Football Game (2018)

I like these point and click mystery games, in general. This one was a bit too abstract for me, however, and while it had all of the normal problem solving I would expect, the story was just too weird for me to truly enjoy it.

I guess he murdered his girlfriend? Is that the implication?

It's short; about an hour and a half though I did need to look up a few solutions to get there.

I'd been meaning to check out more of Cloak and Daggers' games after liking The Excavation of Hob's Barrow so much last year, and finally got around to giving "Football Game" a go.

The atmosphere and music were cool, but most everything else fell a bit short. It unfortunately managed to feel slowly paced, despite only being a bit over an hour long. The puzzles were mostly ok, but just not that interesting. The majority of the game was spent finding a way to leave your house and then doing some errands for high schoolers. The narrative was of the 'purposefully vague so you can go back and piece things together' variety, but it just didn't quite work for me here. I needed a bit more to make me care about Football Game -- adding in some extra dialogue to build up the characters and fill out the plot just a bit more would have gone a long way.

At the end of the day, it just felt a little underbaked. Not bad enough to dissuade me from checking out Cloak and Daggers other games, but not really worth the hour either.

Enjoyed this one a lot after playing "Date in the Park" and "The Terrible Old Man," both pretty decent short games by Cloak & Dagger. You play as Tommy trying to get to tonight's football game and meet up with your girl Suzy, while having to solve little puzzles, catch up with some friends, and listen to some good music. Nobody has seen Suzy though, where is she?

This game can be completed under 2 hours, solid pixel animation, and good music. The plot starts off pretty standard, like a typical jock getting ready for the big game and seeing his girl, then slowly shifts into something else. The story appears to get a little ambiguous towards the latter half, but that didn't bother me. The game is listed for $1.99 on Steam, might be worth to wait to see if you can grab it on sale since it's a really short game.

Starting to dive into the cloak and dagger backlog, this one caught my eye. It has the same amount of drenched strangeness as Hob’s Barrow, but it’s pretty underwhelming beyond that.

The art is super simple and the coloring is missing much contrast. The portraits are great though, very surreal.

The puzzles are ok, some were a little frustrating. The story kinda doesn’t do much, and ends abruptly. It’s definitely feels like an itch.io beta project more than a completed game.