SOUNDTRACK · 2026-06-19
Soundtrack: The Talos Principle 2 — answering scale with a choir
Damjan Mravunac (guest: Chris Christodoulou)
Introduction — the sound of a machine city that has woken up
You wake from a dream of ancient Rome and stand in New Jerusalem, the city where the robots live. In this first-person puzzle that Komugi reviewed with a 9, the first thing to reach your ear is a layer of orchestra with a choir swelling faintly behind it. Percussion is placed less to keep a beat than to widen the space. The BPM is roughly too free to count, the corners of each bar rounded off. The pace of walking and the size of the building you look up at both fall into step with the breathing of this sound.
The music was written by Damjan Mravunac, Croteam's in-house composer, who has been melting orchestra into electronics since the Serious Sam series and the first The Talos Principle (2014). For this game the theme of the great city, "New Jerusalem," was written by guest Chris Christodoulou of Risk of Rain, and Julie Elven sings on the late-game "Survive." The official soundtrack arrived on December 11, 2023: forty-four tracks, about two hours. If the first game was the sound of one lonely android, this is the sound of a society.
Two kinds of time — the closed puzzle room and the open pilgrimage
The experience of this game splits cleanly into two kinds of time. One is the time of solving a closed little room of cubes, lasers, and connectors. The other is the open time of touring twelve islands and walking toward the Megastructure standing on the horizon. Mravunac's sound changes how it plays along that seam. In the puzzle rooms the music steps back, leaving only sustained tones and a low electronic hum. Walk the islands, and the moment the colossal structure enters your view, orchestra and choir rise slowly. Titles like "Megastructure," "The Scale of it All," and "Mesmerizing Beauty" tell you outright that this is the sound of the time spent marveling at size.
Choosing a choir means something. The first game's music was the introspective, lonely resonance of a single being conversing with Elohim, the voice that called itself a god. The sequel's theme is machines, as a "new humanity," building a future, so the sound becomes the voice of a group rather than one voice. Handing "New Jerusalem," named for the city, to Christodoulou — who stacks layered synths and live playing in Risk of Rain — suits that sense of accumulation. The texture of the work is discussed in Croteam's official Behind the Schemes, where music is laid out alongside story, engine, and puzzles. To avoid making things up: what I could verify ends here — the use of a choir and a guest composer, and the way the track titles lean into scale.
The analogy to puzzles — the biggest sound goes to the feet, not the hands
The thinking that solves a puzzle is a fine back-and-forth: try a combination, undo it, try again. Talos 2's puzzle rooms lay almost no music over that back-and-forth, so when your hands stall you don't panic; you can count calmly over a low sustained tone. On the road from a solved island to the next, meanwhile, the Megastructure enters view and the choir swells. In other words, the music assigns its loudest volume not to a "move" in the puzzle but to a "step" through the world. It is quiet while you solve, and it sounds while you advance.
I think this is the right design. If the orchestra were churning inside a puzzle room, the tempo of thought and the tempo of music would collide and both would go muddy. Conversely, time spent merely walking is easy to make boring, so a choir is placed there to make you feel the scale. Quiet for solving, full for advancing. In BPM terms, the puzzle room is a sustain too slow to count, and traversal is a relaxed cinematic rubato. The division of labor in tempo lines up exactly with the division of labor between puzzle and exploration.
Tracks worth hearing
Start with New Jerusalem ↗, named for the city. Over roughly eight minutes it builds from a quiet opening to the heights of choir and orchestra; it is the guest piece by Chris Christodoulou. From Damjan Mravunac's official channel (Provided to YouTube by DistroKid ℗ Croteam).
To close on, take Survive (feat. Julie Elven) ↗. After a largely instrumental score, letting a human voice step forward just once at the very end works beautifully. All forty-four tracks can be heard end to end on the full-album upload on the official channel ↗ or on Bandcamp.
In closing — the one thing I'd steal if I were composing
What I'd steal is the decision that scale is shown by a choir, not a melody. Try to convey size with a single singer or a clear tune and the listener chases a "someone." Stack the voices of a group thickly and the gaze turns toward the space rather than a person. And one more: the allocation that keeps the loudest volume for advancing, not for the moment of solving. The courage to not paint over thinking-time with sound is, I think, the heart of puzzle music.
If you want to listen again, do it at night, lights low, "New Jerusalem" from the top. Don't fast-forward the quiet of the opening — it's that held breath that makes the building look huge when the choir arrives. On days you want the lonelier side, go to the first game's The Talos Principle soundtrack. And if you want more of the feeling of music matched to walking pace, keep COCOON next to it.
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