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singedsun made a post about video game music recommendations that I've been idly thinking about ever since, so I might as well do something about that. (As well as wholeheartedly second their recommendations of the Kentucky Route Zero and The Last of Us soundtracks!)

My personal predilections lean towards grand cinematic orchestrals. I love string music, strong drumlines, and harmonies. I enjoy drama, and melodrama, and exhilarating high stakes, and I appreciate it when the music takes me there as fully as the storyline does. It does unfortunately mean I unironically enjoy watching trailers, but at least that adds some extra value to my movie tickets.

The soundtracks most likely to stick in my mind thus tend to belong to the big games: Mass Effect, tapping into classic space opera; Dragon Age: Inquisition, valiantly striving to stay somewhere to the left of LotR; Halo, knocking my socks off since I was thirteen years old and my brother and I were making a solemn pact never to start the game until we'd let the main theme run through on the menu screen at least once. Curiously, though, it was Halo 4 that most often had me pausing in the midst of the playing to listen with interest. Belly of the Beast, Arrival, and To Galaxy are a nice sampling of Neil Davidge's take on the franchise. I wouldn't necessarily argue he had the more distinct sound, but there were some very striking melodies in there that I guess just worked for me.

Similarly, I seem to find myself preferring Destiny 2's OST to the first, and it's become a regular go-to if I need some background music at work. Inner Light is the central theme and deservedly so, while Journey is a melancholy counterpart to the sense of loss as you flee the sanctuary that early players will have called home for two years, before building to something more battle-ready. I really enjoy a lot of the gentler tunes as well, though: The Farm, Ikora, Holliday. And the best Destiny song of course remains Deathsinger Dirge. (Do not actually listen to that if you're easily startled.)

Outside of the blockbuster games, you get less of the orchestras but more room for unique twists. Sunless Sea, for example, is a game that for long stretches can involve very little but holding one's finger down on a single key; what makes this level of patient grinding tolerable is the visual and audio aesthetic. It's dark nautical if dark nautical were actually a genre, the sound of sailing on waters full of deep and hungry horrors, and it is a startling shift to breach a new region and suddenly get hit with a sound like Infernal in alarming contrast to the comforting familiarity of home waters. A nod must also be made to Hull is Other People for giving me a good chuckle when I first saw its title.

Oxenfree actually incorporates the background music into the gameplay in a way I found simple but really effective. It's not a soundtrack I would choose to listen to in the car, exactly, but it's a strong complement to the bright neon teen weirdness of the game and, like Sunless Sea, helps keeps things interesting in the slower moments of a storyline that is more about exploring and conversing than combat or puzzles.

And then there is Inside, whose soundtrack is of a flavour so subtle that it mostly does not exist, but deserves a mention solely because the composer recorded it from inside a human skull… which I can't even argue isn't a great addition to the metaphor. It's fascinating because ambient noise comprises most of the audio atmosphere throughout Inside, but it means when music does kick in, a tiny handful of notes end up having almost treble the impact. The interplay of absence and sudden, throbbing presence makes for a very lonely, oppressive experience overall.

Finally: it's not quite a soundtrack song, but I listened to Plasma3Music Remix's take on the Uncharted 4 variant of Nate's theme very nearly on constant delirious repeat during the final weeks of my post-grad. You'd expect there to be some negative associations but, no, I'm still fond.