Nomination: Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia
Maybe it’s all for naught at this point, but I found myself very affected by this game’s soundtrack basically from the title screen. That’s this one, on endless loop:
I only just started playing this game about a week ago, but a combination of the story (which seems fairly effective and sentimental up to this point) and personal life developments (finishing student teaching) have already pushed this game, with music in tow, towards the top of my year end list. A couple other good cuts:
Partly because I haven’t played too much stuff that released this year, and partly because I have a thing for vocaloid music, I’ll nominate Hatsune Miku Future Tone as my favorite game music. 200+ tracks of sweet vocaloid goodness? Yes please!
Completely forgot to nominate something here. I’m gonna go with Ruiner. It’s got some really heavy, unsettling, hypnotic, industrial electronic music and I haven’t been so pumped to commit heavily stylized violence since Hotline Miami.
I will second Prey. Mick Gordon’s been putting in work these past couple of years. Wolfenstein 2’s soundtrack was also composed by him and has a killer menu theme, but I found the OST for Prey stuck with me longer. It hits on a lot of different aesthetics, going from very synth-y sci fi beats one second to very moody acoustic guitars the next, and it somehow worked. As previously mentioned, the highlight of the game is definitely Semi Sacred Geometry, which is found in a combat encounter that has you fighting off monsters while the song roars in the background. It’s real good.
I also want to take a minute to give a mention to Daniel Licht’s work on the Dishonored series. Licht sadly passed away this year and his contribution to Dishonored will be sorely missed. He composed for the newest game, Death of the Outsider, as well as all the previous games going as far back as 2012. Which each entry he was able to create scores that helped define the world of Dishonored and make it all the more memorable. I can’t think of those games without hearing his music. There was nothing quite like it.
Cosmo D’s The Norwood Suite has a soundtrack that’s so good that I listen to it during work. It’s even more incredible when it’s put in the surreal sonic spaces found in the game.
