What's good, Internet? It is May 13th, 2025, and this is not a doomed expedition to the depths of a surreal fantasy continent. It's Side Story, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them presented by Friends at the Table and supported. I am joined today by the returning Janine Hawkins and first-time co-host Sylvie Bullitt. Welcome, both of you. Hello, happy to be here. Always glad to have you. Sylvie, for people who don't know you from anything else, what's your deal?
oh man what's my deal people are asking me this all the time i guess just to like go over the stuff that i probably is most out there on the internet these days i'm uh currently one of the co-hosts of our another friends at the table related project media club plus true um i don't mention friends at the table because it kind of goes without speaking I'm one of the co-hosts on Media Club Plus, which has been for, I want to say, a year and a half, maybe a little longer.
Been going through the 2011 anime adaptation of Hunter x Hunter. If you want to listen to that, it's been... So much fun. Jack, who's been on Side Story before, is also one of the hosts of that. And Austin, we've had you guest a couple times. I've been there a few times, yeah. And you're nearing the end of Hunter x Hunter. Your three-camera ant arc, I think you're going to record the next episode soon, right? The first final arc of the 2011 anime. Yeah, we have three or four.
left to record i think depending i need to double check at how keith laid the right the episodes out um But if you want to check that out, it's alternating weeks with Side Story. So there's really no excuse. You're looking for a podcast on a Tuesday where Side Story is not coming out. Check out Media Club. I just want to use this opportunity to shout out the other podcast I do, which is More Civilized Age, because I know there are people who like video games who listen to this podcast.
And over at AMCA, we are going to cover KOTOR 2 starting last week. We started last week. We're going to do more next week. So you should, uh, if you're interested in coverage of that, even though you're not like a Star Wars person necessarily. You should go listen to that. It's good. Maybe you're not a Star Wars person, but you're a Craya person. But you're a Craya person. That's me! That's Sylvie, I think, yeah. Exactly. You can go listen to us over there.
But today, as maybe I gestured at, we are here to start our conversations by talking about the French surreal RPG turn-based. It's not French. It's not even a little bit French. Sure, there's an outfit set called baguette, but it's not. There's mimes. You fight a mime to get a beret. Basically immediately.
I make a guillotine joke in the first like 10 minutes. Let's calm down saying it's not French. They do make a guillotine joke very early on. For a split second, I thought you were being serious. Like a tenth of a second. That's how my humor works. Yeah, and I was like, Oh my god. Is this game just like a big, weird, anti-French... How could they have that slip past me? But no, Sandfall Interactive is French, I guess. There are moments where I'm like, is this anti-French?
But I think that's true of a lot of French content.
sure i mean the same way that if we were making a turn-based jrpg inspired rpg it might be anti-american i guess neither of you you're both canadian so i mean it might still be anti-american you're right yes but if i were doing it it might still be that um yeah clear obscure expedition 33 which if you listen to other video podcasts if you pay attention to the to the kind of scene in any big way it's been like at the front of conversation for the last couple of weeks
uh but we haven't had an episode to talk about it so i've been playing a little bit of it i think i'm in the middle of act one or like early in act one y'all are both early into act two i'll say up top we're probably not going to talk
about big spoilers or anything like that so don't worry about that no one here has finished the game we're not going to spoil any big plot beats along the way we do want to talk about what it is and what it's doing that people are so excited about and i would say the two things that i know about it from the jump and again i've played a bit of it One, uh, you know.
French, I guess European surrealism is all over this game in terms of its visual design, along with kind of like early 20th century art deco france ass france uh visual language like you said berets and baguettes and a certain style of architecture and stuff like that
And then mechanically, I think the first pitch that made me go, oh, wait, do I actually have to play this? Was like, what if something had JRPG style, which is a very, very broad term, as we talked over on a Gathering Information episode, that I don't know if that's out yet, but a turn based in the classic JRPG style, except also with some of Slay the Spire style character building and kind of blending really unique character exclusive mechanics.
Like, charging up for, like, one character charges up a meter until it's filled and then does, like, extra damage. Another character has different stances they move between. Another character builds and spends these kind of resources called stains. and color terminology. There's so much. That's kind of what the vibe is. Not even just paint and color, but like art stuff. One of the first big words you're faced with is called gommage.
Right. Which they say in the French version and the English version, right? They just say gommage. They just say gommage. There's a lot of stuff that's just French that just is in the... I've been playing in the English version because I think both of y'all are playing French. Yeah. No, I'm playing in English. I was tempted to play in French to be like, I'm playing the original voice actor. I'm playing in French.
And I tried to switch back to English and the switch just didn't take for some reason because I was curious. So I'm just playing in French. I saw someone say offhandedly that it was written for English, but I don't know. The lip sync is English. The lip sync on the character animations is all English, and there isn't a French version, so I can usually tell when they're saying... It matches the subtitles, but it doesn't match the French.
I'm not convinced that this is one of those things where it's like, oh, you need to play it in front. It's not like Remember Me, I think. You need to play Remember Me in French if you play Remember Me ever. I did not play that in French. Maybe I should have played that in French. the writing is way less obnoxious in French they're like big name voice actors in the English cast too like yeah that makes sense what's his name who played Daredevil in the Netflix Daredevil is
Gustav's English voice actor. Oh, big name actor actors. Big name voice actors in the scene. There is an antagonist that you meet very early on who I believe is also played by Andy Serkis. Oh, damn. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to double check that, but that's right. It's like a concerted effort to switch over to the English language. Yeah, try it. charlie cox uh daredevil that we were talking about and yeah a lot of names here i recognize yeah does a great job honestly um
I'm really enjoying Maial as a character. If you've not heard, if you don't know anything about what this game is, I think it's probably worth setting up narratively, which is the titular Expedition 33 is a group of people going to hunt down a seemingly magical, powerful, gigantic woman named the paintress, who every year, when the year ticks over... kills everybody who is
Gamage. I'm sorry. She gamages everybody. She gamages everybody. She unalives everybody. I saw someone on YouTube today say that someone was unsubscribed from life. Oh. That's really funny. We're all just finding new euphemisms constantly. Get ready to learn heaven, buddy.
god um so every year there's a big clock and the clock is counting down every year from 100 to zero and uh whenever it crosses a line Whenever it comes to a new year, anybody who's over the number on that clock on that ear clock is dead as sorry as gommage gets gommaged they yeah i don't feel so good mr goosebumps you're a star exactly yes like that's the effect that happens they turn into
into, like, bits of paint and, I guess, like, red and white flowers or whatever, right? Well, there's also a weird, gooey element to it. Like, inky! Yeah, exactly. And so... In order to stop that from happening every year, anybody who is in there, anybody who is willing and is in their last year of life or just apparently decides, fuck it, I'll go early, can go on one of these expeditions to go try to stop this from happening.
uh going forward and so you go in a boat to a distant continent to try to track down an answer to how to stop this paintress uh, character, uh, and, um, uh, things don't go great for you right away as I said in the intro. doomed expedition um you know i think they're trying to evoke like a little d-day action but it's a little more bay of pigs it's a little it's a little more like a completely absolute fuck up
I really need the blowback season on Expedition 33. There's such a thing about this where... I think the overwhelming narrative is like, oh, you know, it's like global warming. It's like all the things that we're doing to fuck off the world that... sort of have have numbered our days and the days of our children there's a whole whole thing about like what it is to
to be an adult and bring children into this world and stuff like that. I mean, that's like right out the gate in a way that I was like, Oh really? For real? Yeah. Y'all broke up. She didn't want a kid. Okay. Yeah. Um, but there's like a, I, I see that, but also... The thing that I see overwhelmingly is like, oh, it's like World War I stuff. It's like big time, like World War I, like.
And I kind of waffle back and forth. I'm like, well, am I just saying it's World War I stuff because it's French and things are going bad for them? But, like, you know, there's an area where you're basically in these, like, super tall trenches. um there's the whole imagery of like you know there's lots of dead bodies like in piles in the mud
Stuff like that. You're walking on them sometimes. World War I also came with that whole thing of why are we bringing children into this world that we lost an entire generation, etc. All of that language was still there in that. So, yeah, there's a lot of all kinds of, all your different flavors of...
apocalyptic fatalism, they're in there. It's like a nice little smorgasbord. Whichever reading you want to apply on this thing, it's gonna... give you the leeway for it for sure um yeah and so like that's the basic side of you then go you survive the doomed landing uh and begin to slowly build a team of survivors uh all of whom you have a past connection with from
when you lived in Lumiere, which is, I think, the last city on the planet, I guess, or in the world. I don't really know where... Okay, maybe not. Don't tell me, because I don't fucking know. No, it's not a big spoiler thing. It's just, like, set-up lore that, like...
lumiere there was a thing called the fracture right right yeah i've heard about this broke their chunk of lumiere off from there's like some sort of yeah there's like some sort of dome or something involved but there is there's like an implication that like There is more out there, or there was more. Gotcha.
We're only part of something or, you know. Right, right. I don't know if the whole rest of it was the so-called continent where... the paintress and the what are the what are the creatures you were fighting called in this nevrons nevrons yeah and also the gastros who are little paintbrush guys they're minions they're minions they are kind of they do sound like minions
They speak in the French. I might be wrong, but I think their voice lines are the same in both languages because they speak like Fringlish. Oh, sure. They, like, kind of go back and forth. Kind of like the song lyrics, often, like, you'll hear, like, somebody saying Gustav over and over again, but then they'll say, like...
Vashtevacana and stuff, and you're like, I don't know what that is. Yeah, well, some songs do just straight up have what just seems to be English in them outright, and just singing sentences. I have looked at the lyrics for some of them.
They're doing kind of like a near thing, but not entirely a thing. Yeah, they are doing a very similar thing. There's parts that are like... japanese sounding like you know oh i see like lyrics you're saying i thought you went just musically in general yeah i thought you were saying near is near's soundtrack is of course referencing a whole history of music
that includes some french music so i you know i think that i've seen some people be like it's just jacking near's whole style i mean yeah it goes way beyond that there is some of that but like that is not near did not invent soft lady singing there's a lot of there's a lot of kajira yuki in here who did a lot of like anime soundtracks like still does anime and game soundtracks going back for two decades now
um and she used a lot of french in her songs anyway and it was like it was like a mix of like french stuff like baroque stuff and then like techno Hell yeah. And you get moments of that where I could swear it was her music in this, so that's a nice little fun thing. Yeah, so, you know, the structure of this game, I think, is pretty standard for people who've played other RPGs and like it.
in that after you get out of the introduction, which is a series of fairly linear kind of dungeons, You get a little bit of an open world, like a top-down world map in the kind of classic JRPG style. um not where you're in you know you literally have like a tiny character running around a zoomed out in this case kind of tilt shifted map of a surreal landscape
Yeah, I don't know if it actually is, but it really feels that way. Certainly. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely supposed to evoke that, I think. Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of this game where I'm like, is it supposed to feel like that? Like, is it actually doing this or does it just feel like this because of like shared influences I in this game have for instance it's like an overworld map JRPG like when you're running around and then you get a mode out kind of thing.
But, for example, just to answer you, Austin... a lot of the dungeons that I've encountered so far give me such Final Fantasy XIII vibes like the whole thing smacks of Fabula Nova Cristalus I don't know how else to put it where it's like
It's these, like, segments and then you stop when there's, like... and 13 there was like some platforming stuff that's like highlighted by like a circle and then in this you've got like your grappling hook or like you've got to find a ladder to go up and i genuinely don't know if it's just like this is evoking the sort of PS3 era 3D RPG that I'm used to, or if it is actually trying to feel like that or not. Which has been fun to sort of piece out.
you should again both of y'all are in act two at this point uh i'm very early in act one recruiting the kind of starter set of characters and so it it feels like i've still been in a fairly linear um uh game at this point there are you know side bosses uh what are they actually called it says someone's like this is dangerous but what's that what are they actually oh they're like chromatic bosses
who are like side fights that seem to be optional. Yeah, there's the chromatic bosses, there's the mimes, and then there's like the little side boss areas that just say danger under where they are. Yes, yes. I learned about the mimes on this podcast, by the way. I did not realize that there were straight up mimes in this game. There's a mime in the opening area. There's a mime in the, like, before you even go on the expedition, you can find and find a mime.
I'll find you a video or something. There's mimes in each main spot. I think I fought three now. And they give the first, I don't know what the first one gives you because I didn't beat him. I gave up because I didn't realize it was a thing at the time. I thought it was just like a tutorial bath. Um... but the second one I think gives you the baguette outfit for some of the characters it's like the beret and then the like stripy shirt with the overall I love that they're called
That's really good. The first one gives you the music from Lumiere to play in your camp. Oh, fun. Which is what I listen to when I'm in camp. I hang out in camp.
Anyway, the thing I was going to say was, you know, at this point, besides those, it's been fairly straightforward and linear in the sense both of, I have an objective, I have to work to that objective, and in fact, most of the world map at this point had been at least blocked off by, like, mountains or rubble or whatever to be like ah you just can't go over there quite yet and i think uh sylvia you were talking about final fantasy 13 and like the at the time that that game came out the big
critique of it was like wait a second this isn't my final fantasy this is so closed off yeah uh and not you know i'm not exploring things i'm not making taking things on my own level and i think that the dungeons similarly feel like very it's a straight line when sometimes there's a hallway off to the side yeah and then you can like dip into for a pickup and i'm curious if that has remained the same um and also i guess i should say at this point
uh there is no fucking map in the dungeons i think that's like one of the biggest annoyances that i have with this game at this point um but does that change at all does that stuff not the map obviously but the the overall like openness of the game So, like I said, I'm still pretty early in Act 2. Janine, maybe it opens up more for where you're at. I think I'm a little bit earlier than you in Act 2, probably. Oh, okay. Or no.
I started it and then I was like, it's late. I might be like a little bit ahead. I think you might be. So I haven't really done any actual dungeons in Act 2. For the most part, it does feel like there's a critical path in the dungeon, and then there's a couple branches that'll lead usually to a treasure or maybe an optional boss.
There was one time where I thought I had to fight something to progress and kept getting my ass beat by it, so I lowered the difficulty and then it turned out it was an optional boss for later.
Which, you know, again, speaks to the we need a map. But for the most part, everything has felt very straightforward. I mean, it's one of those things where it's like... top down if i could look at a map i think i would say like yeah this is pretty straightforward straightforward like you go this way and then there's like a lot of side brand there's a lot of like sort of intricate little side areas that you can get into and then you pick up just like
a point to put in your thingy. Um, A lot of like very detailed little diversions for what feels kind of like a small thing, which is cool, but also it's so easy to get turned around and it can be so hard to see what the critical path is. And each main area that I've been to has had like, okay, here's your critical path. And then like, here's a diversion that is like a big diversion.
like it's not a thing where you can peek down the hallway and see the dead end right and be like okay this is the okay i'll just pop down here it's like okay there's the way that i the way that i've learned to tell what the diversion is is like
Okay, there's climbing footholds on the street. Okay, there's like, I can see there's like a jumping thing there. So that's probably the side path to get, you know, the new... the beret or whatever um but like it's so easy to turn around to get turned around especially you know every now and then i'll go back to try and clean up an enemy that i couldn't really fight at the time but i'm a little bit stronger and i want to kick their ass now
Um, and it's really easy to get, it's so easy to get lost. And also because the lack of mini map is such a thing. A lot of the guides don't really have much for you. They're not doing their own maps, certainly. um so they'll be like yeah you go here and uh the the mime is uh if you go left and right and then you look at you there's like an archway and then you want to like there's like a blue tree not the blue blue tree but the like slightly off blue tree please buy that
Um, and it's really, it's not helpful. Uh, it's a little frustrating, but it's, yeah i don't know some levels it works better than others some levels it feels right it feels like yeah this place is a mess and some levels it just feels like i don't i don't know i don't
I don't know what this is supposed to be. I'm always asking, like, what am I supposed to... be thinking what do they want me to be thinking right now and you're saying that in terms of like uh exploration and like gameplay design stuff yeah yeah what you know what is this area trying to convey and like sometimes i have an answer for that and sometimes i don't
Yeah, I mean, you know, I will say that, like, right away there's, like, a real... feeling of I don't want to say style over substance because I think often style can produce substance but you know one of the very the first real I think dungeon after the main intro of the game is like walking through an area that is underwater and filled with coral and stuff.
And it's not, as far as I can tell, there is no like deep narrative. I've not found a deep narrative reason for that yet necessarily, but it is really striking, but it has a feeling of, I'm not making any sort of actual accusation here, but it feels a little bit like we found these cool assets on the asset shop, and we made a cool underwater dungeon with them.
um i think it fundamentally works but it doesn't it's not like oh we have to go into the the underwater i mean it's not it's not it is not literally it's on land it's just suddenly the land is underwater and you're walking around and it's like there's like an air bubble system you know you're not doing sorry the hedgehog shit it is just visually you're underwater and there's and there's
some, like, enemies that reflect that. Janine, you know, you might go back to your war metaphor earlier, because, like, some of them have, you know, kind of sea mines, yeah, like, tied to them and stuff. And you have, like, big whales in the background and stuff. And it's really, really striking, but I don't actually know what to do with that quite yet. And again, maybe I can get more information about that place.
I'm very, very early. I'm not trying to diminish it. But I do think that there is a degree of, like, we can make, you know, I think that the connection to surrealism is deep and real, like, to art in general. But I keep thinking of, I don't know if either of y'all know Remedias Varro.
the artist, um, who is a, uh, a surrealist painter. Um, and I, and I just like, there is such a, uh, that, that is material that is working through, um, big ideas, but it's doing it in ways that are often like, perplexing or destabilizing to the viewer and it's like okay like I might get somewhere with this stuff eventually but I'm not off the top of my head I'm not quite
sure what i what the thing is being communicated by this environment so much as i am impressed by the aesthetic on display um and so i'm just i'm still working through how i feel i gotta play more of it i have to see more spaces um and also i think some of the spaces i don't know that you get to that manor that's kind of like a hub area it seems um and it's like okay this is a cool place It doesn't have the sort of utility hook. that I think of from great RPG hubs across time and space.
uh across all video games um and but it looks cool and like is that enough for me to care about it as a place you know i'm not sure there's a lot there's a lot in the game where it feels like, um, information's kind of purposely being withheld, uh, not necessarily, just kind of like, um, Everybody has a history together, right? They'll refer back to things and you have to kind of piece it together. We're thinking early on you mentioned the Gustav and I'm blanking on her name. Sophie.
you kind of piece together like oh they broke up and this is why they broke up stuff like that um And that just continues, basically, throughout the whole thing. Yeah, I appreciate that. I really love that part of it. I really dig it, where they'll just, like, refer to, like, oh, yeah, we heard this story about this expedition. Or, like, they'll see something that, like...
It's kind of the book of the new son, Austin, describing a spaceship as a castle or whatever situation where they'll see something and I'm like, I know what that is, but then they'll talk about it and they're like, it's completely a completely different interpretation and those are some of the times when I think it works the best the sort of like narrative move that they're doing I think like the core premise is just
such a striking strong you know it's funny because like it's like i haven't played another premise about people who are going who are going to war because if they don't they go they'll die by the end of the clock taking down like xenoblade 3 came out two years ago or whatever, and it's a very similar premise.
uh but the there's something punchy and hooky about it that i think carries a lot and like makes me anytime i'm like i'm having a good time i'm like well i want to i want to know more about what's going on here like that's enough to keep me I was going to say, I think this game does a really good job at something that always kind of bugs me.
um when you are telling stories about people who knew each other before the camera started rolling essentially um which is like you don't get everyone's history together right out of the
You can tell that they know each other, that they're familiar. You get this feeling, and you should get this feeling, this is a correct and good world-building feeling, that this is a really small, tight-knit community. Because it is. Because... uh it's a group of people who are isolated who like you know Every one of them has lost their parents
And, like, the thing that happens is, like, because it's known, you're going to lose your parents at this point. Because the number is, like, in its 30s. It's, you know, everyone's going to be orphan sooner rather than later. There's a whole culture of, like, orphanages and foster parents and also apprenticeship.
um and like all of these things for like to basically make sure that kids are being taken care of but it also means that these kids as they grow up have really interconnected lives um So, like, you'll get these little tastes of backstory about, like... Oh, hey, remember we worked on that farm together?
um and they don't like belabor it it's not it's not they don't literally say like oh hey remember we worked on that farm together they'll be like oh god this is like project 30 30 whatever or something um and then they'll like give you a few little tidbits here and there Um, or they'll, you know, they'll talk about like the, the, the, the night they met or whatever. And then like. It'll... They weave it in a way that, like...
feels like people who are like actually reflecting on the moment and their past and not just like displaying their history for an audience. Right. Um, that stuff's really neat yeah that stuff that stuff is really good it works really well and i think it fits really well with the um sort of like a big thing that they they try to get into is the difference between the gamage which is this like peaceful sort of like ceremony and then
like we talked about how it goes real bad when you start your expedition and it is there's blood everywhere like people are getting straight up murdered you have to deal with death all of a sudden and the way that the characters will sort of reach for each other and bring up the past and, like, these little... there's like inside jokes that they'll bring up uh i think a lot about um
Gustave and Mayel have like a running thing about throwing rocks at the paintress and like it keeps it comes up a few times and every time I do I'm like oh yeah this is a big brother and his little sister talking about like a thing that like that has been going on for like however long and you can you can feel it you know like the interpersonal stuff i think is one of the real strengths of this game so far
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I will say the other big strength for me anyway is the battle system. There's so much happening here in the gameplay design that I did not expect, even from that earlier description I gave.
You know, at a high level, it's a turn-based RPG. You have, you know, your line of characters, they have theirs. I think the first thing most people talk about is the fact that it has a sort of quick time event system a la... the mario rpg games yeah the only ones to do but i think that's like a very clear
big influence um uh by that i mean that when you do any of your attacks uh except for like a basic attack you will have a or shooting your kind of gun your ranged weapon you can kind of aim at like weak points and stuff and burn one of your resources you have these kind of like action points you can burn one of those as a bullet to like hit a weak point and do a bunch of damage or maybe you have a buff that makes your gun do fire and they're weak to fire so you want to do that whatever it is
But mostly you have a basic attack that's free to do, and then you have skills that you can use which cost AP, and when you use one of them, there is a quick time event on the screen where you've hit a button timed to... uh, the attack animation to sort of like do the damage. There's a whole, there's a meter on screen or there's like a button prompt on screen to be clear for attacking at least. And so, you know, maybe the one attack will just be it shows up once.
And you can time it to try to get like a perfect attack if you hit it at the right moment. Or there's another way that might be like a multi-hit combo. And so they pop up in a certain rhythm and a different multi-hit combo is a different rhythm. You get how that goes. Then, on defense, the other kind of active part of this is there's a dodge button and a parry button that you can hit to try to parry or dodge incoming attacks.
dodging is easier you there is a perfect dodge but there is also just like i've dodged the attack safely if you hit parry with the perfect dodge timing you will parry And if you can parry every attack, whether that's a single big one or like a series of light attacks or something, if you can parry all of the ones that the enemy's throwing at you, you get to do a counterattack.
And there's some other later game things that involve that sort of same type of quick time eventy back and forth response stuff. um i think that's like what most people talk about so maybe we should start there before we dig into the other parts of this combat system
Janina, you and I both were having some parry trouble. I think I kind of got it finally. You get it when you learn the rhythm. Right, right. Then you change enemies and there's a whole different... crop of shit I think I hear the sound now Janine I think I can hear the sound I think I've trained myself to hear the sound
reportedly there's a sound when the moment is you're supposed to attack. I spent the whole first day of playing this game trying to parry too early, and then what I learned was there is a sound with at least some attack. I agree with some attacks, yes. But the thing that that taught me was that sounds for those attacks triggers later than I think it should.
And so I've been able to bring that into new enemies and realize, oh, I'm just trying to parry way too early. I'm parrying where, like, Sekiro wants me to parry, but I need to be parrying, like, after that in a way that is weird. The way that I ended up improving my parries a little bit, because I've gotten better also, is that I would... What I would do is I would dodge when I had the first impulse to parry and then parry right after dodging. Oh, that's really good.
I was doing the literal Animal Crossing close your eyes when you fish thing to get my parries off, and it was working. Oh, I cannot do that. I know there's a sound now, because I closed my eyes. No, I tried to do that. I tried to do that the other day, and I was just like, I just... I just got creamed. It's hard. Yeah, I am fully on the, I gotta tank the first hit from this enemy, and then I'll figure it out afterwards. Yeah. I mean there's
There's straight up a tool tip that says, like, hey, if you're having trouble parrying, try dodging. The time is a little more forgiving. Yeah. And it's worth saying the parry, not only does the parry let you do a counterattack, but parries and perfect dodges also give you a P-back to do your stronger attack. And then it's just like, there's already a bunch with just, hey, what if you have a mage, what if you have a melee character, etc. That's already a lot of depth.
But there's so many cool little systems in this game mechanically in its combat design. It's not just are you balancing your AP right by doing regular attacks and gunshots and da-da-da-da. It's um it's elemental affinities which i think are pretty standard but it's also these passives you get are they good are those called pictos is that what they're called pictos and yeah i think after you master them you use lumina points yeah yeah so yeah you have this kind of like passive
But you have these kind of items that you can equip called pictos. They're like magic. buffs basically that do things that are like oh um you know you have a uh a 50 chance to do double damage on a basic physical attack like you're not using a special thing but you're going to do more damage or you have janine there's one that you really like Is that roulette? Is that the one that you really like? Oh yes, roulette, where there's a 50% chance that you'll do half your damage
or 200% damage. Right. Which, for a multi-hit attack, it's good math. Um... Especially if you also have a character who, for instance, can sometimes just do 200% damage. Let me tell you, I figured out a way to have her doing 200% damage.
all the time right same basically yeah that's a character who has like stances so that she can switch between including the one that is 200 damage stance and you can get weapons that that also have effects so like you can get a sword of her that just starts her out in that stance And then she has abilities that, like, if you're in that stance, it will maintain that stance. Or an ability that, like...
If you use this, you'll get, you'll get ability points and you'll maintain the stance for another turn. And like, so you can really just. chain things together in a satisfying way. That's the entire build I'm running with her. It is the first character. There's something I always like about games where, like, because every character has their own sort of mechanic built into it, um, That means the build crafting for them is so varied and really, uh, engaging in that way. Uh,
I love when you're able to sort of crack open a character in the way that this game lets you. This is the part that does remind me so much of Slay the Spire because it's not just... oh what are your attacks it's like oh they're what if you got this special passive that would open up a whole new way of playing the character or maximizing one way of playing a character and the way the pictos work is you can equip them
to and when they're equipped their passive work but after you win four fights with them That passive goes into a menu that anybody in your party can use, whether or not the actual Picto is equipped. You have a different resource. You have a different meter that you can fill that increases over time that takes certain amounts. A really good one might cost eight.
you know, Lumina points, but a kind of pretty basic one might cost two or three or even one. And so you're building a sort of build of those on top of your regular character stat build. And that stuff just means you can be really expressive.
Along with whatever skills and powers you're picking for your characters, it's very clear that even like gustav who's the the main guy you start as is like oh you could build him out to be kind of like a big physical attacker or he gets a heal really early you can make him kind of tanky and healy if that's the way you want to go And the weapons also build on different stats and stuff sort of Dark Souls style. There's a lot of FromSoft in here. There is a lot of FromSoft in here.
it the most with the dodging and parrying, obviously, but the weapon building. Some of the enemy design. The fact that there's bonfires in this fucking game. Yes. They literally do respawn the enemy your flasks. Yeah, your flasks. I think a lot of games like the consumables in this are a fixed amount that restore when you rest at a banner from a past expedition or you go to camp.
um i think that happened when you can't it must happen when you when you rest at camp right you must get them back yes absolutely yeah um and so like there's all that sort of that fun thing of like it's not can i go grind out enough healing potions to like force my way through this boss fight it's given the resources I have, which are always the same resources I have unless I grind a higher level or go find another healing flask to bring in or a res flask or whatever to bring in.
Can I fight this fight? I will say, some of us have a brain that doesn't do the thing it's supposed to, which is a fight that says, like, no, you can't win this.
because there's parries in this game my brain goes i can do it i could do it uh you could uh that first chromatic fight that you can find i was like well it's kicking my ass but like i just have to parry eight times in a row and i did it just took me an hour but i did it now could i have left and come back an hour later and it would have been easier
Yes, 100%. It didn't take me an hour to make 30 minutes. There are fights where I think that they're catering specifically to that, where it's like, if you take one hit, it will wipe you out completely. Even if you're like a decent level. So I think there are, there's definitely, they are catering to like, if you just want to like play this and have a nice time. Cool. If you want to.
If you want to dude perfect your way through a boss fight, do that also. It's me, trickshot simulator, but make it a JRPG. The other fight. That's one of the other characters gimmicks. You have to do a trick shot for every special move. Curse. There is that danger zone that you can find right out as the world opens up for the first time. For the first time you go to the overworld map. And that one I was like, oh, this boss starts with four consecutive turns.
So I would have to parry perfectly or dodge perfectly all of that stuff to even get one round in. I'm going to come back later. Or you equip your Lumina that always gives you the first turn, no matter what.
Yep. you lean into you lean into mile for instance has a thing where it's like this will apply defenseless and then she has a thing where it's like if you do this and the guy is defenseless you get another turn immediately right so you do that sort of build yeah that's fun yeah yeah there's a lot of like really conscious you can like really consciously If you want to tailor what everyone has to an individual situation, you can also... Me now.
tailor every individual character to just work on their own you can also be like okay well for mile her i'm gonna sort of focus on having her detonate burns stacks of burn and then you can give everyone else lumina that's like When you aim and fire, there's a 20% chance of applying burn or whatever. So that everyone has the ability to build on to what this one character is detonating from.
And that stuff feels great. The thing I keep thinking about is like, I wish that metaphor, ReFontasio, had had some of these gameplay elements Or just not even these particular ones, but I didn't get through Odd Metaphor. I know, Sylvia, you were playing that game for a little while, right? Yeah, I also didn't end up finishing it. I got like
70% of the way through it and enjoyed my time with it. But you know how life happens. You don't have to finish a meal to have enjoyed the meal. I always say this. It's okay to leave a little bit on the plate. It's not bad for me. I think I would have finished it if I was not at a point where I was like, okay, I'm waiting for the battle system to show me a new trick. I'm desperate for something that I hadn't.
the encounter before to happen that's like not just um a new take on something but like a new take on what's already been in this game but like something that i just you know i think metaphor has one of those which i think that the the quick grinding physical attack stuff that are like the outside of the turn-based combat stuff where you're just like
one-hitting fights that are pretty easy for you actually is good. I think that stuff was great. I would love this game to have that because there are definitely times where I'm like, alright, like, I can clear all these enemies in 30 seconds pretty early, one round pretty easily. Just make them die. Don't make me spend the 25 seconds. It's fine. Well, then, you know, there's
Someone does get an attack. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's also just, like, just one character. The nice thing about the metaphor is that, like, you could do that before going into the fight at all. You know what I mean? Yeah. Which was nice. But my point being that, like, I do think that there's some really... It's been a long time since I played a turn-based RPG that had a turn-based RPG that was chasing this style of, or this degree of aesthetic.
I don't want to say complexity, but fidelity, I guess. I don't want to say complexity because I actually kind of think sometimes it doesn't work for me visually, but I'll talk about that in a second. But it's been a long time since I've play something with as much fidelity that also has some genuinely cool ideas around combat design or core verb design for what the gameplay is uh and to the degree that that's actually the big appeal for me for Claire of Claire Obscura so Yeah.
How are you, narratively, are you in a place now where you're like, I'm fucking hooked, I need to know what happens? Or are you going, is this potentially a meal you won't finish but enjoyed the bites of it you had? I...
It's kind of hard to tell. There's been some big things that have happened in the story that I felt like, oh yeah, no, I knew that was going to happen. There's been some telegraphed things, and I think I'm kind of putting together... that again, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, that just means you're foreshadowing, right?
But there's a degree to which the mystery early on was what hooked me. And now that I'm like, okay, I kind of see what's happening here. It's been a little harder to get back. Sure. I think that it's going to be the sort of systems-based stuff that keeps me more hooked into this. The character building, the... seeing how these skill trees build out at late level and how I can
turn the path that I'm on with these characters, even turn the dial up on that, or pivot to a completely different build to see if that works better. That's the sort of stuff that's really got its hooks in me. Narratively, I think that it is fine. It's fun. I'm digging it, but I've also played Final Fantasy X, you know? Um...
Sure. Yes. That sounded way meaner than I meant it to be. I am enjoying it quite a bit. It's just also like thematically they're working in very similar spaces. There's a swing at the end of act one that I found frankly disappointing. But at the same time, it wasn't enough to make me think like, oh, there's nothing here for me anymore story-wise. There's still a lot of...
I have a lot of questions. It's just what those questions are changed. And like, there's, you know, there are some things that I thought could be interesting that they closed the door on, but then it raised this whole other like, well. okay but if that's not true then what about all this shit that i was assuming right um so i'm it's one of those things where it's like if i don't finish this game i will look up how it ends you know it yeah it does have
It does have its hooks into me in that way. For sure. Sylvia, you don't have to worry about being the person who says something mean about this game, because the thing I'm going to say is, the thing that I have been like, pushing down in my brain since I started playing it, which is sometimes I think this game has a Nintendo hire this man look. You're right, though! Which is to say, I...
this is taste, right? And I think that it's like, I think the art design is like really strong, especially the character, the creature design I think is out of this world. I think the environment design is hitting the thing it's going for. But I think that there's something about the way it's chasing fidelity and something about the way that, like, Bloom and Depth of Field, which is, like, kind of applied in a weird way where it's often, like...
a little flaky around characters' faces. And I can go in and turn the depth of field off, I know this, but their default vision for this game is to have that on fucking Mac. A lot of that stuff, and even something like the characters' faces, Give me a sort of, like, sometimes it looks like I'm playing someone's dream Pokemon game where everyone is lifelike, you know? Like, it's not... That part extremely has been difficult for me to get over, if that makes sense.
And that might be the thing that breaks me. Sometimes I don't like looking at the main characters. Sometimes I don't like looking at even the world because it's so... It's not aesthetic, it is aesthetically, but technically it's pursuing this, I don't want to call it photorealistic look, But this particular sort of fidelity that I think actually weakens some of the character and world design stuff visually to me. And that's part of why I said before that sometimes it has this asset shop feel.
because it the stuff feels like it's rendered for for use across some of these lampposts could be in a game that's set in france and that's just it you know what i mean like like I get that that's what they're going for, but it isn't working for me for some reason. It's definitely been hit and miss for me. I think I was saying this to my partner when I was playing it.
that it feels like it's begging for just a little extra stylization of the character designs in regards to you saying sometimes you just don't like looking at them. There's like... This whole world has this... We talked about the painterly aspect of it, but the people just kind of look like...
here's my high-res character model. Yeah. And I feel like there's, like, it's begging for, like, cell shading or, like, something just, like, to exaggerate some proportions. Some proportional change. Because the creature design is just phenomenal. Just, like, out of this world.
both literally and figuratively you know what i mean both not of this world and also wow it's so good um and i i like the costuming for the human characters they're like the protagonists but i they're i need shoes Oh my god! You don't want to run around on the corpse beach with your bear grippers out? Girl, it is gooey! Why are you out here like that? Why are you doing this? I know you can fly. It's cool that you can fly and hover around.
but you're not always hovering. Sometimes you let your feet hit the ground. I genuinely have to not have her be my lead character because I get uncomfortable watching it. I'm like, That would feel so bad. I would hate that. I'm getting, like, sympathy. It would be so gross. Like, sensory overwhelming. I ran over to some water just so she could stand in some water for a second and clean all that goo off. Rinse them off. Rinse them off.
The reason I do like playing as her, though, is because you don't get the, like, constant rhythm of the footsteps when she's flying around. You get to just, like, zip around, and that's the trade-off you make. Do you want gooey grippers, or do you want the sound of... Gustav's loud ass fucking boots hitting the floor over and over again, which gets on my nerves for some reason. I will say, like, I don't know that I'm fully on board with you two in terms of the graphics. I think...
There's like... There's something... I understand what you're saying. This is the taste thing. This is a wildly popular game. Clearly it hit. People do want Nintendo to hire that man. I don't. I think for me the thing that's happening is it is so much in the space of like It reminds me of playing a really cool PS2 game.
that none of your friends have ever heard of. And you're just like, wow, this looks sick, and it's doing all this weird shit, and I can't talk to anyone about it because they think I'm making it up. Like that's what it's hitting for me. So that's what it's hitting for me. And like, I think that the like graphics of it sort of. it it's it's evoking that in my in my head and like yeah i think it would look cool if they were doing like maybe like a like a watercolor-y thing or or something but um
I also, you know, I'm looking at a screenshot that I took right now of just like a random victory screen, right? And it's just so, it just makes me feel so much like... like picking up a obscure jrpg from like a from like a from like a from like a bin where it's just like the back of this looks sick and just Yeah, I don't know. EB games used been I know that I'm the outlier here it just isn't there is something about specifically the human characters but not only that that is just like
And again, I'm not the art director. I don't have the answers here. And I know firsthand what it's like to be like, we have a directive and that directive is we have to hit a certain fidelity you know goal uh in order to make sure that people want to buy this game that we're working with and it does best with this with this type of stuff yeah totally you know
Here's what I'll say. I think that the character or the creature design feels like a fucking ace team game, which is like some of the best creature design in the world. This is kind of what I mean, right? But the character design doesn't feel like that to me.
Yeah, the character design is like attractive unity, not unity, unreal. Right, that's what I mean. Remember that thing, that unreal face maker thing that they put out? This is what I mean. Yes, exactly. Well, I think even some of the world for me... feels like those style of assets that are then really artfully arranged to create.
surreal spaces but they're not the assets themselves that have been made again this is not an asset shop game and i'm someone who defends asset shop games so i'm not this is not a attack in that way but i think that they they don't feel like they have the heat for me that the creature designs do. And if I end up bouncing off of it, I think that might end up being the whole of it, which is like,
I wish that they leaned even more. I would love to be one of these fucking creatures. Let me be one of these guys. Let me be a Nevron. When can I be a Nevron, please? Please make the sequel where I get to be the Nevron. Thank you. There's something here where, like, um... What you're touching on is something that I think a lot about. And I think I've mentioned this sort of... angle of thinking about a game before in this podcast.
of just like, you know, what did this look like in ideation? Like, what did this look like on the whiteboard?
um and i i kind of wonder like is that maybe where some of that's coming from where it's like they had made all this cool stuff and then some stuff changed and it's like well i don't really know what to do with this cool stuff now um so they put it in places and like I just sort of realized, like, some there was an area i was i was messing around in this weekend that like made me think so much of veil guard oh for sure i think i think it might be that there might be a through line there of like
at some point i think this is probably something different and you can see these really cool things that i'm sure are in a lore document somewhere but i don't really know
What, you know, I only have what's in front of me and what's in front of me doesn't explain this that well. Um, yeah yeah uh but again i i get it i get why it's hitting and i for me the thing that's hitting most is the really strong narrative push the overall surreal aesthetic and then like I think that this is some of the most clever kind of turn-based combat design that I've played in. a long time. It is really worth that comparison to Slay the Spire, which is one of the most
flattering gameplay design comparisons I think you could ever make. Any other final thoughts on Claire Obscure? We sort of touched on the surrealism, but I also want to shout out the, not shout out, I'm not saying like, wow, it's so good. The humor. There's like a, I think people often have this idea of French stuff as like,
cool and pretty and elegant. French humor is like goofy and like corny and it's it's minions and it's rabbits you know and that's in here and and like it's in here in a way that like is often exactly what I expect as someone who watched a lot of French cartoons as a kid, where it's just like... So far no one has farted and that's good. But I wouldn't be surprised if it happened, you know, that kind of thing. One of these little mindfuckers is gonna fart. Yeah.
But there is also, like, a big goofy character who is big and goofy and says goofy stuff. Right. And then also has, like, genuine emotional bonds with characters that, like, took me by surprise. Because it's just like, oh my god, that's... That's like genuine affection of a kind you don't see in games. It's like a fully adult grizzled man hugging a big pillow creature because they're besties. It's like, oh, that's nice.
And also, he says poof, woof all the time. He's great. Is this the big guy that I saw while you were streaming it to me yesterday? Yeah, yeah. He makes sounds. He's great. Shout out to that guy. I love the voice acting move with him to have him be speaking English but with a French accent in the English dub. Oh, that's very funny. Like, it's clearly a French voice actor doing that. I feel like you have to do that, again, because of the humor thing, right? Like, because of the way he is.
Like, you can't just, you can't play that straight. Yeah, you can't have someone who sounds like they're from California saying, like, asterisk and obelisk. It's just not going to work out. That's the real ludonarrative dissonance right there. That's why they gave the main guy who has, like, real Robert Pattinson vibes. still, even in the English, he has a British accent. He looks so much like Robert Pattinson. It's crazy. It's wild. I just keep seeing him as that.
Yeah, his brow is a little different, but it's really close. When you change his haircut and his facial hair and stuff, he moves away from it. That starter set, that's just Robert Pattinson. There he is. Yeah, they should have got him instead of Daredevil guy.
The technical guy does a fine job. Yeah, he's great, but, you know, if you're gonna make... But they should've got Robert Patton, so I agree. Or they should've made a different... They should've made the other... options look like like charlie cox like if you change his outfit
It's not actually shooting his outfit. It's like, here's a different face cast. I thought you were going to say they should have made another character look like Taylor Lottner. I mean, they should have. That would be great. Get him in here. Alright, I think that that probably our little segment on uh clear obscure and take a quick break come back to talk about some more stuff uh
And we are back. And Sylvie, you brought a game today that I had not somehow not heard of at all despite liking their previous game. It's called Echo Point Nova, and I guess the specific thing that has you going to it now is that there was an update that added, like, a roadmap mode. um but i would love if you like set up what it even is because i i know like 10 people who would adore this game having put a few hours into it now and i don't think any of them have even heard of it so
Yeah, so this is a game by Echo Point Nova, developed by Greylock Studio, if anybody is familiar with them. Their last game, Severed Steel, I haven't played, but is similarly the sort of... They make these movement-focused FPS games, is basically the way I'd put it. I don't know if we're going with mobility shooter or movement shooter anymore, but they both fall under that category.
And the basic conceit of Echo Point Nova is that an open world with a bunch of, think of the, um, I'd compare it to the... What if the sort of, like, sky levels in Tears of the Kingdom were actually, like, fleshed out? Yeah, that makes sense. It's a bunch of floating platforms that you go to. It's, like I said, very focused on mobility stuff. You're going from point to point. The flow of the campaign is basically...
You're told to go to this place to collect an artifact that'll usually unlock a new mobility ability for you. And on the way there, you'll do these scans, which is basically wave-based... Like combat challenges, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And two months ago at this point, I think it was towards the end of March, they released a rogue update for it. So there's a roguelike mode now, which...
Basically, you get dropped in at a random spawn point. You're given, depending on how much time you've put into it, you'll get a certain number of guns to start with.
and you're tasked with doing a certain amount of... of these scans and each they've updated it so it's like every instead of it just being like a one-wave thing like they are in the single player or in the the campaign i should say because i've been playing the campaign mostly co-op oh interesting yeah i realized after i died once that it was like All players dead. I was like, wait, that suggests that there's co-op on this.
Co-op is really fun. It's a four-player co-op. Some things you can only do in single-player. Some perks are single-player only. Interesting. Some things aren't, which I find really interesting. There's a slow-mo that you can activate. Oh, is that not in the multiplayer? That is in the multiplayer. Everyone slows down when you use that. But the perk that makes it so it's always in slow-mo when you do a flip, which I love to do. I love flipping so much in this game.
isn't available, just as an example. Right, okay. Yeah, I advise people go look up play of this game immediately, because I think this is one of those games where if you hear us say it's an open-world first-person shooter, That focuses on mobility. You might think, oh, Halo Infinite had a grappling hook. And that's an open world. It's just not that, right? It's not even like, what if Titanfall was open world? Like, it is not.
It is more like what if you put guns back into Counter-Strike surfing. It has that degree of... What if you put the Mirror's Edge lady inside of a Trackmania world? Yeah, what if you remove the friction? from the Mirror's Edge lady in Trackmania, because you're on a hoverboard. Yeah, yeah. It almost feels like the character is like an air hockey press when you've got your board going.
It rules. The way I've been thinking of this game is, you know the way people talk about, like, why don't they make the whole plane out of the black box? It's like, oh, they made the entire game out of the feeling of rodeoing titans. Like, the entire game feels like you are doing some crazy pilot movement stuff in Titanfall 2. There is so much core, clever design in this game for me.
And it's more than you can ride walls upwards in your hoverboard, which is very smart, more than you get a grappling hook that can... zip you around it can even grapple onto i think the fact that it can grapple onto clouds is like it's the coolest is sort of the most like oh yeah they know what they're fucking doing you know like don't it is let yourself grapple into clouds why not
It's, like, massively big-brained. The perks that you get, like, most of them will tie into either, like, just making your weapons do crazier things, for example. There is one I got in a run today where it's, like... Shotgun! uh shall as well penetrate enemies and then I also got one where it's like they do more damage to walls so I'm able to blast through walls and stuff and I'm basically just chewing through things with a hand cannon. I did the rogue mode once and got the x-ray vision.
thing so i can imagine that that even if you get that you're shooting through walls and guys you already know they're there is that must be great the thing that i think is even more like core uh are you playing this game mouse and keyboard or controller
I'm playing this on a controller. Because I have repetitive stress injury stuff with my hands, I can't really do a lot of mouse and keyboard shooters anymore. I am pretty much in the same place. I do not I basically never, I tried to play, I played Valorant for like three months a few years ago and immediately got my wrists into a place that was like oh i can't actually keep doing this to the degree i'm doing it um uh which is one of the reasons i ended up stopping playing valorant but
I'm also playing with this with a controller, which I think is important. I don't know if it could do the thing that I think is its most clever design element. which is, it has, lots of games have a sort of snap aim or aim assist type thing. Hey, in this one, it stays aim assisted. It stays kind of loosely locked. Even if you move the thumbstick after you... Usually you left trigger to aim down sight.
It locks on to something that's at the center of your view. So it's not just like locking from across the screen. You have to be pretty close. and so but then it does that and then even if you're moving it stays locked on it's almost like you're circle strafing And the reason that's important is because you're on a hoverboard and you're grappling, grapple hooking all around the place. Sometimes you're literally flipping. And you're literally flipping.
and uh all of it seems to me all of the weapons are non-hit scan weapons is that no every weapon is is projectile it's like So you have to lead your target. And so that means you'll be like on a hoverboard.
skating around the edge of the interior of a mountain or something you know on some like rock face locking on with your sniper rifle from across the thing and then be like oh but he's moving in the opposite direction at a fast rate so i have to like readjust and lead the target just a little bit and then you pull the trigger and all this is happening in like three seconds you know
But it feels so good. The first person sci-fi John Woo kind of like the thing where you do the flip but the guns are perfectly locked. I was going to say like a chicken's head, but you know what I mean. I do know. Yeah, I do know what you mean. And there's breakcore playing, which is also really important to mention. I mean, it's so important. The music of this game is so important. Can you get the soundtrack? Is that available? Can I?
I think it's just available on the Steam page. Yes, there it is. It's my floating door. It is so sick. uh and there's like 89 tracks go into the menu and go out you can like get to a different song if you want so there have been times i'm like i'm gonna do this challenge let me cue up the right the right track for me uh yeah the feel i just
you know, before you talk more about the rogue mode, I know it's the thing that you've been playing the most. It's just, I don't know the last time I played a shooter that has this, this smoothness and this like, it's just such a joy to move around in this game.
The closest I can think of is there were some moments in Neon White that kind of scratched the same part of my brain but Neon White is way more of I consider it way more of like a puzzle game because you're trying to figure out like each run and this because it's open world because you're given like pretty much every tool especially in rogue mode where they just give you like
Austin, I don't know how much you played with your altfire stuff, but you don't start with... There's an ability you can have to put down basically a jump pad, and you don't start with that in the campaign. You unlock that fairly early, but it's still unlockable.
And then there's one that I never had, which is this you put down an ice on the ground and when you go over the ice it speeds you on your hoverboard your speed increases so you can get like they are fully um this game is like fully dedicated to like
momentum control and like your how you are able to handle it um yeah it makes rogue mode kind of hard oh it's really hard it's really it's really hard and the fact that it's wave based instead of just being one big I think where I am in the main campaign at this point is it's all been you know, kill these 19 guys and then you advance forward.
We have not talked a lot about the story. Don't worry about it. It's there. You're fighting a paramilitary organization or something. In Trackmania levels, as Janine pointed out, that really is the vibe. um which i think yeah you know looking at this made me think like man ubisoft really fumbled track mania
I remember there was going to be, what was the shooter? Shooter Mania? Oh, right. Shoot Mania. Shoot Mania. I had to look at some Shoot Mania. Shoot Mania is so funny. Shoot Mania is a wrestling podcast. It is. why was shamania not good why didn't how did they not it should have been they should have made this came out didn't it it came out like like yeah yeah watch uh jeff garstman play at least some of it i'm sure i think i did the same thing um this
I guess it was a versus game, I guess, importantly. I guess this game has I think I unlocked PvP at one point. You can turn on PvP. There's no matchmaking mode, but if you want to get in a game with friends, I think PvP is a toggleable perk. That's very fun. That's very fun. haven't tried but kind of want to yeah i i really enjoy the perk system is super um
It's very... It's really easy to get more points for perks, especially in the campaign. In the rogue mode, you're leveling up the rogue shop, is what they call it, and that'll eventually get you more perk points, too. Most of the perks in the rogue mode are from pickups, though. But you can still toggle them off and on, and you can really customize the way that you are specifically coming at this game.
you can, like, um, my girlfriend really likes, uh, the sniper rifles, if I'm remembering right, and, like, there's, like, pop the sniper rifle bubbles, uh, as is one of the, um, perks you get there. Sorry, pop enemy bubble shields with a sniper rifle. I got too excited and my words all fumbled there. Or like... I, I'm a big shotgun girlie, so I loved, um, i loved like i said the stuff that like makes it uh you have better knock back or like
And one that I find really fun, you can run into guys with your hoverboard and they'll go flying. And if there's a perk where if you shoot them while they're flying, they'll explode. Hell yeah. It is a game that is so focused on making you feel as stylish as you possibly can while playing it, and I think that's why it is so successful at what it's doing.
It understands that to do that you have to really fine-tune the feel of the guns, the feel of all your mobility tools, and... make these sort of arenas that both have some limitation to what you can do with your movement. You can't just zoom around everywhere and just get everybody. You're gonna get hit if you're not being smart about the terrain you're on.
But at the same time, there's like a tower that I'm thinking of. It's like a hollow tower. And I'm probably just thinking about this because before we recorded, I was playing a run where I did a fight in here. Really quick, the rogue mode is just the same map as the regular mode, right? It is the same map, so it's not randomly generated levels. I think there's probably people who are like, I can't do a first-person shoot with randomly generated levels. I've tried those before. They don't work.
this is the regular ass level design. Um, anyways, you're inside. I don't think this would work. Right. Yeah. Well, so like it, it changes what I do. Cause I love to, um, a strategy that i really like i've sent you some uh to y'all some footage of me playing just so like you guys have a reference point of what i was
talking about i like to go sort of around the edge and try and basically stay airborne as long as i can but this one it forced me to go inside this tower stay on my board sort of grind around the side the like edge of this cylinder and like work my way up and down taking guys out and it's like
It forces you to adapt in really fun ways because they have crafted the specific levels. If this was generated, like I said, I don't think it would work nearly as well. Also, sometimes you're taking out mechs or... Giant planes. You talk so much shit. You talk so much shit.
My guns are bigger than yours is what they say all the time or get ready for your hospital bill. The enemy dialogue is really funny. They do just get completely fucking worked. I think something that's interesting about it is you were just talking about the ability to, the need to, like,
Really understand the space and make strategic plays. But again, if you're not watching footage or you haven't played this game yet, we're not talking about Counter-Strike plays. We're not talking about Call of Duty plays. Because the spatiality in this game is so interesting. There's such big spaces. You can move so far so fast. even though enemies a lot of the enemies are like a guy with a little submachine gun you know who is gonna like
zip in behind you and just fire a few shots at you, sometimes in a little hallway. There are parts of exploring the environment where you'll maybe sometimes go into something that looks like a sort of little facility or base or something and you'll like be bouncing bouncing around the hallways a little bit but generally speaking it is more about this kind of zoomed out
Do I understand where the big center point of the map is? Do I understand where there's a little safe hallway I can duck into? Do I know where I saw some health pickups? 30 seconds ago because I'm like suddenly low on health and I gotta like rush over there before I die and have to restart the whole thing.
I'm out of ammo in my shotgun. I need to look for this. Every ammo type is a different shape, so you learn to look for the specific shapes of what... the ammo is exactly like it feels a little bit more like playing an unreal like unreal tournament 2003 or something and knowing max
layout than it does yeah and it's like still way faster than even that it's um but playable with a mouse and keyboard i'm sorry playable with a with a controller i was so sure this would be a mouse and keyboard game and i was gonna be like maybe i'll play a little bit of it for the for the podcast, but I'm probably not going to get too deep into it.
I might keep playing this. Hey, let's play sometime. I would love to. Let's do some rogue mode. The thing that I was going to say was one of the things that's so interesting in comparison to... God, what was the first person? Neon White. Like you said, that game is more of a puzzle game. And part of the thing that's so good about this is like,
It's okay to fuck up. You're constantly improvising around whatever your current situation is, and you want to do well, and if you lose, you restart and try to get it right. But it isn't, there's a solution that you're trying to optimize towards. There might be strategies that are optimal strategies for a moment. But there's not, like, one way to run through a challenge or a, what is it called again? It's a scan. A scan. It is more just like, oh...
It's good to do this type of thing or I know where the pickups are on this level or whatever. And I think that part of my trouble with Neon White was my desire to optimize meant that I actually didn't have a good time with the optimization game because it felt like optimization was anything less than optimization was failure. And in this, I get to feel sick when I happen to optimize something, but it's not required of me, you know?
It's... It is, um... It is a game that lets you feel like the 12 year olds that cook you in a lot of ways. Something that I enjoy about it is there's a lot of accessibility settings and stuff too. You can tweak the difficulty a lot. We talked about aim assist. There's a lot of settings for adjusting aim assist. You can change the way that it works, things like that.
I think that goes a long way for something as fast-paced as this. It is weirdly like both able to do the power fantasy thing really well because you are gliding through the the sky you are taking out waves upon waves of these like hovercrafts and mechs and guys who are throwing down turrets who are my least favorite enemies the turret guys suck
Every time I'm in a thing and it says more sappers, I'm like, okay, great. But at the same time, you feel like you are a glass can and you're very fragile. You kind of have to keep your wits about you. And it never feels like you're just getting beaten down by the game if you're getting hit or if you're not executing on all of the fun movement mechanics and stuff. Also, we skipped this. Do you get a pickaxe? You can Minecraft pickaxe in this game.
yeah so something that's not in rogue mode that i don't know how much you of the campaign you tried austin is there's a lot of agility words let me tell you yes i know i'm chasing those words Yeah, and I spent a lot of time playing a two player has been really fun because my girlfriend and I will go off in like different directions on a platform or whatever.
And she'll just be like, oh, I found an agility orb. And I'll be like, okay, just stay there. I'll come get it. And instead of finding the way to get in, I'll just dig through a wall and be like, hey, I'm here.
It definitely lets you have those shortcuts, too, if you just want to be, like, point A to point B. And then there's just, like you said, there's the agility orbs, and there's some other hidden stuff, like, you know... hats or like what's the name of the thing that you can get bonus points for it's not perk points there's some other type of
I don't remember what it was that I was finding. There are perk points, but I don't know if it's what you're talking about. Yeah, there was something else that I found hidden in the ground at some point. But you have, like, a little radar that can point out, like, oh, there's an agility orb somewhere here. Yeah. Because, like, sometimes it's below you. And, like, yeah, you could try to, like, jump off the little floaty sky island and try to find your way around.
Sometimes I'm just digging straight down. Why not? Let me just keep clicking this right now. Exactly. The game's good. Yeah. It's great. If you're into high-speed shooters and old-school shooters in a way, too, something that really made this game immediately get its hooks into me was... When I started playing it, I immediately got the feeling of, I don't know if either of you ever played like old drives. Very drives. Yes, that's what I was trying to put my finger on.
It is like they made, like, tribe surfing, like, a key aspect of the game, and that is, like, when I was, like, 14, that lit my brain up. Yeah, a lot of it. They need to put the disc thrower thing in here, the disc fuser from Tribes in here, please. Is it still in early access, or is it? No, this app came out. This was fully, like, full release last September. Yeah. But it was also getting updates still, like, of some sort, right? The Rogue Mode. Yeah, rogue mode was added in...
March, and then they added, there was a, they just added a bunch of new guns in April. The son-off shotgun that I keep getting in every rogue run I've been doing. They're very much on top of hot fixes and balancing and stuff like that. It seems like it's got a pretty... I'm not like in any like discords or whatever, but it does seem like there's an active enough community that they're still supporting it pretty well. Um,
Yeah, it's just a great time. Also, you can put stickers on your hoverboard, and when you flip, you see them. I had to do more flipping. I was watching the gameplay, and you were flipping all the time. I need to just flip more. The horizontal flip and the vertical flip. I like that there's a distinction. Yeah. That's good.
I watched the Power Rangers movie too much as a kid, and I saw Tommy with his board in the beginning of that when they're all parachuting down. This is playing for somebody, I promise. And it just ruined me for this game. Whenever I've got a free moment to do a front flip or a back flip, I'm like, yeah, might as well. Especially if I got perks. I got a perk today, which was like triple damage when you're in the middle of a flip. Oh, incredible. Wow. Yeah. The flip master is here. It's crazy.
sick yeah cannot cannot recommend it enough it's been a real highlight of the past like six months or so since i picked it up amazing yeah i'm trying to keep playing some of it um we're gonna hit a few other quick things actually before we before we answer our first side story question i think um uh janine you you had an update for a game you talked about before uh on oh yeah first episode of the show I think so. I think it was. So, Infinity Nikki.
The community has been blowing up. I don't know if the boycott's still on. Um, and there's some, there's some complicated stuff behind that. That's like some real, some real like minute gotcha things of like, they- there were only- the outfits only had 10 pieces and then they did one that has 11 so you have to pull for it more and also-
the upgrade system doesn't work the way people thought it was going to and and they made one thing that was happening every two weeks happen every three weeks and so there's the boycott is happening mostly my understanding is because of sunlight things that have changed to make it a little bit less... uh, generous, um, which valid. It was, I wouldn't have called it particularly generous to begin with. Um, not the worst I've seen, but you know, I get it. But they also added multiplier.
And before multiplayer was like a thing of like you could see pictures that other people took and that would like load in their avatar and you could like take a picture with them. And that was kind of it. Kind of like a style savvy. Yeah. So they added an island where you can interact with people, like, live. But it's terrible. It also came with a lore rewrite that the Infinity Nikki lore heads are furious about. And like, uh-huh, I, yeah.
In brief, the game originally started with you finding a dress in the attic that transported you to a world where a woman was being tortured, and then she transported you into another world.
um oh drew stanlon blank over here yeah but now there's this thing where like the universe blows up and then there's this like woman who's made out of like galaxies and broken stuff uh it was cool and like aloof and just probably you but from the future or something um and she like you she saves i didn't really like i watched the cutscene but like i don't
Whatever. There's universes now. It's multiverse. They multiverseed it. Infinity, Nikki, okay. They brought back a thing that has been a thing in the Nikki franchise, which is the idea of the sea of stars, which is like... the home of the universes or space, but it's like a galactic, like a, like a dimensional space. Yeah. Right.
So they brought that back and that is in this, instead of being kind of like a liminal thing where there's like a guy and his little sister, like it was in the last game. It's a space, it's like some islands, and everything is very sparkly and pink and purple and blue. And you have a special set of daily missions that you do there where you...
Hold a button and then some stars shoot out of a thing and then you go and collect the stars. You can sit on a teeter-totter alone. Sometimes that's a daily mission. There's a little island. Well, you could do it with someone else, but it takes a long time to contact someone, so you mostly just, to complete the daily thing, will just sit on it alone and then leave.
There are flowers that you can touch and then they light up. So sometimes you have to touch a few of them and light up and then you get your daily on that. There's an island where you can turn into the different animals and walk around very slowly, but only in that really small, confined area where the animals are.
And you can't really do any, like, interactions or anything. And you can see other people moving around. So, like, it'll be like you're a dog and then that person will be a horse and you just stand there.
And then there's also, uh, there's some other, there's some other bullshit, but then there's also multiple little, like, gathering games where it's like... put 20 coconuts in the coconut basket and you can only carry one coconut at a time and sometimes you can't get your daily done without doing one of those and it takes like 10 fucking minutes
and they're supposed to be multiplayer progress it's supposed to like as other people are also doing it it contributes to yours but usually when I've played it, no one else is fucking doing it, so I just do it alone, and it feels like the worst Barbie Dreamhouse minigame ever. Okay, but if you described everything you said, but it had... What was the name of that game? The little girls in Soviet-style abstract...
Yeah, tomorrow, children. There is a degree of it being like that, except... bad because there's no variety you know tomorrow children is nice because it's like just do do the thing you like doing do you want to go mine stuff okay do you want to shoot things okay do you want to build stuff that's fine too like go nuts um you want you want to like just coordinate stuff that's great uh have fun um but this is just like the only thing you can do is like run around and like pick stuff up
From the beginning of that first episode, my impression of Infinity Nikki, from seeing you play some of it, hearing it described, is that it is a game about fashion that takes... It's players, not seriously necessarily, but treats them like people who like to play video games and gives them kind of interesting things to do.
has some, you know, some clever level design interaction stuff and story stakes. Yeah, but I can just mean as a game that, like, the platforming is fun and the exploration is kind of interesting.
And none of that feels like what you've described. What you've described does feel like a game for, like, the sort of children's game that doesn't take children seriously, you know? Yeah, it feels, that island to me reminds me so much of the... um era of quote-unquote girl games right girl games a bad name and that's like
so much of what the Nikki series has been cool for is being like, you know, you can have a game about fashion and about, and about this stuff and you can have a story that's interesting and like, that takes big swings and has like, has like, a really unique fantasy sort of situation all of this lore and you know then you can add in all these other like sort of minigame elements and like you can do cool stuff with it
But then this multiplayer island is just like, pick up 20 coconuts. Pick up 20 stars. Put them in the star model. Share your outfit colors. No more heroes jobs. No. it's a real it's a real whiff and like i understand people being mad about the gotcha stuff because gotcha is inherently exploitative and and
i would not again i would not say that i've played games where the gacha was generous and i've been like you know i think they're doing their best here um in terms of like the company saying make a gacha game but then kind of letting them have some freedom there i play games where it feels like yeah no you can play this for free and and have a really good time and not feel held back I don't think that's true.
in infinity nicky just by nature of abilities being attached to outfit sets i think there are some kindnesses there where like you don't get duplicates um until you've completed a set and like You know, there are some concessions, but like the pity system is not great. Like, so there's already stuff where it's like, they're not, you know, they're not being generous. I understand people being pissed at that.
But I think I'm way more pissed at the fact that they made this island that has, again, has its own separate set of daily things. Like, you know, gacha games have your dailies that you do, and then you get your currency, and then you can... And it has its own set of daily things to do every day with its own new set of currency for... very for rewards like poses and whatever for photography um And the...
Stuff is so fucking boring. And you have to do it every day. And it's, there's not that many things to do. And there's not that many things to do. Like the dailies and the other things are like, you know. kill five enemies. And like, fine, the world is big, you can do anything while killing five enemies. Right, right, right. What do you get for doing the dailies in the multiplayer zone?
Uh, like poses for photography. I see. Uh, there's a stuffed animal that you hold. Uh, there's like a skirt, a shirt, and some shoes. Okay, so the stuff that you would want from any activity in the game, just annoyingly lock behind the most boring shit. Yeah, but the poses aren't that great. Okay. I don't know. It's fine. I mostly meant more why... If the activities were better, I would not have complaints about the rewards. Sorry, that's what I'm saying. It was more the other way of like...
Are they even giving anybody anything worth getting to do these for, you know? I think if you're playing it at this stage, you're probably into the picture taking element because once you run out of story content, there's not that much else to do other than like run around, put on a cute outfit and be like, oh, this is nice. Click. So I feel like poses and stuff are good. Like, animations are a decent reward, but...
Inherently, people want clothes most and currency to get clothes. Right. And it's definitely falling a little bit short there. That's a bummer. Uh, well. They shouldn't have gotten rid of fashion almost, either. That's another thing I just want to say. That core conceit at the beginning was so cool, and then you're like, yeah, yeah, but they got rid of that. Yeah. Fashion is pain. Fashion is pain. Let that be the thing. I don't know that she was being tortured, but she was chained up.
So. Simply imprisoned. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's my Omelis 2 is we fixed it. We just have to lock the kid in solitary. There's no torture anymore. We fixed it. Speaking of multiplayer stuff, I wanted to quickly shout out some time I spent with the Ark Raiders uh tech test technical test 2 or whatever it was arc raiders is a uh it is a multiplayer extraction shooter maybe you've fucking heard of them because there's non-stop now we're in the moment of everyone trying to crack
whether or not one of these is going to, like, go big. It's by Embark Studios, who released the finals back in 2023. which is a kind of tournament-focused first-person shooter with a lot of mobility also, speaking of that. Is that still running, or is that closed down? You know, great question. I think it still exists.
it seems to be the one that had the ai it is the one that had the ai voice acting stuff which i think that they said was temporary until they got real stuff uh but i do think that that is still the yes they they what they say on the steam page is during the developmental the development process we may use procedurally and ai
based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team. Examples include voice over audio where we utilize text to speech tools to, for instance, generate the audio of in-game commentators. They should have just hired someone to do voice stuff for that game. That's expensive, but it's like... They should have just had devs do it, frankly. Maybe there's
union stuff around that that I don't know about but they should not have done the AI thing for a public facing demo. I know a lot of devs who use computer voice for internal stuff. I would say, like, the standard. Yeah, it is. To do it internally because you want to have something that you can say, like, does this work immediately? Yes or no? I need to know, does this line work here?
because I don't want to waste time recording it if we hate it. 100%. But that should be a few steps removed from what you're releasing anyway. ArcGraders does not have that, does not have any AI disclosure on Steam, as far as I can tell. Who knows? I've not done a deep dive of it. I played the demo or the tech test for the final day of the playtest. I played with some friends. I played with Will, not that Will Smith. Will Smith?
uh and brad shoemaker from next lander uh and had kind of an incredible time um you know i i think if you asked me a month ago if i was more excited for arc raiders Or Marathon, I would have easily said Marathon because of my history with Bungie and kind of like the core aesthetic.
you know uh design stuff in uh marathon um some of which is really especially the environment design is just so striking i think some of the character design doesn't work for me in marathon um some of the character design is giving NFT. But the model design is incredible. And Arc Raiders kind of has like... The pitch that I gave, I was trying to explain to somebody for Arc Raiders, it feels like the very first level in Destiny 1, the Cosmodrome, which is just like post-apocalyptic.
uh like soviet uh you know space spaceport um uh but like what if that was the whole game what if the whole game was run down in that way and then also you weren't space magic people you were just like person with a leather jacket or i don't know you start with like um like a almost like a one piece like a not a flight suit but uh like an overall and overall or coverall which is which
I think they're kind of entertaining. The sleeved one. That's a coverall. I think that covers you all. An overall goes over all your other stuff. A coverall covers up all your other stuff.
She started with coveralls or a technician's uniform. But very quickly, they did unlock like uh it looked like i was like coming back from the fc barcelona game or like about to go to a rave in barcelona type look so there's like some fun fashion stuff there but uh it's just like uh it is a multiplayer game it's pvpve there are robots that you're fighting there are also other players i had a kind of a shockingly good time there's so much
breadth in the player expressivity uh in terms of interesting tools and weird gadgets to use um you know there is uh you know an example a very easy example for this was just like we're trying to get to a point Okay, let me actually zoom back real quick and get the various high level of what an extraction shooter is. An Extraction Shooter is a multiplayer game where you are going into a map. There tend to be enemy NPCs.
and there also are other players, and you're going in to get gear and extract with it, hence Extraction Shooter. I'd say that the big wave of them started with the Division 1, which had a multiplayer mode in the Dark Zone, where you did some extraction-style stuff. and then really blew up, I'd say, about five years ago, give or take, with Escape from Tarkov and Hunt Showdown, which both had similar aspects of that. Though, I'd say Tarkov, probably the more definitive one in terms of, like,
Oh, you'll lose all your stuff unless you put it in the special bag that you have, and then you get to take anything in your special bag you get to take back even if you die. A lot of those things are here. There's a lot of stuff in this that immediately makes it a little more, I think, player-friendly. There is a skill tree that you're putting points into that includes things like how quickly you can loot things, how much noise you make.
All sorts of more permanent progression. There's also a lot of crafting in between matches that allows you to not feel like you've made such a loss if you, for instance, lose a really cool gun because you got killed. The stuff that I think is really sharp about this game is that some of the stuff that you can craft and find gives you a lot of different kind of verbs. So for instance, Early on, a thing I started getting were keys, and those keys would open special doors on certain maps.
to, like, special loot areas. Like, oh, this opens a supply depot inside of the launch facility in the spaceport. Okay, if I can find the supply room, then I can get all this cool stuff. And then that stuff ends up kind of linking up because, for instance, you land in a zone. What we're going to focus on is getting across the map and getting to that supply depot. Cool.
But that supply depot was like low, like another level down on the ground. We're on top of a huge cliff. How do we get down there? And so we'll look at the map. Okay, we go around. We can find, like, a stairwell back there or a long ladder. But, like, oh, actually, Brad brought the zip line that he can set up and just shoot from the top of the, like, the dam that's looking down into the valley.
and just, like, instantly zipline down there. Cool. Okay. You get there, and, you know, maybe you know you're being chased by some other players or some of these big robots. Some of these robots are like, gigantic screen-filling spider robots or flying rocket launching, you know, hover drones and shit. Like, okay, we have to get in here and be safe because we're being pursued.
one of the other gadgets you can get is like a thing that like permanently or it might not be permanently it might be weapons that can break it but like locks the door like jams the door up behind you so no one else can come in after you and all those little gadgets end up creating little story moments when you tell the the when you like finish the game you will have a thing or a session you will have a thing to tell somebody about what happened in a way that is like
narratively explicable and clear. And I contrast this with playing OG Fortnite, or not OG Fortnite, geez, because OG Fortnite, of course, Fortnite survived the storm. No, what was it actually called? Oh, I don't remember. Janine was the biggest fan of that game. Wasn't something like the storm? Fortnite. Was something like the storm? Yeah. What was it called?
oh this is brutal that's brutal i can't even just find it on a single search i have to do a second search uh but it's not it's not um oh man what was it actually save the world it was save the world or maybe that's just what they called it later no that was i think that was like the I think it's... Oh, Survive the Storm was an event in Save the World. There we go. There we go. Anyway, anyway. I'm like way off now. I'm starting to think about Fortnite.
When Fortnite Battle Royale hit, I remember being like, I can see why people love this, but like,
It's hard for me to tell stories about what happens because, like, and then I built seven walls and, like, a two-level tower. It's not exactly compelling narrativization, but, like, brad and will got trapped at the bottom of an elevator shaft there was a guy at the top of the elevator shaft throwing grenades down at them and like shooting down at them but they couldn't get the angle on each other and i like took a zip line up through the elevator shaft to the top
where I distracted him and then the automated turret came on and was shooting at both of us. You can, like, spin that yarn uh in this in a way that i think is my favorite thing about this type of video game and let me add to that the the stakes that come from playing one of these i just think it's really it was it was shockingly good and I left that tech test feeling like one I wish I could play a lot more of this
I would love to stream some of it whenever it comes back. And then two, like, oh, this might have what it needs to actually hit with a wider audience than just the sort of diehard folks. And obviously there's going to be stuff that I think will always make it hard to truly hit. you know i had a really great session or like a uh not a whole session but like a run and with getting to
Different extraction games have different extraction modes. How do you leave the level? Some of them are ending a Hitman level, and you have to get to one of the edge points of the map and walk out one of those. You have to wait for a gate to open up or something. In this, there's kind of two main ones. One is you can find a key that will open up a sort of almost like a giant bunker door and then go down a ladder.
Back into the vast underground city that all the humans live in now that the Terminator is happening up on the top level. Or there are these like elevators that have a sort of almost like a pillbox, like a metal pillbox shape.
and you can call for one of those elevators. It'll take like 90 seconds to show up, and then once it shows up, you can go in and hold a button down to go back down to base and get all the loot that you've taken. And there was one time when it was like, There was another guy there, and I did the proximity chat thing to be like, Are you cool? Are you cool? Are we cool? Is everything okay? Don't shoot me. I'm just trying to extract.
And then we did. We shot the robot drones and we both extracted. We weren't on the same team. And that felt great. But also, it is always scary to go on to voice comms with anyone on the internet. I can't wait to have a slur hurled at me. And so, you know, to some degree, I think there will always be a barrier of entry to these games. It is a totally understandable barrier of entry. But I do think it might have the juice in a way that...
I could imagine it plays so well to an audience, which is something I don't think Tarkov does. It's something I don't think that the Division Dark Zone necessarily did. And so I think that that alone could make it. You know, it's the sort of game that there's a giant spider robot, and even though it's PvPVE, sometimes all 16 players on the map decide we're going to take down this spider robot.
And that's like a cool bit. That's a cool thing to see. People are going to want to see their favorite streamer do it. And almost just from an academic perspective, I'm like, I can't wait to see this.
come out i can't wait to see all these companies that are chasing the extraction shooter release their games fully so we can see if the audience is actually there for it or if this is like a designer sicko thing you know sometimes like everybody in video games starts playing a thing and everyone tries to like chase that idea
And it's like, sorry, you like this idea because you think about games all day, but the audience isn't there for it, really. And I'm curious to see if this ends up being the one that can breach that, you know, and get across the line, you know? Whenever a new PDPV shooter... comes out that like people are really into i think back to the bad old days where the stories that came out of these were like
A bunch of... Me and a bunch of random people decided to have a truce. But then one guy... found a gun. And then he made the other guy drink gasoline. Right, like the Daisy and... Yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, you know what? That stuff from Daisy so good. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah. That's how it used to be. I never played Daisy. Oh my god.
I recommend everyone go listen to the old idle thumbs episodes about Daisy because that's exactly the shit. Janine just said a thing that's like a hundred percent, you know, we're like, I thought we were cool, but now I'm being held at gunpoint. Yes, and stripped of all of the gear that I've collected, and then they're going to drive me into the woods and leave me there. That's what it used to be. That's what it used to be.
Kids don't know these days. Kids don't know. They're used to Sabrina Carpenter dancing on a rooftop with Sabrina Carpenter. That's right. They've never had Sabrina Carpenter make them drink gasoline. Some of them wish they had, though, which I, you know, don't ever know.
The final other thing I wanted to shout out, which, you know, I don't actually say too much about it. I think I mentioned it actually on maybe an earlier episode, but despolote is out uh by uh julian cordero sebastian valvoina and published by panic it is a first-person independent game about a kind of, like, Growing up. in Ecuador the year that they are trying to qualify for the World Cup.
uh in the i want to say it's the early 90s and not the late 80s i'm pretty sure it's the early 90s um uh and it is sorry it's neither of those it's 2001 it's the early 2000s in fact It is a really stylish first person. I'm going to use the word documentary here because I think there's a lot of documentarian maneuvers happening in Despolote. It's D-E-S-P-E-L-O-T-E.
It is a game where you are running around in a world that is kind of like various types of monochrome, you know, reds or greens or blues, but otherwise just kind of dark. And then you're kicking a soccer ball around. You're listening to your parents have a conversation about Ecuadorian film. You are taking your little sister on a walk through the park. All while, in the background, Ecuador tries to contest for placement in the World Cup.
a year after them having a sort of surprising win in speed walking in the Olympics. And so suddenly there's a sort of Ecuadorian moment uh for the folks there where they're like oh wow we could exist on the national stage via or the international stage via sports in a way we didn't think we could. It's a game about being a child and bumping into the adult world, trying to make sense of what it means to be from a place
trying to understand what a family is. It's fairly short. I think I played through the whole thing in about two hours, give or take. And there were some really... really cool visual and narrative maneuvers, especially towards the end of the game, that I think is the first time I've seen some of that stuff in a video game um uh you know the whole thing is narrated uh in a way that is again drawn from the history of documentaries the history of film
And there's stuff that couldn't exist in the history or in a film version of this story. This is not a game where I played it and said, why was this a game and not just a movie? This is a game that I played it and went... Not only is it a game about a game, which is soccer, not only a game that's drawing on documentaries, but it's a game that takes advantage of being a game in some really unique ways.
I really love it. It's, I want to say, $15 on Steam. Really, really worth it. So shout-outs to Despolote. Yeah, I've been so curious about that. Oh yeah, please, definitely. If you're curious at all, give it a shot. It's really good. A long time since I played this sort of first-person narrative game where I was like, shit, damn, cool.
it does the thing that it needs to do which is like puts you in the moment of like the thing that works for me i guess the best in games like that is when i am saying what do i do at the exact same time that the character is saying what do i do um or the person like you're in that moment of just like wait should i
Should I go home now? Should I go home now? Yeah. I kind of don't want to go home, but it is late. The bit, the bit, I know you watched me play some of this, Janine, back a while ago, and, um... There's a moment where your mom is like, no, whatever you do, don't get dirt on your clothes. We have to go to a wedding later. I was like, I'll be fine. Chat, I was not fine. that's exactly what i mean like it just it really puts you in the
And the thing of, like, well, you're a kid with time to kill. Yeah. You're in your nice clothes. God, there's nothing that does with time. Everyone's into soccer. Again, I don't want to get too many... It's not spoilery, but I don't want to give away too many of the beats. I think hitting them yourself is really good. But the way it plays with time and not really knowing...
How long an hour is? How long is your parent going to be away? How long do you have to wait before you get to go do the thing that you want to do? Because someone's running errands and you're just a kid along for the ride, you know? That stuff is fantastic. Needing to like figure out what time it is by going to like check the clock in the in the park plaza or like look at the go to like walk by the electronics store and look in to see what the tv say the time is
It's really interesting. I think it's a really, really smart game that is going to be one of those things I think ends up inspiring, which are people to make similar stuff simply by the way that it tackles some interesting ideas that I think had not really found their way into games quite yet in terms of how would I tell that? How would I want to tell that story? I think it cracks some of that in a way. So Despolote out now, 15 bucks. Really great.
We got a question. We've never said that we have an email for questions. We do. It is questions at sidestory.show. I think this person just sent it to the Friends at the Table account. Right now, the questions at sidestory.show email just goes there, just like redirects there. So I don't think this person just like figured that out. I think they just sent it to our normal friends at the table email.
I want to read it because I think it actually hits on some stuff that we've already talked about today, both in terms of kind of Infinity Nikki stuff, some Echo Point Nova Rogue stuff, and just kind of like broader character building type things. this comes in from nelson from seattle who says hi sidewinders which
Is that what we are? That's interesting. That's fun. That's a kind of snake that leaves really cool tracks. It does do that. Yeah. Sidewinders. Is Jack going to be okay with those? Oh, good thought. Maybe. I think Jack is hypothetical. A snake in conversation is not the snake in the grass. You know what I mean? Yeah. Hi, Sidewinders. I have a game design question related to some stuff you discussed in your first episode. Sorry for the length.
I like, I'm skipping the TLDR version of this, I like when games feel personalized, an experience I can call my own. I think Gotcha can really provide that. In a Gotcha system, what I get in my collection is and what I have to work with. Sorry, what I get is in my collection and what I have to work with. I might influence what I might roll for, but I never have everything. In most games, I can either spend enough time to get the rare drops needed for something,
or I can choose what I get. However, someone else can play the game and make the same choices and or grind for those same drops. I think that there's something special about the limitations that Gacha could provide, but I don't think most games can quite catch that. Some games give equipment with random modifiers, but that can sometimes feel like you are arbitrarily picking the best numbers and are being requested to grind to use the build you like.
or that the variety is meaningless. Rogue-style games often do this, but the run-based nature means the variety is ephemeral. D&D can have stat rolling, but that can result in power imbalances and other frustrations.
The one game that I find captures this feeling of gacha personalization are Nuzlocke randomized Pokemon runs, and that is only done by the player specifically opting in. As gamers and designers yourselves, are there ways you can think of to tap into that feeling of using the hand you've been dealt?
any non-payment driven gacha games that you think are interesting does this style appeal to you or do you want everything authored or choice driven thanks for the new show nelson from seattle uh thoughts I definitely have some examples here, but there are... The thing that's interesting for me is that some of the qualifications Nelson has, I think, immediately... You know, I would say first, for instance, for most people who are playing their first Pokemon game,
Pokemon is already like this. You're already getting the Pokemon you get from the grass. And, ooh, it turns out that this is the one I've leveled up. I don't know about no IVs or EVs. All I know about is Eevee, the cool Pokemon. you know and like sometimes you have a pokemon who just seems to who just feels
Right, exactly. And that's all you know. Because you got one that has the good numbers, but you don't know. But it's just like, I guess I'm an absol main now. I'm okay. That's right, exactly. And I think that was, in some ways, the...
reason why people really love Pokemon. It was like, ooh, who's your team? And yes, there were immediately people who were grinding out and trying to collect them all. That's part of the pitch of Pokemon right away. But the idea of who did you have when you faced the Elite Four...
still did scratch some of this itch even before nuzlocke if anything i think nuzlocke is sort of about trying to let expert players recapture some of the amateur experience of playing those games before you knew too much and before you were devoted to playing them in that other way.
um for for me at least i think that that's what's going on yeah because you can't it cuts you off at like you can't grind for the perfect you know doug trio right you get one and that's your one and your name is his name is like Doug Trio spelled D-O-U-G. That's right, yeah.
and that's it and if he dies he dies you know um which i guess is the second one of these for me is like I think anything like in the XCOM space, obviously you are making lots of choices to create your characters and make certain choices around what they're... uh their bonuses are but anything that has like a perk system for npcs or not npcs but for like party members
um i think does a lot of good for like oh this is my version of this character like darkest dungeon actually scratches this itch for me a little bit especially because in the middle of a run of a game like that you're like shit, who's ready to go? I don't have my A-team ready. I only have, you know, Renaud, who has had, you know, spent the last, you know, six weeks.
in the church trying to pray away his guilt and it hasn't worked and now i'm gonna send you out another damn Myers or whatever so he's going to get crushed you know so I think that game does pretty well with it and then there's stuff that just straight up has a sort of gotcha element to it like Xenoblade Chronicles 2 a game that I think... Yeah, that's the one that really jumped to mind for me. Yeah, I think most people remember that system for its deeply horny lady design.
Some of the worst, and I'm saying worst inside of the subset of things that is horny anime ladies, I just don't think they're good designs. I think even if you accept the premise, some of them are really bad. But that was a game that did have, like, you could get these things called blades, which were sort of like, what if Pokemon were people? Or women. There's a couple dudes. Remember, the dudes look like...
They kind of look like enemies in a different JRPG. They kind of have that... i gotta find you an example now but uh they had like uh almost like robot style designs remember they ended up being i referenced them a lot in um in partisan because uh i kind of think that's what the war forms of the branched looked like um it's just like look they're just like people they're just like metal people you know Yeah, I'm trying to pull up a picture of this one guy I got in it.
wolfrick who is just like a full-on like looks like a monster from a like an end game monster from a final oh yeah i fought this guy in final fantasy when i went deep on final fantasy 11 i just fought this guy i'm pretty sure yeah
It's either this or like there's occasionally you get a twink and it's like, sure, sure, sure. Yes. These are the two types of dudes you can roll. Whereas the women you roll are twisting around themselves so that you can see tits and ass at all times you know which again I just don't think those designs hit I think if you what you want is a game with hot anime women. There are better options out. Actually, I think Xenoblade 2 is actually kind of good.
Except for this game. There's a lot of actually really smart gameplay design stuff in that game. um but yeah so i think that game literally has this and actually so does um obviously it doesn't actually because the i was gonna say grand blue grand blue uh not versus but relink actually doesn't have a gotcha you just pick which character you want
but you can only get a few of them during the main campaign. So that does not actually literally have one. Um, but yeah, I think anything like that or anything like Janine, I think a favorite of ours that no one talks about the Vita RPG or a Sheikah. Or is she contained in bloodlines? Which is the sequel to a game that was never localized that arguably killed the franchise.
Oh, did it? That's a shame. This is great, because the other thing I was going to shout out here was another Vita game. Shout out to the Vita. Shout out to the Vita. The best handheld ever. Orishika was RPG, where you played... I don't know who you were necessarily, but you basically had a whole line of characters who were like, descendants of deities like you had like like demigods basically uh and you had generation after generation of them and so like
you were you know the gods would pop out a new kid and you'd be like all right get to the front of the line buddy take your sword you had a cursed bloodline right and then it's like you're trying to undo the tainted bloodline and in doing that you're sort of You win, you get powerful enough that certain gods are like, yeah, okay, I'll have a kid with you. And then you have that kid and they inherit special powers and stuff and so on and so forth until you...
It's like a game built around the sort of Shin Megami Tensei or Persona Fusion stuff, except, like, a little more eugenics-y, because it's human. But it's gods. It's mostly gods, right? um but that game i think similarly had like a oh this one character is unique to my playthrough this is my you know this character means a lot for my whole run and that's my guy you know
What were you going to say? So I was, when we got this question, I was trying to think of more of the, um, Like... unique run like unique playthrough aspect that um sure Sorry, I'm spacing on the name of the person from Seattle.
Yeah, that Nelson was asking about, where it's like, oh yeah, in a Nuzlocke run, for example, your party is going to be set for a degree, but then change, and it'll always be sort of like a unique... uh run through with these characters there's a game i played on the vita called um lost dimension and it's it's like a tactical rpg and its big hook was that you were basically in between missions
playing a game of werewolf or mafia with your the characters that you have and whoever is betraying you is different every time and so like every new campaign And so it will, I don't know, I admittedly did not end up finishing it because it just, like, at a certain point was a bit too, uh...
i don't want to say slog but it was like a little too too um samey for me at a certain point and also when someone you really like gets taken out in one of those games it can really kill your your enjoyment um But the aspect of you have to vote off, basically, you have to, one, convince the NPCs to vote the way that you want them to vote.
And two, you have to like vote off someone every chapter or whatever. Well, like it means by necessity, it's going to end up feeling different when you play through. That's the sort of thing I was thinking of, but it's hard to think of gotcha in a single-player... Like, a single player experience because it is so that isn't exploitative because it is kind of that by nature Or because in something like Xenoblade, you could just grind out more.
Yeah. It's not like you're, if what you've done is looked up, and I think this is actually kind of a, for me, subtext of this question, is you could give yourself this experience in a lot of different games simply by not knowing anything about them. I have a personal story that feels like it's mine. happens in a lot of games. It happens in Baldur's Gate 3 if you're not reading a strategy guide to learn where to go get the cool sword. You know what I mean? I think if
all of us sat down to go play Baldur's Gate 3 by ourselves, and then we talked about the experience of playing it, there would be some overlap. We might all be like, oh, I got this cool knife for a Cerion. But I would guarantee that one of us has some build or some weapon that the other one's missed And they were like, ooh, that was so important for my run of da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Even earlier today, when we were talking about Claire Obscure, there was overlap with, oh, the two of you both have built a character out for a particular stance. but there are still other things where you're like oh but i could do this i could you know even just playing a game like that there are so many options available that i think even if it's not literally the randomization of gotcha it still hits like that you know so it's like this is your story
Yeah, Dre, I was talking about, like, completely missed the thing that I'm building one of my characters around in Claire Obscure, like we talked about, and that's, like, giving it a whole different feeling, I imagine. I don't know any minds. The other thing is, and I mentioned this when we were discussing this question, before was or is randomizer. mods or ROM hacks or things like that. Things that basically make it so whenever you get an item...
It is a completely different item than what it is supposed to be. There's a lot of these for, like, FromSoft games, right? There's a lot of them for the early Legend of Zelda games.
Things that basically, again, I think it kind of hits that thing that you mentioned with the Nuzlocke runs, where it's like, for people who specifically are used to overthinking and overplanning, And like knowing something inside and out, it adds an element of being able to play as if you are just a person who's playing the game. sight unseen no access to any other information just like okay i got this thing i have to work with it yep um
Totally. Yeah. And let me be an advocate for the humble roguelike, which I know that Nelson wrote it, and Nelson explicitly said, like, the ephemeral part of those makes that less, doesn't hit the same way.
some of those have some pretty long runs um i think like if you're deep into a caves of cud run or if you're playing something like caves of cud or dwarf fortress adventure mode with the setting set so that you can save your game or caves or cut specifically has a mode that saves anytime that you're at a like a town um or any other type of settlement like
you're going to end up with a character whose build is completely different than someone else who's playing. And not only because games are kind of filled with like random mutation moments, but like, simply because of what gear you find and other sorts of randomization around that. I think that it is, the thing that's really nice about
the gotcha mechanic as a kind of coalescence of this idea is you get a whole ass character from a gotcha. It's a whole... the character is if you had a character who has a big claymore and they're like a slow moving character but they can like turn into fast mode or something that's going to define how you play uh the game because that's who your character is versus if you get someone who's like a fly around
shoot magic character in some gacha game. Like, I get it. The fact that those are all bundled like that is different than getting a borderlands gun that shoots rockets, but like it's a submachine gun that shoots rockets or something. I get it. Or, or playing, Shearing the Wanderer and finding a bunch of staves that let you do teleportation tricks or whatever.
But I do think that there is something to be said about those little things slowly bundling up until suddenly you realize, oh, I'm building towards a particular type of sub-character, you know, or type of character instead of becoming kind of pre-grouped the way a gacha character.
Did Grand Blue Fantasy Relink have a shootout action? That's what I was saying earlier. It doesn't. No, you just get tokens and buy the character you want. It does not actually. You don't roll to get a character. Which I think was the right call for that game because
Yeah. I mean, to some degree you're rolling dice because you don't get to test the characters before you buy them. You just get to see what their portraits are and can read a little bit about what they do. But I definitely unlocked some characters and was like, eh, I don't really like how they play. I like the game a lot though. Any other thoughts on this? Any other examples of this? I thought of another one, which is the, um,
an actual gacha game that has a mode that is outside of the gacha, Sword of Convalaria. Oh, yeah, Sword of Convalaria. I forgot about Sword of Convalaria. There's, like, a mode where, like, you can bring in... like one or two or whatever of your gotcha of the characters you've gotten from the gotcha but otherwise all of your equipment and stuff is just unique to that mode it's what you get in that mode and it's a completely closed off
like, system without any, like, currency or anything like that. That game, yeah, that game's Yeah, everyone knows Sword of Cavalaria is like a tactical RPG in the vein of something like Final Fantasy Tactics. where there is, like, a totally standard daily gacha free-to-play type mode. that you could spend probably hundreds and hundreds of hours in. And then there's also just a mode that is its own tactical RPG that is, like you said, Janine, kind of like,
hermetically sealed from the rest of the game. I think they maybe let you bring more characters in now. I think I saw that at some point. from your gotcha but you don't need to at all and you get a bunch of characters through the game including from yeah in that mode you can go hire random mercenaries from
The bar, which is sort of like an in-game gotcha that's completely just in-game currency stuff, you know? Sword of Cavalaria is kind of good. I mean, I should go back to playing some Sword of Cavalaria. I don't know. I'm thinking about it. Yeah. All right, I think that's going to do it for this run of side story. That's not a run, really. We're not a run based.
We've been talking a lot about runs today. You're not wrong. In this podcast, I got a fire sword. Just so everyone knows. I haven't been flaunting it, but you know. Amazing. We, as always, are supported by you over at friendsofthetable.cash. If you support us at the $10 level, you'll get access to our Outward Let's Play. We have four episodes of that out now. And I gotta say, I think my favorite bit I've done as an editor is in this fourth bit.
We're the fourth episode so far. We've got to get back and play some more soon. Actually, because we're out of footage, we've just played more. But also because I can't stop thinking about it. I really love that game. It has been a joy to play, so people should go support us there and get access to that. You can also get access to bonus content for Media Club Plus, which is the show, Sylvie, that you're on. What's the most recent bonus thing from Media Club Plus?
Let me think. It's been kind of like... We've recorded a Dragon Ball Z bonus that I don't know if it's up or... I don't think it'll be up by the time this is done, but we've covered a lot of Dragon Ball Z, just to sort of expose, for anyone who's not familiar, Jack, who has been, like I said, been on Side Story before. You should hopefully be familiar with our friend Jack DeGate.
has never seen hunter hunter or much shonen anime so one of the big like sort of missions for the season of media club plus was exposing them to sort of seminal shonen stuff we've so the bonuses have been drag the original dragon ball We did some Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part 4, which are some very fun episodes, and a lot of Dragon Ball Z. We've done both Frieza, Saga, and I think the upcoming one is Cell Saga stuff.
So if you want to check those out, they're available. Same price as any of the Friends of the Table bonus campaign stuff. I think it's the $5 tier for that. Speaking of people who haven't seen things, uh you and keith have also been playing through uh 999 uh which you've beaten at this point which are maybe eight or nine episodes into at this point uh yeah we really need to get back to that my
I've been so thrown off by personal life stuff that I'm dying because I've played those and Keith has not. And it has been a joy getting Keith's reactions to the way that Kotaro Uchikoshi writes. How are you playing? I've not played 100 Lion. I want to. I'm just... Nobody come for me. I'm kind of a Danganronpa hater. I'm just like, it's just never been for me. And so like, that's a barrier that I'm trying to push through.
Wildermyth. We're in Wildermyth. Nelson, go play Wildermyth. Wildermyth! Oh my god, yeah. You're so right. to, like, shout stuff out for us and realize we have the Wildermith Let's Play them as normal. We have one more episode to do for it. We're back. Right there, right there. Right there. But people should go, Nelson, you should go play that. Everyone should go play Wildermyth. I'm a Wildermyth booster for sure. Yeah.
And as always, I'd also love if you would go to your podcast platform of choice and leave us a review. I think that it is hard to overstate. How important it is to get reviews for a podcast that you're trying to get off the ground like this.
It is such a key way to get the show in front of new people. You can only reach your own audience so much, and even if you just say it over and over again, it's limited. But because of the way Discovery works on the internet, and especially on these apps, it's useful to have. The reviews, it'll help boost it to the top of the charts and it'll help get more attention. And hey, tell your friends about it.
uh big time too again that email address is questions at sidestory.show before we leave we do have one more question and actually i'm gonna i'm gonna um i'm gonna lead into it with a review that prompts us... Let's see here. The title of this This review is I, and it's written by C G I D G H U D D H D J X F J X F J J D and B.
Probably a new account, I think. Maybe they made an account to make this review. And they said, the I stands for Inca. It's the secret third game from the Inca franchise for the CD-i. Oh my god. Sophie, do you know about the upcoming Fantasy Life game? Yes, of course I do. What's the name of it? Isn't it Fantasy Life? Isn't it Fantasy Life Eye? I was listening to the side story that y'all recorded last, but I didn't get to that segment quite yet. We made a discovery during that segment.
which is that the I stands for some stuff. What is it? I don't want to, like, redo the material. Well, we want to know. Gene, do you want to ask this question? So there's, yeah, the I stands for four things, but they've only explained what three of those things are. Yes. We don't need to go over it again. Island, internet, and individual. Yeah, but they've also said that it stands for a fourth thing that will be revealed. What do you think it is? What do you think that I stands for?
I think it's like they're being clever and it's I like E-Y-E. Ooh. It's the fourth I. Interesting. Yeah. What do you think that means? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, realize, realize, realize. I like it. Good guess. I like this. I don't remember what our guess is originating, but we'll have to go back and check. My new one is internship.
That's my new one that I'm hoping for. Like, two hours of the game, you get an internship, and that's the fourth eye for this game. We have an internship. Great. You start as a blacksmith, and you don't get paid for the first time. God. All right. That's going to do it for us. Thank you so much for listening as always. What's that thing that we say at the end of the episode? To be continued.