This week, we hang around, watch some street races, and eat pears, in Good Morning Drifter, a game for the AGBIC jam by LOWPOLIS. It’s a racing game, but your car is in the shop today, so you hang around and chat with the other racers instead. We chat about how this game manages to be fun and charming based just on conversation, and the age of the characters prompts us to talk about what life is like in your 20s.

Download the game here: https://lowpolis.itch.io/good-morning-drifter

And follow the creators on Twitter: @LOWPOLIS, @rayzones, @yafffle

We play Rave and Claw, a game about shooting a grappling hook and slamming into enemies, made by Owen Senior for the 2018 GMTK Game Jam. As it’s a pretty juicey game, it prompts us to talk a bit about “game feel,” which naturally leads Blake to once again talk about his favorite Jan Willem Nijman instructional lecture. Also, Jordan shares a theory of game feel that he heard at a party.

Download the game here: https://ostsenior.itch.io/rave-and-claw-full

And follow the creator on Twitter: @OSTsenior

Runescape? No, TOMscape! That’s right, we play Tomscape, a Sokpop Collective game designed as an homage to the Runescape days of old. We wax nostalgic about playing the classic browser game as youths, and talk about the various ways that this game manages to recreate the classic feel. Turns out we have some great Runescape stories, too: in one, Blake narrowly avoids getting swindled, and in another, Jordan discovers capitalism.

Download the game here: https://sokpop.itch.io/tomscape

And follow the creators on Twitter: @sokpopco

It’s time for Player KNOWN Battlegrounds (haha), a game about a tour guide at the Gettysburg Memorial. The game prompts us to wildly speculate about the history of American wars, and for some reason also about folk music. Which means you get to hear Blake marvelously sing “The Battle of New Orleans.”

Download the game here: https://gamejolt.com/games/playerknownbattlegrounds/335232

And follow the creators on Twitter: @StevenJHarmon1, @zeldatsi

This week’s game is 10 Mississippi, a stop motion narrative game about the intimate experience of the everyday developed by Karina Pop. We chat about how this game creates feelings of uncomfortable closeness, as well as how it uses unusual button mappings to simulate the tactile feeling of everyday life. Also, we completely misunderstand an obvious masturbation pun.

Play the game in-browser here: https://knarniapop.itch.io/10-mississippi

And follow the creator on Twitter: @knarniapop

This week, we play Hot Pot, a game about an animated pot that steals food in order to feed hungry passers-by. We discuss what makes the avatar of this game intrinsically fun to control, and then transition to a conversation about “A Game By Its Cover,” the game jam for which this game was designed. Also, Blake can’t think of the word “objective.”

Download the game here: https://t.co/aR1qDosv1C

And follow the creators on Twitter:  @Zugai89, @raisedbywoes

What goes up doesn’t necessarily come back down in “What Goes Up,” a “platformer without falling” developed by Lonebot for the 2018 GMTK game jam. We talk about what gives a puzzle game a good “Portal moment” in which everything suddenly clicks together, and how impressive it is that such a small game jam game manages to pull it off. The game prompts a discussion about how videogames try to integrate their “thematic genre” and “mechanical genre,” and how some mechanics can accommodate a greater range of stories than others. Oh, and we get a good laugh from this game’s ending.

You can play the game in-browser here: https://lonebot.itch.io/what-goes-up

And make sure to follow the creators on Twitter: @Mati_Ernst, @itamar_ernst, @patacorow

We explore a polygonal world of garden vegetables and household furniture in Turnip, a short exploration game by Adam Pype (AKA “papercookies”). The game prompts a discussion of retro 3D graphics and spatial design—plus, it has a sense of humor and cartoon lightheartedness that we both appreciate.

Download the game here: https://papercookies.itch.io/turnip

And follow the creator on Twitter: @adampi

Computer, ENHANCE! We play enhance.computer, a voice-controlled cyberpunk game about that absurd crime show trope in which investigators somehow add pixels to images they are inspecting. We talk about the affordances (and limitations) of voice controls, as well as explore some of the darker real-world implications of the crime-predicting technology described by this game. Also, Alex Jones in Spiderman?

Play the game here: enhance.computer

And follow the creator on Twitter: @nicolehe

What has boris created? We try to answer that question in our discussion about Liquorice, a surreal first person exploration and sound-generation game by dlareme (A.K.A. boris). It’s a game that defies expectations—so much so, that both of us almost missed the core mechanic when we first played it. We talk about the particular experience of enchantment produced by not knowing how a computer program works, and all the many ways that this game plays with perception.

You can purchase the game here: https://dlareme.itch.io/liquorice

And follow the creator on Twitter: @elmdare