Soundtrack: Creaks — A 'living' score that is born anew every time

Introduction — a low sustained tone descends the dim stairway

As the boy in red begins to descend the stairs of a dim mansion, the first thing to reach you is a soft-edged low tone. In this hand-drawn puzzle-platformer that Komugi reviewed, the music Joe Acheson wrote refuses, at first, to let you count a tempo. Roughly one footstep apart, a piano note drops, a zither string trembles faintly, and a synth pad catches the resonance. The corners of the beat are carefully sanded off, and the world unspools at the same pace as your descending steps.

The composer is Joe Acheson, a Scottish-born musician based in Brighton, working under his Hidden Orchestra name. He plays most of the instruments himself — piano, basses, zithers, analog synth, flutes, harmonium — layered with Jack McNeill's bass clarinet, Rebecca Knight's cello and Poppy Ackroyd's violin. The deeper you go into the mansion, the further back the timbres seem to travel through time: from primitive handmade instruments, to an ambient baroque of bells and choirs and organs, to a classical world of piano and strings, to an electronic realm of analog synths, and finally down into a subterranean noir where a bass clarinet growls.

A 'living' soundtrack — no room ever sounds the same

The heart of this music is that most of it is not playback of a recording but generative music assembled on the spot. Over roughly five years Acheson built more than a hundred pieces into the game; the 21 tracks on the commercial OST are merely 'fixed' transcriptions of that huge body of material. What he described in his production notes (PlayStation Blog) was a design of carefully controlled randomness that makes a different choice among many ideas every time.

A puzzle game is an art of retrying. The player enters and leaves the same room again and again, repeating the same few seconds. With an ordinary looped BGM this repetition eventually dulls the ear, and the music becomes wallpaper. Acheson's answer was neither the loop nor silence but that third path — 'it never sounds the same twice.' So when you step back into a room, the music does not resume where it left off; it rises again with a slightly different face. The repetition of failure is not repetition on the side of sound. That, to me, is a head-on musical answer to the 'repeat fatigue' the puzzle genre carries by design.

The hidden link — in a mansion without dialogue, the music is the only reply

Creaks has no dialogue, no inventory, no on-screen text. Shine your light to turn the mechanical monsters into furniture, then use that furniture as footholds to climb down — that is the whole rule. Precisely because of this, the job of telling you 'was my last move right?' is entrusted almost entirely to the music. PC Gamer's Rachel Watts called this score a 'built-in guide' to the puzzles. When your steps head the right way, a scattering of piano grains or an added layer of rhythm quietly nudges you forward.

What is striking is her note that the arrival of a new melody can tell you a puzzle is 'already solved' before you have realized it yourself — the music gets there a beat ahead of your own confirmation. By the time you finish and cross the room, the score has stacked thick with distinct instruments. Because the UI stays silent, feedback reaches the body as the swelling and thinning of timbre. The reticence of the mechanics and the eloquence of the music are cleanly two sides of one sheet.

Analogy with the puzzle — the music matches its stride to your thinking speed

I have a habit of measuring music in BPM, but Creaks' music is hard to pin with a number. That, I think, is because it syncs not to a metronome but to the speed of thought. While the player stares at the board in long deliberation, the sound stays thin, slow, almost beatless. Once a move lands and a path begins to appear, a pulse sprouts, instruments join, and the felt tempo creeps upward. The very act of solving sounds like a shift from beatless to beated.

Where a fixed BGM advances by 'time,' this generative score advances by 'understanding.' The unfolding of the music is tied to the moment the player gets it. So in the same room, someone who flashes to the answer quickly and someone who wanders for a long while hear different shapes of music. That the score never settles into one fixed page is not a flaw but a margin that records 'how you thought' — or so I muse while brewing a second cup.

Tracks worth hearing

Start from behind the scenes. In the making-of video on Amanita Design's official channel, Acheson himself talks through the design philosophy of the 'living soundtrack,' and you can see how the generative music actually branches as it plays.

To soak in the fixed versions, Hidden Orchestra's official Bandcamp is the sure bet. Let "Entrance" and "Attic" give you the air of the mansion's threshold, and "Final Battle" the moment where the electronic and the noir come to a head. If you'd rather stream it, the official album is on Spotify.

・Bandcamp (official): Creaks (Original Soundtrack) — Hidden Orchestra

・Spotify (official): Creaks (Original Game Soundtrack)

Closing — what I would steal

If I were to steal one thing for my own music, it would be this: don't let repetition sound like repetition. Even with loop material, prepare a handful of short branching phrases and simply play a different one each time you return — and the same scene stops wearing its 'second time' face. Where it looked like a binary of silence or endless loop, Acheson pulled up a third chair: 'born slightly anew every time.'

The other thing I want to take home is the idea of returning feedback not with lyrics or a sound effect but with 'one more instrument joining in.' When you signal that something worked through the thickness of timbre rather than volume, the listener moves forward without even noticing they were praised. If you want to follow more of the same Amanita family sound, put Tomas Dvorak's Machinarium soundtrack beside it for another study in the balance of quiet and eloquence. Next time you boot up Creaks, try descending the stairs with your ears before your solving hand.