The Besties - February 2018

Episode Date: March 7, 2018

February is the month of love and we’ve got a crop of games that ... well, we like them. Maybe not like like them, but we regular like them a great deal. Games discussed: Lemon drinks, Almost a Hero, Monster Hunter World, Slay the Spire, Bayonetta 2, Membrane, The Fall Part 2: Unbound, Xbox One X Backwards Compatibility, Into the Breach, Owlboy. 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!

Guys, have you tried, let me ask you this, this is important. Have you tried lemonade and seltzer? Are you for real? Think about it. Lemonade, which you love, and seltzer, which you also love, but combined. It's called sparkling lemonade. They sell it at the store. They do sell this in cans at the store, Russell.

Yeah, but they probably copied me, right? I don't think Sam Pellegrino is like, hey, I know this fucking nobody. And he mixes his drinks together in a wild and profitable way. I'm going to rip him. I'm going to get him. I think it sounds great, Russ. I live in a market where the only soda available is Diet Big K. So I'm so excited to hear that I can sort of backwards manufacture my own sparkling lemonade.

Can I ask you a question, Justin? And this is a serious question. If you went into your grocery store where you live and you asked, went into your grocery store where you live and you asked uh sir or ma'am may i have a san pellegrino limonata would they bully you and punch you in the stomach and then when you you go down pull up your underwear over your head yeah i think what chris is trying to drink is because that's a smart drink and as we all know it's, you live in a place of, you know, dumb, blue collar people. I think they would probably react the same way that every grocery store employee has reacted for the past decade. When you ask them where something is, they would stare at you and then they would lie down on the floor completely still until you walked away and found it for yourself.

It's very effective. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game, only good game of the month. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the best lemon beverage this month. My name is Russ Frushing, and I know the best game of the week. My wife is working from home today. Thank you for not waking up our babies. Christopher.

It's CC Lemon, right? Got to be that CC Lemon. CC Lemon? No, it actually is San Pellegrino Lemonade. I love that drink. No, okay. Hold on one second, though, because none of these are really lemonade and seltzer, or at least the proper mix that I'm talking about.

We're in the show now. We can't keep talking about lemonade. We're in the show now. We can't keep talking about lemonade. We're in the show now. One of the things we talk about on this show is. Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in lemon drinks and video games. You eye my lemon drink. You guys see that happening.

This month, though, it's going to be a little bit more focused on video games you know they've come a long way drink content there will be a little bit lemon drink content yes i just i'm just i just want to say i need to water down san paul grino because it's too much guys it's pretty intense way can i can i also just say i want to apologize to the people of griffin and justin's hometown because if there was anybody who would know how to make lemons uh or lemonade out of lemons oh my god forget it what dumb town are you from forget it your your apologetics are worthless to me now yeah classist um this was a um weird month uh in a lot of ways there's not as many days In February so maybe that's why there weren't

Games It's just there weren't enough days for it But this is going to be a weird episode of Besties Because we were talking about what to bring And I don't know two of us are bringing like four year old games So it should be a pretty Lively bout I feel like

Yeah it's almost like you guys didn't really have a lot of time to play video games this year Imagine that Congratulations Chris and Justin lively bout i feel yeah it's almost like you guys didn't really have a lot of time to play video games this year imagine a month i should imagine that um congratulations chris and justin for the beautiful babies these wonderful little folks yeah and you and you guys were recording in the hospital so we're going to release a bonus episode of that right of course uh yeah i haven't had i've played a lot of um played a lot of idle games to try to keep just like keep it have something to do because i know there's a lot of staying up late and i don't really have the mental capacity for most games but like i can click on a i spent fucking literally a dozen hours on an idle game that I am currently trying to remember the name of and cannot. Oh, my God.

Boy. Idle click hero lords? Idle something. There's one that's like idle heroes, maybe. I don't know. It doesn't matter. I feel like I've had the exact opposite where I started playing Monument, not Monument Valley 2. Oh, my gosh.

What's the surf on sand game? Journey? Oh. Journey. No, the mobile one, Odyssey. Oh, you're talking Alto's Adventure. And, like, I was like, oh, this is perfect. Something I can play anytime I want.

It's super easy, relaxing. And, I don't know, I sunk like an hour and a half into it off and on, and I was chasing some dumb objective where i have to perform a certain type backflip off of a certain cliff to just progress and my reaction now is like i have literally one hour in the day that is for me why am i doing this why am i doing anything that is not joyful? Almost a Hero was the name of this game. And it's a clicker game that requires a little bit of skill and strategy

because you really do have to optimize what mystical gems you're upgrading to clear the boss monsters more quickly. If you like this sort of game, it's a very good one. It's called Almost a Hero. It's Soda Dungeon again. What almost a hero it's so the dungeon again what it's all i wish it had the soda dungeon levels of depth and interactivity i want to go

back to chris plant's hour a day what do you do in that hour chris plant right now i'll be honest i've expanded i think i probably have like two and a half hours now. Whoa. Yeah. Where are you getting them? Oh, you only got one. All right. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I went through a similar thing like last year. And it's honestly why I sort of bumped with a lot of the games that we brought to Besties that you guys brought to Besties.

It's funny. We were literally right before we started recording, Russ was talking about how he was playing Horizon Zero Dawn. it's funny we were literally right before we started recording russ was talking about how he was playing um horizon horizon zero dawn and that's one game that's just like the intro to that was a little too slow for my tastes and i was like well if this is it like i don't i appreciate it it's a very good game but like i just don't have the time i i don't know i i i am so vicious about how i spend my my free time with games these days. It's got to be a jammer or no thank you. Very picky.

Does anybody have any other honorable mentions that they want to bring? I played a lot of fucking Monster Hunter at like 3 in the morning. If you saw me pop on there, get a few engine ass there around 4 a.m. I'm playing it. Guy Hoops. They thought they were fine. Oh, it's 4 a.m. I'm playing it. Guy hoops. They thought they were fine. Oh, it's 4 a.m. We're good.

We're good. Let's get out there. Poker night down in my den. Monster hunter. Don't bring all your gems. It's going to be fine. There's nobody there to hunt us now. It clicked for me finally.

I was talking last month about how i couldn't get into these games and it did click for me mostly when one monster pile-drived another monster through a bunch of raptors and a tree fell on them i was like okay this game is it's fucking badass it is i've now spent a a lot of time this is basically the only game that i played in february uh like all my free time was spent playing Monster Hunter World. It is a, I really talked it up last week and how it was a great game. I think it's a fucking masterpiece and I think it's going to be pretty tough to dethrone it in my mind. But here's what I'm going to say.

As someone that is now playing through Horizon very late, it is interesting because they obviously have a lot of similarities. Specifically the idea of like breaking certain parts of a monster off to weaken them and I can't help but think like I wish that like Monster Hunter controlled as smoothly as Horizon does

you're wrong what's interesting is I actually felt that the game didn't click with me until I found the, and I think a lot of people could probably have this experience, until I found the weapon that made it feel like the kind of game I wanted to play. Yeah. Yeah.

I was enjoying a lot with the long sword. And then when I finally started using the bow, I had the level of flexibility sort of you're talking about to take out the specific parts that I was looking for. And I had enough distance usually that like I wasn't just getting my shop wrecked constantly. And it was when I was like, oh, okay, this is how I want to play. And this weapon really like matches my play style. And I think that that's really interesting and cool that like it really does make it a completely different game depending on what what items you you know are yeah you talked about the controls not not being smooth but like i i i

i used to think that way until i played a lot of monster hunter and now i recognize that like it is a different way of handling combat than any other game really tries for in so far as that it is entirely just about sort of like animation priority rather than just like jamming on a button in this like fluid um like cookie cutter kind of way it's almost more like a rhythm game in that regard and every every weapon category kind of has its own rhythm that you have to master and every monster has its own rhythm and then figuring out like what attacks you can get in where during which animations and how your animations are oh boy you got so worked up too excited and how and how your animations can kind of like interrupt theirs is like it's a it's a different way of doing it, but I would argue that it is not like unsmooth. I get it.

I understand it. Uh, you know, in all fairness, I also like haven't at once I like, once it clicked for me and I like understood why people play these games, I haven't had a driving desire to go back weirdly. Cause it was like, oh, this is awesome. Totally. But like, I know that I'm 15 to 30 hours away from like the like intense micromanagement like min maxing elements to the point where i was like i'm good and then i just haven't gone back i like

it and i'm excited like once it comes to a platform that i like switch i mean world won't come to switch because it can't run but like another monster hunter game coming this way there is double cross that came to japan here it's very and it would be hard to go back at this point yeah it didn't come to america because this was still despite the fact that it's been running for a long time and usually found uh a lot of success in japan this was not a you know smash hit franchise for them until monster hunter world is one of uh if not the best-selling game in capcom's history it is a it is a huge hit for them and now because of that like i that's what makes me so excited one that more people are playing it because it's a franchise i'm enthusiastic about but also because like

they're gonna do so much more shit with it now that it's commercially viable worldwide like that yeah rules uh anyway that's all that's an old game that is i played a game called slay the spire uh that i think spent out for a while it's uh it's a really cool like deck building roguelike rpg um where and i what's platform uh i put it on steam um it is i i should say i have not spent too much time playing it but basically you are in a dungeon and uh you're going through battles and uh as you like complete battles you sort of move down this branching pathway of a map so you're choosing whether you want to go into like a battle with a regular enemy or a tough battle with more rewards or like a rest area where you can heal or a shop um and every round of battle you have like uh

like three energy points say and you spend those on the cards that you draw out of your deck um and some you know different abilities take different amounts of energy so you're trying to figure out how to uh best utilize each turn and you see what your enemy your opponent's about to do and you try to figure out the best way to sort of like counteract that while dealing damage and not taking too much damage yourself because it sort of lasts it carries on from round to round that's like the basics of it and but but the game is so smart about how much variety there is in all the different cards you collect and and your deck is something that you are building as you go like each fight you might find one or two new cards and you have to choose which ones you add in there's also certain opportunities you'll have to actually remove cards from your deck

because maybe you've hit a point where they're just too weak to be viable or your deck strategy has gone in a different way and so now you want to just get those cards out so you're not pulling just trash while you're while you're going through a fight it is a it's a really slick game that i want to invest more time into be a lot easier to do so if it was on mobile or something like that. But it's a good little game. Anyone else with... Yeah. I have the generic, hey, thing is good on Switch with Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2.

I'm shocked. I don't think the first game is good. What? I don't think the first game is that good. The first game is not nearly as good as Bayonetta 2. Yeah, the second one is excellent. Especially for people who are Casual action game players Yeah the casuals Bayonetta 2

Oh my god Bayonetta 2 also just feels Like a final draft of Bayonetta 1 Like they finally got to do The thing they wanted to do It's also past that era I think we did probably talk about bandit two like two years three four years ago on the podcast when it first came out but they also

when the first one came out was in the thick of gears of war like next gen browns which is like dreary and like depressing and bandit two is like very much not that it's colorful and silly and over the bright very bright um but i was shocked one how well it runs and two with having had trouble with um shooters on switch though i will say i went back to doom after that patch update yeah that made a big difference i can totally play a huge difference um and yeah that's what i found with bayonetta is that and yeah that's what i found with bayonetta is that you could play this really complex action game and feel like you're getting the input right and also just runs beautifully i assume it's running better than it did on wii u um in handheld mode which is i mean it's funny to say it runs i mean it ran really well on wii u but like it's also a four-year-old game that ran really

well on wii u yeah like if it didn't run well that would be a problem look at it it does not look like a game that should run well on no you're right it's amazingly well optimized yeah yeah um and then the other thing that i want to mention is a game called membrane which is a kind of side scrolling not even that like puzzle platformer shooter uh that's 2d from nyu it i don't think it's published by uh adult swim but it has that kind of like grimy zine old adult swim aesthetic and i believe you are like a creature inside a hallucinogenic body and you have to collect like little balls that are located located on each kind of room i know this is very plain i'm watching a clip of this right now and good luck describing this fucking game the

simple mechanic of it is you can shoot two things at first uh one uh projectiles they stick so you can like if you shoot them against the wall it'll make a bridge that comes out from the wall but it's somewhat physics influenced so like if it's too big it'll weigh it down and it'll like droop towards the ground or you could shoot beneath you to like put yourself up onto the top of a tower and then you can shoot another object that disintegrates those things and then you have to collect the residue to like build up your ammunition of the sticky goop that you use to navigate spaces so it's it's not really a shooter scroll-y thing. You are more like, I don't know, kind of 2D Portal-y. Yeah, it looks 2D Portal. Like that 2D Flash Portal game that came out.

Yeah, and it's just very smart. It has some issues that I think all of these games have if they are not made by Valve or Nintendo in that the ramping up of difficulty is a little messy um i found myself like i would have like very hardcore like oh i am now suddenly just really hitting my head against something early on and then getting past it and like zipping past a few levels yeah um but but beyond that man it's really fun and it is a perfect game for switch in that it's those like here's just a small level that uh would work on on mobile on a phone but having

the control of switch makes it so much more enjoyable yeah this looks neat this looks like something i can get into i haven't played like a good like um i feel like a couple years ago i was playing like four like puzzle platformers 2d and 3d like a year and i haven't really played a good one in a while i was watching clips from uh you remember that game antechamber oh yeah clips from that and getting all nostalgic because i played that for a long time all right what's the what are we what are we doing this time let's just start let's bring it for real bring the heat yeah uh i'll start um i am bringing a game called the fall two unbound now if you uh remember the fall that would be uh surprising because the fall part one was released like four years ago and it was supposed to be an episodic game I suppose this is from a developer called over the moon that I have to assume is a small small house but it was released in May of 2014 the first one and if you haven't played it

and I'm sure there's a lot of people who haven't, I won't sort of spoil what the hook of it is, but the fall is about the relationship of an AI combat, a combat-based AI that is piloting a suit, basically, to try to get an astronaut, I think, back home. Again, it's been many years since I played the original Fall. But it's about the AI sort of becoming aware of itself and creating its own determination. And the Fall Part 2 is sort of about the AI deciding that its number one rule is now to preserve itself. And it is going to find the user that is trying to get rid of it and destroy them. Oh, yeah. But the arid, which is the name of the AI, does not currently, as the game begins, have a body to speak of.

So the game is sort of in two different phases, if you want to call them that, I guess. Realities, I don't know. But in the one reality, you are ARID, but you're sort of piloting ARud inside an AI software consciousness that is represented physically. Think like reboot or something like that. A lot more simple than that, but you're within the programming and you're trying to find basically nodes that can help you connect to the outside world somehow. And when you're in that reality, there is some light run and gun 2D like action where you've got a pistol

and you're shooting rogue programming that is trying to destroy you. And then you find nodes. And I think there's like three different ones. So it's sort of broken up into chunks like that but you find these nodes that let you take control of a robot that is working in the real world and the interesting thing about it is that you have to work within the programming of the robot that you're controlling.

So you're sort of like inhabiting the robot's body along with the robot's own programming, talking to that robot about what you're trying to do and what you need to achieve, but they are unwilling. The first sort of node that you'll encounter is a robot butler that is waiting on its previous owners. I say previous because both the owners have died and are still in the house that this robot butler lives in. But the robot butler continues to carry out its programming every day. So every day it's

making the tea, taking the tea to its gentleman master, and then going and opening the windows for its lady master and putting on her lipstick as it did every day. And you have to find, I know, but you have to find, you have a goal of like that, the former deceased master has information somewhere in their house that you need to fight back against the user that's trying to destroy you.

So you have to find ways of sort of interrupting the robot's programming and sort of fooling it into helping you because it won't work. I would eat the lipstick. Eat the lipstick. Wow. You already, you must be looking at game boomers. That is step one. Eat the lipstick. Wow. You already start. You must be looking at game boomers. Step one, eat the lipstick.

But I, you know, it's those parts are really interesting. I'm not crazy about the, the shooting parts. They're like, it's pretty bare bones and not particularly great, but it feels like it needs something to break the,

up the pace of the other ones which is kind of turgid uh i would say in another uh program you are um turgid turgid swollen and distended or congested no looks like a not that yeah i was thinking of okay how about this slow yeah how's that slow pace um deliberate if you will uh and in the second in in one of them that i'm in right now the um you're controlling an ai that does uh the controlling robot that's training in martial arts and that's hand handled through sort of like a timing basedbased waves of enemies coming at you, and you have to tap on the side of you that corresponds to where the enemies are coming from,

and that's how they sort of handle the combat there, but those bits are actually pretty well done. Yeah, that half of the game sounds really cool to me. The other half does not sound as cool to me. Yeah, the shooting parts are not particularly interesting, but they are brief. they're a connective tissue between the these sort of other more like puzzle oriented chunks the only other thing i'll say and this is like the game's not popular enough to sort of have uh the amount of like forum chatter that i would need to diagnose this issue, but I'm playing on my PS4 Pro,

and it is very dark to a point where I have trouble making things out, and that's what the brightness cranked up 100%. Weird. When I've looked at, I checked out some videos of people playing on PC on YouTube, and it is not the same scenario. Are you using the HDR?

I turned the HDR? I turned the HDR off and that helped somewhat, but it is not completely improved. That is weird. Yeah, it's a very weird issue. I've never had anything like it on the... It is a dark game already. And in a lot of... Very short on sort of like big vibrant color,

a lot of blacks and whites with color just used to like accent. So I think I could see where it'd be easy for something to get like lost in the shadows. But it's really interesting. It does really cool, it asks really cool questions about AI and seeing an AI sort of like rectify its place in the world

and its own self-determination is that is really interesting um i would recommend playing the first fall you can get it for 10 bucks um and it's very cool and would probably be a nice companion piece again i don't have that perspective necessarily because i played it so friggin long ago um but there is a recap if you if you did play it a while back there's a recap at the beginning of this so you can sort of like play catch up i would say it's not required but i think it should be required that all developers put that shit in their sequels because i downloaded i downloaded bayonetta 2 to play it on an airplane and i got it in and then there's there's bayonetta and then there's joe pesci i guess and then there's the i want to make

a recommendation for everybody who is listening for bayonetta and bayonetta 2 is the game is just as good if you hit skip cutscene every single time well the cutscenes are very cool but okay so i've probably i played the entire bayonetta 1 and i'm like two-thirds of the way through bayonetta 2 and i have no idea who anyone is and that's not because i forgot from the first game i know there are witches and i know heaven and hell are not happy with each other but everything else i have no idea what's going on there's this amazing thing that i found on youtube after playing near automata just wanted to mention that one more time yeah um that there are people who take uh all the cut scenes

from games like bayonetta that are confusing um or like just a lot of garbledy gook and they've cut them all together into like a 20 minute movie yeah and i i've really enjoyed watching the movie and then playing the game what do i search for when i'm doing that scenes i i like bayonetta story summary okay shinmu too had this in like a separate disc and it was like a dvd of shinmu won the movie and i remember thinking like oh god thank you yeah a few places have done it anyway none of this is anything justin that game sounds neat it is a neat game it's 15 bucks um check it totally out um we have do you want me to that is that is the highest end of my official scale i'll do a thing that is not a game

so we can break those up yes okay okay is it not a game or is it all games uh both um my thing is uh the upgraded xbox i guess they say it's xbox one x backwards compatibility i mean really it's backwards compatibility across the thing but it's especially nifty with what they're doing with 1x uh and maybe the first real justification of the xbox 1x which is still a terrible name um now there are a handful of xbox 360 and i believe xbox original games that have been further upgraded to take advantage of the power on the x uh the two that i recommend you probably have if you are a long-term xbox player if you're a real gamer down what if you're a real gamer yeah if you're if you're like legit you know like you're not a joke um crackdown and forza horizon one but crackdown especially i have been so jazzed for

crackdown 3 to come out i'm still jazzed i'm still hopeful yeah i was gonna say you're still just even you know what i i enjoyed it when i put it at e3 but let's forget that being able to play that game on a fancy nice new tv and have it run so well um and look so good i mean it looks like running doing what i do with like red faction gorilla on my pc where being able to go back to a game and just completely max it out um and just have it run silky smooth uh being able to do that in console is so neat it's not perfect uh forza horizon is a great example of how imperfect it is they boost the resolution uh towards infinity and it looks great but one thing that i don't know if they will solve uh is forza horizon when it was

released was locked at 30 frames per second because it was an open world racing game and the game is still locked at 30 frames per second because the game was released with a hard lock so as great as it looks you get the sense that wow like it could it could be pushed further um there are two options on uh all of these games now where it's so weird because they had to cook it into the xbox 360 menu so like when you play an xbox 360 game if you hit uh the like select and start it does the old x button menu but now it has xbox one x settings in the old grainy xbox 360 yeah and you can pick um basically graphics focus or performance focus which again is not the level of customization on pc but it still is cool that they are trying to i think make a simplified version of that um and i i don't know like what is the

difference with crackdown like what negligible in my experience i i don't think you see a lot in general with those games uh at least the ones that i've played just because like it's not taking that much to run them to begin with like i think i think that'll be more of a thing is like third-party developers get involved in this that that hey i don't want to put as much resources into like making sure this all works so one really boosts the resolution and one just makes it run well um but the weird thing about this is like notice that like is the like i don't i mean i realize it's been a while since you put it on 360 but so actually i not

only is it noticeable in that way i played crackdown on an xbox one like when they when they made it backwards compatible and it looked like garbage um It did not run well. It was a bad enough experience that I put it down pretty much right away. Are you playing a disc, by the way, or can you download this? No, you can download it. Oh, cool. And you might need disc for Forza. I tried downloading a version of it, and I was having some region lock issue. But yeah, it looks like a very like hands-off remaster not a remaster but like

up res um it doesn't look like oh hey i'm playing an xbox 360 game on my xbox one so that's a significant enough change the other weird thing and i don't know how this is working maybe i'm just seeing things but i had i tried um katherine which is not listed as one of these like mega upgrades but i love the game and wanted to see what it looked like on xbox one and it looks ridiculously good it looks like a full upscale conversion and i know that they're releasing um that game again on ps4 and they're not on the xbox and i'm sure the real reason they're not releasing it on xbox is because there's just no interest in japan for xbox at this point um or at least not big enough but at the same time i don't know if you would even need it because you can get it for cheap and it looks

need it because you can get it for cheap and it looks absolutely fantastic and runs so much better than it did on 360 on xbox one x right now so so what you're saying is everyone should rush out and buy an xbox one x yeah no um but this is only on x i can't do this on no you can do backwards compat on normal but i'm it's like hard to tell because so much of like how Microsoft is promoing it is all about, oh, if you want this really high level 4K output, you need to have X. I don't know if maybe that is even that. I don't know if maybe Xbox One and Xbox One S can output 4K at beyond 24 frames um i don't know i've i could not care any less about whether it's just i i i what's it gonna take man for me to pick up all these x's it's even worse because like i bought i have the x because i was like oh i have 4k i have hdr i want to take advantage of this i want like i can justify it by saying like oh i want to see how it works let me tell you i have

not consistently managed to get it to trying to figure out hdr has been the most infuriating thing um and it's not just the x it's yeah the tvs don't always my the samsung used to say when hdr was on now it doesn't no they literally removed that with an update um receivers even new receivers some of them do hdr but only some things in hdr right now i have it so that if i want to watch hdr movies i can do that through my xbox to my receiver to my tv but if i want to play hdr games on the xbox i need to go direct to my tv and then like basically input out from tv to receiver with a digital audio and then but then with my ps4 it can feed hdr games through the receiver but i haven't gotten like hdr movies on netflix to work

you know it always works just a pack of playing cards yeah oh i mean never fails also it just never feels worth it like i know everybody loves all of that stuff but when you have that much headache it it would need to be drastic to feel like oh i'm i'm really glad that i used two hours to yeah figure this out and the brights are brighter um we don't have to do halftime right you want to talk more about lemonade griffin what did you bring um i brought a game that is probably gonna be a top five contender for me this year i am so deeply in love with it it is called into the breach damn you are you're filling up your uh your goatee slots here in the beginning of march um maarinna World, Celeste,

and Into the Breach, right? These three are definitely going to be part of the conversation for me when we get to the end of the year. How did Subnautica slide past Celeste? You know what? I stand by it as someone that went back and actually finished Subnautica. I'm not downing Subnautica.

No, it's better. It's great. It's very good, right? Really? Okay, but I will say this we i had not finished celeste when we talked about it last week and or last month and the ending of that game blew me the fuck away and you still haven't seen the real ending um i so i've actually been going back to do the 100 collectibles i adore that game anyway did you do the volcano thing that's what i'm

working on now i just got enough hearts to do it okay okay so great level uh into the breach is the new game from subset games which you may remember from ftl uh faster than light which was uh a very good game i loved it i know that i think russ was probably the biggest kind of uh advocate for it here i love fts yeah it's a great game it It was a roguelike where you piloted a spaceship and the spaceship had different sort of stations and you had to assign pilots to those stations and assign power to those stations and you would get in fights.

Very complicated. Very complicated, kind of deliberate in that you knew based on what your ship was capable of and how you would assign pilots and power kind of how a fight was going to play out. You would see the enemy ship and kind of see what they were capable of and how you would assign pilots and power kind of how a fight was going to play out um you would see the enemy ship and kind of see what they were capable of figure out your plan of attack and react to theirs um in in a way that was like i said like kind of kind of deliberate you could pretty much figure out what was going on that game i never finished it um mostly because

one i still feel like i still felt like even though it was kind of deliberate and how it showed you how a battle was going to play out it wasn't always like a hundred percent clear and there was a lot of fingers crossed man i hope that they don't attack yeah the learning curve was long not just learning curve there was an element of of randomness to it sure that's true not and it wasn't oppressive it wasn't like constant but it was like if you got attacked in the one spot where you didn't want to get attacked it was like oh well there goes my whole fucking plan um also the other problem with that game is that the final boss was uh kind of bad and it really

required you to have your ship built in a very specific way. And you could play through the game with a ship and blow through it and be firing on all cylinders. But then when you got to this one boss fight at the end, it was like, oh, well, I didn't have the exact ship I needed to take this down. And that was frustrating and not great design. Still a good game. And a sort of revolutionary one for like the the roguelike kind of uh genre i think into the breach is in every conceivable way a better game and a sophistication of those of that like roadmap that ftl laid out for it yeah i agree it is a game that takes place uh it is sort of a

strategic turn-based mech combat game where you control three mechs on an 8x8 grid map, or rather a series of missions that take place on these 8x8 grids. It's like an isometric point of view. Isometric point of view, cool pixel graphics. And every turn you control these three mechs and you can move and take one action, uh, with, with your mechs. And you'll be taking those actions in response to, uh, these, the, your enemies who are these usually massive insects called the Vek. Um, and every turn the enemies will move and they will ready an attack. And maybe that means that there is a hornet that is going to stab forward on its next turn. Or maybe there's a beetle that's going to launch

like some explosive goo on its next turn. Or maybe there's a beetle who's going to charge forward and attack whatever it collides with on its next turn. There will also be other sort of things that will happen in these like preparation stages. You will see cracks start forming in the ground, and this is where new enemies are going to spawn on the next turn.

And if you can put something on top of those cracks, you will block that spawn for one turn and deal damage to whatever's on top of it. But you see laid out before you what is going to happen, and then you have one turn to prevent it and i there's so many things that play into that um that make this game a i've spent um last night i

finished my first hard mode run uh of of this game. It took me about four hours, which is significantly longer than any other run that I've had to take. And that is because I spent one turn. I spent about 15 minutes just looking at this eight by eight grid and these basically like four enemies that were attacking and tried to figure out what I could do to prevent damage to the, the different buildings that are all around because every time a building is attacked you lose grid power which is kind of like your health bar right

um if you take too much grid power damage you lose the game also trying to figure out how to keep my mechs from getting to destroyed because if your mech gets destroyed you can't use them for the rest of the battle and the pilot inside of it dies um what's and also trying and also trying to figure out how to do things like uh block spawns and uh push enemies into the path of other enemies so that their attacks will not only hit not hit buildings and not hit mechs they will actually deal damage to the enemy team i spent 15 minutes just like there's gotta be a fucking solution in here somewhere i just have to find it and what's so satisfying about this game and the way that it's built and the different variety in the mechs and then different attacks that you can use as those mechs then different upgrades that you can get

there almost always is there almost always is a solution it's just a question of are you going to be able to to figure it out and and i think what's amazing because when i first started playing the game you know and and still i mean there's similarities to games like fire emblem turn based strategy games like this but what's amazing is we're talking about you always only have three mechs like that's the maximum number of units that you could possibly move and the sheer number of options that you have with those three mechs and their minimal moves as griffin attested is outrageous it's just so cool that you can but it's really it's like i want to get it's like all simple like in on theory in the surface if you were to like write it out like okay i could, I could punch that thing. Okay, well, it'll do two damage.

Okay, that's easy to understand. Okay, well, if you punch it, it's going to fly back one square and hit that other thing and do damage. Oh, cool. Well, I want to do damage to both. Okay, cool. But there's this other thing where there's a sort of one of the VEC is like boosting all the enemies where if they die, they'll put out an explosion. Okay.

So if you hit that one, it's going to kill that one and then it'll explode. And your other mech is next to that. So aren't you going to want to move that first? Okay. Well now it's in the way of this. Like it's, it's layers upon layers on layers, but it's all very conceivable.

Yeah. You can like see it. You can visualize it. It's so visual. The secret to the game and like the, the way to succeed when you try to take on hard mode which is like and again like it's a i think it's a better game than ftl because it while ftl was kind of deliberate and how it showed you what was going to happen in each fight there

is no confusion in into the breach you see exactly what's going to happen and it is usually a lot it is when you first see the enemy's moves laid out on the grid before you it is chaos and it seems fucking impossible in hard mode there could be six enemies on the map all about to take individual actions either threatening your mechs or threatening buildings and you've only got the three mechs or if you get the acid tank deployables or have like special map sort of considerations because each mission is different sometimes there's like a tidal wave that'll come in that you can push enemies into there are you know mines on the map that you can push enemies into to freeze them or kill them um but you only have these three moves most of the time how how can i like how can I spend my three moves negating six enemy actions? So, so the game

really becomes about, um, making your one turn accomplish two or three or even four things, whether that is say you move like a, an artillery, like long range attack mech onto a spawn spot. Uh, that's, that's like one move in the future that you have saved yourself right that's one enemy you don't have to deal with in the future so that's like one action you've done and then you shoot into an enemy to knock it so that its attack isn't going to hit a building okay that's the second thing that you've accomplished and also when you moved it you pushed it in the way of another enemy whose attack you have also now blocked that's three things that now you've accomplished like that's the that is what you have to try to figure out and trying to figure out those

combos that you can use to maximize your efficiency with each turn. Like that's the level of complexity. And there's not just one solution for these things. There's, there's, there's hundreds, there's dozens, if not hundreds of,

of solutions that you can accomplish again with these three mechs taking one action each. Can you talk a little bit about it? About the oh, sorry, but, uh, I just want to ask something. Could you talk a little bit about progression? Because even if somebody's played it a couple hours, it's still kind of confusing to me what does and doesn't carry over from run to run. Yes. So while you're playing, before you start, you choose your squad. Um, and I think there's eight or 10 squads in the game that you unlock with coins

and you earn those coins by completing achievements, which basically require you to like use those mechs in weird ways. Like there's a laser mech that shoots a laser that can penetrate enemies and you have to like hit four enemies with one shot and you get the achievement for that. And each squad has three different mechs in it

and each one kind of has different abilities like, you know, the laser mech or the artillery freezing mech that can shoot like a freezing blast at an enemy or uh a mech that can jump forward and whenever it lands it knocks everybody away um so so you have like those different teams you also have a you have one pilot that you start out with you can choose what mech that they go in and that pilot uh can be a survivor from a previous run. So if you do a run and it's going well and you win or you lose or whatever, you get to choose from your surviving pilots at that point to send back in time.

And your pilots can level up as they kill enemies, they get experience points. And so as they level up, they earn different upgrades. Like maybe they increase the mech that they're in their max health or grant them additional movement or additional reactor cores, which is a resource that you spend to like upgrade your mechs while you are playing. And you really like this one pilot and you had them all leveled up. You can send them back in time so that you can use them in your next run. So you get a little bit of a leg up. It's not huge, but you get a little bit of a leg up for the next time that you go in. other than that progression is contained to your individual run so as you

accomplish objectives on each map there's usually two or three objectives um you will earn a resource that at the end of each island which is basically i think there's like five or six missions you complete on each island and then you fight like the boss of the island and then you get to spend what's called reputation which is the uh the currency that you earn by completing these objectives on different upgrades and those upgrades can be different weapons uh you can have two sort of uh tools equipped on each mech and they can be weapons or passive upgrades usually which need those reactor cores to power them up um so you're you're making these sort of micro decisions on how to upgrade your mechs um and that also like also affects the missions

because maybe you do want a building to take a hit if it means you can take an action to accomplish one of these objectives like you it kind of complicates the decision making process a little bit but that that's the sending surviving pilots back in time is really the only sort of well they're the only other thing is that as you play you will find new pilots to fill your yes that's max every time you rescue a pilot uh either through like if you accomplish all the missions on all the objectives on one island without failing any you get a choice of rewards and one of them's always a pilot and so you pick them and then now you can start with them they go to your hangar and so whenever you start a mission you can always start with them so if you

decide i'm not going to bring forward this pilot that did another run i'm going to start with a new one you can pick from any of the pilots that you've found so far and while they won't be leveled up they will have one starting ability that might synergize really well with the squad you're using. And also you get the achievements and the coins that you can use to purchase new squads. You can also create your own custom squad

using three mechs from any of the squads that you've unlocked so far. It's funny when you were talking about the idea of like maximizing your turn and i forget the term you're gonna remind me in hearthstone uh it's not cadence tempo yeah feels a lot like that yeah you're because you are always outnumbered in the ways that like in a hearthstone match if you're playing like one of the ai bosses and they have way more cards than you and they're so you're always going to be outnumbered.

So it's how you take advantage of the situation to make your disadvantage less of one. And that is a, that's a really tricky concept to wrap your mind around, but it is so essential to this game. And it's so rewarding once you wrap your mind around it in that maybe it doesn't make the most sense for me to spend my whole turn going to kill this enemy.

Maybe it makes more sense to spend this one turn blocking two spawn points because then i gain tempo i have accomplished two things at that point instead of just the one thing of killing this enemy um it's it's it is uh it is funny because it is the same grid size as a chess board and it really reminds me of i played a lot of chess uh last year after i we had just had henry like that was my go-to like game that I could play like on my phone or whatever. And what I did a lot of were these chess puzzles, which would show you a board of a game in progress and you have one move and you have to find the ideal move and you spend a lot of time looking at it, trying to figure out what the ideal move is going to be.

That's going to either win you the game or capture a queen or do something to turn the game around. that's going to either win you the game or capture a queen or do something to turn the game around that is all this game is is is puzzles of how can i how can i save myself uh and on easy mode it's it's fun like on easy mode it's like okay you're going through and you're blasting enemies you can still learn unlocks that you can use in any other thing so it's very uh forgiving in that sense if you are having trouble with the game just play it in easy mode go unlock some new pilots get some achievements i found it still like it was very creative but it's still rewarding and you can still get your i i got my clock clean like i had been playing on normal oh yeah doing it okay but i but i watched a guide video with russ in it where he said you know try

playing on easy to get familiarized like yeah i'm gonna try that blade it put switch it to easy literally first map first mission i lost two of the like six health points that you start out with just got yeah absolutely shadrack because this mission can go haywire it can break bad so fast i mean like yeah you can't turn you could and again the weird thing is you can always see it right but like sometimes you get to a point or at least i do where i'm like you know what it's fine i'm just gonna do i have to do something because like i've been staring at it for so long i'm just gonna do something and try to push through uh this like mental block i'm in and then all of a sudden oops like three buildings got destroyed yeah because you can also put yourself in positions where you go to one you spend your turn putting all three of your mechs on one end of the map to deal with

a fire over there and then on the next turn if all the enemies go to the other side of the map you're fucked like you are you have screwed yourself over like there is also a consideration of like how can i make sure that i am setting up a defensible position for the next turn there's there's again it's this is my favorite kind of game in that there are especially when it comes to like strategy games and that there's limited things you can do and infinite ways that it can like play out and yeah and but it but what where this game succeeds is there are infinite ways it can play out but it shows you everything so if you can't if you fuck up if you can't, if you fuck up,

if you can't pull it off, it's not because the game did something to screw you over. It is because of a bad decision you made in the past. It is because you didn't set up these defensible positions. It's because you didn't spend your turns as efficiently as possible. Right. Like, so much so that they give you,

you can revert, if you screw up, you can revert a turn yes once you can start over it's just not easy though right no no it's on all the difficulties everything um it is a it is a it's a fucking masterpiece like it is my it might be my favorite strategy game literally ever i i think i think it is the i i think it's incredible and i i i it's one of it's one of those games that is, I learned this had a name by the way, cause I tweeted about this and a lot of people let me know it's called the Tetris effect, where if you like expend a lot of sort of mental energy with something and it happens commonly with games and that's why it's called the Tetris effect.

You will have dreams about it. I have dreams about into the breach, about how to like spend a turn and of course i do because i've i've spent 15 minutes agonizing over a single turn in a single fight like it is a it is an incredible fucking game and i i cannot recommend it highly enough and i hope it i hope it is uh it came out early this year right i hope it is still, uh, fresh in my memory when it comes time to, to talk about game of the year stuff, because it is, it's, it's such an incredible game. Yeah. It's fantastic.

I, I hope by then it's out on switch. Cause it would be so frigging good on switch. I keep telling myself, I told myself after I beat it on normal mode, I was like, okay, I'm going to stop now. Cause this game is going to come out on some sort of mobile platform and it's going to take over my life. And I, I'm looking forward to that, but I, I can't, I can going to stop now because this game is going to come out on some sort of mobile platform and it's going to take over my life. And I'm looking forward to that. But I can't put it down.

I can't stop thinking about it. Yeah, it's great. Russ, what do you got, baby? My game of the month is whatever. I cannot believe we used to try to do this on a weekly basis. We were very bold back then. Were there a lot more video games back then, honestly? We did a lot of mobile stuff.

Yeah, that's what's weird is there are more games now. Like, if I could be doable now, I really don't know what was going on back then. I don't know. Four games a week would be tough to do anyway. So my game is Owlboy, which came out last year in Steam. I didn't play it then. It's out on Switch now.

And Owlboy was a game, as I understand it, was in development for like 10 years, similar to Stardew Valley in the sense it was like essentially a guy who worked on it for a very, very long time in a very small studio. And it was kind of his dream project. And his dream project was to make this kind of, it's not quite a Metroidvania.

It's like an action adventure 2D side-scrolling game where you play as a mute owl boy, who's like a humanoid owl thing, who is trying to save his friends and save the world against pirates and various other critters um it is a gorgeously animated and scored 2d game beautiful beautiful um to sprite work and and uh animation artifacts and and the soundtrack is spectacular um and on switch it works really well because again it's a you know you can take it anywhere and by nature of it being 2d it's easy to control and it has no performance issues or anything like that um i've heard i've heard people refer to its genre in a way that really crystallizes it for for me as a

vertical platformer because you can you can fly like that's yeah it is the whole thing and it's very very like up up and down focused it it is very vertical but i wouldn't call it a platformer because it's not really it's it's more a lot of skill involved with the jumps that yeah i mean you literally like float and move around like it's not like you're flapping um but the most of the puzzles in the game are more about like moving blocks or like plugging like uh vents so that air stops rushing and stuff like that it's it's not really an action game per se although there are action sequences and boss fights and combat but most of it is about like using the environment to

succeed and i think those puzzles are good um but i think why it doesn't quite do it for me in the ways that like similar games have is because i think the world it's very hit or miss in terms of like the world itself so you you'll go into a town and it'll be amazingly detailed and you'll see these like cool shops and everything's like really like amazingly designed. And then once you leave those like very handcrafted areas, it starts to feel a little bit like samey and a little bit like lacking in that level of detail

where you'll like go into a cave system and like a lot of the caves feel very similar to one another and it doesn't quite feel like that same vibrant world that they created um and the gameplay is good and it's interesting in that like you you don't physically you personally do not do any combat you actually carry people that fight for you um and you can like swap your companions around like who you're carrying and they have different abilities so they're the ones actually doing the combat so it's an interesting mechanic but the gameplay I've probably

put in like five hours or so and the gameplay hasn't quite clicked for me in the way that Metroidvania games that work games like Ori or you know even like the latest Metroid game that we talked about last year um that i haven't had a good example i haven't stuck nearly enough time into it to really

pass any sort of judgment one way or the other but the uh i played for maybe an hour or two this morning um and i i was left with the sense of like wondering when the game was going to start, like when I'd be into the meat of the game proper, because I was doing like a lot of wandering around and nothing particularly like difficult or challenging. The first hour is very throat-cleary. Yeah, that's probably a good way of putting it, and that was sort of the experience that I had.

Yeah, it gets better. It gets more interesting, putting it and um that was sort of the the experience that i had yeah i i definitely it gets better it gets more interesting but it the like meat and potatoes like 10 second loop that you're doing for the gameplay doesn't feel like amazing i think everything else is like very strong and again if you're looking for like a enjoyable 2d side-scrolling game on Switch. Maybe you played through Shovel Knight. I think Shovel Knight is a better game, but I think this is still good and enjoyable and gorgeous.

Did we speak on the fact, this is only somewhat related, but did we speak on the fact that Dead Cells is coming to Switch? I mean, my life will be complete when that game comes to Switch. I mean, my life will be complete when that game comes to Switch. God willing, it

runs well, because that would be heartbreaking. It's going to run perfect. Oh my god. Jackie got the promise from the dev. Said perfect frames. Perfect frames. No drops. Yeah, I don't know when that's actually coming to Switch, but sometime this year, hopefully. Coming to all the consoles. Switch, I don't know when that's actually coming to Switch, but sometime this year, hopefully.

Coming to all the consoles. Switch, PS4, Xbox. Yeah. Those are the consoles. I got Uncle Works at Nintendo said Sonic's coming too. Really? Yeah, Sonic's first Nintendo game. Oh my God, I'm so excited.

The question is this, will Mario be on it? I don't know, but my uncle my uncle saved a bit of a history my uncle says yes oh so but this is podcast exclusive so don't tell anybody scoop don't tell anyone um into the breach yeah i know without a doubt into the breach is my game of the year so far wow really i i have no hesitation saying that whatsoever it is the best game that i've played so well it's not mine so how do you rectify that russ well i'm right so that's all that matters it's weird it's weird like i i have spent a lot more time playing monster hunter world monster hunter world occupies like my favorite type of genre this like rpg with like dope

progression and multiplayer so you can show off all your stuff and work together showing off like how you have customized your character and working with other people who've done the same like that's that's my that's my favorite genre hands down and it's a really good game in that genre into the breach is such a different thing that is also my favorite game that's ever come out in a genre that i don't really is not one of my favorite genre and i think that that's like kind of special in a different way i don't know it's just into the breach is just so dense it's like what is that cappuccino what's the really dense coffee cappuccino is like when you take cappuccino it's like a cappuccino it's espresso you just need

a little cup it's espresso is it yes yes okay so cappuccino you just need a little cup oh my gosh no it is i that that like dilemma where i'm like torn between these two games is like i'm actually kind of excited for the well it's actually not it's torn because uh subnautica won last week so we're never going to talk about monster hunter again last month um actually we have to do this right now because it's march it's the end of the quarter oh yeah we got to do no right now, because it's March. It's the end of the quarter. No! Oh, yeah, we gotta do it. No, but Subnautica won last month. Also, this is the end of February.

We haven't done March yet. No, no, no. Yes. Monster Hunter won January, because that came out. I know it did not. Yes, it did. Subnautica won. Subnautica won January.

It won both months? What the fuck's wrong with you guys? That's two months, guys. No, we haven't done February yet. We've only done the second episode of this year. Right. Oh, you're right, you're right, you're right. Well right well wait we let monster world lose the subnautica yeah buddy i stand by it uh listen guys i don't know i i don't know if this is first off i want to say

i don't know if this decision is legitimate without talking about metal gear survive so i'm going to talk about that for 15 minutes based on what i heard about on the chat podcast i guess because oh god it's so bad is it bad yes i played it too much for the stupid guide that i was writing it's terrible you spent time on a guide you were like people are gonna be just drooling for well i. Well, I figured that nothing was coming out this month, so I was like, well, might as well. So March is not... March is a little rough.

Actually, it's not. It's much better than February, I'll tell you that, in terms of releases. By the way, this is out already, but Subsurface Circular is out on Switch. If you haven't played it yet, go play that. It's great. Also, Turok 2 came out on Xboxbox one what the fuck seriously um all right let's do we need to decide what the better game between

subnautica into the breach no no not until no not march that's next month's problem i can't understand don't we don't have a recurring turak news to me please um i want to talk about march real quick because it's actually a pretty busy month so pit people came out already um when we're recording this that's the behemoth uh turn-based strategy game which i'm going to try i'm very excited uh also coming out is kirby on switch which might be good um burnout paradise remastered which will be fun i mean sea of thieves um sea of thieves which i'm very excited about and far cry 5 far cry 5 also the first um fmv game i have no interest

in playing super seducer is is uh is out so gonna have that to avoid at all costs detective pikachu comes out in mario 22 You're making stuff up now. No one cares about that. No Fair Effects game now? Sure. That's wild. Yeah, March is going to be good. We'll see.

But that is going to do it for us for this month. Congratulations to Into the Breach and to all of our nominees. It's an honor just to be on the show, I assure you. But we're going to talk about all the great games in March next time, but until then, for Rush Fresh Tick, Chris Plant, and Griffin McElroy, my name is Justin McElroy, and be sure to join us again next month for the besties,

because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? besties