The Besties - We Have Cult at Home

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Cult of the Lamb came out of nowhere and has enchanted us like so many woodland acolytes. Join us as we discuss the finer points of managing a demonic community, and share some of our fondest Mortal Kombat memories for good measure. Also discussed: Beetlejuice, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Terraria, Pokemon Go, Slay the Spire: Downfall, Poinpy, Universal Paperclips, A Dark Room, The Ensign 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!

The big problem for me is that all the good cult names are taken already. So when it comes time for you to name a cult in the game we're discussing today, I sat there for maybe a half hour, and I was like, what are the cool, like NXIVM spelled all caps without a vowel? I mean, Keith Raniere sucks shit, right? But like, man, it's a cool fucking name. And I can't, it's taken is the problem. All the big ones.

Have you thought about just like nice guys? See, that does feel more nefarious to me. It does. It's like, well, this couldn't possibly be a cult, right? Because it says right there that they are pretty good people. Happyland. Happyland leans a little too much in the Happy Tree Friends direction that I do feel like this game tiptoes toward.

Yeah, it's hard, guys. It's hard. I went with Club 33, which is the name of a bunch of secret clubs inside Disney parks. I like to pretend every single one of my cult members is like a mid-level Teflon executive in 1970, just sucking down a, a Fanta and enjoying the,

the atmosphere. Mine, I will admit is in pretty poor taste. I did end up going with Kevin's gate. Interesting. And that's interesting. Interesting. And that's... Interesting. Bracing.

Who's Kevin? I don't know, but his gate sucks. Yeah, mine is Frosh's gate, so I guess we were sort of in the same place. Yours is gay. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week My name is Christopher McElroy and I know the best game of the week My name is Christopher Thomas Plant 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 game of the week.

My name is Ross Frusci and I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. Folks, it's a video game club. Just by listening, you are a member. We got a really exciting game this week. Kind of flew under the radar. I wasn't really aware of it, but we are all just,

I don't know about all, but at least a couple of us are really smitten with this one. It's called Cult of the Lamb. Chris, what's Cult of the Lamb? Cult of the Lamb is kind of like two games. One is a roguelite, kind of like Binding of Isaac,

but much better. Sorry, Fresh Dick. And then the other side is kind of, it's like a life town management sim, kind of like Animal Crossing, but with purpose. Oh my god.

It's quite the thing. Chris planned his apparently come on to just drop bombs. Really, really spicy stuff on this episode. Yeah, and we're gonna to get into all of it right after this. It is a singular game, Hall to the Lamb, I would say. It's just one game. Yeah, we should make it clear we are not talking about a bunch of games.

No, no, no. I mean singular in the sense that you don't immediately get it when you're playing it, I feel like. It's fascinating. You know what the best analogy I can come up with is? What's that, Juice? Act Razor. Oh, that is a good analogy. It's like a modern Act Razor, if that

helps. It's like, when I first started playing this game, so what you get is you're a cult leader, basically. You're a lamb, to be clear. You're a lamb. A cult leading lamb that's been brought back. You're a lamb, to be clear. You're a lamb, a cult-leading lamb that's been brought back from the dead to start his own cult in the name of this, it's called He Who Waits, I think is the name of the malevolent deity, or the benevolent deity that brings you back, depending on your perspective.

So you are a cult leader that is venturing out into the – you have a cult at home and then you are venturing out into the outside world to find new followers and collect resources and kill enemies and find junk lying around and also kill these elder gods on your journey to like avenge your death and and and cleanse the whatever you're doing i don't know morality is sort of a uh gray area with this game but it doesn't even seem like a gray area it seems like yeah you don't be moral but you are but you do have the choice to like how you're gonna run your call is that like a benevolent or like are you the kind of guy who's like, hey, everybody, you believe in me more when you eat each other. Anyway. But it feels at first when you're playing it very much like a Hades-like. You're going into sort of like randomly generated world and fighting bad guys and increasing your power and stuff and i kind of thought the cult would be more of a metaphor sort of like um the you know the the hades part of hades where you're you know in the underworld and you're you know

talking to people and and it's not very mechanical yeah it's very casual it's casual and it's a way of like marking your progress really right Everybody there is kind of a metaphor for, you know, different power-ups and things like that. But there's not a game. There's not a game there, right? In that part. There's definitely a game here. And I think the question that I'm wrestling with,

and I would love to get your thoughts on, is like how effectively these two games sort of like overlap and interweave for you. Yeah. Peanut butter and jelly. I just want to say that and I'll throw it to fresh. Okay.

I like that. Yeah. So I was expecting the combat of this to actually be the focus of the game just because that's traditionally how it is. I mean, Hades is a good example. The combat is the focus and then there's the secondary thing. It's actually inverted here where the it feels like the

city building part of it is very very developed and the combat is good it feels good and i enjoy doing it but it you know you mentioned binding of isaac comparing the depth of the combat in this versus binding of isaac is really like not a comparison at all because i agree it's pretty surface it's fun surface like it feels good to hit stuff with a sword or an axe or whatever but it doesn't have a lot of like you know there aren't a ton of different builds you can go into and stuff like that it's kind of a means to an end so that you're gathering enough resources to then power the core of the game which is the city building part i will say i did find it more interesting later in the game, which is the city building part. I will say, I did find it more interesting

later in the game, I mean, several hours in. Did you guys unlock the shawls, different shawls? Yeah, I got one of them. So I got one that you can collect some stuff and get an upgrade that's like these shawls. And the shawls are really sort of like, they remind me of the skulls, sort of. They're like modifiers.

They're not necessarily better, but they are. I got one that doubled the damage that I took. But every time I killed somebody, it added 10% to my damage until I got hit. So that really, I was sort of like, fine on the combat. But that really was interesting because it was like, it increased the difficulty, but it made it like, I really had to dial in and focus on it.

And I think that like with some modifiers like that, it is, it's not boring. No, it feels good. It's not the main focus. I think it's, it's fast and snappy in a way that I, that keeps me coming.

I don't particularly enjoy the like adventuring out part of the game just because I do think it is not nearly as fleshed out as the cult building side of the game. But that said, as simple as it is, it feels good. It's fast and snappy and just kind of fun to move around the world and hit spiky forest monsters. Yeah, I think it's as deep as it needs to be. I think it's set out to do a very different thing

than Binding of Isaac, where, yes, Binding of Isaac on a mechanical level, especially for combat, and I guess mystery, is one of the best games of all time. I'll concede that it's fantastic, right? But that is a game where you have to devote a lot of yourself to that game to really appreciate it. I mean, Frosh, how many hours have you put into that game?

I don't want to talk about it. Hundreds, right? And what I like about this game is it has hints of all those things, but it's immediately accessible. I mean, not accessible. You can immediately jump into it. You can immediately enjoy it. And I feel like I'm going to play this game for,

I don't know how long it is 15 hours and i'll have it'll have been a great experience but because it doesn't have that depth yeah i mean this isn't the game that you play for 300 hours and that's you also like it's also in the moment to moment it works on a smaller scale than that yeah with with hades which you guys know i love hades i'm not here to be smart hades but the whole deal with hades is it needs to be exactly the right length difficulty challenge variety so that when you finish a run you're like yeah i could pick in i could get in one more real quick yeah this is not that i i don't think that they are that inner like they don't necessarily want you to feel that compulsion to jump right back into it like into a run though yes that's i felt the compulsion to

jump back into managing my oh my gosh yeah yeah isn't that funny yeah the comparison weirdly is stardew valley with the caves like that's what kept coming to my brain of, like, I am taking care of my plot of land, and then I can go into the caves and I can fight goo, and it's fun. I think the combat here is a trillion times better than that. Yeah. But, yeah, where I ended up spending most of my time was, you know, planting flowers and pumpkins. Yeah, sure. you know, planting flowers and pumpkins. Yeah, you really, talk about some of the stuff you can do.

Give a sense of the, like, scope of the life sim part. Sure. Well, so the goal is to. Not life sim, but. Cult sim. Someone's life. Sure. Yeah, that you're taking over. The goal is to create a larger and larger cult.

And as you go through the game and the adventures out in the world you are effectively bringing people into your cult and then once you have them it's about keeping them happy so that they pray to you so that you then collect their like prayer bubbles and turn that into greater and greater power which then lets you go into the world and fight some more and the stuff that you do to keep them happy is like, hey, you build them a sleeping bag that falls apart almost instantaneously, or eventually you use that to get enough points to upgrade so that you can buy a toilet

so they stop shitting all over the yard. Oh, dang, you can get a toilet? Yeah. That changes everything. Not only can you get a toilet, you can get a poop hanger. Poop hanger. And you can keep your poop in it so that they can use that poop to fertilize your plants. Does the poop from the toilet go to the fertilizing bin?

Yes. Oh, not automatically. Oh, but you can scoop it up with your bare hands. Yeah, collect and pass very quickly. Speaking of poop, I do want to mention, while you're doing all the city building stuff you'll also get mini quests from your uh cult members who will be like hey i want to be friends with this person can you collect flowers like that's a very basic one one of them came up to me it was like i have a dream a lifelong dream and only you can solve it i need to eat a bowl of poop and you have to make it for me and i'm like okay

was it actual i got one that wanted grassy gruel and i made them grassy gruel but i have not had one that said i want to know i screen capped it he literally said bowl of poop and that is one of your recipes is bowl of poop and i made it for him and he instantly vomited and uh i felt okay about it because that was his dream of dreams so you gave it to him who am i to yuck someone's yum i want to talk about how gross and like surprisingly grim this game gets we still need to talk about the actual like church part of it like that you're the temple right but but first i want to just talk about recruiting characters in this because you know in some of these games, you just find a character in the world and then, great, that's it. There's very clever writing in here where they don't take a lot of time with dialogue, but you can tell what the story is.

So you'll find a character and they will just be in an empty town shaking. And you realize that they've murdered everyone in their town. And then you are constantly brokering deals. So it's like, oh, I'll absolve you of your sins in exchange for like, endless labor and devotion. Or there's like sick and starving, cute characters that you are like getting them to love you in exchange for food and shelter. It's like very grim ideas. food and shelter. It's like very grim ideas. The one that I'm trying to think of like the very worst one that came to mind. Oh, here's an example of this. I had an elk, a very adorable elk that was in my town and was the first to turn against me that decided that I was not a worthy, I guess, cult leader, right? And you're given like options of what to do with that and the options are like oh you can deprogram them you can imprison them you could sacrifice them and instead of any of that I had unlocked a power just recently to just shuttle a character to

the afterlife which gives everyone else in my group like faith in me. To kill them, basically. Which I did, yeah, which I did to get rid of them. But that is so fucked up. Somehow of all of those options, that actually is the one that freaks me out the most because here's a person who fundamentally does not believe in your religion and you're not just killing them,

you're shuttling them off to an afterlife that they are a heretic in. That's deranged the systems in the game are amazing the like customization progression stuff like i'm always on the lookout for for really satisfying like upgrade systems like that and and this game has several of them that are meaningful and connect in really, really cool ways. And the side effect of that, given the tone of the game that Chris has described, is that you will just do shit

to increase the potency of your cult or of yourself in combat scenarios without even really thinking like, oh my God, what have I done? Why did I, this is a horrific thing I have just done to this, I have killed this non-believer and then extorted tithes from all of his buddies

just because I needed more coins to build more sleeping bags. I mean, cults ain't nice, Griff. I don't know if you've heard about this. Cults ain't nice, but it's easy to like lose sight of that when you are just on your grind. Is it,, but it's easy to lose sight of that when you are just on your grind. Is it, Griffin?

Is it easy to lose sight of that? For me, that's weird. Griffin, can you talk about the way that the temple works and all the different sermons and prayers and decrees? Sure. So you have this town that you have control over that you will build new structures in and harvest sort of raw materials from. I mean, let's call it this.

It's a compound, sure. And so you can build things like, I mean, you can plant berry bushes that you can gather food from. And then later on, you unlock a farm. So if you plant stuff in the vicinity of the farm, your followers will know to water and harvest and plant all the stuff there when you assign them that job. You assign every follower a different job, whether it's like gathering wood and stone or praying at the altar or whatever. And one of the first big buildings you get is the temple, which allows you to sort of introduce new doctrine into your cult, which sometimes unlocks new interactions with your followers. Like, for instance, the extort tithes doctrine.

Most of the time, whenever you unlock a new doctrine, you have a choice between two, and those represent the sort of moral choices in the game. Like, for instance, the extort tithe has another option where you can give money to your followers to earn their loyalty um which like that's a sucker's game those those upgrades in particular i found to be the some of the most meaningful in the game because they'll apply to every villager in your town so one of the upgrades was like uh i chose to have it so that the townspeople didn't mind eating grass like they were cool eating big help and so ordinarily they like

lose faith in you if you just feed them grass all the time but here they were cool with it yeah about the stuff they're loving it and then there's there's like prayer there's faith that um unlocks divine inspirations which are like the blueprints for the new stuff that you can build in your compound. Then there are like, whenever you give sermons, I think it's devotion that you earn. And those unlock new, sometimes like combat capabilities for you whenever you go. Everything, all these systems are connected and they all, there are very few that are like, increase your melee damage by 2.5%. Like, it's usually pretty meaningful stuff. I did get a little overwhelmed by the names of everything because it's like devotion, faith, you know, there's like. It's a little confusing.

It's hard to remember that there is there are individual levels of loyalty. Yeah. And then faith is what is like cult wide. Hunger is like that, too. That's not immediately clear, but it doesn't. At least this is my understanding of it. It's actually weirdly like short on. There is a lot of tutorial, but i maybe still could have done with a bit more um food is not an individual act it is like a group hunger like right well technically uh so you can dive into an individual villager and see how hungry that villager is but it kind of averages out the overall hunger of your cult yeah you go to cook you you throw a whole bunch of food on the ground and the most hungry people will eat it um i i yeah i mean i i i want to talk about the the actual choices and like what is benevolent here so the i mentioned the like ascension right that you can

send people to heaven an example of a choice is that or you can just straight up murder people now and the card hints at like hey people are probably not going to like that i guess do it at night time but you might actually there is a way so like there might be another upgrade where when you sacrifice someone ordinarily the the cult might lose faith in you but this upgrade will allow them to like be super into it. Yeah. So you can really craft. Yeah.

I think the murder option is straight up just murder, murder, not sacrifice. Yeah. Got it. But there's also, I want to mention when people die, you have two options.

You can leave their body there. You can strip their body. Three options. Really leave their body there, strip their body of the meat and then feed everyone the meat strip their body three options really leave their body there strip their body of four options and then feed everyone the meat from their body or you can just bury them and then potentially later on resurrect them if you wanted to you can also throw a funeral oh that's nice yeah you can do a tasteful funeral there's there's so much funny like interesting little like uh

you're you're uh it's surprisingly deep like your cult will lose they there's a nighttime daytime cycle right so you have to have enough beds for everybody and they all have to you know make sure they sleep you can actually find necklaces that don't that make it so they never need to sleep oh but yeah um but uh if you start a sermon a sermon is like at the temple you come and you collect everybody's faith if you start a sermon at night people lose faith in you because you woke them up they're like oh this fucking guy okay yeah yeah boss okay classic justin well i i think just you mentioned the like light on tutorial something i i do dig about the game is that it's just kind of what you would expect in real life yeah like it's true it wasn't

always clear to me like oh how do i raise our faith well i guess if i build better beds that might work and then it does um so it's a happiness meter effectively yeah yeah i felt like i was i once i started just going off of feel and rather than like specifically trying to read the rules i i did a lot better um i mean this is the hades of this year for me in that they're they're different but it does a whole bunch of things and it does all of them at minimum well if not outright great yeah it is i will say the thing that i enjoy about the experience of playing it over hades and i'm not you know saying one's better than the other but because hades was constantly improving and i this feels like something that will get tweaked

i don't know um but i think they have said there will be post-launch updates of some sort i don't get furious like i do with haiti like when in this game if i die it's sort of like ah well like i i needed to get back and everybody was hungry anyway everybody was hungry anyway i needed to get back and check on everybody like the stakes of what you're doing in the combat part are not actually that important. Like it's a gradual thing and you are doing things that help your village. But like really, um, as I played more, I found myself more reluctant to like go out to the outside world because there was so much going on at home. Yeah. Um, that I, I found myself hesitant to get out there and.

Yeah. I was curious what you guys thought about the like upkeep aspects of it. Cause a lot of the buildings, you know, you mentioned the beds break if you use them too much, obviously you can make them more durable over time, but even like, there's like a lumber yard that'll break eventually.

I was wondering if you guys felt that was like a little overwhelming just to like keep everything fixed. It is, but it's also necessary because like without that, that is sort of the way it is not hard to get new followers whenever you are in a in your crusade, which is what they call it whenever you leave your settlement to go and collect shit. It has a sort of Slay the Spire-esque way of moving between floors where you can see like, okay, well, if I go this way, I'll find some food resources. If I go this way, I'll find a new follower. Doing that, it's not hard to just continuously pick up more and more and more followers, which is, of course, incredibly important because they do all the work for you. But if you over expand too quickly before you have the sort of resources and utilities that you need to manage all those followers, yeah, you're going to be running around scooping

poop like it is your job until I assume you can eventually unlock a janitor or something. Yeah, there is a janitor. There is 100% a janitor. And it's a great video game, a dirty video game trick that I'm an absolute sucker for is when they put something in the game that isn't fun and then later they're like, hey, we got a guy for that.

I mean, it's the epitome of a clicker mechanic, right? Like clicker games are about automating the things that you find annoying in the game yeah a lot of that happens i also just like it as the the story of being a cult leader or i mean like this is like a startup the video game like you you're going to have to actually work for these people like that if you want to get these this cult to care i mean i i don't know i i really liked having to do the menial labor they mentioned a few different points uh the other gods like critique you for doing this where they're like why would you be doing this like shit work um

i don't know i just i like i have trouble articulating why I like this game so much because it feels so simple in every aspect. I think it is a game about constant choice, and I think the best games are that, where you're constantly making a choice between two interesting decisions. One, I got an upgrade where when I die on a crusade, I have the choice to resurrect myself, but I have to sacrifice one of my cult members

and depending on which cult member you sacrifice you'll get more health back so if i pick like a really old frail cult member they'll only give me a heart or two um so and that is the entire game is constantly making those like you know they're meaningful in the sense that you kind of get attached to certain members of the cult and stuff like that but grand scheme of things you're not going to get devastated by one of these decisions but they're all very satisfying and fun to watch the animations stuff like that the animations are great one one one sorry just one very quick final moment your characters the your followers age um and i i had one who had been aging for a few days and basically came up to me and was like hey you know you know, it's pretty much the end.

Just want to say thanks. You know, it's been real. It's been great. Loved working for you. Great cult. Yeah, in this cult. Great cult times. And he was like level four or whatever, very high.

I was like, you know what? For you, it's time to ascend. And I sent him to heaven heaven got some faith points for it and i realized at that moment this is the best game peter molyneux never made well i mean he i don't know that's not fair he made black and white which i would say has some pretty there's a uh pretty tremendous amount of that venn diagram, I think, overlaps quite a bit. Oh, yeah. But the difference is this one's fun to play.

I will. Okay. One other little thing that I just wanted to highlight because there is some stuff that makes me feel like kind of icky because cults are not a fantasy creation. It's like a real thing. Yeah, you need to turn that part of your brain off when playing this game because it does get started. I do want to flag it. I'm not talking about my own personal enjoyment, but I do want to flag it. To give you an example of the ickiness, there is an option you can get to where you get a ritual that lets you marry a follower.

And I got a quest. Okay, so it's like mechanical it was like hey will you marry me I'm wild about it the whole thing and I'm like I guess yeah cause if you deny somebody then you lose a bunch of faith so I'm like okay yeah yeah yeah no problem

I'll marry you so I married this person who is in my cult which is already like mhm yeah power dynamics you can force anybody to marry you you can smooch you you can smooch on command you can smooch on command which increases their loyalty to you which is like i feel like that's all pretty gross but also it's a gross game about cults. This is like not out of line, but it is like, yikes.

And then that same cult member, and I'm sure this is randomly generated, but it was pretty wild. That same cult member came to me an hour later that was like, I would like you to sacrifice me. It's been terrible. It doesn't say a lot about my husband.

No, I've made a huge mistake. Actually, this has been great. The romance, so special. Would rather get ripped apart by tentacles than live another day. And I got a massive, massive amount of faith from my followers. Like, did you see what this motherfucker did? He sacrificed his wife to the tentacles. The aesthetic of the game is probably my main complaint.

It doesn't do much for me. We need a name for this. Like, Binding of Isaac, Don't Starve. It's like creepy cute. It's creepy cute. It's both kawaii and kawaii oh good job good job uh finding a vice guy is is i think pretty grotesque from start to finish this i referenced happy tree friends which is probably unfair but that like yay it's cute little woodland animals and they're fucking cutting they're decapitating each other like i've always been pretty grossed out by that um and it's i don't know though if the game was like

super grimdark if that would assuage some of that ickiness probably not yeah i think it's just a taste thing like whether it works for you or not uh it's definitely like has some hot topic vibes to it but it's cool with me like i'm into it i also think it serves what justin is talking about because i think this game is a good critique of those things i don't think this game is by any means celebrating this world or cults or any of that it, to me, like a pretty sharp critique of organized religion as a whole. It's not funny. I don't feel like it ever really plays it up for laughs. Like when you do horrible shit, it may have this layer of cutesiness sort of on top of it.

But it's not like it's so fucking funny that you just sacrificed, that you just performed sacrificed that you just you know performed sinicide uh upon this elderly follower of yours uh it also creates contrast like there i mean when you convert a follower is a perfect example the game is very very cute your character is very very cute and then when it's time to convert somebody your eyes go red and you look horrific like yeah it it wants to i feel like a lot of the stuff when it gets gross it it strips the jokes away it strips the cute away and it's like no this is this is unsettling like you are supposed to feel a yicky about all it's it's not like an overlord which is another sort of comparison of just you are this big strong uber deity that no one remembers i mean i love that but you had your cult followers were these little goblins that you would send off to like

you know uh sacrifice themselves for you and the whole time they would just be like farting and laughing and yeah i mean they were minions basically there's there's none of that how about another overlord though how about one i? I think they made two. I think they made two. Fellowship of Evil came out in 2015. That was the last one. My Lord. Written by Rihanna Pratchett. Who knew this game came out?

Not I. Wow. Anyway. Dope game. Very, very disliked. Critically, just a disaster. Oh, no. Okay, so that is Cult of the Lamb.

You should check it out. Check it totally out. It's on basically every, so that is Cult of the Lamb. You should check it out. Check it totally out. It's on basically every platform, which is cool. Yeah. And when we get back... Mortal Kombat! That scared me, actually, a little bit. Is it Mortal Kombat's birthday?

What's going on? It's the 30th birthday. We talked about Mario Kart's 30th birthday on Rusty's 30th birthday we we talked about more uh mario kart's 30th birthday on resties and now we're talking about mortal kombat and then i think that's the end of the birthdays for this year things that we care about i i think uh you know the evo was recently uh mortal kombat not really a big thing there but hey it's still around after 30 years and it it culturally matters and it had a huge impact on me as a kid so i wanted to see for y'all did did you have your mortal moment i i guess the question yeah i i'm gonna say for me mortal kombat was the first game that was like

oh i'm not allowed to buy that because it's inappropriate for my childish eyes. Was that the case for everyone else here? I don't remember ever being explicitly told not to play Mortal Kombat. Justin would remember better than me. It was just never, fighting games were never a thing. We weren't really, yeah, they weren't really a thing in our house. But the content wasn't a concern? I don't think my parents were like even aware.

I mean, aware enough of it. I went to Mark Fisher's house, and Mark Fisher had the good version of World of Warcraft. Genesis, I guess. That's an interesting... So, kids, that was the blood code, though, right?

Because of the way games were under a lot of scrutiny at this time period like early to mid 90s because of mortal combat because well yeah okay but then uh when they made their way to the consoles the sega genesis and the super nintendo the super nintendo version did not have uh blood in it it had sweat. But the Genesis version had a code you could enter, A-B-A-C-A-B-B. Wow.

Which I just found out. Yeah, the blood code. Sorry, does it open with A-Cab? Abacab. Okay, well, still. It actually, there was a death metal, a death core band called A-B-A-C-A-B-B. Abacab.

But yeah, there was a blood code on the Genesis. That was the version you wanted to get when you were a kid. Yeah. I just watched the movie. The new one or the? The new one. Did you guys watch that movie? Oh, yeah. I watched it at a drive-in.

It was a great drive-in experience. It might be the best Mortal Kombat movie you could make. Yeah, I agree. I was like, no complaints. That is exactly the Mortal Kombat movie that I would want to see. No complaints.

Because of, for me, the hyper-violence of it. The problem with the other ones is like, you know, fucking Johnny Cage punches Goro in the dick and then he falls over and dies and it's like ha ha ha ha this one like Jax gets his arms frozen and then shattered while he's still alive it's it is horrific you also see yeah like a real life version of the hat cutting through someone yes it's a real life version of a lot of fatalities that is just hilarious to see done in real life. And every like mimetic line from this entire franchise,

it's not one person who's like, test your might. It's fucking every line ever spoken in Mortal Kombat is in this movie. Flawless victory. I cannot believe they had an adult man murder someone. And then it's just like, hmm, flawless victory. Seeing it with my wife was very weird because she obviously didn't get any of the references.

So I would have to like, I was the asshole during Lord of the Rings pointing out, oh, he broke his toe in this scene. But for every Mortal Kombat reference, that was me. So thanks to her. i appreciate her patience fresh what was your experience getting into mortal kombat as a kid yeah i got i guess the first one that i bought for home was mortal kombat 2 which is a terrific game and it kind of had that element of like diving into like cheat codes before the internet where they were kind of like spread across like, you know, play fields, locker rooms, homeroom, stuff like that. And so I remember finding out from someone through a very intricate like 16 code password how to play as fucking Goro or whatever it was and just like very intimately memorizing that.

I was a reptile guy i want to make sure i'm not confusing this with mortal kombat 3 but i'm pretty sure reptile was playable in the second one and you can go invisible and really annoy people which stuck with me it's always a sub-zero stan just because it's the same reason i played honestly the mortal kombat core game that i think i played the most of was mortal combat on the game boy um oh which was like a handful of game boy games like surprisingly competent a surprisingly like good version of of the mortal combat games uh the one that i hold so near and dear to my heart is not in the core series it is mortal combat shaolin monks which i believe was on ps2 and maybe dreamcast is it like a gauntlet knockoff no uh no i'm not sure what that

is okay it it is you can play as kung lao and lu kang and I think it has two-player co-op. In fact, I'm almost certain it has two-player co-op. And it is like a 3D action beat-em-up. Almost has sort of a God of War style look to it, but with cooperative play. And it was just really fun. It was not like a Mortal Kombat game in that there were these single-plane battlefields where you would just battle against one person.

You would be taking on hordes of enemies at the same time and then doing these- That sounds like Gauntlet. I think that's what I'm talking about. Maybe. I think it rang a bell. It felt similar to Gauntlet when I played it. But then it also had,

it still had fatalities and all that mortal combat that that you gotta have but man i remember playing through that game with my buddy tanner and like just crushing all of it over the course of a weekend and uh surprisingly great uh some of those some of those mortal kombat spin-off games are really great not mortal kombat sub-ero unfortunately that game was complete dog shit but uh Shaolin Monks was dope I I the the original one came out like a week or two before my seventh birthday and I tricked my grandparents into taking me to go get it at Toys R Us and this was my parents eventually did set boundaries on uh games being too violent yeah i did not play resident evil 2 for a very long time that was honestly the only

game because some you know clown at babbage's told them it wasn't appropriate for me so fuck that guy what an idiot what does he know um but no mortal kombat i i did know that my parents should not see it because they would take it away so I sat on it for a couple days until my neighbor was babysitting me, despite him being like three years older than me. And him and my buddy, his little brother, we sat around and tried to perform Sub-Zero's fatality for hours. Because you didn't have internet to just look up a guide at that point. So you just had to guess at the button combinations.

I'm not joking. It's a thousand combinations. At least. Do you want to know how long it took us to do it? Oh my god. How did you even know to try? The answer is, we didn't do it. How did you even know to try? The answer is, we didn't do it. How did you even know to try, Chris Pine?

The luck that we ended up having was the computer did it to us. Oh. Yeah. How did we know? Because I read GamePro. It was like Geist, I guess. I read GamePro every month. Sure.

I'm not dumb. He knew the cheat codes. He's not dumb. He's not a fun factor. Why do you think he's dumb? Yeah. Dumb. You needed one of those tips and tricks books from Barnes & Noble.

Yeah, but those were like cowards. Did you all ever write for GamePro? Wait, did I? I wrote for GamePro. I wrote for GamePro. And you know what? They never paid me. Really?

Yeah. I did a review of, I think it was like this, it was a top-down action game that was like Hand of something. Hand of Fate? Hand of Fate. Yeah. Is that right?

That was a card game, I want to say. That was a card game. No, I don't know. God's Hand. When it came time for you to determine the fun factor of a game, Chris Blant, what sort of metric did you use? And you have to ask Scary Larry what he thinks.

Yeah. No, no, no, no. I actually had my blood taken, and I asked him to check the fun ratio in my blood. Luckily, my doctor does that. What were the results? Well, Dr. Larry, Dr. Scary Larry, he said it was a whoa! blood and yeah luckily my doctor does that what were the results well my dr larry dr scary larry um he said it was a whoa okay are we narrow casting to the four of us right now it feels a lot like it um hey uh what else have y'all been playing uh i've been playing a lot of stuff

because i was on the road for a good long time. Two main ones I want to call out, started playing Terraria again on the old Steam Deck because it performs a lot better than the Switch, which is what I've only played Terraria on in the past. And there's all this new shit in this 1.4 Journey's End update that I had not messed with when me and Russ got pretty deep

into that game a couple years ago. And that game still kicks ass. Still a very cool game. You started from scratch? Yeah, I started totally, totally over. But it's great in that Minecraft way where once you have played through the game, you know, okay, gotta go find some uh gotta go find some iron

gotta build some housing for all the npcs gotta buy gotta build a helivator gotta like you know what the chore list is to to do and you uh it's it's a lot more is that the only game that has a helivator i don't know i think it is dante's inferno, technically. Yeah. And the other big one I've been playing since I got to D.C. We moved to Washington, D.C. I don't know how much of that I've talked about on this show. We just moved to Washington, D.C., where the Pokemon flow like sweet wine. Particularly the Go version of the Pokemon. Do you have a stop near you?

I do. I have a stop near me. Not near enough that I can access it from my house like a million times a day, which would be so choice, but we have gone from Austin, which definitely has a Pokemon Go community, but we lived not in

the city, and so nothing was walkable, really. And so we just like did not play it, but it has been a really amazing way of getting Henry excited to like go walk to some new place or go ride the train to some new place uh that that he hasn't been and you know we'll catch a bunch of Pokemon and hit a bunch of Pokestops on the way and maybe challenge a gym um it is it's very cool they've added a ton of new stuff to that game.

Like a lot of Team Rocket shit, which is fun. Sometimes Team Rocket floats over my house in a hot air balloon. I'm like, you dumb bastards. You don't know. You don't know what I'm capable of. So I've been playing that quite a bit. Just dipped into Xenoblade Chronicles 3, which I think I've played all those games

and bounced off of them at varying points. This one seems great, but I have not spent, I think, enough time with it to say anything more than that. I know people are really loving it. People are... Not just people, Chris Plant. Chris Plant, you're loving it?

Yeah, it's great. How far have you gotten into it? We cannot talk about it. I've talked about it on the last two episodes. People murder me. But I'm probably, I don't know, maybe like 10 hours or something like that. Have you played the other two games?

Absolutely not. Okay. Yeah, I did not like two at all. I played through maybe 20 hours of Xenoblade Chronicles 1 before getting off of that. I would love to spend time with one of these games and get, like, really into it, but it just hasn't happened yet.

But I think this might be the one. Oh, boy. I also just downloaded Live Alive, which I don't know if anybody is, if y'all have talked about that. Oh, yeah, I've enjoyed that. We haven't. Okay.

That's like an old-school JRPG, right? Yeah, it's like an old-school JRPG set across all these different, like, like, points in history there's like a future world and uh uh like a martial arts yeah world there's there's all these different worlds and then the characters at some point like connect i have not the great thing about it is the engine that they're using for the art almost certainly will be used for recreations of Final Fantasy. And I believe it already is in the works for Dragon Quest 3. I cannot wait for it.

It's the only Dragon Quest game I've never played any of because I've been waiting on the... They're giving it sort of the Octopath treatment of 2D, 3D stuff. You can try it on LiveAl or live a live whichever it is uh there's a demo on switch that's like a pretty meaty demo and uh save transfer is over so if you like it you can just go play the rest of the game also i've downloaded and spent a little bit of time with the octopath traveler mobile game that came out they They've made like a, which is kind of great. It is a gotcha. It's a gotcha Octopath Traveler game,

which is a really weird... Gotcha! We tricked you into playing Octopath Traveler. It strips away a lot of the cruft, I think, of Octopath Traveler and just focuses on like, the combat system in that game was fantastic. So it's a screensaver? You're just downloading empty bytes? Alright, alright, alright. Juice. like the combat system in that game was fantastic screen saver you're just downloading all right all right all right all right juice yeah but uh real quick um i've been getting into a little bit

of some idle things that i played like many many years ago um uh a dark room if you've never played you guys ever played like the a dark room in the ensign no oh yeah baby oh god i would play i would play a million of those i know a million bajillion they're clicker games they're narrative clicker games someone who played cookie clicker this is the actual story someone played cookie clicker and he thought like what if i could use this to, like, make a compelling narrative, like a really compelling narrative? Yeah. There's two of these games. It's actually weirdly kind of similar to Cult of the Lamb.

Amirali Rajan. And he did A Dark Room, which is like a clicker where you start with, like, literally a bonfire. And then you're building resources and finding resources and people are drawn to the bonfire. And then eventually like, as you, it's all ASCII, like there's no graphics or anything.

Eventually you like journey out into the outside world and, and, and everything. It is. The incident is also like that, but then with like space travel. Yeah. It's like a sequel with space travels.

So those are great. They're on iOS and browsers browsers if you never played them you absolutely should uh also along those same lines i weirdly just turned on universal paper clips again just to like go through it again just because i'd never done it a very similar idea um i went back through slay the spire i played that downfall that that dlc or like fan made expansion that has a new character class that is so cool and i love slay the spire and i i turn on slay the spire to play a little bit of it to catch myself up before i play the dlc oops 20 hours what were you playing it on pc or mobile i was playing it on pc. It's a dangerous game to have on mobile. Oh, I bet, bud. I bet.

I downloaded it on mobile when it came out and I was like, man, I've spent so much fucking time unlocking all the stuff in the PC version. I don't know if I can. And then I played it through all day. I guess you could play Downfall on Steam Deck because even though it's fan-made,

it would be Steam Deck. I know you don't have one, Justin, but... What do we need to bring it up? Anyway, another very quick one from the makers of Downwell that Russ Frushtick suggested to me, because he's always got his finger on the pulse of the mobile world. It's a point P. Great game. P-O-I-N-P-Y, point P.

It is made by Netflix. Well, it was published, but released by now. Thank you. Yes. Correct. The, it is,

it is released by Netflix. It is a, if you play down, well, it's kind of like that, but backwards, I'm not going to make it sound fun, but it's really fun.

You're, this is a little guy pie and you're dragging down on the screen to jump upwards and you have to collect certain fruits that the game tells you to collect and the more fruits you collect the more jumps you can do in a row and you're being chased by this like juice drinking monster that you have to keep making juice for

and a bunch of like upgrades and stuff is that ringing a bell Justin of your home life oh yeah it's not that far off actually anyway I know it's a lot of video games. I'm really sorry. I should get into books. Someday.

Someday. Plant, what is yours? Well, fresh fruit. I think we should talk about our thing together. Okay, fine. So Plant and I, this is a little while ago, but Plant and I went and saw Beetlejuice on Broadway. And to be honest,

it is one of the most careless productions i've ever seen specifically because they say beetlejuice so much in that play oh yeah they did not care the ramifications of saying beetlejuice as many times as they did and what came out of that was exactly what you'd expect which is beetlejuice shows up and he makes a whole mess of things yeah that's a huge it's huge, it's a problem. It's a problem. They could have edited the script to make sure that didn't happen. And they didn't.

And here we are in the middle of Manhattan experiencing some sort of Hellmageddon. Yeah. We had a lovely time. It was a really nice time. And the folks at Beetlejuice are fans of the besties and invited us. So I want to especially thank them. Oh, cool. I also think that they can thank me.

And I wanted to explain. So the star of Beetlejuice, Alex Brightman, beloved by fans. Extremely hardworking. That's only because he's very talented and works really hard. Yeah, yeah. Right, right, right. So you might think that's why, right? Oh, okay.

And I mean, after every number, people just, I mean, people love this guy. He's incredible. He's fantastic. But would he be there without me is what I kept thinking. Because in college. By you, you mean everybody. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, in college, I had an off-Broadway production, and I cast Alex Brightman in what may have been his first New York show. Is that true?

That's true. And I just think that, you know, sure, does he work hard? Does his agent support him? Has he earned every step of his career yes yes but yes but that old improv axiom but but would it have happened without me so when everyone cheered for him in a way i kind of felt like it was like i mean the butterfly flaps its wings it was my night flaps its wings now chris plant did you cast him in a leading role? Did you know the talent before you? Oh, I 100%

did. He was one of the two leads. And last of the Texas Dollies, a show that you will never see. Well, not now. That's true. That's also how theater works. You do it once, and it's done

forever. You actually have to burn every record of do it once. Yeah, that's a problem. And it's done forever. You actually have to burn every record of the play. I'm glad you guys enjoyed it. So many games we mentioned this week, Plan, I don't feel good for you. I'm very quick. We talked about Cold to the Lamb. We talked about Terraria, Pokemon Go,

Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Slay the Spire, Downfall, Point P, A Dark Room, The Ensign, Universal Paperclips, a bunch of Mortal Kombat games, and Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Oh no. Here he comes. I'm back! Sometimes

Justin becomes Beetlejuice to scare my children. Travis' children. It's uncle behavior, I think. Yeah, it's normal stuff. What are we doing next week? Well, before we do that, I wanted to thank the following people for writing reviews for the besties. Please do.

Barkel, Tanner Johnston, Mab Donna, and Goth Salts. Thank you for writing reviews for the besties. Thank you to everyone else for writing reviews for the besties. I turned into Beetlejuice briefly in that reading. So there you go. What are we doing? I'm so excited for next week's game. Next week, we're talking about Cursed to Golf.

Fuck yes. Yes. I, the creator of this game showed me a little demo of this. I don't know, before COVID, years ago in Tokyo. And it was like, hey, is this a thing? And let me tell you, it's a thing. And now the game is finally coming out. And I'm so excited for this team. Wait, I just wanted to zero in on this very quickly because i know

we're trying to segue out but plant i do want to just verify if you had said this is not a thing back then in the early days it would have died you that would have been the end of it so in a way you picked up what i was putting down in a way way. Once again. It all tracks back. I mean, it's weird. Am I in the Truman Show? Well, okay. We will be back to talk about those,

that game, Curse to Golf, and everything else we're playing next week. But until then, 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!