celestial hacker girl jessica - Itch Game of the Week

Also, somewhat of a mission statement update for this column in 2018

celestial hacker girl jessica is a game created by princess. It can be found at the time of writing at this page.

As we enter a new year I think now is a great time to re-establish the purposes of this here weekly feature. In the back half of last year I managed to finish these columns less and less, only publishing a handful in the second half of last year. I was in fact looking for games to cover, my notes have dozens of potential works I could have written about. Alas I kept finding myself taking on too much in my writing instead of letting the games shine through. I recall one week writing three pages in a word document on the history of launcher games in the flash portal era in an attempt to feature a game that took at most thirty seconds to play. Much like most of my attempts this fall, that essay ultimately didn’t get finished.

So here’s my new rules for refocusing this column in the new year.

1. Let the games take centre stage. If a work can’t support even a short post it’s probably not interesting enough to catch anyone’s attention.
2. Get at least a small post up every week. Having regularity will get more attention on the column, and thus more attention on the creators that need it.
3. Don’t worry about featuring the absolute single best game every week. 2017 saw an explosion in Itch and altgames coverage. Large sites like Waypoint and Kotaku now have regular coverage of tiny games and YouTube let’s players have turned to site in droves to find new and unique content. The cream of the crop will get covered by someone so there is merit in shining a light on the less talked about works.
4. Highlight the unconventional and the bizarre, hold little regard for production value. The aforementioned wave of coverage on altgames is largely taken up by conventionally polished works. The strange games that get by on “programmer art” and the ones that pull from the asset store have been largely ignored by this uptick of coverage. This is a shame because theres often just as much inventive design or playfulness to be found there.

With this new direction in mind I went out to find a game released this week that would be a great example of what I’m talking about above. I managed to find one in celestial hacker girl jessica from gamewright princess and their studio The Lonliest Pixel. This game is a 3D platformer, specifically the rarely explored marbe exploration sub-genre. It’s reminiscent of Super Monkey Ball but especially reminiscent of Marble Blast (which is best remembered as a pre-installed goodie on mid 2000s iMacs). For those not familiar with the sub genre, these games are usually level based, but minimalist in level and visual design. These games are typically the purest of pure 3d platformers.They succeed in creating compelling game design by making the goals and tools available to the players perfectly clear at all times. The player can only roll around in so many directions and tasks demanded of the player are straightforward, reach this goal, collect these five coins, etc…

But here’s the very first landscape celestial hacker girl jessica offers to the player after completing the tutorial.

What?

There’s no wide shot showing an overview of the level, no slow paced one level at a time introduction of mechanics. In this first level there’s already locked areas, computer terminals, interactive objects that do things, some that don’t, freestanding spheres of water where gravity doesn’t hinder you, and at least one open flame. And if the player falls off the world there’s a rainbow coloured skeleton that reaches out and catches them, causing them to explode in his palm.

celestial hacker girl jessica lacks a cohesion to its world. And that’s understandable considering most of the assets in the game come from the Unity Asset Store. celestial hacker girl jessica feels like a game fashioned like a collage, with bits of magazine clippings held together with a glue stick. Individual objects stick out awkwardly from the world around them.

But for celestial hacker girl jessica,this serves the purpose of the game’s design. Compared to the games with which it shares some amount of design DNA, celestial hacker girl jessica is more of a puzzle game. It often teases the player with a level’s end goal kept behind an impenetrable wall. Actual dexterity or mobility challenges aren’t all that common in the game compared to its more puzzle based elements. Like individual parts of complex machinery, each part of the game’s puzzles function in predictable ways. And the varied visual elements draw attention to each element of its puzzles. The artificiality of the levels is clear so the player can read each element of the puzzle clearly, letting them solve puzzles with relative ease once they’ve been correctly parsed.

celestial hacker girl jessica offers a selection of extra collectibles to find strewn about its levels. New marble skins, music from the soundtrack to play on demand, entries to warpzones. These bring an added depth to the game and its puzzles. Often these are hidden in subtle hidden corners of levels, other times in places that require using puzzle elements in original ways. One level has a section where the player is required to hop through floating spheres of water to reach the platform with the end goal. Or they can use the water to line up a spot to drop straight down, falling to their death but collecting an extra collectible for their efforts. This kind of thinking is very rewarding to the player because they’ll feel clever for learning a puzzle, and then cleverer still for learning how to manipulate that solution to achieve extra side goals.

Just getting through levels of celestial hacker girl jessica isn’t the greatest challenge, warp zones are plentiful so if the player wants to make a beeline to the end the game doesn’t get in their way. A lot of what makes the work successful is its ability to cater to multiple levels of play. It works for those looking for a quick puzzle game, but also to completionists willing to sniff around every one of its highly artificial corners, and also to anyone in between.

celestial hacker girl jessica was the game of the week for January 1st, 2018.