The Short Game

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...

We love a game that respects our time. But what if you don’t have *any* time? Do two things at once, of course! To celebrate Raygan’s return amidst new baby mode, we praise games that let us multitask — whether we’re watching tv, listening to podcasts, or even completing a chore or two. When should you multitask? When shouldn’t you? What sorts of games are good fits? What games require every singl...

The leaves are turning, the air is brisk, and we are feeling our seasonal feelings by re-releasing our episode on Night in the Woods . This game’s not only giving us autumnal vibes, it also was one of our 2017 games of the year — we even created the inaugural “Dirtbag of the Year” award to capture our love for Mae Borowski. If you’re new to Night in the Woods, it’s a story-focused adventure game a...

Happy 28th birthday to IFComp! We’re thrilled to start our seventh year of competition coverage with discussions of seven brand-new interactive fiction games. Nate and Laura open with a brief overview of IFComp for the unfamiliar/forgetful, before diving into individual reviews. The Grown-Up Detective Agency by Brendan Patrick Hennessy Esther’s by Brad and Alleson Buchanan The Thirty Nine Steps by...

It’s all there in the title — there’s both slicing and dicing in this turn-based roguelite! Nate, Laura, and Shane take on liches, witches and other classic monsters across Slice & Dice’s 20 increasingly challenging levels. But it’s not all luck — despite a game full of literal dice rolls, there’s a lot of strategy involved too. Slice & Dice is available on itch.io for Windows, Mac, and An...

In Case Of Impending Baby, Break Glass and Discuss Kirby. Raygan is preparing for the birth of his third child this week so Shane and Raygan are discussing Nintendo’s best 2022 release (sorry Splatoon fans) Kirby and the Forgotten Land. It’s a game we mostly played with our kids, so expect lots of discussion of that side of the experience. We also talk about Shane’s newly arrived Steam Deck, and R...

Laura played Tunic when it launched earlier this year, and has been encouraging us to play it for the show ever since, but it’s a bit long (up to 20 hours for completionists) and the discourse around its launch was that it was perhaps too hard for for some folks, so we put it off. As in all things, we should have trusted Laura. It turned out that this long-in-development cross between Zelda and Da...

In this special double length episode, we’re revealing all the secrets of Marissa Marcel. (Ok, most of them? Some at least, certainly!) We talk about the meta-narrative of Immortality , break down the plots and production stories of each of the three movies, and debate the ending. If you have questions about Immortality, we have answers! And also more questions! The Short Game is supported directl...