FEATURES Christopher Larkin Doesn’t Score Video Games, He Creates Worlds By Casey Jarman · November 10, 2025

Hollow Knight: Silksong, released in September after years of delays, is as big as indie video games get. Met with near-universal acclaim from fans and critics—it currently has a score of 91 on Metacritic—and downloaded by five million gamers within just three days after its release, it may be the most successful indie of all time. The hype, according to GameSpot, is “unlike anything we’ve ever seen for an indie game.”

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Christopher Larkin, by way of contrast to that very loud hype, is soft-spoken and thoughtful. At least that’s how the game’s composer and sound designer came across during our long-distance interview, which began (for him) at 10 A.M. in his home in Adelaide, Australia. Morning birds chirping behind Larkin, who would occasionally pause to reframe a sentence or get his thoughts in order. “I’ve always associated music with different worlds,” he said, a trace of childlike wonder still intact in his voice. “When I listen to classical music, I close my eyes and try to imagine what type of game or fantasy world it could be a part of.”

Larkin’s imagination has proven versatile. In the games world, he has chosen projects with spellbinding art design: Hollow Knight is set in an impressionistic, gothic fairy tale world by way of Beatrix Potter, whereas the style-soaked and decidedly purple TOHU is intricate and Rube Goldbergian. Larkin’s film scores—notably the excellent soundtrack for Matthew Salleh’s contemplative food and culture documentary, Barbecue (2017)—pulse with frenetic energy.

On Silksong, the follow-up to Hollow Knight, Larkin expands the sonic palette of the game’s universe without losing the original’s curious soul. The first game’s success meant that Larkin could afford to hire musicians on Silksong, and it indeed features more strings and woodwinds. But Larkin employs the expanded toolset delicately, with a sensitivity toward both video game music’s rich history and his own creative intuition. Silksong’s soundtrack, like the game itself, is an instant classic.

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Before we talk about Silksong, what are you working on right now?

I’m working with Digital Sun on Moonlighter 2 at the moment. I’m still doing some stuff for Team Cherry, but the focus at the moment is mostly on Moonlighter 2. David Fenn did a really good score for that first game, so it’s a hard act to follow.

Silksong**’s protagonist, Hornet, is also a boss in the first game. Did you carry through a lot of musical ideas from the first game?**

I feel like I’m still getting to know what we’ve just done. Initially there was talk of more references to the first game. It was sort of an ongoing conversation with [the game’s Adelaide-based developer] Team Cherry about how much to reference the first game, thematically. There are a few moments where we do. I started on Silksong with this idea that we should revisit Hollow Knight’s “Hornet” theme in a really strong way. But eventually, when it comes to making music for a new game, it becomes apparent that the music needs to match different areas.

**There are a lot of epic adventure games out there, but epic adventure games that take place in a complex and quasi-religious bug-world—that’s very unique. **

I’ve thought more about the religion side of it with Silksong than with Hollow Knight, especially because of the Citadel area of the game and the devotional pilgrim characters. Early on I was listening to a lot of Arvo Pärt and some Gregorian chant. I sent some of that stuff to Team Cherry, and did a track I think for what would become “Choral Chambers,” that was a bit more cold, oppressive church vibe with a chanty vocal and modal melodies. It fit the space, but it made [the player] feel a little oppressed, also. There’s still music in the game that evokes negative emotions, but I think we have to maintain a balance between that and fun. Have you ever listened to that group Enigma? I think “Citadel Halls” is a bit of a nod to them.

You manage so many different moods throughout the game. When I first got to The Docks, the difference in music really felt almost like a change of temperature.

Where there’s fire and brimstone, I think there’s a bit of Howard Shore influence there, with that quiet choir. There are miners down there, so there are the percussive hits and this dark fantasy mining kind of sound, but we emphasized the sort of sad melody that kind of grows through the track. That didn’t have to be there, but I think in the Hollow Knight world—this harks back to the first game a little, where you’re a little character who is exploring this world that may have fallen to ruin—the music carries a melancholy around. We were keen on maintaining that with this game.

There are also areas where the music totally drops out.

I think that’s William [Pellen] from Team Cherry. I do write music that’s designed specifically for different areas, but William does quite a lot of that work. All the tracks have two audio stems, at least, and it gives us a lot of flexibility with changing the instrumentation ever-so-slightly, so that whenever Hornet moves to a side area or a smaller area, Team Cherry can fade out the larger arrangement and we’re left with something a bit more intimate. I’m really grateful that they chose to use some silence, as well. The impact is bigger if there’s not an omnipresent melody.

You did both the sound design and the music for both Hollow Knight games. Is it a third job, figuring out how those two things work together and fine-tuning it all?

I’ve actually been pretty non-perfectionist about it. I do check levels afterwards, and William and Ari [Gibson, also of Team Cherry] are also checking. We really do have a lot of thinking about the unique sounds for different enemies, or for different kinds of attacks, and how those combine with the [musical] themes. The sound effects, they’re pretty much all foley this time around.

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So you gathered those sounds yourself?

I’ve got a leather couch and some fabric and some things around the house that I use. It’s just doing lots of takes of those things and just picking the right stuff. Whatever feels the most satisfying. I feel like I’ve been using the same piece of IKEA fabric for years and years.

All these Hollow Knight bosses are in there!

Yeah, there’s one piece of paper that’s in every winged enemy’s fly loop. But that’s similar to the musicians we recorded with, especially the violinists and viola players. We keep returning to these soloists throughout the score, and it brings a certain glue, I think, to the soundtrack. There was a point in production—in 2022 or so—where I felt like the score was like all the different tracks were pretty disparate and existing in their own bubbles. And the opportunity to work with musicians this time around really helped glue it together and added a human element.

Was the first game’s soundtrack mostly “in the box”? Did you mostly make it on your own?

Yeah, mostly in the box. I recorded with Tim Cheel and Amelia Jones, who played viola and sang, respectively. Otherwise it was all samples. So one of the big questions was like: How much do we change and how much do we keep the same? It’s actually a hybrid score, Silksong. It’s not all recorded live, but it’s not all sampled either. It’s a blend of the two. It was a process of picking which elements would be really enhanced if we recorded them, versus which parts maybe have a certain magical or nostalgic quality to them by using samples. So I’ve got a little bit of both worlds—plus the real musicians.

When did games and game music really first hit you as a youth?

I grew up playing the Nintendo 64. We had Banjo Kazooie and most of the other Rare games—they always had really great scores. Also, Zelda; Ocarina of Time was a gateway to things like Debussy and Ravel.

And you have also done music for advertising?

Yeah, I did some corporate stuff for a while. There might be a script or, eventually, a board of corporate types who want something to sound a certain way. That process of trying to meet briefs helped me realize that you don’t have to be feeling sad or happy to make stuff sound sad or happy. I wonder if actors go through a similar process when they have to evoke different emotions in the way they act? They may not be feeling it, necessarily, but in the process of acting—do they end up feeling it? When I work on an action track, am I filled with action? You do get all hyped up!

Or the opposite.

I did some horror music not that long ago. I can do some of that, but just not—I don’t think I could be a full-time horror composer, as a result of just the emotional impact it has on me.

Did you ever think about moving anywhere else, for work?

For a while I was interested in going to Los Angeles for a while to learn film music; to try to go through the USC or UCLA courses that focus on training Hollywood film composers in the more traditional way. I never got to do that, and there are downsides—I didn’t learn as much about the logistics of music production for larger-scale works or booking and working with an orchestra. But I think there are benefits to that. We’re kind of doing our own thing here in Adelaide, and with a score like Silksong. I’ve just been figuring out things as I go. I wheel in my computer, [violinist] Lachlan Bramble brings in his mic collection, we plug everything in and we start playing. It’s maintaining a bit of an indie approach.

I know you said you were still figuring out what you did with Silksong, but are there moments that you hear in the music, or memories that you have from this process, that you feel particularly proud of?

There was one track that I swore Team Cherry would reject it straight away, but it became one of the key boss tracks. It’s called “Widow.” It was a bit of an experiment. I wanted to push this idea of the string instruments being like guitars in a metal band. I think that strings can be just as cool and as hip as electric guitars. The string players said to me, at one point in the session, “Do you want us to add more distortion?” I was like “What!?” And they did. They didn’t do it with pedals, they just did it through their technique.

I kind of hope that this is our ongoing response to AI, and the normalization of commercial music. The more we do this sort of stuff, the more I think we have a stronger stance or resistance against the movement of AI, and the normalization of boringness that comes about from it.

There’s such a loud chorus of people insisting that AI—and AI music—is just this inevitable future.

I have faith that it won’t be, because I think I don’t have any other choice. I’ve just decided, blindly—maybe naïvely—that there’s a future for music among us humans that is not primarily generated by AI. We just have to keep doing our thing.