The Short Game: Recent Episodes
The Short Game
After a somewhat unplanned summer break, the Short Game crew is returning to talk about the fourth chapter of Deltarune!
The Steam Deck is the number one console(ish) platform for playing ILLEGAL GAMES that Nintendo doesn’t want you to play! This week we’re talking about games that STEAL intellectual property from the RICH FAT CATS at Nintendo and their cronies and remix it into FREE GAMES for the PEOPLE.
Toby Fox is back, and it’s TV TIME!
Previously:
- Episode 320 – Chapter 1
- Episode 324 – Chapter 2
- Episode 65 – Undertale
- Episode 66 – Undertale Spoilers
From the depths of Steam and YouTube comes ENA, a strange polygonal girl in a surreal hypercapitalist dreamscape. Your hosts were left wondering what the hell this was all about, and why is it so incredibly beautifully animated?
Indie game royalty Blendo aka Brendan Chung, creator of Thirty Flights of Loving and Quadrilateral Cowboy among others has come out of his cicada-like 7 year dev cycle with another instant classic. Skin Deep is an immersive sim about popping the detachable heads off of space pirates and flushing them down space toilets in order to save a bunch of talking space cats. It’s an easily the funniest and probably one of the best immersive sims ever made.
A video game memoir by Ecuadorian indie developers Julián Cordero and Sebastian Valbuena, and published by Panic, Despelote takes you back to a childhood in 2001 Ecuador, and the magical grip soccer held over the entire country during the lead-up to the 2002 World Cup.
This is something we have never seen in video games before.
We’re talking about Many Nights a Whisper, a short, meditative archery (kinda!) game from Red Strings Club developer Deconstructeam and Selkie Harbour. The Dreamer has prepared their entire life for one impossible shot that will define a generation. Hear the wishes of your people, and prepare for your one chance to make them come true in this interactive essay on the flight of wishes and the pressure of expectations.
In “What’s Making Us Happy”, Nate is playing the classic Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and Raygan recommends an app. An app!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Mario:_The_Thousand-Year_Door
https://www.suppermariobroth.com
https://reederapp.com/
We spent this week playing a bit more of Inkle’s follow up to Overboard!, and made some shocking discoveries!
This week, Laura and Nate dive into Trash the Planet, a free, browser-based resource-management game that subverts clicker mechanics to serve its narrative. You play as a group of raccoons who start out collecting trash and, through a rapid evolution of society, end up ruling the planet—manipulating the stock market with absolutely no consequences.
Stick around for the return of What’s Making Us Happy This Week.
Shane and Nate were buzzing about FlyKnight, a $5 indie dungeon crawler that surprised us with its humor and depth. In this episode, we break down what makes this tiny first-person RPG so fun, from its retro aesthetic and first person Souls-like combat to its great co-op potential. Should you bug your buddies to play it? Let’s find out!
Expelled! is the latest game from all-star narrative design studio Inkle. It’s a follow up to our 2021 Game of the Year winner Overboard!, and it builds on that game’s strengths in every conceivable area....
Steam Next Fest just concluded and the Short Game team searched through the mountain of demos to discuss some of the most exciting games with short game energy coming out this year. 00:00 Intro04:09 WYRMHALL: Brush...
All four co-hosts are present and accounted for as we talk about ultra-short platformer, Sheepy: A Short Adventure. It’s right there in the name! Sheepy is a FREE game on Steam and itch.io, and it’ll...
Rats with Knives! It’s time to finally talk about Fight’N Rage! This has been on the back burner for a while; it was first suggested to us nearly 4 years ago as a modern, mechanically...
This week we are welcoming long time friend of the show Jason McIntosh (aka Jmac, aka Halstrick) who’s joining us to talk about the Valve Steam Deck. It’s been about three years since the Steam...
How has it taken us ten years to get around to covering a Sokpop game? The venerable but very weird indie collective has put out a fascinating perfectly normal gardening game. Ahem. OK fine, Grunn is a...
🎶️ I’M ON ANOTHER… ON ANOTHER LEVEL 🎶️ This week we are talking about the retro-inspired, Ska-infused rally car racer Parking Garage Rally Circuit. Race through the most iconic parking structures of the US! It’s...
It’s Game of the Year time again! This week we’re looking back at 2024 to pick the best short video game of the year, and recognize some other great games as well. 00:00 Intro04:52 Game...
This Thanksgiving week the hosts gathered to play a bit of a game, trying to match short games to randomly chosen genres and adjectives. What’s a David Lynchian Platformer, or an “I Want To Go...
Press Y to Neva There’s a certain sector of our listenership that loves it when we talk about games that don’t work for us. If that’s you, then please enjoy our discussion of Neva, the latest...
What a story. 1000xRESIST is one of the best works of science fiction we’ve seen in a game, and it opens new territory at the intersection of visual novels, adventure games, and interactive fiction while...
An unsettling game for the tail end of spooky season. Mouthwashing is a non-linear narrative horror game about a doomed space freighter and her crew. Please enjoy Dragonsbreath X mouthwash.
This has been recommended to us a lot, so we finally decided to clean out those drawers and organize those bookshelves. A surprisingly fun series of tiny organization puzzles which added up to an interesting...
Laura and Raygan talk about another handful of games from this year’s interactive fiction competition.
- [00:00:52] LATEX, LEATHER, LIPSTICK, LOVE, LUST by THE BODY & THE BLOOD
- [00:21:46] A Very Strong Gland by Arthur DiBianca
- [00:27:22] Bad Beer by Vivian Dunstan
- [00:30:32] Birding in Pope Lick Park by Eric Lathrop
- [00:37:56] The Den by Ben Jackson
Thanks to the authors, and to all our patrons who are sharing their IFComp experiences on the Discord!
A quick episode about a very fast game. I Am Your Beast is the latest game from Strange Scaffold and Xalavier Nelson Jr. Even more “boomer shooter”-y than previous Short Game favorite El Paso, Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast tells a John Wick-meets-Rambo story across a series of compact score-attack shooter levels. It’s very cool, but also very hard. Each level is very short, but you’ll need to play each several times to optimize your approach. We haven’t finished this one, but think it’ll likely take most players between 5 and 8 hours to complete (assuming they can get good.)
Surprise! The comp started early! Well we were surprised anyway. We’re kicking off our coverage of this year’s IFComp with impressions of the following games:
- The Bat by Chandler Groover
- ROD MCSCHLONG GETS PUNCHED IN THE DONG by Hubert Janus
- You Can’t Save Her by Sarah Mak
- Forsaken Denizen by C.E.J. Pacian
- KING OF XANADU by MACHINES UNDERNEATH
- Quest for the Teacup of Minor Sentimental Value by Damon L. Wakes
- The Apothecaries Assistant by Allyson Gray
As with all our IFComp coverage, we need your help to decide which games to check out in the limited time we have. Let us know what you’re playing or interested in, and join us on Discord to discuss. The comp closes on October 15th!
Frog Fatigue and Frog Enthusiasm abound in this discussion of open world first person mountain climbing game Valley Peaks.
In this topic episode, Laura and Raygan go through their bookshelves to talk about the video game books they have enjoyed. Art books, game design books, history, and even novels.
Doth these nitwits hast what it takes to properly divine the qualities of this absolutely bizarre JRPG?
Let’s dig into the memory hole and try to remember why we love games. What are some of your favorite gaming moments?
It’s a Nate Game this week, as we’re talking about Cobalt Core, a card-based roguelike deckbuilder about a space ship full of furries stuck in a time loop.
I’ve finally pushed my co-hosts down the Animal Well. This uneasy, mysterious, combat free take on the Metroidvania genre asks you to live in a hole and be terrified of kangaroos.
It is both shorter, and longer than you think.
Sure, this game about a duck detective solving an office lunch theft is cute, but did you know it’s also an introduction to Cold-war era Berlin for children?
Duck Detective is a deducktion/adventure game that plays like an introduction to the Obra Dinn/Golden Idol style of mystery solving game. It’s only about 2 hours long, and would be great to play with a kid.
A single bullet to kill a whole bunch of cultists. Children of the Sun is a puzzle sniping game, where THE GIRL is out to kill THE LEADER of THE CULT. Telekinetically redirect your single bullet in flight to head-shot all the cultists in each level. It’s a game that turns out to be much more puzzle game than shooter. Expect it to take around 3-4 hours to complete. In the What’s Making Us Happy This Week segment this week, Shane recommends a horror novel, and Raygan overthinks his e-reader situation.
Indika is a young nun in 19th century Russia, suffering from a crisis of faith, delusions, and puzzles. It’s one of the most cinematically interesting games we’ve played in a long time, and ended up spurring nearly two hours of discussion about a four-ish hour game.
Your ex-girlfriend, queen of the vampires, has holed up in an El Paso motel to perform a ritual that will bring about the end of the world. As John Savage, veteran monster hunter and bullet-time gun-diver, you’ll need to fight through all 50 floors of the surreal extrandimensional motel to stop her. Soon to be a major motion picture!
Slumps. Ruts. Dulldrums. Whatever you want to call them, most of us have likely experienced times when you couldn’t play or enjoy games in the way you might want for one reason or another. In this topic episode we talk about the various reasons we’ve ended up in gaming slumps, and what we did to get out of them.
It’s the ultimate video game power fantasy: the power to clean up after ourselves. Terra Nil is a unique “city builder” in the lineage of Sim City, but with tasks you with revitalizing a wilderness on a ruined Earth, and ultimately with destroying what you’ve built, erasing all evidence of your presence and leaving the Earth to heal.
It’s a strange union of theme and mechanics. It’s also the first “city builder” we’ve covered on the show. Not a genre known for short games, or even games with endings!
After an incredibly troubled development, we finally have the latest game from the team that brought you Gone Home and Tacoma… Sort of. Open Roads, from publisher Annapurna and the developers known here as The Open Roads Team, is a narrative “walking simulator” with some unusual twists, like 2D animated dialogue in a 3D world, and a story that plays out across multiple locations and the car rides in between. Tess is a teenager in 2003, packing up the remains of her life with her mom after her father’s sudden departure and her grandmother’s death. While cleaning up aunt Helen’s house, Tess discovers a family mystery that propels her and her mother on a road trip to discover who they really are, and who they are to each other.
We enjoyed this game a lot, but also spent a good amount of this episode discussing the strange and upsetting circumstances of its development, and where the “walking sim” genre stands today, over 10 years after it rose to prominence with Gone Home.
400 episodes. Nearly 10 years. I absolutely can not believe it. To celebrate, Laura put together an incredibly well produced trivia night game for us to play! Who knows the most about the last 10 years of The Short Game?
Slice & Dice is a game that just keeps giving, and we don’t just mean incredible dice-rolling gameplay. Since we last covered Slice & Dice, it has received two major updates. As we prepare for our 400th episode, Nate & Laura put together a quick episode about what makes this game so great and why you should absolutely play the new release, even if it means begininng a new (or returning to) a major addiction.
As we close in on Episode 400 (where did the time go?) Shane and Raygan are talking about weird-horror phone bank simulator Home Safety Hotline. Is that caller suffering from bedbugs, or Bed Teeth?
Tagspodcast
This week we go rogue and chat about a whole bunch of games — Super Mario Wonder (short to mid-length), Helldivers 2 (long!), and an assortment of “daily games” (seconds to minutes!).
A card based roguelike that is arguably related to Poker has been blowing up recently, so naturally we gave it a shot. Turns out, yeah, it’s good!
Debatably a short game, but indisputably a classic. Raygan has played SotN many times but the rest of the crew is experiencing it for the first time. What will they make of this revolutionary 1997 PlayStation game?
Golf + pool + the developer behind holedown? Be still our hearts. Subpar Pool brings polish and charm to the (pool) table, with tons of variations and challenges to keep it fresh — we highly recommend you pick it up on mobile, Switch, or Steam. Plus, a tour of your hosts’ various attempts to play games in bars.
When inkle drops a surprise release, we dive in — and this time, we dove into a maze of art from museums around the world. The Forever Labyrinth is a totally free, browser-based “replayable narrative rogue-like adventure” made in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture. In addition to reviewing the game, we took this as an excuse to talk about our favorite museum-going experiences and our feelings about corporate-sponsored games. (Encarta may also come up.)
Expect each run to take about twenty minutes, with multiple trips through to uncover more secrets.
Turns out all of us skipped the tutorial and (whaddayaknow!?) had a really hard time with the early hours of this retro action platformer. Don’t be like us! In the end though we all had...
I can’t believe it’s been almost two years since we last talked about the Playdate, the cute little console with a crank. We start with an update on if/how we’re still playing out Playdates, and...
The famous Roottree sisters and their parents, heirs to a billion dollar candy empire, have suddenly died in a plane crash. The inheritance is in question, with a massive family tree full of potential beneficiaries. ...
This week Nate and Laura cover Jusant, somehow our second 2023 tower game and our second 2023 climbing game — but micro-genres aside, Jusant’s got plenty of charms of its own. Don’t Nod, the creators...
We’re a little late, but it’s time to talk about The Short Game’s Game of the Year! As with previous years we’re also handing out many superlatives, including returning awards like Dirtbag of the Year....
Laura and Raygan manage to shift one small shovel of their pile of shame before the holidays. We’re so glad to have made time for Chants of Sennaar, an incredible puzzle adventure game in which...
The latest game from Short Game favorite Inkle has proved to be a bit divisive. Laura enjoyed it, but Raygan hit some major issues that spoiled the experience. It made for an interesting conversation!
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...
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...
We continue our coverage of IFComp 2023 with a few more games AND THEN WE GET KICKED IN THE NUTS!!!!
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....
This week we’re talking about Gunbrella, a game that gets in its own way more than anything we’ve played in a while.
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!
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)...
As a follow up to our episode on our favorite mechanics, a listener suggested we talk about which ones we hate! So we did!
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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,...
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...
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...
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 their collection. A good conversation!
Laya’s Horizon is available for iOS and Android, exclusively for Netflix subscribers.
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 take about four hours away from your busy Tears of the Kingdom schedule.
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 have our eye on for the show.
This is a sort of new format for us, so let us know what you liked and didn’t! And if you liked it, let us know if there are other events you’d like us to give a similar treatment.
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 climate disaster, but also about preparing to leave that community, as you save up for a ticket to the moon.
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:
- Night in the Woods
- Kentucky Route Zero
- Celeste
- Katamari Damacy
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- 80 Days
- The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe
- What Remains of Edith Finch
- Pyre
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.
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 dinner party aboard a robotic train. But what’s this? Sonic’s been… murdered?! Help Tails solve the mystery, and rub elbows with the entire sh*tty friends squad in this warm and funny tribute.
This game is FREE on Steam for Windows. Expect it to take 2-3 hours to complete.
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 hygiene.”
Titan Station is available on Steam and GOG for Windows PCs. Expect it to take about 3-5 hours to complete.
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.
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 produce a specific ending.
Storyteller launches today on Steam and Nintendo Switch. Expect it to take around 2-5 hours to complete.
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.
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 game design in some great ways, producing a game that is a bit less ambitious but far more accessible. It left us feeling like geniuses.
Golden Idol is available on Steam and GOG for Windows and Mac. Expect it to take about 6 hours to complete.
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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.
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.
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!
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 be viewed in portrait orientation.
Everything about the game seems carefully tailored for mobile, but it’s also unlike any mobile game I’ve played in years, with charming characters and animation, an involving story, and difficult but fair combat.
Afterplace clocks in at about 6-10 hours, depending on how lost you get during the game’s less directed sections. It’s a steal at $6.99 on the iOS and Android app stores.
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 Arcade subscription service.
We’re taking this opportunity to rerelease our original episode on the game. Laura and Shane kick things off with a brief intro before we jump into episode 99 of the show.
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 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!
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 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 our show on Twitter at @_shortgame
Your hosts this week were:
- Raygan Kelly – @raygan@bird.rodeo
- Shane Kelly – @8bitShane
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 made for some reason.
Happy New Year!
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 our show on Twitter at @_shortgame
Your hosts this week were:
- Raygan Kelly – @raygan@bird.rodeo
- Shane Kelly – @8bitShane
- Nate Heininger – @natestl
- Laura Nash – @laurajnash
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 creator of Iron Lung, DUSK, and Squirrel Stapler — and it’s available now on Steam for Windows. The game takes 30 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on your skill level.
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 our show on Twitter at @_shortgame
Your hosts this week were:
- Raygan Kelly – @raygank
- Nate Heininger – @natestl
- Laura Nash – @laurajnash
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 10, we were convinced the game was a stone-cold classic. Raygan and Shane break down the qualities that made the game so successful, and its widespread impact on gaming in general.
Once again, we command you: GO PLAY PORTAL AGAIN!
Links for this episode* The Last Guardian * Our Broken Age Episode * The Banner Saga * Casual Shenanigans Podcast on YouTube * Star Citizen * The Veronica Mars Movie * Transistor * Transistor Trailer * Bastion for iOS * The original Portal trailer * Portal: The Flash Version * ASCIIPortal * Narbacular Drop * Download Narbacular Drop * The Orange Box * Johnathan Coulton * Still Alive – YouTube link * Portal’s patched ending * Teslagrad on Steam * Our Thomas Was Alone episode * Thinking with Time Machine
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 our show on Twitter at @_shortgame
Your hosts this week were:
- Raygan Kelly – @raygank
- Shane Kelly – @8bitShane
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 only one way to find out…
Pentiment is available on PC/XBox (Gamepass), and is a little on the long side for us at 12-15 hours.
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 our show on Twitter at @_shortgame
Your hosts this week were:
- Raygan Kelly – @raygank
- Laura Nash – @laurajnash
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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)...
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...
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...
“Marissa Marcel was a film star. She made three movies. But none of the movies was ever released. And Marissa Marcel disappeared.” Short Game royalty Sam Barlow (Her Story, Telling Lies) is back with a...
What better pitch than “A short horror game where you pilot a tiny submarine through an ocean of blood on an alien moon?” Iron Lung is an exercise in feeling doomed. Lost in space with...
Haiku the Robot is a fantastic “adventure-exploration” game (ok maybe that is better than “metroidvania”) that wears its Hollow Knight inspiration on its sleeve, but the quirky post-human robot world has a charm of its...
An Apple Arcade original that is finally making its way out into gen pop, South of the Circle is a film-like narrative game set in the Cold War 60s. It alternates between a climate scientist...
It’s the cat game everyone is talking about, but it still managed to surprise us. While we had some nits to pick, the charming kitty protagonist and incredible lived-in spaces kept us tapping our toe-beans....
Prompted by the fact that all four of our hosts recently got the Miyoo Mini emulator handheld, the hosts chat about the device itself and what retro games we’ve been playing on it. The Short...
Ludum Dare 50 winner Shotgun King is a wild twist on chess, with dashes of roguelike deckbuilding and a scattering of buckshot. As the Black King, all your subjects have abandoned you. Face off against...
Somehow the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles became one of the most persistent media properties of our lifetimes, yet it’s been years since a good Turtles game came along. Shredder’s Revenge is reverent of the old...
This week we played Citizen Sleeper, the second game from In Other Waters developer Jump Over The Age, solo developer Gareth Damian Martin. Citizen Sleeper is a narrative game with mechanics inspired by tabletop games...
Now’s your chance to be a big shot! We‘re all caught up on Deltarune, and now we have to wait forever for the next chapter just like everyone else. Torture! The Short Game is supported...
FRANKEN is a short, free RPG parody from solo indie developer splendidland, and at least to my taste it’s one of the funniest games I’ve ever played. You owe it to yourself to Jordan Starkweather...
Turnip Boy is an immediate contender for our dirtbag of the year award. This game packs a lot of jokes into its 2-ish hours, some of which are even funny! Check out the game on...
Since the 90s, Panic has been known as a creator of playful, functional software. Then, nearly two decades into their existence they took an unexpected swerve into video game publishing. During that time they also...
Thank you to the listeners and patrons who kindly kept asking us when we were covering Deltarune. The answer is NOW! Thank you for your patience these last… checks watch… nearly four years! Deltarune is...
More than a re-release, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is a massive expansion of the original game, with new endings, new jokes, and a bucket. This episode features light spoilers for the original Stanley Parable...
NORCO describes itself as a “Southern Gothic point & click narrative adventure that immerses the player in the sinking suburbs and verdant industrial swamps of a distorted South Louisiana.” It’s full of vivid characters, beautiful...
Raygan has had his hands on a Steam Deck for about a week, and so we decided to chat about the device and what it means for our corner of the gaming landscape. Turned out...
This week we played several Game Boy homebrew games, all made using the free game making tool GB Studio. All these games can be played on the web, in a Game Boy emulator, or on...
A Memoir Blue is the latest release from publisher Annapurna, and first from developer Cloisters Interactive. The developer describes it as “interactive poem” in which an olympic swimmer reflects on her childhood and her relationship...
Raygan and Nate are a little late to the party with this chat about the virally popular casual bullet hell Vampire Survivors. Plus a lengthy digression about popcorn! The Short Game is supported directly by...
Nate, Shane, and Laura discuss the mouse-bouncing tactical pachinko RPG Beast Breaker, from Asher Volmer’s studio Vodeo Games. Beast Breaker is available on Nintendo Switch and on PC via the Epic Games Store. Expect it...
The Itch.io bundle for Ukraine (organized by Necrosoft Games) included a ton of great stuff. We spent some time this week combing through the nearly 1000 games and other works in the bundle, and have...
The sequel (or “sister game”) to 2018’s Far: Lone Sails returns us to a world in which driving a train/boat requires an awful lot of running around. The Short Game is supported directly by our...
A world in which dodgeball is the solution (and cause) of every problem! Dodgeball Academia is a somewhat overlooked sports RPG released in 2021 for PC and consoles (and included in Game Pass), and we...
We’re taking a break from our regular format this week and doing an all What’s Making Us Happy This Week episode. First, Shane talks about the out-of-the-box experience of his new Quest 2 VR headset,...
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...
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...
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!...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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: Wonderbox00:07:42: Hitchhiker00:14:40: A Monster’s Expedition00:21:40: Sneaky Sasquatch00:31:11: Clap Hanz...
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...
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...
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...
Laura and Raygan dive into this character focused kingdom management simulator about a royal family having a really, really bad year. Yes, Your Grace is available on PC/Xbox (and included in Game Pass for both...
This week Raygan and Shane have been spending time with Hardspace: Shipbreaker, an early access spaceship salvage simulator that is just on the verge of releasing its first real story content. We’ve been following this...
This week we are talking abut some of the long game experiences we’ve had going in between short games lately. Nate talks about deck-building RPG SteamWorld Quest, Raygan has been playing (ugh) Cyberpunk 2077 and...
A nameless hero trudges endlessly through a world of darkness, walking an endless path and fighting the confused and desperate monsters of his forgotten homeland. Is the lost world even worth remembering, or worth saving?...
This week we are talking about Ghostrunner, a first person platforming cyberpunk action slice-em-up tough-as-nails wallrunning robot ninja game from Polish developer One More Level. This game grabbed us and would not let us go....
A Hand With Many Fingers by Colestia is a first person conspiracy research game. Using advanced tools such as a card catalog and a cork board, uncover the real life spy thriller mystery of Nugen...
This week we were disrupted by the massive winter storms in Texas, so we are rereleasing this classic episode from 2015. Her Story is one of the best games we’ve covered on the show, and...
Why do these squirrels behave so strangely? Use cameras and other monitoring equipment to track their movement, and uncover the secret hiding in Melmoth forest in this… animal surveillance adventure game? Nuts has a beautiful...
Oh-oo-oh, we’re Talkin’ ’bout Bugsnax. We covered Young Horses previous game, Octodad: Dadliest Catch way back in 2014, and here in 2021 they’re back with a new and even weirder game. Bugsnax sends you on...
Eliza is a near-future sci-fi story about the culture of tech, mental health, and the moral and ethical questions around the creation, use, and misuse of the eponymous AI counseling program, Eliza. It’s one of...
We loved Carto, a friendly little puzzle adventure from developer Sunhead Games. It’s a breezy adventure that combines Carcassonne-style map tile laying puzzles with a cute adventure story full of sweet characters in a very...
In this “Narrative Exploration Game” by Gareth Damian Martin you play as an AI that inhabits an advanced dive suit worn by scientist Ellery Vas as she explores a distant planet and encounters alien life...
Transistor was The Short Game’s first Game of the Year, all the way back in 2014. This week we are re-releasing that episode, with some fresh Making us Happy in the intro. We’ll be back...
Thanks for sticking with us in 2020. We can’t wait to see what next year brings. 00:03:20: Game of the Year 2020: Kentucky Route Zero00:12:44: Shane’s Pick: Streets of Rage 400:20:37: Shane’s Bonus Pick: Grindstone00:28:04:...
Reigns developer Nerial worked with interactive fiction luminary Emily Short to adapt George Orwell’s classic allegory of the Russian revolution to video game form. But is it a farming simulator? Animal Farm is available for...
Abzu developer Giant Squid and publisher Annapurna Interactive released The Pathless last month, in a strange launch that positioned the game as one of the first “next-gen” indies while quietly also making it available on...
Hades isn’t short! But we’re covering it anyway because we’re Supergiant Games superfans. We’re joined by friend of the show and Hades speedrunner Robert Hawks aka Rubella aka The Patron Saint of Bird Week, who...
We needed a low-prep episode for this holiday week, so we’re taking your questions! Thanks to our patrons and listeners who sent in their questions. We’d like to make this a recurring feature of the...
We’re continuing our coverage of IFComp 2020 with nine more games. We plan to return after the close of the comp to discuss the winners. Thanks for joining us for this year’s comp, and thanks...
The Reigns franchise from developer Nerial and publisher Devolver Digital leaves medieval-ish times and blasts off into rock-and-roll outer space in this Apple Arcade exclusive that shakes up more than just the setting. Links for...
We’re continuing our coverage of IFComp 2020 with a new crop of games, and J.J. Guest, winner of IFComp 2018 for his game Alias: The Magpie, is joining us to discuss several of this year’s...
With Reigns: Beyond coming to Apple Arcade on November 6th it seemed an appropriate time to re-release our episode from 2016 covering the original Reigns. This unlikely series has spawned a sequel, a Game of...
World of Horror draws inspiration from point and click adventure games, retro computers, horror manga, H.P. Lovecraft, and even recent rogue-lite games, and it’s a unique synthesis. It’s also notably a game “made by one...
Morris Lupton is the recently deceased museum curator of the tiny British island of Shelmerston. He’s also the only one who can stop the volcano at the center of the island from erupting. Morris and...
Our IFComp coverage continues, this time with a guest! Long time interactive fiction author and first place 2016 IFComp winner Robin Johnson joins us to talk about a fresh crop of games! 00:00:00: Intro –...
It’s fall, and that means IFComp is upon us again. This quick hit episode introduces our coverage of IFComp 2020, and covers the handful of games we were able to check out between the opening...
Paratopic is a cursed Playstation 1 game. Or perhaps it’s an experiment in first person storytelling. Or perhaps it’s just creepy AF. This award winning game from 2018 just came to Nintendo Switch, and it’ll...
In the tradition of great arcade racing games like Daytona USA and OutRun2, Hotshot Racing brings fluid 60fps to Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and Steam. 8 The Short Game is supported directly by our...
This week we’re talking about a pair of very short very wet games. Spitkiss is “a story of boundless love, told through precision platforming.” Navigate the challenges of polyamory by spitting loving loogies through spikey...
What The Golf? for Apple Arcade, Nintendo Switch, and PC, is not a golf game. It is, however, a good excuse for a Raygan Rant. The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on...
We are now participating in the cultural event of Blaseball. Recorded during the final game of the Season 4 Internet Series, we are joined by narrative designer, writer, and Hades Tigers fan Cat Manning. Cat...
Killer Queen Black is a team-based arcade strategy game based on the original arcade-only Killer Queen. Two teams of four players fight for the glory of their hive, with three ways to win. It’s available...
The classic edutainment title is back in 4K, and now you can pay $10 to give your frog a hat! The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level...
It’s a short game rerun this week while Raygan takes some parental leave, but we’re bringing back a timely episode. Superhot Mind Control Delete is out this week and will be our new episode when...
For as long as the show has been around, whenever we asked “what’s a great short retro game?” the nearly unanimous answer was always “Super Metroid!” It’s the game that launched one of our favorite...
Superliminal is a first person puzzle game based on optical illusions and forced perspective. In development by a small team since 2014, this game has some incredibly polished tech and clever puzzle design, while its...
Young love in the Lonely Valley. JELLY is an interactive fiction game co-written by Short Game favorite Chandler Groover and newcomer (?) Tom Lento. It was recently awarded Best in Show at the Spring Thing...
This week guest host Anna Anthropy joins us to discuss an unexpected HD remaster of a beloved but obscure Japan-only GameCube game! The Mr. Driller series burned brightly but briefly from 1999 through the early...
Set in a colorful post-apocalyptic wasteland, Signs of the Sojourner is a narrative deck-building game about building a character – and deck – through conversations. It has a beautifully illustrated visual-novel style presentation, and a...
Jet Lancer is a free-flying 2D shooter that feels like a colorful, expanded version of Luftrausers. Fly a high-tech jet that can flip 360° mid flight and boost to air-brake, and take on swarms of...
This week on the show we are talking about the incredible itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality, a pay-what-you-want bundle of over 1000 games supporting the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Community...
No episode this week, but please listen to this brief programming note. #BlackLivesMatter Our next episode will be covering highlights from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. We’d like to know what stands...
In this episode Shane and Laura talk about Mini Metro and Mini Motorways by Dinosaur Polo Club, a game and its sequel. One has had staying power and one hasn’t. When SimCity got serious: the...
It’s another almost-annual round up of bird-themed games! Mark Bramhill joins us to share some bird facts as we tap-to-flap. The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at any level...
A perfect fantasy about going to an office job, something many of us aren’t able to do right now. Good Job! is a strange comedy puzzle game for Nintendo Switch. As the CEO’s kid, you...
Was Freya Fellow stabbed by a painting? Detective Grimoire and his assistant Sally Spears have come to Tangle Tower to find out. Laura and Raygan discuss this incredibly well animated and voice acted mystery game,...
More than 20 years after the last official game in the series, Streets of Rage is back thanks to a dream team of developers from Lizardcube, Guard Crush Games, and DotEmu. Raygan and Shane, both...
Raygan and Nate dig in to this tough as nails retro-inspired ninja platformer. This game is a little longer than our usual limit, but it hides an interesting structural twist at its midpoint that made...
We’re finally saying goodbye to Kentucky Route Zero, with an episode covering Act V as well as the interludes Un Pueblo de Nada and Death of the Hired Man. It’s been a long, strange journey....
In a world where all mixers are outlawed, the world’s greatest bartender fights against evil corporations by mixing 50/50 vodka and absinthe. The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners on Patreon! Supporters at...
You demanded it, so this week we’re talking about Animal Crossing. Because Raygan doesn’t know anything about Animal Crossing, Shane brought in two subject matter experts: Returning guest Mark Bramhill is a podcaster and radio...
Death Crown stands out with a 1-bit pixel art meets metal album cover aesthetic, but it’s also something we don’t often see: a real time strategy game with a campaign that you can complete in...
It’s been a pretty normal couple of weeks with nothing strange or concerning happening at all, so we’re curling into a ball and playing comfort food games. What’s comfortable will be different for each person,...
Kentucky Route Zero’s fourth act is its longest, most complex structurally, and might be its saddest yet. We continue our discussion of the game as well as the interlude Here & There Along The Echo....
As you’ll hear in the intro we initially planned to discuss both Act III and Act IV on this episode, but we had such an interesting talk about Act III that we used up all...
This week we’re returning to something we used to do semi-frequently: we’re highlighting some of our favorite video game music tracks! We haven’t done one of these in quite a while (years!) so let us...
This week we are re-releasing our 2015 episode covering the Spider series from Tiger Style games. Both Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon are iOS classics that have...
Speed Dating for Ghosts seems at first like a riff on the comedic-dating-sim-adventure-game in the vein of Dream Daddy or Monster High, but this short narrative game doesn’t ever do quite what you’d expect. Get...
Guildlings is a charming mobile-first adventure RPG set in “a world of wizards and wifi.” We’ll be scribbling bad fan art of the characters in this Apple Arcade adventure for a long time. Guildlings is...
This week we’re discussing Wide Ocean Big Jacket, a story-game camping trip, from developer Turnfollow and publisher Tender Claws. Mord and her boyfriend Ben are on their first camping trip together (like, together together) accompanied...
Shane and Laura take the podcast where it’s never dared to go… up off of the couch! Ring Fit Adventure for the Nintendo Switch is yet another Nintendo attempt at a fitness game, but it...
Kentucky Route Zero, both the game and this episode, have been a long time coming. With the 5th act of the long in-development magical realist adventure game finally coming on January 28th, we decided it...
This week we’re breaking from our usual format to discuss the 2010s, and the arc that indie games (and gaming generally) have taken through the decade. The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners...
As Nate put it, Katana Zero is a game that really goes for it. It goes for ALL of it. Incredible high speed acrobatic melee combat. Clever time-manipulation mechanics. A dialogue system that lets you...
2019 was a divided year in so many ways, so perhaps we should have expected a stalemate when picking a Short Game of the Year. All four hosts run down our exceedingly divergent Short-GOTY picks...
The Detective is back in his second mysterious adventure! We covered the first Frog Detective game earlier this year, and now we’re back with his most intriguing case yet. The Frog Detective games are really...
Outer Wilds is a bit longer than the games we typically cover, but it was such a surprise favorite that we had to talk about it on the podcast before the end of the year....
Bleak Sword is a dark fantasy action game with 1-bit diorama artwork and brutally difficult combat. It’s a surprise inclusion in the opening volley of Apple Arcade, since it’s tough as nails and doesn’t seem...
A lot of developers have tried their hand at a first person physics puzzle game, but not many have put the artistry, innovation, and sheer time into them as William Chyr has put into Manifold...
This week we’re re-releasing our episode on the best reason to own a 3DS, Link Between Worlds! This was a great episode thanks to guest host Gary Butterfield. Now that Raygan’s move is complete and...
Fans of John Wick, John Woo, Deadpool and/or Nate and Laura buddy hour — you’re in luck! We’re covering My Friend Pedro this week, a stylish shooter/platformer that prioritizes making you look and feel like...
Our third and likely final episode on IFComp 2019 before the comp ends on November 15th. (Get your ratings in!) We covered the following games: 00:03:18: Chuk and the Arena by Agnieszka Trzaska 00:12:32: Remedial...
What went wrong aboard the low earth orbit space station Observation, and what did you do to cause it? In Observation you’ll play as S.A.M., the AI in charge of maintaining the space station, assisting...
Our second episode covering IFComp 2019. This week we had a lively discussion of 13 games: 00:03:03: Skies Above By Arthur DiBianca 00:10:00: Limerick Heist By Pace Smith 00:17:32: The Legendary Hero Has Failed. by...
Our 200th episode is a special milestone, and we’re spending it returning to the topic of our very first episode. Gone Home came out in August 2013 (our show started in April 2014) and its...
This is the 25th year of the competition (!!!) and there are a record breaking 82 entries! We’re kicking off our coverage of IFComp 2019 with discussion of the first 8 games we’ve played. Due...
Suddenly this horrible goose is all anyone is talking about. Untitled Goose Game, developed by House House and published by Panic, is a game about being a horrible goose and causing trouble for everyone you...
Simogo is a legendary developer on iOS. We’ve covered their work in the past, especially the stunning Year Walk. Sayonara Wild Hearts is a big departure from their previous games. Get a load of this...
Marketed as a “pinbrawler” or top-down, pinball-inspired, hack-and-slash dungeon crawler, Creature in the Well seems designed to appeal to Raygan’s specific tastes. It’s tough as nails, and occasionally frustrating, but this is a truly unique...
Hot on the heels of last week’s episode on Telling Lies, we’re covering another FMV game. This week it’s Erica, a surprise release from British developer Flavourworks and published as a PS4 exclusive by Sony...
Telling Lies is Sam Barlow’s long awaited follow up to Her Story. Similarly to that game you’re acting as an investigator, searching through a database of video evidence, experiencing a story through out of sequence...
A few months ago we finally covered Anodyne, an indie developers Sean Han Tani and Marina Kittaka. Now it’s sequel is here, and it’s a massive step forward. Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is a...
This week we’re re-releasing our episode on Katamari Damacy, which originally aired in May of 2015. Katamari still holds a very dear place in our hearts, and fortunately it’s now available on Nintendo Switch and...
Counterfeit Monkey is a 2012 interactive fiction adventure puzzle game by Emily Short. What’s special about this game is its brilliant central puzzle mechanic, in which you’ll be removing letters from the names of objects...
Long time listeners may remember that way back in 2016 we did a theme week where we discussed only games about or featuring birds (except one, because we’re bad at themes.) We’ve been threatening to...
It’s been over seven years since Jenova Chen’s thatgamecompany released Journey, but game’s influence is still being felt today. This month, thatgamecompany is back with a new experience that builds on Journey’s core concept while...
Eric Farraro, developer and designer of the mobile roguelike deck builder Meteorfall, joins us to offer some perspective on Slay the Spire, a deep roguelike deck builder that’s recently come to Nintendo Switch. We discuss...
We are joined by Gary Butterfield of the Duckfeed.tv network of podcasts to discuss the new collaboration between Brace Yourself Games and Nintendo, Cadence of Hyrule: Crypt of the NecroDancer featuring The Legend of Zelda....
We covered Crypt of the Necrodancer in 2014, before the game left early access. Since we will be covering it’s Zelda-infused sequel Cadence of Hyrule next week, and the original episode has dropped off of...
In this episode of a podcast that is definitely about video games, we’re talking about our favorite board games we’ve played this year. Laura is mid-way through a cross country move and her regular microphone is packed...
Eli Hodapp, formerly of TouchArcade, joins us this week to talk about his new venture GameClub. We’ve long bemoaned the state of premium games on the iOS App Store, and the team at GameClub are...
Mark Bramhill of the excellent Welcome to Macintosh podcast joins us again to talk about this year’s crop of Apple Design Award winning games. This feels like a strange transition year for Apple in gaming, and we have...
Gato Roboto is a retro-styled Metroid-like starring Kiki, a cute kitty in a powerful mech suit. Freshman developer Doinksoft and veteran indie publisher Devolver Digital bring us this 1-bit black and white adventure that might...
A Plague Tale: Innocence is a beautiful if gruesome stealth action game from Asobo Interactive. Set in 12th century France, you’ll play as Amicia De Rune, a girl from a noble family in the French countryside,...
Micro Mages is a NES homebrew with remarkably modern game design. Morphcat Games managed to fit an entire 4-player Towerfall-inspired co-op platfomer into just 40kb. It’s an incredible feat of 6502 assembly programming, and an...
Raygan is traveling this week, so in lieu of a full episode we are re-releasing a classic travel-themed Short Game that has just dropped off of the RSS feed. 80 Days was a break out...
After last week’s big episode, Laura and Raygan are taking a moment to relax into a charming little game about a frog. Developer Grace Bruxnor’s The Haunted Island, A Frog Detective Game is a lovely...
The developer of Short Game favorite 80 Days returns with an ambitious new game, and we are joined by a new guest! Laura Garofalo is a Roman cultural historian and Latinist with experience on archeological...
Do you know what they call a Rolando in Paris? That’s right, they call it a Rolando: Royal Edition. One of the earliest smash hit iOS games has just received a beautiful remaster and re-release,...
This week on The Short Game we discuss Photographs, the latest game by Luca Redwood, developer of show favorite You Must Build A Boat. Photographs is a narrative puzzle game for PC, Mac, Linux, iOS...
Anodyne by developers Sean Han Tani and Marina Kittaka is something we've been meaning to cover for a very long time. Originally released in February 2013 (early days of the indie game boom), it's taken this surreal Zelda-like over six years to get a console release. Now that it's available on PS4 and Nintendo Switch, and on the eve of the release of its sequel, Laura and Raygan visit Anodyne to see if it's stood the test of time.
Game Is Good! This week we're discussing the award winning puzzle game Baba Is You, from Finnish developer Hempuli Oy. In this mind- (and rule-bending) puzzle game, each Sokoban-style level is governed by a unique set of simply stated rules (Baba Is You, Block Is Push, Flag Is Win etc) each of which is represented by a set of physical rule-objects that can be pushed around and manipulated within the game.
A violent instrument plays jazz of rage and sorrow on this week's Short Game. Ape Out is an intense top-down musical beat-em-up from developer Gabe Cuzzillo. We discuss the game's "virtual drummer", Saul Bass inspired art style, and hear a LOT from Nate about Star Trek's Vic Fontaine.
In this special Valentines episode of The Short Game we’re discussing Monster Prom, the monster dating party game from Beautiful Glitch. It’s a mad dash to date the hottest monsters and get a date to prom while screwing over your friends.
The best legs in video games are on display as we tippy-tap our way through Pikuniku. This three hour puzzle-adventure is out now on Switch and PC/Mac from developer Sectordub and publisher Devolver Digital.
GRIS is a beautifully animated and colorful game about a girl on a journey through grief. The artwork is absolutely top tier, while the gameplay is presented without challenge or danger making the game extremely...
After a delay in recording due to Raygan’s daughter being born (what a sorry excuse!) we are back with our Game of the Year episode for 2018! It’s been a great year for short games,...
The Obra Dinn was lost at sea along with all its cargo and 60 crew members. Suddenly the ship has reappeared, but what became of the crew? In this intricate mystery deduction game you’ll use...
The Tetris Effect is the latest music/puzzle/synesthesia experience from legendary game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Shane spends most of this episode mercilessly clowning on me for my Tetris skills while we discuss the benefits playing Tetris...
IFComp 2018 is nearing its conclusion, so it’s time for a few last games! On this episode we discussed: 00:02:09 The Origin of Madame Time by Mathbrush 00:12:01 Terminal Interface for Models RCM301-303 by VigiMech...
IFComp 2018 is nearly done, and we’re closing the comp talking about some really strong games! This is the first part of a two part episode rounding out our coverage of IFComp 2018. I was...
And we are back with more IFComp 2018! We discuss nine more of the games on this year’s ballot. Horror, mystery, and extended IFComp in-jokes abound! If you play something in the comp you think...
The leaves are changing, folks are putting up Halloween decorations… that’s right it’s IFComp season once again. Long time listeners to this show already know how passionate we are about the Interactive Fiction Competition. Now...
In Wandersong you play as a bard, and interact with almost everything through a fun and expressive singing mechanic. You’ll do a LOT of singing. Turns out there is no problem that can’t be solved...
After years in development and what seems like decades on the Short Game upcoming games spreadsheet, solo developer Ben Esposito has finally released Donut County. We loved playing as as a hole in the ground...
In this, the year of too many Metroidvanias (jk there can never be too many Metroidvanias) Drinkbox returns with a long awaited sequel to their 2013 action platformer hit Guacamelee. (We covered Guacamelee way back...
Bomb Chicken is the first console game from mobile game royalty Nitrome. It’s a perfect example of a developer creating a entire game based on a single, super polished mechanic. Nitrome uses clever level design...
It’s an all-singing-all-dancing episode this week as we play Peter Panic, a mobile game that mixes WarioWare style micro games with the magic of musical theater! This mobile game stands out by being a fully-sung...
This week we’re taking a vacation from our typical format to talk about playing games while traveling. The obvious topic is how the Nintendo Switch is chainging how we play, but we also discuss gaming...
Yoku’s Island Express is a pinball-metroidvania. Yeah. And as a synthesis of those two seemingly incompatible ideas it actually succeeds incredibly well. We break down what makes this bizarre fusion more than just a novelty....
Gary Butterfield of Duckfeed.tv joins us to discuss West of Loathing, the hilarious stick-figure open-world RPG by Asymmetric. West of Loathing originally released last summer on Steam, but it recently launched as a console exclusive...
For our fifth year in a row, The Short Game is discussing this year’s Apple Design Award winning games. The ADA winners are often some of the best iOS games of the year, but they...
Mike Bithell’s follow-up to Subsurface Circular is another single sitting dialogue driven text adventure game, but this time it’s on a boat! Also there’s an alien. We discuss the second “Bithell Short”, a spiritual sequel...
In Far: Lone Sails you’ll pilot a massive rattletrap machine across a beautiful, desolate world. This “atmospheric vehicle adventure game” feels a bit like it was grown in a lab to appeal to The Short...
In a world where absolutely everyone cares about golf… Golf Story is an indie developed golf RPG in the Mario Golf tradition, developed by Sidebar Games. It was an early indie exclusive on the Nintendo...
It’s been 18 months since the release of the PSVR and against all odds there are still great short games coming out! Shane brings us his impressions of the second wave of PSVR games, starting...
We’re joined by special guest Patrick Kelpek of Waypoint to discuss his recent article Most Video Games Are Too Long, in which he compares the experience of playing God of War with Minit. We discuss...
In Minit, you are cursed to die (and be reborn) every 60 seconds. This makes solving puzzles and Zelda-like action challenges a bit more interesting. The game was developed by a four person team consisting...
Into the Breach is the second game by FTL developer Subset Games. FTL was the focus of the fifth episode of this podcast, way back in May of 2014,and has been a major obsession for...
This episode we’re checking in on the sequels to three landmark iOS games we’ve covered the past: Alto’s Odyssey (followup to Alto’s Adventure), Framed 2, and Monument Valley 2. Laura and Raygan discuss the games...
The first game from Mountains, a new “craft games” studio headed by Ken Wong (lead designer of Monument Valley), Florence is best described as an interactive graphic novel set to music. It’s a beautifully illustrated...
Celeste is the second game from Towerfall developer MattMakesGames, which this time is Matt Thorson (Towerfall), collaborator Noel Berry (Skytorn), and friends. Nominally a game about climbing a mountain, Celeste is a difficult story-driven platformer...
Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator’s title says it all—you play a hot dad that gets to date other hot dads. 😍 As soon as it was released in July 2017, Dream Daddy stormed to...
Doki Doki Literature Club has been suggested by more Short Game listeners than any game since Undertale. On the surface it’s a moe anime themed visual novel dating sim, but just under the surface is...
Here’s a fascinating and beautiful little puzzle game that’s almost impossible to describe with words alone, but we’re going to give it our best shot. Gorogoa is a game many years in the making. It’s...
Join us as we finally put 2017 out of its misery! It was a great year for games, if nothing else, and we’re rounding up our favorite short- and non-short-games of 2017. Our Game(s) of...
The succession is complete, and Reigns finally has an heir, or uh, sequel. This isn’t merely a queen-based rehash of the original game. Reigns: Her Majesty adds to and improves on the Reigns formula in...
We’re a little late getting this out, but we’re wrapping up our IFComp 2017 coverage with a discussion of the comp as a whole, the top 10 games, and discussions of a few games that...
This episode we’re discussing short-game touchpoint Thirty Flights of Loving by Blendo Games. Thirty Flights has cast a wide influence over the five years since its release and employs film-like smash cuts and non-sequential storytelling...
Continuing our coverage of IFComp 2017, we’ve played a dozen more games. Check out past two episodes for an intro to IFComp and our first batch of this year’s games. Let us know what caught...
Our coverage of IFComp 2017 finally begins in earnest, with impressions of a dozen of the incredible 79 games entered this year. If you’re new to IFComp or interactive fiction, check out our previous episode...
In this short episode we’re introducing our upcoming coverage of IFComp 2017 with an introduction to the competition and to interactive fiction for new players. We covered IFComp in both 2015 and 2016, and this...
Nex Machina is an arcade shooter with an incredible pedigree. Super Stardust developer Housemarque teamed up with video game legend Eugene Jarvis, creator of games like Defender, Robotron 2048, and Smash TV to create a...
Gotta go fast! This episode we’re talking about Sonic Mania, the first Sonic the Hedgehog game in years to recapture the feeling of the original 2D Sonic games. We discuss our history as Sonic fans,...
Fullbright’s followup to Gone Home finally arrived last month, and we’re floating in to investigate. Tacoma is a sci-fi exploration/narrative storytelling game set aboard a moon-orbiting space station 70 years in the future. You play...
Bithell Beyonce-ed us! Mike Bithell, creator of Short Game favorites Thomas Was Alone and Volume, surprised us with an unexpected release, and it’s incredibly up our alley. Subsurface Circular is a two-hour text adventure game...
This episode originally went live with out-of-sync audio. If you got that version please delete and re-download. Sorry! Supergiant’s third game is finally here, and it’s… a sports game? In Pyre, you lead a band...
Laura and Nate discuss a category of games near and dear to them both, board games that have made their way to digital platforms, especially iOS. Huge link dump for this episode: Board Game Ports...
This week we’re shuffling together two different card-based mash-up games on iOS. Card Thief is a stealthy dungeon crawl in card form, and Missile Cards takes Atari Missile Command and reimagines it as a tense...
Little Nightmares is a side scrolling puzzle-platform-horror-action game by frequent Media Molecule collaborator Tarsier Studios. It’s the first major independent work developed by the Swedish developers, whose catalog most notably includes side content for the...
Mark Bramhill of the Welcome to Macintosh podcast joins us to discuss the winners of this year’s Apple Design Awards. The ADAs are Apple’s yearly recognition of outstanding design in software for iOS and MacOS,...
Guest host Jupiter Hadley joins us to discuss the Ludum Dare 38. Ludum Dare is a game jam/competition where game developers attempt to create a game from scratch in 48 (or 72) hours. Jupiter brings...
The Sexy Brutale is a stylish adventure puzzle game set against the background of a lavish casino mansion, trapped in a single, endlessly looping day. It’s a co-production between Spanish developers Tequila Works and UK...
What Remains of Edith Finch is the second game from The Unfinished Swan developer Giant Sparrow and creative director Ian Dallas. It’s a sort of anthology game; a collection of family stories tied together by...
Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya helped define “indie” game development with his freeware masterpiece Cave Story. Several years later, his follow up was a strange and possibly under appreciated game. Kero Blaster is a side-scrolling shooter, but...
Cut Yourself! (Editor’s Note: Please do not cut yourself.) This week we’re talking the about the sort-of-first-party Nintendo Switch exclusive puzzle game Snipperclips. Break off a tiny controller and chat with us about this unusual...
We’re hopping aboard Sophia III with Jason Frudnick to help him find his pet frog Fred in this remake/sequel to the classic NES shooter/platformer hybrid. We start with a brief discussion of the Blaster Master...
The Short Game’s official Dungeon Master (that’s Shane) shares his tips on fitting Dungeons & Dragons into your life. D&D is having a bit of a moment lately, but it can still feel like “30...
Night in the Woods is an story-focused adventure game that follows college dropout Mae Borowski as she comes home to distressed mining town Possum Springs and tries to reconnect with her family and friends. It’s...
Linelight is a minimalistic puzzle game from Brett Taylor and his one-man development studio My Dog Zorro. It’s an action puzzle game distilled down to an incredibly streamlined form. We discuss what makes this deceptively...
2064: Read Only Memories is a cyberpunk visual novel adventure game from Midboss, the same diverse team behind the GaymerX convention and Gaming in Color, a documentary about LGBTQ people and themes in gaming. Originally...
With the English language release of Puyo Puyo Tetris right around the corner (alongside the Nintendo Switch) we take the opportunity to nerd out about our shared love of Puyo popping, the history of the...
The Room series is one of the best selling short game franchises on iOS, known for its beautiful animation and tactile mechanics. Each of the three entries expands on the physical puzzle theme, moving from...
Pony Island is two-and-a-half hours of puzzles and surprises. Don’t be put off by its retro-glitch aesthetic or its apparent self-satisfied transgressiveness. Once you break through its shell you’ll find a rapid-fire series of clever...
Couch co-op comes to the kitchen this week as we talk about Overcooked, a culinary party game from Ghost Town Games. Overcooked was one of the most talked about local multiplayer experiences of 2016 so...
Recorded and edited just before we drop the guillotine on 2016, it’s our Short Game game of the year round up! Stick around for some gaming memories of 2017, and a drunken message of hope...
Virginia is a “first person interactive drama” that tells a mysterious story of an FBI agent on her first. It’s most notable for its unusual editing style, inspired by film and the game Thirty Flights...
Severed is a dungeon crawling touch-based action RPG by Guacamelee! developer Drinkbox Studios. First released as a Playstation Vita exclusive, it has since been released on iOS, Android, Nintendo 3DS, and Wii U. (We suggest...
IFComp, the annual interactive fiction competition, has come to a close and we’re discussing the results. How did your favorites do? We covered many of the games in this year’s competition in our two earlier...
This week your intrepid hosts fly through the galaxy rescuing space-bunnies in Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. Does this couch co-op set our hearts aflutter? Or are we hardened to the charms of neon and...
Shane bought a PSVR and The Short Game leaves boring old reality behind. We give our impressions of the hardware, and discuss which of the launch games might be interesting to Short Game listeners. Links...
We continue our coverage of 2016’s IFComp, the Interactive Fiction Competition. This continues on from The Short Game episode 102, so if you’re just joining you may prefer starting there. This week we’ve picked and...
Hyper Light Drifter is a tough-as-nails indie action-RPG game that came out earlier this year. After initially bouncing off the game, we gave it a second look and found a lot to like past its...
Now in its 22nd year, IFComp (The Interactive Fiction Competition) is an annual celebration of new text-based games. We covered last year’s competition in a pair of episodes last October, and this year we’re back...
Waking Mars is the second game from Tiger Style, developers of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon. On the surface this 2012 follow-up to Spider appears to be...
We apply Big Data (okay, an Excel spreadsheet) to all 434 games played or mentioned in our 100 episode run, in an effort to answer the cocktail party question “Oh you have a video game...
We’re rubbing the Giddyap button this week with hybrid solitaire and horse racing game Pocket Card Jockey, the surprise 3DS release from Pokémon developers Game Freak. Links for this episode: Pocket Card Jockey for Nintendo...
This week we’re swiping right on Reigns, a kingdom management interactive fiction game with a Tinder inspired interface. This clever twist on the Choose Your Own Adventure style has turned out to be a surprise...
This week we’re exploring the ocean of Abzu, the first game from Journey art director Matt Nava’s Giant Squid Studios. We loved Journey so naturally we were eager to play the game some have called...
Quadrilateral Cowboy is the long awaited new game from Brendan Chung and Blendo Games. Its precursor Thirty Flights of Loving was a brief, carefully edited story of crime and romance, but felt like more of...
We’re looking back to the 90s this week as we discuss Sega Genesis brawler Streets of Rage 2. Links for this episode: Streets of Rage 2 on Steam 3D Streets of Rage 2 for Nintendo...
The latest (second) game from Limbo developers Playdead games is finally here. Inside initially seems like more Limbo; a puzzle platformer. A mysterious, unsettling story told wordlessly, featuring a young boy exploring a spooky environment....
This week we discussed Wheels of Aurelia by developers Santa Ragione. Though technically still in beta, Wheels of Aurelia is a complete experience that expertly blends a driving game with a focus on characters through...
Can it really be two years since our last board game special?! This week we’re rounding up the board and card games we’ve been enjoying when not playing short video games. Join us as we...
As we did in 2014 and 2015, we’ve checked out this year’s Apple Design Award winning games, and we’re back to talk about what they say about iOS as a gaming platform today and in...
Expand is an innovative, difficult to classify game about navigating a circular maze that shifts and expands in response to your movement. It’s a really special experience and we highly recommend it. Expand is available...
This week we’re talking about Human Resource Machine from The Tomorrow Corporation. The makers of Short Game favorites Little Inferno and World of Goo have returned last year with a game that is completely different...
This week we are exploring the insanely varied world of indie game marketplace itch.io. Each of our hosts spent $5 on itch and played two or three games from a variety of vibrant micro-indie creators....
This week we played the infamously short game The Order: 1886. Can time (and bargain bin pricing) redeem this beautiful flop? The claws come out as out panel debates the good, the bad, and the...
This week we’re talking about Warbits, the long awaited iPhone game that captures the feeling (and many of the specific mechanics) of the popular portable turn based strategy Advance Wars. We discuss what makes Warbits...
This week we discuss Telltale’s mystery/noire adventure set in the Fables comic book universe, The Wolf Among Us. Released episodically starting in October 2013, this was Telltale’s follow-up to The Walking Dead. Now that the...
Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP celebrated its 5th anniversary recently, and we’re looking back at its art and influence. If you missed this game when it first launched on the iPad now is a great...
This week Laura and Raygan briefly discuss ghostly postage, haunted mansions, and cleansing clerics. Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight is our main topic. It’s the fourth game in a series of short metroidvanias, but it doesn’t...
We’re all game devs this week as we discuss Kairosoft’s Game Dev Story. This early iPhone game was recently updated for newer devices, and the it’s as strange and inexplicably fun as it was in...
Assault Android Cactus is a fast paced arcade inspired twin-stick shooter that pits a cast of heavily armed androids against wave after wave of killer robots. We missed this overlooked this gem on Steam, but...
This is a weird one! Jazzpunk is comedy adventure game with a Dadaist bent developed by indie duo Necrophone Games and published by Adult Swim. It was released in February 2014 on Steam for PC,...
Until Dawn is a 2015 horror-movie-styled adventure game for the Playstation 4 from relatively unknown developer Supermassive Games. It’s unusual for being a “Triple-A” adventure game, exclusive to the PS4 and with a duration of...
Superhot is a first person shooter where time only moves when you do. That’s the elevator pitch that launched the original version of Superhot from a 2013 7 Day FPS game jam contender to an...
Firewatch is a narrative first-person mystery game set in a the Wyoming wilderness. It blends the storytelling of “walking simulators” like Gone Home with the narrative dialogue of Telltale adventure gamesgames (and indeed it is...
Oxenfree is the first game from Night School Studio, a team with roots at Telltale and Disney. Dialogue takes center stage here, as a bunch of teenagers set off to spend the night on an...
In Tharsis, you command the crew of the badly damaged Mars mission Iktomi, scrambling to keep the ship’s systems active and the crew alive. In form it’s closer to a solo board game than a...
Birds. Nature’s weirdest dudes. This week, we date birds, we defend birds in court, we shoot birds, and we… I guess birds eat bread right? We’re talking rounding up four games that for whatever reason...
Journey by thatgamecompany and designer Jenova Chen is the game most often suggested to us by listeners, and for good reason. This 2 to 3 hour wordless game experience changed the critical landscape when it...
Laura and Raygan discuss Cibele by Nina Freeman and Star Maid Games. Autobiographical and naturalistic to a fault, Cibele tells the story of game designer Nina’s first romance (?) with a boy she meets in...
Mushroom 11 is a puzzle platformer with a truly unique movement mechanic. You control a green blob (the Mushroom) by destroying and pruning its cells bit by bit and allowing it to move and regrow....
With just a few days left in 2015 we round up our favorite short games of the year. 3) Her Story 2) Tie between Rocket League and The Magic Circle The Short Game Game...
We finally catch up on a game we’ve meant to play since March. Ori and the Blind Forest is a beautiful Miyazaki inspired Metroidvania style romp through a lush forest landscape full of bright characters...
Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist is a 15 minute free heist game from Crows Crows Crows, a new development studio headed by William Pugh, one of the creators...
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes has more in common with party games played with boards or cards than with most video games. You play it in person with friends, one of whom is the bomb-defuser,...
We’re back with more discussion of Undertale, but this time we’re talking about the story, characters, and endings! This all-spoiler episode follows up on our spoiler free discussion of the game, so if you haven’t...
The initial version of this episode had a sound issue with Shane’s track that has since been corrected. If you hear any gaps in the audio, please delete and re-download the episode. Sorry for the...
In this special episode of The Short Game we are recapping the final acts of Life is Strange, a game we started covering when its first episodic chapter released early this year. If you are...
Continuing on with our coverage of IFComp (the Interactive Fiction Competition) we’re back with brief impressions of 11 more games from this year’s whopping 55 entries. Be sure to check out Episode 61 for more...
This week we’re talking about The Beginner’s Guide, the new game from Davey Wreden. Wreden’s first game, The Stanley Parable, was the topic of the second episode of The Short Game way back in the...
IFComp, the interactive fiction competition, is the longest running and most important event in the interactive fiction scene. Each year dozens of interactive fiction authors submit new work of all kinds, from hardcore parser puzzle...
It’s Contra meets that-one-level-in-Braid with Super Time Force Ultra! S.T.F.U. was developed by Capy Games (of Superbrothers Sword & Sworcery EP fame.) It’s a fast paced shooter who’s unique time-out mechanic lets you approach the...
Laserlife is a game almost too high-concept to exist. A existential-music-biography game in which you play as a laser-based life form investigating the corpse of a human astronaut it finds drifting through deep space. Also...
Porpentine Charity Heartscape is one of the most fascinating figures in interactive fiction. This week we discuss her collected Twine works, released as a nicely packaged collection entitled Eczema Angel Orifice, released in June of...
Have you played Thomas Was Alone dev Mike Bithell’s newest? Volume looks great and brings the classic sneak-em-up gameplay, but how does its writing compare to Bithell’s vaunted debut effort? We also catch up with...
This week we discuss 2012 indie darling Limbo, which recently arrived on PS4. Limbo is a puzzle platformer with a darkly cartoonish black and white art style and a focus on repeated, brutal, and utterly...
Rather than focus on a single game this week we round up some of the new and exciting short games we’ve been playing this summer. It’s been a really interesting summer for short games with...
We welcome Shane back to the podcast by discussing the Spider series from Tiger Style games. Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor (2009) was one of the iOS App Store’s earliest break-out hits and it...
The Magic Circle is something really unique. In this thoughtful, darkly comic first person puzzle game, you play as the hero of an unfinished video game. The developers have failed you, and it’s your task...
It’s a warm summer day in 1971 and the kaiju are roaming the countryside. We discuss the lovely 3DS eShop game Attack of the Friday Monsters from veteran Japanese game developers Millennium Kitchen, creators of...
This week we discuss Contrast, a flawed but interesting puzzle platformer for PC and consoles. Contrast has an appealing 1920s cabaret aesthetic and a really neat shadow-merging mechanic that had a lot of promise, but...
Her Story by Sam Barlow (and starring Viva Seifert) is a game about a woman talking to the police. You are tasked with re-investigating a murder that took place in 1994 by watching a series...
We’re back with our 50th episode, and for our golden anniversary as a show we’re talking about the stylish comic-book-turned-game, Framed for iOS. This game comes to us from Loveshack, a studio formed by refugees...
In what’s becoming a bit of a tradition, hosts Nate, Shane, and Laura discuss the six games that won Apple Design Awards at WWDC 2015. While this year’s awards seemed to focus on the use...
Raygan and Shane fly solo this week as Raygan visits his bro-host in person! (Please forgive any dip in audio quality.) We discuss Helldivers for Playstation 4, Playstation 3, and Playstation Vita. Helldivers, from the...
In this special double-length episode, guest host Gary Butterfield of Watch Out For Fireballs! joins us to discuss The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. As you may know, Link Between Worlds is a...
Special guest Nate Heagy, founder and developer of Amuses Me Games and die-hard Hearthstone player joins us to discuss the hugely successful digital-native collectible card game from Blizzard. Hearthstone is a bit different from the...
This week we talk about the entrants for this year’s Spring Thing interactive fiction festival. Spring Thing is an offshoot of IFComp that focuses on new works (they must debut as a part of the...
Na Na, nanananana na na na Katamari Damacy! This week we’re rolling it all up and talking about this cult hit from 2004. One of the best pick-up-and-play games of that generation, Katamari Damacy still...
This week we’re discussing The Unfinished Swan, an experimental first person exploration game on Sony platforms from Giant Sparrow. This is a really unique game with some incredible visuals and mechanics. Most famously, it begins...
This week we’re releasing two – that’s right two episodes. This first one is a continuation of our Life is Strange book club. We eschew our regular format to return to the world of teen...
Wait, isn’t this a video games podcast? Well, kinda. This week, we’re talking about pinball! We start with a discussion of playing real, actual, physical pinball in 2015. It’s getting hard to find pinball games...
A goat that solves puzzles to escape a magical tower with the help of his little mouse friend. Sure why not. This week we play Escape Goat 2 by MagicalBeanTime and published by Doublefine. This...
Following up on our previous Shortisode on Game Music, this week we discuss… more game music! Nate wasn’t able to join us last time, so we hear his picks and those of some listeners and...
Grim Fandango is arguably the last mass-market adventure game, and is indisputably a great classic of the genre. Tim Schaffer’s last LucasArts adventure is a stunning amalgam of film noir storytelling, Mexican day of the...
This week begins our sort-of-book-club on the ongoing episodic adventure game Life is Strange. Told in what can only be described as the “Telltale” style, this series of 5 episodes follows Max Caufield, an 18...
This week our podcast literally can not stop running/falling/snowboarding as we discuss the Endless Runner genre. This sometimes celebrated, sometimes maligned mobile focused offshoot of the platform genre is (believe it or not) full of...
This week’s topic is Guacamelee! Super Turbo Championship Edition. (That’s a long title for such a short game!) Guacamelee is a “Metroidvania” with combo-based, beat-’em-up combat, and it’s a game we’ve been looking forward to...
“I have entered into the service of a new gentleman. It would seem he is a gambling man.” 80 Days by Inkle Studios is a video game adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic novel of world...
This week we’re taking another short break from regular format to talk about our favorite video game music! Did we miss your favorite soundtrack? (We probably did!) Let us know! We’ll play followup to this...
The Swapper is a surprisingly awesome 2D puzzle platformer from small Finnish indie developers Facepalm Games. Released for PC/Mac/Linux in May 2013, it’s now also available for current generation Playstation and Nintendo consoles. Its puzzle...
Machinarium, a point and click adventure game by Czech game developers Amanita Design, is our topic this week. Released in 2009, it was their first full-length adventure game after numerous web-based titles. It has been...
To The Moon by Freebird Games is our topic this week. When it came out in 2011 this game was hailed as a triumph of video game storytelling. Using the visual language of 90s RPGs,...
Gunpoint by Tom Francis aka Suspicious Developments is our topic this week. Tom Francis began his game industry career with 9 years as a writer for PC Gamer, and this game is his response to...
The Short Game attempts to discuss an entire genre-defying medium of game design: text-based interactive fiction. That’s right, we’re talking about old-school text adventures, but also newer developments like Twine games and more interactive text...
The fourth game in the Call of Juarez series is its first download-only title. Gunslinger follows Silas Greaves, an over-the-top bounty hunter, whose narration carries the show and whose quest for vengeance drives the plot....
In the final show for 2014, we are counting down our picks for The Short Game game of the year: 3 – Shovel Knight Shovel Knight is an incredible throwback to the NES, but with...
A Dark Room is an incredibly simple and yet incredibly deep and even moving game, unexpected qualities in the “idle games” genre. From the App Store page, you begin with this simple and evocative description:...
In this special Thanksgiving holiday edition of The Short Game, we talk bout some of our favorite long games. We named this show the wrong thing! Shortisodes are a break from our regular format; a...
Update: It took some time after playing this game to get to know the developer, Adrian Chmielarz, on Twitter and through his other writing. While we feel this game is an interesting technical and artistic...
The shocking conclusion to last week’s episode! Gary Butterfield of Watch Out For Fireballs joins us for an extra-long episode on the groundbreaking adventure game The Walking Dead by Telltale games. This is a game...
This week, we talk about zombies. Gary Butterfield of Watch Out For Fireballs joins us for an extra-long episode on the groundbreaking adventure game The Walking Dead by Telltale games. This is a game...
The Short Game is experimenting with our format this week, and you’re the guinea pig! We’re calling these shortisodes; half-length (or less) episodes in which we break from our regular format of talking in depth...