Tobias Lilja - Little Nightmares (2017)

Little Nightmares is a darkly whimsical tale about a girl called Six who must escape captivity from a vast, mysterious vessel called The Maw.

Containing all of the in-game music, as well as music from the trailers, the soundtrack spans everything from the calm ambient pieces of the game’s explorative moments, to the nightmarish industrial mayhem of the intense pursuit sequences.

The main building blocks are recordings of acoustic instruments such as music box, trombone, accordion and vocals - often heavily processed and filtered to create a surreal and otherworldly feel. These are blended with sound elements from the game world itself: distant bangs on a metal hull, boat horns, pots and pans, metallic shrieks from a metal cage being dragged across a concrete floor. The goal being to create a blurred line between musical elements and environmental sounds.

Six’s presence is represented by naivistic melodic motifs resembling children's rhymes - but with a bleak and nauseating twist that captures the deeply unsettling mood of The Maw and its influence on the visitors.