This week we go rogue and chat about a whole bunch of games — Super Mario Wonder (short to mid-length), Helldivers 2 (long!), and an assortment of “daily games” (seconds to minutes!).

Golf + pool + the developer behind holedown? Be still our hearts. Subpar Pool brings polish and charm to the (pool) table, with tons of variations and challenges to keep it fresh — we highly recommend you pick it up on mobile, Switch, or Steam. Plus, a tour of your hosts’ various attempts to play games in bars. 

When inkle drops a surprise release, we dive in — and this time, we dove into a maze of art from museums around the world. The Forever Labyrinth is a totally free, browser-based “replayable narrative rogue-like adventure” made in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture. In addition to reviewing the game, we took this as an excuse to talk about our favorite museum-going experiences and our feelings about corporate-sponsored games. (Encarta may also come up.)

Expect each run to take about twenty minutes, with multiple trips through to uncover more secrets.

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?

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.

BANG! BANG! CHOP! CHOP! In this single-sitting first-person shooter, you gotta chop some goblins before they chop you. Other times you gotta shoot, stake, shotgun, or impale them. Because once chop goblins are loosed across time and space, someone’s gotta stop ’em. And that someone is you. (Because you set them free in the first place.)

Chop Goblins was a surprise end-of-year release by the creator of Iron Lung, DUSK, and Squirrel Stapler — and it’s available now on Steam for Windows. The game takes 30 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on your skill level.

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

This week, we’re revisiting an episode for a game that many of you have probably played: Portal. On December 11, Nvidia released a remastered version called “Portal RTX” with upgraded, ray-traced graphics (fancy) — and if you own it on Steam, you’ve automatically got a copy. This shiny new coat of paint is a great excuse to boot up Portal and remember how very awesome it is.

Even back at episode 10, we were convinced the game was a stone-cold classic. Raygan and Shane break down the qualities that made the game so successful, and its widespread impact on gaming in general.

Once again, we command you: GO PLAY PORTAL AGAIN!

Links for this episode

• The Last Guardian
• Our Broken Age Episode
• The Banner Saga
• Casual Shenanigans Podcast on YouTube
• Star Citizen
• The Veronica Mars Movie
• Transistor
• Transistor Trailer
• Bastion for iOS
• The original Portal trailer
• Portal: The Flash Version
• ASCIIPortal
• Narbacular Drop
• Download Narbacular Drop
• The Orange Box
• Johnathan Coulton
• Still Alive – YouTube link
• Portal’s patched ending
• Teslagrad on Steam
• Our Thomas Was Alone episode
• Thinking with Time Machine

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

Fans of medieval manuscripts, murder mysteries and marginalia, rejoice! Pentiment is here to fill your Northern Renaissance needs. Raygan and Laura discuss this rich tale of abbeys, intrigue, and 16th century life in the Bavarian Alps. Do we describe the classic book Name of the Rose as “a vibe”? How do we feel about Big Head Mode? Will we accuse innocent people of murder? Dear listener, there is only one way to find out…

Pentiment is available on PC/XBox (Gamepass), and is a little on the long side for us at 12-15 hours.

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
• Laura Nash – @laurajnash

Now we’re thinking with time reversals! The Entropy Centre is a first-person puzzler set in a collapsing space station on the brink of the end of the world. But it’s not all doom and gloom, for there’s a cheerful robot inside your entropy gun to help you rebuild pillars and reheat tea. Expect it to take 8-12 hours, depending on how good you are at brain-bendy puzzles.

The Entropy Centre is available on XBox, PlayStation, Steam, and GOG.

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