It’s hard to deny the effect of great music on a video game. A well-composed or curated soundtrack transports you to a different world, guiding you down corners you never thought to explore, warning you of what’s to come, or taking you off guard to land an emotional bass drop that you’re bound to remember for months, if not years, to come.
Some original game soundtracks have made history. Think Super Mario, Kirby, or Donkey Kong. Others, like Call of Duty, God of War, and Elden Ring, have earned awards and an eternal slot in living memory. A select few outshine the rest, combining magic and craft into something else: a piece of music that helps you see a whole world, if you just close your eyes. Here are some of them.
10 GhostWire: Tokyo
In GhostWire: Tokyo, you play as Akito, a student living in Shibuya who recently lost his life in a freak traffic accident, but was saved by KK, the spirit of a detective who inhabits his body and takes control of his right hand. When Akito wakes, he finds out that everyone else in his home city has disappeared in a mysterious event known as “The Vanishing”. Thus begins a fight with Akito and KK facing the paranormal beings roaming the ominous Tokyo fog in place of its original human population.
Masatoshi Yanagi captures the spirit of the city and its folklore with incredible finesse in an unforgettable soundtrack that combines the ghosts of ancient tradition with the modern air of this forlorn cyberpunk city, wielding techno distortion with Japanese instruments in a constantly changing orchestral rendition of hope, loss, and maddening thrill.
9 Ori And The Will Of The Wisps
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is the sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest, an enchanting coming-of-age story following Ori, a playful little spirit inhabiting a magical world that claims many sacrifices but offers meaning and purpose in return. In the second edition, Ori goes on a journey to save Ku - the only remaining offspring of Kuro - in order to bring his family back together, and heal the land of Niwen.
Gareth Coker’s score was nominated for four different awards, winning the SXSW Gaming Award for Excellence in Score. His composition translates Ori’s world using a variety of human and instrumental tonal melodies, highlighting opera and percussion to convey a key component of Ori's sound world, the pulses, using organic sources such as blossom bells, gamelans, vibraphones, glockenspiels, Thai gongs, and crotales.
8 Stray
Stray puts players in the mind of a curious ginger cat who falls into a mysterious walled city inhabited by robots. The cat then embarks on a long journey, solving puzzles with the help of a number of companions, to find out what happened to the humans that used to live there, and eventually returns to her own kind back on the surface.
Yann van der Cruyssen’s vision of how this electronic world sounds is closer to ambient music than it is to orchestra, employing a number of nearly unidentifiable synthetic sounds to tell the story of the robot city. The result is highly emotional, mostly thrilling, but sustains a sense of hope and curiosity throughout the different soundtracks that can only be felt by an infinitely curious and hopeful creature, your furry little protagonist.
7 Fallout Series
Built on an alternative history where the US strives to develop fusion power to decrease its reliance on fossil fuel, a dispute with China sets off a nuclear exchange that creates the post-apocalyptic world of the Fallout franchise. In many of the games, you play as a vault dweller tasked with retrieving or fixing items from the nuclear wasteland above, often finding out things about your own past as you explore the different retellings of what really happened.
Composed by Mark Morgan, Matt Gruber, Devin Townsend, and Inon Zur, the Fallout soundtrack also includes a uniquely curated set of licensed music that serves a diegetic purpose in the storyline: putting you in a time and place post-WWII through the music that the characters likely listened to at the time. The combination is always haunting, sometimes downright horrifying, and often triggering goosebumps.
6 Dark Souls Series
Set in a medieval fantasy world taken over by monsters, demons, dragons, and deformed supernatural entities, the Dark Souls series follows the cursed, cyclical journey of a protagonist around a magical flame, set upon by horrors on their quest to recover lost souls as they die and resurrect a thousand times over.
Composed by Motoi Sakuraba and Yuka Kitamura, the score is reminiscent of what you'd expect to hear if you walked through purgatory with a sword of light. The music gives you hope, takes it away, frightens you with glorious purpose, then makes you doubt having purpose at all, all the while flooding your senses with a thousand harmonic melodies that never seem to reach closure.
5 Medal Of Honor
As far as shooters go, Medal of Honor has stood the test of time and passed with flying colors, putting you in the shoes of Rabbit, Deuce, Hawk, and Dante during the opening days of the invasion of Afghanistan. Interrogate captives, meet with informants, capture the Taliban, escape jihadist ambushes, and perform highly complex missions with your platoon of Navy SEAL DEVGRU operators.
Michael Giacchino captures the chaos of war through the eyes of a soldier who doesn’t know if they’re coming back home. His orchestral score is fast, fluid, and pumping with high-wire emotion, fluctuating between happiness at victories, the anguish of loss, and intense relief for simply being alive.
4 Gris
Gris is a colorful experience of a girl going through the different stages of grief after experiencing a tremendous personal loss. The gameplay is largely abstract, with levels portraying her sorrow and hopelessness through art. Waking up in the palm of a crumbling statue, choking on her own voice as she tries to sing, and pursuing strange lights inhabiting the structure of the city inside her mind.
Composed by Berlinist, the soundtrack is as changeable as the nature of grief itself. It employs different instruments at each stage and carries through with no persistent musical motif to hold the score together as a metaphor to the protagonist's journey as she explores her new self and finds color again.
3 Stellaris
Stellaris is akin to Sid Meier’s Civilization, if it was set in outer space. Players take control of an interstellar civilization and grow it through exploration or colonization, building diplomatic ties with other civilizations, trading with them, or waging intergalactic war against them.
Composed by Andreas Waldetoft and Bert Meyer, the score includes performances by the Brandenburg State Orchestra and is continuously expanded with new tracks as the game releases more DLCs. Merging melodic orchestral performance with synthetic creations, the original sci-fi soundtrack tells the story of a people caught in the present moment, eager to survive, thrive, and beat incredible odds in the heart of the darkness we call space.
2 Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight is a gorgeous Metroidvania following the personal journey of a nameless traveling knight through Hallownest, an underground insectoid kingdom. Now plagued by a supernatural infection, it's a complex desolation, crawling with hostile creatures who do not necessarily know what it is they’re protecting, or even why they’re fighting. As our protagonist journeys to find the Dreamers guarding the temple at the heart of infection, he hears hundreds of stories about its origin.
Composed by Christopher Larkin, most known for Pac-Man 256, the soundtrack begins softly, matching the echoing underground being explored before building up as the journey unfolds. Later tracks are riddled with high beats and orchestral explosions, underpinning the intensity of the story of an unforetold glory waiting to be seized.
1 Journey
Journey is the silent story of a robed figure exploring their cultural heritage and through it finding themselves. As they sail across the sand plains, grow their sash with newfound wisdom, and meditate at the temples of their forefathers, they tell the timeless story of what it means to grow up.
Austin Wintory beautifully captures the essence of the game with a soundtrack that makes history as the only one to be nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. In it, he combines traditional folk music with string harmonics to portray magic, wind, and movement along bigger themes of wonder and awe.