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Single Press: Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica is like a Sailor Moon fanpage in 3D

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica
  
• Developer- The Loneliest Pixel 
  
• Publisher- The Loneliest Pixel 
  
• PC (itch.io, Steam)  
  

[TRANSCRIPT BELOW]

Vaporwave often celebrates the commercial aesthetic–the highly polished corporate art, turned kitsch by time and changing tastes. It’s both a reclamation of, and a celebration of, art as a capitalist tool.

Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica draws from the other side of vaporwave’s turn of the century obsession. It’s sincere and positive, almost naive, in the way the early internet felt. It evokes feeling of a space constructed by young people with newfound access to the world and new tools to express themselves. It’s like something you’d make with a trial of Jasc Paintshop Pro and some basic modelling software–using every available brush and filter to create the most maximalist expression of an emotion.

And it’s brilliant.

The premise itself sounds like something you’d find at a demo disc in a checkout line, and I do mean that in a positive way. You play as a sentient marble named Jessica, who loves to eat cake. And she’s also a hacker. It sounds absurd, but by adding some pink and giving Jessica a tiny voice clip it manages to both sell that femininity and even make a marble seem cute!

Movement is surprisingly fun for how basic it is. Jessica builds a lot of momentum and feels like she’s made of glass, but can also stop on a dime. Within the context of the game this allows situations of hidden object searches, high speed platforming, laser dodging, tense escapes, and momentum based puzzles. It even simulates the sensation of hacking by having moments where you roll over a keyboard and see the terminal in front of you update in realtime. It’s super basic, but it’s enough to give those espionage vibes and sell the idea of Jessica as a hacker.

Stages themselves carry that internet traversing fantasy. Spaces are open, populated with surreal combinations of abstract landscapes, feminine pop culture iconography, and seemingly disconnected combinations of pre-made objects, many taken straight from the Unity asset store. It’s colorful, overwhelming, and often garish. A callback to early days where sites like Geocities allowed unrestricted expression to a new generation. Like exploring someone’s 90’s Sailor Moon fanpage in 3D.

Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica is beautiful, and astounding, and creates something way more expressive and fun out of basic tools and art assets. For all its disjointed parts, there’s a strong art direction underneath, and inventive scenarios that make its surreal worlds fun to explore. An open structure gave me leeway to explore levels as I found them, and any time I got stuck or didn’t like a stage’s gimmick I’d just pop out to another, the same way I might find myself traveling through a series of hyperlinks.

Then there’s this fucked up TV noise skeleton that pops up when you fall off the stage. 

Freaked me the fuck out the first time I saw it, and stared wide eyed in awe. That’s the whole game, really. A surreal trip through the cyberspace we were promised, one of positive vibes, magical girls, and maybe a little mischief.