The Besties - No Spoilers for The Last of Us Part 2

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

The Besties kick off a two-part series on The Last of Us Part II with a no spoilers episode. They explore the punishing gameplay, consider the pleasure of headshotting infected pseudo-zombies, and explain the trouble with scavenging Seattle for dirty bandages. Plus, they compete in a zombie apocalypse RPG that tests the gang’s survival skills.  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, I was thinking about going out there and doing violence maybe this weekend. And I got to say, after playing Last of Us 2, it doesn't seem as appealing to me anymore. That's so interesting. I feel like I have finally learned a lesson that hurting is bad. And I'm embarrassed it took me this long to get there. But you think about it and you're like, hurting is cool. There's all kinds of cool stuff. And you look like an action hero,

like a movie, like a diehard. I don't, but this game's got me all twisted up in knots. It hit me in a different way. I played it and I thought, you know what? You can have two hobbies in life. Some people, maybe they play violin and they enjoy cooking. Some people like collecting trading cards and shooting people's faces off.

Right. Two clear hobbies. You can have two sides. Because, yeah, because you can't have, there's only so much time in a day. So collect trading cards, shoot off faces. That would be cool if every time Ellie did massacre somebody, which she does with aplomb so many times in this game,

she did put like two of her little Pokemon cards over their eyes. Resquiat and Pache. Look at, it's important to have, that duality is important. Look at Hugh Jackman, okay? Oh, don't mind if I do. Is he looking back at you? Is he looking back at you?

Okay, good, perfect. Sneak up behind him. And fucking shiv it. No, wait, fuck, I fucked it up. I didn't learn my lesson and I shivved Hugh Jackman. Oh, no. The deadest show, man. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

That actually works this time. My name is Chris Plant, and I know the last game of the week. My name is Russ Frederick, and I know the saddest game of the week. I'm crying. Oh no. All the feels. Welcome to Besties. What are we talking about? The latest and

greatest in electronic interactive inter-game-ment. It's a game of the yearbook club that goes all year long. A king of the hill that goes all year long a show that goes all year it's a it's it's weekly is what i'm saying really calling calling your shot in this yeah we will go to the end of the year at least so at least uh uh and this week we are going to be talking about the last of us part two the second part we should start out by discussing

uh let's set some parameters this game has been out for a week right and we don't want to talk spoilers and i feel like this game is very easy to spoil i have felt myself like completely strapped in glued can't stop thinking about it can't stop playing it i think part of that is like i'm terrified of getting spoiled so we're gonna do two episodes about the last of us two right this is the no spoilies episode zero spoilies if you have not played the game you've seen maybe a trailer i think that's about as much as we're gonna spoilie we're gonna talk a lot about gameplay what does it feel like to shiv in the neck what does it feel like to collect trading cards we're gonna go in depth

and then next week all spoilies no boundaries full spoilee episode do not listen if you want to miss the spoilies we have a back catalog go listen about the back catalog you ever heard about a game called ssx an xbox 360 go listen about it because it's a great game if you don't think you're gonna play the game though i think it'll be like a fine way to kind of like pick up on what the game is all about and i also would not blame you for not playing the game right now because i i think that that is like the biggest conversation we kind of had it last week uh where i think we were all pretty open about like not necessarily being down for a game like this right now, given the sort of just like constant violence. All joking aside that like we are seeing everywhere and also the fact that we are in a global pandemic that kind of sets the stage for this game.

game uh i have to say though probably maybe the wildest reversal i've had since we've been doing this show uh in that like i was not anticipating this game not really uh thinking i was gonna enjoy it and i think i was talking to russ about it on monday and i said like this may be one of like best games i've played in forever and is probably my favorite naughty dog game which is staggering the thing that has surprised me we dog game which is staggering the thing that has surprised me we're speaking in broad strokes the thing that surprised me the most is how so this is a very brief recap okay this is we can spoil last of us one right last of us one we can spoil okay uh this is a game about a world that has been ravaged by a virus, a very bad one, and has been sent into a post-apocalyptic scenario. In The Last of Us 2, what we're seeing is sort of enough time has passed since the

inciting incident that people are starting to sort of figure out a new way to be. Not necessarily rebuilding society per se, but sort of on a smaller scale you know trying to get back to some sort of normalcy that that in the uh village incorporates they're no longer nomadic exactly they're smaller scale um what i have found most surprising is like um setting the violence aside for a second i have found it strangely i i don't know comforting is not the word but sweet there's like no there's a tenderness no seeing people continuing to live in the face of real absolute devastation and tragedy and and uh on an incredible scale and finding moments of humanity and tenderness and pleasure like however small and fleeting they may be um has actually like

felt kind of good weirdly or at least relatable you know like it looks like it deals with some of the things that like i i have been thinking about and dealing with and seeing how people sort of process that. It's like a coping mechanism thing where you're like finding normalcy. A little bit of that expurgation of pity and fear, as the Greeks would say. I'm going to be way more positive this episode, and I'll save my large dislike for this game

for the second episode because it has so much to do with the story. I find this game disgusting. But here's the weird thing about the game everything but the kernel is amazing it's like um if you like saw like an apple on a tree and it was like the most perfect beautiful apple the inclusion of colonel sanders was ill-advised and hugely problematic and the brand it's like how desperate for cash are you at all didn't fit okay sorry plant go ahead it's like an apple on a tree beautiful perfect apple right and then you bite into it and then it's just full of mites that is my experience

of playing this game it is like i thought you said mice both i mean either way whatever it is it's full of mice i like that it's very evocative language let's go with mice the moment to moment writing largely great the acting good it is unquestionably one of the most beautiful games i've i've seen i'm not a huge fan of the combat but it's like very well executed the world design is incredible but the very core of it i feel like is the opposite of what Justin is talking about, in which it truly believes that there is no good and good only exists to make all the bad things that are inevitable sting more.

And like, I know that we want to focus on the gameplay and I'll use that as an example here. And I'm not the first person to notice this. Nick Capazoli pointed this out on twitter but when you first learn how to shoot in the game because they have to teach you how to shoot because at the end of the day this is a game about killing people they have a sequence where you are like playing with the kids in your town and you have a snowball fight and the goal is to like effectively learn how to shoot by like hitting kids with snowballs

and it reminded me of the thing that again nick pointed out which is um shadow of mordor where it's like i was games have to train you to do bad things by doing like good things where it's like you sneak up and you stealth kiss your wife right and like that i i just playing this game i i was so on board with it in the first i don't know two or three hours because it was sweet like i was like wow there is so much thoughtful writing here about relationships and um there's like real drama there's a drama about generational divide between um between joel and ellie ellie yeah and joel and ellie and like that is so heightened because of the post-apocalypse where it's like there's already a trouble with generation divides but then you have somebody who like lived a really full life before

the apocalypse and somebody who didn't get that opportunity she wants to be an astronaut is a huge part of the the game story what i don't like about that is it does all these things in the first two hours to like really set up these very rich lives and then the gameplay finally kicks in and it's like forget all of it here's a gun here's some here's some maltoff cocktails i hope you're ready to punish people and then and that's that's the gameplay the gameplay has is completely disconnected from that we cannot we cannot talk about it we will talk about it next week but i totally disagree with that yeah because i understand what they were trying to do whether they succeed or not is regardless but that is the opposite of what they are trying to do um

so let's talk about gameplay let's talk about i want to talk about mechanics for a second i want to know broadly speaking uh i'll give you my my my take on it um i found so basically if you again to recap very briefly this is very much a game about uh limiting your resources and giving you a a small amount of bullets and traps and everything to deal with a lot of, they call them infected, they're zombies, and some people in the mix, of course. And there is, for my taste, I feel like they did so much work on better ways of expressing the narrative. And for me, the game, the basic gameplay feels like kind of a drag. I, two problems.

This one is very stealth focused. So if you look at a game like Dishonored, that was stealth focused. But when you made the, you very frequently were making the switch into more aggressive combat. And because of that, you got comfortable with that ebb and flow between like, I'm going to stealth here and then I'm going to break out into like full scale combat. If you're doing stealth a lot in this game, when it does sort of like break bad, it happens rarely enough that I like did not feel prepared to deal with like a fast, more intense situation just because I had so rarely done it because I was more focused on self. So when it did happen, it almost felt like a fail state because it's like, I don't, I don't really,

it doesn't feel good enough to shoot stuff. It doesn't feel good. Like nothing feels like right on that. So that was was my that is one problem the disconnect between the stealth and combat i just didn't feel like uh it was two integrated holes i i would say it felt like two disconnected parts okay so it's interesting you mentioned um dishonored because i played a crap ton of dishonored and i i basically saved which i'm i'm sorry i'mop time. I basically save scummed my way through Dishonored because that's how I wanted to play the game

which is to say like whenever I got spotted I basically reloaded because I wanted to go non-lethal and all sorts of stuff which I realized was not designed but that's how I wanted to play it. For Last of Us and part of this has to do with like they're not really being hard saves in the traditional sense but like I really do try to, when I get spotted, adapt to scenarios.

And I've found it actually much more natural in this game, maybe compared to any other game that has, like, a lot of stealth in it, to drop in and out of stealth. Some of that has to do with the fact that you can sprint, which I'm pretty sure you couldn't do in the last game. You can actually really book it and jump through windows and dive into foliage and stuff like that to basically break line of sight with enemies. And they do lose you. It's not like Metal Gear where they know where you are

and they're going to come right for you. They legit lose you even if you just break line of sight you don't need to hide in a cabinet or anything like that so they'll they'll come a lot of side is so bogus by the way there have been many times where i've literally shifted dude while his best buddy is like in his parade like is that i could swear if i turn my head 10 degrees i'd see jeff getting stabbed in the throat but anyway about my business. It's pretty generous. There are like settings you can increase

their awareness levels and stuff like that, but it's pretty generous. But I do think that's on purpose, which is to say like, they want it to be somewhat easy to break line of sight and like lose people. So you can drop back into stealth and really like, you know,

I think when this game is so good is when you can be reactive. It's not so much, hey, this plan is going great. And I'm like, stealthing my way through and I haven't killed anyone. It's more the, oh, shit, I just got spotted by this dog or whatever. And now I need to throw a brick to break line of sight and then run through a bunch of stuff. I think it's important to note here for people who aren't familiar with this game and its predecessor. First of all, I think mechanically, this game beats the shit out of the first Last of Us. I strongly dislike the first Last of Us. And for me, like it boiled down to this, like,

I don't get down on this like cult of personality around console exclusive titles and prestige drama like I feel like people get so far up their own asses about that and I feel like that happened a lot with Last of Us and it drove me wild I feel like it's important to note here that like the Dishonored comparison for me doesn't necessarily hold much water because Dishonored is a stealth game that sort of empowers you with literal powers to become this like super sneaky assassin whereas Last of Us and Last of Us 2 especially is like it is for sure a survival horror game in the sense that like you have resources that are limited and you have to be very careful and you have to be very thoughtful about the way that you are doing things.

And it is that scarcity of your resources that intensifies the fear of being caught or being thrown into one of these combat scenarios. But that said, I don't know if I just found this sweet spot with the difficulty toggles that I put on, which are so incredibly granular. And I fucking love that. I basically turned resource scarcity like way down

so that like I found more stuff, but I also turned my health and enemy's health down a lot. So it was like, if you get shot, like you're fucking dead, but you also don't have to like be extremely judicious about your stuff. But like that is, that for me is how the gameplay perfectly kind of plays into the tone and the narrative of the game

in a way that like, I know you're supposed to feel, I mean, you do feel awful, you know, perpetrating these acts of violence just constantly. But from a mechanical standpoint, I thought I felt pretty fucking good. Like, I think this is one of the best, this is the best combat they've ever had in a game as compared to an Uncharted where you're just like mowing down hundreds of dudes with various automatic weaponry or Last of Us 1, which was just like a fucking slog. I think mechanically, like this game kicks ass.

That is like my issue. That's the problem for me is, I mean, I felt the same way as Justin at first about like, I wasn't prepared. And what I realized was, no, the game's tension had just made me feel like, oh, if I screw up, I die. Not the case at all. Here is a scenario for me.

There are two dudes on patrol together because they always travel in two. That way, if you kill one, the other one can scream the other person's name. I throw a glass bottle into the distance. They both turn around. The one closest to the bottle goes, hey, Hank, did you hear that? And while he's saying that, I'm stabbing his friend loudly in the neck. He does not hear this. So then I stab him in the neck violently.

While I'm stabbing him, Jessica or whoever sees me. And she's like, oh, no, I see Ellie. And I'm like, oh, no, I haven't seen. I must be caught. I shoot her in the face with a pistol, and she to raise her gun which takes like a minute 20 people descend on me i hide behind a table and i pick them off one by one the end i i walk i walk through the stage of gore and viscera and bones missing arms uh i can see into people's like chest cavities and i say my work here is done and then i collect a trading card off of one of their dead bodies

that is every battle scenario for me and i'll be honest did it feel good i mean it feels very chunky this game i mean i don't know if you used the mines but if you've ever wanted to see what it would look like for somebody's eyeball to slowly descend down a like a kitchen wall you could do that in this video game it empowers you but it's really really oh sorry just to put a quick bow on that it is very weird yeah good the action almost finished so please keep going it's weird to do that pretty early in the game. And then you like have a conversation with Dina. Ellie's,

we'll go into this more in the second episode, but a person who is with you. A romantic partner. We can shoot this in the trailer. I didn't know if that was in the trailer or not. And you meet up with her and she's like, you know, like,

I think, I think you might be changing. And it's like, you think? I just killed 60 people. I killed their dogs. Like you think I'm changing? Um, one of the coolest things that, uh, really worked for me mechanically, uh, you know what, actually to circle back on this, to hear you talk about it, I think part of what is not working for me is less the challenge or difficulty of that. And to be more specific about it,

I think it feels less fun or good because I know how limited the resources are. So like, I feel like if I'm shooting six people, I'm like condemning myself to like, go look for more bullets for a long time, which is the second point that I wanted to get into is like, there is so much scavenging and it is boring i mean it's if you want to like keep a pace with you know keeping your stock full um it's just constant looting and it going into rooms and like here's some scissors here's some tape

here's some uh rags oh i have too many rags. I'm going to make a health kit because I need more room for rags. And I found that pretty tedious. This is so fucking weird because when I heard you say, when you said that, I was like, fuck yeah, scissors and tape. I can make a melee upgrade with that. For me, this is the first game I played in forever that has a sort of scavenging crafting system where I feel like everything you can make is fucking vital and you really do have to like use all of it to i

feel like abate all of the stuff that you're talking about but i was like i always hesitant to do it because all the resources have like two items so like right you have alcohol and and what is it rags or something you can make a molotov cocktail, but if you have the same items, actually, you can make a first aid kit. And it didn't feel satisfying to me. But what I'm talking about is maintaining tension. It's like Plant said, right? They don't want it to be like,

oh, easy, I've got the rags and the oil, or the alcohol, I'll just make a Molotov cocktail out of it. They're maintaining the tension, which I get. I think the reason, the why of it, apart from maintaining tension, why you spend these slow moments opening drawers looking for tape, is it's a few things. One, I think it's a pacing thing,

so they don't want you to feel stressed for 20 hours or however long the game is. They want you to take a moment to sort of like chill out no i'm just going to open these drawers and feel safe the other thing is and i think we can talk about it here this game is on unquestionably gorgeous like it's it is a really stunning game and specifically the thing that like constantly blows me away is interiors which is something that like most games do not spend a ton of time focusing on almost every place you walk into feels like a place that humans lived or worked in because every detail from like a lamp on the table to the fridge having magnets on it to

there being like spooky you know halloween costumes in the Halloween store. Like they really went nuts. And so those moments where you're just scavenging and there's no enemies at all, I think are designed for you to just sort of bask in this world and like absorb the world. The thing that really, really, really impressed me about that, and I'll link to this person's video. I can't remember his name. Jacob, I don't remember his last name. But he makes uh youtube

videos he made a story for us at polygon about um the architecture of violent video games and third person first person shooters and also made which is kind of a touchy comparison to uh modern schools how the schools design themselves for like to be prepared for school shootings that they actually have to change their architecture and that there's this like weird architecture of violence in the world and that like when you and the very easy way like i was picturing this is like any gears of war game right like you go into courtyard and it's like wow this courtyard sure is full of three foot tall cement barriers yeah and it's like that and so many games have that that issue where you walk into an area and you know, this is the area where violence happens. And this game is really good at just making it feel like, hey, these are just spaces.

Even as you navigate it, it never feels like a straight line. They don't do a lot that video games have relied on of over painting the like area of like hey this door is yellow so you know to go there there's a whole bunch of light there when you go into like listening mode to hear for enemies footsteps it doesn't automatically highlight uh collectibles for you it sacrifices quite a bit to feel like a believable space that said going back to justin's statement about collecting things once you see the rhythm of oh i'm starting to find a lot of materials this is a new no shooting space this is like the area of town where it's like four buildings with like maybe a couple click clickers and then you go then you go

into the next area and it's like and now that you've collected all that stuff it's time to kill some humans okay i i disagree with that so hard like i feel like uh i agree with you that this game kind of subverts the arena concept of like action games because it it kind of is a mind fuck how many times like i've wandered into a space that is full of uh to use gaming uh verbiage uh chest high walls yeah they're like okay it's fucking on and then like nobody shows up and it's just like oh this these are just you know radiators or whatever and that like really does kind of keep you on your toes and i feel like really does play into like kind of excellent pacing but i also feel like i had lots of encounters where i tried to for like

resources sake uh get through it without killing anybody which I found not that difficult to do uh like because the like awareness thing is there are such great audio and visual cues for uh when an enemy sees you and you know you can get into a combat and then like run off and hide like you can run through and and get through like sequences without fighting anybody that said like the combat encounters are so sprawling and take place in usually like these enormous environments that you know fights can go any number of ways and in those environments there are like a lot of things to pick up there are a lot of maybe maybe like the puzzle more puzzly segments of like,

somebody's written their safe code down on this board. But like, there are, you know, the tools that you need to upgrade your weapons, which I found, and the medicine that you need to like get a new skill enhancements, which I actually found to be like a really catchy sort of progression system.

Like that stuff is scattered all around. And so if you, you are kind of consciously also making a trade-off if you decide i'm just gonna fucking bolt through here and hide and try to get out of here without like getting into this long fight then you're also kind of giving up the opportunity to really go through and scour that huge huge area where the fight takes place um if i could talk about a one more specific combat thing before we talk about like i want to talk about how the story is like told rather than getting into the actual story itself but um the one of the things that i thought was really cool is how dynamic the animations are in in the game um there are a lot of especially in like when things kind of break bad you'll get into a close

quarters scenario and you're like working with a partner, right? There's like a lot of times where you'll go to do a melee hit and, you know, you'll get grabbed or you'll grab the monster and your partner will come out of nowhere and like save you with a shiv. Or like you'll hit someone with a, you know, you'll do a melee attack and actually like there's a counter nearby and you'll like smash the zombie's head in the counter or stuff like that they're making really smart and that's constant and it's like very immersive there's very little i'll tell you one that was that was cool is at one point we i was there's like a little bit of like swimming and climbing that ellie and joel are doing together and uh joel reaches his hand down to grab ellie and I kind of like swam over to the left accidentally before I grabbed his hand. And he just like seamlessly turned his hand to the side a bit to reach it to where I was. Like a human being would do.

You didn't just magnetically like whoop. Exactly. Like shift over to his. There's a lot of work. And that is part of what impressed like that that's tied to what impresses me so much about the the i i you know i i have been in this long enough to know that uh to be suspect of when people are like this is the game that finally proves that video games are movies video games are art yeah right like video games can be better than movies but what

you do start to understand is like advances or progress or steps forward um and i think that this game represents a big step forward in terms of storytelling specifically like the way characters impart uh humanity and narrative and it has the trust that its performances are good enough but also that the animation of the performances are good enough that a lot can be communicated in silence and i think that that its willingness to communicate with no words um and just like let there be silences and let there be expressions that communicate more than words is really, really, really impressive and really drew me in a big way.

I think there are maybe not downsides, but very dark elements to that as well. Because of that attention to detail and fidelity, I'll give an example. This is not a story related example this just happened after a combat sequence that i had random guard no one important it was the last person just to make they don't even matter people they don't even matter so the last shot i took for whatever i guess my aim was a little off so it was it was right in their belly, their gut. It was a gut shot. And I watched this woman who granted was trying to kill me, but still watch this woman for 30 seconds.

I just sat there saying like screaming in agony and writhing and not saying like, please save me, saying like, like go on do it already or whatever but also like squirming in absolute agony and they animated the whole thing in the most realistic intense effed up way sure and all i can think was how much time did someone sit at a computer and program this yeah guard that person had to go home and they're like honey how's your day pretty good pretty good pretty good gotta i only got five more days and to get the scream and the bleeding out perfect and then this one death is gonna be chef's kiss and into like what end i i've seen some people that obviously there was the uh misguided comparison to schindler's list and i've seen some

people course that by saying hey this is actually like mad max right like it's like pop art but grim but i don't think that's right either a thing that i struggle with with this game is i feel like it the the logic was well this is a story about violence forgetting violence therefore every moment needs to serve that so we need it to just be agonizing which i don't think meshes well with the the the like fun of of these combat series that said i do want to go back to a thing that griffin and justin mentioned about um animation and just the way it does storytelling a thing that i just completely impressed me about this game and about how it approached survival horror is the jump scares in the game aren't

obvious horror game jump scares it is not like oh you're in combat and then like a thing you know jumps to the window it is stuff that exists very rarely to so deeply unnerve you that the rest of the game you are then ultra cautious so there's a moment where you get shot by an arrow that is so out of nowhere that like it like i was like oh my gosh i'm having chest pains yes this is a this is a nightmare and then after that anytime i'm in an open courtyard space i'm well, I don't want to have that happen again. That was horrible. The one that got me is – I don't want to get too far in. This is not a spoiler.

It's just a beat. I was with my partner, and my partner is literally like mid-sentence talking about nothing. There is no tension. We're just chilling, traveling together. And she says, hey, I got some more of those almonds. Something like huge jump scare, like out of nowhere. It's terrifying. We've mentioned the animations and stuff.

I think also we'd be remiss to say the acting performances in this game are like, and this is like very, I feel like Naughty Dog very much prioritizes this in a way that I feel like a lot of games that have come after have aped, but like the performances are just out of this fucking world. They're good.

Ashley Johnson, who plays Ellie, and oh my God, I can't believe I've forgotten the most prolific video game voice actor uh ever Troy Baker Troy Baker does a tremendous job with Joel uh the actor plays Dina uh is Shannon Woodward is very good yes everyone is just like everyone is absolutely crushing it and I feel like it they kind of have to because this game is about violence and it does take a long time to introduce you to these characters before sort of like having you reckon with the you know retribution they seek or like whatever uh you know stuff the story gets

into which again we're not going to get into right now it is funny though because we think about like la noir a few years ago where people sat in a chair and was like that was the best performance the face was lying because their lip curled up and here we have like i mean this is all obviously full body and face mocap stuff and you just like there is so much subtlety in the performances and it all comes through just as you'd expect in like you know an andy sorkin's performance in a movie. It's really astounding. Y'all, Chris, I think we should probably save some for episode two. There's so much.

There's so much. There's so much to talk about. Oh, can I just talk about the guitars? There's a fucking... There's one moment early on when Joel is like, I'll teach you how to play guitar. And she's like, all right, sweet. And there's like this sweet little mini'll teach you how to play guitar and she's like all right sweet and there's like a this sweet little mini game you do where you play guitar it's like well i guess you

had troy baker in the game as the law uh set forth in uh by a shock infinite you got troy baker in your game he's got to play guitar and sing right that's that's what we're here for and he does it and then ellie's like sure i'll play guitar no big deal and then fucking any moment there was a quiet moment ellie kind of like this is not this is an exaggeration but literally every building you walk into where there's a quiet moment ellie looks around it's like oh shit a guitar nice let me turn up real quick and get a nice little tender moment uh going and i walked in i i saw at one point there's like a movie theater and they're like let's take shelter in there and i'm sitting in my chair and i said to myself out loud there's no fucking way there's a guitar in there right absolutely there is it's backstage it's fine

it's been in a case the zombies didn't get to it okay uh let's take a break and we'll come back with so much more. Hello, everyone. So, unfortunately, Griffin, Justin, and Chris Plant have found themselves in the woods alone in the world of the post-apocalypse. Mushrooms, previously very peaceful, have now become zombie people. Knew it. Only a matter of time.

And the really big problem is it's lunchtime y'all are hungry y'all need to eat mushrooms i'm thinking i'm thinking arby's do not eat mushrooms chris plan is already dead uh arby's is not an option they closed shuffling mushrooms into arby's is closed has been closed uh at least three weeks not that one i see that the fuck back russ i see an open take it back i'm not even gonna pretend your only option right now you find yourselves alongside a river and it's time to spear a fish got it what if ellie found a note it's like hey it's your boy Hoops. They closed down my local Arby's. I haven't been bitten or anything,

but I think I'm still going to just go ahead and beef it off this mortal coil. I left a bunch of prescription meds and tape under my bed. Help yourself. I'm out. I wrote the combination for the safe on the safe, so you should be able to crack that one.

It's no big deal. Inside is a key to Arby's. Okay, so we're going to spearfish. Yeah, so I should mention there is an REI right next to the river, so you can raid the REI for anything you need in terms of camping gear or whatever. You can get a spear in there if you want. What's an REI?

It's like a camping store. Okay. Now, I don't want to brag, but I already know how to do this because I read a little book called Hatchet as a child. And there's a trick to spearing a fish. So I'm going to let you two fools fumble around a little

bit. And then I'm going to step in high on mushrooms and i'm gonna thwack nail a fish save this is fucking life this is life or death plant so maybe you could just like do this now before justin and i go into an rei and get our fucking dicks bitten off here's a trick i walk into rei i grab the nearest spear i? Okay, there are five spears on the wall. Which one do you pick? Well, you know what? I'm like, I'm tough.

I actually just get a Bowie knife, and I like, I use cord to wrap it around just along the end of a hockey stick, okay? How long is the hockey stick? The hockey stick is... And also, where did you get it? Because REI does not sell hockey sticks. REI doesn't sell hockey sticks?

Nope. No, bud. It's a camping. It's like a camping outdoor store. Why do they not have sporting gear? No. No. Are you sure?

You can buy like P-tons. It's not like a Dix? No, it's not like a Dix. No, it's not a Dix. This is weird because I'm a shareholder in REI. Okay, Plant loses his. They probably have arrows, right? Get an arrow.

Okay, so Plant decides to make a dumb hockey stick that doesn't exist because there's no hockey sticks there. I should have asked a question beforehand. It's Griffin's turn now. You used your hockey stick turn. It'll be back. You'll get your turn. I go into REI and I buy a CD player

and I buy some... I buy a microwave and I buy some swimwear. I buy an microwave, and I buy some swimwear. I buy an inflatable raft. I mean, I guess I'll go into REI, too, but I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Russ. I'm going to do perception sneak, because I'm worried that there's mushroom men inside this REI, and you're trying to trick us and trap us like you did last time with the cow.

A copy of the game Mushroom Men. Isn't this? And you this so disgusted by it so griffin is sneaking into the rei i'm listening with my listening ears and and six succeeded in the listening and sneaking uh there are no zombies in the aria we're good guys wait are there bad bad people no there's nice there's no people either there's nice people in there no there's no there's no people either. There's nice people in there? No, there's no one. I guess Chris Plant's in there. He's pretty nice. Okay, so it's clear. Justin? Is there a bungee cord? Yes.

I need a bungee cord. Okay. And you've got still plenty of turn left, so you've picked up the bungee cord. What else do you want to do? And I'm going to grab an arrow. Okay. From the bow and arrows section. And you can grab one more thing. Whoa. One more thing?

They got cliff bars? Yeah, sure. Eat the cliff bar, don't go fishing. What flavor? Yeah, exactly. What flavor cliff bar? Probably white chocolate peanut butter. Okay, you failed on that, so you got your least favorite flavor, whatever that is. Oh, no. I'm just kidding.

That is my least favorite flavor. Oh, snap. I got you again, motherfucker. Well done. Okay, Chris Plank. I forgot to ask you a question. How deep is the water? I was picturing a shallow stream.

You have no idea. Oh, dang. You can- Now I might- It's murky, Bob. Murky water. See, in Hatchet, it's like a shallow stream. You're getting very hungry.

Okay, so... I'm chill, right? Can I clarify that I'm chill? Justin's show, he just had a clip on. Justin is better prepared since we no longer know the depth of the water and we can't see the fish. My entire plan was based around the assumption

that this was clean, shallow water in which I could see a fish. Now I feel completely out of my depth and i grab a gun okay don't have those at rei i don't think they sell those i keep forgetting this isn't maybe in texas but they probably have one somewhere it's already like yeah um okay well i have my i have my bowie knife my stick i'm gonna have to make this work i go out to oh and i grab some fish food okay they have fish food i love that okay oh um i don't know i what does this what does this have anything i grab whatever like whatever the junky uh flavor bars are that they just had because that's basically fish food i go out to

the water and i start you know crumbling stop your turn is completely done the water there we go we have to move quick chumming the waters chumming the waters the waters have been chummed um i i mean i it's fully supporting justin's plan here because i've watched survivor and i feel like i do actually have a really really firm understanding of how spearfishing works so i'm gonna grab like i'm gonna do some assistance i'm gonna grab like uh some mesh like a net type material maybe off of a tent that i can salvage to uh just like sort of help scoop this bad boy up once he gets uh stay up once i definitely catch okay so just to be clear all justin has is a bungee cord and an arrow i just wanted to make that very clear okay i guess i'll grab a spear no no sorry i probably grabbed several

arrows too i want to say that i probably got so okay i'm grabbing two things too i'm grabbing a I guess I'll grab a spear. No, sorry. You were trusting Justin. I probably grabbed several arrows, too. I want to say that. I probably got several arrows. I'm grabbing two things, too. I'm grabbing a net and an actual ass spear in case his arrow's not long enough, which I don't think it will be. Okay, fine. Justin?

If I had known spears were... There's five spears. Yeah, he said five spears. Okay, then I got those instead. No, I'll keep my arrow. It's perfect. Okay, so I go over to where the fish food is right and it's a crumpled up cliff bar yes but um i'm gonna tie one in the

bungee cord around my wrist and the other one to the arrow one of the many infinite arrows that i have and i want to like pull back on it with tension so it's like ready and i'm gonna point it there and i'm just gonna let the the arrow go and I'm going to like flip in there and get me a battle. Okay, hold on one second. What is this? Griffin, what would this check be? I mean, fucking sleight of hand? I don't know. Animal

animal handling? Yeah, animal handling. You succeeded. You hit a fish. Congratulations. It floated to the top of the river and zoomed away because the river is running very quickly. Oh, wow. Oh.

Wait, it got off the arrow? No, no, no. It's still on the arrow. It just like the current took the fish body down the river. The arrow is tied to his wrist with a bungee cord.

The arrow is tied to my wrist. Oh, I thought you shot it like a slingshot. I said specifically I tied it to both ends. He caught a fish, Russ. Don't be pissed off because your game doesn't have good balance okay unless justin flying down the river too no no no no justin's here okay fine you just hit the fish and then like rickshade well i thought he shot the arrow like his incredible scales i thought he shot the arrow

like a slingshot and it just like zoomed down the river uh okay so you have a fish at the end of your um bungee cord justin griffin get it net scoop oh wait it's not my turn not your turn how many how big is the fish it is uh three inches long oh it's a small fish. Yeah. I wrap my arms around hoops and like kind of like entangle myself in the cord so that now it's like it's both of us. Just in case like a bigger fish eats this fish, I'll just get pulled

downstream. And then together we start walking backwards to bring the fish back to Earth. I do that too just to create a really adorable tableau. okay so you guys are uh backing up and you're about 10 steps away from the river and now you've got a three inch fish at the end of justin's arrow one inch for each of us baby we're gonna eat tonight i call the ass okay so justin eats the ass chris plant what do you want to eat the the gut the middle part i wanted the middle

part now you get the fish head rock paper scissors okay one rock paper show it show it in the fucking okay okay okay rock paper scissors scissors shoot shoot what'd you get i got scissors yeah i can't we both got scissors okay how, how about... I'll eat the fucking head. I'll eat the head. No, I'll eat the left side of the head and the chest cavity. That's good. You can eat the right side.

That's good. I like that. So while you guys were playing rock, paper, scissors, the sounds of your hands hitting your fist alerted a nearby zombie, and it's on its way. I got a spear. Fuck them.

What are they gonna do to me? Got a hockey stick. Justin, what do you do? I'm hiding under the brush creating a natural camouflage with my body justin's hiding zombies coming straight for chris plant i jump into the water raise both fingers in the air say deuces and i let the crit just carry me downstream okay uh chris plant succeeds in drowning he's drowned i'm sorry oh i miss chris okay griffin at least he didn't get bit though

he went out like a pro amen griffin yeah i mean i fucking use my spear i do like a i plant it into the ground and use the tension of it bending to launch myself 10 feet in the air and then i sort of like put it between my feet as i fall down like bracing it and just like just fucking dragoon this son of a gun and he's dead the zombie is dead congratulations unfortunately you all die of hunger because the fish wasn't enough uh that's not true actually chris point died of drowning but the rest of you died of hunger that's you don't know i mean i got a cliff bar yeah this is just like last of us it makes you think that's fair yeah this game has really made me think, Russ.

Just Griffin dies of hunger. Oh, man. I miss Griffin already. We did it. We did it. Y'all, do we have enough time for read-a-mail? Maybe like one or two very quick questions? Very quick.

Sure. Okay. This is from David on Twitter. If you could put any game director or studio on any franchise, what would it be? Jaffe. The example that David gave was Yoko Chato on Zelda, but you were very quick with your Jaffe. David Jaffe on anything. Make it to the raw.

UFC Fight Island. David Jaffe on Dead or Alive 8. That's my name. Boy, God, I can't wait for next week's episode because I feel like once we talk about plot it'll be a lot easier to talk about the backlash against this game from certain elements out there who

maybe refer to the director of this game as Neil Cookman because they're complete pieces of shit oh hey I got one David Jaffe on God of war two and he's like taking it back the very first very first moment uh uh kratos is like sorry i was acting like such a wuss let's fucking shit up. Where's my son?

I'm going to teach him how to get babes. Kyle and Luce, both on Twitter, really want to know how Griffin is handling the Pokemon Snap 2 news. It's very exciting. I'm mostly excited about it because my son, who is three, is very much into pokemon as a concept and as characters but outside of the we we actually played through all let's go pikachu which was kind of great but it was a little advanced for him i feel like pokemon snap is

like perfect you just look at pokemon you take pictures of them that's fucking great you don't need to know like type advantages or whatever i am i'm i'm very much looking forward to that i also need to still play the DLC, which apparently came out, and I didn't fucking know, for Pokemon Sword and Shield. Hey, Griff, can you speak on maybe your son and Pokemon and an experience that you had this week

where maybe your knowledge of Pokemon sort of outstripped his, and you had to admit that to another adult? Oh, yes. He's doing remote uh like classes with a teacher at his daycare and she incorporates characters that he is passionate about to get him passionate about you know letter sounds and counting and shit and so lately she's been doing pokemon but last week she uh was doing a game where she had pokeballs and she like had sounds

up and then she clicked the Pokeball and a Pokeball and a Pokemon would appear and say like, and who's this? Only she didn't know who the Pokemon were this time. So she was like, and who's this Henry? And Henry didn't know. And I would have to be like, oh, that's, that's Rhydon.

And she'd be like, oh, oh, thanks dad. Oh, dad knew that one. And you'd be like, yeah. She'd be like, who's this one? Ha, ha. Starts with an H. Oh, I don't know who that is. I'll Google it.

Don't bother, it's Hitmonchan. Like. I need to thank Griffin's wife, Rachel, for deploying that story to my wife, Sydney, who then deployed it to me. And what I said is, I'm gonna fucking talk about that on the besties 100%. So glad we had

an opportunity to do it. I think we can save some more questions for next week. Very, very, very quick. What else are y'all playing? Fresh, I know that you have something that you want to share with us. I mean, I can't go in length just because we're running out of time, but I played four hours of Cyberpunk 2077.

People can read about it on Polygon.com. People can read about it, yeah of Cyberpunk 2077. People can read about it on Polygon. People can read about it. Yeah, there's going to be some writing about it on Polygon.com. Yeah, by the time this episode comes out. So keep an eye out for that. I played it over the cloud, which is the first time I've ever done a game demo

over the cloud, but it was the only way for the build to happen. So that was pretty interesting, but yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Slay the Spire on iOS. I'm finally learning how to like actually play that game and i'm getting into like the ascension runs which is just like a constantly escalating like difficulty scale i'm only on ascension 2 but like learning how to actually play that game well and draft it strategically and stuff is like i feel like i have

unlocked the bottom 95 of the iceberg of that game and it is just fucking remarkable it's the best 10 bucks i've ever spent. I played a little bit of, in addition to still playing Monster Train every day, I played a little bit of Hardspace Shipbreaker, which is a fucking good name for a video game, by the by. And

Super Quick Pitch is like, I only played a couple hours of No Plant, you probably played a little bit more than me, but would you, is it fair to say sort of like survival and scavenging, but in deep space? So you're like ripping stuff off ships and using that to like sort of build up. But survival is almost kind of misleading in that a lot of people picture survival games, the scrapping things is like the obligation

in terms of that allow you to go do the fun stuff. We're like in this, the scavenging is the whole game. Like you get procedurally generated ships in space, you're in zero G, you are a person who breaks down ships, and there are all sorts of hazards in doing that job. The like first one that you learn is that ships are pressurized so if you do not depressurize a ship through the airlocks uh it will explode with you inside of it which is no good um and as the game goes on and on more and more of these hazards kind of keep getting added um and things can go wrong like the ships don't do pressurized correctly um or electrical issues or fire i mean fire but it all sorts of things um i it is one of those games that

gets my noggin going in the same way spelunky did where it it doesn't really explain how everything works um and once you have started to learn kind of the the way to go about the game each stage feels like its own danger puzzle of like oh i really need to know what i am doing at any given time because if i slip up and cut the wrong you know piece of metal i will be detonated into oblivion but just i know that you you mentioned that you had had some kind of technical issues yeah nothing it's early access so this is not like i'll give an example though i was doing the tutorial about the airlock thing and i couldn't get the airlock to activate i saw the airlock i'm like i activate that airlock but the airlock wouldn't activate because i wasn't supposed to

do it yet in the tutorial so i went ahead and just blazed the ship and exploded it and somehow survived because i didn't understand any of these rules in this just blazed the ship and exploded it and somehow survived because i didn't understand any of these rules in this tutorial somehow survived the ship's in a million pieces and then after i do the little scavenging task my my helper guy's like all right now listen i want to teach you about airlocks it's like oh buddy you're you're late for that now go over and hit the airlock open it up like there is no airlock sir you can see that it's not there and i couldn't progress beyond that because i already blown up the ship stuff like that it's just general polish stuff it has nothing to i mean i'm sure it will get fixed it's just a little

little early for for my tastes uh especially with as much last of us 2 as i yeah for for folks who are listening if you can stomach uh the rough edges and you have patience for that sort of thing i strongly recommend checking it out because i have no doubt it will be a game that we were dedicating a full episode to whenever the game is actually finished um yeah because it's it's it is something special y'all next week more last of us two all spoilings all the time i hope you all are excited um be sure to shoot us a message on our twitter at the besties pod if you have any questions or any thoughts about the the story of this game you know what maybe shoot us a letter at mail at besties.fan uh that way you don't have to put some of these onto a social media yeah. Yeah, please don't. That would actually be very nice and we will be making sure to look through the email.

Justin, what else you got? I just got a lot of goodwill in my heart for people that are listening to this show. We ask that you follow and listen for free on Spotify, which you're likely doing already. Please share the show. Besties.fan is the link to do that. And just thank you

so much for hanging out with us. We're happy to have you here. That is the link to do that and just thank you so much for uh for hanging out with us we're happy to have you here that is going to do it for us for this week so until next time thanks for listening to besties and be sure to join us again next week because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch.

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