The Besties - Stray is the G.O.A.T. of cat games [The Resties]

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

For over a year, Stray has been one of the most anticipated games on Steam. Does it live up to the hype? For the most part, yes! We explain why you should give this virtual cat some cuddles. Then Frushtick and Plante share their three favorite games that let you play as animals.  Prepare for obscure adventures about mosquitos! Discussed on this episode: Stray, Lion King, Lion, Mister Mosquito, Tokyo Jungle, Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers, Ecco the Dolphin, Tunic, Okami, Dead Cells, and The Empty Man on HBO Max. 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!

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. My name is Ross Froschek. Welcome to the Resties, where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. This week, we are talking about Stray. What is Stray? Well, you know that song, Everybody Wants to Be a Cat? Stray is a video game about letting you do that very thing. What song is that?

Everybody Wants to Be a Cat. I didn't ask with the interest of you singing it. Because a cat is where it's at. Who is singing it? So it's in the Aristocats, and I'm pretty sure it probably has racist stuff in it, because half that movie is, yeah. It is of that era. Yeah, the game, it's not just that.

It has trash-eating bio-monsters. It has a caste system of robots who have been abandoned by their creators. And I'm going to do my best not to talk about Nier for half the episode. Oh, boy. And it has gamer fuel, which apparently will outlast all of us. And it has gamer fuel, which apparently will outlast all of us. But first, there's a different type of robot abandonment that I wanted to talk to you about, Fresh. Okay.

I bought a Tamagotchi. Oh, yeah. We've talked about it on the show. Have we talked about how I'm treating it? No. So. I think you had just gotten it. And I remember asking you, why would you do that? So that's a good question.

And when I'm wrestling with, because I have it, and there's the little tab, you know, where it connects the battery to the system. Yeah, don't you like take the tab out? And then it comes to life. Yes. And I did that. And I immediately realized I was in no way prepared to take care of this thing. So I put the tab back in. And then I realized that, like, did I kill the Tamagotchi?

So then I took it out the next day. And I was like, okay, no, now I'm ready. I played for like three or four hours. And then I realized, you know what? No, I'm still not prepared for this sort of commitment. There's so many layers to this. You played Tamagotchi for three or four hours? No, you mean like I got it set up.

It was doing its thing. And I was like, no, I'm not going to do right by you. I'm not going to check in later. This is so fucked up. I'll put the tab back in. Oh, my God. And now the tab's still in i have not i have not i have not taken it back out yet because i don't want to get back into tamagotchi

until i'm i'm ready this poor tamagotchi is blinking in and out of existence it doesn't know whether it's here alive or dead yeah horrible i i think like that's the metaphor that i want to go with is it's like a like god i don't want to go with like i think there's many metaphors i'm gonna go with it's a god who is like you know what i'm bored i'm gonna create adam and eve does it for five minutes and they're like oh my gosh we are what what is going on humanity stands before us he's like actually you know what i've got to get some fortnight done i'm gonna put you back in the bottle and then just like snaps his fingers and then they're gone so you're the god in this scenario i mean what what else are you when you are playing with

tamagotchi but a god i mean it's just like you have a pet. It's like you have a dog in the house. It's not like... Yeah, but what do you think a dog thinks you are? I mean, would you hump your god's leg? I'm not asking are dogs reasonable creatures. I just, I don't know. So you think dogs think of us as gods.

Probably. And they think it is in their wheelhouse to have sex with a leg of a god. There's only so many ways to show respect as a dog. That's true. You know? Sniffing butts. That's true. You know, it's show, don't tell. Oh, boy.

Starting off hot. Let's talk about cats after this break. Welcome back. We're here to talk about Stray, a game that I, here's how I expect this episode to go. And don't tell me the answer. I'm just going to put down my prediction. I'm going to put the chips down. Wait, you should put your prediction in a little envelope

and then we'll open it at the end of the segment. Okay, one second. I'm writing it down. Oh boy, I'm so excited. Okay, it's written down. Okay, written down. Great. So I have a prediction written down. First question for you, now that we have that thrilling bit of exposition taken care of. This is a game about you being a cat.

First and foremost. Science fiction, whoever is playing. There's all these other layers. But above all else, you are a cat and you do cat things. Yep. Is this a cute cat? Unquestionably, yes. Great.

Do you have a moment of hesitation in that? No. Somebody on our team at Polygon compared this cat to Puss in Boots. And I think that's true. I mean, they're both orange, I guess. Orange tabbies. Yeah, sure. And I think if you went to Dolly, the AI art generator. Yeah, sure.

And you said, make the cutest version of a real-life Garfield, you would get this cat. Yeah. So I don't want people to get the wrong idea. Because Puss in Boots, in my imagination, Puss in in boots is like a kitten cat like structurally more kidney uh obviously a hat and boots and a sword but apart from that this is like an adult cat and i would also say like puss in boots very cartoony um at least in the newer iterations of puss in boots yes this cat is like i I would say, one of the most realistic video game cats

I've ever seen in my life. Is that fair to say? Yes, it does that tricky thing that all cats do where you don't know how big or small they are. I didn't know that was a thing. No, it's like, because like cats, they can kind of stretch in a way, like when they jump.

Long, you're talking about length. Yeah, it's like you are five times they can kind of stretch in a way like when they jump. Long. You're talking about length. Yeah. It's like you are five times longer than I thought you were. Or they like kind of like, oh, they tighten up and you're like, you're a little bitty thing. Yeah. This cat, they nail it without it looking weird. Yeah.

No, it looks like a straight up normal cat that you would see at someone's house or something. Yes. It is, in in fact the only normal looking thing and well there are other cats that also look normal okay sure well very briefly at the beginning yes but you this cat get you effectively descend mad god style for the people who actually went and watched mad god all all seven. Congratulations to you. You descend into this, like, underworld where there's no natural light. There are robots living on the bottom level.

It is effectively trash town. And your goal is to, I guess, climb back up. Yeah, get back to your, basically, you were with your friends hanging, and you made a wrong step and you fell and now you're in this under underground like society trying to get back to humanity but you're just a cat and you just have cat powers or do you yeah yeah that's the question because you meet you meet a robot named b12 which sounds like a vitamin but i believe actually i want to talk before we talk about the robot i want to talk about like the first hour or so of the game.

Is it about how it's boring? No, it's the total opposite of that. Really? I like the first hour, but everybody I talk to keeps telling me it's boring and I keep wondering what's wrong with me. Okay. So the first hour of this game is you are a cat running around and doing cat things. Yeah.

Straight up, you're just a cat. You're just a cat. So you're jumping from ledge to ledge. You like oh i'm gonna walk on this ledge instead of this ledge i'm knocking over like paint cans off a ledge because you know how cats love knocking things off ledges um you're scratching walls drinking from puddles um you're like laying down on carpets all cat stuff and the vibe i was getting and again i knew apart from knowing that it was about a cat i knew very little about this game and i honestly thought the entire game was going to be a cat survival story where there was no dialogue whatsoever and you were basically just going to experience this world as

a cat, like a silent limbo, but from the perspective of a cat or inside, same developer. I was expecting a physics-based puzzle adventure game in the style of limbo, but you're a cat.

Ooh. So you as the human player would understand the story but the cat themselves would not yeah but no but that's what i'm saying a cat would also understand the story because the only things that you're experiencing are from the perspective of a cat so it might be like really confusing but you're sort of gleaning certain notes. Like, again, I think limbo and inside are a good analogy because they don't explicitly say what's going on in the plot of those games, but you sort of glean a little information based on, you know, visual clues. That is not the game, though.

I know. I'm just saying the first hour of the game is that. That's true. And I was expecting. And then it pump fakes. And was expecting pump fakes and then it pump fakes and does something very different yeah you meet a robot yes b12 named after the studio that made it not after a vitamin well maybe the studio was named after a vitamin impossible yeah um and b12 is effectively your voice like it's an intermediary who flies around, adorable little hover body.

It's like Navi. I don't think it's the cat's voice. I think it's like. No, yeah, that's what I mean is behaves as a mechanic, as your voice. Because it talks to other people or translates stuff. And then it feeds that back to you. And I guess the logic is you are a cat and there is nothing special about you. But cats might actually have a language in this robot can speak it.

That's my read is like you are not like a uniquely gifted cat. Yeah, no, I agree with that. I don't think you're a super cat uh but i don't get the sense that the cat is i'm sorry the robot is speaking for the cat i think the robot has motivations and is using the cat not in like an aggressive way just in a like a you know mutual benefit beneficial sort of way to accomplish the robot's goals yes i i think that makes sense yeah i mean i i yeah i mean speaking purely on a mechanical sense of the dialogue happens through yes literally the cat is not talking the robot is talking yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um and then b12 is also your way

of like doing things that the cat just can't do so you find items like aforementioned a gamer fuel and b12 was like let me just deatomize that and put it into my like magical container and then i can rematerialize it wherever you need it which is some real good um video game explanation it is of something i i it reminds me of did you ever see that movie thank Thank You for Smoking? Yes. Where they're like, hey, it's these cigarette executives. And like, yeah, we really need to get some cigarette smoking in this sci-fi movie. And they're like, it takes place in space. You know, like you can't have cigarettes smoking in space. And they're like, no, no, no, just invent the like space cigarette.

It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot that you're allowed to do that in fiction. I don't think that's bad. I think I'm glad that they have some way of doing it it's just very fun it yeah i don't know i feel like they probably could have for them outside of like hacking a computer like there's a way to get a cat to carry a bottle of detergent like it's not that hard yeah uh but i realize physics and how you can animate it and stuff like that also I know the team is from what I understand mostly two people

oh really that's it? and the game looks gorgeous but that makes a lot of sense of certain decisions there's a room that you go into I'm about two thirds of the way through the game and I'm not going to spoil any major story beats here but you go into a room that has a lot

of art in it okay and it's the same two pieces of art over and over and over and it looks fine but it's like oh wow you there just aren't a lot of assets that you made for this game i i downloaded river city ransom the new river city ransom the exact same time as this game and they're the same size oh that's funny it's like this is i don't want to undercut it though this is a gorgeous game like art design wise and like world design wise i was instantly super invested they have like their own alphabet that looks like very cool and um they're very good at having like the sort of landscape moments where you're standing above something and you get like a whole spread of everything in front of you um looks absolutely

gorgeous you're saying that it was two people that is fully stunning to me because it looks like a 30 person team at the very least like it looks like a big game when the world is so consistent our the reviewer at Polygon, and it's a fantastic review. It's one of my favorite reviews that we've published in recent memory. And everybody should go read it. But the point that they made was,

wow, this really feels like Hong Kong. And I believe like even the code name for this game was like HK Project. And it is dealing with a lot of the questions of the police state and the autocracy and the layers of wealth in the society um and obviously the visuals the the kind of persistence of i guess i would say like orientalism as like a not as a positive in cyberpunk. But it does a lot of it very well. Like it actually feels quite sensitive at times.

And it feels like it's trying to say something. And the point that they made was it wasn't until the credits rolled that they realized that this was a French studio. And they're like, on one hand, great. Like these people did it. You know, it doesn't feel insensitive. It feels like they have something to say about this thing that they clearly care about. On the other hand, it is like still a bummer

that a studio or a publisher like A24 is yet to kind of fund actual developers in Hong Kong, which would be nice. But again, that's kind of a actual developers in hong kong yeah which would be nice but again that's that's kind of a whole separate thing about the business but i think that that perspective of hong kong i i would love for them to talk about it i kind of doubt they will at this point well let me i guess i should ask you like how i mean certainly hong kong isn't the only situation where there has been like a very aggressive police state sort of moving in on a free society and eventually sort of turning

it into a disaster zone uh or at least a pending one i i just wouldn't want to like assume oh this is literally hong kong versus like inspired by elements. Yeah. I think the reason why is the code name of the project being HK and then them changing it. And again, like the long history of cyberpunk using imagery from like Eastern cultures and making it seem alien when in fact it's just normal yeah two people live in these nations

and you're you're kind of just getting to the part in the game where the police state gets involved but how the police state is involved is not a it's not like an american or i would even say like a european crackdown the way it works so i don't want to get too much because i i worry that that gets into spoilers and also quite frankly the reviewer says it's so much better than i do um but i i think whatever it is wherever they pulled from it felt like they had a very clear idea of what was inspiring them rather than this being bad cyberpunk which is like i don't know super needles and biomutations and you know the police are here to kick ass and take names and they're bad but also maybe you're the cop and it's like what the hell are we yeah there really needs to be some sort of like grounded reality to your

science fiction for people to care like you need to have some familiarity to it and um i think you know certainly cyberpunk the video game had struggled on that front because there was really no analog to like everyday life in that game it was like very much yeah way too out there it's analogs are like very weird and like kind of kind of sticky yeah um uh anyway i want to talk about the the the monsters in this game oh yeah which zirks they're called zirks zirks they look like i like tinier like chibi headcrab that's i mean there's no other way to describe them if you know what a half-life headcrab looks like this is just a chibi half-life head crab spot on exactly not even a question same color same jumping bike physics no eyes it's it's

every yeah i mean spot on now if like me you are into pimple popping oh no no let's not no we got we're already going there okay we don't need let's not get explicit because people will be grossed out no no no of course not i would never do that i would never do that okay but i will just describe what's in the game they the way that they attack is they glom onto the cat shit yeah and they like kind of like suck out its energy they they engorge and they like weigh it down and when too many of them do that that's like game over um but you at a certain point for a while get a weapon maybe maybe it comes back i have no idea but you get some ultraviolet light that makes them like pop yes feels good yeah it's good

this is really where the game shifted for me so the again i was talking about the intro and the like no talking intro after you get to like the first town which happens after the first hour or so there's like a whole lot of talking a whole lot of backstory and you meet all sorts of characters and you get you know as plant mentioned sort of like this weapon they use for like a few sequences and it turns into a very different game i even though i love the visuals and i love the moving around the world stuff like that that game does not interest me nearly as much as the game i was playing previously which was like a explore the world as a cat game versus a action blowing alien little critters up game i have good news for you okay it stops being that game okay right on pretty quickly um yeah it this game's

weird because i it's like there are three speeds to it yeah which i guess is like good narrative pacing where yeah it starts out with that like hour 45 minutes hour of like you're just a cat yeah and then it's like hey here's a small open world town solve some really basic puzzles and mysteries as a cat. I'm like, cool, now I get to explore. There's a little bit more motivation. And then after that, it's like, okay, now go save the day. And you're like, have a minute of being kick-ass cat.

Yeah. Who is, I mean, it's not like you're that powerful. It's mostly you running. But that is probably the shortest chunk. And then from what I can i can tell after that it kind of starts the whole loop again yeah um and i think like that's how they do the act breaks um but the second city you go to which is right where you're just about to be at is considerably bigger considerably yeah because the first city was pretty big uh yeah it's not just that it's big it's like dense with people yeah um but with these robot characters and i i would worry about that being a spoiler were it not like all of the advertisements for the game

um because i i at a certain point was like i guess they maybe just cut a lot as I was playing through it because I, it, the game was so different than what my expectations were for it. Um, off of all the advertisement that's looked like, Hey, it's a busy cyberpunk world that just happens to have a cat around. Um,

what, what did you think of? I mean, for you, the story, the robots, does it work for you? What I've played thus far, it is a lot of telling and

not showing for me a lot of like a lot of dialogue a lot of like fetch questy like we need four notebooks to progress the quest a lot of like uh kind of point and click adventure gamey style like i'm cold and i won't do this thing unless you get me a blanket and to get that blanket you need a piece of wire that's the part where i'm like bummed because i think the the core gameplay is so strong and the visuals and everything and the music it's so so good it just felt like padded and not as great and honestly like everything that i've seen thus far and i'm like probably three or four hours into the game at this point i've not seen a single thing that couldn't have been done without dialogue like literally i could have learned about this world i understood it it would have

been hard to pull this off but i think possible using you know wall art and other tools to tell this story without text scroll text scroll text scroll of which there is quite a bit um so i don't know maybe it's because i was thinking it was going to go one way and it went a completely different way that like my mind was already locked into that. But it just seems a little too talky for me. But when the game is not talking and like letting me just experience the world on my own, I'm like totally on board. Yeah, I agree for the most part. I think the top level story is solid. I don't think it's like perfect

yeah but i i think it i think it like has some propulsion to it which usually bad dialogue and bad plotting go hand in hand that's not the case here i think like i think the top level story is fine it was just weird to me because the top level story should just be you're a cat you want to escape right well i mean they're they're wanting to get into a lot more social stuff yeah sure which is which is a tough ask for a five you know it's a five hour game like it yeah the story is about these robots like it is you know you happen to fall here and now you're going to learn all about them and their society yeah i think the problem there is yeah you could have

overheard a lot of that the part that bums me out because i i don't know i want to give this game a hand where i can it repeats a lot of the dialogue between characters yeah so like you'll talk to like three robots and they'll say the identical thing well they are robots so in theory that makes sense yeah i i kind of tried to rationalize that but it gets to a point yeah i i mean for people listening they're like oh no they're grumpy about this game like i don't want you to think that we don't like the game because i actually do genuinely genuinely like the game um there are just parts of it that I think maybe could have been a little bit stronger,

but then again, I haven't beaten it yet. So I might feel completely differently once I finish it. That being said though, man, if you love cats, there are not very many games that star a cat. In fact, off the top of my head,

I don't know. Garfield. Garfield, he's in a number of my head. I don't know. Garfield. Garfield. He's in a number of racing games. I mean, there will be more. We'll talk about it after the break. Yeah. Because I have one.

I just want to say, before we go to the break, I love this game. I'm actually totally fine with, like, the whatever dialogue. I don't know if you're playing this on Steam Deck. I'm playing it on PlayStation deck i'm playing on um playstation which i'm actually really glad i did because they spent a lot of time getting all the

haptics really right so when you like get this is weird when you get licked by another cat very early in the game it like rumbles in your controller or like when you're purring when you're taking a nap it does like a really good rumble on the controller there's an entire button dedicated to purring yes that well there's a meow button yes yeah yeah so um no it's been great it's been good on steam deck oh i mean incredible it looks so good on it i mean it's obviously not perfect but it looks so good and it's such a chill game that i think again i went into this really suspect i was worried that it was going to be another vibe game that i could not get into that was more of like a gift maker yeah that's

what i was expecting as well than a game and quite the opposite um weirdly if anything i think it could be more of that at times yeah um yeah i mean i just love that you everything you do in this game we talked about this at the very top you just do cat shit like you lay down on somebody to cuddle up or you scratch at a door or you knock something off of a wall and that happens to progress the story yeah but you never have a moment where it's like oh the cat knows how to type a password there's actually keyboards that you can type onto the computer and then the computer is just like what the fuck is going on yeah you you'll stand on it as gibberish my favorite cat moment is pretty early on because you get this vest that carries the robot around and the second you get the vest put on you

the robot around and the second you get the vest put on you you're basically like the cat just freezes in place like a real cat would be and just starts like walking very awkwardly and the robot's like yeah sorry you'll get you'll get used to it don't worry um they clearly a lot of love for cats and a very authentic cat recreation game, if ever there was one. Okay, now we're going to take a break and we're going to come back, come back, and we're going to talk about each of our top three animal games, games where you get to play as an animal. And I promise that I have a cat game right at the top.

Meowmix, Meowmix, please deliver the second half of this episode hello everybody we're back and we are here to talk about our top three animal games games where you play as an animal it puts you in the paws of beasts of burden here is my number one not my number one i don't want to not order there are no specific order okay yes my i'm cheating with the top because it's two games that i think are like equally important it's 1994 lion king comes out on the sega genesis now was this one of the situations where the lion king on super nintendo was different from the one on genesis i think they might be slightly different i believe the sega genesis is also a capcom game as i google it um but you know it's like part of

that style aladdin toy story there's a whole set of these games. This was Westbrook Studios. So not Capcom. I was definitely wrong there. Anyway, it's a good game. I recommend people check it out. But while everybody is playing that because it's all my friends are into for, I don't know,

probably like three or four months. A year later, Lion comes out on the PC and have you do you even know what lion is no okay so i played a disgusting amount of this game in elementary school i was as as you know fresh uh in the midwest in the middle of nowhere and i got into the gifted program but my school had no budget no no no no that sounds fancy my school had no budget so really what that meant was we know that you will be a nuisance in class because you're bored yeah so we're going to take you out of class put you in the basement of the

school with five other kids and basically just like throw books at you you have the computer just like i don't know three hours uh every other day where you just stop talking during class because you're a pain in all of these teachers asses um they had one computer that was the first like computer added to our school since the 1990s everything else was from the 80s and it was brand new so it had this game on it lion which was made by a theologist who had worked with like shelly devol and dennis miller and then was like you know what i need to make after that a lion simulation like kind of like immersive sim so it had different modes and you could play an rpg mode which like whatever sure cool you could also just play an open world like don't starve simulation

where you had like hunt and eat and like find watering holes and just stay alive across multiple seasons it was utterly fucking wild for the time and i played just tons and tons and tons and tons of this game um and uh then i was like yeah i mean that that probably was made by ea or something right no i looked back at this studio literally last night like hey what happened to it literally right after it releases this game it effectively goes under oh yeah it turns out i don't blame lion they were also making um the dennis miller games for the 3do so i think they may have just been bad at business yeah maybe uh i just like the cover of this game because it's just a lion totally going to town on a wildebeest like just taking a big chunk out of the wildebeest

and that's what's on the cover so look can you find the the the cover for its prequel before it there was a game called wolf oh god can you tell me what's happening in that how do you know it's a uh prequel it came out before you know like there was this success be sure you're not talking? Oh, Wolf. Here it is. Wolf, yeah. Okay, so Wolf looks like, wow. One half of it is a wolf's eye, and the other half of the face is a human eye. It suggests a bit of Wolfman. Yes. You know, I think they're, like,

hoping that people will get confused and buy this education. Do you think these are, are you sure these are tied together with the same developer? Same developer, yeah. They're made, like, literally like literally within a year wow they could have just done all the animals that would have been their future yeah instead they made dennis miller a video game for the 3do i can't i can't believe it wow wolf was really well received both of these games

are you should legit i think these games would probably hold up okay yeah maybe um okay what about you what's what's one of yours um i don't know if it's cheating to pick animals that wear clothes but chippendales rescue rangers goddamn that was a good for the nes it was on the nes oh yeah and it was capcom this was a capcom game co-op game great co-op game you could uh it was the first time that i remember playing a game where you could pick your co-op game you could uh it was the first time that i remember playing a game where you could pick your co-op body up and throw them yes um and man did i do that quite a bit i do not think i ever got very far past that first level because the first level just devolves into trolling the other player but super fun uh and you know they play with that whole like oh everything's giant because you're a chipmunk um yeah i don't know that game rocked yeah i this was the first and last video game i

played with my mom oh um she was so excited to have a video game that we could play together and then i just thought it was the funniest shit oh so you just trolled her the whole time which she eventually she somehow talked me into the idea of like oh but what if you carried me to the end oh so you were literal carry so yeah so it was that was fun yeah and then after that there weren't many games like that where it's funny it would be like today i think would be like a kid parent mode but it was the opposite then like oh the kid can help the parent yeah um that came oh it rules uh mosey has a sticker for a re-release of that video game on his bedroom oh yeah yeah every day i see it and it makes me so happy

um okay my next one mr Mr. Mosquito. Are mosquitoes animals? Are you for real? Are you for real? I mean, I just don't think of bugs as animals. I mean... I know they are, I guess, but it just... That doesn't seem like an animal to me. Of course it's an animal. I know, but, like, I don't know.

I realize it's not like a mammal situation. But like animal, like, oh, I have an animal in my house. If someone said that to you, you wouldn't think they have a cockroach in their house. That is true. That is true. Like, oh my gosh, my house has hundreds of animals in it. And you're like, what? And they're like, ants.

I have an ant infestation. Yeah, I can see how that's a problem yeah um anyway this game was made by zoom not the the the software but a company called zoom which i'm gonna guess nobody's heard of i think the most famous thing they made other than this was a robot fighting series called zero divide did you play any of those? Yeah. I don't think. But this is Mr. Mosquito. Yes. I'm trying to, you know, like fill in some blanks. People should know what it is though.

Teach some history. This is Mr. Mosquito, released in 2002 for the PlayStation 2. And you are a mosquito to scale who has been, I don't know, trapped. You have entered the Yamada family's house. And your one and only goal is to suck their blood yeah and it is great it you fly around you suck blood and you are a honestly a huge creep there's like a very famous moment where you fly around a woman in a bathtub and the goal is to suck her blood without her noticing is that good no i'm not gonna stand by it is it

famous yes it is um i guess there was a sequel to it that i just learned about that was set in hawaii never came out to america i can't imagine why i'm gonna have to guess it was a mix of not selling well and being super creepy um that said still pretty fun yeah still pretty fun game i mean i would say all of the i've seen gameplay of this and not just the bath level like all the levels are like weird voyeur like let me sneak up on this sleeping woman it's it's a weird it's a weird pick chris plant but you know what you're stuck with it and there's nothing we can do about that no i'm happy and you know what if this is what with it, and there's nothing we can do about that. No, I'm happy. And you know what? If this is what gets me canceled, it'll be a good way to go.

Mr. Mosquito brought him down. My game is Echo the Dolphin, where you play as a dolphin. And you know what? We were just talking about this cat game where I kind of wish there was more just straight-up cat stuff. There is so much straight- up dolphin stuff in echo the dolphin uh you swim around as a dolphin you shoot echolocation beams at other things to like communicate you talk to whales uh and you like you know groove about the ocean and like complete quests and stuff there might be aliens in it i it. It's been a while since I've played,

but I don't know, man. It feels like a very authentic animal game. Do you remember the story of Echo the Dolphin? I remember, okay. This is what I remember from the very beginning. And it's again been a while. You're swimming in the ocean. You're having a great day.

Suddenly something happens where all the animals get like sucked up into the sky can i read you the wikipedia how how far off am i the game opens with echo a bottlenose dolphin as he and his pod are swimming in their home bay a pod mate challenges echo to a game to see how high he can jump into the air oh yeah, yeah. When he is in the air, a giant water spout forms and sucks up all marine life in the bay, except Echo, leaving him alone in the bay.

I'm not going to read the rest. I will just skip ahead to the beginning of the next paragraph. Echo travels to the sunken city of Atlantis. You don't think dolphins are doing that on the regs i mean i just hell of a jump hell of hell of a twist i mean it was a literal hell of a jump true yeah i wonder if it's like he got like sucked through kind of a space time water spout i think if you stuck a camera on a dolphin and just watched it for a year, at least once it would probably go to Atlantis. Yeah, that's probably right.

It's like really hard to argue with that. Yeah. Okay. The last game that I have is Tokyo Jungle. Tokyo Jungle came out on the PS3 in 2012. Our buddy Ollie Welsh wrote about this just recently at Polygon because the game is streaming on PS Plus Premium. And you might be wondering, guys, why have you not talked about PS Plus Premium? Because I don't know anybody was using it at all.

It's so weird. It's weird. It seems like a legitimate competitor to Game Pass for Sony, and yet the rollout of it has just been bad. It's so confusing. But anyway, Tokyo Jungle's on it, and between that and Motorstorm, I don't know. Maybe it's worth giving it a try just for these games. Ali said that it feels like a roguelike invented by someone who had never heard of a roguelike. It feels like a roguelike invented by someone who had never heard of a roguelike.

And I think that's pretty spot on because I don't remember the specifics, but basically Sony publishes this, right? But then the studio that makes it, I guess, has like practically no experience making a video game. And the result shows as in like it can look really nice. And then it's just utter chaos. It seems to be about an animal, though animal though oh that's a good question so the reason thank you for bringing me back to the important part you really keep me on track i appreciate it i don't know how i would do this without you um so the premise is that kind of like echo the dolphin all humans just disappeared out of nowhere there's gone sure and now animals are inheriting tokyo and you play as a whole variety of them you can be like a giraffe or a cow or baby chickens

or like a lost pomeranian um and then the animals are just out here fighting for survival. Yeah. And I think that's... If there's one game that I think captures the idea of how weird the animal kingdom is, I think it would be this one. Because what would happen if we just let all these different types of animals chill out in the same city block? Spiders, ants...

It would probably be bad. Cockroaches, all the animals. Yeah, it would be a bloodbath yeah um what's your final game tunic oh you play as a cute little fox and he runs around and he does dope shit that game is awesome man i want more people to like experience tunic the way i did which is just like keeping a very detailed notebook it was so much fun and uh you don't really yeah he doesn't feel like a fox i mean he looks like a fox he's kind of cheating you think it's cheating i have a backup if you think that's cheating yeah i think so okami okay okay that's not cheating okami is a game i

don't remember what it came out probably early 2000s uh made by capcom and you play as a wolf god okami who uh runs around saving the world and you're just like a wolf and you i think you have a sword in your mouth or something and um it's super awesome it's the art style is all like um painterly it's not cel-shaded but like an oil painting and the whole game looks like that so it's gorgeous and um yeah i really dug it uh that was that was a dope game yeah uh and very very animal centric one of my favorite bits of dumb video game history is that game originally came out on ps2 and again the whole point of the game the whole selling point is this game is gorgeous that it is kind of a in reference to you know classic japanese art beautiful and then it comes out on the wii and the box art has an ign watermark on it because they just took the art off IGN's webpage and then put it and made it the box art.

I love it. It's so good. You know what? You got to save time and money where you can. It's so good. Copy paste, baby. It makes me so happy. I think that's it.

I think we named our favorite our favorite animal games we did man what a nice time um should we take a real quick break no okay let's keep fun cooking i always forget um yeah let's talk about our recommendations for the week any let's do it final things you're gonna bring a game i feel like we have talked about on the besties. No fewer than 500 times. That's true, but there is a reason I'm bringing it. Yes, and it's not Nier or Zelda. Also true.

I'm bringing Dead Cells. Now, it's been a while since we've talked about Dead Cells, probably at least a year, if not more. Dead Cells, for those that don't remember, don't know, side-scrolling roguelike Metroidvania where you're like this headless ninja guy. And you get new abilities and powers and random drops and you start from scratch every time you die. It's a game that I played a ton of when it first came out, which was a few years ago. I played it on Switch. I played it on PC. An absolute ton.

And then I put it to the side, as we all do, and haven't really touched it since last week when I downloaded it on the Steam Deck. And was kind of blown away by just how much has been added to dead cells since it was released there's been like 21 content updates uh like four paid dlc packs one free dlc pack and a lot of that as i mentioned was just like you know somewhat paid like you could pay five dollars and get a few new levels and stuff like that but almost all that was like free additions that they've made to the game and one of the newest free additions they made to the game which is what brought me back to it and it is an accessibility mode to dead cells now that tells

when it first came out and even today extremely hard game i beat it once and only once and it that successful run took me like an hour of very very very careful play where every single move i made was like carefully thought out and delicate and like spelunky-esque in that way i really like took my time to make sure i beat the game but who got time for that these days and so what i did was i popped on dead cells i went into the accessibility mode and i was like i just want to see as much as i can about this game so i went nuts i dropped enemy health down to 20 i increased my health by 100 or whatever it is um added all sorts of helpers i can still die it's not like i'm immune from damage but uh i was able to basically turn the game into a action game that didn't require me to know every single weapon synergy and every

single combo and how you know i should handle each boss just so i could like kind of experience it and it's a reminder of how great it can be if you add that stuff even as a developer like how much more of your audience you can be reaching by adding those level uh that level of like like tweaking yeah to make I mean, just like it's free. It's yeah. People can sort of approach it the way they want to approach it. Um, I had a similar experience with rogue legacy too,

which launched with accessibility features called a house rules. And you could tweak a lot of the different settings. And it actually got me over some humps where I thought that the game balancing wasn't quite right, and I was able to kind of work my way around that. So Dead Cells, if you found the game to be too hard when you first played it, download it again. The accessibility mode is free for all players,

and I think you'll get a lot more enjoyment out of it at this time around. They have all the unlocks. You're not going to be missing anything if you use this mode. I think it's a great addition, and so, yeah, more games should do it. Okay, I'm going to download it. You should. Damn it.

Great for Steam Deck. Perfect. Yeah. Mine, it's so hot out across, like of the country and especially for well i think our european listeners are finally getting a break um but i wanted to pick a movie that cool cool people down and that movie is the empty man on hbl max so do you know about the empty man i know about the gray man no no, no, no, no. This is quite different than The Gray Man, as in this movie is actually watchable.

Sure. The Empty Man is this horror movie made by a guy named David Pryor. And he, I believe- Oh, wait. I actually know this movie. Yeah? Yes. He was David Fincher's, I believe, director of photography?

No. Yeah, it's like an indie. It became like a cult hit with people. Yes, it came out during the pandemic. Yeah. So it kind of just got lost. And I think it was also one of those movies that maybe it was like 20th Century Fox had it. Is that right?

I feel like it was one of those movies where during a whole bunch of acquisitions and mergers that happened during the pandemic, it kind of got like handed around to people who didn't want it and then just got dumped. So it's a horror movie. It is not perfect, but it's ambitious as all hell. And if you like movies that are just trying something that you've never seen before this is great at that the first 15 minutes of this it's set in the snow on a mountain climb it's pretty much a standalone movie i mean quite literally you could watch it just as your own little horror movie and i think you should I actually think that would be a great idea. And then if you have more time for like,

I think it's like two and a half, three hours, whatever it is. Wait, what? Yeah, it's a long movie. Three hour horror movie? Nah, it can't be that long. I just remember it being like really long and me being shocked.

I'm checking right now. It's two hours, 17 minutes. Yeah, that's pretty long. That's long for a horror movie, right? That's pretty long. But yeah, if you don't have time for that just watch the first 15 minutes you get to see a monster in that time and it is utterly terrifying yeah it is so upsetting um so so i will yeah i will admit yeah it's worth obviously not telling people what happens because i know there's some hooks to it i will admit this is one of the many horror movies

that i have read the complete synopsis of on wikipedia without having seen the movie yeah that sounds right i do that with as you know i hate uh spoilers i'm very anti-spoiler but i also am too scared for most horror movies and this is certainly one of them so i read the synopsis sounded great i think it's like very interesting story so if you're interested you're interested in like kind of twisty uh weird um unexpected horror movies boom yeah the empty man i mean the first 15 minutes are kind of what most people today would think of as horror but the rest mean the first 15 minutes are kind of what most people today would think of as horror but the rest of the movie is more that kind of thriller menacing horror that i was much more popular in the 70s kind of before the slasher boom um yeah so that's that i think

that is it we did it that is it what do we talk about today today we talked about stray we talked about our favorite uh animal games mine was hey you know what we actually both brought four lion king lion mr mosquito tokyo jungle and you brought chip and dale on the nes echo the dolphin on the genesis not the dreamcast version tunic and okami and then uh your recommendation is dead cells which i am literally downloading onto my steam deck and mine is the empty man which is available to stream right now on hbo max next resties i don't know that's a while you at one point you suggested on twitter that we're gonna do live alive yeah it's probably not going to happen. Not going to happen, I'm sorry. I don't think I could talk you into it. I'm sure it's

lovely, but it's not a good idea. Yeah, I mean, so an idea that Fresh and I have considered is the best games of 2025. That's, yeah. We'll have to flesh that out, I think, a little more. Yeah, we'll see.

Yeah, we'll see. We'll see where we're at. I think there a little more. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see where we're at. I think there's some good stuff coming out. You will be pleasantly surprised, I think, by the next Rusties. Me or the audience? Both of us. Yeah, it sounds right. Cool.

Well, until the next time, he's RustFrustic. I'm Chris Plant. We're the Rusties. This is a podcast where the rest of the best discuss the best of the rest. We will see you later. Resties!