SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-09

Soundtrack: Unpacking — How to place a sound without overplaying it

Jeff van Dyck

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #unpacking #chiptune #acoustic #sound-design

Introduction — the sound that plays before you open the box

Boxes are stacked in a new room, and you open the first one. In this 'your belongings tell your life' puzzle that Komugi reviewed, the first thing to reach your ear is chiptune with its corners rounded off. The hard edges of the square wave are deliberately filed down, and over them rest a quiet acoustic guitar and piano. The tempo sits around 80 BPM — slow, like early morning, yet never stalling. The sound keeps perfect pace with the hand that sets objects on a shelf.

It was written by Jeff van Dyck, who won a BAFTA on the Total War series and built a three-layer interactive score for Need for Speed II. But for Unpacking he chose, not intensity, but the discipline of not overplaying. In an interview he says he softened the hard edges of the square waves precisely 'to maintain a relaxing vibe.' Within the first few bars you understand what the music is after: it does not rush you, it does not scold you, it simply sits beside you.

How music behaves in a puzzle with no failure

Unpacking has no failure. There is no timer, and a mistake never ends the game. If an item is placed somewhere that doesn't fit the logic, it merely glows faintly red — there isn't even a penalty sound effect. As puzzle music, this is a remarkably unusual situation. Most puzzles translate progress into sound through a 'correct-answer jingle' or a 'retry cue,' and Unpacking throws all of that out.

So what does the score do? Van Dyck's answer was to demote the music from the lead role. The cues lie down quietly as a looping floor and never step forward. What occupies the foreground instead is the foley — the roughly 14,000 sounds, recorded largely by his wife Angela van Dyck: a plate touching a shelf, a drawer sliding shut, fabric brushing fabric. The music deliberately yields volume and frequency, clearing space for the sounds the objects themselves make. In a world that does not punish failure, the music too passes no judgment. It only sets the temperature of the room's air.

The hidden link — as the objects pile up, the music finds words

Unpacking narrates not a single line of story. Only the number of moves marks time, and only the objects arranged on the shelves tell the protagonist's life. The music tunes itself to this 'telling without telling.' The early chapters are almost entirely instrumental and never name an emotion. But as the story accumulates and reaches a moment of loss and starting over, the score lets a voice in for the first time.

On 'Unpacking a Life,' Wren Brier of the developer Witch Beam herself sings. The fact that the person who made the game is the one singing turns this track from background music into the last line of a diary. Van Dyck says he began from sanding the corners off square waves, then added 'a folky sincerity' with acoustic guitar and piano — a layer meant to connect emotionally. He builds the atmosphere thoroughly with instruments, then unlocks the voice at exactly one point. It is a design that banks silence through subtraction and cashes it in with a single sung passage.

The analogy — the tempo of tidying, and the sanded square wave

I have a habit of measuring everything in BPM. The motion of solving Unpacking is roughly steady: take it out of the box, decide its orientation, set it down — this three-beat is unhurried yet never stagnant. Van Dyck's choice of around 80 BPM beats, I think, at almost the same pulse as that hand. Faster and you'd want to place things carelessly; slower and the hand stops. The pulse of the music is matched to the speed at which tidying stays pleasant.

What's interesting is the timbre. Chiptune is by nature an edged, attention-grabbing sound. But van Dyck filed those edges down. What a puzzle-solving brain needs is not stimulation but continuity. While you think, a pointed sound gets in the way of thought. A square wave with rounded corners keeps its retro touch while dissolving into the background of thinking. To my ear, this is a single timbre that hits two targets at once: chiptune for affection, rounded corners for concentration.

Tracks worth hearing

Start with the theme. Guitar and piano lean into corner-sanded chiptune — it reads like the blueprint of the whole score.

Then the one vocal track, sung by Wren Brier, that cashes in — just once — the silence the instruments banked. This is where the story's weight settles.

One more — It's Not You ↗, which paints an emotional wobble with instruments alone. All of these are official audio provided to YouTube by the distributor (Auto-generated by YouTube); the full album is on composer Jeff van Dyck's Bandcamp ↗.

Closing — what I'd steal if I were composing

What I'd steal from this score is the courage to yield. In an experience with no failure and no timer, the harder the music tries, the more fake the world feels. Van Dyck handed volume and frequency over to the sounds of objects and pulled his own melody into the background. When you compose, you're tempted to fill everything. But what you choose not to sound is as much expression as what you do — Unpacking proves it with 14,000 foley sounds.

The other point is how he sands the corners: keep the affection of chiptune, round only the edges, and stop it from interrupting thought. If you're writing a focus track for working, leave the timbre's texture and remove only the parts that stab. That balance is worth copying. As for when to revisit it — a moving day, or an afternoon tidying a room. In the moment your hand's speed lines up with 80 BPM, the design of this music is clearest. Unlike COCOON, which 'plays on without becoming wallpaper' through generative sound, Unpacking is music that 'stays beside you by not overplaying.'