At first, it’s tempting to see the Loop Hero soundtrack as an example of chiptune minimalism. Loop Hero’s narrative ambitions are plain to see – each enemy will provide their backstory before a fight – and the game’s soundtrack supports this world-building effort with music whose scale comes from its immovable ostinati and gloomily emotional melodies. The result is music that is both highly atmospheric, yet at the same time prioritises clear melody lines – capturing the game’s forsaken ambience while making it melodically attractive and, most importantly, moving. This is music that manages to harness its repetition, weaving a mesmerising spell while never turning monotonous, thanks to new melody hooks Goreslavets introduces at just the right time. He finds the perfect balance between melodic development and hypnotic recurrence (mainly in the drum rhythms and chiptune ostinati that also provide counterpoint). Goreslavets uses this moody backdrop to set up a finely calibrated interaction between repetition and change. A constant rhythm pushes the music inexorably forward, capturing the hero’s seemingly never-ending quest from which he can’t escape. Forlorn chiptune arpeggios echo in the deep, perfectly underlining both the game’s cosmic setting and its downcast atmosphere. Opening track “Lich is Unbreakable” sets the scene with rare authority and establishes the game’s immense atmospheric pull within seconds. Indeed, if one adjective first comes to mind listening to the Loop Hero soundtrack, it’s ‘melancholic’. Describing his approach to composing for Loop Hero, Goreslavets underlined that he “didn’t try to reflect the loop”, since the protagonist’s world is constantly changing around him – and that the music’s melancholy mood was the logical result of the world’s collapse. With few game credits under his belt, Goreslavets nonetheless had been active as a composer for several years, with his earliest Bandcamp album dating back to 2012. Such a close relationship between music and game was no coincidence – composer Aleksandr Goreslavets (aka blinch) was also one of Loop Hero’s co-creators and designers. Another intriguing statistic was that the Loop Hero soundtrack was major indie publisher Devolver’s fastest-selling score ever at the time – and more than one reviewer pointed out how Loop Hero’s music amplified the game’s atmosphere. It’s an unusual setting that resonated with gamers, as Loop Hero sold more than 500,000 copies in its first week alone. The game’s post-apocalyptic setting sees players rebuilding a vanished world, one card at a time – its protagonist the only survivor to remember the universe the way it was before its downfall. And this is where Loop Hero’s narrative ambitions come into play. For example, players can change each loop’s outcome by placing cards onto the game board. Based on a simple idea – the protagonist completes the same loop over and over again, even without player input – Loop Hero folds unusual elements into its rogue-like structure. First presented at the 2019 Ludum Dare Jam, Loop Hero was nurtured by Russian development team Four Quarters into an engrossing exercise in world-building whose gameplay was as repetitive as it was addictive. Loop Hero Soundtrack, Aleksandr Goreslavets, 2021Ģ021’s first indie game smash hit was undoubtedly Loop Hero.
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