It’s the ultimate video game power fantasy: the power to clean up after ourselves. Terra Nil is a unique “city builder” in the lineage of Sim City, but with tasks you with revitalizing a wilderness on a ruined Earth, and ultimately with destroying what you’ve built, erasing all evidence of your presence and leaving the Earth to heal. It’s a strange union of theme and mechanics. It’s also the first “city builder” we’ve covered on the show. Not a genre known for short games, or even games with endings ..read more

After an incredibly troubled development, we finally have the latest game from the team that brought you Gone Home and Tacoma… Sort of. Open Roads, from publisher Annapurna and the developers known here as The Open Roads Team, is a narrative “walking simulator” with some unusual twists, like 2D animated dialogue in a 3D world, and a story that plays out across multiple locations and the car rides in between. Tess is a teenager in 2003, packing up the remains of her life with her mom after her father’s sudden departure and her grandmother’s death. While cleaning up aunt Helen’s house, Tess disc ..read more

400 episodes. Nearly 10 years. I absolutely can not believe it. To celebrate, Laura put together an incredibly well produced trivia night game for us to play! Who knows the most about the last 10 years of The Short Game ..read more

Slice & Dice is a game that just keeps giving, and we don’t just mean incredible dice-rolling gameplay. Since we last covered Slice & Dice, it has received two major updates. As we prepare for our 400th episode, Nate & Laura put together a quick episode about what makes this game so great and why you should absolutely play the new release, even if it means begininng a new (or returning to) a major addiction ..read more

As we close in on Episode 400 (where did the time go?) Shane and Raygan are talking about weird-horror phone bank simulator Home Safety Hotline. Is that caller suffering from bedbugs, or Bed Teeth? Tags podcast ..read more

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 ..read more

A card based roguelike that is arguably related to Poker has been blowing up recently, so naturally we gave it a shot. Turns out, yeah, it’s good ..read more

Debatably a short game, but indisputably a classic. Raygan has played SotN many times but the rest of the crew is experiencing it for the first time. What will they make of this revolutionary 1997 PlayStation game ..read more

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.  ..read more

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 ..read more