The Besties - Besties 2023 GOTY Spectacular - Part One

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

IT BEGINNETH ANEW. Join us for the first half of our annual Game of the Year determination, in which sixteen of the year's top titles (including four listener picks!) square off to see who moves on to the finals! There's at least one decision in here that we're sure to catch flak for, so, hey! Let's get this over with. Games discussed: Baldur's Gate 3, Chants of Sennaar, Alan Wake 2, Armored Core 6, Dredge, Dave the Diver, Blasphemous 2, Sea of Stars, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Spider-Man 2, Connections, Cocoon, Lies of P, Super Mario Wonder, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty  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!

I don't want to do this with you guys. I feel like we've been doing really well in therapy and stuff like that. We've grown a lot, and I don't want to fall into a lot of the same poisonous patterns. Russ, I haven't given you a swirly in the besties toilet in what? It's been... At least seven days. Days. Yeah, days.

I was thinking days. Yeah, at least seven of them. Yeah. No, I agree. Yeah, days. Yeah, at least seven of them. Yeah. No, I agree.

I think that we've learned a lot doing this over the last 26 years. And that as long as we sort of keep best practices in mind and have open minds and hearts and clear eyes, we won't lose. But I will say that if Zelda doesn't win, I'm going to fucking quit the show. I'm going to stop the show. I'm going to make you guys quit too. Good guy. Good, good. Good starter, babe. If it's not Zelda, I'm going to fucking quit the show. I'm going to stop the show. I'm going to make you guys quit too. Good guy. Good, good. Good starter. If it's not Zelda, I'm done, baby. This is good. This is going to be fun.

This is good. This is good. Emotional manipulation is your pro move, Griffin? No, no. I'm saying I've learned a lot and we've all grown a lot, but so this is why I'm quit. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the year. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I'm pretty confident I know the best game of the year. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I have no clue. I'm at a loss this year, baby. Weakness!

My name is Russ Rushing, and this is Game of the Week. I can't even focus on introducing this show when I've spotted my first vulnerability. Chris, strike, Justin, strike. Follow your ranks. Behind me. I claim Chris's power as my own.

Welcome to the besties. We're talking about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It is a video game club, and just by listening, listening my friend you have become a member and this is the the show shows that uh it's all been building to folks and you guys dressed up right just just from the top you guys are i'm wearing my chubbies flannel and some soft dungarees. And I'm ready to talk. And this is where we're going to pick the best game of the year with 12 of our favorites handpicked, lovingly handpicked.

And some of yours. Plant, what's the system this year? What's our approach? So we're doing a bracket of 16. But this isn't like a March Madness bracket. This is a custom tailored thing maximized for the best discussion. So we have some categories that we're going to be talking about. We have duels like Indie Friends, Dredge versus Dave the Diver. Did you know that they're going to appear in each other's games? Because they are. Oh, I like that. We got stuff like Shut Up and Play the Hits, I called one of them, which is Resident Evil 4 remake versus Spider-Man 2. Yeah. It's going to be a delight.

I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, no, there's seven really good ones in here, but I think we could all agree that Fractured Fairy Tales is maybe not your best work in terms of a sort of wine pairing. You're sort of gaming sommelier skills gear. You're saying Super Mario Wonder, Liza P, made me feel like those were the two I couldn't fit anywhere else? That you could figure out how to do the rest of it.

That's fine. It should have just been baby faces. Little baby faces. Black hair boys. The boys with black hair. That's how some of the best flavors come together. I mean, I love pickle surprises where you take a little piece of deli meat,

you put some cream cheese in it, you throw a pickle in it, and then you go and serve it. And people said, that won't work. And I said, that's the whole point of Thanksgiving is to eat that dish. Yeah. Where are we? We're in the game of the year. This is the beginning of all of it. This will make, I think this will make more sense after the break when we actually just do these matchups instead of the chaos that has subsumed at the beginning of this episode you're

right yeah it's a real change of pace uh let's take a break and uh we'll be back right after this okay before we dive in i want to make it clear and plant alluded to this but I do want to like re-highlight it. This is not seeded. So what- Yeah, in no certain order. The picks that were selected were based on their similarities with the games to some extent, as best as we could do with 16 games. And it would make for a good discussion in the first round. So there might be situations where like a fucking King Kongong rock star comes in and uh has a little

fun with a little baby boy but that's just the nature of it that's the only way or maybe shocking turnabouts maybe shocking underdog stories maybe chance of senar does beat boulders gate three in the first round and nobody really knows what to do with that i think we should hop right into it with that sort of enticingness i mean okay okay so oh man here's what we got for you for y'all we are going to go through the first full round in this week's episode there's a lot to go through here and then next week's episode will be the dramatic conclusion so to kick things off if it seems like we're being like very uh trepidatious is that the word it's because these episodes do have a reputation of destroying love and and no not this time but not this time and i think i think we've all are in such good places we are

we're looking into the distance with weary eyes and yet here we are taking our very first step with the showdown telling stories in new ways we've got baldur's gate 3 versus chance of sonar can i go to bat for chance of sonar please yeah please i feel like even if we know sort of which way the wind is blowing we this is a good opportunity for us to celebrate these wonderful gems. For me, I am realizing that Return of the Obra Dinn invented a new genre in my brain. And since that happened, I have demanded a new tasty one of those sort of immersive puzzle mysteries every year. My appetite must be slaked uh and this year chance of sonar did

that for me in new and exciting ways i would say you know in the same vein as like curse of the golden idol or other sort of games where there is just kind of like one big mystery that you unfold while exploring a sort of broader world chance Chances Sinar does that with language in ways that continued to surprise me from start to finish. And it really propelled me along a lot sort of stronger than a lot of other games I played this year where I just, I could not put it down. I think I finished it in like three or four sittings,

which is pretty good for me um and just gorgeous world and i i i think it's i think it's just so damn clever and maybe one of the cleverest games kind of uh on this list and sort of like how it makes words into gameplay mechanics. Yeah, I really admire this game. It's so good at feeling like homework that it is homework. It's basically my only issue with it. I felt like I was actually working playing this game. And that is not, let me be clear, that is not a slight against the game

that is in some way a praise for it i mean every movie that you go and see is homework chris plant your movie taste is like yeah i was gonna say of all of us you are the you are the home no no but that's my point is i i i've said this before but learning a language is it is so good at capturing the experience of learning a language. And I already have that time filled that I just, I could not make more than a couple hours into this. But again, that's,

that's purely personal taste. I think that if anything, like I said, is a testament to how good it is at doing what it's doing. But Justin, you really love this one, right? I did.

I really, I loved it. Griffin, Griffin, you, you and I both were really taken with this. I think you finished it before I did. Yeah, we got Trav on it too. It's the, again, like I am having trouble

kind of encapsulating what this is. It's not just like an adventure game, right? Like I've played lots of adventure games and this isn't quite that. There is a type of game that is so cerebrally satisfying uh so immersive so just cool and clever that i recommend it to everyone and it is that sort of obra din i mean deduction category right like deduction yeah i guess that is a good way of putting and i think the problem is deduction has been usually limited to like the type of games that you would find in the back of a newspaper but no it's using deduction so that you kind of are conversing with the game itself

and i think in video games deduction traditionally has been like oh you found the dumb clue in the corner of the room in the sherlock holmes game so now you get to talk to the guy and tell him you found yeah you turn on your spidey senses right right right and this is I think more subtle and more clever about it I think this feels to me like the sort of game that would totally dominate my life

when it's extremely slow and I could like really immerse myself in it because the like it's been so crazy this year that I haven't been able to, I mean, I played it. I spent a few hours with it, but I want to like lock myself in a room and play this. And it's just not an option.

I would encourage you to give it another shot. It really did not take me too long to beat. The thing that is intimidating, I think, about this game is that it's kind of got like peaks and valleys of difficulty. Yeah. Where you will be banging your head against the wall and then you will figure out one syntax rule or one grammatical sort of structural thing. Yeah. And then all of a sudden 50 other pieces fall into place.

Yeah. And it feels so, so, so, so good. Yeah, that makes sense. And just having those sort of like half dozen or so kind of eureka moments scattered across the game, it really is not that big of an undertaking. But again, I can't recommend it enough if you like any sorts of puzzly deduction games like this. any sorts of uh puzzly deduction games like this and and especially ones that use like language and and like the connection between language and the world where everything in the world has to be so specific for it to be for you to really be in conversation with like every object because

for the most part like it's all important um which really helps you to draw into the world where everything you see, like almost without exception, has a reason for being there within the language of the game. I would say for me, and we're not, I don't think we need to be in this position for a chance of scenario or anything, but I will say I very much look forward to, there was a little bit of extra stuff in this game in terms of like the stealth segments and some of those that like i i felt were a uh maybe a lack of faith in the central thing of the game or or what exactly uh i look forward to like and that's

part of what's exciting about something really new like this is you get to see the things that work and don't work so i i think there's an even better version of this this uh concept but it's still really uh engaging and exciting just just the way it is could you see like the basic idea being very similar but like you know obviously a new language or whatever it is and a new aesthetic could you see a direct sequel coming out of this i could yeah yeah for. Yeah, for sure. Oh, yeah. 100%. They do so much with like art and aesthetics and music, like using every single thing that the game is throwing at you to get like a foothold in these languages. And there's just – there's so much you can do with that.

I agree with you so i think that the stealth segments in this game there's really just one area where the stealth segments are pretty frequent and they are a pretty big bummer um and and so yeah it's funny because uh what was it outer wilds which is i think kind of a similar game insofar as it's a deduction game uh i know what is it metroid brain but that also was failed by stealth sequences in the DLC. It's funny that these developers feel like adding them. Did you say Metroid Brainiac?

Yeah, I didn't invent that term. That's not my term. That's good. I do not take credit for that. Just claim credit for it. I'm super plugged in, Russ, and I've never heard of it. I think Nick Suttner came up with it. I'm sorry, Nick.

We still very much respect it. Now, when you're thinking about Baldur's Gate, what was the – in a lot of ways, Baldur's Gate seems to be a very traditional way, like a well-trod way of telling games in video games. So what struck you as new or novel about this? It's so damn big. It's so damn big it's so damn big i i you all are much further than me in this game i put like i don't know 35 40 hours into it and thought i was in the middle of act two and then freshick told me no i was halfway through the first damn act

it's so big you late you you crash a giant giant cthulhu ship at the beginning of the game you explore the crash site for 10 hours and everything that's underneath it and everything that's around it and then you realize you've cleared off a tiny tiny corner of the map and that that bigness extends in every direction it is both like big geographically but big um emotionally philosophically thematically the uh the sheer ability to involve yourself in the lives of these fictional characters or have them swapped out with real people in multiplayer it i i truly do not know how it's done it feels like magic and we don't get a lot of that in video games these days i think we're fortunate and that we also have zelda to talk about but it it does feel unusual to play something where i it feels like somebody

made a deal with the devil rather than you know learned how to code i i think what's most impressive about that is just how fucking good so much of it is yeah like there are definitely parts of this story that i take umbrage with but that is almost like statistically like the the most likely situation when you are dealing with just this much sheer tonnage of storytelling you know what and despite the fact that it felt it fell short in some departments there is so much about this game that i'm going to remember forever and that's pretty buck wild you know what's the maybe the craziest part of this is when you get to balder's gate spoiler alert you go to balder's gate but when you get there i think

everyone is used to going to the capital city and a bethesda rpg and some dope is like walking down the street and you talk to him and he says like whatever fucking arrow to the knee or whatever nonsense they had the fact that every npc that's standing around in the main city not only has like a little bit of story going around with them even though it doesn't like necessarily branch into a quest or anything like that but they've got maybe they're talking to like their neighbor about some nonsense but it's all very specific and it's all incredibly well voiced and it's all incredibly well written and it just is like there's just like a drum beat that pervades every aspect of it and most studios would not take the fucking time they might throw a bunch of npcs just standing around they're all gonna say more or less the same six lines

because who cares they don't have quests associated with them but here they just filled the entire city with little and that's that's where i think people are going to learn the wrong lesson from this i fear at least uh with major studios that are going to try to crib this in that this is all authored as we talk about you know user generated content or proc gen procedural generation which there's not those aren't inherently bad. But we keep hearing the reason that we need AI, the reason that we need proc gen is because how else will we make things this big? Well, they did. They did that.

And whether or not – And not – Yeah. In a year where like we saw some games came out that were in development for forever, they finished Divinity Original Sin in 2017. It's fucking,

so if we're to assume that this game was in development for six years, that seems like a pretty short span in like AAA games space to make something this fucking colossal. Is it?

Six years? Is it? I mean, compared to GTA. Six years is a long time, man. I mean, compared to-

One of my kids ain't been out that long. I guess a fair point. New kid just dropped. I guess I'm thinking of Alan Wake 2. Yeah, that's a game.

Well, hey, speaking of it, should we, I know we're going to talk more about Baldur's Gate 3 in the next episode.

So how about we do move on to Alan Wake 2? Griffin, do you want to push uh chance of sonar off the cliff uh yeah i i i yeah it doesn't i'm handing it a hang glider so it can go rest on the beach yeah it doesn't die you're making it we have to delete it from the internet it's no longer on the steam store get it while you can um next up we have the return of abandoned series and for this we have alan wake 2 and armored core 6 uh both games i am shocked to see exist in in this our wonderful year 2023 alan wake 2 fresh you i feel like you were the mega champion of this yeah um so again to reiterate i think i talked about this when we first talked about it i was

and have been a huge alan wake fan since the game came out and whenever that was 13 years ago uh i played all the dlc played the spin-off read all the fucking wiki pages trying to make sense of it but mostly i've just been a huge fan of Remedy because there just are so few studios out there doing weird shit at the scale that they're doing. And they saw an enormous success with that with Control, which I think was really a sign that the audience has a taste for them going weird. So long as like the core conceit is still strong and it's still a well-made game, well game well written and they've always been very strong in the narrative as well i think alan wake 2 is like extremely remedy in so far as it's obviously narrative first it's obviously like the writing and the act voice acting and the like live action fucking finnish snuff films that are in this were obviously, I'm not even joking. That's like really a thing that's in this game.

Were obviously the focus. I mean, they're fake video games. We should make it clear that they're not real snuff. There's no way to know that for sure. Not real enough for me. It's not like somebody, you know, like sent you a photo of earwax growing hairs or anything. Yeah, I would rather watch a thousand outwigs honestly um it's incredibly weird uh i you know i think remedy has struggled at times on the

on the gameplay combat side um and that was certainly the case here as well but i was so absolutely like riveted by the story that they were telling in the world that they built that i was more than happy to like futz around with like some struggles with fighting three guys at once um you know i i don't for me that wasn't the issue i i i think ellen wake too is uh i think the best game remedy is made i think that the combat has been a problem in most of their games i didn't think it was that bad this time it was if anything it was the length of time that i sort of frequently had to go without doing the combat um but i thought just like fighting dudes was was all right i thought some of the boss fights were actually pretty great yeah which is a surprise

and you kind of we talked about it when we first did the episode, but those little bonus side things, which I found to be good when, you know, I think there are those puzzles that were like, you put the little dolls down to solve the little riddle. Sure. I thought those were fine, but there is a lot of like, quote, blank space in this world in areas that there probably shouldn't have been. blank space in this world in areas that there probably shouldn't have been. But when you are in those more condensed areas, I think about the retirement home, for example, that, yeah,

those condensed areas that they're like really hand crafting feels, oh God, so lived in and evocative. And just like, you're just in that space or like the the moment where you walk in the bar and the and uh ati the janitor is singing karaoke singing karaoke so fucking amazing there's just and and the game is just full of those moments obviously i think everyone knows the musical sequence now um the moments that will stick with me and kind of fade away the idea that oh it might have required some

excess walking at times uh but why walk when you can swing that's uh skipping ahead to spider-man what no wait no wait no sorry not in even the game that it's up against um So Alan Wake 2 was a game that tried desperately to make me stop playing it. It really seemed at every turn like it was intent to scare me off. But I stuck with it. And I am so happy that games of this type get to be made, especially with the funding that this obviously has behind it like i i am i am thrilled that this came out as well as it did especially when you know how long of a road it is for it to be as sort of like um coherent as it is and i don't mean that like narratively it's kind of obviously over the place but it is a hundred percent coherent to itself like

aesthetically narratively it nothing seems like well this is really out of to itself, like aesthetically, narratively. Nothing seems like, well, this is really out of place. You can like it or not like it, but it is 100% consistent with itself, I feel like. I think that there's like a misunderstanding of auteur theory that people like to place on video games where it's like, wow, this is, you know, Sam Lake really figured it out or Ken Levine or whoever, you know, Will Wright. And it's never that that games are too big for that to be true i think what is really impressive about remedy all along is that they have just consistency in vision so a lot of people are bringing tons of different ideas but whoever the kind of lead people are at the top have done a good enough job creating a style book and saying, yes, that is definitely us. That matches. And I imagine plenty of stuff that gets cut because

they just say early on, no, that is not what makes a remedy game. And I think that's what allows for all the meta playfulness that Alan Wake ends up doing you know bringing together all the different games because few studios have that level of creative consistency across like all their different departments yeah it's really just kojima's in terms of scale like these triple a projects it's just kojima yeah in this yeah area and i think remedies storytelling is way more cogent than kojima's storytelling i mean i like kojima's storytelling it's fucking weird but at least i know what's going on i can't believe we didn't have kojima announces a horror game in collaboration with jordan peele on our game awards bingo card yeah i know we would like a real guest obvious yeah okay so alan wake 2 is great

but we have another game that is also great that is going up against it and it's so similar great segues it also starts with the letter a it's two segwayMan. Two words and a number. We've got Alan Core 6. Alan Core. My gosh. Armored Core 6. Armored Core 6 takes all the beloved pleasure of the Dark Souls games. And I knew that if I could just say the right words, my arms would start to stretch out and turn into crazy chain guns. This is what he wanted the entire time.

Mr. Scratch knew that I would be locked in the chassis of my armored core. He knew that I would bring these giant treads to try to smush him with the light. Yeah. I guess I could take a swing at it. I don't know who the big armored core head was.

It's Plant. Plant is the big armored core head. I want Plant to do it. Yeah, go for it, baby. I mean, it's blending everything that people now love about the Dark Souls games with the franchise that actually FromSoftware kind of built itself up on originally. Sounds like it. That would have been a killer game. Yeah. You didn't get that?

They brought everything people love about the... Oh, man, I don't know. No, I don't think this game is going to make it, obviously. So I'm excited to hear just what people thought of it in general, even if you didn't quite like it. I was shocked by how much I did like it. No, I really, I very much enjoyed it. I was kind of an Armored Core nerd back in the day, and I was impressed that how much it was an Armored Core game. and I was impressed that how much it was an armored core game.

That is kind of what I was getting at. Like the extent to which it still kind of felt like those games that I remember, obviously a lot's evolved, but it's not like unrecognizable sort of trying to reach out for modern tastes and modern sensibilities. Because like even the idea of like mission-based like it is, is a little bit antiquated

right like that you don't see that sort of uh structure too often it legit like if someone didn't know that this was a from soft game i don't think there's any and they and you know everyone knows from soft from their souls games i don't think anyone makes that leap like it is it feels incredibly far the only thing that like screams from soft is just like the scale of the art design and the like overall art design i think is like obviously their pedigree is extremely high but outside of that nothing about this really feels super soulsie to me um which isn't a bad thing i i enjoyed it as an action game and i enjoyed it i think when we talked about it we described it as it feels like a rental like the sort of game that i would

rent from blockbuster and be thrilled for a week yeah i don't want to yeah they don't i don't mean that as a negative i mean that as a this is like a light dip in dip out fuck around have an experience kind of game this is not't focus too much on the fact that that has definitely been used as a pejorative by our industry for the entirety of its existence. No, I just mean it doesn't have the, this is gonna take over my life for three months.

Oh, for sure, yeah. Which I think all the other Souls games do. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I like that it kind of is a different pace to it. I guess that's what I like about it is that for me, it captures the feeling's what i like about it is it for me it captures the feeling that i would have when playing a souls game which is that i get locked in unlike i do in most video games so when i am playing it it consumes every ounce of my brain space and i

feel like i am you know in a dance with with the enemy in combat, right? There's a certain synchronicity there. And that it does all that and it makes it manageable because I cannot get through Souls games. I play a good chunk and eventually I hit my barrier and I bounce. And this, because maybe it's because of the mission format, maybe it was because it just felt easier or the type of action was more familiar to me because it was, as you pointed out, fresh, like a platinum game. Maybe that's why it all worked.

But I don't think it's so unlike a FromSoft game. I just think it is. It's them doing different genres. think it is it's them doing different genres and i i would love for them to be able to take what like their ability to capture a certain type of feel and a certain type of focus and apply it into like more and more spaces and not just be so uh beholden to the the kind of dark souls model can i tell you guys the truth and it's heartbreaking yeah this is one of my most anticipated games i think of the year i think i I brought it up in our first of the year episode. FromSoft is probably my favorite game developer,

reviving a franchise I used to really love as a kid. And I played it and I was like, this game fucking rules. The only issue is that it came out like two weeks after Baldur's Gate. is that it came out like two weeks after Baldur's Gate. And that game really sucked all of the oxygen out of the room for a lot of other stuff that dropped over the next two-month period or so. I think if Armored Core 6 had come out in the summer, earlier in the summer rather,

I would have been sort of more singing its praises. But as it is now, I played it, loved it, dropped it like it was hot so that i could get back into balder's cave it to me feels like it's in the same vein as a game we'll talk about later which is resident evil 4 remake which is it is updating and modernizing a format that has been done before but doing it incredibly incredibly well and it's like a very tight experience i don't know i mean again it's i don't know that it sticks with me in the gut long term in the way that like a balder's gate or even an alan wake does personally even if it

even if it ripped complete ass in a good way i think the musical sequence in ala wake 2 gets it the win in the i feel like that shit was so good yeah i gotta i gotta celebrate alan wake 2 here i really like i don't know for what it was but i i don't wait to it's really special let's keep it moving next up we have indie are you ready to snap the neck of Armored Core 6, Chris Blaine, and dump its dead body in a volcano? Oh, no. You all were talking. I quietly unplugged it, and it's just all set. You know?

Chris Blaine, I want to take issue with how you've categorized the next matchup, Indie Friends, featuring Dredge and everyone's favorite indie game, Dave the Diver. Beloved indie heartthrob,ave the diver listen i i wait wait yeah wait sorry i i actually wrote this down in our document wrong uh can you read that again oh yeah sorry it's dredge versus quote dave the diver end quote now why wouldn't you put indie in quotes that's why would you put the name of the game in quotes? Sorry, can you read the document one more time? Okay, so the category is quote, indie, unquote

friends, and then dredge versus quote, Dave the Diver, end quote. That's the book. That's the novelization. Kilda, Jeff Keighley. Okay, thank you. Yes, Dave the Diver was not an indie game.

I'm giving you a hard time here's what i'm gonna say i'm just razzing you baby i have no i have no idea how you define indie without like looking at the books of everyone's project and knowing how much every single game costs and how many people worked on it so i'm giving you a hard time i'm giving jeff a hard time i think eventually people will like coalesce maybe in like a solve for this problem but these both look and feel like indie games so i'm not surprised that people made that decision anyway they're both great who's who's repping yeah they're both good games dave the diver was a um a fan pick if i recall yes uh who who here has played enough dave the diver was a um a fan pick if i recall yes uh who here has played enough dave the diver

that can speak to it i know i've played quite a bit uh yeah i played a good amount so dave the diver is a uh gosh uh survival mechanics that you might see like gathering mechanics imagine like a 2d zibnot, where you're swimming around gathering like undersea equipment, hunting fish, doing research, getting all of the bounty of the sea. And then after your time in the sea, avoiding its deadly dangers, you take your haul back up to land

and you sell it at a fair price in a sushi restaurant that you also run with a bunch of like quick time style mini games um and so it's really two two games in one working in synchronicity which is both a undersea exploration game and of course there's narrative stuff happening on the on the meta layer of it but that is the the basic pitch from a gameplay yeah it also i think does the i guess cookie clicker for lack of a better game uh version of constantly expanding what you think the game is because it starts and you're just diving and then you sell the fish and then you're done but very quickly as you do more and more runs

they're constantly coming up to you and being like hey actually we have a hatchery now and you could like hatch your own fish you don't have to catch those fish. And it just constantly invents itself in new ways. You're hiring new people for your business. You're increasing the profitability of your fish through new recipes. It's incredibly dense, which I found very engaging.

Yeah, Griffin plant. Yeah, the two halves work really well together and it's nice. It's a nice change of pace switching between the two. I mean, the best thing about this game is it revives Tapper, the greatest arcade game of all time. I guess it's kind of like Tapper. It's very Tapper.

And I love Tapper. And Dig Dug. And the harpooning of things it feels very dig dug so it's got all it's got all the classics i i really don't know how i pick between these two games we still need to talk about dredge but this honestly this is the one that i find the toughest of everything that we're going through today i think these are two in terms of like taking something for what it set out to do i think both these nailed what they set out to do yeah um fresh dredge i feel like you

like another one that you really got into well i'm gonna i'm gonna speak to both of them because i i okay got pretty late into both of them i definitely finished dredge i don't know that david diver has like a formal ending it might but i got pretty late into it and dredge specifically the ending stuck with me um because i found like it just felt like the perfect culmination i don't even want to spoil it for people that haven't finished the game yet but this uh dredge just as a reminder, was a Lovecraftian, you know, Cthulhu infused ocean fishing game where you putter around on a boat and fish for various objects and fish that you then have to like fit into your boat using like Resident Evil 4 inventory management. And then you go back to town, you sell it and you find it. Surprisingly hot mechanic this year. Yeah, very popular. You sell it, you upgrade your boat,

you find new people to do quests for, you unlock new features, etc. I think from a stylistic standpoint, and tonally, there may be no more consistent game in the entire year than Dredge. That's true, man. Every UI element, every line of dialogue

the music the art style it's like so just dream drenched in what dredge was doing that um i was just like just put into that mode of like this eerie creepy just the vision of like when dawn is breaking over like a morning but there's still this element of like uneasiness about the world around you um made it just really incredible and uh that is precisely why they're adding dave the diver to the video game yeah and that fellow board members is why we've decided for those that aren't aware, Dave the Diver will, I guess, be showing, I don't know the extent of it, but it was announced during the TGAs that there's a crossover event going on. I know Dredge also just released a story-based DLC. It's very funny.

I think there's probably a way to do Dave the Diver in that tone in a funny way. But, man, I super love dredge uh and i think because of that consistency and because it has that like culmination feel it it kind of has the edge for me uh dave the diver i loved and then kind of got to a point where it was like oh well you have to grind out this new currency by doing these side quests and i was just like lost all enthusiasm for playing it whereas dredge just kind of kept me through throughout but they're both fantastic games um so yeah i i agree with you about the holistic nature of dredge because you completely nailed something i i've struggled to put together for this game that it feels like a bigger game than

it is yeah because it is so consistent it feels like a truly lived in world and i know that we just saw an announcement for a case of the golden idol getting like a 3d a bigger 3d game dredge does feel like a game that i would not be surprised if we saw something much bigger uh in the future for it that's such a good point it feels like there's more like in the world even like if you went far enough in the future for it that's such a good point it feels like there's more like in the world even like yeah far enough in the right direction there would be like more there it's think about like this team world what they've done I would love oh yeah go that way with with this steam world build one

yep yeah see yes to keep me updated. This is your fault. I mean, like this week. Like this week, it just came out. It's your failing, Griffin. Hey, Dredge. Dredge. Dredge is going to win the, quote, indie friends category.

Yes. I shockingly didn't vibe with either of these games too much. That is surprising. That kid surprises me. I know, right? It seems like extremely my shit. I just didn't feel right. I'm shit. I just didn't feel right. Something was off. The vibe was off, guys.

Okay. Ooh, this next one, though. Jesus. This next one, I'm gonna call it, this is gonna be the nasty one. This is gonna be the nasty fight this year. I don't like this. I like this one because I can just kind of kick back. I'm having a California kickback on this one.

I'm gonna watch the blood spill. This is Indie Spins. Okay, so it's going to come down to Justin and Russ on opposite sides of me having to make the deciding vote. Should I just go ahead and call it now? I mean, sure, if you want to save us all a bunch of trouble, yeah. Yeah. The topic is Indie Spins on Popular Genres,

and we've got Blasphemous 2 versus Sea of Stars. Man. I nominate Justin to talk versus Sea of Stars. Man. I nominate Justin to talk about Sea of Stars. Well, first we actually have to tie Justin and Russ together at the arms and then give them the prize.

You guys put on your get along shirt. Put us in a sack like two feral cats. Okay. Sea of Stars. Would you like me to? Yeah, of course. Sea of Stars. Would you like me to? Please. Yeah, of course. Okay. Sea of Stars harkens back to a classic era of Japanese RPG

around the SNES era. Some of the Mana games are big touchstones here. It is a sprawling open world fantasy that is, I guess, connected in a universe sense to The Messenger from a couple years back. But this is a turn-based RPG. It does a lot of really interesting stuff with the way vulnerabilities, like elemental vulnerabilities and strengths, balance out each other. The way you can sort of pace that out with different party uh mixes some characters are strong with certain things and have a combination attacks that work well with other characters in the party um so there's there's

a surprising amount of uh mechanical uh density that it smartly evolves fairly slowly but uh enough to keep it engaging there's also one of if not the best like mini game gambling type deal uh inside inside this game um and more more than that it manages to tell like a really touching um really lovely story that celebrates the sort of like, that is almost, I think, kind of schmaltzy and cheesy sometimes if you're bringing sort of a cynical approach, but it does have a level of earnest positivity and earnest sincerity and kindness that I think is muchly needed and is really nice to see in a game like this. Um, and I just thought it was,

it was a delight from, from start to finish. I did all the things, uh, and I thought it was just fantastic. Um, I, I think that this game,

I played a lot of fucking JRPGs this year. I play a lot of fucking JRPGs every year. I think this was the one I had the most fun with. And the one that I definitely stuck. I mean, I, I finished it, game i played a lot of fucking jrpgs this year i play a lot of fucking jrpgs every year i think this was the one i had the most fun with and the one that i definitely stuck i mean i i finished it i 100%ed it to get that cool ending as well um and i think there's a lot of stuff that works about the game i think it has a lot of great characters and a lot of great story beats and a sort of uh overarching plot that left me a little bit cold. But in terms of just playing it,

it is really, every fight is pretty fun to play. And that is an incredible accomplishment for a turn-based role-playing game where you are doing a lot of the same shit over and over again. Just between the timing mechanics and the roulette sort of turn skipping stuff, it's all just so, so good. And I just couldn't...

It's like the inverse of what JRPGs usually are to me. I'll play a Dragon Quest game, even though it has pretty boring combat, just to see this world. And in this one, was uh almost the opposite um but but still i mean i i love this game and has a very special place in my heart and it even made me go back and play the messenger because like i wanted to know like what their sort of shared world stuff they they had planned um so yeah i'm a big fan i would echo the the combat stuff that i didn't play nearly as much as just or Griffin did, uh, mostly because yeah, this, the narrative, the like writing, the dialogue and the narrative me, but the combat was terrific. So it actually kind of bums me out that I wasn't being drawn through with the narrative as well. Because if that was also strong, I think it would be one of my favorite games ever in the way that like Chrono Trigger had both.

Yeah. The story and the combat both felt like a blast to play. And I think this was trying to capture that, but didn't quite get there for me, at least. And Blasphemous 2. As you guys know, I play a lot of these games.

Maybe every one that comes out pretty much. I haven't played the Ebenezer Scrooge Metroidvania, but I do play a lot of them. Is that out yet? It is actually out. I hear it's okay. I hear it's okay. Blasphemous 2 is a Metroidvania

inspired by the aesthetics of Spanish Catholicism and the gameplay of Souls-like games. It's pixel graphics, 2D pixel art. It's one of the most stunning 2d games i've ever seen in my life it is like pound for pound totally gorgeous and also like disturbing and creative in how its npcs look and how its enemies look uh the environments and um it has this layer of narrative going on that is constantly fascinating to me even though i could like only kind of mentally piece it together on my own i went afterwards went back

and watched like youtube of people explaining what was going on but i was just like totally enraptured by this world and mostly blown away by how strong the minute to minute gameplay is moving through the world in Metrovania and having like combat sequences, stuff like that tends to be secondary to exploration and games like Metroid and stuff like that. Exploration is like the heart and soul of those games. And this game,

I think nails both exploration and combat in really creative ways where you're using like the weapons that you find to activate different um objects in the world to give you a lift up through a double jump or breaking through barriers with an air dash stuff like that i don't know man i've played again i play a ton of these games. This is unquestionably the best of these 2D Metroidvanias since Hollow Knight. I don't think it's as good as Hollow Knight, but it's extremely close. And I was totally blown away by what they pulled off here. It's so funny because— Congratulations, Sea of Stars.

This kind of did the same thing to me that see if stars did which is that I played blasphemous like I played the messenger neither one clicked with me and then I played see if stars had to play the messenger played blasphemous to beat the shit out of it also and then had to go back and play blasphemous one uh and I I echo everything that Russ said I think I think the game is just amazing. Justin, I have a question for you. Yes. How much Blasphemous 2 did you play?

Quite a bit, actually. They were all kind of the same levels and stuff, but let me see. It was like there were snakes around and dragons and weird angels. Do you guys... I don't... No't it was like no it was like there was like a creepy like corpse on a stick hold on one second i'm looking it up and by looking it up are you looking at the steam screenshots no no no i'm telling you about some of

the different enemies that i encountered in my time. Okay. I got, I did, yeah, I did a lot of these. I did the, yeah, I did all of them. I got the double jump.

I got, this is, this is very frustrating to me guys, because it sounds like I'm making it up. No, no, that's fine. I did play quite a bit of the game.

I just haven't heard you talk about it. So I wasn't sure how much you would actually play. I'm not trying, no, it eventually got to a point where I was like not super interested. But I did the, okay, I unlocked Fast Travel,

the good Fast Travel. Yeah, yeah, you played it. That's fine. So I played a whole lot. That's funny. Yeah, I mean, this is, I think this comes down purely to taste as a lot of these do.

Well, does it? That's interesting because you said, Russ, if I can check the record here, you said that if the story had clicked with you, Sea of Stars would be one of the best games you've ever played and then you said that to understand the story of Blasphemous, you had to read the internet

about it. But it clicked with me. Okay, dog, but you gotta be careful. Now listen, Juice. Hey, listen, no, you listen. I wanna be on your side. He said it comes down to taste and we can't account for each other's taste, so we have to go based on the words that we're saying. Right.

I've been carefully choosing mine. There's a difference. Let me address that, because I'm happy to. There's a difference between finding a story kind of dull, which I know it gets better, see you stars. I'm not negging it. I know it gets better, but I found it kind of dull at the beginning.

There's a difference between that and being in intrigued and what's going on even though you don't fully understand it in the way that you watch what was that natalie portman movie with the bear monster and the lighthouse closer annihilation oh um yeah with a c annihilation in the way that i watched annihilation i was like i don't think i know what the fuck is going on in this movie but i am really interested in it and want to know more that's how i felt playing with blasphemous too like that's how engaged i was with that so i don't i don't think it's a one-to-one like no i know it's not obviously um i uh i don't think it's a one-to-one. No, I know it's not, obviously. I don't know. I played a lot of Blastomous 2,

and I think it's a really, really good one of those. But it also didn't feel so very different from some of the way that those other games sort of play out that I felt like it was something that I absolutely needed to, to see through. Do you think sea of stars is just like a really, really good one of those? Uh, no,

there's not a really, there's not a, there's not a, yeah, that happens way less often. We can, I would agree with that. You said,

yeah, again, Russ, if I could just check the record here, you said you play a lot of these a year is the quote that I'm seeing. Oh, yeah, no, I agree with you. Sea of Stars, that kind of game does not happen very often. So I'm in total agreement on that front.

But I mean, I'm also not against like, I mean, I like Souls inspired stuff, you know, always. I'll check out most of those. you know always I'll check out most of those um yeah you know it's tough for me honestly guys my my own personal struggle here is that the the entire experience of Sea of Stars and playing it is is one that like I really treasure and I really value but I also know that like just speaking from my own experience I have had to push people into keeping going with that. It has been recurrent enough that it's an in-joke at this point. And that's not anything that you can account for other than the pacing issues or whatever. I think Sea of Stars should move forward because it fulfills the perfect besties narrative of Justin dunking on a game before he played it,

slowly falling in love with it, it becoming his favorite game, and then us killing it at the final leg of the besties bracket. I think that would be... Let's tease this along a little bit. I would suggest this as a solve. As the person who has played both of these games to completion

at the end of it i am fine leaving it to griffin um i i think they are both fantastic i think the metric i usually come down to uh here on on the the goatee special of the besties, is which one is going to stick with me more. And I think that is Sea of Stars. So after much deliberation, that one gets my vote. Okay. Excellent. Should we take a break? Oh, well, Frush, before we take a break,

do you want to throw it off the cliff or do you leave that to us? Do you want buried alive? Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you get off on that. I guess buried alive seems appropriate given the catholicism infused with it no you should put it on a spike put it on a spike and have this spike stick it out of the

ground and then have people run past it and have it like sort of move while they run past i mean that's a wiener and also a sword at least that's what your t-shirt says let's take a break and uh let's come back we'll talk about more video games is that fine yeah yeah let's do it okay play it what did you mean by shut up and play the hits when you were pitting resident evil 4 remake against spider-man 2 i mean what i damn well said shut up and play the hits i don't want to have to hear you tell me about video game theory. I don't want to hear about

ideas. I don't want to have to listen to your story if I don't want to. I want to shoot people in the face or I want a web swing around New York City. And everything else is just fluff. Video games. Welcome. 2023 besties. This is a new Chris Plan original.

I'll put it another way. That was great, Chris Plan. I'll put it another way. These are both games that were made previously in a lot of ways and enhanced with these iterations. But like the enhancement was like not the, I don't know, the like overwhelm. It wasn't like a total transformation in the enhancement it was more just like a you know like a 30 enhancement over the previous entry is that fair to say for resident evil 4 remake yeah not dog i think that that that is hugely

underselling the work that that has been done a resident evil 4 4 remake. I've played Resident Evil 4 a few different ways. A few different versions. This is a whole different. I mean it is. It's the same game. But god damn. It is much better. The amount that has been done here is wild.

It is such a different beast. Such a better. I think I get what fresh means though. In that this is taking ideas that really work. These are some classic flavors, right? Like this is a peanut butter sandwich. And they're like, hey, a lot's changed since just peanut butter. It's time to add jelly.

And you're like, fuck, I can't believe we ever lived without jelly. But it's still like a sandwich. I think jelly came first for what it's worth. But go on. Yeah, you're definitely right. but go on yeah i think you're definitely right it is wild this game and and the resident evil 2 remake of like how much capcom has been able to take great games and make them even better like i i we are often quite dismissive of like remakes and remasters uh And I think for good reason, because God knows we've played enough of them that have been just sort of

uninspiring, to say the least. But man. And even good ones. That Dead Space remake, I thought was an excellent remake. The Dead Space remake was amazing. I think I would actually, for me, if I were putting this list together, I would actually have a hard time picking between Dead Space and Resident Evil. Wow. That's interesting,

just because the Dead Space remake, I don i don't i mean it definitely changed stuff but i think it changed way less than resident evil 4 did yeah i'm just talking about in terms of like i don't know they were both remakes of amazing horror games sure really hit the spot for me um but i beat resident evil 4 remake i think four or five times yeah you went hard what was it about this one that kept you coming back Griff? I think that they first of all did some stuff to make sort of like speed running

a thing you can do like shooting the bell at the beginning of the game to like skip the whole sequence in the town there's like all kinds of stuff that they did that made the idea of beating sequence in the town there's like all kinds of stuff that they did that made the idea of beating it in under two hours like doable uh and i don't know it's it is i enjoyed

playing this game in this way and they really set it up in a way that kind of like encourages it so like every time that you go through and fulfill one of these like bonkers finish requirements, like beat the game in under a couple hours without saving seven times and play on the hardest difficulty. Like all of that stuff was just like it was really fun and it turned the game into kind of a well in the runs where I couldn't save. Honestly, a roguelike with that was sort of the most thrilling and most terrifying sort of gaming experience I've had in a very, very long time. Because when you've put a long time into a run and then, you know, you're being surrounded by big, scary zombie monsters. Yeah. It's pretty great. Unless we have somebody who's really going to champion Spider-Man 2, I would like to play more Resident Evil 4 remake between now and next week. I think Justin is the person that's going to champion Spider-Man 2. I would like to play more Resident Evil 4 remake between now and next week.

I think Justin is the person that's going to champion Spider-Man 2. Justin, go for it. Yeah, the one in platinum. I wanted to say an ode to it. So I've got love too. Go ahead, Justin. Oh man.

Okay, so Spider-Man 2 is an extremely good video game. All the things that are good about Spider-Man 2 are extremely good. They're good in kind are good about spider-man 2 are extremely good they're good in kind of a thankless way i would say they it may take a more refined palette to notice all the ways that spider-man is good not the palette of a dullard is what you're getting no no no not a simpleton's palette palette of a refined person uh a person of breeding you understand person of class uh no uh so look in the grand annals of uh besties game of the year conversations i this is not the sort of game we move forward i feel like in this in this particular conversation uh it is uh remarkably polished um in a way that is really

amazing considering how much of it there is every way that the Spider-Man the first Spider-Man game was kind of a did not work this one does and I all the missions are better all the stories are better

all the acting is better they learned so much doing miles morales i guess uh that and they brought a lot of it into it it's very cool to see two um main characters in a spider-man game you can flip back and forth at will um everything's better about it than the first one and the first one was the best spider-man game ever made so spider-man 2 is the best spider-man game ever made and uh resident evil 4 is also remarkable so i don't know what you want from me i don't know if you came here for me to try to dunk on resident evil 4 but it's not gonna happen because it's outstanding no i i didn't want that either i i love like i i feel like to me resident evil 4

is they're they're they they both exceed similarly, but they take very different paths getting there. I feel like Resident Evil 4 was very much about like, let's take all the cool stuff that's here and ditch all the cruft. Like, let's get rid of all the crap and just keep the really cool parts and build these other cool things around those cool parts

and make you feel like make you understand in 2023 why this experience was so good the first time yeah that's cool that's really cool and spider-man 2 is this like okay it's got to be a crowd-pleasing it's it's incredibly fun. It's incredibly, uh, it's a joy to play. I think it is a really good example of like the stuff that super talented people can achieve when it is a properly financed and managed project. You know what I mean?

It's, it's more of a, uh, it is outdoing with scale, uh, and, and firepower, technical firepower a lot.

Uh, but I, I, i i i can't really the passion i think is going to be more there across all of us for for resident evil 4 which i thought was great i didn't personally uh see it through but uh i i think it was uh great and and anything that can hook griffin that much i think is there a merit to that. One last nice thing I want to say about Spider-Man really quick is I thought I was done with this sort of open world, fill out the laundry list sort of game. And it nails every little thing so well. And one, it trims away a lot of the junk. The stuff that it does keep is so pleasurable. It finds a way to tell interesting stories, even with the kind of like filler side quest. And putting just cause in a Spider-Man game is an inspired idea.

It's just I know that some people are not going to like the accuracy of Spider-Man being able to fly. But it feels extremely cool flying around New York City at breakneck speeds. Yeah, why shouldn't you be able to fly but it feels extremely cool flying around new york city at breakneck speeds yeah why shouldn't you be able to do that because spider-man can't well they don't make superman games so let's spider-man fly around it's stupid okay so congrats to resident evil 4 remake next we have puzzling uh i guess this is just a puzzle game category and we've got uh connections which is on the new york times games page and cocoon which is a very cool top-down i guess uh alien puzzle game who wants to tackle i'm happy to talk about connections if somebody else wants to talk about sure uh these were all uh these were both fan votes by the way oh great uh i play connections uh every single

night with with my nine-year-old uh she she and i both love uh connections uh it popped i think we started a few months ago basic idea is you're think of a four by four grid the grid is each square in the grid is populated by one word and those 16 words can be broken into four groups of four that are thematically connected in some way and some of those connections are very like uh literal and direct you know like uh trying to think, one of the categories was, uh, uh, the, for the words were like coil spring wind and twist. And it was like ways to wrap something around something else was that was the uniting thing. So some of them are, uh, a little more direct like that. Some of them are more like, you know single word tv show titles that have a psychiatrist

in them i don't know but uh typically there's also some red herrings where words from these individual groups of fours could theoretically be in like like you'll see five words yeah you'll see like five words that are a flavor of ice cream right so you know one of those is not a flavor of ice cream but it's kind of there to throw you off. So you have to win away the other groups before you know what that group is. Yeah. But it's basically a game about how well you can free associate between concepts and find thematic connections. This to me, the reason this works is it feels like the evolution of Wordle.

I think obviously Wordle had its moment, continues to still have its moment, but had its moment where the entire world was playing Wordle. This evolves that such that, like, I think there's more of a social conversation with this because everyone's sort of in the same boat, even though Wordle, same deal. But I don't know, this feels like more of a conversation starter. And I've been really I just started playing like right around thanksgiving and it's been really great every time i booted up it's like always a really fun interesting experience um yeah someone else can talk cocoon if you if you would like i don't have anything cocoon is a alien inspired puzzle game where you are controlling this little bug creature and a lot of it it surrounds um kind of these logic you want me to lend you a hand please you want me to lend you a hand on this

please please it's really hard to summarize this game it's really hard cocoon is a bug sorry cocoon is a puzzle game set in a world that doesn't look or behave like ours. It looks distinctly alien in a Giger-esque way. And as a result, getting through it, there's like no traditional story. There's no dialogue, no nothing like that. You're just a bug who is pushing around balls. And the way that this universe works is it is kind of inception, like one universe within another universe.

So the balls that you're pushing around, you can actually step into and then solve puzzles within those balls. And you can solve puzzles within balls with inside those balls. And it's balls upon balls upon balls. As you shovel, you shovel, you solve alien puzzles. Yes,

I think that's a well done and impressive I think for people that like games pretty close I think for people that like games like Portal specifically the puzzles in Portal not the narrative but the puzzles this is scratching a very

similar itch Limbo is another comparison those sorts of games uh where you're kind of observing the environment and then using new tools at your disposal to solve the various puzzles in the game um i spoke at length about this game on a resties episode specifically that it was not my favorite just because it felt very restrictive in the way you solved puzzles. Just by design, there was like an answer to the problem. And if you didn't know that answer, you could get really frustrated and kind of stuck.

I know Plant got stuck at one moment. And then, you know, there were other moments that I got stuck. So I think that happens a lot just by nature of there being one answer to the problem. lot just by nature of there being one answer to the problem but because the aesthetics and because the just moving through the world was so engaging and interesting it definitely stuck with me longer than it normally would have um this is not like a soca bond game where i'm like totally disinterested in moving forward like i would really wanted to see more of the game because it was just so visually interesting um but yeah it's not my number one um just because because the style wasn't quite my preference yeah i i i i really bounced off this one pretty hard it's so funny because i i talked so much about Chance of Cinar, and I don't know that it necessarily is so profoundly different.

But with Cocoon, I just felt like it was just looking for the right staircase to get the ball that you needed to put the ball in this hole so you can go up these stairs. I think it is different because I think Chance of Cinar feels empowering insofar as you feel like clever for solving the thing. And you get a little bit of that in Cocoon, but there are a lot of moments where it's just, as you said, like, oh, I did the right order of raising the stairs and lowering these stairs. And that was the solution. Yes. And it just doesn't have that same like impact for me, which is to say i think connections takes this one pretty handily but i think cocoon is still a really good game i think it's on game pass if you're interested in those sorts of games uh yeah the visuals and the aesthetic of it is fantastic yeah it's just and

maybe that's part of the problem is that it is so kind of alien and is committed to that bit that i had trouble connecting with it at a certain point i think i would have been way more into it if i had more ability to like not be like rigidly stuck to platforms and and or if like the balls had like some physics associated with them but again because it's so rigid which i understand from a puzzle solving standpoint like that's good game design to limit what you're able to do at any given moment um it just didn't quite click for me to that end okay i'm just having to ask because i know other people will ask why why are we including connections and i'm not saying that we shouldn't. I'm just raising the question.

Oh, in the, as a video game, you mean? In a semantic sense, yes. I mean, I played it on a screen. I don't think it's that different from like Spell Tower, which is an iPad game. I don't know. Yeah. That's fine.

It just seems wild to not ask. Because it's in the paper. Is it also in the paper? I actually haven't seen a printed version of it. I don't know. I don't live in New York. You're going to have to check. Seems like it would be difficult to figure out.

I guess you could just put numbers in the corner. I don't know. In the first episode of the Besties, Goaty, we did put Neopets on there. So I think that there is precedent for a browser base. Cool. Okay. I mean, the answer is it's our show we do hell yeah uh connections is fun by the way i play it every day some days it's really irritating because it's it's some puzzles are better than others just like the crossword yeah some are clever and cute and some of them are a little cloying so next we have fractured

fairy tales i guess maybe the weakest of the categories that chris plant came up with to bundle these two together but that's okay because it's two excellent games uh that i really enjoyed i guess lies of p did anyone else play lies of p this was a fan vote yeah man i played a lot oh yeah right we talked about it right because this's the Pinocchio game. I love this game. I think this game fucking rules. Yeah. It's cool. I like Liza P a lot.

It's really cool. It's a really... It should have been so much dumber than it is. Yeah. It is. And it is having, I would say, the right amount of camp fun with how dark and twisted it is. It feels like, it's like if American McGee had a sense of humor,

you know what I mean? Like this is, I feel like Liza P would be the kind of thing you'd make. It also like evolves the soul. Obviously it's very inspired by souls, like very inspired by souls, but it also evolves it. It's specific,

specific. What? We've said that about a lot of games but like this one is like specifically bloodborne like it's wild how much it's like bloodborne like it's a lot right it's yeah like it's kind of like how in in like the mid like the late 2000s early 20 teens when everything had rpg mechanics grafted onto it you know what i mean i feel like that is sort of the analogy with like bonfires and some of those dark souls and like tight mechanics.

But Bloodborne didn't have a P organ. That's true. Such a good point. And people aren't saying that enough. You're right. They forget. I also want to give props to lives of P that even though it was comically inspired by Bloodborne,

the fact that they added mechanics specifically the like weapon crafting mechanics like that is a feature that i want from software to steal from lives of p yeah because it gave so much control over how you played and what weapons you used to the player rather than having to like oh i spent all my resources on these two things. So I guess I'm going to use these two things for the rest of the game. It gave a lot of control, not just control, but like the ability to not gate stuff like,

and just let you play the way that you like to play and still get, let you have access to the fun stuff. Like it's not about closing doors to you, which I feel like a lot of those were that you focus on a weapon specialization, go really far down a certain path is much more about like closing closing doors to you, which I feel like a lot of those where you focus on a weapon specialization and go really far down a certain path. It's much more about closing the doors to you. This is just sort of like, I don't know, go mess around with it. See if you like it or not. I feel like the people who didn't click with this game, the issue was that the world design felt, I guess, too simple or not as detailed as a FromSoft game.

But I kind of admire that they knew what their strengths were like they they aren't so the world isn't so bad or so boring it just i never felt like that was the thing that they were most fascinated by i thought that they like you mentioned fresh the the weapon and combat systems were where they were putting most of their time yeah and and yeah again you're right i didn't think the world was that bad i think it actually got better it's one of those rare games that like the further you get into it the environments got more and more complicated and like involved and and kind of loop back on on themselves. I'm thinking of like the convention center level, which like really felt very much on the level of like a Souls type environment, which I dug.

Yeah, it's a sick ass game. It's also going up against a very similar game in Super Mario Wonder. Look, I think I did a very good job with these categories. You did a very good job. You're always going to have the weird one, and this one's a weird one. It's unfortunate, too, because I think both these games could move

forward. They're both quite good. Super Mario Wonder just happens to be the best 2D Mario game since the original ones. Oh, that's interesting. you don't agree this might be a this might be a while what i think i like super i think i like liza p better than super mario wonder yeah me too i've told you tell me why what didn't work for you about wonder or i guess

what what worked but didn't quite get there okay i have i've had a really hard time clicking with a lot of the most recent 2D Mario games. Like the new Super Mario sort of brand just did not do it for me. I think Super Mario Odyssey is one of the best games ever made. I think the 3D lineage has been so fucking strong. And the 2D has not. I think the best 2Dio game that's come out in the past forever is mario maker 2 because it is all about what makes 2d mario like super duper fun right this game has a lot of really funny and memorable set pieces and i don't think that it is It is the kind of like super tight, super rewarding, like platforming, like romp that I kind of wanted it to be.

So you think that's interesting. So you think it's more like a ride than it is like a 2D platforming,ing like a super meat boy that's maybe a good way of thinking about it yeah i i found myself propelled through this game solely to see the crazy ways that like the wonder seeds would change the levels and uh all of that i did not find it particularly fun or exciting to play um that makes so much sense i mean i i it also explains why i like it and why it didn't click for you and what each of us want from these sorts of games which is you are a super mario brothers the lost level sort of dude you you like a really good challenge you like to memorize your path through it you are somebody who speed runs correct me if i'm going

on on any of these um and then i am wow nintendo has so many bizarre weird beautiful ideas and i if i am faced with that challenge i'll admire it but i will not end up seeing it through and this is like a game for someone like me who is is going to bounce off the ultra hardcore um super mario maker 2 levels that people are making online and i'll just end up watching them on youtube um because i agree i think that this is like a joy ride yes i i would agree with that i i for me it is less about the difficulty although i think that that is like i think the difficulty specifically in a platformer – platformers, if you think about them like mechanically, like you're moving around and jumping. And maybe there's a button that makes a bubble come out. It's like not a lot of shit, right?

That's platformers. That's platformers, people. And I really need the game – difficulty I think really forces you to engage with those mechanics and feel some level of like mastery with them right i'm willing to look over that for something like uh super mario wonder because like i'm gonna play it with my seven-year-old who you know didn't get all the b-sides in celeste right like isn't a fucking sweaty platformer gamer like myself uh but then the game does stuff that i found kind of punishing for that too like there's a bunch of characters um and some of them are invincible which is cool but they can't turn into elephants and that's very frustrating for the child uh and uh there's there's just little

stuff like that that uh there's like a death timer if you if you get killed you have five seconds to respawn and then it eats up a life we were just going through lives like nobody's fucking business. And that was getting very frustrating. So it wasn't like, I don't know, if it had been a more casual joy ride, that would have been fun. Or if it had been a more difficult thing. It just, I don't know. I really, this one turned me off really fast. I was shocked by that.

That's 100% where I landed with Wonder. this one turned me off really fast. I landed with, with wonder. I really, I think it was so cool to see sort of the different ideas that they brought to Mario, like to see the different takes on that traditional formula, different positions,

different perspectives even. But I, for me, I, without that, without the difficulty there, I don't, But for me, without the difficulty there, I find just finding those secrets and those unlockables and those hidden versions of the level to be sort of their own exercise and like, I'm doing it. I know how to do it.

I know what I'm doing, and I trigger it, and I see it. But it's not particularly fun to go after those. I don't feel that challenge. You don't feel ownership. Like you accomplished something. Yeah, exactly. Yes, exactly. I feel like anybody could have like done this, which is fine. I don't need games to be challenging,

but if you, it was like Griff said, if you approach this seeking out the difficulty, those spikes are still all over the place. Games that are really hard also have to be really fair and really considerate of how they build your skills and and and that kind of thing um and so this is not that game which is also fine it's like completely i don't need games to be hard we were talking about a little gator game quite a few times in the past few days like i don't need games to be hard either it's just

uh you're just saying you want a super hard game like Liza P to stomp Mario's neck. I get it. It's cool. Hey, I can't stop you. For whatever it is, even when I'm meeting Mario exactly where it is, I have never, like, it just doesn't connect with me. I just don't find it, like, something I want to keep in touch with. You're saying, it's a you.

It's not a him. Can we take a step back and look back in time to the beginning of the year when we're making predictions and Justin had his jokey Pinocchio prediction about this stupid Pinocchio game. Can you imagine back then picturing a scenario where the Pinocchio game would knock Mario out? The first original 2D Mario game in 20 years would knock this out. I didn't even finish Lies of P I just like I like it more in my brain

I just like it more if you were like Justin you have to play here's what I'm going on guys I put about the same amount of time into both of them if you told me right now I had to go play an hour of one of them it would be Lies of P that's where I'm at that'd be sick I wonder what cool puppets on me

fight a donkey? don't mind if I do yeah yeah i think i will thanks you know i went into this and lies of p was i think number 10 on my top 10 list and and wonder was like five i think you guys might have convinced me hell yeah i think i think it happened because i beat lies of p and i fucking loved it i didn't I thought I would have to give more of an ode to it, but I'm glad that it clicked for other people as well. Well, so many wild twists and turns

this year on the besties. Wonder is a delight though. Like I really don't want this to in any way detract. It's just my own personal. I really like Wonder. It's a delight. You know what it is also

that is not doing Mario Wonder any favors is that Nintendo's first party output has been fucking hot shit and if it lets me down in categories that i have seen it do better in in the past i have i it is it is crushingly disappointed i personally think it is i think it's the best um 2d mario game since world uh so it's been like legit 20 years or however long that is since world 25 years so i think they did accomplish that and it is an amazing amazing game but yeah no i i would echo everything that's been said and uh holy shit talk about an upset no kidding wow speaking of nintendo our final category for today, remixing Mega Open Worlds.

We have The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, which is building upon the foundation of Breath of the Wild. And we have Cyberpunk, which is building on Cyberpunk. They did it. They finished the game. Yeah.

Heartbreaking, I think, this game. Yeah, this is painful. Tears of the Kingdom. Yeah. Heartbreaking, I think, this game. Yeah, this is painful. Tears of the Kingdom, because I would say I think of all the games on this list that I did not see coming, even more than Lies of P, I would say, a DLC expansion to Cyberpunk 2077, a game I reviled,

was going to win me over as much as it did. But man, it sure did what a good ass what a good ass dlc it really shows just how impressive the bones of that game eventually became because it is one of the best open world experiences I've ever had. I think it wipes the floor with, you know, some of the other open world games that have come out of the last several years on a visual storytelling gameplay front. like fandom liberty specifically was like a really good story campaign and just like nested within the framework that is cyberpunk which is very very strong i i think if you separate out um like the improvements to cyberpunk from the idea of like what we are considering this year right i think even then phantom liberty stands on its own really well like i have i've uh i love cyberpunk shit like the genre um the lower c cyberpunk i guess uh and

i i felt like cyberpunk 2077 kind of didn't really scratch the itch in the way that i wanted and i felt like phantom liberty was like a full-blown it was like the ghost in the shell sort of like uh immersive rpg uh that that i that i've always wanted yeah very focused uh insofar as like most of the story takes place in this one area but very uh i guess we'll go back to the word holistic insofar as because you are i think in the original core cyberpunk you're constantly getting like phone calls from 16 different people and being pulled in all these different directions and it was hard to like kind of

put your myths on the main story unless you like really just mainlined it and here this all felt like it was all kind of building to an eventual climax within Phantom Liberty that just yeah made it really land the plane in a fantastic way.

And I'm so happy that so many people that either bounced off of Cyberpunk initially or never got a chance to play it have what is unquestionably one of the greatest open-world games ever made now in where this game is at. I'm really, it's interesting how my perspective has shifted

on this is it's similar to the arc you saw with uh obviously um no man's sky is the biggest example um i know there are others ubisoft has pulled it off a couple times now uh in the multiplayer world but i i think it's it's really cool to see games that like for economic reasons or financial reasons, more accurately, like are put out before they're 100 percent ready. see something through to its full potential and not like chuck all the work and time and effort and care that went into it you know before that launch to to be able to like make all that stuff as good as it can be um i think it's really cool it's a really good use of people's time i don't know what that means for the end consumer like if it's fair that they get a product that isn't you know reaching its full potential on launch day. But as somebody who's seeing, if you take it a little more holistically,

I think it's good that people are getting to bring these to their final vision. It feels like where in each of those situations, kind of when the creatives were able to take more command of the project, because I think, I don't know about No Man's Sky, but I know for sure with cyberpunk it was 100 a we you know we've spent hundreds of millions or however much they've spent in developing that game it needs to come out figure it out no matter what we ain't spending no

more and i can i actually talked to some of the i actually talked to some of the, I actually talked to some of the folks at CD Projekt while I was at the TGAs. And you can, you could sense it, how like, bummed they were, because they knew what was going to happen when the game got pushed out when it did. And there was nothing they could really do about it. And, and, but thankfully, after launch, there was something they could do about it. And they, and they were able to kind of right the ship. So that is a good story. I agree with you. It's not necessarily fair to consumers. But guess what, consumers?

Don't preorder games. Don't buy them before they're out. You should read. They're expensive. Trust your podcasting friends. Yes. The besties. the besties uh so also i i mentioned this on a recent episode it is uh the the gulf in the writing between this and some let's say other open world games that came out this year was so

staggering uh that it it really made this feel like i don't know i felt like i was playing fucking breaking bad the video game at certain points I love how in this DLC campaign, just everything goes wrong all the time. Yeah. You are just always fucking up and on the brink of death and everything is just a disaster. And Idris is just yelling at you and you're loving every minute of it. Idris is yelling at you and you have to choose where your loyalties lie. Man, yeah, this shit rules. Now, here's what I'm going to say.

this this shit rules now here's what i'm gonna say before this was added to the list justin i rightly i get it wanted to be really clear because he wanted to make sure that we weren't crediting cyberpunk for its entire uh element you know the entire game but rather just for phantom liberty because it wouldn't be fair to another game that came out this year that only had, I guess, the year, rather than the three years that Cyberpunk spent fixing it. Hey, No Man's Sky had a fucking great year. Great experiences this year. Yeah, for sure. So that's a good comparison.

So I just wanted to say that, because if it was Cyberpunk in totality, so the DLC and the main game game and everything this would be a fucking tight race for me against zelda like really really tight i don't know who would win but it's not so thanks to justin um tears of the kingdom is fucking insane and i spent 150 hours just like absorbing it and living in that world and loving it. And when I finished, I was finally able to look shit up and I found a treasure trove of insane

creations that people made using the building mechanics. And I was like, just a wash with like joy over the world and the tool set that they created. Um, I loved it. I, what kills me that they're not doing dlc it really does like destroy me really bumps me out but uh i need to accept it and bask in the joy that i had from playing it

uh originally which and and i'm sure i'll go back and play it again someday uh but man uh this game is fucking stellar and uh i loved it yeah I mean it kicks ass and so does this Cyberpunk DLC but for me Zelda kicks more ass I think if that's the conversation yeah it's you know and it is

it's just a side thing it's just a little side adventure little snack just a little treat you've been so good lately I think that also i want to give credit to uh whoever is directing the performances in cyberpunk because that can't that has to be a completely different skill set and they have managed to elicit like two pretty good performances from two pretty good actors that probably have a lot of ways that they are used to doing things in front of a camera.

So I think that there must be some really impressive ways that they're translating performance to the digital simulacra of it. I think the voice actors of both Vs also are putting on a fucking clinic. Yeah, they're great. In terms of taking a character whose writing should make them insufferable, but instead

as actually very badass. So Zelda is Avatar Frontiers of Pandora. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Shocking turn of events. What? Guys, you shouldn't have.

My birthday was a month ago, guys. Okay. Zeebaco! Zeebaco! We will be talking about that game in January, by the way. Just, you can look forward to that. We will be singing about that game so our ancestors can hear it in the trees. We will connect with AWOL,

and we will all feel the game and see the game and know the game. Yeah, just as soon as the Ubisoft Connect app does allow me to install it to my computer. It will stink in the skies. Once I get it to work, once I get this shit to work, see if I go, baby.

I don't think we need to do honorable mentions we spent a lot of time but we should recap point you want to recap the winners that are going to be moving on are you going to reorganize these into thematic groups again or is it going to be more numerical no I think I should I think I think we want to give it the best shot

to make for it will get increasingly sweaty yeah it's gonna get no no they're all gonna be perfect I can't wait to tell you about the similarities between connections and resident evil 4 remake they have so much in common they both involve typewriters um uh here's and one of them may be printed in the new york times no one is clear here are the winners we got baldur's gate 3 alan wake Wake 2, Dredge, Sea of Stars, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Connections, Lies of Pi, and The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. That is two games from our fan vote that have made it into the next round.

I fucking, it does my heart so much good to see liza p on this list it's gonna be heartbreaking when it loses to something else but man i'm so proud of him i'm so proud of you pinocchio i'm worried that there's people that have hung with us a long time where this may be the one one besties yeah i used to um god there was a moment what was it oh yeah instead of the best 2d mario game in 30 years but it is kick it kicks ass it does kick ass it does look like chris has gone ahead and bracketed it against zelda the legend of zelda for l games which is wild that you wouldn't do p games but i guess there's not another p game on here um okay well we did it uh i think we should call it i wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcasts we have cam bop we have upset kids

14 11 and we have doink salad thank you for writing reviews for the besties on apple podcast thank you to everyone who has subscribed to the newsletter at besties.fan which has great things in it and is very exciting and great to read and i think hey, people should listen to the Resties. We are bringing an end to the Resties required reading list, our year-long project to find 25 games that you can play that will make it so much more enjoyable when you pick at your favorite hobby. And we've actually recorded this already. Yeah, and let me tell you, the final list, it's flawless.

There will not be a single complaint in the world. We did find the 25 games that will bring you joy, and I can't wait to hear you dig into them. Bring you joy? Was that the rubric? I think I screwed up then. No, don't. We don't want to get into the rubric.

It's a perfect, flawless rubric, and the games are great. Hey, guys, recording this episode made me feel joy. It's been a good ass year for games but next episode is gonna get even wilder and we'll be sure to join us again for that uh next time on the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games Besties!