09: Denied Your Clocks Again

What's good, internet? It is July 22nd, 2025. And this is not a dangerous expanse of wilderness filled with strange monsters. It's Side Story, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by Friends at the Table and supported by our patrons at friendsatthetable.cash. I'm joined again today by the people who were here for the first episode. Welcome back. It's been a number of episodes since we've had this group. Jack and Janine. Yeah. Hi. Hi, Austin.

hello how's it going it's the outward crew it is the outward crew that's the thing is like it feels like we haven't done the podcast together in a bit but we have been putting out outcast outcast jesus outcast album listening podcast separate our outward uh lps and i think that that's you know we're still we're still doing that every week or every

Every few weeks, every couple of weeks, except for this month where they've been, it was the first Tuesday and it'll be the last Tuesday. It'll be next Tuesday for the second one this month. But how are y'all doing? Good. It's exciting to be back. I feel like we started pushing the car down the hill when we started with Side Story. And then I went on both a work trip to Japan and then a vacation to Germany. And then you broke your foot.

And then I broke my foot! I'm here today to talk about Death Stranding 2, which we'll get to later, a game that I will, as a little teaser, it's interesting to play when your foot doesn't work. Oh, I bet. You've got to walk around a bunch in that game and stumble. You ever worried that Sam's going to break his foot? Yes. That would be dope. That seems like a thing he should have put in that game, actually.

Yeah, I think he abstracts it. Again, we can kind of talk about that as we talk about that later. How are you, Janine? I'm good. I've had some big accomplishments in life also.

Really? What's your biggest life accomplishment lately? My biggest recent life accomplishment is killing Dracula, Lord of Vampires. He's had it coming. Finally. He had it coming in a big way. Someone's needed to kill that guy for a long time. Technically, they did. And I had to go back in time to do it again.

It's complicated. Somebody's needed to put him to spicy sleep for a long time now. Oh, God. Someone's needed to unsubscribe from him on YouTube for a long time now. I don't think Jack knows the spicy sleep. I don't know about spicy sleep. I know about... It's the new Unalive. Spicy Sleep is the new Unalive. That's right. I also just disagree with the premise. Death is famously not at all spicy. It's totally a nut. Also, spicy already has a use in censored internet speech. It sure does. It does.

Different thing. Like if you say spicy handshake. Yeah. That does not mean totally inert. No coming back. It kind of means the opposite thing. It doesn't mean like you lost your hand. No, it does not mean you lost your hand. No, no. You're really blurring the lines there in a bad way, in fact. Anyway, you killed Dracula. The historic Dracula. Historic Dracula.

Canonical Dracula. Biblical Dracula. Do you do this in Transylvania or do you do this in a video game? Or somewhere else in the world. I don't know where Dracula is these days. I'm not keeping up. I also went to Japan, and that's where Dracula is right now. Dracula was in Japan? Shit. Dracula was in Japan in, like, the early 2000s, maybe, but I don't think he's there at all. He was, I suppose. That actually makes sense. Yeah. I feel like now he's maybe in, like, South America somewhere.

That's the vibe I get. Isn't he in fake Germany? No, that's Nosferatu. Nosferatu is not Dracula. Different guy. I unfollowed Dracula after everyone told me that he had done some stuff that wasn't above board. So I haven't really been following, you know, the posts. Yeah. He's kind of like a little bit problematic with women. So a little bit. Yeah. But just women and everything else is chill. So.

A little bit of a stalker situation going on. Sometimes he turns into rats, and I don't care for that. Sorry, please continue, Janine. And that reminds me, there's an achievement I need to get. I was playing V Rising. You just reminded me there's two achievements I wanted to get before I...

playing it and one of them is to be a rat and go in a little hole and I didn't know you could do that and I need to find a little hole to go in. There's some forms in that game where I kind of don't understand the use case. Rat is kind of good because it makes you small so you can hide in bushes from the sun a little easier. That makes sense. But there's like a toad form that you're supposed to be able to jump up on stuff, but like...

None of the stuff I want to jump up onto, I've been able to jump up onto while being a toad. So I don't fucking know. V-Rising is, for the person who has no idea about anything except you can become a rat and a toad, the form that, of course, Dracula took famously, which maybe that's true. Maybe I just don't remember that one. A game by Stunlock Studios came out in early access a couple of years ago. More than a couple. Was it more than a couple? Yeah, I guess so. 2023?

That's a couple, right? How do I get Steam to show me when I bought the thing? Great question. I'm not sure, but it came out of Early Access earlier this year? No, it had to be earlier last year. It had to be last year. May 8th, 2024. So about a year ago. About a year ago. And that game is a sort of top-down crafting survival game, but with heavy action RPG elements.

A lot of emphasis on, as you might imagine from our discussing being a rat hiding from the sun, very flavorful systems, kind of really skillful combat challenges. The studio previously made a game called Battle Rite. right royale which were sort of arena fighters with MOBA style combat, which is to say like lining up your shots and dodging incoming attacks and timing based and reach in like, uh, not recharge. Um, uh, what's, what's the boy timer, like a downtime timer.

an MMO what is the thing I'm thinking of cool down timers and then like bosses in V Rising have like very you know bullet hell adjacent stuff at the beginning to from what I've seen bullet hell style patterns by the very very end of this game mechanics and gimmick focused bosses that are really flavorful and you're meanwhile building up your life as a I was going to say as a Dracula, but I guess not as a Dracula. Just as a vampire. As a Dracula rival. Is that fair to say? Kind of, yeah.

um 2022 was the year i was looking for god that's so long ago oh my god yeah yeah yeah um so basically the premise of that game is you wake up you're a fucking vampire y'all um And a long time ago, Dracula was around and it was bad. And then he got fucked up and died. Oh. And there was like a, I believe. Pre or post vampire. This is long before you. No, no, no. Was he bad news and died when he was like...

I think he was a vampire. I'm not 100% sure on this. I'm getting this truly like fourth hand almost. Because the game doesn't really spell this out for you directly. There's a big war. Dracula's got a bunch of demons and stuff on his side, but he gets fucked up. There's like a weird blood rain after that. A lot of the land gets like poisoned and screwy.

Over time, a bunch of different religions and cults form. Different areas have different livability. And you kind of show up as a... inheritor to Dracula's throne a vampire returned and you have to like uh you make a little fort um castle and you feed your castle with blood and you build it up and you make a sort of you know gathering crafting factory situation while you go around killing all of these all of these uh bosses who are

I believe the descendants of people who got powers from the Dracula blood reign back in the day or something like that. Oh, interesting. Okay, they're V-bloods? Is that what they're called? Yes, yeah. And there's a pretty wide variety of them. There's dozens of them because we played the early access version of this game forever ago and a little of the full release.

And we didn't even get, like, we just got out of Act One, and I think we might have had a dozen bosses or something. So, and there's... Three acts of this game. So presumably... I want to say there's like two dozen bosses or something like that. I've eaten every single one of them, but I don't remember the exact number. Wow. That's kind of rude. You don't remember everybody you've eaten? Well, okay, but there's like a lot of... There's a lot of them that...

they're just like some of them have like special areas but some of them are just like walking around yeah also simon belmont is there so if you have the dlc um right and he sucks because he doesn't have a set level he's always just five levels ahead of you And he always just kind of hangs out nearish where you are. That's a low move. He's a piece of shit. He sucked to beat, but we did beat and kill him and eat him. There are so many more than two dozen.

There are so many bosses. I don't have a total. I haven't counted, but I'm going to send you the list here and we can give me just a gut check guess. Oh, okay, I see. Jack, how many do you think that is? Oh. I think that is 151. Okay, let's slow down. Well, some of these are kind of different than...

Can we read some of these names, Janine? Because the names are so... So much of what... appealed to me about the idea of this game was seeing this list in game when it launched which is one of the coolest things there's a there's a page in your like it's like a tree yeah yes

That you can look at. And it, like, shows you, like, because they all give you different, like, they, you know, will teach you how to build different things or whatever, or they'll drop special, uh... skills and stuff like that um i will say that talzer the winged horse solaris the immaculate adam the firstborn and magar the serpent queen they're kind of they're not really like they're kind of ebloods but they're more like dracula adjacent minions who

bosses yeah but they drop like these amulets that decay really rapidly that give you like a special alt it's kind of like a it's like a real it's endgame stuff you know so jack i need you to you need to validate me for a second Who do you think Adam the Firstborn is? If you're playing a gothic fantasy game and you are a gothic horror fantasy game and one of the bosses is named Adam the Firstborn.

Yeah, right. That's our dear friend, the first man. That's right. The first man whose rib was taken. Whose rib was taken to make Eve. In a way, he's the, you know, he's a man in the... he's the first man in the mary shelley sense right he's that first man he's a different he's he's quote the culmination of dr henry blackberry's brilliance the monster you also kill

Yo, you killed Dr. Henry Blackbrew? Oh, yeah. Way before. He's, like, way weaker than his kid. Does he have potions and, like, alchemy stuff? Does he have, like, a mad scientist laboratory? The potion lady is, I think, Lucille, the venom alchemist. She's really cool.

that's a cool fight you like turn her into a sheep and stuff to stop her from casting things in a weird way it's funny you mentioned you mentioned simon belmont being here because even though this is such a different game than the castlevania games i do think something that's common between both of them

It's like, yo, check out this cool boss. Look at this cool weirdo. Yeah. Which is a huge part of those games, in my opinion. So yeah, there's 57 bosses is what I'm seeing listed here. That's what I said. That's like four dozen. Yeah. kind of right in between your two guesses um uh and they're a big part of the game uh and we should talk more about them and i'm sure you have like faves that you want to shout out uh but but i would just love to hear like what the loop is for people so

that they can kind of imagine they're sitting down to play a session of this game what's that look like because i do think that it's interesting obviously i think there's some comparisons to make to like valheim which i think was super popular in a way that maybe that's a good touchstone for people but what is a v rising session like it is a lot like valheim but like a little bit more top-down isometric not like fully top-down isometric but you are sort of zoomed out it's not really fully um

third person-y yeah yeah you have kind of a wider view of things it's got a little bit of like the diablo style um combat in terms of like aiming and a little bit of like twin stick work sometimes um it it's so tough i want to say so the thing that i spent most of the time like most of the time when i wasn't at near the end um working on bosses

The thing that I spent my time doing was farming for resources. And in the beginning of the game, that looks like running out and hitting trees and rocks. Because it's crafting. At the end of the game... That looks like, well, I built a sort of mini, mini palace near the largest human settlement so that I could turn into a bat and fly down to the human city.

And then I would just kind of go through and kill everyone in the city sort of every few days so I could take their jewelry because I melt their jewelry down. And that the gold that I get from melting their jewelry down lets me do shit with radium.

um and also uh-huh and also lets me then turn my old silver money which is for garbage is for the smaller town who cares i can combine my silver money with the gold to get coins so that when i go back into town the next the big town the next time instead of killing everyone i go shopping and then i kill everyone so do you think that this kind of growth from like i'm out here sucking the blood from rats i'm chopping down trees yeah two like i am the monster that the town fears is is um

like a deliberate design choice. It feels like that is such a clear part of the vampire fantasy, is like, one day the town will fear me. And so to hear you describe it so explicitly in those terms makes me think it must have been deliberate.

The map is structured in such a way that it feels like it really is sort of... engineering that arc for you even though it doesn't really have an explicit story in that way that would sort of really shove it in your face um you start out in an area that is there's some village stuff There's like farmlands eventually that you get into. It's a big open world, right? Yes. Really big.

you start out just kind of in like a shitty forest full of bandits like it's it's full of like bandits and skeletons and like wolves and you know wildlife and stuff like that um And it's very much like a sort of unclaimed type, messy, everything's kind of gone to shit down here land between the graveyards and the farmland that you eventually get to.

um and then you sort of advance to fighting like guards who are guarding towns and um like you know members of holy orders like like paladins and priests and things like that um as you sort of go further up and you get into these lands where like some of the lands the sunlight i can't like describe it really it feels like the sun hurts you more or like maybe you have less coverage

um right we should like there are places that are yes you cannot be in the sun right there's a daylight cycle you will die super quick in the sun uh you can mitigate it a little bit with potions and equipment and stuff but It's still, even when you have the best shit and potions, it still does hurt you. Yeah, when I think about the loop of this game, I think about the day-night cycle because it's something that most games that have day-night cycles...

don't actually build around. It's just like aesthetic, which is cool. And I like that part too. But in this game, it's very much like when we were playing this, you know, the thing that we would do is say, okay, it's daytime. We're going to be inside. We're going to be like...

crafting we're gonna be you know moving stuff around in the castle we're gonna be trying to figure out like what our next step is we're gonna be preparing and then it turns to night and we go out and we go oh let's go chase down this v blood

let's try to go get this super bear that's kind of far away. And we get there and we do the boss fight. And then it's like, oh my God, we're so far away. We have to get back before the sun comes up. Let's go into our wolf form because the wolf form runs faster.

And then the sun starts coming up and you have to like stick to the shadows of the trees, which always introduced a lot of fun stuff around like... Especially if you've been over mining the resources around your place. Exactly what I was going to say. You just get rid of your tree cover for a few days. And the trees are...

on you don't have shadows to hide it anymore and then you're fucked this is where the rat form is actually pretty good because the rat can kind of tick can be sheltered by bushes and stuff because he's smaller that makes you also get a spider form where you can dig a hole underground and just stay there but you can't like travel in that hole you just have to hide that's classic first time you play minecraft it's nighttime and the monsters are yeah moment type in my dirt hole yeah um

There are also areas in the map where daylight doesn't reach on the ground level. Oh, interesting. The area that's sort of full of demons and stuff. You can be out there all day with no trouble whatsoever. However... If you have bat form, which is one of the last forms you get, and it's really sick, it completely changes the game. It's good that it's the last thing you get, but it's also neat.

You can fly very fast. You know, when you take bad form, you go up in the air and... you are not protected from the sun when you do that in the vampire area because you are above whatever miasma is filtering out the sunlight so if you are out in that area in the middle of the day and then you do bat form to try and get somewhere really fast there you will be affected by the sun because you're up in the fucking sky um and it will truly blast you so fast uh

if you use it in the earlier areas can you still say to the shadows there or is it or is it similar as a bat no no okay so you're just like above the tree line and so yeah you are you are like in with the bat form you are up so high that you can like fly over mountains and shit like the game does not make you walk it does not make you fly around any invisible barriers um you're flying over buildings where it's kind of clear like oh i don't know if this was meant to be seen

initially i don't know if they built this on top of this building with the intention of someone being able to fly alongside it because it feels a little bit rough so it's not like i i'd assumed that it was going to be like abstracted and so i haven't i hadn't looked at any of the bat no you're a little bad and you're and you just

the camera up above everything i see it now this is very funny this reminds me of this reminds me of fantasy life i and like the the putting the mod in that lets you move the camera i guess they've added that now officially and being like Okay, this works, but sometimes you can see parts of the dungeon. I see why it's not like this. Yeah, I see why it's not like this by default. Yeah, that's very funny. Yeah. So, yeah, it's...

It's an interesting game because it can be a very action-y boss rush. Or, you know, there are times where you can just spend, like, hours and hours and hours just, you know... stealing necklaces to melt down to turn into this other thing to then turn into this thing to make like a couch right for your what's the couch for for looking at

They're hanging out. Okay, I see. I mean, you're making a Dracula palace, so it's got to look opulent. Of course it has. There's context here, which is that like...

You've played this game primarily co-op all the way through. You've not played it the other way that it's intended to be played, which is with a group of friends, which is like Rust, right? PvP server, yeah. PvP server. Because there's a lot of... There's like... um a bunch of plots of land that have nothing on them except for like you can claim this and you can build here um so the idea would be that like you'd be playing multiplayer with a bunch of people everyone picks a spot to set up shop

And then you're sort of running around. You can raid other people's castles. You can do all kinds of stuff. especially like once they start having end game loot, which like shows up on the map where it is. So you can be like, ah, that person has that necklace. I'm going to go fucking kill him. Um, he did not engage with that stuff. It was not generally in a, in a building game. I'm not interested in engaging with.

someone breaking my sandcastle. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, and I think unlike a lot of those other games, this game does seem built so that you don't need to do that to have a really long, interesting play experience, you know? Yeah. Like, I...

You know, even in something like some of the kind of classics of the survival multiplayer genre of like DayZ, I think has a lot of really cool shit going on. But the reason that game blew up is because of... the wild multiplayer encounters that that really propelled obviously you could still probably have a couple of really great

you know experiences just solo exploring that space and avoiding the zombies and trying to survive um but like this feels like that part of the game is so full featured the the the core you know exploration crafting uh you know combat stuff, that it actually feels...

Like, it's a little bit more flexible than I think a lot of these kind of games that are built for PvP server type things. But anyway, that's why you have a couch, Jack. It's because you're supposed to have your friends over and your enemies are supposed to show up and be like, fuck, they have such good couches here.

Here, we gotta figure out how to raid this place and take their cowhits. They invented a chaise lounge. Even if you don't do PvP, there are bosses that are... kind of out doing their thing in the world like there's vampire hunters there are just like weirdos who just like will fucking jump out of literally nowhere at you um

There's all kinds of fucking stuff going on where it still kind of feels like the world can surprise you in the way that a PVP game world can surprise you. But without the added element of someone. stealing your house yeah i think of these games that i've played this has the best first 20 hours of any of them because of how often we went like holy shit it has this wait it has this what do you mean there's and so like that stuff like that is like

finding merchants that you could talk to for the first time after feeling like there's no, why would there ever be a merchant? I'm a vampire. Why would a merchant ever talk to me? Buy a cool couch. Well, I think it was like to buy gems or something we needed. I don't remember. It's been so long. the shady merchants will talk to vampires yes exactly merchants in towns will not you have to disguise yourself as a human

Well, so that was another moment of that was like, we spent, you know, 15 hours out in the wilderness fighting bears and wolves and vampire hunters. I mean, even the first vampire hunter jumping us was like, holy shit. But then we, I remember getting the... getting to a town and just seeing like regular people walking around or like a weird guy in like a cloak walking around and be like is he okay um i think we got up to there's one boss that we fought that was just like

a lady who was like running around the town yelling and screaming and it's like oh my god get back here i'm trying to kill you and drink your blood but you're yelling taylor Please. And, like, her whole boss fight was just her running in circles while other people showed up to defend her. Shout out to Beatrice. Well, this is part of why this, like, here are...

140 bosses or whatever is so appealing to me. And you're told about this really early in the game. I've played so little of this game compared to... the two of you, and definitely compared to Janine. But right off the bat, right off the bat, right off the bat, right off the bat,

They're telling you about stuff that makes no sense and is sort of being presented to you like walking into a buffet and looking at something on a distant table and going, oh my god, they have this here? What's that? That boss list is so good because...

That's not how these games work. Like, imagine if you could play Elden Ring and you had the thing that said, here are the next, like, 15 bosses you might run into, you know? Like, ooh, who the hell is that? There have been experiments with this in... Other games, and also in the AAA sort of scene, that I think have been mixed success. I think recent Far Cry games do really good work in terms of saying, like, your enemy...

A sort of explicitly racialized strange gang comprises this organization. The Assassin's Creed games are all of that now, too.

right yeah definitely the the um uh the order in assassin's creed odyssey and then kind of going forward that sense of like oh yeah the that sense of like i can take out one of them and they will give me a clue as to where another one is they're just kind of out there in the world this part, I have to wonder, comes from that great story about the early development of Far Cry.

way back in what 2008 or something like that where an early version of that game is about hunting a killer called the jackal and an early version of that game had the jackal in the world just from the beginning and you could go and find him. But the problem was that he would just die. Someone else in the world would just kill him. The end.

The implementation that V Rising reminds me the most of, actually, is Crackdown. The original Crackdown, which structured the gang that you're fighting. Again, a sort of explicitly racialized, it's weird how that keeps happening, group in this city across

three gangs and their leaders and each one sort of had their own oh the higher tier members had their own interesting characteristics and the lower tier ones sort of boiled down to mini bosses but by taking out the gang members you would be able to at least in theory at least in the sort of

broad brush work of systems design during the Xbox 360 era, you could affect how the city worked. But I remember playing it and having that same sensation that I got with V Rising of opening up this menu and going like... oh there are like these characterful entities like bebopping around in the world right now yeah well i mean the crackdown version of it is something i wish

I would love to play a game that does that particular thing again. I think it reminds me of his MGS five, actually, for people who don't know this crackdown was the third person open world kind of like super cop game where you developed super speed and the super jumping ability and you collected a bunch of.

Which is somehow even under-selegant. It is. By the end of that game, you turn into a kid in a bounce house. Yeah. Like, non-stop. That's a game. Yeah, it is so arcadey, jumpy around nonsense. While also... being like, you're, you are the police's Superman, you know, like it's deeply fucked and that knows it's deeply fucked, but it doesn't stop it from being a game in which you are killing racialized people for 40 hours or whatever. But the specific.

mechanic that you're gesturing at that I think maybe people don't know about is that the different like leaders the generals of each of these major gangs each had gameplay implications for the for the district and especially for the end of area boss, where for instance, if you took care of the demolitions guy, or rather if you didn't fight the demolitions guy and went to the final boss, which you could do immediately.

he would have rocket launchers, right? And so if you got rid of the demolitions expert, then the final area in that zone wouldn't have rocket launchers anymore. And I think MGS-5 does something very similar to this, right? But kind of in the... other way, which is like...

The famous example of this is if you get a lot of headshots and enough missions in a row, the soldiers start showing up with helmets on because they know that you've been killing them with helmets or with headshots. Can you imagine? This is disgusting.

He was smashing us with helmets. We had to get helmets to block the helmet gun he's shooting at us. Is there a sense in V Rising that the order that you're taking bosses out is affecting the world? Or are they kind of like self-contained little entities? They are self-contained

In that, like, I mean, they have to, they respawn is the thing. Right. Because there is that MMO buses. Yeah, because it's a multiplayer game. So it wouldn't exactly work if, like, one person killed Beatrice the Taylor and then no one else learned how to make clothing.

That would be sick, but I understand why they're not doing that. Can you change that? Because I know there's all that modularity in terms of, like, what are you allowed to teleport with? How much... blood do you need i'm guessing i don't remember any of the other ones um i don't know if that would work for the blood specifically which is the bosses um i know that

there are some things that you can only have one of in the world in certain modes and you can kind of alter that but i'm not sure if that's true of the vbloods i think based i there's a lot of settings so i don't know them all 100 but i don't recall seeing one that would just be like this boss will spawn once and then stop right um specifically i think because some of those bosses do kind of play a role in areas um there's

they're like there's some that are just like you know obviously like leading little troops and it's like well do you get rid of that whole troop right i see you know who are in charge of an area and then it's like well i guess you could just take them out but would that be weird like yeah that sounds that sounds maybe more more uh of a pandora's box to open than than you would want yeah yeah um

In any case, like, so that stuff is more stable in this game. And it's a lot more of like, what order do you tackle them in? What do you, and then the micro, right? Of, you know, on the most recent, I think the most recent outward. um uh let's play you told us about a mine boss uh who is a literally like who basically had slaves and servants and when you were fighting him they would help you fight him

Unless you hit them, in which case they would start fighting you too. And it feels like there's a lot of bosses that have those sorts of neat interactions with the environment. And not just cool moves, but like...

wow, like there's something in the world reacts to this in a way that's kind of clever. Yeah, that boss was Sir Magnus, the overseer, who is like a sort of... paladin with these little wings on his armor uh who is a fanatical servant of the church of luminance his blind faith in the light makes him the perfect candidate for overseer of the sacred silver mines uh where everyone is enslaved um

he yeah he so that the i that fight was interesting because at that point we had already found we already like tackled some fights where There were summons, obviously. That's a normal thing. Boss summons people and then either they fight you or maybe the guy eats them for health or whatever. Right, classic. Yeah. So the first time we fought, we fought this guy. I think me and the person I was playing with both fought.

that, you know, well, we have to clear out the spawns here. We have to clear out the ads. Sometimes that's not worth the time because they just want to burn the guy down. But, you know, whatever, we'll try it. So we tried fighting everyone and we got our asses kicked. And then I sort of realized the second time, like, wait a minute. I'm over here.

All the ads are still going over to that guy. And then they're attacking him. Because when that boss is being attacked, the thing that's happening is people come out of the mine to... fucking kill him and like you can still hurt them they're not your friends they're humans like you can eat them you can if you hit them with your sword they will be hurt they will try and defend themselves if they have to

But also as you're going through that mine, and you have to go through the mine to get there because there's a locked front gate that you can only open from the inside. So you have to basically sneak in the back through, it's like a harpy's nest or some shit.

You just sneak into the back of the mine, go through the mine where you see all these enslaved miners and their guards. And like when you fight the guards, the miners will sometimes help or they'll like run out once they know that they're not being watched.

Um, they'll escape. So there are these little like hints, right. Of just like, these people don't want to be here. Maybe they'll help you. I don't know. Um, so yeah, you get to that boss and then, uh, they will kick his ass and it's it ended up being quite integral to beating him um that was i think why we failed the first time was because we were clearing them out before they could do their their uh very helpful shit um

There's also... Yeah, there's a lot of really interesting bosses. There's one who, like I mentioned before, makes potions and... You fight her in this area that's full of these potion shelves, and you can run up to those potion shelves, knock a potion off and use it, but so can she. So it becomes a game of...

Yeah, of like knocking potions off and using them before she can or using specific ones at certain times. Like I mentioned, there's a... potion of beauty or whatever like that elixir of beauty that when you use it to turn someone into a sheep um so the key to beating her turned out to be uh whenever she was doing her

big scary casting shit right turning her into a sheep this is a classic and it's like really short-lived it's like it's like one second is what it is um right yeah it's all of the all of these effects are like absolutely minuscule moments in time like a lot of the abilities and stuff in this game really famously extremely short-lived like a long lasting ability is like 1.8 seconds

So it's a big deal to have, like, because otherwise that feels like it doesn't have a use. Well, this is the thing that, this is the other thing that I love about this is like, though that what you've just described is like an incredibly important moment in a MOBA. Right. We're like, oh, the other enemy is about to about to alt and I stun them.

And now they can't hit me. Or like, again, a big endgame MMO raid, like Polymorph and WoW, or any of the stun moves in any of the MMOs that are big. Like, oh, I've stunned them right before they're about to do the big thing. And like, that is not approachable if...

I have to play a whole MMO ahead of time or learn how a mobile works to get that incredible great moment where you turn someone into a sheep to stop them from owning you. But this is a game that I think is way more approachable, but still gets to those moments of... high intensity, quick, again, things like skill shots lining up that perfect hit. So many of the fights, even in the first third of this game or quarter of this game, have those moments where you're like,

edge of your seat, they have us on the ropes, but if we can just, like, we're doing damage, if we can just dodge for the next 45 seconds, we'll win. You know? Yeah. Which is great. And it's also kind of, there is an MMO element to it of, like...

You know, I think sometimes I played Final Fantasy 14 for a bit. And I think I ultimately came to the conclusion that if that was a single player game, I would like it a lot. Because the parts that I liked the most were the most single player-y. But things like when you go into a big raid that has cool mechanics, you don't get to just figure it out anymore.

everyone else knows what they're doing and you just have to kind of stay alive or keep others alive or whatever just just stay in your lane it'll be fine you don't get to have those moments of like figuring it out they took out the best thing that that produced which was

the rare instance where there was a really easy one fight, and then a bunch of veterans would be like, okay, now everybody remembers phase three, right? Phase three, switch to alpha stance or whatever, and you're like, what the fuck are you talking about? the fight is seven seconds long they made that one fight like in an instance instead which is probably right that's probably the right thing to do oh but that was so funny so funny but unfortunately the point you're making is like

How many times do you sign up to do a raid to sign up? You join a big raid in Final Fantasy XIV or any of those MMOs and not get to unfold what it is you're supposed to be doing. Yeah. one of the things I really loved about The Old Republic when it launched, which Janine, you mean Art played a ton of at the time, was they had these flashpoints which were like instances.

But not full on raids. Actually, maybe there were more than there's maybe I'm confusing two things, but there were bosses in those where we did have to kind of crack what the what the rotation was that we needed to be using when the big stun moments had to come.

How did we have to make sure we were buffing? How did we need to do debuffing? Where in the arena did we need to be? And when that stuff hits, you know, Destiny raids are very similar to this. Watching people figure those out for the first time is really cool. What's really hard is making them that anybody or a wide number of players can actually figure out and not have to go to a guide to figure out.

Sometimes you could do that in the macro, or rather in the micro in a little fight like what you're describing, and it feels just as good as it seems it must for the day one Destiny Raiders to figure it out, you know?

I mean, even having it available as a guide is fine. Obviously, this game's been out for a while. The information was out there. We did use the information from time to time. But the difference is when you are in that Final Fantasy... 14 rate or whatever right you can't not look at the guide is is is like 10 people in your who are all around you doing the thing

Um, you don't get to opt out of that and just be like, okay, I want to learn this. I want to learn what this guy's deal is, or I want to learn like, okay, if I throw this potion, she'll turn into a sheep. How can I use that? Um, dungeons, right? Like in, in an MMO, like God forbid you want to.

slowly walk through it or go the wrong way because you're curious what's in a different place it's just not what they're built for you know that's not what people how when people are engaging with them at this point so like it often often like when we were doing these fights um you know the person i was playing with is like very combat skilled as a as a game game gamer is a game star um and

I am a little bit less so, I would say, but it was really interesting to sort of have someone who could do the brute force work while I'm there kind of like, OK, well, wait a minute. What are these interactions? um or like what's happening here why why didn't this do the thing that we thought it would do and then like after we had failed one or two times come together and be like okay i noticed this and this you noticed that what does this mean um that's an experience that like

I feel like I don't get in a lot of stuff anymore. A really good example of this is Wilfred the village elder who... Get him. Get his ass. There's a village.

in the game it is it is sort of set apart i believe it's called grace fall village um when you go there in the day uh there's a lot of people walking around who have suspiciously good blood quality okay wait you'd explain what that is There's blood quality in this game. It's like a percentage.

uh-huh and there's like categories and if you get someone that's a high percentage in a category you get more benefits from that category so in other words like for instance what are the what's a what's a category of blood like like warrior might be a cat rogue beast i think it's beast um rogue warrior brute uh worker things like yeah so workers are really great

Worker was one where it's like, hey, you collect resources more quickly. You do more damage to resource nodes. Stuff like that. Because I have more worker blood in you. Because you have more worker blood in you. Yeah. Now, this is fucked. And also, you can... You later get a thing called a blood homogenizer that lets you... This is fucked. So you can... One, you get... Okay. So you can have prisoners. I'll start with prisoners.

Okay, less fucked in the context of a vampire story. You can have servants. Okay, but they're like thralls, right? Yes, they're thralls. They live in a coffin. You can make them a nice bedroom. I made some very luxurious accommodations for mine. Oh my god, the prisoner stuff. I just remembered where we're going. Okay, just keep talking.

They live in a coffin. Are they dead? They're like a thrall. You like feed them your blood to like get them under your thrall. You know? They just hang out. They just hang out. No further questions. You sleep in a coffin. You're a vampire. Yeah, you use a thing called like, I think it's dominance or something dominate to. Or is it subdue? There's some confusion because one of them is just for, there's two skills and one of them is just for horses.

One of them just lets you dominate a horse and then turn it into your magic horse that you can summon and bring back from the dead and stuff. The other one is for people and it lets you sort of mind control them and then you can... bring them back to either an empty coffin if you want to make them a servant or an empty prison cell if you want to make them a prisoner. And if you put them in the prison cell, you can then bleed them or eventually get...

mix blood with grapes to make a blood wine, which is slightly less harmful to them when you do it. Oh, okay. And they have two stats, health and misery. And you want to kind of keep the misery down and the health up because the more miserable they are, the more damage they'll take. I see. When you bleed them, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, I see.

The way that you do that is by feeding them different kinds of fish. Some of the fish heal them more. It's a lot of different kinds of fish. You can also feed them rats, but the rats only help their health. The fish help health and misery usually. You can also feed them a radiated gruel later on.

Which has a chance of increasing their blood quality by like one to two percent. But there's also like a 30 percent chance it will turn them into a big mutant that will then burst free and you have to fight it.

Well, I wouldn't do that, then. That would just be... That seems inconvenient. But, you know, if you have someone whose blood is, like, 98%, and there's some bonuses you can only get at 100%. This is what was not clear, right? So it's not just... You don't just get one benefit. The higher... The more pure...

the blood is the better the benefit i don't know if it's purity necessarily the more stronger the blood is yeah okay right so and there's also you get the the blood homogenizer that lets you take either the just normal blood or the blood Merlot and combine it with another one. And it lets you basically take, okay, I want this. I have this, I have this bottle of vintage 100% warrior blood.

And I want to give it a little bit of a boost for my spell shit. So I'm going to take this like 58% scholar blood that I have. And I'm going to combine it so that this one is 100% warrior blood, but it's got this one benefit that I've chosen out of the scholar blood attached in addition to the warrior blood shit.

Is that a note of scholar blood I taste? So I have a question here. So you're saying that like, if I eat a rat or something, I get like 2% beast blood or something, animal blood. No, if you eat a rat, you're frail. Okay, so if I eat like a cat, like a low animal. If you eat like a deer, you can't interact with cats at all. But if I were to eat, for example, the noble lion, I would get like 50% beast blood. This is the thing.

It's not like that. It's not judgmental like that. It's just some people are, yeah. Some people have 88% blood. Ooh, I really said 88 just by default. Maybe talking all this blood purity bullshit made me think in some bad ways. But, you know, like there is, yeah, random minor.

will have worker, minor M-I-N-E-R, will have worker blood, and some of them will have 70%, and some of them will have 17%. And some of them will be glowing red, and they'll have 98% to 100%. Right, and when you see that, you're like, holy shit, I gotta drink your blood!

You do also get one of the powers you get is blood vision where you can sort of toggle that mode on and you can see what percentage everyone's blood is when they come on screen. So you can just do a quick scan around the room to see who's got the best blood.

He's like a ranking people. Okay, so I can see how you get there. And this is kind of fantastic because it's like how vampires clearly, as everyone knows, as every fool knows, care a lot about blood. That's maybe the number one thing about vampires. You need to drink blood. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you make players care about blood? And one of the...

quickest ways into that is you like systematize blood so intensely that players are thinking hard about blood all the time. This is some really lovely like... What is Dracula actually thinking? Dracula's actually thinking, oh, 41% blood in the accountancy tree. I shall eat Nicholas Holt. Oh, that's Nosferatu again. That's Nosferatu. Yeah, you gotta go. What is it? Mina Harker? Mina Harker and Jonathan Harker and, you know, Tom Waits or whatever. Tom Waits has like 51% freak blood.

So I kind of love that they've gotten their way there. The other part of Dracula that I think is critically important is sexiness. Is this game sexy? It has moments. You can like, when you're playing multiplayer with someone. you know you do you will have those conversations of like oh fuck i i'm out of blood because i've been trying i've been using my blood to heal too much i'm out of blood

do I want to settle for this like 15% brute or like, can I get something else before I'm running out? And then you can, as you know, your other, the other player can like. Be like, oh, I just drank a 98% scholar here. You expose your neck. They can drink. They can drink from you, and you basically split your blood in half, however much blood you have. You split it in half between you. Yes, they get that whatever percent scholar, and then you can both go on your merry way.

I don't remember how he got to prisoners specifically. You were talking about how you're like harvesting prisoners. Okay, yeah. So you harvest the prisoners. The way that I got there was you find this village. The village people have suspiciously... good blood which in this game you learn in the farmlands tends to mean if you find a villager who is like 68 percent or whatever you're like hang on a second of any type suspicious

Well, villagers usually work. They're right, of course. But if you find a villager like that, it's suspicious. And sometimes if you start shit around them, they'll come fight you. And if a villager fights you instead of running away, you know one thing about them. and it's that they're a werewolf and if you come up there at night they will be a werewolf that rules um now gracefall village is a town of such people uh and there is a boss there

The village elder Wilfred. And you have to. Wilfred. However. Right. He reads. That's right. So, you have to kill him. And you might think, well, ha ha ha, I'm a clever little vampire. Taps head three times, I've got his number. It's, you know, two hours till sunset.

What if we start fighting him right now? Oh, no. And then at the last minute, he's going to turn into a person and that'll be great because he'll be really easy to kill. He'll be so easy to kill. I see. It's just like, it's a free, it's a gimme. So you go do that and you kill him. And it doesn't count.

Because you just killed Wilfred, the village elder. You just killed Wilfred, the village elder. So you do not get the tier three blood spell point. You do not get the long case locks. Sorry, he gives you clocks. You can make clocks after you kill him. Do not learn how to make silver resistance potion or pristine leather bag or elixir of the werewolf. You get nothing. So you come back the next day and you think, okay, well, we had a bit of a...

But we've still got five hours of night left. It'll be fine. We'll finish him off. He's hard. You struggle. Time is passing. Right. Oh no, this motherfucker, you're going to be denying your clocks once again? You land the killing blow, I swear to God. Right as the sun comes up, you and the person you're playing with, cheer. No. You say, we did it. It was such a long fight. Yeah, we got him. Wait a minute. Why isn't the thing popping up to let us drink his blood? Why did he just die?

Why is he a human crumpled on the ground now? It's because you fucked up again. Take three. I need those clocks. I believe it was on the third, but it might have been the fourth time. I think it was the third time when we got there with plenty of time in the night to spare. to kill him as a werewolf to drink his werewolf blood to get his clocks like it did happen but

Can you start fighting him? No, you can't because you'll be hurt in the day. Duh. Never mind. He'd die immediately. Okay. He's like, it's a one hit kill in the daytime. Yeah. Yeah. It's really easy to kill a villager. He is no exception. I see. It says here that when he's at 50% health, he'll howl and release seven prisoners. When he shouts, let me have a taste, he'll try to eat one of them to restore his health. Yeah, he will eat the village. He has like prisoner villages. He'll eat them.

prisoner villagers he'll eat he's one of the ones who you know he summons that and it sort of teaches you like oh they're helping him so that means the summon you know and then you get to the mining guy and you're like well fuck i see right of course i think it's tremendous when a boss eats some of his own guys

I think it's one of the classic things a boss can do, and I always love to see it. I was saying, Janine, that this and then the potion, especially the potion one, reminded me of the final boss fight in Knights of the Old Republic, where the evil Sith guy just has a bunch of Jedi in like... cryo tubes all around the boss arena and whenever you kill him you get him down to no health he'll go like

sap the life out of one of them to heal up and the thing you do if you're dark side it is you just do that first you just go and kill them all and sap all their strength you do drain life on them so that he can't and that to me is a very that's actually you know yeah vampire boss fight Except this time you get to be the vampire. Because theoretically you could also...

Because you don't heal from eating, you just get your blood filled, right? Yeah, yeah, you just fill the blood. You have to use the blood to auto-heal. There's a heal, like, yeah, right, right, right. And then sometimes, I guess during a boss fight, they'll drop healing. right they'll drop like big yeah once you get them to about halfway uh they will drop some health orbs also there are some uh like weapon coatings and abilities and things where you can get

health orbs to drop from different um causes yeah i would say that's the other thing that that reminds me of is just like if you were hearing crafting game crafting game crafting game which it is i don't want to diminish that it is that um There is a lot of depth on the skills and itemization and armor progression and build stuff. Especially once you start getting into...

Once you've sort of gotten the bulk of the V blood skills and you start getting into passive unlocking vampire power, vampire awakenings, I think is what they're called and elemental abilities, which you have to buy with sort of.

a more difficult currency that you get from the Dracula vampire hell area. You can really... really hone in on some specific builds that you want like if you want to build purely around the status effect weaken around like weakening your enemies and and taking advantage of that state uh if you want to or if you're more interested in you know if you want to focus on building shit around spells or if you want to focus on building shit around your guns um

You can have a gun and you can sort of build shit so that your gun is going to be more useful because, you know, you can... You get like relic weapons and eventually unlock the ability to swap like different traits into them and like different strengths of traits. This is also true of like these jewels that you use to enhance your spells. You can, you know, have a jewel that's like this is plus 12% attack speed or whatever. And if you like that, if you like that, but...

everything else in that jewel sucks. You put it into another jewel that you like more. Um, same with the weapons. Like you can really, you can really fucking fine tune shit to, um, Sometimes an intimidating degree. Sure, sure. Well, that's the thing. It's like, it's like, choose your intimidation here, right? In a way, which in some ways I like because...

I, you know, I didn't really click with Valheim. There's parts of Valheim I really liked. But this is just taste. Like I'm not a Vikings guy. It's just not a thing that hits for me. And so that was always going to be.

something that i couldn't get over but the thing that i liked about that and the thing i like about this is um the there's more pathways on in a weird way even though they each have high ceilings because if what you want to do is like try to find the uh build your little castle and like put out the cool couches That path eventually gets to be really complex too because it's like, oh, I'm trying to like maximize. I'm trying to put the stuff that goes on the library or study floor type.

in that room. I'm building a study that has, I don't know if that's a specific one, but it has like all of my my, you know, book binding and spell crafting stuff. And then this is my forgery room, which has a different floor tile set. And I'm going to maximize out stuff that way. And it's going to be about building the base and someone else who was like, I am going to like master the.

quick click you know combat stuff i'm gonna push higher than my level is and just like win fights i shouldn't um because what draws me in is the combat and the you know getting attacks off and figuring out just like

patterns and stuff and then another person who still maybe is combat interested but is interested in I'm gonna find a build that lets me break through fights I couldn't fight normally like that's also available there all that all those different pathways in are all adjacent to the other sets of system

that then you lured into learning about, even if they're not your thing normally. And I think that we have talked a lot about other types of... uh kind of action rpg slash crafting games on here we've talked about rune factor we've talked we've talked about fantasy life i The Fantasy Levi is a joy. It had its hooks in me for a long fucking time this year. In terms of moment-to-moment interesting gameplay, I think V Rising has it beat in a big way. It's just a different...

Mood, you know fantasy life is a game that you could just like lose yourself in the very cushy soft vibe of um but in terms of like oh is there something to chew on and think about in terms of decision making both in terms of what i'm building how i'm building it what i'm prioritizing and in terms of combat design and even in terms of exploration

I think V Rising is just really, really, really good. And I didn't even try any of the DLC. There's so much of this game that seems just fantastic. The DLC, I will say, is mostly cosmetic. There's that big new... update that added a second haunted forest, right? That's what I was thinking of. Was that not pay DLC, or was that just... Invaders of Oakvale, I think. Oakvale was the big added thing. Was that free?

I believe so, yeah. I don't remember what Oakvale is. Yeah, I was confusing that with... Is that the poison place? No, because that feels like it's integral. Well, sometimes a live action game or a live service game gets updates that feel integral. There's like multiple haunted forest situations. So I mean, I guess it could be the one that's like haunted haunted. but like there's one that's like it slowly you get a status effect that makes you less and less able to

find any direction. Unless you have a special cloak that you get from a little weird guy who runs away from you and snares you up in vines and shit. It's like a poison forest by the looks of what I'm reading.

also new weapons the corruption poison is like a oh yeah okay yeah we were playing with all that twin blades throwing daggers i ended up being like mostly a claws main because claws let you you can close distance really fast i'm not normally a melee person i really thought i was gonna stick with crossbow for the whole thing but claws ended up being the the Dracula killer of choice in a in a big way I got some fancy ones made of bones

Yeah. Love to have some bone claws. Radium infused, yeah. Good era of Wolverine when he had bone claws. It looks like also Magara, the Serpent Queen.

is the oakvale yeah okay okay yeah that makes that makes sense to me along with stavros the carver who you know uh i had not registered that that was like special new shit because it feels so it feels so like part of it yeah it feels it feels very it doesn't like stick out in a weird way which is great honestly which is a good um it has a lot of mechanics that are it has a whole like corrupted blood thing where like you

sometimes want to have corrupted blood um because it like lets you take less damage from other corruption uh which is important when you're fighting the corrupted bosses sure This actually also makes sense that the boss in this area, not Magara, the other guy, Stavros, I think other than Dracula gave us the most trouble. Interesting. Yeah, that sounds like DLC boss. Yeah, but he's not like top level.

Well, he's kind of top level, but he's not like top, top level. Yeah, I see him in the list. He's towards the middle top, I would say, of this list of V-blood carriers. All right. I think any final V Rising thoughts before we take a break? Good game. You can have a witch in a cage, like a goblin, like a Baba Yaga witch. Oh, that's cool. She usually puts people in cages. I know. You can really one to it. You can have a little rat farm.

I built a tower to store our rat and corpse farm in. And then also it ended up having a bunch of like succubi in the basement. That's where they hang out. Normal. Yeah. it's a it's a it's an interesting video game if you can put a lot of things to the side mentally uh-huh it's a good time i kind of jack your early question was like

Do you think they're doing this because of the vampire fantasy? I forget what particular sub, you know... It was becoming a terror of a town. Becoming a terror of a town. I think everything about it is... The flavor leads systems in this game so strong.

down to, yeah, of course you're going to have prisoners. You're a weird vampire who is keeping... There's a lot of vampire stories about keeping prisoners with good blood around. That's not... It'd be very disappointing if you couldn't, honestly. Right, and in fact... Go ahead. You can turn into a magic bear and that's the only way to bust. There's a fortress and to bust in you either have to be a magic bear and bear the door in with your bare hands or you have to learn how to make bombs.

Fun. So? Love it. Huh. Which kind of vampire do you want to be? Which one is the bear Dracula? Which one is the bomb Dracula? Alright, on that note, we'll take a quick break and we'll come back and talk about some Death Stranding 2 and some other stuff.

Jack, I meant to play Death Stranding 2. I really did. Yeah, because you're a Death Stranding enjoyer. Well, I am. And in fact, I'm such a Death Stranding enjoyer that I've restarted it three times. This is called a Strander? Stranders? Yeah, we're Stranders. Yeah, we're the Stranded.

And I started it when it first came out on PS4. I started it again on PS5. And I started it a third time on PC with the director's cut. And I... spent days being like, I really want to play Death Stranding 2, but I never finished Death Stranding 1. I only got about halfway through. But I kind of get it. I got far enough in that I know I really like it. I only didn't finish it because it came out at the end of 2019, like November of 2019, which is when I stepped back from Waypoint. I was doing...

just the podcast at that point. I hadn't joined Possibility Space, but I was like, you know, trying to write some other stuff and I couldn't keep up with the sort of like...

keep playing the game especially as rob was reviewing it so it's not like i was going to review it so i played enough of it to have the podcast conversation knew i loved it and said i can't wait to have the time to play this game and then just didn't ever find the time to play that game all the way through yeah um let's have these things

So I downloaded Death Stranding 2 the other day. I get what happened in Death Stranding 1 enough that I could just jump right into Death Stranding 2. I understand that there's, like, connections, but there's not, like...

I don't know that there's heavy connection. And so on the front page, or the front, like, the screen, the main menu of Death Stranding 2, it says, like, start new game. And it says, you know, re-experience the past events of Death Stranding 1 or whatever. You know, summary. And then what happened? Well, you get Guillermo del Toro telling you, of course, about what happened in Death Stranding 1. And it is 17 screens of one paragraph each.

It's a PowerPoint presentation. I thought you were going to say 17 minutes, but actually... I mean, but actually, I would have... I have to tell you, if it had been 17 minutes, I might have just played Death Stranding 2. But instead... You go through the whole thing, and it's like, here's the setup, and then it's like one screen per major character.

which if you know about The Stranding 1, that's kind of how the chapter setup is, where it's like, ah, this is the chapter where you learn about Fragile. This is the chapter where you learn about Mama. This is the chapter where you learn about Dead Man or whatever, right? These are the characters in Death Stranding.

a game by Kojima Productions, directed by Hideo Kojima, a game about moving stuff around, moving packages across the wilderness. In any case... We get to a thing, to the very end of that, it's like, and then finally, you know, Sam met back up with Amelie, and she revealed the secret of the Death Stranding, or whatever. What's the secret, Kojima? Well, it doesn't fucking say in the summary!

And I know how that literally ends. Right. Yes, Janine. Yes. That feels like they're shaming you to a degree. I was shamed! It feels kind of like when, like... you know a pet makes a mess and you like pick them up and set them in front of it and you're like don't do this again he's saying finish this fucking game because next time i'm not even gonna be this kind

I, and also I skipped a part, which is like the night before I was ready to play Death Journey 2. I was like, I'll just download it really quick. I'm on, I'm on Fios. I can, I can get some. You've been talking about it for a while. You've been like simmering. Yeah. And then I, so of course I couldn't do it.

it's a huge it's a 98 gig game and psn is the slowest network on the earth somehow um and it would not download even the little bit that it needed to like let me start the game or whatever so i was like i'll play in the morning and then felt shamed felt badly shamed, exactly what you said, and went, fine, I guess I'll go back and play through the rest of Death Stranding 1. And I booted it up, and I was at, and what I did is I went and I loaded my PS4 save into PS5.

director mode um because when i first got the director's cut on both console and PC. Each time I was like, I just really started from the beginning. I'm not, I'm deep in, but I'm not that deep in. I really like this game. I kind of want to like sit with it and just like have that whole experience. This time I was like, no, I'm just going to load my save. I know where I am. I think it's time to like.

I think I'm actually near the end. I think there's only three maps in this game. And I think I'm at the end of the second map, basically. So I may just push forward and do it. And it turns out that I'm at the halfway point of the second map. I think. Did you beat that first game, Jack? No, I didn't. How far in did you get? I think I got about at the same place that you did. Did you start putting zip lines down?

No, I did not. I am now a little further ahead than you. Because what I did is finished out. Do you know why Fragile is like the way she is? I do know why Fragile is like the way she is. You stopped literally seconds. You stopped right after? Where I stopped? The first, like, last time, and I've now passed you. Like, the slowest tortoise. The tortoise versus the tortoise here. I have slowly passed you in the first game because I finished up Fragile Story.

and have started in the section of the game where it's about, like, climbing the mountains. Like, Janine, you're V-Rising Bat. I'm going to fly over the mountains in dangerous ways by setting up a bunch of stupid... sci-fi zip lines and traveling across the world with all these packages on my back. So unfortunately, Jack, I am nowhere near catching up to you and playing Death Stranding 2, which means I'm just going to have questions for you because I also like haven't really watched.

any footage of this game i yes thought i was gonna i just thought i was gonna be there i thought i was gonna finish yeah the replay of of death training one like before the day it came out and instead here i am playing that one i don't even really want to be playing it but i feel i do feel like i need to it's a mess my brain is a nightmare don't have my brain it's not useful um uh high level can you tell people who

don't really know anything about this game which is going to be some people what death stranding is as a series and then like give me a little of like what is two in comparison to one yeah Okay, Death Stranding is the big new post-Metal Gear project from Hideo Kojima, following his move to Kojima Productions, out of Konami It's It's Own.

kind of story, although Kojima being Kojima it is constantly in this sort of reflection with his previous work, etc. It is a very simple idea wrapped in a series of really Opaque and Byzantine uh sort of like supplementary ideas which produce this really odd effect so on the very top level it is about an apocalyptic world where humans have isolated themselves from each other in individual bunkers or in big bunkers

cities. You never see any of those cities, and you only see the bunkers a little bit, because you are a porter, someone who carries goods from one of these places to the other, across a Apocalyptic Ruined World. The first game's Apocalyptic Ruined World was set in the US. You were kind of crossing the US from east to west. But what you were actually doing was sort of crossing like Icelandic. by way of Iceland. Yeah. So in that sense, it's like a package.

And along the way, you are doing stealth against people who sort of want to stop you from delivering those packages. I'll get into this is a really good example of I can say something as simple as you're doing stealth to stop you from being found.

people who don't want you to deliver the packages, but what you're actually doing is even stranger. And you're also playing this sort of complex... terrain navigation game where you know the packages that you're carrying on your back are physics enabled and they're very heavy and their weight distribution on your body is meaningful so you are picking a path that's going to cause you not to like lose your footing or

stumble or something like that. One level below that, it is, or maybe above that depending on how you want to look at it, it is like a delivery and logistics game. in the vein of Euro Truck Simulator and Elite Dangerous and Star Trucker and things like that. These like very meditative, very gradual games that are about... developing an understanding of a route and of your cargo. Kind of like at its best, Death Stranding is a very slow game where you are thinking, all right, so I'm gonna...

pick those things up and head over there. And then in that classic way that you do in these sort of logistics games, you're thinking, all right, so if I just swing by that bunker, I can drop off the pills that I found elsewhere and I can... you know, I can then pick up some goods to take to that place, this place is on the way.

One level above or below that, it is a survival horror game, because something I haven't mentioned is the circumstances of the apocalypse. What has happened in Death Stranding is, on the face of it, kind of transparent, and again, like... occluded from you in really big ways. Something has gone wrong between life and death, and the dead have become stranded in our world as these sort of ghostly, indistinct

called BTs, which stands for beached things, like a whale has been beached. Big thing about BTs is that no one can see them. And if a BT touches a dead person, so BTs will kill you and then they will make contact with a dead person, this causes an explosion like several orders of magnitude greater than a nuclear bomb.

going off. And this is what caused the apocalypse. Just like the game caused these void-outs. Just this sort of, like, basically a ghost touched you and you died. Fucking game. It's so good. All this stuff is so... laser tuned for my brain, Jack. It's unbelievable. Anyway, I'm sorry. It happened everywhere around the world simultaneously, and this is kind of what has caused the apocalypse, and it's also what's caused everybody to isolate from one another. And let me tell you...

The BTs in the first game are fucking scary. You can see them, for weird reasons that we probably don't have time to get into, but it involves a baby that's strapped to your chest. and you can kind of fight them, but they're really quite frightening at first, and then eventually the fear of the BTs disappears. And in this game...

they make them scary again, kind of in two really interesting ways. The first thing that they do is they make them invisible to you, and suddenly you're like, oh, fucking hell. Right, this is actually really bad when you can't see BTs. And the second thing is BTs are usually blind. They can hear you, they can hear you moving around. There's a new type of BT in Death Stranding 2 called a Watcher.

The name, I think, explains what it does, and that is awful. Collects timepieces. It does collect, it collects the clocks from William the Elder. Right, yeah. It gets the day. When you said you drop off pills, I was thinking about the Elder in Death Stranding 1, who's a guy who lives up in the mountains and you have to deliver, like, pills and other supplies too.

and thinking, what if he turned into a werewolf one time? I went up there. What if you got up there? That would be fucked up. And then, the glue that kind of holds this whole thing together is this, um... Kojima Productions calls this a strand game, and they use strand game as a sort of shorthand for a... overarching mechanic they are using where your game is constantly in networked conversation with other people's games. So, it's a single-player game, but...

In the same way that Dark Souls and the Souls games sort of have asynchronous ghost multiplayer happening, you'll see summon signs, you'll see people's messages, you'll see ghosts moving past you. In Death Stranding, the- paths that you and that all the other players are walking onto the world are kind of collectively affecting it. And for example, if you put down a ladder to help you climb a...

a little mountain outcropping more easily, that ladder will appear in somebody else's game and vice versa. You know what else is this like? This is really cool. What else is this like? Tomorrow, children. I was thinking this yesterday while playing Janine. I was literally thinking, how much does this remind me? And specifically, there's on the second big map of DS1.

Sorry, the first game. In the first Death Stranding 1, the main kind of map that you play most of the game on has this mountain range in the middle, and the eastern side is like flatlands and a river, and it goes south and some other stuff. But there's a part where you've... laid down tons of highway, basically, and it leads close to, but not quite completely to, an engineer or a craftsman or something.

And the game not only maps those, but it maps desire paths, the sort of like footsteps in the ground where people just naturally walk. People should look this up if you've never heard this term before. It's like a really interesting concept. And the experience I had... of like okay i'm going from the place where i always go down the highway like just off

to this place to pick up doing the loop that you were just talking about jack i i hadn't felt like playing i was playing the tomorrow children since i played the tomorrow children six years ago seven years ago now at this point um uh that exact feeling of like

I have a little goal. I'm executing a little goal. I have to go a little out of the way to do it. But it's just like that whole thing feels like and the collaborative side of it of, oh, someone else put down that like without knowing it, they put down the desire path. that made it easier for me to drive my little truck to go put the boxes in the truck and spin it around. And I think the important thing about this is that little bit of frisson that comes from...

Doing a job well happens whether you are struggling up the mountain or in your nice big truck filled with boxes. And that, I think, is shocking because... You would think that the obliteration of difficulty by way of highway should, and it changes it. It absolutely changes it. It changes it from struggling walk.

to long drive, but those both have their own character in such a way that I think actually does change it even in comparison to, you know, Elite Dangerous. I guess you can get out of the spaceships now in Elite Dangerous and go on ground. I haven't done that. But when I play Elite Dangerous, you're just in the spaceship the whole time. You know, American Truck Simulator, you're a driver.

There is something different about I walked this place once and now I'm driving through it or I'm riding a tram or I'm riding the zip line or whatever, you know? Yeah, it's really odd because I...

Two of the most magical moments for me in the original Death Stranding were... One was very near the beginning of the game, where the first job you have to go on is you cross this plane... and at the end of the plane is like a very low range of hills, like a craggy range of hills. It's maybe like 15 or 20 feet tall. It's not very big. And... The job asks you to cross that craggy range of hills onto a lower stretch of land behind it. And this was a fucking trial.

This was like finding my footing, finding where the ladder goes, making sure that I could go up there. This sensation of like successfully crossing a 15 foot hill and also like setting up the infrastructure to... make sure that I could do it a second time felt really remarkable.

And then later in the game, when desire paths started appearing, when I started going, oh my god, there are like, these paths have been walked not just by me, but by other porters, which is what the game calls these, like... by hand, you know, couriers. Death Stranding 2, I am trying to figure out whether or not it simply feels easier to move around and whether or not that is as a result of...

design choices in the game, or whether it is as a result of an accretion of knowledge from playing Death Stranding 1. When you say easier to move around, do you mean... easier to to control the character sam porter bridges his middle name is porter his last name is bridges by the way uh or do you mean um pathing from place to place the obstructions the amount of times you trip and fall uh etc

Both tying into one another. There are some ways that this is so obviously mechanical. You know, you get a car in this game so much faster than you got a car in the original game. In Death Stranding... One, I got given a truck after a period of time, and I was so delighted that I crashed into the river. I was absolutely thrilled. Into the river, truck ruined. In this, you get this kind of like...

cute little bike called a tri-cruiser. A weird note about the tri-cruiser is that because the physics are being simulated everywhere and because of certain... criteria because of the certain terrain around a certain base in this game. My TriCruiser, every time I reverse it, will do wheelies out of this base. It will do backwards wheelies. And this is just the terrain. The TriCruiser is not built to do...

that. It's just, they put a base here, this base has terrain around it, I want to reverse out of the base, the tri-cruiser does wheelies. But you get this tri-cruiser really early, and you're zipping around. But some of it is just...

I wonder how much intuition I have carried through in terms of, like, how does Sam like to move? What terrain is readable? And maybe that there's another thing going on here, which is that I might be less coy. When I'm playing the original Death Stranding, this is all so...

new to me that I'm like, I have to take a really careful attack now, Jack. You have to walk real carefully. And now in Death Stranding 2, I'm like, oh god, just go fucking over there. I bet I can climb that. And you probably can. Yeah, and while... I am exactly the kind of sicko who if they were to say to me the

We've managed to make a new From Software game and the bosses are even harder this time. I would be like, I don't much care for the combat. This doesn't appeal to me terribly that you made the bosses harder this time. But the idea of, like, doing weird walking puzzles across...

America disguised as Iceland, them in the sequel saying, we've made it even harder and more complicated, I'd be like, I would love to see that. So I am definitely feeling a bit of a pang. Well, and I thought that it would be, because he had that quote weeks ago, months ago now. I don't... So Kojima had this quote where he was like, if people...

Think my game is too smooth and is too easy. I have failed. And in fact, I asked my designers to make bits of the game more inhospitable. And it might be... I've played about 12 hours of this game. This is a big game, but also I like... This will not surprise Austin or Janine. I take these games so slowly and I look around all the little corners as I go. But I've played a chunk of this game and nothing in it has struck me as...

particularly high friction. I mean, it might be particularly high friction if you're unfamiliar with Death Stranding. There's a bit of it where it's like, the game is like, all right, now take those pallets back to the place. And you're like, oh, okay. All right, back the way I go. But there's a bit of me that wanted... Let's talk about some of what they've added in the sequel. I also have a question about this before you say this, which is, have you played the director's cut of the first game?

The quote-unquote director's cut. An absurd thing to call it because he directed the first game in a company he owns. And there was no... And I think he even maybe came out and said, I wouldn't have called it the director's cut. And maybe it was a publishing thing? You would think the original was the director's cut. It is, right? Presumably. But in any case, did you play any of that? No, I played the original. Okay. Did I play Unpatched Redan, maybe?

You have no idea how much the director's cut makes that first game easy. Interesting. Do you remember a gun in your Death Stranding playthrough? I think I had a shit gun. Yeah, okay. So in Death Stranding Director's Cut, you get a bolo gun basically right away. That can shoot and tie up the mules, which are the cult of Amazon drivers who have lost their minds in the post-apocalypse because they're addicted to delivering packages and have become bandits. It's fucking brilliant.

You know, when it hits, it hits. And yeah, like... Um, vehicles are all over the place. Um, I, I, you, I mean, you get a bike in the first game pretty early on already, but you have the ability to like print them pretty quickly. By the halfway point, you have auto bots that will just deliver stuff for you. Like they kind of.

I don't know if they're procedural, but like the big list of... You have those legs? They have those legs. They look great. No, you have those legs. You get exoskeleton legs. It's huge. It's like, it's life-changing. And you get them...

You get a bunch of different types. You get ones that make you run faster. You get ones that make you more sturdy. You get ones that you carry more. Like all of those different things are super useful. And so I suspect to some degree that stuff that has worked its way into.

It's like a stylistic impetus or mechanical impetus that's being carried forward from the director's cut. I wonder, like, so I first thought when you were mentioning that the second game sort of has a faster on-ramp for all your... mobility enhancement type stuff um my first thought was like oh is this a situation where

You know, it is kind of like, you know, the term abilities was coming to mind and that's not accurate here. But like, you know, the thing of it does suck in a second game when you've spent the first game building up all this stuff and then.

you get into the second game and then you're back at the beginning of like I guess I just have to haul stuff again like I'm wondering I was wondering is there a sort of thing there where he was like well we need to just like jump to that part so it feels like a more fluid transition but the thing about the director's cut makes that weird because the director's cut being that much easier

I wonder, like, is it is it a thing of like them fully expecting people who are buying the director's cut to have already played it and to be playing it a second time? And it's sort of like a new game plus kind of fast track. But like. That's a weird thing to presume, but also I wouldn't put it past Kojima to just be like, well, yeah, people play it again. But like, for example, you know, desire paths appear almost instantaneously now.

Like within one journey. And I don't like that. I liked the feeling of I've tracked backwards and forwards here a few times. And now it's starting to appear. But they're showing up kind of almost... Almost immediately. And it's hard to see. Yeah, I think the fact that I hadn't played the director's cut and hearing that the director's cut has so much of this in place makes me feel a little less hard done by on some level, right? Where I'm like, well, these maneuvers were being made.

earlier. Earlier in the thing. It also kind of makes me think again of Final Fantasy XIV but like Boss we were talking about that got cut out of like there's a part of it that feels kind of like when a Old big long game is streamlined. You know? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I'm really curious to play more and see specifically how the difficulty starts to develop, but every so often the game has pulled these manoeuvres that in the original game were so…

wonderful and still a lot of fun. I'm having a great time with this game. Where, you know, you will do what seems to be a pretty standard job through terrain that you think is, you know, those mountains in the distance are like background detail or whatever. And then they'll be like... Carry the goods to the top of the mountain. You know, like, oh, shit. Oh, I'm going up there. Okay. I haven't had a single one of those moments. You can see the mountain and go? I haven't had a...

You can just climb right up it. But this is the problem. You can, at this point in the game, just climb right up it. I haven't had a moment yet where I have been really, truly stuck. Well, actually, there was that time that there was a huge rainstorm and a river's banks burst. So this is a new thing in the game. Like weather patterns can start to like sweep through the terrain. There's already something.

called Timeful. Oh, God. We can't get into, like... Is Timeful gone? Is Timeful still there? No, no, no. Timeful is absolutely in the game. Timeful ages everything kind of immediately. And it causes things to grow and then age. So it's signaled by plants growing and dying around you at all times. Timefall is wonderful. It also rapidly corrodes the... packages that you're carrying.

Also, I have to correct myself real quick. Bolo gun was in the regular version of Death Stranding. The new gun is the Mazer gun, which is like a little stun laser gun, but you get that very early. And so it carries you until you get the Bolo gun. in the second map. Anyway, you can continue. I'll talk about combat in a second, I think. But like...

So now Timefall, you'll get a notification where it's like Timefall has caused the rivers to swell and their banks have burst. And you'll check the map and you'll see like a really cool overlay showing where a river usually flows and how it's flowing now or whatever. And I got caught in a situation where I was kind of trekking through empty terrain. It was like...

It was like a series of stone ridges that were like almost like a bark on a tree. And there were BTs hanging around them. So I was taking a really circuitous path. You know, I was taking like a ladder up one rather than going through the narrow gaps between the ridges. of bark. I was like laddering over one of them and then using a ladder as a bridge to hop onto the next one or whatever, avoid the BT, etc. And I got to the river and it was...

big and it was bad. And I had thought to myself, I'll put a ladder over it. I'll just, I'll forward it. I'll forward it that way. But my clever scheme with the BTs had removed all kinds of ladders. So I thought... Don't worry, there's mechanics for this. This is a Strand game. I will put down a little sign on the ground that says... Ladders, please. And I will wait for another real-world porter to give me a ladder.

This happens. I have done this several times. I'll come back from a mission and a little sign will appear in front of me saying, weapons, please. And I'll say, you can have my gun. Absolutely. I can just print another one.

Except I was outside of the chiral network. And the chiral network is the mechanical and narrative heart of this game. This idea that you are spreading a peer-to-peer network connection that hooks people up to a... interfaced internet through the land of the dead yeah yeah twilight mirage yeah yeah i know yeah yeah yeah exactly uh and uh But because I wasn't hooked up to the Chiral Network, I didn't even have access to beg for ladders. I couldn't even build...

uh, sort of the, um, timefall shelter that would allow me to, like, really get my bearings, have a safe place to store my goods while I found the river. The rain was coming down, the river was, you know, going. So I said, alright, fine, I am going.

to walk across the river. And as I approached the river, Dollman, who's Sam's companion, who is a man who got his soul trapped in a ventriloquist's doll, and he moves at 15 frames a second. I'm sorry, what? Well, he got his soul, sorry, he got his ha, that is the soul, as opposed to the car, the body. He got his ha trapped inside a ventriloquist's dummy. He is introduced with about as much...

explanation as I just gave you. Someone says, this is Dollman, he got his soul trapped in a ventriloquist's body. And sometimes you talk to Dollman and he says things like, I wish I could eat, and you're like, Sure. Dollman is like clipped to Sam's waist. And sometimes you can throw him way up into the sky. Does he like that? He says it takes great force of will.

To throw him or to be thrown? Or to like it. To be thrown. Interesting. Maybe to like it. And when he's thrown, you can see through his eyes. Jack, earlier today, I was thinking, wait, is there... I remembered Ha and Ka being a big deal in this game. But I was like, wait, is there a... Fort Da thing also, the sort of Freudian here and then gone games that children play. Freud writes about this as like one of the early fundamental ways that...

children make sense of the world. The kind of like you throw the stick and then you have to bring the stick back. And now I'm wondering, are we going to get a big Fort Da Ha Ka overlap? Reveal. Yeah, reveal in Death Stranding 2. Anyway. So here I am, squaring up to cross this, uh, this... water. And if you haven't seen an image of Sam carrying packages, you should. The packages are these big metal briefcases that he stacks up on his back in a big tower.

Still do pizza boxes? And sometimes pizza boxes, and sometimes corpses. There still have to be in the big cases, don't there? Or are they just regular pizza boxes now? No, I believe even in the original, the pizza boxes are pizza boxes. I wish I could source this, but I remember seeing a great post on Blue Sky where someone was like...

You need to understand that Death Stranding is a game fundamentally about delivering all sorts of different packages, and they've developed about four models that the packages could be. You very rarely get unique looking packages, but I do seem to remember in DS1 getting pizza boxes. Dollman says, very dangerous to cross the river, Sam. And I think to myself, I know you little robot.

Or doll, I suppose. I did not want to do this. I take three or four steps into the river and a wave hits me so hard and every package that I am carrying starts to become... The stick's going down the river after you've thrown them off the bridge. And I am in the river on my back. New controls have appeared on the screen. They say paddle left and right. I'm fighting the current. I'm watching these things go. I swim to the side and then I start sprinting.

downriver as my goods are like bobbing down the river next to me and I like wade in three feet managed to grab one package get knocked over again and you know eventually I sort of corral all my horrible now wildly damaged And I'm like, this is untenable. The presence of the BTs here means that it is going to keep raining, because there's a relationship between those two. I don't have anything that can defeat the BTs.

I need to complete this mission. I cannot walk all the way back to the station where the Australian government is trying to set itself up again. That is... Not possible. So I look very hard at my map and I realize that the only thing I can do is walk to the west to the point where the river comes out of the fucking mountain.

and then take a slow climb over the source of this river and then walk back down the other side towards my destination. And that's... I want Death Stranding to be making me do that all the time. All the time. I want that to be... Every gen. In the first game, it felt like getting on the chiral network gave you some big bonuses pretty quickly in terms of, oh, there are more ladders here. There's more ropes here. I can make the climb more easily.

But it did not seem as if the big benefits, things like highways and bridges and other sorts of like intensely useful structures. Those seem like they came on blind much slower even after being on the chiral network. And so you have this middle ground of... I have no support to then you first get on the Chiral Network and you have some support to ladders, which are huge. 100%. Ladders will let you climb up things. I love to see a ladder. They'll let you cross things. Big, important. And then...

By the end of the game or the end of a section, you're like, oh, we got bridges. We got highways. We got zip lines. We got in the director's cut, there are now things that let you launch.

cargo like over a hill or over so fucking and then it parachutes down um i will say i'm so excited you know bridges come into the game really early um highways are not quite in yet but i think they're approaching i cannot wait because the end game of death stranding i do think you should feel like the package is wizard you should you know i do think that there is a point at which this like spectacular power fantasy of i can get any object anywhere

It becomes something extraordinary at the end of the game. I will say right now it feels like the end game of Death Stranding, both from hitting the first of these... and understanding where the third map goes is a kind of mediocre, this is the first game, third-person shooter. I had my first Mads Mikkelsen.

Like fight encounter. Was it Sweaty Mads? Was it Bloody Mads? It's Sweaty Bloody Mads. Oily? Okay. He's oily. I mean, no game has wanted tar and oil on a body more. Then like ooze, then goo. It's a goo game, you know? I love how sexy this game is. Have you met the guy who might be the sexiest man I've ever seen yet? It's a tricky question, Austin. I don't know. Who is the sexiest man you've ever seen? He's like the guy who's instead of Mads in this game. No, I have not yet met him.

Luca Marinelli is the actor. I don't know what the name is. I think that's the actor. I don't remember what the name of the character is. Neil. Neil? Have you met Neil? The guy who in the trailer looks like he's doing... Snake. Solid Snake? Yeah. Yes. I will say that often, to his wild detriment, Kojima has understood that sexy things and gross things are walking hand in hand through this world.

um sometimes he fucks this up so monumental oh yeah um but at several moments in death stranding he he clearly has this real understanding of like What it is when a body carries packages through the world is put under strain. People are constantly like breathing and grunting and sweating and having to take showers and coughing. And then there's just this weird interplay between classically, conventionally sexy things. Here's a hot lady.

And, classically, non-conventionally sexy things, sweaty Mads, sweaty bloody Mads, Mads is tough. I think this is, like, complete bullshit off the cuff, but I kind of... feel like hideo kojima loves men's bodies and loves women's bodies but only loves men i think that that might be true i think that might be true he's interested in women conceptually And I'm sure he loves the women in his life. I guess I'm not sure, but I would, you know, I don't want to say he's like...

you know, a raving misogynist who hurts people or something like that. But when I think about the stories he tells, they come with a sort of, women are written about like timefall. you know, and not like, yes, absolutely. If that makes sense. They're written about like concepts in these stories, um, uh, in big categorical schematic ways, you know? Yeah, women are kind of, sort of...

Also, like, what if you could have a machine that fired cargo? Exactly. Yes. And some of that stuff is still kind of interesting. I'm not, you know, that first game is about parenthood. Motherhood is a type of parenthood. There should be stories about motherhood in that game. And there are. You know?

Her name is Mama. Wildly uncomfortable. She has a ghost baby. And it is so important to him to let you know that she still lactates even though she has a weird ghost baby. Yes, but then, and I mean, then we're also re-answering that like, bodies are weird and are being put under stress, etc. He's a master of his own eroticism. I really think he is. I will say that the kind of the lead woman, at least at this point in the game, is Fragile, played by Leia Sadu. She's so good. And she...

has... Leia Sedue is a fantastic actress, generally. She has figured out this cadence for how to exist in this world. top to bottom. There is, like, nobody better right now, except maybe the actor who is playing the person whose body is Guillermo del Toro. Because that's a big weird thing that Kojima has also done in these games. He, like...

scans his favourite directors and celebrities, but then regularly doesn't cast them. So you get this bizarre... effect happening where guillermo del toro is here on the screen but he's not talking to me right i'm sorry i forgot about that it's not him who's doing the the summary it's whoever voices dead man that character right yes but fragile is Seydoux and she is crushing it. She has this like weird dreamy

affect that at the same time is like very odd and firm. Fragile has this very distinctive costume where she has like a pair of hands, like disembodied hands around her neck that are like making gestures and it's not clear whether... they are controlled by her or- they're probably not controlled by her, but she seems to treat them as like-

her partner in a conversation. So they will be making gestures and she'll be interacting with them. And Seydoux's delivery of this is fantastic. It's really great. The fragile stuff in the first game is some of the most like... If you read it on a page, you would roll your eyes at this guy and say, like, this guy's an asshole.

This guy being Kojima, the lead director on these games. I guess I don't actually know if they're fully written by him or if he has a writing team. I have not looked at the credits enough. He does. I can credit them. At least Death Stranding 2... is written by Hideo Kojima, Kenji Yano, Shuyu Murata, and Koto Watanabe. Okay. So, you know, I think if you looked at this character in bullet points on the page, and maybe even read the script, you'd be like...

Fragile is one of his most simplistic... boring versions of what it means to be a woman right which is like ah to be a woman is to have a have a body and to have that body be you know perceived And, oh no, what happens if someone makes your body something that you don't want perceived? And what's her beautiful face fit in with that? And what responsibility does she have to different communities? And like all of this stuff is, is like, it does not.

live on the page well. But her delivery of that stuff, I think she might be I don't really love Norman Reedus' delivery in any of these games. I think that he's maybe being directed to be kind of affectless and flat because he's just a guy. He's kind of just giving a guy. But Lee Sedue's performance as fragile is kind of... It holds so much of it together in that first game. So I'm glad to see that she's being given more to work with here.

She is the captain of the kind of the ship in this game, which is a big weird spaceship called the Magellan that travels through Tar. and her new costume for captain of the... Yeah, I think she might actually be the captain. She's definitely the pilot. She's wearing this sort of, like, it's one part classic Kojima military fantasy and one part, like, French resistance.

distance soldier. It's a really good costume that she has. But yeah, there is a lot more emphasis on combat. And the combat is... Fine. It is better than the originals, and you're given a lot more combat verbs. I was given a sniper rifle, and the sniper rifle was really cool because the bullets on the sniper rifle move very slowly.

So I fired and went... That's really good. They don't move, like, astonishingly slowly, but they move way slower than you'd think. Sure. So I fired and went, I missed. And I... put the scope down, and then he keeled over in the distance. And that was a really, really good feeling. And then the Mesa weapons, which are weapons that can kind of target humans and BTs now, are back. It is...

secondary to my enjoyment. To your enjoyment, but is it secondary to the game? They will regularly ask you to do things like clear out the bandit camp now, which is not really what they spent a lot of time doing in the... in the past combat was such a it was such a secondary thing in that first game um you know i only just now got gun guns in that in that first game right uh i you you get your first mads playable scene

uh which i thought was different that it was different than what i thought those would be i thought i'd get to play as mads in those scenes for some reason no no you just hunt him around some world war one trenches um in a weird way uh which is Funny because I watched a little, I watched one of the trailers or something of Death Stranding 2 and was like this, there's a fight in this that is just the best scene in, what was it, 19...

1914? What's the recent World War I movie? 1914 with the illumination in the graveyard. And I was like, you just lifted that whole scene? That scene rules. That's Kojima, though. In any case...

After that fight, you end up leaving it with, like, assault rifles and shotguns and stuff. And you're like, wait a second. Whereas I have assault rifles from the beginning. Well, yeah, because you had them from the beginning. Because it's Death Stranding 2, Jack. You know, you come in with the assault rifle from Death Stranding 1. Yeah.

Sort of. I will say that the... How do you make the plot a sequel to Death Stranding 2? His answer to that is really wild. He... He will regularly be introducing big new facts about the world. For example, you can teleport to Australia. That is a fact about the world. There are these things called plate gates. We just discovered one of them. In fact, it appeared when Sam had connected all of...

north america to the chiral network the plate gate appeared and if you go through the plate gate australia you also cause a massive earthquake and so like as you are yeah as you are playing i think this is great you'll just be told like uh, plate gate transport incoming, and then an earthquake will happen as someone moves through the plate gate. I don't know if that's a real player or if, I mean, in fiction, people are moving through the plate gate quite a lot.

So he'll be doing stuff like that. He'll also be doing really incredible tonal stuff. Like, really early on, some figures come out of the tar that look like they are from... Book of the New Sun. I saw this. They are like... They are like Ray Alice ass. Yeah. monks who are like leading a parade through the uh through the sand towards a plate gate and that's fantastic and then at the same time characters will say, Sam will say, like, what's my mission? And characters will say, almost explicitly,

It's what you did in Death Stranding 1. You need to link up Mexico to the Chiral Network, and then you need to link up Australia to the Chiral Network. And there's something so... kind of like formally pleasing about that to me to an extent like this is this is a game in which you could essentially break down what you're doing as carry the metals to Old Oz. And then you need to carry the plastics to the lone adventurer.

That's what you need to do. And so it's so pleasing for the sequel to come up and be like, yeah, well, look, buddy, there's another country and it needs to be connected to the chiral network. Have you, another thing he said a lot before release was like, After COVID, I'm starting to wonder if we should be connected. So the tagline of this game is, should we have connected? And I will say that there is some plot.

maneuvering. There is some sort of Act 1, Act 2 plot maneuvering that is happening that is so... obviously suspicious that not one single character is mentioning that it almost feels deliberate it feels like this great weird genre move of like No way. It's like in a pantomime when they make the children say he's behind you when the monster creeps out behind the hero. And the audience knows, but the hero doesn't know. For example...

America doesn't really exist anymore, and it's this organization called, I think, the USC? Is that what it's called? The United Cities of America, right? UCA. UCA, yeah. Yes, perfect. And they are kind of like setting up the Curl Network throughout America. And as they do this, this sort of private company called APAC... starts to emerge. Spell that for me? APAC. Different APAC, presumably, than... APAC. Okay, no I for... Okay, sure. No, no, no. APAC is a private organization that is an...

automated package delivering company. And so right off the bat, any savvy viewers hackles a race because I deliver packages. And what are they doing putting me out of a job? And the answer is they've sort of put me out of a job. completely at the beginning of the game. APAC is now delivering packages through its automated systems and through a very powerful computer called APAS. It has essentially replaced Porters.

Completely. I gotta play this game. Some weird stuff kind of starts happening immediately, right? Which is that you start learning that the United... cities of America, the UCA, and APAS are separate entities, but the UCA has taken out a lot of contracts with APAS. And so all of Sam's equipment is fitted with APAS as well. I see. And Carol just keeps saying things as we start moving the Carol network into Mexico and Australia.

Characters keep saying things like, well, we understand that people might think that what we're doing is colonization on the part of the USC, but it's not because it's a private company. It's not the USC at all. It's the Hudson Baker. company it's different that's right it's different what's really funny is the

I mean, APAS and American people are saying this to me, but also Mexican and Australian people are saying this to me as well. They're saying, like, well, it's good that it's not the UCA because we're not terribly sure about those guys, but it's APAS. Now... It is very clear to me where we're going here, right? In terms of, like, the shape of this thing. In terms of, like, we have met a character, a shady backer, is revealed to be the president of APAC. And his name is...

the president. And we have a whole cutscene about how America has done away with presidents and doesn't have them anymore, because instead they now use... A sort of systems-driven automatic voting powered by ass. He has to listen to us, at least, if he's going to keep stealing our shit. So this guy is now the... essentially the president of America, but the text of the game is saying to me, it's okay, he's the president of APAC, and also he's suspicious, but...

It shouldn't be clear to you why yet. So all of that is kind of rumbling along, and it's clear to me that this is part of what Kojima is talking about with the should we have connected. I have to imagine there is also some other stuff going on. For example, Australia has been saying to me, Australia has been saying to me, stuff has gotten worse.

Wild. There are new kinds of BTs that have appeared. There are earthquakes everywhere. There are forest fires. There are sandstorms. And all of this has coincided with the appearance of the plate gate. And if you remember, as I said earlier, the plate gate... appeared when Sam connected America. So there is this real sense of like, we are meddling with forces beyond our control, especially because as far as APAC is concerned,

Are you following? As far as AIPAC is concerned, one of the key goals to getting Australia onto the Chiral Network is that they think that if they can get... Australia under the Chiral Network, another plate gate will appear that will take them somewhere else. I see. And they're like, well, we can just fix the world. Right.

right if we find another plate gate not only can we then travel to you know brazil or whatever but we can also start triangulating because now we have three of we have a plate gate in America, we have a plate gate in Australia, and we have a plate gate wherever this goes, so we could figure out where they go next. And once we've done that, then we can have the world. What the game isn't saying to me, but is very clear to me because I've seen a story, is...

a pass has an ulterior motive here about like control via the chiral network um this also sounds like a very classic kojima thing of uh i don't know i i i think keith on a run button metal gear let's play maybe said that that kojima was the smartest dumb guy ever um uh and like explicitly the sort of the the thing around like this is someone who seems to understand that nations

have used their power in ways that shape the world in ways that are inegalitarian and bad for people, but often doesn't have the... can't take whatever the next step from that is and kind of like pulls up short from any sort of diagnosis or cause outside of there are bad people there sometimes has causes sometimes confuses

causes or confuses methods for causes in ways. Metal Gear Solid V is all about language eventually and all about the, I don't know how deep either of you have seen that, but like big talks about how English's dominance as a language has a sort of cultural imperialist kind of element to it. And then kind of just kind of like it falls away into the science fictionality of the way he...

He builds his story sometimes. And I would believe, Jack, that it's going to somewhere big. But I would also believe that it just kind of swerves off the road at a certain point. I have no doubt. And not only swerves off the road and like... hits you with something surprising and different but just like

drops a big part of whatever the big metaphor was that he was producing you know well this is a little bit like the way we talked about the way kojima writes women and also the way he writes like sex and sexuality is that he does sort of like glance towards an

interesting idea and then we'll regularly like go ricocheting off into some you know either outright fetishization or just some like really troubling uh like assumptions that he has made right about uh about how the world works about how women work about how sex works

um i wrote down in my list here i was writing down kojima hallmarks and it's like to keith's point the first thing i wrote down was wheels within wheels of corporations and organizations you know uh kojima loves this idea that like within organization a there is Yeah, well, he does like a metal building. It's true. world war ii american military infrastructure of like i think about like mother base and uh the inside of the magellan here is just a sort of an aircraft carrier

But yeah, there's so much I want to say about this game and I'm sure that we can come back to it. Yeah, let's come back to it. I will try to get there because I will say, you know, cards on the table for friends at the table listeners, you're saying things that are making me go when we get back to the divine cycle.

there's stuff here for us to work through. Definitely. Especially given, I think I've recently kind of cracked what the next of those seasons is and it's not what I thought it would be. And there's fucking cool stuff around this. Yeah. And there's stuff here that I think is. fascinating to bounce ideas around in terms of, you know, what I will say broadly is one of the things that was interesting about Death Stranding 1 That's a game that comes out at the end of a decade dominated by the zombie.

you know, maybe 15 years dominated by the zombie, you know, from Shaun of the Dead through Walking Dead and everything in between. And... Core to that version of the post-apocalyptic story is the sort of, like, we will eat each other, right? All community is community only so long as it doesn't fall apart and then you have to move on to the new community. Lots of post-apocalyptic stories.

have this sort of nihilism about the part, the human, and about human community in them. And I wouldn't say that Death Stranding 1 was like... necessarily it's a game about if you touch a dead people a dead person you will explode 100 right and it's not a game about like I'm, oh, wow, but we could all figure out how to build a garden together in the remains. But it is a game that is interested in the small, the large and small ways in which it's like.

I still want you to deliver a pizza to me. I still want to make food for somebody. Oh, someone really wants this book that someone else has. And that small desire could cash out into... A third person bringing the book from person A to person B. And not always, I'm going to break your head open so I can take the book from you, right? Yeah.

thinking here i'm thinking here of the book of eli a whole movie about smashing someone's head open to take a book from them um uh but it's got a twist it does have a twist we talked about this recently on one of the shelf by genre episodes of the bonus episodes that came up because we're doing a post-apocalyptic unit right now.

Bet you wouldn't think it has a twist. You know, Gary got me on that one. I gotta tell you, I couldn't have never seen it coming. In any case, that was part of the thing that I think was so appealing about that first game. And it's part of why I'm like... huh, I wonder where that stuff is going. Because I recognize where...

The skepticism might come from. I think especially a lot of people talk about that first game when COVID happened in this sort of like, wow, he was such a sage, you know, it was so he saw where we were all going. I don't know.

man. Sometimes this just happens. I've always said this is like, for me, this sort of science fiction work is often about where we are and not about where we're going. He was already, the world was already a weird fractured space where it felt like we were distant from one another.

Also, bird flu had already happened. Swine flu had already happened. 100%. Yeah. Right. I mean, he made Metal Gear Solid 2 20 plus years ago now about, you know, the ways in which the digital world was fracturing information and...

separating us and fragmenting communities. These are ideas he's had for a long fucking time. But it is interesting to see him explicitly say, the last five years have made me wonder... about this, and I'm curious to see if that ends up being an actual major thematic that can be universalized, or if what he's telling, not universalized for real, but that he's saying something about connection, or if he's giving us a little parable about how it might go wrong.

if it's not done right or something. You know, those are different. You know, you can play the game that is nihilistic. You can tell the story that is like human connection fundamentally is flawed. I don't think he's going there. I doubt it. But, you know, it wouldn't, it would. It would surprise me, but it wouldn't shock me, if that makes sense. Yeah. So.

To leave our Death Stranding segment, I would like to read two things. This is a tweet from Kojima on May 29th, 2019. This is maybe my all-time favorite Kojima tweet, a man who is both a great poster and a terrible poster. Um...

Dear Mads fans, there are many scenes in Death Stranding which I think you'll love. In this trailer, there's Mads covered in blood, Mads tied, smoking Mads, variations with Mads' eyes, Mads with glasses, dot dot dot, singing Mads, and Mads in battle dress were new challenges. I love it I wish I felt this way about anything in this world about anything there's nothing in the world where I would ever communicate or feel like that and that makes me sadder

You know, life is long. Hopefully I find it. What if it's like dressage? That'd be great. Are you kidding me? Something that completely creeps up on you. I would love to be someone. Free diving. Sure. I recently... I recently joked with Austin that he should become a greeting card-making guy. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I feel like that's... I'm still kind of in the camp of like, I don't know, that might do it. Give it a few years. I would love it too. What about consulting?

other people's model railroads that would be great you don't build i would do any of these things i'd be happy to become that person i'm kind of a nothing guy is the thing and uh with with which has its benefits it allows us sort of like Like fickle tea, fickle tea, fickleness has its... Fickle tea. Fickle tea doo. Batman. Oh, it's Piccolo. Right, it is Piccolo. But like there is a benefit to being a fickle person, which is like...

You get to experience a lot of different things. You get to have these great swells of interest for a limited amount of time. And if you make peace with that, it can be really pleasurable. Jack, this is how you play video games, for instance. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's how I often play video games.

to be sure you know i think i'm on on the scale i did not finish be rising you know what i mean um yes uh and so and so i i but i do think if i could become a dressage person and that was like the thing i loved and it's all i thought about and could make the mads post but about different horse trots different horse prances what's gates thank you i couldn't remember the general term

I'm preempting this. People are going to come out of the gate and say, well, Austin, you're like this about mechs. Thank you, Jack. Not even close. I'm not even close to like this about mechs. Every time someone sends me a picture of a thing, they're building mechs for real. I'm like, they should stop doing that. Yeah, that's not good. It's not good across...

any spectrum it won't work and also i don't want them to exist and i don't have that it's i don't have that in me in that way just like him i just i like telling stories with them but i don't yeah but i don't and i don't even like them in that sort of like

You know, I have a closet filled with unbuilt Gunpla, and they're not unbuilt just because I didn't have time. It's because the interest wanes, you know? Yeah, I don't have it like... that and uh kojima you are are if nothing else you seem to be someone who is honest no i said kojima no kojima is honest about 100 it was honest about the things

is driven by the preoccupations in a way that I think is fascinating. You know? The last thing I would like to read is a clip from the game's Codex. Codus. Sorry, Codus. Very different. Codex, different. No, different thing. Codus, like the database of... fingerprints and shit i suppose that's what they call to be clear the codex right uh

This is a really good example of the way the game's narrative tone dovetails with the game's mechanical tone in really funny ways. I mean, I feel like the classic example of this in any game is when a character with their own mouth says to you, crouch press the B button. It's always a delight when that happens, when video games have to tell you what they are. I think this is a really good example. This is a CODIS entry for a character called Norberto Puente.

Norberto was a guard on the Mexican border just like his father before him. After the death stranding, he continued to maintain the security of the border region, even when the societies on either side had collapsed. A shortage of materials and equipment left the border security system on its knees, however, and the threat from extremists only grew until the situation became dire.

It was around this time that the first bridges expedition arrived, promising to bring the chiral network in the near future. Norberto therefore left the border where he'd been born and raised and moved to Ciudad Nudo del Norte, C1.

His hope is that the Chiral Network will bring about the peace and security that he and his colleagues were unable to maintain. And then there's a little line breaking part of the UI off. And underneath it says, continue to develop your connection with... connection level with him and his facility and you might receive a silent handgun. Isn't that good? Yeah, great. Fantastic. Thanks, Norberto. I'm not being ironic. I love that very much. I do love it when tone just goes casket. Oh, also.

We do have to move on. I realize I've said chiral network over this section one trillion times. Let me define that really quickly. That is the internet through the land of the dead. You said that. We did, yeah, because I said, yeah, I've heard Twilight Mirage, yeah, which is, I mean, we didn't have the Land of the Dead part, but we did have the you get people on the network that is the physical internet part.

Yes, because I spent a lot of the time playing the second game after having had a break, being like, what the fuck is... What do we mean when we say chiral? What is that? Well, chirality is like when something goes... The other way in its reflection, right? Yes. Chiral, like, organization of your organs places your heart on the right-hand side. Right. Sure. Yes. Anyway.

I actually think, Jack, we should save our next segment for the next episode. We've been going for two hours already and my mouth hurts. And so I think that's a good enough reason to stop talking. Yeah. Great reason to stop talking. They finally invented a way to make me shut up.

Pain. Jaw pain. So that's going to do it. Janine, you get to talk about that next thing in a future episode? Yeah, because I think we should finish it by then. We should beat it. Yeah, I think that's probably true. Yeah, we're close.

Sort of, maybe. I'm so excited. Austin and Janine want to talk about a game that I have never heard of, never seen a single screenshot of, and based on their description in the show docs, don't understand what it is. I would love to continue that level of knowledge. Yeah. All right. I'm not going to tease it beyond that. People have to come back next time and listen to us talk about it. As always, you can support the show by going to...

friends at the table dot cash. You can go check out merchandise for our main friends at the table show at friends at the table dot shop, which if you're like, if you listen to the beginning of perpetua, but haven't gotten deep into it yet, even if you want, listen to the first main perpetua.

episode there is relevant merchandise there there is flag merchandise there for you friends at the table dot cash if you don't know what a flag is you should go to friends at the table like cash and be charmed by a wonderful creature what did i say cash shop Yes, Cash is the Patreon. Shop is the store, friendofthetable.shop. What else? What else should we... I guess, Jack, by the time this comes out...

Media Club Plus will be... Oh, actually, I think we're going to end up in a situation where they both drop on the same day. Oh. Because Media Club Plus was delayed by a week last week, right? We finished. Yeah, we finished. I don't know if Keith will get it out early. We finished watching Hunter x Hunter and we finished season one of Media Club Plus. I have seen the works as it goes. That is a great fucking question. It's a great question. I would say that Hunter won. They did not get married.

They did not get married. We're going to be doing a Q&A episode that is probably going to be coming out a week after today. So that will probably be on the 29th. Austin's going to be there. It's very exciting. And we've already read a little bit of the... I've read one chapter of the manga and my socks were knocked clean off my butt.

At the same time, I'm doing a really cool stream series at the moment. I'm doing a subscription drive over where I stream with my partner at CatBamCapow on Twitch. We are playing Blueprints. Cat has never seen Blueprints before and is, I would say, fated by the gods. I'm losing my mind, Jack. It's... I mean, it's now gotten beyond...

It's now spectacular in ways that even I don't understand. It was initially spectacular in ways that I was like, how the hell is she doing this? And it's now it has exceeded that. I'm like, I can tell this is critically important. How have they found it on day seven? It's remarkable. There's a thing I want to tell you all that I'm going to wait until you're done streaming that game. Tell those years of Nancy Drew training. Genuinely, it's part of it. We are playing on...

Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at twitch.tv forward slash catbamkapow. That's not only Blueprints. You're also doing a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, that's Kat with a K, and we are... Oh, if you've seen our Outlast LP, you will have seen Kat and I playing Let's Play the Hammock of Schlemmer catalog. Sorry, our Outword LP, not our Outlast LP. That one's awesome. Oh my god.

We are not doing that. I constantly almost say Outlast instead of Outward. Different game. Very different game. It is really hard to make an LP about a game you dislike, and it's a very thin line to try and make that a good... project it would take so much mental energy but i truly believe we could make a good outlast lp i'll leave it to you and cat because y'all do a horror thing already and if you want to do that one day go for it um yeah anything else

I think that might be it. Media Club Plus did announce our next mini season, which neither you nor I are going to be on the main cast, but we'll both be guessing. And Janine, you'll be guessing on that at least a little bit. A little bit. covering the works of M. Night Shyamalan in not completion, but in great number, I would say. In significance. The majority of the movies, right?

It's fascinating to me because I'm an M. Night Shyamalan enjoyer. I think he's a really interesting, capable filmmaker who has kind of ebbed and flowed, but I think everybody does. Listening to... Keith has barely seen any M. Night Shyamalan movies. And at the moment, all Keith keeps saying is, wow, M. Night Shyamalan is really good. I am fascinated to see how this develops. Keith believes that M. Night, he thought M. Night was bad.

and he is discovering that he is good, and you're about to watch a man go on a journey. Maybe. I will make a bet. I think Keith is going to double down and say the bad ones are actually good and no one else understands. I actually think the bad ones are good and no one else understands. I am maybe with Keith here. Do you think the good ones are bad? No. I think M. Night is a skilled filmmaker. I think...

I think he is regularly... He's hitting the ball when he comes up to the plate. He's not always hitting hummus. He is sometimes missing that ball, Jack. I gotta tell you. Split is trash. I haven't seen Split. We're not going to be covering Split. Mr. Glass is bad. Listen to find out what happens, dear audience. I'm, of course, a hater in some ways. It's just called Glass, but it's about the character, Mr. Glass. Science is wildly overrated.

All right. I think that that is actually it. I think that's going to do it for us. Please leave us some reviews. I actually, I actually, wait one second. I did promise I would find and read a review and I forgot to get one. I forgot to get one. Let me find one. I'm going to find one right now. Ojek69 says, the I stands for, I love this show. Aww. Thank you, OJX69. That's just very sweet. Oh, here we go. One more from LZnot, who says, Tail Time, T-A-I-L-T-I-M-E.

I don't know why it's called that, why they've named the review that. I'll read the review now. Hey, love the pod and can't wait to hear y'all go deep on Gex Trilogy when it hits next week. Until then, stay Gexy. I know one fact about Gex. He's a damn lizard. You know two facts about Gex. He's not a lizard. I couldn't tell you what you're doing. He's a gecko, isn't he? Which is an amphibian, isn't it?

Oh, okay, right. So I got the beast wrong. He's more of a lizard than, for example, Daxter. It's like if you picked up Virginia and said, this is a lion. Well, it's not. It's like if you picked up Virginia and said, this is a... Geckos are lizards. What? I thought they were amphibians. Geckos are lizards. Geckos are lizards and fractious outbreaks. Wow. Foisted. There you go. Geckos are lizards. Damn. To be continued.