One of the highlights of the game is (POSSIBLE SPOILER) when the main character floods a big part of the complex and amidst the chaos of the water damage a serene piano piece is played – an excellent twist on the action that is going on in the gameplay, yet this piece is also limited to a whopping forty-three seconds. Taking an incredibly awesome angle of almost baroque/classical style to the soundtrack, Acker had an amazing idea going, yet the game is played almost entirely in silence. Josh Acker, the game’s composer, clearly is talented. A great chunk of these are a cool drum beat, but – really – what can we do with that for twenty seconds? A twenty second track that does not repeat is barely an effect, for instance. Unfortunately, Shadow Complex’s soundtrack cannot add much to the game because it simply does not feel like it’s there – it’s as though the developers intentionally stifled it.
There have been many soundtracks that do not survive well outside their game’s setting but add such ambience and thrill to the action that we can forgive them for being an effective storytelling device. In fact, this soundtrack is a SOUND track in the very sense of the word: it is mostly sounds, not music. Whereas a soundtrack to the previously released XBLA game, ‘Splosion Man, had short tracks that told a story, Shadow Complex is primarily ambient drum sounds or a bit of strings and an effect or two. Of these, only half are more than ninety seconds in length. Out of its sixty tracks, only about ten or eleven are longer than a minute. Click the jump to find out more!Īs a soundtrack to be enjoyed as a piece of music, Shadow Complex does not offer the listener much. Thankfully, the game has no politics in it to speak of, and its soundtrack doesn’t either.ĭid you even realize there was a soundtrack? Well, there most certainly is a soundtrack! In fact, it has SIXTY tracks. With it, however, came a great backlash from the community as the game’s universe was based on that of Orson Scott Card, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage. It was received with near-unanimous acclaim as a great throwback to the “Metroidvania”-styled side-scrolling games.
Epic Games’ and Chair Entertainment’s Shadow Complex was a game that caused quite a stir upon its release on the XBOX Live Arcade at the end of August of this year.
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