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Tessara runs on one brass cylinder. Every pin is something that happened. One pin sits in the wrong bar, and because of it a girl was never born.
A narrative JRPG for PC PlayStation 5 Nintendo Switch 2
Act one
Tessara is a city built on a music box. Every birth and every quarrel on Chandler Row sits as a pin on one brass cylinder, and while the cylinder turns, the city lives.
The last cylinder setter left eleven years ago, and the song has started to repeat. The same rain on the same Tuesdays. The same argument at the bakery door.
Wren Calloway, twenty, mends music boxes on Lantern Street. She is the only person left in town who still opens them up to look inside.
Inside the great cylinder, Wren finds a pin standing where it should not be.
She follows it back to one night nine years ago: a fire on Chandler Row, and an empty room above the bakery. The midwife went to the fire. A girl named Linnet was never born.
Linnet would be nine. She turns up at the edges of scenes she was never part of, faint as a pencil line, waiting for someone to write her in.
The empty hole in this bar is where her pin should be.
Act two
The song of Tessara has seven bars. Each bar is one scene in the life of the city, and each holds the pin of everyone who was there.
Wren walks them in order: the fire, the bakery, the bell tower, the flood gate, the wedding that went wrong, the school that shut. The seventh bar is blank.
She can move pins in any of them. Each pin she moves pulls someone else out of place.
Maestro Orrin Bellweather set the cylinder for forty years. The last time the song changed, the flood gate failed and his daughter’s street went under.
So he locked it. A song that never changes never loses anyone else. Every night he climbs the bell tower to check the lock, a tall thin man in a coat buttoned to the throat, sixty-six, with a baton he no longer conducts with.
He knows what a moved pin takes. He lost a street to one.
Move a pin to another bar and you change who speaks in that scene, and who is still standing when it ends. Every move changes the tune.
On the night of the fire, the midwife Mags Tolley is pinned to Chandler Row. Lift her pin and set it in the bakery bar, and Linnet is born a little after two. Chandler Row is down one pair of hands. Whether old Pell walks out of the smoke now depends on who else you put there.
You hear every change. A bar that holds together rings clean. A bar that loses someone goes sour.
Act two, bar 6
Three bars from the night of the fire. Eight pins, one for each person who was out that night. The Maestro locked three of them. Move the other five until every bar rings clean.
Drag a pin to another bar, or tap the bar you want in that row. With a keyboard: Up and Down choose a pin, Enter lifts it, Left and Right carry it, Enter sets it down, Escape puts it back.
Act three
After the sixth scene the cylinder runs out of pins. The last bar has never been written, and the Maestro wants it locked like the rest.
Wren could fill it with anything. A whole life for Linnet. A flood gate that holds.
She leaves it empty. The cylinder turns, the comb waits, and for the first time in eleven years Tessara does not know what comes next.
The first playtest covers Act one and the night of the fire, with the full Re-pin board. PC first. PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 follow.
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