What are games that enthrall you with purely their atmosphere

[Faarbaute]

Sound design, or rather, a great soundtrack in particular, makes all the difference for me. It's what I'll remember, years later, even as the details of the gameplay and the story beats have begun to fade from my memory.

Besides all of the great games that have already been mentioned, I found Divinity 2: Ego Draconis to be really atmospheric for this reason.

Lovely atmosphere in that game, even though it's a bit rough around the edges and quite dated, by today's action RPG standards (which was always true, some might argue, even back then).

 

[Baron Tahn]

Yep soundtracks are undervalued. Its subtle for me, never really thought I was a music guy, but a good game with a good soundtrack is elevated into the great tier while good games with shit soundtracks are mediocre, so to speak.

Of course good soundtracks cant save a shit game, its got to be quality and have the music add that little bit extra.

 

[Raghar]

Is this another of these thread where people lists every game?

 

[United Nations]

STALKER trilogy, Arx Fatalis, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Visage, Dead Space, SOMA, The Suffering

 

[Vic]

I see Soul Reaver mentioned a lot but no love for Abe's Oddysee?

 

[Silverfish]

but no love for Abe's Oddysee?

I'm just grateful no one said Stranger's Wrath.

 

[Iucounu]

Players may not register sound design on a conscious level, but I think it has a huge impact on atmosphere:

SOMA – Behind The Sound​

"A recent tweet went out saying that SOMA featured over 2000 footstep sounds, and this is due to the room size system. Instead of recording a bunch of footsteps on various surfaces, our foley artist Tapio Liukkonen actually went out and scouted for interesting-sounding locations of varying size. This is where the footsteps were recorded, so when you’re running through a large hall, you’re actually hearing the sound of a large hall, none of it faked through reverbs or other processing (which can end up taking away some of the life of the sound).​

...​

So how about underwater? Again, we wanted this to be grounded in reality, so instead of processing various sounds or making them muffled, we opted for recording a huge amount of fresh content with underwater microphones (known as hydrophones) and contact microphones (special microphones that only pick up vibrations in objects rather than the air).​

...​

the final SFX count for SOMA is slightly eye-watering, clocking in at a little over 18,000 SFX files (not including voiceover and music)."​