The Besties - The Besties pick the best games of April 2017

Episode Date: May 9, 2017

It’s only APRIL? Remember when good games only came out after Madden? That’s out the window. It’s been a stunner of a year already for game releases, and the streak continues in April with everything from JRPG/dating games to idle games. Join the Besties as they pick the month’s best. Games discussed: Puyo Puyo Tetris, Office Space: Idle Profits, Flinthook, Kubb, Nier: Automata, The Sexy Brutale, Persona 5, What Remains of Edith Finch, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. Theme song by Ian Dorsch Download MP3" Subscribe? Sure, you can subscribe. 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!

But let's get into it. Wait. Trash trucks outside. Come and take your fucking skills away, Justin. Down to the dump where they belong. You fucking idiot. from the vox media podcast family comes my name is just so fresh napoleon dynamite reference. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best games of the month. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I really do know the best games of the month.

My name is Chris Plant, and I definitely am the winner who knows the games. My name is Russ Rushing, and I know the best games of the week. Russ just sounded like the beginning of an Assassin's Creed game. Okay, this is the besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in food, fine wine, culture, resort destinations,

video games, fashion, golfing destinations, luxury watches, and so much more. But today we're going to be uh just mainly focusing on video games you know guys they're they've come a long way since pac-man i don't know if if you've uh have heard about this but um they're they're pretty advanced these days i played a game justin and i swear to god you guys it had two pac-mans in it what so they like learned how to like double that amount of technology at least

one of them have a bow or was it one of them did have a bow yeah i'm glad you asked thank you griffin have you seen this game that so it's tetris but it's also another game that's like tetris at the same time except it's not let's so let's do honorable mentions so we can talk about Tetris v. Puyo Pop the like really historic Supreme Court case that established a truly like like really incredible super precedent

that's the law of the land I don't like Puyo Pop is the problem I wish I could switch that out and have it just be Tetris vs. Super Tetris or Tetris vs. Dr. Mario unless Dr. Mario is just be tetris versus super tetris um or tetris versus dr mario unless dr mario is just puya pop or tetris tetris versus wetris that's what i or that one would be good versus wetris um yeah i just i i play that game and i maybe i just need to spend some time with it but i just like play it i'm like fuck yeah tetris and then puya pop comes on it's like i

don't know how to do anything here the only time time I played it was in the New York office against Nick, who is like, apparently like, grandmaster level Tetris player, and like, a very good Puyo Pop player also, and so I just got like, fucking creamed. Now, if it was not Super Tetris, what did I say? Super Tetris? Tetris Attack is what I meant. That's my favorite

fucking puzzle game of all time. I'll play that one for days. So, I wish I had more options in switching those out but it's a really fucking i'm amazed at i'm probably gonna pick it up just because i'm kind of blown away at like how much like content there is it reminds me a little bit of tetris ds which had all that like buck wild shit like the metroid level of tetris and like it had like all these different like nintendo mashup tetris levels um yeah it was it was a really really fucking good game talk to me about real quick explain because i watched you guys play it and i know how chesters works and i relatively know how

puya pop works so it bounces between the two in the middle of a single match right um so there's there's a bunch of different options that you can do right there's like uh if you're playing competitively you can play swap mode where it just like every i mean you set the intervals i think it starts at like a minute and so after a minute of tetris uh both of you switch to puyopop or you can just do a straight up and down like one of you plays tetris one of you plays puyopop or both of you play tetris yeah i mean it's it's but the way that like how do you score that well it's it's survival right so if you do like a crazy chain and puya pop or you set up like a big combo um then it drops tetrominoes on the balance it was it was pretty well but i mean it's hard for me to judge the balance because nick is fucking

way better at this than i am but um it seemed it seemed pretty pretty well balanced there's also like handicap settings which when we turned on like i actually was able to hold my own um but then there's like a big story mode and oh we actually only played the um the demo version which is out so go check it out now um uh and i've sort of like been following along with like all the extra shit that you can do in the game but um yeah it was it was it was fun i've never really gotten deep deep deep into a Tetris game before, but maybe I'll. God, I'm just so desperate for more Switch games. Maybe this will be the jam. There's a really good one coming out next week.

There's a Wonder Boy remaster. Yeah, I've heard good things about the Wonder Boy game. What did you say, Chris? I was going to say there's a really good game coming out next week, but we're going to save it for May with Tumble Seed. Oh, yeah, all right. I might have broken embargo by saying that's very good um uh justin have you played wonder boy or heard of it before uh no i heard him talk about it on the bomb cast today it's weird because it's like i had never

heard of it but everyone at gdc was so excited about it and it's just one of those like weird european things that i feel like never made the jump to america it was a master system game right so that was obviously not not a big not a heavy hitter over here yeah it's like asterisk and obelix no one really cares so wasn't it it's from japan right i think it was developed by european developers why are we talking why are we talking about this if we don't know fucking anything about it? Listen to us guess about video games. Okay, what other good games? I have been playing, I started a game

yesterday, actually. You guys into idle games here? You guys ever fuck with idle games before? Those are the games that play themselves, right? Well, clickers, you know? Like clickers, you guys ever play? I play Japanese idles. I also thought you were talking about Idol Master. I played a bunch of Bitcoin Billionaire. well clickers you know like clickers you guys are playing i played like japanese idols no i also thought you're talking about like idol master i played like a bunch of bitcoin billionaire that's

probably the deepest i got in that's a good one uh i'm playing a new one because every once in a while i like to get down with one i find it kind of soothing uh but there is a new one out that is uh uh it's office space the idol games which is pretty buck wild, mainly because it is insane how well the idea of Office Space maps to a clicker. So, you know, in Office Space, the thing is there they create this software that carves off like fractions of pennies. Yes. And those add up to big money over an extended period of time well the office

space idle game is basically that idea you're earning pennies for each floor of the inatech offices that you uh uh build out and like any good idle game you're you're uh investing that money back into the floors and then eventually uh and this is again like one of those areas that it melds really well you when you get far enough you can uh ask milton the steven root character to burn the place down which he does in the movie but it's also a perfect metaphor for idle games that have to have that like destroy everything you work for but get a bonus that makes it go way faster the next time and just progressively build out from there it's not doing much uh super innovative the only thing that's kind of interesting is you can

buy uh character packs so that come with um that are all characters from the movie and each one of those has its own like all those memorable characters all those beloved characters michael bolton um uh the other ones michael bolton the the guy you know the main guy rob yeah i think it's his name jennifer aniston's character uh the lady who says corporate accounts payable nina speaking just a moment i guess her name's nina it's right there in the thing the guy from scrubs guy from scrubs is up in the mix um wow but anyway from scrubs in the mix John C. McGinley is one of the bobs um but uh if you have a place in your heart for office space and a place in your heart for idle games and hi you found him hello ladies just like I didn't when I woke up this morning and i made my coffee and i took

my son to daycare and then i sat down at the mic at no point during this morning did i expect to be hearing about and talking about office space quite as much as i i have in the past few minutes it sounds like a good game it's just like wow office space it's not a good game it's an idle game i mean it's like it's a pretty good idle game. If you like idle games, they're all pretty much built around the same thing. I will say this one, idle games are built like the,

the strength of an idle game is how it is able to evolve over time. Like how much new content you see over time. I think the best example of this is, uh, uh, the, what's the millionaire one. The,

the one where you make a bunch of money adventure capitalist that's also all of them yeah um but but that was or or the candy one yeah candy box candy box was spectacular candy box is amazing i mean that's like the best and cookie clicker is amazing that too where you're making like there's also you have dark there's also dark grandmas making space cookies and shit like that. There's some decent RPG takes on this too, like Tap Titans and shit like that. Soda Dungeon is one of my favorites. That's a really good sort of barely an idle game. I like Soda Dungeon.

It had a little more RPG stuff. Yeah, a little more RPG stuff. But it's fun. If you like that style of game and you know if you do, you know right now listening to this if this is your jam or not. If you do not fit that Venn diagram of office space idle game fans like you you are not going to enjoy this product but otherwise check it out i played flint hook i bought it yes i bought it yesterday so i could talk about it on the podcast and play it because i it seemed all the

trailers made it look really fucking hot um if you played mercenary kings it's by the same dev uh tribute um and this really cool trailer of them showing the flint hook dude running through the first level in bionic commando yeah it was really really great um so yeah as as the name and um russ's uh uh interjection suggests you have a grappling hook and you use it to uh connect to and like sort of fly around these different um points the the game is like the game's slick as hell um it's got this like it's got some of the best pixel art i've seen in a real long time and the soundtrack is fucking banging um and you are this little character i'm not exactly sure what the character is. There's like some deep lore to Flint Hook that I don't quite understand.

But you have a grappling hook and you have like a blaster pistol. And you have a belt that allows you to slow down time. Wait, wait. How would you describe this belt? It's a time belt, I guess. They actually do call it the time belt at certain points in the game which is magnificent um so the the whole like structure of the game is you are this like sky pirate this space pirate and you fly and you're hunting down bounties and the way that you do that is you

go and you um siege an enemy ship um and these ships are comprised of these fairly small like um square or rectangular rooms um kind of imagine how maps were structured in rogue legacy and you're kind of getting the picture um and also envision rogue legacy because they are randomized uh you have your choice of like which ship you want to attack and you will see like what modifiers are available on the ship so like one ship will have like a laser grid in it and one of them will have you'll just know that there will be extra enemies in this one um and so you choose which modifier you want to go down and there's difficulty rankings for each one um and so you go in and you fight through these randomized maps and like the game like playing the game is slick as fuck like hooking between these different points and like flying through the air and like turning

on slow motion so that you can dodge some enemy bullets and like taking them out as you are still like flying through the air and then hooking onto another platform and zipping up to like it's really easy to get these like really cool fluid combos going uh there's a great like progression and customization system in the game too where you can level up and get these um basically expansion packs that have these perks in them that you can equip um and you also find this currency in the ships that you can spend to get these permanent upgrades for your character so you're always moving forward even when you die which is good because i i haven't gotten through the first i i only played it for maybe an hour and a half maybe two hours yesterday um

it's the structure of the game i don't like very much because basically what you have to do is in order to find your bounty you have to collect um these gems from in this first round three different ships before you can move on to like the boss ship and if you die at any point you have to start the whole chain over now you do get like you only have one life so you do get like experience points and shit if you die and so you're constantly you are constantly like moving forward it's not like it's not a roguelike in that sense but like i played for 25 minutes or so and I was like killing it and I had these like sick perks and I like went into the boss ship with like full health and like some bombs and like an upgraded like super powerful blaster. And like I was like ready to do this thing. And the boss was like really, really very, very tough.

And I died. And so like I still got experience points so i could like take a whole run at it but this was like my third time trying to get to the boss in the first place and i don't know it was like it's punishing it's punishing in a way that's like not great like i'm i'm into rogue legacy i think rules and i think it does this really really really well this idea of like constantly banging your head against this wall until you sort of erode the wall with your head blood like i i think rogue legacy does it really well but idea of like constantly banging your head against this wall until you sort of erode the wall with your head blood like i i think roguelixity does it really well but there's something about like investing this much time in a loop and then losing it at the boss fight and be

and even though you're moving forward mechanically like it still feels so fucking defeating and i kind of wish you want to feel like the upgrades that you're carrying forward are giving you like a huge noticeable impact after you do it and i think and i think they are right like i can tell that my character is getting stronger it's just like okay i'm stronger now do i really want to go and do that and do three more ships just to try to get back to that same boss like yeah i just i just kind of wish the cycles were more um like in in the micro scale like just one ship one big ship that you had to try to take down instead of like three and maybe it's just a time investment like let me play for 10 minutes and if i die and i lose 10 minutes like that's a different beast than like 30 minutes and

because like and and again this all boils down to like i don't have that much gaming time and the very little i do have i basically am pouring into the sieve of persona 5 at this point so uh but it's it's a really it's a cool game and i'll probably spend a little bit more time with it i also wish it was on um is it on vita i know i'm not 100 sure they have brought their other stuff to vita so i wouldn't be surprised but i'm not actually sure i know it's not on switch because i wanted to pick it up on switch but yeah that would be good too do you think part of like what's frustrating about this versus, say, something like Spelunky or FTL is that you are able to get to the boss relatively, comparatively easy? No, that's not true.

What? Oh, you're saying the opposite. Yeah, in Clickhook that it's easier. Spelunky was way harder. Yeah, I'm saying Spelunky feels like a constant build so by the time that you get to the boss and lose it's not heartbreaking because it's like well wow i can't believe i even made it there to be fair there is some of that in flint hook like the upgrades that you find are like randomized in in the levels so like when i hit the boss i was like oh i'm fucking set up i'm stronger i'm so much stronger than i was before i started um yeah but what i mean is like the first time you get to the boss on

splunky it's after you've played like 30 rounds 12 yeah i mean yeah if you're an expert like but i'm saying like getting there so quickly in this yeah sure i can see how you felt like going in like well i did it Like I got here in three. But this was not the final boss of the game. No, no, no, no. This is just like the first chunk of level. Again, like it's a big game and it's really polished and it's like really slick. And there's a lot more to it that I haven't seen.

So I don't want to like call down any kind of judgment on it. I just like I found myself a little bit turned off by this structure for the same reason and honestly i'm turned off by most roguelikes these days y'all this is honorable mentions we've got we have got to move forward wait chris and i need to talk about one more honorable mention make it quick what oh cube cube yeah the great i mean it shouldn't be an honorable mention it should be the game of the decade i had a lot of fun playing Koob with you, Chris. You own the Koob. Do you want to tell folks what Koob is? Yeah, I mean, it's hard to describe, but I'll do my best.

Spell it for us. It is the chess of yard games. You can have as many people as you want. There are two sides. How do you spell this? K-U-B-B. K-U-B-B. That's the least interesting thing about it.ubb that's like cub

kbb okay so there's there's a field on opposite sides you line up five uh pieces that are i don't know like six inches tall in the middle of uh the field there is a king piece uh both sides these are just like little thick wood blocks essentially and then you're playing this in a yard yeah and it's a yard game it's a big rectangular like playing field that you have to kind of stay inside okay yeah and each each side throws uh sticks at the other side's uh cube if you will you cannot hit the king till the very end that's like the kind of eight ball and if you knock it over they throw it onto your side and the goal is to eventually get all of the cube on your side and you alternate throwing

large sticks at the cubes and every time this cube gets knocked over it gets thrown back to the other side so you're constantly like throwing these i think the little uh bricks are called skulls you're constantly trying to knock over the other people's skulls and when you do they have to throw them over to your side and then they have to knock those ones over before they can go for your back row and if they don't knock over all of the like more um frontwards field skulls then you get to throw from those next time so you get like a distance advantage and the point of the game is just like wipe out all of the other team's skulls and then knock down the king and win there's like a distance advantage. And the point of the game is just like wipe out all of the other teams, skulls, and then knock down the King and win.

There's like a lot of, there's a lot of like strategy and skill in it. So it's like lawn darts meets Jenga. Um, kind, kinda, kind of, maybe a little bit.

I think I'm not really wrapping my head around it. Maybe I'll just search online. Google, Google cube. It's very difficult to describe. K-U-B-B. Yeah. It's not cub. describe. K-U-B-B. Yeah. It's not Cub.

No. How do you know that? I just, it feels right in the mouth. Say it. Say it. Say it, Russ. Cub. Cub.

Kube. Kube. Unless there's an O loud over the U and then it's Kube. Oh, I could talk about, I'm still playing Fire Emblem. Oh, Jesus. I kind of want to talk about it a little bit. I appreciate all the hard work you did playing, setting up my team for me, but I just can't. I know you're not.

I think I might be done. Yeah. So I just think it's interesting because like we're coming up on three months since the game came out and I'm still playing it like pretty much every day. And it's just been a fascinating look into like the world of gachapon and like the gambling like tendencies that people sort of fall into

when they play these games I haven't I've only well only I've spent $40 on the game so far and basically have told myself that I'm not going to spend anymore because the upside for spending money is pretty minimal but I still find it very rewarding and it's like a great strategy game I'm not going to spend anymore because the upside for spending money is pretty minimal.

But I still find it very rewarding and it's like a great strategy game. And it's crazy to me that like it has sort of supplanted Destiny as like the game I play. The thing you really deep it. Yeah, sure. I for me, it's just like all of the stuff they've added, like as you were describing it to me, like once you started mentioning like, oh, well, this is a good character. You can break them down to transfer the skills over this other character.

But first you need to make sure that the IVs on this other character are good enough before you invest your feathers. And once like, I can't, I- Yeah, no, totally. I mean, there's a reason I can't go back and play Hearthstone for the same reason. Is like, I played when it first came out.

I knew all the vanilla cards back to front. And then I left for a while. and then they added 300 new cards yeah i just like have like i'm like no thanks like i don't want to be at that disadvantage so i get it yeah man i also i guess the new hearthstone expansion launched last month and like i feel i feel um i bought i pre-ordered like the first set of like you can do a pre-order when those new expansions drop and you drop like 50 bucks and you get 50 packs or something like that um and i did that and i got some decent stuff and i haven't played since i opened those since i opened i heard it was kind of bogus the the expansion people weren't happy oh i don't know i haven't i i i'm worried

that i may have like fallen off i really appreciate hearthstone i think it's a fucking great game but um uh and i played it a lot actually after henry was born because it was like a good little game that i could like have on the on the ipad yeah um and just like play it wherever um but i since that um expansion i just like yeah i haven't really i haven't really gotten too deep in yeah it's tough to keep up with those games it's just a lot it's like it's one of those games hearthstone kind of feels to me like one of those games um and i think it's less so than like dota or league of legends but like i think there's and destiny like destiny was this for me there are certain types of games that's just like that

has to be the only game you play. It feels like maybe a little bit, maybe I'm being a little bit like overdramatic, but like in order for you to like, I feel like Hearthstone is a very demanding game. There are types of games that are just like really, really demanding. And I just don't have the time to like do that anymore.

Totally. That's kind of why I like Fire Emblem is that like it fits in the slots where ordinarily I wouldn't be able to play a game. Like I'm waiting for five minutes do that anymore that's kind of why i like fire room is that like it fits in the slots where ordinarily i wouldn't be able to play a game like i'm waiting on for five minutes on the subway platform or something like that like it's perfect for that and it doesn't impede on my like you know chilling on the couch or whatever doing other things which is kind of nice okay um so near automata we did we mention it last episode?

We mentioned that we all wanted to play it but haven't. Yeah. It's like I'm looking at it hungrily and hoping that I finish Persona 5 soon. So it is exceptional. And it is like a continuation of the thing I think we talked about earlier. Maybe like the first episode of our, you know, this great reunion tour. earlier maybe like the first episode of our our you know this great reunion tour um of like it feels like either japanese games are just clicking with us or in a western audience finally or they have like kind of found out how to be themselves without i guess you know prizing western game

design ideas but i mean this game has so many of the weird things that you would see in stuff like a suda 51 game last generation that was like interesting but also super frustrating as in like we mentioned earlier you can play the first 30 minutes and die and just have to start over um or you can go down paths in the game that don't really lead anywhere and then you have to walk your way out of them. There isn't like great fast travel. The map is like purposefully obtuse. And yet it's kind of amazing because the game seems like utterly obsessed with everything being inside of its own universe. So like you are playing the game through, I think, like the user experience of an artificial intelligence almost or as if you are a cyborg down to when you start the game you can start it or you can look at the

actual uh like coding certificates of all of the software and like share or not shareware but like middleware they use to create the game as if it's part of the canon like as if like a unity license is in canon with the game you you get like ui elements are items that you have to like install in your body and you can only carry so much and each item has its own weight yeah you have to put like space use space to like have your health bar on the screen you have to install it actually like i'm not joking like is it that kind of like the story is heavy the story is about you are a cyborg um who is humans have been they've had to flee earth to live on the moon it is silly um and these like

alien robots have kind of just inherited the earth and you are fighting on behalf of humans to take the earth back um but a lot of the story is kind of like are you a cyborg like are you just a robot shit are you know do robots have the robots yeah yeah on earth have feeling there's an amazing i i want to highlight one sequence that like i think really capitalizes on this you start from the very opening sequence i mean like from the very jump you're fighting these robots that are giving you hints that like they are much more sentient than you're giving them credit for like there's a lot of hints towards that and in one sequence

there's you come across a huge group of them and you just start like slaughtering them because they're the enemy and that's what you're supposed to do and they start individually start chanting this cannot continue this cannot continue and then they start chanting it together in this

very creepy like high-pitched robot voice and then they start chanting it together in this very creepy like high-pitched robot voice and they congeal into a single like boss kind of enemy and that chant this this cannot continue becomes like the rhythm section of this song this like pulsing song that becomes the boss music like and it it becomes underlying like that song is then underlying the boss fight that they have created through this chant like it's amazing and don't get me wrong like this idea is familiar to sci-fi but like there is there's such a human games have never done it games don't do that shit right though like i haven't played a game that has done right by that idea there's early on you have another moment where you're just fighting like a horde of these these robots and they just

start like saying in like the simplest most like emotionless way ouch when you hit them oh and it is like brutal i mean yeah like the turrets in portal yeah the one the one thing that i will say i'm fairly early in the game. I mean, I'm a few hours in, even though, as Chris pointed out, my play time is like 72 hours because it keeps going when you pause. But there is a lot of running from place to place. And it's good. It feels good.

It's not unpleasant to navigate the world but there is a lot early on of hiking from like one spot to another spot and backtracking did you figure out how to run it took me a second yes i figured out how to run um and that's that's pretty smart uh but the in the pay you run really fast but still it's like big areas that don't always have a super clear a to b path and um that ends up being like a lot of i think for me for my taste kind of unfortunate pace killing like i want to get to like this cool stuff but it's so far yeah to get from a to b that it really killed the pace for me a little bit i will say this and this is what i think the game does as it opens up and this is just going off of like things i've seen from the game is the game is

meant to be played i think five or six times all the way through it's short like it's very short oh really um and the game changes each time you play it like new game plus is not just like oh you have better items um the game changes i guess they're just gobs of endings yada yada yada but i think you also gain pretty real abilities that change how you travel and i think this first playthrough is kind of meant to get you to just know what the world is um which is like not a defense of it that's expecting a lot of the player but i mean the game the game makes a lot of choices that are hey we are really proud of this and we really want you to like enjoy it and if you're willing to invest in it there's going to be some real payoffs we should talk about actually yeah let's get into it. Yeah. I'll talk about it later. Yeah. I can start.

I want to talk about a game called The Sexy Brutale, which I think is on PC. I know it's on PS4. It is on PC. I put it on PC. You played it. Oh, so you played it. Good. Good, good, good.

The whole thing or did you? No. It's not that long. I played a good chunk, a couple hours. I'm going to try to describe the game. It's a little challenging and Russ could probably help. The best touchstones I've found, well, these won't be immediately accessible, but sort of like Groundhog's Day meets Sleep No More meets Clue, I guess,

is the best way. I mean, I don't know how many people, apart from your love of it, know what Sleep No More is. So basically you're in this... How about my Dora's Mask meets Clue for that matter. How was your 11th Sleep No More experience? It was my eighth. It was great.

I got two private scenes I'd never gotten before. Whoa, you got two fucking private scenes in one trip? I got the older nurse in the hut. I had to climb under some trees to get the older nurse in the hut. She gave me some tea from a spoon. It's anyway google sleep no more and kube that's your homework dear listeners so you're a uh a a guy a dude you're a dude you're a dude in a uh large sort of casino hotel and the there are guests at the hotel and there are the workers at the hotel there are these like masked sort of automaton fellas and basically the guests in the

hotel have all been killed in in the span of 12 hours all the guests in the hotel have been killed. You have to stop that from happening. And the trick is, the plus and minus is, the minus is you can't be in the same room as anybody. If you enter the same room as one of the workers or one of the guests, the game sort of stops and the masks that everybody wears come off their heads and fly at you to try to attack you and kill you. So you cannot be in the same room as other people. You can, however, peek through keyholes. You can listen through walls. You can hide in closets to observe things.

And basically, so that's the bad thing. The good thing is you can reset the day back to noon. It goes from noon to midnight. You can reset the day back to noon at any point. So basically to use this sort of intro bit as a, uh, an example, you have an example.

And I was example, sorry. You have to listen to me on like a regular rest, fresh takeover. You have to use, come on. You have to listen to me on like a regular rest fresh ticket. You have to use, come on. You have to, uh,

uh, there's a, a scientist of some sort that gets shot in a chapel by one of the workers and he gets shot at 5 PM. Uh, so what you have to do is, uh, there at some point while the, the scientist is looking through a safe, he drops a blank cartridge that was hidden away in the safe.

A bullet. A bullet. No. No, a blank cartridge. I mean, but. There's no bullet. A blank. I understand.

A blank has no bullet. Okay. So you pick up this cartridge and you can find if you are quick you can get to the gun that the hotel employee uses before he does and install that blank cartridge in there and when you do that

when he tries to shoot the scientist it's obviously the blank and that gives the scientist time to fight back so that's a very simple one. There are others that involve like watching through a keyhole as someone uses a keypad and then that information, you don't keep items for each run, but you do keep information. So you can see people sneaking through a secret passageway.

And if you do that, you then know where that secret passageway is. And each time you save someone in the hotel, it's sort of segmented. So like each time you save someone in the hotel, you get their mask, which gives you a new ability, like the ability to shatter glass or the ability to unlock any lock or whatever.

And each murder is completely unique. I mean, it's completely of itself and you have to figure out the steps you need to take. And it does very little handholding, basically none in the sense of like, how am I going to, how does this person even die? Like, where is this person? How does this person die? What, what, what steps could I take to do it? You really have to decide like, okay, on this one, I'm just going to try to find this person and follow them so I can get a sense of their story. And that's really how you ingest the stories all through, through key holes and through, you know, listening through walls and that kind of thing. And it is a very cool story that is so inscrutable

until you get to the end and understand exactly what's happening. But yeah, it's, I really like the idea of like almost working backwards where you see a murder and then you like see the events that led to that murder. And then you find places within those events where you can sort of take advantage

of the information that you glean from reversing time. This sounds a lot like Ghost Trick. Like a lot like Ghost Trick. And that's not a knock against it. It just sounds like it's doing a lot of this. I don't remember Ghost Trick. That was like the 2D handheld. That was like this, yeah,

that super fucking slick Capcom 2D a uh you were a ghost and you could manipulate things in the environment to prevent these like horrible murders from from taking place i guess except that like you never feel like a ghost you just can't yeah it's more like you're you're in the periphery right and no one ever interacts like until you save them. There's a brief scene when you save someone, they acknowledge your presence and stuff. But like you can't really interact with people.

So it's about like exploring, like you feel like, I don't know, you don't get that sense of like, oh, there's a creepy ghost in this room. You're just sort of tweaking things a little bit to keep the murder from happening. Yeah.

I also want to mention the the art in this game the graphics are super cool it's an isometric game that kind of looks like if you were to like imagine like a 3d version of a clue board like that victorian like old house style like like super detailed very with a little bit of like lucas arts aesthetic i feel like there's a little bit like monkey island kind of vibe in the character design it just looks but it's also gothic like a god and the music's fucking great too um it's a very cool world to be in there's lots of secrets to uncover you can collect like the guest invitations and there's playing cards to collect and things like that each of which not the playing cards but guest invitations, and there's playing cards to collect and things like that, each of which, not the playing cards, but the invitations and things in the environment

give you additional information about what's happening to try to help you piece that together. But it's really, really, really neat. It doesn't feel like anything I've played before. And I did play Ghost Trick, so it's a little different. There's definitely some of that DNA there, but um it's very it's very very cool uh um and and worth worth checking out it's the sexy brutal i really want it yeah are you ready for my transition yeah please yeah when when the masks fly off in this game did the people go i am thou and, and thou art I? Oh. Like that?

Are we going on to the next one? I mean, yeah. I think that's how it works. That's the transition. All right. Then I'll do my game. My game is Persona 5. It's the next Persona game.

The fifth one. Well, it's probably like the 71st one, including like P4 Arena and Persona 4 Dancing All Night. And man, Persona 4 Dancing All Night was a good one. That spinoff with Fire Emblem. first one including like p4 arena and persona 4 dancing all night and man persona 4 dancing all night was a good one off with fire persona q shadow the labyrinth fucking took it fits into all the shimogami tensai games yeah that's there's oh man it's so huge um bit of back backstory i guess persona 4 golden's my favorite game of all time um and it's persona 5 has been um what was the original release date for it wasn't it like september 2013 or something no dude it was supposed to be a ps3 title and then it got pushed back and pushed back and pushed back uh came out in japan last year and then just arrived

here and it's probably been like um every year colin writes a it gets the the polygon staff to all like chime in on what their most anticipated games of the year are and like for the past three years mine has been persona five so i've been looking forward to this one for a long time um and it's it's really great it's a very very very good game and one of the better like one of the better design jrpgs um i've ever played have you all russ i don't think you played it i played it oh you did okay i didn't play 60 hours of it but i played uh like the intro in the first few hours so i planned i think you've probably played it the most after after me um and so here's what i'll say about persona 5 it is a um if you've ever played a persona game game, it is a sort of a half JRPG, half like life sim, dating sim type game.

I always get uncomfortable when the dating sim part is applied to it because frankly that part of it is kind of weak. It doesn't even appear until like hour 50. It feels more like an interactive story. It's a visual novel meets JRPG I think is a really good one. And Persona 4 Golden is my favorite, my favorite game. And a lot of that is just, um, in, uh, like the tone of the game is really unique and the characters are so, so great. But I will, I will acknowledge that the, uh, like RPG part of it was never like awesome.

Um, because these games, uh, they take place, uh, over the course of, uh, about a year usually. And so the structure of the game is broken down into days uh you will go to school and do stuff there and come home from school and have some free time unless your fucking cat makes you go to sleep half of the days um you have some free time to like go out and explore whatever area you're in and like go do whatever activities you want to do and hang out with whoever you want and build these bonds with those characters um and all of that stuff feeds back into the rpg part which is sort of a dungeon crawler up to this point pretty much randomized dungeon diving uh you know fighting enemies getting stronger collecting persona uh which

are kind of pokemon-esque like they all have all have, there's hundreds of them and they have different stats and different abilities and you can combine them to form new Persona with new abilities. And that part of the game in Persona 4 Golden was like, it wasn't as good as the Life Sim stuff. Like it wasn't as good. For me, it feels like you play through the days and you hang out with all your friends and you do all these like fun activities and then it's like okay well time to go to work and get in that dungeon and do do the stuff i think the best thing about persona 5

is that um for the first time and i've played most of the persona games at this point um that that dungeon stuff the rpg stuff is fucking. It is like some of the best mechanics I've ever had in an RPG. Combat breaks down into, as it kind of always has, picking out the elemental weaknesses of enemies and exploiting them to get extra turns in combat. I think Persona 5 is especially demanding in that sense because uh i have i've been playing the game before and i didn't exploit those weaknesses and didn't get those extra turns and then like if the enemies get a single turn they can just fuck your whole party

up in in that span um so you really need to be very very smart basically every battle um there's a rush mode where you can just hit start and all your characters will just rush in and do melee attacks and it like fast forwards through the battle. You just fucking can't do that in this game. Because again, like if the enemies get one turn, there's no guarantee that you're gonna survive that. What this game does really well

is it adds the negotiation system back into the game that I think has been absent since like two it's in all the shin megami tensei games where basically you're fighting these shadows in in dungeons um and in past games it's like kind of random whether or not you collect them um persona for golden had this weird like card drawing thing after certain battles where like maybe you'd get a persona or maybe not uh in this one like if you knock down all the enemies you can enter a negotiation with them where you can try to convince them to give you an item or give you money or join your cause and if you do that latter one you have to actually like

have a conversation with them in which you like kind of look at what their temperament is and try to guess what kind of answers they want um and that can be a little bit finicky but uh it gets much easier as like a lot of the really difficult things about this game get easier as you boost up those those social links which they call confidants in this game um which is another like hugely improved thing where like as you make friends with people basically everybody has these like really really valuable skills to teach you that you're just constantly upgrading as you like go and get um you know sushi with Ryuji and then all of a sudden like he teaches you this new technique that's like really really helpful or um you go talk to uh a character who is essentially Bernie Sanders who teaches you like how to like negotiate with with shadows better and make that part of the game much easier um so you like also the dungeons aren't randomized they are uh there's one that sort of

adheres to like the roguelike structure of the game that you can go into at any time and you kind of have to to like um fulfill these like mini objectives but the like main dungeons in the game are like set and they require you to uh do like a heist metaphor basically yeah each one is a heist metaphor that you have to like go in and like rob a bank or siege this castle um but there are like puzzles that you have to solve and there are um uh you know you have to like find find these unique solutions to get through the dungeon which is new. Like, in Persona 4 Golden, it was just, like, run and hope you run into the exit door and fight all the enemies along the way and pick up all the treasure.

And you get a—it's very advantageous to get the drop on enemies. So there's a lot of, like, sneaking from cover to cover and attacking enemies. Yeah, it felt much more action-y. I actually thought that the whole intro, which you didn't really go into um i so i played persona 4 golden and that was the first time i played a persona game and i put in a good four to five hours into it and like really tried a few times to get into it and i just couldn't get over the hurdle which is like a very very slow intro and maybe it's just like my taste or whatever but i found this game well first all, this game does start with like,

I forget the terminology for it, but like a flash forward and then a flash back. It's a framing device where the game starts out sort of in the future, and so all of the events that take place during the game, basically like whenever you find a new confidant, it flashes forward to this event in the future. And so the story of the game is being told from this event in the future.

Right. So you sort of have an idea of where things are vaguely going, and that makes you more engaged in the events. I also think, unlike Persona Golden, where the mystery was sort of happening, but again, it's very low-key. Persona 5 takes place in the center of tokyo yeah and like chaos is going like the city is like so shit is going wrong big time and that is um that's my problem with with persona 5 and i should mention now that i am i i think like maybe two or three hours away from finishing it like i'm pretty sure i'm pretty much at the last dungeon um and i'm not gonna get into the spoilers or anything like that

um uh and and at this point i probably put about 90 hours into the game broken up over the course of like i mean i've played it like i play it like uh maybe an hour every day i do a lot of remote play it's fucking great for remote play i've played it probably 85 remote play the rest like on my on my tv which i was kind of bummed about because persona 4 desperately needs to be a video game yeah like it needs it's so sad being on a plane and not being able to like like or traveling or whatever we went to new york for like a week last week and i tried so desperately to stream it using like shitty hotel wi-fi but i couldn't couldn't get the bandwidth um so like the the the mechanical part of the game is great also uh i haven't mentioned this yet the style of the game is like every fucking menu every ui element every gorgeous it is it's

not just gorgeous like gorgeous intimates that like the graphics are really good it is the most fucking stylish game i've ever ever ever played like the after battle results screen is the coolest shit ever like i the first time i played like whenever i just hopped into the menu like there are animated like motions in the menu like you see your main character and you go to like the equip screen and he like rotates and like points a gun out over the menu. And then like there's shit like that in every facet of the game. And it's like so slick and inarguably like the mechanics of the game are more sophisticated. Not just more sophisticated than Persona 4 Gold, but maybe more than any other like JRPG I've ever played.

four golden but maybe more than any other like jrpg i've ever played um that that being said i i i don't like it as much as persona four golden and in fact i think it kind of uh has made me appreciate the things i like more about my favorite game of all time than it has like uh surpassed them um and i think a lot of that kind of boils down to the tone that Russ mentioned earlier the game takes place in Tokyo and it's actually that's it's it's cool like being able to go like to Akihabara and then to the Meiji Shrine and to Asakusa and like all of these different like real real places in in Tokyo but the the whole game is structured around you are a a member of the phantom thieves who go around and it's it's hyper convoluted because as as all like uh big plots in persona games are you go into sort of the the um what's called the cognitive world of of different adults

like different shitty shitty adults and you go into their palaces to steal their hearts and in doing so you sort of change their awful desires um and fix them i guess as it's like inception kind of like inception yeah i think that's a decent but but all of them are framed as as as, as Justin mentioned earlier, like different heists. Um, and so the game, the game, uh, the game tries to tackle this idea of, um,

uh, adults sort of exploiting souls. Well, not just souls. Like I think it's important to point out, like this is a game about adults taking advantage of the younger generations right and you are that younger generation who is standing up for it and it's not just like that it's not just um those how the dungeons are set up it's like every one of the

confidant storylines like every one of your main character storylines like boils down in some way to some shitty adult is fucking something up which is like and it i think it does a decent job at some of this some of this stuff the biggest bummer for me about persona 5 is uh two things one i i don't i just don't this tone is it's not great like i don't think it's i don't think it's great and i don't think it i don't think it's great. And I don't think it always pulls off what it's going for. Russ mentioned the intro sequence. The intro sequence starts with you getting your fucking ass beaten. And just the whole time, your character is always desperately imperiled.

And the world just kind of sucks. And a lot of the times like uh it feels like your plans don't really work out and everybody kind of hates you and um all of that is set up to like create this drama of like oh we're gonna overcome this by going into the you know the cognitive world and stealing their hearts and fixing it all up but like after um 90 hours of that like i don't know it's not the it it's not the relaxing sort of kind of fun vacation that persona for golden was for me and i think the other thing is like and the bigger thing is narratively speaking it it misses a lot more it misses a lot more... It misses a lot

of its punches. I'm not going to get into specific spoilers, but if you want to go in totally, totally pure, maybe fast forward a little bit. There's certain stuff in this game like there are twists towards the end, and one

of them is something that's just like, was this supposed to be a twist? There's a character whose identity is kind kind of revealed and it's like you literally set this up in like the second or third scene of the game is it but they treat it like and and they always like return back to it like three or four times to make sure you get this is the twist and it's like how is this a twist you haven't even disguised this character's like appearance or anything like that at all. There's one sort of, appropriately enough, since this is sort of a heist game, like, Ocean's Eleven style thing that happens that is somehow even more convoluted and, like, okay, than an actual Ocean's Eleven twist. There's, like, there's also these big narrative beats that just like it just doesn't land like

there's a character who has a family member die and the the game doesn't do very good by that like it just kind of this character just kind of brushes it off like it's no big deal and then don't talk about it again and they're you like whenever you see them in later scenes or you talk about the you do like their confidant scenes with them like they don't they don't there's not a lot of weight to what is like a pretty like huge moment in their life and instead they just talk about whatever like little goofy shit they talk and it's like really dog like your family member just died like you don't want to get back to that at all i want to hear chris did you have some of these same like tonal or narrative problems with the the structure of it because i know you've spent a lot of time

into it yeah i mean i think i have had the good fortune of stopping at maybe the right moment i i i spent about i don't know maybe 40 hours or so. I think we talked, and I know where you are in the game. I'm about halfway. A lot of this stuff is closer to the end, yeah. Yeah, and I had heard a lot of these issues. So for me, the game has largely been fine. I mean, I enjoy it a lot. I don't mean like, oh, the experience has been fine.

I just haven't confronted. The rubric is different because you're spending 100 fucking hours with the game. Like, the rubric is different. It has to be really, really good the whole time, I feel like. Well, yeah. And like I said, I've really enjoyed the beginning. I think also just the stuff that I'm enjoying from it is different than like what Griffin enjoyed about Persona 4. Like I know that you dug just the location.

Like that vibe of like, hey, I'm out in the country. This is kind of weirdly like a vacation you can hear the rain on the windows it's like folksy and persona 5 is not that um and like like griffin said it's it's very grim and it does not always stick its landings on this stuff i mean the room the like each of the the adults problems is basically a rumor that you probably heard about an adult in high school. They just took it to the furthest end. So it's like, you know, the gym teacher is a pervert. That is the first one.

And they take it to its furthest possible idea. And then it ends up being real. But the thing I do really, really dig about it versus the other games, and I think kind of in general, Persona games have always been good about this, is capturing what being a teenager is like in the moment, or maybe just a little past the moment. But I love how the game is all about like being stuck on your phone. I mean, so much of the game's dialogue takes place over text messages. The way that you get into these worlds is through an app. And I kind of get this sense that like, so technically you're going into these castles and you're doing these heists, yada, yada, yada.

But it feels almost like a metaphor on a metaphor of how we have these separate digital lives of how we have these separate digital lives and that you are kind of breaking into this other life we're now allowed to have on top of the one that we have in the real world um and it like digs into anonymous and a bunch of other things uh a bunch of other communities on the internet that i i like the way it does it because it doesn't feel as it feels like it actually knows what it's talking about compared to we've we've got uh uh sorry sorry go ahead oh no i mean that that's that's it i i just dig that stuff but i i mean will i go back and even finish the rest of the game i don't know i i've really enjoyed what i played i don't know if i need a whole lot more that's exactly where i am i i just want to weigh in real quick because we got to move on we've got we spent a lot of time persona but it's important that the Justin McElroy take be heard yeah

definitely I think a lot of people are hungry for it um I played probably 50 hours I think I'm about I would guess I'm about halfway through the game um and I don't I'm kind of in a similar bucket with plant in that I don't think I'm gonna go back I might go back but I don't think I'm going to I my main issue is this the localization is oh boy not it's really bad and for me like if you're gonna make your game 100 hours long you better have like good a good like you better value my time a lot like you better like be really considerate of how you're using my time and the dialogue in this game is so repetitive and redundant and like lacking in efficiency of language that a lot of times i'll like see the first few lines in a scene and then just set it to fast forward because like i get it now you're going to like circle around these a million times over um and and talk about

this exact same thing a million times and you're going to come back to it three or four times to reiterate what i missed earlier and like the the game i never feel that way about the action sequences like the but the discussion sequences are so tedious it's like such a waste of time i've seen a lot of like um there's like a a website that has like compiled some of the most egregious translation issues the most egregious localization issues i should say um and like yeah sometimes i'll hit a line that is just such gibberish i'm like what the like you don't even got subject verb agreement on this what are you doing um and like that shit is it's bad but i think there is sort of a um uh a more like overwhelming

problem with it like a more overarching problem which is what justin said it's just like a lot of the writing is just really flat and and that's not like a literary critique that is like a lot of the characters kind of feel exactly the same like the way that that they talk, obviously I'm not talking about voice acting. I'm talking about like the way they are written is kind of indistinguishable, which is a bummer. Um, because like the, the thing that this,

this franchise does right is these really, um, really great, uh, really like different characters that you like kind of go and you, and you get to know, um, over the course of this year and it's just

it's kind of a it's kind of a bummer that like and i think this also like goes back into some of the games like punches falling flat um i also want to mention just one last thing is that like you mentioned it the like dialogue being repetitive i feel like just this structure of the game of all the adults are shitty so let's go in this let's go in this magic world and fix them it's how every it's how every arc resolves like it's how every single it's pretty much every single arc resolves not just the main arcs but like the different confidant arcs also like more or less have the same ending and that's kind of a that's kind of a bummer too i feel like that's i've talked mostly about like how negative it is obviously like i love the game or else i wouldn't have spent almost 100 hours playing it it's just

like i i've been looking forward to it for four years now and um i i it hasn't it hasn't it's like met my expectations i guess but it is um it's not i don't think it's exactly the follow-up i wanted to my favorite game of of all time that said i do think it's um it's not i don't think it's exactly the follow-up i wanted to my favorite game of of all time that said i do think it's maybe a little bit more accessible than persona 4 golden was like you get into it a little bit faster and like again the mechanics aren't as like a lot of people play persona 4 golden and they bounce off the the the mechanics of the game which is like sure yes definitely um i don't think you'll have that same friction with persona 5 but at the same time i think the story and characters and writing and um tone of persona 4 golden are um miles miles ahead of five i have a recommendation and then i'll get into my

game here is my recommendation if you have not played persona 5 already you are probably not a super fan um wait because there are like a gajillion of amazing games out this year i have no doubt that very soon persona 5 golden uh will make its way to a portable console it's gotta be portable like if it i would probably still be doing that like if it was on vita like i would probably still be i would have a lot less i have a lot more patience for like my time being wasted when i'm not sitting on a couch in front of a television like when all my energy has to be focused on that when i'm on like a plane or driving somewhere it probably in the passenger seat yeah and also i mean that's the other thing is i feel i feel bad about like i really want to play near i really want to play sexy brutal i really want to play more flint hook i really want to play Nier I really want to play Sexy Brutale I really want to play more Flinthook

I really want to play Horizon Zero Dawn I want to play more Nioh I want to play all these fucking games But this is literally the only game I've played all month Except for the hour and a half I played of Flinthook yesterday Y'all want to hear about my buddy Edith Finch? Yes Edith Finch, what remains of her?

The answer will surprise you So what remains of Edith Finch is from the studio Giant Sparrow. They were originally contracted by Sony. I think they had, like, that similar three-game contract that the folks who made Journey had. Anyway, they made the, what is it, the Swan. What's the Swan game? Unfinished Swan. Unfinished Swan.

That was a good one swan the game was a good one yeah it was a first person game you start out in like an all-white environment that was a paintball game yeah you fire yeah well it started good and then it sort of fell off the rails it's nice it's it has like a kind of like a children's book story it's very sweet um this is their follow-up it has been in the works for quite a long time. A lot of different people have worked on it. Sony, Santa Monica, I think, dissolved parts of its studio, or at least dissolved this contract.

I don't know exactly what happened, but now the game is being published as the first game from movie studio Annapurna, who is the studio that releases releases pt anderson movies um and anderson what pt anderson pt anderson no pt anderson okay um and it is uh it's pretty great if the previous game was a children's book this is a ya book that is like not a controversial statement i think it kind of aspires to be that thing. And it plays somewhat like a collection of almost Ray Bradbury-esque short stories.

You are visiting this creepy house that you are the heir to in the Pacific Northwest. It's built somewhere between, I mean, it's Seussian. northwest it's built somewhere between i mean it's susan like imagine like a spooky house and then imagine that people just kept building rooms onto it over the course of a century and you're pretty much there um the house belongs to the finch family they came to america from norway maybe um and they are cursed to die young um and as you go into the house you have to learn basically how each member of the family died by going into their rooms and every room in the house once the person passes away is basically shut permanently they're like a sealed sealed thank you that's a word for it sealed and you find secret ways into each room and inside the room it's i mean a perfect time capsule of where it

was when that person passed and there is a usually a journal or some document that transports you into the short story of that person and somebody on twitter i wish i could remember who compared it to basically wario ware which i think is pretty dead on like missed or something no no like not the direction i thought so the game itself is you know walking simulator e like you just move in a linear fashion from uh room to room in this house but once you go you ambulate slowly um and it does a great job simulating that you you it's a very slow pace of a walk you're not in a hurry um i mean and why would you be if you are finally learning how uh everyone that could have ever been close to you died before you could have met them um but yeah so each each story is like kind of has a little like morbid

irony to it um some of them are funny some of them are sad some of them are not especially great uh but like they're kind of like edward gory stories tonally yeah yeah and and what i would say about the game is taken as a whole it's kind of exceptional it is very much more than the sum of its parts and it's only I don't know Russ it's like two and a half hours

three hours I played about half of it and you know how far you are because it actually keeps track of like which rooms you've gone to and so you can in your journal you can like see how many people are left. So I put about half of it. And the back half is faster than the front half. What I,

what I will say though is it's really affecting. Like it, it deals with some really hard and upsetting deaths that just aren't fair and in the first half i i think it kind of it eases you into it better than i really understood at first i thought it was like kind of silly and hokey um and then it deals with the death of a child and a few other people that are it's really really heavy and personal. I mean, obviously, death is personal, but really heavy death. Yeah, but that shit's like...

I'm popping that one off the Gamefly queue with that. I'm not equipped to handle that shit anymore. It's not... Yeah. I mean, I think they do a good job of making these tough topics a little more digestible, because it's not like

nah man you have a thing coming up that's gonna it's a lot there's i i think there's i think you have not gotten to some of the stuff yeah um i mean yeah that isn't to say i can't really knock it for being heavy but no i'm not knocking it i'm saying it's it's not bad like it's not um it's not it treats it with an appropriate amount of respect and i think like a lot of game stories don't often um at first russ we talked about this a little bit yesterday that the writing seems maybe a little off at times but i don't well yeah okay i was gonna say my my the writing felt for, for being what is essentially an interactive movie, at least for the first half of the game that I played, I think in those scenarios, the

writing needs to be really, really good because that's pushing you forward. And my rubric for that is stuff like Gone Home and stuff like Firewatch, I think are both really good examples of games that are propelled by their writing. And the writing in this, there was like a lot of like, the room felt like a bar of a blah, like a lot of analogy stuff that just feels like lazy, like, and YA is right, like, that a a good way to describe it but i think there's very good ya um and there's like kind of a little bit more simplistic ya and it felt like the latter at least for the first half yeah so in the first half too it it seems to largely be just journaling is like the voice of the stories you're reading a journal and that's how you're getting it and and to like give you an idea of how each of these stories works is basically the story is being uh it's coming to you over voiceover and you're seeing the words appear on like in the world of wherever the new story takes place an example that's early so i'm not spoiling a whole lot is like a teenager i I think teenager. He is swinging, and you control both legs with each of the joysticks,

so left leg with left, right leg with right, and you are trying to go over the bar while the story is being told to you. It's a tree. It's a tree swing, and he's trying to do a 360 around the tree branch, and you're controlling that and i actually found that to be one of my favorites of what i played because it felt like very like really felt like i was controlling it and it was like a very emotionally engaging experience i thought that was very cool yeah but the writing really comes together in the second half where again i'm not going to spoil

anything but it moves away from journaling to things like poetry that are a little more abstract or or the opposite uh like legal papers um and once it gets into that zone it seems to like really find its voice and again like as it gets into the heavier stuff having things that are either more subtle or or you know not as like emotionally forced like a legal paper both of those help them come at things that i think if they had taken the kind of like creative writing approach would have just felt ham-fisted or like yeah over the top so i i mean i i really like it i think um it's very interesting chris bell is the lead designer on it there's a there's a this is like not a game by just one person i'm just going to use him as an example but i i it's exciting to see his career

kind of hit this point um because he started at usc i don't know probably about like eight years ago and made uh with a with a team this really interesting game that was like multiplayer cooperative it was very strange but had just really interesting ideas about how you can feel a game through its controls and then he hopped on the journey team um and then transitioned to this and it's it is like this rare game where i feel like i can kind of like see somebody's or like almost experience somebody's trajectory as their design style changes which is the thing that i really enjoy about like music or like all other forms of art that i haven't been able to track that well in games and and i think kind

of like going through these games and seeing this is really awesome to kind of really sense a a kind of creative style changing from game to game. I also wanted to give them credit for what I think is a struggle in narrative games like this is making the actual interactions with the game interesting. Yeah. At the beginnings of it, in a case like Gone Home, I think it's pretty straightforward. Obviously, there's some 3D manipulation,

but for the most part, it's like pointing and clicking and reading and here when you do things like for example you open up a book the way you do that with a controller is you hold down a trigger and move the left analog stick to like analog wise open the book or you open a door like that and there's like a variety of interactions that are like that which are crucial to the game and it really did make me feel like much more within the world and much more connected to what I was doing so I really really did appreciate

that this is going to be a great transition to our final game Mario Kart oh there it was actually that was a really good transition thank you our last game is Mario Kart 8 deluxe, I guess. Thank you.

It comes out technically tomorrow, but we got some early codes for it. Essentially, it is just a re-release of the Wii U version of Mario Kart with the DLC all included but so thanks for listening everybody that's been the best game if you're not hooked by now um here's what i'm gonna say i uh as and i realize a lot of people disagree with me on this podcast but i think the wii u had a lot a lot a lot of major problems and was one of my least favorite nintendo consoles of all time and a lot of that had to had to do with the logistics of actually playing it um i didn't like the controllers

i didn't you know the gamepad was like bulky and annoying and whatever um the reason why i think this i can't necessarily say hey if you already bought bought this game on Wii U and played a ton of it, you're going to get that much more enjoyment on Switch. But I would say there was a moment last week we had a bunch of video people in the office. We were doing a little conference of all the video team members. minutes we were able to get a six person essentially land game of mario kart point played on three different switches with six different people in the same room with like with no friction like it was no it was a fucking nintendo commercial in that joint like oh come on and play okay click the wireless mode okay and we're in. Like, literally fucking super, super, super butter. Like, buttery, buttercream, sweet, soft, honey.

Yes. And we've certainly talked a lot about the Switch so far. And I remember talking early on before it actually came out about, like, you know, what we hope for it and what we hope it actually achieves and what the commercials are promising and vice versa, et cetera. what we hope it actually achieves and what the commercials are promising and vice versa, et cetera. And I'm going to reiterate, like, I don't think I've ever seen a more accurate representation of a gaming

console on commercials than I have with the switch. And I realized it looked fucking ridiculous. Hokey as hell. Yeah. Like super hokey. Like who's going to do that? What party are you going to go to where someone's going to whip out a switch and then a bunch of people are going to whatever,

hang out and play switch games. i think the reason why a big reason why local multiplayer games in general have had such a big big problem selling is because of that barrier to entry to like get them working it's like a hassle are all the controllers charged does everyone have a copy blah blah blah so on and so forth and the fact that nintendo has made this system so well designed for a very quick very easy local multiplayer honestly it makes it like a party yeah to like if two people have this console with them like you have like an activity for the next hour for like a group of at least four i mean smash smash is going to be amazing for this jackbox like it has a game that everybody who needs a controller can use their smartphones for so yeah all you need is a screen which it is yeah it's it's spectacular i will say

all of this so far has been how great the switch is the reason we had to do that the reason we had to create this nintendo commercial in the office is because still if you try to play mario kart 8 deluxe with more than two people on one switch the frame rate is dinky in a toilet that is true so if you are planning on playing in a four player so four players on the same system it's not i mean i think for people that are not super snobby about it the like frame rate stuff i am i'm one of those people i'm not it's playable it's definitely playable i'm not snobby about it but then when we switch to two people on a switch it is like oh this is oh it's what it's fucking so so so so good and it probably runs at like 25 frames a

second when you're in four player split screen damn why did Oh, damn. Why did you have to say that? Why did you have to put that down on paper? Someone's going to clock you for that. We'll see what Digital Foundry says, but that's my guess. And it's definitely like a silky, silky smooth 60 when you're playing with two people. And they're smart about it

because if you're playing wirelessly, so... Also, it's not 60 when you're playing with two people. It alternates frames i believe so it does a frame up top yeah it does a frame up top and then a frame at bottom so the whole screen i think is 60 but it's alternating frames i think it looks fucking gorgeous like that i'm sure i am wrong but i think that's what it does it looks spectacular i would say so the thing to keep in mind if you're playing wirelessly like if you have two switches with the game uh you can only do two players on each of those switches so you can't play wirelessly with two with four players on the same switch but you can play

locally with four players on the same switch which is really bizarre we tested this too yeah where we put a switch and we did four-player split-screen on a Switch. And again, it was playable. It's really hard because it's so tiny. There's also a weird restriction. This is very nitpicky where if you're playing two players on one Switch, you can either do single Joy-Cons

or a Pro Controller. You can't do both Joy-Cons in one controller and a Pro Controller, which is actually not bad because I just played with a single joy con and it's fine like it works really well gets pretty esoteric um yeah but i but i think but as griffin said like i was shocked that like well the controls with like a single joy con like drifting was no problem yeah whatever using items was no problem like it felt totally fine so so to like to do a like deeper dive into like what's different in deluxe i i there's there's

some cool stuff like you have two items you can carry two items at a time now that you can't switch between them but it does have like another kind of layer of strategy the strategy to the game there's also like you can get those pink sparks now which is yeah there's a higher level of drift boost and the other big thing that i do want to mention is drive assist oh yeah which is basically like driving mario kart for dummies to the point where like you're familiar with the experience of playing mario kart you're doing like rainbow road or some shit and you're playing with someone or you are terrible and you just keep driving off the edge and it's very frustrating drive assist will basically for all intents and purposes prevent

you from driving off the edge but they actually balanced it i didn't realize this until i played a little bit more they balanced it in a few ways one you can't get the highest level of drift boost when you're using drive assist it like locks that that out. Oh, interesting. And two, there are a ton of shortcuts in all of the maps and you basically can't use them at all. Like I've, I tried multiple times to like drive through like a waterfall that I knew was a shortcut

and the drive assist just kicks on the second you get to the edge of the track and pushes you back onto the course. So what it's designed for is like, I think it's really great for like learning the maps, like the basics of the maps and stuff like that. But I also think like it's like taking training wheels off a bike. Once you feel comfortable with the maps,

you can turn off drive assist. You go through waterfalls? And drive through waterfalls. Yeah, I think my biggest problem with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is it feels like the thing that it spent most of its time expanding is battle mode, which like, who? I don't know. I don't know how much time they spend expanding battle mode. I mean, there's new modes and the way that battle mode works is different.

Well, Shine Thief is good. We didn't play Shine Thief. Yeah. Is that new? Maybe. There's different balance things now. You can do U-turns in battle mode, but not in race mode. It feels like the thing that got the most work done on it over the original Mario Kart 8,

when, like, I would have been happy with just, like, two new sets of tracks. But, like, that was the thing most people complained about, too. Oh, the battle mode in Mario Kart 8 was very bad. Yeah, people, like, freaked out about that damn thing. And there is the mode Shine Thief, which we didn't play in a group, Battle mode in Mario Kart 8 was very bad. Yeah, people freaked out about that damn thing. And there is the mode Shine Thief, which we didn't play in a group, but I think is much better for people,

is like an oddball style, like everyone chasing the same person. And I think that could be really fun as like a local multiplayer thing. So at least there's that. We played a couple of new modes that were not very good, though. Yeah, I don't know that i like battle mode anyway and nobody does this is yeah nobody really but i think shine i kind of like battle mode i'm not what you play

after you've done like 10 races and you're like i'm a little burnt out let's try battle mode and you play battle mode you're like yeah let's go back to racing races uh the one last thing i did want to mention and i'm torn about this but i like vacillate between a really really loving mario kart and really really hating it and everyone's obviously talked about this, but I vacillate between really, really loving Mario Kart and really, really hating it. Everyone's obviously talked about this, but the idea of getting screwed... Well, no, not even the rubber band AI, but getting

screwed by items six, seven, eight times in a row. You're in second place, you get hit by a shell, you get hit by a banana, you get hit by a turtle shell and then last place it was hard it was hard for me to know if that was a mario kart 8 deluxe thing or just like a mario kart thing i think that's just a mario thing yeah like i played i played all of

them but that like hour or two that we played it in the new york office every other race the person in first place got fucking drilled an inch away from the finish line and lost and it's like i'm having a fun time playing video games with everybody today it did happen a lot i i think the issue is it feels a lot worse to get hit by an item than it feels good to hit someone with an item sure so it's kind of like a net negative uh in terms of like that aspect specifically uh there are settings and stuff like you can turn on so it can be like only turtle shells or only whatever stuff that's like you might feel is more fair um but that's just like a mario kart thing and the reason it's such a popular series is this nature of like well you always have a shot because you'll get better items

if you're in last place and crush people i just kind of wish all it needed was like some sort of like invincibility thing after you get hit by an item or like you get five seconds to like get out of the way or something because that when you just get hit by three items in a row you just want to throw your controller also the single player doesn't need so much of that like i it feels to me and i i can't imagine that they changed it but it feels like it that if you're in first place in a single player going into the third lap you are going to get destroyed and so much of the game has become like i don't know i've only probably played like a couple hours of it but spending the entire second lap making sure i can like get a whole bunch of shells or like bananas to play defense

so that once i do get in first i can use it but then it doesn't matter because if you get the uh the lightning bolt shrink thing it like tosses your weapons so it's blue shell you get yeah it's just this thing of like i i i get what the pleasure of it is but at a certain point it feels strategy yeah it feels like i don't i can't even strategize to prevent it like if i'm really good and that is that's frustrating yeah i mean i'd be curious to see like what the pro like strategy of playing Mario Kart online is, which for what it's worth, I play I tested it yesterday with Nick Robinson, who's across the country for me. And like, we were checking to see what the lag was like. And it was basically zero lag, like we were doing a battle mode. And he told me when he got hit by a shell, and it was instantly. So that's very cool for what it's worth. No, it's like technically

a very cool game. And I think it does's like technically a very cool game and i think it does it's a it's a good showpiece for the switch part yeah because like that technical stuff we touched on earlier actually works really really well and if you had any doubts about it like mario kart 8 deluxe will put that shit to bed but it also like looks and feels really really really good on yeah and i think if you go if you go to like a gaming conference in the next year what it packs people are gonna be playing it yeah it's this will like a gaming conference in the next year, what it packs... People are going to be playing it, yeah. This will line the halls in the same way that Smash would do the same thing. And it starts creating that same culture that we saw in those Switch commercials,

which is, honestly, it's just very, very cool. I'm glad they're really coming through on that. It made me more... It made me like... I haven't played the Switch really since I beat Zeldaelda and so like this was a good this is a good thing for me to play because it's it actually makes me feel like oh there's gonna be more cool shit on this like oh they're actually gonna do some really cool shit with this god i hope um so guys we have four games um is there any that we can eliminate before we start talking about like what is the the best

of the kind of a weird situation because like we have i think there's a just a batch of games that like people haven't played yeah so i don't know that anyone yeah yeah i don't know but we've been here before and i have full i mean i would say I would say I'm cool eliminating Mario Kart in the sense that like it is a re-release of a game and people pretty much get it. And I would personally vote for Sexy Brutale of these games. Oh, interesting. For what it's worth. I mean, I would vote for, I know I was hard on it,

but I also really, really like Persona 5. So I would put my vote there. That's tough for me i really i think that sexy brutal is very cool like it's very very neat and really for like a first attempt at this sort of design it's pretty genius um i i think Persona 5 is more ambitious, but for me, especially where I'm at as a person, like that, it's very hard for me to stomach just how poorly it manages time. It really does feel like these games

have always been this long, so that's why it is this long. Well, this one's even longer than Persona. My first playthrough of Persona 4 Gold was like, does feel like these games have always been this long so that's why it is this long well this this one's even longer than persona i i my first playthrough persona for gold was like i want to say like 65 70 hours and i'm at i'm at almost i'll probably be at about 100 by the time i finish persona yeah i just i just can't do it anymore i mean i i really i it it if it justified it i wouldn't have a problem with it sure but it it doesn't and to me that's a really big like it's it would be very weird for me to like i would recommend anybody play sexy brutal i would but it but like there would be a lot of qualifying questions i need to ask before i

would even like recommend dipping into persona 5 like where are you at chris um i mean honestly i i would probably say edith finch only because i i feel like i can recommend it to absolutely everybody like shit it's a game that i feel like i could recommend to people who don't play games which is so it sounds like justin chris and i are voting for our own shit russ i think you're the you're the no i said sexy brutal okay that Okay. So there you go. Boy, we're going to hear about this one, I feel like, boys. I mean, it doesn't really matter. No matter who wins, I think Persona 5 is a great game.

There's no fucking way in any universe it beats Breath of the Wild. Yeah. Let me just say, before we move on, if you're a Persona fan who wants to complain about this, please just provide me with a skip button so I can sort of get the gist of what you're saying and then play past the rest of it. Also, to the dev team that spent five years making that game,

tough shit! Oh, wow. Indie games, baby. No. Just to put a bow on this really quick, somebody on Twitter said, are we going to basically make this four games for four quarters? and that would mean that

yeah i think that's a good idea i think it's smart to give us something to talk about at the end of the year so it's not a um yeah and that way yeah i think that's good and we're gonna do it okay with that with that in mind and with that in mind i think persona 5 is our our game of the month then right how does that change the math well because i was fine with it because i thought With that in mind. With that in mind, Zelda sent. I think Persona 5 is our game of the month then. What? What? Wait, how does that change the math? Well, because I was fine with it because I thought either way it was going to get beaten by Zelda.

But if we're in a new quarter. You thought it was a pure victory. No, but the quarter ends this month. So Persona would still lose to Zelda. No, we're in March 8th. March is the quarter. Oh, no, that's not how math works. It's the opposite.

Yeah, bud. Our 16 months long year. Fine. I'll vote for Persona. Just keep it in for the quarter. Oh, no, that's not how math works. It's the opposite. Yeah, but... Our 16-month-long year. Fine, I'll vote for Persona. Just keep it in for the conversation. Oh, here we go. Now we're talking. Now we're talking. I don't approve of this at all.

Now, Persona 5 is longer than Sexy Butel, meaning there's more game content, meaning per dot, per dot, your dollars, your dollars per hour. I think it's ridiculous. Because what you're saying is we're going to talk for the end of the year thing. We're only going to talk about four games. That seems silly.

Well, I think those are the top seeds, you fool. Do you not know how seeds work? Yeah. Have you never watched NCAA basketball? Yeah. It's a March madness. Seeds. I also like, I don't know. I kind of of want to finish persona 5 and talk about it more it would be nice oh god it'd be nice to have a place can

i vote against it just so we don't talk about it more i got i got to rap i got to rap who who is it oh i thought you were gonna like do a like a rap i'm not even rap go with that joke because i know how humiliating that would be i just still i i for me the persona 5 is is very it's very much a a love letter to people who have enjoyed the series but the fact that they like it so much of it is story. The majority of it is story. And the dialogue, which is the primary method of conveying that story, is, broadly speaking, not good. Just not well written. I agree. And that is a huge problem.

I'm going to say Sexy Brutale. No matter what, we are going to be discussing that at the end of the year. I have no doubt that Persona will bracket. Yeah, for sure. And Griffin, consider that Persona will be in a lower seed, so therefore we'll have a good game. That's a very good point, yeah. This is fair.

I'm starting to feel regretful for how much it sounds like I've just been slamming this game, which I've really enjoyed and it's one of the my favorite games i played this year this is absolutely a case of and this is unavoidable just because it's been so fucking long of my expectations were through the through the roof they were through the fucking roof and um i don't think this is a case of like oh there's a few little things that like it didn't quite meet i i think there's like i think there's some some problems with it but that being said like it's still better than a lot of a lot most most games so um it's not the spaghetti incident the what the spaghetti incident i don't know what the fuck that guns and roses album that took 15 y'all my bladder is literally

going to wasn't that chinese democracy wait chris going to piss his pants, so how can we drive this out? I'm going to burst. Alright. Well, folks, that's going to do it for us. Congratulations to Sexy Brutal, the new leading game of this quarter. See if it hangs on to that slot. A lot of great games to check out, so get out there and play some games, and we'll do the same next month.

Prey is next month. Tumble Seed is next month. Fuck, yeah! It's going gonna be another good good uh and go play near automata by the way it's bizarre that the like three of the best open world games ever have come out in the past like this year it's buck wild um but uh that's gonna do it for us folks please go rate and review our show on iTunes. Go read a bunch of stuff on the newly redesigned Polygon and also find Chris Plant on The Verge. And we're done. Also, there's a lot of good Vox Media podcasts out there.

Yeah, go check them all out. Until next month, my name is Justin McElroy. No, no, no. Wait, until next month. We'll be back with you next month for another episode of The Besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games? Besties!