Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re also joined by Katharine Castle again, someone you may or may not know. So, Katharine, thank you so much for joining us again. It’s a delight to have you. Thank you for having me again. It’s a pleasure to be back. Yeah, so since we last spoke to you, you’ve been promoted, right? You have a new job at Rock Paper Shotgun. Yes, I’ve moved up in the world. I’m now, I was the hardware editor, now I’m the editor-in-chief. That’s quite a kind of trajectory. Soon you’ll be CEO. So yeah, I’m wearing the big boss shoes now, which is quite a different thing from being just a hardware editor, but I’m enjoying it. It’s been good fun. Yeah, you get to panic about what’s going up on weekends, which is the burden of all editor-in-chiefs of websites. Yeah, that’s good. No, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on here. We’ve basically just been trying to figure out a way to get you on here that didn’t require waiting for a Final Fantasy Anniversary. So, you know, I’m really glad you could join us. So in this episode, we thought we’d start a new kind of like micro series as it were, a kind of like a recurring series we can do where we can bring in different guests and talk about different games. Focusing specifically on indie games. Obviously, Katharine, working on Rock Paper Shotgun, you’re kind of an expert. To start with you then, is the term indie games, is it just like a bit too vague these days? This conversation is very played out, but what does indie mean to you? Yeah, I mean, how long is a piece of string? I mean, we sort of have conversations about this all the time. The definition of it is always changing. You’ve got quite large studios now who self-publish, like are they indie? Is it size that negates you from being an indie developer? If you’re a tiny studio, but you get published by Nintendo or Microsoft, does that also prevent you from technically being an indie? I don’t know. It’s a really tricky one to draw the line at really. In compiling my list, I was like, is this an indie game? I was like, oh no, that was published by Nintendo. This one was published by someone else who was a larger publisher. I don’t think you can really define it. It’s a tough one for sure. In this episode, what we’ve basically done is we’ve all got five games each that can fairly be described as indie games. Maybe people will contest that meaning a little bit. I doubt most people will care. It’s just an excuse for some good game recommendations. Matthew, how about you? Do you have anything in mind when it comes to indie? Is it like a status of the developers thing or is it kind of a genre thing as well? There definitely are certain genres where these things tend to gather. In my head, I’ve always made the distinction in that traditionally, it’s independent, as in not published by an existing publisher. But since then, we’ve seen the rise of indie publishing labels, which I think still counts as indie. Or they’re indie-spirited and they’re sort of Indian scale, whatever the fuck that means. Which is the problem with a lot of these things is that it’s super vague, but you sort of know it when you see it. Yeah. It’s like, I was going to say not published by EA, but then also EA has its own kind of like range of games that are by independent developers that they’re publishing under a different label. So everyone has a piece of the pie on this these days, right Katharine? The EA Originals is like a great example of even sort of like things in the eShop that Nintendo get behind. I really wanted to include like Boxboy on my list of games, but it’s like, oh no, that’s published by Nintendo. So maybe that doesn’t fit the definition. Or something like Ori and the Blind Forest, which is made by a really small team, but published by Microsoft. It’s an ever kind of moving goalpost situation, I think, with indie games these days. But yeah, I think as Matthew was saying, you definitely know one when you see it. I think it’s more of a kind of gut feeling these days. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, then. Well, with that in mind, let’s get into the recommendations then. So I suppose I’ll ask a little bit about our starting points. Because the idea of this is that we’re building up a cannon of indie games. So different guests will come on and we’ll talk about games they like. Me and Matthew will throw in suggestions too. In this episode, we’re all throwing in five different suggestions. And we’ll have like a medium post or something like that that we’ll keep updated with the different games that people suggest. So I guess then, Matthew, what was your starting point for picking five favourites for this episode? Like you say, because I know this is the start of a bit of an ongoing mini project for us, I didn’t necessarily feel the need to put in like my top five greatest of all time. I sort of see this more as like a slightly more kind of casual list of recommendations. So I think they’re all great. Obviously all the things I’m recommending, I think you should play. Otherwise, I wouldn’t put them on the list. But you know, I tried to mix it up. I didn’t just go for my obvious favourite five games because you’ve probably already heard about them by listening to this podcast. So yeah, I tried to kind of come up with a mix of stuff. I mean, actually, the ones I’ve got for this episode do skew reasonably modern. I think they’re mostly all the last five years. When I set out, I thought, oh, this would be a great opportunity to highlight some really good like eShop and Switch stuff and maybe some like go into sort of downloadable stuff on console so it isn’t too PC centric. But I don’t think I’ve, well, some of these are on Switch, but I haven’t got, I haven’t dug particularly deep into like Wii U with this one, for example, which I probably will in future lists. How about you, Katharine? What was the process for you, both on picking these games? So for my picks on this list, I kind of went more for my, you know, all time favourite indie games, as I won’t be, you know, this is probably going to be my one time appearance on this series. So yeah, these games are quite dear to my heart. They’re all quite modern. Probably, I think the oldest one I’ve got on my list is from 2015. How about you, Sam? How was it for you putting it together? Yeah, I think for me, it was a combination of, I mean, a bunch of my picks are quite obvious, I think. Part of this for me is a kind of exercise of like, if I get a bunch of recommendations from people I know and like, like yourselves, perhaps it’ll encourage me to go down some more interesting routes. I’ve heard of most of the games that are on both of your lists, and I think that there’s a good mix of like, I don’t know, a couple, maybe there’s like one or two obscure, more obscure picks per list. And by obscure, I mean, you know, just moderately obscure as opposed to really, really obscure. But I think that’s fine as a starting point. And I will say, Katharine, this isn’t like the, this isn’t necessarily the only time we’ll invite you on this. So I appreciate you being as fatalistic as you have been. This isn’t like, we didn’t, I should explain to the listener, we didn’t say to Katharine, this is it. This is your one chance. If you fuck this, that’s it. No, so yeah, I’m excited to hear your picks for sure. So shall we just get straight into them? Go into the game? Okay, so I guess just because of the way I’ve laid out this doc, I’ll go first, I guess. So the first game I’ve picked is You Must Build a Boat from 88 Games. I played this on iPad a few years ago. It was during a kind of distressing deadline time. It is a match three puzzler game combined with an endless runner. And you’re kind of going through these sort of Indiana Jones style sort of situations, kind of adventure situations. You don’t have to pay that much attention to the endless runner bit, but the things you do on the match three screen, which is very straightforward stuff, affects what’s going on on the animation on the top, basically. And over time, you slowly accumulate a lot of like, total fucking weirdos to move on to this big boat you’re building. And it’s a really simple, well, it’s like simple to play sort of like mobile game with quite a high skill ceiling. And I thought it was quite a nice mix of genres, just because I’m not personally that invested in playing endless runners is not a genre I really care about. But I like the idea of fusing two quite broad mobile game genres into one kind of slightly more interesting twist on it. So the developer of this is a guy called Luca Redwood, who has also made a game called Photographs, which I definitely didn’t get the same level of attention this did. I believe You Must Build a Boat was pretty successful. So yes, have either of you played this one? No, I haven’t played this one. Yeah, I haven’t either. Maybe it is obscure. I’m not sure. But I think like a friend of a friend knew Luca and then I just sort of became vaguely aware of the game. And I think, yeah, You Must Build a Boat as a name as well just sort of jumped out to me. It is like a tiny boat when it starts out. And then yeah, it’s like rooms full of weirdos. It just slowly accumulates and even that that side of things, it’s not like a heavy narrative aspect to it. But I did become weirdly invested in the prospect of just hoarding strange people onto like a big arc. That’s kind of the energy of this podcast. What as in like the guest we pick? Yeah, only I’ll be chucked off the side of the boat at the end of it. That’s bleak, Katharine. That’s not really fulfilling the role of an arc, which is kind of more of a kind of conservation exercise. It’s not like he went, I’ve got three armadillos and toss them off the edge. Might pick the other one around in case one’s got like, I don’t know, problems. I don’t know what I’m talking about. So that’s my first pick. Is it a thing you can complete? Yes, yeah. You eventually have every one is on your boat and you’ve built a boat and then I think it sails off. I believe that’s the end of the game. So spoiler alert, but yeah, eventually you build a boat as the name suggests. But yeah, a very charming game. I do recommend it. You can play on phones and iOS and stuff. It’s one of about 15 games I own on my iPad. That’s my relationship with mobile gaming. So yes, but one I’m very fond of. I think actually this might have been recommended to me by one of the former Games Read iOS people thinking about it. Someone just wrote about how charming this is. So yes, you must build a boat. I’m quite fond. Katharine, you’ve got one that’s been recommended to me multiple times as your first game. So why don’t you kick us off? So my first game is SteamWorld Heist by Image and Form. So this is like a 2D turn-based strategy shooter. It’s sort of set in the same sort of SteamWorld universe as Image and Form’s SteamWorld Dig games or game at that point when it came out. They’d only made the first SteamWorld Dig at that point. It first came out on the 3DS in 2015 and it just blew me away. Like I’d never really been a massive fan of SteamWorld Dig. Like it was fine, I enjoyed it. But I think this really kind of like put Image and Form on the map for me. They’ve sort of done so many genres through their SteamWorld games. And this was sort of like their first kind of like major departure from that first one. And I think it’s still probably one of the best games they’ve ever made. Like it has some great characters all led by this kind of pirate robot bounty hunter called Captain Piper. And she goes about kind of looting ships, recruiting new gang members to join her cause. All of the ships that you kind of come across, they’re all sort of procedurally generated, but they’re just like really great spaces to kind of duck and cover in. Just being able to bounce bullets off the wall to hit foes in the back or from like, you know, to hit people from like impossible angles. It’s just really, really satisfying. Like it scratches a very similar itch to actually one of the other games on my list, which is I’ll talk about in a minute. But the strategy element of it is just, you know, it’s really good. It’s a little bit like XCOM in that you have action points that you can spend, you know, kind of getting into position or firing your gun. My sort of go-to team was this sort of like doddery old sort of sniper bot, this sort of strong man who sort of like pumps sort of dumbbells, who has a rocket launcher and this kind of like unicycle kind of trickster character who just had like an amazing kind of movement range. So he could just sort of like wheel past everyone and kind of like, you know, shoot them from behind. Really, some of Image and Form’s best character design is in this game. And there are hats. Like, you know, you can blow people’s hats off their heads with your gun and go and claim them for yourself, which you know, I think we all know is a sign of a truly great video game when there are hats involved. Yeah, it’s just fantastic. And, you know, like it’s the good news is it’s now on practically every platform, you know, you can think of. So yeah, there’s simply no excuse not to go and get it. Yeah, good pick. What do you think the secret is to this developer like staying so consistent even when they’re working outside of genres that is, you know, their home or their starting point, I guess? From other things I read about them, you know, they just play like loads of games all the time. And I think, you know, one of their more recent ones, Steam World Quest, which is kind of like a kind of deck building RPG. I think, you know, they were just playing like a lot of card games at the time. They’re just very good at like identifying what makes a certain genre tick, but giving it like, you know, their own sort of spin and flavour. Highly recommend all of the Steam World games really. And like Steam World Dig 2 was also just like excellent as well. But yeah, Heist, I think because it was so, because it’s a little bit different, it just does what it, you know, it does that that sort of turn-based sort of 2D XCOM like just really, really well. That’s, it’s definitely my favourite of all that they’ve done. Really interesting studio though, I particularly find the fact that they’ve crafted this weird fictional universe of sort of steambunk kind of slightly kind of cowboyish robots. It harks back to something they made before SteamWorld Dig, which wasn’t like a big breakout, wasn’t like a big hit, but they kind of stuck with this sort of vibe in this universe. Yeah, and then then kind of hit it big with Dig and now it feels they kind of off to the races really. Yeah, really like nice breakout success story for that kind of whatever generation that was. Was that technically the last generation? It’s always a bit murky when it’s like 3DSWU, but whatever that generation was, like they were a really big part of it. You know, we had them in O&M a lot and Joe Scribble was our writer on official Nintendo, like had quite a good relationship with the slightly kind of unhinged bloke who heads up Image and Form who always gives like really mad fun interviews. Yeah, good studio. I really hope they carry on getting bigger and better. It feels like the Switch is just perfect for a studio like that as well, just in terms of, you know, maybe 3DS and we, you weren’t that necessarily, but then along comes a format that’s sort of perfect. Yeah, just throwing in with, you know, they threw in with like the weird platforms, but made really great stuff which they could then port to like everything on earth and have their success. Their next thing is this Xbox thing, isn’t it? The Gloop or something. It’s something like that. The Gloop or something. The Gunk. The Gunk. That was it. I’m sure they, I’m sure they considered those names though, Matthew. It’s not a SteamWorld thing, though, I don’t think. No, it’s not. But they are making more SteamWorld games. I think when they announced the Gunk, everyone was just like, but SteamWorld! So they have, they have sort of come out and said, yeah, they are making more SteamWorld games, but they’re making the Gunk first for Xbox. This was one of those games that was revealed in that very confusing first Xbox Series X gameplay showcase. Yeah, which is a weird thing to get caught up in. I think the Ascent was in that as well. And it was like, and everyone was just like, where’s Halo? Yeah. But no, that’s cool. I’ll look out for that. I think that’s, I see that will be on Game Pass if it was in the Microsoft thing. Yeah. Oh, good pick, Katharine. I will look to keep those up during a Switch sale at some point. They’re bound to be like four quid a pop. Oh, yeah. When that pops up, I’m sure. Yeah, they’re pretty regularly on sale, I think. OK, great picks. So, Matthew, what’s your first pick? I’m going to put in The Room by Fireproof Studios, the then iOS, now PC and Switch. I don’t think it’s on PS, PlayStation or Xbox puzzle game about, well, it’s called The Room, but it’s actually about a box, the first one, which I always thought was, why don’t they just call it The Box? And it is, I think, one of the great blockbuster kind of iOS games in terms of like production values. This kind of came out of nowhere and it was this incredibly luxurious thing about manipulating a very ornate puzzle box, which I guess is in A Room, so justifying the title. And you sort of spin this box around, you look at it from different different angles and you poke and prod at it to find sort of hidden switches and weird sort of mechanisms that cause the box to unfold and open up and reveal kind of nested puzzles within. It’s kind of weird as a puzzle game because you’re basically just poking and prodding at a box until you kind of solve it. Like there’s some kind of sort of item combination puzzles and there’s some sort of hidden codes where like, you know, the carvings or the illustrations on the box will kind of hide hints to solve other mechanics on like the other side of the box. I wouldn’t say it’s kind of like a super difficult puzzle game, but just as an exercise in like manipulating this really tactile object, it’s absolutely amazing. Particularly like a really great showcase for touchscreens because it was all about kind of, you know, clicking things into place and sliding things out of the way and the kind of satisfaction of moving kind of hinged joints and all this kind of stuff. You know, it’s on PC as well where you manipulate it with a mouse. It isn’t quite as tactile and satisfying because of that, but the, you know, the general flavour of the thing and the kind of slightly sinister but at the same time kind of relaxed energy to this, I really like. If you played these, Katharine, I feel like your proximity to Matthew means you probably would have tried these as well. Yeah, definitely. Like, I think it was Christmas. It was Matthew played on my iPad. Like I think it was the it was the Christmas that I got my first got an iPad and both of us were just, yeah, couldn’t get enough of playing the room. You know, I think Matthew played it first and I sort of kept kind of like looking at every shoulder, trying not to like look at it and see all the puzzle solutions. When you’re manipulating this thing, particularly on an iPad, it just feels just like it just feels amazing. Like, I don’t think it would work nearly as well on even like other touch screen devices. I think just the sheer size of the iPad, you know, it sort of feels like you’re kind of poking an object like inside the iPad, which is yeah, it’s just a it’s a really, really great puzzle game. Really very, you know, very satisfying. Interesting. I have seen it on sale on Switch several times, but I hadn’t really considered that the size of the screen might be a factor in them. I haven’t played the Switch port, but it’s meant to be really, really solid. Like they need to put a lot of care and attention into kind of porting and like remaking a lot of assets and redesigning bits of it and so that it works better on each host platform. So, you know, I think they know they’re on to like they’ve got this quite precious thing and they don’t want it to ever be represented poorly, which is like a very admirable trait in a studio. OK, great stuff. So my second pick is FTL Faster Than Light. Very big selling PC and iPad, I believe as well. Strategy game. So in this you basically control a Star Trek style spaceship going across a galaxy sort of fleeing this enemy horde that’s coming towards you. And basically galaxies, well, like star systems are being sucked up behind you and you’re trying to basically make your way to the end of the galaxy so you can make a last stand with an armada basically. And so how this is represented in game is you get into real time battles with different spaceships and you can do things like targeting different systems on the enemy ships to disable their guns, very much replicating the kind of Star Trek style sort of like combat of basically like naval ships in space essentially. And then on top of that you control the sort of like micro level sort of disasters going on so like a room catches on fire and you have to send someone in there to sort of fix it and that sort of thing. And it’s really kind of chaotic, sort of frantic, fun space combat game that it’s a roguelike so it you know each time it kind of loops you can pick a different spaceship if you want and you can name your characters which is fun and yeah essentially the story will play out differently each time because it has like about I don’t know it must have like a hundred plus different sort of narrative obstacles it puts in your way or things to decide like you’ll come to a remote planet and then the game will ask you oh there’s a stranger there they’re from a kind of like a discarded vessel do you want to let them aboard and they might turn out to be a new crew member which is really handy they might also be like a suicide bomber and blow up a bit of your ship so there’s a bit of a risk involved and yeah I think this is actually this is actually I did play this on iPad so I don’t know why I said I suppose it’s on iPad earlier I have played this on iPad extensively. The cool thing is they released the original version in 2012 but then they released an advanced edition which is the iPad one later on and that added a bunch more story scenarios and different bits of the game kind of like an ultimate edition of the game and I don’t know I wouldn’t say it’s like near infinite in terms of how much you can play it you do eventually burn out on it and it is very very hard but I think that it’s I played it for well over a hundred hours and I thought it’s a phenomenal game that was basically made by two people and and a composer very very impressive. I’ve only ever actually played it as part of a group at a party. Someone had an FTL party which was basically like collective decision making I think it was a Tom a Tom Francis thing actually a very stressful very stressful party activity. It’s got that sort of Battlestar Galactica sort of like doomed everything that can go wrong will go wrong kind of energy to it so it exists in like a highly stressful place which you know obviously makes it ideal for a party. Not knocking the party, I should add. We had a you know we had an evening of playing it and laughing at all the terrible things going wrong and how bad we were at keeping the ship alive but I didn’t come away with like a feeling of this is something I would personally like enjoy just because of that stress level. Yeah, you’re not much of a strategy guy either are you? Not at all. I can I’ve got real tunnel vision with like everything I do so the idea of putting me in charge of a spaceship is just I’d be oh my god I wouldn’t wish it on any space travelers. How about you Katharine have you tried this one? I haven’t actually no I’ve played Into the Breach a lot and I almost put Into the Breach on my list but yeah no FTL is a sort of very bad blind spot for me I really should play it at some point. Well it’s a good you know they’re both fantastic games as a thing they’re like they are just really good modern simple to control and play but then extremely hard to master strategy games I think they’re fantastic I can’t wait to see what they make next but yeah great stuff. So Katharine what’s your second game? So my second game is Hull Down by Grapefruit Games which is the other game I was talking about earlier. I mean Hull Down is I mean I hate to think how many how much time I’ve spent playing this on my phone but this is just a brilliant puzzle game that’s kind of pretty much kind of reverse alleyway so kind of you if you’re armed with like an ever kind of expanding number of these weird little kind of smiling worm balls that you sort of fling at these blocks as you kind of bore down into the centre of a planet and each block that you know has a number on it that you’ve got to hit it you know that number of times before it breaks and all you do is just kind of like line up these little worms and just sort of let you know let them fly but the great thing about it I think is you know it’s it’s USP as it were is that each block has rounded corners which I know doesn’t sound particularly groundbreaking but sort of bouncing one of these little balls off a rounded edge just right so that you know it either slips into a gap to do like mega damage to like loads of blocks at once the movement of these sort of little balls gets faster and faster the longer they’re They’re in play, and it’s really satisfying to watch and execute. It’s just perfect. I don’t like to brag about these things, but I have become very good at this over the last, I don’t know, couple of years. I wish there was more of it. There were, I think, maybe half a dozen planets that have… There’s this big core at the end of it that you have to hit in a certain number of moves. And then at the end, once you’ve done all of those, it’s like an endless mode. I’ve just been playing that for absolutely ages. It’s a real kind of like perfect kind of brain switch off game that you can probably do while watching TV or something. And yeah, I’ve been playing that for ages. I think if any other hold down aficionados are out there, my record is 1090 meters, which judging by the other couple of hold down obsessives I’ve come across, I think that’s pretty good. It’s something very satisfying when you see some people having a conversation on Twitter and they’re like, yes, I’m at like 400 and then you can drop an absolute walloper of a score. And it’s great slash obnoxious, but it’s quite fun. I mean, I would happily buy a whole other load of hold down levels or a hold down two or whatever. I just really love it. It’s a really good phone game. And so that was about three years ago that came out, right? It was like, was there like a moment where it was incredibly hot and loads of people were playing it? I vaguely recall this being like a thing on social media. And then, you know, like mobile games often are. Yeah. Just everyone playing once. But yeah. Yeah. I think it definitely had a moment, I think, when it came out. It then came out on PC, I think, like either a year or two years ago. It’s not quite the same. I think there’s something about just being able to kind of line up these things with your thumb that I think is what, you know, where the magic is. But yeah, I really, really love hold down. More people should play it if you haven’t. That’s a good pick. I think that’s really cute looking art style as well. Simple but nice looking. There is something quite creepy about the worm. Just kind of like his sort of dead, you know, his dead eyed stare. But yeah. Yeah, I didn’t want to like say it was slightly cursed, but it is a little bit, I’ll be honest. I mean, wouldn’t you look like that if your job was just to get thwacked into a load of blocks forever? Like where your life is deemed a success if someone has angled you that you’re going to ricochet for basically infinity, getting faster and faster, which presumably is going to hurt more and more. I mean, that’s the energy of this podcast. That’s like we’re both the worm in that sort of thing. Very much so. Yeah. Great pick, Katharine. I’m going to go. Is that on Android as well? Yes. Yeah, I’ve been playing on my Android phone. Yeah. Okay. It will be mine in the next two minutes. So what’s your second pick, Matthew? It’s kind of boring and super exceptional and everyone already knows about it. But I thought I’d put in Return of the Obra Dinn. This is comfortably in my top 10 games of all time, I think. It’s Lucas Pope’s maritime murder mystery, where you are a sort of insurance investigator working out how everyone died on a boat. We talked about it at quite great length in the detective episode. I think it is the best detective game of all time in terms of, like, it just gives you a boat full of information that you have to pair up to work out how everyone died and who they are, and combining what you know from the ship’s log with what you see as you explore the ship and what different characters say to each other and taking this vast soup of detail and extracting via logic the kind of correct answers feels like, you know, the closest you’ll ever feel to, like, being Sherlock Holmes. Also just, like, you know, an audiovisual experience to die for because it’s got this very strange, sort of dithering, is it called, sort of effect where it’s all sort of monochromatic drawn in sort of lines and dots and it’s, you know, very, we’ve said cursed already about the worm, but there is something quite cursed about, you know, what happens to the ship and just how it looks in its moments of horror, accompanied by this sort of demonic music played on, sort of, ship’s bells. This is just, it’s the raddest game, it’s so good. Yeah, I mean, this is one I’ve still only played the first act of, so I owe it to myself to go back, and I think that the beautiful, like you say, dioramas of horror, basically, like them picking through those, and it just creates such a sense of space, so a sense of place in such a small area, and yeah, I must play this. But Katharine, I imagine this is one you would have played too, right? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Again, this is something that Matthew played first, and I kind of had to kind of just remove myself from the room, like, just so that I didn’t see how it was all solved, because I wanted to play, you know, kind of come in fresh for myself, and yeah, I love this game as well, it’s fantastic. It’s really funny, because even though Matthew played it first, and you know, I sort of saw vague hints of what was going on and got a sense of like, you know, exactly what was in store, like, we worked things out in completely different ways, which I think is fantastic for particularly like a detective game like this, that, you know, the fact that there is that room to come to different conclusions, like, I sort of worked out a bunch of people, you know, who they were from like, literally their socks. And Matthew didn’t, you know, he worked out who those people were from, you know, a completely different method. And yeah, it’s really, really well done. I’ve sort of, as I say, I’ve sort of haven’t, I’ve tried not to play it again, because, yeah, I sort of want to forget it all and be able to play it again, you know, without knowing all the all the answers, but yeah. Yeah, great stuff. Yeah. Well, well worth having him in this, this kind of like vault we’re building, Matthew. I think a good pick on that basis. Got to have some big obvious classics there, I think. Yeah, absolutely. My third game is Jazzpunk. It’s a 2014 first person comedy game. It was published by Adult Swim Games. When I joined PC Gamer, Phil Savage reviewed this and gave it, I think, 93%. I think it was just around the time that indie games were still super hot and there weren’t so many of them flooding steam that it was impossible to curate them all. There was a canon, an easy-to-digest canon of the big ones. This comes along and it’s like an espionage-based comedy. It has a Mission Impossible style setup where you take on missions and then go out and do various bits and pieces, but the game actually comes down to basically these hub worlds that you explore and then interact with. You poke the game and then jokes come out. The humor is very naked gun, like a lot of slapstick and comedy sound effects and quite strange. It’s one of the best funny games around. It’s very inventive on that front. It doesn’t have loads of dialogue that can sort of deliver jokes. It is mostly about the inventiveness of physical comedy or timing and things like that. I don’t think there are many other games like this really, and I don’t believe that Necrophon Games, the developers, made anything else like it, but there’s a director’s cut out now. I only played the original, but I think the director’s cut has more going on in it. I was very fond of this game. I think it’s only like four hours long, something like that. Not very long at all, but just a very memorable, very stylish and memorable, funny game. Have either of you played this one? Yes, I’ve played this one, yeah. I also quite liked it. I think probably, as you say, I don’t think Necrophon have made anything else recently, but I think probably the closest that I’ve come to this kind of style of humour is, I was going to say Tales from Off Peak City. I cannot remember who the developer of that is, which is terrible, but that has a very similar, like just wild vibe to it and… Was it the person who made that? Was it the Norwood Suite or whatever it was? Oh yes, that’s it. Yeah, both the Norwood Suite and Tales from Off Peak City are just kind of just brilliantly like out there in both, you know, what happens, the way that the characters move is just sort of so eerie. Those, I think, definitely fall into that category of those sort of, you know, carrying on that kind of jazz punk vibe. It’s Cosmo Dee is the developer. That’s the one, yes, Cosmo Dee. Cosmo Dee, a person. Yeah, I think so. That’s an amazing name. Yeah. This does look a lot like jazz punk, actually. I should totally play it. You’ve got two recommendations for one there. Yeah, this looks a little bit more sophisticated in animation and stuff as well, whereas… I’d say the Cosmo Dee’s just got a bit more of like a, maybe like an artistic sensibility to it. It’s not as willfully, look, it is silly and odd, but there’s like something a bit more like, I don’t know, lynching as well going on, where jazz punk is a lot more just like, here’s just a load of daft bullshit for four hours. Yes, and now it’s in the Hall of Fame. And now it’s in the Hall of Fame forever being silly. Yeah, absolutely. But no, I’m very fond of it, and I always think it’s a good starting point for someone who’s like, I don’t know, building a sort of an indie collection, wants a little bit of variety in there in terms of like tone. So yeah, so Katharine, what’s your number three? My number three is Muta Zioni by Daigut Fabrik, who’s Dana’s studio, a game I first played on Apple Arcade, actually, which I think definitely kind of was a factor in why I like it so much. The developers kind of I think, you know, I’ve seen it described as like a mutant soap opera, which kind of to me makes it sound like EastEnders but with aliens. But it’s I promise you, it’s a lot it’s definitely a lot more interesting than that. There’s not kind of a huge amount of like game to it per se, but like it’s it’s very chilled and laid back kind of like a narrative, you know, more of a narrative game than anything else. But stories, you know, it’s I really gel over the story and just really enjoyed my time with it. It’s mostly because of the soundtrack, like the music that kind of accompanies the game is just fantastic. It’s great background music, very zen, very calming. The soundtrack has these kind of 15 minute long day and night suites that just kind of, you know, is basically the background music. And it’s just the kind of thing that you could put on read a book, you know, read a book to after a long day. You could use it to replace your Blade Runner rain mix, Sam. Yeah, it’s definitely got that vibe. It’s very, very calming. But yeah, but there’s there’s there’s also kind of a musical element to what you do in the game as well. Kind of you play this young human girl called Kai, who goes to visit her, her ill granddad, who is a mutant and lives on this kind of isolated community, sort of island community full of other mutants. The mute is the mute is the only of the title. And during your stay there, you meet all these kind of strange and interesting characters and they all have, you know, their own hang ups and personal dramas that they’re dealing with. And you get to see glimpses of all these problems kind of as an outsider. But I think like, what it does really well is it still makes you feel, you know, it sort of, it still makes you feel that like, actually, you don’t really know these people. And maybe, you know, like you meddling in their affairs isn’t actually being that helpful, you know, you’re sort of causing more trouble than, than, you know, than you intended. But sort of throughout all of this, you know, your granddad is also kind of trying to pass on his traditions to you. And that involves planting, like musical gardens, which is, it’s quite odd, but it’s quite an odd game. But there are all these sort of plants and seeds and stuff that you collect around the island and, you know, as you explore and visit different sort of story locations and you have to plant them in kind of a handful of gardens and each seed kind of creates its own little sort of little musical tone and harmony and just putting these together isn’t, you know, like really satisfying and lovely. And there’s no kind of right or wrong answer, it just kind of lets you kind of, you know, you’re free to kind of decide what you want to put in these gardens. And they actually released like a whole separate garden mode after the game came out, which is basically just that. It’s just the planting of these gardens. Yeah, great shout. I’m shocked to learn I own this. God bless the Epic Games still press count of this. But yeah, so you think it’s better suited to mobile than say PC? I think it’s just because like you’re kind of just moving Kai between these places and sort of clicking on characters to kind of trigger dialogue. Like it’s really suited to that kind of simple Apple TV remote. I’m sure it would play like perfectly well and everything else, but it sort of it just felt like, oh, yeah, you know, this is like it just a it is very well suited to mobile as well. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Great pick. Matthew, is this one you’ve checked out? I watched Katharine kind of playing it. And I hear the sort of plinky plonky soundtrack getting played around the house a lot. There are like five indie soundtracks which seem in constant circulation, you know, Katharine will often read to something and it’s it’s often I think it’s this or one of the eight million indie games that’s about running a coffee shop, which is the one. Coffee Talk. Coffee Talk. That and Sides of the Sojourner and Grindstone are probably the soundtracks I have in most frequent roadtrips. Nice. You were the right person to get on this podcast, Katharine. OK, great stuff. So we’re Matthew. We’re on to your third pick. I get to pick The Hex by Daniel Mullins Games. Have you played this? I have not. I have, yeah. Yeah. So Daniel Mullins made Pony Island, which was about a kind of cursed arcade machine. What’s awkward about his games is they’re sort of games you’re not really meant to talk about, because the pleasure of them is discovering kind of sort of how fucking mad they are, and they never really behave in the way you think they’re going to. So Pony Island is kind of like a simple looking kind of arcade game, which takes a super sinister turn. And this is more obviously weird from the outset in that it’s set in a hotel where all the guests are different game genres, all the heroes of different game genres, and they’re kind of like classic kind of sort of archetypes. And there’s going to be a murder in this hotel, so it’s like a murder mystery, a kind of very kind of Agatha Christie, you know, you know, all these people in a weird location isolated at night, but all the different people represent different game genres. And as the game unfolds, you you play as each genre, and sort of discover their story about how they got to this place. It’s a mild spoiler, but the one I can explain is the first person you play as a sort of washed up platforming mascot a bit like Sonic the Hedgehog, called Cheetah Boy. And it kind of traces his sort of story through, you know, how he sort of started out as this kind of retro hero, and as he kind of sort of falls out of favour with gamers, all these like negative Steam reviews begin to like infect the game and things like that. So it’s like, it’s quite weird, it’s quite meta. It’s also just, you know, mechanically, the individual genres are really interestingly done. Some of the twists you think, wow, that could be a whole game itself, like one of the genres is a kind of fallouty kind of turn based tactical shooter. But the kind of big gimmick there is about like using a cheat code to kind of rewrite elements of the game and like cheat your way to victory, which just as a mechanic, I would happily play like a much longer game of that. I think I remember when you were reviewing this, you were trying to get your head around it a little bit. Like it was, it sounded quite complicated when you explained the premise to me. Yeah, it sort of, it makes perfect sense when you’re playing it. But I think the problem with it is there’s certain things you could say that it’d be like, this makes sense of this game, but then it would just spoil it a bit. Because there are just a lot of surprises. But hopefully that’s given you enough of a taster to want to play it. Yeah, it costs almost no money as well. It’s like £7.19 on Steam. So yeah, that is very reasonable. He’s got that new one coming out which looks super odd. It looks a bit like a collectible card game combined with The Room. You’re sort of playing some weird card game in an alpine lodge and you seem to break out from the card game and manipulate things in the wider room to change the game or something. I can’t wait. I mean, this guy’s bit galaxy brain as far as I’m concerned. Yeah, but kind of perfectly at home on PC, really. Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, I mean, I feel like by 2025, 30% of all games released on Steam will have some kind of single player card based element. That seems to be like where that’s going. But Katharine, do you play this one too, right? Yeah, don’t read anything about it. Just go and play it is the best advice I can give. Cool. So we’re on to my fourth game. So I’ve picked a minute, which is from JW Kitty, Jukeo and Dom. They are all indie developers. I think they’re a large group of friends basically. The various developers on this game have worked on other games you would have heard of and they basically got together to make a very short Zelda-like game where you play it in 60 second increments because the day keeps resetting. So it took me, I think, like 97 minutes to finish this according to Steam. It’s actually a really satisfying indie game to put into your rotation if you want to finish a game in one night and feel like, oh, I’ve ticked off another game before I go and play another fucking monstrous open world game. It’s kind of spot on for that. But it’s just really elegant and perfectly formed in terms of how it uses items and unlocks parts of its world and plays out. I think the way it borrows different bits of Zelda work really well. There’s also the very simple visual style as well, which kind of suits the style of game nicely, and good music as well. So, yeah, very straightforward, just Zelda-like with quite a nice little sort of story that pans out and a world that is perfectly fitted to basically be… You unlock different bits of it and then over time you can kind of get anywhere very quickly and it becomes about strategizing with your precious 60 seconds. So, I’m assuming both of you have played this because it was so massive. What do you think of it, Katharine? As you say, it feels so well designed for that kind of time limit and it’s always about working out where the next save point is so that you can start from a different location on your next run and there are so many other bits to it as well, like little side quests that are amazing to think that side quests can be completed in less than a minute, but are much more than just your standard side quests and stuff. Yeah, I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s got great music as well, gets you really into the groove of playing and puts you in the zone of like, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to get to the next thing. It really kind of psychs you up a little bit. Yeah, I think it’s great. How about you Matthew, as a Zelda connoisseur? It’s actually a ruthless depiction of what a Zelda game is, sort of like under all the faff. I wonder if a bit of it is, look, The Emperor Has No Clothes, this kind of is a Zelda game in its entirety, and this is how basic it is, and I wouldn’t say it’s a critique of it, but it does make you think, oh yeah, this is what Link’s Awakening is. It makes you see how much colour or kind of stodge you can layer on top of the bare skeleton of it, which is kind of interesting. I think it’s definitely a more interesting game if you have played the things that it’s riffing on. What you say about Zelda there is interesting, because I think the longer you play a 2D Zelda, you start to break the game down like that in your head. When I played Link’s Awakening on Switch, I felt a bit like that. I know this so well now, it’s just actually taking me no time at all to finish all of this once you know where you’re going. So yeah, okay, good stuff. Well then, we’re on to your fourth pick, Katharine. So, quite a very acclaimed game here that has been recommended to me many times, but I think I might be too stupid to play, so yeah, go ahead. Yeah, so my fourth game is Heaven’s Vault by Inquil Studios. I’ve always been a big fan of Inquil’s games, like I very nearly put 80 days on here, but Heaven’s Vault is just the one I keep thinking about, you know, and keep coming back to. It is a really hard, odd pitch to get your head around. You’re effectively this kind of space archaeologist who travels around like a load of settlements in this sort of star nebula, kind of translating ancient hieroglyphics, which is a really sort of odd pitch, thinking like, oh, translation, like, I don’t really want to spend my downtime like learning a language, like that’s really weird. But it’s kind of like a, it’s a classic, you know, understanding the past to understand the present sort of thing. And I just, I just really like the way the inkle sort of translation system actually works, like, you know, you start off with these two words, but you’re left to pick which words you think are the best fit, simply by looking at the weird shape of these sort of squiggles and groupings of these, of these words and patterns that your character kind of identifies for you. And from there, you know, you just construct this entire language based on just, as I say, the kind of nothing, like, you know, it’s just incredible, and, you know, by the end, you’re translating these great big long phrases and sentences, building up your vocabulary to kind of unearth more of this story. And it’s, it’s just the whole piecing together of the language, it just really feels like you are, you know, you are unearthing some sort of secret piece of history, sort of there’s no really right or wrong answer, you know, sometimes you will get things wrong, but you know, the game is so kind of quick to kind of autocorrect you that it never feels like a failure or an error of your judgement, you know, it’s just like, it’s just another way of seeing things and I think, you know, it’s a really smart thing for a game, you know, to do that well. Is it as hard to play as it sounds when you describe it and when other people describe it? Just translating thing, an alien language in general, I just, I almost can’t wrap my brain around me being able to do it, but is it simpler than I think it is? The game kind of, you know, gives you kind of suggested words that you basically just kind of like drag and drop into these kind of like, you know, these kind of like little kind of word place, placeholders to kind of think, you know, to make these sort of sentence of what you think is the correct answer, like you have to pick two words, you get a choice of like holy and friend for like the first one and then like emperor or like beloved for the second one, but the two words, like the two different kind of clusters of symbols are very similar. So I sort of thought like, well, you know, maybe it’s like holy and emperor because you know, again, you bring all these sort of assumptions, maybe people in the past thought that, you know, an emperor was sort of, you know, kind of like holy or, you know, ordained by God or something. And it’s just like, you know, just making those kind of connections in your brain from what you’re given is just like, that’s a really kind of interesting process. Yeah, great stuff. Yeah. Do you think this is best played because you can get this on Switch as well, right, as well as PC. Do you have a preference? Yeah, they’ve, yeah, they’ve definitely released it on more platforms since I first played it. I first played it on PC. But yeah, I’m sure it would be, yeah, equally suited to Switch. It’s like, it sort of sounds super highbrow, but it’s quite entertaining, like you’ve got like a little sarcastic robot and like fundamentally you are visiting kind of like, you know, there are human characters to talk to and, you know, there’s a sort of central like mystery or kind of adventure you’re on. You know, one of the points it’s trying to make is like, you can never truly know, you know, or understand what people were thinking in the past. So kind of being like wrong, like I don’t think there is a right answer in the game, like being wrong, you know, but it being a bit murky is kind of the point, which, which is quite, you know, quite an interesting thing to sort of investigate. But I always feel for them, because I get the impression after Sorcery in 80 Days, which were just like huge, you know, really felt like they were, you know, really big and talked about. This felt like them trying to like do quite a step up, like production values wise, this feels like their biggest game in terms of like ambition. But I wondered if it if it just if the pitch was almost like a little too high brow and kind of scary for people. The pitch was so simple on Sorcery and 80 Days, that’s the thing. You know, I’m not saying like, oh, you have to keep it simple. But I think the fact that their recent like murder mystery, which is like, you’ve done a murder and you have to get away with it in is it overboard? It’s just so easy, you can get your head around. And that felt like there was just a lot more buzz around it and a lot more talk because Heaven’s Vault feels very academic and in screenshots looks very academic. But I hope people do give it a go because there’s like a lot of interesting stuff and and heart and kind of you know magic and wonder in the actual adventure itself. It’s an excellent game in the moment but very difficult to describe and kind of convey it in an interesting way. It is very good, I promise. I’ll take your word for it. So Matthew, what’s your fourth one? I’ve forgotten, there is no game wrong dimension. I’ve literally never heard of it. I think this came out last year. It’s a bit like The Hex in that it’s a game which is sort of spoiled the more you talk about it, but very broadly you load up this game and there’s like a title screen that says there isn’t a game and there’s this sort of narrator character who talks to you and they’re like, you know, I hate to break it to you, there isn’t actually a game. You’ve bought this, you should just uninstall it. And so begins this kind of meta sort of war between you and the narrator to try and play this game that allegedly doesn’t exist. That first chunk of the game is all about trying to sort of crack open the title screen and kind of bust through to see if there is a game. You know, that’s sort of like what you can say about it, other than it kind of plays with genre massively and, spoiler alert, there are layers to this beyond this title screen and as you dig deeper into it, it’s almost like this narrator is like throwing distractions at you or is trying to kind of get you to sort of ignore the fact that there isn’t a game or he thinks there isn’t a game. It makes perfect sense when you’re playing it and is, I would say, like Jazzpunk, one of the quite rare genuinely funny games. Yeah, looking at the screenshots on Steam, this does actually ring a bell from last year and is it based on a game jam? Yeah, yeah. I haven’t played the earlier version of it, they kind of grew the idea out but it just moves so fast. I guess a bit like Jazzpunk, if you don’t find one joke funny, there’ll be another one along in like 10 seconds, so it doesn’t really matter. And generally, I’d say it hits more than it misses. Yeah, looks like it was massive as well. I think this is the kind of game that, when I’m not working on PC Gamer, just sort of passes me by. I feel like maybe I’m just not as tuned in because I see it was IGF nominated as well. But Katharine, is this one you’ve played? No, but again, it’s sort of one of the ones that is on my list. I’ve sort of heard a lot of good things about it and feel like, yeah, this is definitely something that sounds like my kind of game. But yeah, I just haven’t got around to playing it yet. Yeah, Steam is telling me it’s similar to the games I’ve played, The Stanley Parable. Yeah, fourth wall breaking comedy puzzler, I guess, which is an interesting genre. Great stuff. Okay, well that’s gone on the wish list then. That looks really cool. The screenshot, the art looks really nice for the different game types I’ve done based on these Steam screenshots. Yeah, so I’ll pick that up when it’s on sale. Good stuff. So my fifth and final pick for this episode is Risk of Rain 2 from Hopoo Games. I hope that’s how you say it. It’s a small developer who originally made, obviously the first Risk of Rain was a 2D game. You could play it in co-op and it worked really well. It was a mega seller. For the second one, still a relatively small team decided to make a 3D version of that game. It’s basically like a rogue-like shooter. Your abilities differ, but you go through these worlds killing enemies and finding power-ups to basically slowly build a very powerful warrior. Those power-ups can vary quite wildly. You can get a rocket launcher that straps to your character’s shoulder, for example, that will ambiently fire rockets while you’re shooting. Or you’ll get a multiplier for how much you can run or how much you can jump and things like that. That will allow you to reach different parts of the environment where you can unlock different treasures. You keep building up and up and up, basically. I think for a lot of people who burn out on the four-player co-op games they enjoy, this is well worth considering if you haven’t played it yet. It was a mega-seller. It was published by Gearbox, I believe. I’ve enjoyed playing this with previous guests of the show Jay Bayliss. I think we played 20 hours of this together. It gets so, so hard. The enemy types are really weird. They almost remind me of Sirius Sam where they’re just very strange-looking things. Later on, there’s a Doshen the Giant-style yellow enemy that just comes along and absolutely fucking clobbers you. There’s these giant worm things that come out of the ground. It gets weirder and weirder. It’s about managing this chaos. Sometimes you’re just on the run from about 40 different enemies. The goal of each level is to look for this activation point, like a portal that goes to the next level. When you do that, a boss arrives and you take on the boss. The hope is that over time you accumulate enough deadly weapons and multipliers to be able to handle the mess. The characters vary wildly. There is one character who’s got a Spider-Man-style grappling hook. It’s a really unwieldy but powerful thing that will get you to parts of the environment really quickly. I’ve started playing this dude who’s got a shotgun short-range guy. There’s another one who can call in an orbital strike. They all differ quite a lot. There’s one that’s a swift archer character with low health, so you’ve got to stay out of the carnage a bit more. The fact that it’s a four-player co-op means that the challenge scales up and down and you can think quite carefully about how your different classes fit together as a group. I’m very fond of this game. Have you played it? No. No, I haven’t either. I’ve not played either. For some reason, it’s just something that lots of people have told me about but has just never ever pushed me over the line to actually try it. I find the screenshots of this one super hard to pass. It just looks super hectic and surreal. I don’t know if it is the best-looking game. I don’t know if that’s the reason to play it necessarily. The music is really good. It’s like this Pink Floyd style, whatever that type of rock is where it goes on for 30 minutes and then gets a bit weird, but it’s also quite daddish. Whatever that genre of music is, that’s sort of Dark Side of the Moon Pink Floyd kind of stuff. That’s the kind of music they go for. It’s got some interesting wrinkles as well. There’s a shop you can visit. If you go down this secret tunnel, you go to this ultra hard realm of enemies, which if you can survive it, will give you power-ups to take back into the main game. It’s kind of like an optional side room that’s devastatingly hard. There are different ways you can augment your character as you go and different risks you take. This is a roguelike as well. Obviously, you have to be conscious of death. There’s one type of currency I believe that carries across between lives. That’s another thing to keep in mind. But it really is about mastery this and finding a character that works for you. I really rate it. It would be a good one to have on Game Pass. I think that would get more people to play it. I don’t know if I would play it single player, but it’s a perfect game to play with someone who is better at it than you. Maybe you’ll have to show us the ropes in this one. I might just get Jay to do it because he’s better than I am. He’s always carrying my ass in this game. Risk of Rain 2, I very much recommend it. Katharine, we’re on to your fifth game. My final game is Soma from Frictional Games. I think probably most people know Frictional from Amnesia, The Dark Descent. That’s probably their most famous game and the one that people like the most. For me, I think Soma is their best game. It’s a little janky in places and recycles some of the monster ideas from Amnesia in that I think, again, it’s unclear for some of them, but the general vibe is that you can’t look at them or they’ll hunt you down and kill you. But I think it has a much smarter story attached to it and a lot more thought-provoking ideas. You start off as this bloke who goes into hospital one day for an experimental brain scan. I know that’s never a good sign, but this guy was involved in a car accident, it was quite badly injured, and he goes in as part of his recovery treatment. He’s not a well man, but when he arrives at the hospital something happens while he’s hooked up to all the machines. Suddenly he wakes up and the entire room is in disarray, very apocalyptic, something’s gone down, and you spend the rest of the game discovering what that is. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say. You find out quite early on that you’re not in the hospital, but you’re in this underwater facility, and you’re suddenly in this weird diving suit type thing. You’ve got to find your way out and find out what happened. As you go through this facility you encounter all sorts of nightmarish things along the way, as well as some strange monsters that seem to be part experiment gone wrong. It’s a mixture of stealth and survival horror. As I say, it’s a little bit janky in places. In Amnesia it was just really clear, you can’t look at this thing, and it was just the one monster. Whereas this is multiple monsters, I think this is probably one of its main downfalls, and probably the reason why they eventually then later patched in a completely conflict-free version of this game that removed all the monsters. It was never really clear exactly what you had to do to get around them. But the main reason I love So Much So Much is kind of because of its ending, really. And I won’t spoil it because, you know, that would obviously ruin the whole thing. But the twist was just something I didn’t really see coming. And it was surprisingly devastating in a way that I wasn’t really expecting. Really kind of existential dread sort of stuff. If you’ve ever read Greg Egan’s Permutation City, you’ll probably have an idea of what I’m talking about. It’s all tied up in transhumanism, uploading your memories to a computer and all that sort of stuff. What happens in that process. It’s just really thought provoking stuff and hard sci-fi themes I hadn’t really seen in a video game before, or really seen since, I don’t think. Another game that’s hard to talk about without spoiling exactly what makes it good, but if you haven’t played it, kind of do it. Just sort of go and play it. This is one I have played, so I don’t think I finished it. I sort of felt like I got the measure of the story, but maybe I didn’t if there’s a big killer twist at the end. But I thought the environmental design was the best thing about it. It kind of felt like Bioshock Adjacent, like a less stylized underwater sci-fi environment. I think it didn’t help that the monster stuff, it arrived around the time that Alien Isolation did, or at least close enough that that was in my mind as like, if you can have one thing stalking you in a game, like the alien in that game was completely, you know, smashed out of the park in terms of AI, so that was tough. I did quite like the monster design though. I sort of like… Matthew, a question for you. Is this one of the games where it’s a bit more psychological horror rather than actual horror and it’s not quite scary enough? Is this the sort of game you’re talking about when we discuss that? I would say it’s more psychological horror than actual horror. This one has like the intellectual chops to kind of pull it off. Yeah, I think that this is a very classy game in terms of how nice it looks. I feel like it’s not so much terrifying as it kind of puts you at an unease and the themes of the story tie into that. Just that feeling of like, I don’t quite know why I’m here sort of thing. What do you think of the voice acting in this, Katharine? Because that was one of my bugbears of the game. I thought it was slightly melodramatic. Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve played it, but yeah, I don’t remember it kind of being amazing. It was fine, I think. It didn’t really kind of bug me in any particular way. It’s all kind of goes with the kind of general jank of it, I think. Sort of like a kind of endearing kind of B-movie sense to it in some respects. I know it’s not very long, so maybe I should reinstall this, download my cloud save and just get it done. But yeah, okay, great stuff. That’s very different from your other picks for sure. This is where it reveals that Hull Down is also a psychological horror. I mean, in a sense, I guess. You don’t know what is in the core of the earth. That’s true. Okay, great stuff. So Matthew, what’s your fifth and final game for this episode? So I’ve gone with Dandy Dungeon by Onion Games, which is the studio run by Yoshiro Kamiura, who made Little King’s Story, which I’ve obviously talked a little bit about on this podcast before. A really quirky, interesting guy, and I think a lot of him is in his games. Probably no game more so than this. Dungeon crawling RPG, but about a man who has just left his job at a mainstream studio to go indie, which obviously reflects the life story of Kamiura himself. He’s creating a game based on the characters in his life. The bad guy of his game, the Demon Lord, is the head of the big games company he used to work at, and the princess you’re trying to save is the sort of next door neighbour that he has a crush on, and all these kind of weirdos in his apartment block and in his life kind of gradually get folded into the game. He’s making the game as you play the game, so he’s making this dungeon crawler. So it starts off very simple and then he keeps layering on new mechanics as inspiration strikes, and as the game design gets more ambitious. The crawler itself is quite interesting. Every room of the dungeon is played on a 5x5 grid, and it’s kind of a spatial puzzle in that you’re trying to draw his path through the room so that you hit every square of this 5 square grid. But at the same time you’re trying to sort of shape that progression so that you can kind of collect items to use against monsters on that grid. Which is really interesting in itself. It’s very, very fast moving. It’s like an RPG in fast forward. What’s originally on mobile as a free to play game, where it had free to play mechanics, so you had to buy these, spend real money on various food items to kind of sustain yourself through these dungeons so you could push deeper. Now there’s a paid for version on PC or Switch, which is the version I’d recommend because it’s basically, you know, this game and its story is so grand and so good that you don’t want to have the kind of stop start of the mobile experience. I think you just want to be able to enjoy it as a whole. It’s incredibly funny because the way he like folds all these kind of pests in his real life into the game is really, really well done. Like his animosity towards his old corporate overlords. He himself is this really weird, endearing character and he keeps taking, he sort of takes off his clothes to the program and there’s like another programmer who also takes his clothes off. It’s really, really weird. It’s got amazing music. It’s not really hummed, but all these strange little ditties that are kind of sung by this kind of strange crooning voice. Hopefully we can include some of the music in this episode so you can see what I’m talking about, but it’s really a one of a kind soundtrack as well. Quite grindy, I will say, but it has enough good ideas that you’re excited about what it’s going to do next that you don’t really mind pushing through that grind. Very charming, very, very funny. A Kimura classic. It has a lovely art style, just looking at it on Steam. There’s some really surreal stuff which I don’t really know where it comes from. There’s a dungeon in this which is all based on asparagus farming and all the enemies are giant bits of asparagus and stuff. Their enemy descriptions are really colourful and super odd. Or some of it’s localised by Tim Rogers. Kimura was tied in with Grasshopper and Suda 51. I think their paths have crossed there in some way. Onion Games I think should just be supported at all costs because they’re a super, super precious studio I think. Is this when you played Katharine? I’ve played a little bit of it. I haven’t played as much as Matthew. It’s dearly weird and strange. The crooner sort of like singer. It is great. It’s a real one of a kind video game. You just don’t see that kind of combination of weirdness anywhere else really. Amazon is represented in this. It’s this lady called Mamazon. Her song is just one for all ages. You get really excited every time someone knocks on the door because you know something brilliant is going to come through. It’s really, really fun. Great stuff. That’s a vintage Matt Castle pick. Weird in Japanese. Exactly what I expect from you, Matthew. Now I know it’s on Switch as well. I can’t buy the PC version. That will be where I have to buy it when it’s discounted, which seems to be quite frequently actually looking at it. So, yeah, worth picking up. Cool. Well, we did it. We got to the end of this first run of Indie Games going into this vault. I have no idea who we’ll have on next, Matthew, but I’m sure we’ll think of some guests. Katharine, thank you so much for joining us and talking about these games that you love. It’s been great to have you. Thank you for having me. It’s going to get increasingly difficult because each guest has to come up with stuff that isn’t already in the vault. Is that the pitch? Yeah, I mean, yes, they do. So, yeah, that’s a tough break for them. Plus, we have to come up with five games each time too, Matthew. That’s right. I’ve deliberately held back a lot of my classics. I’m up for changing the format depending on who we have in as well. It’d be cool to have some developers come in and talk about the stuff too. I haven’t worked up the courage to DM them yet because I have no idea how much they care about being in a podcast with about 3,000 listeners, so who knows? But, yes, so, yeah, we’ve got a few listener questions here, which I’ll just fire through. Katharine, a general note, what’s the behind the scenes of this podcast like for you? Because Matthew talks quite a lot about, oh, I was chatting to Katharine about this episode and she said X, Y and Z. What’s it like for you hearing about the behind the scenes of this podcast? I get sort of snippets of all the kind of in-jokes and the things that you talk about. I kind of almost feel like I kind of don’t have to listen to the entire episode because I feel like it’s all filtered through Matthew in some form. I do still obviously listen to it as well. But, yeah, it’s sort of like, it’s funny kind of hearing these these sort of in-jokes keep cropping up every now and again, just in general conversation. It’s quite funny. Yeah, I don’t really know how that has happened. Some of these jokes are very bizarre. I like the, you’re hearing some of these reader questions. I just, I love the confidence which people talk about things which are total bullshit and don’t exist outside of this podcast. I love the combination of obscure Japanese developers and Bath. Yeah, that’s a perfect set up for this first question then which is from Tom Doughty who was written to us before. But you wake up to the sound of your doorbell ringing frantically. On opening the front door you’re greeted to Yuji Naka who explains he’s got 24 hours to kill while in Bath due to a heist gone wrong. What do you get up to with him? So the question that was put to us on Twitter when I tweeted this question out was he’s got 24 hours to kill, so is he going to kill someone in 24 hours? Or are you just going to hang out with Yuji Naka? This is what I thought when I first read this question. It’s like, he’s got 24 hours to kill someone? That seems quite dark. But then I sort of read it again. It’s like, oh wait, no, he’s just got time to kill. That makes more sense. I love the justification for him being in Bath. Is that just a heist has gone wrong? I mean, there’s some quite nice jewellers. That’s true, yeah. There’s that big jewellery shop which has the scary elf hologram. Have you ever seen that, Sam? No, I haven’t. Where is this? So at Christmas, that jewellers which is near Portnay Bridge, Mallory, the big Bath jewellers, they project this image onto their storefront as part of the Christmas lights. And it’s of this demonic looking elf kind of creeping around. It’s really sinister. It looks like the Green Goblin from Spider-Man. It’s not very festive at all. And we used to live near there and we’d always see it at Christmas and be like, oh, the sinister elf is back. I must go and see that. It’s like when there’s a limited time event in a game. It’s like right now in Bath for 12 days, you can go see this fucked up looking elf. I guess to answer the question, I don’t know. I mean, I feel like this is more directed at you, Matthew, because you have the rivalry with Yuji Naka. Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s a rivalry. I mean, to suggest that we’re some kind of equal peers is obviously ludicrous. He’s an incredibly successful game designer. I know. I’m a bloke who annoyed him in a queue once. But it’s a story we’ve heard at least five times before. Yeah, like, I don’t know. Like, Bath’s got quite a set tourist trail, like, of things that you’d probably want to see. I mean, to be honest, you know, take him to the Roman Baths, that kills a few hours. Jacey’s Kitchen, obviously, to taste the meat. If it’s open. If it’s open, it’s 24 hours, touch and go. Bath is full of tourists who seem to be having a good time. Like, we forget that it’s quite nice just to look around it. I’m sure Yuji Naka would just enjoy it. Yeah, that’s fair enough. The thing is, you can see all of it in 24 hours. That’s the fact. Again, don’t really know about the heist element. I don’t know if the cops are after him this whole time. The Roman Baths would be a good place to hang out, though. I don’t feel like the cops would be looking in there. Yeah, well, the Central Bath, there’s a lot of it to kind of pedestrianise, so it’s quite hard for cop cars that can’t go tearing up the high street. There are a lot of bollards. So, like, Yuji Naka, he’s picked a good place to hide out if he is on the land. There are also basically no cops in Bath as well. I think I saw three police the entire lockdown last year enforcing it, and they just walk up to a barbecue and say, excuse me, there’s more than six of you or whatever, and you’re like, brilliant, this is law enforcement. I must admit, alarm bells rung when they shut the police station. Okay, well, we’re not doing law and order in Bath anymore. It’s like, how is the council tax going up, but there’s no longer a police station. Amazing. Bit of Bath satire for you there. So, second question then. Hey guys, I’ve been listening to you guys since your third or fourth episode, and I must say that your show is my favorite podcast I listen to. Thank you very much. So thank you. I’ve got a question that may be directed a bit more towards Mr. Castle. I thought this would be a good one for you too though, Katharine. So, similar to how you ranked the Ace Attorney games and listed your favorite trial, I was curious if you could do the same for the Danganronpa games, just the three. Just brief answers and no heavy spoilers, of course. Thanks and keep up the great show. You actually got me playing Hitman and that’s a series I never thought I’d like. So thank you for that. Cheers from Canada, Kevin Jones. Nice. Yeah, so Danganronpa, I’m assuming, Katharine, so you’ve played these as well as Matthew? I haven’t actually, no. I own one and two and I think three on… I definitely have one and two on Steam, but then have three on, like, I don’t know, PlayStation 4 or something, which is always sort of like in my head, prevented me from just starting them completely because it’s kind of like, there’s stuff that kind of carries over and it’s like, oh no, I’ve made a sort of new bearer of buying these games on a different platform, so I can’t do that. You have to get a Steam deck. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I know I’m pretty much useless for this question because, yeah, I haven’t played any of the Danganronpa games, even though, yeah, I really do need to. I think it’s just because there’s some kind of mystery and it’s Japanese. But Matthew, you are obviously the expert then, so how would you rank them? The short version, I’d say 1, 3, 2. I think you have to play the whole series because there’s like rolling, the wider rolling on story stuff is kind of there. That said, the actual ongoing story is kind of like sort of the least interesting bit of it for me. I don’t really like what the overall kind of thing is in Danganronpa. It doesn’t interest me. It’s very melodramatic, very overwritten. And I think you can enjoy the kind of murders and the trials as individual things without having to worry about the bigger story too much. That said, there are like references and characters nods and things that I feel like a bit like the Ace Attorney trilogy. You have to play the whole thing. So putting them into order is maybe redundant. But yeah, the original pitch of one, which is the school, you know, the kids in a school, it just there, the concept makes the most sense that they are students, that they are in a school. The second game, which I think is the weakest, they go to this tropical island and it’s just a little bit kind of like, sillier and kind of hard to get your head around. There’s this really terrible female mascot who, I don’t know, it’s just a bit too sinister with some of the stuff they do with her. I didn’t enjoy that as much. The third one’s got arguably the best mysteries, some absolutely killer twists. I probably couldn’t do an individual trial breakdown like I did with Ace Attorney just because they’re all sort of much for muchness. I think they’re all pretty solid. I think actual as murder mysteries, Danganronpa, the core ingredients of each case is maybe better than Ace Attorney, but the overall story and the character and the tone of the thing is way, way more obnoxious. So that’s why Ace Attorney kind of trumps it for me. But yeah, do play them though. They’re really marvelous games. Okay, great stuff. And obviously coming to Switch later this year, so yeah. I like that question. It says, just brief answers, which feels like the subtext of that is like, Oh, don’t go on. Yeah, I don’t need an entire podcast. It’s like, don’t do it. Don’t. No, no, no. Shut the fuck up. Tell me what I want to know. Last question, then. So, hello, gentlemen. After Katharine Castle’s scathing hardware review, The Game Gent is having a rocky start. There’ll be a conflict of interest there, I feel. Still determined to get one on launch day, Samuel has been queuing all night outside Tandy. Luckily, the manager recognizes him and ushers the famous meat tent influencer to the front of the queue. Jesus Christ. How many in-jokes have we got? Well, Tandy, that’s like a very Alan Partridge-y thing to mention, I feel like. So, arriving home, he boots up GTA V on the new machine. But no, it’s the dreaded purple ring of death. Throw the device to the floor, it splutters and suddenly an electrical surge bursts out of the machine and pulls Samuel into the computer realm, into a GTA heist, no less. In the act of heist, Jesus Christ, this is like as dense as… It’s a big set-up, this one. It’s just written by Namura. Yeah, am I wearing a lot of buckles in this scenario? In the act of heist, Trevor has stolen a large stash of Ferraris and Rolexes designed to be given away as freebies at an indie developer press event. Okay, you must put together a Video Games journalist crew to storm Trevor’s will-guard compound and retrieve your rightful press event swag. Which three current or ex-colleagues would you choose to bring into the game world to complete the heist? Please note, you’re selecting your three gang members on the basis of their real-life mental or physical skills rather than their gaming ability. Is this the heist that Yuji Naka failed? Is this the heist that’s gone wrong? Well, he did it inside the digital game world of the Game-Gen, and now he’s hiding out in Bath having re-emerged from your own Game-Gen console that you have reviewed. You two aren’t talking because of the scaling review. Matthew’s not happy about that. Yeah, to be honest, I would struggle with this. I would definitely have to bring PC Gamer’s Phil Savage, because if you look at us both side by side, we’re beefy gents, and we often joked about forming a wrestling team when we worked together on PC Gamer. I would push a guy towards him and he’d clothesline them. We were like, that sort of energy. And I don’t know, maybe I’d get on his shoulders and he’d just throw me another guy. We joked about that scenario. And then Phil even came up with what our signature moves could be. We went fairly far down that rabbit hole. So I’d bring him. I don’t really know elsewhere. I think I’d bring like, I don’t really know. I’d take Matthew just because I think I’d need a bit of like comic relief. Not for my incredible brain power. Well, that’s it. I don’t know what. There are often puzzles in these GTA heists, like little minor sort of things to solve. I think Matthew could be the guy who’s like on a kind of number pad trying to figure out what to do with that or trying to stop a nuclear bomb from going off or whatever happens in the heist. Oh God, one other person. God, I don’t know. John Denton, who I used to work with, is like an MMA fighter. He could beat the shit out of people. I’d bring him, I guess. There you go. I’ve got three people. John Denton’s an MMA fighter? I think he does like judo or something like that. But he’s like, there’s lots of pictures of him in sort of the… What’s it? What is the costume? I don’t know. Costume? I don’t know. I was about to say robes. It’s not robes. Oh, sorry, John, has been listening to this. This has gone very well. Well, yeah, I hope that answers your question anyway. So, yeah, Matthew for his intellect and wisecracking. Phil because we can sort of do wrestling moves as a pair. And John Denton because he’s got a sort of physical strength. Exactly. It’s a magazine team heist crew inside Matthew’s game console. Oh, I love that. Yeah, good lord. What a mad question. I enjoyed it. Yeah, it is. Also, maybe you should have read it out because I read it out and I was increasingly incredulous as I went on because I didn’t really read it before we started the episode. And then I glanced at it as we were going and it was like, OK, that was intense. Well, thank you Katharine for sitting through that. Where can people find you on social media, Katharine? So I’m on Twitter at, I think, I probably, again, explained it last time, it’s very confusing to say out loud, but my Twitter handle is at Burninator, but spelled B-Y-R-N-E-inator. I really need to change it, make it something that’s a bit easier to say out loud, that doesn’t require me spelling it, but yes, I’m there on Twitter. I’m also on Instagram, but my Instagram is only for books, so if you want hot video game chat, then Twitter is the place to be. But if you do want weird book recommendations, I’m at Carthupial, a bit like Marsupial, but with a K. Your Instagram account is rad, Katharine. People should definitely follow that. Just the photography itself is very nice, and obviously the book covers you get are beautiful. So yeah, that is well worth a follow, actually. It’s cool. And obviously people can read your work on rockpapershotgun.com. Indeed, yes, that is true. Yeah, that’s cool. We’re now writing about indie games as well as keyboards, which I’m delighted about. Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? At MrBazzill underscore Peste. I’m Samuel W. Roberts on Twitter. If you’d like to leave us a review of the podcast on the platform of your choice, that would be much appreciated. That always helps us find new listeners, and a bunch of you have been doing that recently, which we really appreciate. And some of you referencing the weird in-jokes of these episodes. So thank you for that. And we’ll be back next week with, I think it’s the Games Court retrial next week, isn’t it Matthew? I believe so. So I’ve been buying more bullshit on eBay, and Matthew will put me on trial with the potential of death at the end of it. Oh, another public execution, can’t wait. But thank you very much for listening, and we’ll be back next week. Bye for now!