You’ve seen them. If you’ve tried to read almost anything on the Internet, especially on a social media site, you know these mobile game advertisements.
“Many failed before! Think you can do better?” one reads, positioned over an auto-playing video of a simple puzzle played by an unseen, incredibly stupid hand. It pulls the wrong pin, melting the gold and drowning the king. Or it can’t do elementary math, so it sends a “10” fighter to its death against a “13” creature, ignoring the “8” it could have picked to add up to 18. Sometimes, there are colored liquids in tubes to be poured, and they are selected with an almost elegant idiocy.
They’re infuriating, but you know they work, because these ads keep showing up. If you actually downloaded these games, you’d discover they were stuffed with pop-up ads, relentlessly barking micro-transactions, or they’re some unrelated and cynically monetized game entirely. What if you could actually play the original bait games, for a reasonable one-time fee, crafted by a developer who was in on the joke?
That’s exactly what Those Games are. Their full title is Yeah! You Want “Those Games,” Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let’s See You Clear Them!, originally in all caps. Developer Monkeycraft, makers of the Katamari Damacy Reroll titles, has now made many of the games that don’t seem to exist. They’ve just arrived for the PlayStation, having already provided their public service on Nintendo Switch and Windows on Steam. The package is $10 on all platforms.
Some people will find that price a bargain, given the chance to prove how much better they’d be at these kinds of puzzles than the psychological dark patterns that taunt them. Some people might wait for a sale, given that you are, in fact, getting some very free-to-play-esque puzzles. But having spent more time than I expected tackling them, I can vouch that once you get past the first few patronizing levels and adjust to some slightly muddy controls in a couple of titles, each set of games starts giving you real, thoughtfully constructed challenges.
Three of the games in Those Games were instantly familiar to me, a person who owns a smartphone and reads things on it. Surprisingly, I had never seen the last two in the list here:
- Pin Pull, removing barriers between you, monsters, traps, and treasure in the right order.
- Number Tower, sending your number-ranked fighter to tackle numbered monsters, potions, power-ups, and rebuffs in the right order
- Color Lab, combining similar colors from vials in the right order
- Parking Lot, moving cars facing different directions out of a lot with a circular drive, in the right order
- Cash Run, clicking on an auto-walking man to have him pile up money to avoid obstacles, finishing with enough to not be “poor” and disappoint his spouse.
I got a few levels past this Pin Pull stage, but not through all 50. Troll clubs goblin, goblins run toward stick guy, so when do you release rock?DCPublisher
As with most of the games, the inherent “how hard could it be?” starts coming back on you as the complications multiply.DCPublisher
You can’t pour a full, single-color vial, and that makes the later levels of Color Lab an actual challenge.DCPublisher
Parking Lot is fun, but only if you stop caring about timing and star ratings, given the quirky controls.DCPublisher
Cash Run is perhaps the only game in the set you could suggest has a deeper meaning, vis-a-vis capitalism. It’s also harder to grasp than the others.DCPublisher
I can’t believe I actually lost, and respected, some of these levels
Those Games toys with its premise in fun, knowing ways. Each level you beat earns you a star rating based on how quickly you completed it. Your accomplishments earn you coins and “IQ,” unlocking levels and giving you money to spend on a “Gotcha” (get it?) prize gamble and additional looks for your “Nameplate.” The cloying interface and fake rewards will be familiar to anyone who has put a fraction of a toe into any “free” phone game. The games themselves are something different.
Pin Pull, based on the ads that have instilled the most impotent ad-consumption frenzy in me, ramps up pretty impressively throughout 50 levels. It guides you from the iconic “Do smart thing or do dumb thing?” puzzle to levels where you’re actually flexing some decision-tree thinking. By around level 20, I wasn’t certain to complete a level on the first try. By level 30, I was almost mad at how actually engaging I found this mechanic, and realizing I had to move on to other games to not spend a whole workday on this.
Number Tower and Color Lab gave similarly enjoyable “started as a joke, now it’s becoming real” puzzles as I moved through their 50 levels. Parking Lot was fun, but only if I stopped trying to complete levels quickly. On PC, at least, choosing a car, then moving it with either a mouse or keyboard felt like there was lag in the input, putting some mistakes into successive actions. It also ramps up in difficulty quicker, though smacking cars into each other as you flail through strategies is pretty fun.
Cash Run felt the most like the game that didn’t quite achieve ironic escape velocity. Your stick figure walks along, picking up dollars as he goes, and then you have to click at the right moment to send him up on a Fornite-ish staircase of hastily stacked money. Waiting too long to build means bumping or falling on the obstacle, but being too careful means spending too much money. If you end the game with money in the “Poor” range, your final climb to a plateau to meet your wife ends with her disappointed, and you living in a shack instead of a suburban tract box.
It’s bizarre, it’s imprecise, it feels like slow-mo Flappy Bird with an Eisenhower-era viewpoint—it’s exactly what I’d expect from a free bait game. Thankfully, it’s just 25 levels and entirely optional.
I appreciate Those Games as both a kind of performance art and an actual puzzle game. It turns the wasted potential of fake marketing funnel mini-games into enjoyable challenges. Maybe we can’t fix this industry, but we can enjoy a little meta-fun from its darkest reaches.