Almost 1 Month After Angeline Era

Liner Notes, Music and Popularity Reflections, etc...

Hello everyone. First of all, the Liner Notes for the game’s soundtrack are out - thoughts about each track, my various influences, etc, can be found. You can read the most up-to-date version here, but volume 1 on Bandcamp also has them as a PDF.

The OST is on Bandcamp + all streaming platforms (except Volume 2 for some reason on Youtube music…)

First, I’d like to share the album arts if you haven’t seen them yet. (Volume 2 has minor spoilers in case you want to skip over looking)

Volume 1 Art (Marina Kittaka)

Volume 2 By Matej Kollár

The soundtrack is fairly complex, containing songs that are horror-adjacent, faster action songs, all the way down to stuff based on early/mid-century 1900s music, to more modern MIDI shitpost music. In other words it would be too hard for me to represent the game through one album art, so I wanted to have two artists draw out the lighter and darker aspects of the game. Matej’s work is perfect for the darker side, and I thought Marina (given she wrote the story) would be perfect to draw out the lighter (and overidealized) sides of the story!

Thinking about Popularity

I’ve been thinking a bit about Angeline Era vs. our past games, and popular appeal. My desires as an artist certainly have wider audiences than the most niche of games, but they’re not as widely appealing as others’ desires. I don’t really like roguelikes or D&D-heavy fantasy, for instance, probably from circumstances, like how I grew up.

Generally for Analgesic’s games we aren’t explicitly targeting popularity. My first game Anodyne was lucky enough to be released on Steam with little competition, and the game happened to have enough hooks to be a tiny cult classic, but we weren’t aiming for this at the start. Subsequent releases were also relatively niche, probably the main thing that kept us afloat was that a lot of Anodyne fans came to show up for Anodyne 2, as well as Anodyne 2 having a more widely appealing story than our other games.

While Analgesic has often been near the verge of bankruptcy (like during AE development), having a few big games released without becoming popular meant we got to practice our skills as artists while people slowly discovered our work — all without the pressure and stress from sudden popularity. We learned what it means to have fans, how you’ll disappoint and please those people as the games you release change, and how that’s natural. We know that AE having a more gameplay-forward focus will disappoint fans who prefer the heavy story focus of other games, while we know it others will like it! And we know that AE’s (spoilers) can negatively surprise new fans attracted mostly by the gameplay.

Having so many releases has helped us know that it’s natural that every new game will appeal to different people, rather than “not being appealing to some” being some kind of negative quality. Games are different, people are different, so responses are different.

By slowly gaining popularity it lets us better disconnect fan response from a judgment on ourselves. Of course, harsh opinions can still sting, but I don’t think they have negative influence on our mental state! And sometimes they can be helpful. So we still feel able to experiment, and I’m thankful to be in a position creatively and mentally to to handle more popularity and pressure.

So during development of Angeline Era we wanted to reach a wider audience. Not to the extent of picking “Action-Adventure” from the start, but to the extent we were thinking about how to communicate and frame things like “lots of levels” and “lots of exploration” and “fast action”, with an intention of more popular appeal. Or shifting e.g. character portraits towards “conventionally attractive” designs. Because you can have some of these things but how you decide to communicate those elements can affect the popular appeal. E.g. the hundreds of levels could have been strung together very plainly and linearly and forgettable, or they could have been put inside of some more hostile and complicated structure.

And it seems to have worked pretty well! Now, with Angeline Era well on its way to being more of a cult classic than our past games (but likely not a “Hit”), it’s given me some thought towards popularity and games. This is a bit oversimplified, but you could bucket popular games into three groups:

• Cult classic: The majority of Analgesic’s work - games that are markedly different from others, but because of various factors such as the difficulty of word-of-mouth working, are socially unable to grow beyond a certain scale.

• Hits: Stuff like your Braid, Spelunky HD, Tunic, Vampire Survivors, Dark Souls, most AAA games etc. I don’t think Angeline Era will be at this level, it’s sort of in-between Cult Classic and Hit. I think games in this category generally always have something unique and interesting to offer but on the same hand tend to be more straightforward in some ways. However you do see trend-hopping games that sell well here, so maybe you could call those hits, although do they have cultural staying power? Who knows.

• Big Hits: DOTA, CS, Mobile/PC Hero Shooters, Gacha, Casinos, Pachinko, anything with over 250k Steam Reviews, Stock Market.. These are games that are exactly in tune to the dominant desires of society, and will be likely remembered forever in some way. I find all of these games fascinating from a sociological angle but pretty unappealing as a player.

I think the lines between Hits and Big Hits can be blurry, which is why I’m hesitant to name specific examples, but when thinking about popularity I’ve had this sense that the more popular a work becomes, the more that work tends to represent the desires of a given time, rather than light the way forward for other types of desires. Hence, why in a numerically-focused, unpredictable world, Pachinko, Casinos, and the Stock Market are three of the world’s biggest games.

(Digression on the Machine Zone)

Casinos are symbolic of the societal desire (or demand) to focus on money-making as a way of sustaining meaning in life, it’s a microcosm of what it is to live and die in the 21st century. In these kinds of games, players (knowingly or not) pursue the machine zone (see Addiction by Design), a kind of trance-like state where you disassociate from your physical body in order to just be totally immersed in the experience of playing ht slot machine. We could compare this machine zone to “very deep immersion” in games.

We could generalize machine zone to the influence stock market has on the world - the stock market being a “story-heavy” game of sorts - where you follow the “story” of a company from its IPO, hoping your money goes up or down with it, pinning the hope of a country’s future on how well their stock market goes. In a way, the Stock Market could be seen as the ultimate immersive game: people’s futures and hopes are tied up in this game for better or worse, and no one can really opt out.

What better way to describe the “First World” than a place where people have disassociated from Earth to stay in a kind of hypnotic trance-like pursuit of making the S&P 500 (a measure of how “good” the economy is doing) go higher? The AI Market drives this number higher, but it is predicated on strip mining the shit out of countries, thousands of miles away from the people making the software.

I think games at popularity just below Casinos still contain some of those aspects of the “machine zone”. Gachas, for example, keep you in a part-time-work-esque habit, doing little login rituals and gameplay rituals in order to try and obtain objects of desires or little narrative snippets. That you could find nicer versions of by browsing certain websites or reading a book. At a level a little less nefarious than those could be immersive open world RPGs or 50+ hour games, which could have some level of transformative potential, but often operate in common narrative and gameplay tropes (hence their appeal).

It’s worth acknowledging some self-hypocrisy given I make a living from this industry and arguably Angeline Era has been more immersive than our past games, but at the same time there’s obviously a difference between what AE encourages vs. what a gacha or casino does. We are all born into a system of hypocrisy and contradictions, so it’s really about where you draw your moral line in the sand. And for me, even though the supply chain and history of games are pretty bad even today, I still think there’s worth in making (good) work within that system

(Back to Angeline Era)

Release enough commercial games and you start to think a bit meta about the marketing of them. A game has a base popular appeal (let’s call this x), limited by its genre and word of mouth. Without changing the game much, the way you talk about and market that game can increase that popular appeal maybe up to 1.5x-2x.

Really, popular appeal comes down to how legible the game’s advertising hooks are to an average person and how easily they can convince a friend to try, and how often that hypothetical friend will have a consistent experience with that recommendation. This is why the most popular games are always straightforward, even to a fault. It’s why cult classics stay cult classics, because even if they appeal to some people it’s almost impossible to get a friend to play. There will never be justice for Brightis…

How high can you raise popular appeal before your game is just entirely The Machine Zone? Am I already infected as a designer from thinking about this after Angeline Era? Hmm…

I’ve looked at too many game studio’s release timelines, and it’s obvious how often quality falls off once you start introducing Making My Company Big And Important into the equation. I still get people asking me excitedly about my plans to scale Analgesic, but I just politician-ally nod and try to explain how that’s not quite my reason for existence…

Obviously, I have a desire to be popular and reach a mass audience. I like having an audience because it is a fun way to live in 2025, and because to some extent I’m also convinced that I’m right with my approach and philosophy to games compared to whatever thing some corporation wants you to play.

Are games something the world needs? How will people 200 years on judge this culture? Valuable human experience, or indulgent extraction of rare earth minerals? I don’t know for sure, I just know that games always are in need of more little cultural leaders trying to point things in the right direction.

But also, the desire to make popular work is actually tied up in some level of self-work to approach the world a bit less cynically. Being open to the idea of learning how to do character designs or frame stories with inherent popular appeal. Like, I like Trails in the Sky, I know exactly what makes those characters and stories tick, so shouldn’t I open myself up to thinking about those methods of storytelling?

The thing of course, for me, is I’m also well aware of how much those structures of storytelling are catastrophic failures when it comes to certain ideas. Coming from a minority standpoint I can struggle to find narratives or work that speaks to my experiences (and this is is why I have a bunch of hard-to-market game releases lol).

Fostering popular appeal feels something akin to enabling communication between the game and players, but I guess the challenge is not fostering so much that you lose yourself in the process.

Thinking about AE’s Music

As long-time listeners know, my music can sound a little different than the average game music. If you didn’t know, my music doesn’t have a lot of traditional cultural recognition (e.g. Youtube Essays, Awards, in-depth interviews, mentions in books) This is not surprising to me, because game music recognition is heavily tied to the popularity of the game itself, as well as a given OST’s proximity to contemporary pop-style or cinematic-style music. On one hand you can’t exactly fault this phenomenon, most people’s taste in music (and a not-insignificant chunk of mine!) is just what they happen to hear growing up or on the radio and that often ends up aligned with Grammycore or Algorithmcore music.

But on the other hand, I do think that game musicians or people in the games industry could stand to dig a little deeper than each year’s usual range of safe and expected picks. The unique charm of game music, to me, at least, is that it is music which can emerge organically from being inspired by the game itself. Nevertheless, this time around my OST got some recognition which is nice.

• The game music-focused Bit Harmony podcast did an episode on Angeline Era! It’s a long thoughtful discussion on the game’s music as well as the game itself. Check it out! The hosts have talked about my music before on past shows, so check those episodes out too.

• Angeline Era’s OST got a shoutout by Lena Raine in this article “This is the best video game music of 2025, as chosen by the composers behind it”.

• The OST was also mentioned in IGN Japan’s end of year list! Wahoo!

• Something I can’t talk about yet!

The OST getting more recognition has made me think a bit about my musical process and how it’s distinct from a lot of other music. I think it comes down to a few things:

1. My mixing style (how i combine each instrument in the song). I don’t think the average listener picks up on this, but my music doesn’t employ many complicated mixing tools or tricks beyond what I feel is necessary to achieve the right balance for the game and leave headroom for sound effects. Part of this is I don’t have (or enjoy learning) more complex mixing/mastering skills. BUT also, to my ear, a lot of modern music mixing can feel too perfect! Overemphasizing digital cleanness and perfect separation of layers, which to me rarely makes sense with how we experience sound in real-life: reverbed across all sorts of spaces, overlapping, muddy. It’s technically impressive but falls a bit flat for me. I also think that overemphasizing mixing techniques for other music mediums can at times give game music a feeling of not perfectly meshing in with the game, which I’d like to avoid.

2. Heavy emphasis on sound design. I think good game music comes from sound palettes (the combo of synth/instrument choices, sound design) uniquely made for each game, because those sound palettes are created organically in response to the game’s visuals/demands/gameplay. If you compare my OSTs you’ll notice they tend to have pretty unique overall sound palettes. I put a lot of emphasis on using samples for instruments or doing a little bit of sound design for each song’s synths. I don’t do this for the sake of it though. For example, I rarely make percussion from scratch (although I might adjust the samples slightly), and sometimes it’s just more convenient or easier to rely on something that’s identifiably a particular sample pack’s piano sample. But I think having a sound design first approach is helpful for keeping a game’s OST to have its own uniquely identifiable character.

3. For composing I try to draw holistically on my musical experience/listening history rather than particular songs or genres. This isn’t always possible (or desirable), but generally I’m trying to find a holistic musical answer for each thing the game needs, which is why my OSTs often end up stylistically diverse and hard to classify. It’s not like I never play by conventions though, like Anodyne 1 & 2’s music intentionally uses sounds meant to loosely evoke “game boy” or “game boy advance”, but I try to be more creative and flexible with the sound design.

Thinking About AE’s Story

Spoilers here! Please skip to the next section if you plan to play haha.

I’ve seen some good discussion of AE’s story which makes me happy. I want to add a bit of my perspective on it. For obvious reasons it feels like a very Japanese American story, because, well, the obvious. But also it resonates with my experience as being Asian in the USA and having a meta-view towards religion and race because I’m both mixed race and grew up and became an adult amidst competing religious systems (Buddhism, Daoism’s long tail, Christianity, Catholicism, etc…), and because growing up in the USA Suburbs around computers kind of has a tendency to make you feel meta about things by default…

I find AE’s story interesting also for the way it depicts someone wandering around, looking for meaning. To me this idea of ‘looking for meaning’ is really relevant in 2025, because we’re in a world that’s built and constantly severing us from past chains of meaning, instead trying to make us find meaning in worshipping corporate narratives (“X corporation will save gaming!”) or blind at-any-cost technological progress (“X technology will make our lives so convenient and good even if the costs are really bad lol!). One of the common 2025 struggles seems to be finding meaning that isn’t just served up to us conveniently, in service of one of those narratives. I think in the past, when you lacked meaning (e.g. a 1800s Japan to USA migrant, or 1960s Taiwan to USA migrant) you might seek to form ties with neighbors or join a religion (Taiwanese Christians). But with the convenience of communication nowadays that seems not as likely in some cases.

Broadly speaking I think the best kind of meaning is anything that puts us into a shared cause with people, face-to-face, outside of a system of corporate money-making. (And ideally it’s not a destructive or cult-like cause…) I don’t even think the cause has to be an organized political front, just anything really face-to-face that isn’t just playing into the hand of “Maximum Convenience Lifestyle”.

What that looks like is different for every person, but it at a baseline tries to work against technology making everything convenient, e.g. the suburban home/car offers convenience but reduces the chance of running into neighbors. Or how online shopping is fast and easy but reduces the opportunity to talk to shopkeepers or neighbors. Online dating is a convenience but reduces the demand for spaces and events that previously led to dating. Google Search AI can offer me an answer to some questions that I may have previously asked a friend or book for (and run into other information). Meta-progression systems in roguelikes substitute an experience of grappling with a game and its mysteries, for a more immediate and addicting “treatmill”, reducing my further trust in games when they challenge me. Algorithms reduce the chance of us finding things via word of mouth or on our own, reducing our openness to new experience. And so on.

But it’s uncertainty and the messiness of human relations that stops us from being meat-machines merely seeking comfort in optimizing numbers, while anxiously fearing the unpredictability of a chance conversation with a stranger.

All technological convenience is not necessarily bad, but it’s pretty clear things right now are not ideal. Anyways, that’s what’s been on my mind with the story.

Other Updates

• In terms of traditional news articles Angeline Era has basically dropped out of there, but if you want to read more thoughts about the game I’d recommend backloggd or Steam. There’s also a few topics on the Steam discussion forums going into the game’s story.

• The launch sale ended but I put Angeline Era in a bundle with Anodyne 1 OR Anodyne 2, so if you own either of those games you can still get AE at a 15% discount for a while.

• No post-launch DLC planned for Angeline Era, but we are in the process of figuring out console stuff and have a few more languages in the works (LATAM Spanish, German, Russian, Simplified Chinese).

• Work-wise, on my end I’m now shifting to working on Danchi Days! Look forward to updates on that later this year.

• Marina and I are loosely brainstorming ideas for future games, but we’ll be easing into it very slowly.

• I don’t know when I’ll get to it, but I’d like to start on some game design posts on Angeline Era at some point before I forget everything…

• There’s been some small interest in a level editor for Angeline Era. I won’t be able to make one, but I would like to take a day or two at some point to release a Unity Project or something of the game with just the level creation tool I made or something.

For Number Lovers

• We live in a world of numbers, and numbers can be soothing for thinking about the future (numbers have replaced ancient astrology for many, you see.)

• 3 weeks out, the number of people playing each day (DAU/Daily Active Users) on Steam peaked at 1,231 on release, but is still at an average of 500! This is around 40% of the launch peak which is pretty crazy. For comparison, Anodyne, Even the Ocean, Anodyne 2 and Sephonie’s were around 15% 3 weeks out from launch. Launch peaks for our past games were: Sephonie - 247, Anodyne 2 - 615, Even the Ocean - 123 (cry), Anodyne - Steam didn’t have this data in 2013 but it was probably close but a bit lower than Angeline Era.

  • I don’t know what a “good” rate is or if it even matters (Seems MMOs/AAA games have higher rates) but it’s higher than our past games. So wow!

• Rating’s sitting at 4.1-4.2 on Backloggd, which is pretty good. Statistically speaking I don’t think you can hit much of a higher rating without a game that has a stronger word of mouth factor (high ratings are driven by easy-to-recommend-to-friend games that straightforwardly deliver on those recommendations).

• Over 350 Steam (any language + purchaser) reviews, most of them positive! Kind of wild for me personally - Sephonie’s at 200 after 3.5 years and Even the Ocean at 200 after 9 years. Anodyne is at 1,000 (12.5 years), Anodyne 2 at 640 (6.5 years).

Well that’s all for now. Hope everyone’s 2026 is off to a good start, and thanks for the support as always!