It’s What’s On The Radio: Skin Deep Composer Priscilla Snow Talks Scoring an Immersive Sim
When you launch Skin Deep, the opening riff of “Spychic” fades in as if someone turned on a radio and cranked the volume. The track’s twanging guitar gives you something to groove to while you fiddle with settings in the main menu. Once you boot up the game proper, though, the music disappears. The soundscape you’re greeted with is dripping water, the drone of air blowing through vents, and a robotic female voice declaring, “Good morning, Nina Pasadena. Pirate incursion. Emergency protocols activated. MIAOCorp commando deployed.”
Composer Priscilla Snow faced a fascinating dilemma when it came to Skin Deep’s soundtrack. How exactly do you score an immersive sim that’s being programmed in the Doom 3 engine? It turns out, the answer is deceptively simple: make the music diegetic.
When insurance commando Nina Pasadena boards a starship overrun with purple-clad pirates, tasked with rescuing cuboid cats from their clutches, the player is cast adrift in a music-free environment. They’re left alone with their thoughts, the echoing footsteps of spacefaring scallywags, and some idle commentary from the game’s intrepid protagonist. It’s only when they locate a radio, either a portable box or a built-in wall unit, that they can bring music into the equation by turning it on. The problem? If the radio’s playing, Nina can hear it, and so can the pirates who want her dead.
That doesn’t mean there’s a lack of music in Skin Deep; it’s quite the opposite. The soundtrack clocks in at 59 tracks, which is a lot for a game with an estimated playtime of 10-12 hours. To say it’s a multi-genre-spanning OST is quite the understatement. The songs cover everything from smooth jazz and classic rock to retro commercial jingles and techno sea shanties. There were plenty of opportunities to deploy non-diegetic music throughout the game as well — while the ship-breaching levels are all-in on the creativity and chaos inherent to an imsim’s emergent gameplay, the game also features story-centric segments that come paired with traditional scoring.
The sheer range on display in Skin Deep’s soundtrack reflects Snow’s years of experience. They began composing for video games in 2014, when they scored their partner Kevin Snow’s Twine game The Domovoi. The Snows continued to work together on additional projects under Kevin’s Bravemule label, and Priscilla collaborated with several now well-known names in the indie space, creating the music for Bruno Dias’ Voyageur, Cat Manning’s What Isn’t Saved (will be lost), and Strange Scaffold’s Can Androids Pray. They haven’t only stayed in the indie space, though — they were contracted to work on audio for Camouflaj’s Iron Man VR, which was a major transition that included a move to Seattle.
Snow also made notable contributions to the games Jett: The Far Shore and Immortality. Jett composer scntfc (also known for his work on Oxenfree) reached out to them for help with a choral composition inspired by Sacred Harp music. This was after scntfc learned of their connection to the American folk tradition via their relative Benjamin Franklin White, a pivotal figure in its history. This collaboration grew into much more — the choral piece Snow wrote served as the basis for what would become Jett’s conlang, and they also voiced a character and assisted with voice direction for the game.
Working with scntfc, who happened to live in Snow’s Seattle neighbourhood at the time, was something of a dream come true. “In 2017, somewhere around there, there was this video that had come out with him that was showing his studio and showing all his hands-on physical analog radios, and things like that, that he was using for the sounds in Oxenfree,” they said. “And I remember basically shouting across the apartment to Kevin, just being like, ‘How do I get this person to mentor me?’”
As for Immortality, Snow didn’t compose the soundtrack (that was Nainita Desai), but they handled the in-game sound design, and were responsible for a low, droning sound effect that’s integral to gameplay (if you know, you know). They’re working again with developer Half Mermaid on the forthcoming Project C, about which little is known beyond the fact that the studio has teamed up with Blumhouse’s new games publishing label and director Brandon Cronenberg.
Blendo Games’ Brendon Chung first reached out to Snow in 2020 to create a theme song for Skin Deep. The result — the brass-heavy, Bond-style theme “Nina Pasadena,” which accompanies the game’s interactive opening credits — was actually Snow’s second take on the material. Originally, they’d written a “slinky lounge song involving the words ‘skin deep,’” but by 2023, they realised they needed to rework it. As it stood, the song was too broad, and they wanted to dial in to something more specific. “I knew it was going to be this set piece in the game, and I wanted it to land, and I wanted it to be fun,” they said. With the second pass they took a bigger swing, and roped in multiple collaborators. M Gewehr assisted with the brass arrangement, Josie Brechner laid down drums, and Aricka Lewis lent her voice to the track. “The theme song, I will say, was definitely the most difficult track to get through,” Snow said of the experience. “I think just between bringing [Lewis] on and having [Gewehr] helping with the brass and everything, I went from dreading the theme song and being stressed and anxious about it to being excited about it.”
Otherwise, their process working on the game was much more streamlined. Over the course of nearly five years working with Blendo Games, they jumped in and out of the project, writing and recording new music as the need arose. As is typical of the modern-day musician, Snow’s compositional toolkit encompasses both an acoustic and electronic approach. Indies like Skin Deep don’t have the budget for studio recordings with a full orchestra, but that didn’t stop Snow from incorporating plenty of live performances into the soundtrack, both from their own instrumental arsenal as well as by bringing in collaborators. Where there were gaps — or the desire to go all-in with electronics — MIDI instruments and synthesized sounds filled out the ensemble.
There are places in the music where the human touch is unmistakable — the slight honk of the clarinet in the first SFPR bumper (performed by Friends at the Table’s Jack de Quidt) perfectly encapsulates the public radio aesthetic. Snow often limited the number of takes they recorded, preferring to capture a more raw performance, as opposed to a perfect one. “I wanted to infuse as much of that kind of, ‘this is a real performance’ kind of a vibe as I could to make things feel more alive and less ‘this is a perfectly quantized MIDI thing happening,’” they said. In the case of the “Pippu Fresh! No. 2” soda ad, Snow laid down the voiceover in one take, bouncing between the voices of a little kid they described as “[buying] Anya Forger from Spy x Family on Temu” and a perfectly polished suburban mom.
“Little Lion’s Song” epitomises this half-acoustic and half-electronic approach. The instrumental version of the theme features Snow on trumpet and Brechner on drums, accompanied by MIDI piano and bass — yet it still evokes the feel of listening to a jazz set played live in a dimly lit club. Meanwhile, “Katzenparade” sits the listener down in a recital hall for a classical music performance, even opening with a cough, but the synthesized harpsichord, violins, and cello have an electronic oomph that adds a sci-fi vibe to the mix. (According to Snow, their own personal canon is that “Katzenparade” was “composed by a cat for a cat ballet.”)
One thing that was important to Snow and the Blendo team is that all the music be earnest at heart, whether it’s a barbershop quartet jingle for cat food or a campfire ballad full of thinly-veiled corporate threats. The team’s touchstone for this earnestness is a scene from Inside Llewyn Davis, in which Oscar Issac, Justin Timberlake, and Adam Driver perfectly perform the painfully bad song “Please Mr. Kennedy.” None of Skin Deep’s music sounds like the cringeworthy folk-tune begging the president not to send its singers to space, but the comedy inherent to that performance was key to the soundtrack’s development. “We knew that a lot of the music needed to have an earnest approach to it, but still be off kilter and still be a little weird. And that was really the kind of line I was trying to toe,” Snow said.
To be sure, Snow put a lot of their heart into the music. An image they often thought about was being a kid in the back of the car, half asleep and at the mercy of whatever’s playing on the radio. With that in mind, they drew from their childhood memories of listening to classic rock, commercial jingles, the local NPR station, and more in order to create various fictional broadcasts. Snow’s personal experiences also bled into MIAOCorp’s propaganda songs. The improvised monologue at the top of “Productivity (Presented by MIAOCorp),” for which they dove back into the Arkansas accent from their youth, references their family history; the singer’s fictional grandpa is an analogue to Snow’s own grandfather, who worked sharpening saw blades in a lumber mill.
Snow’s fingerprints aren’t just on Skin Deep’s music — their feline companions also lent their likenesses to a few of its characters. Guts, who passed away last year, is memorialised as a high-level MIAOCorp executive who shows up later in the game, and Grendel appears as Captain Palanka, Gubo, and Trish. Although Chung couldn’t definitively confirm that the character is based on him, Snow’s cat Dada also looks markedly like Fortinbras. Additionally, Grendel’s meows are featured on “Pr4nc3 D@Nc3,” which is also sampled in another track towards the end of the game.
The soundtrack’s inspirations vary as widely as the genres of its songs. Skin Deep employs a retro aesthetic — from the ‘70s to the ‘90s in particular. When developing ideas for the game’s satirical corporate propaganda music, Snow passed videos back and forth with the Blendo team on Discord, including a Wendy’s corporate training rap music video and the opening sequence of the Crystal Light National Aerobic Championship. Another detail that evolved on Discord was the invention of the game’s enigmatic Laser Lords. When writing “Pippu Fresh! No. 2,” Snow originally had the child proclaim, “When I grow up, I’m going to be an insurance commando!” However, Chung nipped that in the bud. On Discord, he said: “I think in this universe, being an insurance commando is something that's not aspirational or fancy. … Maybe it could be something more ambiguous, i.e. Space Cowboy, Laser Lord, et cetera.” Snow’s response? “Laser Lord, love it. Done.” From there, they finalised the advertisement (“When I grow up, I’m gonna be the most powerful, most strongest Laser Lord the universe has ever seen”), but that wasn’t the end of the matter. The idea took root, and eventually evolved into the headbanger “Laser Lord,” for which Snow donned a “dad rock” voice in a homage to classic rock icons like Black Sabbath and Metallica.
Snow and the Blendo team also theorised as to how music could fit in with Skin Deep’s imagined world. One brainstorming session centred on how radio broadcasts might work in-universe. Some basic questions arose: How do you tune in to a radio show in space? Can you know when a particular show is going to air? They determined that it would be impossible to schedule punctual broadcasts across the cosmos — it’s simply too vast, even before you bring the concept of Wonky Space (“that parallel dimension that we all visit when we go too fast for light to see,” according to SFPR host Tina Tuna) into the mix. While this thought process isn’t expressly present in the game’s canon, the radios perform according to its principle. Whenever you flip one on, a song, advertisement, or SFPR interview may come on at random. Turn it off, then back on again, and you’ll receive something entirely new.
Speculation on the nature of Skin Deep’s radio broadcasts wasn’t the only invented backstory Snow kept in mind. They also imagined Tina Tuna as SFPR’s only employee, trapped for decades surviving on Kitty Kitty Space Mix as she produced everything the public radio station put on air. “My core belief is that she's in there just chugging out tunes and cutting promos,” they joked.
Regardless of the exact nature of how radio waves transmit through outer space, or Tina Tuna’s life story, the game’s radio broadcasts play an important role in the imsim levels. Since the music is audible to everyone present, radios are in play as a distraction method — you can switch on a portable unit and huck it into a corner to lead a pirate where you want them, for instance. On the other hand, if a room is clear and you want to hang out and catch some tunes, paying attention to the lyrics of in-game product jingles provides gameplay hints. The end-of-song disclaimer in “Dignity Deodorant” gives some explosive clues (“Do not use near cigarette lighters or combustible surfaces”) and “Washnado & Drynado” points out the laundry units’ potential as a hiding spot (“Cats, kids, and commandos should never climb inside the Washnado”) or a perfect place to slam a pounced-upon opponent (“Don’t just get clean — get even”).
For their part, Snow hopes players use the radios to add another layer of fun to the game: a proposed speedrun category. “My dream is for there to be a speedrun category that's ‘All Radios Active’ or something like that,” they said. For the run, the player would be required to grab the first radio they find, pick it up, and keep it playing in their inventory all the way through beating each level. Since the inventory resets for each rescue mission, players would presumably need to seek out a new radio each time they board a ship. Snow didn’t specify how to handle wall units, but turning them on as well could be fertile ground for cacophonous chaos. “So much of my thought behind what will make a lot of these things feel very funny to hear — in context of the game — is just thinking about being on a pirate's back, smashing their head in while listening to Tina Tuna selling you on the SFPR fundraiser,” they added.
Moving forward, Snow hasn’t ruled out further involvement with the Skin Deep community. In the spirit of Blendo founder Chung’s own history as a modder, the game launched with full modding support, and Snow might decide to get in on the action, too. “In my mind, I'm already like, ‘maybe I could release some bonus packs that people can drop in to add additional tracks to the radio down the way,’” they said. “I want to release some supplemental things for this game, and if people are excited and interested in it, it's easier for me to be motivated to make more stuff to add on my own time.” Whether or not any additional Skin Deep music materialises, Snow has already made a few extras. On their YouTube channel, they’ve posted a lyric video for “Dignity Deodorant” and filmed a music video for “Catnip Baby” starring Dada and Grendel.
With such fertile ground to draw from, it would be no surprise if Snow returns to Skin Deep’s sonic landscape. Regardless of any potential additions, though, the soundtrack augments the game both as accompaniment and an element of play.
“For such a funny game, I feel like I have put a weird amount of myself into these things. It was definitely a labour of love, and really all I want is for people to have a fun time listening to it and spending time with it,” Snow said. “I hope that the fun I had making it is what comes across. I really didn't ever just phone it in.”
