The Besties - Partying at the World's Worst Summer Camp in The Quarry

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

This week, we're playing Supermassive's latest interactive horror movie-game-thing, which we played in a bunch of different ways, some less recommended than others. Also, we discuss the genre's origins in FMV at length, because ... of course we do. Other games discussed: Until Dawn, Heavy Rain, The Looker, Neon White, Card Shark, Stardew Valley Expanded 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!

Ooh, plants. Sounding good today, man. Thank you. You still in California? Yeah. Damn. Are you sitting in the pipe? Oh, I have moved into the pipe.

Oh, that's good. You might know me. My name is Lawnmower Man. Rent? With rent these days, the way it is, who could afford to live anywhere but a pipe? A pipe. I aspire to a pipe. Frickin' Mario used to live in a little three? A pipe. I aspire to a pipe. Frickin' Mario used to live in a little three-bed, two-bath, ranch-style home in Reseda.

But then, you know, inflation. Now a man's a pipe man. The first time Mario went through a pipe, he must have assumed that he had died. Yes. Right? Yeah. A hundred percent. Like, the first time, like, Mario's first impression

of the Mushroom Kingdom was, this is the afterlife. Have I been good or bad? I can't figure it out. I know I died in that part. Probably sees Bowser and is like, well, I guess I was bad. I guess I was bad.

I guess this is hell. I think he did die. I think he was, like, eating, like, a meatball grinder while working on a toilet, choked a little bit, fell face first, drowned in the toilet bowl. And this has all been his death dream. Do you think each of the games are like a different circle of hell, basically?

Well, my bigger issue with that theory is that Super Mario Bros. 2 is a dream. But I guess is it a dream within a dream? It's a dream within a dream. Timely. 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. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the game this week. My name is Russ Breschle, and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment.

It is a video game club, and just by listening, my friend, you are now a member. This week, we're talking about a new entry from Supermassive. Supermassive is called The Quarry. Chris, take me to The Quarry. The Quarry is a playable horror movie all right man i think that's like pretty much it like this is your segment plant i feel like you need yeah you can't be more so you don't you don't know this yet i have a page and a half of notes for when we talk about the proper game but i don't want to spoil it because talk okay it's a horror movie where you go into the

woods there's a summer camp it's playing you with a lot of trees. You sound so miserable, is what I'm saying. You gotta, like, do you... Oh, okay. Oh, no, no, no. Sorry, Justin. Can you set me up? Yeah. Okay, Chris Plant, tell me about The Quarry.

This week, we're talking about The Quarry, the new game from Supermassive. It is a spiritual follow-up to Until Dawn, and it is going to thrill you and chill you more after the break. Okay, so quick walk-in if you don't know Supermassive or their history. They've made a lot of different stuff.

They did some DLC, some adaptations, what have you, but really the main through-line of what you would think of as like super massive games are Until Dawn, which is in this genre of like playable horror movie, you know, recreating like slasher or whatever, uh, Until Dawn, Hidden Agenda, which was like, kind of like same idea, but more of like a crime thriller type deal um they did a couple vr things uh the impatient and there's another one little hope uh house of ashes so that then there's the there's the dark pictures anthology yeah also hidden agenda that was the one you controlled with

your cell phone yeah that was a neat one where players would like great idea it was neat and now the quarry which is not part of the dark pictures anthology it is rather a standalone game published by 2k games the quarry but really does it matter because effectively it's it's the same it is in this genre there's no creepy man's feel like they are siblings right of a piece yeah i like these games i i enjoy these games i didn't actually i i should clarify i liked until dawn uh i think i only played a little bit of the um the first what was it man of medan uh with and i think we did little hope as a besties episode if i don't remember if you were playing it but i don't think so um but i really liked until dawn a lot because

i love schlocky like trashy horror movies which like this this definitely is ari aster this is not this is full-blown like uh pastiche of a uh i mean it's got so many different horror classics like a like a scream like a i mean american werewolf in paris is pretty on the nose uh but that um it's it's this this one in particular really wears its inspirations out on its sleeve and even though it does not do so with a deft or subtle hand i'm still i'm still down i'm still down for all of that just because i'm i kind of adore the genre fresh day can you give us like kind of a narrative setup on on the quarry sure so there's like a prologue with some like brief scary horror moments but the bulk of quarry takes place on this camp called Hackett's Quarry.

It's the last day of summer camp. And the counselors have basically seen all the kids away. They drive away in a big yellow school bus. The counselors are left there with the owner of the camp, who is played by David Arquette in the most uncanny valley scenario I've ever seen. uncanny valley scenario i've ever seen yeah and they uh are basically like stuck at the camp for another night because of some shenanigans and david arquette seems very concerned about that and but doesn't give any sort of background and so the counselors sort of like pair off and explore the camp and you know get down to some business. But then things go horribly awry. But before then, there's also just fun, campy

hijinks. Yes, there's definitely plenty of hijinks. Do you like to smooch? Do you like to bonfire? I would say fun, campy, and extremely poorly paced hijinks. Yeah, the hijinks are not nearly as fun or as campy as... Okay, can I talk about...

This is the only part I feel super duper strongly about. Go for it. So you get the basic flow, right? You're walking around camp, you make some decisions and conversations. You know, there's a few like quick time events that are extremely generous, I think. I mean, you're walking around and you're like, I don't know, you step, in these early hours, you like step on a, I don't know, you're going down the stairs and you push the button

so you don't slip on the stairs. There's a tree branch and you dodge it. A lot of it is key throwing. People throw keys or phones and then you have to catch them with quick time event precision. It is, I mean, half the game is this and not a scare in sight maybe some like atmosphere but like

nothing scary has happened i mean there's a few like fake like a bird flies by or like a boar but like it is un it is unimaginable how long this section of like setting up the characters goes like if this is a horror movie this is like an eight hour ish experience you know if this is a horror movie it would be the first hour is nothing happens and then the second hour is the the horror movie part like it is so even that even that is like there are some horror movies that go an hour without like really starting to do payoffs on the scares. You can't scale that out to an eight to ten hour long game. It is rough.

I think there's ten chapters in the game. The first three are all set up. And then in four, people can start to die. Depending on choices. um depending on choice well it also so like fresh said the beginning this sort of intro is its own little like mini scary story right to get you into it and i think the good thing about that is it's i don't know like an hour hour and a half fun little story the bad thing is okay well now you have to reset everything and then once again, build the story back up. I mean, but that's a pretty typical horror trope, right?

You look at Scream and it's like, well, of course, but that's the whole question, right? Is like, sure, it's a horror trope, but does it help in a video game where you are going to just be waiting for a story to start all over again? Yeah. I mean, so, yeah, I want to i want to talk about the pacing really quick because i think there's like great like i don't know praised horror and then they're like the a24 type of horror right and there's like good schlocky horror and i think great horror is like very well paced it is the type of movie that you can watch on your own and it benefits like not talking over it right like you really get into it it completely holds your attention that's why i like horror because

i feel like once i turn it on the rest of the world just kind of like disappears because i have to pay attention to it but then there's schlocky horror which i don't know about y'all but i watched a ton of it when i was in high school like just watching it with friends and watching with vhs tapes and like there it's kind of the opposite like the pace is trash like it's actually i always feel like intentionally slow because they know people are going to be talking over it they know people are only paying attention like halfway yeah and i think this game i guess i'm curious if it works a lot better with a lot of friends in the same way that like watching trashy horror worked in high school yeah it's like okay you're all kind of talking over it you're you know joking you're using it kind of as a prompt for conversation which is again what i think is horror is good for because it's people making a

bunch of really stupid decisions so that well not only that talk about that. Yeah, well, not only that, but also the game is designed, at least some portion of it is designed specifically with multiplayer in mind, either it's past the controller multiplayer, or it's not out yet, but they have an online mode coming, where you would watch the game with, I think it's eight people, and you literally vote on what should happen, and whoever gets the most votes, that's what you end up doing. Which is probably the idea. I mean, I don't know that it's unrealistic that anybody would do that in one sitting, but that is probably the most fun way of doing it. I have to take umbrage with the idea that this has passed the controller multiplayer.

It does not. If this has passed the controller multiplayer, fucking The Witness has passed the controller multiplayer. It does not. If this has passed the controller multiplayer, fucking The Witness has passed the controller multiplayer. Like, what remains of Edith Finch has passed the controller multiplayer. The ability to pass the controller to other humans is not a feature, Supermassive. But I would say, I think what they're trying to do

is the idea of each person that is playing is basically assigned to a specific character in the game. I think that's the ethos behind it. So it's sort of I get what you're saying, Justin, but it's a it's a little more multiplayer than that. I I want to say so. So I enjoyed this game. I enjoyed my my playthrough of it. And I want to give a lot of praise to the cast, which I think has some genuine, like, fantastic performances.

As soon as I saw that Skylar Gizondo is in it, he is the kid from Booksmart who is like the dweeby guy and nobody comes to his birthday party and is fucking hysterical in that movie. He is like excellent at this game and I was like, I will do anything in my power

to keep this sweet boy alive. Which character does he? He's Max Brinley. At the very beginning. He's in the prologue. Oh, right, yeah. Justice Smith gives a very Justice Smith-y performance in a way. Star of Detective Pikachu.

Star of Detective Pikachu. Brenda Song, who's been in everything. On the Disney Channel. Lots of just horror movie and cult movie people. Ethan Supley, Lance Henriksenson and fresh already mentioned David Arquette and of course Ted Raimi who like is just eats up the scenery in every fucking like in a digital

performance eats up the scenery in every hey let's not let's not blow over Grace Zabriskie though Grace Zabriskie most notably from Twin Peaks in my world Sarah Palmer. She's great.

She's like a sort of odd tarot reader, fortune teller type person who gives you like what I think is actually a really cool little thing where if you find these collectibles, she will give you a small glimpse of what could be in the future. So it's like a tiny five-second clip of a scene, which just isn't, like, it's not really that helpful, but it is sort of in the back of your head, like, oh, this is something that could happen if I make the wrong choice, which is kind of interesting. It does make me, because I agree with everything that's been said. I think the performances are great,

and I actually think the writing, specifically for, like, the back-and-forth dialogue, not bad either and it's that's a rare commodity in video games like that sort of back and forth tends to fall pretty flat and there's a lot of pretty entertaining scenes on that front just to go back to the pacing a little bit it reminded me of telltale insofar as the way telltale structured their things would be basically like two and a half hour two-ish hour episodes right and the episodes would have like a very clear uh kind of arc to themselves like they'd have like a mini arc and it did make me kind of wish that that was more the mindset for this game and these games in general because at least you know

oh in these two hours i'm gonna get at least some of a story rather than seeing like a third of a story yeah uh yeah before we move on i want to talk about the all the actors you mentioned uh i think that's great there are so many people who are recognizable if you look traditionally beautiful you look great in this game i think the engine and the art design work out really well if you have any unusual just look and that's not even to say like i'm not saying ugly here but like ted ramey even skylar gizondo who i mean he's also in righteous gemstones licorice pizza i mean this is a dude who's like a handsome dude yeah handsome dude he's in a lot of movies it took me forever to figure out who the hell he

was supposed to be like oh i recognized him i'm congratulations yeah i didn't have that problem no there's still i mean i gotta say the facial capture is fantastic there but but there is like even with the like people who i know people like brenda song and and and some of the other characters like i know what they look like every once once in a while, it's just the teeth, I think. Yeah, it's the mouth. The mouth that's kind of teethy. And the eyes. And the eyes can be a little dead.

The eyes are... I think there's some close-ups on the eyes in this game that are stunning. I mean, they're like, what is that? I thought it was video. Like, I really thought it was video. I think there might be two sets of eyes. Yeah.

Because I think when they're wide, it looks like dead eyes dead eyes and when they're close up they really do look realistic i think they might be mindful of the limitations of the engine and what they can pull off i agree with the smile in their defense a big company like disney very recently did motion capture around a mouth specifically on a well-known character in The Mandalorian, and totally beefed it. I don't think anyone has fully nailed it. Yeah, this isn't me criticizing them. This is me saying I kind of wish for celebrities that they didn't look like the celebrity sometimes

because that just makes the Uncanny Valley effect so much more obvious. So I'm going to disagree with that because I think in a horror game, it adds to... I don't want to see sweet Skylar Gazzando get fucking decapitated. I'm not joking. I don't want to see the little girl from Modern Family get her fucking head ripped off. But you're agreeing with Plant, though.

Yeah, you're agreeing with me. No, no, no, no. I am disagreeing because I think it adds to the tension of like, I want to keep these people alive. Oh, okay, okay, okay. You're bought in quicker because you're making them. Yeah, of course. See, I thought what you were going to say is in a horror game, it's good that they look like soulless, desiccated corpses.

No, no, no, no. No, I, well, just very quick on that. What's up with when you need to make a decision and the camera like zooms in on the character's face and it looks like they're having really bad gas or they don't know where they are. I mean, Elinor had the same problem. I think it's just

tough to visually manifest what it looks like when people are thinking. Yeah. It's bizarre. I was just going to say, I think the performances are fantastic. There were like four characters in this game that I was just going to say, I think the performances are fantastic. There were like four characters in this game that I was like, man, I really hope they make it. And that was enough to pull me through.

I think I played through the whole thing in like two nights. Did they make it? So a couple of them did. A couple of them died in the dumbest way imaginable. But I played through the game in director mode and i'd be curious if anybody else did that too i also tried that yes okay uh director mode is a completely non-interactive way of of watching the quarry and the way it works is you have three options when you start you can choose everyone lives and then you see a playthrough of the game where everyone lives that's boring you can see the

everyone dies version of it where everyone dies that is also boring or you can customize actually i think that that customization is called director mode is otherwise it's just called movie movie mode. And in director mode, you set the stats for all of the campers or rather all of the all the camp counselors. And those stats are things like, you know, physical dexterity and cool headedness and observation and social skills. and social skills and you assign them points in those stats and then the playthrough goes through and incorporates those stats into the decisions it automatically makes and the QTEs that it automatically succeeds at or fails and all that. That was a very cool way of playing through the game because it solves what is in my mind the worst, the biggest conceptual problem with super massive horror games and it is this if you play through the game very well you take your time and look for all the clues and you do all the qtes and you don't make completely boneheaded decisions when you are

afforded the opportunity like do you want to open this shaking rattling door filled with screaming behind like as long as you don't make those kinds of decisions you will you will do very well most of the campers will survive if not all of them right uh that's not a great horror movie right it removes those moments where the character doesn't know they're in a horror movie but use the audience do so you're like no no no don't go in that door but i'm getting control i'm not going to open that fucking trap door no way like i know this is a horror game yeah you need to play it like you're playing an rpg where you're playing a character that can be a bit of a dumbass yes and like being true to that character and so i i did the same mode that griffin did he also linked us

to a mode that someone on reddit came up with where you know you could just max out everyone's stats and everyone wins and hooray that's boring but uh someone came up with the idea of using a d8 to basically roll for stats for the different campers yes so there was a lot of randomness and variety so i did that and so i had like oh i rolled a one on someone that character was a total dumbass and would fuck up every qte and event and whatever and then i had someone else who was basically like turned into the you know final girl trope because she kept surviving um so that was cool i it made me wish that there was more of a visual manifestation of those moments in director mode.

Just like I knew, oh, this is a moment they failed or succeeded and why. But I did actually like this. A, I think you need to unlock it. I think in the deluxe mode, it comes unlocked automatically. But I think the normal mode, you don't get it automatically. I don't know it automatically okay um i don't know that it's certainly if you're playing in multiplayer you should not do that because i think part of the fun in multiplayer is making dumb choices with other people yeah but if you're playing alone

and you just kind of want to experience the story in an interesting way yeah it's pretty cool the one issue with that d8 mode um which i is what did and I thought was very clever, is I didn't know while assigning those stats which characters I would really like. So Caitlin, which was the character that Brenda Song plays, and Dylan, who I don't have that actress name pulled up in front of me. Miles Robbins. Miles Robbins. Like, probably my two favorite characters in the game like their their dynamic is fucking great and so charming and funny dylan in particular is like such a great really good character actually uh but i didn't know that when i was assigning stats and so they

didn't make it out uh and that was frustrating because the way they went out wasn't necessarily uh i don't know it didn't necessarily align with how their character was the rest of the time. So even that way of doing it, the director mode is not perfect, but it does add this sort of random element that gets around the issue of like, well, do I purposefully fail this QTE

just so we can have a have a death here well i think there are two different games that you are playing when you play that any of these super massive games right and i think the traditional one is you are playing as people inside of a horror movie and you are making decisions inside of it which is one type of fantasy right like okay you're kind of like most horror games. And then the other fantasy is, what if you could control or, like, make your own horror movie? And I think this sounds great in that it's serving that, which is kind of a totally different thing. One huge thing. scenes with Grace Zabriskie, where she's like reading your tarot cards, which by the way,

this game has some Romani stereotypes and slurs that are like borderline drag me to hell. But you don't see any of that in director mode. You don't get any of those Grace Zabriskie like tarot scenes, right? Because you don't need, I guess ostensibly you don't need the sneak previews. Well, you can't collect the collectibles. I guess ostensibly you don't need the sneak previews. Well, you can't collect the collectibles. Does it also remove the QT animated shorts? The QT animated shorts?

Yeah. So in the main game, when you are doing the prologue, right, when your QTE pops up for the first time, the whole game stops. And then you get treated or cursed by these, like, Saturday morning cartoons that explain how QTEs work. They're voiced by like a Rod Sterling impersonator. And they're very, very clever. But it's also kind of frustrating because you're getting into this horror story.

And like every 10 minutes or so, it's like, I see that you are tense. What if we brought up a cartoon animated short yeah yeah and those are weird too right they got they get a rod serling impersonator and then the the shorts themselves look like fallout and it's yeah like fallout boy style fallout stuff it's like this is not you just had two things you like like yeah yeah um there's also there's weird i don't know the the stuff that hangs on when you play i'm a gamer right so i like to play video games rather than just watch them um so i'm a real gamer and there's weird gamer like game lineage type stuff that holds over like uh give me an example um there's a

scene where you can eavesdrop on mr h who is um uh david arquette's character and he kind of catches you and then like he catches you and then you get this prompt on the screen that's like mr h is disappointed in you and it's like why did you why is that necessary if you if the performance captures this good like why can't he just look disappointed fair like why do i need to see like that sort of like alert on the screen like it really again it's like it's just like the the tutorial thing like taking you out of it for no real reason i mean uh, if I could also say, I wanted to say something a while ago, but rushed past it.

This idea of like playing in a group, I think would be pretty effective except for the first half of the game. Like I wanted to play with my wife. We've played some of the super massive things before and it's more like her sort of like watching and me doing some of the quick time stuff and and it's more like her sort of like watching and me doing some of the the quick time stuff and then we'll make the decisions together um but i mean we were

at it for two hours with like nothing interesting happening and it's like it i mean i can't really imagine a an event where you would like invite adults over for a two evening, like, okay, tonight is going to be really boring. Just hang with me for four hours in this party setting. And then I promise the next four hours will be a lot of fun, which they would be. I just can't imagine a group of adults,

like powering through the first half of this thing. I think that's true for like people like us with kids and stuff. But I think like, there are a lot of people who just hang out on discord with friends every night and it's mostly just an excuse to talk and i feel like it's those are the people that sure well the online version may very well be yes i mean that's a different kettle of fish it's not even live yet oh well a question for you you said you don't like the part where it's like mr. H is disappointed in you. Yeah. Would it have been better if it didn't appear on the screen, but your wife just mumbled it under her breath? Oh, that could be good.

It looks like Mr. H is disappointed in you. He's not the only one. I think if this was a six hour long affair, which, by the way, I wouldn't be surprised if my playthrough was considerably shorter than yours. Because a couple of my guys were real dumbos and died like instantly I played both ways right so I tried the director's mode too the director's mode or movie mode

completely skips all the ambulating around the world so like there's no walking which is I gotta say it sucks it sucks walking around this world. Yeah. So, like, there's no walking, which is, I gotta say, it sucks. Yeah. It sucks. Yeah, it's nice to not have to do that.

Walking around this world, I don't know how they messed it up so bad. It looks terrible. Like, you can walk, and you look sort of normal, and then there's, like, a walk faster button, where the person looks like,

it looks like a four-year-old making an action figure walk across a carpet. It's like, it looks ridiculous. I can't fathom, and I don't know why it's a thing. But you skip all that stuff. And that's great. What you cannot skip under any circumstances are the cut scenes that you, even the ones you have seen before which really for me is the biggest critical flaw of the quarry um is that even in

that director mode like i got the playthrough i got right but i was bummed because a couple of my favorite characters like didn't make it out and i know also that there was a bigger overarching mystery that i just kind of glanced off the side of because of the characters who died. And that's cool, right? Like conceptually, that's very cool. I got online to like look up the ending later. And it's kind of neat that I just didn't get it. That I just got my own kind of ending that had its own resolution.

It's like you saw a cabin in the woods and didn't go in the basement, basically. Not quite that dramatic but sure um yeah the but there's no skipping cut scenes on on repeat playthroughs which like sorry guy like there is there is no way i will i i really loved my playthrough of this game there is no way on earth i would do it again like Like now, maybe in a, maybe in a couple of years when the ravages of time have scrubbed it from my memory, but the, that,

that they missed a trick there in a pretty major way. Cause there's fuck, there's like over a hundred different ways that the game can end up based on who dies and when and what you find and how like, and yeah. And switching from one mode to the other, if you decide like, ah, you know, I tried the director's mode that's interesting but i actually want to play it or i want to take control now yeah that would be that would be that would be

fantastic but you can't do that it's it's and that's not that doesn't seem like i don't know so wildly innovative that it would be difficult or impossible to do uh and it seems like the kind of thing that would elevate this and really honestly elevate the whole of supermassives like canon from a trashy novelty that i enjoy once to like oh this is like actually kind of a this is kind of a cool exploration of like video game storytelling uh which it absolutely could be the pieces are there they just do not give you the tools you need to kind of like line them up in in all the different ways that you might that can be patched in i feel like it's like they could definitely add that that uh um who pressed mute on uncle marcus

actually just added this feature that lets you skip more stuff. Classic. I would also add, if you feel compelled after you've played it to see other scenes for what it's worth, it's actually kind of the best game to scrub through on YouTube, which is what I did, just to see

changes in various scenes and what could play out. Man, my playthrough of the prologue ended in the funniest possible way because your kind of lead character just sort of like bails out of nowhere, like not in character at all. She's like, sorry,

and just walks away from her friend. Wait, you just left? Well, it wasn't me. Oh, because you didn't have a choice. Yeah, so she just is like, sorry, and leaves poor Gizondo. Hey guys, can I just say, there has to be a middle ground in this,

please, where you get to do the idea that you wouldn't want to interact with this thing that's already such a slog for half of it is so mild. It was so funny, though. I really got a kick out of it. But yeah, you can watch it on YouTube if you want. I think the takeaway here is if you like horror

games or you like the Supermassive games, this is a pretty good entry. You are going to like it, yeah. It is on par with Until Dawn. I think that's right. I think the performances are much, much better in this one, but I also Facial capture too, much, much better. Much, much better. I think Until Dawn was more was a better paced game

that kind of more evenly distributed the scares and I would say more a bigger variety of the type of scares than the quarry does, but they both have their strengths. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break and we'll talk about more

sort of like storytelling in this sort of mode. And we'll do that right after this. Shoot the tube, dog meat. Shoot the tube, dog meat. No, I'm really interested in this idea. When I was playing this, and I know that it probably occurs to me more

because I'm somebody who's played a lot of uh fmv games um but fmv from its inception which if you're not familiar with the term it's like games that have real actors and performers in it most recently think like her story and conviction and stuff like that uh and in the olden, the olden times, like sewer shark, night trap, that sort of thing. Those are always really designed. And I would say the most effective ones were designed to be like interactive movies.

It's movies you interact with. Um, and that never really landed, um, because one loading times were too long. So it never really got into a flow. There was not budgets. There weren't actors. Um, there was a lot of this stuff that still was getting ironed out but i

i really felt this clear line between that and the quarry i mean it very much feels like an interactive movie and i was curious if like where you what you think of this idea as a sub-genre i mean we've seen it in horror not a lot in other like it's pretty much just been supermassive right sort of like carrying this particular uh torch you could argue quantic dream does a bit of that i think quantic dream games are much more interactive than than the supermassive games are but they are maybe it's just the sort of like heavy focus on narrative with outcomes influenced by your qte dexterity to me quantic dream the delineation i would make and it's a it's a pretty minute one but to me quantic dream has always felt like people who are making games that wish they were making

movies yeah you know what i mean like this and this feels like a little bit more settled in the fact like we are making a movie it's just a movie that you can you know be a part of if you would if you so choose yeah i mean it's also the issue for quantum dream and again for people that aren't familiar quantic dream developed heavy rain uh what is the robot game? Detroit Become Human. Detroit Become Human. Those games. I think the issue there is they are desperately,

desperately trying to make, quote, meaningful stories that tackle important issues and they are very poorly written and it does not work there. Whereas when you're doing like a lighter fare, like a horror movie that's like schlocky and silly i think it works a lot better in this format um

i still think this is like very move it's way more movie than game in in the quarry and i don't think that's a bad thing i think that is that was their passion and that's what they feel like they're good at um you know it's it's difficult to sort of bridge that gap but i i would rather them feel more confident in the thing that they're confident in which is in this case making a movie um then trying to like jam in like hey you can cook eggs well that sounds like metal gear you mentioned the writing and i think somebody complimented the writing in the first half of this episode and i do need to just very quickly mention that there's a part where

ethan supley is chasing um justice smith through a house and ethan supley's character shouts um you can't hide from me in my own house fuckerer. And then Justice Smith shouts back, as the screen fades to black to transition to another screen, you're a fucker. And it's one of the wildest sort of written lines, deliveries. Yeah, but what was Justice Smith's smartness stat or acting under pressure stat? Oh, that's a fair point. Maybe I had him set too.

I bet, no, no doubt. There were like two witty comebacks you could choose from or acting under pressure stat. Oh, that's a fair point. Maybe I had him set too. I bet. No, no doubt. There were like two witty comebacks you could choose from and he just like didn't choose. Yeah. I think that the FMV game comparison feels a little specious to me

and only because those games were very Dragon's Lir in that there was like wirehead didn't have 60 different and like it had fail states that would kick you to a do you want to try again screen and success states that would move you forward in the one story i i think that the uh branching pathways thing which like whether or not you like quantic dream games like they did some pretty major innovations in the space even at a time when people like um bioware were saying like oh man mass effect so many different endings you're gonna shit when really like it's not that huge of a difference between the different nobody nobody's shit

yeah right but in like heavy rain there's not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination but it's genuinely ambitious and i think well executed in how when that game ends you you you can have a completely different playthrough result than somebody else. I think that, okay, this is getting a little too heady. Certainly too heady for besties, but this is my outlet, so here we are. The problem that I think you're always going to struggle with with interactive fiction is that almost by their very nature, stories should communicate something beyond the text. Themes, something they're saying.

It doesn't have to be a message. It could just be like what it's about or the way the narratives connect in a satisfying way that like makes you feel something in an emotional state. I feel like when you're, when you give that much control over the narrative of the player, you're always going to struggle with the sense with like creating a satisfying narrative experience authorial intent yeah because you're handing if you're sharing that it starts to feel a little bit more like um i mean there

is a successful version of this and it's dungeons and dragons but that's completely um a shared like collaborative storytelling method. And that obviously has a guardian in the DM who can make sure that things sort of progress in a certain way to some extent. Yeah. I also think that's why maybe director's mode might work better because at least then the shared authorial intent,

you're on the same page. Like you kind of have equal control where when you're in the game and you don't really know what any of intent, you're on the same page. Like you kind of have equal control. Yeah. Where when you're in the game and you don't really know what any of the decisions you're doing, you don't know how they factor in. You can't sculpt it because you're like,

you know what? I want to tell this type of story today. And I think that this sort of genre is always going to be more effective in this sort of idea because you're relying on some more base type thrills right it's not the themes of it are so unimportant that like it's it's it's more akin to like a roller coaster

you know with a lot of of these movies and like i i feel like that makes a little bit more effective to to give the player a hand in it a Counterpoint, though, in director's mode, you are not fighting against your primordial gamer instincts to press the X button the moment it appears on the screen, right? And that takes away... When I play a horror game that is, like, truly pretty scary, like, the first couple Outlast games, games like scared the shit out of me. Like any, any type of game where you are hiding from a nude murderer is,

is, it scares me. Right. And so what I would do is I would just like run up to them and die just to get, just so that power, they no longer have that power over me right and i think that's true in any game but especially these super massive games where it's like i am not scared

of this werewolf that is chasing me because i i can just press the right buttons and that will go and in director's mode it's a it's it's a complete crapshoot. You do not know how a scene is going to play out unless you gave a character full stats or no stats, in which case you're pretty sure how it's going to play out. And that's, I think, another mark in the column of that being the more sort of successful way of doing the story. Yeah. When you're describing two different perspectives, right? Like one of those is it's scary because you are worried about losing and it's you that is like the tension is in you right the other one is you are watching this effectively movie at this point and you are caring about the characters and the horror is you don't want that character to die and like i feel like those are kind of two or or you want the character to do something dumb or funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I don't know, man.

I'm like so mixed on. I like that this exists. I like that people continue to try game narrative stuff. There's a part of me that always feels like, please just make a movie. Like, please. It's just the pacing. I feel like it just it's the pacing i feel like it comes back to the pacing for me like yes yeah it's just too long like yeah it just needs to be shorter

arcs you can't maintain an eight hour long slasher like yeah are you okay you can't like an eight hour movie is unthinkable anyway but like an eight hour long horror movie of any stripe is completely not sustainable. But there's an alternative to that. And it's Alan Wake, which was structured like a TV series and had 45 minute or whatever, 90 minute episodes that had like endings and surprise twists. Absolutely. Each of those. There's a much better version of the quarry that just intercuts between the first half and the second half.

We mentioned it earlier, but I genuinely think the first couple seasons of the Telltale Walking Dead is maybe the most successful that has ever been. Branching narrative, lots of different ways it can turn out. Great, well-performed characters who you do not want to die. And sometimes your hand is kind of forced and you do have to see that happen that game i played together with rachel front to back and there were some moments in it that were genuinely scary not because zombies are scary but because like this game executed everything it tried to do well made you care about these characters and then was like okay you can't keep all of them alive good luck yeah i think that's also a good case of even still you don't want it to be

eight hours long because i think that works the first three episodes of that and then i think it falls off precipitously well it depends on the right again walking dead that that release schedule of those telltale games while frustrating when you're like in it and you just want to know how the shit resolves, playing two hours, two pretty tight hours, and then waiting a couple months for the next episode to drop was, in retrospect, a good way of doing things. Oh, yeah. I mean more that you know that the two characters are going to live, so it ends up feeling like having eight new movies where you know that the protagonists are going to survive. Yeah. Anyway, I like video games. I like story.

I like that people are trying. I have a feeling they're going to crack this nut fully one day. Right now, pretty close. Yeah, pretty darn close. Sure. You guys been playing anything else that you've enjoyed? I've been playing The Looker on Steam. The Looker is a parody of The Witness,

and it just spends two hours dunking on The Witness, and it's pretty fucking funny. It's really timely, too. It is extremely. Well, it takes a while to make games. Fair. The Witness, for those that don't recall, was a first

person puzzle game by jonathan blow uh who which had like these line puzzles but also had like very heady audio recordings and this game also has those things but is like just kind of a little bit shitting on i mean a lot shitting on the original while also having some surprisingly good design like puzzles in there. Uh, if you are into puzzle games, it's like pretty fucking fun. And,

uh, in addition to, to being funny, I think you have to have played the witness. I think you have to have, I think, I think you need five minutes context of what the witness was before playing this. I mean, there are some jokes in it that are like the there's a part where a laser comes out of the ground that would then like shoot at another puzzle to activate.

It was just like straight out of the witness. Yeah. yeah uh and in the looker it takes like five full minutes for his laser to like deploy and aim and then like bring out a mirror to refract the beam and then bring out like a mechanical arm to adjust the laser like and that's it's it is i think funny uh from if you've played like any games but if you have played the witness where you have seen that slow ass laser it's a it is a knockout fucking joke yeah uh it's also free it's on steam and it's completely free so you don't have much of an excuse i even like the witness and yeah no i like the witness too i i mean it's a good game um i have still just been playing steam Deck all day, all night. And I just started dabbling in the world of mods for Stardew Valley.

Specifically, there's one called Expanded Edition, I think, which like completely changes the not completely. It adds a ton of stuff to the town as a bunch of characters and events and items. adds a ton of stuff to the town adds a bunch of characters and events and items um and then i've got like a bunch of different little quality of life mods in there uh that you know have smoothed off some of the rough edges that i wasn't necessarily psyched about uh playing is that all through steam workshop or are you like so no, no. And this is, I was very nervous to do it because you have to go into the, like, desktop mode of the Steam Deck to do it, which is simple enough. And then, like, use a web browser on the desktop mode to, like, download software and then go on, like, Nexus mods and download all the mods and do you know file management to drop them in the right folders and i was like fuck this is gonna be a nightmare it was really easy it was very easy to sort of navigate the you know linux desktop of the steam deck uh much more than i thought it was

going to be but uh i am i am fully back it is one of my favorite games of all time and uh it's it's very cool how much the community has created these incredibly polished, virtually canonical additions to the game. And especially on Steam Deck. Like, come on, you can't. It's perfect. It's perfect for that. You gotta do a little finagling,

but if you have a Steam Deck and like the game, or genuinely, honestly, I guess if you have a pc and and enjoyed stardew valley like it is not hard to get it chopped and screwed in a way that is really very very cool to see um i uh wanted to talk about uh well i've been playing plants game as well so i'll let plant talk about plants game but uh i wanted to mention um card shark which is a very interesting little thing that uh travis my brother travis mackerel actually um clued me into uh i played it on switch i'm sure it's on steam too it is a card cheating game it is a game about cheating people at cards. And the basic flow is you've been taken

under the wing of this like professional card cheat when he notices some latent ability in your character. You go stage by stage, which are arranged like card games that you're traveling to. And before each one, you learn basically a new way of cheating at cards. So it's like ways of marking a card so that you can find it later in the deck and rearranging and palming cards and deck switches, all which are achieved by like sort of precisely timed. sort of precisely timed uh you know a lot of them are precisely timed like uh you pour a drink for a certain amount of time and you use the time that you're pouring the drink to look at the cards of the person that you're pouring the drink for right but if you pour too long while you're looking you'll overflow the drink and blow the blow the scam um just as an example and then you got you have to like have a hidden signal that you use to hint to your partner

as to what their best cards are. That's just one example of one of them. They all feel very different and interesting and they use different skills. It's like, how quickly can you organize these cards in your head? How quickly can you find the card you're looking for and remember what step of the trick you're on?

You start getting to a point where you use two decks so you can put dope cards from one deck into the other and then between rounds you have to discreetly remember the cards that you snuck into one of the decks and go through it and remove those cards so that you don't get caught when somebody also pulls you know the ace of hearts yeah uh and it gets it gets real tricky real fast yeah it is it is really tough and but the the it's well written it looks cool um and uh if that sort of world interests you at all i think it's it's it's very different i mean it's like not like anything i've ever played um but it it is very satisfying when you nail a ripping people off so highly recommend Card Shark

Justin I spoke about Neon White on Rest Eater there this week so I'm ceding my additional time to you because I want to hear what you think about this game Neon White fucking rules Griffin do you play Neon White? I have not played Neon White oh my god Griffin it rules

it rules I love especially after the quarry where which is like the opposite the quarry this is like levels that are 20 seconds long and you okay i'm going to give a very quick okay so you're uh basically in the employ of heaven and you're doing some stuff for heaven to try to get into heaven like killing some people to get into heaven as you do and you have to get through these levels that are

sort of like heavenly looking sort of platformers Dreamcast heaven Dreamcast heaven, thank you I mean that's just heaven and you are equipped with a sword but everything else you collect is in the form of a card and the card has two uses Dreamcast heaven, thank you. I mean, that's just heaven. And you are equipped with a sword, but everything else you collect is in the form of a card,

and the card has two uses. So the card is a gun that you can shoot, like the long-range rifle is a card that you can use the... I use the mouse. So the mouse one button to fire like a gun at the enemies or demons, I guess, and you have to kill a certain number of them to exit the level. And then the right mouse button is the discard.

And when you discard, it uses an ability like a long, like parkour type ability. So like a long dash or a double jump or, you know, and so on. So the levels are how, what is the quickest path that i can find that eliminates all the demons but gets me to where i need to be as quick as possible and you're like finding new little shortcuts throughout as you beat the levels uh the first time you'll often unlock hints as to what the shortcuts are so you're not completely um figuring it out on your own each level also has like a gift that you can find that has a narrative purpose but you can but that adds sort of like a more of a platforming less speed focused way to approach the level um but it

shaving down your time getting it faster and faster and really like the levels are so short that you get a sense of them really quickly like it's it feels so good because you're just doing it over and over and over again until you can do it like flawlessly um and it's super duper satisfying when you can get to that point i became to do like a b segment spoilies chunk in a few weeks on this if everybody's... I need some people to try to come for my times because... I mean, are you on Steam? Yeah, I'm on Steam. Oh, I... Are you friends on Steam?

I need to bug you because... I see your times. They're very easy to find because they're right... I just look for my times and then I go below them. That's weird because I don't even see yours on mine, which means it must be very low. You need to crane your neck back tohe them. That's weird because I don't even see yours on mine, which means it must be very low. You need to crane your neck back

to see them. It's really fun though, and it is like, it is, I don't know, it's just super, it felt so good to play something so gamey. I think that's it. Frush, you want to thank anybody? Sure, I would love to thank the people who

wrote reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. B-M-G-I-A, Mr. Henson, TK333, and Sequitur. Sequitur, which was literally their username was two names. Thank you for writing reviews of the besties on Apple Podcasts. Thank you to everyone for sharing the uh show on twitter or various other places that you tell people about podcasts i don't know where those are but thank you sure this week we spoke about uh supermassives the quarry we also spoke about some of their other games including until dawn i think that's probably the one that got the most airtime

sure uh fresh brought the looker um i brought Neon White. Griffin brought his Steam Deck and Stardew Valley with mods. Expanded Edition, I think, is the one that he mentioned being his favorite. And Justin brought Card Shark and Neon White. And next week, we're talking about Cuphead. Cuphead! Cuphead! I've been playing a little Cuphead to get back into Cuphead to get ready for the Cuphead DLC. Hey, guess what?

Cuphead is a very good video game. Yes. Very good. It is very good. I'm excited. We'll talk about that and so much more next time. Be sure to join us again for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends

pick the world's best games? YAYS! Besties!