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 To There” Card Game? What on Earth is Snacks ‘n Jaxson? All will be revealed. Happy Holidays!

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 game from the developers of Gris. Raise your teleporting wolf-deer-puppy, nurturing her through many double-jumps, until finally she can become a gun.

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 drawing on other media like film and theater.

1000 years in the future, humanity is all but extinguished and a disease spread by an alien occupation keeps the survivors underground. You are Watcher. You dutifully fulfil your purpose in service of the ALLMOTHER, until the day you learn a shocking secret that changes everything.

This game is a LITTLE long for us at about 12 hours, but it’s divided into ten tightly plotted chapters and respects your time in every conceivable way.

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 discussion!

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.)