Halfway through the 2018 indie platforming recreation, Celeste, the principal person, Madeline, all at once stops her wall-jumping and air-dashing to mention something to her buddy: “I can’t breathe.” She’s starting to be afflicted by a crippling panic attack even as she is trapped aboard a gondola with masses of ft within the air; as gnarled, pixelated tentacles encroach on her from each facet, the music swells right into a spiraling internet of paranoid synth stabs. It’s one of the most intense scenes in a game. This is full of them, and if it weren’t for Lena Raine, it wouldn’t even exist.
“When I got the song in for the Anxiety scene, I keep in mind Matt Thorson turned into like, ‘I simply realized I need to alternate this, as it doesn’t live as much as they revel in you’ve created with the tune,'” Raine tells me via Skype. Celeste is an online game about overcoming struggles, each inner and outside, telling the tale of a female named Madeline demanding situations herself to climb an increasingly more punishing mountain even as confronting her tension, self-loathing, and despair. Its powerful statements on growing and persevering via lifestyle hurdles made it one of the year’s maxima celebrated breakout games, and much of the acclaim has rotated around Raine’s dreamy, eight-bit-inflected rating.
When I hop onto our call, she’s curling up with her cat Bobbin after assembling a new set of IKEA furnishings herself. “I’m a huge nerd, so I am, broadly speaking, living in ner,” she tells me with a laugh when I ask her how she loves to spend her lost time in her homeland of Seattle. (Her different present-day pastimes encompass filling out the gaps in her great collection of CDs by anime composer Yoko Kanno and replaying through the Kingdom Hearts collection—a private favorite). The day we talk, she’s inside the center of preparing for her trek to San Francisco for this year’s GDC, where she’s been nominated for this 12-month “Best Audio” award. A week after our communication, she’ll be protecting the award in her hand.
“It turned into the most sudden factor to me, mainly as a person who’s worked on pretty small-ish games,” she says of the large reaction to Celeste. But Raine’s real journey is best simply beginning; this week marks the discharge of her authentic solo debut LP, One Knowing, an enveloping album that takes her soundtrack sensibility into luscious new realms, positioning her as one of the most interesting current composers to emerge from the gaming sphere.
Music and video games have been a large part of Raine’s lifestyle since she was an infant, but it took a bit even for her pastimes to cross paths. As a child growing up in the 90s golden age of the NES and the SNES, Raine vividly remembers gambling Chrono Trigger as a teen for the first time and knowing that video games had the strength to inform complex memories beyond the Ninja Gaiden-fashion United States, she was gambling up to that factor. “It turned into surely one of those first games that confirmed to me what video games could do,” she tells me, mentioning Chrono series composer Yasunori Mitsuda as an enduring source of the proposal. Nevertheless, Raine was raised in a traditional musical family that placed her on classical music and choir tunes from an early age, sending her to symphonies and recitals with the layout that she might subsequently go to song school.
