The Besties - We overlooked Unsighted, a brilliant Zelda-style indie [Resties]

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Unsighted appeared on consoles and PC earlier this year, but we missed it. What a mistake! Frushtick and Plante talk about this brilliant indie game that blends Zelda and Metroidvanias into something new and thrilling. In the back half of the episode, the Resties discuss their favorite new additions to Xbox Game Pass, particularly the intergalactic space exploration chill-out game, Exo One. 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!

Hello, everybody. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. I'm Russ Frushtick. And welcome to The Resties, where we celebrate the best of the rest on Festivus. Oh, that didn't rhyme as well as I thought it would. Festivus. Festivus there now it's closer every every episode we get a little closer to perfection that was sort of like the the m&m four inch door hinge rhyme that everyone makes a big deal about which is to say not the best

i i appreciate that you continue to let me try. This week, we're talking about Unsighted, which is just an absolutely fantastic game. I can't wait to tell you more about. Plus, we'll be talking about some new Game Pass gems, including a brand new game called X01. And as always, we'll talk about what else we've been playing at the end of our show with our recommendations of the week. First, Unsighted. I realize this one might take a little bit of an explanation because it's not your Halo Infinite. It's not your Resident Evil Village. It doesn't have, you know, a giant marketing campaign.

So I'll try my best to sell it to you before we throw it to a short break. So I'll try my best to sell it to you before we throw it to a short break. Unsighted is kind of a Zelda, Metroidvania-type game about a meteor that has crashed into Earth. And it contains, and I know if you're anti-fantasy, I can already feel those eyes rolling. Just bear with me. Contains anima. And this resource radiates energy that grants robots sentient life. And of course, because people are terrible in science fiction, especially and, you know, sometimes in the real world,

humans are like, no, no, no, no, no. We're shutting this down. Except for one doctor who's like, I'm going to work with the robots. We're going to fight back against humanity. We're going to protect this precious resource. And we're going to make it so that these robots who just discovered what it means to be alive can keep doing that. The video game. Did I do it?

I guess so, yeah. It's very, I wouldn't have started necessarily with the lore to bring people in, but that's fine. It's good lore. It's a's fine. It's good lore. It's a good game. It's not bad. It's a lot to sort of take in early on. You know, I wanted to get it out there to begin with because now we can get to, like, you know, the meat and potatoes. Sure.

You know? Okay, so we'll do that right after the break. right after the break. Okay, so I started playing this game after listening to friends of the show, Into the Ether. They had an episode with Dom Nero from, I believe he's at Esquire. Well, I apologize, Dom, if it's GQ somehow.

But they had a great episode talking about this and dom was particularly passionate about it uh and and said that this was probably his game of the year and immediately i was like well i i need to play this if uh there is a game that i effectively had only kind of seen rumblings about on twitter getting that sort of praise from from people i trust and wow i'm glad i did i'm glad i did that because i can feel it skyrocketing up my own game of the year list as i kind of progress through it um what what is your reaction to it because when i threw it to you i i as someone who doesn't fully get the difference between metroidvania and zel games, I was really interested to hear what you would think of this at first blush. Sure. So I originally played it right on launch day when it came out, because it was on Game Pass. I was like, Oh, what's this?

I'll download it and give it a shot. And I'd been hearing some good rumblings about it. But I picked it up. I played it for probably a half hour right when it launched and was not immediately gripped by it you know plant sort of alluded to this in the intro there's a lot of lore there's a lot of like info dump at the beginning and my tolerance for that is pretty low generally speaking not to mention the fact that it kind of was reminding me of a game that I also didn't super care for although I know a lot of people did, which was CrossCode, which was a game we've talked about on Besties before. It was like a weird meta MMO, but not really an MMO game,

top-down RPG thing. And this has the same perspective as CrossCode. It has some of the same puzzle stuff as CrossCode. So I was initially like kind of put off by it but the more i have played since then plant came it was like no you really have to play it so like several weeks after launch i came back to it and it definitely did end up clicking for me way more than it did initially so i've i really been enjoying it. Whether it's a Metroidvania or not, I don't know.

What are labels? Who cares? It's a game that borrows, I feel like, very joyfully from a whole bunch of different things. And does it, not in the way where, you know,

sometimes you play a game and you're like, oh, they really wanted to go out and make this type of game. Where this feels like, oh, they had a thing that they wanted to go out and make this type of game where this feels like oh they had a thing that they wanted to create and then wherever they saw inspiration they just grabbed it and threw it into the the recipe yeah so just to like talk about what you know we've talked about the lore before but what the actual like minute to minute of the game is

i you know plant mentioned zelda it is very similar to like link to the plant link to the past era Zelda, which is to say you're dropped into this very large open world and you're, and you're given this objective of, Hey, here are five crystals scattered around the world. Go get them to save all the robots from turning, you know, you know, losing their sentience basically. And to that extent like you have a lot of freedom about where you go and what you do next whether it's hey someone's like oh you could go

here and someone has some gear for you um or you could go directly to your objective or you could do a different dungeon instead of like the starting dungeon they suggest it is very open but the minute to minute of like moving through the world does feel very zelda um there's a lot of like switch puzzles and block puzzles and stuff like that um that allows you to sort of like progress the world but also that's paired with what i think is better than those early zelda games is a combat system that is like very involved and, you know, with dodging and building up a combo meter and stamina and stuff like that. It's very souls-y in some ways. It feels great.

It's a really great combat system. Something I love, love, love, love, love about the combat in this game is you do have to parry. And as someone who's bad i'm just bad at at the hyper reflexive games i really admire the souls games i could kind of get into them i just i just i'm just not good enough i don't know my reflexes aren't there but this game the cue that you need to parry is very forgiving and the window that you can parry inside of is also very forgiving so i found that i was playing the game to parry like i yeah you were really rewarded for parrying an attack and then um diving in after that and i i quickly realized that's that is the way to do combat in this game yeah and it just feels very fun

yeah i mean i think the combat and the the minute to minute stuff is very very good i don't think it's why it is on so many game of the year lists or at least in contention um i think that's more to do with the narrative stuff which i guess we can get into now yeah certainly the most unique aspect of the game is uh not not the stuff that plant was talking about early on but actually the idea that every npc every talking npc basically that you meet when you talk to them they have a timer and if the that amount of time passes in in-game time, so if their timer says 300 hours and in in-game time, 300 hours passes, which is much, much faster than real time. That character. Well, I mean, you can explain it. Yeah, they go unsighted.

That's where the title of the game comes from. And what that means is these robots that briefly gain sentience from this, like, meteor crashing into Earth lose sentience. And they become effectively like zombies craving the resource, the anima, that gave them life. So they're the creatures that you're fighting. It brings to mind in the Souls games, there's always those moments where like the person that is chilling in your hub world at some point goes blanking on the term they use, hollowed. They go hollowed. Yeah.

And at that point, they're more or less an enemy that loses all, you know, you basically have to fight them or they'll kill you. So that happens. But for every NPC in the game, pretty wild. Yeah. loses all you know you basically have to fight them or they'll kill you so that happens but for every npc in the game pretty wild yeah and and when fresh says every npc this is like all of your friends these are the shopkeepers these are just random people passing in the street of which

there are many this is even the like um fairy robot tutorial like person. Yeah, the equivalent of like Navi in a Zelda game. Yeah, any of them will just die. And what makes this particularly tragic for your character is in kind of a JRPG fashion, you have lost your memory when you are starting this game. fashion you have lost your memory when you are starting this game but gradually you realize that you had very very deep relationships with most people in this area that you were a pretty key figure and that you had romantic relationships that you had very serious friendships and just as you are learning about these relationships you're also having to decide kind of who lives and who dies. Or you, because you also have a clock ticking down.

So you could be extremely generous with all of the anima that you collect as you complete the game. But you could go inside it and then that that's just game over like that's that's it um which might not be for everybody so that's why we should also mention there is a thing called explorers mode which turns off all of the ticking clock stuff well i think it just slows it down dramatically to the point where it becomes more like the ticket the time still passes but i mean i've been using it so i could say yeah i i haven't been watching exactly whether people's clocks are ticking like i need to look more carefully at the numbers but my understanding is that it just dramatically dramatically slows that down um i will say for myself when i first

heard about the ticking clock mechanic and then when I played it and realized the implications of it, I instantly turned on explorers mode. I instantly turned that mode on because that gave me so much anxiety, which I realize is the point. I realized the idea is you're supposed to become attached to these characters and have to make tough choices about who lives and who dies. The problem is I was not ready to do that and some of that is like gameplay stuff like i didn't know which characters would be most useful to me but some of that is

also like i'm not gonna let my little like fairy creature that follows me around everywhere die that's nuts yeah why would i also save the shopkeeper and then i learned the shopkeeper has this whole backstory it was like giving me anxiety and not only that it ties into the game point because like as you're let's say you're go you go and fight a boss and you die a bunch of times you're still reviving but time is progressing so you're losing all of that time for all these people so that adds even more to the anxiety of it that was not the game i wanted to play there might be people that want to play that game not for me it's me it's it is big time me so there also are

two modes there's one that is pure anxiety mode which is the hard mode where i'm really i mean people are just dropping like flies um and there's kind of the normal mode which i feel like so far bad things happen but i don't i feel like i'm gonna see the end of the normal mode which i feel like so far bad things happen but i don't i feel like i'm going to see the end of the game have you have you like lost people um yes i mean but but but i i've been very careful with the people that i don't want to lose but I think the thing that I'm most worried about right now is, like, myself. Because I think, like, effectively saved three people. So you collect this dust, and you can give it to characters, and it gives them, like, a heart each time.

And if you fill up, like, the four heart containers, they will give you a reward that is a pretty each time. And if you fill up like the four heart containers, they will give you a reward. That is a pretty big benefit. I won't spoil what those rewards are, but I mean, they are, this isn't like, Oh,

you know, 10% increase on your attacks. It's like. Meaningful. I'll give you one because they actually gave it to you in a tutorial. They basically say like, Hey, if you max this out, instead of having to go to these save points to change your equipment loadout, you can do it anywhere on the map.

That's like an example of like a pretty significant upgrade that you get. I would say that is the least useful one that I have on my watch right now to give you an idea of just how much better they can get. right now to give you an idea of just how much better they can get um but yeah when when you lose people they they effectively just go off they like i have not lost yeah i was wondering if you fight them well i have not i have not had that yet i have not had to fight them but there are characters in the game who are like a type of robot like they serve to function in society before this happened where you will meet friendly versions of them and then you will meet other versions of that type of robot that are unsighted so you'll come across robots not knowing at first like wait are they an enemy or are they like a shopkeeper what am i doing here um yeah i mean the game rules it's just

it's so smart and the the big thing worth mentioning about this game um is it was made by two people which i can't believe yeah that's taking. The other thing that I'll say about, you know, extremely to the creator's credit, the game has all this going on. But the world that they've actually created is full of femme-identifying characters, of queer relationships, like the gamut of body types and disabilities. the gamut of body types and disabilities and it's very interesting that they've created this world of robots that it was like the breath of humanity right like you you get a sense that for humanity's flaws they actually because you don't come across a lot of humans in this game they actually gave a lot to the robots that they created in terms of like you know capturing the full experience of human life which which makes this story so much richer when you both know that humans are the villains but also in creating these creatures these these robots they they gave them so much um which creates i don't know it's just a really

interesting friction do you think narratively uh this is gonna this is i'm gonna get letters do you think narratively this is a stronger and again i'm not i'm not talking about production value or anything just narrative stronger than near automata oh i i don't because they're very similar yes i i don't but but it's not that i don't think it's stronger it's that they're just doing very very very different things so like near automata for me is feels like a creator with kind of at the top of his game like with yokotaro and with just more resources than he's ever had sure and he's kind of done like rough drafts of the game like at that point at least two other times before it

with drakengard and near replicant right yeah so when i play near automata i feel i get the sense of like wow this is just it's stuffing all of these ideas into one thing to the point that it can't really contain it and i i actually think near ottoman is messier than this game yeah i completely agree yeah i think it is too this feels like a very singular we have the story we want to tell um there doesn't it doesn't feel like there's a lot of fat on this game like no everything is very precise and there for a reason and with near when i played it like as much as i really really loved the like bigger parts of it there was a lot of like side extra stuff that just felt unnecessary and tacked on yeah i think this is a trillion times more accessible than near automata and i i also think if you're playing Nier just for what it has to say about the idea of humans as gods

creating robots and what it means for robots to have sentience, this does that better and simpler. I just think Nier is also doing so much else on top of that that I can't really dock it against it. But it's an interesting comparison. comparison yeah it's definitely some similarities and i think people who have played near will check this out and like be a pretty maze that there are so many uh analogs to it well and even the like play of it like the action style of it has some near elements there's there's an upgrade that is particularly near like um you can do chips uh like you could in near and chips are these um you know little slots that you can fill

in with like uh oh you get an extra i'm trying to think of like you want more stamina or yeah you don't lose stamina from running. Stuff like that. Like passive perks. Faster reload. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that works exactly how it does in Nier, which is to say you can pay for upgrades to have more memory space to store more chips. I'd be stunned if the developers didn't play Nier, to be honest.

Yeah. Oh, I mean, yeah, I have to imagine. Before we kind of wrap up Unsighted, and I have a feeling we'll talk about it more either on Besties because I know Justin is playing or at the Game of the Year part. How do you feel about the kind of dungeons and the abilities that you unlock for each dungeon? You know, like in Zelda, you have the bomb and the boomerang. and this game has its own particular versions of that and i was curious what you thought yeah i had so i i was able to play through um the first dungeon and i was just starting the second dungeon but hadn't unlocked that ability yet but the first dungeon was the um you get the boomerang that can like

carry elements right so it it can basically move fire from one place to another which i think has been done in a zelda game as well which i thought was fine i am not i was not super taken by that dungeon i thought the boss fight was like very epic and impressive but the actual like puzzle solving i think in general is not my favorite favorite thing there's a lot of there's a genre called sakuban sakuban it's like a japanese japanese origin genre of like box pushing there's a lot of box pushing in this game i don't know if that lessens over time but early on there's a lot of box pushing doesn't really do it for me um i do like the combat in

those dungeons though so um but i don't know maybe what what what is the next ability so you get a a gun that fires ice grenades effectively and when they land in water they create plot like temporary platforms which becomes as you can probably imagine uh where you're at in the game extremely useful yeah sure um and also the grenades can like break certain stuff because it freezes it so pretty cool in that it does two different things um in terms of solving puzzles and yeah i think i think you're right i i think the dungeons are a bit simple and the puzzles are a bit simple but i also wonder if that is intentional because of the anxiety of the clock like if you had really challenging combat or really challenging puzzles plus the anxiety of oh my gosh every second counts and i can't figure out this dang thing

that yeah that would maybe be too much well i don't i don't know about that i think it i think if that were the case the bosses wouldn't be as hard as they are and that first boss is like no joke legit difficult um oh did you did you find out how to get um the recipe to make extra health packs oh my you didn't you definitely syringes the syringes yeah yeah yeah yeah i got that but it was after beating the first ball okay that's i cannot imagine it was extremely difficult yeah i was throwing all sorts of perks and yeah yes so early on this is a tip for people where we go if you at the very beginning of the game if you go left there's a city i'm sure you can find a guide for this too on online but there isn't a little

area that will um have a character who will sell you a blueprint to make health packs from like materials that you find all over the place and you find tons of this stuff make a beeline for that before you do pretty much anything yeah that's funny having to do that so early yeah yeah i just stumbled across it by accident they also you can get just a permanent second um health vessel i personally have not worried about that just because it's so cheap for me to make you know temporary ones yeah um but i after beating the first engine that was my immediate thought was oh my gosh i i don't know how anybody would do this without that yeah that's uh that's funny because they actually do prompt you after beating the first dungeon hey you should

go over here and this person will give you more syringes, which would have been useful before, but oh well. Cool. Well, like I said, I think we'll talk about this a little bit more. Do you have any other thoughts on it before we... No, no, I think it's great. It is on Game Pass. So if you subscribe to Game Pass, you can check it out there. I know you've been playing on Switch, which is probably where,

if I had to choose, probably I would have played it there, but I actually have been playing on Xbox. So also good, but having it portable is probably really nice. Yeah, and it runs so well on Switch, which was a problem that we had with CrossCode back when that launched. I think that got patched and got fixed. But yeah, if you're worried about that, let it not be a concern. Okay, on the other side of this break, we're going to keep talking about things that are on Game Pass.

There has been a bunch of stuff dropped on the service, some kind of besties, favorites. So we're going to look back at those, and I'm specifically going to talk about Exo 1, which is a game I think you'll see bubbling up in the games community over the next few weeks. So we will talk more soon. Okay, Frosh.

So do you know anything about X01? I think I saw a screenshot of it. It kind of looked like Star Fox. Kind of. Just based on the screenshot. I don't know what the gameplay is. Yeah, so I don't know if you've seen these lately, but there's been an increase in marble games on PC.

Like games are 3D games where you are a marble and you're just moving across the world like trying to navigate spaces or solve puzzles. I hate it. You hate it? Oh, yeah. I don it. You hate it? Oh yeah. I don't like Marvel games. Well so this isn't

a Marvel game in that sense. I initially saw the video and the screens and I was like oh okay it's like a puzzle solving game. This is a momentum game. So you are

effectively a Marvel but Did I am I making the Star Fox thing up? Maybe I'm just thinking of a totally different game. Well no no

I don't think you are because you're a Marvel but you're not actually a Marvel. You are some sort of alien spaceship. And I do not. I'll be real with y'all. I tried.

I do not understand the story. I really wanted to like whatever kind of like arrival sci-fi story this is going for. For the life of me, I can't figure it out. Some astronauts are on jupiter they had to eject after seeing a strange light and now suddenly you are zipping across like the galaxy in this marble and all that whatever that that doesn't matter what matters is that you are effectively going through all a ton of alien environments in a marble that can turn into a disk. And when you don't press down on a button, you are, I think, like 10 times lighter than gravity or something like that.

And then when you do press down, you are 10 times heavier. So if you're going downhill and you push the trigger it really sends you down the hill and then if you let go going up an incline you like fly up it because you're extremely light which will shoot you up into the air and then once you're in the air another button allows you to change your um ball into disc. So that you can kind of float. It sounds like. What was the game? Not Flappy Bird but.

Tiny Wings. Tiny Wings. Yes. Sounds like Tiny Wings. It is. It's very. It's like Journey meets 3D Tiny Wings. Where you are going up and down hills.

And the game is only about two and a half to three hours. And your goal is just to. You see a beacon of light in the distance and you need to get to it and the the i guess the meat of the game is the changing environment so yeah you know you might have just an environment that's hills but then you might have an environment that has lots of water and because you're a disc you can actually skip on the water or you can go you know plunge really deep into it and then that'll like shoot you really high up in the air so you're using the physics of these different

environments you know that now there is a gaseous planet using these physics to propel yourself where you gotta go um incredibly simple yeah it sounds cool feels great looks at times like one of the prettiest games i've seen this year and other times like a playstation 1 game okay um there's is that intentional or is that i you know i don't know i i've been trying to figure it out there is most of the time i was like oh i think this is intentional it's just going for kind of a rough uh aesthetic but there are trees in this game that look like they like bought one tree off of some asset package and then there's like 10 of them they're not using speed tree is what you're saying they're no they're not using speed tree um and yeah it just looks really funny and i

i don't know what they're going for um I dig it. It's cool to look at, but it's kind of jarring when you go from what kind of looks like realistic almost alien skies. You know, like you're in the clouds and it's like, wow, I'm like in the clouds of this alien planet. And then you like throw yourself to earth and you're like, oh my gosh,

what Nintendo 64 game have i found myself in um textures are hard man yeah i mean making video games seems really difficult that's that's kind of like what i i took away from playing this game is i don't think i would be good at making a video game even one as simple as this and i i think like that's the the hook of this and a lot of these marvel games i don't mean this isn't it's gonna sound like an insult i really don't mean it that way but it feels kind of like a student game in the sense that it's such a like simple premise of make the marble roll to the point yeah um and then it's decorated with all of the other good ideas you know like it's you know playing with physics and

a little bit of the sci-fi story that it gives meaning to something that if like you actually just stop and look at it is i'm rolling a marble north yeah i think journey is does the same thing where it really elevates a relatively simple input system yeah which itself was a follow-up to a student game, right? Journey of flower. I guess flower wasn't a student. Oh no,

no, no. You're talking about the underwater one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, so yeah, it, a very cool game. I'm curious for you. Has there been anything else that you, uh, have been playing on game pass?

Yeah. I mentioned on the besties, uh, unpacking, which is a game about unpacking your room. I know a number of people have really really enjoyed it uh if you haven't checked that out highly recommend it um i also want to talk about moonglow bay oh yeah which is fishing it's a fishing game it is basically

the closest i can describe it to is like very stardew valley but instead of being like a farmer you're a fisher person and um you can basically make money and meet a variety of people throughout the town as you improve your fishing skills and find new fish and all sorts of things like that gorgeous like um low poly aesthetic uh really great soundtrack it's just like a very vibey game where you just sort of like relax and chill out uh i really like after you go fishing you actually have to prepare the fish so there's these like little cooking mini games that you do with the fish you've caught um if you like games where you like make a store and then get more productive at running that store this is

definitely checking that box is it boring and i don't mean boring in like a mean negative way i mean like oh you know this is a game where nothing really happens and he kind of i mean there's i i don't know if you would describe stardew valley the same way i think a lot oh i mean yeah i you know i don't know that it's quite as i mean stardew valley is like one i think a lot oh i mean yeah you know i don't know that it's quite as i mean stardew valley is like one of the best games ever made so i don't want to like challenge things against that i think there's i think it is very smart in the way that it evolves uh and like shows you different things throughout the town and uh different fish to catch and stuff like that i don't i didn't find it boring i

haven't spent enough time with it but what i played i thought was pretty interesting i feel ashamed because the the other two games that i i wanted to flag are like the very opposite of this and will make me sound like i don't know you know just like a dope yeah dope like uh so uh i wanted to talk about my friend pedro i really like this game i do too years ago it came out a couple years ago on switch um and i think maybe pc it was on pc yeah yeah and it's basically a john woo like simulator you are this it's a 2d side scrolling uh action shooter where you jump into rooms and you can slow down time and perform all sorts of chaotic gun ballet action sequences, you know, diving across the room and grabbing onto a hook that

zip lines you over the heads of all these mobsters while you, you know, take them all out. while you take them all out. It's very silly and kind of messy. I don't know how much they fixed it up. There are some driving action sequences that were particularly messy on the Nintendo Switch, but this is exactly the type of game that I love to see on Game Pass because if you're paying full price for it,

it can be a little tough to recommend to everybody because because of that right like i personally think it's worth the rough edges but you know your mileage may vary for that sort of thing but when it's just a matter of the cost of downloading it not so bad um so yeah i i really liked that game did you did you end up finishing that or you just put a few hours into it no no i just put a few hours and when it when i played it on switch it didn't run great so i kind of do want to try it again on xbox just to like see it run it i'm sure it's amazing at 60 fps um i also would say like you talked about john woo i think it's the closest that i've seen a game get to like a deadpool action simulator yeah because as you said it's very silly and not

just like the graphics of it although the graphics are very silly there's also like you like throw a pan into a room and then you shoot the pan and the pan makes all the bullets reflect all over the room in like goofy ways. So that I think I don't know if that appeals to you at all. It's definitely worth checking out. I did actually enjoy what I played, but I remember thinking like, hmm, wish this ran a little bit better. Yeah, I just realized that there might be younger listeners who don't know who John Woo is. So just quickly, John Woo was a director who made some american action films like broken arrow and face off and a mission impossible too but his masterwork which is like weirdly hard

to find is a film called called uh hard-boiled and it is unbelievable if you are in the market for just basically the inspiration for so much of the john wick uh knockoffs of today it all goes back to this film hard-boiled yeah any any movie where you see someone diving in slow motion while shooting a gun basically comes from this yeah yeah it is fantastic the other um kind of silly action thing is Kill It With Fire, which I think I maybe brought as like a honorable mentions to a besties. But this is a game where there are spiders hidden throughout different environments, like starting with a house, and you try to kill them with increasingly elaborate weapons from sh shuriken or shuriken samurai stars yeah

thank you um and to like obviously fire to to other stuff how realistic are the spiders the spiders are not realistic they're quite cartoony but if you have a arachnophobia i still somewhat i still wouldn't play it because a lot of the game is not knowing where they are. So you're opening closets or drawers and they jump out at you. Yeah, hard pass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm glad you mentioned that because I know that that is a big problem for a number of people. Any other stuff on there that you want to mention?

Yeah, just two more real quick. Dicey Dungeons and The Forgotten City. These are both games that we've talked about on Besties before, so I won't go at length. But Dicey Dungeons is like a puzzle RPG, kind of like a deck-building dice game, which is very cool. And Forgotten City we talked about at length for a full episode.

Great narrative uh like said in ancient rome so both are excellent and uh well worth checking out cool i think it's time for some listener mail to talk about traditions uh do you want to just we can take these back and forth sure cool um uh what was the prompt i'll let you take the first one so the prompt is uh what are some of your favorite holiday traditions around gaming right we've we just had uh thanksgiving we got the full holidays on the way uh you know what what brings you joy in the gaming world during this time? So you want to take the first one? Sure.

This one comes from Cameron. My biggest holiday gaming tradition has been playing through the Tomorrow Corporation game Little Inferno every Christmas since it's come out. In my opinion, it is the closest video game equivalent to the fun but moving qualities of classic Christmas animations. It's really interesting. I remember I loved the game that came before that, which was World of Goo.

That was like their big breakout game. And then this game came out and I remember trying it. And I remember you like set stuff on fire, but it never really clicked for me. I'm not saying it's bad. I just never got to the point where it was more interesting than that. But I do know that it does get to that point.

So maybe it's where I got to maybe it out if cameron likes it so much that was exactly my reaction i feel like it's been on that kind of list of i really should go back and play that game they make good games yeah um this one is from old gamers almanac uh our group of friends will all travel back into our hometown during the holidays, and we make a point to play weirdly complicated Halo 3 zombies custom matches. And more importantly, suffering the annoying process of getting Chaos Theory Spies vs. Mercs working. Oh, man. Yeah. Both of those check in a lot of boxes for me.

say that i played chaos uh that chaos theory that is splinter cell chaos theory had an amazing spies versus mercenaries multiplayer mode whereas like this asynchronous uh asymmetrical multiplayer that was just like that was my college years to date myself for a little bit um but man so much fun um and uh halo halo uh local like land matches, also spectacular. And supported right now in Halo Infinite, which is also very cool. Okay, you take the next one. Okay, next one comes from Kevin. For many years, my parents owned a Wii U. Very nice parents.

One of the few parents that owned a Wii U. Just to play the game and Wario minigame called Sketch, Nice parents. One of the few parents that own a Wii U. Kept Nintendo alive. Just to play the Game & Wario minigame called Sketch, which was just a multiplayer Pictionary game that we would trot out every Thanksgiving and Christmas, everyone passing around the game pad after dinner. It's pretty good, to be honest. That's great. That's very cool.

I think the more convenient version of that is probably one of the Jackbox games. Um, I forget what they call their Pictionary version, but yeah, I mean, they're Pictionary is Pictionary. Like it's almost always more or less the same idea.

And it's very cool that y'all have sort of landed on the one, uh, game that you tried out and, and giving the, giving a reason to turn the Wii U on, which certainly been quite a while since I've had an excuse. I, game that you trot out and and giving the giving a reason to turn the wii u on which certainly been quite a while since i've had an excuse i i love when i feel like this happens with parents a lot when um people fall in love with video games and they're outside of the video

game world so they don't know that that video game is now irrelevant um and they just continue living in bliss thinking other people must do the same thing. Yeah. My most recent example, I was in Austin a couple weeks ago with my parents. And I stopped by this retro game shop in Austin. And my dad immediately made a beeline for the front desk and was asking them where their Kinect games are because he loves to play connect with um their neighbors sure and he's like i love this and he's like what what connect games do you have for xbox one oh and they're like oh well not a lot he's like well i know that everything's backwards compatible can i play my my connect games on xbox one so savvy and he's like they're like no you know

that was not their priority and you can tell, I felt bad for everyone involved in this conversation. And probably because it didn't need to happen because I could have just talked to him through all of this. But he was so crushed. And he hadn't, I guess, had not played these games for like six months because their 360 broke. So then he was like, oh, do I need to, I now need to buy an Xbox 360 to like an Xbox One, right? No, a 360

because most of Oh yeah, Kinect was on 360 as well. That's where all of it was. And Xbox One didn't play most of the Kinect stuff. It only played like the new Kinect games. Oh right, the new Kine oh right the new connect yeah i know it wasn't so long but like yes watching him process all of this was like it was sad but it

was also very charming that there is somebody out there who really loves connect and it instill like i had seen him do this years ago we'll talk to his neighbors as if it still exists and that they should go buy one um it rules that's incredible has he seen the famous video of showing the foot no he would be lost on him yeah okay actually he would probably be impressed um okay uh one one other uh listener man before we go this one from rose um when i was little my dad had a stroke and that left him physically disabled so we could never travel anywhere for holidays every christmas easter birthday etc we uh have a tradition now of buying and playing a new multiplayer game as a way to spend time together as a family i think that's really nice yeah that's great i this is like my you know i i had a child five months ago

this is my vision of the future is like fun there's a number of multiplayer games that my wife will not play with me the idea you know what fringe benefit of having a child is i i can finally do some multiplayer but the idea that everyone in the family gets together to play like a multiplayer game that's awesome i want more of that please i think that's great so long as everyone behaves and doesn't get angry at each other yeah well i i know i was just goofing on the connect stuff but why my dad is obsessed with it is you know he is older he lives near a bunch of older people who have their own disabilities or or inabilities to play certain games or just have never come in contact with a video game controller um so being able to like pull that out and have

something that everybody just plays together during you know the fourth of july is really special and i i imagine in this case i i that that's such like a lovely tradition that you know it's sad to not be able to travel um but being able to bond in this way it just rules yeah no that's great it makes me wonder when the next like connect or we sports equivalent will happen that like captures that audience of people that never ever play games but because it's so easy to just like pick up it suddenly does yeah yeah yeah yeah i think it's like it's there's kind of like two threads there there's that there's the accessibility part of it for the audience i was talking about with like my dad and there's just this multiplayer audience of you know we didn't talk a lot about you know the new mario party um but i'm just so glad those games exist um for this sort of scenario right for the like that couch multiplayer continues to

survive in a world that seems to be determined to uh switch almost entirely to online yeah no for sure and and more and more systems are actually supporting like simulated couch multiplayer where even if the game doesn't have online multiplayer you can connect i know it's supported on steam and playstation you can connect over the internet and it'll be like someone is joining your game uh locally so yeah that's great to see as well i love it uh okay that's pretty much it, the part of the episode where we recommend one thing that pretty much is never a video game. Yeah. I hate this segment because it's always like Chris Plant coming in with like, well, Aristotle's, you know, he wrote on the wall and then there was a documentary about it that was 36 hours long and you could only get it on this one streaming service.

Oh no, I hate what I'm about to recommend today. Anyway, I'll start with my approachable recommendation, which is Nora from Queens. You might know it as Awkwafina Show on Comedy Central. It is now, the second season is now streaming on HBO Max. If you haven't watched it at all, it's an excellent like comedy about sort of a woman dealing with the rest of development

of like being a millennial and having difficulty finding a job and stuff like that. But also Awkwafina is very, very funny, extremely talented, was great in Shang-Chi. Just, I just watched that as well. But I love this show it's massively creative um it's in the same way that like i think broad city uh it really took risks with its episode structure and uh format and stuff like that um i just watched a time travel episode

that was spectacular so i highly recommend it um that is streaming on hbo max and now put on your ted talk hats oh my gosh oh so i went and saw this movie called labyrinth of cinema yeah i went and saw it at uh at this art theater in santa ana that i love um was it was it crowded in there? You know what? So that's actually part of the story. So first, it's directed by Obayashi, who did... You actually probably are familiar with one of his movies, House. That weird 70s, 80s horror movie from Japan.

It does ring a bell. It's very psychedelic. It became popular in America 10 years ago. Anyway, this is his final film before he passed away it is a three-hour movie yeah about the history of cinema and also the history of war in japan from like the shogunate era era to like just after world war ii knowing that and also it shot kind of like comedy french new wave like truly bizarre there there is a ufo that is flying through time that is turning a movie theater in hiroshima

into like a portal into the world of movies i mean like very weird yeah you know we talk about weeds movie we movies versus uh not this is or weed games this is a weed movie um so i know all this right and i'm sitting down and this theater was playing two movies one was fantastic mr fox and the other was this and i get there 10 minutes before it starts i am the only person in the theater. And this couple comes in right before the movie starts, sits behind, like, two rows behind me. And they're like, oh, you know, it was so hard to decide between Mr. Fantastic, Mr. Fox. And the woman's like, yeah, you know,

I don't really like art films, so I hope that this isn't like that. Like, the only art movie I've ever liked was The English Patient. Oh, no. And he's like, well, I think this isn't like that. Like the only art movie I've ever liked was the English patient. Oh no. And he's like, well, I think this will be really fun.

And kind of like the trailer looked breezy and she's like, yeah, I don't really like movies that are over an hour and a half anyway. Oh no. And I'm just, I, I felt like I needed to turn around and be like, turn back.

You know, there's no shame. Fantastic. Mr. Fox is an absolutely fantastic movie go see it go see that box um and 90 minutes long even better 90 minutes long they lasted to their credit 20 minutes before very audibly deciding to leave yeah which i completely respect um have you seen the trailer does the trailer look breezy the trailer for this yeah it actually

looks really fun um which i i you know i don't think that they were deluding themselves uh there anyway it's on movie if you want to watch it i think if you are the type of person who who really likes getting in wikipedia holes and likes to like learn. Like this is a movie that I felt like I was just learning so much. And it's a movie that despite all of the pretentious sounding stuff is very funny and inventive. The way that, um,

Obeyashi does, uh, makes a lot of his films is he uses copious amounts of green screen. So it looks kind of like a blend between the Star Wars prequel prequels and like collage, you know, like where you cut stuff out of magazines and paste over each other. It looks like moving collage. It's really cool. And again, it's on movie. So if you wanted to try that thing, what is? Movie, M-U-B-I.

It's a streaming service. Okay. But it's like Criterion Channel, but somehow even more snooty. Cool. They found a way. I want to recommend these things because i don't know we i feel like we have a very you know small but curious audience and if like five no i'm giving you shit no no it's fair shit it's very fair shit to give i i was gonna recommend you know

something like i i don't know. Well, damn it. I was going to say Tokyo Godfathers, but that's not going to help me out. That's like also. You're going to bring Meet the Clumps next week. It'll be great. I mean, Tim Allen is fantastic in that film. You know, like a fox. I think we did it.

I think we did the episode. To recap the games that we talked about this week, we talked about Unsighted, which was the bulk of the first half of the episode. I talked about X01, the kind of like marble sci-fi game. Marble, not Marvel. Unpacking Moonglow Bay, My Friend Pedro,

Dicey Dungeons, Kill It With Fire, and The Forgotten City. All of those games are on Game Pass, including Unsighted, if you want to check any of them out, which is really cool. I recommend people check out Nora from Queens, which I completely support. I think it's wonderful. I recommend Labyrinth of Cinema, which is on MUBI, which I don't know if that is a like hey everybody go out and do it but if my description made you curious maybe maybe give it a try and and uh let us know what you think if you do and you're and you're gonna bring a dummy pick next week next time unquestionably i'm gonna bring like reruns of the price is right i love it uh do we have any any plans for next week uh or not next week next episode two weeks uh i don't

know we'll we will be in game of the year territory but it's pop maybe we'll highlight some of the uh picks that will not make the final, final cut, but are definitely still worth playing. Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Cool. Well, thank you for making time to chat, and thank you listeners for making time to listen. We are so thankful for you for being part of this weird experiment that is Resties during this extremely busy holiday season.

Thank you. So that's it for the resties. Because, wait, no. That's it for the resties. Where we celebrate the best of the rest of the festivest. Goodbye. Bye.