Returnal

Before it could be built, the project had to clear PlayStation’s green-light process, which meant showing early what the game would feel like. Adam worked on this during his time in the Creative Arts team at PlayStation (Sony Interactive Entertainment), from the green-light stage in late 2017 and early 2018 through to the 2021 launch.

A ripomatic is a video cut from existing movie clips, assembled to capture the mood and direction a game will take before there is any game footage to show. It is an effective way to get the feel of a game across very quickly: a roughly ninety-second piece can convey the visual and sonic aesthetic along with the feel and tone, while showing the legacy of inspiration behind the project. With no fixed rules to work to, it gives a pitch presentation room to breathe, and it is a method the department used regularly to support PlayStation titles. For Returnal it was approached like a reveal trailer, with the arc used to tell the core mechanic and concept, including the protagonist voiceover and the title reveal.

The sonic palette came first. From that starting point, original music and sound design were built to the ripomatic, and the result became the blueprint for the project’s audio, used to onboard team members as they joined. The clearest proof of how well the pitch held came at announce: the public announce trailer was recreated almost shot-for-shot from the ripomatic, now with real game footage in place of the movie clips.

From there Adam continued onto the marketing campaign, taking the audio on a run of trailers and videos through the run-up to launch and beyond.

On the announce trailer, Adam handled the mix and the sound design, and cut Bobby Krlic’s game music stems to picture so the trailer carried the score from the game itself. Alongside the scored elements sat non-diegetic tonal and textural sound design, the kind of work that lives in the space between music and sound effects, leaning into the trailer format. There was a lot of this on Returnal.

The larger piece was Breaking Down the Cycle, a roughly twelve-minute creative dev diary structured as an interview with game director Harry Krueger, playing with the game’s meta narrative and its mechanics. Adam designed its sound, scored it with original music and mixed the final video. Carefully restrained binaural audio was used in key parts of the video to reference the game without distracting from the conversation.

Across the wider campaign Adam carried music, sound design, mixing and music editing on the trailers and videos he worked on. The original music here scored those marketing pieces; the game’s own score was composed by Bobby Krlic. Binaural audio was used in a targeted, restrained way where it served the piece. The through-line was consistency: sound design and music edited to picture, held to one sonic identity from the green-light pitch to the public campaign.

Tools & techniques

Returnal launched on PlayStation 5 on 30 April 2021 to a Metacritic score of 86, and went on to win Best Game at the 18th British Academy Games Awards. The marketing work was recognised at the 2021 Clio Entertainment Awards, where Returnal won four Clios. Two of those honours went to pieces Adam shaped the sound of: the announce trailer (Silver, Games: Audio/Visual, Game Play Trailer) and Breaking Down the Cycle (Silver, Games: Audio/Visual, Promotional Content).

In Adam’s words: “There was a lot of creative freedom, and the teams involved were full of incredibly talented people. It is great to have been part of a game that not only earned its critical acclaim, but is adored by its fanbase too.”