The Short Game

LudoNarraCon is a digital convention celebrating narrative games, hosted by indie label Fellow Traveller . It includes an online panel series, a narrative focused Steam sale, and most importantly for this episode, a bunch of new demos for upcoming narrative indies. Laura and Raygan took this week to discuss some of the demos we played as a part of the event, and talk about what upcoming indies we...

Turnfollow, developers of Short Game favorite Wide Ocean Big Jacket, have returned with an extremely unexpected game. Before The Green Moon is a 3D farming sim with a clearly early-3D inspired aesthetic, whose story is a far cry from other farming sims. You play as a young farmer living at the base of a space elevator. It’s a game about building community at the fringes of space capitalism and cli...

The Short Game began in April of 2014 , so this month marks our 9th anniversary! To celebrate, we’re doing the impossible (and probably inadvisable): We are going to produce a totally inarguable and completely 100% perfect list of the best nine short games of all time. Or at least we’re going to try! Kind of! Here’s a link to our complete list and personal lists on our Patreon page! The top nine:...

Laura and Raygan discuss a lyrical puzzle game about a jazz band preparing for a farewell concert for their lead singer, and about that singer’s spirit as she explores the mental landscapes of her band-mates helping them move on. It’s way less of a bummer than it might sound! Stick around for a great What’s Making Us Happy segment about Dog Beach and the Tetris movie. (00:00) - The Forest Quartet...

We learn to love all the sh*tty friends in this weirdly-not-just-a-joke release from the Sonic the Hedgehog social media team. The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog was a surprise release for April Fools 2023. In this visual novel point and click adventure, you play as YOUR_NAME_HERE the Quokka, waiter and microwave operator to the Sonic crew, as they celebrate Amy Rose’s birthday with a murder mystery...

This week Raygan reveals his complete lack of knowledge about the various planetary moons of our solar system as we talk about Titan Station, a “walking simulator” set on a space station in the far future year of 1999. This is a game by friend of the show Joakim Larsen, who has managed to create an incredible photorealistic environment for what Nate describes as “a story about poor password hygien...

A chat between Raygan and Shane about the “Fitting Games Into Your Life” aspect of The Short Game. We talk about what’s working and what’s not in terms of our gaming setups, our schedules, and ourselves. (02:43) - Schedules and Stuff (11:54) - The Playdate (16:59) - Steam Deck Improvements (20:26) - Get Out Of My Office, Kid (34:26) - An Unnecessary Digression About Soldering (38:10) - Moar Elite...

Storyteller won the IGF Nuovo award in 2012 (!!!) and finally releases today, making it the longest in development game we’ve ever covered. Finally emerging from development hell and partnering with publisher Annapurna, developer Daniel Benmergui has delivered a charming and intuitive “continuity simulator”, in which you build a simple comic strip from drag and drop actors and scenes, trying to pr...

Hi-Fi Rush was a surprising January “shadow drop” (is that really what we’re calling these?) from previously horror focused developer Tango Gameworks. Part beat ’em up, part music game, part Saturday moring cartoon, and a whole lot of fun if you can jam to its dad rock soundtrack. Hi-Fi Rush is available on PC and Xbox consoles, and via Game Pass. Expect it to take around 11 hours to complete. (00...

Solve a string of bizarre historical murders in this extremely clever deduction game.  Previously if you liked Return of the Obra Dinn and wanted to play something with a similar deduction mechanic, your options were basically zero. Now they’ve increased to one! Golden Idol has a very different presentation, art style and structure to Obra Dinn, but feels like it builds on that game’s excellent ga...

Is Pizza Tower a revival of one of platform game design’s most fascinating evolutionary dead ends, or something new?  Is it, as Shane put it, “Celeste for Weirdos?”  Pizza Tower is available on Steam for Windows. Expect it to take about 6-8 hours to complete, but with a lot of room for additional score attack and speedrun challenges. (00:00) - Introduction (01:04) - Mandatory Banter (06:15) - Pizz...

Luck be a Landlord is a roguelike deckbuilder (hello Nate!) about using a slot machine to earn rent money and defeat capitalism. This strange but compelling game recently emerged from early access and has started finding an audience, so we checked out out! Nate really checked it out. (00:00) - Introduction (02:13) - Mandatory Banter (07:33) - Luck Be A Landlord (49:20) - What's Making Us Happy Thi...

This week Nate and Raygan are talking about UnderDungeon, a game with awesome 1-bit pixel art that somehow seemed like less than the sum of its parts. Not, ultimately, a recommendation, but a good discussion! (00:00) - UnderDungeon (34:27) - What's Making Us Happy This Week? (34:34) - Nate: Star Trek: Lower Decks (41:02) - Raygan - Hot Water! (44:58) - Outro

Afterplace is the first mobile game that has really grabbed me beginning to end in a long time. The game, from solo developer Evan Kice, is a whole-assed open world indie action adventure game, but for phones. It takes a lot of inspiration from games like the Legend of Zelda and Undertale, but brings them to your iOS or Android smartphone with touch-native controls and a world that is designed to...

Pocket Card Jockey is a weird footnote. A lesser known but beloved 3DS side-project by Game Freak, the creators of Pokémon. It‘s a brilliant and hilarious mash up horse racing and solitaire, first released in Japan in 2013, and in the US in 2016 when we covered it for The Short Game.  Now the game has been remastered (or remade?) for iOS! Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! is available now on the Apple...

We haven’t covered a mobile game, or a tower defense game, in quite a while! Isle of Arrows comes from Gridpop, aka Daniel Lutz, best known as the creative director of Hitman GO and Lara Croft GO, and this game brings that aesthetic and polish to the venerable tower defense genre while freshening some things up with a touch of roguelike and board game mechanics. It’s a total bullseye. The Short Ga...

We absolutely love stuff where little guys go around, the littler the better. Tinykin upended our expectations around 3D platformers, and manages to out-Pikmen Pikmen. It’s about 6 hours, and is on Switch, Steam, PS4/5, and your various Xboxeees, and is included with GamePass. The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level get access to our Discord, where...

It’s been a great year, and we played some great games. It’s our Game of the Year special for 2022!  In addition to our Game of the Year, we’re handing out lots of honors and superlatives, some returning like our coveted Dirtbag of the Year award, and some new that you’ll need to listen to discover! Patrons also have access to our unedited planning session, if you want to hear how the sausage was...

BANG! BANG! CHOP! CHOP! In this single-sitting first-person shooter, you gotta chop some goblins before they chop you. Other times you gotta shoot, stake, shotgun, or impale them. Because once chop goblins are loosed across time and space, someone’s gotta stop ’em. And that someone is you. (Because you set them free in the first place.) Chop Goblins was a surprise end-of-year release by the creato...

This week, we’re revisiting an episode for a game that many of you have probably played: Portal. On December 11, Nvidia released a remastered version called “Portal RTX” with upgraded, ray-traced graphics (fancy) — and if you own it on Steam, you’ve automatically got a copy. This shiny new coat of paint is a great excuse to boot up Portal and remember how very awesome it is. Even back at episode 1...

Fans of medieval manuscripts, murder mysteries and marginalia, rejoice! Pentiment is here to fill your Northern Renaissance needs. Raygan and Laura discuss this rich tale of abbeys, intrigue, and 16th century life in the Bavarian Alps. Do we describe the classic book Name of the Rose as “a vibe”? How do we feel about Big Head Mode? Will we accuse innocent people of murder? Dear listener, there is...

This week’s episode is a little early and lightly edited, since we are all busy with Thanksgiving. Just a quick, fun conversation about things we were thankful for in gaming in 2022! Back to regularly scheduled programming with Pentiment next week. Happy Thanksgiving! The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level get access to our Discord, where we discu...

Now we’re thinking with time reversals! The Entropy Centre is a first-person puzzler set in a collapsing space station on the brink of the end of the world. But it’s not all doom and gloom, for there’s a cheerful robot inside your entropy gun to help you rebuild pillars and reheat tea. Expect it to take 8-12 hours, depending on how good you are at brain-bendy puzzles. The Entropy Centre is availab...

Mosey on over to this here podcast fer some of the worst accents this side of the Mississippi — it’s time to cover Card Cowboy, yeehaw! Saddle up to take revenge on the Gunman who killed your dad, wooed your mom, and kicked your dog. Card Cowboy is basically Western mad libs and we’re happy as hornets. Each playthrough takes about 30 minutes. (Yall make sure to pick up the Steam version, which is...

This week, we pick back up our coverage of IFComp 2022 with seven more games: Into The Sun by Dark Star The Absence of Miriam Lane by Abigail Corfman Admiration Point by Rachel Helps Star Tripper by Sam Ursu To Persist/Exist/Endure, Press 1 by Anthony O The Only Possible Prom Dress by Jim Aikin Trouble in Sector 471 by Arthur DiBianca Let us know if you’ve got a favorite we haven’t reviewed yet, a...