Entry 420 - Shovel Knight Treasure Trove - Part 3 - Specter of Torment

 

It's been a while since I last listened to anything in this boxed set. It's been a while since I listened to any VGM at all. There are times when I just don't listen to a genre at all for a while and when I come back everything sounds so much fresher than before. Specter of Torment is a prime example of how good things sound after a proper break.

This album feels very much like the proper successor to the base game of Shovel Knight. So many of the melodies and themes are carried over to this release in remixed ways. The entire soundtrack is once again chip tunes and contains the same high energy of the base game. In short it's banger after banger.

I normally am a pretty hard sell when it comes to chip tunes. They really are not my thing most of the time, but like all good things there are exceptions... and the Shovel Knight series is one shining example of that. There are a few things that work in this series favor.

For one the music is active and engaging, it has nuance and intricacies that simply are not present in a lot of other chip tunes. The synthesizers are also not compressed at all, so we as the listener get the fully glory of the music as it was originally composed... not as heard through a hyper compressed version of an NES or Master System sound chip.

On top of all this the music transfers well into the soundtrack formula. So much of VGM simply does not flow well from track to track and it feels more like a collection of music rather than an actual album. This is avoided completely in the Shovel Knight games, these songs f l o w from one to another and it feels like an album... a journey.

This is one of the first times I've really sat down with the music from Specter of Torment. After spinning the record a few times I really should have done this sooner.