Wednesday Basketball

Being someone who's played basketball all their life, I was really interested in finding a strategy basketball game and seeing what it would play like. The system was easy to understand, by the second game I was already feeling pretty comfortable in the mechanics. Being on offense is the most fun part, tailoring your playstyle based on the characters that you were given was the most fun aspect of the game. The defensive mechanics, however, were pretty lackluster in my opinion, and it was even noticeable when I was on offense, as I never really had to factor in the skillsets of any of the defenders when strategizing, aside from one character. There's no real option to ensure on-ball defense, making you feel extremely helpless when the CPU chucks 3s in your face and nails every single one, or when they move away from ur defender on their turn and then drain another 3. The "first to 7" standard makes the difference between 3s and 2s a huge deal, so it's really demoralizing when the CPU Re...

Wednesday Basketball took me 2,5 hours to complete. It is a fun, relaxed story centered game, with a couple of bugs, which should not be there. The game has excellent and funny dialogue at some points, which makes the story about the value of community worthwile. It also has a clear political message about immigration and equality. There are quite a few bugs, which cause the game to freeze (two balls in play, the AI making no moves) or crash. Luckily the creators foresaw this in including a 'skip match', button, which moves you forward to the next dialogue. I had to use it three times because of these bugs. Sadly enough, at some points the dialogue between characters is missing, showing only an alphabetic code, which I assume must be a placeholder for that missing dialogue. This is a serious bug in a game reliant on story. The gameplay features dialogue between our main characters on one hand and playing a game of basketball on the other. Both phases of the game take about 1 or 2 min...

The game has rough edges but it's really really sweet! It's more of a story than a tactical game. The tactical phases are mostly there to support the story (and they do it brillantly). The game takes roughly 3h to finish and it's worth every second of it.

Even with a few bumps along the way, the devs have tapped into something special with Wednesday Basketball. The moments where you start to feel why your team is playing basketball and why they may want to win... when you can see characters grow and change as a result of what happens off the court? That feel absolutely electric. I found the quality of the English translation a little spotty (so if you can read French, that's the way to go) and wished there was something more conclusive to the stories and the characters, but if you're looking for a cozy, slightly puzzly, drama-infused-basketball game, you can find a lot to love here.

This is the kind of cool, melancholic & feel good game you'll want to play. The tactical part of the game is well done and the story is gonna make you laugh & cry a little. Hot beverage, blanket, launch the game.