The soundtrack to one of the weirdest indie games of 2016, and it has no business being this good. Maize is the game where sentient corn stalks wander around a secret government facility, and the music plays it completely straight.
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"The Farm" opens with this wide-open Americana warmth that makes you forget you're about to spend hours solving puzzles with talking maize. "Welcome to (Redacted)" shifts into something eerie and institutional, and "Into the Depths" commits fully to underground tension.
"Going Nuclear" and "Secrets Revealed" ratchet up the drama as the absurd plot thickens, but it's "Saying Goodbye" that catches you off guard with genuine emotional weight. For a comedy game about corn, that track hits surprisingly hard.
"Promised Land" closes the narrative arc with a sense of earned resolution that the game's humor doesn't undercut. Then there's "Top Secret" getting the triple treatment: standard, power ballad, and 8-bit. The power ballad version is gloriously over-the-top, and the 8-bit rendition feels like a victory lap.
The whole soundtrack treats its ridiculous premise with total sincerity, and that's exactly why it works.