I love rhythm games, and I think it’s fascinating the way they create challenging gameplay. For most listeners, music is not inherently interesting because it’s hard to perform. Yngwie Malmsteen is not a more popular guitarist than Jack White – Art Tatum isn’t inherently more beloved than Dave Brubeck. Games based on pop music run into this problem pretty fast, with the highest difficulties basically always being occupied by blast beat metal or hardcore techno. The ceiling is a combination of speed and variable notes that make for a pretty niche listening experience. At some point, it represents difficulty for difficulty’s sake. Guitar rhythm games require being able to powerslide and fingerpick through borderline illegible solos – dance rhythm games have so many notes flying at the screen their order has to be memorized in slow motion.
Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven franchise is pretty notoriously difficult despite stripping out a lot of that complexity. In Rhythm Heaven Fever, the franchise’s best game before the pivot to “greatest hits” collections from the first three games, there are only two commands. You either press the A button, or you press the A and B button at the same time. The speed also never gets especially high, either, largely set around 130 BPM. Where Rhythm Heaven Fever derives its difficulty is precision – the game requires on-beat hits without the sloppiness of some more forgiving rhythm games, and its pass/fail criteria can create brick walls if you’re really struggling to get the rhythm down.
The music itself is just delightful, veering wildly in genre from city pop to bossa nova to hard rock. Because the difficulty is only tied to the rhythm itself, the game’s later stages are able to vary far more in terms of genre, with the game’s later levels including hip-hop, 80s power pop, video game chiptunes, hard rock – it’s much more feasible to play with an interesting rhythmic challenge in a typical genre than to introduce difficult notation.
The game pairs every minigame with a unique, fantastical cartoon that the music is soundtracking. The mascot monkeys that appear here and there throughout the game might be playing golf or operating a watch – Karate Joe needs to land his punches on beat to keep in shape – a cat and dog are keeping a badminton volley going while piloting biplanes. The visuals are absurd, full of jokes and color, and are themselves such an aesthetic treat for playing well. Sometimes they can be so engaging that it’s actually better to just close your eyes and feel the music, but learning the visual cues can also help mark your place in the song itself.
At a time when the odd side of Nintendo’s magic has somewhat waned in favor of iterative sequels and huge, complex games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, a game as simple as Rhythm Heaven Fever seems especially far away. Nintendo has chosen to grow alongside its players, creating experiences that are deeply appealing to people who either already intimately know how deep video games can be or who have a child’s time to learn. Even getting into a game of Mario Kart 8 requires building a vehicle, one that has stats, and engaging with that system without attention can result in creating a kart that’s no fun to play. I admire Rhythm Heaven Fever because it takes only two or three sentences to explain the controls you’ll use throughout, and each individual rhythm game contains tutorials to ensure the player knows how to interact before beginning. And yet, without any fear, Rhythm Heaven Fever also throws those players directly into the deep end, demanding that internal metronome be more precise than a lot of the rock legends of the 60s and 70s. It’s a wonderful dynamic that creates a sense of humor in play, matched by the cartooning you see on screen. It’s Nintendo embracing absurdity, and I hope it’s not the last we see of those funky monkeys.
Fez is the first video game I had to start keeping a notebook to complete. On the surface, Fez is a classic pixel art puzzle platformer with a twist – all of its 2D environments actually exist in 3D, and by hitting the controller triggers, you can rotate the world to another perspective and see a new part of the level. The primary action is jumping around collecting golden cubes (or, for extra challenge, the purple anti-cubes.) Collect all of them and ascend into the monolithic hypercube for a light show akin to Beyond the Infinite from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The world of Fez is a brightly colored collection of floating islands, the primary sensibility being comic. In the town where your avatar Gomez lives, his neighbors largely deny the presence of a third dimension, living a life unaware of a world beyond home (the door is on the back of the 3D island.) There is a factory zone where little billboards in some sort of cube language are accompanied by portraits of Gomez’s Doughboy-like kinsmen. Little pixel frogs ribbit and little pixel gulls caw. The animals, little machines, and bouncy mushrooms are all animated with the kind of charm that rewards attention to small details.
But whatever is Beyond the Infinite is encroaching on this world. Breaking into the third dimension seems to have broken something – as you continue to explore, more and more of the world crumbles into what seem to be black holes, tears in the fabric of reality that Gomez can disappear into. (The game is very forgiving with respawns, finding whatever solid ground you last set foot on and quickly depositing Gomez back to where he can stand passively.) The majority of the sense of peril in this game stems from the early career score by John Carpenter synth descendant Disasterpeace (It Follows, Mini Metro,Under the Silver Lake.) Some tracks are peaceful, others majestic, others energizing – but when he aims for horror, the sense of dread that envelops everything still chills me.
Math class.
After the credits, Fez loops back into a “new game plus” that offers a new first-person perspective and new rewards for earning all 32 golden cubes and all 32 anti-cubes. Doing so involves ascending into Fez’s true difficulty. Fez is not, at its core, a puzzle platformer. The game transcends into a game about archeology. It involves looking for ciphers and decoding ancient language. It involves reading ancient star maps to understand how ancestors looked to the stars. It involves, well, taking notes. The obvious comparison point for games critics in 2012 was Myst. But I haven’t played more than a half hour of Myst – when indie games center on this kind of meta-puzzle, like the brilliant Outer Wilds or this year’s Animal Well, I compare them to Fez.
There is something so immensely rewarding to me about this kind of language game. I’m bad at learning languages in real life – I think in English. I recognize our language’s many, many faults and confusions, but it is the system I understand. While Fez does have a literal language cipher (one that conforms to English directly) it also offers other, less linguistic symbols. Fez doesn’t just challenge the player to solve puzzles – it challenges the player to learn How To Learn. It invites you into a game world with very limited information, gives you everything you need to solve it and hands you the reins to pursue as much knowledge as you care to collect.
The maddening thing about a cipher game is that it is a one-and-done experience. I cannot un-ring the bell. Walking through Fez’s world, the solutions that were once obscure and required meticulous attention to detail are immediately obvious. Being in Fez’s game world is pleasant, listening to Disasterpeace’s score. Some of its platforming challenges are rewarding in the same way replaying a Mario game can be. There are moments of knowing I’ve solved something before but not remembering the exact solution. I used to consider Fez the greatest game I’d ever played. Not being able to recapture that experience will sort of always crystallize it as the best game I played when I was 20 years old.
Fez was a five year passion project, and one of the early examples of a breakout indie game. Unfortunately, Fez ended up being the end of a sentence for its developers rather than the beginning. Even before release, lead designer Phil Fish was considered by entitled gamers to be a blowhard who would never release his game. Then, Fez came out and was extremely buggy, resulting in dismissal from would-be fans (the game works great now.) And then Fish became one of the few male voices standing up to #GamerGate’s bigotry, eventually resulting in him exiting the game industry. Fish will likely never make a game again. The spirit of Fez lives on, but how quickly we silence our own luminaries.
Fashion is rarely the subject of a game. Now, fashion, wardrobe choices, character editors, those are a massive part of many RPGs, sims, and minigames within larger genre titles, but fashion itself is rarely the focus a game drives itself on. Style Savvy Trendsetters, the second in the Style Savvy series, keeps that focus centered – the next entry, Style Savvy Styling Star, branches out into the pop idol industry in an attempt to give the game a clearer sense of direction. Trendsetters instead uses this more freeform milieu to create a setting for the game’s real focus – spiritual fulfillment and relationship building. When I look at people comparing the franchise’s entries, there’s a strong contingent who never were satisfied with the next two titles. Unfortunately, I never played them myself, probably for the same reasons this game was ignored by so many in the first place.
The core gameplay of Style Savvy: Trendsetters, the outfit designer, is fairly simple. You collect clothing for your shop, and then work with customers to find outfits that work with their needs in terms of budget and style. Each clothing item or accessory is separated by where on the body it is worn (there are three layers for shirts, for example, separated into whether they function as a base layer or as outerwear.) As you select items on the touch screen, they populate onto a mannequin on the top, building the outfit as it tallies the sale total against the customer’s budget. When you’ve assembled your suggestion, the customer will decide whether or not to make the purchase. Rinse, repeat, make cute outfits, meet new people.
Your stylist, a self-created avatar, is hired on as the assistant at a local women’s clothing boutique. A few days into your job, the shop’s owner decides to pass control of the store to you – having gone through the tutorial of assembling outfits, you’ll now be responsible for selecting the store’s stock and style, keeping up with current fashion trends, hiring new assistants, and directly assisting customers with selecting new clothes that meet their needs. The day-to-day operation ends up serving as a fairly satisfying shop management simulation, where sales feel personalized and more detailed than just setting a price on an item and letting the day pass. Clothing recommendations require keeping in mind elements of style and seasonal weather, which give you reasons to sell more than “the most profitable” items in your shop – and every customer will keep what you sell them, so you want to try your best to only sell things you actually think look good!
This structure ends up providing a drip feed for new story content, most of it focused on your relationships with your customers or fellow workers throughout the city at local cafes, makeup shops, and so on. But inklings drip in about your shop’s former owner trying to become a superstar fashion Some number of weeks into building relationships, creating aesthetics, and exploring the city for social opportunities, you’ll gain the ability to select and outfit men’s clothing at your boutique as well, and eventually enter your boutique into fashion competitions in an effort to expand your store’s brand.
How many weeks? Well, I honestly don’t remember. There…isn’t a lot of writing about Style Savvy Trendsetters on the internet. A handful of reviews exist from the time of release – one of the five on MetaCritic is print only, and another links out to a site that no longer has reviews whatsoever. There’s only one in-depth customer list on GameFAQS – and zero walkthroughs, clothing lists, or competition guides. I remembered that Leigh Alexander used to tweet about the game – I’m fairly confident that’s how I originally found out about it! – but I can’t find anything in my searches now. This lack of guidance ends up leaving the discoveries of the game feeling even more special, more intimate. Style Savvy: Trendsetters might be one of gaming’s best kept secrets. If so, I’m glad I get the chance to share it with you.
Let’s walk through a short play session, maybe twenty minutes or so. I’ll boot up my file on the third copy of this game I’ve bought over the years, which I’m probably about three hours into playing.
In my shop right now, I have Shea, my assistant. Per the game’s tooltip, “She’s a bit of a scatterbrain but works hard to make up for it.” I like her updo and denim vest, but the black-and-creme striped top she wears under it doesn’t quite line with the buttons – I have an option to change her outfit, so I suggest a different striped top, this one pale cyan and white, with a small blue bow at the collar. She thanks me for the suggestion, and I move back on to my customers.
First, there’s Guinevere, a serious-looking woman in a black blazer and knee-length straight skirt. Checking the tooltip, “she has asthma but is training every day for a half marathon.” This isn’t her first visit – she has a budget today of $300. Checking in on my other customers, I have a first timer in a cute soft outfit and glasses (“She slathers on the sunblock because her skin is so sensitive”) and India (“She’s a waitress at the cafe and has a serious thing for dinosaurs.”) I take too long deciding and find out for the first time that each game day is processing on a timer – it’s not about how many customers you choose to help, but how long you take. Now the pressure is on. It’s now nighttime, and my customers have changed over!I’ll help this next first-timer. There’s now a customer with long dark blue hair and blue polka-dot dress. She has a budget of $800, so we’re picking her quickly. Her name is Wren: “Listen up! I have some great news for this city! There’s going to be a new makeup studio opening near here! Everyone around here is going to be so gorgeous! Once it’s open, you’ll be able to buy makeup there!” Makeup is highlighted in yellow – a new feature is being added to the game. Wren asks me for a feminine skirt as her first purchase – let’s help her out.
The game opens directly to the skirts menu – it doesn’t highlight which skirts are “feminine,” though. To discover that, you either need to know your wholesaler and styles, or you can use the menu to highlight all the feminine items in stock at your store. Feminine in this game means “adult, but not formal.” It’s a style I’d affiliate with business casual. Noticing her leather brown vest, I pick out a brown fluted-hem skirt from Marzipan Sky. It’s well within her budget, so I’ll ask her to try it on rather than take a look first – it’s a double-down mechanic, going all in rather than offering choices.
That feeling of putting on a new piece of clothing you love – you see it in your customers every time. They receive these suggestions as an opportunity for a Sailor Moon style transformation sequence – they are empowered to be their best selves in the clothing you’ve selected. “I decided on a whim to try it on, and I was blown away! It’s perfect for me! This look is just what I was going for! So sophisticated!” She isn’t buying anything else today, but sometimes these sales will lead to customers asking for an entire new outfit. You’ll see them in clothes they’ve bought from you going forward, mixed and matched with what they already own.
Eventually, as a player, you come to know these keywords, these wholesalers, and, yes, these customers. They’ve written hundreds of customers, and compared with Animal Crossing, there’s a lot less shared dialogue between them than you might expect. Combine that with the number of events available in the game at an ever-expanding list of locales, and you end up with hundreds of hours you can spend long after your shop is 100% solvent.
What makes that gameplay so appealing is how much of the writing is geared toward people who actually behave, well, like people. Some of them have mundane problems, like a lack of self confidence, or job dissatisfaction, or a history of dismissing their ex-girlfriends’ love for dressing well. Those relationships reflect something very real, which is the way putting effort into your own appearance can make you realize your own self-worth, or how valuable putting effort into something you care about might be. Other characters are bubbly and fun from the jump, and their conversations tend toward being like easier, occasionally more superficial friendships.
In addition, I have to say, it’s a blast to play a game where the clothes actually look good. I always love to notice details like the button-work on a cardigan, the stitching on a pair of pants, the little accent stripes on a scarf. All of it suits the game’s character models well, who look very much like classical fashion school hand-drawn models, the sort you might see in traditional design drawing. I like the music too – catchy, easy-going music, mostly jazzy, a little bit elevator-y at times. But I spend a lot of time with the game with the music off, mostly because it is such an easy pick-up-and-play title.
There are obvious limitations to this game’s appeal. While I think the game does a decent job presenting racially diverse customers to the player, there is absolutely no body diversity – everyone is shaped like Taylor Swift or Andrew Garfield, reinforcing a monopoly of the thin and slender in fashion that many of its players won’t see themselves in. For a game with a fairly thoughtful approach to how strange and wonderful people can be in the city, there’s also not any explicit queer representation within the game, which is something I’d like to see them approach in a sequel. And, for all that great clothing can do for a person, the game frames that clothing in a sort of utopian capitalism, with no real concern given to where clothing comes from beyond “a warehouse wholesaler” and “a smartly selected boutique”, leaving it fairly unconcerned with any serious consumerist critique.
Still, I love this fantasy. I love living in a world where I think about expression. I love playing in a world where problems are easily solved. I love looking at clothes, and looking at those clothes on people who are nice and who I want to dress. Maybe someday there will be the Style Savvy clone that Stardew Valleys the original and builds even more into a queer utopia. When it does, I will remember this game.
You can expect me to write about this one again someday, now that you’ve been introduced.
Style Savvy Trendsetters is only available on the Nintendo 3DS, and currently sells at $39.99 digitally in the US. You can also find the game for significantly cheaper as a physical copy on online storefronts. The game is localized as New Style Boutique in the PAL region, and Wagamama Fashion: Girls Mode Yokubari Sengen! in Japan.
All My Friends 