The soundtrack of space is classical. Always. Strauss in 2001: A Space Odyssey or even Star Wars’ John Williams. It has to be classical. I love Queen but that isn’t space.
Moonlight Sonata captures space perfectly. It’s eerie, quiet and makes you a bit uneasy. That’s why it was featured prominently in the first Resident Evil game.
Adr1ft is a survival game set in space. The new trailer is called the Moonlight Trailer because Beethoven is all you hear. The piece plays as you float peacefully in space. It continues as the pace of your breath increases, and you pan right over Earth and to the space station. The music keeps playing as we first see the signs of destruction – fragments of your second home. The sounds of destruction and panic crescendos but the Sonata plays at its even pace. The last image is a cable – literally a life line. You reach for it…everything goes black.
Yes, it’s like Gravity, an overrated film about survival in space. But more intense in many ways, at least based on what we see in the trailer. We are that castaway in first person, and similar to the space sequence in Call of Duty: Ghosts, it’s hopeless. How do you survive in space? There’s nothing in space that can keep you alive except things human-made. Nothing of nature. People can’t live in space. That’s the fascinating nature of this game. How do you keep this concept intriguing? Will you be in a space suit the entire team? Will you be stuck on a space station following a linear path and looking for things like screw-drivers and freeze-dried peaches? How do you keep this game from going stale?
Throw a pebble and you’ll hit a survival game these days. Island castaway, zombies, and more zombies. Even seven years after The Great Recession, everyone’s just trying survive. They should eventually make a corporation survival game because the developer of Adi1ft, Adam Orth, didn’t. Microsoft axed the former executive over some un-survival-smart tweeting. Maybe that had something to do with him making this game, but guess we shouldn’t go there.
Adr1ft is out in September 2015 (PS4, Xbox One, Steam).