Labyrinth of the Demon King is one of my top games of the year, a first person survival horror delve into Feudal Japan. Part of its appeal lies in the oppressive, stressful music and sound design by composer Remu Daifuku: This game has the worst, most disconcerting collection of gurgles, slurps, crunches, screeches, creaky floorboards, and haunting biwa string solos I ever done heard. I love it so much.
Demon King producer Andy Han got me in touch with Daifuku so I could find out how you make a game that sounds like literal hell. The answer, it seems, is some incredibly creative (and occasionally painful) sample work.
"Making the sounds was basically just layering, spectrally morphing and manipulating samples until I found something I thought sounded cool," Daifuku said. "Most of the sounds I made were simply happy accidents, such as the Nure-onna gasping before she feeds, which was me accidentally eating very stale banana chips."
Unfortunately, the exact scene Daifuku is referencing is not on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure you can hear the gasp in question (followed by some stomach-churning slurping) at the 57-second mark of this trailer for Labyrinth of the Demon King.
"I thought they’d sound good for her munching on the bones of her victim, so I grabbed them without hesitation only to realise they were terribly out of date," recalled Daifuku. "Instead of recording bone crunching sounds I accidentally recorded me gasping for air as the stale banana chips absorbed all the moisture in my mouth in an instant.
"After recovering I sifted through the recording and decided to pitch it down for laughs, but it actually sounded rather creepy and happened to fit the animation perfectly."
This suffering for art isn't even the most mind-boggling thing Daifuku pulled for Demon King: The composer also drew on materials and locations you could literally only find in Japan. "In terms of real world references and samples my house is really old and basically looks identical to the towers in LotDK, so I just sampled that extensively," said Daifuku. "I also got access to record my town’s bonshō bell."
"To make it sound more hellish I built a custom daxophone that could use old nokogiri blades instead of traditional wooden daxophone tongues, so I had an 'instrument' that sounded horrifying yet could have been made in feudal Japan."
Using the actual bonshō bell is an incredible aspect of this game's sound, but I'm still wrapping my head around the daxophone-nokogiri combo. A nokogiri, to be clear, is a type of metal saw, while the daxophone is a kind of stringed instrument invented in Germany in the 1980s—Daifuku's custom rig presumably lacks the electrical component of a daxophone, though, if it fits a pre-modern technological profile.
The final touch was "running the sounds through an old tape machine which had a mind of its own to help give everything a gritty lofi feel, which helped to make the audio match the visual aesthetics of the game."
Demon King is a blurry, dithered piece of work, and always presents in a 4:3 aspect ratio, so the deliberate use of a crappy tape deck feels perfect. You can listen to Remu Daifuku's Labyrinth of the Demon King soundtrack on YouTube or itch.io, and check out the full game for yourself on Steam.
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