The Short Game

Webbed from Sbug Games is a puzzle platformer starring a charming little spider on a quest to save her boyfriend. It has incredible movement and webbing mechanics, and fantastic animation (all those legs!) but suffers from some early game pacing issues. We discuss why we loved the game, and how to get past some of the early game hurdles and into the fun stuff quickly. The Short Game is supported d...

The biggest surprise of Wonder Labyrinth is that it was made at all. Team Ladybug‘s 5-10 hour Symphony of the Night clone inspired game is based on a nearly forgotten early anime property, yet released in the year 2021. If you ignore the minimal but mostly unintelligible story content, this is a really good metroidvania in the direct lineage of the Koji Igarashi Castlevanias. It’s available on Win...

ElecHead is a little robot with a high voltage head. Touch any surface to electrify it, or throw your head to electrify things at a distance, but pick it up in 10 seconds or explode! That’s the whole premise of this clever and breezy puzzle platformer from Japanese indie dev NamaTakahasi. Stick around after for one of my favorite ”What’s Making Us Happy This Week” segments in a while The Short Gam...

Tux & Fanny began as a 2019 film by Albert Birney, released in parts on Instagram and as a feature-length film on Vimeo . Barney has since developed the idea into a video game that mixes the quirky oddness of the film with an almost bottomless well of lavish but incongruous inclusions. Full of delightful one-time throwaway mechanics and unnecessarily fleshed out mini-games, Tux and Fanny begin...

This week we’re talking about Sable , a long-in-development open world coming-of-age story set on a beautiful but desolate alien planet. Afterward, in the What’s Making Us Happy segment, Shane has very bad opinions about the execrable M. Night Shyamalan movie Old . The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level get access to our Discord, where we discuss...

Word games are ubiquitous, and almost universally short, but most are too slight to make for a full Short Game episode. This week we’re starting by discussing the virally popular Wordle , then moving on to talk about our favorite word games over the years. For Patrons, check the Patreon exclusive feed for a separate recording of Nate and Laura playing Shane’s “Guessing Game!” The Short Game is sup...

We are pondering our orb this week, with Shane and Raygan talking about Exo One, a game that is hard to describe as anything other than “Flappy Bird meets 2001: A Space Odyssey“ in 3D. We also launched our new questions segment, so skip to the 39 minutes or use the chapter marker for that if you want! Let us know if you have a question for the show, or if you think we should put the Questions segm...

Our slightly belated GOTY 2021 episode is here, and we’re honoring our favorite games of this complicated year. (If you’re a patron , you can also tune in for our unedited horse-trading and planning session in the Patreon podcast feed!) Thanks for sticking with us in 2021. We’re looking forward to a bright 2022! The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any le...

It’s absolutely inconceivable that we have been doing this for 300 episodes . We’re celebrating this milestone by answering your questions and a few of our own, and generally just hanging out. Thank you! The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level get access to our Discord, where we discuss games, plan episodes, and talk about what we are playing in re...

We’re still talking about Inscryption, a game that… well there’s a lot to talk about here. Next week is episode 300!! The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level get access to our Discord, where we discuss games, plan episodes, and talk about what we are playing in real time. You can also support us by writing a review on Apple Podcasts! You can follow...

We’re spending the next two episodes talking about Inscryption, the wild new deckbuilding roguelike meets escape-room horror game from Pony Island developer Daniel Mullins. We’re taking the unusual step of breaking this into two episodes (similar to what we did with Undertale several years ago) because while the game has a lot of incredible cards (literal and figurative) hidden up its sleeves, the...

The second game from Witchbeam, the developers of Short Game favorite Assault Android Cactus, is completely different but equally great. Unpacking is an intricate pixel art game about… unpacking! This chill, open ended puzzle-ish game tells the story of a life through the mundane, familiar experience of taking objects out of boxes and trying to find some place to put them. Each new house comes wit...

IFComp 2021 voting closes TODAY! Our third and final episode on IFComp 2021 just before the close of the comp covers four absolute bangers . We will return in a few weeks to discuss the results, and play any high placing games we missed! [00:03:17]: What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed by Amanda Walker   [00:17:19]: Fine Felines by Felicity Banks   [00:30:11]: A Paradox Between Worlds by Autumn Chen...

Despite some high profile and popular examples, the deck-building roguelike genre is a hyper-specific niche comprised of such a small number of games that every major new entry still seems like quite an event. 2020’s biggest deck-building roguelike release was Monster Train , which made its way to Nintendo Switch this year. It’s a must for fans of the genre, and might be a great entry point for ne...

Continuing our coverage of the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition, we’re back with impressions of six more games, including some really incredible ones! 00:03:23: Closure by Sarah Wilson   00:12:26: Funicular Simulator 2021 by Mary Goodden and Tom Leather   00:19:30: we, the remainder by Charm Cochran   00:29:19: Taste of Fingers by V Dobranov   00:35:14: Dr Horror’s House of Terror by Ade   00:...

Our spooky game for spooky season this year is Devotion, an atmospheric first person horror game from Taiwanese developer Red Candle Games. Devotion was well received at its 2019 release but was very quickly pulled from stores due to a very strange situation involving the Chinese Communist Party and Winnie the Pooh. The game remained as hauntingly unavailable as PT for years, until Red Candle bega...

This is the start of our IFComp 2021 coverage, and it’s looking like a good year! We discussed 9 games, and will be covering many more over the coming weeks. 00:13:09 : Grandma Bethlinda’s Remarkable Egg by Arthur DiBianca 00:25:48 : The Golden Heist by George Lockett and Rob Thorman 00:33:31 : The daughter by Giovanni Rubino 00:41:40 : A Papal Summons, or The Church Cat by Bitter Karella 00:48:57...

A complete, mainline Mario game you can complete in 3-6 hours? Yes, Bowser’s Fury is more than a “new mode” for the Switch re-release of Super Mario 3D World. It also has more cats per minute than any game in recent memory. Hope you’re feeling better, Nate! The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level get access to our Discord, where we discuss games, p...

This week we are getting romantic with a few interactive fiction romance novels from Choice of Games and their new imprint Heart’s Choice.  Crème de la Crème from Choice of Games Dawnfall and A Player’s Heart from Heart’s Choice Creatures Such as We from Choice of Games Laura’s recent guest appearance: 471. Romance Games and Interactive Fiction with Laura Nash of The Short Game Podcast | Smart Bit...

This week The Short Game played an online escape room experience called Project Avatar, in which we commanded an “avatar”, a real live human person in a warehouse in Ukraine, through a series of puzzle challenges. It was a supremely weird and wildly entertaining experience. We also discuss escape rooms generally, including online and at-home escape room experiences. Here are Laura’s links and reso...

With a little help from our listeners, we’re bringing back our music episode format. We have a few picks from the hosts, and a lot of listener suggestions! Nate’s pick:  A Colorful Tale – Chicory: A Colorful Tale by Lena Raine Raygan’s Picks: Boku No Chikyu Bokura no Chikyu – Mr. Driller DrillLand by Go C-Na Burn My Dread – Persona 3 Mind of a Hero – Wonder Boy III The Dragon’s Trap Shane’s Picks:...

The Twelve Minutes Defender (Shane) and the Twelve Minutes Hater (Raygan) are locked in an endless cycle of discourse . This time loop thriller adventure game has garnered some really mixed reviews, and we can’t give it a full throated recommendation, but it ended up generating a really interesting conversation. The Groundhog Day “fan fiction” podcast Shane refers to in this episode are episodes 7...

We’re taking a romantic dip into the “dunj” this week and playing Boyfriend Dungeon from Kitfox Games!  We talk about the smooching, the slashing and talk about our favorite Baeblades.  Boyfriend Dungeon is available on Steam, Gamepass (Windows and Xbox) and Nintendo Switch. Expect it to take between 5 and 10 hours to complete depending mostly on how many swords you want to smooch. The Short Game...

The Forgotten City  is a mystery adventure game of exploration and deduction, and a re-imagining of an award winning Skyrim mod. Travel 2,000 years into the past and relive the final days of a cursed Roman city, where if one person sins, everyone dies.  We absolutely loved this game. It’s a masterpiece of narrative design, and one of the most fun examples of a Groundhog Day style time loop in vide...

Button City is a cute (you might even say wholesome ) adventure game about an adorable fox and his animal friends in a dayglow 90’s nostalgia infused world, trying to protect their local arcade from an uncaring real estate developer. Unfortunately, it’s also… not very good.   Nate and I had a chat about what this promising game got right, and why it ultimately failed to move us. We also have a cha...