Tess
released on Sep 21, 2014
Tess is a platformer run-and-gun game. It follows the story of Tess, an odd little girl who had a bad day.
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Just a beautiful game with a great soundtrack and a really unique atmosphere. Loved every second of it.
Poor Tess, I should replay it someday.
Edit: I played it again better than I remember, the ost is pretty nice and the only bad thing is how rigid the movement is in the platforming sections.
Edit: I played it again better than I remember, the ost is pretty nice and the only bad thing is how rigid the movement is in the platforming sections.
With the assistance of this list I started digging around for a morning game to play. I was astonished.
Tess, the timid girl, wakes up one morning after something mysteriously bad that happened yesterday, gun in hand, room doubling as a title screen, a common decision close to my heart. She receives a letter from her friend Minnie beckoning her outside.
Little did I expect when little Tess walked out those doors into the great abode that the game would blanket me with some of the most incredible electronic birdsong imitation in any game I've ever touched. The blissful green hills that your character has to ballet over while dispatching the pests in her way. Screen pulled in close to you character such that the whole affair of shoot and gunning is turned protective and intimate, reinforced by the ambient electronics of the surrounding world. Its translucent starry twinkling giving me the motivation to see this journey to the end.
The world of Tess is not one of outright hostility, the enemies only are doing their thing or responding as a defensive maneuver, aside from a final boss all the enemies are only at most retaliating, nobody shoots back which weaves well into its melancholic setting. It's a wistful game with a specific kind of emotional core backing it, one that often only comes across in smaller titles like this.
To break with the more poetic style of affection for a moment, I want to give particular focus on how it handles external 'non diagetic' UI and pickups. Usually in games like this, title screens, save functions, and pickups serve as 'middle men' for the game experience. This is sort of hard to pin down but when you open a game the title screen and options menu ends up functioning closer to the front page of a book, saying something like 'welcome to this adventure'. Which is what makes having the title screen be interactive so special, it immerses you to remember you are experiencing something audio visually rather than treating it as a tool. These extraneous functions are further minimized when you save, there's no title screen to save at, instead its at checkpoints but the save menu is as simple and quick as it needs to be, 3 saves, slap it in and it will tell you where you are in the game and the time it is in real life right now. This is the only point where your immersion with the experience is disturbed, but it's one I quite like, as it makes me reflect on the long passage of time and generally just gets under my skin a bit in a way I personally appreciate. That being said I'm almost certain if this game was made today it would probably be an auto-save or something like that with no menu at all. How do pickups serve as middle men? Usually because they are something you have to idly collect in order to improve your character, but even here this process is simplified by using Cave Story's style, all XP does is improve your health but that's what XP does across the board. If you shoot and open XP crates they give exponentially more XP than a normal enemy rewarding exploration over enemy grinding.
Perhaps game design and audio visual aesthetics are not as separated as we might assume. The soothing color palettes create a feeling of environmental intensity thereby imbuing the game as a whole with an enhanced sense of player character struggle. But more nuanced examples of this are the size of what you can see on screen, Tess screen is small, but this actually sets a situation where unlike Cave Story you have to respond much more quickly to the enemies in your path rather than seeing everything a mile ahead of you. Despite this, Tess plays like a charm and is even smoother to handle than Quote's (I think that's his name?) slightly pixely and chunky character. Also when your character speaks to somebody the generic and somewhat annoying text scrawl sound is replaced with one small ghostly 1 second sound effect that emits from each character. I can't express how absolutely satisfying this is, I wish more games did this.
The game only clocks in at around 20 to 40 minutes in length, but I don't think it being much longer would be in the benefit of the game at all. For one it allows the music, which is gorgeous, to fill out the experience more fully with less repetition. Music repetition being one of the secretly most difficult things for a game to deal with in terms of production. But even beyond that, I feel that the game's bitesized experience cultivates an aesthetic experience all its own, you're relationship with Tess is really just 1 day long, a blip on the map. You're a foreigner in her world, which gives it an even more dreamlike experience. Short simple games, as an amateur critic, become also a great bus stop on the journey to improve on writing about games both because it allows others to easily check your work and lets you more clearly mark the effective parts of an experience that longer works may dull out due to the cognitive tedium with longer game experiences. I've personally always been an advocate just in general that efficient and small games are better than games that are just trying to fill your time with as much content cramming as possible, in part because we live in a time now where there's an overabundance of games, something our gaming forefathers didn't have the privilege of.
Overall the fact that this game is dodging game design conventions to more unique ones that have been tried before but not cohered in this specific way makes the game an absolute highlight. Especially because it doesn't rely on metacommentary to do so which is itself a tried and true convention.
If you're familiar with and like games with heavy yet melancholic aesthetics imbued with strong color palettes, for example games like the more aggressive and philosophical Off, the more soothing and melodic Grimm's Hollow, or the more chilled out exploratory Knytt than you might like this game (and for those who've tried this consider these recommendations as a potential dessert). Not to mention that its an obvious game worth trying for Cave Story fans.
I wont spend long on this, but I noticed that this is yet another debut 1 man team 1 and done game, by a game dev who posted their work on GameJolt and then went dark. 7 years ago the guy teased a sequel and nothing ever came of it. You can sort of tell that the original game here leaves room for a sequel but as awkward as it is I think the lack of one and ambiguity left here works in the games favor as to give it a more dreamlike quality to its simple narrative. Although apparently he worked on the soundtrack for 1 other game before this called 'Rip Demo' I might check out. A damn shame, but it seems the practice of dropping one or 2 games ever and then disappearing from the scene (the most famous RPGmaker game ever Yume Nikki being an iconic example of that) is tragically common to the indie scene it seems, something that makes their often 'outsider' status all the more worth exploring and appreciating.
Also, sigh. Yes I'm also happy that there's a green cloaked protagonist with a mask I can turn to and think happily on to overlay a certain minecraft memelord.
Tess, the timid girl, wakes up one morning after something mysteriously bad that happened yesterday, gun in hand, room doubling as a title screen, a common decision close to my heart. She receives a letter from her friend Minnie beckoning her outside.
Little did I expect when little Tess walked out those doors into the great abode that the game would blanket me with some of the most incredible electronic birdsong imitation in any game I've ever touched. The blissful green hills that your character has to ballet over while dispatching the pests in her way. Screen pulled in close to you character such that the whole affair of shoot and gunning is turned protective and intimate, reinforced by the ambient electronics of the surrounding world. Its translucent starry twinkling giving me the motivation to see this journey to the end.
The world of Tess is not one of outright hostility, the enemies only are doing their thing or responding as a defensive maneuver, aside from a final boss all the enemies are only at most retaliating, nobody shoots back which weaves well into its melancholic setting. It's a wistful game with a specific kind of emotional core backing it, one that often only comes across in smaller titles like this.
To break with the more poetic style of affection for a moment, I want to give particular focus on how it handles external 'non diagetic' UI and pickups. Usually in games like this, title screens, save functions, and pickups serve as 'middle men' for the game experience. This is sort of hard to pin down but when you open a game the title screen and options menu ends up functioning closer to the front page of a book, saying something like 'welcome to this adventure'. Which is what makes having the title screen be interactive so special, it immerses you to remember you are experiencing something audio visually rather than treating it as a tool. These extraneous functions are further minimized when you save, there's no title screen to save at, instead its at checkpoints but the save menu is as simple and quick as it needs to be, 3 saves, slap it in and it will tell you where you are in the game and the time it is in real life right now. This is the only point where your immersion with the experience is disturbed, but it's one I quite like, as it makes me reflect on the long passage of time and generally just gets under my skin a bit in a way I personally appreciate. That being said I'm almost certain if this game was made today it would probably be an auto-save or something like that with no menu at all. How do pickups serve as middle men? Usually because they are something you have to idly collect in order to improve your character, but even here this process is simplified by using Cave Story's style, all XP does is improve your health but that's what XP does across the board. If you shoot and open XP crates they give exponentially more XP than a normal enemy rewarding exploration over enemy grinding.
Perhaps game design and audio visual aesthetics are not as separated as we might assume. The soothing color palettes create a feeling of environmental intensity thereby imbuing the game as a whole with an enhanced sense of player character struggle. But more nuanced examples of this are the size of what you can see on screen, Tess screen is small, but this actually sets a situation where unlike Cave Story you have to respond much more quickly to the enemies in your path rather than seeing everything a mile ahead of you. Despite this, Tess plays like a charm and is even smoother to handle than Quote's (I think that's his name?) slightly pixely and chunky character. Also when your character speaks to somebody the generic and somewhat annoying text scrawl sound is replaced with one small ghostly 1 second sound effect that emits from each character. I can't express how absolutely satisfying this is, I wish more games did this.
The game only clocks in at around 20 to 40 minutes in length, but I don't think it being much longer would be in the benefit of the game at all. For one it allows the music, which is gorgeous, to fill out the experience more fully with less repetition. Music repetition being one of the secretly most difficult things for a game to deal with in terms of production. But even beyond that, I feel that the game's bitesized experience cultivates an aesthetic experience all its own, you're relationship with Tess is really just 1 day long, a blip on the map. You're a foreigner in her world, which gives it an even more dreamlike experience. Short simple games, as an amateur critic, become also a great bus stop on the journey to improve on writing about games both because it allows others to easily check your work and lets you more clearly mark the effective parts of an experience that longer works may dull out due to the cognitive tedium with longer game experiences. I've personally always been an advocate just in general that efficient and small games are better than games that are just trying to fill your time with as much content cramming as possible, in part because we live in a time now where there's an overabundance of games, something our gaming forefathers didn't have the privilege of.
Overall the fact that this game is dodging game design conventions to more unique ones that have been tried before but not cohered in this specific way makes the game an absolute highlight. Especially because it doesn't rely on metacommentary to do so which is itself a tried and true convention.
If you're familiar with and like games with heavy yet melancholic aesthetics imbued with strong color palettes, for example games like the more aggressive and philosophical Off, the more soothing and melodic Grimm's Hollow, or the more chilled out exploratory Knytt than you might like this game (and for those who've tried this consider these recommendations as a potential dessert). Not to mention that its an obvious game worth trying for Cave Story fans.
I wont spend long on this, but I noticed that this is yet another debut 1 man team 1 and done game, by a game dev who posted their work on GameJolt and then went dark. 7 years ago the guy teased a sequel and nothing ever came of it. You can sort of tell that the original game here leaves room for a sequel but as awkward as it is I think the lack of one and ambiguity left here works in the games favor as to give it a more dreamlike quality to its simple narrative. Although apparently he worked on the soundtrack for 1 other game before this called 'Rip Demo' I might check out. A damn shame, but it seems the practice of dropping one or 2 games ever and then disappearing from the scene (the most famous RPGmaker game ever Yume Nikki being an iconic example of that) is tragically common to the indie scene it seems, something that makes their often 'outsider' status all the more worth exploring and appreciating.
Also, sigh. Yes I'm also happy that there's a green cloaked protagonist with a mask I can turn to and think happily on to overlay a certain minecraft memelord.