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Soundtrack: Trine 2: Complete Story — from a forest lullaby to a battlefield of drums
Trine 2: Complete Story is a physics puzzle-platformer built around switching between three heroes. Drawing on an interview with composer Ari Pulkkinen, Doremi listens for how the score grew from the first game's gentleness into something built on drums.
Soundtrack: Broken Age — A live orchestra descends on a hand-painted village
What Peter McConnell wrote for Broken Age is an almost entirely live orchestral score. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and a small ensemble breathe in a way no sample can. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart how a co-inventor of iMUSE fitted his music to the wandering hands of point-and-click — through a lens you can take home to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Psychonauts — Every time you enter a head, the genre changes
Each time you dive into someone else's head, the entire genre of the music swaps out. What Peter McConnell wrote for Psychonauts is twenty tracks that each seem to come from a different record shelf: flamenco, Twilight-Zone eeriness, a summer-camp folk tune. Why does something so promiscuous never turn into clutter? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
Soundtrack: IMMORTALITY — recording a theme together with its dark underside
You chase a vanished actor through her unreleased films by scrubbing footage — and for Sam Barlow / Half Mermaid's live-action mystery IMMORTALITY, Nainita Desai wrote three orchestral themes, one for each of the three films. What is really interesting is that each theme carries shadows: a 'subverted' version and a 'supernatural' version, and which one sounds is switched by the metadata of the footage you are on. I, Doremi, black coffee in hand, take apart this design of building a theme together with its twin underside, in a form you can carry home to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Call of the Sea — Flip the love song over and you get a second theme
What Eduardo de la Iglesia wrote for Call of the Sea is neither minimal nor silent: it is a love story for string orchestra. Centered on the 'negative melody' trick of building the husband's theme by inverting the wife's note for note, I, Doremi, black coffee in hand, take apart how the tempo of an observe-and-combine exploration puzzle pairs with a melody that keeps pulling you forward.
Soundtrack: The Talos Principle 2 — answering scale with a choir
A first-person puzzle in which you leave New Jerusalem, the city the robots built, and walk toward the colossal Megastructure on the horizon. Damjan Mravunac's music is written for orchestra, electronics, and choir, sounding the small time of solving a puzzle and the time of marveling at the size of the world at two different tempos. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why the biggest sound is reserved for the walking.
Soundtrack: World of Goo — A waltz before the storm, leaning into the building hand
The music Kyle Gabler wrote for World of Goo holds a Tim Burton-esque gothic carnival and an Ennio Morricone western in the same room. Why does this waltz lean so gently into the trembling hand that stacks the goo balls? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can take home to your own composing.
Soundtrack: Return of the Obra Dinn — music that sounds, then steps back
Raise the pocketwatch and, after a few seconds of black, you drop into a frozen tableau of a death. The pseudo-19th-century orchestra Lucas Pope wrote alone swells at that instant, then quietly withdraws. Between the sounding and the silence is where deduction lives.
