The Short Game

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...

This week I was thinking about The Stanley Parable , which had a great recent episode on Watch Out For Fireballs and is also probably, finally getting its updated re-release this year, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe . This was only the second episode of the podcast, originally released in April of 2014, and we were still figuring everything out. The format is weird, the takes are stale,  the au...

Our patrons voted for it , and we played it! It’s Metroid Fusion! A 5-7 hour Metroid game for the Game Boy Advance. This was Samus Aran’s first game in 8 years following Super Metroid, but it picks up seemingly right where the SNES game left off. We talk about the good, the bad, and the controversial in this soon-to-be-prequel to Metroid Dread. The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners...

Play as a tiny crow with a huge sword, tasked with reaping souls in a world in which no one has died for hundreds of years.  Death’s Door is a top-down exploration and combat focused action adventure game in the mold of the Legend of Zelda, from developers Acid Nerve (the developers of Titan Souls) and published by Devolver Digital. You can find Death’s Door on Steam for PC and Xbox platforms, whe...

This week we are talking about the long in Early Access roguelike deck-building RPG Griftlands , and if you just heard a sound it was Nate vibrating in his seat. This isn’t that short a game, with a completed run taking up to 8 hours (and completing all three characters will likely take over 20 hours) but it sneaks in with our increasingly unjustifiable exception for roguelikes!  Griftlands was in...

This week we played Boomerang X, a new first person shooter boomeranger from developer DANG! published by Devolver Digital. Fling your boomerang (and yourself) through the air in a series of increasingly insane combat arenas as you delve into a lost civilization and test your agility against the swarms of dark creatures within. Boomerang X is available today on Switch and Steam for Windows. Expect...

This week we are covering Ynglet , a weird little anti-platformer for PC/Mac. Enjoy us trying mightily to describe the abstract main character creature (betasseled space squid?), and stick around for Shane’s What’s Making Me Happy when he finds a way to troll me by just enjoying sparkling water. The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level get access to...

Chicory is a game about a black and white world, and an unlikely artist-dog given a magic paintbrush and tasked with coloring it in. Like developer Greg Lobanov’s previous game Wandersong, it’s also a deceptively well written and emotional story with engaging characters facing real problems. Chicory deals intelligently with themes of depression, impostor syndrome, the nature of art, and what it do...

When one of the creators of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture makes a Firewatch -inspired game about running a metal detector over the British countryside, we pay attention. Unfortunately, despite some very good ideas, this game’s writing was a bit of a misfire. It’s a very interesting failure, though! The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level get acce...

Overboard! is the latest game from Inkle , creators of Short Game favorites 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault. Developed in just over three months during the Covid-19 pandemic, Overboard is a deeply repayable detective game where you’re the one whodunnit . Designed to be played in under an hour, but with numerous routes and endings and an advanced narrative design allowing for enormous amounts of player...

Mundaun is a pleasant mountain hike gone dreadfully, dreadfully wrong. First person protagonist Curdin returns to his grandfather’s home in Mundaun, a secluded village in the Swiss Alps, to find his grandfather dead in mysterious circumstances and the mountain haunted by a dark presence. This folk-horror-adventure game’s unique art style was achieved by hand-penciling all of the textures for a moo...

Who would have thought we could talk for nearly an hour about Peggle, a game that according to Nate doesn’t even exist in his home timeline. 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 P...

This overlooked open-world kitchen sink game might be Apple Arcade’s best exclusive. Sneaky Sasquatch looks on its surface like a light stealth game aimed at children, but get past its first minutes and you’ll. discover a game that is eager at every moment to show you one more fun thing. The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level get access to our Dis...

In IFComp 2017 , we were excited by the possibilities Filip Hráček showed in his comp game Insignificant Little Vermin , built with his bespoke choice-based system Egamebook. Now Hráček has released the first commercial Egamebook game for iOS and Android. Knights of San Francisco is a 90 minute mobile RPG with simulated combat and a text based presentation. It’s a story about a young necromancer c...

This week we are re-releasing our episode on Severed, a game from Guacamelee developer Drinkbox Studios that originally released on Vita and has since been ported to just about everything including iOS and Switch. It’s long been one of our favorite games, and Drinkbox has a new game coming out later this year so we thought it might be worth revisiting. If you haven’t ever played this fantastic tou...

This week we are renewing our Apple Arcade subscriptions and talking about some of the games we’ve checked out since the debut of the service. 00:01:57: Wonderbox 00:07:42: Hitchhiker 00:14:40: A Monster’s Expedition 00:21:40: Sneaky Sasquatch 00:31:11: Clap Hanz Golf 00:41:05: Assorted App Store Greats, Music Games, Etc. 00:51:59: Sp!ng & lumen. 00:55:52: Listener Recommendations and Other Ga...

Before Your Eyes is a short narrative game that uses your real life blinks (monitored via your PC’s webcam) as your primary interaction. It’s also an extremely moving story, well written and performed, about what makes a life valuable. You play as Benjamin Brynn, a deceased soul reviewing the moments of his life, but each time you blink, each moment is lost. Shane and Raygan both found this 1.5 ho...

Better late than never! This week we are looping back to our promised IFComp 2020 wrap-up, and discussing the four games in the top 10 that we didn’t cover during our colossal four-part coverage last fall. This was a truly colossal comp, and all of the top games are worth your time. This year’s top 10 included two mathematically unlikely ties (!) and included games in a variety of genres and style...

This week we’re reminiscing about the ultimate short game machine, the Game Boy, with special guest Jordan Starkweather . Jordan is a host of the Pocketoid podcast , the internet’s longest-running handheld gaming podcast, and also runs @CRTPixels , a popular Twitter account documenting retro games the way they were designed to look. We had a lot of fun reminiscing about the Game Boy with Jordan, a...