The Besties - The Nightmare Before March

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

The gents hop into the scary and tiny world of Little Nightmares 2. They also explore the existential and impossible to answer questions of: Is Luigi's Mansion 3 a horror game, and can kites be scary? 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!

Are we going to do E3 this year? I think we should go. Yeah, let's go. Not a holy shit, not us. See you guys at the con. I meant like gamers, are we going to do E3 this year? Because if I don't see my big friends up on stage, Peggle 2 guy, fucking Mr. Caffeine,

like is it even games anymore? No don't think it is i i think e3 is the probably the organization that benefits the most from covet 19 because everyone was like writing on the wall this little hear me out this is my writing on the wall this thing is over johnny it's just a big empty floor with an inflatable sonic hanging from the ceiling and then coven 19 hits and they're like sorry guys we gotta go all digital and then the next year they're like yeah we're digital it's just for safety sake and they can just keep doing that and just be like i don't know he never died we just it's just always a digital event as far as we remember. It's never been a big empty room with Sonic hanging from the ceiling. Yeah, no.

I think it might be toast. This might be it. Nah, nah, it's back, baby. You watch. By 2022, I'll be sitting on John Wignocki's shoulders roaming around the show floor. It's going to happen, baby. And look who's back.

Reggie's back. Reggie! Reggie's back. He's running Xbox and PlayStation. He's back.gie's back reggie reggie's back he's running xbox and playstation he's back yeah 2022 yeah i think e3 2022 is going to be the year that's going to be the year it's all coming back better than ever kent jahal it's open it's back yeah any other predictions i love this e3 2021 is going to be a digital event, which is basically E3's way of announcing.

We emailed a bunch of JPEGs of watermarks to send to a bunch of people. Can we start a side podcast that's just dunking on E3? Because I feel like. Yeah, they deserve it. They've been riding high on the hog for too long. 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 Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best nightmare of the week.

My name is Russ Farshtick and I know the best game of the week. Was that a race car driving by? Maybe. It was a Russ car. by maybe it was a rust car for joining us for the besties where we discuss the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment it's a video game club we're gonna be discussing video games here uh today uh we've got a new one sneaking out the door. It's Little Nightmares 2. Plant, what's Little Nightmares 2? Little Nightmares 2 is a sequel

to Little Nightmares 1. And I'll tell you even more. It's kind of, it's a horror platformer puzzler in which you embody a tiny little doll child who tries to escape a world full of big monster people that's great russ russ uh just in case you at home are not looking at our rundown

our show rundown as plant was saying that we were talking about little nightmares too russ updated the part in the rundown where it said plant talks about early access games from last week. So as plant was doing it, Russ was updating it to say what plant was in that exact moment doing. Right. Posterity. I want to make sure everyone remembers. You will delete this next week when you write whatever it is that we're talking about next week.

So it's one week of posterity. If he remembers, we will. Okay. So little nightmares. We'll talk about it after a non-existent commercial break and we're back. Yeah, baby. okay so little nightmares we'll talk about it uh after a non-existent commercial break and we're back yeah baby to talk about little nightmares too did any of you all let me start with this did any of you all play little nightmares one i did not okay i wanted to

play it does that count that was you know for nothing you ever have one of those games where you see the entire like marketing cycle and you're like yeah like a kind of a grimm's fairy tale platform looking game kind of like inside i'm really or limbo i'm really into this and then you don't remember the game coming out and then like years pass and then it's like hey the sequel is coming out and you're like oh oh shit yeah sure sure yeah yeah i'm on board i had the opposite experience where i saw the marketing materials for for little nightmares and saw the game once it had come out and thought oh that doesn't look good that doesn't look good to me that doesn't look like my jam uh but uh scrambled egg all over

my face because i really enjoyed little nightmares too i've done i've done finished this this this one uh yeah i think i think the immediate reaction i didn't play the first one either but i think the media reaction is that the art style is not my personal preference and that like didn't make me super jazzed we also know based on history that i get very scared very easily so i tell us a little about the art style really quick well can we talk can i talk about the game first and then we'll back into it in case you don't it's like uh sure because i had no familiarity with this franchise i could have been getting into anything when i got past that title screen it's a 3d platformer i guess you would call it still yeah similar in the vein to limbo or inside where you are basically solving uh you could a lot of some are physics based i i

guess they're all they're mostly physics based puzzles and navigating this world and sort of the big hook i would i would say aside from like this sort of dark twisted uh art style which russell get into the thing that's kind of interesting about it is you are too small for this world. You're like a borrower or a Lilliputian or whatever. You're tiny in a world full of big, scary stuff.

You're not like Thumbelina, though. You're like, if you're talking about a six-foot person, you're about one foot tall. Yeah, you're small. And it does a lot of really cool things with that dichotomy and that perspective. The stuff that's scary in this game

is much bigger than you. And it is immediately scary. That is the basic, from a gameplay idea, that's what you're going to be doing, right? You're going to be pulling crates so you could jump on the crate to get to the next thing. You're going to be, I don't know, jumping on a swing on a rope

or knocking a piano off a hook whatever physics stuff and you have a little friend that comes with you and helps you helps you out helps you make long jumps and carry stuff around and and uh not not the worst what's what's the word for when you have to protect someone in a video game not the worst it's the whole game that that uh npc assistant not assistant you're you're surviving this huge scary world together uh is with you the whole game and it's not terrible but it's also i would say not the best sort of version of this that i've ever seen i think i think the the character that's with you through the whole game is actually pretty smart because you're not escorting it it's escorting you so by that i mean when you struggle

with a puzzle if you struggle long enough it'll walk over and be like hey uh looks like this box can move yeah hey maybe you want to lift me up over here uh which which i thought was like pretty clever before we get into the stuff that's great because i think there's a lot that's really special about this game but just right off the top i want to talk about the one thing i don't like about this entire genre which is puzzle games and horror games that are combined um man i don't know like why we've been stuck with this formula for the past two decades but it's not an ideal match and that i mean most horror games have puzzle elements especially if they are not about combat and the the problem with it and it happens quite a bit in this game is you get really into the horror and it's really scary and then you come across a puzzle where

you have to move two blocks and you can't figure out which the block you need to move is in the environment and you bat your head against it for 15 minutes and you get completely pulled out of attention uh or or worse there's a puzzle where it's like an instant death and what was scary becomes like okay and now i'm going to get crushed for the eighth time trying to solve this and this game does a lot to kind of avoid that at times but i found that frustrating and the other issue unique to this game is even the combat is kind of tied to this so there are a number of moments that are somewhat like combat sequences but really they're just choreography it's like hey you need to run to this next spot hide let the thing happen run to the next spot hide let the thing happen and it felt like anytime there was a what should have been a really cool combat sequence there's one

with porcelain dolls i felt like oh i'm not actually in combat here i am trying to like almost learn the rhythm game that it wants me to perform. The combat, quote unquote, combat sequences are the worst part of the game. And it's such a weird thing to like lay at this game's feet. The thing that kind of made this game click for me was not the comparison to Limbo or Inside or any of those. Once I started thinking of it like an eric chahi game like a

uh heart of darkness or uh out of this world that's kind of what made it click for me because it is a lot of rote memorization of uh patterns and very very sort of uh twitchy actions that you need to complete in sequence in order to survive these different kind of like set piece at like events um i i feel like it's being maybe overly critical to pick out the few of those set pieces that do not work but like when that's all the game is is like a series of pretty cool set pieces when one of them one of those combat sequences took me 20 tries to complete, and when I finished it, it didn't feel like, ah, I finally learned how to complete that.

It felt like, ah, I got lucky, and that finally happened. So Plant mentioned this porcelain doll sequence. I'll be more specific. You were kind of dragging a hammer around, bashing these porcelain dolls in the face as they jump at you. And this kind of applies to the rest of the game i actually i enjoyed the game uh a bit um but i would say that the level of polish for this game is not there and in this specific circumstance dolls were flying at me and some dolls and i do not know why or how were able to reflect the hammer blow as i smashed them on the head which is not intended that is a total bug and it shouldn't be happening but if

you're seeing it in game it's telling you i'm like i was honestly thinking well that's not the solution dolls are special like they could reflect and i need to amp up your strength stats whatever it was yeah i actually had a lot of problems with similar to that moment um i struggled with this game anytime they started uh bringing the y-axis into it yeah like if you so you can imagine this right if if you've got a doll coming at you and you're swinging a pipe at it and it uh it's on a 2d plane you will tell exactly the arc of that and if it would connect and once they bring in a the the another axis a third axis i guess z even z axis thank you once they bring in the z axis you it's much harder to

tell in three-dimensional space if you're going to connect with that and i had problems with that in like jumps and stuff like that where it's like i'm kind of or walking a path like sometimes you'd be walking a path and it would kind of hove into that z-axis and became much harder to tell yeah what was what wouldn't wouldn't fly. That was the big difference from a game like Limbo or Inside. Between this and those games is just this level of, like you can tell Inside and Limbo, which are two incredible games, I couldn't recommend them more highly,

but they are polished and tested within an inch of their lives. Every single puzzle works as you think it will once you figure out the puzzle, puzzle works as you think it will once you figure out the puzzle so long as you execute it properly whereas this you just do not have that level of consistency there are like boss encounters in this game where i like fully broke a few boss encounters where i was doing stuff where i was running away from like a chef and shouldn't have been i should be doing another thing but nearly almost beat it the other way but didn't because the game wasn't working properly it just it does not have that level of polish but i would say environmentally and and we haven't really talked

about the visual art style at all but environmentally like i was pulled in by this universe i think it looks really cool and interesting in the way that like what springs to mind is like coralline paranorman like that oh yeah yeah it feels like stop motion it's not there's a yeah that sort of aesthetic it goes it goes uh tarzia studios who's the developer of this game but was also the creator of the the first little nightmares but they also worked on the little big planet franchise for a long time oh yeah so they made they god i forget like what the distribution of they did dlc for a little big planet one and two but then they fully made a little big planet three and little big planet ps vita which was fantastic they also made the ps4 port for tearaway um and so i feel like there's a little bit of that DNA in here, but there's, and I guess some of that little big planet DNA also owes a debt to like

Bunraku puppetry. And I think that the horror aesthetic, which from what I saw of little nightmares and sort of the, the enemies there, they went way harder in that respect there. Like there was an actual sort of geisha boss enemy that you had to face off against. And, and, and in this game that is definitely there with the creature designs but it's also going in a more

otherworldly sci-fi almost twin peaksy vibe with the stuff it gets into yeah i would say it it's very um german expressionism like Fritz Lang. The stuff that inspired Tim Burton. There's a point. So a lot of the first game, from what I understand, is more rural village settings. Well, I think it's a ship. The first game is in a big freighter or something. So the beginning of this game is a village rural setting. And then you have that first stage.

And then you get on a uh wooden door and go across the ocean some big body of water and you come across a city and it is intensely like german expressionism it is these giant buildings at odd angles and they're collapsing then you go into it and it has like very Soviet Eastern block vibes. And that for me is like when the game like started to click. The first, the very first set of stuff just felt, I don't know, like a cross between a tutorial and like I said, a choreography that you had to perform. And after that, it started to become a lot more puzzles. And I think I found its footing with its kind of vibe

a lot more. I don't know a better way of saying this, but the type of horror that I love the best in video games is experiential, like PT, where it's about just kind of wander the space, discover things, don't get so caught up in these puzzles. And I think that the game starts to have a few more moments like that where it just puts you in large spaces and lets you walk around without so much pressure to keep moving forward. I would say also it's very generous

in the amount of art. This is a weird way of phrasing it, but it's very generous in the amount of world it's giving you that doesn't necessarily tie to gameplay. There's a lot of times where I'd be walking through an environment and it's so intently made and it's so like deliberate that you think like, man, there's going to be some big action set piece. Like, no, it's just a landscape for you to walk through and like get the vibe of what you're going to be doing like it doesn't turn everything into a game mechanic which is cool because i think it lends a credibility to the world and when you do get to those like other worldly elements and i i'll tell you about one just to give you an idea of kind of what we're talking about because it borders on surrealism from time

to time there's one uh very brief segment where you're in you enter a classroom there's a giant teacher riding in a school board um and the the large people the the the full-size people in this have a kind of paper mache like you've ever seen like gigantes in like parades yeah in other countries where it's like that that look like the huge paper mache head so you're you're walking through the class you sneak you're the students are looking forward at the teacher you're sneaking behind them um and occasionally the teacher will like turn around and look for you and you kind of like scuttle behind a desk and not only does she look for you if she hears you her neck begins to extend and like worst worst worst neck in video games i will get horrific to fought

to try to find you uh and oh by the way if she sees you not only does she scream and and find you um the kids will all then turn on you and try to kill you and what's kind of interesting about some of those like stealthier bits is that they are not the Insta fail that they seem on the outside. There are several instances and this makes it scarier. Like you can't just put the controller down and be like, ah, fuck she saw me there. Like you can usually like find a way to get away,

which makes it like much more frightening to have an escape route somewhere for you to, to be able to get through and i and there's tons of stuff i mean tons of of segments like that that are just and really making great use of they do a great thing with the art and i was just complaining about the z-axis but i'm going to compliment it here they do a great bit with the art where the things that are deeper in the background are really blurred. I mean, and you're really in high focus there.

It's like a depth of field. Yeah, exactly. And that really height, it makes it feel real in like a weird way. Like, especially when the things are much bigger than you, it feels like a real person hunting you and you are a tiny person and they

make great use of that all all throughout yeah yeah um i i i finished the game i don't know how far you all uh got into it i played about seven minutes no i played much more than that no i i got to the last area but haven't quite finished it yet it it is uh i mentioned the sort of er Eric Chahi comparison and how it breaks down into like a series of set pieces, which is something I think you could also say about Limbo and Inside. And this, I don't know what the name for this like type of game is,

like if it even has a name for this genre. But I thought it was- I think like platformer adventure, like adventure platformer. Yeah, something like that. It's just fairly descriptive. I thought it was a really good one of those adventure platformer. Yeah, something like that. Just fairly descriptive. I thought it was a really good one of those. I think that there's a lot of pitfalls that that genre can fall into that Little Nightmares 2 evaded.

While I had some trouble with the combat parts of the game, I knew what I was supposed to be doing, even if the like controls and feel of the game weren't precise enough to necessarily like allow me to do that but never in like my whole playthrough was i like stuck stuck um and i i think russ you were saying you there was like a puzzle that like a dumpster puzzle that was a bit tricky i i never felt like the game wasn't giving me enough information to progress if that makes sense. That dumpster puzzle I should just mention is just like a very long jump that really doesn't look like you can make it. And if you don't do the angle exactly right, you just miss it to the point where you feel like you're not seeing something. And that was the biggest issue I had

is just the signposting in the game isn't always great. There's plant mentioned the like AI helper, but there are moments where the AI helper does not push the box that you can definitely push. And so I was just stumbling around a single room trying everything but knowing, oh, I can push this box. The most damning thing I can say about it, and I really liked

it, and I love games like this, where every time you enter a new space you really do feel like you're going to have to use your mind to come up with an original solution that you haven't seen before. It really does that really well. The, the most damning thing I can say about it. And,

and I, and I hope it wouldn't put you off from planet, but it is why I think I will not stick with it is if the puzzle is going to be in the platforming rather than a binary, like a key into whole, right? Sure. If the puzzle is going to be in the platforming rather than a binary, like a key into hole, right? Sure. If the puzzle is going to be, how do I solve this with platforming? It's got to be so tight that you don't get mixed signals about what is and isn't a solution.

This is the example. At one point, I was getting chased by a hand and i was right you know i was running around and this hand was chasing me and i was like narrowly escaping it right and then i clamber up onto a this uh rack of bookshelves and i i or something drawers or something and then i climb through this vent and then when i climb through the vent the hand scampers up behind me and while i'm going through the vent it jumps at me and kills me while i'm climbing through the vent it's like well i guess that's not it because i have to i have to do something to contain this hand right did it over and over and over and over and over

again eventually frustrated enough i just did the thing i did in the first place but instead somehow he missed his jump when he leapt at me and then i went ahead and got through and it was fine and it's like i that's such a breach of trust you know like you can't expect me to bang my head against something if there definitely is a solution if maybe the solution is just like i don't know he got hung up on a corner this time and it didn't work out yeah it's just kind of weird that all the enemies have an ai associated with them because there should be a binary answer to a lot of these things and because like the fact he should never miss the jump like realistically speaking like or he should always miss the jump that's the only

acceptable scenario in this type of game yeah but i agree with justin like i i think i enjoyed it overall it's i think it's easy well worth seeing it's you gotta see it this would be a perfect like this is maybe damning the fate praise be a perfect like game pass or something like that where it's like yeah just go see it and get a get a sense of the vibe because it's it's so cool yeah it's pretty short it's like five hours i want to say in total maybe right griffin is that right um yeah i mean not counting the sort of it depends on me how many times the hand misses yeah it depends on uh yeah those hands represented the worst combat encounter for me uh i i think that i think it's worth playing through all the way like i think it does some really it the first game and the beginning of this game deal in that sort of uh just gross horror of just body you know puppet body parts and

gore and uh horrible horrible necks and shit like that uh but it it dabbles in a different kind of horror towards the end of it in a way that was pretty cool and also i think open to interpretation in a way that once i finished the game i immediately wanted to check with you guys to see if you guys had finished it because i wanted to kind of talk about it like i and that's i don't know i think that's about as high praise as i can give a game okay well hey that's the video game uh it's called little nightmares it's out the i guess it's out by now february 11th is when it was supposed to come out right yeah it'll be out when this episode goes live. Yes.

There's a PS4 version, I think, that upscales to PS5. And I played it on Steam. It's on Switch. It's on Xbox. It's on PS4. Yeah. It's on PC. Play it. Check it out. Check it totally out. We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll come back to talk about other things.

going to take a quick break and then we'll come back to talk about other things hey huge thank you to everybody for uh sending in your reviews i don't think we're going to be singing this week but we'll have singing again soon uh but please keep those coming uh on your on your podcasting platform of choice it really does help other people discover the show and it keeps us alive because without this show we'll die y'all we've got a lot of reader mail this week i'm gonna start it right from the top this is from one mr patrick frisbee is luigi's mansion a horror game maybe for babies next question boom it's not scary at all for babies and Next question. Boom. It's not scary at all. For babies and children, it would be scary. For Luigi, I suppose.

Everything in it looks like it's made of marshmallows. Next question. Yeah, I could kick one of these ghost asses. Any one of those ghost asses. Even the big boo. I could fucking destroy him. It's not scary. You can't.

Also, it would be scary for hoarders. Oh. If you're a hoarder, seeing all that stuff get sucked into a vacuum would be scary for hoarders oh if you're a hoarder seeing all that stuff get sucked into a vacuum would be very tired a long walk to get there a long walk to get there

poor guy wow I thought it was not scary you're picking on me what no oh you're right

fuck you Chris fuck you for being friends with Russ Chris next question I think it's not scary like

I feel like in order for a game to be scary you got to be afraid that you're gonna lose progress or time or something i guess it did have a pretty draconian stop dignifying this the answer is no thank you mr frisbee uh next question this one's from uh emily eisenberg tips on how to play horror games when you are too scared to play them please i'll answer the question yeah go for it don't all right life's too short you have a finite number of minutes on this planet you don't like horror games go play katamari domacy next question let me tell you what i did for little nightmares too because it's when i started playing it the long neck especially i was like fuck this but it was only scary when i

was trying to sneak around and not get caught by long neck teacher lady so what i did and i do this literally anytime i play a horror game where i feel like this is a little it's a little too late at night i'm alone it's scary it sucks i don't want to be scared i'll just run right at long neck teacher lady let her gobble me right up you gotta kill me kill me fucking dead yeah let me see the bad thing that's gonna happen and then all of a sudden i've robbed it of its power now it's like well now if i die i'm just losing a little bit of time uh and i'm not gonna it can't it has no power over me anymore the zombies in resident evil run right at him let him gobble it's fucking from the jump it's like here's a quick time event grab your pistol and blow that zombie away don't let it fucking kill you that's that's actually pretty good advice

that's a good tip okay uh plant's having some technical difficulties so we are going to carry on with that. We're praying for him. He's had an inspired, he's like war horse. He's an inspiring figure of, of, of video games, podcasting,

uh, true friend. Thomas asks, what's the best slash scariest horror moment from an otherwise non horror genre game. For example, Raven home in eight half-life two. That's funny because I actually think half-life

and half-life 2 are horror games to some extent i mean they're pretty scary if they were a movie it would be a like a sci-fi horror movie i feel like um anything that's like has crabs that are the size of cats that jump on your face i think we can count as a horror game. I'm going to say in Sekiro, when you first make it to the castle area and you're climbing up the rooftops and you find the open window that you're about to hop into and then a screaming assassin on a kite

swoops down from the sky and you didn't even even you maybe saw him when you first walked in but you didn't know that this was a gentleman who was going to swoop down and attack you and he just comes in at you like quick fucking flare and just destroys you i feel like that whatever my answer to this is i feel like that's probably this most a game a souls game has scared me but something from from software is definitely the answer because that's probably this most a game a souls game has scared me but something from from software is definitely the answer because that's the game where it's like i cannot die yeah i cannot if i die right now i'll be fucking everything ignore griffin's advice you'll

lose all your dang souls right uh yeah that that that doubles as the scariest slash fucking funniest moment in in a from soft game uh i will i will frequently watch like see people react to the screaming kite assassin from sekiro because it is it is hysterical when you're not the one being you know scared shitless by it um let's move on let's talk about other games we've been playing would that be okay could we could do that could we seamlessly uh talk about that um sure i have because that it's because it's a horror thing that i wanted to talk about uh and i don't think anybody else played it because everybody said they were too this was their words chicken shit uh wow but before that that's a teaser first i want to say did i give my strongest possible

recommendation that everyone should play there Is No Game Wrong Dimension? I think so. Okay. Yes. Because I kept playing it and it gets so much better. Everyone should play this fucking thing. I would have been fighting tooth and nail to get it in Game of the Year consideration last year. It is just accidentally unfolded into an

alternate dimension LucasArts Sherlock Holmes game. It's really radical. Absolutely phenomenal. accidentally unfolded into an alternate dimension uh lucasarts sherlock holmes game it's it's it's really radical absolutely phenomenal everybody should play it yeah we got we got a few replies of people saying how much they yeah russ how do you feel about it i have not played it huh so when i said i gave it my strongest possible recommendation and you said yes i did then that's not enough to get you to try something you said that about sherlock holmes in the case of the missing didn't say strongest possible recommendation that was it that was a one anyway um the the thing that i want to uh

to hip everybody to if you're not on this uh yet it's called at dead of night which is a bad title that is very easy to forget and I have to google it every time that I want to talk about it which is frequently right now I thank you to Mark who suggested this game to me it is a FMV CGI

hybrid think like Myst or games like that it is not a completely FMV world what this game does so well uh is well you you are in a hotel you check into a hotel you find out that the owner when you first get there the owner this really sets the tone uh invites you to his comedy show that he does every night and he's the entertainment and he does this like uh character uh who is like very bawdy and kind of like will say all the kinds of offensive things he's usually a big hit with the

young people yeah i would say like an independent comedy show alone is already like so terrifying right and he's like uh but i do it and he's like do you want to come to this evening's entertainment it happens at midnight and the the person checking in your character is like, no, absolutely not. But then it turns out that this guy's character is sort of an alternate personality that he is living with. Credits to them, by the way, for having a spot in the menu that you can click on about dissociative identity disorder, like about DID, like here's the reality of this. This is not what we're talking about. This is a real thing, et cetera uh which i thought was pretty cool so you check into the hotel and

the owner starts hunting you and your friends that have checked in this hotel with you and the uh he has killed many people here uh in this creepy hotel and and you're not i killed not in the no no i don't think it was that going on um and uh uh he starts hunting you and there are these ghosts of people he's killed that you can communicate with via this like you know everybody's got a ghost communicator um so you find one of those and the the thrust of the game is that you're trying to find the ghost that he's killed and find like things that are connected to their stories and help them tie together their stories and help them find peace basically but while you are doing this you are being hunted by the owner who is represented in fmv in this cgi world which it taps into the thing about fmv that is so creepy that is just fundamentally

unnerving don't know why it's just weird but he will uh peek around corners and you'll go around a corner and you'll see him just peek out and then hide back away he will uh you'll hear you can peek out of a keyhole in the door to see if he's there. And occasionally you'll see him walk by. If you think he clocks you, you can run into a room and hide in a closet. And you'll watch him walk around and look for you. And he's a real actor, real performer doing this. And it is terrifying.

I mean, it is terrifying. I mean it is terrifying. The ghosts are also real people. So you'll see like, and you're in a CGI environment you'll just see a real person and it's creepy. Like that's why people don't like games is because it's creepy. And this like really leans into it.

The performances are a little bit hammy but also like if he catches you when you're not expecting him to, terrifying. There are certain safe spaces you can go to, like the stairs, where he can't go. And you know there are places he can't go. So entering in one of the places he can go is very... It's bad, and it feels bad. It's bad to do.

It is a scary game. It is, again, because you've certainly forgotten, because I have At Dead of Night is the name of it. And it is very cool um i've been playing a lot of dicey dungeons oh which is a 500 year old game but uh i've been looking for something to play on the switch while i wait for stardew valley 1.5 to come out um we've talked about it a few times on the show i know justin got into it i got it it's great i don't have a whole lot to add except there's six playable classes that each really feel very different. In a way that is kind of rad.

Like you, the, the basic setup of you roll dice and then put them on skills to activate those skills with the, you know, the dice numbers that you've placed on them is it holds true. But then like, there's a class where you actually are, it's a holds true but then like there's a class where you actually are it's a deck builder and then there's a class where uh you are trying to fill up a gauge

with your dice rolls and then there's a class where you have a spell book that you have to activate with your dice rolls before you can uh the the six classes feel really really different and then each of them have i think six chapters and each chapter has like a unique rule set i i don't think i realized how um i don't know it feels it feels almost like a like a really rewarding puzzle game more than anything else uh and i i'm i'm really into it i've unlocked all the classes and i think beaten two chapters with each class uh and i'm i'm really enjoying my time with that game yeah it's wicked uh which is a great platform yeah sure as well so highly recommend it um i want to talk about real quick a game called cyber shadow uh which is a ninja game uh inspired by the

original ninja gaiden side scrolling nes style graphics this is yacht club right yacht club produced they were not the developer i'm blanking on the name of the developer i'm sorry but it is a very good game um it basically uses yacht club made um remind me shovel night and it uses that same mentality so it basically uses modern control schemes and stuff that makes it feel like a modern game in the visuals of like a retro game um and it brings that to that format of like a side-scrolling ninja game what mechanical head studios is what mechanical head studios thank you so the um first few levels are like very like one levels one and two are like very straightforward hey this basically just feels like an old school um ninja gaiden game once you get to level three it really

starts to introduce a lot more modern mechanics um you get these upgrades you can like upgrade checkpoints where they all uh heal you or give you full energy whenever you die. And you spend like currencies to upgrade each checkpoint, which is really neat. You also get these upgrades like the ninja gets like, it's like a yo-yo with a blade on the end of it that like swings around you using like accurate physics. That feels like something that I would never, that would have never been able to be done on an NES game.

So kind of stick with it if you're just dipping in. Stick with it past the first two levels because it does get more interesting. I actually mailed on it, so I'm glad to hear that. I'll go back and do that. Yeah, it's available on Game Pass. So if you're a subscriber to Game Pass, you can get it for free, which is very cool.

But it's also on Switch and PC and ps4 and everything else uh but i played it on game pass i think it'd be really good on switch for what it's worth and uh yeah no highly highly recommend it if you like those retro style games cool oh real real quick last one uh if you ever played quest for glory on pc it's an old pc series uh in the same vein as king's quest uh if you're a fan of that there's a spiritual successor called hero you made by the same vein as King's Quest. If you're a fan of that, there's a spiritual successor called Hero U made by the same developers that just

came to Switch. It's been in, it was a Kickstarter thing. It's been in development for a billion years, but it's on Switch this week.

So check that out. Is that Hero U? Hero U is in university. Letter U. Yeah. I played it on PC and never finished it

because like a quest for glory game i got stuck on a puzzle and the game wasn't out yet and so i didn't know how to beat the puzzle yeah they worked on a ton so i'd like to hop back in on switch and see if it's a little smoother yeah for sure i love i love those those almost always the bucket that you need to use do you remember when the buckets remember when i made everybody on this podcast play Trial by Fire, the Quest for Glory game, and Russ and Chris hated it so much and they never forgave me? That was a long time ago. That was a very long time ago. You know what else was a long time ago?

The beginning of this episode, which means that we've reached the end of it. Thank you so much for joining us. Next week, Russ, what are we talking about we were talking about super mario world wait i fucked it up super mario 3d world plus bowser's fury which is a game that i'm extremely excited for because i never played 3d world on wii u because it was a terrible platform and now i finally get to fantastic i mean i i don't have the the new game but that old one rules let's i think it's got online multiplayer so let's let's let's set that up because i feel like that's going to be the

ideal way for us to talk about it that'd be very fun all right guys i love you and i treasure you and thank you for listening and uh be sure to join us again next week chris chris prayers lift up chris and prayer uh please take care of our our brother Chris thank you so much for listening and be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games Besties!