Hollow Knight — Relaxing Music with Rain, Fire & Snow

Christopher Larkin scored Hollow Knight for Team Cherry, three people in Adelaide who shipped it in 2017 and then spent years on the sequel. The writing is piano and strings with a great deal of air left in it, and the location themes are what people actually remember: "Dirtmouth" for the emptied town above, "City of Tears" for the drowned capital below, then "Greenpath", "Crystal Peak", "White Palace". Tenpers layers four ambience beds over them and closes with "Bonebottom" from Silksong.

"City of Tears" is the one that did it — a rain-soaked ruin with a piano line that never quite resolves, playing while you fight through a city that has already ended. Larkin's method throughout is restraint: long stretches where a single instrument holds and nothing joins it. Five and a half million people have used this as a work soundtrack, which for a game about an insect in a dead kingdom is a strange and cheering fact.