It’s 2199. Warsaw City. A world in which the first and the last floor of a high rise shows the gap between social classes. Still, in virtual worlds everyone can be anybody swaying between being real and unreal at the same time. As a special kind of a detective, a gamedec, we fall deeper and deeper into the crack between. But at the end of the day, there’s nothing more real than human nature.
Such a team brings contrasted pieces and colours of music stitched up together by durable threads of orchestral instruments and the noir style.
The cyberpunk concept has been a very popular setting lately – like in Cyberpunk 2077, Ghostrunner or Cloudpunk to name just a few – but there’s one important thing that Gamedec does differently. And this thing is music. Futuristic places are usually expected to sound futuristic with an immense amount of electronic instruments and virtual plugins. Not this time – Gamedec doesn’t give a hook about it. After all, it’s a detective story, so musically it goes back to the roots of noir films and adds just a little flavour of modern sound to blend things together.
Each reality in the game needs to have its own character. That’s why the score was written not by just one composer, but a team of four. They have different experiences and different stories that coveraged only at CD Projekt Red some time ago. Marcin Przybylowicz (the project’s music director) collaborated with Piotr Musial for The Witcher 3: Blood And Wine and with Magdalena Urbanska for Cyberpunk 2077. Maciek Dobrowolski, on the other hand, is best known for his film scores and cultural projects, although he crafted music for some video games as well, proving his versatility. Such a team brings contrasted pieces and colours of music stitched up together by durable threads of orchestral instruments and the noir style.
Live performance is one of the most fascinating sides of this project. The synthetic cyberpunk world covered with real instruments becomes organic and fragile like human emotions. It never sounds the same twice. One can hear all the little imperfections, noises and nuances of the body of the instruments when a bow meets a string or the air goes through the long neck of a brass.
While in the game, the music draws attention easily, not only because of Gamedec’s point-and-click experience that leaves space for text and sound, but also because of having solos or lead melodies on selected instruments that weave in and out the rest of musical layers. This is partly how the composers create a palette of moods and colours of various areas. On one side there are calm, mellow sounds of clarinets, alto flute and bassoons. On the other one – rough, dark textures of trumpets and cellos. Sometimes all of this even plays together like in Happy Hunting. The music for Gamedec makes the whole experience of dipping in the cyberpunk city and the virtual worlds much more real – seen less with the eyes and more with the heart.
