SERIAL
Puzzle Soundtracks
41 episodes · updated 2026-07-11
Puzzle music is a peculiar genre: it must never become wallpaper. Doremi, who composes as well, listens through one soundtrack per episode and puts the design of thought-supporting sound into words.
Episodes
- Ep. 41Soundtrack: FRACT OSC — solve the puzzle and the music grows back2026-07-11
The music Alex Taam (Mogi Grumbles) wrote for FRACT OSC is not playing as a finished piece from the start. Each puzzle you solve in its ruined synthesizer world switches on one more layer - a bass, a pad, an arpeggio - until the player's own hands have assembled the score. Using the composer's own statement that he kept every piece in C pentatonic minor as a thread, black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can bring back to your own composing.
- Ep. 40Soundtrack: Poly Bridge — music that never scolds you when the bridge falls2026-07-10
Collapsing bridges, retrying hands, and an acoustic score that blames none of it. A look at the 'road-trip music' Adrian Talens wrote on a single guitar — with takeaways for anyone who composes.
- Ep. 39Soundtrack: Maquette — the design of choosing songs instead of scoring them2026-07-08
Maquette has almost no score in the usual sense. What plays instead are real songs by San Francisco indie musicians — the kind a now-parted couple might actually have listened to. While you solve the recursive diorama, why is there lyric-heavy pop in your ears? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart what it means to choose songs rather than write them, in a form you can carry back to your own composing.
- Ep. 38Soundtrack: Paradise Killer — I decide the running order2026-07-06
What Barry "Epoch" Topping wrote for Paradise Killer is 24 tracks where city pop melts into vaporwave. The developers call it not music pinned to specific scenes but a single album. An order-free investigation, paired with an order-free playlist. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this music lands through 'happy coincidence,' in a form you can carry home to your own writing.
- Ep. 37Soundtrack: Q.U.B.E. 2 — Sound that is almost real, and not2026-07-05
The music David Housden wrote for Q.U.B.E. 2 is a calm, beautiful layer of piano, strings and synths. But the beauty has a trick in it. To match a premise in which an alien structure imitates Earth, he ran real sounds through synthesizers to make tones that are almost real, and not. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart the distance between first-person puzzle thinking and this sound, through a lens you can take home to your own composing.
- Ep. 36Soundtrack: The Gardens Between — Music that never plays backward, even when you rewind time2026-07-04
Even though The Gardens Between is a game about rewinding and advancing time, Tim Shiel's music itself is never played in reverse. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why 'sound that never turns back even when time does' works so well for a memory puzzle, through a lens you can carry into your own composing.
- Ep. 35Soundtrack: INSIDE — Telling a story about the inside of a head, through a head2026-07-03
The audio of Playdead's INSIDE was recorded through a real human skull. Martin Stig Andersen and SØS Gunver Ryberg pushed synth tones through bone to give them a brittle, hollow quality. Why does 'sound heard from inside a head' work so well for a puzzle about hijacking other bodies through mind control? Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart.
- Ep. 34Soundtrack: IMMORTALITY — recording a theme together with its dark underside2026-07-02
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.
- Ep. 33Soundtrack: Viewfinder — music that breathes with the hand that places a photo2026-07-01
Take a photograph, paste it into the world, and the two-dimensional image becomes solid — the music Aether (Jason Taylor) wrote for Sad Owl Studios' Viewfinder is downtempo that keeps company with this strange act without ever rushing it. The track names split into Lounge and Domain, mapping the very skeleton of the game. Including the fact that the composer is legally blind and builds by ear, I, Doremi, take it apart, black coffee in hand, through a lens you can carry home to your own composing.
- Ep. 32Soundtrack: Carto — Rearrange the map, and the music rearranges too2026-06-30
The 31 pieces Eddie Yu wrote for Carto are all short, round-cornered, and faintly acoustic. In this game the player rearranges map tiles to reassemble the world itself. What is lovely is that the music, too, is keyed to place and gets rearranged with it. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this music can keep playing over long deliberation without ever tiring you out, through a lens you can carry home to your own composing.
- Ep. 31Soundtrack: The Pedestrian — a jazzy gait walking a city of signs2026-06-29
The music Logan Hayes wrote for The Pedestrian is a single garment stitched from jazz, ambient and Eastern-European melody over a backbone of piano and orchestra. Behind the puzzle of rearranging signage panels to connect doorways, it keeps reshaping without ever cutting out, driven by FMOD. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart this music as a companion that never falls silent, through a lens you can carry back to your own writing.
- Ep. 30Soundtrack: Call of the Sea — Flip the love song over and you get a second theme2026-06-28
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.
- Ep. 29Soundtrack: The Case of the Golden Idol — grey music for frozen time2026-06-27
The OST Kyle Misko wrote in wartime Lviv for The Case of the Golden Idol: cold 18th-century England fused with new-age ambient, looping beside a frozen crime scene and never rushing your deduction. On the design of music that refuses to react — and what a composer can steal from it.
- Ep. 28Soundtrack: Superliminal — The most suspicious sound is the one that soothes you2026-06-26
You wake in the waiting room of a dream-therapy program. What Matt Christensen wrote for Superliminal is lounge jazz that could be playing in a hotel lobby, carried by pianist John Reeves' hands. The comfort is both the weapon and the biggest misdirection — just like the puzzles where perspective changes an object's size. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart how this no-fail first-person puzzle meshes with music that never rushes you, through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
- Ep. 27Soundtrack: TUNIC — Music that turns like the pages of a manual2026-06-25
The 60 tracks Terence Lee (Lifeformed) and Janice Kwan wrote for TUNIC lean on the memory of retro game music without hiding inside the quotation. Built from samples of stray cats and summer wind recorded in the alleys of Taipei, it lives between the artificial and the organic. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart how this game of gathering fragments to read a world meshes with its music, through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
- Ep. 26Soundtrack: Opus Magnum — A loop that never insists, beside an optimization that never ends2026-06-24
For Zachtronics' alchemy puzzle Opus Magnum, Matthew S Burns wrote both the story and the music. Seamlessly looping machines, and a lounge-style loop that hides its own seams. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart how this music turns an optimization that never ends into a place you want to stay — through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
- Ep. 25Soundtrack: Obduction — Music that changes its timbre from world to world2026-06-23
Robyn Miller, who wrote the music for Myst and Riven, came back to Cyan's worlds after twenty years. The music of Obduction changes its very timbre each time a world changes. Including how he made it — looping footage of someone walking on his iPad and finding the themes on his piano — I, Doremi, take it apart with a black coffee in hand, through a lens you can carry home to your own composing.
- Ep. 24Soundtrack: Void Stranger — a symphony built from poor sound sources, echoing in a monochrome labyrinth2026-06-22
The music of the monochrome Sokoban labyrinth Void Stranger conjures both grandeur and unease using nothing but stock MIDI sounds and chip waveforms. Composer Eero Lahtinen built it around one idea: that you shouldn't get sick of the same loop while stuck on a puzzle. Doremi reads its repeat-proof writing and its patient drones from a composer's chair.
- Ep. 23Soundtrack: The Swapper — a cosmos built from a freezer and an old tape2026-06-21
A derelict space station. In The Swapper you clone yourself and swap control to advance, and its sound was assembled single-handedly by Carlo Castellano — music and effects alike. The groan of the ship came from a microphone shoved inside his freezer; footsteps came from crumpling an old VHS tape. What does it mean to lay handmade sound over a clay-model world? Per-room ambience managed procedurally, and the improvised piece 'Recreation.' Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart sound that refuses to keep a beat.
- Ep. 22Soundtrack: Braid, Anniversary Edition — only the sounds that survive being reversed2026-06-20
The music of Braid was not composed. Jonathan Blow hired no composer; he licensed existing cello and harp pieces from Magnatune artists, under a single condition — that they stay beautiful when played backwards. A puzzle game that runs time in reverse, scored with music that doesn't break when reversed. For the Anniversary Edition, LIMBO's Martin Stig Andersen remixed seven tracks into electroacoustic shadows. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart 'reversible music'.
- Ep. 21Soundtrack: The Talos Principle 2 — answering scale with a choir2026-06-19
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.
- Ep. 20Soundtrack: Manifold Garden — Music that returns even when you fall2026-06-18
Choose your gravity, fall to the bottom, and you return from the ceiling: an endless architecture. The music Laryssa Okada wrote for it is built from strings and pads that never resolve, shaped much like the looping space itself. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this music loops yet never sounds like mere repetition, through a lens you can carry back to your own composing.
- Ep. 19Soundtrack: FEZ — the music that carried 8-bit into the present2026-06-17
The music Rich Vreeland (Disasterpeace) wrote for FEZ keeps the vocabulary of chiptune, yet sands its corners down with reverb and bitcrushing and carries it into the spaciousness of New Age. Dynamic scoring that shifts with altitude and time of day, plus a trick where images are hidden in the spectrogram so that the sound itself becomes a puzzle. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take it apart through a lens you can bring back to your own composing.
- Ep. 18Soundtrack: Chants of Sennaar — Learning a people's sound before learning their words2026-06-16
The music Thomas Brunet wrote for Chants of Sennaar is a small chamber ensemble woven from live instruments. The peoples living on each floor of the tower cannot understand one another's words. But the sound gets through. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why the score of a language-deciphering game tells you 'who these people are' before you can decode a single word.
- Ep. 17Soundtrack: Antichamber — Music that grows a layer the deeper you go2026-06-15
The music Siddhartha Barnhoorn wrote for Antichamber is neither a loop nor silence. Thin layers crossfade and stack, never repeating the same combination twice, thickening as you push further in: a living ambient bed. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why this sound follows you through impossible spaces without ever coming undone, through a lens you can take home to your own composing.
- Ep. 16Soundtrack: Papers, Please — It plays at the top of the day, then the stamp takes over2026-06-13
You sit in an inspection booth hunting for discrepancies in documents. The music Lucas Pope wrote himself is barely a thirty-second anthem. It blares at the top of each day, then withdraws once inspection begins. What carries on is the sound of the stamp, the shuffle of paper — a beat tapped out by the player. Black coffee in hand, I take apart this 'play it at the top, then go quiet' design in a form you can carry home to your own composing.
- Ep. 15Soundtrack: A Monster's Expedition — The rhythm isn't in the music, it's in your fingertips2026-06-12
For an open-world Sokoban about toppling trees and rolling logs between islands, Eli Rainsberry wrote music with the rhythm removed from its spine. So where did the beat go? It moved into the UI — into the sounds your own actions make. Fifteen guitar-and-piano tracks drift like the sea of your thinking, while the rhythm is tapped out by your hands. Black coffee in hand, I take this division of labor apart in a form you can carry home to your own composing.
- Ep. 14Soundtrack: Blue Prince — A manor where even the music gets drafted2026-06-11
The music of Blue Prince is dark jazz by Dutch duo Trigg & Gusset. Almost no percussion, mostly silent exploration, music that rises only in particular rooms. The composer wrote sketches; the developer drafted them into the manor. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, dig out what a composer can steal from this design that refuses to ring.
- Ep. 13Саундтрек: World of Goo — вальс перед бурей, льнущий к строящей руке2026-06-10
Музыка, которую Kyle Gabler написал для World of Goo, держит в одной комнате готический карнавал в духе Тима Бёртона и вестерн Эннио Морриконе. Почему этот вальс так мягко льнёт к дрожащей руке, что складывает шарики гу? С чёрным кофе в руке я, Дореми, разбираю её через призму, которую можно унести к собственному сочинительству.
- Ep. 12Саундтрек: Unpacking — как поставить звук, не переигрывая2026-06-09
Музыка, которую Jeff van Dyck написал для Unpacking, накладывает акустическую гитару и пианино на чиптюн со сточенными углами, и почему-то никогда не переигрывает. В головоломке без провала и без таймера что делает музыка и от чего отказывается? С чёрным кофе в руке я, Дореми, разбираю её через призму, которую можно унести к собственному сочинительству.
- Ep. 11Саундтрек: Gorogoa — всякий раз, когда плитки накладываются, накладывается и музыка2026-06-08
Музыка, которую Joel Corelitz написал для Gorogoa, почти не выводит на свет ни мелодии, ни аккорда; она кладёт «чувство места» одной лишь фактурой. И маленькие пьесы, привязанные к каждой плитке, соединяются по правилам наложения — сама головоломка перекладывания картинок происходит и в звуке. С чёрным кофе в руке я, Дореми, разбираю её устройство в форме, которую можно унести к собственному сочинительству.
- Ep. 10Саундтрек: The Talos Principle — рай, построенный на одном долгом выдержанном тоне2026-06-07
После шестнадцати лет написания музыки-стены-звука для Serious Sam, Damjan Mravunac из Croteam озвучил философскую головоломку, намеренно отказавшись от ритма и мелодии и положив вместо них один долгий выдержанный трек. Почему эта музыка выдерживает четырнадцать часов прослушивания в поддельном раю священных хоров? С чашкой чёрного кофе в руках я, Дореми, читаю чертёж её двухслойного дизайна.
- Ep. 9Саундтрек: Portal 2 — музыка, написанная машиной, что собирает себя по мере решения2026-06-06
Музыка, которую Mike Morasky написал для Portal 2, — это не то, что ставишь и слушаешь; она собирает себя сама, пока ты в разгаре головоломки. Наступи на Aerial Faith Plate, прокатись на Excursion Funnel — и музыка добавляет ещё один слой. С чашкой чёрного кофе в руках я, Дореми, разбираю, почему эта партитура звучит так, будто её сочинил компьютер, и что из этого можно украсть для собственной работы.
- Ep. 8Саундтрек: LIMBO — остаются лишь звуки, лишённые своей идентичности2026-06-05
Martin Stig Andersen, в одиночку отвечавший за звук LIMBO, происходит из акусматической музыки. Искажая «идентичность» звуков и отказываясь от музыки, которая манипулирует эмоциями, он наложил звуковые тени на мир силуэтов. Как выглядит «защищённая от рестарта музыка» для головоломки в духе «умри и научись»? С чашкой чёрного кофе в руках я, Дореми, разбираю это.
- Ep. 7Саундтрек: Machinarium — арифметика петель, которые не выдыхаются в ржавом мире2026-06-04
Музыка, которую Tomáš Dvořák (Floex) написал для бессловесного, нарисованного от руки приключения Machinarium от Amanita Design, — странный сплав: телесное тепло фортепиано и кларнета, сплавленное с грязным аналоговым синтезатором и лязгом металлолома. В игре, где вы минутами смотрите на один и тот же экран, почему эти петли продолжают жить в ушах? С чашкой чёрного кофе в руках я, Дореми, разбираю это через призму «соотношения, в котором смешиваются абстракция и мелодия».
- Ep. 6Саундтрек: Patrick's Parabox — звук, что разматывается по мере умножения коробок2026-06-03
Музыка, которую Priscilla Snow написала для рекурсивного сокобана Patrick's Parabox, сидит ровно между электроникой и эмбиентом: спокойный, вопрошающий аккомпанемент. Тембр обновляется всякий раз, как появляется новая механика, а названия треков буквально и есть имена этих механик. С чёрным кофе в руке я, Doremi, разбираю, почему этот звук не мешает долгим раздумьям, в том ракурсе, что можно унести в собственное сочинительство.
- Ep. 5Саундтрек: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes — фортепиано, прорезающее гостиничную тьму2026-06-02
В плотной головоломке-наблюдении Lorelei and the Laser Eyes от Simogo музыка Daniel Olsén и его соавторов ставит в центр фортепиано, укоренённое в Дебюсси и Сати, и при этом плавит цифровое в акустическое. Doremi с точки зрения композитора разбирает, как звук поддерживает долгие раздумья и тихо перекликается со скрытым согласием с изображением.
- Ep. 4Саундтрек: Baba Is You — маленькая петля, что никогда не корит тебя за ошибку2026-06-01
Музыка Baba Is You — чиптюн, написанный в трекере (OpenMPT) Арви «Hempuli» Тейкари, который сделал всю игру в одиночку. Это игра, которую переигрываешь сотни раз, и всё же музыка не возвещает ни победы, ни поражения — она просто крутит светлую маленькую петлю. С чёрным кофе в руке я, Дореми, разбираю, почему эта «музыка, которая не корит», держит метод проб и ошибок лёгким, под углом, который вы сможете унести к собственному письму.
- Ep. 3Саундтрек: Return of the Obra Dinn — музыка, что звучит, а затем отступает2026-05-31
Поднимаешь карманные часы — и после нескольких секунд черноты падаешь в застывшую картину смерти. Псевдо-оркестр XIX века, написанный Лукасом Поупом в одиночку, вздымается в это мгновение, а затем тихо отступает. Между звучанием и тишиной и живёт время дедукции.
- Ep. 2Саундтрек: Outer Wilds — когда музыка становится инструментом прохождения2026-05-30
Партитура Эндрю Пралоу к Outer Wilds — не фоновая музыка, которую оставляешь играть. Большую часть времени она молчит; когда звучит — это сигнал открытия; а порой сами инструменты становятся орудиями исследования. С чёрным кофе в руке я, Дореми, разбираю, как работает эта музыка, под углом, который вы сможете унести к собственному сочинительству и дизайну.
- Ep. 1Саундтрек: COCOON — музыка, что звучит без перерыва, не превращаясь в обои2026-05-30
Музыка, которую Якоб Шмид написал для COCOON, почти целиком синтезирована, и бóльшая её часть генерируется в реальном времени. Это ни зацикленная подложка, ни обет молчания, а третий путь. С чёрным кофе в руке я, Дореми, разбираю, почему эта музыка может звучать непрерывно, ни разу не оборачиваясь «обоями», под углом, который вы сможете унести к собственному сочинительству.