Weekly Recommendations – w/e 26th January 2024: New Cycle, Beware the Boogeyman, & Le Bonheur Est Pour Demain

Continuing with our catch-up of weekly recommended scores, here’s a round-up of scores that caught my attention over the week ending, 26th January 2024.

New Cycle (Part 1) (2024) – Mustafa Yazıcıoğlu (Mustafa Yazıcıoğlu)

New Cycle (dev. Core Engage) is a city-building game where survival is the game’s main goal. After a global apocalypse the player must establish a new settlement and build it into an industrial city: a complex game testing management and logistic skills. Strings, and low register strings in particular, are a strong voice in this score. And their constant presence gives an impressively tense, brooding atmosphere to the score. Although unrelenting in it’s dark tone, the composer maintains a musicality that keeps the score interesting. It seems that, on the basis of Yazıcıoğlu’s score, world-building is not a particularly happy experience.