SOUNDTRACK · 2026-05-31

Soundtrack: Return of the Obra Dinn — music that sounds, then steps back

Lucas Pope

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #obra-dinn #orchestral

Introduction — what sounds the moment you raise the watch

Hold the pocketwatch to a corpse and the screen goes dark. For a few seconds you hear only the sound just before death — an argument, waves, a sharp intake of breath, sometimes the dull crunch of bone. Then the scene freezes and I am standing inside a diorama of that death. In this deduction puzzle covered by Komugi's review, the music Lucas Pope wrote entirely by himself rises at exactly this moment.

What starts up is a pseudo-19th-century orchestra of strings and winds — not a live ensemble but something built from samples, with the slightly grainy hue of an old recording. The tempo is roughly slow, the beat swaying like a funeral bell. I have a habit of measuring everything in BPM, but with this piece I hesitate to put a number on it. It isn't there to keep time; it's there to give the scene weight. For the few seconds it took to refill my black coffee, I just listened to that weight.

Why not chiptune — leaving room for the voices

Look at this game's 1-bit black-and-white and the natural guess is retro-machine electronics — chiptune. But Pope didn't go that way. In a PC Gamer interview he explained that the puzzles required full voice-over, and he judged that chiptune would clash with those voices. And when he thought 'old computer,' what came to mind was the Mac Plus's 8-bit DAC — that is, 'samples,' not square waves. So in Logic Pro X he took the long road of a sample-based pseudo-orchestra.

That decision shows up directly in how the music behaves. In an Obra Dinn death scene the preceding dialogue and noises are the lead; the music is a supporting player that enters afterward. It waits for the voices to finish saying everything, then the orchestra sets the temperature of the scene. Not the sharp foreground of chiptune, but an accompaniment that yields its seat to the voices. The choice of timbre is itself a design for where to fall silent.

Sound, then withdraw — silence as the second movement

The most puzzle-like thing about Obra Dinn's music isn't how it sounds but how it leaves. Enter the frozen death scene and the chapter's theme rises, coloring the moment. But after about thirty seconds the music simply fades. What remains is the stillness of the diorama and my own deduction. Who killed whom, with what weapon, where — Pope deliberately pulls the sound back for the time you spend thinking about that.

This is one clear answer to a problem every puzzle-game score must face. Keep music playing for a long-pondering player and the loop will, before long, vanish from the ear like wallpaper. Pope does the opposite: he sounds loud for the presentation, then withdraws quietly for the thinking. The thirty seconds of sound is the first movement; the silence after it is the second. Music writes a prelude to the scene-as-question, and the answer proceeds, soundless, inside the player's head. I think I'll remember this courage to withdraw for a long time.

Solving tempo and the music's structure — the span of a single bell

By my reckoning, the tempo of solving Obra Dinn moves in three beats: sound, stop, write. Raise the watch and audio and voices play; the scene freezes and the music carries it; it goes quiet, and I write a name and cause of death in my notebook. In the middle of these three beats sits music exactly the length of a single bell. Too short and the weight of the scene doesn't land; too long and it gets in the way of deduction. Pope knows the length of that one strike well.

What's interesting is that the music itself breathes the same way. Each chapter's theme rises slowly, holds its breath once at the peak, then sinks again. The arc of seeing a death, thinking, and confirming it overlaps with the arc of the phrase. Play a chapter theme through on a record and, even outside the game, that same 'span of a single bell' returns to the body. The music remembers the tempo of the solution.

Tracks worth hearing — from official sources

The full soundtrack is available on composer Lucas Pope's own official channel (@dukope1). Start with this one, all the way through. From the opening theme to each chapter's theme, the 'sound, then withdraw' breathing I described above is laid out in order.

If you pull out just one piece, take the main theme and the closing track. The texture of those low strings building slowly is — even knowing it's sample-based — as vivid as the creak of an old ship. The official audio is also available on the Steam soundtrack DLC, Spotify, and Apple Music (see the reference links below).

Closing — if I were to steal something, it's the exit

If I were writing music, what I'd steal from Obra Dinn is not the sound itself but the design of the exit. In scenes where you want the listener to think, pull the sound back boldly. Rather than playing on out of fear of silence, play the prelude and then leave your seat. Write the time of sounding and the time of silence as two movements of a single piece — a lesson that works, I think, not only for deduction puzzles but for any experience that needs space.

If you want to listen again, do it at night, lights low, with a half-solved puzzle at hand. The stillness after the music sounds for just one bell's length and withdraws is exactly what clears a seat for thought. Anyone wanting to learn more about the use of silence should put it next to the soundtrack of The Witness, which also wields quiet as a weapon, or COCOON, which supports walking with low sustained tones.