Those Games (or, YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM!) Review 6/10 "A great send-up of fake game ads that lacks the key fun factor" 🤳 @D3_PUBLISHER #IndieGames #GameDev

Designed as a series of actually accurate versions of games glimpsed in fake mobile gaming adverts in the days of yore, Those Games does a good job of representing the games that people who click on those ads assumed that they would play, but it’s a premise that – to me at least – is more fun in concept than in action.

The main menu is suitably garish and features daily quests to complete, linking you to various unlockables and of course – to each individual game available for play. Completing stages in each game results in a rating between 1-3 stars, and these unlock IQ points, which in turn unlock stages across all of the games in the collection.

The games included are:

Color Lab – 50 stages of pouring colours from one test tube to another in order to create specific colours in specific tubes.

Parking Lot – 25 stages of sliding puzzles set in various car parks.

Cash Run – 25 levels of a timing-based puzzle game, whereby you have to hold down a button to drop stairways of cash to make it over various obstacles in your way.

Number Tower – 50 stages of math(s)-based adventuring! This was the one that I gravitated toward the most, a mini-game in which you you make it past various enemies and items whilst making sure that your number isn’t up!

Pin Pull – 100 stages of sliding pins out from single-screen dungeons in an order that ensures your enemies are slain whilst your character survives.

The level of difficulty in each game varies quite a lot, with some feeling tough fewer than 10 or so stages in, whilst others ramp up in challenge swiftly! Whilst these games capture the ‘fake game ad’ ideal perfectly well, I discovered that in practice, only one or two held my interest for longer than a few stages, and I found myself wishing that there were perhaps a handful more games at the cost of the number of stages in each.

A mini-game collection that has a lot of content in terms of the stages available and does a great job of sending up that which it intends to parody, it just feels a little flat in terms of actually playing the games, as they do boil down to time-killers that offered me little satisfaction.

SUMMARY

There is clearly craft here in the design, audio, and visuals, but I’d really prefer to see Monkeycraft Co. Ltd – if they do continue down this avenue – come out with a future game that throws in a more WarioWare approach, with the wackiness turned up to max, and the focus more on fun than parody.

That said, I can see that other reviewers have really clicked with this game, maybe I’m just not as invested in fake mobile game ads as others, who knows?