The Besties - The Boys Enter Early Access

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

Join the Besties’ quest through Rogue Legacy 2, which is now available in early access on Steam. Plus, they offer other titles to check out like Heroes of Hammerwatch. And read fan mail which includes an in-depth look into what Russ has done with all his muscle money. 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!

Everybody's mad at us because it's been too negative. So I want to try to be more positive. Everybody's tired of us beating up on Russ. And I want to try to be kind of a more positive environment for him in this one. This isn't for the show, obviously. This is just us talking. I just want to be nicer too. Everybody's like, enough with the negativity about Rush Freshtick.

They're happy with it. They love us tearing up the games. And the one note we've gotten is like, if we could do like a really thick British accent when we say mean shit about the video games, for some reason people like that better. But the negative stuff about Rush is

getting a little excessive. So I do want to say, Rush, your muscles look so fucking big, dude. Yeah. When you decided to start doing this show shirtless, I was like a little bit agog, I guess would be the word. I don't want to aghast. No, aghast, kind of halfway between the two. But now I think it brings a really cool energy.

I will say it's very difficult to frame delts on a Zoom call. Like it's really difficult. But I think the rule of thirds is difficult to follow when your delts occupy like a good fifth of your body mass. It's tough. I miss seeing your eyes. I haven't seen your eyes for four months.

Beautiful eyes. Beautiful, exquisite eyes. Oh, thank you. I mean, you need glasses. Griffin, goddam eyes. Oh, thank you. I mean, you need glasses, so. Griffin, goddammit, we barely made it. Just already. Literally all of us are wearing glasses right now. Well, Justin's wearing gun arse. That's where my scorn should really be directed.

Yeah, everybody take a turn on these gun arse. Protect my sight. I wear the gun arse, so I don't have to wear glasses like you guys. I wear these by choice so I'm not forced to wear them later in life when I'm in my twilight years like you all. I may be the oldest person on this call. You definitely

are. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Froschek, and I know the best early access game of the week. Welcome to the Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. These bad boys have come a long way since Pac-Man. This is not, if you've been peering over your nephew's shoulder and seen a lot of characters that look like people, and it's not the bleeps and bloops that we remember from our childhood.

And we just want to cover that transition into this modern era of, I guess, video games. And this week we're going to be talking about Rogue Legacy 2. So there was a whole other one of these that people apparently loved. But this is 2 we're talking about. The second one. Now I'm like, can Justin keep this character up for the entire episode? That will really seal the deal on no season two of Besties. Chris, do you want to tell us what this game's all about? Yes. Today we're talking about rogue legacy

2 it is from cellar door games and it is a roguelike it's a 2d platformer uh that you know it's kind of like castlevania if you died and lost everything and then had to restart again uh and make your way through the difference between it and roguelikes like spelunky the best game ever created is that uh as you go through the game you can acquire money which you can use to unlock uh health upgrades or new character classes and you can also uh find new abilities like a dash move which helps you get further in the castle that that sounds about right yeah that's about right good work it's pretty good and uh we're gonna get into the discussion but i i thought there was more there's so much to discuss we're gonna talk about more though uh i'm anxious to do it but first we're gonna take a quick

break damn it you guys were watching me you knew that sneeze was coming and then you all were i had an audience and it didn't come out god that sucks wow it's gonna be haunting me the entire day um rogue legacy 2 i i want to start off with a quick temperature check rogue legacy 1 how deep in the paint did you all did you all go i went hard on multiple platforms a lot i played it on pc when it was like just first coming out and still kind of early i played it again on pc when it was finally out and i just put it again like six months ago on switch like that many times i've played through this game so i really adore the first game i even bought it on ios and as i was like looking at it in the app store i was like this isn't gonna feel right this is this this tight action platformer is not gonna feel right on a phone but i still bought it anyway because i love this game it has a i am a sucker for like a really good progression loop and it is hard to find one

that is more sort of like viscerally satisfying and rewarding than than rogue legacy and also rogue legacy i feel like came out in this uh really like this zenith for, maybe not zenith, but like when roguelikes were becoming a extremely like standardized genre. And it was the first one that I can remember that didn't frustrate the hell out of me because it had a really good head on its shoulders when it came to like ongoing progression that you did not lose when you died.

The smartest thing about their loop and i don't think the progression loop and i don't think anybody has done this better other people probably mimicked it but there were a lot of inexpensive upgrades like you know boost your health some boost your tax some uh increase your magic whatever a lot of inexpensive upgrades and then you kind of hit an invisible plateau where like when you finished buying stuff in town and you go back into the dungeon, you lose all your money. So you have to start doing better

to start getting more money to get the better upgrades. It's not forcing your hand, but there comes a certain point where you're just not making enough if you do badly in a run. You just don't make enough to buy anything. So all that money goes to waste

and you have to do a little bit better to get the money to for the next upgrade and by that point in the game you've played a lot because it takes a while to get to that point so you actually have the experience required to do better because you fought all these enemies before um so it actually like loops back in on itself which is i think from a game design standpoint just genius i really adore the first game there are a ton of genius things the the castle is randomized every time you play there are four different sections and i don't want to spend more time talking about the first game than we do the game we are actually supposed to be talking about but you can also

uh sacrifice some of the money on your next run and lock the castle down so that it will not be randomized so then you get to choose like am i going do a gold farming run am i gonna do a progression run where i actually try to take some bosses down it is a it is a fucking amazing game and if you have not played it even if you're not a fan of the roguelike genre you owe it to yourself because it is a it is a hallmark game i feel like so i was very much looking forward to Rogue Legacy 2, and I think it is... I was really looking forward to this discussion because I think it's really interesting where it is at. And it is so important, I think, to frame this as like,

this is an early access game. This is not the finished product. But in a lot of ways, it's evolving over Rogue Legacy. The first one had a sort of pseudo retro art style um this is much more hand-drawn it kind of reminds me of like behemoth games the castle crashers people are alien yeah yeah yeah sorry thank you it's been a while they're not quite as uh ubiquitous yeah thank you um the traits which are the things that sort of make each run feel difference most of which are sort of negative some are i would guess neutral and a few are actually positive uh there's a lot more of those i think they're more fully realized and

i don't remember if you did you get the gold boost for hard ones no that was that's a new thing brilliant brilliant thing i think russ you wrote about it for polygon yeah this um so there's basically a new mechanic it's actually something that they experimented with just a tiny bit with the first game basically the really bad annoying super annoying traits from the first game for example vertigo uh you basically have to play upside down and that's miserable no one wants to fucking play upside down it's awful so what they did was to encourage people to like give themselves a little challenge they'll give you a little boost in the amount of money that you make so that they only did that for vertigo in the first game now they've applied that to all of the traits were like the really bad ones in this game

for example the like most basic one i can describe you only get one hit point so if you get hit you're dead that's it that one's wild though because you get like a 100 gold boost right so you get well it's actually 150 last i checked so you get an enormous gold boost so if you can do really well and dodge all of the attacks which is possible i've done pretty good runs using that um You'll make a ton of money. So they what that allows them to do is basically rebalance the entire game around those bonuses so they can put in really shitty traits, but reward you a ton for using them. And it actually makes it like a lot more interesting. I do want to mention because Justin was sort of getting into it, but I want to talk specifically about the early access aspect of this game because it's very important that people understand early on how much is in this versus how

much is not in this i think a lot of people use early access as like kind of a shorthand for like well you know the game's out in three months but early access i think fortnite was in early access for like three years or something like that it covers an enormous range now early access yeah in this case it is maybe the most true example of early access i've ever experienced in a video game because uh griffin mentioned there were three or sorry there were four biomes in the first game there's really just one you can visit two in this build but there's really just one that is like fully complete there's like a very few uh maybe like a quarter if not less of the like number of upgrades you can get there's a very little armor to get the game feels very early there and they haven't shied away from this the logic from the developers is basically

when we first made the game there was so much community feedback so they ended up having to do like a bunch of like post-launch. And now they're basically integrating that into the development cycle. So the next for the next year, they're going to be doing these updates based on community feedback of what they're seeing in the build. But again, the build is extremely early, which I'm sure is going to apply to a lot of the stuff that comes up in this discussion. And to talk about that idea of community feedback, I'm not sure where i feel where i land on this ethically i don't know that's the right phrase for it but it feels a little like they're using um this as a qa opportunity and i don't mean that in the bethesda the game is broken sense of quality assurance yeah i mean

that in you mentioned the the money rewards like for like i i hate to call some of them bad challenges because some of the challenges are good they're good challenges and some of them are truly bad as in they're they're annoying and not fun um but the the challenge balance is so strange like there's one where i think you can't collect any health items and you get 50 coin boost which is a lot like you can really go ham on those runs and there's ones where you can't even see your own character it's just blurred like 10 feet on both sides and that one is a 10 coin boost and it's like wait what like this is so much more challenging and i'm barely getting rewarded for it and i'm not i'm not again

i want to be clear i'm not complaining about it i think that is the way they see this development cycle working is hey here is a game that's going to require tremendous amounts of balancing right and we are a small studio there's no way we can test this the best opportunity for us is to create effectively a very clean build that's the weird thing you mentioned you know this is early access i played plenty of early access games where they're like literally not playable yeah and this is playable it's just not balanced and again this is not a slight against it as much as it is like an interesting observation of like scale it feels more like a a demo than an early access uh which like i know it's going to be fleshed out but like it does the very small amount that is there does feel finished and it feels like it feels all right

yeah but just just to like i i i feel like they have earned a decent amount of credit with their with their first game and how you know much they they polished it up and listened to community feedback and did the work and i just saw that they just tweeted that they were going to remove the like blur based uh visual options because they were like actually giving people really bad headaches yeah so like that's one very good example of, of, uh, and, and honestly, like that is good because I would say, uh, too many of the like traits are, you can't see super good. And that's like, not, uh, it's not the most interesting choice. I don't think. When you're in the cycle of development, uh, and when you've been working on this game,

I think they've been working on this game for a few years now. When you're in that cycle, I think it's very difficult to look outside of yourself and say hey this is something that's not fun or this is unbalanced like right you need that external support now now studios like you know huge studios like activision etc what has plant said have a qa team that they can sort of rely on you know i know there's some complexity here with regards to like, should you be charging people for something that's this early? And that's really, you know, I think it would, I would be more concerned about it if they weren't so explicit in terms of what's in the build, which they are. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's early. I think it's kind of interesting from that perspective. I don't think I've ever felt like a qa tester in the way that i do playing this

and i feel like it's an interesting insight into game development that and i don't know i've never made a game so this is absolutely my own perspective as an outsider well you made you made justin mcroy's cool skater um back in 1999 uh yeah you remember that one for the for the uh for the 3d it was actually the last 3d no but it i think that like it's a miracle that all the things work and then i feel like the fun is a razor's edge that you probably get to right at the end you know what i mean like that's like the last thing that you do is like and now it's fun okay print it and i think that you're just before that point in rogue legacy too i want to play a very quick clip is from the uh hit film super bad uh where michael cera is playing the getaway black monday okay and he dies is a 10 second clip there's something about i i love this little

reaction that he has and i have uh it has been it has come to my mind so many times while I'm playing this game. I'll play it for you real quick. Don't talk. And again, he has just died in the game, The Getaway Black Monday. Fuck me. I can't. That's fun. Why does it make that?

If you can't even win, then why am I playing? Do you want to go see what my dad has? win then why am i playing do you want to see what my dad has so that that that moment of like that's fun why do you make that if i can't win why am i playing there there are just these moments in the game where it feels like well do you want me to have fun are you trying are you trolling like is it i'll tell you the one the the one thing to me that is a big change from Rogue Legacy, and I don't think it's quite there, and I think it's interesting because I would be shocked

if it remains the way it is. There are two they're called heirlooms in the game. I'm assuming there'll be more at some point. There are these heirlooms where as you're going through the level randomly, again, because it's randomly generated, sometimes you will find these. They're very Metroid-like statue holding a thing.

And it's like you have to complete this challenge to get the thing that they're holding, right? One is the power of empathy and one is the power of momentum. And I don't know power of empathy and one is the power of momentum and I don't know power of empathy I've I have yet to actually finish it power of momentum though if you finish this pretty difficult challenge it gives you the sprint which is sort of like an air a dash which is like an air dash or you know dash in on level but you can dash the air which is like basically an essential tool right and the problems with this are twofold one is they're randomly generated you don't always find them you only find you know at most you'll find one sometimes neither are there and they're randomly generated and also you may not have a build

that is conducive to actually like beating the challenge. I had a couple of builds with traits that made it like basically impossible. What's an example? Because I'm- Like a low health build is like not conducive for what is essentially like a pretty challenging platforming challenge

where if you screw up a couple of times as a mage, you're boned. But if you're playing a couple times as a mage, you're boned, but if you're playing a barbarian with like, you know, Quintuple the health pool. Oh, I mean more literally than that. I had one, there's one challenge where there are spikes just above your head to make it so that you don't jump

and they're trying to teach you to dash, right? And I had, I forget what the thing is called, Gigantism, which made me so tall that i was immediately getting hit by spikes like that that is one of those like well that's fun why are you making that way if you don't want me and then when you die on those it's like triple frustrating because like how long till i find it again how what build will I have when I do find it again and will I actually finish it the next time and also what I think is like even worse about it is like the dash is an essential move right and I had been playing for probably six hours or well

probably four hours when I unlocked it and by that point like my rhythms were such that i wasn't instinctually reaching for it it's like an essential part of this tool set that every character has and yet i i wasn't thinking in terms of like oh i've got my dash i should use that and i had to build that up i would be and and if you guys got power of empathy love to know what that is i have a theory but yeah it's extreme it's like much much harder than the first one for what it's extreme it's like much much harder than the first one for what it's worth fight that challenge um i i like what they're doing which is but you're not going to tell me what it is okay thank you you're able to read clues out of runes that are scattered around the world like they're those you can talk to ghosts and they give you

like hints about hidden shit i think what they're trying to do and i think it will make it in the final game because i think it is at its core a good idea, but I completely agree that there's polishing to be done, is, as you said, there are certain abilities that everyone should just have. The dash in the first game was not a thing that everyone had. You had to equip the dash as part of your runes for it to even work.

So now they're saying, no, we're going to say that everyone gets all of these abilities at all times but you need to do this very difficult challenge to pull it to to have it permanently so like that's a pretty big leap as you said an ability like it's it's a big deal so they i understand them wanting to make it feel like very difficult and a challenge and very satisfying when you finally do it which i felt but it is i agree inexcusable to have those challenges be unbeatable if for example you have gigantism and can't fit your body if your body too big your body yeah what i think they'll

do with it i suspect and i could have sworn this happened with one of my abilities in a challenge is they'll just turn off all the tweaks that you'll just have a normal build like a blank slate build when you go into that challenge like that seems like the very obvious fix um anyway the the thing that i i did want to say uh about this like is it fun is it not if you are curious about how a game evolves and like how development works of all the early access games this is the one like because at the end of the day if you play the the main like the first build the general sword knight build and you play through the the first stage this is rogue legacy 1.5 it's extremely polished it is very fun um and then if you want to venture out into the unknown that's also an option the if

you want to play as the archer or the mage or the other um characters the barbarian yeah are not balanced really at all that's cool like it's still fun it will infuriate you on some level you will have much more of the super bad reaction but the the cool thing about this is the game is actually playable it is largely good and enjoyable and knowing that it makes it easier for me to go kind of screw around with all the weird stuff and like whatever like yeah it's a little broken but i'm very curious to see how it evolves literally the next time I turn this on. The Archer's cool. The Archer has a cool class talent where if you press Y anywhere, he'll create a floating platform,

which I don't think I've ever seen for like an Archer type class, but that makes it really neat because you can, you can like get a good angle on a, on a battle sometimes. I also picked the Archer. I had to get used to the archer's bow and arrow. It's kind of cool. It will hang you in the air for a second

if you try and shoot it in the air and you have to manually aim it in 360. And that takes some getting used to, but it's pretty powerful. But the reason I played the archer was for that ability because I enjoyed Rogue Legacy 2, but I'm probably not going to come back to it

until I see a patch note that says, like, the sheer number of environmental hazards has been reduced because it's out of control. Please, please. But there are trap rooms this time where, like, there's a little board on the floor that you can jump down through, and sometimes you jump down through those,

and there's action and adventure and intrigue and mystery and fun and sometimes you jump down there and it's just spikes and or like you jump down there and there's like a wall of flame chests that are going to hit you in one second if you don't jump the fuck out of there really fast and that's fun never times zero times uh and it's so frustrating because you get on a good run where you have a good build and you're getting like lots of gold and you're finally working your way towards like some big expensive upgrade you want and then you run into one of those and it's like ah gosh but again like that is the exact type of thing that i feel like is just primed for tweaking and yeah just just delete some spikes i just wanted to just to mention to put a pin in it the um if you go to the main screen of Rogue Legacy 2,

they actually have the patch notes right there on the giant main screen with all the changes. And I just went through, after playing for four or five hours, I just went through and scrolled back because they even have stuff that was even before it was released to the public.

Oh, interesting. And you can really, it's amazing how much they've changed. At one point, they talk about the Barbarian specifically because it was underpowered so they like jacked the damage up way ahead of where it was and they're like well it might be overpowered but it's super fun so maybe we'll just leave it this way and that's honestly the sort of thing that i think you're gonna see over time so it'll i think it'll be really interesting to see how this game evolves it is very cool to have the

opportunity um if you're somebody who is interested in game development i would say and i don't want it'll be really interesting to see how this game evolves it is very cool to have the opportunity um if you're somebody who is interested in game development i would say and i don't want this to sound like homework it's it's a fun video game but like there's interesting things like uh i got a big kick out of coming to a bridge and they're like now normally this is going to go to a different place well we didn't build that so you can go you can go look around if you want because it's there's nothing i mean it's not a lot there we're making it but here's just a note from us to you and i really felt this weird sense of being like in it with them at that moment like okay if you cross the bridge you can actually see one of the developers arms just like in the frame for a

second oh no they saw herald of the purple crayon just like scribbling the world in as you're jumping um but it's a i i don't know it's i have i will say this i did not have a a huge amount of fun playing it i thought it was a lot more interesting than fun at this point. I have zero doubt that it will terminate in a extremely polished, addictive, fun, well-realized final product. I have no doubt about it. And the question of whether or not they should release it at this point I think really comes down to personal responsibility. It's your money. No one's forcing you to do it and they have been very upfront about what it is i think there's a lot of games where like if i could pay now i'd love to dip in and see what's going on um and i think that's you know if you're down for that then i you know i think it's it's absolutely worthwhile because i don't know

that you'll get a lot of opportunities like this honestly i have one more thing that i want to hit just because i love that this is happening in video games this is a game that is not about politics that is deeply political and i love uh how much it just goes for it not even that i agree with its politics i largely do but uh there was a great piece on the outline maybe a year ago about how all video games are inherently political and how like you just are so used to it because every time you play a shooter you're like whatever military industrial complex is just what it is you know i'm just i'm just here for it baby um and this game with its traits i mean i think like the one of the very first ones

you unlock is health care is universal health care and it's called like universal health care and when you unlock it just this big banner pops up and it's like welcome to the future your kingdom has decided to tax the rich to care for the poor a contentious decision for sure but let's see how it pans out and it's like like, I, I, again, like, I just like that games are recognizing that they're made by human beings who have the freedom to not just have generic, like congratulations, plus one to health. Like you can just say whatever it is you're feeling.

You're an indie studio swing for the fences. There is one trait that does nothing that just says you're, the trait is just FMF fan. And that is a reference to Full Metal Furies, which is the last game they made between Rogue Legacy 1 and Rogue Legacy 2. And the trait just says, Full Metal Furies fan, you have great taste, you are probably Korean. Because I guess that is where the audience for the game is uh sorry i i wanted to share one more uh the living safe which uh the banner is welcome to offshore

banking and it says before being transmogrified the living safe hid money for the rich to keep from the poor dot dot dot now that he's on your side he doesn't seem so bad that's really good no i think it's fair i think it's fascinating and i think that if you you know i i think it's if you're in for it at all you know that already yeah like you know already if this is like gonna be your your thing um but i i think it's i i honestly think it's cool that they're giving people the opportunity because that's the other thing is there's a cost to obviously they're charging people money, but there's a cost to getting a game into a state where you're comfortable opening the doors to the public. Like I would imagine it sort of like, you know, sealing off the the the the the corners, you know, like rounding off the corners just so it's like not dangerous.

We're working on Jesus Christ. Okay, come on. Let's take a break never mind whatever this is a podcast and here's a commercial in the podcast great questions coming up do we have emails we have so much good mail we're gonna be talking about the roguelike y'all this one is from Dark Honey Dumat. What is every bestie's favorite roguelike? And also keep up the great work. I mean, there's only one answer, right? I mean, Spelunky is going to be at least half of this call's answer, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's very good. It's probably, it's so iconic. It's probably that for me i can mention my number two which is not spunky what is that and that is binding of isaac binding of isaac is way up there i think uh i would say uh slay the spire if we would count that yeah sure one i don't know if that's its own thing or uh dead cells is of course a fucking classic yeah juice i think it's gotten fuzzier because you're seeing the core idea of roguelike i think it's sort of what you saw happen to mmos where like games that

weren't mmos were adopting sort of the core tenets of mmos and sort of like strip mining them like i'm playing griftland still and that is something that like has roguelike elements you're like repeating your um your journey and and uh and and and there's cumulative progression but like it's really more of a deck battling game that just has that in in there um i would say though for me uh it's it's it's dead cells um yeah I just don't think it's been topped. You're missing the best that isn't Spelunky, Prey Mooncrash, one of the best games of this generation. I tried it.

I forgot about your fetish. That game rules. No one likes it. It rules. Ooh, quick plug for FTL, though, also. Ooh, that's really close between Dead Cells and FTL for me next question from Dave

what subgenre do you find to be the most effective for a roguelike platformer, twin stick shooter, turn based combat etc I think this kind of gets what we were all talking about right it's spread so so far yeah I think a lot of great games have used a lot of different genres to the point where

like i am not convinced that i could tell you what the best one is i think we've listed it's pretty crazy like we've listed five or six games at this point and all of them had different genres binding by isaac's like a shooter card game platforming game like what's funny is that none of them are in the style of rogue which was a effectively a turn-based top-down rpg um right so like i don't i don't know do you guys have any thoughts i honestly think like if it's a great game it kind of doesn't matter yeah i don't think there's a bet i think there's a way to implement it um i would say that what i like about the the card battling thing is like the card based deck battlers like grifflans or monster train that have done it is that it it feels really good to get like adding the new cards it's a very natural way of uh that progression

because it's not necessarily making it easier but it is evolving it as you play which i think is a cool yeah i would also add i think it's good for card games because roguelike traditionally are very tense like when i play spunky or binding of isaac like you really have to be like zoned in on it and for like you know card games uh obviously you can take a break whenever like you just stop at the end of a turn and it's fine and you don't have to like yeah you also get interesting um opportunities to rebuild decks so like you get different cards each time you play and that like makes the run feel different uh and in a very organic way i will say like regardless of the genre if it doesn't have significant enough like carry over like minor boosts that you can do like the um like the the castle upgrades in rogue legacy like i i i have very little patience for a true true true rogue like even spelunky like you can get the upgrades to unlock the like shortcuts or whatever um and

without some element like that like it is hard for me to not feel like i'm just wasting i think the other uh the like flip side of that is not necessarily upgrades but unlocks so like binding of isaac and uh and uh slay the spire both do this i'm sure other card games do this we're like hey these cards can actually start showing up now or these items can actually start showing up now and that mixes things up so you feel like you're progressing yeah the one thing that i'd add to that is it's not a genre but just mobile gaming oh like i i think it has kind of been a perfect genre for mobile games i think of zaga 33 868 hack um yeah like less obscure things like ftl on on the ipad but i think there's something about that kind of classic rogue formula where you have time to make your move and then the the game reacts to

you has worked really really really well on mobile we're kind of dancing around there's there's a game that we are playing that me and russ and i know justin's picked it up too that we're playing called heroes of hammer watch that i think we're going to stay save for the what else are you playing segment um but I know we're running out of time but that that it is like a really really really good example of I think a roguelite game that has enough sort of like ah fuck I lost I lost you know a lot of stuff challenge with the like continual well i am still building this house brick by brick let's dig into that just a little bit more i got one more question for you um and this is from uh joe on twitter uh what single attribute from your current real life would you

want carried over if you were able to respawn after death probably just my strength yeah all the work i've done on my muscle tone and uh you know i've been going to russ's he calls it the he calls it the iron church uh and i go there i fly there every week i know you're not really supposed to be doing that and well it's on my jet so it's fine it's on russ's jet they earned with his muscle money and that's what he calls it his muscle money and i say like what does that mean do you like pose are you like a muscle model do you do like muscle contests just kind of he just kind of smiles so like i don't know if i don't know what he's up to but yeah i go i fly to his iron church every week and he has me sort of uh pick up heavy things and i'm i'm huge now so that'd be great yeah i would keep my um uh my bad

habit of eating my fingernails not eating them you know chewing them off um because it would keep me humble you know yeah no i'd want the opposite i would want my huge body. Juice. Good wiener. It's not great, but I made my piece of it. I think that that would be nice. I guess the piece I've made with my wiener. That's what I actually want. The sense of acceptance. I bond mostly with Rogue Legacy 2. There's a perk that gives you colorblindness,

which I have in real life, and I would never want to lose that. Does that make it so you can see color when you play with that, Russ? Yeah, it does. It's actually this double colorblindness that comes back around. My favorite thing in life

is when I tell people I'm colorblind and they ask me what color things are, which is definitely something you should do to someone with some sort of deficiency. If they want to prod your deficiencies, there are so many more interesting avenues they could go down. This is the Be Nice to Russ episode, Justin.

You're right. You're right. I meant too generous. He works too hard. Real quick, what else are we playing? Here's a hammer watch me and russ have been getting real real real deep into it wait did you play this by the way i haven't i haven't played it yet i've been playing uh uh it's this little game that you've never heard of called

near automata and spall and key okay look look i'm appearing i'm i'm doing a a guest on on another podcast and they asked me to bring my two favorite games. Uh, here's a hammer watch. It is a rogue light gauntlet game basically in the style of gauntlet. Does gauntlet have a like genre name? Gauntlet gauntlet is a, if you're not aware, it's like a very old school arcade game where there were several different classes, where isometric action,

isometric action, I guess, where you shot, I think the original gauntlet was just like four cardinal directions and you just like go through a top-down dungeon and kill scores and scores of monsters that just kind of flood toward you you collect keys open chests get you know treasure eat meat to get your health back like a lot of that stuff is here in heroes of hammer watch and there have been a lot of games made in the gauntlet style.

Including Hammerwatch. Heroes of Hammerwatch is actually a follow-up to a game called Hammerwatch, which I actually think we've talked about on the Besties before many years ago. I don't remember. And that game was a very, I would say, not a modern. It's obviously retro-inspired, but like a more modern take on the very core gauntlet style where the levels were set and there was no like real progression system that says there was progression but it was very minimal

and um and now here's a hammer watch as a follow-up to that where basically all these new roguelike and modern mechanics have been added to that formula and yeah i think uh griff and i have just been playing it non-stop it has got my it has got its hooks into me it was we're playing it on switch it's been out on pc for like forever and just came out on switch a couple weeks ago and xbox it's out on xbox as well and xbox it is uh it is really fun it is tight uh mechanically like it feel it i didn't expect a gauntlet style game to like feel this good but like when you are in the groove and like running into a room filled with dozens of enemies and just weaving between bullets and like it has twin stick shooter appeal i think like once you get into once you get good at it and you can like

be evasive and uh sort of calculated about your approach like it feels really good there's eight different classes i think and they all have like different ways of like, they all have a different feel, which is really impressive. Like you, Justin's been playing Paladin, which is just like you run into a room, you have a dash, you can get up close and tank a few hits.

I'm playing as a priest where I can heal my teammates or drop like a damaging glyph on the ground. So I want to like pull enemies around a tight corner and just watch them run into my death zone. so like all the classes feel really good but then it has like an obscene number of progression mechanics uh where you can collect or throughout your runs that you use to upgrade your towns where you can like upgrade a blacksmith to buy more upgrades that are permanent or upgrade your shop where you can buy sort of like one-off item upgrades that you lose when you die or buy a chapel with very very expensive permanent upgrades

or buy like it is very complex and it doesn't do a great job of explaining all that complexity but i feel like once you get into the loop which took me a while to do it is inescapable it is really really what's amazing for a game that's so complex and they've been designing it uh for like several years now is that it seemingly has no audience um nobody's playing this game you can look at the server list of everybody hosting a game on switch and it's almost always empty like nobody what's amazing is that there is one guy who has officially taken on the mantle of i'm gonna teach the world how to play this game better. And his YouTube channel is just filled with videos. And the videos have like 10K views or something like that.

But they're all great, like really good deep dives into how this game works. And the fact that this developer, probably a very tiny developer, I would imagine, has like sunk this much time into f and effort into this like really core core fan base um i think is really great like they clearly love what they've made and they've spent a lot of time updating it with various dlcs and stuff like that which is all included in this pack which is to say help us grow this fan base yeah don't let them be so lonely they deserve now i should mention why i know why the fan base is small um and part of the part of the thing to keep in mind is that the first chunk of this game i would say the first few hours are pretty brutal and glacial in the same way that

like you know when you first start playing spelunky you die 60 times on the first level um you really do like it is very very slow early on i would strongly recommend if you can play it in multiplayer it is really designed with that in mind i was able to play it mostly solo but once griff and i got into a multiplayer game it like really started it really clicks yeah yeah it's uh it's fantastic. Hoops. Tell me about Song of Bloom. Song of Bloom is a really interesting little iOS game. It is very abstract. It's hard to describe also.

I guess puzzle would be the specific genre. But when you start it off, you see this little movie where a narrator is describing, I don't know, it's again very abstract about her place in the world. And as you play through the game, you learn that there are little gestures you can do while you're watching this movie that open up different pathways to different puzzles

so and as you do those puzzles which are all extremely different look completely different sound completely different some look like yarn some look like one there's one that looks like it's on someone's uh skin uh there there's another where it's like tearing up uh pieces of paper everyone looks completely different but it all springs from this initial little black and white movie that you watch so like there's one where uh there's a dial a picture of a dial in the movie and if you draw a square around it it launches a mini game and once you complete that then you learn about another gesture you can do within it and each time you it, finish one of these mini games,

you're brought back to the main screen, which is like a plant that is growing and branching out. And as you complete each of the branches, it unlocks other branches for you to explore. And it's very beautiful and haunting. And one of these that uses all the parts uh of the phone in really interesting ways i love games there was another one like that that had like 99 it was called 99 maybe or had 99 different like challenges in it like that but like there's one where uh these scraps of paper form a

sort of abstract pong game and you discover that moving the paddles you do with the volume buttons so you're using the volume buttons to actually move the paddles back and forth and there's little little stuff like that like one just opens up a chat screen like an iMessage screen where the person is messaging you in like indecipherable language and you have to just figure out like what they want back and what you need to do and there's like little hints hidden in other when you complete other puzzles there are sometimes hints for how to unlock different pathways and puzzles you've already completed like you'll see shapes where like oh if i arrange the scraps of paper in that way it'll unlock a

different pathway for me to go down so So it's very small and lovely. I actually found myself playing through it very slowly because I don't want to rush through it because it's so nice and lovely. So it's called Song of Bloom on iOS. Next week, we are talking about one of the coolest games i have ever played there's a lot of skepticism from my my my comrades here who have not yet played the game thought it was a joke when

he said it they thought it was a joke but it's actually the best uh if you can get it to run on your computer which is not a guarantee because holy moly does it take a lot of power. And that game is Microsoft Flight Simulator in parenthetical 2020 edition. Don't go out and buy the old versions. They're very different games. Chris Plant told me it's very accessible. Within just one mere hour, I'll be in the sky. Imagine that you've never played a first-person shooter. Which compared to planes is good.

Imagine you've never played a first-person shooter and then somebody is like is like oh you could learn how to play shooters for for the first time ever in an hour incredible that's what that's what they've done they've made it so that you can you a common lay person can fly a real airbus wow uh you know you know Do you remind me of I told Steffi about this game? I was like, Steffi. I came out of my room in a state covered in sweat. Wind-swept hair. I was like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix when he comes out of the pod. You ripped off your goggles.

And I was like, Steffi. Steffi, I need $2,000 to buy a flight stick now. You won't believe it. The entire world is in this game. I found our house in this game and she's like, uh-huh, and then what? I was like, that's

it, right? That's enough, right? Did you see yourself in your house playing Microsoft Flight Simulator? I did and then it just kept going in and in and in. Further and further and further. So next week's we'll be discussing MapQuest which also has the entire world in it

so that'll be a fucking journey come on that journey with us because I'm excited about the journey if you've never played a flight simulator game I would love to get two emails from you one before you play the flight simulator game and one after you play the flight simulator game if you've you play the flight simulator game

if you've never played it that's the experiment i want to run you can send that to mail at besties dot fan or you can send it to our twitter at the besties yes because we all understand that twitter is a little more usable two tweets it's got to be two tweets replying to yourself one before you play the flight simulator game and one after because i one after. I want us to all go on this transformational journey together. Hey, where can people listen to us? They can follow and listen for free on Spotify, which they know because they're hearing this right now.

But they also can share the show. If you don't mind, besties.fan is the link. Just say, hey, here's an interesting discussion about Rogue Legacy 2. That's going to do it for us. Thank thank you so much for listening to the besties. Be sure to join us again next week for the besties. Send the world's best friends.

There he goes. Fly the world's best planes. The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch.