Shownotes

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 one of our 2017 games of the year — we even created the inaugural “Dirtbag of the Year” award to capture our love for Mae Borowski.

If you’re new to Night in the Woods, it’s a story-focused adventure game about a college dropout returning home to a distressed mining town, Possum Springs. It’s about reconnecting with your friends and finding things aren’t the same as when you left.

Also, everyone is a talking animal.

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

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 unfamiliar/forgetful, before diving into individual reviews.

• The Grown-Up Detective Agency by Brendan Patrick Hennessy
• Esther’s by Brad and Alleson Buchanan
• The Thirty Nine Steps by Graham Walmsley
• Nose Bleed by Stanley W. Baxton
• Use Your Psychic Powers at Applebee’s by Geoffrey Golden
• Glimmer by Katie Benson
• HOURS by Aidanvoidout

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:

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

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 levels. But it’s not all luck — despite a game full of literal dice rolls, there’s a lot of strategy involved too.

Slice & Dice is available on itch.io for Windows, Mac, and Android (plus there’s a free demo.) A good run will take about an hour to an hour and a half, depending on your undo button use.

What’s been making us happy:

• Laura: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
• Shane: Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal
• Nate: Midnight Mass

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:

• 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

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 struggling to survive after an antarctic plane crash, and his memories of the people and events that lead him to this dangerous moment.

We start the episode with a pretty lengthy discussion of the state of Apple Arcade, which has just had its first game delistings, and at 34:55 talk about what’s making us happy this week, before our spoiler break at 52:30.

South of the Circle is available on all the current Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch consoles as well as on Steam and GOG on PC. The Apple Arcade version is still available for iOS, iPad OS, tvOS, and Mac. Expect the game to take 3-4 hours to complete.

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