Thanatosis OST

Link to Album on SoundCloud

https://soundcloud.com/user-514960188/sets/thanatosis-ost

Game Description:

For the first time in human history, there is reason to believe that life outside of our home planet may have once existed. Thalassa, a planet submerged in an endless ocean, possesses a bare and lifeless depths, but at the ocean’s floor lies the remnants of a civilization possessing technology and science far greater than our own. And underneath even that, past a maze of twisting waterways, lies a world that defies everything we knew about existence itself. And at its heart, there may just be someone who’s alive.

You play as Nell, a marine biologist hired as a part of a team researching the fossils and decaying life forms located on Thalassa’s floor. As the one who discovers the hidden waterways beneath the sunken city, she of course has the option to merely report the find to her superiors, and launch an official investigation of the area. Or…she could venture in alone.

The game is a 2D puzzle platformer set in an abstract underground world. It’s as if someone took an underwater paradise and scattered the pieces haphazardly – there are floating blocks of water, caves with marvelous crystal stalactites, fish and dolphins and seahorses all situated impossibly in empty space. And at the world’s heart is an enormous crystal castle, from which you occasionally hear the playing of a flute throughout the game.

TRACKLIST:

1 – Waterways:

This track plays during the game’s opening cutscene. We open with Nell traversing the hidden waterways alone, her flashlight revealing walls graffitied by what looks like the drawings of a young child. Eventually, she comes to a dead end, with the ground coming to what looks like a hole leading to the ocean below. But….aren’t we below the ocean already?

Nell jumps in. But this isn’t…normal. She swims downward, reflected by crystals that seem to just float in mid-water, bubbles that simply stay in place. She swims out of the bottom of the water, falling onto a giant pink crystal – somehow the water itself was just suspended in midair? She looks into the distance, the camera panning to show that this world stretches on for miles. And at the end is a sunken castle, from which impossibly comes the sound of a lone flute.

2 – Swimming Upstream:

An area theme, this track shows a small part of Nell’s journey through this mysterious world. It plays while she scales a river that is suspended vertically. 

3 – Sunken Castle:

Nell stops to sleep before entering the castle. In her dreams, she sees the young girl, spinning in delight by the castle’s entrance, dancing with the bubbles and the fish that float around her. An old woman sits leaning against the gate, with a resigned smile as she watches the girl dance. The woman then looks up, not at the ceiling of their little world, but imagining what must be going on above it. At this point, they’re probably the only ones left.

This is another area theme, playing in the final stage of the game. The remains of the castle are one of the most intact elements of this game’s world, but that doesn’t make it easy to navigate. The areas are twisted and confusing, and a room may not look the same if you enter it from different sides. It almost seems as if someone is trying to keep you out.

4 – Plummet:

Finally, at the heart of the castle, you find the source of the flute: the old woman from the flashback sequences. When she sees you, she stares. “Mei?” she asks. But you aren’t her, and she knows it – her granddaughter has been dead for centuries, and by all accounts, she should be dead too. Nell tries to approach her and talk to her, but the woman backs off, eyes filled with fear. She starts screaming, quietly first, a pained screeching sound from a voice that hasn’t been used in hundreds of years. But as she does, the castle begins to shake…pieces begin falling away…pieces of everything begin falling away.

The Final Boss of Thanatosis is less a boss, and more of a chase sequence where you’re the one doing the chasing. Gravity has reawoken, and every element of the world is falling; including Nell and the old lady. As the player, you have to navigate through the falling debris of the world in a combination dropper/movement tech section in order to reach the woman before you both hit the floor of the world and receive a game over.

When you finally reach her, something seems to click inside. This was her world. She was keeping it alive, and it was keeping her alive. Maybe it’s time to just….stop. The camera shows her perspective, once again showing the approaching Nell as her granddaughter. The music swells, coming to a watery blip, and Nell is suddenly back in the waterway where she started. She looks around confused. There’s no entryway in the wall to the world she just spent so long in. But the look on the woman’s face says not to worry, so Nell picks herself up, and moves on. The last image of the game shows the edges of two beds submerged underwater, with two hands held between them. One from an old woman, and one from a young girl.

How does it fit the theme:

The soundtrack fits the theme in two main ways. The watery aspects of the provided image are on display through the game’s setting, as well as the “underwater” nature of the pieces itself. Percussion with reverb, bubbly synths, and elements like the dark bubbly pad in Swimming Upstream are used to create this effect, as well as more explicit water noises like splashing in Waterways.

“Inside My World” ties more into the game’s story. This entire world you are exploring was born out of the refusal of one woman to accept that her efforts to make a haven of escape were all for nothing. The scattered and abstract nature of all the world’s elements represents how she cannot accept losing her granddaughter, but the world holds on through sheer stubborn persistence until you convince her to let go. You are “inside her world.” The world she created for her granddaughter to survive their planet’s end.

Relating to the image itself, the granddaughter is the girl dancing in the drawing, and the grandmother is represented by the human-shaped bubble lurking behind her.