Moonlighter 2 and Silksong composer reveals the process of 'hand drawing' video game music

'I want room to move and experiment and change things up,' he says

Video game music is in a weird place. Hideo Kojima borrows pop stars for Death Stranding 2. Sandfall Interactive gave Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sweeping orchestral arrangements with endless variations on themselves — thematically appropriate, but not very game-y. Ghost of Yōei's soundtrack is basically the kind of score you'd expect from a film. It's all quality stuff, sure, but it also seems afraid to acknowledge the fact that it's intended to accompany a video game. On the other end of the spectrum is a vast swathe of games reveling in their game-ness and relying on retro-styled chip-tunes to make you feel like a kid again, and in between are the soundtracks that are Just Nice And Fine and don't try to be anything else.

Christopher Larkin, the classically trained composer who wrote the soundtracks for Hollow Knight, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and, more recently, Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, believes all those styles can exist in harmony together. Moonlighter 2 is a bit of a hybrid itself, part shopkeeping administration game and part roguelike, as you venture into the wilds to scoop up goods to sell. While the town where you work is very medieval-fantasy-inspired, Moonlighter 2 sends you into deserts, up through the clouds, and through sci-fi inspired robot lairs as well. There's a lot going on. Larkin spoke with Polygon over a video call in November about how he put his ideals into practice working on the Moonlighter sequel, what makes for good video game music, and why film scoring techniques work best when combined with elements that make video games unique.

When you ask someone who isn't terminally online what they think of video game music, there's a good chance the first thing that comes to their mind is a chip-tune piece from a 30-year-old game. A broad awareness of the ways video game scores can work in tandem with a game's interactive elements just isn't there — not yet, anyway.

"Games, unlike movies, are still not spread among the different generations as evenly, so people who don't give it a try don't hear [how music has changed] unless they hear maybe some of it on the radio, or hear their kids playing something," Larkin says.

He points to synthetic sounds and electronic sequencing (where you enter notes in a device that creates combinations of different patterns) as two of the most common features that people, including gamers, consider characteristic of video game music. So to counter that expectation with Moonlighter 2, he made a point of doing what he calls the equivalent of "hand drawing" much of his music, which included, among other things:

• Crafting percussion instruments out of things he found in his kitchen
• Recording a live guitarist and violinist
• Playing live for several tracks himself

Larkin wants to push video game music forward, not change its identity entirely. He mixed those hand-drawn elements with synthetic sounds and electronic sequencing throughout the project to "pay homage to the idea that this is still a video game."

Other composers I've spoken with previously have often said one of the biggest challenges of writing game music is anticipating how long a player will stay in a specific area and writing a track's loop point (when it cuts out and starts from the beginning again) with that in mind. Larkin tackled that challenge by trying to make Moonlighter 2's music more alive and reactive, with a multi-layered effect in each biome.

"In video games, we don't swell to a moment in a script as easily or as often as we might do in a film, for example. But we do have ways in which we can make the music ebb and flow in video games," Larkin says. "And that's usually by changing the mix, where we might have multiple layers of the music going at one time, and we can take some out or add some on, depending on certain parameters."

Here's how it plays out. The score starts out as you might expect from any soundtrack, with a melody that fits the location, but you'll notice it lingers and changes more than most area themes. It takes on new shapes as you progress through a region, and it shifts dramatically when a combat encounter starts like, for example, swapping chill classical guitar chords for percussion-driven heavy metal or taking "trippy, dreamy" tunes for the sky biome and bending the pitches in unexpected ways. (Larkin didn't use Joseph Haydn's Surprise Symphony as a reference point, but it certainly has the same jolting effect in-game.) Different kinds of action get different themes — a standard fight desert, for example, has a different track than a segment where you're chased across a dangerous clifftop — and they all borrow riffs from each other and toy with them using different instruments.

Larkin went a step further with Moonlighter 2, which features strands of combat music, along with sounds from other, less violent encounters that will linger on as you continue, weaving themselves into the main area theme. The idea is for everything to snowball together into something that feels more natural, more of an experience than a soundtrack.

He uses a variation of the same effect in Moonlighter 2's hub areas. The theme for the main village is about two or times as long as themes for something like, say, Peach's Castle theme in Super Mario 64, as Larkin set himself a goal of making tracks roughly four minutes long or longer. (That, he says, gives them enough room to grow and keep them from becoming repetitive.) Right when you think it's about to loop back to the start, it carries on with a new instrument and a different variation of the few chords that originally inspired it. The intended effect is for the musical ambiance to evolve and deepen alongside your relationship to the town and the people who live there, anchoring you more firmly than if it was the same basic melody repeating every 90 seconds.

"There's a bit of Breath of the Wild styling here," Larkin says, comparing his approach to composition more broadly to the open-world Zelda game's lack of constraints and feeling of open opportunities. "I want room to move and experiment and change things up, to take the music into a less defined stylistic zone." The result, in Moonlighter 2, is something that carries a weightier sense of place and helps the world feel more alive. But more importantly, it's a different way of looking at video game scores, one that's ambitious and eager to move ahead without being ashamed of the past.