Capybara Games on the "organic" sound of Below

Sean Lohrisch of Capybara Games was on hand at E3 last month to talk about Capybara Games' Below, and one area we asked about was the sound in the game, which has been crafted very deliberately to match the small scale of your character as they explore the world.

"We've tried to keep it realistic. We try not to get anything too... early on especially we want you to just feel like you're in an actual space that you would experience in your regular life, like you arrive on an island [...] So try to keep everything very organic, and anything that's not organic is covered in the music," he explained. "And then also try to keep everything sounding small, so that it feels like you're looking down into almost like a Terrarium type of thing, and it's sort of a balance between trying to make it sound as good as it can, while we make things sound small, sometimes they get kind of thin and very mono sounding, but we try to keep some balance there and just try to [...] fill all the details like the player's movement and all the little footsteps and the little elements in the world, trying to fill that in and keeping their scale small while also making them sound interesting."

Do you find yourself noticing sound design in games?