SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-01

Soundtrack: Baba Is You — A small loop that never scolds you for being wrong

Arvi "Hempuli" Teikari

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #baba-is-you #chiptune #tracker #loop-design

Introduction — a palm-sized loop that starts turning on the title screen

The moment you reach the menu, a round-cornered square wave starts circling with a light step. In this puzzle-of-words that Komugi reviewed, the music was written by Arvi 'Hempuli' Teikari, the same person who did the code, the design, the pixel art, and the sound — all of it, alone. What you hear is a few channels of chiptune. The tempo sits at a brisk mid-pace, a tidy stride around 120 BPM, the lead darting back and forth across just a handful of notes.

No lavish synths, no acoustic instruments. What plays are only tracker samples, and not stacked for grandeur but used in exactly the amount needed. Even the title theme is easy to remember yet modest in development, looping back to the top quickly. This 'small enough to hold in one hand' quality pays off later.

A game full of mistakes, and music that never scolds — retry design and the loop

Baba Is You is a game where you push the word blocks laid out on the floor — BABA IS YOU, WALL IS STOP, FLAG IS WIN — and solve by rewriting the rules themselves. Naturally, thinking becomes a chain of crash-and-retry. Slip up and you restart instantly (R); want to take one move back and you undo (Z). Resetting a single screen dozens of times is just how you play.

Listen to the music again here and you notice something interesting: the song reacts to your success or failure not at all. Stuck, failed, solved — the music keeps calmly turning the same bright loop. No victory stinger, no failure buzzer. It does not scold. However many hundreds of times you get it wrong, the sound keeps the face of 'it's fine, go again' and never breaks tempo. Trial-and-error stops sounding like punishment precisely because of this.

And the very origin of the sound is continuous with the feel of the game. Teikari entered every track in a tracker called OpenMPT, and later even distributed the project files via the official Twitter account. For a handmade world built from pixel art and a minimal set of rules, no palette fits better than chiptune hand-keyed in a tracker. Incidentally, that theme came about because at the end of 2017 he had to settle on an 'official theme' quickly for a trailer, and the tune materialized mostly by chance during a development stream. Not a grand piece labored into shape, but a phrase that rolled out from within the limits of the tools at hand — that lightness of origin is, I think, one reason it never grows heavy no matter how often you hear it.

The analogy with puzzles — short melody, short solutions

Solutions in Baba Is You tend to arrive not through long calculation but through a 'flip of perspective.' Swap the WALL in WALL IS STOP for another word and a wall stops being a wall — once you see it, you're done in a few moves. The thinking time may be long, but the solution itself is short.

The construction of the music fits that rhythm. The lead phrase is short and returns to the top quickly. It isn't a piece that carries you through a long beginning-middle-end; a small ring simply turns. During the long thinking while the player stares at the screen frozen, this ring neither advances nor retreats — it keeps turning lightly in the same place. And the moment you have the insight and finish in a few moves, the music follows you to the next screen without changing a thing. The pace of solving is jumpy and irregular, yet the sound stays at constant speed. This decision to deliberately not sync the player's wave to the music's wave strikes me as correct. If the music reacted to every waveform of insight, the still-unsolved time would surely sound rushed.

Tracks worth hearing — the theme, and a cave piece

Start with 'Baba Is You Theme.' That square-wave theme is the face of the game itself. Short, memorable, quick to return. If you want to verify by ear what a loop that survives hundreds of retries sounds like, this one piece is enough. The official audio is embedded from the composer's own (Hempuli) YouTube channel.

To hear how scenes are tinted, try 'Crystal Is Still - Crystal cave.' A piece for the cave area, it keeps the same chip sources but swings toward a slightly cooler, calmer ring. Compared with the theme, you can see how a limited palette of timbres is divided up to paint a 'different room.' → Baba Is You OST — Crystal Is Still (Crystal cave) ↗

The full album streams on the composer's own official OST playlist (Hempuli) ↗, on Bandcamp ↗, and via the official Steam OST ↗.

Closing — if I were to steal one thing, it'd be erasing the win/lose cue

If I were taking something home to my own writing, what I'd steal is the decision to deliberately place no victory or failure stinger. In a game built on retrying, music that does not announce success or failure actually keeps the challenge light. Write one short, friendly phrase you can run on a 20-minute loop without tiring of it, then subtract the win fanfare and the lose buzzer from it. Leave the rise and fall of the player's emotion not to the music but to the moment of solving itself — that subtraction is, I think, the single greatest invention in Baba's sound.

One more thing: don't stack for grandeur. The resolve of aligning the world's handmade feel exactly, using only a few channels of tracker sources, is worth remembering before you reach for more gear. If you want to listen again, do it precisely while you're stuck at a hard spot redoing it over and over. You'll hear the music that never scolds, circling close by the whole time. Different from COCOON, which avoids 'wallpaper' through generation, and from Stephen's Sausage Roll, which greets you with silence, here is a third answer: a light loop that refuses to punish failure.