The Besties - Pokémon Sword and Shield

Episode Date: December 6, 2019

Griffin loves his adorable little pocket monsters and tries his very best to convince the boys that they are truly creatures of god. This is generally ineffectual. Also: Pokémon that get far, far worse the more they evolve. 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!

one two three four griffin you'd close your eyes when we count is that like a like just focusing or well it's hard isn't it the numbers when the numbers come at you fast and furious and you have to remember um you know what your number is and uh there's a lot of math there's a lot of calculation and if i look around though there's only one number before you uh yeah yeah yeah or but sometimes it's hard to remember that isn't it so i do close my eyes where i go inside what i like to call the math zone um and it's just a fun little like it's there's a lot of geometric lines in there and there's lots of fun numbers and it's neon colored and very tron very math gr. Griffin was the first student to learn Common Core in our family.

So he has a very unorthodox way of handling numbers. Yeah, it's mostly math zone based. And I'd like to invite you guys inside if you want. I'm gonna open my mouth real wide, okay? Welcome to the math city. You've fallen for my trap. It's just like the number 6929 is massive it's just a massive 69 this is all this is using all of the math so there's no room for math in here just a

giant 69 on top of a slightly smaller 420 and this is those two numbers so there's no math i hate this let me out, your teeth are a gate. My name is Justin McElroy, and Mario is my real dad. My name is Griffin McElroy, and Mario is also my dad because we're brothers. My name is Chris Plant, and Yoshi is my papa. I'm Russ Frustik, and I'm gonna win! Welcome to The Besties, a Spotify production. The greatest thing that Spotify ever did was bringing back the besties.

Second best thing was telling Russ that he legally couldn't say his name as loud as he used to say it. So thank you to our overlords at Spotify. It's a great choice, and I celebrate you. Here on the Besties, we talk about the latest and greatest in video gaming entertainment, focusing on one game every week, really drilling down,

getting into the fiber and the grain of the product. And this week, I'd love to talk about Pokemon Sword and Shield. We're doing two games this week. Doing two completely different games this week. All right, take it away someone else i can lead i can sort of lead the charge on this one uh pokemon sword and shield first sort of uh full i would say pokemon adventure out on switch uh obviously let's go uh pikachu and eevee came out what was

that earlier this year was that late last year okay i i just completed a i played that one with my son and it's like he's not a big gamer, but he likes to touch the Pikachu. So we actually finished our playthrough of that like a few weeks ago. So I was sort of coming into this, coming in hot with all of the Pokemon knowledge fresh in my mind. So it's the first sort of full Pokemon adventure on Switch, which is, you know, ostensibly kind of a home console.

Pokemon Adventure on Switch, which is, you know, ostensibly kind of a home console. And, you know, therefore it is the first Pokemon home console game since like, geez, I don't know. There was a Pokemon Colosseum game on like GameCube. But those were not real. It's like, oh, you can battle. All the console ones before this have been kind of like not real Pokemon games. Right. So this, I would say, is a very anticipated thing, whether you're a Switch owner looking for a big, beefy RPG, or if you are a Pokemon fan like I am, and like millions of people are.

And here's what it is. It's very much a Pokemon game. This is not the one that is like the mold breaker. It is, in fact, sort of like profoundly traditional, and it drills down on like the idea of the gym challenge of going across this world and collecting the eight gym badges, which is a tried and true sort of formula. It drills down on that, I think, in an interesting way, which is that like it makes gym battles a big ordeal. Like there's lots of people watching them. There's crowds cheering you on. It fleshes out the gym leaders more as characters.

So you're doing the same stuff, but every time you get to a gym, it's not just like, oh, well, shit, I gotta fight a few people, and they might be a little bit tougher than usual. This is gonna be annoying. But other than that, you're not gonna be be experiencing i think too much new stuff necessarily in this one you explain the like story you i just did yeah i kind of just did you're you're a you're a boy you're a

boy or girl growing up in a small town and it's time to start your pokemon adventure here's one of the grass or a water or fire one take one of these and go on and hey go to that one get the badge cool you did it next one get that badge uh the story is not i don't know i i don't know who is coming into these games necessarily and expecting them to be like a wild reinvention of the of the formula yeah no that's true but i do i don't know it's weird because like i've been playing pokemon games since 98 when red and blue came out like oh gee pokemon games right and i remember and maybe it's because i was just a wii one but i remember like i'm gonna fight giovanni and it's like a huge it's gonna be this big deal and there's something like way more like

kind of low-key about this like it's not i'm not fighting the universe like even the bad guys the bad guys are the best bad guys they are team yell and they are just sort of like rowdy hooligan fans of uh this one trainer named marnie and that like everything they do to stand in your way they're not trying to steal your pikachu they are just such big fans of this other Pokemon trainer that they will be just big, loud assholes the whole time. And that is so delightful to me. There's a lot of things in Pokemon Sword and Shield that are just kind of delightful. And I don't know that that was...

It's the first Pokemon game that I've actually really adhered to since X and Y, which was a few generations ago on 3DS. I never finished Sun and Moon in either sort of form. Yeah, Sun and Moon was not good. Yeah, because, you know, there are a few things that this game does really, really well. Rachel, my wife, was, like, asking me, like,

what's different about this one? Like, why are you enjoying it? And it's kind of like... I'm assuming there's more disgust in her tone. Yeah, I was gonna say. enjoying it and it's kind of like uh like i'm assuming there's more disgust in her tone yeah it's it's kind of like uh like the opposite of death by a thousand cuts it's like life by a thousand like there are a lot of really great quality of life things that are really geared for people who know what they're doing for instance like uh your rival will like be like

hey i'm gonna teach you how to do a pokemon catch and you can be like no no i'm 32 and so i know how to do a pokemon he's like oh okay and you can just skip the tutorial which like uh sun and moon was like five hours of tutorials so like this is obviously a major upgrade and then there's like lots and lots and lots of little things like you can switch your pokemon out of the box like regardless of where you are in the world you don't have to do it um they've added this pokemon camp which is like you know whatever it's this game sort of gimmicky way of uh hanging out with your pokemon but you can also heal them while you're on the road without having to burn a bunch of items that's pretty cool that's good the the biggest thing for me

is and the and there's never really been a pokemon game maybe um i didn't play let's go but maybe let's go did this to a certain extent but being able to see the pokemon in the world like previously you would just like walk into this hot tall grass and have a random encounter and it'd be like okay i guess there's pokemon in this tall grass even though like charizard popped out and the grass is like one foot tall that doesn't make any sense but fine but now you can actually see all of the pokemon just like wandering around and like no but there are occasionally you'll have also they make you want to find the hidden ones though right because so yeah they're the ones that you can see are the common ones and then there are these exclamation points that appear or question

marks whichever and the grass and those i i believe are less common so you actually seek out the random encounters which is a really smart inversion because in the past when i just got thrown into an encounter i i usually just got pissed right it's it's created a really smart loop of when i get to a new area i will just run around catching everything and i again like this game has its hooks in me in a way that this series hasn't done in a while we're like i want to catch everything i'm almost halfway through the pokedex and i'm starting to think that maybe i'm this may be the next generation that i catch them all in which is made easier by the by the whole dexit controversy which we'll get to here in a

second now question when you told this to rachel what was i did i was i was i am too i don't know how to break this news to her it might be very difficult it might strain things a little bit um but it created this really really nice loop where I would get to a new area I would just run around trying to catch everything uh because uh one benefit of them sort of paring down the list of available Pokemon is I feel like this game actually has a really cool roster of Pokemon like you are not spending the first few hours of the game. Like, well, there's another fucking zoo bat. Like you, by the time you get to the first gym, I had a team that I like was having trouble

picking who I actually wanted to be in it because everybody, I had a few like really good potential options and that has not been true in a Pokemon game. I mean, there is a dumb apple. There's an apple, but you can evolve it into a dragon apple. That's badass. I haven't gotten to that point. It's just an apple. Right, but you,

so I would run around and catch everything in this area, and then, you know, my Pokemon would be kind of banged up, and so I'd just camp and heal them up and raise their happiness levels and give them some experience points along the way, and then I could just run through this cave,

and instead of being, like, plagued by Zubats, like, every three steps, I cave and instead of being like plagued by zoo bats like every three steps i can just sort of like weave around them because i don't need to fight them but do anything there's been a lot of positivity here i'm wondering is there somebody maybe a hoops who could hop in and just shut down the party yeah okay so like good i'm glad for you guys and i do not come to denigrate the quality of the pokemon game that has been offered here um i will say that it's weird that they have hand-holding stuff for like catch pokemon here's how to catch a pokemon but not for the like to the outsider like myself who's never really gotten into a pokemon game just like the unfathomable levels of complexity um that that

i find like still so overwhelming and like unpleasant to engage with i'll give you i'll give you a good example right did you Did you hear how Griffin dismissed the Pokemon camp thing as like, it's just a fun little area to play with your Pokemon. I, coming from my perspective, I have no idea if Pokemon camp is important or not. Should I go into that camp

for 10 hours and play with these fucking Pokemon? I have literally no idea. I have 60 Pokemon probably at this point something like that maybe probably a lot more right uh and i'm getting new ones and there's and it's like should i be training up a group for a specific thing that's about to happen or should i have a diverse group that's ready for any situation and who should i be leveling up i have no idea like Like, I have no

clue. And it's like, I feel like if you intrinsically, there is a lot of assumptions. It's not, it doesn't, it's not dissimilar from Madden, I feel like, where it's like, if you don't understand the core game, what the core thing is, like, none of the, like

they have made no concessions to make the rest of it actually make sense. Madden ain't gonna teach you how many points you get on a touchdown it's going to it yes right like i i asked griffin like how do you keep track of like what type is strong against which type and it just points to his brain because like of course right he's been playing these for 20 years like it's okay polygon.com is really good for that griffin poison type weakness strongest let's see let's hear it uh poison type is weak to psychic and ground and it's strong against uh fairy type and uh grass type for sure i may be forgetting one or two different things in there i'll trust you to be right so i i want to i want to respond to what uh hoops is talking about because i think

they're kind of two i'm not saying by the way before you respond i'm not saying this is like a you guys are wrong no and i am right it is literally just the perspective if you're someone who's like i've never gotten into a pokemon game i wonder if if this is the time it is not i think game freak has two challenges and they're they're pretty different one is they have to make a game that five-year-olds can play and enjoy um and learn about the magic of pokemon and become lifetime fans uh then they have to make a game uh for i don't know like me like somebody who an adult who maybe played the game a while ago and is interested in it and then they have to make a game for competitive gamers who uh have everything memorized and are going to

irl tournaments um to compete for cash prizes and making a game like that i just think is borderline impossible to please everybody but then there's there's a separate problem which is uh they have to create the illusion of magic for children that these pokemon are real and that they um respond to you and that you are raising them so when you ask about the camp um hoops my guess is doesn't matter much but they don't want to let you know that uh in any way in the game because they want the you know 10 year old who's playing it to be like oh my gosh i have to keep my meowth so happy because i love him and adore him and if i don't make him the sweetest beef curry he won't do his best for me in battle when in reality like the ones and zeros don't

don't validate that i don't know the difference between stuff that's in there because it's like fun if you want to do it or it's in there because it's like important to experiencing the whole thing right yeah it's our broken adult minds a child comes across this and is like, I am lost in the magic. And our adult minds come to it and we say, how do I make the ones and the zeros do what I need them to do? Right, I need to min-max my investment in these little digital monsters.

The truth of the matter is that it is not a particularly difficult role-playing game. So these systems that are, you know, you're finding intimidating, like, the answer to most of those questions is, like, no, you don't need to do it, because all you need is, like, if you're going into the rock type gym, you need to know what beats it, and you need to have

a good, one good sweeper Pokemon of that type, and you are going to be fine. This game does an okay job of, like, actually keeping you at the correct like uh levels for the most part like i have found myself somewhat challenged uh with each area i'm not just sort of steamrolling although i am just about to get at the eighth badge and i am i have reached steamroll sort of capabilities um and and i don't know that uh

there is something this is the game i think if i was going to like summarize like why i am enjoying it despite the the controversies surrounding it uh is is really just the the catching and collecting is just really working for me this time uh there there's a new feature that is not exploited to the best of uh you know, Game Freak's ability called the Wild Area, which is sort of a big open area that, thank God, you can control the camera with the right thumbstick, which is a Pokemon first, which really tripped me out, where you can run around and see, like, all these different Pokemon. There are rare, super difficult spawns. There are these things called Max Raid Battles, where you and three others fight a Gigantamax or Dynamax Pokemon, which is just like big, strong Pokemon. So there's some tactics

there. Uh, and the online functionality of the game is like actually pretty, pretty good, uh, where I can just like press the start button and look at a ticker of what people online are doing, find a max raid battle somebody's doing, hop into it, catch that Pokemon, get some XP candies to like level up all my Pokemon with. Like there are really, really, really good loops in this game that that are really, really hooking me. Yeah, I did want to talk about the difficulty, though, because you mentioned you mentioned how easy it is. And that's true. Like effectively, if you just play, eventually your Pokemon will be so strong that nothing will really be a threat. your pokemon will be so strong that nothing will really be a threat so it had been a while before i since i've gotten into a pokemon game because it had gotten like kind of rote and easy so i thought that maybe it would be a good idea to play this uh there's a rule set called nuzlocke where

griffin is intimately familiar he did a video series on it that's very good on youtube but basically it's permadeath for Pokemon. So if a Pokemon dies, it's gone forever. The other rule set is you need to, you can only get one Pokemon per area, and you need to nickname all the Pokemon. So the idea is to have this very small group of Pokemon that you're emotionally bonded to because you know their nickname. And then when they die, it's absolutely devastating. And I thought, hey, that that's for me because i'm a crazy person and i thought maybe that'll get me more into it because it'll add some difficulty and i'll be emotionally invested in this whatever sheep or something and that worked pretty well and then it really super didn't i basically got three badges in and got totally hosed by about six different things in a

row and i was like no my my adorable little bird just got like shot in the face by a cactus and it just like one shot at me and i was like oh well there goes two hours of grinding experience for another stupid bird right and then i quit i think i think that's a good launch pad to talk about like and something that chris alluded to like this different game for different audiences thing uh the thing i'm thinking about now and i think it's just because the game has gotten kind of easy for me because i am sort of steamrolling everything that stands in my way which is like why i built the team that i built and leveled them up the way that i leveled them and gave them the moveset it's it is again that whole idea of progression of power. I progressed in power, and now I am unto a god. If there was, like, a hard

mode or a new game plus mode afterwards where, you know, you just play through the whole game again, but the Pokemon are, you know, higher levels, and so you can use all the Pokemon you've got now, but it's going to be a big challenge, and maybe, like, I don't know, shiny rates are escalated in the harder version of the mode. That would be great, because that would give, like, the hardcore people who love farming for shiny Pokemon, like, a reason to come back and play. This game does not, this game has not really courted that hardcore audience. You know, this franchise's most dedicated players very well at all. And this is like where the Dexit thing comes in. If you are not really aware,

the whole Pokedex of all Pokemon from all generations in all games at this point is like over 800. I want to say it's in like the mid 800s. I believe. Yeah. And for this, and in all past games, there has been a thing called the national decks where maybe there is like a

smaller curated list of Pokemon that you're supposed to catch here in, you know, Pokemon X and Y. But once you beat the game, you unlock the national decks and now you can transfer any Pokemon into the game. You can, maybe you'll find them in different areas and all these different ways.

But ultimately you can get all the Pokemon ever in this game. And in this one, you can't because there is no national decks. And so that has been this major source of controversy. Game Freak has said, well, it's because we really want to focus on the animations. And then there have been some like pretty damning like clips of animations of attacks. Like Double Hit was a move that grookey one of the starters learns early on and he just kind of like bounces up and down and so people are like sharing that like dope animations uh or you know hey it would be too difficult to get all the models in in time uh

because we'd have to make them from scratch and then there's evidence that they're just pulled from the 3ds game so uh this this has led to a pretty huge blow up, and I, I, I think it's bigger than this, this, like, one thing of the National Dex not being in the, in the game, and I think it is that these, these, like, more hardcore people, uh, because I find myself sort of, like, leaning more towards that, that side of the audience, too, just wants, like, a platform, just wants, like, a Pokemon platform, not necessarily even like a live service Destiny style thing. But in the way that like you play Destiny and no matter what you do, you are getting sort of loot that you can use. If you're playing Crucible,

if you're playing PvP, you can get stuff that you can use in the PvE side. Like all that they want is like a place for them to do high level competitive play. At the very least, they want a place where they can, you know, upload the Pokemon for this paid service that they use to store their Pokemon from all the games, and the fact that they can't do that in this one is, like, kind of fucked up. It is, I think it is a point of frustration that they, I think it's a good RPG. I think for me playing through it, I'm really enjoying it. And I think anybody who has a Switch who wants to play like a fun RPG and get through it and catch some Pokemon

and have a good time, it's gonna be that for you. But for the people who want this to be the Pokemon game that everybody is playing with a long tail, whether that is, you know, breeding from this list of huge Pokemon for great values that you can take

into the competitive play and have this very comprehensive online competitive experience. There's a few reasons why that's not true, and it's not going to be true until they release Pokemon Big Sword and Fancy Shield. One quick note for our listeners. If you haven't heard of all this, don't look it up. It's bad. Don't look it up, because while some of the complaints are valid the uh harassment of the studio that made this game

not as valid you would not know that the audience that it feels underserved as adults because the reaction is profoundly childish uh and at times scary um people got really really really really mad about their pokemon so uh yeah let's talk about one more happy thing with pokemon uh griffin what was like your standout thing that brought you joy from this one as a mega pokemon fan um i think Um, I think for, for me, uh, it's, it is tough to say. I think that, uh, this game has an aesthetic and it is a very comprehensive aesthetic, both in the, uh, you know, the land that it takes place in the, uh, what is it? Galar region that is sort of based on, uh, you know, Western Europe, uh, for the most part it is like a really really neat place to be and they have explored it uh really well i think the wild

area lends itself to that like just getting off a train and seeing just these sweeping planes full of sheep uh like this very pastoral scene uh is is neat but i think the thing that brings me the most joy is there's so many shirts and jackets and pants and shoes and backpacks and that's only one type of backpack i don't want a big bulky stupid backpack i want a little one yep and you there's no option to remove it i don't think because where's your pokeballs gonna go dumb dumb uh in my pockets i think that's the stuff that's important to me like i play these games to uh i honestly the reason i play most rpgs is because i like the feeling of individualism of just like this is how i've built my character this is this is my character there are others like it but this one is mine like and and you get that

from the team of pokemon that you put together and you get that from the clothes that you wear and i for me like this is the best game this is the best that pokemon's ever done that uh that's that's the stuff that brings me a lot of joy but i also see the end of the experience i see the like the termination point because there's not like a huge end game and there's not like a great competitive platform uh and that is what bums me out and i think is what has led to this like huge schism in the in the community juice and yet the huge schism worth noting the game is like the best selling switch game yet ever so it's not you know what a lot of those people like i'm gonna boycott it they did not they probably done shit justin is a skeleton justin is a cobweb covered skeleton juice all bones alley alley hoops to our ad break yeah that'll do that's fine the ad starts now we're going to

continue to talk about pokemon now russ can you sort of set it up i understand perfectly what you're saying with this but absolutely what was your start concept here yeah so so in case you're not familiar um pokemon tend to get worse as they evolve and i I mean, well, let's look at Squirtle, for example. Squirtle starts as like a tiny little water turtle and he's adorable. And then he evolves and he turns into War Turtle and he's got like little whirls on his head. And then he evolves again

and he's got cannons on his back. He's got a fucking gun. This is a bad example, Russ. You're wrong. Blastoise is dope. He's like, what would be better? A turtle with two big guns. You're wrong.

Hey, I would love to keep this conversation going in a positive manner. I'm bringing that energy for sure. If I have to listen to you two argue about which Pokemon are cool, I will quit. So we'll just kind of keep it kind of fun and moving, okay? Griffin, can you give us a good example? A good example of a Pokemon that gets worse the older and more mature it gets is pretty much any starter since like Gen 4, I want to say. Because they start off and they're really cool.

Take Rowlet from Sun and Moon. This is a little owl with two leaves forming a bow tie. That's fucking cool. But then he grows up and he gets like swoopy emo hair. And then he grows up again and he he turns into a fucking military sniper. What? I didn't want that. I wanted the bow tie owl.

That's good. Sobble is a starter from this generation, and he's like a little sad, what is he? He's a frog. He's like a frog, lizard, salamander dude, and he's cute, and he's crying, and he's very sad,

but then he turns a little bit edgy when he turns into Drizzile, and then he turns into Inteleon, and he's like this weird slender man very trying to give off a sort of erotic energy of just this strange water pervert there's a lot of erotic energy which one does litten come from litten turns into incineror yeah just like a yeah so litten starts out that's my choice here litten starts out like just a really cool cat, you know? Yeah. The type of cat that you're walking down your street

in the neighborhood, getting a healthy walk in the morning, and you see the cat, and you're like, cool cat, maybe I'll pet it, and it's like, no, and you're like, okay, I respect it. And then it evolves into like a teenage cat, which is basically Litten, but just with like a frown, kind of like when Kirby came over from Japan to the US. They're like, he can't smile.

He has to be mad Kirby now. It's like, just let him smile. But then he makes a huge jump to Incinerator, which looks like if you went on Tumblr, just any random Tumblr, and you were like queried some artist for like a cat that fucks, they would send you a photo of incinerator it is an upright cat it's an incinerator god sorry thank you it is upright cat with a fire belt around

what looks like it's wearing red ballerina tights and just a really sexy fire belt and um scarring that looks like it might be abs or also might be chest hair um and you just know that he gets it and that's fine like i'm i'm very happy for pokemon fuck they don't want to talk about this all of them are egg they make eggs i guess none of them are mammals that's kind of weird pokemon fuck and if they're not gonna say it but they'll show us this huge ripped buff cat i guess maybe it's our fault here maybe it's that we just want our little children to not grow up and to be you know sexual creatures um but that's what pokemon is trying to open our eyes to yeah justin do you have a least favorite evolution yeah i've been giving this a lot of thought. My least favorite is Diglett, which becomes Doug Trio.

And that sucks because there's one and then there's three. And I don't know if it's like shared consciousness or souls. If there becomes more souls in the poker. I don't know if they have souls to start with but like is it a soul split three ways is it just like a hive mind is it three friends that then share one hole that they're all popping out of from the ground it's all very challenging and i guess the least favorite for me is doug trio yeah it should probably start as three and then become one because it'd be like they were conjoined and now that's like so fucking challenging

also russ that's like an extremely challenging idea if you really think it through to this culmination of three discrete individual sentient beings that then few like lose sentience and fuse into one well no they get separated that's what i'm saying more more horrible things happen in the pokemon universe than that. So do not sweat it. I think it'd be fun if to evolve to Dugtrio, you had to have three individual Diglets in your party. Oh, yeah, that'd be good.

This game actually has a lot of wild evolution methods that there's no way that you could possibly figure out how to do it. There is basically a cream Pokemon. And you get this cream Pokemon in your party and you have to have some sort of item, but then you have to spin your character around really fast, which like whips them up into this new evolved cream, like this whipped cream Pokemon.

It's really, really wild. And there's like a ton of stuff like that in the game that's like super, super playful. I will wrap it up by saying my least favorite is Valoniteite who it starts as an ice cream which i don't abide to begin with uh because i don't like food pokemon because what is the implication there so he starts as valenite this ice cream and then when he evolves into whatever his mid form is his face becomes like a clown creepy ice cream face he still looks like

an ice cream but he's bigger and more horrifying and then similar to justin his third evolution is two ice creams in one which again is like where did this question question question i'm gonna bring up your bias here uh lactose intolerance are also that to the table yeah yeah i there's definitely not enough lactate pills to take in that final evolution i will definitely get very very sick it is by the way vanillite it's like a play on words a lot of these are what i said what did i say you said valenite which is like a val kilmer sort of post line which would be so dope this one's three val kilmers he's uh really strong he has no soul so we would love to uh to hear eight out of ten stars by the way eight out of ten stars This one's 8 out of 10 stars.

We've got an email address. It's mail at besties.fan. If you email that address, you legally have to be a fan. That's the law. We want to hear about... We'll be asking for a variety of emails as the show goes forward, but right now we're prepping for our Game of the Year stuff, and we want to hear from you. What's your favorite Game of the Year?

And give us one sentence, one sentence, as to why it is the best game of the year and give us one sentence one sentence as to why it is the best game of the year and maybe we'll read your email on the air is there anything else you guys are playing other than this uh pokemon or or other stuff that we are not covering in other episodes i have also dipped back into uh when i was traveling i downloaded uh professor layton in the diabolical box the first first two, I think, 3DS Professor Layton, or actually DS Professor Layton games are on iOS, and they're really good ports.

They're like the whole game, and they're like 10 bucks or something like that, and they're long, and the puzzles are fun, and you can play it in portrait mode, which is, wait, which one is, yeah, portrait mode is the upwards one, and that's like, that's all I really need out of a game. So yeah, but they give me like six toothpicks and they're like, make a house.

And I feel like a dummy. Well, you got to, sometimes you got, it's a thinking man's game. I don't know what to tell you, Russ. I don't either. I'm stuck with this. I've been playing Manifold Garden. Have any of y'all played this? Oh yeah, I played it on iPhone.

It is excellent. You know, every, it feels like three years or so, a big puzzle game comes out, like Portal is the obvious example, but it just kind of breaks your brain about how you navigate 3D space. That's this game. The hook that makes this one special is,

it's about infinity, I guess is how I would say, that you enter environments is it's about infinity, I guess is how I would say, that you enter environments and they expand out in infinite directions. So if you enter a corridor with vertical columns, there are infinite vertical columns extending away from you. And the way they do that in later levels is kind of patterns. So you think you're going down a stairwell, but that stairwell goes on forever. And it's all about taking advantage of that idea so you can jump

off of part of one pattern and land on the next pattern you know the best way to think about it would be like if you look at a wallpaper with like a pattern on it if you were turning your wallpaper into a 3d puzzle um that is how i would describe manifold garden and it's available it's designed wasn't that wasn't that the um the rapper that designed that game i i have no idea who designed mc escher wasn't that him oh my god oh jesus okay that was racing okay whoa a little bit close to the grave. Thanks, Russ. I want to give a real quick plug to Guildlings.

It's a neat Apple Arcade game made by Asher Vollmer, who you may know best from Threes and also the very good Puzzle Juice. But this is a, God god really hard to describe but basically uh a fantasy role-playing puzzle sort of game where you are uh reconstructing a guild of adventurers from your cell phone and you are, uh, encapsulated in a bubble and only able to interact with the world via this little sprite that can open doors and charge locks. Uh,

but mainly have conversations with people to try to get them to follow you, even though, um, you, they can't see you. Uh, and, and it has a very modern sort of,

uh, tone to it. Like the first character that you bring into your guild is your sister who's been grounded. So you have to help her break out and go on a date with her boyfriend before she'll join your guild. Um, and the entire thing is done through a like phone UI,

which I think is a really cool, uh, feat whenever games can, can pull it off, but it's neat. It's funny. think is a really cool uh feat whenever games can can pull it off but it's neat it's funny it's uh sweet uh and like it kind of i would say a similar vibe to like a steven universe something like that uh and if that's your sort of thing is worth checking how many stars though juice oh is that what just the one on his shirt for steven universe you mean he just has one on his shirt. Alright, let's end it. I'm still, I don't know, I think actually the

episode did end after the MC Escher joke. Oh, and we're all, we're all, so ghosts? Yes. Our lives ended. We were struck down by God for our role in letting it happen. Oh hey, one small note. If people are listening to this on

our old feed, you should know that starting January 3rd, new episodes are going to be fully exclusive to Spotify. So if you're excited about hearing us every single week, make sure you hop on over to Spotify and follow the Besties podcast there. And don't worry, you'll still be able to listen for free, even if you're not a paid Spotify subscriber. Okay, friends, that is all the show we have for you this week.

Thank you for joining us as always. And be sure to join us again next week for The Besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Vox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!