The Besties - DOOM Eternal with Elyse Willems

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

Elyse Willems (Funhaus) joins The Besties for an in-depth conversation on the newly released Doom Eternal! Topics include ripping of arms and limbs, the world-building of hell on earth and space castles. 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 know about you guys, but I got fucking crunk this St. Patrick's Day. I'm still hungover. Are you a wild? What a wild one. I watched the Circle Brazil. I drank two glasses of wine. I'm still feeling it. As an Irish Catholic, I can assure you that is what we intended.

We said, drink something green and watch Brazilian reality television. I feel really guilty. Yes. Inherent self-guilt. Yeah. I was saying to my wife, I was saying to Sidney, God, this is a real bummer of a St. Patrick's Day.

And then I remembered, wait a minute. I'm a five-year-old. They've all sucked for half a decade i haven't had fun for six years well imagine how miserable her saint patrick's day is she doesn't know that's true yeah she she doesn't get to get blazed doesn't know the standard we're going to talk about something else to try to get energy up yeah what else is going on it's great i'm talking to human beings you are just living the life uh i should mention this is like a cold i didn't prep her uh this is like a cold oh no i'm yeah you're sorry yeah yeah it's the it's well it's gonna it's got to be a

warm open yeah we're not right now it is the definition of a cold open. Okay? We're not there yet. And I've been hanging back in disgust. No, I'm just kidding. Hey, I think that is it, actually. We did get it. In talking about how we didn't get it, we did get it. Is that what it was?

Amazing. That was it. We came full circle Brazil. Oh. Oh. Damn. Griffin's out forever. No. Oh, I can't keep up this Griffin-like pace. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

Oh, no, we didn't talk about the order here. Ah, shit. Well, guys, you just fill in the fucking gaps. This isn't rocket science. My name is Justin McElroy. I know the best game of the week. Either one of the two of you can just like do it.

I'm so used to going last though. You're going to get, what are you going to get? A citation? You're going to get It's going to be weird because the energy is going to be way up here

when I go at two. And then, Okay. You know? Now this is good. This is good. This is good. Plant,

can you do your second and then at least you do yours third to roll out the fucking red carpet for Russell Frushtick to bring it home. Should I also introduce Russ? Like now he's a special guest. And as always, it's Russ. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Plant and I went to hell and back and i know the best game of the week my name is christopher plant

and i went to hell and back to bring you the best game of the week my name is elise willems and my best game of the week is the hellish life that i am living and also doom eternal my name is ross fresher and i know the best game of the week hello and welcome back to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in interactive entertainment it's a game of the best game of the week hello and welcome back to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in interactive entertainment it's a game of the year podcast that goes all year long it's like a book club but four games uh and we are we have finally the games are here and boy just in time i would say the video games arrived right when we needed them the most as they so often do uh we're going to talk about uh doom eternal this week but first uh stepping in for griffin mcelroy who was supposed to go to disney world and didn't it's elise williams she's the lead

producer writer and creative force at funhouse and uh we are so happy to have her here on the program welcome elise thank you thanks so much for having me you like her better than griffin oh no i i do i did mention earlier that i hope that griffin who was arizona unceremoniously dumped this week despite not being at the happiest place on earth i hope that he's like lurking in the background just full of resentment and and anger that he he was not included yeah i will admit definitely griffin asked me four or five times whether we still needed him to come on the show and i was like no we do not just to try to score a copy of doom early i think i think is what he's angling for uh question to set the critical boundaries uh what is your favorite video game ever don't don't

think about it and what is your least favorite yep just like give it to us oh uh my favorite video game is legend of zelda link to the past this is the only correct answer and you've gotten it in one oh my gosh that is the best video game thank you wow thank you uh for a lot of emotional reasons as well my least favorite i guess i i don't really dwell on the least favorite um uh like stuff like like tropico i apologize to all those finally got them somebody take a tropico down a peg you've had it too good for too long tropico um they do just keep making them don't they there are just so many of them it's like didn't we get it i feel like we must have gotten it by

this point that that feels like i'm doing a disservice because there are lots of bad video games but uh none of them are i guess that's that's the genre that just doesn't really do it for me i suppose yeah sure sure sure uh plant christopher thomas plant do you want to whisk us away through the incredible world of doom eternal i most certainly do hello i'm here to tell you about doom eternal a video game that really i think everybody needs in their life assuming that they can play uh games rated m for mature because this is a mature video game uh do maternal it uh in every sense of the word it it takes off where uh doom 2016 left off uh if you don't remember any of that lore bless you neither did i uh here's the long and short of it earth is taken

over by hell demons who didn't come from hell i believe i believe they came from the planet mars well they came from hell kind of via hell energy via mars got it anyway the point is demons have taken over earth you are a one person army um slash god uh now you are not a mere soldier you are not you know just the the average video game soldier people are terrified of you everywhere you walk there is a story in this game every time they even dare to start it your character walks in says nothing and basically every character goes hey i don't know what we were talking about but that guy's thick um and this is the only this is the only video game character where um the racking of a shotgun is his most prominent line of dialogue and most quotable

like literally there are many conversations that he ends and begins with racking his shotgun and that is the that is all the discussion that is necessary so if in terms of how the game works you go from point a to point b you kill everything in a room to clear it that allows you to progress forward sometimes you get keys the what the makes this game different than so many shooters is uh it's not like call of duty or battlefield or most shooters where you're aiming down a site it's much more about movement uh you jump and platform and double jump you gain health by busting open enemies like literally ripping them in half vivisection is very popular in this video game they've also added a flamethrower

mechanic that allows you to get armor there are are increasingly large demons and increasingly large weapons to kill them that is literally the foundation of this game uh if you want to know what the video game is it's all in in the chunk of words now why is it special that my friends is what we are going to discuss um and and i want to start off because i'm most curious here with hoops because i'm i'm wondering did you like this game was it was it was this good for... Justin is putting on chapstick just caring. Oh yeah, I was going to say, yeah. It looks like he's either going to provide pure celebration

or utterly shut down my enthusiasm. Oh yeah, he might be wasting good chapstick. Depending on the quality of his review. Yeah, it's fucking good. Like, why wouldn't I like this game? It's fun. It's good. Yes, good. Excellent. like this game it's fun it's good yes good excellent i like it a lot it's good uh i like it it's much smarter than it looks just like doom i think was

sort of like that like it's there's more depth going on here's the weird thing about doom in a in a sense it is an action game in another sense it's sort of more like diner dash okay or cook serve delicious or any other like time management games because really the for me at least the challenge of doom is like partially like the running and shooting and not being blown up that's like half of it the other half is is sort of like this idea of keeping a lot of plates spinning at once by which i mean like there there's a lot of encounters in this game where okay so let me back up a bit depending on how you dispatch enemies there's different ways to get what you need right if you set them on fire and kill them you get armor if you lower their health and then do what's called a glory kill

which is like they're flashing and you do a melee attack on them, you get health. And if you use a chainsaw on them, which refills over time, then you get armor, or sorry, ammo. And that's kind of interesting because it's very easy to forget about certain mechanics

in the heat of a fight and then notice like, oh my God, my health's running low or I'm running low on ammo. And it's because you forgot to like keep that part of the rotation going. Like i should you i should bring the chainsaw into it more and that will like keep the balance because it's so fast there's not really a lot of like tactical thought it's not about like let me run to this corner and try to bring these guys into this like

it's not it's like in the moment making split decisions and like for me the biggest challenge is like remembering all those different mechanics that i have at once which are all sort of on cooldowns and cycles and stuff so i can integrate them into the flow because once you've got all the plates spinning at once like it it's a much smoother experience but like even forgetting about one like uh you have a frag grenade on timer right and like even forgetting about that which I would often do. And I'm like, God, this is hard. There's so many guys all around me.

And oh, wait a minute. I'm just going to blow all of them up. That's what I think is really interesting about combat in Doom. You played on Xbox, right? Oh, yeah, I played on Xbox One. And how did you find the like, I't know so i played on ps4 i'm used to playing the original doom on pc this is the one that came out in 2016 and when i played it on pc i found that like i was able to like do these like 360 spins and like do like outrageous

stuff and then once i was like on a controller it kind of slowed me down a little bit it wasn't bad but i don't know what was your experience i mean i my experience was similar to justin's and i think like it's it does slow you down compared to pc and i do find that you use the environment less like i would have the similar to the way like just was describing um not not necessarily using your full arsenal to its potential, I would clear an area and then I would look around and see that all of the little jump pads and stuff that I could have been using to propel myself in the air

and evade enemies and do all kinds of cool shit, it did not even occur to me as I was in the throes of battle that those were all there. And I think maybe part of that is if you're playing on a controller and you're maybe a little bit limited in your range and your movement and you're not doing those 360 spins, maybe you're not noticing the environment around you as much. And maybe that's just me.

Yeah. I also found myself taking advantage of weak points a lot less. Oh, yeah. There's some fine aim stuff. It tells you with every enemy, here's where you should shoot them to make it easier. And that is a lot trickier on a on a controller to to hone in yeah once you get the the scope and you can kind of like take out those points a little

bit more yeah um like with the uh who's the big heavy guy um the mancubus the mancubus is my favorite that big boy you can take out his his two you know arms um uh yeah once once you kind of get that that uh scope you're like okay i'm taking that out this little spider yeah i forgot what that that is called too arachnodrome probably yeah i i um kind of going off what you were saying i found that difficulty uh is crucial in this game like what what difficulty you set the game at and the game wants you to push yourself out of your comfort zone which i wish every game did this so you can change your difficulty at any time in the game and it doesn't affect uh your progression whatsoever so there's not like oh well you're

playing on a harder mode so you get better rewards what about them trophies though or yeah or you lose these things like you pretty much don't get punished really at all for for changing your difficulty throughout it so when i i played on pc but played with controller and the two things i did is i put it on ultra violence which is i guess the hard mode which i normally would not do at all and i boosted the sensitivity on the the direction pad or what the the joystick and i found that like i never really was struggling too much but it was forcing me to use all those things like if i didn't take advantage of the entire environment i was utterly pulverized um and this isn't like one of those like awful there's only one right way to play it you should

play it on this difficulty you should be miserable for hours or else you're not really getting the experience not a true gamer not a real gamer and more i think like what i liked about this game was knowing that i had that safety net of like hey if this starts to like just suck or like one there's a boss that we can talk about in a second called the marauder that happens later in the game that is truly miserable and i i hope is the first character to just be fully patched out of a video game um that like during that it's like whatever i'm just gonna boost this down to like the easiest difficulty mode and just destroy this thing um so that i can get back to the parts of the game that are actually a pleasure yeah i had one boss encounter where uh i died several times and then

it was like hey uh there's this thing sentinel armor it's just like way better if you want to put it on you just can and it'll make you harder to kill if that seems fun i was like yeah it seems fun actually let's do that. Cause it's like, does it give a shit? I think that it's trying to keep the spirit of like, you should feel like this, this doom guy, this God,

this Slayer. And if you die 13 times, it's like, it kind of ruins that illusion. So, Hey, just throw some other stuff on who gives a shit. I've never understood developing a game that you wouldn't want people to keep playing.

Yeah. Like that. Yeah. That you would want to create so many obstacles in that you wouldn't want someone to try to stick with it or maybe create some avenues throughout that they can kind of pivot if they need to it's so funny because when you think about the like or the history of doom i like what i always think of is the original difficulty levels where it's like i don't even remember the names of it but it's like if you picked anything below hard it's like coward big wuss, but it's like if you picked anything below hard, it's like coward, big wuss.

And now it's like, yeah, just do whatever you want. You want to feel more powerful? Hey, no beef. Just go in and kill your mancubuses. A lot of the difficulty for me was sort of self-imposed because there are these, and I love this, it's a big

Bethesda action game thing i feel like a lot of action games have adopted it where it's like challenges within the like flow of the game to upgrade your weapons or whatever and i i have a very bad habit of like focusing on those and ending up dying a lot because i really like if there's an enemy that i need to kill with this certain weapon, like I will not switch. I will go get the ammo I need. I'll be absolutely laser focused on that.

And I will like get killed 10 times before I finally relent. Like, okay, I'm just not going to get this one, this one time. Uh, but I, I actually,

I, I enjoy, uh, that aspect of it. It helps it feel. Yeah. I think they balance those really well um i also think it's funny because plant mentioned earlier that this game is m for mature and not appropriate

for youths and what's funny about that to me at least is i think this is more appropriate not for like a six-year-old but for like a 12-year-old more appropriate for a 12-year-old than fortnight is to be perfectly honest wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait so just so everybody know everybody know everybody knows who's listening fortnight is a game in which cartoon characters build things and they shoot people and there's no uh blood i mean i just want to make sure that we're all on the same page we're all on the same zoom everybody looks're all on the same page. Everybody looks like human people, cartoon human people. Yes, yes. Doom is a game in which you find the Mancubus,

you shoot off its arms, you rip out its heart, and then you make it eat its own heart, and then the heart is explosive, so it, like, burp farts its entire body off, and then, like... You've proven what you're saying is a 12 year old should slay the mancubus. Yes.

100% a 12 year old should slay the mancubus. That's my point is like, this is not, this is so far from like realistic gore or anything you would see in humanity that there's no connection to anything that i would find like inappropriate it's just like so goofy it's like a looney tunes cartoon yeah it's like cartoon violence to an extent it's how i feel about quentin tarantino where his violence is so over the top yeah that might be able to there are humans getting ears cut off well russ does have

limits weird hey elise did you get into like do you get into like uh tracking down collectibles and stuff like that is that is that something that you you like no not as much i mean i would be i would be happy when i ever go oh it's a secret or oh i found part of the lore but it's it's generally like for me i'm i'm more interested in progression especially with a game like this knowing that this game is twice as long as the 2016 one. I was, I was like, Oh geez, 22 hours.

I don't know if I have, we might not even have 22 hours left. I really dug the flow of the, the pace is, I think more, it's measured compared to the 2016 one. Yeah, for sure.

And I think that this game more than the last, like always has a moment where it's like okay you're done fighting do you want to look around for collectibles or do you want to move on and like what I will say is that I usually don't like tracking down like secret stuff but they are so well done in this game where there's always like a little if you look around there's a little something there's very few like take a blind leap off a thing and you know you have to look it up on game facts or whatever like there's always like a little hint maybe there's a light over here like a weird path you don't know where it goes that sort of leads you to them and i actually enjoyed tracking those down like more than i

normally would in in a game like this it feels weird sometimes with the flow of what they want you to do like it's very much like a hard charging like bullet train action wise uh but like it it uh i i enjoyed the the respite of like tracking down collectibles at least you mentioned the lore did you read any of the codexes and if so what is your opinion well chris i i haven't finished the game yet um but i fully intend to go back and read every single codex religiously i promise i will um i just i'm really busy with the mancubus right now sure sure all the man all the mancubi i don't want to stop and read and usually i'm i'm such a actually a story driven person in games usually like doom is very much outside of my wheelhouse not what i would play

ever because usually i'm looking for a great story and that's my focus but in this situation i'm like that's not really what i'm here for i can't tell if the story is real and by like like like if it's like if there's actually a real, like, if you read all the codexes, it, like, really makes sense and, like, is good. Or if it's a parody of, like, Dime Store, like, sci-fi. Because I, there's a section towards the end of the game where it starts just, like, you go in through a stage and it gives you, like, ten lore, like, lore dumps. Like, one after the other and it's like in the grim days of the lore and ors when the fauna was raised it's like i don't know what it's like someone was using like a sci-fi fantasy name generator and just just ran the gamut with all of them and then said put it all in because i do actually kind of dig like the the story

structure of the priests that are the you know the cultists that are trying to do this and then you've got to find each one i i do kind of dig that but all the superfluous like like you're saying the naming convention i i just i'm so lost hilarious there's a hilarious and i know nothing about this lore i have i remember that there was like a mean businessman in the first one that has not appeared so far. I think he was Satan or something. And in this one, like you kill one of these priests. And for some reason, you visit like a ghost king who kind of seems like your dad a little bit. And he's this guy is even like, you are going a bit far.

You actually should not be killing this hell freeze. They are actually like, you're not supposed to be doing this. I really wish you would cut it out. You don't know what you're doing. It's like, would cut it out you don't know what you're doing it's like that's true i don't know what i'm doing except i i know these hell priests are bad and i'm supposed to kill them for sure something i i really loved in terms of just like the the story and performance was when you're in the facility and you're hunting the cultist and the p there's someone coming over the pa system saying like the slayer is in the building please be aware like and it's i like that they're giving these psas for the the demons that like can't put two intelligible words together right

they're supposed to listen to these announcements have you met don't forget taco tuesday have you have you run into any humans yet i have yeah my i love that anytime you run into humans like everybody's just like busy doing paperwork the world's like literally on fire like half of the population is gone they're doing paperwork and then they see you and they're like oh oh no why are you here um i wanted to say when you're talking about the story structure because i agree that's what's so funny about the lore like the hardcore lore being so dense the real story is hell on earth there are three witches you need to kill them that might save earth the full that's the full story and then like what like what an incredible first i don't know like 20 minutes this game has

where they don't even give you a pistol anymore you just start with a shotgun you immediately get like three upgrades and you kill one of these like three witches in like the first 20 minutes like it just it gives you everything up top it is that like um action movie structure of like you came here to really just immediately feel good and we're gonna let you have that right off the bat we need to probably move on and any quick complaints because i feel like there's so many for besties uh it's not really a complaint i'm more curious how you guys felt about it but uh like you were mentioning earlier there's the game gives you those breaths

after intense action sequences and a lot of that i think is in platforming too and which there's a lot a lot more platforming than i expected there to be in a Doom game, especially compared to playing what I did of the 2016 one. I kind of dig the platforming, but I've seen a little bit of mixed reviews from other people. I dig it. I think it's extremely forgiving. I mean, you have a double jump and two air dashes that can let you clear like wild amounts of space um i'm i i think it's i think it's fun especially as a counterbalance to the the uh the action stuff fresh have you gotten to the back half of the game no go for it go wild about it so yeah the platforming is so good and then in the back half of the game, they're like, seems like you're all having a lot of fun.

Like maybe too much fun. What if it was time to go swimming in poison? Oh, and there's poison. There's a poison pool. And you learn to swim in a pool of poison that kills you within three seconds. And the only way to get out of this pool, and I know it's a fine to spoil it because I'll save everybody the 20 minutes that I wasted on it because I missed the prompt that came across my screen. It switches your melee from the melee button to the dash button when underwater. And you have to break through a wall, but you use a different button than you've used the entire game to do it. Sure.

And there's like two or three more swimming puzzles. the entire game to do it sure there's like two or three more swimming puzzles um also the platforming while good very good the whole game towards the very end you start like doing thousand foot gaps and you do them at ultra high speeds so it's it's not bad it's just different um it doesn't matter though because the game is so good and and where the game ultimately goes is just so so good it has such such a very final the the final moments of the game are fantastic i don't like the home base you have a home ship that you return to. It's like Labyrinthine. Like Doom Palace.

Yeah, it's way more inscrutable than it should be for a place that is yours. It's wild that there's jumping puzzles at your house. I'd rather just walk around. You get these batteries that you just use to power up parts of the ship. I literally wandered around for 20 minutes just trying to find a part of the ship to plug these batteries into. There's, like, power up, like, there's upgrades you can use.

You can unlock with them. But there's supposed to be parts of the ship you can power up. I don't have any idea. I just wandered around the ship for a while. And he's got a lot of weird, like, he's got an office. Like, I don't know how to describe it other than an office with lots of papers about demons on it you can just walk into there should be like a bulletin board with newspaper clippings and like right string with like demons priests cultists i'm here to announce

though no bathroom so i don't know that's what space is for i guess that's what space is for. Let's take a break. We'll come back and talk more Doom and other things. Welcome back. One element of the narrative that isn't necessarily the deepest in terms of lore is where Doomguy comes from or his name or where his where his house is, or if he has a bath. Well, we've seen his house. To be fair, we've seen his house. It's in space. It's like a space castle.

So it's there. But beyond that- He does have a house with no bathroom. Well, again, space is his bathroom. But beyond that, I mean, I didn't read the codexes, so I don't know. Maybe Chris Plant actually knows the real answer to these questions. But it did make me think like, okay, so you have this guy, right guy right he's trained in military arts he's very deadly when it comes to doom people like hell people but he's also really good at gymnastics so what does that say about him as a

like where did he come from why what makes him tick chris plant do you know. I mean, so I believe that he's motivated by the death or loss of a bunny rabbit. I'm pretty sure that's canon. Is that in the lore? I'm pretty sure. And there is, throughout your Doom Palace, there are images of your dead pet rabbit. I love that. This is true. dead pet rabbit i love that this is true i believe also i think in the game quake champions which i'm sure all of you made the time to play uh we learned that to this day doom guy carries around

the lucky rabbit's foot of his dead rabbit this is true these are facts wow this isn't just known people don't just spend time reading the quake champions lore bible is he in quake champions 2 uh as well i don't know i just know that i read the quake champions wiki why so it's morbidly curious here's some... I know all the lineage stuff where it's like, is he a Blazkowicz? Is he... Did he descend from, you know... Right. Whoever.

There are some possible names. So, there are Doom novels, which I'm sure are very good, where the main character is known as fly taggart oh yeah in the movie doom which exists as a rock right he was the rock in that movie is he carl urban carl urban thank you was it the rock in the embarrassed yourself he is okay he was in it but he wasn't the main doom he's the antagonist kind of oh yeah john reaper grim he didn't need reaper on the nose you should have just stuck with grim that's all we needed

why do you need to add on well i think they probably called him reaper because his last name was grim is already a badass nickname so just stick with him so my question justin do you think that the original writer was like okay the character's name is Grim Reaper and the like studio notes were like that's a little on the nose what if we made it Reaper Grim and they're like uh not quite there and they're like John Reaper Grim and they're like

nailed it nobody will see what we're going for now well I think it's probably better without answers yeah just leave it open when asked about it, John Romero said that he's supposed, the Marine is supposed to represent you, the player. I'm going to say John, no, he's not.

Because I've, not me, Justin McElroy, quarantined podcaster. I don't think so. Can I ask you things? I don't think he's supposed to represent me. Things Doomguy does. Do you do acrobatics?

Wait. I'm a blue belt in Taekwondo. Haven't been to class in eight months. Is that anything? Close. Have you ever fired a weapon? Yeah, bud. Absolutely absolutely was it a gun all kinds of weapons weaponry nerf and non i will say i'll just leave it at that does anyone else

feel more represented uh the mancubus because uh that's that's who i identify with i like the mancubus style the mancubus lives for All of a sudden, this little man comes out of nowhere and shoots off both his arms for no reason. Let's talk about honorable mentions. Are you all playing anything right now aside from Doom? Is like a palette, a Doom palette cleanser? I was much to Chris's chagrin playing Ori andion and the will of the wisps but now i've heard that it's not good no he's got gripes it's fantastic i just okay my only gripe is the first

hour of this game of orion the will of the wisps great game becomes becomes fantastic first hour is like i don't remember the story from the original ori i'm sorry like i imagine it has something to do with tree spirit i remember being very sad in the first hour of the original game yeah but this one is like there's like an owl who shows up and then the owl can't fly and then they give the owl a feather and everybody has like it sounds like the beginning of the sonic the hedgehog movie to be honest yeah and then Yeah, and you don't start with anything. You can't double jump. You can't even attack.

You just kind of wander around. I felt helpless. And after being Doomguy, who represents me, to go from feeling like... You get the shotgun right away. You get the shotgun right away. feeling like you get the shotgun right away you get the shotgun right away why does ori not get the shotgun right away is the question i kept asking myself for the first hour of this well let's ask elise what does she think uh i understand that they had to like regress our abilities i was like okay well you know they can't just if they open the keys to the kingdom right away. Then, you know, what is this game really?

I felt like you kind of rebuild them back fairly quickly. But I also like Chris, like as much as I love the first game, didn't really remember much of what the story was. And I think that's more attributed to the fact that like we can, we as a society now consume stuff so rapidly and we don't take time to reflect on stuff before we move on to the next thing and keep consuming. I think that's how my brain just works now. Is it just goes,

what's the next? Yeah. Deposit like throws that away. I don't need this garbage anymore. There's something about the design too. I don't know. I, I,

if you can speak to this, like where it's very pretty, but it's not like it doesn't stick with me like i i it i it kind of reminds me of um back in like the 90s when there was like disney animation and you're like yes i know what this is i'm here for it and then fern gully comes out and like if somebody's like hey describe a character from fern gully i'm like, I don't know. Two eyes, a mouth, and a nose. What's the bat from Ferngully? Bartok?

No, Bartok is from the one where all the princes in Russia die. Anastasia? Anastasia. Are you, Russ, are you kidding right now? No, seriously, isn't Bartok from that movie? I think you might be right. Batty Coda is from Fern Gully as voiced by Robin Williams. Right.

That's Batty Coda, right? Right. Bartok is from the other one, right? Got it. This is unimportant in any way, structure, form. So Ori is bad. No. It's beautiful.

It's beautiful. But not, I mean, the world's all blurred together. Yeah. Is it good? Are you enjoying it more than, Chris' plan has not said a lot positive. Elise, are you enjoying the video game Ori? I am. I am, Chris.

Yeah. It's good. Yeah. Yeah, there it is. Put him in his place. Now that we've gotten all the fake games out of the way, I want to talk about the only true game on this podcast, a real game for true gamers.

It's called Murder by Numbers, and you're going to think I made it up just because you've never heard of it, but it's real. I mean, it's a Sting song, so that's a start. Right, so it's a video game. It's out on the Switch, came out March 5th. This is a game.

Here's a story. It's at 96. you're an actress named honor mizrahi that gets fired from uh her detective tv show murder miss terry and she finds a robot in the trash named scout and this trash robot doesn't remember anything and so the two of them are going to be detectives together because there's a murder the same day that she gets fired. And her boss is the one that gets murdered. And you and your trash robot with no memory scout are going to solve the cases together. Your dad was a cop.

Mysteriously died. I'm sure we'll unearth more of that. But, Justin, what are the mechanics? Well, my friend the the robot from the trash doesn't remember anything but it does have a visual scanning program that helps it organize analyze clues and evidence so the main game mechanic of this is you play pit cross and that is how you uh that is how you unearth the clues it's good as fuck i love picross and it is and when you get a new clue you solve a picross puzzle and then you have that piece of

evidence and then you can go back to like talk to people and present your evidence to them like a ace attorney style so like as you're going through your conversations, you get new evidence and that lets you unlock new secrets and progress the story. Let me ask you, why is all the evidence in 16 by 16 pixels? Is it just like a really low res notebook?

It's because you're processing it in Scouts like evidence scanning system. It's very low res it's actually pretty well written it's kind of funny it's uh and uh as a nice like palette cleanser between doom it is it is very good it's called murder by numbers it's on switch uh and if that if that i have just told you exactly what it is you now know with 100 certainty if you like this game or not that's it sounds really in my wheelhouse actually of what i is what i usually like um should we uh get some

read-em-rail in here yeah i'd love that uh so we asked uh folks both for doom memories and some questions about the new doom one of the questions we got from at a major operation on twitter uh how's the increased lore doom 2016 getting ironically unironically real into its own lore was a weird aspect of the game for me and i don't know how to feel about that uh even increased focus on it we touched on this a bit um just, I think you have feelings here. No, well, I was just going to, you hit the nail on the head. There is a,

what I actually think works better than the first Doom is there is, you kill these three hell priests to try to save Earth. And that story is presented from, like in the opening moments, and that's all you actually need. And I think you engage with the rest of it

as much as you want or don't want, everything else in the sort of that is directly presented to you at least from what i've seen is is in service of that main like narrative if you can call it that yeah this is a recurring uh feeling that we have from uh our listeners uh at the color plaid i die for doom but i'll kill for animal crossing um that that seems to be the energy in the world right now that we need doom but we need animal crossing yeah we're gonna be diving into animal crossing uh next week uh i have been playing it for like three weeks because i did the review for polygon i don't want to here he goes rub it in too much sorry earth but uh it is an interesting dichotomy to switch between the two of them but they're also kind of perfect for this both games

are kind of perfect for this time to be honest i'm impervious to your powers i have a question for you guys which game do you think is going to actually result in more anxiety animal crossing or doom oh oh that's a good question because on paper i mean i'm feeling very anxious playing doom obviously but then i worry about well i can confirm for sure i have spent sent about six or seven dms in the last two hours trying to find out what the price of turnips are in the only other code i know of in the office. One other person has code, and I keep asking her what her turnips are so I don't lose a ton of money in turnips. So maybe that is more anxiety-driven than Doom. Yeah.

Here, let me do an email real quick. Byron emailed to say, Doom scared me. My cousin had a 32X in Doom, and they made me believe it summoned the devil. Now, years later, looking back, I feel like an idiot. Okay, a question for all of you from atbreakingcreech. Would you recommend the game to a person who is squeamish? I'll start with Elise. It's tough because I'm really not squeamish, but I could see some of those glory kills

where you're ripping off the mech spider's leg and jamming it into its eyeball. I could see somebody finding that a little over the top. Yeah, I think everyone sort of has that different line, right? Of what sets them off. It depends. If you can play it for a little bit and desensitize yourself to it,

because they are all recurring, you know, moments, then maybe. It's like Elise Willems always says, video games desensitize you to violence. Put that on the box. A great way to desensitize yourself to violence. I have one more that I want to share, just because it's a feel good.

From at Ishtar the red i bonded with my partner over over an essay they wrote for college about doom 2016 as a uh as an i love you for christmas i got them a commemorative doom coin that they keep next to them on their desk oh that's so nice that's very nice you know Who says you can't find love in a battlefield? Don't spend that Doom coin. Careful. Ray asks, does the Doom Eternal stick to the same basic structure? Walk into a large open area, get pummeled,

navigate around the next large open area, get pummeled. Are there more puzzles between areas this time around? This person should be doing more pummeling, I would say. Maybe not playing the game right. Yeah, lower the difficulty. It is not your ass to be beat. It's theirs. You are the Doom guy. There's way more puzzles.

I'd say there's a little bit more. It's a little bit more. I mean, I think it's kind of up to you, right? Like, I think you could charge through and just keep running into, you know, different engagements, but I wouldn't say there's a lot in terms of puzzles. Yeah. It could. If you want, like, the extra stuff, it's there.

It's kind of like what you said, Justin. If you want to go for those distractions, they're there for you. If you do not have interest in page nine of the horrors of Alcabar, you don't have to seek it out. It's okay. What's tricky, though, is that they show up on your mini-map as question marks. So until you, like, get up on it, you usually don't know what it is you're tracking down. I'm sure there's an upgrade.

There are literally eight different upgrade systems in this game. I may be underestimating. You said that you can resist the sheer magnetism of collecting a toy in a video game that is utterly worthless how do you do it well i don't part of it is part of it is not looking at that mini map a lot because when you look at the mini map and then you see where everything is i think that entices you i'll i'll do the kind of thing where it's if i see it in world if i see like a question mark then i'm gonna for it. But I don't scour the map looking for like what I've missed, what I could possibly get. I will give one endorsement for one collectible is the vinyl.

You get soundtrack like sounds from the soundtrack and they're like old like old doom tracks. And you like in world collect the vinyl, which like, sure, why wouldn't it be? But what rules is when you're back at your space castle, you can walk up to them and like play them in the ship, and like it is the most Doom guy ass shit to turn on like a track from Doom 2 and just walk around your castle like, yeah, this is music are you kids

hearing this this is what music i can't concern you can do the exact same thing in animal crossing not even lying i i i'll do wrap i want to recommend playing literally the way that least described of like don't look at the map because if there's one thing i do regret this game does have such a cool pace and such a great energy if you just move on through it and about a third of the way through i became deeply addicted to 100%ing it um no which was not good because i just started living in the map um and it's not yeah there's there's really no way to make you feel less like doom guy um than to become a cartographer in the middle of your adventure i do wish they had found a way to integrate that a little bit better i found myself it's really hard to get your bearings in

that map because it stops everything i wish there was some way to bring it into the world where you had like a little bit better sense of what you were looking for. Cause yeah, it feels, it feels at odds. Although I did enjoy it. Like I enjoyed the, the puzzle of finding that stuff.

Um, it feels a little bit at odds with the pace of the game. Um, all right, let's, uh, let's call it there. This has been so fun.

Elise Willems. Thank you so much for joining us. You guys so much. This was a blast. Where can, where can folks find, find your work? Um,

you can follow me on Twitter and Instagram, Elise Willems. You can find my work on YouTube.com slash Funhaus and RoosterTeeth.com. Now, is that Funhaus spelled the way everybody on Earth spells it or a different way? How everyone on Mars, Doom spells. That's F-U-N-H-A-U-S. Also known as Germany. Excellent. F-U-N-H-A-U-S also known as Germany

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