Play soundtrack
Spirit Warden's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Quality | #19 | 4.351 | 4.351 |
| Composition | #24 | 4.281 | 4.281 |
| Overall | #25 | 4.147 | 4.147 |
| Creativity | #35 | 4.140 | 4.140 |
| Impression | #39 | 4.088 | 4.088 |
| Correlation to theme | #129 | 3.877 | 3.877 |
Ranked from 57 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Description
The soundtrack is composed for a narrative puzzle game. I used Ableton as my DAW of choice. The game combines a mixture of orchestral, folk and electronic music to convey a vibrant but dystopian world.
Before Your Eyes
As the player boots up the game, they are met with an opening cinematic recounting the death of Ashe. Jarring flashes her of memories are shown, split seconds apart from one and other before cutting to a view of the towering mountain and wind-swept plains.
Spirit Warden
The main menu track. The camera is fixed on the same shot of the mountain. A constant breeze is gracefully swaying the grass and trees in the area.
Distant Memories
The player is introduced to the main characters in the story: Ashe, Ayra and Yuma. Ashe has just awoken reborn as a ghostly spirit. She struggles to remember anything from her past life. Ayra is a resourceful young girl set on a mission to spread her parent’s ashes on the summit of the distant mountain. Yuma is Ayra’s pet dog. Ayra and Yuma collect firewood, mournful over the passing of her sister, Ashe. Ayra can’t see that Ashe is with her in spirit-form.
This section acts as the gameplay tutorial. The player (controlling Ashe) is introduced to basic movement in spirit-form and must complete a couple of basic puzzles, helping Ayra source the wood for the fire.
A Long Road Ahead
Ayra and Yuma begin their journey towards the mountain. Ashe guides them through a dense forest, helping them navigate difficult terrain by possessing and manipulating items in the environment.
Ancient City
To progress, Ayra and Yuma must navigate through a large rundown city, a shell of world once teeming with life. Cars and many other modern pieces of technology are scattered throughout the city streets, long forgotten and reclaimed by nature. Ayra was told stories by her parents of the dangers of these cities. Raiders often fight amongst themselves over what little resources are left over from the old world.
In this section of the game, Ashe must use their abilities to stealthily guide Ayra and Yuma through the city. Raiders patrolling the city can be distracted and knocked out using objects in the environment to help give Ayra and Yuma safe passage. As they approach the final stretch before escaping unscathed, they are caught in an ambush. Ashe must act fast, chaining together her abilities to disarm the raiders before they fire.
Loyal Companion
As Ayra narrowly escapes the raiders she notices Yuma slowly limping and inevitably collapses. Yuma, hit by a stray bullet from the raiders passes away in Ayra’s arms. From Ashe’s perspective, Yuma’s soul leaves her body as a spiritual being like herself. The remainder of the raiders approach and surround Ayra. Before they have the chance to fire, Yuma’s spirit quickly dashes and disarms each of the raiders, sending them running in shock and horror. Ashe can now communicate with Yuma’s spirit and unlocks a new ability to use throughout the remainder of the game.
Alone in This World
Ayra, now completely alone in the world, is even more determined to complete her journey. ‘Alone in This World’ is a short montage of Ayra’s travels before arriving at the base of the mountain.
Base Camp
Ayra, now at the final leg of her journey, must endure the extreme conditions of the towering mountain above. Ashe helps manipulate the terrain to provide Ayra footholds to ascend.
The Summit
After a gruelling climb, Ayra finally makes it to the summit of the mountain. Her journey is almost complete. She takes out a pouch filled with the ashes of her deceased parents and scatters them into the vast open air, overlooking the immense journey she overcame. As she scatters the ashes, Yuma and Ashe feel themselves being pulled into the ether. In this brief moment, their spirits are conjured into reality where Ayra finally sees the loved ones who were by her side throughout her journey. They share a brief, emotional embrace before Ashe and Yuma fade away. Their journey is complete.
Message from the artist
Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to my soundtrack. Video games have been such an important and influential part of my life and it means so much to begin sharing my music.
Theme
How does it fit the theme?
When first looking at the prompt artwork I was immediately drawn to the human-like figure looking down on the girl. I interpreted it as a spirit guiding the child through the space. This was my leading inspiration when developing the story and soundtrack for Spirit Warden.
Link(s) of the submission on streaming services
https://soundcloud.com/go-go-calypso/sets/spirit-warden?si=babf54d29725453192ca84a7ae8683a4&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
Number of tracks9
Genre
Soundtrack use permission
Any non-commercial project
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Your OST is full of magical songs with outstanding production and sound quality. You did a great work!!
Outstanding production, mixing, choice of instruments, variety in composition! Guitar is absolutely gorgeous! Chorus is so beautiful. Blending of electronic and orchestral music is amazing. This OST is something I am looking up to :) Great work!
So Good
I loved your work! It overflows with sensitivity in each track. And I loved the very cinematic orchestrations!! Congratulations on your work!!
Really cool! I like how much worldbuilding you put into this ost - the story here is really beautiful, and the music portrays it well!
I was really surprised to hear the direction your music went in! Not only is it rare to hear some folk music in a video game soundtrack, but the way a lot of the tracks are written and produced reminds me of contemporary musical theater, which is really cool and very unique!
Lovely submission, great job!
you do such a great job mixing nostalgia with an epic feel, and honestly it's all thanks to composition, instrument choice, and your chord progressions. i especially liked your introduction of vocals in certain tracks, especially the first one. this truly feels like a coming-of-age tale and your tracks are interwoven with a lot of emotion. "Base Camp" is one of my favorite tracks, because it introduces a great deal of contrast without straying from the original theme you have built. i love how you play around with time signatures as well, great touch!
great work!!! i had a lot of fun getting to listen!!
Wow, this is definitely one of my favorites entries, the variety, harmonies, the catchy sections, the good decisions with the instrumentation (nice guitars btw!), personality and the narrative is so brilliant for me.
Congratulations, keep going with your amazing job! 🤩🙌
Yoooo this is really cool! I like how the overall sound is like happy and uplifting, but I gotta say the end of Loyal Companion and the whole of Base Camp were my favorites. When the drums come in to make that sort of polyrhythm in Base Camp, and the epic sound at the end of Loyal Companion, nice! I'm a sucker still for prog rock and metal. I also enjoyed your use of different time signatures, refreshing to hear things not in 4/4. You pulled it off well, good job!
I didn't know what to expect after the first song, since it was quite the ride, but it really paid off to stay. Very bittersweet sound quality that makes you feel at home. I truly enjoyed the listen.
Wow! Great effort put into this! I love the mix of mood and ambiance right in the first track! It tells the story you write very well.
Every track was following a great dynamic and had it's own emotional impact for the story. Perfect musical narration!
The mixing and sound design is superb. I loved the mix of folk and electronic textures to translate the world you described. Amazing job :)
Edit : Truly super fun and creative, almost full five stars :0 love it!
Loved it! Each track is unique in their own ways but uniform. Made for an exciting listening experience
I'm really enjoy it very much! You blending the acoustic and electronic so well. Very nice tracks!
Oh this is one of my new favorites for sure, well done
I really love the vocals they were mesmerizing!
Wow! I love how you combined acoustic and synthetic sounds together with this OST, it's a very emotional one for sure! This is the kind of soundtrack that inspires me to keep writing, it's so authentic. I love it!
really touching(
Gorgeous orchestration throughout this. Before Your Eyes being so electronically driven was not expected but it works out really well. Great use of nature SFX baked into the track to really bring this to life, too. Would happily listen to this outside the context of a game.
Spirit Warden has some wonderful melodies. Great shift in instrumentation here. I absolutely love the trade-off of parallel melodies later in the track with the acoustic guitar and lead synth. I think this may be my favorite of the bunch, in all honesty.
I really respect the varied directions, choice of instruments and genres throughout this. The more prevalent live instruments toward the end and rock-influences were really cool. Production for this was incredible throughout also - did a fantastic job at getting everything to sit comfortably in the mix, no matter what the focus of the track was. On point theme-wise too, and probably one of the tighter thematic submissions there is. Great work, this was a delight to listen to and genuinely really good. :)
Very vibrant and melodic, coupled with wonderful technical elements with rock and electronic elements. 'Spirit Warden' and 'Before your Eyes' are so beautiful! Whole score fits together really coherently. Awesome job!
Okay what.
I was not ready for this. I started Before Your Eyes, and 00:41 hit me so hard I actually leaned into my chair. Some of my favorite works of music are exactly into this style, I got extremely excited and looked forward to the rest. Was not disappointed. Such a beautiful mixture of electronic, folk and orchestral. I crave genre mixing like this. I think my favorite is Before Your Eyes, but I have to mention Ancient City and The Summit, the latter being a top tier ending track. I love the attention to the progression in albums; this one felt like a delightful trip, and I read the story along the way and could feel it. Your interpretation of the theme and the game idea that followed is unseen, at least for me.
You get a 25 stars and a like on Soundcloud. If you ever make more stuff like this I want to be there.
This was nothing short of amazing! Really impressive work to get that many quality tracks out in such a short time. My favorite track is the summit it was a perfect conclusion to this wonderful experience! That and reading the description of the tracks as I listened really got me invested! Great work!