Still life

One distinctive element of Ueda’s most recent games is their sparse soundtracks, which focus on atmospheric environmental noises and only sporadically employ music. But he’s surprised at how much focus is placed on this. “I often get the comment that my games have little music and a lot of quietness, but that’s not how I feel about them,” he says. “Rather, I feel like a typical game has too much music. If you look at most TV dramas or movies, there isn’t that much. So it’s not that I reference other games to figure out what to do with music – I reference other types of media. I’m originally more of an animator, so I’m a bit envious of the power of music and how much can be expressed with it. You can feel a lot more with music, and that kind of power makes me happy as a director, but also a bit jealous, in a good way.”