The music also plays a surprisingly large part in the experience. Your actions help bring each level to life, filling them with color and movement. But they also add more layers to the sound, with the soundtrack growing in depth the more you explore. And the Ghostly-provided tunes — some of which were composed specifically for the game — are a perfect fit. The partnership happened relatively early on in development, when Honeyslug gave its partners at Sony Santa Monica a musical "style guide" in the form of a Spotify playlist, which represented the kind of music the studio wanted in the game. It turned out that the majority of the songs were by Ghostly artists, who in turn were more than happy to collaborate on the game.

"The game is very otherworldly."

The soundtrack features a combination of original tracks and ones made specifically for the game. The new songs were made through a collaborative, back-and-forth process, with the developer passing along concept art, early animations, and vague details about how each level should feel to the musicians. "Our job was to tell them about the place, and the atmosphere and what happens there, and let them react to that in whatever way they saw fit," says Honeyslug co-founder Ricky Haggett. "We gave them a pretty free hand." In some cases the artists also played early versions of the game to get a better sense of what it was all about. "I met a couple times with the developer in the early stages to get a feel for what they were looking for," says Scott Hansen, better known by his stage name Tycho. "I think they had a pretty clear idea of the role music was going to play from the start."

Even though some of the music isn’t original, all of it feels perfectly suited to Hohokum. Tycho's "L", for example, is my favorite song from his latest album, but after playing the game I now associate it with flying through a colorful wonderland with waving people riding on my back. Part of the reason it works so well is that the different collaborators have a lot in common. "A lot of the people on Ghostly are people who work on computers, making music, in a very similar way to video games," says Haggett, with Hogg adding "there's a sort of like-mindedness between us and them." (Hogg also dabbles in music, playing in a band called Satans Cock.) "The game is very otherworldly and I think there is some overlap there with Tycho and Ghostly," says Hansen.

The collaborative process — where a game studio, an artist, and several musicians all had input in the game — has helped make Hohokum into an experience unlike anything I've played before. The gameplay, art, and music all feel equally important to the experience, letting me enjoy them in an entirely new way. It works whether you're relaxing on your couch in front of the big screen or huddled over your Vita with headphones in. Hohokum is like playing, watching, and listening to your favorite album, all at the same time.