For me, Tess was a game that really stood out for its unique concept and atmosphere, and pretty much other element of the game held up well, making for a good play experience.
Presentation and Ambience
The whole thing feels very surreal in a Little Nemo sort of way. It's a combination of mysterious, cute, disturbing, and psychadelic. The "what happened" from yesterday is intentionally obscured, everyone is acting withdrawn and melancholy, this little girl is running around in a monochrome world shooting globs and plants for reasons unexplained, the music sounds like I'm on some sort of mellow acid trip... it's all just very surreal. You did an extremely good job creating the atmosphere and making it stick. Speaking of surreal, I just did a double-take the first time I saw the "Milly face smashed" graphic. Then I laughed, then I did another double-take.
I liked the presentation, on the whole. Given how simple the graphics were, they had a ton of style.
Control
The camera felt smooth and never became an obstacle. I liked having the key binding options, but it's something that doesn't feel particularly comfortable on a keyboard. For me, it was very difficult to have one hand trying to do any two of these three: shoot, move, jump. I died several times because I hit the wrong button, which is always frustrating. Is there any way to change the direction you're shooting? I feel like that's a badly-needed feature - it was very annoying to constantly have to jump up and down while shooting to hit enemies that were, for example, one tile above you.
With that being said, it was very smart to give the player little "trial areas" to play around with mechanics, such as the black things with sad faces that become pink physical objects once you kill them. It lets the player figure out the mechanic before they need to use it to solve an obstacle. You also gave the player a decent amount of time at the beginning to figure out jumping and movement.
Game Mechanics
I thought the mechanics, aside from my problems with the basic controls, were very well done, and a strong point of Tess. Each new area brought a few clever twists to the basic gameplay, making every stage memorable and most of them fun.
The snow rabbits that shot spikes when they died seemed to be a difficult but fair mechanic - very clever. I wasn't a fan of the static enemies, on the other hand, which took a lot of hits and slowed down the action.
I LOVED the very cool screen-wrap mechanic in the tower! It's unnatural, in a cool way, to try to view the screen and think "where do I jump down this gap to come out the top". At some locations (see screenshot for an example), though, I thought I'd be able to use this mechanic, and all of a sudden wasn't (e.g. I'd hit the top wall and not be able to wrap under).
The final boss had some cool patterns and was relatively challenging. It took me about seven tries to beat.
On the End of the Story
I'm torn about the reveal before the final boss. It gives the whole thing an intriguing but disturbing, aura. Personally I don't prefer that to bizarre, off-kilter charm that resonated from the game before it was painted in this more ominous light, and it's hard to get that more innocent feeling back once I know what it was all about. What you did here, you did well, but part of me wishes you had gone for something less nightmarish and more just outright bizarre.
The ending was left very ambiguous, because it cuts off pretty quickly and it's told from the point of view of Tess, who's an unreliable narrator. I assume it's something you want the player to interpret on their own, but I'd love to know what your interpretation is, of what happened to Tess and Milly during and after the ending.
A couple suggestions
If you expand the game, especially if you can manage to tighten up the jumping mechanics a little, I think one thing Tess could really benefit from is a sense of speed. This would make it a lot more exciting - either have some of the easier-to-figure-out levels run on a timer, or have their screens scroll so that the player constantly needs to run, gun, and make progress through the level.
Another nice thing would be a couple extra guns (or other weapons). I assume you ran out of time and wanted to add more, because you included two different buttons to cycle through a grand total of (unless I missed something) two weapons. One suggestion - a bomb that you can lay, exploding a few seconds later to do massive damage to enemies caught in a small blast radius. Or how about a "rocket gun" that you can fire downward after jumping to either blast an enemy below you or get a little extra height on your jump (or both)!
Programming
From what you said on your site it looks like you made Tess pretty much from scratch. I'm frankly amazed you were able to code this all in Java in 30 days! That's pretty freaking impressive, given how admirably decent it all looked and felt.
I also appreciated the (OPEN ME / RUN ME) notes on the files, and it's amazing how lightweight the game is at 9MB.
I never experienced in slowdown or crashes. I also didn't notice any bugs, typo's, or glitches whatsoever, so nice job with that.
Overall
A really admirable game coded from scratch in a month, with a lot of good game design mechanics and a well-done, bizarre atmosphere. Definitely one of the better non-RPGs in the contest, and I think it would make a good play for most.
Thank you for this game!
