The Besties - Besties 2022 GOTY Extravaganza - Part One

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

IT BEGINS. Well, it ends. Okay, actually, both. This week, we're taking our top 16 games of the year and pitting them against one another in arbitrary combat until only eight remain. Next week, we'll get things sorted down to a nice, tidy ranking of the five best games of the year. Join us! But like, get comfortable, because this is going to take a while. 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!

It happened again, guys. Happened again. What happened? What happened? Snubbed at the Game Awards. Snubbed is, which one were you vying for? Best Gamer. Top, just Best Gamer?

World's Best Gamer. Knows the most cheat codes. Do you feel like you need to stop putting so much money into your campaigns? Yeah. No. I was curious about that because I opened up a woman's day at kroger yeah and there was a two-page spread of you in black and white arms outstretched shirtless yeah and it said for your consideration yeah it's just like who are you trying to reach it didn't even say best gamer

or yeah none of that it's just nothing consideration and it said fuck greg miller on it and it and that's not even like you're not even supposed to cuss in magazines yeah that was that's true i got it in a little bit of trouble they let people with names in the influencer category anymore i think you you gotta be you gotta be like stinkman 69 380 well i guess next year keep keep an eye out for Fart Guy 23. Fart Guy? Fart Guy 20. Fart Guy 23.

This message is brought to you by the Fart Greg Miller campaign. My name is Fart Master 23, and I approve this message. Fart Greg Miller. Attack ads. That's what the influencer category needs. Tear everybody else down. My name is Justin McElroy and I know, I can't believe I finally get to say it, the best game of the year. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I've known the best game of the year in my heart of hearts for a long time.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and we're going to be talking about Nier Automata. We're going to be talking 13 Sentinels. We're going to be talking Spelunky 1 and Spelunky 2. I am ready. My name is Russ Froschek and I'm the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a video game club, but just by listening, my friend, you are an official member. Congratulations. Congratulations. Today we are going to be honoring pretty much the only consistent, and even this is like semi-consistent feature of the Besties experiment,

as we like to think of it here, our game of the year, picking the best game of the year. And you say consistent because generally we've done it the same way for many years. No, it's just that this kind of shape is usually at the end of this part of the year around here. Yeah, that's as consistent as it gets. There were years where we didn't do the show except

for this episode. We've always done this episode, right? Yes, as far as I can remember. Yeah. I think we're 11 years and counting. Is that right? Yes. As far as I can remember. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're 11 years and counting. Is that right?

10 or 11. Something like that. I think this is our 10th one. I think this is our 10th Game of the Year special. Congratulations, everybody. One other thing that is consistent about this, we do it, but we change the rules basically every time. Every time. Yeah.

Should I explain the rules for this year? Please do, because I think it is your masterpiece, Chris Blake. Yeah, it's really good. That's really kind of you. Wait, wait, wait. Before you do this, can I say one thing? Before you tell how we're going to do it this year, I just want to real quick run through our previous winners.

Oh, sure. Oh, great. Great idea. 2012, Dishonored. 2013, The Legend of Zelda A Link Between Worlds. Nope. Sorry, can you pause for one second? I believe those were the only two games to actually win the bestie, which was a statue of Marcus Fenix that I clay-painted gold. Oh, my God.

Wait, did you have two different ones, or did you take it from Arcane to give it to Nintendo? I just never bothered to put it in the mail. Yeah, I don't think we ever gave it to anyone. They had it. Do you know where the bestie is now, Plant? I don't know if it made my last move. It made it to Texas, but I don't know if it made it from Texas to California, you know?

2014 Dark Souls 2, and that was with New York Giraffe putting in a tiebreaker vote over Hearthstone. I feel about that. Suspect. New York Giraffe. 2015, this is my favorite. This is from the besties wiki on fandom uh inconclusive bloodborne won the initial vote but chris and russ were willing to switch to rocket league and then new york giraffe showed up to second griffin's favorite undertale which is where the discussion ended. That is a fine year for the roses there in 2015, 2016,

Stardew Valley, 2017, the legend of Zelda breath of the wild 2018, return of the Obra Dinn, Lucas, where you at 2019, Sekiro shadows die twice, 2020,

Hades 2021, resident evil village. That's a wild one. Yeah. That's surprising. I don't remember. That was last year. We're actually doing our 11th winner this year.

This will be our 11th winner. Well, not if you count 2015. Not if you count 2015. Our 10th winner. It's like the 30th winner. Okay. What's the plan? Should I do it?

Yeah, do it. Okay, here's how it works. We do a bracket. There are 16 games in this bracket. 12 of them were picked by us. Four of them were voted on by y'all, the listeners, right? We're going to do a round of that bracket today. Just one round.

That is eight matchups. That's a lot. That's a lot for your ears, and we're really excited about it. eight matchups. That's a lot. That's a lot for your ears, and we're really excited about it. After we do that, next week, we're going to get that eight down to a final four. And once we get to

the final four, we're not going to do what we used to do, which is, like, have basically some of our favorite games, I don't know, ever have to, like, fight each other. That's not fun. That's just bullying things we like. We're going to take those final four. We're going to take those final four. We're going to throw in Elden Ring.

You were wondering where that was at. I saw you. I saw you on the comments. Yeah, Elden Ring is not even going to show up in round one. It instantly makes it to the final four. It makes it there, which becomes the final five. And then together as a team, we're going to put together the besties top five. So it's going to be more about placement

than it is about dunking on all of these awesome games. Is this a fix to solve the problem that there will be no tension as to what our number one game of the year will be? I don't. So I am not fully convinced that Elden Ring is our number one game. I love that. That's so cute. I love this stuff.

I could definitely be wrong, but hey, there have been a lot of great games that ended up not winning. Yeah. Because of like weird, I don't know, the math doesn't always add up. Let's take a quick break and then let's get there. Let's do it. I love this first matchup, guys. I'm so excited for this one. Kirby and the Forgotten Land versus Pokemon. Do you like it because one of them has to lose? No matter who wins, I win. I think Justin liked Kirby, no? Oh, no, I like Kirby a lot.

Quite a bit, actually. Okay, well, do you want to take that one, Justin? Because I can't imagine you want to take Pokemon. I'm no great expert in the Kirby lineage. He's pink and round. Yeah, ducked in and out on. What made Kirby such a special game for me, and I think at least one other person on here, it is just a great game to share with somebody.

So it's Kirby. you're running around you're you're uh sucking up other enemies and and uh using their powers against them and that's just as like fun and cool as it's ever been there's a lot of like feels very different character to character and then you inhale like bigger stuff that can do some environmental puzzles sucking up stairs and things like that lots of collectibles lots of like all the fun third person platformer stuff um and then you can throw a second player on there as waddle d who is uh not less powerful oh i mean it is less powerful but is different abilities more like mobility and some more distance attacks and stuff like that um and it just makes a really great game, especially to play with a kid who maybe hasn't mastered 3D control,

but wants to be able to participate. And it looks great. It's just so eager to please. And the bosses actually ramp up in difficulty in a really satisfying way. I just want to say there's an epic moment, and I think I talked about this when we initially talked about the game where uh king ddd like basically sacrifices himself

to save kirby and friends like has this epic moment where an elevator door is closing and he's like no keep going and he like faces off an army with his hammer like i did not expect an emotional connection to a kirby game and they fucking nailed it i also want to say that this game has a difficulty curve that kirby and i would say nintendo games in general are not known for this game has like once you beat the game it unlocks this like shadow world that is way tougher than anything else in the game it unlocks these like tournaments these like boss rush style tournaments with like hell versions of bosses that are present throughout the game uh henry was very much in that like not super experienced with 3D, you know, gaming,

twin stick, like moving and looking at the same time, sort of gaming. This was the game he cut his teeth on this year and went from like being pretty much a novice at this style of game to like me and him, like jumping up and down and screaming as we took down the like nightmare boss at the end of the the final tournament it was uh i don't know if this is my game of the year but that's definitely like my favorite moment i had this year playing video games i and literally the exact same thing

with mosey and there's something about the design in this game it is like a lesson on how to play 3d games it it is 2d and it's not it's like that 2.5d at times the way it feels so simple it's not you know not open world like uh mario odyssey or mario 64 um and it it's forgiving the the decision to just change your health if you want to put on easy mode is so simple but so effective at keeping you in the game. You know, it's basically enough health to kind of bash through the level. But it's not just unlimited health. I completely agree in that playing it with Mo, it really opened my eyes to, you know, what goes into designing a game like this for kids. Yeah.

And stuff that I think we've talked about this, but that I just ran past whenever I played this sort of game. And, you know, Mo would spend hours, hours at the home base and, like, going to sleep. And every time we finished the game, he had to tuck Kirby into his bed in his house. That's so cute. Yeah. had to tuck kirby into his bed in his house um yeah and like that those little details are there for a reason even if us old adults you know skip right past them there's one decision that this game makes that i think is truly inspired and i think every tired franchise in the world can learn from which is they they just simply asked what is it that this character actually does?

Right? And here's what I mean by that. They said, Kirby, what does he do? He swallows things and takes their powers. And I'm like, yeah, but how can we show that in a different way? And they're like, what if he just swallows them and they get stuck? And it's a brilliant idea. Yeah.

Like, what if he just swallows a car and instead instead of turning into, like, a fun cartoon car, he just has a car stuck in his body? That's great. I don't know. That's a great idea. Tell me more. And they just keep doing it throughout the game, and it's awesome.

It's so funny every damn time. I really hope you guys are not counting on me to represent Pokemon Legends Arceus. Yeah, we definitely are. Was this a reader contribution? I'll talk about it. Yeah, I think Chris was the one who dug it the most. I think it was a reader vote.

Okay. Plant, what is it about this one that resonated with you? They did something new. That's true. That's it. You know, they tried something new new and is the bar so low yes yes it is they they haven't they haven't really tried a whole lot new like this in in decades and this has been the dream since i had you know pokemon red on my you know game boy of

like what would it be like if we had a console a real console video game pokemon and then once open world games came out oh man what what if it was this and they did it is it extremely rough around the edges yeah definitely would i like the um the setting to be like denser and look like i don't know like a finished video game? For sure. Then again, I saw Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and that somehow got even worse. So maybe I have to reset my expectations again. I don't know. Do I think it is better than Kirby and the Forgotten Land?

Absolutely not. I think this is a pretty easy one because Kirby and the Forgotten Land is, to me, a franchise that I was kind of mixed on, hitting its, like, potential. And Pokemon Arceus is at the very start of that journey. Like, I would not be surprised if a sequel, if they really buckled down and were given the resources and the time, which I know is a big ask, could be awesome. which i know is a big ask could be awesome but no kirby in the forgotten land i mean this is this is the nintendo game for me of this year and i would have never guessed it would have been a kirby in a year with two pokemon games yep yeah i i want i like desperately want this to be the

future of the pokemon franchise and i realize there's a lot of people out there that want the traditional turn-based, but with a better game engine or whatever, just better performance. But I find this way more engaging than traditional Pokemon combat. And so I want this to be the future, but I am deeply concerned

that they don't have the back end to hold this up long-term. Maybe Scarlet and Viol violet and the critical response sold a billion trillion it did hold on i i am uh i maybe next year is the year where i just give up hope on this franchise no but like i know that's sacri sacrilegious to say a bit but i am i the further i get from the release of scarlet and violet the more sort of like pissed off i am about how how uh just lazy the those games are i think this is my point rcs is is it i will agree i think of i was excited about scarlet and violet after playing rcs and said basically the same thing of like wow this is a cool rough draft

and then they released a rougher draft let me just say this about scarlet and violet there has never been a more critically panned main pokemon game than scarlet and violet i agree with you the sales are through the roof outrageously high it does make me wonder whether the critical response will make them look a little more inward than they have previously and be like, we need to make this not the shoddiest project imaginable. And I think that that work would carry over to whatever a potential sequel of Arceus would be. i i that's the dream but i also think that this franchise is a such a revenue engine uh yeah for nintendo that it i i find it pretty unlikely that they would slow their what i would say is cod was that too and cod eventually took time off between games because they realized they couldn't keep up i'm i'm optimistic that Arceus could do that. I am not optimistic that the main line will change really at all.

Yeah. I kind of think they both have to because they're both running on the same engine. All right. Well, we're... Anyway, in the weeds. This is well outside our purview today. Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.

Hey, guess what? Congratulations to a little game called Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Yeah. We'll see you next week hell yeah okay next up what do we got justin uh well our next matchup is mario plus rabbits warriors of light i just made that up and call of the lamb what is mario's versus rabbits sparks of hope sparks of hope I wasn't that far off. Was I just guessing?

Sparks have light. And if you're gonna play this one, maybe think about sparking some dope to really, because you'll love the jokes that these rabbits make when you're like fucked up, faded. Who's talking about,

it feels like maybe this one's you again. Well, no, i really like this game too yeah okay fresh got it please fresh i want to hear you yeah i'll do it so again uh just you know we talked about this game probably two or three months ago and i think we all went into it expecting a very uh by the books sequel where you're more or less just adding new levels to like the framework that was established in the first game what they went ahead and did was re-examine every single aspect that was introduced in the original mario plus rabbits and think about ways that they could do it better

uh you know we've given a lot of praise to the idea that like movement in this game feels way more kinetic than it ever has in a turn-based game because you can move anywhere you want before you actually decide okay now i'm gonna like take my action it feels like you have direct control over these characters you can attack guys before you even like take a main action and it feels like you have a lot more control over team how you build them up uh how you um you can you know pair any uh characters together. Uh, for the most part,

there's some missions that lock that out, but for the most part, you have just tons of control. And I just found it like the most engaging turn-based strategy game I've played in totally recent memory, like the last 10 years. It is really quite good on that front. I think they really nailed the gameplay.

Whether the story lands for you is like another situation. I think it's funny, but I don't think it's certainly anything to write home about. It's shitposting. It's the light, but it doesn't really stick with you. I mean, that's my only problem with this game is I really, really, really enjoyed it while I was playing it. I was really impressed by it.

And it just, i don't know i i just didn't feel a lot of motivation to keep going it also feels like the game that's most likely for me to uh finish during the holidays and then immediately regret everything i'm saying i mean your game of the year has changed 16 times throughout this year so no that couldn't be me no i think that's good to be fluid though man yeah you're passionate you're enthusiastic i love it i feel similarly not really to that extent but i very much enjoyed call of the lamb our other uh contender in this category uh if you don't remember it was quite a quite a, quite a, it was a great year for hybrids, great year for hybrid genre hybrids.

This was a sort of survival, like don't starve esque mechanics mixed with a bit of SIM because you're managing a cult that you're in charge of. And also some like third person action, rogue, like light rogue, and also some like third-person action rogue-like light, rogue-ish, because you're making these runs into the forest and coming back with like resources and followers for your cult.

Of cute little animals. Of cute little animals. It's very, it's doing a lot. It's like for a game that looks, I don't know. It's Hot Topic Animal Crossing. Yeah yeah and i say that as a compliment yeah it's it doesn't sound like it you know why do i have to hate hot topic it's like sometimes you want a good shirt animal crossing um and but it it's doing a lot that each run feels like very unique you get a lot of different upgrades as you're going through the runs and then it's got a very funny when you're managing your cult there are a lot of like quote-unquote

moral decisions that you have to make about like sacrificing people who disagree with you and making people eat feces and cannibalism etc etc etc and marry you and marry you and it's all handled it's like um it's like obstinately amoral like it it refuses to pass judgment on you no matter what your choice is like a lot of games like this it's sort of like well you could be the good kind of cult leader and the bad kind of cult leader and we know which one you are and this one's just sort of like i don't know do whatever you want you have to live with it uh they're all pretty bad yeah they're all pretty bad. Yeah, they're all pretty bad and we're not really passing Judge and Arden

one way or the other, which I found pretty entertaining. I really, I enjoy this game a lot. I think that it is the sort of thing that would be,

I could see you getting lost in like some of the mechanics and losing track of others. Like finding that balance was not always easy for me Justin, why did you think the mood shifted on this game? Because I feel like there was like a couple weeks

where it felt like this was like legit game of the year contender and not just me being an enthusiastic puppy I mean like a lot of people really liked this game When you look at real hybrids like this and I'm talking about even stuff as far back as like act razor and what was the one that was like an asynchronous multiplayer it was like an rts

where like god some people are doing force versus shooter savage i guess it was like an rt anyway um i think when you're doing stuff like this it's really hard to if something becomes like really sticky you kind of want to stay in it and i think that for me at least um the adventure parts the action segments of this were stickier than the sim aspects of it and that's funny because i felt the opposite that yeah i mean that's i think that's really interesting but it also like if it starts to feel like a portion of the game, no matter which portion it is, it's something you're sort of struggling with. I think that that was the issue I ran into late was that it started to feel, some of it started to feel like a chore to get to the stuff that I was enjoying more.

Whereas, like, a Hades, you choose how much, you can do a lot of stuff in the environment, but, like, if you don't want to engage with it and you're just frustrated about your last run, you want to get out there right away. You know, you can just do that. But this is not really that. And I think that that reveals itself much deeper into the game. And maybe that's why things turned. But super ambitious, super funny, really cool art style cool art style very enjoyable doesn't feel or look like really anything else let's dig in on that though do

you think that there's a little bit of devolver fatigue because it does i mean it doesn't look like anything else but that was the other thing that i i certainly am suffering from some of that, but this game didn't trigger it for me. Yeah, and even though I know that Devolver has kind of a tone, which is like dark. They're the publisher of this game for people who do not follow video game publishers, and they tend to do like, I don't know, Nasty Sweet at the same time.

Yeah, Nasty Sweet is probably the closest comparison, but you know like death's door i think went a slightly different way although i guess that has dark tones um yeah maybe that's it i don't know i i just think their games overall are very strong and i think this one is certainly a very strong game um i don't think it's the tone necessarily i think it's i think justin's point is good which is I think one side or the other is going to click with you, and usually only the greatest games can nail both,

and it's very, very, very rare. I literally off the top of my head can't think of one where I enjoyed both in equal. Yeah, I like the angel bits in Actraiser better than the action bits by a lot. Well, the action bits are terrible. So whichever of these games wins we're gonna have to play a little bit of this week to prep for next week so really what

i'm asking is which one do you want to revisit call of the lamb for me yeah yeah that's a clean that's a clean kill for me it's called the lamb cool i mean it's same for me so i'm cool i'm fine with that that's that's cool with me. Great. Cool. Oh, God. I just saw the next one. Oh, fuck. Yeah, we got a really brutal one coming up. Next one is Vampire Survivors versus Neon White.

Oh, God. That hurts. That one stinks. I'll take Neon White. Who came up with that? Did you do this, Plant? Or is this randomly seeded? He did it. The gods must be crazy. Plant went ahead and tried to pick pairings that this, Plant, or is this randomly seeded? He did it. The gods must be crazy. Plant went ahead and tried to pick pairings that would make for good conversation in the very first round, and here we are.

And here we are. Yeah, but would it have been good if either of these games somehow lost to Kirby? That wouldn't have been fun. No, he's right. No, no, no, it is. It's just a tough one. It's a tough one. It's a tough right. I think this is the worst. No, no, no, it is. It's just a tough one. It's a tough one.

It's a toughie. I'm going to take Vampire Survivors. Yeah. Vampire Survivors. Okay, I thought you were casting your vote already. No, no, it's like explaining what it is. Okay, okay. I don't know.

Did we ever do a dedicated episode on Vampire Survivors? I don't think we did. No, it's like one that was hanging out in the periphery. Yeah, so Vampire Survivors is a top-down horde action shooter, let's say. It uses 2D, like, retro pixelated graphics, and you play as one of, like, 30 fucking characters that you pick from who is basically trying to survive against waves and waves and waves of uh monsters various uh ghosts and goblins and ironically no vampires in the game very funny

um and where this game is interesting is that there's only one input for this game it is your analog stick or your movement button uh you don't have to press fire in fact you can't press fire you just move around and based on the items that you have and the weapons that you have equipped uh you will automatically attack and the game eventually just becomes kind of a dodging survival game where you're facing off against i mean from a body count standpoint i do not think there's any game that comes fucking close to Vampire Survivors. A 30-minute run, you will kill, no joke,

30,000 enemies in a 30-minute run. There's just no equivalent to that. Like, Mozu games or whatever it is, it comes nowhere near it. And it is a sight to behold when your entire screen is filled with like total insanity and monsters. It is a game that lives and dies

based on that simple mechanic and that loop. And I find it tremendously satisfying and such a brilliant idea coming from like such a relatively simple idea. And immaculately balanced. Like the idea that you are putting a build together essentially with each run yeah by trying to get you know six weapons that are strong and the six passives that will ideally allow you to evolve those weapons uh but not

getting a guarantee of either of those things. There's a lot of versions of that where it doesn't work, or you feel compelled constantly to restart runs because you get some trash item. But somehow this game doesn't do that because it feels like you always have a chance. You always have some way, and they do some smart stuff with, and I think these are

fairly new changes like the ability to skip uh level ups or banish different power ups uh from from the rotation to make it a little bit easier to source the ones that you want um that all that stuff is so clever and i think would be really really really, really hard to pull off. I would add to that, they also do the progression systems pretty good because there are things that you buy with the currency that you earn in the game that will make you better at various things,

but also there are unlocks that you're constantly chasing, like, oh, survive this map with this character for 30 minutes, and you unlock this new character and then that new character has a bunch of unlocks you know the reason all of us have been pretty obsessed with binding of isaac for the last few months is because there's always like another carrot to chase and that is definitely the case with uh vampire survivors where there's so many carrots yeah i think it also made some choices outside of the game that benefited it a ton it was really affordable it kept getting um it launched at three dollars i think it's five now but like

it came out on ios last week and it's fucking free yeah it's the and it is supported by ads where you want money the only way that you see an ad is you can watch an ad if you've been alive for like 10 minutes in a run. You can watch an ad for one additional revive, which like once you get a certain point in the game, you will have tons of revives. So that hardly is like a necessary thing. Or you can boost the amount of gold you got on any given run. If you watch an ad, you'll get like an extra percent.

So it helps you rather than just. You don't, you can play this game for free completely without watching a single ad on iOS and it works perfectly on iOS. It's, it's amazing. It is the sort of game that I wish I like, I wish we would do several episodes about so I can just talk about it in a way that would not be interesting to anyone like yeah like when you said that about revives the thing i was gonna say is well you know it's interesting i kind of feel like once you have to use a revive you've probably

set up a system of powers that probably aren't going to get you through much further than that because the power balance is no one wants to hear like it's completely uninteresting but i would like very much talk about vampire survivors high level play even once you're to the point where i like der rigor will survive to the 30 minutes right but then there's like how you have to get 99 experience levels as a certain character to unlock this other thing um so it like layers another uh kind of layer on top of it what's amazing is that it's basically like really like started as one step above like a game jam idea like it's so close to its prototype idea that you can really see like video games lives and dies based on the tiniest core of an idea and then everything around that is just trappings well and they the original art was like just an art pack right but that

yeah i think yeah and they've slowly been making it a little bit prettier but it's still very consistent with the i do wish it was nice to look at but i also know that would be a like that would be a trade-off in in a number of things on screen yeah you can't have 30 000 gorgeous polygons floating around uh okay here well here's my question about this game though and and i'm not saying this is true but it's a thing in the back of my head is this the kind of brain cane brain candy game of the year like a threes or a wordle or yes but but one of those games that we love all year and two years from now

basically no one's talking about it except for like the, you know, 100 extremely hardcore players who never stop playing. Now that it's on my phone, I think I can pretty confidently say it is not ever going to leave my phone. I would also say that like even though I don't actively play threes every

day, I think it had an enormous impact on video games and it overworked. So like, I don't think that whether people are still playing it or not is necessarily not follow through on like being a great satisfying experience i'm thinking of like your assassin's creeds right where it's like yeah i see what y'all are going with this it's not fun but you know the first assassin not the the franchise but like the first is that's great it's like not a good game but it is like you can see the idea here yeah this is such a big idea and it's one that you're seeing replicated a lot of places. I guarantee you in the next two years, we will see a big AAA game that brings some of these mechanics in more.

You're already seeing a lot of spin-offs of this. Yeah, you're going to see a major IP, like a Warcraft, do a version of this 100%. That is the cool thing with these updates, though, right? You know, like, this game has definitely been cloned already. There have been some that have been somewhat successful. But the original thing,

it turns out, this designer really was a genius. In terms of not just creating the idea, but evolving the idea. Survivor.io came out before. No. Survivor.io came out before on mobile, but it is a clone of Vampire Survivor. I'm going to talk Neon White,

because I fucking love this game. Neon White was... I think I was actually... Did we do a full episode on Neon White? That was Orestes, I believe. Okay. It is maybe the most sort of exciting game that I played this year, if I were to sort of apply any kind of honor. Moment to moment or like in general terms?

Yeah, definitely moment to moment. The way that this game condenses down platforming action is, I think, is a revelation. And first person. And first person in first person yeah i i uh when i got into this game it was in the middle of like a bunch of like gigantic games that were sucking up all of my time like your elden rings and what have you um and i tend to not love when i get into patterns like that where i'm just playing these like huge time suck games uh and so neon white was about as disruptive to that process as is possible where i played it for a week and like platinum did or whatever the steam equivalent of platinum is uh and the whole time was just like edge of my seat white knuckle like just just thrilled the whole time uh it is it feels great

looks cool it has a presentation that is very sort of like um danganronpa like visual novel esque sort of thing with like dreamcast graphics for the in-game stuff. Yes, with the dope Dreamcast graphics, which, you know, from Paradise Killer, you all know is a thing that some of us enjoy. It is, the story is like kind of nonsense, but I really, I just really like the way that it is presented presented but for me

it is just like chasing down that ace metal on every single level trying to figure out like okay if i use the rocket to like do a rocket jump here and then i burn that card i can grapple up and find this shortcut it has a really really good to, I'm not like a first-person shooter expert, I would say, at all. And I've always kind of struggled with movement in games like this. But this game has a really clever way of when you get a certain metal on a level, like if you get the silver metal, it shows you a hint of how you can find a different route that can shave off some of your time. Once you get the gold medal,

it's like there's a ghost that you can chase that will show you that too. And so it just makes trying to knock down those like highest level achievements in the game totally feasible, even for somebody who is not particularly well-versed in first- person platforming um i i think that each level is like brilliantly designed uh and i just got so so so into

speed running this thing and i can't i say speed running that's just the game i can't wait to see what like actual speed runners do with it because it's going to be like absolutely disgusting yeah this game reminds me of what we were just talking about with cult of the lamb because there there are really two games in this it's a visual novel mixed with the you know first person platforming thing that griffin was just talking about and once again i think this is a situation where i was very excited to get back to the first person platforming the visual novel stuff didn't do a whole lot for me yeah it was fine I didn't find it like bad but it just wasn't as thrilling as the first person so yeah that's sort of where I I landed on it there is a lot to the visual

novel set like there are gifts hidden in each level that you can find and give to other characters and then yeah but then you have to watch more of the story or sometimes it like unlocks like character exclusive levels that are themed to the characters so there's like violet i think is the name of one of the characters in the game and all of her levels are like these torture traps that you have to like figure out how to escape without discarding any cards they each have their own kind of gimmicks to them um i i i just i love this game i think it is really really really fun and i think it has like instilled in me an interest in this genre that just straight up did not exist before i played it yeah um i don't know how it stacks up to vampire survivors because i i love this game. It has the thing that I love most when I

play video games, which is just movement and momentum. It's frictionless. Just Cause 2's whole ability to zipline and fly into the air with your parachute. Favorite feeling in a video game. This captures some version

of that. But damn, I tried so hard to fall in love with the story and i really wish i had made no effort because that i i put more and more into it and it paid less and less um and it really did you know take away from the fun of the game itself. And there's so much of it. There's so much talking. And this is not to the quality of the game, but the bugginess at times infuriated me. The game crashed on the final stage for me a number of times.

I know. Which, again, I'm mentioning it not because I think we should dock it, but that I think that's skewing my, my, well, that's a, your mileage may vary thing because I didn't hit, I don't think I hit a single bug. Yeah, me neither.

Yeah. I, I will say, I feel like, I really liked Neon White a lot. I liked playing it. I think it was fun. For me, the struggle that I had with it was

I found it really hard to uh i found really hard to move on from a level that i hadn't done the absolute best on yeah and i would find myself kind of banging my head against a wall trying to get the you know the top marks in each level uh and i didn't necessarily want to move on past that until I had achieved that because it felt like that was the whole thing, right? It was to find the quickest, cleanest path through. And that slowed my progression to a point where I kind of lost interest

because I couldn't stop just doing that. So I eventually stepped away from it. And that's why it didn't click as much for me because it didn't feel as satisfying when I couldn't nail like that perfect, perfect line. Yeah, finding, getting that perfect line and like nailing it was what kept me into it. Because eventually I knew that it was within,

I've, you know, beaten fucking Splunky too. I can do this thing. So I kind of just stuck with it. And then when you have that moment of endorphin rush by like finally getting the time you've been pushing for, feels amazing. And there's like a hundred of those levels to go through. Or discovering, there were, I think,

maybe two levels that I just could not do. And so I like looked at YouTube to see like the way that other people did it and seeing like, well, actually, if you jump up on this railing, you can discard your shotgun and just dash right up yeah and seeing that and being like oh fuck why didn't i think of that it's it's uh like i don't know i actually really like that in games when you can can hop on game facts after school and you know or print off a a walkthrough at the library

like i love that energy a lot and and this game had me doing that some. Griffin, you mentioned the gifts. I just want to dig into that. I usually don't like collectibles in games. I don't like things like Uncharted where you have to find the treasure, but it breaks the entire flow of the game. They put the collectible there because they made this beautiful world,

and they want you to see every inch of it, but it also feels antithetical to the whole point of an action game where you're moving forward but the gifts in this game you you basically decide oh i'm doing a gift run you're not trying to get a score so basically you go into that stage to explore the stage just to like see the geometry and that is the whole point and that's what you're rewarded for and that just felt like such a clever idea with collectibles of hey we want you to see these gorgeous environments let's that is just the point yeah that is the reward um i am i am i'm genuinely torn i think for me it's neon white uh i do love vampire survivors i honestly guys i've played more vampire survivors

on my phone over the last five days that i think i did on my steam deck or anything like that but i didn't play a ton of it on on pc before then but for me neon white like just in terms of a pure sort of emotional payload the uh the the joy that this game made me feel was uh virtually unparalleled this year i think it's survivors for me uh i i just think that core loop is pretty profoundly perfect and uh yeah i mean i again i think they basically invented a genre in in ways neon white did too but i think in this case uh it just feels like something completely new and special. And, you know, I just couldn't put it down. Yeah, Vampire Survivor, man.

Yeah. I mean, honestly, I would go one way or the other. And basically, if I abstain, it's Vampire Survivors. But I do like Neon White a lot. I basically if I abstain, it's vampires survivors, but I do like neon white a lot. I just feel like neon white is very cool. I feel like if you were to average out our feelings about the game, there would be more excitement for vampires survivors. That is my personal take,

listening to the discussion here and how long we talked about one versus the other. But I, you know, if you all, if, if there was a super strong neon white, I Griff, even Griff's on the fence. Um, I, yeah, yeah.

I think it's vampire survivors, but Hey, just a reminder, 16 killer games this year. Yeah. Sure. Like neon white could have been a winner in a different besties year. I think so too. I also think that vampire survivors is a more besties year. I think so too. I also think that Vampire Survivors is a more foundational game. Like I agree with that. So I think that that

is a good reason to move it forward. Text. Okay, one more. One more before the half. One more before the half. Tunic versus Stray. No matter which five letters you choose,

you are going to have a winner in this category. Can I be your hype man? Can I just be like, uh-huh, uh-huh? Where are you going? Tunic, just a quick reminder, a top-down exploration RPG in the style of Legend of Zelda, where you play as an adorable little fox

and you run through a 3D polygonal world, solving puzzles, finding treasure, and beating bosses. The hook being that very little is explained to you in Tunic at the outset. You're basically finding pages as you explore that fill out the instruction book for Tunic, which is not written in english for the most part um so you're using the pages that you find to sort of suss out clues within the environment in this weird meta game experience where you just like paying attention to every tiny little detail within the world in the game um game. I said it before when we talked about it. I actually kept a notebook for Tunic.

I never, ever do this, like extremely rare. I did it a little bit for Elden Ring, but kind of forgot to do it a lot. For Tunic, I did it all the time. And piecing together Tunic without like looking up guides online or anything like that was the most satisfying experience of the year for me uh i felt so amazing when i put it all together and the fact that the game had everything in it for you to put it all together uh you know it requires a fair bit of patience to get into but i think it is incredibly well designed from a, like just a puzzle standpoint, but also visually like a gorgeous,

gorgeous game. Um, so, uh, special to me. And, uh, yeah,

I really want everyone to have the same experience cause it is, it is really pretty outstanding. Wait, I, man, I just want to, just like, I just want to say Tunic is frigging great.

Like I adore Tunic. The, uh, the, the most profound experience for me in Tunic is freaking great. I adore Tunic. The most profound experience for me in Tunic and the question I kept bumping into, the limits of – like the main challenge for me in Tunic was not thinking that a person would do what it is. Like to think, no way, like no way would it be this like wild, convoluted, you know, almost hidden, like barely there little sliver of light. There's no way, but every single line, every polygon, every splash of light, everything is like intentional. It's so intentional and you can feel the hand of the person making this in like every single screen of this game is so deliberate because it has to be because the clues to actually like unlocking it are so vague and thinly veiled there can't be any room for confusion and and there's not it's um it's stunning i wish i could forget it

and play it again yeah um i feel the same way i do about this as i do about like obra den right where like i just wish i could erase it and and watch the whole thing one more time yeah playing this game uh one real quick thing like replaying this game like doing like a new game plus the second you start the game, your mind is like flush. It's like being in the matrix and having, you know, all those, the guns and karate training downloaded to you.

Cause your mind is now flush with like the 60 things that you learned the first time you went through the game. So you can just demolish every enemy that you face because you know, all these little secret like combo weapon combos and oh i know there's a hidden path there so i could sprint right to this exit it is amazing and all that stuff was in the game the first time you go through it you just do not know to look for it uh outer wilds is another uh kind of uh touch point for me um for this i i love that it it does the classic nostalgia play but gets that what we loved about games back in like the late 80s early 90s was as much about what

our our experience our very specific experience around the game and not just the game itself and by that i mean importing these sorts of games back in the day, I imported a lot of not a lot, do we hear it most of this sort of game, beginning with the SNES. And when you imported these games, and you didn't speak Japanese, it felt like this, it felt like there was this extra puzzle layer of, well, how do I even play the game? And then based off of what I learned while I play it, can I figure out kind of what some of these words are, cues are in the instruction manual? And you end up turning that into a secondary game. And the idea that you could then just recreate that experience for,

I mean, I imagine most people who play Tunic did not have that experience. It is a very specific type of way of playing a video game. I think that's really cool and special. Stray? You're a cat. I mean, I can do Stray. I have strong feelings about Stray.

Please. Okay, Stray, you're a cat. That's certainly the thing that everyone remembers. Strayray, you're a cat. That's certainly the thing that everyone remembers. Stray, basically you're a cat that is lost from your brood of other cats. And you find yourself in this underground society of robots who are, you know, have various priorities and trying to, but you're also trying to basically reunite with your fellow cats. The strong feelings I have about this game, one, it's gorgeous,

like aesthetically just beautiful to look at. I think the art design is like really top notch. I love the city designs. The cat itself is very, very cute. And I just loved it. I also loved the first two hours of this game more than many games on this list i think this game opens up incredibly strongly because all you do is run around as a cat and you jump up on rails and you kind of paw at carpets and you do cat stuff but you're also solving like physics-based puzzles kind of like

limbo um for me and again i don't want to like yuck anyone's yum if this was your kind of game but for me the game takes a pretty drastic left turn once you start interacting with the robot characters because it turns really into like a more traditional talk to various people who have needs in an event and like an adventure game format and you're constantly like oh i need this item to motivate this quest forward um and that part of it didn't really click with me a whole lot um and i just don't think the game ever manages to reach the high the heights of those first two hours where you're really just a cat, which was disappointing to me. That's what I wanted,

and I thought that they were on the path to do that, and then it kind of just became something that was not as interesting to me. Well, I mean, I love Tunic. For me, this is like such a, and I didn't like Stray. I don't know how else to put it. I mean, that's what I'm Tunic. For me, this is like such a, and I didn't like Stray. I don't know how else to put it. I mean, that's what I'm struggling with. Like, this is the other edge of having reader nominations. Like, some of them just didn't resonate with us for whatever reason.

I think Stray falls into that category. Yeah, I also get why people love Stray. It's a solid B-level game. get why people love straight it's a solid b level game i i think the the where it struggles here is it's going up against games that aren't flawless but like feel way more intentional and like thought out and there are entire chunks of this game where i i just expected more or something more interesting or something richer whether that is the action pieces which i don't think work at all and i think complicate like complicate a game that felt more inviting to people who don't have to have reflexes for video games to the dialogue being a bit repetitive

hey listen we don't need to tear down yeah yeah anymore. Yeah, yeah, no, no, you're right. This is about Tunic being fantastic. I also hit so many bugs. Like, this was one of the bug year games, I think. But hey, hey, hey, this isn't about Stray. But hey, this isn't about Stray. This isn't about Stray. This is about the fact that we need money to pay our bills. Okay?

That's what this is about. Congratulations, Tunic. We're going to take a break. Then we're going to come back. And, God, man. Woof, this list. Okay. We'll be right back.

Our next matchup, God of War Ragnarok versus Horizon Forbidden West. up god of war ragnarok versus horizon forbidden west uh not just in in similar in terms of like mechanics but like the arc of these right like about it's the the hotly anticipated sequel to a big splashy sony exclusive uh action from the same era basically like p.s. more proof that these things are not just Pac-Man anymore. The graphics are- Both made by the same single designer, which is, Jeff Minter had a killer year, guys, and I think we need to acknowledge-

David Jaffe's back in a big way, baby. Yeah, who's gonna do God of War Ragnarok? I feel like we all got pretty into it. I have, I talked about it with Russ several times, even since we've done the episode. Uh, I love the first God of War Ragnarok. Um, and I, I love the first God of War. I love the first God of War. Thank you.

Uh, I love what it, what it did with the character. I love that idea of like did with the character i love that idea like revisiting a character's history um i think that uh ragnarok moves on to an interesting but more uh traditional big question of parenting and this idea of like uh destiny and fate versus what you uh want to happen and letting your kid kind of go basically yeah and how hard a parent needs to hold on yeah uh to to a child like finding that balance which it's interesting to watch kratos who has like trained his son uh to survive you know than, more than I would say most parents has given his kid the tools to, uh,

to survive, but is still struggling with that same sort of elemental parental question. Um, and obviously like the, the gameplay stuff is all more, right? There's more side quests. There's a new spear weapon that is,

uh, really cool that lets you like hit enemies with a spear and then explode them and there's a bunch of like ruinic abilities i would say even the gear is better it feels less like weirdly incremental than the the the others it feels more like choosing a loadout that that uh supplements your play style well um but i i you know i love this sort of game like triple a single player action adventures is is my favorite sort of like genre and for whatever reason i am still trying to make my way through this one and i'll get going for a couple days and then just kind of like it just does not gel for me to the same extent that the last one did yeah so the and i think this has

been mentioned a lot in reviews and i think i mentioned it as well when we first talked about it i think the the big reason that you're running into that juice is just a pacing issue like i just think the game is not very well paced i think there are sections of the game that are 100 better than what was in the original god of war uh the dragon crater section is like probably the best environment ever for a god of war game the frozen uh lake area is exceptionally good but those are all sections that are primary although they have story elements to them like you're learning things and there's dialogue and back and forth and whatever they are primarily gameplay sections and they have some puzzles and they have story elements to them, like you're learning things and there's dialogue and back and forth and whatever,

they are primarily gameplay sections and they have some puzzles and they have a lot of combat but all of it is like the player is in control. There's never a moment in those areas where it's like, I'm going to slow walk my way around this corner and have some back and forth dialogue because the story needs to progress.

And the game bounces back and forth between these two modes where it's like okay full-on gameplay etc and oh this is now a narrative thing and i really wish that those would have been fused in a smoother way because the moments that you're getting hung up on juice are the pure narrative moments and frequently they are slow walking through a corridor or slowly climbing up a hill and it just doesn't uh maintain the level of uh enthusiasm for me uh in those areas that the the core gameplay does richard fucking shift though yeah still the best shift yeah he's good i i don't know how much i guess we're saving spoilers until until round two so because there's some sport like very very late game spoiler stuff i did want to talk about but we'll save it i guess if you think it's gonna make it to round two it

might i don't know we're gonna see uh boy howdy poor horizon forbidden west we talked about it with ron last week but this franchise can't catch a break well it's just two in a row right competition yeah i mean it's both of the games that are in the franchise came out at the same time as gigantic beloved revered open world titles that just completely ate its lunch uh and that happened to to forbidden west did did any of you i i didn't go back and play any more forbidden west after we finished it on the besties but my uh i i feel like i got what i wanted out of what i played of that game which is fighting huge gorgeous robot dinosaurs in super fun ways uh all the way until you had to go and talk to a million people in some sort of outpost like all that stuff i thought was pretty good

yeah i mean i i play i probably put in fucking 25 hours into horizon West. I didn't finish it, but I, you know, got pretty close. And I do, again, I think the core gameplay here is strong. And even the narrative stuff, like I found myself like pretty engaged with the narrative. It just feels like a, kind of an evolution of the,

of another era of games, of sort of what was built up with Assassin's Creed and open world games. And it feels like an evolution of the, of another era of games of, of sort of what was built up with the assassins created in open world games. And it feels like an evolution of that, but it doesn't feel wholly new to me. And it doesn't necessarily feel that standout to me in the way that, um, even God of War Ragnarok, I think has moments where it like really steps ahead of where things were

previously. This feels, uh, of war ragnarok i think has moments where it like really steps ahead of where things were previously this feels uh i think more of an iteration of the horizon model and it's definitely better than the first game i think it is but it doesn't feel like it stands uh necessarily like it's breaking tremendously new ground i would say i will say and this is this is usually for me personally and i think i speak for the podcast in general we sort of gloss over this but uh presentation wise i think it stands pretty head and shoulders above anything else that came out this year it is it is i think it's the most like jaw-droppingly beautiful open world game that maybe that maybe exists that's funny yeah i don't i don't necessarily i don't think it's a bad looking game at all i think it is

extremely pretty but there are a few games on our list that i i think probably edged out including god of war ragnarok i think has moments that are uh more stunning visually speaking i i know i know what you mean though griffin in terms of its like scope and its vistas versus god of war ragnarok in terms of its open worldness i felt like this game figured out what horizon should be which i i don't even know i i liked the first horizon i don't know if it even really figured it out but for me it's the vegas stuff of realizing like hey you know what it's actually just fun to see the old world through the eyes of this character and through the eyes of the ai lens right and all of that stuff and seeing that the dlc is hollywood basically that gives me the sense that oh they they get it now that you know we don't need to be subtle about

this being you know past earth that there's something fun in any apocalypse story about going back to that right it's the end of Planet of the Apes what? oh sorry did I ruin it for you?

I will say for developers of both of these games and anybody else who might be making a big epic I ruin it for you. I will say for developers of both of these games and anybody else who might be making a big epic sort of single player action game, stop making me climb shit. Don't want to climb anymore. Don't want to climb no more. Or make it like free climbing.

Yeah, like Breath of the Wild climbing I'm cool with. I want more of that. If you're making it part of a video game, that's fine. Just don't make it like a shitty movie you have to watch every five years. Okay want more of that. If you're making it part of a video game, that's fine. Just don't make it like a shitty movie you have to watch every five minutes. Okay, yeah, sure. So like Spider-Man climbing is fine.

Yes. Yeah, I'll climb all day. Did you see the trailer for the movie that is kind of doing a Horizon thing in 65? Did you see this? Oh my gosh, what a brilliant trailer. So the movie is called 65, right?

Trust me, you will care about this. And it stars Adam Driver, right? And he's a futuristic space dude. And he crash lands on a planet that looks a lot like ours, right? Right? Yes, cool. And then twist dinosaurs. There are dinosaurs there and and you you're you're smart right you're thinking like oh i know what this is they're playing with planet

of the apes at the end of the movie we're gonna find out that's what's earth all along the trailer doesn't have patience for you the trailer in giant words says 65 million years ago what it just says it right from the top and they're like yeah this is just a movie about Giant Words says 65 million years ago. What? It just says it right from the top, and they're like, yeah, this is just a movie about a space dude fighting dinosaurs on our planet forming civilization. Just great. What a great premise.

Okay, just to come back to Horizon, good segue. Yo, I'm watching this trailer now. Can this be our game of the year? Adam Driver looks so strong he looks so good i just want to say i think there are do you have anything more to say about the trailer griffin i'm 65 our game of the year so strong he's gonna fuck up so many velociraptors in this movie i'm gonna watch it he has a better bone structure than most dinosaurs. What if the N had been like 65 and then a big racer comes down and then it says Dino Crisis? Oh, shit.

Anyway. I just want to say I think Forbidden West has very good side quests. Like the writing in the side quests is actually quite strong with surprising twists and good characters. I think the voice acting is, in general, quite good in quite strong with surprising twists and good characters. I think the voice acting is, in general, quite good in this game, considering how many characters there are. Again, a similarity with God of War, where I thought the side quests were the strongest parts of the game, which is somewhat predictable because it's a lot easier to tell an hour to two hour long story than it is a 40 hour story. But yeah, that was just something that stood out to me as i think both have pace pacing like very similar pacing issues uh where like i just kind of want to get back to fighting shit and finding like treasures in the open yeah there there's a lot

of linear uh like slow walking stuff in in both games you're right. I will say this also. And I think that our reaction to both of these games can also be derived from, and this is, I think doubly true for a plant and Russ, we have to like, keep playing the next thing for this podcast we do and for rest and plan for their careers. So like games that are sort of expansive in this way um may not click as much with with us you know what i mean where if you are saying like i'm going to be devoting

a certain chunk of time to a game these the both horizon and god of war i think are really good at offering you like tons of uh different stuff to explore and experience and and things like that i think that we probably are a little bit more biased on this show towards condensed experiences. Yeah. Except for Elden Rangwich. Yeah. Well, I think the bigger thing is, is it respecting my time? Exactly.

I don't want a game to respect their time. They want it to fill up as many hours as possible yeah and i think these games are designed in some ways for that sort of person um and i i like both these games i i end up liking horizon more than i thought i would after going back um but, it's hard for me. When I know exactly how many hours I have in a week, and I realize, oh, God of War is just going to eat full weeks. Yeah.

Nah, it's hard unless I really feel like it's going to be worth it. I would still lean towards God of War, though. Yeah, I would, too. I think I would, too. Neither of these cracks are probably my top five, but God of War does have Richard Schiff in it. It does. That's true.

Too true. I didn't play enough of Horizon Forbidden West. He may show up as like a little goblin guy. Like a little, or maybe like a dino. He has the voice of all the dinosaurs. You just didn't know. Yeah. You are.

This next round looks fun. Hold on. I want to do another Richard Chips the Dinosaur. I'll probably never get an opportunity. Yeah, go ahead. Roar? So we got Citizen Sleeper versus Case of the Golden Idol.

You'll be happy to hear I played Citizen Sleeper over the weekend. Nice. Because you have been recommending it to me non-stop, and I'm glad you did because this is a good game. That makes me happy. You want to explain what it is? Well, can I talk about what both these games are really quick? Sure.

Which they are games that don't require expert level programming to make. And I think that's kind of incredible. Citizen Sleeper is a largely story-heavy game set on a space station, I assume in the distant future, unless it was 65 million years ago. And you are a, effectively like a bot that has somebody else's soul uploaded into you. And you are on the run and you are trying to decide like am i going to make this space station my home uh am i going to help people am i going to fend for myself and the way you do all this is by rolling dice which give you points to spend or kind of like risks i guess uh to make your story choices and that's that's it that that's the game it is rolling dice saying

like hey i have a six that means i'm likely to pass a test i'll use that on something that's really important to me hey i have a one i'll use that on something less important to me or i'll use it to buy some data that i can use in other ways later in the game and that's that's the that's the game uh i finished citizen sleeper this morning before we started. And it's fantastic. I really, really love. How long did it take you? Can I ask just so I know?

If I had to guess, I'd say eight hours. And it could have taken longer. One of the fascinating things about this game is it kind of has like has like you're on this space station and the game sort of has like narrative off ramps where it's like maybe it ends here and you know you can you can do that if you want you can end it here if you want like this could be your ending that you go with i really like story in games but it has to be balanced by mechanics that support it and i feel like this does a really great job of giving you exactly enough mechanics to stay engaged with it. And it really, these mechanics support the narrative. So when you wake up one day and you haven't had enough

to eat and you don't have the energy and it's starting to take a toll on your body and your body's broken down because you haven't repaired it. And so when your body is taking damage like this, you don't have as many dice. And so like, it feels desperate. You feel like you're willing to do something desperate to get the energy back. You need to play at a more complete level and to be able to do more stuff in each cycle. You feel the station also feels very alive because things are happening on clocks, which is interesting because we've been playing a blaze of the dark on the adventure zone.

And there's a strong similarity here of this idea of like clocks that are counting down without your input or affecting them. And it is, I don't know. It's, and the things that I don't want to get into the narrative stuff too much, cause it's like not interesting to hear somebody talk about, but it, it deals with so many questions that I'm fascinated by if things of like what it means to be a person and making

sort of like moral choices that are actually like kind of complex and interesting, um, deciding who you're going to side with and how you're going to live and uh how you're going to spend your time you know there's more to do in this world than you will have time to do um and that's that's cool it frees you from trying to like min max um i don't know i just thought it was really wonderfully written you know what it reminds me a good comparison is um uh disco elysium if, less nihilistic and more humanistic. Yes. That's the big thing is this game is just astonishingly well-balanced because you're going to die that you know you have to spend a few more points just to have effectively

the health or food to to stay alive or to pay off a debt of somebody who's coming to you know trying to kill you a hitman yeah um and yet the game's always kind of watching out for you like it doesn't want you to fail and you know you make, you make these really big choices. And at first I had this real anxiety of, shit, I'm making some terrible choices. And I feel like I'm being pushed, you know, just to survive. I'm having to make hard choices. And I don't really like myself in this game. And yet there is always a sense of understanding in the game. It doesn't shame you.

It just kind of keeps moving on it's like yeah you're you're doing your best and the characters seem somebody always recognizes that you know there will be people who are mad at you but there's somebody always who saw why you made your choice and they treat you with like a sense of decency that i i honestly can't think of another video game story like that. And fascinatingly, the progression, like as you gain experience, you can use it to increase your skills. It sounds very mechanical, and it is. But you can become a better engineer or better at engaging with people or whatever. Having better resources and more food and more energy and all that stuff, having better resources and better skills enables you to be more altruistic. You know, like early on, you have nothing to offer.

And so you're put in a lot of like situations where you're doing unpleasant things just to get by. And as you get more powerful, if you will, you can be, you have the ability, it's sort of like instructive on privilege and stuff like that, because you have the ability to be more open-hearted. And it's really fascinating watching how people who are in an ostensibly hopeless scenario find ways to move forward. And that's sort of the connective tissue

for all the stories in it. It's just magnificent. It's great. I'll do, can I talk about Case of the Golden Isles? Please. Yeah. I feel like this has scratched the Obra Dinn itch for me in a way that nothing since Obra Dinn has.

Yeah. And we've talked about that before, but mystery games that are sort of all about arranging the galaxy of clues that you have available to you at any given time. Is always so, so, so much more satisfying to me than, well, I have to use this key on this lock. I have to put this bust of the king on this pillar. bust of the king on this pillar. And it's astonishing to me that there aren't more games like it, especially after Obra Dinn came and sort of, you know, won everybody over in the way that it did. Case of the Golden Idol, I think, sets itself apart in that it is, well, it is structured

completely differently. It is a series of i want to say like maybe a dozen different cases and the the length of each sort of mystery is wildly different basically you go through each case collecting the words which are essentially the clues of each murder that has taken place and then it is up to you to kind of like put those words in the correct order, in the correct sentences to sort of elucidate what is going on. And while that may sound like a pretty simple process,

the murders that are in this game are pretty convoluted, I will say. And occasionally leaning on sort of supernatural elements that you also, like half of the game, it's not like find the bloody knife. It is like, how does the reversal of entropy affect, like there's, it really wants you to learn the in-world rules of how, how, how like stuff works in, in case of the golden idol.

I would also add they like intentionally misdirect or at least like move away. Like there's the obvious answer in a lot of cases. And then there's two or three levels beyond that, which you can then only glean once you've like really looked at every little tiny piece of uh evidence um and having that like layered mystery makes it feel you know like a glass onion or like a knives out kind of thing yeah um because it's constantly kind of surprising you with oh wow i thought for sure it was x but it's actually y i just i just need you all to just take a a real deep hit of of whatever you have on hand okay are you ready yeah so in most video games you're the person and the computer's the computer right like it's if then statements so if you do this if you

fire a gun at a character and you hit him in the head then the character in the game it's going to die like you you you give it you you provide into the video game and then the computer reacts right it responds but in golden idol it's the opposite it gives you the if statements if this person was in this room, if this person owned a pair of scissors with a little blood on it, if all this happened, and then your brain is the computer that puts it all together.

Hell yeah, man. Do you ever think about that? That does sound very fancy, but it's also like when the game... Yeah, but if a game tells you you're low on health and then your brain tells you to take a health pack... No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no what plant said was very erudite it did sound erudite i'll give him that thank you thank you

i i think that the way that this game has you interact with its mysteries is really cool and a really clever way just in the same way that Obra Dinn had you filling out a journal and having to like use every single stitch of information available to you in the environment. I think this game has a similarly clever way of solving mysteries. And then the mysteries that it provides to you are really clever as well.

I do think that maybe the comparisons to Obra Dinn aren't particularly favorable to Case of the Golden Idol because I also think that everything that Case of the Golden Idol does, like I think maybe Obra Dinn did a bit better. Like just exploring these 3D environments and like listening for clues. Like there's a lot more,

there are a lot more ways to glean information in that game that made the mysteries like feel way more rewarding whenever you solve them. But that said- I was gonna say just on that point, the only thing that like I found to be the slowest part of Obra Dinn was the reviewing scenes that I'd seen 30 times over

just like desperately looking for a clue, whereas here, everything is really in front of you. Like you cannot miss. They even highlight, I mean, it's an option to turn this off, but like evidence that you have not seen yet will be glowing in yellow. So you can't miss it.

And then at that point, it really is just on you to like piece it all together. So is one area that i think case of golden idol is better at i i i said this about over there and i will say it about case of the golden idol i would play a new one of these every month yeah if they if i if they charged me a subscription and they added a new case every every month i would fucking do it because i think that this is a like dramatically underserved genre that uh like as unbelievable as it is that you know mystery could be this genre that i feel like we are on the like cutting edge of i feel like developers are figuring out more and more really really clever and engrossing ways of having you interact with with mysteries uh and and i just uh i loved

it it's also cool that both of these games could absolutely have come out 20 years ago like these these exact games i mean and pen and. Exactly the same. Like, Golden Idol is very close to a pen and paper game. It is wild. I think they both are in a lot of ways. Yeah, I agree. But especially Golden Idol. That's what I mean when I was teaching at NYU, there's courses. I mean, this isn't any game.

Hey, come on. Come on. There are courses that they have for, like, entry students any game. Hey, come on, come on. There are courses that they have for, like, entry students where it's like, just make a game on pen and paper. And every time I saw that, I was like, that's not how games work. You can't do a kickflip on pen and paper. You know, like, it's not going to be fun. And I was wrong. I love that people are coming up with inventive ways to make games without being, you know, the world's, you know, top level programmer.

Just a really good, clean idea with good narrative, good art design. I love it. I will say that the I have a very special place in my heart for the like Lucasfilm adventures style graphics that Golden Idol brings to the table with like a layer of grotesqueness on top of it. that Golden Idol brings to the table with like a layer of grotesqueness on top of it. Like this game, when you talk about this game coming out 20 years ago, I mean, fucking Loom came out like 30 years ago and basically looks exactly like this. So there's definitely a huge nostalgia play

happening here for me and it worked. Should we vote? This is a really, really hard one. This is a really, really hard one because I think Citizen Sleeper is brilliantly written and is very, very engrossing in that way, but I think I enjoyed Case of the Golden Idol a little bit more.

Ooh. I think we're running into our first tie. I'm Citizen Sleeper. I think Justin probably is. Justin, you are? Yeah, I'm Citizen Sleeper. I love Golden Idol. I mean mean this is a really hard one okay so i didn't talk a lot about citizen sleeper the i struggled with it i like the gameplay the dice mechanics i thought were really good i struggled to get into

the writing of it but the writing style specifically um it reminded me of those like middle chapters of a neil stevenson book where he like goes off and uh it just it was i mean my add was like and we're gonna talk about in a second because there's another game on this list where my add was like really struggling um so i'm gonna defer and i will let you guys vote even though I adored Case the Golden Idol. This is a case where it seems like Citizen Sleeper has the numbers and I am totally also fine with that because I think that that game has some of the

best writing. I also feel like, Griff, if you return to it this week and go deeper, you will come away feeling because I was sort of in a similar boat a couple hours in and i'm really well that was me i think griffin was more on that was i was on board yeah i've played a few hours and uh and i'm pretty bought into citizen sleeper all day it'll be good

for next week too i mean part of this is like what's gonna make good conversation you know yeah i i think i think us revisiting it and talking about it more next week will be good before we close the door real quick on case the golden idol great multiplayer game i played this with my wife oh yeah and like fun super fun to like piece everything together she is so much better at solving these games than me and but it was really fun to like play it with someone else and piece it together oh man i'm so ready for the next one. This one's going to be... You better be, man. Pentament versus immortality. Oh, boy.

Describe pentament real quick. Okay, it's book-level boring. No matter who wins this one, some nerds are going home sad, you know? Yeah. Book-level boring, you know? Yeah. Book level boring, book level beautiful. It is a game about... I'm so thrilled.

If I achieve nothing else, the fact that I got another person on Earth to describe a game as books level boring. It's insane. Yeah, you're an illumination artist and you are working at a scriptorium you know the typical video game stuff yeah and um now chris if you did you redeem enough uh upcs from a mountain dew to uh get the bonus illuminations with the holograms yeah yeah the the snail illumination

you only get after you drink enough Surge. It is, well, the game itself, can we talk about what the first hook is? I think we have to, because people that don't know that there is an actual hook will just bounce off immediately. It's so early in the game, comparatively there's that early there's a there's a murder and you um kind of become the central detective of that murder and you have to talk with everybody in town and everybody at the

church uh and figure out figure out basically who who did it and that's the first third of the game and then it goes in some different directions which we can figure out if we want to talk about in a little bit what do i like about this game it is a game about religion and you could say it's like extremely catholic or protestant or religious or heretical or mystical and depending on how you played it and what you brought to the game, you would be right. It could be any of those. It somehow reserves judgment, but also, I don't know, it leaves enough gaps in there that you can kind of fill it in with your opinion. So if you are going in and you really, really dislike the church, there is definitely a way to read the game that

way. If you go in and you're like, wow, I can definitely a way to read the game that way. If you go in and you're like, wow, I can't believe this is the first game that seems to really understand the beauty of faith. That's there too. It kind of is a game that makes of it what you bring to it, which again, getting to the book point, that's how a lot of great novels work. That said, holy moly, this game is just reading there is no voice acting there's none of that it has some of the most peaceful music uh imaginable which on one hand great on the other hand will put certain people to sleep um i love this game might be my favorite game of the year i don't know if i expect it to even survive this round i want to say uh definitely a struggle to get through the intro part uh before the actual murder happens which plan alluded to

once that happened i was more engaged with it but still a struggle again my add is like fighting this a little bit because just the sound of uh a quill striking parchment was enough to put me asleep but i was i really enjoyed the writing i think the writing is like very strong in ways that i was not expecting given the topics of the game it's very snappy it's funny it gives you a lot of agency in conversations um it made me feel more tied to characters than ordinarily I think I would have. So I was pretty struck by that. For a game that is like just an inch above a narrative, a visual novel,

it's rare that these games have very strong writing. So this, I thought, was a great example of that. And yeah, as Plant said, it's gorgeous. And it also has big head mode. I don't know why it has big head mode, but does i'm glad it does it's important did anybody else have feelings about it they want to share i god almighty i really really really wanted to to bust into it but it is uh man it's it's a slow fucking burn, man. And I honestly kind of feel the same way about it that y'all feel about like God of War and Horizon Forbidden West, which is like I keep waiting for it to really hook me.

me and uh despite the fact that i want that to happen so desperately it just has it just hasn't happened yet and i don't think i have another let's move let's bounce to immortality and we might come back to pentament if we're getting the sense that it's gonna you know if this is the end of the road for it but let's talk about immortality first immortality is the new game from Sam Barlow, who you may remember from Silent Hill, Shattered Memories, and Her Story, and some work with Echo Studios. I think he worked on War Games, right? At least contributed to that. He makes acting games. Makes what? Acting games.

Acting games. God, Russ, yes. The genre has been renamed to acting games. Acting games. God, Russ, yes. The genre has been renamed to acting games. Immortality is an FMV game in the sense that the entirety of it is filmed clips of real people. sort of tracking down the life story of an actress who appeared in three different movies, none of which seemed to have actually been theatrically released. And you are reassembling these films in a sense, not to completion, but you're seeing how these films were made and scenes from the films themselves. And the way you interact with these are you find objects in the clips that you're viewing. And if you click an object, you'll be taken to another scene in which a similar object appears.

So, for instance, you see a pool of blood in a scene. You might click on that pool of blood and find blood from another scene. Or ketchup spilled. Yeah, whatever. It could be a spill. I could categorize that as a spill. Sometimes you'll click on like a prop weapon and actually see a real weapon in the clip that you are transported to.

There are also some like layers beneath that initial surface that help you to get to the meat of the game. Um, I will say that it's very open to interpretation. It's a game that's like asking a lot of questions, but not giving a lot of answers. Um, but it is magnificently acted, incredibly well shot. I found it really like, um, immersive in a way that FMV can do when it's done well, where it's sort of you're gently pulled in and sort of like living in this world. It's so well realized. This isn't going to work for everybody. I, it is mechanically really light in the same way that the Pentaman is not to the same extent, but I mean, neither one of these games are like, you know, dual stick shooters or anything.

Uh, but I, for me, I just thought it was a wonderful use of, of the, the, uh, this video technology, like that you don't see used very well outside of games that sam barlow makes i guess but uh yeah i i loved it also has i would say a kind of magic trick that it does that when you discover it is very very cool and seeing people discover it is very very cool uh i remember talking to travis about this i mean you guys talking to me about this game on the episode where we first discussed it and I hadn't seen sort of that,

the aforementioned trick, which maybe we'll spend some more time on if this game makes it to the next round. That is cool. I love when a game can pull that off.

On the other hand, I think that that makes it inherently kind of spoilable, but that seems like a weird thing. I don't even think you can spoil it because it doesn't make any sense and like and and i'm not saying that like oh i didn't get it i think that that's like the reaction people have when i don't like a chris nolan movie

and they're like well you just didn't think about it did you see it was in their minds it's like no i get what it's doing i just i find i find the message of this game shallow and like a bit insipid it's pretty cynical i would say it's profoundly cynical and what i don't like about the cynicism is not only is it cynical but it's like okay i've heard this a trillion times you know art is this parasitic force. And, you know, that being an artist is torturous and that it can fuel all this offer behavior in the entertainment industry. And all of this is true. I'm aware. You know, like I found that very frustrating.

And for me, this game works best just as those three movies. When I'm actually watching the three movies that they made, it's, I mean, what an incredible feat. The movie is, like you said, Justin, they're well acted. They're well written for what they're trying to do. They're enjoyable. And then the deeper the game pulls away from that, the more that I just found myself getting increasingly frustrated.

And then on a mechanical level, just i don't know do you think this is like a good mechanic or does it feel to you like they gave us like a tool and never actually finished making the game it feels like an experiment i don't think it feels like a fully realized how does this manifest into the experience that we should be having? The idea of like clicking around to the various things, it just kind of feels a little bit arbitrary. And I kind of wanted to, I don't know, engage with the clips in a more interesting way than just like constantly clicking on things

and going to similar scenes. Because once all the scenes are revealed, like there is an element of like, okay, I'm going to watch this and make sense of scenes are revealed like there is an element of like okay i'm gonna watch this and make sense of it but getting there i don't know takes there's some randomness to it and yeah i i agree with point like i don't think the overall narrative sustains the uh you know performances or the or the movies themselves or anything. I think it's fine. It's interesting. But yeah, it doesn't stand out to me.

Certainly, I mean, I think Penziment will stand out to me more. This is not how I expected this conversation to go. So where are we? Where are we leading? Probably 2-2. Yeah, I preferred Immortality, I think. Yeah. Your points are well made, though, Plant.

And I do think that this is an interesting thought experiment for both of these, but in a world where several of these types of games were released every year, if you had a lot of these types of games, I think my feelings on immortality might differ.

I really love the experience, but I think the things that you're saying about the message not clicking with you, I definitely felt the same way. It was much more about the thrill of the discovery and the tone and look and all that sort of stuff more than it is the message that it is carrying across. And I think in this case, like, the entire game is relying on that message.

Like, you need to click with that because it's, like, at its core, an extremely narrative game. Like, Pentament is a narrative game as well, but it has many arcs where you get those satisfying clicks after, you know, solving a like mini case, whatever, but immortality,

like you don't really get that eventual satisfying arc until the very end. So it better be damn well good. And it just didn't land for me. I'm fine with, I'm fine with penment here i can tell there's a lot of strong strong love for it um i i've i've said my piece about our immortality while accepting that i loved it it's not going to be for everybody that's fine it's not going to have the wide mainstream appeal of a pentament for example uh but yeah i think i think i'm i'm good with that wow i'm i'm i'm genuinely surprised i

thought i was going to give that exact same speech but the other way around but i'll take it i'm not i'm not going to turn around now um thank you don't look back we are going to make you make pentiment and citizen sleeper fight each other so i'm excited oh yeah and i i already know where that's gonna go i if if there's a way that you all can get to like at least the second act i i think that would be good if if you can i i i know that that's a big ass but because it once it it it's doing something much bigger and we i want to talk about that next week um our last matchup for today marvel snap versus nobody saves the world i think this was the matchup where plant had no idea how to match these two games these are yeah these are ephemera

no no no no in marvel snap and it's talking about the thanos snap and nobody's gonna save the world after that uh let me talk about can i talk about nobody saves the world real quick yeah please or no fresh stick why don't you do you want to talk about one of these because i feel like we've gotten less less from you this episode i'll talk about nobody saves the world just as a quick refresher you are a like literal nobody you're like just like a clay being and uh you are plopped into this world and eventually you are given the ability to transform yourself into a creature i think it starts with a rat and eventually the creatures get more and more extravagant um there's you know uh birds and bears and all sorts of crazy demon stuff it's been a

little while but uh there's like a skeleton thing anyway uh you uh use the abilities of these different characters to essentially like win various combat challenges set across dungeons in this world um and that's pretty cool just to start off with you like you're learning oh i this archer fires this way etc where it gets really interesting is you eventually start blending between these let's say 20 different classes so you're basically crafting a uh multi-class character using whatever abilities you find along the way. And it turns into like a much more off the rails version of Diablo than I certainly was expecting. It just gives you so much player freedom

to design and craft your own character that I found it tremendously satisfying because you're constantly like swapping, depending on the situation, oh, I'm fighting these guys that are weak to whatever, dark versus light or blunt damage or whatever it is and so you're adjusting your character according to that and you're not locked into oh i have to play an archer the whole time uh and it's all paired with like a really fun cutesy cartoony art style uh and like really fun writing like silly light-hearted writing um great

multiplayer great maybe my favorite local multiplayer experience of the year yeah super fun multiplayer uh oh wait no kirby is that but this is close behind it yeah fun you can join it just caps it too right it's it's not more than two i don't know i only i think that's right yeah but it's very good with two players um especially once you unlock like the character customization stuff like it really allows you to cover all of your your your bases in a way that uh playing in single player didn't really i this game didn't click for me until i played it with henry uh and then it clicked for me in a big way yeah Yeah. So yeah, that's Nobody Saves the World. Marvel snaps.

I will be straight up with you all. I am. The worm has turned on Marvel Snap for me in such a big way, which is heartbreaking because I think it is the best. In a good way or a bad way? Sounds like a bad way. I think that it is the best designed TCG since Hearthstone, which makes sense. I think that we, and we've talked about the virtues of Marvel Snap a lot.

The way that it sort of condenses down all of the decision making and strategy that goes into a trading card game into a much much much more digestible package is uh is brilliant uh and i've played it a fucking lot and i know that the rest of us have too i'm pretty sure yeah uh i don't know how much you all have been paying attention to how they have added monetization hooks into the game but it's fucking bonkers it is absolutely ludicrous uh what what they have done for example right now if you want gambit and rogue they got some variants on sale of gambit and rogue gambit's a great car i think it's a series three or series four card that's in like a lot of decks, especially like destroyed decks.

It's the 90s like cartoon aesthetic. It's not exactly from the 90s cartoon, but it looks kind of like it. And you can get those two cards and a handful of credits and two character avatars for 30 goddamn dollars. Now you say a handful of credits. It's like 15 bucks worth of credits.

It's 1500 credits which credits have never been in short supply for me but wait two cards i'm sitting on like 2400 credits right now i only do it when i i get enough boosters to boost my shit oh you don't like the daily like quick boosters there are you could buy a handful of the games on this list for $30. That's insane. They also launch tokens, which you can use to purchase specific cards from the store. They start you off with 3,000 tokens when this feature launched. And some of the cards are 1,000, the sort of basic cards. Do they separate them by cost, by energy cost? Is that how they do it?

Because Black Panther is on sale now and it's a five energy cost card for 5,000 credits. Regardless, you can find some of those credits through the like rank up feature throughout the game. But like if a card pops up that you want, you can pin it, but they also were charging, and it's still available, a pack that has 3,000 more tokens,

a variant for Apocalypse apocalypse bunch of credits some boosters for 7 500 gold which uh 8 000 gold is 100 american dollars that is wild that is it's fucking it's for me it is the extent to which this has completely disintegrated the goodwill that i felt towards this game i i genuinely have stopped playing it pretty much altogether, partially because Vampire Survivors is on there now and that shit's free. It reeks of- But it's disgusting. It reeks of this thing got really big, really fast,

and someone in an office was like, put as much money making hooks as you can into this thing right now. Well, and you can't raise money. You can't raise the cost of something that you've already sold for a lower cost, but you can lower it. And I think they probably were like, let's put it at the ceiling and see what happens.

Right. Let's see how much people are willing to. Let's see if there are whales out there. I actually have a bigger problem with uh aside from that and i'm again my collection level is like 732 i played a ton ton ton marvel snap really enjoyed it um recently i found that the uh locations that will pop up are often so sort of like wild and random and significant that it sort of makes all of your deck building and even the playing of the match irrelevant. And I'm running into more and more areas like that.

Like I had Ego, the planet Ego location pop up, and that just plays all your cards for you. Like you don't even play anymore. And there's a lot of locations like that where it's like, okay, well, this is just so wild that it doesn't matter what else I've got in my deck. Like, this is already over. There was a recent one that had you draw three cards and then it destroyed the rest of your hand. Which is like, I run a deck based around a handful of cards that if I don't draw them, that's it. So, like, if that was the first location on the very first round of the game, I would say like, well, this I'm going to lose.

So bye. And the game's not particularly fun when someone bails out after like a round or two. It completely gets rid of the whole like snapping wager mechanic, which is so which is so brilliant because it forces you to kind of slow play and bluff sometimes, which are like mechanics that haven't really been featured in a trading card game before. But they are rendered completely like void by these locations that do pretty much just turn it into a, you know, roll of the dice. Yeah, these past couple weeks have been really bad for me with regards to marvel snap uh and can i ask a quick question about the monetization is it just cosmetic layers for these these cards are you like well like i don't have gambit right so the

series three cards you have to get through these random collector packages as you look up right well no because you're not you're not paying for those necessarily you could but they're random out you could extrapolate out like oh you could buy gold to buy credits to pay for the boost like whatever all that stuff i feel like has been was great genuinely at launch like was was a really this was a really consumer friendly game i, I feel like, starting out. But I don't have Gambit, and it's a great card. So if I wanted to drop $30 to get the leg up, that is an option that is now available to me. And that stinks.

To explain that a little bit more, theoretically, you're just paying for these visual upgrades but when you visually when you get a new card and then you upgrade that card each time you upgrade that card you're increasing your level right as your level increases that's where you get to unlock more cards so they're kind of having it both ways or they can say like this is purely visual but it's like yeah it is not though because i don't have gambit right like i could keep playing and keep waiting on gambit to drop in one of these packs or i could just buy them uh and the same thing for the tokens like oh man this this new card uh i've been waiting for like uh hella i think is one of the color harrah is one of the cards that like uh everybody is

playing in these discard decks uh and it is a completely like like it's a huge card that like I don't have nearly enough tokens for I think it's six thousand when it does drop because it's a six cost card. So like it just man those two decisions honestly have have really genuinely tarnished the game. So tough though because it could be fixed next week. Right. I mean. Yeah but it's not. have really genuinely tarnished the game. It's so tough, though, because it could be fixed next week, right? I mean, that's a- Yeah, but it's not, and this is game of the year now. No, I know, but it was also as good as it was a while ago. You know what I mean?

There are first-person multiplayer shooters where I think are great, that I loved, and then the meta evolved to a point where I could no longer participate. This is not a meta thing, though. This is a, you're buying specific cards with money, or, you know, skipping ahead by spending money. If it was purely cosmetic, I would be totally fine with it. You're not skipping ahead, though, really. Like, if you kept playing, you would get all these things, right? But for how long? How long would Griffin have to play before getting the Gambit card? Have to play is a weird way to apply to a game that you like

i mean like but if it's a competitive game and you feel like you want like you have this deck and the one thing you're missing is the gambit card whatever but isn't that the drive that they that's the same driver they use to keep you like playing and trying to unlock cards like it's the same it's the same pull, right? Yeah, for me, it is not so much, and maybe this is a double standard and I'm showing my hand a little bit here, but like for me, it's not so much that these cards are on sale.

I think you could argue this is an edge case thing, right? Where, yeah, if I kept playing, I would get Gambit. If I kept playing, I would get any of these cards, right? They have not put a card up for sale that you can only get by spending money, right 30 dollars like come on guys that's so much fucking money when you spending money on virtual goods and games is already kind of like a like a i i sort of conceptually a hard sell when i could spend that money on other video games like yeah and and i'm willing to do that right like i played hearthstone for a very long time and would you

know buy the pre-order the expansion so i could have a huge pile of uh packs waiting for me that i would open up um but this seems like for a first step in like how it is adding monetization to the game, it smacks of what Justin described of just like how people love this fucking game. How much money can we get out of them? And it really has, it has tarnished the experience for me.

I don't know how else to how else to put it um so i i i don't know you guys may not feel as strongly about it but for me uh i've stopped playing marvel snap it probably will unless this gets a sort of course reversal which may not ever happen i find this not great but the actually the thing that i took more issue with was what justin was talking about which is like the the zones deciding making a lot of your decisions for you which i understand makes it a more uh approachable game because it narrows down what makes the most sense in any given hand but i found it uh i mean it's interesting but it i don't know i feel like it there's a level of simplicity that comes from that,

where it's like, oh, I can only really play this card here. And that's, I don't know. Especially with the later zones that you're talking about, like the ones they've recently added, even more so in that direction of fully deciding what exactly can go here versus not. I think it's an interesting game. It almost needs it like a Smash Brothers Battlegrounds style. exactly can go here versus not i think it's almost i think it's an interesting game i like

needs it uh like a smash brothers battleground style it almost needs like a ranked playlist where maybe some of the zones that are a bit zanier uh are maybe left out of the rotation uh i wouldn't know items smash brothers you mean basically yeah right uh final destination no items uh fox only like i don't want that level of fun squashing obviously but there are some zones in this game that just aren't fun like when the thing reveals sometimes i play uatu the watcher just so i can see if one of these shitty zones is gonna come up later so i know whether or not like this is gonna be a fun a fun round of Marvel Snap for me or not. Where are we at?

I mean... I mean, it's hard because I feel like... Man, I'm really... Everything everyone's saying, I don't disagree with any of it except the pushback that I've already offered. And I really like Nobody Saves the World a lot, but I don't want this to be a case of Marvel Snap losing

versus Nobody Saves the World winning. Does that I don't want this to be a case of like Marvel Snap losing versus Nobody Saves the World winning. Does that? Yeah, no, that's the important takeaway for everyone listening to this and every besties we've ever, ever done is we narrowed down the games that we enjoyed the most over the entire year. And some of those games are your games, like games that the readers picked. None of these games are bad. None of these games are a waste of time. You're not an idiot for liking some of those games are your games like games that the readers picked none of these games are bad none of these games are a waste of time you're not an idiot for liking any of these games they are dope games but in the interest of like having some sort of culmination

of this episode that's not just here are 16 great games we you know narrow things down and uh here here's what i would say i I think I would lean towards Marvel Snap because I feel like there is a very decent chance that in a couple of weeks, in a month, everyone will be playing Marvel Snap again. Like it will be a whole new renewed interest. They've done something else interesting. Maybe they figured out a way to like do one-on-one,

you know, be able to play your friends that kind of thing um i i feel like this the basic game is so strong that it will continue to have life despite these like current missteps and that is where that's where i'm at if i were to separate out this like enormous disappointment i feel in in how marvel snap has handled things post launch i think it would just by you know on merits of design and execution alone i think it would win out over nobody saves the world but like i also don't i can't really yeah i don't think you can do that it's a it's a live game i think you need to judge it for what it's presenting. I also feel like this is like Nobody Saves the World I don't think is winning by default.

I had a fucking great time playing that game. And I think it does a lot of, there weren't a lot of Diablo style sort of action games that came out this year. And I really liked that genre. And this was the best one of them and this approached that genre in like a totally new weird great way and also sometimes poughkeepsie community college beats duke you know we can have we can have a low seed win i'm i i agree i agree

with you hoops man marvel snap at its best is just so high, but it feels really hard to push it forward after everything that we've just been talking about. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I'm torn about this. I really like No Base is the World. If we want to go that route, I am thrilled with it for sure. I think we should do it.

I think we should go in with that route. Let's do it. That's it for round one think we should do it going with that round let's do it all right that's it for round one should we uh plant yeah i'll recap what one our top eight uh so moving on to our uh our round of eight kirby in the forgotten land cult of the lamb vampire survivors uh god of war ragnarok tunic citizen sleeper pentament and nobody saves the world i am gonna go out on a limb here guys and say that there may i'm certain there have been better i'm not certain but there may have been better crops of uh games in previous years, but this is, I think 2022 is the most besties ass year.

Yeah, for sure, man. By far. This is the most best. I'm looking at these eight games and feeling like I, oh, fool. There's Kirby and there's God of War as the only established franchise games that have made the top eight.

That's cool. The rest of them are completely new things. That's very cool. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I wanted to, before we wrap, thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. We have PainAnna, PastProblems, HSmitty20, and DMOccupant.

Thank you for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. Next week, you know what it is. You know what we're doing these eight are going up against each other uh and until we figure out the the top five games and then oh my god that's elden rings music uh yeah then we'll do our top five i'm genuinely excited to do it that way i genuinely think it'll be way more fun for us to rank five games than have to arbitrarily decide what the only one is. No, no, no, no, no. Very quick.

Nothing else, just the name. Tell me one other thing that you watched or played this week. I mean, I watched Avatar with my kids and saw it with fresh eyes. What a flick. Great. Fresh? I've been playing all these games. That's the problem. I've been playing all these games.

Not really, man. I've just been trying to clean out That's the problem. I've been playing all these games. Not really, man. I've just been trying to clean out the old backlog before we do these episodes. Did I mention Spirited last week? No, I didn't. Because I haven't talked to Justin about this flick. No, wait. Maybe because Justin wasn't here last week.

That's what it was. I can't recommend Spirited again. We should talk outside of podcasting someday, Griffinin you gotta give me your number i keep asking that's gonna do it for us for this week be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games Besties!