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I think the ultimate credit for total air hockey immersion really has to go to Shufflepuck Café’s opponents though. The delicate balance between the occasional sound effect and otherwise total silence somehow has the effect of making you feel even more… there. This was fairly common with Amiga games as limited memory made it difficult for both music and SFX to be played simultaneously – some even gave you the option of one or the other – but in Shufflepuck Café it feels less like a limitation and more like a directorial choice. Every match is tense, and yet there’s also something quite comforting about the way the immersive perspective wraps you in its hold.Īside from the title theme and a jaunty jingle played in between rounds, Shufflepuck Café is music-free, leaving you only with the ambient sound effects of the bar. As you play, all other concerns fade, and time stands still. You should feel afraid most of the alien patrons are degenerate thugs or powerful gang lords, but all that seems to matter to them is shufflepuck. You’re in a seedy bar on some planet, god knows where in the galaxy. Sit at a desk, let the glow of the cathode ray tube wash over you, and as the blackness of the room blends with that of the screen, you’re no longer at that desk. But the effect is a potent one nonetheless. Maybe it’s just an absence of detail, an attempt to conserve the power of the hardware, or a holdover from the game’s monochrome Macintosh roots, perhaps. There’s quite a lot of black in Shufflepuck Café. No, this is best experienced on original hardware, through a CRT monitor and in a dimly lit, if not entirely dark room. You can’t get the most from this game by playing on a crystal clear display, in a window, with your favourite collection of GIFs and a folder of tax returns beaming back at you. I find Shufflepuck Café is best played now, exactly as it was when I first discovered it on a mate’s Amiga 500 back in the Nineties. Every element of the game works to suture the player into its narrow slice of alternative reality so well that all else momentarily ceases to exist.

But Shufflepuck Café’s great illusion isn’t just a matter of control. Presented from a first person perspective, your only avatar is an air hockey puck, controlled with absolute one-to-one precision simply by moving the mouse around.

On a purely mechanical level, Shufflepuck Café is so simple that it’s genius.