I recently took some time to play Wasteland Remastered, as watching Amazon Prime’s Fallout television series renewed my interest in Wasteland. Given I had played the 2013 port of the 1988 PC classic game around the time Wasteland 2 was released, my love for the spiritual predecessor to Fallout made me want to try out the latest version of this classic game.
And when I booted it up, the first thing I noticed was music. Real, actual music. That’s a big deal, given that the original version had no soundtrack. To that end, the mere existence of the music was a leg up on the original. One could argue the same about the recent Wizardry soundtrack I reviewed by Winifred Phillips. While the Japanese Famicom ports of the old Wizardry series had music from Kentaro Haneda and others, the original American releases from Sir-Tech lacked full scores, as was typical of 1980s CRPGs. When Phillips added her musical touch to the remaster, she mixed tropes of high fantasy musical score with her clever blend of musicality, creating something that both suited the game and served as great listening on its own. For Wasteland Remastered, composer Edwin Montgomery did some of the former, but not much of the latter.
If you’re going to write music for a post-nuclear wasteland, you’ll want to go heavy on atmosphere, right? Some droning tones, acoustic stuff, a bit of pulsing synth, and some ambient noise and clanging industrial sound effects. That’s all here. Montgomery’s score is very appropriate for the game, and this is an effective soundscape while playing the game. Giving each of the game’s locations different music was also a great choice, and I enjoyed Montgomery’s choices in instrumentation and approach to each area. For example, the pipe organ on “Temple Of Blood” is perfect, and the sampled background loop of what sounds like some kind of patriotic tune for “Guardian Citadel” is very smart.
However, for listening outside the context of the game? I suppose it can make for pleasant background listening. Especially for someone who recently played the game (like myself), the music makes mundane tasks a little easier. Heck, just leaving the overworld music “Desert” on loop at a low volume could probably serve for a good nap, or maybe a guided mindfulness meditation with associated desert imagery. I must also acknowledge that I dig the choices in instrumentation and the chanting in “Savage Village.” That particular track may be one of this composer’s more creative outputs on this OST.
That said, it is hard to get too excited about this score when I also have the works of Mark Morgan and Inon Zur accessible. Morgan worked on the pre-Bethesda Fallout games and the Wasteland sequels, while Zur is the masterful musician behind the post-Bethesda Fallout titles. I like what Edwin Montgomery did for Wasteland Remastered, though I feel this soundtrack is a notch lower in musical production and quality compared to the Morgan and Zur soundtracks.
If you like a good, dark, ambient soundtrack with the occasional catchy melody, the Wasteland Remastered soundtrack is a good place to start. And if you enjoyed listening to it in the context of the game, you may want to hear the haunting tones of “Base Cochise” or “Mind Maze” in other aspects of life. You can pick up the digital soundtrack from Edwin Montgomery’s Bandcamp page.
