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All I can hear is my own breathing.
I've just started playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a first-person horror adventure game from indie developer Frictional Games, creators of the Penumbra series. From the little I've played of Amnesia so far, it's bloody terrifying. And one key factor stands out to me as to why: the lack of music.
I've been playing music all my life, so it's one of the first things I notice in video games. I love the creativity of early gaming soundtracks, how they used limited resources to craft such enduring tunes, and the way they've evolved into a legitimate form of composition.
But for all that, I think I appreciate it even more when a game can judiciously refrain from letting music drive the emotion of the scene, instead using sound effects and silence to heighten the moment. Read on for a few examples….
Horror games, like horror movies, use silence and emphasized sound effects to maximize scare potential. It's a time-honored tradition of the genre. But Dead Space stands out to me because it wraps its scares in the real-world science of space. When you venture outside the Ishimura, all the creepy sounds stop, because they can't be heard in a vacuum. This only makes the player more terrified. You know bad things are still out there, but now you don't have any audio clues to help locate them and protect yourself. Spooky.
Of course, this game has an incredible soundtrack. But most of it kicks in during colossus battles and cutscenes. For most of the game, it's just you, your horse, an incredibly vast and empty land, and the sounds of galloping hooves and gusting wind. I don't think I've ever felt such a combination of awe and solitude in a game. I appreciate that the soundtrack gets out of the way and lets me feel that.
I loved the sparse design of Lara Croft's original adventure. Small compositions punctuated battles or moments of discovery, but for the most part Lara was left to the sounds of her footsteps and various athletic grunts as she scaled the game's environments. This gives the game a real sense of isolation and exploration; you feel like no one has ever seen what you are seeing. (And then you shoot a T-rex with handguns that never run out of ammo. But still.)
The world just ended. You wake up as Celes, in a bed in a tiny house, tended to by Cid, who's at death's door himself. You've been asleep for a year. You're on a deserted island. All you can do is catch fish…or try to end your own life. And instead of Nobuo Uematsu's classic themes, all you hear is the sound of the waves. This moment stayed with me as a child, and it's still one of the best absences of music I can think of.
I asked some of my Twitter friends for examples of silence or lack of music, and they came up with moments in BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, ICO, and according to one smart-aleck, "Every time I play Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live." Let's hear your favorite music-less moments in the comments.
