Ancient Loops
One time, I went to Lakeside Amusement Park near Denver for a Halloween event. You may have heard of it if you ever played Silent Hill 3, which drew HEAVY inspiration from the place. After the sun went down, a band called Itchy-O (no relation to the video game-hosting website) crashed the party, bringing their drum-heavy, Satanic-yet-family-friendly entertainment to the night. There’s something like 50 people in that band, all dressed in complete black, and they wandered the crowds and fairgrounds, drumming and shining lasers and surprising people with their sights and sounds. If you subscribed to their Patreon after the show, they would send you a secret key to a music/sound creation… thing… on a special website. It was almost a soundboard, with lots of creepy sounds that you could mix and match, none quite fitting together in the traditional musical meter sense, but definitely filling the air/your headphones with a vibe. This is what Ancient Loops feels like.
It’s not quite a game, more of an audiovisual toy. There are eight different sounds, all from some other part of the underworld, and you can mix two of them together at a time. Use the crank to roll forwards or backwards through the sounds and see how it makes you feel. It’s not for making “music” in the traditional sense, and the sounds are not editable. In fact, most of them barely sound right when played together. But there is an option to record up to 30 seconds of your sonic creation to replay later.
The sounds are dark, almost tribal drums, or scratches at the door, or clicks that you might hear from a creature just out of sight. Any single sound might be good to export to your favorite DAW if you’re looking to make a spooky Halloween soundscape or add some texture to your music, and combining any two is disconcerting in a weirdly uncomfortable way. It’s not a deep experience, but there are some sounds here that you’ve never heard before, with an equally off-kilter vibe to the presentation.
Ancient Loops very intentionally doesn’t do more than this. I think I might like it to, however, let me adjust when individual notes are triggered to make the sounds fit together in a more pleasing manner. But it’s not about being pleasing to the ear. It’s about hearing something maybe you shouldn’t. As a game: it’s not. As music production software: it’s also not. As a spooky fidget spinner that lets you explore some otherworldly audio: it’s spot on.
(Released June 10, 2026, on Itch. Copy provided by developer.)