MIDI Week Singles: "Maybe You'll Kill (Everybody Does)" - PULMO (NS)

 

"Maybe You'll Kill (Everybody Does)" from PULMO on Windows, Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 4 & 5, Nintendo Switch 1 & 2 (2025)
Composers: Artem (archivariouss) Chubarkov, Areniy Shadrin
Album: PULMO Music
Label: Self/Steam
Publisher: North Lab
Developer: Emil Ismaylov, Denis Petrov

There are a lot of layers to the game PULMO, and having this song played over a typical game of "figure out the order to select the things" is a brilliant use of this original song.  Like a lot of the scenes in PULMO, you have to figure out what the puzzle or mechanic is to proceed to the next scene.  The puzzle/mechanic here is that you have to select the correct order of the nine people to continue through.  If you mess up the order, the puzzle resets.  This is where PULMO excels.  When you select a particular person, there is a brief flash with spikes emanating out of their body, and then they sit down in a crouched position.  If you guessed the incorrect order, that fallen person immediately stands back up.  The likelihood that you guess the correct order for all nine people, while not impossible, is highly unlikely.  Then, remembering who is number one, and who is number two, and who is number three, etc, can easily trip up the player.  So you're now forced to select/hurt these figures over and over again, because that's the only way to get through the puzzle.

With all of that in mind, you then have the lyrics:

There will be a day when you hurt someone

You will never know

There will be a day when you kill somebody

Though,

Everybody does

The combination of those lyrics, along with the mini-game of needing to select/hurt people to continue on with the rest of the game, created a very strange feeling for me.  I knew what I needed to do, but was what I was doing killing the other nine figures on the screen?  Maybe these figures are just facets of myself that I'm killing off.  That's what I love about PULMO (more on Friday), that because this game is art, there can be multiple interpretations. Unless the developers explicitly say what one of the puzzles is about or if the music in combination with that puzzle alters the meaning, then it can be how you interpret it.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
If This Day Be Our Last

P.S.  I also wanted to mention that on the official soundtrack, the song actually ends at 1:24, but partly because of the likelihood that the player will figure out the puzzle in that time, you're more likely to hear the song loop, so that's what I did here.