10 Best Modern Video Game Soundtracks

10. NieR Automata (Keiichi Okabe)

NieR is a weird game. It consists of equal parts philosophy, tragedy and emotional world building as it does of giant skeleton masks and upskirt imagery (it was an accident I swear). Most of its pieces have an almost surreal and ethereal feeling that strikingly fits the wonderful yet unnerving world.

NieR's soundtrack has a weirdly ''sweet'' feeling. A lot of its pieces feel very light, almost as if filling your room with the feelings of the characters on screen. All this sweetness disappears in a second for the more dramatic parts in the game, especially the excellent bosses. The sweet voices vanish, the tempo starts to rise, and the choir starts to swell. You'll feel the tension rise, and before you know it, you are sitting at the edge of your seat, intensely focused on the bullet hell gameplay infused hack 'n slash action.

The game's choir-like vocals recall those of the Ghost in the Shell movie and reveal the desolate earth that 2B and 9S find themselves in. In this, the game finds a unique balance between the aforementioned softness and slight and subtle tones of dread. A feeling that this is not our earth anymore, but merely a husk of what has been.