Soundtrack: Bonfire Peaks — the more you carry, the heavier it sounds; burn it, and it lifts

Introduction — the sound of hauling your belongings up a cliff

Bonfire Peaks is a Sokoban-style pushing puzzle game released by Corey Martin in 2021 (see Komugi's review; difficulty rated "Brutal," with an estimated 20-hour clear time). You carry your own belongings up a cliff face and burn them in a bonfire at the top. The more you're carrying, the harder the climb gets.

The score is written by the developer himself, Corey Martin. In an interview with the PlayStation Blog, he describes the sound he was chasing as "equal parts warm, pretty and unsettling" (dated 2021-09-14; see references). Roughly 60 BPM, maybe — that's only my ear, not a measurement — always landing half a beat behind your own footsteps on the climb.Bonfire Peaks (official Steam screenshot)

A puzzle-specific trait — retries with no punishment, weight that piles up

Undo in Bonfire Peaks has no limit. You can rewind as many times as you like, and failure carries no penalty. The hardest stretches are designed around the assumption that you'll rebuild your solution over and over until it clicks.

One of the 18 tracks on the soundtrack is simply titled "Satie" (per the track list on the Steam OST page) — a nod to the composer Erik Satie, I'd guess, though I can't confirm it. Satie's trick of repeating a short motif while quietly reshaping it each time strikes my ear as a good match for a game built on solving the same layout again and again.Bonfire Peaks (official Steam screenshot)

A hidden link with the experience — from a jam about sacrifice to a story about nostalgia

Bonfire Peaks began life at a 2018 game jam themed around the idea that "sacrifices must be made." According to that PlayStation Blog interview (dated 2021-09-14), it grew from there into "a sappy game about nostalgia."

The reference points Corey Martin named for the score were Philip Glass and Angelo Badalamenti, plus songwriters Burt Bacharach and Brian Wilson (same interview). Glass's repetition, Badalamenti's uneasy chords, and the sweet pop melodicism of Bacharach and Wilson — I hear that combination as a way of sounding the sadness of letting something go and the relief of being lighter, both at once.Bonfire Peaks (official Steam screenshot)

The puzzle analogy — a tempo for stacking things up, a staircase of sound that never collapses

Sokoban-style puzzles only move forward one careful step at a time; rush a move and you lock yourself out. Bonfire Peaks adds one more constraint on top: the more you're carrying, the harder it gets to move at all.

The music doesn't rush you either. It sits on a bed of minimal repetition, and every so often a Badalamenti-style uneasy chord slips in without breaking stride. The pace never changes — only the mood does. To my ear, the way this score moves runs at exactly the same speed as the way I stack up one puzzle move after another.

Tracks worth hearing

All 18 tracks on the soundtrack are written and performed by Corey Martin alone (per the Steam OST page credit "Written & produced by Corey Martin," as of 2026-09). The official stream lives on his own Bandcamp page, where the whole album plays through.

I couldn't find an official YouTube upload of any single track, but the trailers on developer/publisher Draknek & Friends's own channel still carry the score's mood well. Start with the release trailer.

The track order itself tells a story: it opens with the quiet "Prologue," runs through the late-game suite "Gauntlet (pt I–IV)," and closes on "Forgot" — one full trip up the mountain and back down, with the weight set down at the end.

Closing — what I'd steal

Here's what I'd steal: naming the emotional ratio in plain words before writing a single note. Decide up front that it's "warm, pretty, and unsettling" in equal thirds, and everything after that is just checking by ear that you haven't drifted off that ratio.

Corey Martin wore three hats on Bonfire Peaks — design, programming, and music (PlayStation Blog, dated 2021-09-14). The voxel art came from Mari K and Zach Soares, with Alan Hazelden joining as co-designer. The same hands that watched a jam prompt about "sacrifice" grow into a three-year story about nostalgia also wrote the score. Next time I score a puzzle game, I want to start with the chord for the moment you let something go.

References

・Steam: Bonfire Peaks Soundtrack — official DLC page crediting Corey Martin

・PlayStation Blog: "Inside Bonfire Peaks – the atmospheric puzzle game about burning your belongings" (2021-09-14, developer interview)

・Corey Martin's official Bandcamp — Bonfire Peaks (Original Game Soundtrack)

・Draknek & Friends's official YouTube — Bonfire Peaks Release Trailer

・Draknek & Friends's official YouTube — Bonfire Peaks Draknek Direct segment

・Steam: Bonfire Peaks official store page