The Besties - Our Fall Favorites Leading into GOTY Season

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

As we near the thrilling climax of 2021, we're taking a seasonal approach to see what games stood out over the last three (or so) months. Joining us this week is Kirk Hamilton (of the Triple Click and Strong Songs podcasts) to dive into this giant leaf pile that is the fall release calendar. Games discussed: Metroid Dread, Resident Evil 4 VR, Deathloop, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, Death's Gambit Afterlife, Forza Horizon 5, Inscryption, Archvale, The Binding of Isaac Repentence, and Wildermyth. 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!

Game Awards coming up. Once again, I have not been selected for Gamer of the Year. And I think that's pretty effed up, man. Do you put yourself up for that? Or is it like, so you're approached? I'm pretty sure it's like a MacArthur Genius Grant. Yeah. Where they just like tell you, like, you get a call from Jeff Keighley, like, damn, you're such a gamer, Griffin.

I'm assuming, like, I've not gotten the call. gamer griffin uh i'm assuming i like i've not gotten the call despite the fact i think we can all agree that in 2021 i gamed about as hard as i possibly could yeah and do you think you're more of an overall gamer or like specific kind of gamer because i'm well-rounded i think that's what you gotta be if you want to be gamer of the year yeah like i play you know like i... Match threes. Match three. FIFA. I go to all the FIFA tournaments and I win them all. Yeah. Overwatch. And the other one.

Final Fantasy. There it is. That's it. Those are all the games. Do you know what I mean? There's really no argument. Slime. The slime games.

Oh, that might be why you weren't selected because of the slime games and then i you know crokinole like what's it gonna what's it gonna take claw machine do you know what i mean i know i know man someday it's just what what's missed what's missing is it you said crokinole so i really can't think of anything else and you know and this is why i think it's just a popularity contest yeah do you know you know what I mean? I do. But I'm pretty fucking popular. That doesn't make sense either. Just not with Jeff Keighley, I guess. Yeah, we do have some beef, though.

Yeah, he hates your fucking guts. Yeah, he does. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best games of the season. My name is Russ Froschek, and I know the best game of the week. Kirk, you can say it if you want. Yeah, do it, Kirk. Go wild. My name is Kirk Hamilton, and I know my favorite games of the fall. Hi, everybody.

Welcome to the Besties. It's a book club for games, and just by listening, you're a member, and we do it year-round. This is the Besties. It is. Wait, this is a book club for you? I thought this was a video game club, and just by listening, you're a member. I didn't think it was a book club. No, no, no.

It's a book. You can do listening, you remember. I didn't think it was a book club. No, no, no. You can do it different every time. That's the best thing about the podcast is that when your brother's gone, you know how in a lot of podcasts when your brother is not present, you can do it wrong? In this one, it's just like jazz, baby. Do you know anything about jazz, Kirk? A little bit, just a little bit.

I'm trying to learn more, always. This week, we are not talking about a specific game because we are in this weird quiet. It's the calm before the storm that is Halo. Well, and also Game of the Year, I feel like. And yeah, we're whipping up our Game of the Year stuff. A lot of, I would say, poorly scheduled, pretty big late contenders that I don't know that we figured out how we're going to talk about yet. Although I'm sure if we don't have time for Final Fantasy XIV and Walker discussion, that would not break the hearts of 75% of this podcast. Yeah.

So this week we are spending a little bit of time looking back over the past quarter uh by discussing the games of the fall how deep back are we going it didn't necessarily establish yeah i so my attitude was like i don't know like i i i told kirk i said if there was anything that like late summer came in and you want to include that go for it we've been doing this more or less every quarter this year where we like kind of do a look back and some of the games that we've talked about just like our favorite picks from the last let's say three months and um so that's more or less where i sort of boxed it in and obviously a lot of this stuff will also appear in game of the year

but here we want to make sure that we're just focusing on this chunk of the year to uh hammer home whether we've got them all right i feel you so uh yeah we're gonna be talking about a lot of stuff maybe some some gems that we missed out on uh just after the break so stick keep it don't touch that dial it's got jam on it before we hop into the games themselves i do want to introduce our audience to the lovely and talented kirk hamilton hey um so kirk has his very own video game podcast it's true that he hosts with maddie myers and jason schreier also friends of the besties uh that is called triple click you also have a podcast about music called strong songs which i've long been a fan of it's so it's so good kirk i've never had a chance to tell you to your face that is super awesome to hear yeah i

i am russell occasionally text me musical questions and just things which is which is very fun but griffin that's awesome that you listen to uh that makes me yeah it's a very it's a very good show about songs that are powerful songs. Yes, it really is. It really does it right there on the tin. As Kendall Roy says, just the bangers. Just the bangers. That's our sort of subhead on Strong Songs.

Kirk, is there anything else that you are working on right now that we should be aware of? Or is it all secretive? I'm working on the guitar fretboard and understanding what notes are what on the fretboard, which is something that I've just finally decided that I'm going to do because I've played guitar for a long time, but I play other instruments too. And so that's the main thing I'm working on right now. And it's breaking my brain. You didn't know the notes?

Well, like, I know the notes. Like, I know the chords, but I can't just, like, play you every single A up and down the fretboard and then play you every single C. I got to be real. I'm surprised to learn that there's more than one A. There are so many A's. I can't even tell you how many A's there. It's wild. So I like know the notes and I can play a lot of stuff, but it's very easy with guitar to fall into just playing shapes and not really think about the notes that you're playing. And I've been just forcing myself to say out loud, like I'm playing chord inversions just up the neck. And I'm like, A, F sharp, D, F sharp, A, you know, like trying to make my brain attach the meaning to the shape. And it's really a trip. It's been hard. So that's the main thing I'm working on other than

Strong Songs and Triple Click. It'll happen. I believe in you, Kirk. Slowly but surely, yes. I've been making progress. It's been fun. We should also note that Kirk, for a very long time worked at kataku i did that's true he was a uh what would you call yourself like you were surprised like he worked at kataku it was the kind of thing that surprised people like the the students in my jazz band at high school that i taught before that would have actually been surprised about that job so in some ways it was a kind of surprising job. And I was surprised when I found out you were a music teacher afterwards.

So it all comes back around. That's kind of the key, is to have secret things up your sleeve that you surprise people with. But we don't give a fuck about music on this episode. No, that's touchy-feely nerd shit. We like guns with guns. Shoot quest.

Chainsaw guns, especially. Those are the best, really, the best kinds of guns. Guns that are also other weapons. Anything Cliff Leszczynski's up to, you know what I mean? Jazz Jackrabbit 3. Speaking of jazz, I asked both Kirk and Griffin and myself to bring our favorite picks of the last. He looked at the mirror and he said

Russ I'm gonna need you to do this for me and mission accomplished I thought given that you're the guest we'd start with Kirk what Kirk what are some of your favorite picks of the last several months well so I I'm in a weird place because I've been actually playing a lot of games from forever ago now, and I'm feeling sort of paralyzed about recent games. But I'm not going to mention all of those games that I've, like Resident, or no, not Resident Evil, like Metal Gear Solid V or Death Stranding, like old things that are back out on PS5. Like, I've spent a lot of my time playing games that aren't from the fall. So that's where a lot of my time has been that aren't from the fall so that's where a lot of my time i have to don't don't beat yourself up i feel like i'm kind of in the same boat because i have not

necessarily resonated with a lot of this this season's games that has really knocked everybody else's socks off so yeah so i've you know i'm back on inscription which i know russ you're going to talk about that so but that game is great but i just sort of that, there was just this period of time where I'd try to play it. And then I'd think, you know, I don't really want to do that. And then I'd find myself playing, like, Ghost of Tsushima or whatever. So a lot of my time has been spent on that. But there are a few games from the fall that I wanted to talk about. First of all, I want to talk about Resident Evil 4 VR, which I know you guys talked about some.

But I want to talk about it some more for a few different reasons and the first thing though griffin okay yeah so when you talked about this on the show you said that you really like this which i agree it's it's really good it's really slick but that you didn't like half-life alex and that kind of blew my mind that's what i'm saying they are it's crazy uh they are they are similar i will i will grant you that in the sense that they are you know both first first person action games here's the thing alex is by any metric like a better game uh because while resident evil 4 is like fun to play and like a really cool vr adaptation it's it is an adaptation of a hundred year old like pretty clunky game that has been

again in a fun arcadey way sort of retrofit for vr in a way that alex was you know primarily designed for it i just thought that alex alex was a cool game where you could like pick up a bottle of water and then drink it and then like shove it in a toilet tank and put a bomb in it like all that shit you could do. There are all these physical interactions that Resident Evil 4 just doesn't have, but I just didn't think it was very fun. I still think you pulled the plug on Alex too early.

I still think you should go back. I got a decent chunk of it. Yeah, I will maybe one day go back and play it. I'm struck by the similarity playing RE4 VR, which I started a couple of days ago. And I played both of them, I should say, on a Quest 2 wirelessly, because you can play Alex wirelessly from your PC if you sort of set it up right, which is kind of the only way to play VR these days. Like I think back to

playing, you know, on the OG Rift, sort of plugged in with this huge cable running out of my back, like banging around into the walls, and just how awful of an experience that was and how much better this is. And it's really nice that RE4 is just on the Quest. I actually, even that is nicer than having to turn my PC on and get it working and sort of update the side quest thing or whatever it is to make the quest work.

So it's really nice that it's self-contained. And I actually do appreciate how it's simpler than Alex. Like I get that you could play Alex and be like, oh my God, like there's so much physics in here. There's so many little objects. There's just so much going on. It's kind of a lot of business. Where in Resident Evil 4, it's really simple and you're just shooting zombies. And it's just sort of the basic fun of, well, fun, the basic, very intense experience of having a guy coming at you slowly while you're aiming at him and then like reloading your gun

and pulling back the, you know, the lever to get the bullet into the chamber and like, you know, kind of panicking. And they both are very similar in that way. It's just Alex has way more going on. It just struck me how much Half-Life Alex owes to Resident Evil and specifically to Resident Evil 4

and how interesting it is that the next good first-person VR game, I should say, at least that I've played, is Resident Evil 4. Since the one before that was Half-Life Alyx. Like maybe VR is just particularly, you know, attuned to this kind of experience right now. Well, yeah, I think a lot of it has to do, like you're not necessarily having to run you know you could play with teleport movement but generally speaking the movement is not the thing it's more you're standing in place and taking shots at something yeah um i think is part of it because you're right like gameplay wise the minute to minute is very similar between the two if resident evil 4 had had a little bit more like Boneworks DNA,

which in like my opinion, I don't know that Boneworks is probably in like my top five favorite VR games, but like I don't think anyone could argue like the way that it handles motion and climbing and the very physical feel of like, you know, stabbing a mannequin in the head with a, you know, a pickaxe or something like that.

Like it feels pretty much right. I guess in a way that like a resident evil before doesn't even try to go. No, you just slash the knife across the guy. There's no touch or feel or reaction to it. What's ever you just hear like, and you know that they have been, they have been hit for a certain amount of,

you also can't eat a chicken egg, which i again tried to do and it didn't work so that would be nice yeah but man it's fun it's still fun yeah the fact that it's an adaptation of an older game kind of it like limits it to the vr stuff is just the basic part of the game you know you're not yeah dealing with all the sexual stuff. Like when you get hit, it doesn't even bother showing you get hit or it kind of just fades to black for a second and you take a hit. Or cut scenes and QTEs like play out in little screens. And it's not actually that jarring.

Maybe it like reveals the limitations of VR by leaning into the things that VR is very good at. But I'm very impressed by it. I think it's a really cool it's a really cool thing i wonder if this will be i've never finished resident evil 4 i've started it on so many it's definitely a big blind spot so maybe this will be the way that i play it and maybe i believe in you maybe that won't even count how far have you gotten just out of curiosity because that's a game that like chapter chapter changes i'm in like the village showdowns oh yeah okay yeah it

gets it gets silly yeah i've gotten farther i think on pc was the farthest i got i never played on we i like the aiming with a mouse the aiming always kind of gets me with a thumbstick so it is nice that the vr version lets you actually aim yeah which helps the game a lot for me anyway um i noticed here you put a death loop which is um i wouldn't say interesting because obviously everyone was sort of bowled over by Deathloop when it first came out. But for me, it has a little, has kind of diminished since I stopped playing it. So I'm curious what your perspective is. Yeah, so I wanted to put this because I think it's a really interesting game.

It was definitely one of my favorite games of the year. Anyone who listens to TripleClick knows that I love this kind of immersive simmy game. I love arcane games and Dishonored and Prey and all of that. And I've really come to enjoy this game now as I've gone back to it and tried to get some of the achievements, which is a very, very fun thing to try to do. Yeah, I did the same thing. It was a blast. Yeah, so it's just lingered for me in the way that Hitman 3 also continues to linger for me where a lot of the fun of the game is just repeating things over and over again i almost wish the narrative layer were gone now now that i'm playing it that way since hitman makes it so minimal and the narrative kind of lost me a little bit at the end which i think

is a fairly common take about this game is just once i got really into the lore of all of this and what's going on in the character motivations i was kind of like this makes me care less than i did when it was even compared to other arcane games like especially dishonored you could kind of just shut that part of your brain off if you wanted to and just have a just have a silly time at a fancy party. Yeah, I'd say Dishonored is their strongest narrative game, where Prey also really falls apart toward the end. And then Mooncrash, which has a lot in common with no weapons, you know, without taking damage, or just all these other really tricky things that you're trying to do. It turns into that experience of, it's kind of in the main game where you're playing the same thing over and over again, and really trying to perfect it, but it gets closer to the Hitman escalation missions that

I love so much that almost nobody does, but those are like the best thing in that game where first you have to kill the target, then you have to kill the target this specific way, and then without this weird contingency, and then it keeps getting more and more complicated until it starts to feel like Hitman Go almost, where there's just one path through and you have to really nail it.

So Deathloop does that too. And Arcane has actually updated this game on PC a few times where it didn't run very well for me when I actually played through it, which bummed me out. But I appreciate now it runs really well. I kind of wish I'd waited. And they've also increased the enemy AI and made it so you get spotted faster

and sort of just made the game a little bit more polished and a little tougher, actually, which I also appreciate. So yeah, I've been playing it again. It's definitely one of my favorites of the year. And the last one you mentioned on here is a game that we talked about on Resties specifically. I know Griffin, I'm pretty sure, Griffin, you haven't touched it, which is The Outer Wilds.

Yeah, it's so wild because that was my favorite game the year it came out. But I am having the fucking hardest time stepping back into Outer Wild wilds and i do not know what it is i think that's totally understandable i think it's because i invested like all of my gaming time for like a month into that game and i mastered it right like i knew everything about that world and exactly what time things happen and what the interactions were. And so I really just sort of seeped into like the incredible pleasure of that game

because there is so much cool stuff to explore and to know. And then that's all gone for my brain now. And that idea of trying to like get back in there just seems like, I don't know, it's the same way I feel about MMOs. I can never play WoW again because everything's different and I've forgotten everything about the game yeah but i mean it's worth considering and kirk i'm sure you'll speak to this that the expansion echoes

of the eye is entirely self-contained so all the information that you learned previously is more or less worthless yeah yeah i guess so i think that's totally understandable just because i had that experience too we played this for a triple click a bonus episode that we did that was just like spoilers for this game and it's kind of the best way to talk about it so i'll be pretty vague here because you know if you spoil what happens in this game it kind of that's the whole game right is finding out what's going on but yeah i did have that experience picking it back up just because Outer Wilds, you construct that game in your own head. You know how like, because the remarkable thing about it is that nothing in the game changes from the first time you play it until like your 27th hour on your final time through. It's the exact same game.

It's just that you've completely changed your understanding of it. And so that structure you built in your brain kind of deteriorates over time, or at least mine did, because I'm now old and my brain doesn't work anymore. And I just came back to Outer Wilds and was just kind of at a loss just for the controls and for how everything worked. I found myself just really struggling to get back into that headspace, and it took a little while. And then once I got there, which it kind of clicks at a certain point in Echoes of the Eye, you have these, a couple of major revelations about this new area you're exploring. And then pretty soon you're like back to charting things out and figuring, making these mental maps. And now I again have this sort of amazing understanding of it from top to bottom. And it's so good. I think it's just incredibly, incredibly good.

And more than anything, it just makes me really happy that there's this team of brilliant young game developers who made this game at Mobius Digital, that they could do it again, that they made Outer Wilds, and that they were just like, okay, let's just do that again. And they did. And it's like lightning in a bottle twice, which just means that these people are just super, super at what they do yeah they're just really good and

that's cool it just it doesn't feel like anything else and i really think it's a special thing and just uh yeah i loved it you know what kills me is outer wilds definitely would have won our game of the year that year if i was physically able to play it at that point. Yeah, man, that's tough. Did it not win? I think Sekiro was our pick for that year. Oh, fuck, never mind. That game kicks ass too.

It's a really good game. I mean, it's not as, but Sekiro for me is not as special, at least now looking back, as Outer Wilds. Like Outer Wilds is a really special game. Outer Wilds is a once-in-a-generation kind of game. Yeah. I did not sort of jot down my picks here and now i am saying that russ has uh taken at least one of mine uh can i talk about metroid dread like let's talk about

metroid dread yeah it's it's definitely a front runner for for me for the whole year because god i i this is a big statement I feel kind of the same way about it as I did the first time I played Hollow Knight, where I just thought about it for a long time, even after I had finished it. That game is just so top-to-bottom cool. I think that's the thing that my main takeaway from it, it is, in a lot of categories

that I kind of measure metroidvania games by it doesn't necessarily get top marks like uh map map design and pacing and flow like i feel like there were some there were some issues there but the very few times that i managed to counter one of those big shithead robots and get away from it uh every time that you know you you beat the little mini boss to get the super powerful charged up laser that you managed to finally kill one of those shithead robots with like it that game doesn't have a lot of tricks but the tricks it does have are so good and so exciting and scary in a way that like not not just metroid games but like most nintendo games are are not uh it had me howling with like glee in a way that like beating a dark

souls boss uh does um it's it that game is just so cool and it unfolds in a way that is uh and has a narrative that is compelling in a way that like metroid hasn't done for me uh it's hard like the way that it handles difficulties is is so smart um i think it all just comes together to i don't know put together a package that is just really really neat it's just neat and i like it yeah it's it's interesting because this happens a fair amount when we get to a game of the year territory where we have you know maybe we have the like super original game or maybe we have like the really well crafted game whatever and there's almost always the game that is a sequel but it is the best version of that game series ever and it's always a question of like how much are we rewarding right true

total originality versus like total refinement wasn't it the first season of the like the first goatee that we did for the show was i think dishonored versus uh legend of zelda link between worlds yes i think that's right and it's like that's a tough one because Link Between Worlds is, when it came out, it was the most exciting Zelda game since God knows how long it had been since a Zelda game had come out that really set the world on fire. But on the other hand, Dishonored was so clever and good. And we're definitely going to have that conversation again this year. That is an interesting one because Dishonored was also kind of picking up the thief torch and being the first immersive sim in a long time. Yeah, sure. And it was exciting in a similar way, even though they're, of course, very, very different in terms of their meta narrative.

Unless there's some like seeding, you know, mishap, I feel like it's going to be Metroid Dread and Inscription and we're going to be just like right in the same shit again. That's a tough one. It's so interesting. in the same shit again. That's a tough one. So it's interesting. I know that the two of you both also love Hollow Knight, which I love too, and it was kind of the first Metroidvania-style game

that really knocked me out because I didn't actually play that many Metroid games when I was a kid. Dread is so interestingly different from Hollow Knight. That's always going to be the thing that I think of when I think of the game. The pacing is just so dramatically different. Hollow Knight is this long exploration, this contemplative experience.

You're kind of getting lost underground. Sometimes you're not sure where to go. You're wandering around. The map is so huge. It's like a 60 to 100 hour game. Metroid Dread is like 15 hours max and you're done. Everybody played that game in a weekend. And it's just such a like punch of a game.

Like it just, it's so relentless. Yeah, it's a sprint to the finish. And wasn't honestly i wasn't expecting that and as i was playing and i just kept being like this is so different from the energy i was expecting but i love this i love that it's so different that it has such a strong identity yeah yeah um two games that i want to talk about we talked about one of them a second ago inscription um i still feel very strongly that like the more information that is uh shared about this game the less impactful it is so i'm going to say very little apart from saying if you still haven't played inscription uh it's definitely definitely worth playing by pretty much anyone uh if you're remotely interested in like creative games

it is a wild wild experience that i will not can i frame a conversation about inscription and this is one that i've been wanting to have and maybe it's better done off off the air you tell me if it's getting too spoilery for you the gameplay uh changes right like the core loop of what the game is changes at a certain point like it doesn't it doesn't right okay yes but it changes enough that it it is recognizably different yes and kind of similar to uh outer outer wilds for me like when i hit that point i wasn't, I was not wild about having to learn a new like game. Right. I wasn't wild about like, Oh,

well some of the things I knew is, is irrelevant. And now, you know, it's this new thing. Like there's a lot that changes that is cool. But then when I started to play after the, after the change,

uh, I, I kind of lost the, the momentum a bit. Uh, so i don't know if that's something you all had and got over or what i here's what i'll say that part that you're at is in my opinion the weakest part of the game okay i think it does get better but you should stick with it if you if you found yourself bouncing off of it i'm sure justin would strangle you to ensure that you would play it and or die.

This year though, it's been so weird because I feel like there haven't been a ton of like knockout games, but there is a quantity like surplus here where if I hit any friction with a game, I'll just bounce over to one of the like 50 games that came out that are good that I haven't played. Yeah.

And Inscription, I think, suffered from that. Well, Inscription has some friction, right? I mean, I've found, so I'm beyond what the part that you're talking about and also do think you should stick with it. Partly because I get back into the groove of it whenever it shifts on me, which is, it is shifting from the very beginning, right? It's constantly changing the rules on you and surprising you. And for a long time, you're like, am I not supposed to understand how this game works? Like, because you're kind of getting these cheap deaths and it, you know, it sort of cheats almost. And then you figure out how to kind of go, you know, how to play it. And it's just constantly being flexible enough to

change, which does sometimes feel like a lot of friction when it's like, oh, I could just go play Ghost of Tsushima and kind of go clear out another outpost and get in a cool sword fight instead of being kind of challenged in this way so i i understand that feeling though i found that when i do stick with it i get in the groove and i really like the card game like i just each time find myself getting really into the deck i'm building and you know how i'm how i'm gonna win and the strategy of it yeah i yeah i i know I will get into it. And in fact, I think I have sort of a limited window to do so now because everybody's going to be talking about it during Cody season.

Yeah, I think that's a safe bet. I'll get in there. I have a game. I don't know if Kirk has played it yet. It's Death's Gambit Afterlife. I haven't. This is a new game? Death's Gambit came out in 2018.

Afterlife came out in, I want to say September. What's the difference? And it overhauls the game. Okay. I've got it downloaded, but I didn't realize that it was, that it was a new version of the game. Yeah. It adds a ton of new areas. It like changes the sort of like balancing. It adds a bunch of new items and it's, I never played the original. I only played Afterlife, but it is astounding. It is so good. It is the best sort of Souls-like game that I have played.

I can't remember the last time I played a Souls-like game that I like really, really, really, really stuck to like this. It's like the combat is mechanically satisfying. The character crafting is super satisfying. really stuck to like this uh it's like the combat is mechanically satisfying the you know character crafting is super satisfying the the world design and narrative is just as sort of uh arcane as as

a good souls game is i finished it and got a sort of unsatisfying ending so i went right back with and just played through the game with a different build and it was totally different and got a completely different ending that was much longer and had like a lot more to say so i beat this game like twice in the span of a couple weeks it's it is it is so so good and i think uh anybody who likes action games or especially souls like games or should should definitely play it it's not like the most surprising game right it's not like that's fine though right yeah here's a little you just want another one of those that's a good one yeah it's it's like uh i remember the first time i played dead cells and i was like oh this is really good and i feel that way about death's gambit partially because they look very similar yeah they do have a kind of similar vibe

yeah all right russ sorry okay so the last game i want to talk about and i've talked about this previously on the show as has plant is forza horizon 5 yeah i know that you really like forza horizon 5 how do we convince griffin that this is a game that he should be playing i don't know it's tough if people aren't into cars and i'm not into cars no i know i i think that it's it works right that pitch works for it because you don't have to really you just have to be into like having a good time in a video game to like for like cruising on across like a desert in mexico and like jumping off yeah giant sand dunes and shit it's so much fun it's got such a good vibe i've been thinking about the vibe of this game i think given how everyone is so depressed and covet exhausted and sort of isolated there's just something about playing a game

where you're invited to this big festival and everyone's always talking about how much fun they're having and you're like the most special person there. And it's just this big party and it's always like, we're having so much fun and it's all kind of forced and very corporate and it's sort of, but in a way that almost feels safe.

It's really hard to totally articulate the vibe of this game, but i find it very calming yeah it reminds me of ssx i think they both franchises have a very similar vibe yeah i don't know i i think it does a very good job of just making letting you craft the experience that you want to play it doesn't force you down pads of like oh i don't want to do drag racing so you just don't do drag racing it's like 16 other events you could be doing um very satisfying constantly unlocking new shit and also like doesn't feel greedy in the way that like you know a lot you know halo infinite for example has gotten a lot of shit lately for its like battle pass and like oh

you have to buy every single color for your armor and whatever. And granted, that's free to play, so it's a different story, but it feels like Forza is constantly tossing you cars to unlock and all the customizations you're making to the car are all in-game currency. You don't have to real money buy anything

if you don't want to. It's great. I really, really adore it. And definitely think anyone who is, like, quasi, almost slightly into racing games should just check it out and play it for two hours. And if it doesn't hook you by then, don't worry about it. Yeah, it's just, like, a fun thing.

I'm scared it will hook me. That's understandable. I'm noticing a pattern in like all of the games that are making my goatee list uh save maybe for monster hunter rise like i think i'll always find time in my life i'll always find time on my plate for a heap and help and a monster hunter oh griffin are you gonna play that again when it comes out on pc or no not on pc but i'll play the dlc for sure no i mean i i yeah i i only play it mostly on this way that's not true i played monster hunter world in a few different places but uh i don't have i my life is buck wild right now and honestly it has been since my my second son was born and uh

i have not really had much of a appetite for big ass, big long games. And so I feel like that's why I'm a little sort of hesitant about Forza 5, is I feel like I've played a lot of Forza games for a couple hours before, and I don't feel like that's the right way to do it. I don't know if that's wrong. I do that too.

That is the right way to play those games. There's no beating Forza. Like, you could, could i guess beat every event ever but for me i just like oh i've got 30 minutes i'm gonna do a couple races and dick around like it's not a it's not a intimidating prospect yeah and since it's on game pass you can really just play a few hours of it only play a few hours of it ever and that's kind of fine because it's just on game pass like it's it's not it doesn't have that buy-in of you have to think of it as this massive 100 hour experience because you bought it for you know 70 bucks or whatever it costs yeah which is

also kind of nice if i swore off destiny like i'm not playing destiny all the time but like in my mind that is my time suck game i feel like if i put that one to bed, maybe I could swap it. Put it to bed, Griffin. Yeah, it might be time. As a former Destiny, hardcore Destiny player. Meanwhile, you've got Final Fantasy fucking waiting in the wings. So that is true.

Oh God, I haven't played that in a while. Yeah, that one's gonna kill me. Okay, whatever. All right, we're gonna take a break. When we come back, wow, this episode's gone long. We'll see what we have break uh when we come back wow this episode's gone long we'll see what we have time for when we come back yeah uh all right we got some we got some letters from back home by which i mean our listeners asked us some questions uh or we asked them a question which was what are some fall deep cuts let's see capital madman says super auto pets has

kept my attention through the last few weeks it has that deck builder quality mixed with monster batlin i haven't heard of or played this game yeah i saw a couple streamers playing i know northern lion on youtube has been playing super auto pets i haven't played it um it does seem like a justin game insofar as there's definitely like a card battler aspect to it as well as like i think a progression system that seems like justin would really dig but i've heard good things and very highly rated on steam so something must be clicking i that unrelated but i did not realize that next month they are releasing a like remake of monster the original monster hunter one and two like the true playstation

like original monster the one that you put the cds in apparently obviously you can't put cds in your nintendo switch but uh they will have some sort of database i guess that you can draw monster rancher oh what did i say i think you said monster hunter oh fuck no what i was very dummy yeah sorry it's monster Rancher. Yeah, I'm excited to play it. I don't remember Monster Rancher except putting in, you know, the Crash album from Dave Matthews' band and getting a cool dragon or whatever. Yeah, I don't know if it'll still be novel. Alex says, I cannot believe y'all still haven't talked about Deltarune, even in passing. Surprised it wasn't a whole episode.'s fair yeah that's that is fair have you played it either

of you played it no i played yeah i mean i played chapter one and i started chapter two but chapter two came out like the same week as a bunch of shit including a bunch of stuff that we were going to be talking about for besties for the next couple episodes so i missed it and i just haven't come back to it despite the fact that like undertale is one of my favorite games ever yeah same i didn't finish chapter one i kind of struggle with the episodic thing like part of me just wants to play the whole thing even though yeah people write into strong songs all the time about the music they're like talk about some deltruan music the music in the you know in in the original game uh in undertale is

so incredible i want to play it but i kind of am just hesitant because it's not finished right if like if someone were to offer me like oh you can play the first three hours of haunted chocolatier a game that i am dying to play i would not do it because i'd rather just play the full thing it's why i like have a tough time with some early access stuff. That's fair. I, I, I feel like I played through chapter one of Delta run and I think it

stands alone. Like I think it's, yeah, I guess that's my question. Yeah. Um, I feel almost like chapter two, like I,

I am so looking forward to it that I want to like feel like I'm playing it and I have time to like really to you know really dive deep maybe that's a shitty excuse i i want to play the game i know that feeling that's that but it's it's yeah um let's see ye olde andy man says i haven't really heard anyone talking about uh kena bridge of spirits despite it being one of the most visually and audibly stunning games this year yeah Yeah, I haven't played it, but I have heard the critical reception about this game, and the general consensus is

it is one of the most gorgeous games yet released. Yeah. I have also heard that it's not as totally special from a gameplay standpoint, and that's been something that is like scaring me away a little bit just because i'm like again where it's so busy there's just so many games to play that if something is not like particularly outstanding i probably will just bounce off of it but i have heard really really good things so maybe i'll check it out this year is wild man because i feel

that i'm just to read the next email from ethan i think you guys should give sable a look it's very chill incredibly beautiful and the soundtrack by japanese breakfast is a stunner i've also yes i've also heard really good stuff about about sable it feels like in past years like you get three or four of of these of like the deeper cut stuff yeah that like is is aesthetically like it's good in a different way than a lot of other games are good that year but i feel like for whatever reason like just the last couple months have it's it's just been a a title wave of all of these of all of these titles and so you get to oh a title wave that's fun uh and so it almost feels like you have to you have

to you know pick and choose uh because you still got to be a real gamer and play halo right you do still have to be a real gamer and check out the new madden and so you know how do i squeeze these indies in between all my cool fifa sessions i don't know yeah it's especially tough with a game where i'll hear oh it's kind of a game where you fight off purple stuff. This is back to Kena or Kena Bridges. Yeah. Like, you know, it's you fight off a purple corruption and it's got it's like pretty much like other games, even though I know people tend to love games like that. Like Ghost of Tsushima was this way or Mad Max or games that are just like, OK, it's an open world game. It's kind of predictable.

But then over time, you kind of come to appreciate how it was just a good game and it was fun it's just kind of harder to play it right now when there's a bunch of stuff that feels kind of urgent because it's it's more groundbreaking or more buzzy or something yeah i dug sable for what it's worth i played it on xbox yeah i want to play it i have it down when i play i this might have changed when i played it initially it did not run great which was really disappointing because it's absolutely gorgeous and the soundtrack as they mentioned is amazing but um i'm hopeful i keep meaning to go back to it just to see if the stability is better because i really really dug what i played it was like breath of the wildy and but with this really cool line art style

it's it's maybe it's just a symptom of having done this arbitrary game of the year process now for 10 10 10 years or however long we've been doing besties but there's just been this like tremendous flattening of the playing field yeah that has been like especially intensified over the last couple years maybe it's it is like directly covet related where there are a lot of these games with smaller developers that are all really great. I mean, fucking Hades ran away with everything last year. But that's kind of the opposite of what I'm talking about. Maybe this is a bad example

because Hades was like the clear front runner. I don't know that there is one this year. Like I took a guess at Inscription and Metroid Dread being our final two that I guess I feel pretty confident about. But like there's so much shit out there. Like there are so many very, very good games out there. And so it's not anymore like you go into the Goaty process and you're like, oh, it's going to be it's going to be Dishonored.

Like for sure this year, it's got to be Dishonored because that game was so incredibly good. It's not as predictable and that's exciting but it also makes me feel like i have missed out on half of the good games this year because there's a lot of them yeah it might be unique to this year it's definitely been a year for sort of a lot of yeah like you said there's kind of a lot of diffusion there isn't just one you know yeah consensus pick uh among pretty much every game that came out. Should we jump into honorable mentions real quick? Yeah, let's do them.

So I want to talk about a game. It is called Archvale. It will be out by the time this episode releases. It's not quite out yet. It's out December 2nd on Switch and I think other consoles as well, Xbox, PlayStation. Archvale is basically, second uh on switch and i think cons other consoles as well xbox playstation uh archville is basically it's funny griffin's writing binding of isaac it is it is like a much more approachable

version of what binding of isaac is trying to do because it is a it is a like a bullet hell top-down action shooter but with rpg mechanics so you can actually grind your way to like getting more powerful and finding new loot and leveling yourself up to the point where a lot of those games games like nuclear throne or enter the gungeon or binding of isaac are roguelikes where you die and you start from scratch and it can be very discouraging arch fail is like a straight up traditional rpg with those gameplay mechanics but without needing to like start from scratch like you are actually there's like a power curve and you're leveling up and it's simple but i also think it's a very um good way to sort of approach that genre if you've been intimidated by it in the past uh very cute like

pixel art graphics um good soundtrack very chill allows for um same system co-op if you're interested in doing that but uh yeah i've been digging it it's uh just kind of a surprise i wasn't expecting it but i uh watched the trailer and was like oh this looks cool and uh so yeah that's called arch fail is it just on steam or is it on other show you can definitely play it on steam and uh switch and probably other platforms as well but i'm not entirely sure i played it on switch and it rained great for what it's worth cool uh yeah i've just been playing more binding of isaac damn it i've mostly just been that game has challenges uh that i don't think

i recognized the past times i've tried to get into the game where there's like a specialty build that you have and then you have to reach a certain checkpoint in order to unlock permanently like a new item that will appear and some of the items are like incredibly powerful yeah so it really behooves you to like jump into those challenges even when they're like super annoying uh speaking of i have been trying to beat for most of the past week uh a challenge called solar system oh god where you can't shoot tears you have no way of like dealing weapon uh damage in the traditional sense you just have these two orbital flies oh wow that circle around you and it's your only way of dealing damage is to like move in a way that your flies run into enemies uh and it's an it's a really different way of playing the game and i can't stop trying to beat this one challenge uh and like i've made it to the final boss and and fucked up and got

killed and uh it's it's it's so punishing but i can't stop trying because i feel like this this grim determination that only like the best games can seem to coax out of me griffin have you tried uh co-op at all with maybe i don't no i don't know how to do it i don't know how to do it on switch yeah you so you just if you're in like the starting area of a run you just hit start on a second controller oh that's it okay interesting i mentioned it's obviously as you know it's a very hard game i would not immediately suggest it for like a small child but there's there's a couple ways to play it you can play it with like just like a little ghost character that

follows you around yeah that might be doable although the themes are a little bit dark yeah i was gonna say at the other day henry actually like leaned over my shoulder and was like what is this and i was like oh we'll talk about it in a few years yeah but i was battling a big poop boss and that he liked he liked that a lot yeah sure but then i got a devil deal and it gave me this power up that let me like shoot out rifts that suck enemies in which is super powerful right like you can clear a room so easy and safely with it, but it does put like a giant glowing red hole over one of Isaac's eyes. And he saw that and he's like, turn it off.

Turn this off, turn this off. And so I turned it off. He's like, I don't want to play that. He was cute. And then he got super scary. And I was like, yeah. Yeah, there's not really a solve for that. Every random item has a potential to be horrifying.

Yeah. What about you, Kurt? I am back playing a game called Wilder Myth, which I'm actually not sure. Did you guys talk about this on the show? We haven't had a dedicated episode about it, but it is definitely coming. I think it's plants, if not number one,

it's very high up. So it's definitely going to come up again during game of the year. This game feels like a deep cut to me, only in that I still don't see people talk about it. I don't think it got a single nomination at the Game Awards, which is crazy now that I've played. I've only played a few hours of it, but I'm coming back to it now because I really want to get even farther. The more you play this game, the more rewarding it is. And it's so interesting and good and fascinating. This game, for anyone who doesn't know,

it's a sort of a procedural narrative generation slash tactics role-playing game where you tell the story of a group of heroes largely through, you know, well-written sort of modules that all fit together. And I'm just, I've never played anything like it. I've never seen this narrative approach actually pulled off as well as it is in this game. And it's also a really fun tactics, you know, sort of grid-based tactics combat role-playing game. But the heart of the game is in these stories. And it's just, it lets you role-play like you're playing Dungeons & Dragons with a Dungeon Master, like more than any game, even more in a way than Divinity Original Sin 2, one of my favorite games of all time. But it has that same kind of energy, the Disco Elysium as well, where you just feel like there's this richness to the characters. There's an ambiguity to every situation. It's so good. It's so well written. And I gather because your characters sort of age and grow up and have whole careers and children, and then their children have whole lives and it can become this sort of

this genuine epic. I'm just looking forward to that. Like, it just seems like it's going to keep going. And they've got, they have my confidence completely because the writing is so good and it's so well-implemented. I'm kind of surprised I've never seen anything like it before. And I'm also surprised that more people aren't talking about it. I guess there might be reasons why that is, like the look of the game, maybe. Yeah, I think it's probably the visual style that might, like, it doesn't screenshot great.

No, you wouldn't just look at it and think, oh, that's great, it looks kind of like a mobile game. But when you're playing it, I mean, this is another game that lives in your head, and it just, it really sparks my imagination. I think it's just a wonderful, a wonderful game. So that's Wilder Myth. And I'm playing it on PC.

Yeah, I'm dying to play more. I really only spent a couple hours with it and was amazed by the magic trick, but I'm dying to play more of it. Yeah, it's really good. Cool. I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties.

We have Pirate Rock, Nevermind Sleep, Beaticles, Ort, and Billy Jackbones Jr. III. Thank you to all of you for writing reviews on Apple Podcasts. Thanks to everyone else for writing reviews on Apple Podcasts. Plant is not here, so I'm going to quickly recap the games we talked about. We talked about Resident Evil 4 on VR, Deathloop, Outer Wilds, Echoes of the Eye, the expansion pack, Metroid Dread,

Death's Gambit Afterlife, Forza Horizon 5, Inscription. Talked a little bit about Super Auto Pets, Delta Rune, Kena Bridge of Spirits, Sable, Archvale,

Binding of Isaac, Repentance, Wildermyth. That's a lot of games. I think that's everything. Yeah, that's a good list. That is a lot of games. We did it. We really did it. Alright, next week we need y'all to kind of

be flexible. Because next week we really want to talk about Halo, but it depends on if we get it. If we get Halo. Yeah, it's a timing question. We usually record the day that Halo drops. We would need to get it early

to be able to actually play it before we record so it will it'll be next week maybe an episode talking about how cool halo might be what's funny is that chris plant will have played it because he got early code through polygon but none of us have so he can just tell you about it for like an hour yeah that should be fun horrible everyone loves listening to podcasts like that, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, hey, thanks for listening to The Besties. If you wouldn't mind leaving a review,

that would be super cool of you telling a friend. Go listen to Strong Songs and Triple Click. Please do. And support Kirk. Show Kirk your support in these trying times. It's a real hard time for Kirk right now. Kirk, where can people find you busking? Oh, I would say, I mean, I'm not really on Twitter anymore.

So really just strongsongspodcast.com, tripleclickpodcast.com. Those are the main places they can find me. I wasn't using a euphemism. I expect you to be standing on the streets of Portland somewhere with a hat. I haven't done much busking. There is some good jazz happening on front porches around town, so you might see me someplace or another, but

not a lot of busking these days. Kirk, would you say that this podcast is the jazz of video game podcasts? You know, yeah. I'd say it's kind of like a hard bop, late 50s era. I was thinking the same exact thing. Kind of the Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers of video game podcasts. I swear to God, i was thinking the same exact thing kind of the art blakey and the jazz messengers

of video game podcasts i was i swear to god i was thinking the exact same thing yeah but there's something to it then i think yeah for sure there are like 30 of us so it makes sense yeah all right that's that's it so till next time uh come listen again because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!