There’s something special about the way English Country Tune presents itself. You open the game with nothing more than synthesised chords fading in and a menu screen with a handful of options. From the genesis of your experience the game whispers sweet simplicities into your ear.
Over the past few years of gaming I’ve begun to find I respect games more when they take fewer concepts or mechanics and polish them to a blinding shine, rather than games with bloated budgets that cram as many different features in as possible to appeal to a wider audience. Super Meat Boy has some of the most infuriatingly immaculate controls that are refined to point of fault because after moments of playing the game you fully understand that any fatal move was utterly your fault. AntiChamber champions perfectly fluid level design that leaves you totally disoriented but innately curious to try and make sense of the non-Euclidean environments. English Country Tune uses a handful of pinpoint sounds and the platform alone to present you with a challenge; an example of a game done right.
From the menu screen you hit New Game from which you are placed in an innocuously barren void with a strange network of circles floating right in front of you. You’re left to navigate to the first coloured circle alone; it assumes you’re aware of the very natural WASD control scheme so familiar to regular PC gamers. You bring the circle to centre screen and hit Enter, taking you to it’s sub-levels of which only the first is available to you. You navigate this circle to you again, and you enter the core of the game’s experience to solve a puzzle.
Curiously, the menu itself has made itself a part of the game; it’s so seamless, the transition between puzzle and navigation screen is a little journey in itself, within the quiet, uninhabited void as you’re left to find some semblance of agency to connect with. This is something that is, as far as I’ve seen, not apparent but there’s something to be said about how the game welcomes you so unassumingly.
The ‘music’ in English Country Tune is quiet and really only composed of low frequency synthesisers. Rarely are there flourishes or dips in the soundtrack. What makes the game’s sound is how the navigation dances on top of these bass lines. Hovering over an available circle will yield an inquisitive electronic gurgle that echoes for a short time. The pitch is random with each selection and the more you play with the navigation controls the closer the game comes to creating conventional music. Just not quite. You then enter the puzzles.
The bass lines persist, but in place of the electronic gurgles you’re now a 2 dimensional square and with each flip of your being a light sizzle emanates, much like the sound of a bean bag being dropped on the ground. As you begin to solve the puzzles this again approaches somewhat of a musical experience, but again, not quite. At this point this theme became apparent to me.
The barren, groundless void that offers just enough earthly colour to not seem too ominous. The basic geometric shapes that offer enough tangible presence for you to lock your vision to. The echoic sounds that inhabit an otherwise constant soundscape. All of these things are just enough – just there – to maintain something that’s just within the realm of logic, but still rather abstract. Even the nature of the puzzles themselves, the solutions are just there – and you know they are – but they will continue to evade your reach until you accidentally stumble upon it, though you never feel too rushed to get there. Then you move onto the next one. Playing this, you will feel lonely, but the company of the fleeting sounds and simple geometry will keep you striving forward. This simple concept keeps you going; there is always something just there.
English Country Tune is developed by increpare games.