Game info: website (Japanese), a random thread on Famiboards
Listening: Bandcamp
Info
Ten years ago I found that Tatsuya Yano had a doujin alias, clavinord, but until recently I never bothered to check how much music he’d released under that name. It turns out that at that time he’d been on a few albums, and since then he’s released a bunch more, so I’ve been adding them to VGMdb. His music under that name is largely pop songs with usermade UTAU voicebanks for furry characters that after some skimming I don’t really feel like diving through, but he’s done some game soundtracks as clavinord too. Here’s one!
Shuugoku no Seventh Heim is a dialogue-heavy puzzle adventure game with some similarities to the Zero Escape series in being suspenseful games with escape room-style puzzling, though here you run around 3D areas rather than point and click in more static environments. Apparently in this game a bunch of people are locked in a prison facility after being transformed into animal people, and I assume during the game you try to solve such mysteries as “why are we locked in a prison facility?” and “why were we transformed into animal people?” I haven’t actually played the game, but that seems like a safe bet.
The soundtrack features a lot of piano and is a mix of a few different styles: there’s ambient piano with electronic noises, chill downtempo electronic, orchestral, EDM, anime, etc. I got some visual novel vibes from how it starts off with a block of four of those chill electronic tracks in a row and later from some of the emotional and mood-setting pieces, which is fine because the game is at least slightly a VN (it has an entry at VNDB so I guess it’s officially a VN). There’s a little bit of a dark edge to a few tracks but only a few of them; the soundtrack definitely isn’t as hard or aggressive as any of the Zero Escape soundtracks, which could be because the in-game stakes are lower and less murdery.
I enjoyed this one! I hadn’t heard Yano do the more electronic and ambient styles in this game before and he did a great job with them, definitely my favorite stuff in the game. I was less fond of the more purely acoustic pieces, which I generally found a bit sappy in a way I do a lot of his non-prog Atelier series music, but a few of them had good chords in them so I didn’t hate them.
Recommended tracks:
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“Awakened” might trick you into thinking it’s not going to be one of those chill electronic tracks from the intro, but it’ll totally get there
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“Pulsate” is the most over-the-top track compositionally, cool harmonic and syncopated moments in this
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“Tragedy for whom” is the most dissonant, evil-sounding track in the game
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“Outsiding” had the coolest electronic noises of the ambient piano music
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