Hello! Hello! Hi! Long time no see! You know how time is essentially a hole these days? Difficult to untangle and even more difficult to track? I’m still swimming through it, trying to find a small bit of land to help me get steady on my feet, but until then, I have a small gift:
Through all this temporal mishmash, I’ve had the company of a few excellent short games. They’re just about what my brain can handle these days, and they’re all perfect little serotonin snacks for the summer. Maybe you’ll like them too.
And soon I’ll be back with some actual thoughts about game design! But until then:
short games for short summer nights
One of my earliest gaming memories is playing Age of Empires with my little brother, and it really set the tone for what I wanted from video games. Being predisposed towards anxiety, there was something reassuring about playing a game where I didn’t control a single person, but where I was in charge of the environment. Early Maxis games like SimCity, SimPark, and SimAnt scratched the same itch. Even though these games had goals and challenges, I found them relaxing. There was something about seeing their digital worlds grow and change from a bird’s eye view that just settled my mind.
Dorfromantik — a game that describes itself as a “peaceful building strategy and puzzle game” — really focuses in on the relaxation, while keeping it just challenging enough to be captivating. The player is given a stack of hexagonal tokens with different landscape features: trees, houses, railroads, rivers, and farmland. Players can earn points and, more importantly, get more tiles in their stack by following certain challenge prompts (e.g. creating a river of a certain tile length, or by creating a village of an exact number of houses). When the player runs out of tiles, the game ends.
It’s really the design of the game that shines: as the land grows, subtle changes occur. Forests change from green to fall-colored on different ends of the map. The houses in the villages give off little puffs of smoke. Boats and trains travel their ever-growing paths. Little geese fly across the landscape in a soft V. It’s like looking down at the world from an airplane, which imbues the whole experience with an air of calm detachment. There are no troubles or problems to solve, just little hexagons to rotate and place, building a world out of thin air.
Lydia Davis is one of my favorite authors. She mainly is known for her short stories, some of which are literally only a sentence long. Her work, to me, feels like magic. Here’s a noun. Here’s a verb. String just the right ones together and, POOF, a story: perfect and compact.
Big Ocean Wide Jacket feels like the video game version of a Lydia Davis short story. There’s not a lot to it, in either story or graphics. It’s about a camping trip, with the four main characters rendered as kind of floppy polygons, traveling in a low-poly world of wide swaths of color. But despite its simple premise and short run time, I can’t stop thinking about it. .
I get frustrated with big-name video games that so clearly want to be movies. I can’t be bothered with their cinematic cut-scenes and action sequences that are more on-the-rails than challenging encounters (lest it interrupt the plot’s need to be driven forward). Big Ocean Wide Jacket feels like a movie, too, but in a wholly more interesting way. Rather than concerning itself with exciting cinematics, it is more interested in cinematography.
There’s a moment where all the characters are sitting around a fire at night. The player can see only one character at a time, and is instructed to press an arrow key to rotate around the circle to move from person to person. As the player loops around, the characters move and shift into new spaces: someone gets a hot dog, someone ducks out of the circle into the dark, someone has their head in their hands. Big Ocean Wide Jacket knows that what’s not seen is often just as interesting as what is seen. This very simple sequence gives a sense of the tone of the characters’ evening more than any cut-scene ever could. It’s a sort of magic
Sure, a murder mystery is a good time. But what about a murder mystery where there is no doubt that you are the murderer?
Overboard! is a snappy and charming little game where there is no doubt about who is trouble; the game starts with the player’s character pushing their husband over the railing of a boat while they’re out at sea. From there, it’s up to the player to move around the ship and avert suspicion away from themselves and to literally anyone else. At some point, their late husband’s disappearance will become apparent to other people on the ship, and a Poirot-style living-room “whodunnit” sequence will determine whether or not the player actually got away with murder.
No matter if they get off or not, the game will loop, and the player will have another chance to do a run. Overboard! does a great job of keeping things moving on future loops. The game remembers what choices the player made in the previous run, and so there’s an option to fast-forward sequences using the same answers, if you choose. Also, little side quests come up as smaller mysteries arise (what is the captain trying to hide? why did the often-drunk high society lady say the ship is sinking?). It can be hard to make a repeated story feel fresh and fun, but OverboardI manages to do just that, all while teasing that maybe you can get away with murder better, faster, more slyly next time.
Listen. This one isn’t complicated. Dating sims are stupid fun, and even more stupid and fun when the people you’re trying to win a date with are sexy monsters.
Monster Camp is the sequel to Monster Prom and, in terms of gameplay, is essentially the same. The player (or players, since it can be played either solo or multiplayer) has a certain amount of rounds in order to try and win over the monster of their dreams. Each round, the player chooses a spot at camp to spend the day in order to level up a stat: going to the haunted house makes them more Bold; going to drama makes them more Creative. Level up the right stats, and you might just have a chance to ask your favorite monster to join you to be your summer love.
It’s meta and goofy, with dialogue that is tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek. Given that its surprisingly replayable, it’s a great way to spend some time that, refreshingly, doesn’t take itself too seriously.