DON'T NOD has unveiled a new trailer for its upcoming game, Aphelion, at today's New Game Plus Showcase, which focused on the game's music and featured an interview with its award-winning composer, Amine Bouhafa.
You may have already heard Bouhafa's work in the 2021 short film The Summit of the Gods or in 2025's The Little Sister, though this is the first time the César-winning composer is working on a video game. "This is my first time working on a video game, and I loved the way that [the Aphelion team] thought about the music and about the game. I'm enjoying the experience," Bouhafa said in a press release.
Bouhafa narrates the trailer while gameplay from Aphelion is shown, as he describes how he approached writing the score for his first video game and how he used what he described as an "alien instrument" called a Cristal Baschet to capture the cold and frozen world of the game.
"It is an instrument that had been invented by the Baschet brothers in the mid-20th century. For me, it looks like an alien instrument. When you see it, you cannot even predict that it's a musical instrument," Bouhafa says. Playing the Cristal Baschet involves dipping your hands in water and then running them along several crystal batons to create its sound. For Bouhafa, it was the perfect element to "convey the frozen identity of the score."
Bouhafa also talks about using the grand organ at the Saint-Eustache Church in Paris, which helped convey the bigger, grander, and sacred moments in Aphelion's narrative. It's all together an interesting behind-the-scenes look at how a major aspect of Aphelion is coming together.
DON'T NOD has suffered a string of commercial misses lately, with last year's Lost Records: Bloom & Rage missing expectations, and Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden and Jusant both underperforming before that. The studio does have a new game in the works with Netflix on top of Aphelion, which could prove fruitful, as it is based on "a major IP" within Netflix, but it'll be some time before that materializes into a full release - if Netflix even lets it get that far, since its willing involvement in video games seems iffy, at best.
Aphelion is currently set to arrive sometime in 2026 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S. It'll also be available on Xbox Game Pass on day one.
About the author: David has been writing about videogames, technology, and culture since 2020, with a focus on reporting daily news across multiple publications, including GameDaily.Biz, GameSkinny, and PlayStation Universe before joining Wccftech in 2025. David started contributing as Canada/US reporter for Wccftech's gaming section in 2025. Besides being up-to-date on the industry's movements, he loves interviewing developers, reviewing games, and writing intricate essays about the symbolism and layered meanings to be found in rich narratives as he's done for publications like GamesIndustry.Biz, LostInCult, and others. Outside of games he loves movies, music, theatre, his hometown, and his family, though not necessarily in that order.
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