Although a soundtrack can be essential to a movie or game's atmosphere, sometimes it can feel a little bit like cheating. Take any documentary, if they layer a sad piano soundtrack over it, you're going to feel sad for whatever is happening on screen. It's such an easily manipulated part of our brains, that some developers, like creator of Braid, Jonathan Blow, see it as immersion breaking.
Which is why he's pulled almost all music out of his upcoming puzzle game, The Witness, which was showcased in a strange "long screenshot," trailer yesterday, giving us a birds eye view of various parts of the island that the game takes place on.
Music feels right in a game because we're comfortable with it he said. We're used to having music just playing from some unnamed source in the game world. That's disorientating and breaks immersion he says, giving us yet another anchor to the real world.
"The Witness is a game about being perceptive: noticing subtleties in the puzzles you find, noticing details in the world around you. If we slather on a layer of music that is just arbitrarily playing, and not really coming from the world, then we’re adding a layer of stuff that works against the game. It’d be like a layer of insulation that you have to hear through in order to be more present in the world," he said in a blog post.
There will be some music and voice recordings to discover links to the past or present, with The Witness bring translated into more than 15 languages from around the world, but it won't be the main focus of the game.
