The Besties - We Really (Rogue)Like Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and Balatro

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

This week, we're evangelizing for two indie games that have completely consumed every moment of our free time: The rock and stone-fueled auto-shooter Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor, and the poker deckbuilder Balatro! We're going to go back to playing those, now.Enjoy the episode. Also discussed: Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Helldivers 2, Riders of Justice, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, Elden Ring 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!

Okay, so some of you probably remember my Christmas tree dilemma that I have taken down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Please, any updates? I wanted to give you an update. I didn't take it down. Thank you. Okay, okay. And I think this is important.

It's not a real tree. So, like, it's not a fire hazard. Okay. But what was a fire hazard was the wreath on the front door, which I had completely forgotten about. You don't use your front door often? You don't have to answer that, Chris. I'm not here to be bullied.

I'm here to share the truth. I didn't say anything. I didn't say anything. So after we had this episode, it kind of came at me really fast. Like, oh, no no that's probably bad that seems like a fire hazard and i i did decide i'm going to take the wreath off the front door and i went to do it did it have spideys in it it didn't have spideys the only comparison i can make is imagine like boiling a fish for like eight hours and then um letting it cool and then

pulling it out and how all the skin would just like slosh right off do I not know what a reef is yeah I'm so confused right now what I mean is like when I picked up the I lifted the reef off its little um hanger and immediately all of the pines just everywhere all over me so you're saying the pines are the skin of the wreath yeah i think that's right and then like the bones are like the the wood of the okay sure wood yeah that makes sense right no what i'm trying to say is it took so long to clean up because it's guts. The Reese like organs were just like all over my hands, all over the floor. And then I just had this like this vision of like a single spark.

Like I don't know. Maybe like maybe the postman is like smoking a cigar or something. Yeah, he does that. He like, you know, and then like as he drops off my mail, he turns around and he like he's done with his cigar. So he like throws it over his shoulder and then just like my entire front of my house explodes. Well, I'm glad that didn't that incredibly likely scenario didn't happen to you, Chris. I often worry that the sort of service workers who come to my house are going to willy-nilly throw fiery objects at it. Just mindlessly.

So I'm not the only one? No, yeah. No, I mean, you are the only one. Would you use a shop vac, or? my name is just a macro 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 games, plural, of the week. My name is Ross Frosch 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. This is a video game club. Just by listening, you, my friend, have become a member.

Special greetings to our Patreon members. Welcome. I hope you enjoy this show more than everyone else. Cool. What's that address where people can go to join? Patreon.com slash the besties. Earn my love. Buy Justin's love.

Buy my love. It is affordable. You can also go to the newsletter at besties.fan which is free that's something you don't get as much of justin's love that way but you get you the lot my light my light still reaches email subscribers right it's dimmed it is a dimmed version of my light is that the full there's a veil over it um so this week we're talking about Deep Rock Galactic Survivor. Chris, play it. What's that?

Deep Rock Galactic Survivor takes the Deep Rock Galactic multiplayer adventure and says, let's make it single player and let's make it like Vampire Survivors. Let's have you bust in rock and stone. Rock and stone. We're back. I'm so excited. We're going gonna talk more about that right after this i've played so much of this fucking game guys this game this game guys this one is uh this is a really good one can i try to tell people why it's a good one of these yeah okay so if you don't know the vampire survivors model you're one person don't have a name for this freaking genre yet okay i've

heard lots of different uh search action game has that been taken yeah we'll call it a search action uh i i have not heard a good uh name name of this genre yet i know what auto shooters i guess would be oh i like i kind of like auto shooter it's like an auto shooter so you're right you're it's one of these auto shooters you're running around your your weapons are uh and this isn't universal actually but the weapons are firing on their own um so there's not a firing mechanism it is you running around trying to survive increasing hordes of enemies. That is the whole thrust of these overwhelming odds, increasing weapon power and energy and all kinds of upgrades and stuff.

What makes this one really cool? There's several things, but I think the number one thing is you play as one of the classes from Deep Rock Galactic, which is a game about dwarven miners trying to kill bugs and get stones, get gems. And once you're in the level, it's an isometric point of view, just like all these types of games are. But you are surrounded by, there's lots of like rock formations all around you,

walls basically. But when you pull up to one of these walls, you automatically start digging a tunnel through it. So that's useful because for starters, there's all kinds of gems in the walls that you can see and you need them for upgrades. So, you know, you want to dig in to get some gold and you can use the gold to buy more upgrades. You can also use them after a run to upgrade your abilities permanently. But the more important part of it is that it allows you to, when you've got a horde of enemies, almost all these games, one of the central things is you'll get overwhelmed and have to try to sprint out of the group, try to find some place where you can find a little room to breathe. In Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, you dig through the walls, and that allows you to basically create choke points and bottlenecks

you can lead enemies into, especially when you start getting deployable weapons. There's a class that uses turrets. So you can lure a whole horde of enemies after you. You dig into where you see a little crevice or place that you can lure a whole horde of enemies are after you you dig into you know where you see a little crevice uh or place that you can stand and they will all pile into this hole with you except you set up all these turrets and stuffs to hopefully stand your ground and mow them down it also allows you to if you're overwhelmed make a hasty exit when when you need yeah on that point in

particular the best moments i've had with this game are i see this enormous crowd chasing after me i'm totally cornered i've got nowhere to go and i'm waiting because the ai in this game and this is actually a good thing the ai on this game is very stupid like they will follow you pretty much as straight a line as they can possibly follow you and so what i've found is if you wait until the absolute last second you can kind of make your break for it and like basically escape out the back end where the you know the tail of the giant horde is kind of finishing up so you end up just like completely dodging them but that tension of like waiting waiting and then making your move feels so fucking good but what's what's really what's great is it's not

overpowered because there are so many things that are useful for you to collect and so many upgrades that are hidden in the walls and the alcoves and stuff and there's and each level has its own mini mission of like you know collect these mushrooms or uh dig out this this thing called more kite and so it's constantly tempting you to do dumb stuff yeah like it's constantly hey i mean i know you're pretty safe over here this is working pretty good and you're mowing down the enemies but like who you should probably go over and uh go get those pearls i know you need pearls right uh and these are it's it's level which is – a lot of these aren't. This is like a five levels in increasing difficulty. The last fifth level ends with a big fight versus a big creature that is kind of immune to walls basically. It can leap great distances and kill you pretty quickly. Yeah, I think it also benefits from the levels themselves having boundaries.

And they're procedurally generated as far as I can tell. So you don't know where those boundaries are always going to be. And with that, what you're talking about, Rush, of wait to the last second and dig a hole and then sneak out right behind them. That is great as long as you haven't already spent a ton of time digging you kind of have to be strategic about how often and where you dig because you can end up creating too many paths to give the enemy an opportunity yes or if you're not paying attention to the map you dig yourself a hole like what fresh is saying and you're like perfect and now i sneak out the back and then you sneak out the back only to find out that you are on a little tiny peninsula yeah it's about to be swarmed

by thousands of hungry uh bugs uh there's there's a degree of strategy here that i just did not feel when i played the original vampire survivors and maybe that's changed, you know, as the game has been updated so many times. But I really felt like, and this is probably fake, but I really felt like it was my skill that was doing this, not just some arbitrary. Oh, yeah, 100%. I think this game exchanges, and honestly, guys,

it hasn't clicked with me, I think, as much as it has for y'all for this reason. I think it accomplishes a lot with this, guys, it hasn't clicked with me, I think, as much as it has for y'all for this reason. I think it accomplishes a lot with this like mining, burrowing, tunneling, routing sort of mechanic that I don't know that I've seen in a game like this before. But I think in exchange, it loses a little bit of the like overwhelming synergy sort of focus whereas like in vampire survivors it's very much about like okay this time i'm going all area of effect things and i'll pick up this item that boosts that and this item that advances this one like it feels less about sort of on the ground build crafting or maybe this gets better as you sort of progress to the game because there's a ton of stuff you unlock as you go i wanted to address that in particular because

my experience with this game is actually similar to what you're talking about early on i don't think the onboarding for this game is very good and there's a few reasons why i think the early classes in particular don't like the first two classes you unlock specifically. There's something about the feel of it where you where all the weapons are auto firing, which is pretty normal for this. But unlike vampire survivors, you're not getting this like constant hail of gunfire and it kind of loses a little bit of the like grippiness to it. The other issue that I ran into is you really can't succeed with these classes until you unlock, I think they're called like weapon mods or something. And the only way to unlock a weapon mod is to level up a single weapon up to level 12. And you kind of burn a run getting a weapon up to level 12 so that future runs will have weapon mods.

And that's not a good experience. Really, it should just be, oh, you get a weapon to six, you get a mod. You get it to 12, you get a mod. You should, there's that, it's just like too many layers of unlocking before you start feeling powerful. I mean, yeah, it's not that hard to do though. It's not hard.

It just feels like a little bit wasting. Like I felt like I was wasting time. Oh, I got to burn a run. Wait, you're wasting. Okay, so this is, all right, that's so suspicious though, because this is a video game that you're playing. It's like not wasting.

It is wasting time. It's all wasting time. It's a video game that you're playing it's like not wasting it is wasting time it's all wasting time yeah but you know you know what we're talking about right we've we talked about it a lot last week with final fantasy the idea that there's these open world areas that feel like genuinely like i'm just burning time getting through them and i that exists in video games too you can feel productive or not productive depending on how the game is built i know what you mean because that was my number one complaint big time about Vampire Survivors. For me, I didn't mind this. I completely agree with Griffin. It's there. And for some folks, it's going to be a problem. was so interested in learning about like the burrowing techniques that worrying about guns

and builds and all that stuff we just wasn't really where my head was at and i was fine and by the time i really was like mega upgraded and starting to actually have to think about my classes because there yeah there are multiple classes you know some that start with a focus on drones and and um and sentries. Some that are more like basically you have to aim your weapon. So like really heavy artillery, but they only fire in one reliable way. And you can kind of like start creating those subclasses. Yeah, before you even start.

And I found myself like having a lot more fun with that later. There are also more levels as you go. And those levels add little twists. So there's one earlier on that is lava. And that means certain parts of the ground and the stone that you crash through, you can go through it, but it's going to damage you. There's another one later on where it's thorns and half the thorns are like basically like dried out and desiccated and you can carve through them pretty easily.

But then there are red thorns that you can't carve through at all. So you end up having a situation where like some of the walls are kind of rebuilding themselves or some of the walls you just can't get through. And it's, it's changing how you think about moving through the environment the subclass is also just to touch on like you have the four basic ones of the subclasses really change how you play like for example the the gunner has one called juggernaut and juggernaut's got the highest health and it's got this thing where if you get hit, your damage gets a 10% bump.

And that stacks up to five times, but it's on a timer. So basically you want to get hit enough to keep your damage multiplier really high. So you're trying to balance that, trying to keep track of how long has it been since I got hit. I don't want to lose my five damage stack so i want to keep you know getting dinged so i can keep the the damage on and then there are other upgrades that go with that that like cause a like fire bomb to go off when you get hit or so that is a case where it's like this time i'm going in heavy on defense right because i know i'm going to have to take a lot of damage to keep my the the multiplayer the multiplier up yeah i i've played a lot of these

we'll call them auto shooters i like that uh and it feels like thus far the ones that i've played have been like halls of torment probably my favorite out of all of these but all of them have changed the vampire survivals model maybe like 10 or 20 they do not fully like reimagine how this game could work this game in particular is like a pretty dramatic change to the format such that it feels like a really new experience which again i think will appeal to some people and not i think after it took me about five hours to like have a successful run and like actually finish a run and after that that happened, I was like, okay, I have the whole loop. I understand it now.

It feels good now. It did take, yeah, a while before it got there. But now that it's there, I'm pretty on board with it. I will say if you're maybe on the fence a little bit, this is early access. And they have said that there is going to be more of everything when they get to the 1.0 release, which is 6 to 12 months. It's so nice to me. It is so much exciting.

I will say this, though. After playing 8 hours, there's only 3 levels, and each level has multiple hazard difficulties, and I am still getting new weapons. I just got a throwing axe that i have to that will automatically return to you which is a lot of fun but like i'm still unlocking stuff but

uh it needs more it needs more of everything uh to to really be able to stand with some of these it's also like it's cheap right it's like ten dollars yeah ten bucks um which all these games are pretty reasonable i don't know if that's because Vampire Survivors set this insane price point rubric for all of them to follow. But for $10, this is a total fucking steal. I will say also a huge – that I have never seen in one of these. The character is talking while you're playing. Yeah. And there's a – I will say there's a lot of barks.

You also have a – Is have a character or is it like your your manager that's like you get the manager that's talking like when you enter a level and give you some updates like hurry up minor there's the oh oh i forgot to mention one of the key things the the level gets harder the longer you take to do it yeah so when you've got the the big boss you can't just run around collecting minerals and let him do his thing because the enemies are going to keep getting more and more difficult the longer it takes to to kill him so you're up against the time and then you gotta after you kill the boss you have to actually do like a sprint to the exit otherwise

you just die yeah uh but the the your your miner does talk about like upgrades and stuff that they get there's not enough of them you know you, you hear them repeated, but there's also, you can press the Y button on to just shout about rock and stone, which thank you. Very important. Thank you so much for that. Putting it on the front of the controller is so wild. Like you're not using the button. So I get it, but like it is the most prominent pointless button i've ever seen in a

video game um i i for for people who are considering this i i do think i'm fresh what you're saying about it being a pretty significant change i i can see that if if you're like um griffin and vampire survivors specifically really stuck with you maybe wait until the full release but i i think especially if you were like me and vampire survivors just wasn't quite clicking but you really want to try this genre i i don't think you're gonna find a more enticing version than this it's i will absolutely pick this back up as as it continues to get updated um it's really, I will say this. I love Vampire Survivors. I've played a bajillion hours of it.

This feels more like a video game than where Vampire Survivors sometimes feels kind of like, for a lot of it, like a lightly interactive. It's like a screensaver, practically. Idle game, right. It ain't that tough um you can things can break bad pretty quick here if you're not smart you also the one thing i would also add is like it's the only game that i can remember in this genre where you actually really

need to pay attention to the environment we've talked about it a lot with the drilling and everything but like i was trying to think of other games in this genre where like i was genuinely using like walls and things as like a huge upside for how to like manage the environment whereas usually you just like laser focused on your character in the like circle of death that surrounds it and that it's pretty simplistic all things considered so this definitely adds much more complexity it really reminds me like classic tower defense stuff yeah especially if you're playing as the engineer class which is sort of focused around uh like place placements and uh turrets and drones and stuff like that because you can just burrow

yourself a long tunnel and drop a bunch of turrets along the way and then just sort of just chill yeah it felt really good yeah great i am very excited to talk about the next game we're about to talk about yes so let's take a break thank you there's no sense in waiting i bought bellatro yesterday am i saying it right i don't think anybody knows how to say it right i think even the developer has said i don't know if this is apocryphal you don't know how it's pronounced that's cool i bought it yesterday and i played it i think all day uh and i just realized it's on switch i had it on steam deck and then i realized it was on switch which i prefer to play so i just bought it a second time on Switch to have as sort of my off-court buddy. I am all in,

pun intended, on Bellatra. I've never seen a game, this is a weird one. This is one where, like, suddenly I was getting this game from, like, six different angles, like, six different vectors of people, like, you have to play Bellatra. There was a time when, like, I was playing Deep Rock Galactic Survivor

and, like, I saw, like like my friend's notifications on Steam. Like three different people like, hey, this person is playing Bellatro. Now this person is. Hey, somebody else is playing Bellatro. You want to describe how it works, Griffin? You got that? Sure. I'll take a swing at it.

So it is a deck building poker roguelike. The main mechanic of it is that you have a hand i think it starts off with eight cards and you have to build poker hands out of those up to a max of five cards because that's how poker works uh the better hand that you play the more chips that that uh hand is going to earn when you play it uh there is also a multiplier associated with each hand. So if you just play, you know, high card, it's just going to give you like 10 chips or something like that. If you play a straight flush, you know, it'll give you like 100 chips and a 10 times multiplier. And the point of the game is that each round you have a basically what they call a blind,

which is the score you have to beat in a certain number of played hands. You also have a discard function to help you build those hands, but you only get a certain number of those two, right? So you take a look at your hand, you say, oh, I'm pretty close to a flush. I'll get rid of the cards that aren't a flush. Oh, okay, I got the flush. I'll play the flush and get my chips and my multiplier. That is the basic sort of mechanic. On top of that, there's like eight or nine layers of like deck building strategy that goes into it, the main hook of. There's a shop that you can spend that cash in that lets you buy new jokers and new cards and other stuff like that. Those jokers, there's like a blue million of them. And they can synergize in a lot of really wild ways. So for example, there's one pretty straightforward straightforward just adds plus 40 or

multiplier every hand that you play just gives you a pretty static like bonus to your thing or you can get one that um uh makes it so that every face card that you play adds 40 chips to the thing that you play and then there's also a joker that makes it so that every card you play counts as a face card so you get those two going at the same time and you're going to start generating like a shit ton of of chips or there's one that makes it so that if you uh you know if if you open up a booster pack then you could potentially get an extra card with this joker like there are so many different effects that influence how you play uh all kind of just feeding back into this very simple loop of of building poker hands it has this uh it has this great thing that i've not felt in one of

these games where you're in a really good run and sometimes you'll get like a few jokers that work together really well uh and you'll feel like you broke it it's like oh my god i just got five times as many points as i needed to beat that guy i am like cruising and then the game will catch up with you it's like oh yeah yeah you didn't figure out a cheat this isn't you're doing it as intended it's just now you have to do something else because you're you're 30 000 points that you were so excited about a couple rounds ago it's's not enough to cut it, so you better come up with another strategy quick. That said, you can't definitely

fucking crack this game. Last night I had a run where I had a card that made every card count as a face card. Every played face card turns into a gold card, which gives you extra cash at the end of the round. And then a card that sort of gets rid of the special effects on the cards that the round and then a card that uh sort of gets rid of the special effects on the

cards that you play and adds a permanent like times multiplier uh to your multiplier so that by the end of the game every hand that i played was like times 100 multiplier and i was in like the six digits uh just destroying the entire game and i breezed through that run which is like absolutely my shit in a in a rogue like like this uh and i have i will say i've also lost many runs following that one trying to rebuild the yeah the glory of that one but you cannot you can't lean on you get these things called planet cards which boost the like score that you earn for each hand so there's one for each different hand so jupiter for example if you play that it permanently increases the the uh the score that you get from playing a flush so then you're like

all right i'm going hard on flushes gonna get just chase flushes as much as i can uh and then you will miss one flush and be completely boned yeah or, or you get, there's a lot of times where you think, well, God, I've got a full house. I mean, I've got four of a kind. That's pretty common. You know, I got a straight flush to the ace. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that'll happen.

And you play it, it's like, what the hell? I got more points from that pair, the two pair that I played. Well, yeah, you leveled up the two pair, and your heart is actually a diamond and it counts as double and it's like the the hands of poker pretty quickly like uh are it is it is not as important as as you might think let me ask you i haven't played this yet i'm looking forward to playing it sounds extremely my shit is there a um between games sort of meta game at play where you're like unlocking features as you complete runs things yes so there are different decks uh and that basically all that that means

is you will have like a small bonus to start out so the i think the deck you start out with is the red deck and all that means is that you get one extra discard uh per per round um but then those decks also get very wild where there's one where uh you can hold an extra joker card you can hold six joker cards but you get one less hand per thing uh there's also like interest so if you don't spend your your money between rounds. You will accrue more. Or there's a deck that makes it so that you get money for each hand and discard that you didn't play in each round. So there's lots of stuff like that. There's also basically achievements that you earn. And those achievements can be things like play an entire game without playing a three of a kind or without playing a flush.

game without playing a three of a kind or without playing a flush uh and for each one of those that you beat you unlock a new joker to to that you will start seeing in your runs got it again i i i want to look up the exact number of jokers because it is obscene there are there are so so so many of them um so yeah there is a there is a shit ton of stuff they also all look really cool like a lot of the jokers like as you start to get into weirder and weirder ones there's one that looks like a business card there's one that look like like any kind of card you can think of like movie tickets whatever um they all have a really cool style and also i tell you what's really surprised me about this and plant you kind of touched on it it tells you basically what's going on but it throws concepts at you with like not a lot of

setup like the idea like i started encountering mentions of planet cards before i had any idea what a planet card is it throws a lot at you it just like it just kind of works like it is weird how quickly you grok it considering how much is going on. There's 150 jokers. I looked up the number. Yeah, it's a lot. I think what you're talking about, Justin, works because as many ways things can go wrong, there is as many ways for things to go right in surprising ways. And because of that, you can have these what would be learning runs in so

many roguelikes right where you it's like oh i discovered what that was in spelunky and it killed me um but here i while i was learning about you know the tarot cards or the planets i would stumble into really good runs without even knowing yet how the game works yeah and then and then learning from that so an example and unlocking shit as you do as you like even if you have a failed run you can still unlock like four or five jokers right just from goofing around so like i i had a run where the logic to me seemed like oh i i want to store aces and clubs in my hand. Basically, I want to play hearts and diamonds, and then if I store clubs and aces,

if I only have clubs and aces in my hand, I have these Joker cards that give me a multiplier for everything, right? And then I kind of accidentally stumbled and picked a completely opposite, it seemed to me at the time, Joker card, which added a multiplier whenever I spent a club or a spade. And what I realized was, oh, wow, now no matter what I put down, I'm in great shape. I can create a scenario where I am playing all these hearts and diamonds, and that is one strategy. But then once I've stored up all these spades i can then play

a flush each one of those cards is its own multiplier and then i like explode with more points from a completely different strategy and i i feel like so often in roguelikes it's like if you divert from what seems like the obvious strategy you're just immediately doomed and here again there's just so much room for creativity that things that seem like they would be in conflict are actually like in harmony i think the thing that works so well for this game for me is having to balance greed in terms of like setting up that incredible synergy you can you can get it to a point where like you have a joker that just gives you like 200 point where like you have a joker that just gives

you like 200 chips and then you have a joker that adds 10 to the multiplier and then you have a joker that multiplies the multiplier times three and then you could just play high card two and win the round because you are just getting so much shit from your jokers that it can just carry you all the way through the game but it is also like, sometimes you'll see a Joker in the shop where it's like, okay, that's not building to that dream synergy, but it's gonna give me a little bit more consistency maybe as I build towards it,

or it's going to generate more cashflow for me to have more money to spend in the shop, or it is going to set me up for a more conservative run. And having to kind of like balance that out uh is such a it's such a fascinating wrinkle uh in in this in this genre um i i've i think beaten like three or four runs now i am like obsessed with this game uh and i am i i don't think i've even unlocked like 10% of this stuff that there is to to see so i'm i'm thrilled that it's uh i don't know it came out of nowhere do you guys know why it's called that no i haven't

i haven't played this game but since i haven't played it at least i can contribute something in ancient rome a balatro was a professional jester or buffoon balatrones were paid for their jests and the tables of the wealthy were generally open to them for the sake of the amusement they offered. Okay. There you go. Great. Old-timey jester.

All right. Thank you. This game sounds dope. I'm definitely going to play it. Russ, you're going to lose your mind when you get to it. It's absolutely unreal. It feels, like, dangerous. Like, the second I finish my first run,

and every run after that, my first thought is, well, I'm going to try one more. I'm I, I think, yeah, I think I can do better than that.

I, I see what went wrong there. Uh, I remember when plant mentioned it and it sounded cool, but it's also like, Oh, you know, like poker roguelike.

And I looked at it on steam and I was expecting like maybe 300 reviews or something. And when I looked at it, it had like 8000 reviews. And now it's sitting at almost 10000 reviews at 97 percent on Steam. It is becoming like kind of a thing, which is really exciting because it came out of nowhere for me. I did want to mention because this is kind of like a subgenre at this point. It's not really like like Solitarica or was the other one that you mentioned sword and poker was that yeah that's what i thought it might have been like yeah it's not really it it's not like a

role-playing game it sounds like a poker game but with variables that like no well it's not even a poker game really right it's like um it's about the math and the meta of building out a deck that is like working together. And less about like, like with an RPG, they like in Solitaire or whatever, you have these where you like can spend currency to upgrade. And this is not like when you're in the shop, you're not just like spending coins to get better.

You're having to make really deliberate choices about what kind of run you're going to have. It's like, it's like part of the meta. It's not all good stuff good what you're talking about is it sounds more like slay the spire no uh yeah the slayers is a better but this is deeper in a way right there's like the the variables that you're adding on here are so much bigger and more consequential than any card or upgrade you could get in Slay the Spire because one thing can change, can pull everything together in a way that makes you unstoppable. Right.

That sounds awesome. Play Bellatro. I have one complaint about Bellatro. I do have to mention. Sometimes, and this is like, maybe this is just luck of the draw or whatever, but you do have to kind of have a concept for your deck for what you're building. You have to have an idea of what you're doing, and that can happen as you play.

They will have these weird rules like none of your clubs will count or you can only play one hand or other stuff. And sometimes one of those can stop a run in a way that feels kind of unfair. I've been having to hyper focus on this strategy and I just kind of got like the bum luck of having the one boss that will cancel out my whole thing. And that feels like a bummer. It doesn't feel great yeah it feels like i don't even have a shot at it do you think the reason is because they want to encourage people to make more diverse decks than rather than just having one like ultimate solve well the counter for it is that when you start a new the sort of rounds of the game are called antis when you start an anti there's three like matches that you're going to do there's a small blind the big blind and the boss blind and you can see all

the rules for the three of them sure as you look start into the anti so the idea is i think you like look at what the boss blind is and if it says something like uh you know hearts won't count right maybe you look at your heart based jokers and think like, okay, I've got two rounds here to try and shift things just to try and survive. There are also some cards that you will unlock that will allow you to like change the boss blind or nullify it in some way. You also have the option to skip blinds.

I don't know why you would do that. Yeah, so you can get sort of, if you don't want to play a blind you can just skip it you won't get the cash for uh for doing that but you can get these things called tags which are like little little bonuses and they can be they can be pretty good they can be all right i i don't think i've ever done it once it seems like maybe that's a bit of an advanced strategy i mean maybe you would do that if you feel like oh there's no way i would be able to handle this blind that they're throwing or well i think more if you get in that situation you're probably fucked because you can't skip the you can't

skip the boss blind but i think the idea is more like if you are sitting pretty cash wise and you don't necessarily need sure like you are not so reliant on the shop uh maybe you can you know get these other sort of uh additional benefits that are a bit outside the purview of the other upgrades that you can explore um cool no this game this game sounds dope i'm gonna check it out uh we have some reader mail including maybe the longest letter i've ever gotten as part of reader mail but i think it's worth uh reading because i found it really interesting uh this letter uh was in the newsletter it comes from josh schoenbacher i thought i would provide some context as a game developer who previously worked on an online live service game this is

regarding um specifically hell divers 2 we had had that conversation last week about the fact that like the servers weren't running and whether whether there was an excuse. For why the servers weren't running. Or versus not. That discussion. First. Just because the game is published by PlayStation. Doesn't mean they got a shitload of money. From them.

Slash funded the servers. They probably had a funding agreement of some sort. But it's not a blank check. This game is cross platform. Which means they aren't using PlayStation servers. They are likely using a cloud service like Amazon Web Services. That gets super expensive. And when you're launching a game,

you have to talk about capacity and peak users. The fact that they planned for 200,000 peak users when the first game was only around 6,000, in my opinion, is quite ambitious, 30 times higher than the previous peak. If Sony is only subsidizing server costs, this is still an independent developer so any extra costs they have to put up are putting the company more at

risk second the engine that they're working on was the same one they previously built games in but it is a really bad game engine this is the opinion of the uh writer uh that was discontinued five years ago due to how bad it was their engine choices are ultimately their choice so i know it can be hard not to fault them but knowledge of an engine sometimes trumps the usability of newer ones that's certainly true people are already trained up in an engine that being said they've stated that their back-end code for server management login wasn't scalable at that size meaning meaning the $700,000, 700,000 users they were getting. And they were running into technical limits with the servers they're using. So there

is a bit more to it than just buy more servers or increase the server number to 200,000 to 1 million, for example. Sorry for going on a rant here. I know the point that we were making was ultimately being pro consumer. And I very much share share that sentiment but i've seen a lot of frustrating discourse around this game where people don't really understand the intricacies of the situation or just straight up have no sympathy for the dev team or fully fault them not saying that's your opinion uh i just i think they are truly suffering from success but are doing a fantastic job of patching the game and fixing up the experience uh so as many people can play it as possible and for what it's worth this is an after note from me russ frushtick uh the game works great now i have not run into any server issues not saying that like a patch won't come out and break the whole thing again but thus far

over the course of like the last five days it's been running really really well anyway i read all that mostly just to like provide some context from someone who's actually worked in this space uh and can give some insight into like how these sorts of things happen it is it is interesting i can't think of another game that has over over succeeded like past its expectations that anybody would have expected as much as this one maybe boulders gate 3 but that's not so much a uh you know that doesn't have online multiplayer servers yeah even they weren't able to keep the uh save cloud stuff working uh for boulders gate 3 so they even ran into it i think they've handled it marvelously i mean just since we recorded i think one of the studio leads came

out was like don't buy it if it's like all the money you got. Like, don't spend all your money on it. Just wait till it's working better. I hate the idea that people are buying it if they can't play it. Which, like, I'm sympathetic to all that. And I'm sure that everyone on there is, like, you know, busting their humps to make it playable. They actually said there were only four people on the engineering team specifically charged with like ensuring server cap uh it's a very small

studio relatively small studio and it was four people like non-stop days and nights basically getting they've had a rough one yeah yeah i mean hopefully the bonus comes their way for sure absolutely i do just want to mention that like the people that bought it had to do difficult jobs to earn their money as well you know i'm just so it's i think it's impressive that they were able to fix the issue so quickly as well for sure a hundred percent a hundred percent i just never want to get to a point where i i have seen throughout I've been doing this for a long time and it is weird to me the the regularity with which people people who play games will be upset about a practice or a situation and then eventually just becomes due rigor and no one's like throwing their hands up about it

anymore which is like absolutely fine I just want to keep highlighting that like if you buy something you should be able to play it when you buy it i think that makes sense there we have people who have done early access like build ups for this reason right to prevent a situation like this yes i think i think what what the letter is getting at is that things are complicated. I actually think people are getting better. I don't think anybody like, again, with like a call of duty, I don't think you see nearly the apologies on either side. Oh, 100%. And I think this is my hope is that the audience in general is becoming more aware of what to expect i i agree with you i i'm

not saying i think empathy should go both ways to some extent yeah for sure i think that's and i am fully i am way more willing to extend that empathy towards an independent studio uh than i am like i don't know like blizzard when diablo 4 launches and has server issues it's like really guys you should you i understand that there's issues there too but this is the fourth fucking diablo game at the very least that y'all have made you should i think it's it's worth mentioning also that like this game like they are frustrated too i'm sure because yeah it must feel fucking terrible to be a victim of your own success and have have like feel like your moment is maybe passing a little bit which i kind of feel like a little there's a lot coming out i don't know i will see if the heat stays on

now that everything's i mean every night i check it's not like peak peak numbers but they're still at like hundreds of thousands of peak. I'm really glad. I'm glad. I don't think there's much competing with it right now. I played yesterday with Griffin and Trav had a great time. It's awesome. I do want to say one more thing about it.

And this is an important note for a lot of people. There was a mention of the, the engine being bad in this. And I think that is a great, this game is a great representation of what true mastery over an engine results in now i'm not talking about the server stuff obviously it was an issue but in terms of like the actual gameplay when it's working which it now is this game is representative of what someone can do or an entire team can do when they know an engine inside and out and holy shit this game looks gorgeous is fucking fun as hell has all sorts

of crazy shit going on runs very smoothly and uh so even though it is a discontinued engine it fucking cruises i've never it's built an autodesk stingray once called bit squid which i've never heard of before yeah, we got one more question here. This one is from Will. Hello, besties. I have been granted the green light to teach a video game class in my school. It meets for 13 weeks for one hour a week, and it's called a video game genre study, platformers, where I get to teach them all about 2D and 3D platformers by playing through the sum of the games. I have my Switch and PS5 to work with.

What games and series do I teach them? I'm thinking the Mario series, Mega Man series, and Sonic series would be included, but what games specifically should I include to be representative? What do you all think? If you were teaching a course on platformers, what would you focus on? I would focus on Super meat boy i was gonna say super meat boy also because i feel like it's because the distillation of it right you see exactly the component it is it is as bare bones as it needs to be to be to get across the ideas

um and i think that that would if i was teaching something that like i feel like the elements of it the structure of it would be a lot easier to unearth with Super Meat Boy because it is so mechanical. It is like just you versus the level. I would also recommend I Wanna Maker, which is the like – gosh, that sounds so much worse. like that the god that sounds so much worse it's like the mario maker version of uh i want to be the guy which is a very um basic but exciting and difficult like very classic platformer and i think having a way for people to actually create their own um platforming levels is kind of key if you're wanting to dig into that. I think you could also use something like LittleBigPlanet, but a 2D, again, very retro platform maker

is probably going to be much easier. You could also do Super Mario Maker, but I imagine Super Mario is already going to have a pretty cushy place in any curriculum. cushy place in any curriculum it would be really interesting i think to teach your way through super mario 64 and then go to odyssey and see like the the ways we've like learned how to deal with being in 3d space better because i even i mean 64 is great you know but it's obviously contending with a lot of like how little we understood about moving around in the 3d space at that point yeah uh i think celeste should should be in consideration just for being maybe the most mechanically like tight and satisfying 2d platformer ever made um i i i would definitely i would definitely push for that one and then you get into stuff like what what sort of side stuff,

like do you want to get into the 2D platform or search action genre of a Super Metroid or a, you know? Yeah, my immediate thought was Ori and the Blind Forest, I think is a really great representation of both platforming and light combat and how powers sort of evolve a platform experience. There's, yeah, a ton of ways you can kind of go with it um sounds like a cool class yeah yeah i take it we have any uh honorable mentions to talk

about i've been playing uh elden ring again after watching the shadow of the earth tree trailer i realized i haven't really played it since launch which was two years ago um i think was it two years almost exactly two years ago yeah two years ago uh and yeah. Was it two years ago? Almost exactly two years ago, yeah. Two years ago. And yeah, I figured, you know, it'll take me a while to get through Elden Ring if I just sort of play it a little bit here and there, which I'm sort of planning on doing. The DLC appears to be like,

I mean, you have to be pretty far into the game to even access it, as is sort of usually the case with Soul stuff. And, you know, when this drops in June, I don't know that I'm going to feel like, you know, sitting down and powering through, you know, 30 or 40 hours or whatever just to get to the DLC stuff. If you have a leveled character, maybe you have like a new game plus, but the save is very early. I think you could probably get to the point of where the DLC is in about about an hour uh yeah if you like beeline it based on wait russ what are you basing that on uh because i know exactly where you need to go to start the dlc and what the prereqs are oh cool they've already said uh so man it's really a bummer. I'm so conflicted about when every Souls game gets DLC like this

because I do not remember anything, right? So I'd have to time it to where I play enough of it that I remember what all the things are. But you're not sick of the game. But I'm not sick of it where I want to play more of it. What was the last one? Did Bloodborne have? Bloodborne did have DLC.

That was the one. It was so hard that it was not even that i think i think dark souls 3 also had really hard dlc that's maybe the one i'm thinking of i think this will be better because it is one large chunk of dlc and they've said they're not currently planning on more dlc for this game so they basically poured the last whatever two years into making this one giant piece and they're selling it for 40 dollars so at that point it's kind of they are also horizon is So they basically poured the last, whatever, two years into making this one giant piece. And they're selling it for $40. So at that point, it's kind of insane.

They are also in Horizon is the one I was thinking of. Remember when Horizon released that winter theme DLC? And it's like instantly like, there's 100,000 mechanics in this game. Do you remember them all? Let's go. They also have announced that the DLC will incorporate sort of Sekiro style character progression. Where in Sekiro your character became stronger by defeating bosses and so there will be a bit of a level playing field

like obviously if you're you know soul level a billion like you will have an easier time than somebody who's starting fresh um but it sounds like for the DLC like everybody is going to be kind of progressing in in strength uh yeah at just about the same rate as they play there which i think is very which is i think pretty cool um because yeah that's great it's not especially fun to just like power through um you know a game like that okay well um i want to hear about writers of justice heck yeah man writers of justice is uh um a mads mickelson picture but by in i mean that in the old timey way that people used to refer to pictures where the you talk about the actor who

was in them but he didn't direct it or anything although um he acts in it which is not nothing this is about a guy who's former former military his wife is – dies in a train accident, like a subway accident. And his daughter is also on the subway, but she is unharmed. He is at home. He is grieving. And two guys who are technical experts who have focused their careers on like statistical analysis of crime come to him and say this wasn't an accident this was a deliberate hit on a mob boss and your wife was just like caught in the crossfire so it becomes about him and these guys who are just sort of like tech

dudes like computer guys uh basically like banding together to get revenge basically on this this uh this biker gang that did the the the crime that is like the top level view of it and it is ostensibly an action movie and if you watch the trailer it was very much an action movie uh but as you watch it's first off like really, really funny. It's hysterically funny. Um, and so well performed and, and, and written. Uh, but it's also really moving. It's really about what this quest for vengeance means to a dad and a daughter that are, are grieving and like, what can revenge fix and what can it not fix and is it even worth pursuing that

and that all these like big questions that it's asking um it is not in english there are you can listen to with english vo i guess but uh i would not recommend it because mads mickelson is a good actor and the other people in it are good actors too. So you should probably just hear the acting they did and read the words. I thought he was from Chicago, no? No, actually he is not. Anders Thomas Jensen is the writer and director of this movie. I've never seen anything else he has made because he doesn't make English movies. And I am a huge English stan.

that make English movies, and I am a huge English stan. He wrote the screenplay for The Dark Tower, so we don't love that. We don't feel great about that. But this is way better. Yeah, that's a tough assignment. That's tough. There's a lot of things to it out there. Yeah, I love this current era of Mads films where he seems to do things that would be direct-to-video in the U.S. But then makes them in his actual country.

And they're infinitely better and richer and more thoughtful. But then end up on a streaming service with a box cover that looks like a generic director. It looks like, as they call them, geezer teasers, you know? It looks like a geezer teaser. Looks like Bruce Willis is gonna come in for the first five minutes and be like, here's your mission, I'm gonna leave till the end.

But no, it is a a really it's an excellent movie and it does not go like it starts to feel a little gross because it's in the same mold as a lot of these like action revenge hard boiled it's so much more than it seems like it is

that rules Riders of Justice I think it's on I don't know about on Apple store I think I think it looks on, I don't know, about on Apple Store, I think. I think it looks on Hulu. It's on Hulu. Sorry, it's on Hulu. I'm still working my way through Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth.

I think I'm getting pretty close to the end of that game. How's it going over there? I just, I love this game so much. Where you at? No spoilers. Yeah, I'm not going to spoil anything. I just, I really, really adore this game. It really is like four games in one.

Two of them are full just Yakuza games. There's an argument for you literally do the entire game all over again with this game, which could be a diss. But for me, it has just been a delight. I really want to do a spoiler episode about this sometime down the line. Maybe we can figure that out. The other thing that I have really, really, really enjoyed, and I really want all three of you to check this out, on Crunchyroll, it's a show called, I wish I knew how to pronounce it, Freiren, or it's F-R-I-E-R-E-N, and it's Freiren Beyond Journey's End, and it is about a spellcaster mage who, in the first episode, in the first episode has completed the 10-year quest and uh is like departing from her group and then um by the end of the episode this is not a spoiler because the rest of the series builds on

this a chunk of that group is dead because so much time has passed because she can live for so much longer than any you know human um so the the story is really about her kind of living this very unusual life where time means nothing to her and everything to everyone she meets um and large large chunks of time can just kind of like fade away between episodes. And it's wild. It's such a cool idea to make a show that is not about adventuring, but is about time. And I mean, it really is, oh my gosh, Ozymandias, the TV show of how whatever deeds you do, whatever the most important thing was, Whatever deeds you do, whatever the most important thing was can become so completely irrelevant once you're gone. And, yeah, it's fantastic. Heck, yeah, man.

I can't wait to fire this shit up. You know me so well. Hell, yeah, dude. Hell, yeah, dude. Okay. Also, there's just some like there are some sick action sequences. There's some really. Oh, but they won't matter once we're all dead fuck

I realize my taste might be a little more niche than I thought I really want you three to watch this cause I don't enjoy you as people and I've just met you now I'm starting to see that maybe I'm misjudged And I've just met you now. I'm starting to see that maybe I'm misjudged.

Oh, my God. As I alluded to, I've been playing more Helldivers 2. I do want to mention one quick thing on Helldivers 2. Right now, there's an event going on where the humans, or I guess Super Earth, is supposed to defend a bunch of planets from a robot incursion. The problem is there's a mission on those planets where you basically just stand at the top of a big mountain and kill 175 or so giant robots as they storm the thing. And it ended up being a huge XP churn for people to like level up extremely fast. What's funny about that is people keep quitting in the middle of the campaign after they get their XP. And it's causing the whole campaign, like the whole metagame that's going on, to fail miserably because the robots effectively keep winning because all these people keep quitting in the middle of an operation.

So there's an amazing metagame going on where the robots continue to push their lines forward just because people are grinding out XP. And I think that's fucking incredible. Hey, quick note on Helldivers 2. It really needs mounts. So if you guys could put in hover bikes, see what you're done, fixing the servers. They are actually working on mechs.

It was in one of the trailers. There will be mechs. I don't know how fast they're going to be working on mechs it was in one of the trailers there will be mechs i don't know how fast they're gonna be but mechs are included also the original game did have other vehicles so i've been told i think it was trav that travis has been playing a lot of this i think he said that as you get or maybe griffin that like as you get into harder difficulties there's not this like long gap there's no downtime in the higher difficulties it's all fucking intense we're sprinting so yeah no it gets pretty fucking hairy the other thing i'm going to mention we talked about that we're going to bring it up but i do want to like address it so i think we've pretty

much all been continuing to play final fantasy 7 rebirth we're not going to give any spoilers or anything like that i think the general consensus among us is that our opinions haven't dramatically changed based on the first episode recorded so if you listen to that i would say we'd probably be echoing a lot of the same beats but obviously if you're a huge final fantasy fan you're gonna get what you're looking for out of this experience but also there might still be some pacing issues i have to put an asterisk on that and i know we're going to return to it, but I hit a segment after we recorded that episode that literally, I mean, I think four hours of very lightly interactive material. It was a real frigging slog.

Yeah, so just be mindful of that. If you're not a fan of like watching long series of cut scenes and there's a lot of that for what it's worth more so than the first game and doing boring things i could do with the cut scenes because i can make sandwiches during those i think we've made the point the game is out now like everyone can play it so you can definitely make your own opinion and please write in uh on the newsletter comments or anywhere else uh let us know how you're feeling about it. Plant, can you recap the games? Yes, I would be happy to.

This week we talked about Deep Rock Galactic Survivor, Balatro, Helldivers 2, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Like a Dragon, Infinite Wealth, and Elden Ring. We also talked about the film Writers of Justice and the anime Freuden Beyond Journey's End. Cool. I want to thank the following patrons at the Patreon, which is patreon.com slash the besties. We have Jalen Rupp.

We have Katharina. Maybe Katharina, but I'm going to say Katharina because that's how it's spelled. G. Willad. Jack O'Feef. And Sozetta Slow. Thank you so much for supporting the show. Thank you to everyone else who has supported the show. Obviously, we can't list everyone, but we greatly, massively appreciate it.

We're going to be having our next Bracket Battles episode going up that is on the best first levels in video games. That's going up the first week of March. And then we've got Resties coming at you. Two episodes of Resties coming in March as well. So appreciate all the backers and always happy to have more. We appreciate all of your support.

You keep the show alive. First week of March? That's like in like four days. That's when that episode is going to go live. It's going live soon. Yeah, it's the first Tuesday in March. It'll go up.

So yeah, just a few days from now. Can't wait. Those are so fun. All right, what are we doing next time? Unicorn Overlord. We're here. This can't be right. Was this a Unicorn Overlord decision?

We're here. I didn't know what to say in his response. This is the game from 13 Sentinels team. And it's, I guess, like Final Fantasy Tact game from 13 sentinels team and it's i guess like final fantasy tactics meets 13 sentinels or something oh my god i just you don't you never know man i'm looking at images guys i just don't know i'm just looking at screenshots my driver's license updated to unlovable it says unable maybe Maybe Juice and I will play something else. No.

No. Okay, we'll play this one. They make some of the best games. Also, you like tactics games. This is a thing that you like. I do like tactics games. That's true. Oh, my God.

It's a tactics game. You like Fire Emblem. I love Fire Emblem. That's true. Yeah, so you're going to like this game. I can't wait for all of you to be eating shoes next week. It's going to be great. I would rather.

Hey, man, I ain't eating no shoes. I'm down for Unicorn Over. Thank you. Thank you, Griffin. End it, Justin. It feels like someone making end of it for me. This is like just systematically. Okay, listen.

This is still the besties, and we're gonna get through this together, and I want to thank you for listening to the podcast, and be sure to join us again next week for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? Besties!