8. The Score
As with all highly-regarded movies and games, you need a suitably grandiose score to hammer-home the plethora of emotions in the game. As I will get into later, the game plays with its emotional scenes like a child does with building blocks. Just as you feel theyre coming together and resembling some sort of structure, it's shattered by a sudden impact and reconstituted all over again. That being said, the score in place is one-part Steven Kings Carrie during the more supernatural moments, and two parts self-realisation, soft-string-section stuff. I never felt it got in the way of what I was feeling about the game, instead depending on your choices within certain scenarios, the resulting composition accompanying your decision supplies a suitably supportive backing to the games twisting-chicane narrative. If you choose to focus on the score alone, perhaps you could take it as being very direct in terms of heres a sad scene or heres a crazy ghost scene etc. Although occasionally there is a total lack of sound outside what would otherwise be diagetic sound i.e. footsteps and context-specific sound, but depending on your dispositions, the idea of a game replicating the mundanity of certain real life tasks is a huge turn-off, but regardless of whats happening on screen, the score always felt like a solid accompaniment.