The Short Game

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...

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...