Too warm, just too warm. I'm sweating like a bawdy metaphor in church and I'm just not cut out for this thing we call summer. It's a hostile environment is what I'm saying. It makes me want to pack up and relocate to a walk-in freezer. So naturally, what better time to revisit my love of videogame music than when my brain is slowly baking from the inside.
Today we shall showcase the music of a game we've highlighted around these here parts before. Indeed I recall this was the best game I played back in the bygone days of three years ago. Today we highlight the music of Oxenfree for no other reason than I haven't already done so. That and I recently got around to playing it's sequel, so the first game has been on my mind a lot lately.
Oxenfree was one of those special games for me. An emotional, atmospheric journey of angst and loss with a touch of the sublime, strange and sinister about it. Somewhere halfway between a young adult novel and an episode of The Twilight Zone. A group of teens spend a night camping out at a beach on a lonely island and get involved in all kinds of inter-dimensional shenanigans. Spectres of the past both metaphorical and literal come to the fore and it all ends on a rather ambivalent note befitting the finest examples of weird science fiction.
But I'm not here now to revisit the game as a whole. No that'll be left for when I finally get around to doing that long in the making personal list of my favourite games. No today we are focusing on my favourite tracks from its soundtrack. Provided by scntfc, the soundscape of this game is a haunting ode to analogue synths, radio static and poor signal reception. It evokes the bygone sense of nostalgia often associated with the pre-modern age. Think magnetic tape faded from use, think sounds recorded in less than optimum conditions. Where everything is a little too far away and the original sound has become something else entirely
Much like how the quirks of pre-digital photography translated into a distinct visual style now familiar to us as a wide array of Instagram filters, there's been a similar movement in music to reclaim the faded, warped, distorted sounds of a radio not quite tuned correctly to the right frequency. The Oxenfree soundtrack very much sits on the sweet spot of this type of sound, with tracks that lean heavily into the ambivalent and the atmospheric. Almost like someone set the strange sounds of a numbers station to music.
As with all the video game soundtracks I highlight in this section of the blog, it all sits rather beautifully within the game itself. It's a key part of the immersive rich atmosphere that underscores the emotional beats of the story and the journey. For a story steeped in a sense of warm nostalgia underscored by a touch of haunting melancholy, it is the perfect audio accompaniment.
To this day it remains very much a part of my regular Spotify rotation. The modulated buzz and tone of background static becomes something more than the sum of its parts. High frequency sounds go low and slow and everything feels a little more poignant as a result. Whilst I'll keep my thoughts on the sequel for the inevitable end of year gaming roundup, I will say it maintains the high standard of the original, enhancing the feels of a story that goes in directions both old and new. Enough of that for now, here's one more for the road...
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