405 - Deja Vu: A Nightmare Comes True!!

Deja vu. In this case, what you don't know can kill you. And welcome to Nostalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America.

I'm Mike. Hey, Mike. Oh, I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. Ironically, maybe, Deja Vu is about amnesia. Yeah? I think that that's true. I accept this. Both as a video game and as a term. Yes. The word means kind. No, it actually doesn't. It doesn't, right? But experiencing deja vu is a form of amnesia. It's future amnesia. Yeah. I think we'd be misrepresenting what deja vu is, but I think if you have amnesia...

and then you suddenly get like a memory starts coming back to you that you used to have, that would feel like deja vu. It's like, oh, I feel like this moment's happened before because you're remembering something that happened before.

Whereas deja vu I know is actually just like something that you're living in right now. And it feels like you already have that memory. So they're like adjacent. So it's kind of like, you know, we're, we're not, we're not being literal with deja vu, but yeah, there's still like brain brain.

do good work good sometimes exactly and what deja vu is is it's a point and click adventure game set in uh 1941 chicago You're a private investigator, Ace Harding, who suffers from amnesia, awakes in a bathroom stall, and slowly unravels a case that... actually involves him. This is just an NES port. It's not exclusive to the console, but it is kind of...

uh, in line with some of the other point and click games that we've had, uh, on the show. And I guess like the, the series of, of games is known as like Mac venture style games. Uh, these, these point and click. Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know enough about the history of these to know why that's called that, but it's like maybe that's the company or maybe that's... Like Macintosh Adventure Games? Yeah, yeah. Like maybe it's like...

It says it's a series of menu-based point-and-click interface games. That's how they're known for. Deja Vu, Shadowgate, and The Uninvited, which I think also comes to the NES, are like what these... And they were developed for the Macintosh by ICOM Simulation. So they're all made by the same team. So do you feel that Shadowgate DNA in Deja Vu? Absolutely. I like the change in tone and setting, but it's very Shadowgate, for sure. And what do you think about the amnesia?

private investigator as a trope uh specifically in video games but also in media as a whole well i was gonna say you think this is the first one of our first instances like is this kind of where that trope in video games came from have we had other games on the nes where you're you're you don't remember anything because it's such a common trope in games

No, I agree. I can't think of one off the top of my head. I feel like there's a lot of not point-and-click adventure games, but text-based adventure games that probably play around with that. Right. Or the twist of like you being someone more important than, than you realize, you know, like when you, when you start this game, when you start this game, it doesn't become inherently obvious that you are.

like you don't know who you are you know again you're just waking up in this bathroom stall and you're just kind of wandering around and then this case really kind of naturally presents itself to you but Sean you know Disco Elysium kind of the same idea I think it's just a very, I mean, yeah, maybe it's a little overdone, but it's incredibly useful for having the world explain to you.

In a way that like, yeah, generally characters that live in a world don't need the world explained to them, but maybe somebody with amnesia does. And it's a good excuse diegetically to have these explanations made to you. Now that's not so much what's happening here. There's no deep lore that's being explained to you as some like outsider to society. This is more so just a setup for a mystery.

that happens to involve you. So maybe it's not done for the same reasons, but, uh, it's a, you know, it's a versatile trope and I think tropes are meant to be used. And, um, this is, this is a fine use of it.

And like any good investigator, whether you know it or not at the start of the game, the screen is very similar to Shadowgate in that you have your commands or your verbs on the bottom of the screen. and then you have your notebook where you're uh keeping tabs on everything but also i guess your notebook is your inventory of like things you have and that's on the right hand side of the screen and then on the left hand side is this very small

but detailed interactive window of, you know, from your POV, what you're seeing in the scene. And you can click on things and you kind of... The gameplay loop is you verb into the object and then the game tells you. It's very dirty phrasing. Right, right. You verb into the noun. Right. So, you know, you might search something, you might examine something, you might open something, take something, but...

this idea of just essentially using that to kind of make the, what would have worked as a text adventure game, but now with a visual component to it. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm trying to remember if these. Because there are some shortcuts in this that make that, because describing it like that makes it sound more tedious than it is. There are some shortcuts that I can't remember. It's still a little tedious.

It didn't bother me as much maybe because I wasn't expecting some of these shortcuts. Were they in Shadowgate where you can press B to cancel out of any verb you're doing and then also you can just click on any door? anywhere to move in that direction. It's a great question and something I wondered as well because it also kind of remembers where your cursor was too. Right. That's something that I noted.

Right. If you cancel out of the open thing because you didn't want to open that particular thing, you're still on open rather than having to go back to it. Yeah, I guess. And the only reason that I said that there is still some tedium is that like no matter how. Like sort of no matter how intuitive everything else works, you still have to make sure you open doors before you try and walk through. So that'll be something that I kept doing. But in general.

uh it's it's got a good streamline like yeah there's a few pages of items in your inventory pretty quickly that you'll have to like change pages on but uh

In terms of just, it all, you didn't need to read the manual to get how it really worked. Right. But if you take it at face value, there are some things that like... are obvious that you have to do, but could have been shortcuts if they would have made the leaps with the player, such as you can't... leave a room until you open the door but if you clicked on the move screen the the wherever so there's this other thing on the bottom hand side of the screen where

you see move and you have these blue squares which represent any particular area that you can move but it's supposed to be a top-down view of the first person view that you're viewing so sometimes this move screen with many squares It can get kind of confusing about which square is which. Eventually, you'll figure it out in your head, but it is a little disorienting at first. Just to say, I want to move to this door, and then the game tell you, you know.

You have to open that. It's like, okay, but you could have understood that I was trying to do that. And it very much does understand that you know that because it's a very, every time that happens, there's a very like... talk-down-to-you vibe. You can't go through doors before opening them, silly. Okay, thanks. That should just be assumed. And it's important for, like...

things later in the game too that you wouldn't you know you wouldn't want certain things to be not necessarily opened but to examine things to find things within things you know that bathroom uh is like the tutorial where you have to like, sure, there's a code in front of you and you can just take the code.

But if you don't examine it, you won't find out what's inside the coat, you know? And then you have to take those things. That actually took me a very long time. Right. So it's like it needs to teach you that right away because otherwise you would just expect that by...

you know, by opening something, you automatically get it all. Or by examining something, it adds it to your inventory. It's like that's not how it would work. Well, I have a question for Joe, actually. Yes. Because I think you kind of gave a...

uh an acknowledgement of of that when i said it um how far into this game did you get before you actually went through the pockets of the coat well so i was just going to say i had almost the opposite oh Problem I went to the pockets of the coat immediately first thing I did I examined it then I went to the pockets I took everything out of it Then I left I walked away or whatever and I was trying to figure out where to go next or whatever and somehow later in the game I ended up back there

And then I took the coat. Like I went through the pockets without taking the coat. Like I opened the coat while it was still on the hook. Wow. And then when you take the coat underneath the coat. is a gun on a holster that was not in the pockets of the coat so it didn't wasn't there so like I did the opposite I was like oh intuitively I think I should open this that's really fine but I didn't take it to see what was underneath it

until much later in the game. And I was like, oh, I could have used this gun like three times already. So I, um, I like escaped to the bar. Um, I, you know, went into the, went into the basement through the secret. through the secret casino and found the dead body and jumped onto the fire escape all while wearing my coat and not know not knowing that I had money in there that I had like

That I had clues in there So I got to a point just like where the hell am I supposed to? How am I supposed to like acquire currency like can I can I do a day job while I'm out here like and Then I just, you know, opened the coat and there everything was. But I will say there is a not quite a day job, but I guess it's some people's day job of the casino.

That is just like an unlimited money creator. Well, I needed the money first. Did not know that that was the case. Yeah, but I think that you can also just, I don't know, but I think you can just like unlimitedly like check the slot machine. And like find a coin. Like one coin. Or something like that. I think there's a way that you're not locked out.

I just know I want to be at that casino because there's never been worse odds for the casino than that specific slot machine. It pays out way too often. It's crazy. I didn't even think to gamble. And this is me talking. I was like, who the hell am I talking to right now? Yeah, I ended up with like 30 coins pretty early and then I was like, great, I'm like set. Which foreshadowing, I just, this is why I...

I got like softlocked three or four times is because I didn't have enough money, not knowing that in addition to not ever being able to spend your $20 bill, did not know that you could gamble. You can spend it. We'll get there. Yeah. At least I thought you could. No, you can. Yeah, you spend that $20 bill. No problem. The cabbie won't take it. Yeah, nobody takes it. I only know of one place that takes it.

What I think is so cool about this game is that even when I finally did get stuck and resorted to an FAQ, when I was reading like the order of events, I was like... that's not how I did it. Like, did I miss something? But I didn't miss something. I just got to the casino probably like less than optimally, but there, there was like another way to get there. And it's like, it does give a better sense of a,

you know, explore and goof around vibe than Shadowgate was giving where that felt like, yeah, I mean, you know, you could kind of go around, but you were very like locked to the puzzle. This isn't like every room is a puzzle. This is...

You're trying to piece together where to go next based on the information you have. Yeah, I did like learning how there were... several entrances and the fact that like again you find a key in that jacket that lets you open the front door of the bar and I kept going in thinking that I'm gonna have to go up to the third floor of this bar and jump out the window to get back to the street

Or I could go down into the sewer and then come up through a hole in the floor to get back into the bar. And then I found that there was a key for the front door. So yeah, there are several ways to get around the map in addition to several ways to go. across like the larger expanse of the game, usually by hailing a cab or just in terms of like order of operations of where you go first.

Yeah, there's even random events that can happen to you on the street, too. It's not guaranteed that you're going to be mugged. Yeah, but you do get mugged, and it is a pain in the ass. So what do you do? You just hit that guy, right? Yeah, like over and over again. Yeah. But I think there's a limit. I think if you hit him enough, eventually you will have to pay or he'll hurt you. Did you ever get cornered by the lady? What's the lady's deal? She's got a gun?

She's got a gun. I shot her, and then the cops came because I was right in front of the police station. Yeah, I'm not proud, but I punched her. I think that was the right thing to do, actually, because she was about to pull a gun on me. But I was like, I gotta punch her. Here's the interesting thing, and you're getting to what my favorite part of the game is that, like, if we think about the Grand Theft Autos or even the L.A. Noire of all that stuff, like...

Those games are so fun, not because of the actual story mode, but because of the sandbox environment you're put in and how you choose to interact with things. And while this game isn't on that scale by any means. There is so much fun that you can have in this game by acting like a jackass. Oh, yeah. You can get the gun, select... shoot and then self and then the game will be like you know like oh wait go out with a bang like

I did appreciate that. I did appreciate they could shoot whoever you want. You would like that is the end state. I did like that. I thought I got around the money thing by starting. a car with a key i found and then you immediately just blow up and it's not even just like a like a like wow how's i supposed to know that like if you talk to somebody

Or maybe if you read a note or something. No, it's the woman. Oh, it's the woman. Yeah, she's just like, yeah, I read that to blow. And it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. So I do appreciate the...

The level of interaction and all the fun fail states that you got here. Yeah. Another fun thing is like... forget fail states you can also like soft lock yourself out of the game by doing really stupid things like flushing toilets uh flushing your your inventory stuff down the toilet like literally watching this saying goodbye to the game as you watch it swirl down

There's no animation for it, of course. The game is kind of lacking that. It's all still screens instead of animated screens. But then there's also like, the game is kind of snarky. I think you referenced that, Sean. But like, if you're being... stupid it'll it'll imply so but like you can use the speak command on that same toilet and it the game will tell you like you're talking to a toilet really i didn't know that there's a lot of things i've tried speaking to

and it would just be like, what are you doing? And I thought for a while it was like, oh, wow, it's actually... Maybe if only if I talk to that thing, it says that, but no. If you talk to inanimate objects, usually it just asks you what you're doing. Yeah, or it says like...

Or if you examine them, it says like nothing, nothing unusual here. If it's just like examined like blank spaces or whatever. But it is cool that like sometimes it does have like a little flavor text just to add to it. Like there's a lot to discover in the game. Not even just.

on the way to beating the game, but just exploring the world and seeing what you can do. Throughout the game, there are these, I guess we'll call them deja vu moments where uh there's like a there's a music cue and i guess it shows you uh so now it switches povs uh but it shows you And it reveals a twist of sorts. They get grander, but that deja vu moment as a repetitive cue also works really well from a...

Not repetition, but even just sound perspective. How do you mean? Like just, you know, that like every time you hear that specific thing, it's like you've learned something bigger than just like collecting another thing in your inventory. or another address. Yeah, I guess it was, I didn't really put together that whatever was happening would be like a big moment. Because I remember I was just going up some stairs and I thought I was just getting...

like lightheaded because it's like, you don't feel so hot. Um, you really need to take a break or something. And I'm like, I'm just walking up some stairs and then it didn't happen again until I like went to an office and, uh, i guess it was my own office but maybe you don't know that yet and you're sort of getting that deja vu as you might say so yeah i guess i see that yeah or like when you look at the picture and you recognize yourself

That I didn't see, yeah. Oh yeah, there's like a picture on the wall that is of Bob Boxer. It's you. And then that image comes up of your face and that music plays. And it's a little corny, but it is kind of like... it is kind of cool and it's kind of like mysterious and it catches your interest of like oh man what is going on like this is such a creepy situation for this guy to be in you gotta just kind of suspend your like cringe a little bit

And while you guys were talking about whether or not you pulled the items out of the coat, the first moment where I had to actually look at a guide was because the desk above the bar in the office... Because of the point of view, you're facing... It didn't read like a desk, did it? I mean, the guy was hunched over it, if I recall. There was another one that wasn't, but there was another one where a guy's hunched over the desk, so you knew it was a desk.

But the drawers would be on his side. Yeah, you can't see there's anything to open. Right, right. But the only way to progress is to open those drawers. And so I guess I could have just tried spamming commands around the room. don't have time for that. It kind of defeats the purpose of the game. You're not even playing the game anymore. I got there. That's like, you know, maybe you guys knew you could gamble. At least I opened that desk pretty easily.

yeah i did the same thing as mike i was like i was like i had no idea i finally looked at a guide and it said like open the desk and and i was like oh yeah and there's no visual indication that there's like a drawer involved in this desk Because if you know everything to do in the game via a guide or whatever, it's a pretty short game, but it's also like...

It's not even short because you're just doing everything. You're missing the actual personality of the game. I feel like the best part of this game is the vibe. Just the world that they put you in. Not that it is, again, keeping up with modern open worlds or anything like that, but for what we've experienced in terms of...

building out a story and a character and the people you interact with. I had more fun just tinkering with things, kind of like what we did in Maniac Mansion, too, where you were just like... fuck around in the mansion for a little bit, you know, like, yeah, let's see what's going on over here. Right. And like, everybody was like following their own scripts. That wasn't quite what this game was doing, but I was interested in just exploring it. So like when you got a new address.

I wanted to make sure I saw everything around here first before I went to the next location. That was a priority for me in a lot of games, I think, in my... Earlier days of just like I want a bunch of toys to play with and I think everywhere you go in this game is kind of like a It's like a fun house in itself and there are weird ways to interact with stuff So yeah, this was very much up my alley in that sense

Now, is the actual story, though, as strong as the world that you're put in? Like, is this amnesia? And then, like, I guess some spoilers here, but eventually you find out that you're being... framed by the mafia for the murder of somebody that they didn't agree with. And the doctor that you went to go see was actually not a good doctor at all, but the one who injected you with these. uh amnesia drugs and you need to take medicine against them is that part compelling does that part like hold up

I don't know if I if I were watching a movie or reading a book. I don't know if this would be like, oh, my God, what a standout story. But because I'm doing it and I'm solving it and I'm playing an NES game that is that.

is causing me to experience this story myself it does stand out to me i mean as far as stories on the nes this was one of the more engaging um and you know it's there's tropes and it's there's generic parts but also like other stuff i didn't see coming and i i was interested enough to you know for it to keep driving me forward and not just like oh i want to see what this game can do what is in this area what's it's like no i do want to

find things to help me solve this mystery and it does give you this satisfaction when you find something that feels like it's going to uh be like a key part in in the solving of this the mystery Yeah, it's funny. I'd actually, because we didn't do it, how I soft black myself several times. But so I didn't know how the game ended until you just sort of gave the very brief spark notes version.

But that I will grant to Joe's point, any story that actually has some sort of self-contained narrative and isn't like sound like a. five-year-old child made up the aliens that you're shooting in a shmup. I'm a huge fan of that. And I think that puts it in the upper echelon of stories on the NES. But granted, when you said...

like the basic, like key points there, you kind of get that vibe in the bar. Like you don't even need to leave the bar and you're already kind of like, Oh, some doctor injected me with something because there's all this. shit on the counter and I work above a doctor and they keep mentioning the seagull guy. There's a very large lady in the trunk of this car. This all makes sense. Yeah.

And Sean, just to be clear, that's kind of the story beats I gave were just like the entirety of the setup of the amnesia element. The final like win state is actually pretty interesting because then once you piece it all together, you have to go to the police and prove your innocence. And. You know, you're basically like tracking down all the correct evidence. But furthermore, you have to get rid of the bad evidence, the framing stuff. Like if you go into the police. That's illegal, Mike.

but i'm saying yeah exactly that's what's so weird though is like if you go into the police station the game oh yeah The game assumes that you handed over everything. And so then they find the other stuff and they're like, all right, well, you're, you know, you clearly did it. And so it's like, you have to not only find everything that would prove that the mafia was behind it. You have to throw out.

The bad evidence. That is funny. When I went onto the street the first time and saw the police station, I had already seen a lot of evidence for wrongdoing. I guess you always would. But I guess there is some version of this game where you just sort of find your way outside and beeline to the police and have no idea why they've arrested you. Right.

Is the jump from the bar to the sewers too drastic? Why are we traveling by sewer? like so early in the game you know what i mean like it could it have been more like could it have gotten more extreme as time went on it's kind of weird that you can just go like straight from uh waking up in this bathroom to like and he chose the sewers to travel around yeah i mean i guess it depends on on your playthrough because i feel like it wasn't quite as

quite so early for me that i found the sewer because i kind of had explored a lot before you know i like and i was you know outside seeing the the manhole cover and i was like well i wonder what's down there um So like, I feel like it didn't happen right away. And also it's like, if I'm like, I get that I'm trying to solve some mystery. So like, I don't know. It's not, it wasn't that crazy to me to be like, oh, I wonder if I can like.

you know, get into an unlocked area through the sewer or something. But like, I get what you're saying that it's not like, it may be like, it has a totally different vibe than the rest of the area. Well, Joe, that's a great point though. I liked it. It is a great point because. I didn't open up a manhole to go down into the sewer because I agree that would be a bit of a stretch. I opened the curtains of where the dead guy was, saw the fire escape, went...

upwards to the third floor, got on the elevator, and rode the elevator down to the casino, and then, yeah. See, I went the opposite. I got to the casino by going outside. going into the sewer, exploring, and then ended up in the casino, which took me to the elevator, which took me back to that room where that guy was. And I was like, okay, now I understand there's an elevator that'll take me through this, this building.

So, like, it wasn't like, oh, I just went from this building to the sewer somehow. It was like, no, I went outside and deliberately crawled into the sewer. Just for completeness and balance, I guess I'll say that I got into the sewer by... going down into the basement from the main room of the bar uh hitting the the loose book on the bookcase having the bookcase move out of the way going into that central room finding the

finding the whole casino and elevator situation, but also seeing the ladder down into the sewer. But all this that we've said of how we got to the sewer, do you ever need to go into the sewer? It's a great question. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. Well, as far as I know, unless the toilet, which I didn't know about, is another way to do it.

Later in the game, towards the very end, you need to get rid of evidence. I see. And there's this big, deep water area that you can throw all your evidence in, so I guess that's the only way to get rid of things. But, um...

But I love that we all found it in different ways. That's actually really, really cool. And I also, I didn't know anything about the book until I watched a video after I had played it. Yeah, I thought you were going to talk about the wine. Yeah, sorry, you're right. Wine bottle. Oh, the wine bottle. Did you select that because there was no dust on it? I examined and it was weird that it said that the one on the far right has no dust on it, so I just...

hit both of the ones on the right and the one actually caused the door to open. So I, yeah, thought that was pretty cool. Well, that's what makes me a little upset is cause I, I,

Saw that first before I wound up doing the fire escape route and I got the notification that like this one looks different and I tried to take it Rather than hit it and that doesn't work and I get it. It's a push into to do it all so that's why you have to hit it but I wouldn't think to hit something that looks different you know they should have just like programmed both to accept

that right so I just kind of gave up there but I shouldn't have I guess is the story also you have to go into the sewers because how else are you going to see the alligator yeah that's true That is in a random event, right? Yeah, it's a random event. There's a bunch of oddball stuff in this game. Or is it the first time you go to the deepest part of the sewer? I don't know. I think it's random. Okay.

So here, let me just, I have a negative because I've been very positive. And I know that anyone in their right mind would immediately try to gamble with the money they have in their pocket. But I just need to explain. I did softlock and... And I thought maybe, oh, maybe it's like an order of operations thing. Like I have to go to the right, go to the right address before I go to the next address. And you have to sort of route out your cab.

movements to make sure that you don't run out of money. But I thought that my seven quarters and my $20 bill were the only things that I had to go on. So first, I think it is absolute bullshit that your $20 bill can't be broken into change in a cab. I already mentioned this, but it's a big deal to me because...

This cab driver only accepts quarters of which you start with seven and yeah, you can gamble to get more. But I thought maybe at these other locations, there would be some way to get more quarters. But there is not, at least as far as I know. Like I went to the apartment high rise, thought that the little puzzle to get up there was cool. Found another address to go to and like, all right, cool. I've got a lead.

I go back to the cab, try and pay with what I have. He doesn't like it. And I just could not go forward. And I could have saved and gone back to it, but I did not save. So I played again. It is weird that you can't get more coins any other way than gambling. There needs to be some other... This is something that... It's a thing in adventure, at least in modern adventure games, because a lot of us are dum-dums.

redundancy like there needs to be other ways to just be able to progress if you've maybe softlock one branch right especially because in this game there are these these alter these like multiple locations that you need as far as I know the cab to get from one to the other and yeah what like

At least then let me walk all the way back somehow or something. Exactly. I thought there's no way to beat the game. I'm just stranded here now forever because there's no quarters in this in this neighborhood. Yeah. So that's just my that's my peeve.

Um, but yeah. I mean, if we want to get into negatives, I have a couple as well. I think that like the main thing is that, and I don't remember how much shadow gate felt this way too, but I don't think it felt. as much like I need, like there was some randomness. Like in this game, there are things that I'm like, yeah, I get now in retrospect why this is the way it is. But like, I don't know if I could have figured this out.

dumping the items in the sewer before going to the police like which items you have to dump into the sewer without a guide like that's like i don't even fully understand why i'm dumping these items into the sewer like they incriminate me but like

why just because i have them but like can't i just say like hey i got these while i was while i found all this other evidence that shows that i didn't do this and that this guy did and like i sold us out of his state whatever or does it incriminate you for like stealing or whatever but then there's like other

thing there was like something where if you know there's a point where you can find the um the way that you need to like find which medicines will counteract the uh the medicine that was given to you that's giving you this amnesia that's giving you this headache and all that And if you don't do that before you go into a certain room, you die. Oh, wow.

How would I know that? Yeah. How would I know? You know, it's like I guess it's kind of like if you're if you're not like looking too hard at the game, it's like, oh, it's just a time that you just died because you waited too long to go there. But it's not like, oh, you go into a certain amount of rooms after a certain amount of moves. You'll die unless you.

healed yourself it's just like this room because of the way that like you have to have your memory back before it like makes sense the way you progress it's like oh if you walk in that room before you got it back like it's like oh you're now you've died from you know you didn't heal yourself and like

I get it. Like there's a quick, you know, it saves like the moment before you die anyways. So it's like not like that much of a punishment, but it just felt like there were a lot of things where like there were more guess and check trial and error.

than like intuitive like puzzle solving that and i again it's been a long time since shadowgate but i do remember sometimes in there where i was like oh my god this is so frustrating i can't figure it out and then i figure it out and it's so satisfying because it's like i figured it out

Whereas this, I felt like, even if I did figure it, I felt like there were a few times where it was like, I kind of just lucked into that. Or I looked up a guide. I remember when I first went into the... the restraint doctor medicine room in the bar, finding the medicine that just died on the table and not so much in the shelves or anything like.

I only picked up the stuff on the table, and I tried to take it. Like, I don't know. I was just playing around. Like, let me just take this random drug that I found. And it just said, you can't do that. And I don't know if we need to, like, find a syringe later in the game or something. Or... If it only will let you take certain drugs together. I don't know. This bothered me a little bit too, because it's, it's like not those drugs on the table. There's like also drugs in the garbage can.

In the garbage can. That is kind of cool, but it was like a weird red herring that there are these other drugs on the table that you can't take. One of them I think you can. It lets you take them into your inventory, but you...

can't ingest them yeah it just if anything just have it be another like death sequence i don't know but it does it does i think it's useful in another way at some point you have to give it to someone else for some reason or something well one of them is the i don't know if it's that particular medicine that you're picking up in that scene, but there's like the truth serum medicine. Yes. And then just to go back to a question you had posed, Joe.

To the best of my knowledge, I cannot recall a single random encounter in the sense of like truly random in Shadowgate. But again, Shadowgate was more like you enter the next room. Now you have to solve the puzzle in that room. to go forward this is more like there's not a puzzle in every single screen it's just like certain screens you you will interact with multiple times as the story unfolds and other areas are just like well once you

Once you've collected everything in that room, you're done with that room for the rest of the game. The $20 bill thing, besides not being able to break it, Sean, there's also a chance to get a second $20 bill. And I can't figure out what you would use it on because as far as I know, the only thing you can use the $20 bill on is the gun, right? So why would you need $40?

How much are bullets? Are those a quarter each? Those are a quarter each, if I recall, which is a great price on bullets. Yeah. But it sucks because you have to buy them all individually. And you have to move the cursor to each one. And you have to say take. Take sounds like you're stealing it. Did anybody else think that they were stealing these items? Yeah, I would want to talk to the guy and then pull up a menu or something. I want a verb that says please. Yeah, where's the please verb?

wait wait please be as a verb as in like you're pleasing someone oh no no i mean it's just specifically like instead of just speaking yes say please say please yeah at say please

Say please at. Yeah. There was a second Deja Vu game. Deja Vu 2 Lost in Las Vegas. Can you believe this guy? See, they should have just called it Deja Vu. Right. Wasn't this in Las Vegas? No, this is Chicago. Okay, whatever, whatever. Lost in Las Vegas, it sounds like, I mean, I didn't play this game at all, but it's like.

Did he really get amnesia or lost again in a different place? Like maybe this guy should just consider taking a break. Hey, it's like home alone to lost in New York, lost in Las Vegas. Yeah, who copied who? Left Home Alone again. Wet Bands were last week, but it all connects. And Deja Vu 1 and 2 both came out on the Game Boy Color as like a collection. Wow.

That's pretty crazy. That is nuts. If you're asking me, I feel like, not that I, Game Boy Color is better than finance on the original Game Boy, but I also just don't think there's enough real estate. on screen yeah it is well confirmed well I just a bit before you said that I was like wondering why you both agreed that it was nuts that it came out

Game Boy Color, but I guess, yeah, because of the small screen. Yeah. Deja Vu 2 received generally mixed reviews, but apparently, like, Story, you know, back then at least, was just as good as the first. So...

Almost not really worth talking about. Yeah, worth talking about for a minute and a half. All right. We've been here before. Or have we? It's time for... The Essential Games List.

I'll be honest, I had a lot of fun with Deja Vu. Didn't get to the end, but had enough experimenting that I feel like I can confidently vote on this one. My feelings... are still the same as they were for Shadowgate and Maniac Mansion in just that like the NES is not my preferred way to play these games. This one might be less essential.

then shadow gate or a maniac mansion though, like as just video games, like if they weren't, if they were with a, a mouse and keyboard like I played through snatcher earlier this year and that is. Not necessarily like this, but in many ways is just like a visual novel where you are on screen and you interact with things and the story beats and just like everything like.

I do think Deja Vu is very influential to video games in a lot of ways. And so you can't discount that either when you're thinking about the essential games list. But... My time with it on the NES just wasn't like the best way I feel like to experience this game. And I think everything else that iterated on this, we've given a lot of examples of modern games and even like.

what's now considered retro games that kind of take this and run with it better. I'm comfortable more than I was with Shadowgate and Maniac Mansion leaving this one off the list. Joe?

Yeah, I think as far as the NES point of it, I get what you're saying. I think that I just in the past have expressed that it doesn't hurt my experience as much as it does for you guys. It doesn't bother me that much. So I think that for me, moving the cursor around the NES is like a minor, minor nuisance, but I get it. But that being said, I did love this game.

as well and i love that they kind of took what shadowgate did and they brought it into this like new environment not only a new environment like a new genre where you're not just like yeah going through this this creepy labyrinth but you're exploring these this city and like

kind of you kind of have a little more freedom and i like that idea i think what something about shadowgate just hit me a lot harder than this game and maniac mansion too i wasn't really comparing it to that but that's a good comparison but uh This game, I liked a lot, but I felt like I needed to open up a strategy guide more for this one. I did eventually get to the end with a strategy guide, but I think that just something...

Maybe it's like the music in Shadowgate and the vibe of like the kind of like the genre of it. It hits me more or whatever. Something about that just like was like pure essential to me. Whereas this one, I think this is definitely a play it. But it just, and maybe I'm comparing it too much to Shadowgate, but it just didn't, it never got to quite the heights I was hoping for it when I started playing it. But I really did like it a lot, and I really liked the Explore and Goof Around vibe.

that is in this, but at the end, I think it falls just short for me. Sean? Yeah, I really like this game. In many ways, I like it a lot better than Shadowgate. I think it's sort of a similar reason as to why you might have the opposite opinion, Joe, whereas I just prefer this setting. I think that all of the systems...

like the like the the technical aspects like just the way everything's set up um it felt a lot more streamlined maybe i don't even know how stream maybe it wasn't more streamlined than shadowgate but this felt more like holistically designed to me than Shadowgate but unfortunately this game really

really got on my nerves in some very specific ways. Like I just, like I just described, I think that if there was some way to find change in the couch cushions somewhere, other than in the casino and i was able to progress without having to reset uh in in a way that's like not like i don't know i feel like there are reasons

To say that, like, all right, this is, you failed, this is a lost state, but to have it so far into something that's not easy to roll back from, it's kind of a cardinal sin for me. Like, it's a typical... Like a typical adventure game sin. I don't think that really existed in Shadowgate. And I think that Shadowgate also gets the benefit of novelty. where it was sort of the first time we had seen something like this. So I think this one might have more of a lasting impression on me, but I...

It really peeved me, so I don't know if I can vote essential, even though it doesn't really matter at this point. All right. To close the loop on the Shadowgate talk, I would also just throw in that I feel like Shadowgate is... more rewarding gameplay like moment to moment like you're solving what we're going puzzles quickly and in and all the time whereas like you can get

kind of stuck in deja vu and just wander about and that doesn't feel as good so there's more of like but i do prefer i do prefer the idea of solving a murder mystery than escaping a bunch of really elaborate traps. I think it feels more cerebral. than that. What if it was solve a murder mystery or defeat Satan twice? That's true. You got it there. There you go. All right. No, no, I...

I'm very impressed by this game. I agree, Sean. I'll be thinking about it, but I'm still thinking about Shadowgate too. So just quality games coming out of, what is their name? Icom? I think it's Icom. Like iCarly. I feel like I heard you say that before. That's where it came from. Yeah, yeah. It's ICOM simulations, but they didn't do the NES port. They did the Mac version. They created the game, and then they put it over to Chemco.

to make the NES port. So they don't even view this thing as an official product. They're like, yeah, it's not worth our time. What's their third one that we haven't played yet? The Uninvited? Yes. I'm excited for that based on these. It's going to be so scary. It does sound like a horror game that I've heard about. Also, I like that too about... Is Shadowgate horror? No, it's just... Skeletons. Yeah, yeah. Which are spooky, but not horror. Yeah, yeah. Ironically, maybe Deja Vu is about amnesia.

you Deja vu. In this case, what you don't know can kill you. And welcome to Nostalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. Hey, Mike. Oh, I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. Ironically, maybe, Deja Vu is about amnesia. Yeah? I think that that's true. I accept this. Both as a video game and as a term. Yes. The word means kind. No, it actually doesn't.

It doesn't, right? But experiencing deja vu is a form of amnesia. It's future amnesia. Yeah. I think we'd be misrepresenting what deja vu is, but I think if you have amnesia... and then you suddenly get like a memory starts coming back to you that you used to have, that would feel like deja vu. It's like, oh, I feel like this moment's happened before because you're remembering something that happened before.

Whereas deja vu I know is actually just like something that you're living in right now. And it feels like you already have that memory. So they're like adjacent. So it's kind of like, you know, we're, we're not, we're not being literal with deja vu, but yeah, there's still like brain brain. Do good, work good sometimes. Exactly. And what Deja Vu is, is it's a point and click adventure game set in 1941 Chicago.

You're a private investigator, Ace Harding, who suffers from amnesia, awakes in a bathroom stall, and slowly unravels a case that... actually involves him uh this is uh just an nes port it's not exclusive to the console but it is kind of uh, in line with some of the other point and click games that we've had, uh, on the show. And I guess like the, the series of, of games is known as like Mac venture style games. Uh, these, these point and click.

Yeah, I'm not sure. I don't know enough about the history of these to know why that's called that, but it's like maybe that's the company or maybe- Like Macintosh Adventure Games? Yeah, yeah. Like maybe it's like- It says it's a series of menu-based point-and-click interface games. That's how they're known for. Deja Vu, Shadowgate, and The Uninvited, which I think also comes to the NES, are like what these...

And they were developed for the Macintosh by ICOM Simulation. So they're all made by the same team. So do you feel that Shadowgate DNA in Deja Vu? Absolutely. I like the change in tone and setting, but it's very Shadowgate for sure. And what do you think about the amnesia?

private investigator as a trope uh specifically in video games but also in media as a whole well i was gonna say you think this is the first one of our first instances like is this kind of where that trope in video games came from have we had other games on the nes where you're you're you don't remember anything because it's such a common trope in games

No, I agree. I can't think of one off the top of my head. I feel like there's a lot of not point-and-click adventure games, but text-based adventure games that probably play around with that.

Or the twist of you being someone more important than you realize. When you start this game... When you're Darth Revan. Right. When you start this game, it doesn't become inherently obvious that you are... like you don't know who you are you know again you're just waking up in this bathroom stall and you're just kind of wandering around and then this case really kind of naturally presents itself to you but Sean you know Disco Elysium kind of the same idea

I think it's just a very, I mean, yeah, maybe it's a little overdone, but it's incredibly useful for having the world explain to you. In a way that like, yeah, generally characters that live in a world don't need the world explained to them, but maybe somebody with amnesia does. And it's a good excuse diegetically to have these explanations made to you.

Now, that's not so much what's happening here. There's no deep lore that's being explained to you as some outsider to society. This is more so just a setup for a mystery that happens to involve you. So maybe it's not done for the same reasons, but it's a versatile trope. And I think tropes are meant to be used. And this is a fine use of it.

And like any good investigator, whether you know it or not at the start of the game, the screen is very similar to Shadowgate in that you have your commands or your verbs on the bottom of the screen. and then you have your notebook where you're uh keeping tabs on everything but also i guess your notebook is your inventory of like things you have and that's on the right hand side of the screen and then on the left hand side is this very small

but detailed interactive window of, you know, from your POV, what you're seeing in the scene. And you can click on things and you kind of. The gameplay loop is you verb into the object, and then the game tells you... It's very dirty phrasing. Right, right. You verb into the noun. Right. So, you know, you might search something, you might examine something, you might open something, take something, but...

this idea of just essentially using that to kind of make the, what would have worked as a text adventure game, but now with a visual component to it. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm trying to remember if these. Because there are some shortcuts in this that make that, because describing it like that makes it sound more tedious than it is. There are some shortcuts that I can't remember. It's still a little tedious.

It didn't bother me as much maybe because I wasn't expecting some of these shortcuts. Were they in Shadowgate where you can press B to cancel out of any verb you're doing and then also you can just click on any door? anywhere to move in that direction. It's a great question. It's something I wondered as well because it also kind of remembers where your cursor was too. Right. That's something that I noted.

Right. If you cancel out of the open thing because you didn't want to open that particular thing, you're still on open rather than having to go back to it. Yeah, I guess. And the only reason that I said that there is still some tedium is that like no matter how. Like sort of no matter how intuitive everything else works, you still have to make sure you open doors before you try and walk through. Yeah. So that'll be something that I kept doing. But in general.

uh it's it's got a good streamline like yeah there's a few pages of items in your inventory pretty quickly that you'll have to like change pages on but uh

In terms of just, it all, you didn't need to read the manual to get how it really worked. Right. But if you take it at face value, there are some things that like... are obvious that you have to do, but could have been shortcuts if they would have made the leaps with the player, such as you can't... leave a room until you open the door but if you clicked on the move screen the the wherever so there's this other thing on the bottom hand side of the screen where

you see move and you have these blue squares which represent any particular area that you can move but it's supposed to be a top-down view of the first person view that you're viewing so sometimes this move screen with many squares

It can get kind of confusing about which square is which. Eventually, you'll figure it out in your head, but it is a little disorienting at first. To say, I want to move to this door, and then the game tell you... you know you have to open that it's like okay but you could have understood that i was yeah right and it very much does understand that you know that because it's a very every time that happens it's a there's a very like uh

talk-down-to-you vibe. You can't go through doors before opening them, silly. Okay, thanks. That should just be assumed. And it's important for, like... Things later in the game, too, that you wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't want certain things to be not necessarily opened, but to examine things, to find things within things, you know, that bathroom. Is like the tutorial where you have to like sure there's a code in front of you and You can just take the coat

But if you don't examine it, you won't find out what's inside the coat, you know? And then you have to take those things. That actually took me a very long time. Right. So it's like it needs to teach you that right away because otherwise you would just expect that by...

you know, by opening something, you automatically get it all. Or by examining something, it adds it to your inventory. It's like that's not how it would work. Well, I have a question for Joe, actually. Yes. Because I think you kind of gave a... uh an acknowledgement of of that when i said it um how far into this game did you get before you actually went through the pockets of the coat well so i was just going to say i had almost the opposite oh problem

I went through the pockets of the coat immediately. First thing I did. I examined it. Then I went through the pockets. I took everything out of it. Then I left. I walked away or whatever. And I was trying to figure out where to go next or whatever. And somehow later in the game, I ended up back there. And then I took the coat. Like I went to the pockets without taking the coat. Like I opened to the coat while it was still on the hook. Wow. And then when you take the coat underneath the coat.

is a gun on a holster that was not in the pockets of the coat so it didn't wasn't there so like I did the opposite I was like oh intuitively I think I should open this that's really fine but I didn't take it to see what was underneath it

until much later in the game. And I was like, oh, I could have used this gun like three times already. So I, like, escaped to the bar. I, you know, went into the basement through the secret... uh through the secret casino and found the dead body and jumped onto the fire escape all while wearing my coat and not no not knowing that i had money in there that i had like uh

that I had clues in there so I got to a point just like where the hell am I supposed to get how am I supposed to like acquire currency like can I can I do a day job while I'm out here like and Then I just, you know, opened the coat and there everything was. But I will say there is a not quite a day job, but I guess it's some people's day job of the casino.

That is just like an unlimited money creator. Well, I needed the money first. Did not know that that was the case. Yeah, but I think that you can also just, I don't know, but I think you can just like unlimitedly like check the slot machine. and find a coin, like one coin or something like that. I think there's a way that you're not locked out.

I just know I want to be at that casino because there's never been worse odds for the casino than that specific slot machine. It pays out way too often. It's crazy. I didn't even think to gamble. And this is me talking. I was like, who the hell am I talking to right now? Yeah, I ended up with like 30 coins pretty early. And then I was like, all right, great. I'm like set. Which foreshadowing, I just, this is why I...

I got like soft lock three or four times is because I didn't have enough money. Not knowing that in addition to not ever being able to spend your $20 bill, did not know that you could gamble. You can spend it. We'll get there. Yeah. At least I thought you could. No, you can. Yeah, you spend that $20 bill. No problem. The cabbie won't take it. Yeah, nobody takes it. I only know of one place that takes it.

What I think is so cool about this game is that even when I finally did get stuck and resorted to an FAQ. When I was reading like the order of events, I was like, that's not how I did it. Like, did I miss something? But I didn't miss something. I just got to the casino probably like less than optimally. But there was like another way to get there. And it's like.

It does give a better sense of a, you know, explore and goof around vibe than Shadowgate was giving where that felt like, yeah, I mean, you know, you could kind of go around, but you were very like locked. To the puzzle. This isn't like every room is a puzzle. This is you're trying to piece together where to go next based on the information you have. Yeah, I did like learning like how there were.

several entrances and the fact that like again you find a key in that jacket that lets you open the front door of the bar and I kept going in thinking that I'm gonna have to go up to the third floor of this bar and jump out the window to get back to the street

Or I could go down into the sewer and then come up through a hole in the floor to get back into the bar. And then I found that there was a key for the front door. So yeah, there are several ways to get around the map in addition to several ways to go. across like the larger expanse of the game, usually by hailing a cab or just in terms of like order of operations of where you go first.

Yeah, there's even random events that can happen to you on the street, too. It's not guaranteed that you're going to be mugged. Yeah, but you do get mugged, and it is a pain in the ass. So what do you do? You just hit that guy, right? Yeah, like over and over again. Yeah. But I think there's a limit. I think if you hit him enough, eventually you will have to pay or he'll hurt you. Did you ever get cornered by the lady? What's the lady's deal? She's got a gun?

She's got a gun. I shot her, and then the cops came because I was right in front of the police station. Yeah, I'm not proud, but I punched her. I think that was the right thing to do, actually, because she was about to pull a gun on me. But I was like, I got to punch her. Here's the interesting thing, and you're getting to what my favorite part of the game is that, like, if we think about the Grand Theft Autos or even the L.A. Noire.

of of of all that stuff like those games are so fun not because of the actual story mode but because of the sandbox environment you're put in and how you choose to interact with things And while this game isn't on that scale by any means, there is so much fun that you can have in this game by acting like a jackass. Oh, yeah. You can get the gun, select... shoot and then self and then the game will be like you know like oh wait go out with a bang like

I did appreciate that. I did appreciate they could shoot whoever you want. You would like, that is the end state. I did like that. I thought I got around the money thing by, um, starting. a car with a key i found and then you immediately just blow up and it's not even just like a like a like wow how's i supposed to know that like if you talk to somebody

Or maybe if you read a note or something. No, it's the woman. Oh, it's the woman. Yeah, she's just like, yeah, I read that to blow. And it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. So I do appreciate the...

The level of interaction and all the fun fail states that you got here. Yeah. Another fun thing is like... forget fail states you can also like soft lock yourself out of the game by doing really stupid things like flushing toilets uh flushing your your inventory stuff down the toilet like literally watching this saying goodbye to the game as you watch it swirl down

There's no animation for it, of course. The game is kind of lacking that. It's all still screens instead of animated screens. But then there's also like, the game is kind of snarky. I think you referenced that, Sean. But like, if you're being... stupid it'll it'll imply so but like you can use the speak command on that same toilet and it the game will tell you like you're talking to a toilet really i didn't know that there's a lot of things i've tried speaking to

and it would just be like, what are you doing? And I thought for a while it was like, oh, wow, it's actually... Maybe if only if I talk to that thing, it says that, but no. If you talk to inanimate objects, usually it just asks you what you're doing. Yeah, or it says like...

Or if you examine them, it says like nothing, nothing unusual here. If it's just like examined like blank spaces or whatever. But it is cool that like sometimes it does have like a little flavor text just to add to it. Like there's a lot to discover in the game. Not even just.

On the way to beating the game, but just exploring the world and seeing what you can do throughout the game There are these I guess we'll call them deja vu moments where uh there's like a there's a music cue and i guess it shows you uh so now it switches povs uh but it shows you And it reveals a twist of sorts. They get grander, but that deja vu moment as a repetitive cue also works really well from a...

Not repetition, but even just sound perspective. How do you mean? Like just, you know, that like every time you hear that specific thing, it's like you've learned something bigger than just like collecting another thing in your inventory. or another address. Yeah, I guess it was, I didn't really put together that whatever was happening would be like a big moment. Because I remember I was just going up some stairs and I thought I was just getting...

like lightheaded because it's like, you don't feel so hot. Um, you really need to take a break or something. And I'm like, I'm just walking up some stairs and then it didn't happen again until I like went to an office and, uh, i guess it was my own office but maybe you don't know that yet and you're sort of getting that deja vu as you might say so yeah i guess i see that yeah or like when you look at the picture and you recognize yourself

That I didn't see, yeah. Oh yeah, there's like a picture on the wall that is of Bob Oxer. It's you. And then that image comes up of your face and that music plays. And it's a little corny, but it is kind of like... It is kind of cool and it's kind of like mysterious and it catches your interest of like, oh man, what is going on? Like this is such a creepy situation for this guy to be in. You got to just kind of suspend your like cringe a little bit.

And while you guys were talking about whether or not you pulled the items out of the coat, the first moment where I had to actually look at a guide was because the desk above the bar in the office... Because of the point of view, you're facing... It didn't read like a desk, did it? I mean, the guy was hunched over it, if I recall. There was another one that wasn't, but there was another one where a guy's hunched over the desk, so you knew it was a desk.

But the drawers would be on his side. Yeah, you can't see there's anything to open. Right, right. But the only way to progress is to open those drawers. And so I guess I could have just tried spamming commands around the room. don't have time for that. It kind of defeats the purpose of the game. You're not even playing the game anymore. I got there. That's like, you know, maybe you guys knew you could gamble. At least I opened that desk pretty easily.

yeah i did the same thing as mike i was like i was like i had no idea i finally looked at a guide and it said like open the desk and and i was like oh yeah and there's no visual indication that there's like a drawer involved in this desk Because if you know everything to do in the game via a guide or whatever, it's a pretty short game, but it's also like...

It's not even short because you're just doing everything. You're missing the actual personality of the game. I feel like the best part of this game is the vibe. like just the world that they put you in. Not that it is, again, keeping up with modern open worlds or anything like that, but for what we've experienced, like in terms of...

building out a story and a character and the people you interact with. I had more fun just tinkering with things, kind of like what we did in Maniac Mansion, too, where you were just like... fuck around in the mansion for a little bit you know like yeah let's see what what's going on over here right and like everybody was like following their own scripts that wasn't quite what this game was doing but i was interested in just exploring it so like when you got a new address

I wanted to make sure I saw everything around here first before I went to the next location. Yes, that's kind of a... That was a priority for me in a lot of games, I think, in my... Earlier days of just like I want a bunch of toys to play with and I think everywhere you go in this game is kind of like a It's like a fun house in itself and there are weird ways to interact with stuff So yeah, this was very much up my alley in that sense

Now, is the actual story, though, as strong as the as the world that you're put in? Like, is this amnesia? And then like, I guess some spoilers here, but eventually you find out that you're being. framed by the mafia for the murder of somebody that they didn't agree with. And the doctor that you went to go see was actually not a good doctor at all, but the one who injected you with these.

uh amnesia drugs and you need to take medicine against them is that part compelling does that part like hold up I don't know if I if I were watching a movie or reading a book. I don't know if this would be like, oh, my God, what a standout story. But because I'm doing it and I'm solving it and I'm playing an NES game that is that.

is causing me to experience this story myself it does stand out to me i mean as far as stories on the nes this was one of the more engaging um and you know it's there's tropes and it's there's generic parts but also like Yeah, there's stuff I didn't see coming. And I was interested enough to, you know, for it to keep driving me forward and not just like, oh, I want to see what this game can do. What is in this area? It's like, no, I do want to.

find things to help me solve this mystery and it does give you this satisfaction when you find something that feels like it's going to uh be like a key part in in the solving of this the mystery Yeah, it's funny. I'd actually, because we'll get into it, how I soft black myself several times. But so I didn't know how the game ended until you just sort of gave the very brief spark notes version.

But that I will grant to Joe's point, any story that actually has some sort of self-contained narrative and isn't like sound like a. five-year-old child made up the aliens that you're shooting in a shmup. I'm a huge fan of that. And I think that puts it in the upper echelon of stories on the NES. But granted, when you said...

like the basic, like key points there, you kind of get that vibe in the bar. Like you don't even need to leave the bar and you're already kind of like, Oh, some doctor injected me with something because there's all this.

shit on the counter and I work above a doctor and they keep mentioning the seagull guy there's a very large lady in the trunk of this car this all makes sense yeah And Sean, just to be clear, that's kind of the story beats I gave were just like the entirety of the setup of the amnesia element. The final like win state is actually pretty interesting because then once you piece it all together, you have to go to the police and prove your innocence.

You know, you're basically like tracking down all the correct evidence. But furthermore, you have to get rid of the bad evidence, the framing stuff. Like if you go into the police. That's illegal, Mike. But I'm saying, yeah, exactly. That's what's so weird, though. If you go into the police station, the game assumes that you handed over everything. And so then they find the other stuff and they're like, all right, well, you clearly did it. And so it's like...

you have to not only find everything that would prove that the mafia was behind it, you have to throw out the bad evidence. That is funny. And when I went onto the street the first time and saw the police station... I had already seen, you know, a lot of evidence for wrongdoing. Um, I guess you always would, but I guess there is some.

There is some version of this game where you just sort of find your way outside and beeline to the police and have no idea why they've arrested you. Right. Is the jump from... uh the bar uh to the sewers like too drastic like why are we traveling by sewer like so early in the game you know what i mean like it could it have been more

They couldn't have gotten more extreme as time went on. It's kind of weird that you can just go like straight from waking up in this bathroom to like, and he chose the sewers to travel around. Yeah. I mean, I guess it depends on. on your playthrough because i feel like it wasn't quite as quite so early for me that i found the sewer because i kind of had explored a lot before you know i like and i was you know outside seeing the the manhole cover and i was like well i wonder what's down there

Um, so like, I feel like it didn't happen right away. And also it's like, if I'm like, I get that I'm trying to solve. some mystery so like I don't know it's not it wasn't that crazy to me to be like oh I wonder if I can like you know get into an unlocked area through the sewer or something but like I get what you're saying that it's not like it may be like

It has a totally different vibe than the rest of the area. Well, Joe, that's a great point. I liked it. It is a great point because that's not how like I didn't open up a sewer. I didn't open up a manhole to go down into the sewer because I agree that would be a bit of a stretch. I opened the curtains of where the dead guy was, saw the fire escape, went upwards to the third floor.

got on the elevator and rode the elevator down to the casino. And then, yeah. And that takes, see, I went the opposite. I went for that. I never, I got to the casino by going outside. going into the sewer exploring and then ended up in the casino which took me to the elevator which took me back to that room where that guy was and i was like okay now i understand there's an elevator that'll take me through this this building

So, like, it wasn't like, oh, I just went from this building to the sewer somehow. It was like, no, I went outside and deliberately crawled into the sewer. Just for completeness and balance, I guess I'll say that I got into the sewer by... going down into the basement from the main room of the bar uh hitting the the loose book on the bookcase having the bookcase move out of the way going into that central room finding the

finding the whole casino and elevator situation, but also seeing the ladder down into the sewer. But all this that we've said of how he got to the sewer, do you ever need to go into the sewer? It's a great question. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. Well, as far as I know, unless the toilet, which I didn't know about, is another way to do it.

Later in the game, towards the very end, you need to get rid of evidence. I see. And there's this big, deep water area that you can throw all your evidence into. I guess that's the only way to get rid of things. But I love that we all found it in different ways. That's actually really, really cool. And I also, I didn't know anything about the book until I watched a video after I had played it. Yeah, I thought you were going to talk about the wine.

Yeah, sorry, you're right. Wine bottle. Oh, the wine bottle. Did you select that because there was no dust on it? I examined and it was weird that it said that the one on the far right has no dust on it, so I just... hit both of the ones on the right and the one actually caused the door to open. So I, yeah, thought that was pretty cool. Well, that's what makes me a little upset is because I, I,

Saw that first before I wound up doing the fire escape route and I got the notification that like this one looks different and I tried to take it Rather than hit it and that doesn't work and I get it. It's a push into to do it all so that's why you have to hit it but I wouldn't think to hit something that looks different you know they should have just like programmed both to accept

That right. I just kind of gave up there, but I shouldn't have, I guess, is the story. Also, you have to go into the sewers because how else are you going to see the alligator? Yeah, that's true. That is in a random event, right? Yeah, it's a random event. There's a bunch of oddball stuff in this game. Or is it the first time you go to the deepest part of the sewer? I don't know. I think it's random. Okay.

So here, let me just, I have a negative because I've been very positive and I know that anyone in their right mind would immediately try to gamble with the money they have in their pocket. But I just need to explain. I did softlock and... And I thought maybe, oh, maybe this is like an order of operations thing. Like I have to go to the right, go to the right address before I go to the next address. And you have to sort of route out your cab movements.

um, to make sure that you don't run out of money. But I thought that my seven quarters and my $20 bill were the only things that I had to go on. So first I think it is absolute bullshit. that your $20 bill can't be broken into change in a cab. I already mentioned this, but it's a big deal to me because this cab driver only accepts quarters of which you start with seven.

And yeah, you can gamble to get more. But I thought maybe at these other locations, there would be some way to get more quarters. But there is not. At least as far as I know. Like I went to the... The apartment high-rise thought that the little puzzle to get up there was cool Found another address to go to and like alright cool I've got a lead to go back to the cab try and pay with what I have he doesn't like it

And I just could not go forward. And I could have saved and gone back to it, but I did not save. So I played again. It is weird that you can't get more coins any other way than gambling. There needs to be some other like this is something that like it's a thing in adventure, at least in modern adventure games, because a lot of us are dumb dumbs like redundancy. Like there needs to be other ways to just.

be able to progress if you maybe softlock one branch. Right, especially because in this game there are these multiple locations. That you need, as far as I know, the cab to get from one to the other. And yeah. At least then let me walk all the way back somehow or something. Exactly. I thought there's no way to beat the game. I'm just stranded here now forever because there's no quarters in this in this neighborhood. Yeah. So that's just my that's my peeve.

Um, but yeah. I mean, if we want to get into negatives, I have a couple as well. I think that like the main thing is that, and I don't remember how much shadow gate felt this way too, but I don't think it felt. as much like I need, like there was some randomness. Like in this game, there are things that I'm like, yeah, I get now in retrospect why this is the way it is. But like, I don't know if I could have figured this out.

dumping the items in the sewer before going to the police like which items you have to dump into the sewer without a guide like that's like i i don't even fully understand why i'm dumping these items into the sewer like they incriminate me but like

why just because I have them but like can I just say like hey I got these while I was while I found all this other evidence that shows that I didn't do this and that this guy did and like I sold us out of his state whatever or does it incriminate you for like stealing or whatever but then there's like other

thing there was like something where if you know there's a point where you can find the um the way that you need to like find which medicines will counteract the uh the medicine that was given to you that's giving you this amnesia that's giving you this headache and all that And if you don't do that before you go into a certain room, you die. And it's like, wow.

How would I know that? Yeah. How would I know? You know, it's like I guess it's kind of like if you're if you're not like looking too hard at the game, it's like, oh, it's just a time that you just died because you waited too long to go there. But it's not like, oh, you go into a certain amount of rooms after a certain amount of moves. You'll die unless you.

healed yourself it's just like this room because of the way that like you have to have your memory back before it like makes sense the way you progress it's like oh if you walk in that room before you got it back like it's like oh you're now you've died from you know you didn't heal yourself and like

I get it. Like, there's a quick, you know, it saves, like, the moment before you die anyways, so it's, like, not, like, that much of a punishment. But it just felt like there were a lot of things where, like, there were more guess and check, trial and error.

than like intuitive like puzzle solving that and i again it's been a long time since shadowgate but i do remember sometimes in there where i was like oh my god this is so frustrating i can't figure it out and then i figure it out and it's so satisfying because it's like i figured it out

Whereas this, I felt like, even if I did figure it out, I felt like there were a few times where it was like, I kind of just lucked into that. Or I looked up a guide. I remember when I first went into the... the restraint doctor medicine room in the bar, finding the medicine that just died on the table and not so much in the shelves or anything like.

I only picked up the stuff on the table, and I tried to take it. Like, I don't know. I was just playing around. Like, let me just take this random drug that I found. And it just said, you can't do that. And I don't know if we need to, like, find a syringe later in the game or something. Or... If it only will let you take certain drugs together. I don't know. This bothered me a little bit too, because it's, it's like not those drugs on the table. There's like also drugs in the garbage can.

In the garbage can. That is kind of cool, but it was like a weird red herring that there are these other drugs on the table that you can't take. One of them I think you can. It lets you take them into your inventory, but you...

can't ingest them yeah it just if anything just have it be another like death sequence i don't know but it does it does i think it's useful in another way at some point you have to give it to someone else for some reason or something well one of them is the i don't know if it's that particular medicine that you're picking up in that scene, but there's like the truth serum medicine. Yes. And then just to go back to a question you had posed, Joe.

To the best of my knowledge, I cannot recall a single random encounter in the sense of like truly random in Shadowgate. But again, Shadowgate was more like you enter the next room. Now you have to solve the puzzle in that room. to go forward this is more like there's not a puzzle in every single screen it's just like certain screens you you will interact with multiple times as the story unfolds and other areas are just like well once you

Once you've collected everything in that room, you're done with that room for the rest of the game. The $20 bill thing, besides not being able to break it, Sean, there's also a chance to get a second $20 bill. And I can't figure out what you would use it on because as far as I know, the only thing you can use the $20 bill on is the gun, right? Yeah. So why would you need $40? How much are bullets? Are those a quarter each? Those are...

A quarter each, if I recall, which is a great price on bullets. Yeah. But it sucks because you have to buy them all individually. And you have to move the cursor to each one. And you have to say take. Take sounds like you're stealing it. Did anybody else think that they were stealing these items? Yeah, I would want to talk to the guy and then pull up a menu or something. I want a verb that says please. Yeah, where's the please verb? Wait, wait.

Please be as a verb as in like you're pleasing someone. Oh, no, no. I mean, it's just specifically like instead of just speaking. Say please. Say please. Yeah. At. Say please at the boy. Say please at. Yeah. There was a second Deja Vu game. Deja Vu 2 Lost in Las Vegas. Can you believe this guy? See, they should have just called it Deja Vu. Right.

Wasn't this in Las Vegas? No, this is Chicago. Okay, whatever, whatever. Lost in Las Vegas, it sounds like, I mean, I didn't play this game at all, but it's like, did he really get... amnesia or lost again in a different place like maybe this guy should just consider taking a break hey it's like home alone to lost in new york lost in las vegas yeah who copied who left home alone again wet bands were last week but

It all connects. And Deja Vu 1 and 2 both came out on the Game Boy Color as like a collection. Wow. That's pretty crazy. That is nuts. If you're asking me... I feel like, not that I, Game Boy Color is better than Finding Us on the original Game Boy, but I also just don't think there's enough real estate on screen. Yeah, it is small.

Confirmed. Well, I just, before you said that, I was like wondering why you both agreed that it was nuts that it came out of the Game Boy Color. But I guess, yeah, because of the small screen. Yeah. Deja Vu 2 received generally mixed reviews, but apparently Story, back then at least, was just as good as the first. So, almost not really worth talking about. Yeah, worth talking about for a minute and a half. All right. We've been here before. Or have we? It's time for the Essential Games List.

I'll be honest. I had a lot of fun with deja vu. Didn't get to the end, but had enough like experimenting that I feel like I can confidently vote on this one. My feelings. are still the same as they were for Shadowgate and Maniac Mansion in just that like the NES is not my preferred way to play these games. This one might be less essential.

then shadow gate or a maniac mansion though, like as just video games, like if they weren't, if they were with a, a mouse and keyboard like I played through snatcher earlier this year and that is. Not necessarily like this, but in many ways is just like a visual novel where you are on screen and you interact with things. And the story beats and just like everything like.

I do think Deja Vu is very influential to video games in a lot of ways. And so you can't discount that either when you're thinking about the essential games list. But... My time with it on the NES just wasn't like the best way I feel like to experience this game. And I think everything else that iterated on this, we've given a lot of examples of modern games and even like.

what's now considered retro games that kind of take this and run with it better. I'm comfortable more than I was with Shadowgate and Maniac Mansion leaving this one off the list. Joe? Yeah, I think as far as the NES point of it, I get what you're saying. I think that I just in the past have expressed that it doesn't hurt my experience as much as it does for you guys. It doesn't bother me that much.

So I think that for me, moving the cursor around the NES is like a minor, minor nuisance, but I get it. But that being said, I did love this game. as well and i love that they kind of took what shadowgate did and they brought it into this like new environment not only a new environment like a new genre where you're not just like yeah going through this this creepy labyrinth but you're exploring these this city and like

kind of you kind of have a little more freedom and i like that idea i think what something about shadowgate just hit me a lot harder than this game and maniac mansion too i wasn't really comparing it to that but that's a good comparison but uh This game, I liked a lot, but I felt like I needed to open up a strategy guide more for this one. I did eventually get to the end with a strategy guide, but I think that just something...

Maybe it's like the music in Shadowgate and the vibe of like the kind of like the genre of it. It hits me more or whatever. Something about that just like was like pure essential to me. Whereas this one, I think this is definitely a play it. But it just, and maybe I'm comparing it too much to Shadowgate, but it just didn't, it never got to quite the heights I was hoping for it when I started playing it. But I really did like it a lot, and I really liked the Explore and Goof Around vibe.

that is in this, but at the end, I think it falls just short for me. Sean? Yeah, I really like this game. In many ways, I like it a lot better than Shadowgate. I think it's sort of a similar reason as to why you might have the opposite opinion, Joe, whereas I just prefer this setting. I think that all of the systems...

like the like the the technical aspects like just the way everything's set up um it felt a lot more streamlined maybe i don't even know how stream maybe it wasn't more streamlined than shadowgate but this felt more like holistically designed to me than Shadowgate but unfortunately this game really

really got on my nerves in some very specific ways. Like I just, like I just described, I think that if there was some way to find change in the couch cushions somewhere, other than in the casino and i was able to progress without having to reset uh in in a way that's like not like i don't know i feel like there are reasons

To say that, like, all right, this is you failed. This is a lost state. But to have it so far into something that's not easy to roll back from, it's kind of a cardinal sin for me. Like, it's a typical. like a typical adventure game sin. Um, I don't think that really existed in shadow gate. And I think that shadow gate also gets the benefit of novelty. where it was sort of the first time we had seen something like this. So I think this one might have more of a lasting impression on me, but I...

It really peeved me, so I don't know if I can vote essential, even though it doesn't really matter at this point. All right. To close the loop on the Shadowgate talk, I would also just throw in that I feel like Shadowgate is... more rewarding gameplay like moment to moment like you're solving what we're going puzzles quickly and in and all the time whereas like you can get

kind of stuck in deja vu and just wander about and that doesn't feel as good so there's more of like but i do prefer i do prefer the idea of solving a murder mystery than escaping a bunch of really elaborate traps. I think it feels more cerebral. than that. What if it was solve a murder mystery or defeat Satan twice? That's true. You got it there. There you go. All right. No, no. I...

I'm very impressed by this game. I agree, Sean. I'll be thinking about it, but I'm still thinking about Shadowgate too. So just quality games coming out of, what is their name? Icom? I think it's Icom. Like iCarly. I feel like I heard you say that before. That's where it came from. Yeah, yeah. It's ICOM Simulations, but they didn't do the NES port. They did the Mac version. They created the game, and then they put it over to Chemco.

to make the NES port. So they don't even view this thing as an official product. They're like, yeah, it's not worth our time. We don't know how to... What's their third one that we haven't played yet? The Uninvited? Yes. I'm excited for that based on these. It's going to be so scary. It does sound like a horror game that I've heard about. Also, I like that too about... Is Shadowgate horror? No, it's just...

Skeletons. Yeah, yeah. Which are spooky, but not horror. Yeah, yeah. Ironically, maybe Deja Vu is about amnesia.