When considering ‘English Country Tune’, whatever connotations are conjured up inside your head when you read that title should be cast aside. Unless, of course, the image that you automatically think of is a flat blue square navigating a three-dimensional map of cubes, pushing balls and floating cubes into an empty abyss of a dull colour you might find on a Dulux paint chart.
In fact, if that is the image you immediately came up with, then I can recommend you play English Country Tune without hesitation, because you have exactly the right mindset and nutty way of thinking that’s required when you first encounter some of the more ‘interesting’ levels within the game.
English Country Tune is one of those delightfully simple looking indie puzzlers that lures you in with its quiet, modest trailer. It looks like a gentle and laid back affair, one to take at your own pace, it even describes itself as a ‘traditional puzzle game’.
I think I’ve been trolled.
There is barely anything that’s “traditional” about English Country Tune. Perhaps the two most traditional things are the main menu screen and using the arrow keys for movement. After that, you’re fucked. In fact, I can remember staring at the screen for roughly ten seconds, waiting for something to happen after selecting ‘new game’ in the main menu, only to realise I’d been staring at the very abstract world selection screen.
After that humiliating episode I settled myself into the tutorial levels, which explained pretty much everything I needed to know. Basically all I need to do in the first world (appropriately named Larva) is use my flat blue square to push these orange balls (very inappropriately named Larva) into their own cubes to complete the level. Easy! But no, again, I’d been lured into a false sense of security. English Country Tune gets difficult very quickly. The phrase ‘gentle learning curve’ has never been less applicable. Since I progressed to the ‘Advanced’ versions of each world disorientation has been much more commonplace, plus I’ve been staring blankly at levels, trying stuff that will never work, all the symptoms of someone who’s nearing breaking point on a puzzle game.
But don’t mistake this bewilderment for hostility, because I really like English Country Tune. It actively pushes you to that breaking point and most of the time you’ll just give up and quit, but the rest of the time you’ll reach that elusive Eureka moment; the point at which you feel like a genius and want to high-five your brain for a job well done. It’s a moment that I became accustomed to when playing through fellow indie puzzler SpaceChem and I’ve been searching for a similar game to provide me with that fix for a long time now. However, I don’t feel like I’m enjoying myself quite as much as when I was playing through SpaceChem for the first time. English Country Tune is lovely and simple in design yet obviously a lot of work has gone into it with 17 worlds to play through. The sound is very good as well, promoting an almost haunting environment with the sound of your movement being akin to footsteps moving down an empty corridor, while a deep, solemn hum plays in the background, then you get the satisfying ‘plonk’ of objects falling into their correct places. Overall, it’s a very aesthetically pleasing experience, but I just feel like everything that it does, puzzlers such as SpaceChem do slightly better.
The fact that I’m even comparing English Country Tune to SpaceChem (which will be featuring in my considerations for Game of the Year), though, is a fine achievement. English Country Tune is delightful on an aesthetic level, but it’s a bit too easy to get disoriented even in some of the early three-dimensional levels. This is quite easy for me to overlook, though, because I’m able to overcome that disorientation and reach the Eureka moments that I play puzzlers for. Increpare has also added an incredible amount of different concepts for a game that looks as though it should be doomed to monotony after the first half an hour. English Country Tune is very much at home in that pedigree breed of indie games that we’ve seen so many of this year and certainly worthy of your purchase.
