bureaucratic Maze” reminded me a lot of the soundtrack of Qbeh-1: The Atlas Cube by Launchable Socks in its sound design and minimalist composition before it turns into a full-on dance track
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“Watch Out, Police!” is the most demented-sounding track in the game
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"Life in a Pencil House starts off with crusty noises I really wish the track continued with throughout, though there’s some nice stuff after like some layered syncopated writing and the filtered noises starting at 6:11
Not to be confused with Tomáš “Pif” Dvořák, who does a lot of sound design for Amanita games. Shit like this is why I’m paranoid about inferring even obvious aliases for people. How can you know for sure the company doesn’t have two people with the same name in the audio department?[2] ↩︎
Well, practically speaking, the company certainly knows they have two people with the same name in the audio department, so what they would probably do rather than embrace chaos is find a way to distinguish the two, which is why when both Dvořáks are there then at least one of them is specified as Floex or Pif. But, you know, what if they weren’t? ↩︎
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