Among the Trolls

Among the Trolls is a first-person survival adventure from the Italian studio AvantGarden Games, published by 505 Games — a journey into the Finnish wilderness, where Anna returns to her grandparents’ island in search of her missing grandfather and finds the old myths of the North waiting under the trees. Daniele Carmosino wrote the original score. The game comes to Steam in 2026; a demo is already out.

The game lives on the border between two realities — Anna’s contemporary world and the ancient one of Nordic myth — and the score refuses to illustrate either from the outside. It stays inside Anna: what she feels as the journey moves from family tragedy through desperate solitude to a bond with the land itself. So the duality is not painted, it is embodied in the sound — in the timbre before the harmony or the themes. Everything starts from real, concrete sources: piano, cello, voices — the tangible world. Pushed through extreme repitching, distortion and layering, those same sources become almost unrecognisable while staying organic — the inner, mystic world. The player keeps hearing sounds they cannot quite place. That is Anna’s own estrangement: she recognises her grandparents’ island, but not what she finds on it.

One decision was made in the very first conversations with creative director Giorgio Macellari: no folklore. No kantele, no runolaulu, no philological quotation of Karelian song. The score takes a modern cinematic sensibility and a custom-built contemporary palette, and runs a narration parallel to the game’s — emotional rather than descriptive. What it does absorb from the Kalevala is structural: its darkness and tragedy, which in that world — as in the game — are not anomalies but part of how reality is built.

In an age of infinite instruments, the hardest discipline was the opposite of accumulation: covering exploration, cutscenes, dungeons and combat with a deliberately limited palette — piano, cello, a Sequential Prophet 10, strings, voices, and little else. A self-imposed constraint, and the thing that gives the score its identity and coherence across many hours of play.

The track that says it best is “Endless Exile”, which carries the player through the opening walk in the forest, before the house appears. It began as an idea and a lyric by Giorgio, adapted and set to music by Daniele, and is sung by Maria Chiara Argirò — the Italian artist based in London who has spent years moving between jazz and electronics. A chance meeting through friends; a perfect fit. After that first collaboration she stayed for three more tracks of the soundtrack.

A game score cannot be linear the way a film score can — it has to answer the player. Daniele’s writing turned out to be built for it: his music naturally works in levels — a base of chord roots, a pad, a held cello note or percussion, with elements added on top before anything changes. Those are the mechanics of adaptive music, so the move to vertical layering in Wwise was almost painless: he was already composing in stackable stems. Concretely: as lykky — the life-energy of the islands — rises and falls, the music adds and removes layers in real time; when combat begins, another set of layers lands on top of the lykky bed, sharing its harmony and its tempo, with transitions quantised to the rhythmic grid. The player never hears a cut. The music simply grows with the danger, moment by moment. More than changing how he composes, the game forced him to make explicit an architecture that was already implicit in his writing.

Before production there were months of research. Jóhann Jóhannsson and Hildur Guðnadóttir were constant references — Hildur above all for method, that way of starting from real, concrete sources to build abstract worlds. Into the same pot went more electronic things: Apparat (above all “Goodbye”, with Soap&Skin), M83, and the Low Roar songs tied to Death Stranding. But what truly defined the sound was months of free recording and experiment: the Prophet 10, voices, acoustic and electric cello with the great Christof Unterberger, Daniele’s Soviet upright piano, a Lirika played by maestro Mark Aanderud, and whoever else passed through the studio — everything then repitched and re-amped through guitar pedalboards, distortions and effect chains, until the source material stopped resembling itself.

Score credits: Original score composed and produced by Daniele Carmosino Vocals: Maria Chiara Argirò Cello (acoustic & electric): Christof Unterberger Lirika: Mark Aanderud “Endless Exile” — lyric by Giorgio Macellari, adapted and set to music by Daniele Carmosino Adaptive music system: Wwise vertical layering Sound design: Marcello Radice (AvantGarden Games) Music production: Danca

Game credits: Developer: AvantGarden Games Publisher: 505 Games Creative director: Giorgio Macellari