Indie dev’s joke gets adorable poker game temporarily banned from Nintendo eShop

polygon.com:

The pitch for Sunshine Shuffle, a new indie game out this week, is a real good one. You play as one of several cute animals, together on a boat, playing poker. As you play, you learn that, like in Reservoir Dogs, said cute animals have just done a robbery together. Poker, animals, and crime — a compelling mix for a promising indie game that was supposed to come out this week. The problem is, some people won’t be able to play it for a few days, because a pretty funny joke from the game’s developer got a little out of hand.

Xalavier Nelson, Jr., who runs the development label Strange Scaffold games, is known professionally for both his quirky narrative games (An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator) and his occasionally tongue-in-cheek online presence where he goes to great lengths in the service of extremely corny jokes. (Consider this 93-tweet thread, a shaggy dog story in the service of an awful, awful pun.)

One of Nelson’s latest jokes was about Sunshine Shuffle. As he explains in a video, he settled on a recurring gag that the game “teaches children to gamble” because of the combination of cute animals and poker — which, to be clear, the game does not do. Unfortunately this meant that at the 11th hour, people started taking him seriously — the result being that, while Sunshine Shuffle is out now on Steam and itch.io, itis not currently available on the Nintendo eShop in North America, and, according to Nelson, banned entirely from the Republic of Korea.

SUNSHINE SHUFFLE IS SUPPOSED TO COME OUT TOMORROW ON SWITCH AND PC KEYWORD BEING “SUPPOSED TO” APPARENTLY, MY SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN ABOUT THE GAME NOT TEACHING CHILDREN TO GAMBLE HAS UH CONVINCED NINTENDO THAT THE GAME IS