Interesting! I wonder whether you’ve found a “sweet spot” in your style between fully avant garde and more traditional VGM - whatever you call it, I find it really exciting.
These tracks did such a great job of evoking their era, I'm really impressed. There's more to it than just the soundfonts, authenticity also comes from the way the themes are treated, the balance of genres, the rhythms - you really nailed it across the board. Even those elements that would have been impossible or near-impossible with a commercial cart on the S-SMP were welcome and fun variations on the classic setup. Really great work.
I've made this comment on a couple other OSTs in this jam, but I think it bears repeating: When viewed as VGM, these longer tracks that pull their variations out like taffy are very welcome, as they'll take the experience of playing the game and make it more pleasurable. So I have to try and judge these in the context of how they would actually fit into a game, and in that context, I think these tracks work very well. The overall feel of the album is that it would work for a game with a strong cinematic flavor.
The last track is where it really all came together for me. Everything that got introduced was really fun and welcome: the 8va portamento synth, followed by the arps, then the crunchy lo-fi drums, then the guitar and choir. Finally, the fadeout with forward/reverse piano - fabulous. I think tracks 1-3 in general could stand to be given a little more of that treatment, the ideas are good but they needed taken a little bit further. Track 4 I get what you were going for, it felt like it was too much when everything came in all at once. In general, I feel like track 5 is such a winner of a track, I'd love to hear more tracks like it.
I've listened to this album 4 times now and I do wonder whether I'm slowly going insane. But this might be one of the most original things this jam has produced. I'm not usually a "labels" guy, but I'm curious: do you consider your work avant garde? This would have flown under the radar for me but compositionally it really is something unusual and special, and I hope you're able to capture that uniqueness and infuse it into future work.
This was a really high-quality soundtrack. The sound design was well-observed and gave us a lot of distinct flavors in each track, and there were so many little treats for the listener (The little vocal that snuck in on "Palace of the Demiurge" was great, perfectly placed) I really feel like "Forsaken Ruins" was such a good introduction to the rest of the soundtrack, I almost wish it had been first rather than "Alternate Past", or that the two tracks had been put together and the ambient soundscape of "Alternate Past" fed into the forsaken ruins track after maybe 15-20 seconds. That could be just me, but knowing how strong the rest of the soundtrack is I just wanted to get to it right away.
I loved how I felt the mood of the tracks swinging back and forth, often with only subtle changes between them but still managing to evoke different moods. One of the best non-literal interpretations of the theme I heard all jam. Normally this is where I'd put suggestions for how to make it better, but you pretty much nailed it. Must be something in the water in Finland - some of my favorite ambient/abstract music comes from Finnish producers.
I appreciate that you didn't just create some loops and blast them at us for 3 minutes, there's definitely some compositional consideration being made here and you went places with these tracks. A lot of the entries to this jam have been heavy on timbre and light on composition, while yours is the other way round, I think - the best way to bolster a track like this is to start looking into ways to produce the track more, create a wider variety of tones and explore the space in terms of sound processing, stereo imaging, reverb, panning etc. That stuff is more about knowhow than talent, so imo you've figured out the hard part first.
A good start - I liked the musical ideas in here. Me-as-future-listener-in-game appreciates that each element takes a while to get introduced, especially in tracks 1 and 3. Me-as-current-listener-in-jam would probably suggest taking some of the musical ideas (like the addition of the choir in tracks 1 and 3) and bringing them in a little more quickly to get them into the listener's ears faster, and maybe from there either move onto the next track (show variety) or take the existing soundfloor and either introduce some changes to the chord progression, maybe a key change, or some dynamic variety, give us highs-and-lows. The ideas are strong enough that you have a lot of flexibility in how you choose to execute them, so you can really build them up from here.
This relentless, muscle-y bass sound very much evokes "summer fever" for me. Long hours, fever delirium, it really feels like it'll never let you go. I look forward to seeing what your next viral infection brings us :D (but seriously, I hope you get to feeling better soon)
This evokes for me the kind of mid-90's grim aesthetic that led to MIDI soundtracks like the Heretic OST (shoutouts to the Roland MT-32 and its kin) Sometimes it felt like the high strings were off doing their own thing and it was hard to figure out how they tied into the rest of the track. I really enjoyed the low highly compressed guitar sound, it did a good job of evoking an atmosphere that fit the game.
Re: the SNES sound engine, Mario Paint taught me that it's hard to use. While technically less powerful, I find the Yamaha YM2612 chip (Sega Genesis) a lot easier to wrap my head around. So I appreciate making the effort to try and wrangle these sounds into a coherent soundtrack. I would have liked to have seen some of the more interesting compositions like "7pm - No Time To Waste" further forward in the soundtrack, I think it would have helped get me invested more quickly. As it was I had to dig a few tracks in before it really grabbed me.
Acoustic guitar is rarely as cleanly rendered as it is here, which was most welcome. I love the tone of a clean guitar and it was nice to have to contrasted against a voice. Unlike Neatneet, I am a native English speaker, but I still struggled a bit with the lyrics :) I don't think it mattered much to the final product, as your tone and intention still came through. I think it'd be interesting to hear either an overdub or harmony with an additional guitar/voice layered in.
I think there's definitely a place within the VGM space for simply orchestrated tracks written to clear purpose, which you've accomplished here. The opening and closing themes here strike me as delivering very specific callbacks, as the closing track feeds me "sonic drowning", and I can't listen to the opening track without thinking katamari damacy :) I'd love to see you take these foundations and either tweak them to head in a slightly different tonal direction to the original, or build on the source and deliver an expanded version. Cheers!
The genre said "metal" but it opened with a kind of chiptune-y thing so I wasn't sure whether I was going to get, like, metal metal or some kind of chiptune metal - I was pleasantly surprised when I got a real mixture of genres as described - metal, synthwave, lots of interesting digital stuff sprinkled throughout. For me, the main theme (which really shines through in the last minute) is the best thing about the entry generally. I love that you've managed to deliver a really empathetic melody over the top of the hard orchestration, that's a winner for me. Thanks for including it in the jam.
I hear what youre' going for by juxtaposing the two tracks, and I think there's definitely a sort of "gotcha" game where you'd want to keep the horror aspect of the game hidden that the first track would hide. For my part, I would love a bit more variety in the pizzicato strings in the first track, and possibly some kind of foreshadowing for the upcoming horror, but that lends itself better to the sort of game I would want to play, and there are definitely people that want to have a cutesy intro section with no indication it's a horror game underneath, where I think it would work. Overall, I think the second track works better for me, as I love the persistent ticking and thumping and think it generates a strong sense of urgency. Also, as I'm discovering, I'm a sucker for a kind of slightly detuned/chorused tubular bell sound.
I'm reaching the end of my 158 album odyssey (just 3 dozen or so to go), and this covers so many firsts:
* First entry composed entirely of ballads * First entry with moaning alien chorus * Most authentic punk entry * Oops all bangers
"I AM THE MAIL MAN, I LOVE MY MAIL" is going to serenade my dreams. I don't think I can listen to any more entries tonight, you're too tough an act to follow.
I think this entry is the one with the greatest disparity in effort level between its album art and the album itself. I was like "what is this pink and white scribble" then I listened to the tracks and the album art ceased to matter. This is one of a couple entries that as soon as it was over, I listened to it immediately over again. Several of the longer entries of this jam overstayed their welcome, but yours left me wanting more, lots more. So much love packed into these few minutes. Great stuff.
We're the only two entries whose album art is a console parody, and we both chose the same console to parody, which I find truly wild. We should probably either be friends, or bitter rivals, or something. Fate has drawn us together.
I've rated 110 of these and this is only the second one that solely drew their inspiration from the picture. You both interpreted the picture wildly differently but both ended up evoking what you were trying to accomplish very well. This is a bit of hypocrisy on my part since I just wrote a big long comment praising an extremely minimalist soundtrack, but I liked the tracks better here that had a strong bassline ("Couch Party" and "Race Together", I think) imparting a fully fleshed-out sound.
A lot of entries wanted to jam a ton of musical ideas into their tracks, in a way that would make them really unsuitable accompaniments to gameplay. You've given us VGM that lives and imparts character without having to cram the signal with 12 different sounds at once (I am admittedly guilty of this as well). I'm glad minimalism had a strong showing in this jam, and yours was one of the most pared-down and effective minimalist soundtracks in the whole thing. Cheers.
I don't think any other entry in the jam can trace its compositional influences so directly to pop music. It really speaks to the infinite variety available to the video game composer in terms of where they can draw inspiration and what sort of world they want to portray. Being as "pop" as it is, this could easily be a game portraying a contemporary world, with contemporary, realistic characters inhabiting it. I can't think of any other entry in the jam I can say that about. Also, the "tick tock" theme came through really strongly without being too literal, especially in "Koriyama Skyline". I was prepared not to like this but in the end it won me over, so good work.
The unusual key signatures add a lot to these tracks for sure. Many of the tracks suffered from needing a little more variation, especially harmonically. However, I enjoyed the murky, frenetic smudge of notes that made up the melody in "reforestation", it gave it a darker character that I think made it the most successful track of the five. Normally I praise the upbeat, high energy tracks of a compo entry, but I think for you specifically, tapping into your darker side might be a good move.
For me, this evokes the N64/Gamecube era sound in a big way. These tracks would drop flawlessly into a Harvest Moon/Rune Factory sort of game. I think it's telling that a lot of commenters are able to place these themes directly into some genre or game series that's familiar to them - there is a familiarity to the tracks that really seems to evoke memories of people's favorite childhood experiences. Awesome work.
A number of different composers used accelerando/rit. to encourage ideas of playing with time, (me included) but I don't think anyone else came close to making as heavy use of it as you did. I got like, radiohead on a dangerously malfunctioning carousel, which is a fantastic mental image. So, thank you for really taking us all the way. No Thom Yorkes or carousels were harmed in the making of this album (I hope).
I appreciate when someone has a good sense of what makes a song work and is able to deliver solid song structure. I know that the constant tempo was a way to tie the tracks together, and I think that's a good move. One consideration there is when you're not relying on a variety of tempos to introduce variation into your soundscape, you have to take extra care with the rhythm section itself and really give it a lot to do, so that you don't end up with a rhythm section that repeats or nearly repeats itself for 96 bars. I do think that "Restoration" is the most successful track, it's the one where you're bringing together all the musical ideas from the whole album, which gave the piece a lot of different places where it could go, and that worked out well.
Based on the game description I was really hoping for something mysterious and a little spacey, and you really delivered there :) You really gave me very distinct aural worlds to travel through, and I found myself being taken away somewhere new with every track. I don't think I could ask for anything else from VGM than that, especially for the genre you placed the game in.
Ha! I've been reviewing these for a couple hours now and I was starting to kind drift away... then I get this absolute shoe-to-the-face moment at the end of the first track and all of a sudden I'm awake and paying attention again :D I'm glad, too, because there's some really lovely and subtle work going on here that I would have been sad to have missed or glossed over. Very few entries were willing to take us through the full range of dynamics, so I'm glad you pushed that angle. IMO more jam entries should open with a track that really kicks the audience in the face, but that's more my personal preference than real music advice.
This narrowly beats out "the fighting for shrimp prince 2: rise of rizzmaster" for most outlandish album/track title of the jam :D I got like.. Lieutenant Kije's romance theme there in the third section. That's one of my favorites so I was a fan. I hope the lamb is okay and gets the help it needs.
The textural variety in this entry is for me the strongest thing about it. Nearly every song gives us multiple wildly differing tonal palettes, which is good, we're never bored as listeners. There are large sections of each piece dominated by a lead instrument with all its notes at identical velocity, which makes me feel a little bit like I'm trying to eat fifteen identical pancakes (?) so I would keep an eye on the dynamics of your lead instrument and maybe give us some more variation there. Overall I think it works as an accompaniment to a puzzler, so well done.
I hope that more folks come in and pay attention to this killer entry. I love the aggressive noisefloor, and the confident delivery of so much sonic variation. I love loved the addition of the pan flute right at the end, the texture of that final section really was the cherry on top. One of the few entries in this jam that I desperately wish was longer. Great stuff.
I found myself hypnotized watching the patterns fly by in GB Studio. I enjoyed the chromatics and the overall dim-'n'-grim vibe, I very much got ancient civilization ruled by monster-gods. I love a chiptune but there are a lot of people drawing from the same well, striking the same tone a lot of the time. I got something new here. For me, this is the most intriguing chiptune OST of the jam.
Sorry, I had to make that joke. But really, I enjoyed the floaty-away vibe of this and for sure got the sharp peacefulness of the desert at sunset/night. Thanks for this.
I read your response to "How does it fit the theme?" as "I don't really know how to be honest." I thought "that's a really melancholic interpretation of tick tock, but ok." Then I heard the track and realized there was no way I read that right. And indeed I hadn't :D
As a listener to this in its place in a future, if fictional, video game, I am glad for the longer tracks, if I'm playing a game for a long time the less a track loops, the less likely I am to get brain rot. As a reviewer in this jam where I'm trying to average 8 of these an hour, I can see where having these ideas in more of a showcase style vs presenting them in their entirety might have been a wise move. That being said, the tracks themselves have a strong flavorful point of view, exactly the accompaniment to an adventure featuring Marc Xenon, Ranger R-4D, and Zirco the Mage (I loled at these names btw). I'm picturing some kind of lost vikings situation where you have to switch between all three and use their unique powers to progress to the next level.
Me: This feels like one single extended song Me to me: One single extended BOP
Times I was bored during this: 0 Number of times my head wiggled: 739 times
Captivating work. I mentioned this in another OST review, but not a lot of people had the courage to really fill out the noisefloor. That was not a problem here.
And here I thought I'd written a horror soundtrack, this is a Horror Soundtrack. This is also very nearly the Most Unhinged entry in the jam (top spot goes to NeatNeet's "Clocks... The Soundtrack!" there, but this is a close second) this is also one of the very few soundtracks in the jam where if it was actually playing during a game, I would either (a) immediately return it, fearing it was cursed or (b) crank it up. 50/50.
This is my favorite album art of the jam. I was like "that's a pyramid but I don't recognize these hieroglyphs", until I had a closer look 8-) And then you give me this really richly realized orchestral soundtrack. This is one of my more favorite orchestral soundtracks of the jam: strong sensibility, coherent themes that complimented rather than competed with each other, nice variation between tracks, everything I was looking for. Great stuff.
I think "Simplex" was my favorite track. I loved the first Dragon Quest game and there was a lot of ornamental, baroque stylings in that OST, so this brought me back there. I appreciate your uncompromising point of view here as well: no funny business, just baroque chiptunes.
