I’ve finally pushed my co-hosts down the Animal Well. This uneasy, mysterious, combat free take on the Metroidvania genre asks you to live in a hole and be terrified of kangaroos.

It is both shorter, and longer than you think.

• (00:00) - Animal Well

Sure, this game about a duck detective solving an office lunch theft is cute, but did you know it’s also an introduction to Cold-war era Berlin for children?

Duck Detective is a deducktion/adventure game that plays like an introduction to the Obra Dinn/Golden Idol style of mystery solving game. It’s only about 2 hours long, and would be great to play with a kid.

• (00:00) - Duck Detective

A single bullet to kill a whole bunch of cultists. Children of the Sun is a puzzle sniping game, where THE GIRL is out to kill THE LEADER of THE CULT. Telekinetically redirect your single bullet in flight to head-shot all the cultists in each level. It’s a game that turns out to be much more puzzle game than shooter. Expect it to take around 3-4 hours to complete. In the What’s Making Us Happy This Week segment this week, Shane recommends a horror novel, and Raygan overthinks his e-reader situation.

• (00:00) - Intro

Indika is a young nun in 19th century Russia, suffering from a crisis of faith, delusions, and puzzles. It’s one of the most cinematically interesting games we’ve played in a long time, and ended up spurring nearly two hours of discussion about a four-ish hour game.

• (00:00) - Intro

Your ex-girlfriend, queen of the vampires, has holed up in an El Paso motel to perform a ritual that will bring about the end of the world. As John Savage, veteran monster hunter and bullet-time gun-diver, you’ll need to fight through all 50 floors of the surreal extrandimensional motel to stop her. Soon to be a major motion picture!

• (00:00) - El Paso, Elsewhere

Slumps. Ruts. Dulldrums. Whatever you want to call them, most of us have likely experienced times when you couldn’t play or enjoy games in the way you might want for one reason or another. In this topic episode we talk about the various reasons we’ve ended up in gaming slumps, and what we did to get out of them.

• (00:00) - Topic Episode: Gaming Slumps

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!

• (00:00) - Terra Nil

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 discovers a family mystery that propels her and her mother on a road trip to discover who they really are, and who they are to each other.

We enjoyed this game a lot, but also spent a good amount of this episode discussing the strange and upsetting circumstances of its development, and where the “walking sim” genre stands today, over 10 years after it rose to prominence with Gone Home.

• (00:00) - Open Roads

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?

• (00:00) - Introduction

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.