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If you choose to back Buried Treasure at a specific tier, you can demand that I review anything at all. Ideally a game, and even better an underappreciated one. Ameer has done exactly that, and his suggestion is a shoutout toward the completely splendid guessthe.game.
I am already very familiar with Guess The Game, primarily because Kotaku‘s Carolyn Petit is supernaturally good at it, and often reminds me to play. The site is one of those post-Wordle creations, where people innovated on the format of six guesses based on increasing clues in all manner of directions. GTG is definitely one of the best, and today is on its 795th puzzle!
The format is very straightforward: there’s a section of a screenshot of a game, and you have to guess what it is. The entry field for game names is a smart box that searches against a reasonably comprehensive database of game names (you won’t find a lot of the smaller indie games that didn’t break through, for instance, but then that would be impossible to manage), so you don’t need to worry about spelling or exact titles – it takes care of that for you. If you get it right on go one, you’re a genius, and you can spend the rest of the day walking around like a peacock.
Get it wrong, as is most likely, and you’ll get a different screenshot snippet along with the game’s Metascore. Miss again and stage three has yet another section of a screenshot and this time the game’s original platforms. For the fourth guess there’s a shot that’ll give away a lot more, alongside apposite genres, and by the fifth the original release date and a proper gimme shot. For your sixth and final guess, there’s a gif of the game running along with its developer name – if you can’t get it here, then you’ve failed that day. I have often failed the day.
Let’s spoil yesterday’s entry, as an example. It begins with a shot that actually contains a generous chunk of information, and one that for me, absolutely should have given it away immediately. Why? Because my own website was obssessed with the game. And yet, I entirely couldn’t place it.
That face – it’s so distinctive. I knew it. I couldn’t remember it. But that’s fine, next image.
This may seem mean, but if you know the game, you can see what a big clue this is. It’s a sporting field, right? But that leg up top seems to also have a cloak. Those two ingredients pretty much point to one game. You know, that game that combined American football with fantasy figures. It’s obvious! Kieron never stopped going on about it! WHAT THE HELL IS IT CALLED?
The next three shots don’t help me, given the ridiculous situation I’m in, but get progressively more unsubtle about what the game looks like.
Along the way we’ve learned that it has a Metascore of 72, was originally on PC, was a sports, RTS and TBS game, and originally came out in 2009.
Finally, the video clip shows the game I already knew running like I already knew it ran, and reminds me it was developed by Cyanide. And I swear it’s only now, now as I type this sentence, that the game’s name came back to me. Blood Bowl. BLOOD BOWL! For goodness sakes. That could have been a 2! Instead it was a very loose 6.
Um, I’m not entirely sure how helpful it was to take you on a trip through my terrible memory, but it certainly gives you an idea of how the game works.
What’s so splendid about it is the curation. There are some people who’ll look at today’s first picture and just wonder at how anyone in the world could not know it. There are others who will be entirely mystified, given the genre. The subtlety of the shots, and the incremental revealing of the game, make this always a satisfying experience. Unless you just completely blank on the name of a game your friend helped make.
Monday’s entry just started with a picture of some grass, which many will declare ludicrously impossible, while a decent few will go, “OH! I know THAT grass!” And if you do know that grass, but recognised it from another game in the same franchise, Guess The Game will tip you off on that, too. Games can be anywhere from extremely old to very recent (there was a game from May this year recently), and enormously famous to somewhat niche indie, meaning each day biases a different type of person, allowing bragging rights to be spread around. Also you can get furious with it, when you’re so proud of yourself for having recognised something as obscure as Little Big Adventure, and it turns out to be Little Big Adventure 2.
The same creator, Eric, also has Guess The Book, with extracts accompanied by dripfed details like genre, release date, and author. And Guess The Audio, which offers ever-longer snippets of a song and similar developing details. Both are also great.
And that’s the thing: Guess The Game is great. It could so easily have been fine, probably even if it were automated to have a bot grab games off Mobygames and manufacture a new entry each day. But it isn’t that, it’s something far more hands-on and meticulous, and that makes it something much better. And it’s free, there’s no nags for subscriptions, and you can support it via Ko-Fi.
- Guess The…
- Website
- Free
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