Nutmeg is one of those games that, if you’re in the target demographic, sells itself on the title screen. Pure Roy of the Rovers and Panini vibes, with a flaming football streaking across the middle to put an exclamation point on “Nutmeg!” I am a man in his mid-forties who’s followed football since I was a kid in the late ’80s, had the sticker albums and replica kits, and played obsessively until a few years ago. In other words, I am very much the target audience for Nutmeg.
This is not only a love letter to the ’80s/’90s era of English football when the old First Division was becoming the Premier League, but to everything that accrued around it. At times, perhaps, too much so. To give an example that works: you view your squad, backroom staff, transfer targets, and various other information via flipping the pages of a sticker album.
Managing your squad and playing the core game is what Nutmeg is amazing at. The cards could I think do without the little crafting minigame (where you upgrade them before matches) and with a little more craziness. There are some fun and obvious references like an 80%+ attacking chance card called “Hand of God” that comes with a high chance of being caught and carded.
But this game is specifically evoking those early Premier League years, and let’s not forget that this is the era where Eric Cantona kung-fu kicked a Crystal Palace fan (and was right to do so) before returning after a lengthy ban to tell the assembled press that “when the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines are going to be thrown in the sea.”
Some bonkers stuff went on in those days. Leyton Orient’s manager John Sitton fired one player after a match then offered two more out for a fight in the middle of a TV documentary about the club, delivering the immortal lines: “You can pair up if you like. And you can fucking pick someone else to help you. And you can bring your fucking dinner. Because by the time I’m finished with you, you’ll fucking need it!”
I really have often wondered about whether, upon regaining consciousness after a beating, I would be glad to see a chicken tikka masala nearby.
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I don’t recall Rivaldo and Alessandro del Piero queuing up to join Blackburn in the early ’90s, but with some juicy contracts they soon putting poor old Grimsby to the sword.
Nutmeg has some naughtiness to it, which is unfortunately confined to its Teletext-aping news service, but none of that craziness that ’80s/’90s football had. A far bigger problem, as so often, is all the fuss surrounding the good stuff.
The game leans into the retro manager vibe by making your hub a desk, on and around which are an old PC, a phone, the tactics board, stadium blueprints, the TV, a games console, a stereo, the sticker book, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Yes that does sound like a lot of things. It is.
Nutmeg’s greatest deficiency is that the concept is bang-on, but it hasn’t stripped away enough. For such a simple game the subsidiary systems don’t feel like they need to be there: I’m not interested in managing what merch the club shop stocks. I don’t want to hire the club accountant. I don’t want to manage the stadium, or phone the bank manager, or even set training routines.
This game demands all of those things, and admittedly in a mostly light-touch way. But the whole reason I’d be interested in something like this is that I want the football manager match day fantasy: I don’t want the granular simulation of a Football Manager, even diet Football Manager.
Nutmeg should be Roy of the Rovers stuff. I want to sign some awesome players, whack a team together, and manage the matches. Yes some sort of meta-structure around that would be cool, but what Nutmeg has now is just a bunch of cruft that takes me away from what the game’s good at.
Then the real crime: the UI is just very clunky, even if serviceable. This game asks you to switch in and out of different menus all the time but it’s not as slick an experience as it should be, with giant blue-and-purple arrows somehow combined with at times unclear signalling. This is obviously an early build so I wouldn’t want to be too harsh, but this isn’t a pleasant game to navigate.
I played through Nutmeg’s challenge mode as Blackburn, aiming to win promotion to the first division in the early ’90s. The team you start with isn’t great, but very quickly some interesting transfer prospects pop up: some young buck called Alan Shearer is going for a song, this Tim Sherwood looks alright, and who’s that David Batty fella?
Yes, you essentially start building Blackburn’s Premier League winning side from the ground up. Nutmeg’s structured around one month increments, each of which contain five matches, but you delegate four of these to your coaching staff and choose one fixture as the “broadcast” game. The broadcast matches increase the boosts you get from good results (fan sentiment, gate receipts) and vice-versa, so it’s important to pick carefully: if you’re away to a very good Ipswich team, maybe let the coaches take the hit on that one, and focus all your efforts on hammering Oxford at home.
It took me roughly two hours to play through the season, which started badly before a bunch of incredible signings righted the ship. I don’t recall Rivaldo and Alessandro del Piero queuing up to join Blackburn in the early ’90s, but with some juicy contracts they soon putting poor old Grimsby to the sword.
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There’s a nice balance to be struck here between the fixtures and what kind of cards you take in. I rocked up to Newcastle away with a ludicrous forward line and a load of attacking cards, but then barely saw any of the ball and didn’t have the defensive boosts to shut down opposition attacks: scoring from your only counter-attack is nice, but when you’ve already shipped three it is cold consolation.
There are incongruities between what’s happening in the match and the commentary all the time. Your stout centre-back Colin Hendry might decide to go for the classic tactic of hoofing it as far as possible, but the voiceline says something like “this slow pressure is really wearing them [the opposition] down.” Such things are to be expected in pre-release versions, of course, but if the audio commentary can’t maintain some kind of consistent link with what’s actually happening in the match, then you start wondering why it’s there at all.
I really enjoyed most of managing Blackburn, mainly the games, the transfers, and the odd press conference. I found most of the rest of what Nutmeg’s doing extraneous, and even irritating at times. When it comes to the structure around the matches something like the stadium upgrade minigame is simple enough to work, and retain my interest, but I just can’t be bothered with choosing between selling scarves or badges on matchdays.
You knew this was coming: Nutmeg is a game of two halves. There’s a great game bubbling under here that feels like it really vibes with the era it’s going for, and catches a little of the magic of football in the late ’80s/early ’90s. The cards could perhaps be a little more characterful and out-there at times, and I’m not enormously sure what the crafting adds, but in the matches Nutmeg can really deliver.
Almost everything outside of that feels like a distraction, even though I’ll emphasise the management side is (as these things go) very light. It’s a difficult balance to hit: you do want to feel like you’re managing a club somehow, but also you just want to get on with the matches. Nutmeg has a great line-up on paper but, as the great Brian Clough once said, it’s a pity the game’s played on grass.
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