This week we are getting romantic with a few interactive fiction romance novels from Choice of Games and their new imprint Heart’s Choice. 

• Crème de la Crème from Choice of Games
• Dawnfall and A Player’s Heart from Heart’s Choice
• Creatures Such as We from Choice of Games
• Laura’s recent guest appearance: 471. Romance Games and Interactive Fiction with Laura Nash of The Short Game Podcast | Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

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
• Laura Nash – @laurajnash

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

Here are Laura’s links and resources for this episode:

Main review — Project Avatar: Stalker

https://projectavatar.fun/

Games Mentioned

Trapped Takeout: https://www.trappedpuzzlerooms.com/trapped-takeout/

The Emerald Flame (PostCurious): https://postcurious.myshopify.com/

Colby’s Curious Cookoff https://curiouscookoff.com/

SCRAP’s Escape From the Science Lab of Scifting Rules (the Baba Is You-y one) https://roomescapeartist.com/2021/04/02/scrap-escape-science-lab-shifting-rules-hivemind-review/

Bluefish Games: https://www.teambluefish.com/

Box One: https://store.theory11.com/products/boxone

Guides to finding good at home games

My favorite reviewers, cause they do hiveminds where multiple people review the same room (and they ran the conference I liked)

https://roomescapeartist.com/

2020 Online Escape Room Awards https://terpeca.com/2020/#onlinerooms

An index for at home game reviews:

https://escapethereview.co.uk/location/play-at-home/

A flowchart

https://www.escapethereview.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PlayAtHomeFlowchart.pdf

Which Room in a Box should I buy?

https://escapethereview.co.uk/which-room-in-a-box-should-i-buy/

Meta list of lists of at-home games https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1anO0NQhwwOFZLmydCuoY4cd4R6x52KnxOAfAxZCGt1c/edit

Puzzle Hunt Calendar http://puzzlehuntcalendar.com/

Want to know more about Escape Rooms?

RECON Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvtiar8OygeaCKLog9ff_TBmJKuW-b8ZZ

Escape Room Design Links: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lwSTxIews8azOqzHEy0vyoSrX7orx55pRImXWuBVkjU/edit

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
• Nate Heininger – @natestl
• Laura Nash – @laurajnash

The Twelve Minutes Defender (Shane) and the Twelve Minutes Hater (Raygan) are locked in an endless cycle of discourse. This time loop thriller adventure game has garnered some really mixed reviews, and we can’t give it a full throated recommendation, but it ended up generating a really interesting conversation.

The Groundhog Day “fan fiction” podcast Shane refers to in this episode are episodes 72 and 73 of the Imaginary Advice podcast.

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

We’re taking a romantic dip into the “dunj” this week and playing Boyfriend Dungeon from Kitfox Games!  We talk about the smooching, the slashing and talk about our favorite Baeblades. 

Boyfriend Dungeon is available on Steam, Gamepass (Windows and Xbox) and Nintendo Switch. Expect it to take between 5 and 10 hours to complete depending mostly on how many swords you want to smooch.

The Short Game 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

The Forgotten City is a mystery adventure game of exploration and deduction, and a re-imagining of an award winning Skyrim mod. Travel 2,000 years into the past and relive the final days of a cursed Roman city, where if one person sins, everyone dies. 

We absolutely loved this game. It’s a masterpiece of narrative design, and one of the most fun examples of a Groundhog Day style time loop in video games (and that’s saying something in a category that include the previously covered Outer Wilds and The Sexy Brutale!)

Shane brought a friend for this episode! We’re joined by Rahul Rao, Houston area performance artist. 

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
• Rahul Rao

Button City is a cute (you might even say wholesome) adventure game about an adorable fox and his animal friends in a dayglow 90’s nostalgia infused world, trying to protect their local arcade from an uncaring real estate developer. Unfortunately, it’s also… not very good.  

Nate and I had a chat about what this promising game got right, and why it ultimately failed to move us. We also have a chat about the Wholesome Direct where this game was featured heavily, and wrap up with a fun What’s Making Us Happy This Week segment.

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

This week I was thinking about The Stanley Parable, which had a great recent episode on Watch Out For Fireballs and is also probably, finally getting its updated re-release this year, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe.

This was only the second episode of the podcast, originally released in April of 2014, and we were still figuring everything out. The format is weird, the takes are stale,  the audio quality is poor… but I had fun listening back to it. Hopefully you will too, and hopefully you’ll forgive us for anything dumb we say. I added a couple of chapter markers. in case you want to skip past the 15-20 minutes of banter about such current topics as ”should I buy a Playstation 4.”

We’ll be back next week with a new episode. Thanks for listening!

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
• Nate Heininger – @natestl

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

The Short Game is supported directly by our listeners 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

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

You can find Death’s Door on Steam for PC and Xbox platforms, where it’s currently a console-exclusive with a $20 price tag. Expect it to take somewhere between 6 and 15 hours to complete. (We recorded a couple of hours before I actually completed the game, but my final clock at credits was 14 hours. How Long To Beat currently lists 6.5 hours for the main story, with most playthroughs in the 6-10 hour range, so perhaps I am just bad at this game! I still had a great time though. Plus: Bird Content!)

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