Outside Your Heaven

So Let Us Melt and The Supremacy of Music

Posted: 23 Feb 2018 07:17 AM PST

THIS POST CONTAINS SLIGHT SPOILERS.

I played So Let Us Melt, the VR game by The Chinese Room. I'm quite familiar with their work, but I wasn't prepared for how affecting this was. The game itself is good, but the main impact is due to the music. Jessica Curry, the composer, is characteristically excellent here, and it speaks to just how important a musical score can be in games.

I read an article recently that "defended" video game music by saying it is great music to work by, meaning its droning, trance-like aesthetics are great for being "invisible" to your ears, a pleasant background presence that helps focus you on other things. This is the opposite of all the video game scores I love. I prefer music that is demonstrative, direct, memorable, demanding and insisting on an emotional experience. There is a similar school of thought in film, that music shouldn't be memorable, that it should blend into the background and not draw attention to itself. This is a classic Hollywood thing, and it has many variations, from editing, to acting, to camera work. All nonsense. When art violates this aesthetic you get things like Psycho, like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction. You get the operatic, the epic, the dramatic. You get cinema you love, that demands love, that is worthy of your love.

Great video game scores also do this. This is why everyone remembers Nobuo Uematsu's classic scores for Final Fantasy, where boss fights feel like set-pieces in a musical. This is why people remember the balls-out rock opera scores for Castlevania. This is why people love the Hyrule theme from Zelda, not because it's a bunch of vaguely pleasant mush but because it slaps you in the face with a melody worth humming for the rest of your life. Video game music that achieves its own erasure might take skill to create, but it doesn't inspire love. It can't survive outside the game.

Curry's music for So Let Us Melt is so powerful, so unapologetically attention-grabbing, it feels like the game was created to accompany it, not vice versa. This is not a flaw. This is why the game is great. Can a single aspect of a game be so beautiful it lifts everything else up, to the point it all becomes sublime? Yes, this is how aesthetics work. This is how music often works, when it has soul. This is how music works in So Let Us Melt.

The visuals and interactions in So Let Us Melt add layers of specificity to Curry's already sublime music. The score by itself is haunting, sad, inevitable, cosmic. The fact that the game is about the lifespan of a planet, told from the perspective of a terraforming bot that lives for millions of years, makes this one of the great time and space narratives in media. The choice of a lyrical sci-fi subject, combined with Curry's powerhouse artistic presence, reminds me a lot of the relationship between Carl Sagan and Vangelis in the original 1979 Cosmos. When I first saw Cosmos, about 10 years ago (long after its initial broadcast), I was struck by how earnestly it combined music and narrative ideas. It reaches for the sublime in the way Vangelis scores Sagan's narration, the way he keeps trying to capture of feeling of billions of years of evolution, the desperation to survive. The original Cosmos was a plea for humanity to not throw away thousands upon thousands of years of work. It could all disappear tomorrow in a nuclear fire that would darken the sky, choke the planet, and end it all. The final episode was an extended nightmare where Sagan imagines what it would mean for us to end it. There will never be another child, he says at one point. Something else might evolve, but it won't be us. We just ended humans for The Universe. The empty planet will continue, for millions of years, with no one to remember us. Just the eons of wind blowing across the harsh, dead husk of a world. Endless. Agonizing. Forever.

So Let Us Melt is the most apocalyptic game The Chinese Room has made, and this is really saying something. All their games -- Dear Esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, and even their Amnesia sequel Machine for Pigs -- are about empty worlds haunted by regret. In Dear Esther it's obtuse and poetic, a life you're trying to piece together through clues that can never be fully decoded. In Machine for Pigs its more explicitly narrative, a straight horror story about how glimpsing the waste and death of the 20th century from the preservative of the 19th century drove someone to abandon their humanity. Rapture is what it says on the tin: the end of the world, told in all its blubbering glory as we shriek, cry, and shake our fists at the darkness swallowing us. So Let Us Melt pushes these ideas farther, so we witness the entire life, death, and rebirth of a planet. We're told humans are sleeping somewhere on it, people who have presumably landed from some other place and are waiting for it to be made habitable by you. This takes millions of years, and you wonder how many times this has happened. Is this just a glimpse of the story of humans as they attempt to extend their lifespans across the stars? Do they find a dead planet, sleep for millennia, and wake up just so they can build some cities, make some art, find some meaning for a few thousand years? How many da Vincis came and went while you slept? Does it matter, since it will happen all over again, taking another billion years next time? And the next?

Thematically this is the logical extension of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. What if we survive the end our our world? What if humanity continued, found a way to live for these little snapshots of life across the cosmos? What then?

So Let Us Melt doesn't have any answers, because it's told from within the psychological limits of a worker robot designed to please. It has a surface optimism that conceals a deep sadness. It feels a lot like the Spielberg/Kubrick film A.I., which is also an eon-spanning post-human story told from the perspective of a child. This perspective is what allows us to parse its impossible scope. Where does humanity end? How long can we last? What does lasting mean? Why would we want to last? What happens when we see the last day, the last sunset, the last star that dies? What if we make it all the way the end, sleeping intermittently? Would we feel like it all meant something, like we "won" the universe? Or would it just feel the same as it all ending right now?

The fact that you do nothing in the game except look around, move on an invisible track, and sing occasionally feels perfect for the type of guided, propulsive experience Curry's music demands. The track makes each level a song, and this is the right accompaniment for music as fateful as Curry's. Everything exists here for her score, and these are legitimate game making aesthetics. I've read reviews of this game that are also in awe of the score, but suggest a little more interaction would be nice. Why? We have countless AAA games full of endless complex systems and all sorts of agency yet say nothing. This has barely any interaction yet says something with every piece of itself.

So Let Us Melt showed me a nightmare I've had for a long time. I'm haunted by what it would be like to be on Earth when the sun dies, what it would feel like, what it would mean. There is a part of this game where you fail to avert a global catastrophe. You've already spent millions of years building the planet up, setting up the ecosystem, helping plants and animals evolve, getting it all ready for the humans who are asleep. And then you wake up in a cave. Something is wrong. You spend an entire level just trying to get to the surface to find out what happened. Then you see it.

I've seen this sky before, in my dreams. The last sky. The forever sky. The sky of a dead planet, with its giant red sun -- the wrong shade of red -- peering through black clouds. A great lidless horrible eye, staring forever.

So Let Us Melt touched me in a way that is impossible to describe. Words fail, and they should. Words will fail all of us in the end, whether it's today, tomorrow, or in a billion years. Music is the only language for what this game is about.

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