Steam has quietly become the best place to buy videogame soundtracks—even for games that were never released on PC
SOURCE:PC Gamer|BY: Kerry Brunskill
5 games I played this year made me rush out and buy their soundtracks, and each was rewarding to own in a different way.
(Image credit: Neowiz)
Soundtrack Sunday
Welcome to Soundtrack Sunday, where a member of the PC Gamer team takes a look at a soundtrack from one of their favourite games—or a broader look at videogame music as a whole—offering their thoughts or asking for yours!
I love game music. Always have. But it hasn't always loved me back. In the old days I had no choice but to resort to amateurishly recording sound tests onto tape so I could carry some sweet chiptune bangers with me at all times. In more recent years I've gone spelunking in places like iTunes, but inconsistent regional availability, seemingly random tags that omit or misspell an artist's name or list soundtracks under a generic publisher label can make game music frustratingly hard to find.
Heck, some like Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter were never even released on PC. Square Enix has more than a dozen Nier albums, including various special arranged selections, to treat my ears to.
The great thing about the soundtrack category on Steam is that it's more than just a dumping ground for terabytes of preexisting audio. It's a fertile and frequently updated landscape filled with generous freebies, phenomenal collections that traditional physical media would struggle to hold, and albums so obscure that even in this welcoming online space it's a minor miracle they exist at all. Here are some of my favourite surprises from this year.
The original Lies of P soundtrack was already a comprehensive 70 tracks long, with high quality FLAC files bundled alongside more typical mp3 duplicates for a great price. I happily bought it the instant I heard the quiet tune that plays inside Hotel Krat, all soft choirs and tastefully restrained melancholy.
With Overture carrying on in a similar tone, I was fully prepared to do the same thing again as soon as the accompanying album appeared on Steam. More music that makes it sound like I'm fighting the gods themselves one minute thanks to their epic strings and angelic vocals, transitioning into delicate song over piano melodies seemingly designed to emanate from an elegant brass gramophone the next? My wallet belonged to Neowiz—so I was smiling all day when I saw Overture's 51 tracks added to the existing soundtrack as a completely free update. Mine, just like that? Really? I felt spoiled.
The only thing better than finally getting a proper standalone version of Virtua Fighter 5 on PC this year was seeing it released alongside a soundtrack that takes a "kitchen sink" approach to the series' music. Even priced at £30—definitely on the higher end of Steam's selection—it's great value, boasting an unbelievable 531 tracks totalling almost 18 hours of delicious arcade beats, the raw quantity of music within (and the file size that entails) making it virtually unworkable on any other storefront, let alone traditional physical media.
Less a bundle of tunes and more an aural history of tech-pushing, genre-defining, standard-setting 3D fighting games, this is a definitive library so complete the only way to outdo it would involve kidnapping composers and raids of Sega's archives. There are Saturn variants of arcade songs, the ease of flipping between the two highlighting the fresh takes these later remixes brought. I can listen to a variety of Virtua Fighter 3 tracks that were either last heard at a decades-old Japanese trade show, and tunes from one specific version of Virtua Fighter 4 that never made it into the game.
It's more than everything I ever wanted—it allows me to fall in love with new takes on old favourites and hear great tunes I'd have otherwise never even known I was missing.
Yukiharu Urita may not be a famous composer in English-speaking circles, but there's no doubt this former Zuntata composer's work was the perfect fit for M2's 2025-fresh revival of Taito's high speed arcade action game, Night Striker. Surprisingly the music eschews the predictable fast-paced electronica sci-fi shooting tunes usually sleepwalk themselves into and goes for something more cinematic instead, rousing drumbeats punctuating orchestral swells and choral chants.
More shocking is the fact that at the time of writing, the soundtrack page on Steam is the only place I can buy the music—it should be a crime this excellent work's not more widely available. Then again, it seems safe to assume that if it wasn't on Steam then it wouldn't be anywhere at all, and that would be so much worse.
You've probably not heard of this one, seeing as this untranslated game's a more modern (and legally distinct) reimagining of classic Chinese language RPG You Cheng Huan Jian Lu. But that's also the beauty of the release; a few years ago I wouldn't have even bothered looking for the soundtrack—it would have been so out of reach I may as well have gone Googling for a tin of stripy paint. Now? I casually picked it up on a whim for an almost offensively low price while I was busy enjoying the game's gentle melodies packed with soaring flutes and plucked strings, and had the tracks transferred to my phone minutes later. Every now and then I check the files, just to make sure I didn't dream the whole thing.
Unfortunately this one's so niche I couldn't find a previewable version of the soundtrack anywhere. Thankfully, a general sample of the game's beautiful music can be heard in the official trailer.
💽 Favourite track: Sword's Cry
Soundtrack perk: Free update with remixes and new tracks
Of course Clair Obscur's award-winning wonders are on this list—I've got ears. This eight-hour marvel hasheart-wrenching songs, tinkling music box melodies, energetic battle themes that can only be described as, uh, French. And the more I played the game (thanks to some accessibility tweaks), the more I fell in love with the music, until I reached a point where I knew I had to have these delights in my ears all the time.
On CD—due February next year—the complete soundtrack's an attractive but somewhat unwieldy eight disc monster. On Steam it's roughly half the price, DRM-free, easily fits on SD cards so small I could swallow them, and has been making my kitchen cleaning feel like an epic boss fight for months.
And now they've added even more on top too—for free. The separately available Nos Vies En Lumière and Verso's drafts expand on this already lush selection with new remixes, unused tracks, and fresh tunes. Merci beaucoup, Sandfall.
💽 Favourite track: Dualliste
Kerry insists they have a "time agnostic" approach to gaming, which is their excuse for having a very modern laptop filled with very old games and a lot of articles about games on floppy discs here on PC Gamer. When they're not insisting the '90s was 10 years ago, they're probably playing some sort of modern dungeon crawler, Baldur's Gate 3 (again), or writing about something weird and wonderful on their awkwardly named site, Kimimi the Game-Eating She-Monster.
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