Description
“You Are Empty” Original Game Soundtrack
Limited edition of 1000 copies.
Label: KMRCD 006
Description
Game Release Date: 2007
Album Date: 2008
Tracks: 16
Time: 52″23
You Are Empty is a first-person shooter video game based in a fictionalized postwar Soviet Union. The story takes place in 1955 in alternative Russia where Joseph Stalin still reigns. In an attempt to ensure the global victory of Communism, the Soviet Union has constructed a massive psychic antenna to broadcast a reality-altering signal designed to transform the population of the Soviet Union into undefeatable supermen. However, the experiment goes horribly wrong and most of the population is either killed or transformed into homicidal mutants. It’s up to the player to reverse the tragedy if it’s still possible…
The game’s protagonist is a high-ranking soldier in the Communist party who is hit by a truck while crossing the street on his way home from work. Because his brain is unconscious during the Great Transformation, our hero remains unmutated and awakens in a hospital to a world populated by homicidal mutants. During the game, the player must through a variety of Russian locations, establish contact with the remaining survivors, including members of the Red Army. On a mission to destroy the great antenna, the story reveals more twists and turns, including a rare chance at seeing what the master race should have been like if the antenna had actually worked…
The atmospheric ambient score was written by Dimitriy Dyachenko, whose You Are Empty was the first Ukrainian game soundtrack to be released on CD. Since then the composer has moved on to work in the United States, where he is employed as a game sound designer whose greatest asset is the ability to transform sounds into music and vice versa. By always paying attention to the balance of dialogue, effects and music, Dimitriy’s contributions have been more recently heard in the Haunted Manors series and the upcoming game Metro: Last Light.
Ambiance plays a key part in the music of You Are Empty, where the alternative timeline is coupled with alternative sounds that don’t exist in our reality. Starting off with the reality-altering signal for the Great Transformation, this soundtrack CD is filled with creepy textures where music only slowly emerges from the mass of gray fog. This way each track contains a powerhouse action performance for the attack of superhumans, nested in bleak musical textures that effortlessly blend into each other. GameSpot described the score as „effectively creepy” and you’ll have to agree with that if you get this soundtrack.
