SOUNDTRACK · 2026-07-08

Soundtrack: Maquette — the design of choosing songs instead of scoring them

Cody Predum (audio director) and a cast of San Francisco musicians

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #maquette #diegetic-music #indie-folk #licensed-music

Introduction — the first thing you hear is not a score, but someone's song

You wake inside a sketchbook, into a dreamlike San Francisco steeped in warm color. Place a cube into the palm-sized model of the city, and the same cube towers up, enormous, in the life-sized world. In this puzzle built around that nested recursion — the one Komugi reviewed — the first sound to reach you is not a tense sustained synth. It is lyric-bearing indie folk: soft guitar, a whispered vocal. Roughly 80–100 BPM, the beat loose, keeping pace with a stroll.

Music in a puzzle game usually means either ambient that won't disturb your thinking, or outright silence. To an ear trained on that binary, this feels strange. A song is playing. There are words. And yet your hands are rearranging a diorama. That friction is the doorway into Maquette, and the reason I wanted to write about it from the side of the music.

The hidden link — this is the couple's shared playlist

Maquette was built over roughly a decade by Hanford Lemoore of Graceful Decay, and published by Annapurna Interactive in 2021. The story retraces the memory of two former lovers, Michael and Kenzie. The whole game is a memory drawn inside a sketchbook, and Lemoore has said in interviews that 'everything in the game is a metaphor for the story.' The shapes of the city, the colors, are placed to mirror the state of the relationship.

The music obeys that same principle. Led by audio director Cody Predum, the team did not take the road of writing a large original score. What they chose instead were 'songs this couple might plausibly have listened to while they were together.' And nearly every track on the soundtrack is by a musician from the San Francisco Bay Area: Jay Som (Oakland's Melina Duterte) with 'Lipstick Stains' and 'I Think You're Alright,' Cannons and Clouds with 'Meridian' and 'Dolores Park,' Meredith Edgar's 'Tidal Waves.' Some titles even carry the place names. This is not a score; it is the couple's shared playlist, from the city where they lived.

That realization was, for me, the hidden link. Many games use music to 'specify' an emotion — sad here, tense there. Maquette does the opposite. Rather than the emotion itself, it places the concrete music the emotion once lived inside — the songs they'd have played in a café, in the car, in a room — and lets the player re-live a memory. Predum wrote a handful of original pieces too, but they're built with a texture that dissolves into the existing songs, so the seam never shows.

The puzzle-specific craft — don't the lyrics get in the way of thinking?

As a composer, what snags me here is the risk of playing lyric songs while someone is mid-thought. Words steal attention. This is exactly why many puzzles avoid vocal tracks: you don't want your thinking bandwidth eaten by language processing. But Maquette's recursive puzzles are solved by spatial reasoning and noticing, not reflexes. You shuttle between the small model and the large world, waiting for the click of 'this ledge is the rim of that little box.' There's a lot of time spent just stopping and looking. So even with a song playing, it rarely collides with the tempo of thought.

Beyond that, the songs change scene to scene, and as the chapters advance the temperature of the sound shifts with the fraying of the relationship. From warm folk early on, the later, straining stretches thin out — fewer notes, more space. The tension is built not through literal silence but through 'the words receding.' Retries and loops are handled deftly too: shuttle through the same space over and over and the song withdraws behind you like ambience, never rushing you. It's vocal music that still permits the long deliberation a puzzle demands.

The analogy — the speed of recursion and the tempo of a song

I have a habit of measuring everything in BPM. The speed of solving Maquette is, in beats, very slow. You place a cube, shift the viewpoint, compare model to full scale, place it again. That shuttling won't sit on a strict metronome; it's a swaying, breath-like tempo. Drop tightly-gridded EDM or busy chiptune onto that and hands and ears start fighting. But indie folk around 80–100 BPM has a soft beat that doesn't run. It fills the interval — the beat before 'oh, I see' arrives while you stare at the model — without hurrying you.

What's striking is that this music does not sound as a reward for the moment you solve something. Puzzles usually hand out a rising sting or a resolving chord at each correct answer, doling out accomplishment. Maquette's songs carry no such cue. They keep playing at the same temperature, sounding not achievement but the duration of 'the two of them were here.' So when you solve it, no trophy tone rings; instead the memory continues for one more bar. Recursion — 'the same thing repeating, nested' — and song — 'the same melody returning at the chorus.' Those two repetitions quietly overlap. That, at least, is how I read it.

Tracks to hear — three from the playlist

First, as the core of the Bay Area indie sound, Jay Som's 'Lipstick Stains.' Blurred guitar and a close-mic'd vocal are the very air of the couple's room. Here is the officially distributed audio.

Next, the track many call the soundtrack's high point: Cannons and Clouds' 'Meridian.' Its unhurried chord movement fits perfectly into the 'pause' of staring at the model. Official audio is on the artist's Bandcamp: Cannons and Clouds, 'Meridian' (official Bandcamp) ↗.

If you want to feel the game's atmosphere with visuals, here is a trailer from Annapurna Interactive's official channel: MAQUETTE | Cast Announce Trailer (official, Annapurna Interactive) ↗. In a short runtime it conveys both the in-game sound and how the recursion looks.

Closing — if I were making this, here's what I'd steal

What I want to steal from Maquette is the idea of giving a character a playlist. Before writing a single theme, ask: what did this person actually listen to? That question brings a specificity a score can't — proper nouns, place names, the sonic texture of an era. If you wanted to do something similar and licensing existing songs was hard, one move is to write your own pieces with the texture of 'a demo some fictional person recorded,' erasing the feel of a score. That is exactly what Predum's original tracks do.

At the same time, carry the risk home as a lesson. Lyrics are strong. So if you're going to play vocal music, restrict it to scenes that advance by deliberation rather than reflex, don't use songs as achievement cues, and thin the notes to match the temperature of the relationship or story. Only when those three conditions are met does a song stop obstructing the puzzle and become memory. When I next revisit this music, it won't be in the quiet after a solve — it'll be in that 'pause' where the answer hasn't come and I'm still staring at the model. And if you want to check the summit of a conventional score, set it beside Call of the Sea, which also handles parting and memory. One writes; one chooses. Two correct answers, side by side.