🎮 YOUNG TEAM SOUNDS

Written by Daikon

This article was featured in our 2024 July-August issue. Check out more articles and interviews in the full issue.

CW: The game and this article contain discussion of mental illness and distress, clinical psychology, and references to real-life acts of violence and terrorism.

Creating art is not a neutral act. Take music: listening to it can resonate deeply with our own experiences, evoking pleasant feelings and fun memories. But it can also dredge up uncomfortable thoughts, distorting the way we look back on our memories, feeling like a poison being drawn out of us that we didn't even know we carried. Music and art is a sort of primeval communication that spreads not through words and logic, but with raw and complicated emotion, and creating art is a way to both spread and act as an antidote to the poison we all carry inside. When I played through the game YOUNG TEAM SOUNDS: INTRO, I was able to experience that complicated duality.

YOUNG TEAM SOUNDS has a distinctive art style highly reminiscent of zines cut together from magazines and newspapers.

YOUNG TEAM SOUNDS is an upcoming zine-like adventure game by POST COMMERCIALS: ALLIANCE that explores the dark side of creating music. You can currently wishlist and find more information about the full release on Steam, and play the demo in your browser on Novel Game Collection.

The choices you make set the tone for the kind of music your protagonist will later create.

Starting the game is like opening an explosive zine. The player is immediately confronted with an intense rush of hand-drawn illustrations, striking collages made of cut-out newspapers and photographs, and provocative text in all-caps, all of which flash rapidly across the screen in an overwhelming visual assault. Our protagonist Kubota, a depressed young man sitting in a wheelchair, is clutching a cell phone and a guitar. He is trapped within his home, and before the story has even begun, he has already been cornered and defeated.

You are competing in the crowded attention economy against powerful and unsettling online influencers.

Despite the circumstances in which Kubota finds himself, the cell phone in his hand pours forth with job offers as a musician. How did a musician end up trapped in such an environment? He strums his guitar, but instead of music, a roll of negative emotions come unfurling out.

The people on the phone don't care about his feelings. They want to see results, they want him to meet deadlines and fill his contractual duty to make music. And so Kubota returns to his tiny room to scrape together enough of his soul and grit in order to sell as music.

Kubota's room is tiny and stifling, just large enough for his guitar, his smartphone, and his bed.

This is when the player is allowed to make choices to affect what kind of music our protagonist creates. You are given leads to track down in the form of search term keywords you enter into your phone. There is the shady online influencer who calls himself a clinical psychologist and cultivates a devoted and cultlike audience; the flowers from tropical Okinawa, a place the protagonist has never been; the composer who neither know nor care about you, and who seeks only to increase their own clout in the industry.

Pick up keywords from conversing with other characters and then search for them on your phone for musical inspiration.

At the end of each search, the player is given a choice on how to respond to the memories and feelings unearthed within our protagonist. There is no right or wrong answer, and players are encouraged to make choices based on their own thoughts and emotions.

With each choice that you make, your musical style will change and reflect your current mindset.

The final result is a guitar lick that reflects the choices that the player and Kubota make together. The music may be sharp and edgy, or it may be wistful and longing. This music is the result of your own choices, drawn upon your real experiences and memories that bubbled up when presented with those three prompts.

I ended up with a rather intense piece of music. I imagined myself living in Kubota's constrained environment, and having to deal with creepy YouTube influencers interrupting my work to bother me with their nonsense. It made me quite angry, and that showed in the music that I ended up with.

The highly stylized world of YOUNG TEAM SOUNDS is unsettling and strange.

I was quite satisfied with how my music turned out. However, did I make the right choices? In the process of creating this music, my emotions flared up and I was forced to confront my own anger at this situation. At the same time, I felt as if my spirit had been drained out of me, leaving behind only poison. I couldn't help but feel that young Kubota, who already started out worn down and defeated, would be losing out even more on life by clinging to this anger. What will his future look like? Will he have to squeeze out even more of himself for the sake of his music?

The colors are dazzling but overwhelming, reflecting Kubota's information overload.

Throughout the work, there are also references to real-life violent incidents that took place in Japan around the time of this game's production. The things that disturb and agitate Kubota in the game can be found in the player's world as well, and the decisions that the protagonist makes are often the same ones that define our own lives.

Although our circumstances are quite different from those of the game's protagonist, many of us spend our lives feeling utterly drained. Why not examine your own poisons by creating music in YOUNG TEAM SOUNDS?