When we reviewed the very enjoyable escapist tourist trip of A Highland Song (2023), the game had just launched and the excellent score wasn’t fully available.

Two years on and we’re eager to cover English composer Laurence Chapman’s beautiful music. More of the work is available online and you can have a listen to get into the spirit of the Scottish Highlands.

The Gorgeous Score of A Highland Song

The Beltane Tide is our favourite of the whole work, a perfect fit for the game and some of the incredible scenery you encounter.

We should add Chapman was assisted by Talisk and Fourth Moon, two folk banks from the Scottish festival circuit.

There’s no hiding the folk influences, which work extremely well wrapped around Chapman’s leaning toward classical themes. Lots of piano, occasional flourishes of violin.

The game itself is by Cambridge-based indie team Inkle Studios. In May 2022, co-founder Jospeh Humfrey told Game Developer:

“I was just kind of looking around at various Scottish influences and listening to Scottish folk music. And having grown up in Scotland, I had a very clear sense of what I thought Scottish folk music was like, because in school [as] part of the sports lessons, we had to do Scottish country dancing, which is a bit like kind of line dancing, I guess, in the U.S. It has a very different feel to this high-beats-per-minute, Scottish fiddle music that we started to listen to for this project.

We genuinely fell in love with the style of the music. John and I are really, really keen on jazz, and it has these complex rhythms that we kind of recognize a little bit from jazz. It’s a totally different genre, but these kinds of skipped beats and surprising drum rhythms are really fantastic. We got really excited about the potential for having that kind of music in the game.”

For A Highland Song, players take control of young Moira McKinnon as she runs away from home to visit her uncle hidden away in the mountains. It’s essentially a coming-of-age type story, as told as a 2D platformer, with some of the most gorgeous hand painted artwork and scenery imaginable.

The addition of the scores an incredible layer over the top of it all. For Chapman, when it came to composing, all the piano work was layered up with violin to make for one of the best indie game scores we’ve heard.

Alongside the more considered pieces that play on McKinnon’s sense of adventure set to all that spectacular scenery, there are lively moments as well.

It’s fabulous stuff. A Highland Song is also a fine game, with magical-realist elements and an interesting take on the 2D platformer genre. Well worth your time playing (out on Steam and Nintendo Switch), not least to hear all this music.

And a Bit About Composer Laurence Chapman

From Suffolk in England, Chapman was inspired by film scores and studied at Southampton University. He’s particularly inspired by classical composers—Bach and Beethoven.

Thanks to the rise of the indie game scene, as with many other composers he’s found a natural home creating scores for many games. Although he also also provided music to the September 2024 film My Husband is a Dog.