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Soundtrack: Tetris Effect: Connected — every rotation adds a note to the song
Tetris Effect: Connected’s score is music written as a system: every move you make adds to it. Drawing on interviews with composer team Hydelic and a technical audio breakdown, Doremi listens for how line clears, the Zone mode, and elapsed time all grow the song.
Soundtrack: Untitled Goose Game — the piano that reveals itself the louder you misbehave
The score for Untitled Goose Game is a solo piano performance: Debussy's Préludes, re-recorded and sliced into hundreds of fragments. Composed by Dan Golding, it runs through three states — silence, watchful low-energy, and full chase — all keyed to how suspicious the goose looks. Over black coffee, I, Doremi, take apart this idea of a performer who's watching you.
Soundtrack: Kine — engineering a jazz you cannot play wrong
For Kine, where three instrument-robots roll through a theatrical city dreaming of making it as a band, Chel Wong wrote show-tune-flavored jazz. But it is not music that follows a score. Every roll the player makes on the board sounds a note, and so that this improvisation can never go wrong, a safety net is stretched underneath - a key, a constant bassline, banks of recorded sound. Verifying the design of this 'jazz you cannot play wrong' against the composer's own Q&A and developer interviews, black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
Soundtrack: Thimbleweed Park — music that decided never to give a hint
The music Steve Kirk wrote for Thimbleweed Park does not help you solve anything. Step on a thing, push a thing, and it never tells you where the answer is. On a palette of theremin, lounge and prog, all he plays is the air of a town that functions. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this music refuses to hint, and what you can steal from the 'pool' system he built for each location.
Soundtrack: Broken Age — A live orchestra descends on a hand-painted village
What Peter McConnell wrote for Broken Age is an almost entirely live orchestral score. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and a small ensemble breathe in a way no sample can. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart how a co-inventor of iMUSE fitted his music to the wandering hands of point-and-click — through a lens you can take home to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Creaks — A 'living' score that is born anew every time
For Amanita Design's Creaks, Joe Acheson wrote a 'living soundtrack' of more than a hundred pieces that branch generatively. Return to the same room and it never plays the same way twice, and when a solution is near an instrument quietly joins in to nudge you forward. In a mansion with no dialogue and no on-screen text, the music becomes your only companion. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through the lens of writing your own music.
Soundtrack: Vessel — Water music that assembles itself as you solve
The music of Strange Loop Games' liquid puzzler Vessel is ten tracks Jon Hopkins had already released, taken apart and reassembled in real time by Leonard J. Paul's engine. The further you push into a puzzle, the more the smouldering background gathers drums and bass, until the full track plays the instant you solve it. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why the reward can be the completion of a piece rather than a victory jingle - from the angle of someone who writes music.
Soundtrack: Taiji — Choosing to keep the sound on, inside a lineage of silence
Taiji descends directly from The Witness. But where its ancestor threw out music and bet on environmental sound, this island lays down an ambience that never quite ends. It was composed by the developer himself, Matthew VanDevander, and rewoven into a finite album by Grzegorz Bednorz. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why the choice to keep the sound on fits a puzzle of pure observation — in a form you can carry back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: The Sexy Brutale — a masquerade that tells time by ear
The music Matt Bonham and Tim Cotterell wrote for The Sexy Brutale is electro-swing that conjures a 1920s masquerade — but underneath, it is the most precise clock in the mansion. It differs from wing to wing, tightens toward each scheduled murder, and resets with the loop at midnight. How a time-loop mystery and its music mesh, and how to steal the 'let the sound measure the hour' idea for your own writing. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
Soundtrack: The Gardens Between — Music that never plays backward, even when you rewind time
Even though The Gardens Between is a game about rewinding and advancing time, Tim Shiel's music itself is never played in reverse. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why 'sound that never turns back even when time does' works so well for a memory puzzle, through a lens you can carry into your own composing.
Soundtrack: The Pedestrian — a jazzy gait walking a city of signs
The music Logan Hayes wrote for The Pedestrian is a single garment stitched from jazz, ambient and Eastern-European melody over a backbone of piano and orchestra. Behind the puzzle of rearranging signage panels to connect doorways, it keeps reshaping without ever cutting out, driven by FMOD. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart this music as a companion that never falls silent, through a lens you can carry back to your own writing.
