The Game Music Festival Vol. 3 reimagines the sounds of Supergiant and Larian

Comb your hair, spray that perfume and suit up for a night of high culture, readers - the third edition of the Game Music Festival is underway. Starting last night, you can already tune into a full evening of orchestral rearrangement of scores from Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades, with Larian Studios picking up the mic tonight for a more high-fantasy swing at the concert scene.

The Game Music Festival kicked off last night with a quartet of soundtracks from Supergiant Games, dubbed The Symphony Of Four Worlds. You can catch the show below, with the music turning up at around 22:30 with Bastion's "Build That Wall".

Now, with the strong musical pedigree their games sport, Supergiant end up doing this live music lark fairly frequently at conventions or in their own shows. What's interesting here, though, is the way their games soundtracks have been arranged for orchestral performance. Studio composer Darren Korb has an extremely playful, unique approach to genre, from Bastion's acoustic trip-hop to Hades' Ancient Greek metal riffs. It's real strange hearing these compositions performed so... traditionally?

It's a compelling experiment, though, even if the new takes on some of my favourite game scores don't always jam with me. Pyre folk song "In The Flame" (at 48:00) sounds almost operatic, while the new arrangement of Bastion's Spike In A Rail (25:00) wouldn't feel out of place on Broadway. Hearing Transistor's The Spine (1:35:00) performed as it may have been heard in-fiction in Cloudbank's concert halls, however? That's goosebumps, right there.

Granted, I don't know what the bit with the VR headsets was all about. Bit strange, that.

Tonight, Larian follows up the even with their own performances of songs from Divinity: Original Sin 2 and Baldur's Gate 3. I'm infinitely less familiar with the scores to either, but if you're up for a bit of a tune, the stream starts over on Twitch and YouTube at 7pm UK time.