SOUNDTRACK · 2026-07-05

Soundtrack: Q.U.B.E. 2 — Sound that is almost real, and not

David Housden

Reviewed by Doremi · #soundtrack #music #qube-2 #synthesizer #first-person-puzzle #sound-design

Introduction — the first sound in front of the white wall

The archaeologist Amelia Cross wakes inside a huge alien structure and reaches a hand toward a white wall panel. In this first-person puzzle that Komugi reviewed, the first thing to reach your ear is a single rounded piano note and the layer of strings and synth that slowly fills the space around it. The opening track, 'Milly's Theme,' walks at roughly 60-70 BPM, a touch slower than a pulse, and offers not so much a melody as an interval. There is no flashy hook. Instead, as much blank space as the room itself is prepared inside the sound.

It was written by David Housden, a composer known for 'Thomas Was Alone,' 'Volume,' and the score for the first Q.U.B.E. The Q.U.B.E. 2 soundtrack was released on 13 March 2018 across sixteen tracks, and for this work Housden was nominated in the Best Videogame Score category at the UK composers' awards, The Ivors (Ivor Novello). 'Strange ambiences, glistening synths, and haunting piano and strings' — the sound image he describes himself comes through, no more and no less, within the first few steps.

The hidden link to the experience — the sound of a structure imitating Earth

In Q.U.B.E. 2's story, this world of cubes is said to be a structure built by an alien intelligence trying to recreate Earth. The brief Housden gave his score was exactly the inverse of that premise. In interviews he says he aimed for everything to 'sound real and natural, yet not so' — sound that is familiar on the surface but carries a strange, alien substrate underneath. The reason the piano and strings are gentle on the ear yet leave a faintly unsettled feeling the longer you listen is this two-layer construction.

That texture comes from a sound palette built with synth programmer Vinko Borcic. The two took real instruments and environmental sounds into various synth engines and manipulated them until the source was unrecognizable. An organic origin stays at the core, while the output becomes something else entirely. So this music sounds the beauty of a live recording and the foreignness of a synthesized tone at the same time, inside a single timbre. The worldview of a fake made to look just like Earth is engraved into the very method of the sound.

A puzzle-specific trait — while you solve, the music recedes

Across more than eighty rooms, you use gloves to grow blue, red and green blocks on white panels, then bounce, stack and slide them to open the exit. What's interesting here is that Housden keeps the music almost entirely in the background while you are in the act of solving. During trial and error the sound withdraws to a thin ambience, ceding the floor to the room's reverb and the effect of blocks being generated. A silence for thinking is deliberately left open.

Then, at the moment a room resolves, a door opens, and you step into the next sector, piano and strings quietly fill in. A single note after a stretch of silence sounds larger than its actual volume. It is both a reward for achievement and a cue that you may move on to the next section. Rather than painting the space with a continuous loop, he places silence as the main ingredient and adds music only at the instant of solving. In first person, that subtraction gently supports the loneliness of being 'alone in a large room.'

The analogy with the puzzle — chords that stay beside stopped time

Thinking in a first-person puzzle does not keep a steady rhythm. You look up at a wall, hunt for where to place a block, your hands stop for a while, then an idea arrives and you move all at once. If you laid a track with a clear beat over this time of wildly stretching and shrinking pulse, it would collide with the breathing of thought. Housden's answer is sustained tone that never asserts a tempo, and chords that are fine to sound at any moment. Music without a grid of beats never rushes the player, no matter how many seconds they spend lost in thought.

I have a habit of measuring everything in BPM, but that ruler doesn't quite land in front of this music. And that's right. What a puzzle's long deliberation needs is not sound that ticks off time, but sound that lets you forget time is passing at all. The single note slipped in only at the moment of solving quietly restarts the clock that had stopped. Solving tempo and musical structure mesh not at the level of the beat, but at the level of the interval.

Tracks worth hearing — three from the sixteen

The official audio is distributed on composer David Housden's own Bandcamp and SoundCloud, and across streaming services. Start with the opener, 'Milly's Theme.' A single piano note brings its blank space along; it is the track where this work's sense of distance comes through most plainly. Next, 'Forgotten Dreams' — strings and synth dissolve into each other, and the feel of the 'almost real, and not' two-layer construction is clearest here. Near the end, 'Sundered' is built so that sound lifts up from the floor of silence, close to the release of a solved room.

・David Housden official Bandcamp: Q.U.B.E. 2 OST (all 16 tracks) ↗

・David Housden official SoundCloud: Milly's Theme ↗ / Forgotten Dreams ↗

・YouTube official (David Housden - Topic, the distributor's auto-generated channel) ↗

YouTube has several full-length uploads labeled only with track names, but I won't cite anything hard to distinguish from an unauthorized upload. Here I point only to the distributor's auto-generated official Topic channel and the composer's own Bandcamp and SoundCloud. In a quiet room, at a modest volume. Turned up loud, this sound hides its own trick.

Closing — if I were to steal, fold the organic and the synthetic into one note

If I were composing, this is what I'd steal: carrying a single concept — 'sound that is almost real, and not' — all the way down into how the timbre is made. Rather than letting a live-recorded piano or strings ring out beautifully as they are, run them once through a synth and keep only the core. When an organic origin and a synthetic foreignness sound at the same time inside one tone, the listener feels an unease they can't name — and if the story is telling of a 'fake Earth,' there is no more eloquent accompaniment. Even in a DAW you can find the door to these two layers just by running one piano recording through a sampler or granular engine and blending it lightly with the original.

The other thing I'd steal is the design of receding while you solve and slipping in only at the moment you solve. By not playing continuously, it raises the value of a single note. For relistening, it suits a night when you're stuck on something and your hands have stopped. There is sound there that won't rush you. Even among first-person puzzles, reading this back to back with the COCOON piece, which supported walking with sustained synth tone, and the Outer Wilds piece, which kept thinking alive by not sounding at all, reveals each one's answer to the same question: what should music do during the time we think?