The Besties - Alan Wake 2 is Weirder Than You Could Possibly Imagine

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Thirteen years ago, a troubled fictional author by the name of Alan Wake stumbled into our hearts, yelling about shadow monsters and nightmares made manifest. Now he's back, and he's got a friend! What's changed in the intervening decade-plus-change? And how much of the original Alan Wake do we remember? (Hint: Literally none of it.) Also discussed: Venture Bros.: Radiant is the Blood of the Bamboo Heart, Sea of Stars, The Sisters Brothers, Paranorman, Death Stranding, Shadow of Doubt Subscribe to our newsletter at besties.fan! Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

My biggest son was Squirtle for Halloween. Sure. Sorry, that sentence, I shouldn't have put a pause in there because it makes it sound like I adopted Squirtle. No, it sounds like you measure your children not by age but by size. Yes, my biggest son was approximately one Squirtle high. Okay, got it. He was Squirtle for Halloween.

We stan. What? We stan. We stan. What? We stan. We stan Halloween? My son or Squirtle? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So in his class, they had like a class Halloween party.

And there were a few other kids in his class that were dressed up as Pokemon. There was a Charmander in there. And there was a there was a charmander in there and there's a couple pikachus and my my wonderful son who is so experienced with this franchise now um went up to one of the pikachus and was like hey man stay away from me because you're electric type yep and i'm not trying to get a super effective attack over here but the charmander you better keep away from me man because i might hydro hydro blast you and uh then and then that would be super effective none of the kids had any fucking idea what he was talking they don't know about type strengths parents i am begging you i am begging you parents you have to show your kids this you have to teach it is stolen valor to have your children

dress up as pikachus and charmanders and not tell them the basic listen griffin you get confused about like is fighting strong against fairy or is it the other way that's fine that's a new type i get it water and fire though guys it's basic electricity and water though guys griffin there's a you need to do something it's a little experiment you need to go into that class and look around at all the kids and see if there's a poindexter because if there's not a poindexter like a dweeby kid you mean yeah what i'm saying is you're setting up your boy to be the poindexter no listen your kid's the poindexter exactly and you You look around the class and see if your kid's the Poindexter.

Exactly. I can't find him. And you're gonna have to look inwards at your own floodline. You are thinking of this in 1999 terms. Yes. I can say pretty confidently this exercise you're telling me to do

would have proven true for years truly back in 1999 if i went in and i was like hey you guys uh you guys filled out the old pokedex yet i would get paint i would get pants but it's 2023 everybody's into fucking pokemon and pokemon cards yeah my son is in a is in a seat of great power now yeah you ignorance is not to be applauded. Yes, but also, like, they're into the music. They're into the look. They're into those foil cards, right? They're not over here being like, let me get out my spreadsheet.

It's, yeah, it's a shame. I'm not asking for that level of commitment. I'm not asking for that level of commitment. I don't care if you want, you don't have to have a team of six level 100 Pokemon like my incredible son. Sure, sure, sure. Just show your children. At least teach them the basic element type matchups.

When I was learning the multiplication tables in whatever grade that was, they gave me a grid-like thing that you hold, and when you push the little squares, it showed you what the multiplication combo was. Yes. That seems like we need to make that just for these kids. Oh, I misunderstood.

What you're calling for is a national standard in Pokemon. Yes. Common core Pokemon stuff. Sure. I'm sorry. You're right. That actually, I think, is right. Griffin had promised us a brief cold open,

but suddenly it was a story about his son, and it was going on longer than anybody thought possible. The pages were wrong. I knew to get to the dark place, I had to go deeper and ask more questions about Pokemon, even if it costs me everything. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of 2020. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Rushing and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in the dark place and in how the words shift to make the stories are powerful. And this is a video game club and just by listening you're a member today we're going to be talking about alan wake 2 can that be right i feel like it's been 13 years since the last one of these came out thereabouts yeah i mean alan wake he's back but this time he bought a friend it's bigger it's better it has that sweet sweet epic money and direct line to the unreal engine

so alan wake doing his stephen king john carpenter riff but now with actual financial support and we'll talk about it more after the break who else i hope i i'm sure i know the answer to this question but who else had to watch a story recap of Alan Wake 1 and Alan Wake's American Nightmare? Okay, so I would consider myself, I think unquestionably, the most dedicated Alan Wake fan in our quadro. What is that called with four people? Quartet.

Quartet. Quadro. A quadro. Quadro. And I 100%. That's actually the nickname hey are you listening to besties nah babe it's the quattro that's what i call them now four guys just use like a chic razor marketing term to describe us there are so many blades in this podcast we are open to that promotion if chic wants to give us uh even though i am the most dedicated fan there is no question in my mind that i would

have not remembered 80 of what happened in the first game but it's not just the first game as you uh american nightmare also and the dlc for the first game and control which has like huge impactful revelations that have direct implications on this game so yes you need to watch a recap you will be lost even if you consider yourself a fan i will i watched sam lake recap that's a very good one ign did a good job on that was a pretty good video it was supposed to be a five minute recap it went 16 minutes that tells you love that literally everything you need to know about alan wake and Remedy and Sam Lake. It is preposterous that it is not included in the game.

It is outrageous that they do not include a plot recap of the story so far in this fucking 13 years later sequel. The thing that I sort of was reminded playing this and watching the video is that I think it's kind of different for a lot of these things in that it does not attempt to the game that the storytelling and the plotting and all that is very dreamlike like it's not trying to map one-to-one onto a linear story that you can just like write down it's it's about inducing that sort of like dream logic and dream state as you're playing so i feel like watching recaps i feel like it's a little hard to get back to like that dream logic that alan wick employs more so than even like kojima and i think later in the show we'll talk more about like kojima stuff but kojima by and large maybe less so in death stranding but most

of the metal gear saw games is trying to tell a linear somewhat cogent story I think he just really really struggles with it this is intentionally like circuitous and dreamlike is a good way to describe it such that you're right like and hand wavy I mean pretty hand wavy I feel like a lot of times like it it I don't think it necessarily is hiding that. Yeah, no, I think it's all sort of like, I mean,

there is a bit where Alan wakes like, and that what happened, that's what happened. And the police officers, airfume are like, what the fuck are you even saying? Let me back up. So you're scratch,

but scratch is also the dark, the dark presence. Yeah. You're interchangeable. You know, what's funny is i feel like what prepared me for this game better than the recap was just watching all of twin peaks uh in the intervening period since the first game's release uh because it's just it is that it's the it's that yeah like

way more than i think i uh appreciated when i played the first alan wake before watching twin peaks i want to i want to circle back to all of the inspirations, but before we do that, we should probably give people a baseline of what the game actually is. Oh, man, let me try. Go for it. Go ahead. Alan Wake or Alan Wake 2? Alan Wake 2, please. Okay.

Alan Wake 2 is the follow-up to the last Alan Wake game. The important thing you need to know is that Alan is an author who is creating a reality around him that also seems to be guided by his storytelling. He is trapped in this ephemeral area called the Dark Place that's sort of like between realities. It overlaps with our reality in some places. He's trapped. He's trying to write his way out like Hamilton. Meanwhile, there is a FBI agent named Saga Anderson who's following a lead on a serial killer. But that lead is is connected uh to uh alan wake yeah and in searching for him

uh she she manages to sort of unearth him from the dark place and the two of them have to work together to stop alan's evil double mr scratch from you know messing everything up and i would say that the you do play like the actual gameplay as a third person like survival horror game um you play as both characters alan wake and saga anderson um and you're kind of deciding from chapter to chapter which character you're going to play as but the story of saga anderson is directly affected by the writing of Alan Wake. So in a way, he is kind of controlling both stories. Again, to try to describe this in a cogent way in a short period of time is next to impossible. standpoint the closest analog that i would make would be something like uh the resident evil 2 remake or even the resident evil 4 games where it's a mix of like third person like there's some action combat stuff but a lot of puzzles and honestly way more narrative than either of those

games i actually think this game is like 60 to 70 percent narrative and like 20 action and then 20 yeah puzzle solving like you can't go into this expecting an action game it's actually way less of an action game than the first alan wake was and way more of a narrative game both characters have mind palaces but even more important than the mind palaces they have effectively like pin boards where you have to arrange the story or just like let the game know that you figured something out by pinning it to this board in the right spot and that is like very visual novel-esque and you quite literally through key parts of the game cannot progress until you do that i like that system i'm a big fan of the proliferation of evidence board

sort of as a um like storytelling device i feel like it's happened a lot uh we just talked about it in assassin's creed with the sort of like investigation board thing there i i like it it is weird that there's two different ones one for each character and uh agent anderson's is like a proper like investigation where you're putting clues on like lingering questions and then alan wakes is like a sort of plot board that is completely nonsensical that you can use to change uh the environment around you uh it they feel like two completely different i mean they are like he's he's brainstorming a story that's like the background premise of his mind palace where she's trying to solve murders so when he's brainstorming

as you would it's like okay we have this scene it's a subway station it's the middle of the night what's going to happen in this scene? And Alan can change, depending on like things he's discovered, info he's discovered. He can say, oh, there was a murder that happened here. Or, oh, this is where the cult tried to perform their ritual. And by making those choices,

that'll unlock new paths within those environments. I think that can sound like almost impossibly complicated. The clever way that they do that for Alan is there are effectively rooms that you can go into. And when you're in those rooms, you click on, again, like whatever the thing is. So it's like I want the cult version of this room. I want the missing author version of this room. And then it will change that. In the rest of the environment, from what I can tell, not as much changes other than kind of like the art design. So you are moving the story forward by taking that writing.

This gets even more. Different versions of the rooms will have different items in them and different ways to get out of them. Yes. It's the mechanical version of this. And then then there's another reality changing mechanic called the clicker which is a light that's not a clicker absorb light sorry sorry to be an alan wake snob but that is not the clicker oh sorry the lamp thank you no he the clicker turns the lamp on yes clicker is another object entirely that we won't even get into thank you thank you um i well i won't even it's so hard to talk about this game without spoiling it um i i i think that like

gets us in a good place of like kind of the mechanics like you're again solving puzzles you find guns you find ammo uh healing items saga is doing the fact and alan wake is doing the fiction that's a good way of putting it, yeah. If you see something on her board, it is true and you know it's true. With a game like this, that's actually really helpful. There's no bullshit on her board. It's just real crap that isn't about dreams or Alan Wake's dumb books. Okay, but here's the problem.

The stuff on her board is being impacted by the stuff that Alan is writing. Right, but we can understand that to be true as much as in anything is true, the things on her board are true. In her world, they are true. In Alan's world, they are knowingly not true. Speaking of someone that's a little bit further in the game, I will say a big part of what is going on on her board becomes what is true and what is false and no

one is entirely sure so it gets i think as messy as you think it might in hearing that i'm going to plant the flag here and say this is where we stop trying to yeah i think that's fair to say yeah the plot of this game i think folks get now that it is a a a very complicated i'd watch a recap it helped watch that sam lake recap he'll get you there yeah with with all that i do want to go back now to griffin what you're talking about with the twin peaks because what i think is wild about this this game is and sam like has always borrowed from from sources youantly. I don't think that's bad. Yeah, he doesn't hide his inspiration.

Yeah, this game is so heavily the follow-up series to Twin Peaks, but also In the Mouth of Madness by John Carpenter. I mean, this is like— I thought about that the entire time I was playing it. I'm so glad you called that. Can you bring us up to speed because I'm not familiar with it. Let me know when this starts to sound familiar to you it is about a author who may or may not be writing books that have the power to change the world and reality as we know it but the detective

like character in this noir who is chasing him doesn't believe in it until the world starts to change and he realizes that there is actually a fanatical cult around this author that wants to bring about a darkness that ends the world that does sound familiar that's yeah a lot like the video game yeah yeah it's very much only to the video game that movie's sick by the way if you don't watch this yeah that would be rules it's also on i think criterion and hbo max right now if you want to stream it um yeah and i don't think any of that's bad i actually think what has changed with sam like and remedies games in general is like so many video games back in the day it was we like movies more than we like games

and we're just kind of cribbing from them and borrowing whatever cultural cachet they have. This to me does feel more like almost like not pastiche, but like collage. Like I am taking all these different pieces and then putting it into this medium and creating something wholly new. But like a collage, you look at it, you can clearly see that it's ripped out of the other sources. Yeah. Griffin, what did you think about the twin peaks stuff i mean i found it a genuinely helpful um like foothold for trying to like follow what was follow what was happening uh some of that by the way if you're not a twin peaks stand like i am um you am there are like layouts of buildings that are like the sheriff's department

the sheriff's station is like eerie deja vu level crib from Twin Peaks and this is not a new addition like Alan Wake 1 was also very clearly inspired by Twin Peaks as well as with Deadly Premonition we could go on and on

I think that this stuff is if you're sort of like if your eyes are glazing over i guess your ears listening to to this i i feel like it is important because the vibe of this game is sort of the the the star attraction of it right like the mystery the mystery and the other worldly stuff and the trying to decipher fact from fiction and what is, uh, uh, you know, the dark presence and like trying to unravel that stuff through, uh,

you know, uh, TV commercials that you will find, uh, and watch these like live action FMV sequences of, uh, like that is, that is the hook here for from for my money the actual sort of uh

you know survival horror gameplay stuff is decent it's fine but it is not on the level of a you know a resident evil or an evil within or sporadic i mean it's really really it's a lot of walk i was shocked at how much just kind of walking around is involved in both in both sort of storylines of of the game i'm really glad you're saying this griffin because i really i am really struggling with Alan Wake too. I really am. I, I, there is so much about that,

this game that is so much up my alley. There is so much about this game that is like so dead on for me, tonally, narratively, like a lot of this stuff. There's like individual puzzles that are like, there's a lot of really creative, like make you feel smart,

but it's not too easy. It's not too easy it's not too hard it's just like out there in the world and you saw it and it feels good great scares like great great scary moments there's just too much time where the game doesn't necessarily care if you're engaged with it or not like there's there's so much walking around and a lot of it's like there's no compass on the screen or or mini map stuff or anything like that. So it's usually like checking your mini map to find out. Every 15 seconds.

Every 15 seconds. I found that to be really, really frustrating and it was a problem. It's been a problem the entire time and it really screws up the pacing for me. There's like you can regularly go 10 15 minutes without something like really interesting happening um and and i i i really i'm struggling with that so much because i like the rest of it so much and i would love to hear especially like russ and plant where like where you guys are if you guys struggle with that at all i I did, but I want to hear from Fresh before I get into my challenges, because I do like this game.

I have a feeling Fresh will be best at capturing the enthusiasm of what's so special about it. Yes, it's tricky for me, because I adore this game. There are three games that came out this year that I will remember pretty clearly in 10 years, and this is one of them,

Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur's Gate 3 are the other two. And it's hard for me to divorce my passion for Alan Wake as a franchise, Remedy as a developer, from, you know, just judging this game without that. Because so much of that passion drives me to, like, run through the forest somewhat blindly, looking for clues. When I find something, I get really pumped. When I find, like, every, like, you know, you mentioned the, like, cable access commercials that you find, like, or the radio stations that you'll find. I'll sit,

like, in a room listening to a guy on the radio stations that you'll find i'll sit like in a room listening to a guy on the radio because i'm that that's the highlight of the game like yeah that's the best shit in the game and i don't think at least for me like i there's never been a moment where i've been like it's been 10 minutes since i've done or seen something that was interesting. Like, I honestly, like, can't think of a moment where I was just blindly walking through the woods with no direction and nothing engaging anywhere on the horizon. Like, I feel like there is a pull. It's not Resident Evil 4 in terms of engaging, but it, I think if it was that pacing, it would mess up the overall vibe of it anyway because you don't have those slower moments. I just I don't know.

Again, it's just really hard to divorce my passion from it. a recap it wouldn't have the same pull that i have in like exploring a old age home or something for like every little piece of art and stuff like that spoilers now i know i go to an old age home later uh so yeah here's we can talk about the bugs a little bit because i i have a suspicion that fresh having the best experience here is tied to the fact that he ran into the fewest bugs. And here's why. I agree with what you're talking about, Justin, and I was shocked how often I found myself lost in this game. And I don't think of myself as particularly dumb, but I was doing a lot of backtracking. I mean, like kind of dumb, but not like super dumb.

I was doing so much backtracking. I mean, like, kind of dumb, but not, like, super dumb. I was doing so much backtracking constantly. And there was a point where I was like, why do I just not know where to go? And I pulled up a YouTube playthrough. And in the playthrough, just over the course of 15 minutes, there were multiple moments where, random npc characters kind of like nudged the person in the direction of like hey you should head this way that just didn't trigger for me yeah and and what i realized and there are many other issues that i had including like icons not triggering for me to be able to talk to people i had issues with the boss fight i had all sorts of things and what i realized the experience had become is this game works best as a theme park ride

it works best when i'd like any narrative game you can just go straight through and like ride the wave and what was happening on my theme park ride is it kept breaking down like every few minutes and i didn't even know that that was part of the ride like what do you play what platform are you playing on i played on pc and i was on ps5 and i had these problems um and and you know what chris i think if i had to guess i think that there is a direct line of that where i very early on had a situation where uh a prompt would not appear for me so i could not continue the story i mean mean, it was like done. That was it. I had to reload.

But I didn't know that that's what had happened. Right. Yeah. And this game is not that great about sometimes you have to go into your board and like figure some stuff out and then you can do the next thing. But sometimes you just, or in my case, in this instance,

the prompt just didn't appear. And I just didn't know. And I think I took away my case, in this instance, the prompt just didn't appear, and I just didn't know. And I think I took away from that a sense of, well, I don't know if wandering looks like me not – like if explore – if this wandering I'm doing is actually helping or if it's just like I'm not seeing the prompt I'm supposed to see. And so I'm just kind of trying to keep to the critical path as much as possible and not risk like screwing something up and and ironically because the game is already so mysterious it right it's it's a it's a really risky game like when you have any of those sorts of bugs with a game like this it it really compounds it that said i i think like and i'm like you justin i can feel in my gut that i would love this game as much as freshwood it is actually like honestly quite irritating where i'm like

getting mad playing the game because i feel like i'm being deprived of something i know i will love so the what i've made the decision to do is i i got pretty far i got to a point that fresh and i had talked about that we're actually going to end up not talking about on the show because it's a spoiler um but i'm gonna put it away after this and i'm gonna go back to it at christmas when i think that there's going to be like plenty of patches and whether it's the pc version of the ps5 version i'm gonna just start over from the beginning um because i i i personally do not want to muscle through at the risk of like continuing to be irritated with it um knowing that like i said i think fresh is right like i think there's a

brilliant game here i would say for people who are listening if you are a diehard fan and you can't wait like definitely but i i don't necessarily think it's a bad idea to wait even a couple weeks because patches come. I mean, I think there's already been like four patches for this game. They're coming in fast. I would like to if I can before we move too far along. I just wanted to say because that is the most I've said about it. I just wanted to enthuse a bit to kind of balance out the frustration that I spent so much time.

This is a really, the fact that this game is made in 2023 is like really makes me happy. Like the fact that something this weird, it, it not only is weird narratively, mechanically, like it doesn't, it, it, it asks more of you as a player than a lot of games in this genre do, right? We're like, where's the screwdriver? Someone needs this. You need the screwdriver to open the lock. Where is it? You don't know. You don't know where the screwdriver is. Look around for it. No dice. This can't be right. And then you find a note somewhere that's like, Hey, I was using the screwdriver on this ride over here. And it's like, oh, shit.

But the game wasn't nudging me to that. It wasn't making it glow. It wasn't Saga saying, I should maybe look at the picture on the ground to see if it has these screwdriver clues. And I think it's so cool mechanically to have something that has you engaged like that. But also like the narrative. There are layers of like meta to some of the scenes in this game without to keep it like context free to not spoil anything there is a scene where the actor playing alan wake is playing alan wake in a video clip on a fake tv show where he is joined by sam lake who is the creative

director of the game pretending to be a creation of the author in a movie adaptation p.s it's not his voice it's a different actor's voice but p.p.s that combination of actor and voice is max pain max fucking pain yeah and this character basically we all agree like it is max pain right yeah oh unquestionably yeah that is uh so like and that is also happening in this same scene it is unthinkable wild. And that same character is in the saga universe, a FBI employee. It's a real person. Yeah. Yes.

That shit. And he's, by the way, the movie adaptation of the novel that Alan Wake does not approve of. And I think what's really cool is that this is not new for Remedy. They've basically been doing levels of this since the first Max Payne came out, like 2000, whenever that was.

levels of this since the first max pain came out in like 2000 whenever that was and the fact that they've just further leaned into it in like outrageous unexpected ways is and further leaned into giving themselves more of a verse yes i love that i love that give me all those fucking crossovers you got in stock please this has made me feel guilty for not finishing control i finished control but i didn't play the alan wake don't go which i heard was not good yeah it's not very good watch a video instead yeah just watch a video control is a great game but the dlc was not very good i i wish that some of the man this i bang this drum too much on this show and i worry that it makes me sound like a a real fuddy-duddy but uh the open world stuff in this game i i am just constantly sort of frustrated by uh because i there's a there's a big forest they explore where lots of you know murder and scary stuff

happens and at a certain point a bunch more of the forest opens up and it's like, I'm going to explore before I go and do anything else. And so you can walk around and, you know, find hidden lunchboxes and get manuscript pages, which is like a currency you can spend to upgrade your skills

in some of the most sort of banal methods imaginable. Like the mechanical upgrades in this game are pretty wild like oh the last shot in your pistol will have 10 increased damage that was worth the 15 minute like trek i saw some of the i will say some of the upgrades are much better than that like pretty impactful i'm saying that like the traipsing around stuff is it has not been worth it at all especially when you know i i went deep into the forest explored it all found all the lunch boxes that i felt like finding solved a bunch of neat

puzzles and then i was on the opposite end of the land from the parking lot i needed to go to which was a full-blown uninterrupted like 10 minute jog through a forest where nothing happened just so i could get back to my car and drive drive home and the same in like the alan wake stuff like uh areas there's just a lot of just like oh there's some new spots on my map i can go run around and check out and get some upgrade points that are not especially exciting when all i want to do is watch clips of this weird fictional triple fictional talk show and like dive into the story i mean for what it's worth i i get the sense that you could beat the entire game without any of those upgrades for what it's worth i i absolutely but he didn't put

them in the game they did that's that's what i'm saying is i wish that it had focused more on what is cool about this game because there's a lot that's really cool about this game and it is not stumbling around an open world and backtracking and doubling back to find things that aren't aren't meaningful or cool or exciting in any way my my only counterpoint to to that because i agree with a lot of it is i think the actual things that you do in these open areas that are optional are quite cool and I think what you do the game opens with saga's story the FBI agent and when this extra area of the woods doesn't open up I think what you find there sets up what is going to happen in Alan's story really well.

Yeah. I almost. And vice versa. Like you get the same thing the other way around. Yes. Yeah. Trust me. You do. Yeah.

It definitely. I'm not talking about a thing you get. I actually don't care about. But the other point of this is like, I don't care about any of the rewards for any of this stuff. I, I think the story things that you're doing are interesting enough that like again it somehow it felt worse when you would do something really cool and it's like

and here's a charm that does blank and it's like oh well i didn't actually need anything i just kind of enjoyed getting the story um anyway i i i think we're probably getting close to time. I do want to say Sam Lake's career increasingly reminds me of Damon Lindelof in that I think it started with some very well done but very mainstream meat. I don't know. Like fodder entertainment. That sounds meatier than I think. Are you talking about Max Payne specifically? Yeah. Max Payne is not,

even though it was kind of at its surface a mainstream game, it's extremely not. Like it really isn't. If you go back and like- I think if we were to poll our audience and ask who among them have played the Max Payne games, I think it would be a staggeringly low percentage.

Yeah. We're old. What I'm saying is I don't think these games are like especially well-written and I don't think the stories are especially rich. I think that they're aspiring to do those things, but I don't think that they're like, they're there in Max Payne. I think Alan Wake gets closer.

I think each game is getting better and better. And I think- They're also getting better at integrating. You talked about this earlier. I get so irritated when a piece of media is so much about another kind of media that I'm just like, well, why don't I just go do that? Like, if you love books so much, just write a book.

I feel like they're doing a better job of finding what's special about an interactive electronic product being in conversation with it rather than just holding it up and saying isn't this cool and they actually have tried the isn't it's cool in quantum break and it really didn't work and i think this is much more a much more smart way to integrate those two medias in a way that like feels consistent with what they're doing and feels like fun in its own thing. Yes, and the reason I mentioned the Lindelof of it all

is I think if you look at something like The Leftovers and how it plays with the genre, I think you see a lot of that here. And I think if you look at Watchmen and how it treats a familiar property but then does its own thing, even though this isn't officially a Twin Peaks game or a Johnny Carpenter game, it is borrowing about as much from those texts as the watchman tv show is borrowing

from the comic and then going off and doing its own thing yeah um and i think it's doing it in a very like mature and thoughtful way i yeah i just think it's great whenever you can see a writer it's not so unlike stephen king himself who is, at the end of the day, the very center of this text, who I think just has gotten stronger and more interesting the more he writes. Yeah, man. game which is that i have not enjoyed large swaths of it and i'm probably gonna go back to it just to keep trying to unravel the the many many threads of it and there's like a sense of dread i feel where it's like well i'm not gonna fucking like a lot of the i'm feeling the same way i'm not really i i yeah i'm i'm struggling with the same i would recommend it's hard to like give any pro tips but i think for what it's worth from a like a if you're trying to like rationalize what should i focus on in the game or where will

i get the most out of it um i think the saga stuff when you're at a certain point you can choose which character you're playing as if you're looking for like more of a twin peaks in the quote real world of twin peaks not in the whatever that room is in Twin Peaks, the weird room play a saga saga. You will do like weird stuff where you'll like walk into a bar and someone will be singing Finnish karaoke on the stage and you'll just stand there and watch them singing karaoke. So focus on saga stuff.

If you're looking for fun and bullets to shoot yeah if you're looking for more lore alan wake deep divey stuff the alan wake stuff parts of the game do a lot more of that and are more i guess action heavy to some extent you're gonna do both of them right sorry you have to do both by the end if you want to finish the game. But also, I'm just going to say it before Fresh can, play Alan Wake's first mission before you play the first mission from Saga. Once you were given a choice in the game and you actually started Saga, you should switch over to Alan Wake for one mission. Yeah, it's basically after you do whatever you want.

It's the sequence after you do the subway stuff with Alan Wake, which is the first. Why didn't you tell me this, Russ, before I did the wrong thing? I'm sorry? Why didn't you tell me this? Why are you just telling Plant? Why didn't you tell me? I don't know. I just wanted you guys to play the game as much.

I honestly think Saga's chapter is also really effing good. So I think you're fine either way. Okay. The Alan Wake thing is a very Justin moment. Okay. Yeah, yeah. You know I like things that are focused on myself. And for what it's worth,

you don't need to wait for a chapter break. There's a lot of save points in the game where you can switch at will. There's like a puddle of spilled coffee, and you stare into that for a while, and you'll switch over. So just keep an eye out whenever you enter a save room. This game is fucking wild.

I really hope that you guys stick with it as it sounds like you might. And I do agree for what it's worth. If you're running into bugs, wait a month or a month and a half, whatever it's going to take. And I'm sure a lot of the rough edges will get smoothed out. I want people to have the best possible experience in playing

this game because it's extremely special and there are very very few of them. For what it's worth, I am playing on PC and I have not experienced any of the bugs that y'all have talked about. It's good old normal American boring.

Not since books. Not since books. Home Wake is not normal American boring. Yeah. Not since books. Not since books. Home Wake is not books level boring, I will say. It's more fun than books. Should we take a break and then talk about, let me see, it says Kojima and Remedy. I can't imagine that'll be a controversial conversation. Let's find out right after this.

So real quick, I just wanted to kind of dive into something that we kind of touched on a little bit in the first half of the show which is you know this game is like one of the like last maybe triple a weird fucking games that we're going to see for a very long time and i think the only other studio that is putting those out come from uh kojima productions and his stuff but it kind of bums me out that this is like because video games have become so expensive and so risk adverse that like we just don't see these anymore and i don't know how you guys feel about that, whether you want more of this stuff or what, how do you even make more of this without it being like a huge money sink? I mean,

if every game was, or more games were like this, I feel like it would dramatically reduce my interest in continuing to play Alan Wake 2. I think it is the, the exceeding strangeness of this and, and uniqueness of this game that makes me play it is the only reason I play Death Wake 2. I think it is the exceeding strangeness of this and uniqueness of this game that makes me play it.

It is the only reason I play Death Stranding is because I was like, wow, I've never played a game like this before. I don't like it, but it's different.

So I'm not exactly chomping at the bit for more Death Stranding. I think I've said that exact sentence in several episodes. We have some reader mail for you coming up. Oh boy, I can't fuckinging. I think I've said that exact sentence in several episodes. We have some reader mail for you coming up. Oh boy, I can't fucking wait.

I think that a lot of these, if you want to use the term auteurs, would be better served if they would work in smaller projects, more contained projects. I think one of Kojima's most like 100 successful things he's ever done is pt right yeah like and and that is ostensibly a very small contained thing that had this whole life outside of it but it is as big as it needed to be to get across the ideas that he

wanted to do i feel like a lot of of times creators end up straddling this gap between like the budget that they want, which requires a certain size of thing. And doesn't necessarily like that's not necessarily the scope that this idea needs to be. It's just what it needs to be to be like a quote unquote $60 video game in the year of our Lord 2023. Yeah, I think I agree with that. The good news is that I think this quote weird genre, whatever we want to call it, is so well represented within the indie space and smaller projects that I don't necessarily need a big name studio director with 200 people working under them to produce these sorts of games all the

time it's just interesting that like for triple a they're almost not they're almost dead like nearly nearly dead and so i'm getting enough weird game stuff out of indies i'm like very uh satisfied on that front it but it's the triple a part of it that I think is the most interesting about this. I think the funny part there is you said 200-person studio, which at this point, I don't know if you're talking about the indie studio or the AAA studio. I mean, there are not... But that's what I mean is things are so weird right now

and that term, you know, like indie, there are these mid-budget games that are are coming out i mean we have a stalker 2 coming out you know at some point hopefully in early next year yeah i mean you're right the word indie is not necessarily representative of anything um mostly it's just a scale thing i wouldn't necessarily yeah and i'm not not trying to be pedantic i'm actually saying i think that you're i think you're validating your point by saying that which is that like all of this has gotten so messy i think even things you know whether they're good or bad for the industry in the long run but like the game pass of it all on streaming services you know xbox wants

to release more games now netflix does too and you have these companies that just want to have a certain cadence which means they're not looking you know they have two businesses they have the living games business which is the really big thing that needs to live forever and then they have the thing that's like hey this is 10 hours and we want you to play it this weekend and i i would hope that that will lead to more stuff like this. I mean, I'm sure, Frush, there are games that you can think of on Game Pass that meet that. Yeah, I mean, as I was playing it, I forgot to mention the first half of this. Actually, Psychonauts 2 is a really good analog to this game, because you're right. Mechanically, there are some aspects that don't 100% land, but because it's A, super weird,

aspects that don't 100 land but because it's a super weird be like auteur led um and that's not just tim schafer i mean like the whole team each individual level in psychonauts 2 felt like its own standout experience and thing and that has a lot of analogs to this but i think psychonauts 2 is the last of that giant project that double Fine is making because of the nature of Game Pass, not necessarily encouraging a ton of 30 hour, whatever, games. If you look at a lot of the stuff that's coming out in streaming these days on TV, a lot of it would not have made sense in the network template. Yeah. Right? You think about how many shows that I watch regularly are like a season is six episodes. Right. A season is eight episodes. That would have been unheard of 10, 15 years ago.

Like it just you'd be a miniseries like it's not that's not a television show. And I'd like to see it'd be nice if games could start to find some of those, you know, those experiences to something with like triple a you know funding behind it but like in a much more contained uh what's funny is that i think they've tried in the past and i think that they've tried in the form of like episodic releases and that has never gone well yeah the problem is to spin up a project that is like a triple a scale project is to kind of commit and like you're committing of x amount of resources to support this thing and if it's going to be a two-hour experience that's going to sell for whatever 10 or 20 dollars you can't necessarily get that roi back so it is this weird like synergy of business

and creativity that makes video game development like so fucking hard i i i would say like kind of two notes on that though i think that's less and less true because of unreal and other engines getting so much easier to use in just allowing for triple a fidelity this is the north white engine for what it's worth this is not unreal i did want to correct one aspect oh yeah thank you thank you thank you you're right they haven't been forced to switch yet. Which, hey, maybe that would be for the better for bugs. But anyway, what I mean by that, though, is it is easier for very small studios to make big, beautiful 3D games if that's what we're talking about. So I think it is possible to make smaller things in a way that people couldn't in the past. There's only one other thing I just want to clarify because I know there's a certain type of person who's listening to this. And here's a saying, auteur. The auteur theory is like, not, it's not even possible in video games. is these are games that put creative first on every level before they put whatever the publisher wants

or the marketing team or anything else. Every level has creative people empowered to actually make decisions that are coming from a place of genuine vision and not just, hey, this is what's next on the docket. How do we get monetization into this or whatever? Yeah. I'm actually probably misusing auteur also to not like I am.

I think what I am talking about more is like a narrative first approach that straddles the lines of the medium, straddles uh tv movies whatever um because obviously there's a lot of auteurs that are just mechanical right so you wouldn't even really i think stardew valley is an auteur game for example like well that's a great point yeah for sure yes when you can be literally one person who makes a game yeah yeah anyway i i agree with you i think this is an interesting conundrum i i do wonder if it's that different than the past you know like i can't even think of a whole lot of games that had big budgets i don't know 15 years ago that were as weird as this there were more games but were there games this weird i mean it's one of the weirdest fucking games i've ever played i mean it's pretty weird yeah and same with death stranding like you know kojima was making

metal gear which don't get me wrong weird metal gear 4 especially but like death stranding is like a whole different level it's so weird i think the weirdest thing of all this is that there's a death stranding 2 that's how do you a time. I agree with you, Justin. The studio heads were like, Kojima-san, baby, people love carrying shit around. Get back to the death terminal, baby. The fans are clamoring for it. The pack mules, they demand it. Get back out there, baby, another carrying game.

This is such a good segue, Justin. Well done. We have reader mail coming from Slyfer Jam, or Slyfer Jam, I guess. I'm in the camp of people who love death stranding and are looking forward to the sequel the desolate world and lonely atmosphere of the game combined with the strange sense of community from seeing all the other porters buildings and messages was delightful was a delightful juxtaposition the credits of the game even have a section that lists the names of all the other players that you helped and helped you.

I totally agree. Mr. Scratch was trying to use his words to shift the narrative of how good Death Stranding actually is. Every step, every bit of hollow praise brings me closer to the dark place. But I must go deeper. Yeah, I mean, that stuff's cool that stuff is kick that stuff

does kick ass i agree i love a lot i love a lot of this stuff about death stranding except the playing of it and the love rita one of the greatest things about death stranding is how the critical reaction to it and just everybody's reaction to it is changing for the better and more and more people love this game. And at the same time... It's not that people love the game that is so weird to me. It's that... It's that

people finished it, and then the people with the money were like, Kojima, you're starving them, baby! Get back out! They gotta eat! They gotta carry more new things! You know what happened, which was Kojima showed up at the house and they were like oh boy okay so we did death stranding it went good we like the weird stuff with the baby what do you have on the docket next and kojima's like buckle the fuck up and just drew a two on the board. I will play Death Stranding 2

if that is genuinely the salesman. If the pitch for Death Stranding 2 is Kojima had some ideas that were far too wet and wild for Death Stranding 1. Bigger, heavier, more unwieldy. It's Death Stranding 2. So in the first game,

Norman Reedus drank his own piss that turned into Mountain Dew. What happens in the next one? Just you fucking wait. Big news, baby. He's preggo again, and yeah, it's twins. Here we go. He makes twins out.

He shits out a whole McDonald's, and other players help with their own shit. And twins. We have a couple more emails. This comes from Catherine. As a Canadian, I resented the implication stated that we also mangle the pronunciation of Mario.

So apparently it's not, hashtag not all Canadians say Mario. So I apologize to the other Canadians. As somebody who has family from Canada, I can tell you that it's pronounced La Mario. Yeah, it's true legally they have to pronounce it that way both ways um uh we have one more uh letter i should say uh these

are all from the newsletter in the comments so if you want to submit questions and thoughts uh do it in the comments of the newsletter at besties.fan this comes from nanchoman definitely off topic but have you have any of you played Shadow of Doubt yet? It's a procedurally generated detective mystery with an insane amount of detail and the sort of emergent stories you might see in an immersive sim or something like that.

I have a feeling some of you would have a super fun time with it. Also play Dwarf Fortress, you cowards. We're not going to play Dwarf Fortress. I did play it. No, I did play it. It scared me. I did play it. No, I did play it. It scared me. Didn't like it.

No, it wasn't. Didn't like it. This game looks dope as fuck, though. Yeah, I've seen trailers for this game. I've been kind of following the development of this game. It looks super fucking sick. I think it's still in early access. There's a part of me that wants to wait until it hits like a 1.0 release,

but I think we will definitely at some point play it because it seems like our kind of jam. Okay, do we have any honorable mentions to discuss? I just wanted to say that I finished The Sisters Brothers as a book. They made a movie out of it. Oh, yeah. The book's great. It's sort of like, if you like Coen Brothers stuff or... I finished the sisters brothers is a book. They made a movie of it. Oh yeah. Books. Great.

It's a sort of like, if you like Coen brothers stuff or yeah, that's probably the best, the best analog or just sort of like, it's funny and dark and really well written. It is like, you could tell every word is like very thoughtfully chosen and it's, it's a genuine joy to read i

really really really enjoyed it it's called the sisters brothers it's a western about two brothers who are hitmen um and they're sort of like journey uh through the west i also wanted to say i 100% spider-man 2 wow ama were you disappointed by the lack of funny costumes in the unlockables? Yes, I think a lot of the costumes suck in Spider-Man 2. Just like normie. They're like normie costumes. I want silly costumes. Yeah, you got to give me baghead. Let me be fucking Spider-Ham.

I know you got the pollies in there. Let me be Spider-Ham. Come on. But I thought the narrative beats for the rewards were like, they were all pretty good. They were all pretty fun. There's even a fun Easter egg if you get all the spider bugs or whatever they're, spider drones.

And I thought the end of the game was really well done too. I just think that's a great fucking video game. Yeah, they did a good job. Just a really good good really good job i've i i never do 100 of a game and i i just thought and they made it very easy for what it's worth everything you need to 100 is in the game you don't need to look anything up it's all yeah like babies could do it sorry russ um i there I... There are things you can get, like items that help you

find some little... Oh, and there's one of the little... Oh my god, I have to tell you this, in case you're trying to do this. There's one of the EMF experiments, which is like Peter Parker's little science chemical things, that you can't get until you beat the game. So do not spend time

swinging around looking for it, because it won't be there until beat the game. So do not spend time swinging around looking for it because it won't be there until after the game is over. I played through and finished all of Sea of Stars. Gotta have been waiting for this, Griff. Yeah, I did the whole true ending stuff. I really, really liked it. I'm very glad that I went back to it. I maintain that the writing is the weakest part,

but I think I reserve that mostly just for the dialogue. The characters in the game are great. The world building that happens, largely through these stories that you can hear while you're camping out with all of your teammates are very, very cool. And I found myself getting really invested in this connected world with the messenger. This game is telling a gigantic story. It is a sliver of this like huge ongoing parallel dimension spanning conflict that is like really, really fascinating and that it doesn't really – it never really betrays the idea that you are a small cog in a much larger machine. Because the game's ending is I think on paper a little bit – I don't know.

I'm not actually going to get into that. I don't know why I not actually gonna get into that I don't know why I'm spiraling so much uh all that to say is like I didn't play the messenger and now I am going back and playing it just so I can uh figure out all of the connections uh between those two games but uh yeah really really enjoyable to play um I saw someone describe it as RPG comfort food I think that's a very apt way of describing it. But the presentation is immaculate. And once it got its hooks in me, I mean, it took a while to get there. But once it got its hooks in me, I felt thoroughly propelled to just finish the hell out of it. And I'm really

glad I did. It has made me want to actually go back and give uh chained echoes another shot which was the other sort of classic jrpg inspired uh title that i think came out last december that i never put a ton of time into you played that right didn't you which one chained echoes they all kind of blend together for me i think i think you're thinking of astral chain oh yeah that's a totally totally different uh jam um but yeah i i i like sea of stars i i feel like it is a if if the writing had been as strong as the the presentation and the gameplay and everything else like i think it would be a genuine masterpiece that could hang like with like hang on the shelf with chrono trigger and and and the many games that inspired it i think it falls just short of that but i also think it is one of the better like jrpg uh inspired games that i've maybe ever

played so uh if that sounds like your thing i i would recommend sticking with it. Hey, check your watch. Unless you're driving, then don't check your watch. It's November time, which means it's not Halloween, but it's not quite Christmas. It means it's time for Paranorman, the greatest November movie outside of planes, trains, and automobiles that you will find. Paranorman rules, and I want to make it a seasonal thing for as many people as possible. For a non-season. For a gap between seasons.

It's Paranorman season. It's its own season. It's PS. I love you Paranorman season. Yeah, that's a good movie. I enjoy it quite a bit as well. I have another movie recommendation. This is Venture Brothers.

Radiant is the blood of the bamboo heart, which is the Venture Brothers movie. I think it went straight to digital. It released earlier this year and now it's on streaming. You should not watch it if you've never watched the Venture Brothers TV show. It is extremely the Venture Brothers TV show to a T. But that show essentially got canceled and this was their i guess last hurrah unless they decide to make another movie um but uh it's it's great i love the show i think it's if you're a fan of um harley quinn the new harley quinn series uh i think it's tonally very similar. And it's great to see all those folks back together again

in that very complicated and funny world that they made. Harley Quinn has Ron in it. Does this one have Ron? I don't think this has Ron in it. I don't know how many friends of Bestie's are in Venture Brothers, but if, I don't know, one of them listens, please write in and let us know. Okay.

Well, that's a podcast, right? Yeah. That's a whole podcast. No argument here. Next week, what's going on? What are we doing? We are going to be playing a little game called Metal Gear Solid 3, which we can now play because it was

re-released as part of the Metal Gear Solid Collection Volume 1. But this is not the remake of it? This is not the remake. That is at least a year out, if not more. Perfect. This is the original. Oh, I hate that. I hate Metal Gear Solid. We can judge it, and this will probably

be the last one we do for a while, because I have no idea how we would play Metal Gear Solid 4, which is only on PS3. Justin, I think you're going to be okay. Justin, Metal Gear Solid 3 is the fun one. It is the fun one. In menu navigator. If you love going into menus and adjusting your camouflage every 10 seconds

like you're checking an Alan Wake 2 map, this is the game for you. It's the fun one. So we're going to be playing that. Please join us for that fun time. Justin will be way more positive than he might be. I got the shits. Can't come to a podcast. Justin, last time you said this, it was Sea of Stars.

That's true. Now that was one I had. No, no, no, no. That was ignorance. This is stubbornness. It's two different things. Hey, speaking of tummy things, I think we should wrap up this episode. Wait, no, no, no. That was ignorance. This is stubbornness. Okay. Hey, speaking of tummy things,

I think we should wrap up this episode. Wait, I want to know. I need to thank the following people for writing reviews to the besties on Apple podcast. We have Ross made me read this and total Ross and taco cruncher. I don't know what's going on with the Ross stuff, but that's fine. I guess I'm Ross now. But thank you for writing reviews and subscribing to the newsletter at besties.fan.

All right. That's going to do it for us this week. Be sure to join us again next time for The Besties!