Dune: Awakening (Knut Avenstroup Haugen)

What is it?

Dune: Awakening is a multiplayer survival game from FunCom that was released on June 10, 2025 (but began development in 2019 already, two years before the Denis Villeneuve film came out), as part of a three-game deal with Legendary Entertainment. The game departs from the Frank Herbert source novel, and instead provides an “alternate timeline” in which the events of the novel never take place. Paul Atreides is never born, instead Lady Jessica gives birth to a daughter. And while the Houses Atreides and Harkonnen engage in a war of assassins, our protagonist, working for the Bene Gesserit, goes searching for the missing Fremen.

Reviews from the industry mags have been largely positive. Matt Kamen at Empire Online, for example, contends that “Awakening is an unabashed love letter to Herbert’s world, both thematically and in its brilliantly authentic depiction of the planet Arrakis. The desperate hunt for even the tiniest droplets of water will leave you parched in reality, while the game’s depiction of strange technology — from stillsuits to flittering ornithopters — and complex interplanetary politics between rival houses comes straight from the page. It captures the feel of the universe perfectly.”

Norwegian composer Knut Avenstroup Haugen, whose previous game scores include Age of Conan and Lords of the Fallen (as well the first three Pinchcliffe reboot movies) takes on the unenviable task of entering a musical vernacular established across multiple films, TV series and computer games – including those of Toto, Hans Zimmer, Brian Tyler, Graeme Revell, Frank Klepacki and the late Stéphane Picq.

How is it?

While Haugen is primarily known for his lush orchestral soundscapes, he’s always been very interested in electronic music (according to himself, this was – in fact – seminal in his formative years). However, if you’re not aware of that fact, the sheer quality level of these compositions may take you by surprise.

There are no direct citations of existing Dune styles or themes, although Zimmer is there as a looming shadow – from the Interstellar-like organs in the opening track to the wordless, female vocals to the warped, middle-eastern oscillations and giant chord leaps (incidentally also a feature of Toto’s score for Lynch’s 1984 film – there’s always been a natural correlation between wide-open sand dunes and big, often minor-moded chord modulations, ever since the days of Lawrence of Arabia). There might be other inspirations – I hear bits of M83’s Oblivion in tracks like «Welcome to Arrakis» and most definitely Vangelis’ lofty Yamaha CS-80 in the drop-dead gorgeous «Mirages at Dawn», the best track on the album.

But mostly, this is its own thing – a slightly leaner, more accessible take on the Dune universe that blends orchestra with electronics in seamless fashion, ripe with broad, fatalistic melody lines and inquisitive synth ostinati, ruminating on its own grandeur and adventure. The first nine tracks of the album are spectacularly good, almost like a mini-album in itself, that contain most, if not all of the score’s building blocks. There are highlights later on too, but while the album is refreshingly curated at 83 minutes (compared to most videogame score releases these days, anyway) – with four distinct “blocks”, so to speak – it’s perhaps 15-20 minutes overweight to attain maximum flow. Nothing a little whittling can’t fix.

While Zimmer’s Dune scores are excellent (especially the second), they’re very dense. Dune: Awakening, meanwhile, juggles the dense with the lean, the muscular with the dreamy, in a way that opens it up; that makes it engaging on a whole other level. Impressively, Haugen has crafted a musical take on the Dune universe that rivals the very best it has spawned, i.e. that of Toto for the Lynch film and Picq for the 1992 game. That’s no mean feat.