It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

A style of storytelling that’s really only possible in video games is gameplay as metaphor. It’s a form of narrative that happens through the interactivity and problem-solving of playing the game instead of through the typical avenues of storytelling like text or visuals. Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons did this by having you control two brothers cooperating to solve puzzles, with each represented by separate sides of the controller. When one of the brothers isn’t around you feel that loss not just empathically through the writing, but also as a hindrance to the gameplay since you effectively lost the use of half your controller.

In A Fold Apart, the puzzles and how you solve them act as a metaphor for the two main characters working through their anxieties about their relationship. The game follows who we’ll call Red and Blue, since they don’t have names and their genders are selectable by the player. Red is a teacher and Blue is an architect. They both live together and are clearly very in love. 

Blue is offered an amazing job to help design a major skyscraper, but the job is for a year and a half in a city far away from Red. They decide that they can maintain their relationship apart for that long, and Blue moves away. While separated, the two communicate with text messages, which are cute and lovey, but then a seemingly innocuous phrasing in a text causes one of them to fall into a bit of an anxiety spiral. This is when the actual puzzle solving takes place. 

The game’s puzzles require you to navigate one of the characters across various platforms to an endpoint. But the characters can only walk, so in order to bridge the gaps, you need to fold the level. The best way to think about these puzzles is as a piece of paper. There are two sides, each usually having platforms on them, and you need to fold the paper to line up the platforms in order to get the character to the end. Initially, you can only fold the paper in the cardinal directions, but as the game progresses you also get diagonal folding and the ability to rotate the paper.

Aside from the puzzles being well designed, what’s actually fascinating about them is how they work to help tell the story. Each set of puzzles, usually about five or so, has the characters working through their anxiety about a different message. The puzzles in a set will get progressively harder over the first few as their anxiety grows, before getting easier over the last few as Red and Blue work through things by realizing the message likely wasn’t intended the way they read it. 

This helps to make the folding and other mechanics not only a metaphor for trying to bridge the characters’ separation, but also how a person can twist and complicate things for themselves when communication breaks down. The issues that arise for Red and Blue, though they stem from their separation, are more about a lack of communication. While they agreed to mutually endure the separation, by not voicing their issues with each other are not able to work through them together. Which actually just made things worse as it let their imaginations and anxieties run wild.

All of this is also conveyed in the actual written text of A Fold Apart. But it’s the game’s mechanics and pacing that help to accentuate and amplify those turbulent moments. The writing and gameplay feel as though they are working in concert toward a specific experience. It isn’t just a series of puzzles with a story about long distance relationships, but a game about communication.

A Fold Apart was created by Lightning Rod Games. You can get it for $19.99 on Nintendo Switch and Steam (Windows) or on Apple iOS with an Apple Arcade subscription. It’s also coming soon to Playstation 4 and Xbox One. It takes about three to four hours to finish.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Often, when I’m not sure what I want to play, I go browsing the new releases on Steam, Itch.io, and the Nintendo eShop until something grabs my attention. Usually, it’s a game that fits my mood, which, like a lot of other people’s moods lately, is a bit more anxious than usual. While in such a state, I’m almost more interested in playing something familiar and relaxing instead of something new. That’s probably why I’ve put so many hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons and also why Hidden Through Time got my attention.

Hidden Through Time is a game where you locate hidden objects in a scene, similar to 2017’s Hidden Folks, the Where’s Waldo? books, and the puzzles inside the Highlights magazine at your childhood doctor’s office. It’s about as simple as a game could be: it presents you with some objects, animals, and / or people at the bottom of your screen, which you have to locate. Once you’ve found enough of them, you then move onto the next level.

This is how things progress in the game’s story mode, which doesn’t really have a story. Rather, it is a progression of 26 levels that take place across four fantastical interpretations of specific periods in human history: Stone Age with dinosaurs, ancient Egypt with giant gods walking around, medieval Europe with goblins, and the American Wild West. Each period provides a unique aesthetic, along with new sets of buildings, objects, and people. Aside from being visually pleasing, this also helps the gameplay from growing stagnant.

By the time you’re near the end of a time period, you will have adapted to become more efficient at parsing the levels for where things are, so it can start to feel repetitive. In this way, the change in appearance isn’t just visual, but a new challenge to adapt to the new visual language of the level. For instance, the Stone Age period is full of rounded and curved things; a lot of green between the trees, bushes, and dinosaurs; and trees and bushes are often overlapping or hiding other objects. In the ancient Egypt stages that follow it, it is more yellow, things are more straight line and square, while people and buildings are more densely packed together, yet not overlapping in the same way.

There are a lot of similar choices that might go unnoticed while you’re playing, but they show that a lot of consideration is made about how things are hidden in a scene. Generally, objects are near where you might expect them to be; a sword will likely be near a knight, and bread will usually be in a kitchen or at a meal. But the game also uses small scenes within the level to not only look amusing, but also as a way to draw your attention to an area where an object might be. For example, in one stage, you are tasked with finding a sword stuck in a stone that happens to be hidden near a wizard and a boy, aping Merlin and a young King Arthur.

When the game breaks from your expectation or if you find yourself confounded as to where something is, there is a hint system. These are some of the best hints I’ve seen in a game, as they are like their own little puzzle that tells you just enough to point you in the right direction. A hint in one level for a small stone statue was something to the effect of, “I made this so I’d be less lonely,” which tells you that you need to be looking for someone or something by itself and that they perhaps resemble the statue.

Perhaps the game’s best feature is that it has a level creation tool, which lets you quickly make your own levels and upload them for other people to play. The editor is all drag and drop, first letting you pick which of the time periods you want to use, and then giving you access to all of the buildings, people, and objects from it that you can use to populate your level. Or if you aren’t interested in making levels, you can just download other people’s, effectively giving you access to far more levels than you could possibly play.

Hidden Through Time is also available on pretty much everything — PC, Mac, iOS, Android, PS4, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch — so you can play it however you want anywhere inside (and, eventually, outside) your home. The game isn’t exactly revolutionary, but what it does it does very well.

Hidden Through Time was created by Crazy Monkey Studios. You can get it for $7.99 on the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam (Windows and macOS) for $1.99 on iOS and $2.99 on Android. It takes about three to four hours to finish.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play, we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Growing up, I played a lot of educational games on the Apple IIe, like Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? The games that actually taught me things were also the ones that were fun to play, learning how a particular subject aligned with how you needed to think about getting better at the game. The Carmen Sandiego games were particularly good at this: improving meant teaching yourself more about the locations or places in time where the thief could have fled to in order to better discern the clues.

In a similar vein, Kana Quest is a sliding block puzzle game that’s designed to teach you Japanese hiragana and katakana characters. It does this by being a really good puzzle game that just so happens to use Japanese characters as the medium for connecting the tiles. This means that you don’t need to learn the characters to solve the puzzles; rather, you end up learning them to get better at solving the puzzles.

The goal of each puzzle level is to connect each tile together. Tiles connect when the character on them matches an adjacent tile in one of two ways: either they have the same starting consonant sound or the same vowel sound. For instance, the hiragana character さ (sa) can connect to characters like す (su) or せ (se), which all start with an “s” sound. But it can also connect with か (ka) and な (na), as they both end with an “a” sound. That also means if you put a さ tile between す and か tiles, all three would connect.

This setup is enjoyable enough, but as you progress, new mechanics are introduced to mix up how you need to think about each puzzle, like tiles that can’t be moved at all, ice tiles that slide in a direction until they hit a wall, or immovable tiles. Slime tiles — the characters あ (a), い (i), う (u), え (e), and お (o) — are particularly tricky. When moved over another character tile, they change its vowel, so if you have a さ tile that you move a う slime tile over, it changes to す.

However, it’s the question mark tile that is maybe the most interesting, as it adds an additional puzzle on top of the actual puzzle. These tiles can’t be moved until you guess what character it is, which you can figure out by moving the other characters next to it and seeing which ones it connects with or by looking at the tiles and determining what character you need to solve the puzzle. A question mark tile might connect with せ, す, and な, from which you can conclude that since it connects to two “s” beginning characters and an “a” ending character, it should be さ.

The way Kana Quest incorporates all of these different mechanics keeps the game from feeling like you are just doing the same puzzles repeatedly in different configurations. Instead, it layers on more complex gameplay while also never losing sight of the fact that teaching Japanese is pretty special. The slime tiles, in particular, showed how well-thought-out this game really is since they could have just been normal tiles. But the mechanic around them helps to differentiate them and make them memorable characters as well as change how you think about each puzzle.

Kana Quest has over 300 puzzles that can then be played over again with katakana characters instead of hiragana characters (or vice versa), effectively doubling that number, which means you likely aren’t going to actually finish this game in a weekend. Normally, that would make it contrary to the objective of these Short Play recommendations, but it is an ideal game for the quarantined world we currently live in. You can play for 30 minutes or so a day, knocking out a few puzzles. You’ll have spent your time doing something that’s both relaxing and constructive in teaching you something that’ll be useful beyond just the game.

Kana Quest was created by Not Dead Design. You can get it on Steam (Windows) for $14.99, and it’s coming to iOS and Android later this year.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Sometimes what isn’t said in a story is just as important as what is said. Usually, that’s because it can help provide the audience with a deeper understanding of the characters and their actions, but it also leaves things up to the interpretation of the audience. And because human brains love to find patterns, with enough information, they’ll try to piece things together for the full picture.

The Bookshelf Limbo is a game about a character trying to pick out the right comic book for their father’s birthday by perusing the shelves of a bookstore. There are only nine books on the shelves you are able to select from, and each has only a little bit of text to go with it. But much of what the game is trying to convey isn’t explicitly expressed in the text. Rather, a lot of information you can glean is from reading between the lines of what is said and in what choices are and aren’t available for you to make. This gives it a feeling sometimes that the storytelling is happening more in the negative space of the writing than the text of the work.

The game is played only with a mouse, and as you move the cursor over parts of the bookshelf, circles appear to show you which books have caught the character’s eye. Clicking on the book lets you see its cover, title, author, and a brief description. You’re then prompted with a few choices: you can read some online reviews for the book, you can read the quotes on the back of the book, you can decide this might be the book you want to give as a present, or you can put it back to go look at another. 

The online reviews in particular provide some great insight into who the book might appeal to as they tend to be a pretty blunt few sentences that get right to the point. You’ll also start to see the same reviewers popping up across various books. This acts as a subtle way to get your mind to try to profile what the reviewers might like from limited information. It also plays into the fact that you don’t actually know anything about the character or their father, making it seem like an impossible task to actually choose a good present for them.

There is actually a lot of information you can gather, it’s just somewhat hidden until you have a book you want to choose. When you pick the “this might be the book you want to give” option, you are given three unique choices for each book. These choices are different concerns the character has for picking that specific book One book, for instance, has poly relationships in it, and the character remarks that they don’t want to have a discussion about poly relationships with their father.

You need to go through all three choices before you can actually pick that book for the present, but each time you pick one, the player character will put the book back onto the shelf. You then have to highlight and click on it again before you can choose a different concern. While that’s a somewhat annoying set of interactions to repeat, it does generally help give the sense of a character who is indecisive and caught in a decision paralysis. Additionally, the different reasons they come up with for not choosing a book help to provide a lot of information about them as a person and what kind of person their dad is, or at least how they perceive him.

With these little snippets of information you glean from the text, the gameplay, and even from questions, you can start to construct an incomplete understanding of the characters. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle full of missing pieces. The fascinating thing about The Bookshelf Limbo, though, is that there is just enough there that you can start to see what the full picture is. Especially if you start filling in the holes with people or things from your own life, whether from stories you’ve read / watched or your own experiences. It helps turn a simple game into something much more engaging and empathetic.

The Bookshelf Limbo was created by Deconstructeam. You can get it on Itch.io (Windows) for free. It takes about 30 minutes to finish.

When playing the Magic: The Gathering card game, you’re asked to imagine that you’re a wizard who battles other wizards using a book of spells. You can summon creatures to fight on your behalf, use elemental magic to directly attack your foe, or even utilize magical blessings or curses to empower your own creatures or weaken your opponent’s. In reality, it’s a deck of cards you’ve carefully constructed, but the theming feels right while you’re playing. That said, I’ve often found it hard to imagine what all this spell-slinging would actually look like — and Magic: Legends finally answers that question.

Magic: Legends is a multiplayer isometric action roleplaying game in the same vein as the Diablo or Torchlight games. You create a character by picking a class that has a set of unique abilities, which you use to defeat hordes of monsters to acquire better loot and experience you use to level up to make you stronger so you can fight stronger monsters and get better loot, ad infinitum. Where Magic: Legends differentiates itself is not just in utilizing the almost 30 years of lore and locations from the card game, but in actually making the core of the combat system based on the card game.

Like the card game, you construct decks of cards, limited to 12 in total, which act as a pool of spells your character can perform. Like in MtG, these decks are based around a color of mana (red, blue, green, white, and black) whose spells tend to synergize and play in different ways. Blue decks tend to be about controlling the flow of battle, while red decks tend to favor overwhelming the opponent quickly. 

In the pre-alpha demo I played at PAX East, these spells were assigned to the controller’s four face buttons to act like you have a hand of four cards. What spells are assigned to which button are random, and when you use one, it’s removed and replaced with another card drawn from your deck. For instance, the four spells mapped to your buttons are: a spell that heals you, one that summons a creature to fight with you, one that makes your creatures stronger, and one that does a damaging blast in front of you. You hit the button to summon the creature, and then that spell would be replaced by something like a spell that weakens an enemy.

Of course, you can’t just cast spells willy-nilly as there is a mana cost to each spell that drains your character’s mana bar with each cast — just like in the card game. If you don’t have the right amount of mana for a spell, you won’t be able to do it, potentially leaving you with a spell you can’t use or get rid of. The bar recharges while you’re attacking normally in combat, which, in the demos, was done by holding down the right trigger, or you can activate a mana surge ability, which greatly increases the regeneration rate, letting you cast more spells than you would normally be able to for a short amount of time.

This system provides a constant loop of interesting choices to make in combat, forcing you to be continually attacking enemies to regenerate mana, while also trying to position yourself to best utilize whatever spells you might have. This does a good job of preventing you from falling into a specific routine or rotation of abilities like you might in a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft. But the game also uses an AI director system to dynamically change the sorts of enemies the game is throwing at you based on how well you are doing. In the demo, it felt like it hit a nice balance of big combat encounters that were almost overwhelming yet manageable.

Aside from your deck, the class you choose for your character also has a major effect on how you play, as each has a different playstyle. However, characters aren’t locked into a single class when playing; like Final Fantasy XIV, you can switch classes to whatever might work better for your group or what you happen to feel like playing. The classes also aren’t tied to a specific mana color, letting you compose whatever kind of single- or two-color deck you think would best work with it.

During the demo, I got to try the three announced so far: Mind Mage, Geomancer, and Beastcaller. Getting to play the same quest with both the Mind Mage (using a blue deck) and Geomancer (using a red deck) really highlighted how completely different the game can feel depending on your class and deck choices. 

The Geomancer has some very close-up punch attacks and a secondary move that lets them bound into the middle of the fight. Combined with the red deck they had full of big, close-range magical blasts, you feel like you are just bouncing around the battlefield into wherever groups of enemies happen to clump together.

While the Mind Mage is mainly shooting little magic projectiles from a middle distance, but also has a secondary psychic blast will turn enemies to fight for you if it doesn’t kill them. They were given a blue deck that was built around mind-controlling enemies to fight for you, but also summoning up your own minions to fight for you while you kept a safe distance from the actual danger.

The Beastcaller uses a big axe, ideal for wading into a group of enemies and hitting the lot of them. They are joined by a magical fox companion that can assist in taking down enemies and is healed when the Beastcaller hits enemies with their secondary attack to throw their axe. Teamed with a green deck, I found myself constantly going into battle with a group of already powerful summoned creatures, which only got stronger from the other spells in the deck. In a few ways, it feels like a combination of the Geomancer’s close-range attacking with the Mind Mage’s reliance on minions, except it feels completely distinct.

The producers I spoke with during the demo were always quick to note that, in this pre-alpha state, Legends is still very much a work in progress; there are still a few more classes to announce and a beta starting soon. However, even as it is now, Magic: Legends is a far more interesting game than I had expected, and it has me excited for a new isometric action RPG for the first time since Torchlight.

Magic: Legends is slated to launch on the PC, Playstation 4, and Xbox One in 2021. There will be a beta later in 2020.

Fighting games are different than other types of video games. A lot of titles — think action games like Control or Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order — are about giving you the feeling of becoming more powerful over the course of the game, or just being powerful from the get-go. However, fighting games and other competitive games instead ask you to practice and work to become stronger. This usually means failing — a lot. Compared to team-based competitive games like League of Legends or Overwatch, in fighting games you can’t easily pass the buck on who’s to blame for losing. If you lose in a fighting game it’s because you messed up.

This is a potentially huge hurdle to overcome mentally before you even begin to approach how to play. And while Granblue Fantasy Versus isn’t necessarily going to help you over that hurdle, if you can get through it, the game does a great job of helping you understand how to get better.

Granblue Fantasy Versus (GBVS) is based on the incredibly popular Japanese mobile / web browser roleplaying game Granblue Fantasy (GBF), which boasts having had more than 25 million players in the game’s six years of life. It’s a game that, despite not being available in the iOS and Android app stores outside of Japan, has amassed a decent-sized English-speaking following thanks to simultaneous English localization by the developers. 

GBF follows the player’s character, named Gran or Djeeta depending on what gender you choose, who is the captain of an airship in a world of floating islands. Gran / Djeeta is looking to travel to the mythical last island in the sky where their father is. Along the way, you gather a large crew of adventurers who become entangled in various adventures like defeating evil empires, battling fallen angels bent on destroying the world, and helping the cast of Love Live put on a concert.

Knowing anything about the original game’s story isn’t necessary, since the game’s RPG mode does a good enough job of explaining what you need to know. And if you’re planning to play the multiplayer competitive modes, you aren’t going to be engaging with story content anyway.

When it comes to competitive play, you’ll need to use the game’s training missions which do a fantastic job of teaching you not just about playing GBVS, but fighting games in general. So if you are completely new to, or only somewhat familiar with, the genre there are missions that quickly walk you through the basics of attacking, jumping, and dashing, as well as more complicated concepts like cross-ups and cancels.

Once you feel like you know what you’re doing, there are missions that teach you each character’s specific moves. These moves work as they do in many fighting games, requiring a specific joystick movement followed by a button press, like making a quarter circle from down to the right then pressing the medium attack button. However, GBVS provides a second easier option for executing these, reminiscent of Super Smash Bros., requiring the player press a single button while also holding the joystick up, down, left, or right.

It’s a system that’s great for newcomers, but also for people having trouble or who just aren’t able to do the joystick movements that are required. The balance, though, is that all the special moves have cooldowns, so once you use them you might have to wait a few seconds before you can perform the move again. If you use the simple input, these cooldowns are a bit longer than if you do the more technical move input. From there, once you have a character you’ve taken a shine to, there are additional missions that teach a couple of move combinations for each character that’ll be particularly useful in competitive play. 

What makes all these training missions a useful learning tool is the game’s UI. It not only tells you what to do, but gives you a sense of the timing for the next move or button press (especially important for learning combos). It also surfaces your button presses and joystick movements in real time on screen. It’s a function that has shown me a number of times why I’ve ended up messing up moves that I otherwise wouldn’t have any feedback on to understand why it wasn’t working.

However, if you aren’t looking to play the game competitively this isn’t to say that you should look elsewhere for a single-player fighting game experience. GBVS’s RPG mode is roughly based on how the mobile game works, except instead of fighting turn-based battles, you engage in beat ‘em up style levels against monsters and raid-style battles against the other fighters and giant boss characters. As you play, you’ll collect a large variety of weapons, which have different elements; essentially, you’ll upgrade and equip weapons to give your characters stat bonuses while also ensuring that their element is counter to whatever you’re facing.

The mode doesn’t really get interesting until near the end of the story, and particularly with the hard mode that unlocks afterward. It’s then that you have to really engage with equipping the right weapon sets for the best bonuses and deal with fights (especially against the big raid bosses) that require more strategy.

The raid battles are also mimicking GBF somewhat, requiring you to bring along a co-op partner, which can be either a computer or controlled by another player. I say somewhat because, also like GBF, you can potentially put together enough stat bonuses from your weapon grid and from leveling up your fighter to let you go solo. However, there is a very fun dynamic of having someone else around who you can coordinate with to take down some of the more challenging missions. Co-op partners can also join you in normal battles, but they are less essential since they tend to not be as difficult.

Generally, I’ve found GBVS to be more fun than frustrating to fail at, especially when playing online. The matchmaking, at least at my low-to-mediocre level of play, has done a good job of putting me against comparable players so that matches feel competitive instead of one-sided. There are a number of things about GBVS that are there for players and fans of the mobile RPG, but there seems to have been a more significant effort to make this game accessible to newcomers to the series and to fighting games in general. It might be exactly what you need to get over that hurdle.

Granblue Fantasy Versus is out now on PlayStation 4 and coming to Steam (Windows) March 13th.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend.

Tools like Twine have made it easier than ever to make interactive text-based games. But while they can be simple to make, that doesn’t make it any easier to tell an engaging story. As a writer, you have nowhere to hide: there aren’t graphical avatars for the player to control or music and voice acting to help tell the story. It’s just words and hyperlinks. Despite that, games like Lionkiller show just how engaging and powerful interactive fiction can be — even if they only have words to work with.

Lionkiller is a reinterpretation of the legend of famous 4th or 5th century female Chinese warrior Hua Mulan. It deviates from the original source material and the well-known Disney adaptation by setting the story during the first part of the mid-19th century Opium Wars between the Chinese and British. It’s a war that started due to British merchants illegally smuggling and selling highly addictive opium to try to balance their trade deficit for luxury goods from China. The Chinese government was not particularly keen on this, to say the least.

Lionkiller starts with Mulan working at a flower shop, and the choices you make influence how her story plays out in both big and small ways, much like they do in games like Life is Strange or Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Does Mulan join the army to keep their father from getting drafted? Or her brother who has fled? Or maybe in place of her love interest so that she can live her dream? 

It’s not these choices that keep you engaged and interacting with the story. Instead, it is a combination of the writing — which is brief but impactful — and the way it uses text links almost like cuts in a film or TV show. Effectively, all Twine games are a number of webpages full of text, in which there are colored text links you click to go from one page to another, or sometimes they add, remove, or change the text on the current page. 

In Lionkiller each of these pages feels less like reading a page of a book and more like a shot or moment in a larger movie scene, with the links that go between pages feeling like cuts between shots or scenes. The links that add or change the text work much like if you were a film editor, giving you moments where it adds or changes a shot to more explicitly express the subtext of a scene. And with these links being optional, your choice to interact with them feels as though you are helping to create the scene.

What’s great about these interactions is the way they become as automatic as turning a page in a book. It just sort of happens and becomes part of the flow of reading. You’re never overly conscious of how much you are interacting, but you also don’t settle in as a passive reader where the appearance of an interaction feels surprising.

Aside from being a great game, Lionkiller is also a great reminder of how rarely interactive fiction games are recognized beyond their niche. This is despite the fact that they’re often incredibly accessible to play, only requiring a web browser. Given the amount of reading the average person does, it’s a style of game that should appeal to more people — and it deserves more attention than it currently gets.

Lionkiller was created by Sisi Jiang. You can get it on Itch.io (Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android) for $10. It takes about two hours to finish.