- Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko says every Remedy game has "absolute evil lurking in there"
- Alanko says he and Remedy rely on players' intelligence to understand the "psychological aspect to it all"
- He adds that "Remedy is not a dictating entity; we don’t do walking simulators, and we don’t hold hands"
According to Control Resonant composer Petri Alanko, every Remedy Entertainment title has a sinister aspect at its core, and he relies on the player's intelligence to understand it through his music.
When asked if there is a particular approach to the whole Remedy-verse score and musical landscape in an interview with TechRadar Gaming, Alanko explained that "There’s always the absolute evil lurking in there," with an added psychological aspect.
He said, "It affects instruments, instrumentation," as well as "the overtone series" (a sequence of musical pitches or frequencies that naturally sound above a main base note when it is played), as something so evil it "has a gravity" and "that affects the sounds, too, by bending and separating the overtones from each other."
"Its nature is very prominent, and there is a psychological aspect to it all: when you hear something familiar to be slightly off, it triggers your lizard brain into action, and with some preparation, we’re able to have a very suitable fight-or-flight reaction to introduce some action as a spice," Alanko said. "It is a very, very interesting process to affect people, to sort of kick them into action without actually telling them what to do."
As for how he and Remedy portray that "evil" across the games, he explained that they rely on players' understanding of subtext and context clues to find the meaning of what they're experiencing.
"Remedy is not a dictating entity; we don’t do walking simulators, and we don’t hold hands; we believe in intelligence and the ability to think and deduce something from the facts given," he said. "Same applies to music: a set of hints and a basic feeling may be introduced, but it ends there.
"A good mentalist always lets the audience do the magic. And everyone has seen those really awful marketplace magicians; nobody wants that for a birthday. Remedy is not that. We believe in a thinking, investigating, curious human being."
This applies across all of Remedy's games, whether it's Control, Alan Wake, or Quantum Break; however, Alanko and the studio know they can't regurgitate the same thing over and over again, but players will find a commonality between each series.
"Every new IP adds to the recipe, more or less, and though we don’t exactly want to repeat ourselves, there must be something in common and something familiar to the scores and the soundtracks, and that’s something you can’t really create overnight," Alanko said.
"The same applies with everything: it gets better with time. For instance, we introduced orchestra to Remedy’s sonic identity with Alan Wake, and it was there as is, but also as a slightly mangled version of itself, too. Then there was a very softly played grand piano, with enough compression to turn Manhattan into a peanut, with a reverb that ate half of Helsinki, basically. Quantum Break allowed for much more industrial and electronic flavours to enter the soup, and Control brought musique concrète in."
He added that those three qualities created "What I love to call 'A Remedy Sonic Bermuda Triangle', some top-notch processing," noting that a "huge amount of raw material is originated from acoustic sources, as "There’s very little 'just synths' stuff, although I do love my arsenal."
In the same interview, Alanko has suggested studios should value music more if they care about their games and avoid AI at all costs.
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