Game Review: Say the Same Thing – OK Go’s foray into mobile gaming

Say The Same Thing

Space Inch, LLC

Free on Apple iOS and Android

OK Go, the band behind such visual masterpieces as the music videos for This Too Shall Pass and Here It Goes Again, have dabbled in mobile gaming.

More specifically, they’ve created Say The Same Thing in collaboration with Space Inch, a words-with-friends style game for Apple and Android devices.

The aim of the game is, unsurprisingly, to say the same thing as your buddy, who can be one of your friends, a random person or even, coolest of the cool, a member of OK Go (you have to queue for an unspecified time for this).

To get you both to say the same thing, the idea is to start with two random words of your and your buddy’s choosing, and then try and say a word which has something in common with both those two, whose meaning slots in between the two, as it were. For instance, if the words were ‘alarm’ and ‘hot’, you might say ‘fire’.  If you both say the same word, you win, and if you don’t, you continue on with the two new words you’ve both just said.  You can’t use the same word twice but your answers can be in the form of a phrase.

You can choose the x2 button, which lets you put in two words, and if your partner guesses either, you win.  There’s also the ‘That Counts’ button, which will count an answer if you and your partner both think you got the same word (handy if one of you is a terrible speller, for instance).  You can also add stamps to people’s words, to encourage your buddy, such as ‘Genius’ and ‘Lol’; these sound lame but they’re actually quite nice to receive, particularly when playing a random stranger and they award you with a stamp – it’s primary school all over again.

These options, however, cost bananas.  You’re given 50 bananas at the start of the game and three every hour when you get low, until you’re back up to 12.  Each new game costs two bananas, and you can have several games on the go at once; in fact, this was the only way I found it interesting enough to play, since your buddy can take an age to respond.

There are various additional extras, like buddy chat, and the game recommends that you play Say The Same Thing in person with your friends by thinking of a word for each round and having someone count down from three.  If you say the same thing, you have to hug (check out the video of OK Go demonstrating this):

The YouTube video description says OK Go formulated the game while on tour.  And the thing is, I’m sure it’d work well when you’re surrounded by quirky and fun-loving people who get the rules.

My problem is, when you’re playing with strangers, you seem to run up against a lot of people who don’t quite understand how the game works, or indeed, what words are.  Someone replied to ‘butter’ and ‘pillow’ with ‘butterpillow’ (what?!).  Someone else consistently wrote the same thing that I did, or variations of my previous word, instead of a word in between the two.  And after a series of near misses, people seem to get tired of the game and give up; three games are currently on hold and have been for 24 hours.

You can however invite friends to play, via Facebook (login to the app requires a Facebook login or a Games Center login, which is kind of annoying) and this is where the game gets good.  Your friends are generally your friends because they think a bit like you, plus the chat function can be used to ridicule or applaud each other’s choices.  My friend and I played about five games in a row, and had a trail of conclusions starting with ‘Sick Monkey’ through ’28 Days Later’ and ending in ‘Cure’.  For a word between ‘Rubbish’ and ‘Money’ my friend wrote ‘Wall Street’ and for ‘Dino’ and ‘T-Rex’ she wrote ‘Tiny Arms’. In short, playing with ingenious and hilarious people will make this game incredibly addictive.

The game is also free, which is all kinds of good, but does have pop up ads which become more frequent, the more you play and are intensely annoying when in the middle of a game.  However, for the amount of fun I ended up having guessing words in between ‘Time Travel’ and ‘Fred Flintstone’, I think I can handle that.