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

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) Kirby and the Forgotten Land. It’s a game we mostly played with our kids, so expect lots of discussion of that side of the experience. We also talk about Shane’s newly arrived Steam Deck, and Raygan’s new obsession Dungeon Encounters.

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 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 discourse around its launch was that it was perhaps too hard for for some folks, so we put it off. As in all things, we should have trusted Laura. It turned out that this long-in-development cross between Zelda and Dark Souls with a lot of mystery thrown in was just what we needed.

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

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 stories of each of the three movies, and debate the ending. If you have questions about Immortality, we have answers! And also more questions!

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

“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 third entry in his not-a-trilogy of FMV masterpieces. This game, Immortality, ups the ante from the previous two in every conceivable way. 

Explore the unedited, unordered clips from this trio of ill-fated films using a new match-cut symbol mechanic, both more accessible and more mysterious than the previous games. Uncover the stories in front of and behind the camera of these three almost-fully-realized movies. 

There is so much to talk about with Immortality that we’re dedicating two episodes to it. This first episode will be a spoiler free discussion of the game’s mechanics, production, and surface level story. In next week’s episode we will be diving deep into story and unraveling the mystery of Marissa Marcel.

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 all habitable planets mysteriously vanished, you are a convict piloting a blind submarine on a suicide mission, using only a map and a low resolution still camera to navigate. It’s a lo-fi dread generator. It’s also shorter than many horror movies!

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

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 own. The focus is on exploration, but Haiku also has very good combat! Really a great game, and more manageable than a lot of other games in its genre at around 6-10 hours.

Stick around for a fun What’s Making Us Happy 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
• Laura Nash – @laurajnash