The Besties - Lies of P is the Pinocchio Souls-like We Never Knew We Needed

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

In a year full of surprise sleeper hits, Lies of P might just be the most surprising -- Pinocchio trappings and ridiculous title aside, it's one of the most solid replications of the Souls formula we've ever played. Join us for a discussion of what sets it apart from other entries in the genre. (Hint: It's the P-Organ.)Also discussed: Remains of the Day, Sea of Stars, Hammerwatch 2, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet DLC, Stray Gods, Inland Empire, Willie Nelson 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!

uh guys i just got an email from um nether realm studios and they they need more um some help coming up with new fatalities for all the tough guys in mortal kombat i know we're not doing mortal kombat this week but this is like a business opportunity for us yeah do they want themed or um yes no it doesn't have to be themed yeah this is our themed mortal kombat episode no no no i'm saying like the fatalities need maybe there's like a sponsorship opportunity like oh okay slurp slurp slurpy brought by brought to you by 7-eleven and then reptile buries a straw in his enemy's throats or we could do it we could do it like um shao khan shoves um uh casper mattress up ryden's butt and then unzips it

and then Raiden kind of explodes from the inside out. I think that's more of a preparation age partnership. It would be. It would end up being that. Or like I was thinking like Scorpion would like rip off Liu Kang's arms and then his legs and switch his arms and his legs and then rip off his head

and his butt and switch those also. Let me hit you with this one. What about Kano comes out of nowhere, rips off a guy's head, and then Sam Watterson comes out on stage and he's like, life really can't come at you out of nowhere.

Hi, I'm Sam Watterson for Colonial Life Insurance. Oh, that's cool. You know what I mean? It's like, you never know when your head might get ripped off. Yeah. What about this one? Wait, wait's cool. You know what I mean? It's like you never know when your head might get ripped off. Yeah. What about this one? Wait, wait, wait.

What if Goro pins Johnny Cage to the ground and he punches him in the face and he punches him in the face and he punches him in the face until his entire face is just a bloody pulp? And he says, head on, apply directly to the forehead. Oh, that's good. That would work also. What if Molina just eats Pizza Hut? That would be awesome.

No, that's probably the best one. Until the opponent leaves. Like, I don't understand what we're doing here. Are you going to kill me? No? Okay. Guys, what if they threw a Mortal Kombat and nobody came? You know?

Yeah. Think about it. Give Pisa a chance. Look at these Kompats. I've gotten two Mortal. Let's stop. They're all too busy waiting for the pepperoni to come up to the Pizza Hut buffet, you know? Shao Kahn eats. He does kind of eat, though.

I will say. He's an eater. He eats. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I could come up with Mortal Kombat fatalities, literally, for another hour and a half. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best games of the week. My name is Ross Frosch, and I'm the best game of the week. This is the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest home interactive entertainment. This is a video game club, and just by listening, you'll become a member.

Chris Plant, this week we were talking about Lies of P, and could you give me the improbable answer to the question, what is Lies of P? It's time for it. You've been waiting all year for Dark Souls but make it Pinocchio. Bloodborne but make it Pinocchio. Pinocchio but make it bad. Bad like the sick way.

Not evil. The game's actually pretty awesome. We're gonna dig into it right after this. the game's actually pretty awesome we're gonna dig into it right after this do you think there was a moment when they were talking about this game where it was called lies of pinocchio and then someone just had to be like pump the brakes y'all we can't put pinocchio right there in the name i mean it is kind of fun that it yes I yes I agree with you the interesting thing about this premise is when we first heard about it it would have been what it feels like six months something like that no it's been like three years

ago yeah yeah three years ago I think at the Game Awards or something they showed it off or gamescom or something well is an okie a video game and when you hear it is initially hilarious and then I went to type out the premise to my friend Slice and I said so here's the deal um Geppetto got really popular after Pinocchio came out and he started making automatons that now populate the globe and one day the automatons all go bad and start killing people and the only person who can stand against them is the one puppet with a soul Pinocchiochio. And when I typed it out, I thought, fuck, that's cool.

That kicks ass, actually. It actually whips ass. What a whip ass. Yeah, that kicks ass. He's got like a sword. Yeah, that's actually a very good idea for a video game. Congratulations. Now, is Pinocchio a puppet or isn't he just a boy now?

I mean, that's interesting, right? He's still a puppet. Yeah, that's an easy answer. He's a puppet. Because when he says he's a human, the game counts it as a lie canonically. So he is a puppet. I literally, I don't know a better starting point for this

except to say that it's like Bloodborne and Pinocchio, obviously. The Pinocchio stuff, let's put that to the side for a second. The Pinocchio stuff, you all know what it is already. It's Geppetto. They do it in a cool way.

He's got a cricket and a lamp. A sassy cricket. The lamp, the name of the cricket is spelled like Gemini, but he pronounces it Gemini. Very good. Very good.

Take all that Pinocchio stuff and put it to the side for just a second and i feel like if we just talk about the game we can get through that in like a minute and then we can get back to having fun talking about the pinocchio stuff because it's it really is calling this a souls like i feel like is like calling pepsi a-like. It's the same beverage. They have done a very, very good job of recreating so many things, so many elements from so many different Souls games. I absolutely agree.

I mean, if you have the... Man, this is really hard, right? So if you don't have the vocabulary with what that means, do we need to stop and explain that first before we explain how this sort of i don't think you get this is souls kind of game there's bonfires you go through you beat enemies collect souls and it's hard if you die you die a lot experience and then you have to run after and pick up your experience and there's so many there's builds yeah i mean you get it you get it what i do think it brings some cool stuff to the sort of formula

um little tweaks i mean nothing major but there's stuff like if you block it still hurts you but it opens up a window where you can attack the enemy and regain some of that health yeah that was a blood-borne which is a blood-borne thing yeah there's um um but there's also perfect you can do perfect blocks yes which don't drain your health which is kind of a sekiro over yeah there's um but there's also perfect you can do perfect blocks yes which don't drain your health which is kind of a sekiro thing so there's like it's got a little bit of everything it lets you switch um this is probably the most meaningful difference it lets you switch um the handles and blades of your weapons so those become interchangeable and it's still it's a little like i'm still a

little unclear about the what each one of those factors controls but i do know that the the handling of like the the stats the weapon scales with is connected to the handle of it right and the the move set is also i believe determined the handle, like the way that the weapon behaves, the way that the, you know, every weapon in a Souls game kind of has different animations and attack speeds and all that stuff. That's all pretty much determined by the handle. So if you had, for example, like a rapier handle and you know how a rapier, you know, you poke, poke, poke with a rapier, but you put an axe head on it, you're going to be poke, poke, poking with the axe head. And in fact, there are some weapon combos that are intentionally not effective because if you poked with an axe head,

it wouldn't do shit. Yeah, I put a big, fat wrench head on a rapier handle. It is the worst weapon ever devised by mankind. Yeah, I don't like to make some bad ones in a way that's, it's, but when you upgrade, you're really upgrading the blades. And the blades have varying amounts of damage, but they also have varying amounts of block. And range.

And range and stagger and things like that. It's cool. Every time I go back to Hotel Crot, which is like the. A very good one of these. A very good hub. The hub area. Of the thing that you can one of these. A very good hub. The hub area. Of the thing that you can return to basically for free at any time.

And that's where you level up and upgrade all of your shit. Every time I go back there, I goof around with the... Every time I find a new weapon, I will take the handle just to see what the different moveset is like and then put some different heads on it

to see what that's like. And it really freshens up the like build craft for uh this this genre in a way that is really exciting to me because i keep i i usually just pick a weapon and stick with it in these in these types of games uh but this one has me mixing it up pretty yeah that that i think that's the big why it's so smart is because you feel a little bit pot committed in a lot of these games because you've upgraded a weapon and it's like well i spent my whatever resource on this sword so i have to use this sword and here even though you are doing that you're upgrading the blades themselves you can still

modify your upgraded sword with another handle and feel like oh i have another weapon at my it's a different it's a different move set and different like types of attacks but using the same boosted stats of the blade that i've leveled it's it's really really smart of all the things that i've seen in this game that is the i mean there are a couple but that is the biggest one that I'd love to see in like a full on Souls From Software game. I'm curious how much FromSoft would borrow stuff from this game, though, because for me, this game is a FromSoftware game, but kind. And I mostly mean that for the better, but in some ways, for the worse, I could see a lot of like hardcore fans being against the friendliness of this game by that i mean everything from like yes the hub world that you go to is just it's very safe it's

very warm it's very um you can listen to records and you get a little boost from it throughout the whole game everything is very clearly explained from the tutorials to even like the story where when you find a little nugget of story, like a written note, it usually relates to like whatever's in the room you're actually in. Down to even like the very like Dark Souls-y thing of you're walking across a bridge and you think you're going to attack an enemy, but then the bridge gives way and you fall. And in Dark Souls souls you would die and then here it doesn't actually hurt you that much plus there's a really nice treasure waiting

for you down there and i don't think any of that's bad to be clear i think it made for like a much smoother experience for me but it is it's just different well okay let's let's pause for a second because i think people might interpret what you just said which a lot of that i agree with but this is not an easy game no in fact i would say this is like dramatically harder than elden ring because it is an old i think so i'll tell you what i was like shocked how easy this game was for me as somebody who has never been like i bounced off sekiro i didn't finish bloodborne even though i really liked it and this game has been kind of silky smooth for me most of the way

so my experience in playing this game is this feels very much like an old school from software games specifically in structure so the way the game is is almost entirely linear i mean a lot of the souls games aren't linear but like this one you'll get to moments i guess it's closer to sekiro in that way where you'll get to moments where it's just a boss fight and you really have nowhere else you can go apart from kill this boss and the boss's plan i think you're still probably a little bit before where i am like the boss you just fought the i think there's a fire boss that's like probably the biggest skill jump and then the boss after that even harder you hit these walls in this game specifically in the boss fights that i think a lot of people are going to bounce off just because of that if you don't have the patience to like learn all the moves and like take 20 runs at it because this game legit gets

difficult yeah that that might be honestly why i found it easier is i've never gone about learning how to parry in souls games i've always played a sorcerer or anything else in this game it it demands it i know that you you found a way to make use of the dodge i i didn't so it just forced me to learn the basics and i found that once I like actually learned it, I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I feel like I had almost been like afraid of learning how to parry in these games. Hey, you should go back and play Sekiro now. Yeah, I know. That's that game.

And Bloodborne. I feel like this, it reminds me of Sekiro a bit and Bloodborne, I guess, because Bloodborne didn't really have like a dedicated ranged class. Like you could use like the weird occult weapons, but it's not like Elden Ring or Dark Souls where you can get the magic missile attack and then just kind of cheese your way. There's no easy build in this. I've not had a hard time with the bosses because you can also summon little AI guys. I think I've actually beat every boss on my first try because the the ai buddies are do you fight the fire boss griffin yeah fire boss fire boss also but first try really i think so yeah for me it's the little mini boss the mini boss guys that you come across will fucking combo wombo you yeah it's to the ground so so so much and there's so many of them uh that have killed me

many times over so i don't think this is the easy onboarding experience for people who have looked at this genre from afar um because i do still find it quite quite challenging i also i kind of stumbled into i don't really dig parrying in these i don't like to take the time to learn like the animations and the way this game kind of demands, because even if you get the hang of it, as you meet different enemies, they have different windows to parry. And this game compared to others I played is a pretty tight window, at least as far as I could tell. But I kind of backed into it because the weapon that I like, I went with a sort of rapier and I didn't realize that like rapiers in this game don't really block and they don't really uh the the thing they do is parry right so i kind of loaded in my my my stat points before i i figured out a way i that is one complaint i have about this i do wish it gave

you at least one chance to respec when you start to get a sense of and i do from what i read there's a something late game where you can do this but i would really appreciate after a few hours of like experimentation being able to respect my character to something that's a little bit more how i want to play the game because i i ended up with a few more stat points in those. But for a lot of these, for most of these games, if you stop using a certain stat, there's almost no point in upgrading it. So I kind of felt pot committed once I put some points in. And I also think it would have been great if they would just call these skills what they are. Motivity and advance. Yeah, I didn't even know what I was picking at the beginning.

So I wish you had an opportunity to respec. I'm still not entirely sure why you would use Advance versus Motivity. Because it's really just all three of them increase the same stats across your entire character. Well, it depends on the weapon. Except they're tied then to a weapon. Right. So it's about what type of weapons you're going to use. increase the same stats across your entire character well it depends on the weapon then to a weapon right so it's about like advanced also boosts your your legion arm which we haven't talked about in addition to having your weapon you also have like a i mean fully sekiro prosthetic yeah uh arm uh that you can change you unlock different ones and you can upgrade and you can change them

so like i i usually rock with one i think called fulminus which is like a charged up electric blast because electric damage does extra damage to puppets um although i am running into fewer of those types of enemies now uh where i'm did you get to the part where you can like really upgrade the arm like there's like seven different options yeah yeah yeah yeah it's it's very it's wild there's also so the other sort of big rpg huh i i one one knock against the game uh armor is bad is not good it's like all uh robot parts that aren't visible and so it's like when i find like a union workshop catalytic converter that just sort of changes you know i mean you feel i feel fucking nothing for that when I find a new costume that makes me look

like a handsome little boy I do like that can we talk about what a I actually in this game I don't think that Pinocchio is a delicious little snack of a man whoop that was my nose growing but you also so there's a thing called,

if I favorite- Does everybody talk about how scrumptious Pinocchio is for one second? He scrumptious. He scrumptious. He puts on this little sailor boy costume and he looks exactly like the berries and cream dude. It's great.

He's such a, they do not shy away from the fact that he's a dandy little boy who is doing his best with a very small sword. There's another upgrade system that you upgrade and it's very neat. It's like on a little node path. And if you invest in a node, you get the benefit from that.

So that's how you get like- You gotta tell the people what it is. Say what it is. I'm going to say what it is. I'm saving it for the end. Jesus Christ. You guys gotta trust me. Gotta say what it is.

Gonna deliver on this. So there's one, this is like how you get more Estus flask charges. This is how you can like upgrade your dodge. You can also like slot in these little sort of smaller boosts that's like you get extra ergo which is the souls anyway this system is called your it's called the p organ which is so good it's so good guys they really say enhance your p organ like you enhance your p or and it's not a pop-up ad you might be no there's a feature you can do enhance your pee organ. You enhance your pee organ. And it's not a pop-up ad. You might be sent to the thing.

No. There's a feature you can do with your pee organ where you can change shape. I don't know what that means. I don't know how to change the shape of my pee organ. I think it's just haircuts. Okay. But that does feel like a spam email of like, does your pee organ need a new shape? Fucking hysterical.

We talked a lot about mechanics there. The Pinocchio. Now I feel like the window for Pinocchio stuff. Did y'all get to the point where you can spend the Megasouls or whatever they're called on special weapons? No, I haven't unlocked that vendor or whatever yet. You must be a lot farther than us, Plant.

I will tell y'all off this how to find that vendor. They're locked weapons, so you can't switch the handle on the blade, which seems like a bummer. Until you realize one of them is an umbrella that pops open and kind of has like a defensive technique. And there's a sword that is kind of like, remember Ivy from Soul Calibur? Yeah. The sword that like breaks into a whip it's that what is that thing called griffin what was the thing oh there's no way i'm gonna remember

me neither a blade whip blip it's like a each uh there's also a system of like your weapon charges as you use it uh well it also has a roomy arumi yeah your weapon charges up this like magic power that you can spend on techniques and each blade has a technique and each handle has a technique which is another consideration whenever you are building your weapon each weapon also has like um like endurance degradation and the way that you repair, you can do it for free at any time, is your arm, your robot arm turns into a grindstone that you just pull your weapon through. That you will sometimes have to do, like if boss fights go on long enough, you're going to have to find a window where you can kind of sneak away and then fucking grind your weapon through your arm. It looks fucking rad every time. Yeah, and it's not, there's not not really it's not a kind of mechanic where

you're using up anything which i really like it's about like because of this sharpness would have irritated me if it was like use an item to sharpen your blade it's just like this little extra layer of like this little plate to spin like oops did you forget but but you can also you do get an upgrade for it that lets you like add an elemental charge to your weapon for a brief like buff period. Those are consumable, right? No, no. Those respawn every time you hit a stargazer. Oh, really?

It's the bonfires. Okay, I didn't realize that. It incentivizes you to actually like use that shit, which I never mess with in Souls games because I don't want to use all of my, you know, lightning ash or whatever. want to use all of my you know lightning ash or whatever um i i feel like uh i was coming into this from like a jokey perspective because it's the game's called lies a p and you have a p organ you can change the shape of and you play as pinocchio and geppetto is a fucking full-blown dilf and like it's there's so much about this game that is zany and you're kind of in a bioshock world you're kind of in a bioshock world but also i have stayed up very late every night this week playing this game because i keep my desire to play it is so

is so dramatically greater than i ever would have expected it's honestly one of the best and it's coming to game pass as well for me i think it's already on game pass for people that are interested oh god it's one of the best game pass like day and dates that i've seen in recent memory like definitely i will say if you have been keeping up with like the way this like um sub genre has been evolving over the past like five years i do think it's a little bit of a step back in terms of things like level design or what have you in that in that sense it does feel like you can really feel the difference all the mechanics in the world you can rip right from the souls franchise but like you cannot compete or at least this game does not compete

with like the grandeur and the like the art the general art design of the world and well not just the art design but like the inner like really interesting level design this is fine you get the shortcuts there's funny little bits where like you see a guy across a roof and you sprint at him and oh stupid he just fell through the weak boards or whatever but it's not it's not of the same uh same class there are moments where you will see like an alleyway and in any from software game there's no such thing as like an invisible wall or anything like that here there's like a lot of alleyways that'll be like sorry these boxes just don't break yeah we just didn't make this far yeah and that just doesn't happen in a from game but that's honestly

it's fine like i don't i think it's a big deal i think that's also part of just like the streamlined version of this game i don't know if that's necessarily that they're like poor at level design i think just again the whole game is it's much more straightforward than most of these from soft games yeah i would just say that will be nice it just makes it feel a little more gamey than I think. Like I get way more convinced that the worlds in like a FromSoft game are like living, breathing worlds, whereas these feel more like a game level to me. I think that will be the interesting kind of critical conversation around this game as more and more people play it is it is very gamey and i think a lot of people like games that that that hold your hand sounds patronizing but like they

kind of guide you through it and i again i don't think that's bad but i think that that it's kind of one of the push and pulls of video games is on one hand iteration is really good it is how like we develop franchises that are reliable it's how genres evolve but on the other hand when you do continue to smooth off the rough edges of of of a type of game like this it does lose a bit of its soul pun i i would man but i don't know because for all of that there's a bunch of pinocchio shit that is like that's true fucking great like really genuinely it i don't i don't have much sort of like connection to that story or world or anything but like i don't know once jim jiminy started to chatter i was like oh hell yeah that's my little the pinocchio cricket friend it would work better for me if it wasn't so bioshock infinite that that that is i did find at times I was like, okay, I get it.

Like, we live in a world, it's a society. Things have gone bad. I wish that there was more Pinocchio shit. I was actually kind of surprised how little Pinocchio it is. There's got to be a whale coming up, right? There is a donkey man. I met a donkey man. There is a donkey man.

There's some foxes uh yeah yeah i i feel like i i am used to a certain rate of playing souls games at a regular interval and it's been just long enough since elden ring came out and the dlc still isn't here that i did not realize how hard I was jonesing for this until I got deeply, deeply absorbed by Lies of Pete. Yeah, kind of nice that we got this and Armored Core right next to each other. We still have a new From game, and then somebody else can make this, which is also

a delight. You know, I just don't know if we mentioned this, but also I just did want to mention, it feels really good. Like, even from the beginning, it does not feel and in the way a lot of these games will sort of limit your mobility um as a way of like making it more challenging i feel like this game really does give you a lot of like if you get hit usually in this game it is your fault like you could have run away pretty easily with a lot of the enemies

um it feels great and it's really fun to play. Okay. Who would have guessed, not in a million, billion, trillion years, I think we mentioned this, I think we should go back, I would love to go back and hear the times we have referenced this game, because it is funny that there's a game called Lies of P. And it is.

And it is funny. But hey guys. It was gonna be good. It's fucking great. Hey guys, who would have guessed? I don't think he's made a wood in this game also yeah but originally he was you do lie and there's like a lying system that i believe affects sort of like you reach these buying choices where you can lie and i think it does probably affect like the ending and how some characters react to you my My nose has not gotten bigger. And I think that's bullshit.

Can I tell you what it is? There's a portrait of you as a boy. And the more you lie, the more human you look, and the more the boy's nose grows. Oh, I didn't, I haven't seen that. It's in Geppetto's office. I take it back. You gotta find it and bring it to Geppetto.

When I'm in Geppetto's office, I'm just so like. What's up? Strap me in your chair, you weird old man. Put a quartz in my pee organ. Let's do this. We'll be back after this. Okay, so we are Pinocchio'd out for the time being.

Great game. Speak for yourself. I got the steam deck blazing. I'm mad. This fan is heating my crotch as I charge up a pee organ. You gotta protect it. Don't put the steam deck fan is heating my crotch as I charge up a B-Organ. You gotta protect it. Don't put the Steam Deck right out of your crotch. You guys ever hold the Steam Deck in a weird way? You're like, fuck, I'm holding something that's extremely hot this entire time. Sometimes I smell the vent.

Do you guys do that? The Steam Deck has a smell it makes when it gets angry. When it starts processing a lot. I played Liza P on Steam Deck, by the way. It worked great. Is it good? Yeah, it worked absolutely fine. Plant and I played a different game.

In addition to Lies of Pee, we doubled up because there was a game that is the most wish-listed game on Steam that is upon us. Plant, what is this game? On Steam that is upon us. Plant, what is this game? Party Animals, which is kind of like Human Fall Flat and Gang Beasts that characters made a putty that do cute things. But then they beat each other up. And if the, what was last year's one? The big one?

Fall Guys? Fall Guys. year's one the big one uh fall guys fall guys yeah if that was you know like uh the battle royale version of it this is like the mario party kind of version of of that series type um yeah can you describe like what type of mini games are you doing in this rush yeah so they're mostly team-based mini games at least the ones that i've played although they're i think there are one-on-one like combat games but they're all objectives so for example i played one where two teams of like cute adorable animals are trying to launch explosives with a trebuchet across a river and uh trying to like score points that way but there's also like traditional like gang beasts like fighting levels and like you're throwing people out of a ring the controls and stuff don't change mini

game to mini game right like you're still moving around and interacting with stuff in the same way you are a a gooey bit of uh cute animal and you can headbutt you can jump you can jump kick you can punch and you can grab and then yeah a lot of the games are um kind of sports based so like yes there's a hockey game where you're on a you're itty bitty on a giant hockey ice hockey rink and you have to punch the uh hockey puck into the ring the trebuchet one for example there are explosives that come on to your side it's two trebuchets facing each other across a river and you fire the explosives onto the other side and then the team on the other side. It's two trebuchets facing each other across a river. And you fire the explosives onto the other side. And then the team on the other side has a few seconds to try to throw those

explosives into the river before they detonate on their side. And you want to get like seven or eight or however many to blow up on their side. But quickly, you realize, oh, you yourself can get fired in the trebuchet so you are going over there carrying like two explosives running away from people and then detonating yourself to like create a detonation um yeah i don't know how to underestimate you need to sort of set your expectations because i don't think there's ever been a cuter fucking otter in a game than the otter that is in Party Animals. Oh, yeah. Wow.

Yeah, and a dumber looking duck than the duck in this game. It's a real dumb looking duck. The other good thing about these animals is when they get concussed, you feel it. They really take a shot to the head, and the game kind of vibrates. They're not getting up for a long time. So much of the game's humor is seeing a very dumb looking duck

get hit in the head really hard and its body go limp. You know, because what else is video games for? What else is video games for what else is video games for Pinocchio stuff that's true

I think we should all play it a little bit because I know we're going to be talking about a bunch of games I don't think this is quite like game of the year material I think it's going to be very very very very popular among streamers I'm excited to get it is it on Xbox yeah it's going to be very, very, very, very popular among streamers. I'm excited to get it.

Is it on Xbox? Yeah, it's on Game Pass, actually. It's on Game Pass? Yeah. I'm going to play this with Henry, and I already know he's going to be delighted by it. I will say, I wish that there was more of a cooperative thing. It's all pretty competitive, is my sense. You're always playing against other people

and i yeah but i kind of just wanted what yeah oh so i there it's team versus team but you're yeah versus like the computer yeah well i was more more kind of hoping for something like human fall flat where you have these levels that you could go through with another person using the goofy physics that these characters have because like you really do have a lot of you have these levels that you could go through with another person using the goofy physics that these characters have. Because you really do have a lot of, you have a sprint, you have a dropkick, you have a lot of things at your disposal. And using them in team-based format,

I feel like it can very quickly turn into chaos where if it was just two people trying to get across a bridge in a smart way, it would be a little more organized. And I don't know i like i think that setting expectations again for this game is key playing with friends is great because one problem that i saw and maybe was guilty of and then had it come back my way you can just grab on to whoever the best player on a team is and just pull them out of the match. So, like, I, there's voice chat in it and people would be like, oh, this is the, the duck is the good one. Somebody just hold on to the duck and don't let him get anywhere near the puck and you've isolated, like, the one good player. The duck is sus.

Yeah, which is fun until somebody is just holding on to you and you spend five minutes of your game getting pulled into a different direction um overall good good party game excited about it is there sorry is there you guys might cover this but is it online only is there a as far as i'm aware is online only uh because almost everything is like you're playing against other people i don't know if there's a split screen or same system uh multiplayer that'd be nice if there was but yeah i'm not sure um there's like a whole like progression system where you like unlock costumes and there's like a monetization thing if you're like you know like fortnite if you want to buy costumes stuff like that but um overall i think that otter is just fucking cute so great love an otter uh fresh you want to open the reader mailbag it's open uh

the first question comes from patrick with the announcement that re4 re village ac mirage and other triple a games are running natively on new iphones i'm curious do you think that it will make for a good alternative to the steam deck or other handheld pc specifically with the steam link app being available on ios at least my experience being pretty usable y'all are the best hope to keep listening for at least another 10 years wow shucks um thanks i think it depends a lot on like where your stuff is bought like if you have like a big library on steam yeah you could use steam like i don't have a lot of luck using steam link but i think it might just because there's a lot of interference in and around my apartment but uh certainly seems like if you have a controller

for the uh for an iphone or an Android for that matter, which I know supports Steam Link as well, I think we're getting to the point where these devices become very viable gaming machines. it an alternative to this steam deck just because i don't know i think the way that the steam deck has mobilized pc gaming is pretty uh i don't know unreproducible yeah it's hard to match the value proposition just because steam is able to like you could buy resident evil village on steam for i don't know 20 bucks at this point probably yeah also with the steam link app that point only holds if you already have a gaming pc that you can yeah that is true from so you're like you're kind of doubling up on your pay yeah i think for versatility's sake i think steam deck's probably the way to go but for people that only have a phone it's pretty fucking cool they'll be able to play like actual like new triple a Resident Evil 4 Remake, which fucking ruled.

Are y'all getting that new phone? No? Okay. I'm the only one. TBD. If they bring one by, if they bring one by the crib, they're like, hey. Come on, Tim. Tim, swing by the crib.

Tim, you bring one to the crib, we'll talk. Does it fall? Mine's getting a little creaky, so it might be. Mine gets very hot, so that's not great. It gets the steam deck hot. You don't leave it on your pee organ, do you? We have another question. Ned asks, oh, hey, this one's from Ned.

Ned says, I wonder why they wouldn't shout. This is, I think, about Rusty's conversation we had about Unity and all the drama going over there. I wonder why they wouldn't shout out Godot Engine for hobbyist creators. It's free forever, and there are some great games to develop on it. The Case of the Golden Idol, Luck Be a Landlord, Cruelty Squad, Sonic Colors Ultimate. The reason we didn't shout it out is just there's a lot of things, and sometimes we just't say them all and i don't know pretty basic i don't know but uh honestly i never made video game at all i tried to type a version of snake and q basic once from a book i got at the library but i fucked it up so bad that i decided i should review games it's smart it's smart. It's smart. Those who cannot do, review.

Did you see the note from the Terraria developer that Terraria's developer is giving $100,000 to Godot and another open source engine? Is Terraria made in Godot? I don't think so. I don't think it's made in. I think that they're just trying to support other engines during all this Unity. Yeah, Relogic is the name of the developer behind Terraria, think that they're just trying to support other engines during all this unity yeah the uh re logic

is the name of the developer behind terraria and they made fuck loads of money selling terraria because they've done such a good job with free updates great game uh and yeah they're donating a hundred thousand dollars and also i think long-term funding each of them a thousand dollars a month or something like that wow just to like help support them do dope shit which is great because unity uh is fucking things up pretty good if you want to recap and you didn't listen to the resties episode you can listen to that did you talk about how many people work for unity no episode of resties it's like 7700 people it's so many people i don't know that seems like a lot of people right that doesn't seem like a lot of people i know they have you know they do work obviously in uh special effects too it's not just game design stuff um but that does seem like a lot of people

that's a fucking lot of people i don't think that's a company i don't think that's i don't know that doesn't seem like that much for a company that big am i am i crazy i don't think that's i don't know that doesn't seem like that much for a company that big am i am i crazy i don't how many people work for i'm gonna google how many people work for unreal because that i don't know for epic for epic yeah well okay yeah i guess that sort of will throw off the throw off the thing how shitty would it be to be making a game and spending a decade of your life making it into a platform and then they come out and say and also you have to pay a fee every time anyone installs yeah i think they've the most recent update and again this is going to be uh delayed

based on when you listen to this is that it sounds like they're going to walk some portion of it back but they're still keeping things up in the air it is fucking wild to me that they didn't plan this better or talk to at least one person and be like hey what would happen if we did this hey yeah do you like one of one of their 7700 employees would say i found the epic the epic number epic uh has 12 000 people and is adding 1.7 thousand jobs. Okay. Well, I mean, but that's, they have a whole store. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just want to, I don't think those Unity people are over there sitting on their hands. I think it's just mismanagement. No, of course not, no. I imagine there's a lot of frustration probably from the people who work there at this, at this, this fuck up.

Hey, did anybody, anybody enjoy anything else this week? I saw the oldest headliner I will probably ever see in my entire life. Nice. I saw Willie Nelson perform at Forest Hill Stadium. Lovely venue, lovely performance.

The dude is 90 fucking years old. He's 90. And he can sing well, better than me, certainly. And he can play the guitar like a motherfucker and thank you for finally admitting that willie nelson sings better than you it's been so long i thought you were gonna die on that hill yeah me too i saw uh i saw willie nelson in charleston with uh uh al sharpton one time fucking hell man political rally for uh like Willie Nelson in Charleston with Al Sharpton. Fucking hell, man. It was a political rally for just Democrats in general, I think.

And it was Willie Nelson and Al Sharpton together. Al Sharpton did a DJ set. It was pretty lit, actually. Yeah, it was pretty good. I wanted to shout out. I'm still playing Sea of Stars. It's great. I want to shout out a book uh

that i i don't really have an explanation for i'm pretty surprised to see it in the rundown uh yeah it's it's remains of the day by kazo ishiguro uh oh what the i thought this was the sad anthony hopkins thing it is but it's a book. The book, the sad. If you read only one book about a butler written by a Japanese-British novelist, make it remains of the day, especially one that has been turned into a film starring Anthony Hopkins. And Emma Thompson, I think, is right.

Make it remains of the day. This is such a beautiful meditation on life and service and it is beautifully written and it's about a man who has lived his whole life as a butler through like the

30s and 40s and is discovering late in life that his his employer was maybe on the wrong side during World War II and maybe made that whole conflict worse. And it's him sort of meditating on if a life of service is well lived, if the thing you live your life in service of turns out to not be worthwhile and what you do with the time that you have left after you've made that realization it's just it's beautiful it's evocative i uh i read um never let me go another uh that was the i was trying to remember which book of his i had read before yeah uh and that's also beautiful if you're into like literary fiction at all and want something that's like beautiful and not not too challenging to read

just kind of sucks you into a very different world and a very different mind, it's a great book. One other book by Ishiguro is Clara and the Sun, which is his most recent book. And for people who are playing Liza P., you might enjoy this because it's about a solar-powered artificial friend. Do like that. powered artificial friend um do you like that the pseudo robots uh relationship with like a sickly child uh but it is also very good though i honestly if you haven't read any of its work i'd probably read the other two first this one's a little a little slower um i wanted to talk about uh the dlc for pokemon scarlet and violet uh i think I think it is a two-part DLC. The first part is out now called the Teal Mask.

I mostly wanted to circle back to this because I've been playing this game a lot with Henry after we talked about it on the show and I was very cool on it when we first talked about it. And playing it with my son, who has gotten deeply, deeply into it, has really changed the experience for me. They've also made some sort of

marginal performance improvements to the core game, which are necessary because it kind of runs like shit still. But the DLC is quite neat. adds like a whole new area to the game uh called kidakami which is sort of like classical uh like rural japanese like field trip inspired uh stuff and uh the the story is cute and i would say memorable, if not game-changing for this franchise. And it has a ton of activities and stuff.

I feel like if I was not playing this with my son, it would not be something that I would be as deeply into. But I mean, we got pretty hardcore into catching super strong Pokemon and EV training them so that we could do the seven star Mewtwo raid. We are pretty deep into it now. And the co-op multiplayer stuff is genuinely very neat if you are playing with someone who is experiencing this world

with the childlike wonder of a child's eyes. So I've been enjoying that a lot. I also finished Baldur's Gate 3. Oh, man. And I think I'm the first of our set to have done that. And so I will reserve my time. I'm so excited to play more. We are talking about doing a big spoiler episode

like next year at some point once everyone's had time to finish it because I uh I there I there is a there's god there's so much to talk about yeah I think January probably makes the most sense I want to give another update actually real quick um I was kind of cool on stray gods the musical interactive game um about like deities like uh on a modern era that kind of comes in murder mystery. I just want to say that Charlie heard me talking about it and wanted to check it out. My nine-year-old

and she played the whole thing and really loved it for whatever that is worth. If you have someone who maybe is a big reader and is into that world and loves musicals, she really dug it. if uh again your mileage may vary is charlie listening to this podcast no no no i was talking about oh thank god

yeah um but uh yeah see the stars i mentioned it i just there's not much to say i'm still playing it sleep i'm even back a little sleeper hit for justin mccroy uh i think i'm gonna finish it i played 20 hours now. It's really good. It's happening. Hey, as long as we're talking about sort of updates, Russ messaged me yesterday that Hammer Watch 2 is getting a new multiplayer mode

that is basically what we wanted. Demanded. Demanded, which is like, you know, you can bring your characters around different multiplayer games and there's like a sort of constant progression there i still i i am excited to dip back into it i think it is a huge undertaking to basically change the entire structure of the multiplayer of of that game in the way that a lot of people were asking for and so that is i think hugely

commendable and i'm excited to to hop back into it i'm still a little bit worried about like the action rpg gauntlet style thing not necessarily meshing with a kind of big open world rpg format but i at least feel uh excited to check it out knowing that you know i can play multiplayer with russ or you know anyone online and not have to start a new fucking character every time i play it so kudos to the they also added um instance loot was which was another big critique we had about the multiplayer that so yeah it's great to see that they're really taking the time uh two things for me one uh i watched inland empire for the first time the other day. Have you ever seen this, the David Lynch movie?

No. That's one of the few ones of his I have not watched. It's fantastic. It's three hours long. Perfect. To say that it's about anything, like it's about an actress who gets a big role in a movie only to find out that it's a remake of a cursed movie that never got released which a little bit of like that game that we played last year more immortality um but it's i mean obviously it's about a million other things there's something great about the feeling of

watching a movie like this where it feels like a gamble like you know we're like you're watching it and it's three hours and it doesn't make a lot of sense. And there's that moment that's gonna happen, maybe like a half hour in where you're like, Oh, I'm gonna love this. Or, oh, no, I've made a grave mistake. And that feeling I like I really chase that that energy from a movie. And this was definitely one of those half hour in, oh my gosh, I found a new favorite movie. It's great for Halloween season, I will say, I think people would really enjoy it. If you like creepypasta. Hey, this is what has inspired a lot of your favorite creepypasta, especially movies like Skidamarink, which I think I mentioned earlier this year. And then the other thing that I have, I just want to give a

shout out. I have finally made my way through these books called Genki, which are like learning Japanese books. And there's a YouTube channel that I've used through a lot of this called Tokini Andy. And if you've ever been one of those people who's like i really want to go learn japanese but it's really tough and challenging and scary uh i think this channel is like a really great place to start and that it works a lot like having a tutor who is just taking you through every chapter of the book so uh that's something that interests you you should really check it out cool uh i want to thank the following people for writing reviews of this it's an apple podcast we have ultra pabs we

have m fish king and we have make russ say farty oh which which they've done well done uh what are we doing next week uh next week we're going to talk about we We're gonna go back in To Cyberpunk We're gonna jack in Dig through the wrecking We're gonna make a return to Cyberpunk See how things have evolved in our time away I heard they really clean up the streets Out there so that'll be a relief

There is new DLC coming out that is the impetus And also there's a 2.0 Starring Solid Snake What? Starring David Hayter as Solid Snake. What? Starring David Hader as Solid Snake. I don't think so. Is it not? I don't think so. I'm really unconnected.

Where are you getting David? It's called Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty. It sounds like the most fucking Metal Gear Solid ass name ever. Phantom Liberty was definitely a Metal Gear Solid game. I'm certain of it. We did it. We did it.

That's the end of it. Thank you so much for listening to our show, The Besties. And this is the end of it, as I always say at the end of every podcast that we've recorded. We're so thrilled that you spent this time with us. And we hope you will join us again next week for The Besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games Besties!