THOSE GAMES Review: What A (Faustian) Bargain!

Fiction has popularized a specific kind of gamer fantasy: pure, immersive escapism, where the player can be anyone and do anything. Look deeper into the primordial ooze, and you’ll see glimmers of something stranger. A crude facsimile of our capitalist reality ebbs and flows in the gaps between online articles, the pauses in-between gem-matching, and the algorithmic slop drip-fed between your social media followers. We dream of hypercompetence and petty revenge in equal measure.

Against our better judgment, we sneak glimpses into that alternate plane where success is simple and grotesque. All you have to do is add the numbers. Match the colors. Pull the correct pins so you can reach the pile of treasure. Such a plane was unattainable. That is, until THOSE GAMES released.

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From Pitch to Product

“What is that?” my partner asked from over my shoulder. I was rearranging cars in the metaphysical parking lot of YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES”, RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET’S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM! “You know those mobile game ads? It’s those.” After a few more failed attempts at clearing the level, I let him take control. My partner was riveted for the next five stages. He turned to me again, bamboozled. “What’s next?”

That’s the thrill and the grim reality of THOSE GAMES—each of the five minigames within is a mobile advertising conjuration made real, but at great psychic cost. THOSE GAMES is infuriating and wildly compelling. It’s a bargain. It’s too long for it’s own good. It’s a gloriously twisted version of WarioWare. It’s a chore to play. I want THOSE GAMES to sell five billion units and become a full anthology series. I haven’t felt this contradictory push-and-pull since Deadly Premonition or Spec Ops: The Line.

THOSE GAMES follows the all-too-common trajectory of rich storytelling tradition to commercial product: a compelling but brazen idea is polished to a metallic sheen, losing most of its sharp edges in the process. To be clear, I’m glad this form of defanged mobile game ad exists. I don’t miss the sting of endless microtransactions or a gameplay carrot dangled endlessly on a stick, but the simple and crisp shading loses the wilder edge of say, Hero Wars’ hapless mobile game protagonist falling into a pit of lava or spikes.

There’s a healthy precedent for this kind of consumer-friendly sandpapering— Jack Zipes’ landmark translation of the complete Brothers Grimm restores the abrupt endings and cruel undertones left on the cutting room floor. Two centuries after the source text, Disney is still winnowing down those folktales for a live-action Snow White adaptation. They’re too late.

Our monoculture isn’t a shared pool of fairy tales and easily marketable IP, it’s the algorithmic friction between what we search for and what is presented to us: Cocomelon and cooking hacks. And yes, the mobile game ads where a low-level mafia recruit is spurned by his would-be girlfriend, driven into an endless spiral of attaining money and power.

More Money, More Monkey’s Paw-blems

The actual minigames are, for better or worse, almost exactly what you’d expect. Most of the classics are here: match test tube colors (Color Lab), use piles of cash to traverse obstacles (Cash Run), unjam a parking lot (Parking Lot), pull out the pins in a haphazardly arranged dungeon so you can reach a pile of jewels and gold (Pin Pull), and traverse a series of towers with filled with enemies (Number Tower).

The core of Number Tower—fight a lower-level enemy, then select another lower level enemy, scaling up to the final confrontation with a triple or quadruple-digit boss—runs through the best iterations in the first 20-odd levels, padding out the rest of its runtime with sheer complexity.

Number Tower taught me the hazards of PEMDAS more efficiently than Math Blasters. Was that deliberate? Probably not, but the lesson sticks: it’s risky to make an idea real, to transform a bait-and-switch into a real life product. THOSE GAMES’ gameplay turns a bit stale as each minigame goes on, but the small, delightful animations keep things from being unbearable. A gyrating, shirtless ogre in Number Tower, the POP! as your house in Cash Run sprouts from the ground.

THOSE GAMES has an artistic cohesion up there with the Game Boy Advance WarioWare games, a uniform approach to style and rendering that keeps things goofy but readable. This extends to the menus, which have the familiar font choices and rounded corners of the Nintendo microgame series. Additionally, there is somewhat arbitrary gacha machine (called Gotcha! in the game) that dispenses titles for your nameplate.

Clearing all the levels of a minigame unlocks challenges, but that’s a steep price to pay. Some minigames are a brisk twenty-five levels, others stretch to a hundred, and none really justify their runtime. While there are online daily challenges for Gotcha! coins, this addition underlines the obvious: it’s an attempt to try and justify the game’s existence as a paid product.

The Verdict: An Act of Self-Preservation

Capitalism won’t save us, the gaming industry regularly makes older games almost completely inaccessible, and software companies sunset tools on a whim. Too often, it’s up to volunteers to pick up the pieces after vibrant communities unceremoniously die. If the Video Game History Foundation and FlashPoint have to work this hard for games that actually exist, what happens when the current mobile game advertising trends vaporize? We’re left with bootleg video compilations and the glimmer of an idea.

THOSE GAMES carries on shared cultural memory in its own way, unable to completely avoid the crude undertones and punishing scaling of the source material. While the collection is far from perfect, it’s what we have now. Please go play it. I need the stinky girl and wild makeover games in the sequel.

Great

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