English Country Tune

English Country Tune (Increpare Games) Available for download from Steam.com for $4.99

Plot Summary

English Country Tune has no plot.  It is a unique puzzle game.  You begin by selecting from among a series of available nodes on what looks like a strand of DNA or a Molecular model.  The worlds have names like larva, whale, and cutting.  Each world represents a different kind of puzzle.  The directions are minimal, and on occasion, you have to determine for yourself what the goal of the puzzle is.  Completion of every challenge within a node opens further, harder nodes.The art style is simple and the music ambient and electronic, giving the game an oddly calming feeling.  No one seems to have any idea why the game is called English Country Tune.

Critical Evaluation

Typically in a puzzle game, you quickly learn the game mechanics and objectives and then simply play more challenging versions of the same level over and over.  Not so in English Country Tune, each level (or nearly each: some of the levels are advanced versions of previous ones) presents its own puzzle with unique objectives.  And while the basic mechanic (flipping a little square to interact with the rest of the world) remains throughout, the various interactions make that mechanic novel each time.  Part of the games challenge is understanding the goal or purpose of each puzzle.  They quickly get rather difficult.  The level Half Sided is particularly complex: you have to design the level and then play it to completion.  For this level no directions are provided and the goal is not immediately clear.  This level of burden being put upon the gamer is rather uncommon in my experience of abstract puzzle games.  But makes this particular game all the more appealing. 

In the Larva stages your goal is to use the little blue square (on its side at the left here) to but balls into boxes.

In the Cutting levels, you must remove sections of the blue square by forcing the appropriate segments to land on red squares so you can pass obstacles near the escape portal (the small blue square at the bottom of the picture).

Reader’s Annotation

If you've long enjoyed puzzle games, but thought they were too easy and mundane, meet English Country Tune: both challenging and esoteric.  Play nice.

Information about the author 

From an interview on Pitchfork.com with Stephen Lavelle -- the one man company Increpare:

Stephen Lavelle is one of today’s most prolific independent game developers. Lavelle describes his games as acts of performance—often casting the player in scenes, from the absurd to the brutally realistic, asking the player to keep up. He makes players experience hopelessness by making them wait in line, asks them to explore what it means to be human by whittling days away in a retirement home, and explores desire by using Google as a metaphor for our subconscious. Lavelle’s games are demanding, and, likewise, take a toll on their creator. I talked to Lavelle about what it was like to work on his first large-scale game English Country Tune and how he recouped after being mentally and physically drained.  

With English Country Tune, what came first, the desire to make a commercial game or the idea for the game?  

The idea came first. There was a game jam last January. There were a lot of two-hour jams inside of that. For one of them I did a prototype along the lines of SpaceChem, where you're trying to design a system that produces certain types of things. I got it sort of working, but there was really nothing to it.  

A couple of months later I tried to fix a couple of things with it, and [the game] ended up getting a lot bigger and changing a hell of a lot. In July or August I decided I would buy an iPad and try to port it, and implicit in that was the decision to try and sell it. I liked the idea of finally trying to deal with new hardware—I'd just been dealing on PC with [the programming languages] Flash and Unity for a long time. It felt like the sort of game that might sell.  

Is the idea to go commercial from now on?  

No, it's not. I just released another small free thing, a collaboration that I've been working on with Docky. We've been collaborating three years in total.  

You usually make smaller games, and you keep a pretty breakneck pace. Did you find it hard to focus on just the one idea in English Country Tune for so long?  

I found it hard, but a lot of the hardness was just the fact that I wasn't able to detach myself to work on other things. It started off enjoyable because I was putting a lot of things together: It's a reasonably complex system. Now that I have this set up, I have to finish it, and that'll be a couple of months; and I couldn't bring myself to work on anything else in good conscience. I just wanted to get it finished. The change of pace was definitely strange. Having finished [the game] now, I'm completely creatively drained. I'm just reading books to recuperate. I don't really know what I'm going to do in the medium term now. (Salgado, 2012).

Genre

Puzzle Game

Curriculum Ties

The game's focus is solving puzzles, so it requires some analytical thinking skills, but it doesn't have a clear application to specific classes.

Booktalking Ideas

1) The odd, ambient music really sets the tone for the game and could possibly be used to open a book talk.

Reading Level/Interest Age

7 years old and up.

Challenge Issues

It's a video game and to be made available would have to be purchased and downloaded onto a library computer; some parents may not feel that this is appropriate use of library resources.

I would openly greet any patron who presented a challenge to the work, giving them ample time to detail their complaint.  I would listen attentively.  To respond to these challenges I would have some reviews of the work on hand.   I would be prepared to explain that as a public institution libraries "cannot limit access on the basis of age or other characteristics" (ALA, 1999).  I would have copies of the library's collection policy on hand.  I would be prepared to politely discuss that parents can control what their children are exposed to by coming to the library with them and examining books they check out.  If the Teen Advisory Group had written reviews of the work I'd have them handy.  While it may be of little comfort to certain parents, I would also be prepared to discuss my staunch support of intellectual freedom and abhorrence of censorship.  As a last resort, I would be sure to keep copies or a reconsideration form on hand.

Why did you include this game in the titles you selected?

The game was part of Indie Bundle 8 and the simplistic style was appealing.

References

American Library Association. (1999). Strategies and tips for dealing with challenges to library materials. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/challengeslibrarymaterials/copingwithchallenges/strategiestips


Salgado, F. (2012). Interview: Master of the esoteric, Stephen Lavelle doesn't make games so you can play them. Retrieved from http://pitchfork.com/killscreen/156-profile-stephen-lavelle-needs-a-break/