Shownotes

Storyteller won the IGF Nuovo award in 2012 (!!!) and finally releases today, making it the longest in development game we’ve ever covered. Finally emerging from development hell and partnering with publisher Annapurna, developer Daniel Benmergui has delivered a charming and intuitive “continuity simulator”, in which you build a simple comic strip from drag and drop actors and scenes, trying to produce a specific ending. 

Storyteller launches today on Steam and Nintendo Switch. Expect it to take around 2-5 hours to complete.

Hi-Fi Rush was a surprising January “shadow drop” (is that really what we’re calling these?) from previously horror focused developer Tango Gameworks. Part beat ’em up, part music game, part Saturday moring cartoon, and a whole lot of fun if you can jam to its dad rock soundtrack. Hi-Fi Rush is available on PC and Xbox consoles, and via Game Pass. Expect it to take around 11 hours to complete.

Solve a string of bizarre historical murders in this extremely clever deduction game. 

Previously if you liked Return of the Obra Dinn and wanted to play something with a similar deduction mechanic, your options were basically zero. Now they’ve increased to one! Golden Idol has a very different presentation, art style and structure to Obra Dinn, but feels like it builds on that game’s excellent game design in some great ways, producing a game that is a bit less ambitious but far more accessible. It left us feeling like geniuses.

Golden Idol is available on Steam and GOG for Windows and Mac. Expect it to take about 6 hours to complete.

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Is Pizza Tower a revival of one of platform game design’s most fascinating evolutionary dead ends, or something new?  Is it, as Shane put it, “Celeste for Weirdos?” 

Pizza Tower is available on Steam for Windows. Expect it to take about 6-8 hours to complete, but with a lot of room for additional score attack and speedrun challenges.

Luck be a Landlord is a roguelike deckbuilder (hello Nate!) about using a slot machine to earn rent money and defeat capitalism. This strange but compelling game recently emerged from early access and has started finding an audience, so we checked out out! Nate really checked it out.

This week Nate and Raygan are talking about UnderDungeon, a game with awesome 1-bit pixel art that somehow seemed like less than the sum of its parts. Not, ultimately, a recommendation, but a good discussion!

Afterplace is the first mobile game that has really grabbed me beginning to end in a long time. The game, from solo developer Evan Kice, is a whole-assed open world indie action adventure game, but for phones. It takes a lot of inspiration from games like the Legend of Zelda and Undertale, but brings them to your iOS or Android smartphone with touch-native controls and a world that is designed to be viewed in portrait orientation.

Everything about the game seems carefully tailored for mobile, but it’s also unlike any mobile game I’ve played in years, with charming characters and animation, an involving story, and difficult but fair combat.

Afterplace clocks in at about 6-10 hours, depending on how lost you get during the game’s less directed sections. It’s a steal at $6.99 on the iOS and Android app stores.

Pocket Card Jockey is a weird footnote. A lesser known but beloved 3DS side-project by Game Freak, the creators of Pokémon. It‘s a brilliant and hilarious mash up horse racing and solitaire, first released in Japan in 2013, and in the US in 2016 when we covered it for The Short Game. 

Now the game has been remastered (or remade?) for iOS! Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On! is available now on the Apple Arcade subscription service.

We’re taking this opportunity to rerelease our original episode on the game. Laura and Shane kick things off with a brief intro before we jump into episode 99 of the show.

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.

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