Shownotes

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 a ton of games, including:

• Celeste
• Mimic
• What is a Cart?
• Pico Driller
• The Shadow King
• Combo Pool
• To A Starling
• Super Crane Bug
• Dusk Child
• Shelled Shinobi
• Mai-Chan’s Sweet Buns

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?

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 calf on an alien world as it is born and travels with its in injured mother across dangerous seas. It’s one of the most artistically beautiful games we’ve played, and it’s available on Steam and itch.io completely free. Expect it to take about one to two hours to completely experience.

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 an hour to an hour and a half, depending on your culinary skill and reading speed.

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 of the best Making Me Happy segments in ages!

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 I mention they’re all animals in this?) as he navigates professional and moral difficulties working at the only hospital in rural Porcupine. Great conversation about this unusual game. Finally, in What’s Making Us Happy This Week, Laura and Raygan both unpack from their travels.

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 other games Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite, and Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1. but requires no knowledge of those games. It feels like a perfect homage to the short, punchy zine tabletop RPGs that inspired it.

Club Low is available on PC, Mac, and Linux, via both Steam and Itch.io. Expect it to take around 3 hours to complete, with multiple endings possible.

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 is actually a short game (though it can be completed in under an hour.) No, Laura and Raygan were traveling this week and Shane and Nate just had a lot to say about everyone’s favorite unofficial Kerbal Space Program sequel. It was a great conversation, and we’ll be back to our usual deal soon!