SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-12

Soundtrack: A Monster's Expedition — The rhythm isn't in the music, it's in your fingertips

Eli Rainsberry

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #a-monsters-expedition #ambient #guitar #sound-design

Introduction — first island, first push

A small monster pushes over a tree. A low, satisfying thud, and the log bridges the sea. Behind this journey — the one Komugi's review called an open-world Sokoban — what you hear is soft nylon-string guitar, piano hazy in the distance, and a thin membrane of synth. Try to count the beat and it slips away. There are moments that sound like roughly the low 60s BPM, but a beat as skeleton barely exists. When drums do enter, they enter as blanket-like texture, not as outline.

It was written by Eli Rainsberry, the composer behind Wilmot's Warehouse and Bird Alone, who described this score as more guitar-based than their previous release, drawing on alternative, ambient and jazz-adjacent things. Fifteen tracks, released the same day as the game, September 10, 2020. On my record shelf this album sits next to Geotic — and it lived there before I learned that Rainsberry names Geotic, Angel Olsen and Hiromi among the influences.

The rhythm moves house — the beat lives in the UI

The single most valuable thing to take home from this score is where the rhythm lives. Rainsberry and the team are described as having agreed on an approach that stripped rhythm out of the music's backing to open up ambient space, and relocated it into the UI audio — the sounds of your actions. Pushing a tree, rolling a log; small interactions get light, clicky sounds. And undo is assigned a cymbal hit. In the Sokoban genre, the most frequently pressed verb is undo. They gave that most-used verb the role of a percussion instrument.

The reference point cited is Breath of the Wild's minimal, atmospheric score. The palette runs to several kinds of guitar, pianos, synths, and subtle drums carrying the whole. But the core of the design is not the instruments — it is the division of labor. The music holds space and feeling; the sound effects hold the beat and the groove. Only while the player's hands are moving does this music become its finished form.

The puzzle analogy — one island's worth of thinking

Thinking in A Monster's Expedition comes in short breaths. An island solves in roughly a handful to a dozen moves, and the moment it's solved, the next island is already in view. Just as silence suits the long deliberations of Stephen's Sausage Roll, this think-then-walk cadence suits music that asserts neither beginnings nor endings. The tracks are like the sea lying between islands: they keep flowing when you stop, and they sound no fanfare when you solve. What changes is not the music but the density of your action sounds.

By my ear, the felt tempo of this game while your hands are moving is set by the interaction audio. Push, roll, the undo cymbal — more moves, faster tempo; hands stop, and only the music remains, BPM approaching zero. Music whose tempo is steered from the player's side. It has exactly the same shape as Sokoban's structure: when to think and when to move is yours to decide.

Tracks worth hearing

Official audio lives on developer Draknek & Friends' YouTube channel — per-track official videos and an official playlist — and the full 15-track album is on Bandcamp. Start with track one.

・The Rain Cascades ↗ — the rain theme. The plucked guitar takes the side of the raindrops; here too, the percussion's job is outsourced to the environment.

・Bandcamp: A Monster's Expedition OST (all 15 tracks) ↗ — as an album, from the top. Cover art by Adam deGrandis. The official playlist ↗ has every track too.

Closing — the one thing to steal

If I were writing music, this is what I'd steal: don't lock the rhythm inside the track — hand it to the listener's actions. Call it the courage to let a piece sound somehow unfinished on its own. A looping track is the same every time, but the rhythm tapped out by the interaction sounds differs per player, per playthrough. Which means this score has a different groove every time you hear it. It applies outside game music too: mute every beat in your track once and check whether the song can still stand. If it can, that beat can be given to someone else to play.

For a re-listen, I recommend a rainy workday. Start from The Rain Cascades, loop back to the top, and wait for your own keyboard's clatter to turn into the undo cymbal. I wrote about the same hands-become-music design in the Unpacking piece. Rainsberry's Wilmot's Warehouse is also a Sokoban cousin, with a little more rhythm left on the music's side. Compare them, and you'll hear how boldly this score let go of the beat.