SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-25

Soundtrack: TUNIC — Music that turns like the pages of a manual

Lifeformed × Janice Kwan

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #tunic #ambient #field-recording #synthesizer

Introduction — the sound washing up on a shore

A small fox washes up on an unfamiliar coast. In this game that Komugi reviewed, the first thing to reach your ear is "To Far Shores": soft-edged pads and a synth arpeggio ringing somewhere far off. The tempo is roughly so slow you lose the urge to count it. The corners of the beat are sanded down, and phrases stretch and contract like a receding tide. It is exactly the volume to sit beside the unease of stepping into a green world you know nothing about yet.

The music is a collaboration between Terence Lee (under the name Lifeformed) and Janice Kwan — sixty tracks, roughly three hours long. Lee was once known for the music of Dustforce, and he worked on TUNIC on and off for over five years. Acoustic instruments are rare here; what you hear are sustained tones from soft synths and field recordings made in the alleys of Taipei, manipulated until their original shape is gone. The 'artificial yet organic' texture that drifts up in the first few steps comes from there.

Sound attached to places, not to characters

The first thing you notice in TUNIC's music is that the cues are tied to places, not to characters or story climaxes. The twinkling "Redwood Colonnade" and the eerie "Sigil Seeker" don't push a particular emotion; they paint the geometric landscape itself. That is good design for a puzzle-exploration game. The player isn't made to cry in a fixed order — they find places on their own feet and receive the air of each one through sound. You could call it music that doesn't break when the order gets shuffled.

In the Bandcamp Daily interview, Lee says he leaned on the 'memory of what he liked' about retro game soundtracks, but deliberately not the literal soundtracks themselves. What the pair actually drew from was the landscape of Taiwan — the beauty of the hillsides, the way 'public and private blur' in the city. They sampled stray cats and the summer breeze and manipulated them past recognition. That is why TUNIC's sound feels half-familiar yet ultimately belongs nowhere. Kwan's more piano-driven melodies ("The Librarian," "The Scavenger") surfacing little by little over Lee's ambient strata also mirrors the feeling of a world coming undone.

Two workstations, and the track that was once the title

The making-of is carved into the sound itself. Stranded in Taipei by the pandemic in 2020, Lee and Kwan sat at two workstations side by side in Lee's family home, a large red keyboard splitting the space, making music nearly every day. Their methods are opposites: Lee mines 'like a miner,' trying dozens of ideas until an unpolished gem snags him; for Kwan, music is self-liberation, a way to surface what she can't put into words. That difference is exactly what produced the two-layer structure of ambient strata and piano melody.

My favorite detail: the album's 31st track, "Secret Legend," was the game's own working title in early development. Inside the finished work, the old provisional name survives as a single track. One song title quietly carries the project's prehistory — the very TUNIC-like trick of inferring a whole from fragments reaches all the way into the soundtrack's tracklist. And the two of them actually fell in love over the course of making this album. The intimacy that seeps into the sound isn't a reading imposed after the fact.

The puzzle analogy — the tempo of an unreadable manual

The core of TUNIC's puzzling is deciphering the manual pages you gather. The text is in a fictional language you can barely read at first. The player lays out fragments, guesses, and at some moment it clicks: 'oh, that's it.' This tempo of thought refuses to be hurried. So the music, too, doesn't push forward with a clear beat; it supports the time of 'waiting' with slowly pulsing sustained tones. Many tracks let the beat slip away when you try to count a rough tempo, and I think that is because the act of decoding has no fixed rhythm.

And only at the moment of 'I get it' does Kwan's melody rise up. Piano surfacing from the ambient fog is the very shape of the small flash that arrives after a long stretch of wrong guesses. The music not telling you the answer first — that, I think, is the discipline of TUNIC's soundtrack. It respects the solver's silence and brightens just slightly at the instant of insight. Played straight through on a record, that ebb and flow starts to look like a single map.

Tracks worth hearing

Start with the opener, "To Far Shores" — the sound of the fox washing ashore. A perfect entrance: it explains nothing and offers only the width of the world. Available from the official source.

Next, the former working title itself: Secret Legend ↗. This is the one for savoring the moment a melody rises from the ambient strata. If you want to soak in the whole thing, here is the full album (about 3 hours) ↗. Both are from the official Lifeformed channel.

Closing — what I'd steal

If I were composing, what I'd steal is the decision to 'attach sound to places, not to characters.' Music that doesn't pre-assign emotion hands the lead back to the listener's stride. In a puzzle or in exploration, if you want to leave room in the player's thinking, save the melody for the moment of insight. I'd also copy sourcing material from the everyday environment and processing it until its original shape is gone — it keeps the smell of a place that no off-the-shelf synth preset can.

If you re-listen, do it right after solving something. "Secret Legend" quietly overlaps with your own small lift at reaching an answer. Set it next to The Witness, which builds music from environmental sound alone, or COCOON, which fills its world with synthesis too, and you'll see three different answers to the question of how to place sound inside a puzzle's silence.