Keeping Score: 140

This is Keeping Score, a series about games and their soundtracks. This particular entry is an honorary member of the Rainbow In The Dark series about games that actually contain colors. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

I’ve had 140 in my library for a while. I read a review over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun back in 2013 when Carlsen Games released 140, and must have picked it up not long after. It’s sat in my backlog ever since, near the top due to its numeric name, and many a time I’ve pondered playing it, only to pass it over in favor of something else. But I always kept it in the back of my mind for a Keeping Score post, because not only did my copy come with the soundtrack included, but 140 is itself a musical game, concocting platforming challenges in time to its pulsing techno beats and big synthesizer hits. I suspect, in fact, that the title refers to a tempo of 140 beats per minute. It’s also a very colorful game, constantly shifting palettes for its minimalist artwork, making it worthy of my Rainbow In The Dark series as well.

140 goes all in on the minimalism. There’s no options menu, and no credits shown anywhere (but it was mostly made by Jeppe Carlsen, who is more famous for having worked on Limbo and Inside for Playdead, and more recently directing Cocoon for Geometric Interactive after leaving Playdead in 2016). There’s just a title screen, with the colors changing periodically in time with the music. Press a key, and a brief burst of static coalesces into a white square against a two-tone, greyscale background. Players control this square, although it changes shape depending on what it’s doing: a square when stationary, a circle when moving left or right, a triangle when airborne. The faintest afterglow trail is all that’s needed to convey the shape’s motion against the swaths of solid color that make up the game’s levels.

These levels are always primarily two colors. To start one, players must grab a floating, bi-color orb and bring it to the semicircular slot in the center of the greyscale hub area. This sends players to a level made up of the same two colors, one for the foreground on which the morphing shape travels, and one for the background. Well, mostly just those two colors. Once the music really starts to kick in, the background imitates the pulsing bars of an equalizer, using a range of similar shades to do so. This emphasizes the interconnection between the music and the level, something that becomes even clearer during play. Platforms appear and disappear in time to the beat. The deadly patches of static — the only things that don’t conform to the chosen color scheme — move around in sync to the synthesizer melody. Pass those, and the melody will fade out, replaced by new musical elements timed to a fresh platforming challenge.

As players move through the level, they’ll find more of those bi-color orbs, and more semicircular slots to plug them into. Doing so creates a new two-color palette for the level, and also activates new elements of the level so players can proceed. A set of stationary platforms will start moving, that big wall of deadly static will start opening and closing to the beat. All with new musical motifs to accompany them, of course. While 140 only has four levels — the original three, plus a fourth that was added later in a patch — each of them undergoes multiple palette changes, creating an impressively colorful game. It’s precisely what that constantly shifting title screen promised.

Navigating the levels is simple. 140 has only the most basic elements of a platformer: players can move left, move right, and jump. That’s it. The jump is always the same height. The player-controlled shape does have some momentum, I think, but it’s easy to change direction. Movement, like the art design, is minimalist, cutting back to the core of what a platformer is. Challenges are about jumping, and timing. Levels are built from big, rectangular (or circular) blocks of solid colors. It’s almost too basic, but avoids that fate because of the way the art and music work in tandem. There are also some boss battles of sorts, which change things up a bit for some variety. Other cool touches make 140 feel slicker than its basic mechanics initially seem, like when the 2D art mimics 3D objects in a surprisingly convincing way. The bi-color orbs and the slots they fit into both do impressive imitations of spheres rolling into position, for example.

Some parts of 140 can get difficult, but players always restart from nearby checkpoints, so it’s not too painful to get through the levels. Until it is. Upon completing the four levels on offer, I learned that 140 doesn’t really have an ending. Or rather, it kind of does, but it comes after the third level since the fourth was added later (a fact I didn’t learn until after I played). I was left wondering if I was truly done, only to discover I’d unlocked mirrored and re-colored versions of the same levels. But these have one major difference: there are no checkpoints. Players must complete them in one go, starting over from the beginning if they touch a patch of static or have a platform snap into existence on top of them.

At first, I scoffed. Who would have the patience for that? But eventually, curiosity won out and I started trying these extra challenging levels. I got frustrated quickly, and would go play something else instead. But I found myself returning to 140 periodically to have a try or two. The smart way to approach this would have been to replay the regular levels to practice tricky sections before diving into the hard version, but that’s not what I did. Instead I just tried the hard versions over and over, once or twice a day for many weeks, slowly getting a bit farther each time. Often I’d almost completely forgotten what the original levels had been like by the time I got to them on hard mode, which meant I was re-learning everything from scratch.

I don’t recommend this. But it did give me a new appreciation for 140’s design. I realized, for example, that the toughest sections came when certain musical motifs — which had been helping me out with timing earlier in the level — faded out, yet I still faced hazards with their now-absent rhythm. I needed to really learn the music in order to pass these. Sometimes I would keep humming the old melody, out loud, to help me keep time. Other times I literally counted out beats. But I always became intimately familiar with the music for each level, and how its melodies and beats overlapped with each other to create the level’s hazards, before I finally pulled off a perfect run.

And I did, at long last, get a perfect run on all four of these extra-hard mirrored levels. There was no reward for this beyond my own satisfaction, no secret ending lurking behind them. But I knew that I had mastered 140. My perfect runs were choreographed dances through its bright, energetic levels, counting time and moving at exactly the right moments. If anyone had been watching, I would probably have made 140 look easy. Many parts are surprisingly easy, once I learned the rhythm, but getting to that point certainly was not. And many sections remained challenging, particularly a couple of the boss battles which are more like quick-response prompts that cannot be easily anticipated. My success was a mix of memorization and quick reflexes, and lots of patience.

Having learned all of the music intimately along the way, I was curious to see what it sounds like on its own. Which brings me to:

The Score:

The soundtrack for 140, composed by Jakob Schmid, spans 10 tracks and clocks in at just under 42 minutes. Aside from the title track, which plays during the game’s title screen, each track is actually a remix of sorts, because the music doesn’t simply “play” during levels. It reacts to what players are doing, bringing in more percussion as they reach certain sections, or cutting back in dramatic moments. Certain motifs fade in as players approach certain obstacles, only to fade away again in favor of something new as they move past and encounter the next hurdle. Each component of the mix is critical to the player’s experience of traversing the levels.

This dictates the overall sound, somewhat. Everything here is synthesizer-heavy techno, but it’s necessarily sparse in its arrangement: every drum pattern, every synthesizer riff, is clear and easily picked out of the mix, because each corresponds to something in the level. Sonic elements are only combined if those parts of the level are on screen at the same time. Where many composers might have opted for more layering in the composition, Jakob Schmid needed to keep everything separate so players wouldn’t be overwhelmed.

For the out-of-game soundtrack, however, he was able to take a few liberties. Most tracks broadly follow the sequence that unfolds during the levels, but the mix is tighter, elements flowing into each other more smoothly. Some motifs that are very prominent while playing are dialed back a bit, while others are emphasized. For some tracks — most notably those that accompany the boss battles — Jakob Schmid offers an extended remix of sorts, with a longer runtime than the actual battle and some extra sonic elements added. For example, in “140 Part 2B” (the music that plays during the level 2 boss battle), the rhythmic thump that is central to that battle is mixed lower, while a new, bouncy synthesizer organ melody transforms the track into a rave banger.

There’s also one bonus track that does not (I believe) appear in-game, called “0x8c”. This is an ambient piece, of the type that might have accompanied a credits sequence if 140 contained one. It’s a nice coda to the high intensity tracks that make up most of the soundtrack, and pairs well with “140 Menu”, the minimalist ambient piece that plays in the level selection hub. “0x8c” has more melodic elements, however, making for a more engaging listen.

I’m impressed with the tracks on offer here. They are recognizable from the in-game levels and boss battles, but work much better as complete pieces of music due to more nuanced mixing that blend different elements together more cohesively. In a way, I feel like playing the game gave me a “making of” view of the music, while the soundtrack lets me hear the finished product, giving me a better appreciation of the art of mixing in the process. The soundtrack is a good listen straight through, and I’ll enjoy hearing these pieces pop up on shuffle too, each calling to mind the stiff challenge of a perfect run through 140’s memorable levels.

If you want to give 140 a try, it’s available on Steam and GOG (and is on sale on GOG at the time of writing), with both offering the soundtrack as an optional extra.