Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month?
Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends.
The staff and contributors that make up Remap play all sorts of video games, and you hear us talk about most of them on weekly episodes of Remap Radio. But even with nearly three hours of banter, some games don’t make the cut, or simply do not fit into the flow of conversation. We also don’t do a lot of “reviews” here at Remap, so we needed to find something that fit in-between.
Every month, Remap Recommends is a chance for each of us to sit back and reflect on a game that’s continued to sit with us, to the point that we want to tell you, in writing, why it’s interesting.
These aren’t traditional reviews. They’re not long essays. This is “Hey, check this out. I liked it.”
Patrick Recommends…Unsorted Horror
Platform: PC (Steam, itch.io)
Genre: Short Form Horror
Hours Played: Two
Number of Jump Scares: Three
Spiders?: No comment
I have an affinity for short form horror specifically because it squeezes out what crushes most scary stories in longer formats: characters. A clever idea, or creepy design for a monster, has trouble holding up over the course of two hours without decent characters to string you along. Characters can elevate gimmicks to something special. But sometimes, one good idea, or good twist, can be enough!
In Unsorted Horror, an anthology series of interactive horror shorts, you are not experiencing hours of tension and release. You’re spending 15 or 20 minutes in one of five vignettes determined to make you squirm. It doesn’t have to justify a skill arc for the character, or a series of interactions that need to feel good seven hours from now. It turns the screws quickly, before hitting you with a singular relief: the credits.
Finally released, you can move onto the next set of nightmares.
P.S. If you're looking for good horror short story anthologies, my favorites include Clive Barker's Book(s) of Blood and Stephen King's Skeleton Crew. The latter includes King's horrifying The Jaunt.
Rob Recommends… Football, Tactics & Glory
Platform: PC (Steam)
Genre: Turn-based tactics, sports
Hours Played: 4
Offsides Called: 12
A month or so ago, we had a long conversation on the podcast about how we wished there were more sports games that had space to go wild with the concept and embrace the weirdness that is often sanded-down in officially licensed games. That led to a brief interlude where we were delving deep in Steam to look at sports games from further afield than the likes of EA Sports and super crunchy management sims. One of the things that caught my eye was Football, Tactics & Glory. The Steam page pithily describes it as “XCOM meets Football Manager” and that’s pretty much accurate and it’s as cool as it sounds.
The game slowly layers in complexity via a long tutorial, and one of the things that distinguishes it from XCOM is that your footballers move a bit more like chess pieces than squaddies do in XCOM. Certain players are able to do special movements and maneuvers just by virtue of what positions they have been assigned, so the same guy can do things as a wing that he can’t do as a defender, even if his stats are appropriate for both. On the other hand, every player learns special abilities that they can take with them no matter where on the pitch they are playing.
It‘s a lot to keep track of, to be honest, and I think it’s harder for me because I don’t have an intuitive sense of soccer’s logic. Football, Tactics & Glory relies a lot on that across its tutorial-packed opening hours. But it’s also an incredibly charming and rewarding game. Seasons change as you play, the stadiums you play in get fancier as you climb the ladder into serious professional play, and you watch your hopeless little rookies slowly develop competitive identities that turn them into superheroes on the pitch.
It’s also, frankly, a game that seems to resist becoming rote in the way that some tactics games do. Because so many plays require precise positioning, and the only way to get enough actions to complete your set-pieces is to use your players’ special abilities successfully, each turn feels a bit more like you are solving a chess-puzzle. Think more Into the Breach or Tactical Breach Wizards for how you have to plan your attack.
People who know soccer better could probably tell me how right or wrong I am on this score but Football, Tactics & Glory feels like it is actually a pretty brilliant interpretation of soccer, and one whose rules and mechanics do a lot to teach the intricacy of the beautiful game.
Cado Recommends... The Jackbox Survey Scramble
Platform: PC (Steam), Basically Every Console
Genre: Party Game
Hours Played: Two
Volume When Yelling at My Team During Bounce: +20 dB
Schmitty?: No, thankfully
It’s honestly a bit of a surprise that Jackbox has taken this long to hop on the “Family Feud” style survey based games, about as surprising as the way this game seemed to stealth drop this month. It’s almost like Jackbox was trying to scrub everyone’s collective memory of that unfortunate pack they dropped last month that was rightfully lambasted for grossly misunderstanding why it’s fun to put obscenities into Quiplash. It’s not funny when the cum jokes make sense in context!
In Jackbox Survey Scramble, you and your friends are treated to four different survey based games, all with slightly different setups but seemingly pulling from the same pool of survey material. The sets range from opinion based questions like “What is something that you could crush in your hands” to the more subjective brand of “My Ex thinks I’m …” with one common thread: every answer can only be one word. The games themselves have you either trying to guess what’s at the very top or very bottom of the list for points (HiLo) to trying to fill in as much of the list as possible (speed), to breaking your group into teams for versions of Tic Tac Toe (Squares) and Breakout (Bounce) that have you using the range to try and place your team’s X/O/Paddle in just the right place.
I had a ton of fun with all of these games aside from speed, which requires a focus that has you head down and not interacting with the people around you, a failure as far as party games are concerned. The team games in particular are really great and had a ton of opportunities for chatter and teamwork with really hilarious arguments over whether something comes higher or lower on the list. Do you think babies or depression are higher on the list of “things that make you cry?” Like a lot of good Jackbox games, the correct answer doesn’t even matter, it’s all delicious fodder for jokes, arguments, and good times with friends.