Last Friday Helvetii, a character-action game set in Gallic Celtic mythology, was released for consoles and PC (except XBox). You play as war chief Divico in 100BC Gaul, who has just declared victory over the invading Roman legion but is now fighting something an axe can’t slay — a mysterious rot claiming the land around him AND his body. Divico must journey out to undo the source of the rot and restore what was lost inside him. That’s the game, but the subject of this post is the soundtrack.
The music to Helvetii was created by Dale North, a pretty prolific video game composer who’s done the tracks for RWBY: Arrowfell, Wizard of Legend, Dreamscaper, and also the theme tune for those “Nintendo Minute” videos from a few years ago. Since Helvetii takes place in another era with another culture, North felt he had to go the extra mile and supply lyrics in the native tongue. The finished soundtrack actually has lyrics in Gaulish, written and sung by Emi Evans (NieR, Dark Souls, Ace Combat, and the TV show Star Wars: Visions).
“It’s rare to feel this encouraged to dig down deep and musically explore a world, but with Helvetii I was given full license to get lost in it,” says North. “The goal was to create something fantastic and awe-inspiring, but rather than shift between those energies, I put forth that we could just continually combine the entire emotional range for all of the music of Helvetii. So while melodies expressed by strings and pianos and accented by Emi Evans’s lovely voice float above, heavier energy underpins it all using 1980s-era samplers for dirt and grit, with lots of resampling and distortion to create twisted, gnarly rhythmic bed. I hoped to reinterpret the mythology of the world with raw sound and I hope that comes through in the work.”
″It was really fascinating to research into the extinct language of Gaulish in order to write the lyrics for Helvetii,” says Evans. “With no footage of native speakers available, it was quite a challenge to imagine how it might have been pronounced! Thanks to the beautifully-crafted music from Dale North, each track came to life with its own character as I was recording. I am very excited for this soundtrack to be heard!″
You can get the Helvetii soundtrack on all storefronts by hitting this link. The game itself is now available on Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam.
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