Garry Schyman on composing the fantasy score of Forspoken and finding a voice for Frey

“It’s quite a stunning world that [the developers] created, so it gave me an opportunity to write some very beautiful music,” says Forspoken co-composer Garry Schyman. “It really was an opportunity to write something that’s not just combat and not just dark; it was an opportunity to write melodies.”

Forspoken is the latest fantasy epic from Square Enix, following a young woman named Frey who finds herself transported from modern day New York to the strange world of Athia. Composers Garry Schyman (the BioShock series, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and more) and Bear McCreary (God of War Ragnarök, and Amazon’s Rings of Power series) took on the job together of writing music for Frey’s adventure.

But how do you create the sound of a fantasy world through music? And what is the musical voice of Frey?

It begins with melody. “I love writing melody, and you know what, I think the audience loves melody,” says Schyman.

“And games often provide the opportunity to write melody, which I love. There are a lot of films with terrific scores, but they’re pretty ambient, they’re pretty sound design-y shall we say, for lack of a better word. And there’s nothing to recall, really.

“So that is a very dominant style right now in film and television, and games too. Games don’t escape this.”

He adds: “[The developers] really wanted something in a way traditional, but the score also, I think, has some very unique elements as well.”

Schyman and McCreary shared responsibility for the score, composing a number of themes between them that Schyman elaborated on for the in-game music. Schyman picks out Frey’s theme and the theme for central city Cipal as key pieces: the latter features long musical phrases tinged with dissonance over harp accompaniment to really add to the mystical vibe.