Outer Wilds — Full Soundtrack by Andrew Prahlow

Prahlow built the score around an odd instrumental palette for space — banjo, harmonica, whistling, acoustic guitar — because the game's astronauts are amateurs who went up in wooden ships. "Travelers" is the piece everyone names: each explorer scattered across the system plays their own part alone, and the full arrangement only exists if you gather them. It is a mechanic and a melody at the same time, which almost nothing else in games manages.

Hard to write about without spoiling a game whose entire substance is knowledge, so: the music is doing something specific with time and loss, and it lands differently once you know why. As background listening it works regardless — sparse, acoustic, unhurried, with long stretches of near-silence between the melodic material. The closest neighbour here is Subnautica, another score about being very small somewhere very large.