Among the Trolls

Among the Trolls is a first-person survival adventure from the Italian studio AvantGarden Games, published by 505 Games — a journey into the Finnish wilderness, where Anna returns to her grandparents’ island in search of her missing grandfather and finds the old myths of the North waiting under the trees. Daniele Carmosino wrote the original score. The game is out on Steam on 14 October 2026.

Two realities, one sound

The game lives on the border between two realities — Anna’s contemporary world and the ancient one of Nordic myth — and the score refuses to illustrate either from the outside. It stays inside Anna: what she feels as the journey moves from family tragedy through desperate solitude to a bond with the land itself. So the duality is not painted, it is embodied in the sound — in the timbre before the harmony or the themes.

The player keeps hearing sounds they cannot quite place. That is Anna’s own estrangement: she recognises her grandparents’ island, but not what she finds on it.

No folklore

One decision was made in the very first conversations with creative director Giorgio Macellari: no folklore. No kantele, no runolaulu, no philological quotation of Karelian song. The score takes a modern cinematic sensibility and a custom-built contemporary palette, and runs a narration parallel to the game’s — emotional rather than descriptive. What it does absorb from the Kalevala is structural: its darkness and tragedy, which in that world — as in the game — are not anomalies but part of how reality is built.

Less, on purpose

In an age of infinite instruments, the hardest discipline was the opposite of accumulation. Exploration, cutscenes, dungeons and combat are all covered with a deliberately limited palette:

A self-imposed constraint, and the thing that gives the score its identity and coherence across many hours of play.

“Endless Exile”

The track that says it best is “Endless Exile”, which carries the player through the opening walk in the forest, before the house appears. It began as an idea and a lyric by Giorgio, adapted and set to music by Daniele, and is sung by Maria Chiara Argirò — the Italian artist based in London who has spent years moving between jazz and electronics. A chance meeting through friends; a perfect fit. After that first collaboration she stayed for two more tracks of the soundtrack.

Music that answers the player

A game score cannot be linear the way a film score can — it has to answer the player. Daniele’s writing turned out to be built for it: his music naturally works in levels — a base of chord roots, a pad, a held cello note or percussion, with elements added on top before anything changes. Those are the mechanics of adaptive music, so the move to vertical layering in Wwise was almost painless: he was already composing in stackable stems.

The player never hears a cut. The music simply grows with the danger, moment by moment.

More than changing how he composes, the game forced him to make explicit an architecture that was already implicit in his writing.

Where the sound came from

Before production there were months of research, and a few constant references:

But what truly defined the sound was a long period of free recording and experiment: the Prophet 10, voices, acoustic and electric cello with the great Christof Unterberger, Daniele’s Soviet upright piano (a Lirika) played by maestro Mark Aanderud, and whoever else passed through the studio — everything then repitched and re-amped through guitar pedalboards, distortions and effect chains, until the source material stopped resembling itself.