The Besties - Doing the Time Warp Yet Again with Deathloop

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

This week, we're discussing Arkane's time-traveling Groundhog Day-meets-creative murder sandbox Deathloop! And boy howdy, is there a lot to discuss. We also break down the glut of time looping games that have come out this year, which we've definitely done before, but, hey, it feels appropriate, right?Other games discussed include: Destiny 2, Elsinore, The Forgotten City, Overboard, Zelda: Majora's Mask, Returnal, Outer Wilds, World Flipper, Prey: Mooncrash, and Eastward. 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 want to do some callbacks to some things that have come up recently, and it's important that I share this information with the world so that they don't get sort of led down the wrong path. Callback number one. In a recent episode, I discussed the concept of egg steam, specifically pouring cold water on a very hot cooking pan, specifically a nonstick egg cooking pan, after you do that and inhaling the steam that comes off of it.

I've been informed— God, did I miss— Like aaling the steam that comes off of it. I've been informed. God, did I miss? Like a normal, regular egg steam kind of thing. Did I miss that? Was I not there for that episode? Because that feels iconic to me. It's possible you missed it. I don't remember.

It should be noted. Your commitment lately has been just so sad. People have informed me that both that might not be the best for me and also maybe not the best for the pan either um because it'll warp the pan and maybe remove some of the teflon on the pan and maybe i'm inhaling teflon and not so much egg steam so maybe don't do that i don't know for sure that that's the case but yeah so that's that's thing a and also this isn't in the show. This is just us recording beforehand, and just whatever happens, happens.

The other thing, as a callback, people might remember many, many months ago that I bought a shitload of cereal because I was really excited about it, and then I had a bout of acid reflux because I kept eating cereal very late at night and then going right to sleep. And then the cereal lived in my closet

for a very long time i am now on the last box of cereal it expired in may congrats oh no what do we just an expert of cereal that is on this show what do we think is it okay for me to eat the frosted mini wheats that expired in may they were still sealed um I mean, no. Okay, now what do I do? The expiration date. Okay, now normally you have come to somebody who's very permissive about expiration dates. Because I think a lot of it's trumped up bullshit, right? But in this specific case, it's so many months past the expiration date. The expiration date, like, Russ, it is implicit that it is unopened.

If you ripped open a box of cereal and dumped it on your counter, it's like, I'll be back for you in May. Like, it would be ruinous, right? They assume that it's sealed. Okay, so the follow-up question I have now is what do I do because I've been eating the May expired cereal for the last two days. So this is more asking for forgiveness than permission situation. Yeah. Okay. You knew what you were doing.

Yeah. How bad is it? I mean, probably pretty bad, friend. Yeah. If it makes you feel better, I don't think less of you. I appreciate that. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plante, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week. My name is Frost Frostick and my name is Ross Frostick and my name is Ross Frostick and I bought... Oh, I get it. Oh, you fly devil.

That's fun. That's fun. It sounded like he was saying Frost Rustick. I think it's one of those... It's like an optical illusion but for your ears. Welcome to the besties

where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a video game club, and just by listening, my friend, you'll remember each week we're going to take the latest new hot releases and dig deep, deeper than any other podcast is willing to go. Perversely deep, some may say. Those cowards. Way too deep. We're going to be elbow deep in ones and zeros. Folks, this week we are talking about a big new release on a scale that we have not experienced,

I would say, for some number of months. It's Deathloop, the latest from Arkane Studios, the house behind Dishonored, and the remake of Prey. Well, not a remake. Arx Farsalis. What is that game called? Farsalis? Arx Farsalis. What was that game called? Farsalis? Arx Farsalis?

Fatalis? Farts for salad? I don't remember. I shouldn't have said anything. Farts for salad? That can't be right. What was the game before Farts for Salad? Dishonored, notably, there's a lineage here.

Dishonored was if memory serves the very first besties game of the year. I think that is right. That sounds right to me. Timing of that sound right. But this is a new, I would say there's a like spiritual successor seems weird but it definitely feels like a spiritual successor

to Dishonored. It's one of them arcane games. That's what it is. If you like the other arcane games, this is one of them. Yes, it's a fart salad of arcane games. It's taking all the different pieces

and it's putting them together. Can I do it? Chris, do you want to get you a job? Chris, do a better job. Yeah, so basically what the game is, you're a dude who wakes up on some like Christopher Nolan-esque beach and you find out that maybe your ex-girlfriend is like, hey, you need to break the loop.

And that's because your day is just going to repeat over and over and over again. And let me tell you, breaking that loop is probably going to involve some stealth, probably going to involve some fresh guns, probably going to involve killing lots of people. And that's the game. That's the game. That's the game. And we're going to talk even more about it.

Believe it or not, even more detail than that. Right after this. So, yeah, this is a tricky game to talk about just because it doesn't really match up with a lot of other games. Even games that, like, Arkane has made it is still feels very very different um you know obviously the big hook of this is that there is a time loop and the end goal which is made very clear to you early on is that there are these eight quote visionaries or like more or less bosses and in order to end this time loop and let you escape from this hell,

you need to kill all of them in a single day. And to pull that off, you have to follow very specific steps to sort of know where they're going to be. You can even manipulate different characters to make their routines change so that they're in a different spot. And then once you have everything lined up, you can have the, quote, one perfect day

where you just go through and, like, you're in the right place at the right time exactly at that right moment. The way that you do that is through following leads, which is, I feel like, becoming a very common sort of narrative feature. I mean, it was in Forgot in forgotten city and like almost exactly the same yeah it's yeah exactly right like it's it's you can't just you you play as cole and you can't

just like go through and oh there's a guy i shoot him and then i go to the next area shoot them like you have to you know manipulate things so you put three of them in the same room and you can you know more efficiently get more bang for your buck because you the the day is basically split into four segments you have the morning you have noon you have afternoon and then evening and you can spin those four sort of chunks exploring four different parts of this island right so it's all about like what's the right time to be at which place uh what are like here is a password that i found that lets me open up a door at this one segment and this person's here at this time of day but i can trick them into going here at this time so like aside from all

the arcaney stuff which is making these builds to get around these islands and either being stealthy or super loud or coming up with all of these clever ways to kill people with these slab superpowers it's also like a a mystery yeah game kind of where you are trying to figure out you are trying to equip yourself with information which uh is is really yeah i'll give like a specific example of like how you can pull this off so there's like a scientist character for example who's very obsessed with an experiment that he's running and if you go in the morning to his experiment and fuck it up such that like he's no longer getting the weird signal that he's been studying he'll be frustrated and then in the evening he'll go to this party that otherwise he would just stay by his science experiment in the evening.

So that's like a very simple example of how you can affect this stuff. But it's so multilayered such that like you can't pull. It's not like Forgotten City where you can, if you've played the game before, you can like beat it in the first shot. I think that was the case with Outer Wilds as well, where you could play through, you know, if you knew exactly where to go, you could beat it in one go. Here, you really do need to take the many steps that is required to like get the passcode, to get the door, to get the experiment,

to da-da-da-da, so on and so forth, which takes many, many loops. Who feels, the progression mechanics of this game are wild. And I will say to its credit, it does a great job of onboarding you onto those mechanics because it is not a roguelike, right?

Like when Cole dies, which first of all, he gets to do three times before the loop actually resets. You basically get two redos. If you die, it rewinds time for you a little bit, which is a very smart mechanic once you start getting into the multiplayer aspect of the game, which we need a minute. to save things from one loop to another. Things being weapons or these powers which come in the form of slabs or these more passive modifiers

that I can't remember the name of. They're called trinkets. Trinkets, yes. Which, using those, that's how you start to get into the Dishonored-style builds of the game. And, for example, there is a blink blink style trinket that lets you dash forward in space right which not a trinket that's that's a tab a slab right that's a slablet that's a slablet

uh so like by killing a visionary you can get that right but then if you go back and kill that visionary again you can modify that slab with further upgrades and then you can spend residuum to like lock that into your character so that when you die you keep it when you wake up uh that that's the best i can do i feel like in explaining like the the progression mechanics of the game because there's a fuck ton of stuff to unlock and like you know a ton of different ways to kind of play through the game depending on which slabs and which weapons and trinkets and everything that you

Justin I know you were a little overwhelmed or something confused maybe by like how to get into it and how to quote play Deathloop what was the hang up and maybe we can help you through it my experience is so I've been playing for a few hours. I got a couple of these slabs.

We were talking about. I think I just meta wise don't necessarily have a good sense of like the progression of the thing. So like I'll give you an example. There are these, one of the sort of like big leads, they're called visionary leads,

that help you track down these people that you need to kill and maybe like help to steer them into a way that you can kill them all at once i killed one of the people this guy who has his own like basically rpg like a larp that he has set up in in his home uh which is cool and i i killed that dude and it gave me his like slab and then it said like you, he met with this other person here. Maybe you should go check that out. I was like, okay, sure. So I go into that area of the world at that time of day where there's there, I have this picture that shows where they met.

Right. And it wasn't really like an indicator or anything of like where they would, where they met. It's just like, I have a picture and it says like they, you know, they normally met on the shore or whatever. So I like wandered around this area for like, I have a picture and it says like they, you know, they normally met on the shore or whatever. So I like wandered around this area for like, I mean really 45 minutes of like killing all the dudes that are there. And then like finding this just throws so much at you.

If you're not like really focused. And there's a lot of like, you know, this is a place where frank likes to eat poison i hope nobody and i'm like wait who's frank it's like yeah anyway this is where frank and benita like to eat apples but there's poison maybe it'd be a shame if someone did a poison to it and it's like when are they doing this who are these people where is the poison yeah i don't understand there's so much of

this and it's like every room has something like that where it's like i hate the feeling of like man i've worked really hard to get to the point i'm at right now i hope i don't have to do this again or like i hope i can fully take advantage of the position that i've put myself in and i can't tell you how many times i've like found like a secret passage that I think like, Oh, this is neat. I've like outsmarted something and gotten to this point where I'm like,

okay, well I don't have whatever weird thing it wants me to have at this point at whatever switch or key or whatever. Do I do, did I do it wrong? Should I start over? Should I die? Can I leave?

I also PS I've collected so much of this residuum in this run and i don't want to die so it's not just like a fun sort of i don't know let's take another loop whatever and in this exact area by the way i died in a room where a dude like locked me out and then killed me with gas love that and then i lost i lost my residuum in there and couldn't get back to it and that's like fun but anyway that's the kind of thing i'm saying like yeah there was a lot covered there and i want to see if i can tackle it yes please okay so i'll talk about the first one because you mentioned the photographs there's a moment where you get a photograph of the couple and you're trying to find where the photograph was taken basically on this Island.

It's actually funny that you were frustrated by that, given how much you love, um, Sherlock Holmes games and like detective games. Cause like that photograph actually gives you more than enough information to find the spot. There's like, I'm sorry,

I'm calling you a little bit stupid there's stuff in the back going on in the background there's like a crash plane in the background there's a number of a bunker like it's i'm not saying it's super easy to find but like that's part of the game is really like using every little piece of information that they're giving you well i think that way what i'm struggling with though is like what i i ended up following those clues i just kind of like went i happened to not go to it straight away and ended up basically walking around the entirety of the island on the coast i mean that's what i did and i got there um i think what is hard is like i also don't know should i feel like i've found a lot of

little things that i have no idea how they connect but i find a lot of little things that I have no idea how they connect, but I find a lot of little things by poking around through the area, right? So if it's my first time in a region, I don't know the extent to which I should be like, should I be just trying to find this thing or should I like poke around? I think you're playing it right. I think a big part of the game is digging into the areas

and like, oh, I found this little clue. Is this gonna be worthwhile or not? I would say for people that like, maybe don't have the patience for that, into the areas and like oh i found this little clue is this going to be worthwhile or not i would say for people that like maybe don't have the patience for that you can turn on there are waypoints if you like go to your menu and go to your like visionary leads and you just click one of the leads it'll just toss you waypoints generally speaking to where you need to go next and honestly this is the one area that i like kind of wish that they trusted the player a little bit more because there are a lot of moments in death loop where i feel like i'm just sprinting from waypoint to waypoint i enjoy the trip getting there and i think the

world is gorgeous and the net like the writing is spectacular the character is really fun but i you know in the enthusiasm and like excitement i got from figuring out a puzzle in Outer Wilds, I don't necessarily get that same thing here because it feels like I'm a little bit being directed by the nose. And I think that one aspect is something that I think differs from even Prey, which I think offered a little more exploration. Well, Prey didn't have the loopy stuff. Well, Prey DLC does. Yeah. Yes, the thing you plant. The thing that plant played and nobody else.

Hey, hey, we got plenty of questions about it. I'm going to offer the, I guess, like the Goldilocks scenario here because I feel like Justin is wanting this to be a bit more direct. Frush is wanting it to be a little bit looser. For me, i am astounded by the beginning of this game i i think it's just absolutely incredible um i i i feel like it was like um crackdown meets megaman uh is the comparison i would make but made by uh arcane and the way it hit for me was i had all those waypoints that Fresh talked about. There

were a number of people on our Twitter who, you know, did not seem to like those. But what I liked about that is it showed me generally where I should be. And then it left it up to me to be inventive about how I went about things. And it is like such a easy win for me of, went about things and it is like such a easy win for me of hey is there a mansion built on a cliff and uh if there is i wonder if i can go around the cliff to climb up it backwards and somehow breaking through like the back entrance and let me tell you i did that in the first two hours of this game um that's that's that's i feel like when you talk about what an arcane game is it is a game that offers you uh a few different ways to get through any situation but the thing that they are known for is like non-combat exploration like oh well i could find

this secret vent by turning into a rat right like that is that's not something that other games necessarily do it's like not magic-y it's not stealthy it's not combat-y it's just like oh well the level design is as such that it has a logic to it that i bet i could figure out yeah but what i liked about this in where i bounce off of arcane games is i'm not a big stealth person i wish i was i like wish i i liked i admire hitman 3 for example a lot but like i'm just not that patient um this game completely allows for combat every every time you come across characters it is really really lenient on you creating a far cry uh kate like camp raid type of scenario on every little puzzle box uh of times that you find people it's really nice it has a very nice

sense of like it's not that thing of like did i fuck up by starting a fight here it's really like i don't know man do itself or do it don't do it yeah i don't know you can like bend time and teleport around fucking kill him if you want what do we care yeah and i i and the combat is like fun like i i really enjoyed using the various weapons they felt really powerful most things are like close to like one hit kills um especially if you headshot um i don't know why i keep coming back to this thought but it reminded me so much of goldeneye which is a game I don't even really like love going back and revisiting. I think I know why.

Yeah, go ahead. Let me speculate. I think GoldenEye is a game that like people played when it came out nonstop so many fucking times. Like I remember trying to unlock the cheats in GoldenEye and to unlock the cheats, you had to beat the levels under a certain amount of time. So I knew Complex so fucking well. I knew where every enemy was. I knew where every guard was. I knew every camera, you name it.

And because you're playing through this game and you're constantly going through the same environments different times a day, but generally speaking, the same environments, there were moments where I was like, I would just know the path that I could sprint where no guard saw me until I got to the target that I was going for. And it just feels amazing. I mean, it is reliving that experience in the Tom Cruise movie. I think maybe that's what I'm missing because I'm spending so long in a given life or a given loop,

right. That like, I'm really being pretty thorough and I'm not getting that sense of like repeating time. Like I'm not getting the sense of any sort of loop. Like it still feels very much like, I don't know. I would,

I would add to that and say like, it's important to remember if you have anything that you care about, whether it's a bunch of residuum or a gun you really really like you can just leave generally speaking you just exit the level and save anything that you want you don't need to kill someone on every map is there a way to get that icon back uh that's a good question i haven't because i i don't know the exit icon is what you're asking i mean I know at this point where the exits are, but that came. Yeah, I'll say this about the level design is astonishing. It is like just bonkers good.

They managed to have like that kind of Bioshock-y, every stage has its own kind of like theme. But then even within each stage there's like there's like a theme park one ish thing there's one that's like an air air force hangar but then it's also kind of has a james bond i don't know inception snow area but then like interior factory thing going on like i i found it very quickly that I knew where I was. I was learning about the story from where I was. And I was just, I just found it quite beautiful.

There's something, I don't know. Maybe that's, again, where I keep coming back to the golden eye thing. There's something very simple about the geometry of it all, despite it looking dense and beautiful, that I, it just stuck in my head really easily. Yeah. Let me, let me, because I said we would talk about this later. Juliana, right? There is a whole second mode to this game

where you can play as Juliana, who is the aforementioned sort of foil to Colt. And when you play as Juliana, you are hunting Colt. And so when you're playing as Colt, occasionally you will get a message that says Juliana's on the hunt. And then all of a sudden, when you play as juliana you are hunting colt uh and so when you're playing as colt occasionally you will get a message that says juliana's on the hunt and then all of a sudden there's a real actual ass person in the game trying to kill you uh kill you three times potentially depending on how many

times you've used your like respawn power uh but if you can manage to take juliana out she will drop like some dope ass trinkets a slab upgrade and will also completely refresh your three bonus lives which is fucking brilliant because for a while i turned it off you can turn it into offline mode because i got so tired of like chasing down these leads being like doing really really good on a loop and then just getting destroyed by a juliana who had like more upgrades and shit than i did and feeling just really demoralized by that until i realized actually if you can take the player control juliana out which is not impossible not only will you get all of these dope upgrades and the residuum you need to keep them it'll refresh your lives completely so it's like not it's like nothing happened except you got all of these dope upgrades and the residuum you need to keep them it'll refresh your lives completely so it's like not it's like nothing happened except you got all of these great

upgrades so there would be times and for me this is what really it's a double-edged sword because i'm sort of in the same campus juice where i find chasing down these leads like a little uh just annoying from time to time but it's really cool when you have a loop that all you've really done on it is kill a player controlled juliana and get an incredible upgrade and a bunch of residuum and you say actually fuck the leads right now i'm gonna go cash out essentially and keep all this incredible stuff that will allow me to you know have a little bit of an easier time next next loop and for me that me, that system works so damn well. And I cannot, like, there are so many versions of that

that are terrible. And the fact that Arcane managed to thread that, also playing as Juliana is pretty fun. It's pretty fun because if you've played as Colt enough, you know where they're going, you know where to, for instance, if you really want to be a troll about it, like where to put the proximity mines uh maybe around the antenna that they have to go hack in order to open up the exit uh maybe you chop a few proximity mines around that uh like you actually it's as juliana you also get so let's say the cult is being spotted by guards and being

really loud you'll get on-screen indicators exactly where that's happening so that's your edge the way that's balanced as juliana you only get one life whereas colt one life the three lives so all of that shit is so like on paper that shit is so smart and an execution like they nailed it and and for me that is that is the best i cannot recommend enough that you leave that mode on, because especially once you get like one good weapon, like I got a machine gun that was pretty good. And then all of a sudden I stopped losing my Juliana encounters.

Maybe she would take me down once or, you know, in a really rough case twice. But, you know, Juliana's only got the one life. So it's not that hard. If you play offline juliana will still invade but it'll be like a bot control juliana who is like basically an idiot yeah so yeah yeah it's not hard to take also on or off throughout the entire game your character and juliana are talking to each other that's where like much of the story comes from the writing is quite good i think ron mentioned

this last week the voice acting is the best yeah it's spectacular it's very fun it is very very very very good if you want to hear what good voice acting can be like in a video game uh they've found i was genuinely trying to think of an example of like better chemistry between two characters in a video game and i really i can't struggling like it the back and forth between them it's not just these two characters either right it's this world is occupied this world where no one can die and they are all cognizant of the fact that they are looping and not dying to the point where like there's one segment where just like people are doing these like american idol style auditions

that if they fail they get dropped into a meat grinder. And they're like, yeah, whatever. Like, because I can't die. Like I just will come right back, right? And so what you get is an island full of just fucking psychopaths who are, and sociopaths, like they can't die. So it's like they have changed dramatically as human beings. But that's not just true of the like eight characters you're trying to kill.

Like that's true of Juliana. It's true of Colt to some extent. Like everyone in this game is pretty fucked up. And it's really fun that they like made that so comprehensive, I guess. It's very cool aesthetically too i just want to mention like the the look and feel of this game is like this very cool sort of like you know i'm not an art guy at first but it feels like kind of like a 60s pop art mod sort of yes with um a little bit of like a tinge of grindhouse sort of sort of deal, it's gorgeous. One quick note before we wrap up.

If you are thinking about playing this on PS5 versus PC, if you want to play right now, don't play it on PC. Please don't play it on PC. That's what I've been playing on. And even with this new patch, the new patch actually made it much worse for me. Oh, no. Last night, I grinded on it for, I i don't know like three or four hours just so i

could have enough to talk about but i had five full and like booted out of the game crashes and all of them came after i had like killed a boss um so ps5 version works great if you happen yeah i would have i would avoid it on pc but that speaks to how great the game is like yeah i i really really want to be playing this right now so i'm i am excited for whenever they patch it it's so wild by the way that um i know we talk about this but like the fact that like if i want to play anywhere in my house the best option for that is having it on my ps5 is wild like i've been playing mainly on my pc doing like remote play through the ps5 it's great i mean it's like indiscernible

um i mean you can also really is it on steam because you can steam steam link you know remote play that also i'm assuming i don't know i think it is um man what a good what what a good thanks yeah i thought i'd come over there with like a little, I thought you were setting up like an alley for like fun facts. And so I decided, Hey, let me get a hand on the ball. Hey, here's, here's a fact that may or may not be true. It definitely is not fun. Let me get up in here real quick.

Real quick. It's cool. Like, it's very cool. I, yeah, I'm, I don't have any desire to stop playing it. But you know what it feels like? I feel like I'm in that moment when you're reading a fantasy novel. You know what I mean? And it's like, who the fuck are any of these people?

And I know from experience that two-thirds into it, I'm going to be like, oh, okay. I'm a little bit more into it now. But it's just throwing so much of the world at at me at once um but i i know that i'm gonna um i'm gonna stick with it i'm sure it'll all congeal we're gonna take a quick break and then when we come back we're gonna talk about more time looping games answer your questions whatever i don't know don't tell us what you got some questions for you after the break whoa now plant do i have this right you have have questions for them? We've got questions for them. Some people on this website, twitter.com, maybe you should ever visit it.

They're always like, hey, besties, how do I keep your show going? I've noticed this trend of when things seem good, you disappear forever. And to that I say, a survey. That's the answer. We have a survey for you to fill out. And it's just like a little bit of info, I'd say demographics info, that helps us keep the show going. And you can do the survey. I'm going to say it once, but then you can just go to our Twitter page. It's bit.ly forward slash survey besties. That's one word right there. And you can just go to our Twitter page. It's bit.ly forward slash surveybesties. That's one word right there.

And you go there. You fill it out. I think it's 20 questions. It takes like a couple minutes. It's totally anonymous for what it's worth. Totally anonymous, yeah. Or you could go to the besties pod on Twitter. That's their address, right?

Yeah. Yep. And I'll make it the pinned tweet so you can get it right there. But yeah, if you have time, it's super appreciated if you can fill that up for us. The other things you can always do, which you can do anytime, you know, leaving a review, sharing it with friends and family, helps a lot. So that's that. Now we have a real B segment. Fr segment fresh do you want to kick that off yeah obviously this trend and we talked about forgotten city in the at the beginning of the

show a little bit this is this trend is not going away um and i wanted to see time loop time specifically time loop games that acknowledge that they are time looping and like integrate that into the narrative has only increased. There's like four or five the last year that I can think of. So I want to ask you guys, what are your favorite time looping games? I mean, do they have to be modern? No, no, no. Anytime.

Oh, okay. Majora's Mask for sure. I think Majora's Mask is a tough one to beat just because it does so many of these things that these games do, right? Like you have the Bomber's Notebook, which was the, that's what your leads are. There's so much mechanical stuff. So much like also great and heavy storytelling in a way that I don't know that a Zelda game has done again. I'm a big Majora's Mask apologist. know that a zelda game has done again i'm a big majora's mask apologist uh but i think you know even if you despise the game you can't deny the fact that a lot of the stuff these games are doing

these days has roots in this what 20 year old maybe not 20 year old video game but pretty old video game um so yeah yeah it feels i talked a little bit about this last week in the Ron episode. I think these days, the, the reason they've sort of come up about is narrative is something that you can really flesh out, um, with relatively small teams. It can be a ton of work, obviously an incredible, you know, Hades jumps to mind as a game that is like so packed full of narrative in terms of developing tons and tons of levels that can be a real major resource sink that can require teams of dozens if not hundreds of people so i think people have been leaning on this as a way to tell

really interesting stories without needing these enormous teams now obviously arcane that's a pretty big studio so right but they but they've sunk their time into you know in addition to creating these four areas each of the areas has multiple time frames that you're in you know there's this multiplayer functionality that we talked about so it's interesting to see how this concept is sort of scaling um returnal is another example of a game that like constantly acknowledges that you're time looping um i'm into it i i think it's i'd rather that than i'm just gonna play through 12 levels of whatever cod and never think about the sixth level or seventh level again because

that's just like such a resource thing uh it's it's crazy to me like how much time and effort gets put into like an uncharted experience that you only play once right i think that the insta uh first off i want to highlight one of my favorites the sexy brutal yeah great one if you haven't played that yeah that one uh came out 2007 uh or 2017 rather um it's i the story's too complex to get into it but basically murder mystery time loop kind of deal. It's very, very good. If you have not played it, this is the game, number one game,

that I get tweets like, thank you for recommending this, because I wouldn't have found it otherwise, and I loved it. So trust me on this one. If that sounds interesting, I'll check it out. I would make the argument that this genre, this sub-genre,

was kick-started by the success of Dark Souls. Interesting. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I could fully see that. Yeah, I think that what you saw is people looking at that and thinking like, well, this is cool from a mechanics perspective. How do we layer narrative onto it and keep this satisfying sense of I'm progressing by getting good at the thing and replaying it over and over again. And I feel like it lends

itself narratively to that very well. And I would make the argument that that's what opened the door to this mechanic being something that's like being leaned on a lot is Dark Souls. And what's so fascinating about Deathloop, and I think what makes it work so well is it's doing both things where in dark souls is a very mechanically loopy

game right where that that loop of oh shit i need to get to a fucking bonfire and cash out right now death loop does that but it also does it the the narrative looping thing also and the way that it kind of plays with both of those intentions is is is where its strength are leaving out the greatest of all time oh and just what's that there's outer wilds yeah i was gonna say oh yeah for time loop game yeah all the time and then i would say like close second place elsinore where's that one i have not played that look at look at all of you i feel i actually feel like this would be like deathloop would my experience would be improved if it was a little bit more like out of wilds in the sense that the limits seem so small at first and you're opening up

possibility you know what i mean it's like you're you're it's an expansion of the possibility sphere rather than i feel like death really drops you in the middle of that because i really wanted you to be like i would like death loop more if it was more like elsinore yeah what the hell is elsinore it's it's just uh it's hamlet in a time loop and you play as ophelia it's very does not end well for very well that's the point that's the point of the game yeah justin you really should play this game i think you would really really like this game i do think you mentioned outer wilds i do think it's important you know outer wilds just came out what is it two or three years ago but that game was in like the igf awards i know like and in the space of like the development world for like four or

five or maybe even six years so i know that it was like churning through developers heads for a long time and i really do think this new era is very much informed by that game did you know there's dlc for outer wilds coming out next week yeah that's fucking why like that game that game is so perfect like narratively and mechanically the idea of now let's throw some more shit on there is like absolute uh hubris it seems like a lot of people had a lot of very well-founded problems with that game i don't remember that i don't remember that at all i remember that perfectly hey very quick question what about quantum break yeah we're

gonna get into reader mail but i want i want to get a question here that uh that ties to this first uh this one's from eric of the recent batch of time loop games which do you think of address the idea the best from a narrative thematic standpoint i mean i think death loop i think is my favorite of recent stuff. I think that the way that it is thematically attaching it is actually very sneaky. It's like a very sort of like, be careful what you wish for idea of like, how are we perverted when consequence is removed? Like, how are we corrupted by the lack of consequence? And that's like like it's an interesting

thematic question they only lean into that more as the game progresses so it really is a huge huge part of the game so i i totally agree um i i mean for me it's not like once you learn about like i i can't forget about like the when i first learned about like Ash Twin project in Outer Wilds and the reason why that game sets up this wild interstellar mystery that just seems like there's no way they're going to resolve this. And then they resolve everything in excruciating detail. I don't know.

I agree. I thought by recent we meant this year just because there have been so many this year. Then Overboard. I think Overboard is pretty rad. Yeah, Overboard is spectacular. Yeah, Overboard. been so late this year but i didn't then uh overboard i think oh yeah spectacular yeah overboards does it does not messing with it really thematically that much it but it is like mechanically uh a fantastic dilution of that um uh very quick and i guess i'm the only person to answer this fresh maybe you can talk about a little uh a couple people andrew and simon both asked how the game compares how deathloop compares to prey

moon crash um if you want deathloop with all of the like uh the help turned off and uh kind of inverted almost we're like deathloop is about collecting all of the powers from different people. Mooncrash is about being different people and using different builds. That's Mooncrash. Mooncrash is much, much, much more of a roguelike than Deathloop is. And it's worth noting, though both games are made by Arkane, Mooncrash was made by a team in Austin, Texas. Deathloop was made by a team in Lyon, France. So I'm sure that they were communicating,

but they are different teams. Do we know what the Austin studio is working on in ways that we can talk about? They're working on Redfall now, which has already been announced. Oh, that's right. Fuck, that looks good. That's a vampire,

that grindhouse-y vampire left for dead looking type game, right. Fuck, that looks good. That's a vampire, a grindhouse-y vampire left for dead looking type game, right? Yeah, it looks wild. Yeah, yeah. I'm just happy that, I mean, I don't know about that game,

but my fear with Deathloop and I guess after Dishonored 2 didn't pop quite the way I think people hoped it would and neither did Prey, like that was the end of the immersive sim for another, you know, decade.

And Deathloop feels like a really good compromise of still having the immersive sim thing but in a game that i think moves a little faster and i hope will like click with an audience last i've heard the numbers sales numbers for deathloop have been very strong so i think it's doing well that's that that's really cool immersive sims a weird name yeah i don't know that that's what i get i think it's doing well. That's really cool. Immersive Sim's a weird name. Yeah, I don't know that that's what I call it. I know it's what we all agreed on, but it's very weird. I mean, all video game genre names, they're weird. Yeah. They're pretty bad.

Yeah. Oh, man, I can't wait to get another action adventure. Yeah, but let's not talk about Metroidvania or Roguelike. Oh. It's all pretty bad. Do you want to play Metroidvania? No? Okay.

Here's the next question um this one is a question from thunder dan um if the besties were stuck in a loop who would be cognizant of each new day and what would the others there uh the other three be doing on repeat for eternity i would not be cognizant but i would be the first one to be convinced that we are stuck in a loop like if plant was the one that was looping i think it would take very little like evidence to to like get me on board with oh okay it's a russ would like believe that we're in a loop but i mean i am like i'm in a loop every single day for the last two years so yeah you got a newborn baby like you're in the you are in the fucking loop yeah you're in the death you're in the um hey do y'all want to talk about some honorable mentions um i'll bring up

real quick uh i have some buddies that are still playing destiny 2 uh including travis who's like been getting real into it uh and i haven't i missed like two seasons that's how they break that game down now are these uh every year has four seasons oh god you don't need me to tell you that every year has four seasons but that's how they also break down destiny 2 um i played so much of this game and then i missed the i think season of the splicer and season of i don't know the cabal theme season and i came back to it and that shit is unrecognizable uh like there's a whole new social area that you play in called the helm and uh the way that you like access quests and stuff i feel like is totally different and there's a like a a new like aesthetic uh armor modification system that and like a bunch of new exotics and all this stuff uh and so i've been

banging my head against it but i also feel like i don't i used to know what to be doing yeah you don't know what gear to bring you have no idea what you're doing right i will say to its credit like i've just been kind of playing it and doing what has been fun and leveling up like which i guess is what you want from a video game but it is so antithetical to how i'm used to playing destiny which is like tell me the one activity i need to do and the three weapons i'm supposed to use to do it and that's like that's not immediately apparent anymore so So I feel like it has improved. And that's what I've heard from all my friends who are still playing it. And I'm trying to figure out the not monotonous and boring way to play the game that I am kind of used to.

So I have been enjoying it, but I also feel like I am playing it wrong, even though I don't actually think that I am. But yeah, I've been having fun with it not playing it in the like intense and obsessive way that i am used to playing destiny so um i started playing eastward i think we're gonna maybe talk about it more next when are we going to talk about eastward i feel like we need to have a... I feel like there needs to be a discussion, but I don't know when is the right time. I think next week. Yeah, maybe we'll talk more about it next week.

I'll say this. I really can't think of a more stunningly gorgeous pixel art game in recent years. The most beautiful. It's unbelievably gorgeous. Production-wise, the best. Music is remarkable remarkable and the art and the cut scenes is incredible the cut scenes are too long yeah we'll talk more about it i'm

playing on switch i'm still extremely early i'm still in chapter one so like very very early but um definitely a very interesting game and worth uh keeping an eye on especially if you dig games like earthbound and stuff like that yep anyone else what are you playing nothing nothing it's just this just a game of life right bills yeah yeah just death loop it's been good i mean hey what is uh the game of life but one giant death loop has anyone else been playing world flipper and i say else knowing that i've only played like 10 minutes no i haven't even heard of world flipper it's an ios gotcha game that is a pinball it's a pinball rpg what are you summoning if at balls if it's a god i mean you're summoning characters and weapons like your pinball is a team of heroes that have different abilities that bounce between it's

a lot of people are talking about it, and I played through the tutorial and played a couple levels and then got into the gotcha hook of it, and I was like, I'm okay. But I also think it's a rad free game that is worth checking out. Wow, it's free until it's not, right? Yeah, I guess so. Oh, I do have a recommendation that i can talk about really

quick uh hey if people like death loop and all these loopy games we've been talking about you should read the seven and a half deaths the seven and a half that's how you say it deaths of evelyn hardcastle um i am not even close to the first person to say this but there's an article about it on polygon it's the one on rock paper shotgun i think eurogamer did an interview with the author like three years ago um but it is a great picture are you ready for this murder mystery roguelike what what what but it's a book but it's a book and it's like the when i read it i was like i read it years ago and i was like man this sure feels like it was influenced by video games. Despite being like very Agatha Christie, read an interview with the writer.

Turns out he's a big gamer. He's a big gamer. Yeah. It's absolutely like one of the, Travis turned me on to it. I think it's one of the best books I've read for years. Like, turns out it's like raw entertainment. Stuart Turton, the author of that, also did a follow-up called The Devil in the Dark Water,

which is fantastic. Basically, a Sherlock Holmes type and a Watson type are on a boat, and Sherlock Holmes is accused of murder and locked in the brig, and it's up to the watson to uh free him using his limited skill set uh to solve to solve the case it's and and there's like supernatural elements and everything it's fantastic um it's great books check them out

hey thanks so much for listening to our podcast uh you're uh yeah i want to do you want to thank some people more podcasts yeah I wanted to thank a few people who have written felt felt if we're not done why am I so tired of podcasting you know thanks to these people who have written reviews

on Apple podcasts Ren Ren 512 Chie fan club gaff gack hyper driven human and Steph Beth Thank you to everyone in addition to those five. Fun names in there! I know, fun names. Some fun names. Thank you to everyone who's written reviews, we really appreciate it.

We talked about a lot of games today. I'm going to try to do everything Deathloop, we talked about a bunch of time-looping games like Majora's Mask Outer Wild, Elsinore and y'all have been playing Eastward, Destiny 2, World

Flipper, I mentioned Cruise and Blast very briefly, and books. The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and what's the name of that book that I need to go read now? Oops. Devil in the Dark Water. Okay, I'm gonna go check that out. Next week, we're gonna talk about hidden gems of this holiday season.

Y'all, there are a lot of games out there that people are just looking right over. And we're going to just dig them up. We're going to hold them in front of your eyes. We're going to say, play these games. These are not the Call of Duties of the world. No, these aren't your mama's Call of Duties. Also, it's like our 200th episode at some point. We missed it.

At some point in there. It's very clear that we missed it. It happened maybe two episodes ago, and we forgot to count because our numbers are a little bit weird. So we're just going to say next week is our 200th episode. Yes. So to celebrate, we're going to go through our favorite hidden gems of the last 200 episodes. So if you, you know, joined during, I don't know, the Spotify era or the post-Spotify era, and you're like, I don't want to go back and listen to all those podcasts.

That's a lot of podcasts. We'll let you know what are some of the games that we really loved from back in the day. I mean, we're talking like 2012, long time ago. You know what? I could say Kentucky Route Zero and you wouldn't even know which year I'm talking about. Could be any of them. True.

It would span about eight years. So how long have we been doing this fucking podcast? 10 years. Since like the beginning of Polygon. Yeah, we're gonna have a 10 year anniversary in early next year. Something special. Yeah, I can't wait.

And I would like to know, actually, if there's hidden gems that we've helped you uncover that have become important to you. We mentioned Sexy Brutale, but if there's others like that, I'd love to know so we can resurface them yet again for a new generation of podcast listeners. Thank you so much for listening to our show. We hope you have enjoyed yourself, and we hope that you'll join us again next week for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!