If you didn’t believe that PlayDead’s Inside was eerie enough, hold on to your seats ’cause it just became a lot creepier.
It’s not just the game’s environment and story that will give you goosebumps, it’s the development in itself as well. In an article on Gamasutra that deals with a deep dive into the audio of the game, composer Martin Stig Andersen revealed that the game’s haunting soundtrack was recorded with the help of a human skull. No, not a fake one that you use as a Halloween prop, an actual human skull.
“I had the basic idea of trying to recreate sounds as they would sound if they were happening inside your head,” Andersen wrote in the Gamasutra post. “That was the curious thought that led me to acquire a human skull and experiment with it.”
“I didn’t really want to hear synth music in the game,” He continues. “I tried to do it, but it felt too much like a statement — like we wanted express something by subscribing to a specific genre. I don’t think that’s appropriate for a game like Inside, a small game that’s all about creating its own unique world. … But when I played them through a skull, the sounds acquired another quality.
“During the development we acquired an intuition for what kind of soundscapes resonated well within the skull. … The end result, after the post-processing, is generally a bit creepy and cold. The sound has almost a chill about it. Eventually all the teeth fell out of the skull because of the vibrations, but while they were still there they created this small vibrating sound that I think was unsettling but also strangely familiar to people. Because we all know it, in a way.”
The enigmatic story that Inside tells through its individualistic play style and visuals is perfectly complemented by the eerie music, and the composition goes to show how much thought and effort was put into the whole process. You can read the in-depth article on Gamasutra and listen to the SoundCloud embeds of the clips as well.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/286032541″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/286032539″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
Source: Gamasutra
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