The Short Game

Oh dang it’s a holiday weekend and we don’t have time to prep for an episode… Let me see what everybody else on the internet is doing right now… … So here’s the Short Game Holiday Gift Guide! (01:52) - "Gamer Gifts" (08:11) - Game Plushies (12:39) - A Large Tray (14:36) - Controller Storage (17:10) - Boppy (19:23) - RGB shit? (21:42) - Setting up a retro handheld for a kid (26:52) - Goose Game Key...

You’re here to slay the princess. Don’t believe her lies. This horror adventure (visual novel?) sets you a simple if trope-reversing task right in the title, then blows the doors off with an extraordinarily wide branching structure. There’s a lot to talk about with this one! slaytheprincess.com The Magnus Archives Standard Patterns in Choice-Based Games by Sam Kabo Ashwell Chapters | Slay the Prin...

Orb! Orb orb orb orb orb. Orb Orb? Orb Orb Orb!… (00:00) - Cocoon (40:50) - What's Making Us Happy This Week? (40:59) - Shane - Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (44:34) - Raygan - Nintendo DSi (49:11) - Laura - MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios (55:48) - Outro

We continue our coverage of IFComp 2023 with a few more games AND THEN WE GET KICKED IN THE NUTS!!!! [00:02:39] LAKE Adventure Follow-up by B.J. Best [00:08:27] Assembly by Ben Kirwin [00:19:05] The Whisperers by Milo van Mesdag [00:26:38] Fix Your Mother’s Printer by Geoffrey Golden [00:35:32] CODENAME OBSCURA by Mika Kujala [00:43:01] Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head by The Hungry Reader [00...

Gordy and the Monster Moon is a bite-sized exploration-driven game about a pumpkin astronaut going on spooky adventures. It’s also a tiny part of the Frog Fractions extended universe, brought to us by Jim Stormdancer. It’s made entirely in Pico-8, and is available on Steam and itch.io for $4. It’s a great short game that made for a quick conversation, so Shane also brings us a seasonally appropria...

This week we’re talking about Gunbrella, a game that gets in its own way more than anything we’ve played in a while. (00:00) - Introduction (54:06) - What's Making Us Happy This Week? (54:32) - Laura - Material Girls Podcast (59:34) - Raygan - Powkiddy RGB30 (01:03:26) - Nate - Budapest, Running & The Fall of the House of Usher (01:09:32) - Outro

This week we are kicking off our coverage of IFComp with coverage of a handful of games, including some new names and returning Short Game favorites. Looking forward to playing more over the coming month! [00:00:00] Intro [00:06:28] Xanthippe’s Last Night with Socrates by Victor Gijsbers [00:16:05] 20 Exchange Place by Sol FC [00:20:10] LAKE Adventure by B.J. Best [00:28:01] The Vambrace of Destin...

This week Shane and Raygan betray the premise of the podcast and have a nice long chat about Baldur’s Gate 3, an immense game we’re both enjoying immensely, with some digressions into D&D and (ding) Magic the Gathering.

As a follow up to our episode on our favorite mechanics , a listener suggested we talk about which ones we hate! So we did! (02:11) - Collect X of Y to Open the Boss Door (13:27) - Adventure Game Puzzle Design (21:08) - Finding Objects in 3D Spaces (29:17) - Photography Mechanics (38:11) - Microtransactions & Random Loot Drops 🙃 (47:37) - Text Parsers (55:11) - Outro

This week we’re celebrating PICO-8 games! PICO-8 is a fantasy console for making, sharing and playing tiny games that runs on PC/Mac/Linux. Raygan, Nate, and Shane talk a little about the “console” itself, then review a ton of games, including: Celeste Mimic What is a Cart? Pico Driller The Shadow King Combo Pool To A Starling Super Crane Bug Dusk Child Shelled Shinobi Mai-Chan’s Sweet Buns (00:00...

Set sail with your Short Game hosts on a spooky adventure about… fishing? This week we’re covering Dredge by Black Salt games, who describes it as “a single-player fishing adventure with a sinister undercurrent.” What will you dig up from the depths?

From Flying to Fleas, this week we’re just about some of our favorite mechanics from the many games we’ve covered over the years. (02:29) - Charms from Hollow Knight (13:03) - Magic: The Gathering's Saga cards (21:30) - When a game tempts you into non-optimal choices (31:02) - Superhot’s Whole Deal (35:16) - The Hint Fleas in The Wizard Sniffer (42:38) - Looping in Loop Hero (46:17) - Fun But Usel...

South Scrimshaw is uses the visual novel form to do something very unusual: a science fiction nature documentary. Using hundreds of beautiful bespoke watercolor and ink illustrations, South Scrimshaw tells the story of a whale calf on an alien world as it is born and travels with its in injured mother across dangerous seas. It’s one of the most artistically beautiful games we’ve played, and it’s a...

Hope you’re hungry… for narrative fiction! This week we’re dealing with dosas and building biriyanis in Venba. It’s a story-driven cooking game centered on a South Indian family living in Canada. Expect it to take an hour to an hour and a half, depending on your culinary skill and reading speed. (00:00) - Venba (27:34) - What's Making Us Happy This Week? (27:46) - Nate - My Job is Beach (30:02) -...

We’re finally playing this long anticipated first person puzzler. (No Shane you can’t call the genre a “Portalortal”.) It’s a breezy but inventive and incredibly well executed exploration of perspective. We wrap up with one of the best Making Me Happy segments in ages! (00:00) - Viewfinder (40:36) - What's Making Us Happy This Week? (41:14) - Shane - The Hobbit, Illustrated Edition (49:52) - Rayga...

Laura and Raygan are back to talk about a very Night in the Woods inspired narrative adventure game that focuses on the medical industry. Fall of Porcupine follows new intern Finley (a big-eyed pigeon, did I mention they’re all animals in this?) as he navigates professional and moral difficulties working at the only hospital in rural Porcupine. Great conversation about this unusual game. Finally,...

Shane and Nate take on a bizarre mission full of pizza, dice, and pizza dice in Cosmo D’s Betrayal at Club Low . It’s a unique RPG set in the same surreal world as Cosmo D’s other games Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite, and Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1. but requires no knowledge of those games. It feels like a perfect homage to the short, punchy zine tabletop RPGs that inspired it. Club Low is avail...

If you saw the title of this episode and thought “What? Tears of the Kingdom? On The Short Game podcast?!” then dear listener so did I . No, we’re not making some tortured argument for how this is actually a short game (though it can be completed in under an hour .) No, Laura and Raygan were traveling this week and Shane and Nate just had a lot to say about everyone’s favorite unofficial Kerbal Sp...

This week we check in on the last year or so of releases on Apple Arcade, and mostly what we find are a bunch of ports of good Short Game games and an excellent coloring book app for toddlers, plus a car with legs! We also take the opportunity to talk about the latest news in the weird world of Apple and gaming. Is the Apple Vision Pro going to be any good for games? Does the Game Porting Toolkit...

This week, for the first time, we’re covering a rom hack. A Plumber For All Seasons is a Super Mario World rom hack that is an almost total conversion of the game. 37 original levels, custom hand made graphics, an original soundtrack, and more make this feel like a true sequel to SMW rather than just a level pack. It’s a project that took rom hacker Eric Kaiser nearly a decade to complete, and it’...

Editor’s note: If your episode has gaps/silence around the 16 minute mark, please delete and re-download the episode. Sorry for the inconvenience! Laura has been telling us all about Fallen London, the cult interactive fiction browser game from Failbetter Games, for nearly a decade. It’s a vast and varied game centered around the Fallen London setting: a cosmic-horror tinged world where Victorian...

Something a little different this week — in the words of Gregg from Night in the Woods, lets do crimes!  This week we have our first-ever draft: a Short Game Heist. Each of us assemble a five-person caper crew, filling our teams with characters from games covered on the show.  Who gets away with the goods? Who’s pinning it on a patsy? Whose plan relies heavily on suction cup hands? Fire up a sweet...

The latest game from Snowman, developer of the Short Game favorite Alto’s Adventure/Odyssey games, has made a loosely related 3D wingsuit flying game for Netflix’s weird mobile game subscription collection.  Laya’s Horizon seems like it checks all the boxes for us, but somehow Shane loves the game while it leaves Raygan cold. We also discuss some of the other eclectic  games Netflix has added to t...

This week the hosts played Lil Gator Game , an adorable open world adventure game about a lil kid (also a gator) playing who just wants his big sis to come play hero with him. We also have a surprisingly long digression on Bluey and children’s TV,  and recommend some great books in the “What’s Making Us Happy This Week” segment. Lil Gator Game is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch. It’ll only...

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...