Hello, welcome to The Back Page, a video games podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. How’s it going Matthew? You enjoy these early March days when the podcast goes live, even though it’s February when we’re recording this? I don’t know, I hope so. Unless something goes very badly wrong at pancake day tomorrow. But I can’t really imagine what could possibly happen that could be that bad. Will we have seen Batman by the time this is out? Well, I will have seen Batman after. I’m seeing it on the Monday, are you seeing it on the Friday? Okay, well, we won’t have seen Batman, so we won’t have had to deal with the potential disappointment of that being bad. So I imagine both of us are probably stupidly invested in it being a good film. Yeah, it’s weird for me to hear you say that because I didn’t think you really had much sort of like truck in sort of Batman as a character, but maybe… I love Batman! Oh, really? What’s in a way about that? I’m not like a big comics guy, but if there’s a comic I do like, I’ve read more Batman than I’ve read anything else, and I love the films. Okay, well fair, I underestimated you clearly. Maybe we should have done another Batman special episode rather than like cramming it into the last 20 minutes of the tomorrow episode like we did. We could have done like a two hour one just like that. There was a lot of pressure in that episode, and I felt like I couldn’t really talk about frivolous Batman things when we heard some very important stuff about Palestine. Yeah, there was definitely some contrast going on in that episode. But yeah, great episode nonetheless. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. So when they make a sequel to The Batman 2 or The The Batman, we will do another episode then maybe. But for the meantime, we’re doing an episode all about Elden Ring. Who out there wants to listen to two people who don’t know that much about from-software games, talk about the latest from-software games? Because that’s what this podcast is basically. It’s two people who are not experts, but have properly given the game a run. We’re going to talk all about that in this episode. In the first section, I’m back on the episode planning duties this week for those who listen to the chaotic Uncharted episode. You says everyone. The first section is about our background with from-soft games for a little bit of context. Then section 2 is all about Elden Ring, which I’ve played for 15 hours. How about you Matthew? Do you know how much you’ve played? I’ve played for 22 hours. Okay. There you go. Some plenty of experience there. I went out on Friday night, which is why I’m behind Matthew on the hours played. You actually have a life. See, if I plan this episode, section 1 would have been our background with FromSoft Games, and section 2 would have been FromSoft Games, do you have a background? Yeah, exactly. There would have been Elden Ring points in both sections and the same points would come up over and over again for three hours. People said they enjoyed the Uncharted episode, Matthew. It was just chaotic in its own special way. I frankly thought it was beautiful. So let’s jump into it then. So do you remember when FromSoftware’s games first appeared on your radio? I guess I’m talking more specifically about Demon’s Souls there, Matthew, when it released on PS3 in the late noughties. But do you remember how you kind of first came into contact with this being a thing, being a phenomenon? Yeah, I mean, it was probably like most people reading the early batch of import reviews and feeling the ripples from the release of Demon’s Souls in Japan kind of echoing out. Like it’s almost like there was this sort of first wave of journalists, I’m not attributing the series success specifically to journalists, but for me, there was definitely this first wave who kind of cottoned on and started talking about it a lot. And they tended to be people of good taste, you know, it was, you know, your Kezzers, your Simon Parkins, your Rich Stanton’s of the world, all former guests on this podcast. And yeah, like I think when the right people start making the right noises, you tend to sort of absorb it on some level, even if you don’t necessarily run out and import a PlayStation to play it yourself. Yeah, I think that’s probably fair. I’ve told this story before in the podcast, but the first time I ever heard of Demon’s Souls was we had a section about Japanese games in play, the PlayStation magazine I worked on, and Chris Reynolds, the news editor on the magazine, I said, oh, look at this game that’s just coming out in Japan for PS3. I don’t know why it’s not coming out here, but it looks like Shadow of the Colossus, which is kind of a weird statement in retrospect, but it kind of did from the screenshots. It was like a small dude and then like a big monster. So that kind of made sense. And then, yeah, after that, I sort of didn’t really think about it so much. A year or two passed. It’s maybe just a year, actually. 2009, I remember Kez’s review on Eurogamer being like a big moment. And I remember as well, I don’t remember if it came before or after, but Ashley Day on Game Steam reviewed it as well, gave it a 10, I think. And so it quickly emerged as this hardcore Japanese game in an era where Western action games were getting a bit gentler, arguably. And so, yeah, that’s when it kind of like popped up. But, well, I don’t know. I can’t say I was on board from day one. Can you, Matthew? No, not really. I definitely bought it when it came out in the UK, because I have distinct memory of playing like an hour of it and then never, ever playing it again. Right, yeah. Which is going to be a kind of running theme with a lot of From Software games for me. But I can just remember being quite nervous going in and going, well, I know this has been pitched to me as this particularly brutal, unforgiving thing. And then it was brutal and unforgiving, and I was like, oh yeah, I probably should have expected this. So it’s kind of my own fault really for just not heeding people. Yeah, sort of my memory of it is that the opening sort of theme that plays over like the cutscene was this quite aggressive electronic trumpet sort of going or something like that. And then a dragon just sort of like vaguely hanging around a castle. And I thought, well, you know, this seems a little bit cheesy. So I started playing it and I think one of the first things that happens is like a skeleton comes out and there and clobbers you. And of course you die. And I was kind of like, ah, I’m not sure I can set the time aside for this, even though I had nothing but time on my hands as a single man in Bournemouth at the time. But yeah, I can’t say it really clicked. So and then yeah, so time passes and then Dark Souls becomes a huge thing. I remember that Dark Souls cover of Edge very vividly. That was a really cool, felt like a big moment when that happened. And then yeah, so Dark Souls obviously becomes a phenomenon. Over the years, I never really properly engage with it, only kind of like in a really brief way and just decide pretty quickly it’s not for me. I remember being sort of jealous from afar though of the journalists who did get into it. Because I don’t know if this happened down in the imagine, but in the future, basically every magazine had one person who was reviewing it. And they all formed like this little kind of, is clique too strong a word? No, I’ll say clique, of sort of uber dark souls, sort of hardened nerds who are all kind of exchanging war stories and riddles. Like they were actually adventurers, which I know from reading their subsequent write-ups was very exciting for all of them. When you’re on the outside is quite irritating, partly because of jealousy and partly because you’re like, get over yourselves. But the only thing I remember really, I remember picking up because they talked about it a lot was, is it in Dark Souls you can get, is it cursed where your health bar is cut in half permanently? Until you do something to remedy it. That something is not something that you can just do immediately. It’s quite far. I think Jason had been, Jason Killingsworth on Edge, who was a big Dark Souls guy had been cursed and it had zapped his health bar. And I don’t know if he’d been cursed again, if that can happen. But he was basically like absolutely sort of fucked and had to try and make it to this thing with only this tiny sliver. And this was during the review window. And I remember thinking, oh, that’s quite exciting. You know, that’s you know, that was that was a story that is obviously stuck with me because of the drama of it and the kind of I like that kind of absolute commitment to just sort of messing with people. Yeah. I think regardless of that sort of stuff, like I imagine my memory is that Ash was into it and then I don’t remember there being a groundswell of other people who were into these games. Like I think like a couple of people maybe were later, but it didn’t. By 2011, I don’t remember there being like a massive sort of following for it. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I don’t think so. What is a surprise in retrospect is how these games become like the center of games culture and like massive blockbusters, which I don’t think I ever would have saw coming. Like they always seem like they were destined to be, you know, one to two million sellers and the same one to two million people buy them each time. And now we’re at the point where Elden Ring, I don’t know, is like comparable to Horizon in terms of popularity and major Sony exclusive. So that happening is kind of miraculous, but it is a testament to how the games got under people’s skin and how they there was something in them that just really clicked with people, whether it was the world building, the sort of like flavor of the world, the atmosphere, the kind of like combat, the stakes, the kind of multiplayer elements. There’s a lot of different very specific things about Dark Souls and Demon’s Souls that obviously becomes the kind of foundation of a genre in itself. So really interesting to me that these became blockbusters, you know, seems like a surprising retrospect. Yeah, I mean, again, not attributing this to journalism, because I know there’s, you know, this coincides with the rise of influencers on YouTube and this stuff is is very entertaining to watch streamed and all this jazz, because it’s so sort of punishing. So it gets a huge crowd from that. But these games definitely seem to like resonate with journalists, they got massive scores which must help them. And also, I think they sort of the people who really got into these games and who are really into these games. I think it kind of changes them, in a way, in that their expectations or what they need to be thrilled from a game changes. It’s a bit like dare, I guess like daredevil, you know, stunt people, you know, when you do something extraordinary, you know, the everyday becomes even more mundane by comparison. And I wonder if, you know, actually, it’s kind of self fulfilling prophecy a bit in that these people kind of get hooked on this thing that only this one company can do. Company can can provide and so from that comes this sort of snowballing of a claim, because, you know, it’s the only thing that, you know, every time one of these games comes along every three years, you know, it’s it’s the one thing which can give them that hit, you know, like these people cannot play and enjoy an Assassin’s Creed because they find it so boring. I mean, that may sound super melodramatic, but talking to some people, I’m mainly basing this on my interactions with Rich, like it does dominate, like the conversation and dominate their minds to an extent that I think, you know, these games have sort of changed their sort of gaming kind of genetic code in a way. Yeah, I think there’s something in that. You’re talking to the person who wrote Sekiro who has ruined all other games for me for PC Gamer. Right, exactly, it’s that. Yeah, yeah. And that was specifically about the combat, because once you’ve experienced the combat that gives you that kind of rush, it’s really hard to go back to combat where it’s like you press, you kind of feel like you’re just counter-attacking, you’re not really attacking and like there’s just not that one-to-one feeling that Sekiro has, it’s hard to row back. I will say that hasn’t ruined my enjoyment of other games. I just sort of see sort of open world games with gentle combat as more being like a kind of a more relaxing experience, I suppose, rather than an intense one. So like Ghost of Tsushima was an example of that, it was never hard, that game, but it was relaxing to kind of go through it and still satisfying on its own terms. But I can see why that happens for sure. So that seems like a good transition point, Matthew. Why don’t you tell me about From Software’s games that you’ve clicked with the most? Do you have much of a background with them yourself? No, so I’ve played about the first hour or two hours of every Dark Souls. The one that probably clicked with me the most was Sekiro. I’d never finished it, as I’ve said on this podcast before. But what I liked about Sekiro was that it was that kind of pre-built character thing. I think the big problem I’ve had with a lot of these games is when I’m struggling, the first place my mind goes is not am I playing this wrong, but have I like scuppered myself in some way by picking the wrong character? Have I made bad RPG decisions? And in Sekiro you don’t really get to make any decisions, so you think, well, this is it, I’ve got the same thing that everyone else has, I have to make this work, and just that psychological change I think was enough to get me to stick with Sekiro, in that it is the one I’ve played probably, I don’t know, 20 hours of, 15, 20 hours of, where the other ones, I just think there are too many variables at play, I don’t even know where to begin improving, so I step away, has been, I would say, my sort of journey I think we can catch them all. And I think we can catch them all. And I think we can catch them all. And I think we can catch them all. And I think we can catch them all. And I think we can catch them all. I’m sure the regular listeners know that I played a ton of Sekiro. I completed it twice, did the new game plus. And then suddenly the Genichiro Ashina boss fight on top of the tower, which kind of really properly teaches you how the kind of dueling mechanics work in there, how to parry properly, how to understand parrying. That really clicked with me. And yes, I agree with you. The reason I haven’t gotten with their other games the most is I find a lot of their systems quite nebulous. It’s like I didn’t know not to bring a sword that I should have upgraded from somewhere else. And actually this, when we get to Elden Ring, that’s the problem I have with Elden Ring as well. And the RPG stats, I’ve no idea what to throw my points into, but I’ll only understand once I’ve got to a really hard boss that I’ve made a mistake and that kind of sucks. Whereas Sekiro is like, here’s all the information you need. Here’s the stagger bar right up here. And to block attacks, you just need to press this one button, perfectly timed, but you only need to press this one button. And if it’s an unblockable attack, you can go to the side or you can jump while they swipe at you. And those are basically the controls. And everyone has the same sword. You can change a couple of bits and pieces, but generally speaking, everyone, let you say, has the exact same thing. You don’t have to factor in other players who might be summoned in. It’s just you, it’s just you in a duel with a boss. And I think it’s like perfectly calibrated and like the sort of peak of third-person combat in games. So I felt like Dark Souls and Bloodborne did not have that. And where instead like, do you know, you shoot your gun at some point and you’ll be able to like parry this boss attacking you. The logic of it won’t make any sense. It’ll just be a vague point in the animation when you do it. And then you can like get a brutal attack on them. And then like, oh, a player just invaded my game, twatted me on the back of the head. And now I’m playing Dark Souls and a player just invaded my game and they’re teleporting. So we’re playing on PC and they’ve just killed me. So I have to go back to the save point. And like, Sekiro felt fair on its own terms to me, like tough, but fair. Whereas Dark Souls and Demon Souls, I mean, there must be something about them that I just simply don’t get. But that’s my kind of like, where the, that’s where the line is for me, Matthew. It’s just like a system I understand versus one I don’t, you know? Yeah. And you know, and I get that for the people who do love this stuff, the vastness of its systems or the sort of the unknowableness of its systems is like the appeal, like deciphering it and kind of crafting your own way in it. But it’s very, very easy to get lost, especially early on. And I just don’t think those games give you much of a foothold. And I don’t think they show you much that’s particularly exciting in the first couple of hours to make you make it worth holding on and make it worth persevering with. Like the first spectacular thing you tend to encounter in those games is like the first major boss, which will be, you know, is always for me the point where I sort of step away and fail and it’s like, well, I’ve got nothing, you know, if all I’m working towards is like an even nastier version of this, if I get beyond this, I just, yeah, I never really see the appeal. I never really get the magic. Yeah, just, yeah. I imagine you like me really respects though, the kind of world building element of it, you know. I do get it. And I, you know, like I get the talk and, you know, I’ve read probably more about these games than I’ve read about any other games because, you know, friends and beers are always writing excellent things about them and it really does bring out the best in a lot of people in terms of the writing anyway. You know, they’re obviously like rich in ideas and mechanically they’re really rich, interesting things. They’re sort of kind of old school, but sort of blown out in a new, interesting way. And you know, there’s so much there that I’m into. It’s just a point of huge frustration that I’ve not been able to mine it. Yeah, there’s, I suppose like the thing with the RPG stuff that I should mention as a counterpoint is that it does give players the flexibility to play the way they want to play, which is no doubt a massive part of the appeal for a lot of people. So I should definitely acknowledge that when I explain what I prefer securing, but yeah. And to be fair, you know, whenever I am like, you know, I want to start one of these games, what should I start as? And ever, you know, people are very quick to tell me that, oh, there’s no such thing as a bad class and blah, blah, blah, and that’s a myth and you know, this, that and the other. But there are definitely like, you know, there are cheesier classes. I think there are sort of a spectrum of difficulties hidden in those very early options. And I think that is because that, like I say, that is the make or break period of the game. I think actually those early options are probably more important than some of the hardened fans give them credit for. You know, I definitely, you know, I felt like at Demon’s Souls, you know, like the remake, I got reasonably far, I say reasonably far, I got beyond like the first boss and opened up the game, playing The Sorcerer by shooting everyone from afar, which didn’t even cross my mind when I’ve played it all those years ago on PS3. But if I had, I probably would have played more of it. You know, this idea of, oh, actually, there is this glass which keeps you out of harm’s way, kind of gives you a nice projectile and kind of recharges itself. So there’s a way of doing this. There is a way of getting through this easily. And, you know, maybe it took years and years for people to cotton on and work these things out. I don’t know. But yeah, that’s always been like the big, the big sticking point for me. Yeah, I have some interesting thoughts now relating to Elden Ring, which I’ll get into a bit later. But lastly for this section then Matthew, where do you stand on the difficulty conversation? It’s always a discussion with these games. They don’t have difficulty modes. You know, when I was on PC Gamer and one of the writers produced a piece about using a kind of like program to speed up or slow down security to beat the final boss, there was like, you know, the kind of reaction you would expect from the internet, deeply unpleasant, not very nice at all. And, you know, it’s sort of like, it’s a form of gatekeeping, isn’t it? To sort of like say, oh, you’re a noob or get good and all that stuff. But I was curious what you make of this, because I’m actually like not entirely sure where I stand on the difficulty conversation generally, because I’m a person who played God Hand on easy mode. Like, I’m certainly not in the camp where I would rule anything out when it comes to difficulty. But I do think games are allowed to be hard if that’s the intent. Where do you stand on this sort of thing? Again, this always feels like a minefield. It feels like there is absolutely a couple of truly incorrect answers. And I don’t know what they are. I can never remember what they are. I’m a big believer that they can make the game they want in terms of difficulty. And games don’t owe us, like, understanding or even entertainment. I think the thing they do owe us or increasingly, like, you know, is definitely a growing concern is the accessibility thing. And I think accessibility gets a little smeared in with difficulty. And I think that’s where some of the problems in the conversation lie. Agreed. I think you should have the right to play something. You should have the ability to play something. But you don’t have the ability. No one is owed the ability to be good at it. You know? Like, that’s as long as the baseline is there that you can play it. I think that’s an acceptable goal. And by all accounts, you know, a lot of the From Software games, Elden Ring especially, is not particularly hot on that. Like, it is not something which a lot of thought has been put into. There is not a lot of accessibility options. You know, I’d probably liken it to, if you compare it to, like, film, you know, if you compare it to, like, quite a hard experimental foreign film, like, it owes us the subtitles so we can understand it, but you absolutely can pay money to go to a film and come out and not understand it or not enjoy it, and that’s perfectly fine, but that is the rules of cinema. That is acceptable. You know, it’s like, Titan does not have to be full of fucking laughs. I was just thinking about Titan. Oh, that’s so funny. Amazing. Like, Titan is completely uncompromising and horrible, and it’s art. It wasn’t for me. I thought it was horrible. But this idea that games can be art, but they also have to be for everyone. I don’t think it can be both. I think, you know, anyone should have a chance at liking Elden Ring, but I don’t think everyone has to like it. And it’s quite kind of a, I don’t know, like this idea that that’s a criteria by which something is good, that everyone likes it, that doesn’t really exist in many forms of art at all. I don’t know why we’re so hooked on it in games. I think it’s absolutely fine for like, you know, Rich to think Bloodborne is the greatest game of all time and for me to have no time for it, like we can still be pals and respect each other. I assume Rich respects me. Very inspiring, Matthew. I mean, a tough break for Elden Ring, which has been compared to a film where a woman has sex with a fire engine, like that’s like a tough break, I would say, a little bit harsh. I’m not saying it is the titane of games, but I don’t know, like, I didn’t understand Twin Peaks Season 3. I’m not like David Lynch to change it so I can understand it, you know, it’s like, it’s fine. You know, Twin Peaks Season 3, like 60% of it was good and 40% of it was total dogshit and that’s like, that was Twin Peaks Season 3. And to be honest, Twin Peaks in general, that was pretty much Twin Peaks, so, yeah, good stuff Matthew. You made it through without stepping on any minds. Yeah, I think so, yeah, I agree with you. Those being mixed together is not helpful. But generally speaking, yeah, I agree with you, like, I think that if these games did have an easy difficulty, I wouldn’t, like, resent it or anything. And like, I just, yeah, it’s just, yeah, it’s one of these things that I have no I have no real strong opinion on and like, but I do agree with you that they can set the difficulty as high as they like. That is in their ballpark as designers, that’s their decision to make. Yeah, you know, I wouldn’t resent it if it had an easy mode. I don’t resent it because it doesn’t. I think both both these things are fair. I think actually in some of its online features, which is something I’ve never really gotten far enough in any of these games to actually, like, click with or experiment with, like the fact that you can summon like a really good person into your game to kill a boss for you. Isn’t that sort of like easy? Isn’t that sort of easy mode? Oh, yeah, it definitely is. And like, I didn’t realize it was easy. I was really bumping my head against something. And then I just started summoning people and I was like, oh, this is great. And did I feel a little bit dirty when they killed the first big boss for me? Maybe a little bit. Because I was like, oh, man, I should have really done more. Like I was just watching from the sidelines. But at the same time, that’s the system. That’s the game built that system. I had the ingredients to activate the summoning portal or whatever. I mean, I played by its rules and so that’s fine. I have some thoughts on this, Matthew, but let’s take a quick break and we’ll come back and dive into Elden Ring some more, yeah? Let’s do it. Well. Welcome back to the podcast. Two giant men play Elden Ring. Two giant men sounds like a boss who would fight in this game, doesn’t it? So, Elden Ring, Matthew, first impressions of the game when we started out, hit me up. I thought it was, I thought the opening to it is very like the openings to a lot of their games in that it’s not very well tutorialized. It’s got the same kind of feel as Dark Souls. It felt very Dark Souls-y to me, so I sort of felt this sort of like, oh no, this isn’t going to be for me. Almost in fast forward mode, I think the first proper enemy I encountered, you know, when you step out into the world, which is always this magic moment in games, which is like that, da da da da, look at this huge landscape and you’re like amazing. And I think like the first thing in your eye line is just so horrible, this horrible man on a horse and- It’s tree-scented all. What’s he even called that? It makes no sense. It’s just, it’s like having, what’s the name of the person who sits you at a restaurant when you go in? The maitre d. It’s like going to a really nice restaurant and the maitre d just like punches you in the face the second you step through the door. It’s like literally on like, welcome to Elden. Oh, you’re dead because of this giant fucker on a horse. I was like, oh no, this isn’t for me. Basically, this game has been reviewed by people who love Dark Souls and Bloodborne and Sekiro. And they were all telling me like, it’s super approachable. And this is the big, you know, if you’ve never gotten with these games before, I think it was arguably like the quickest I’ve been punished in one of these games. So that was like my immediate interaction with it. Did you know there is a tutorial in this game, Matthew? When you start and you turn around, there is a little king sat on a chair. If you fall down a hole, there is a whole tutorial that explains all the controls to you. Did you know that? So yeah, yeah, and I did do that. But even so, I still found it like, because it’s bad, that’s what I mean. It’s like bad at tutorials, even within its tutorials. It teaches you very limited stuff and it uses terminology in the game, which you don’t necessarily like understand. And it doesn’t like explain the UI. There isn’t a bit where you press a button to crouch under a log, which I think every tutorial needs. If I’m not crouching under some granite at some point, I’m kind of disappointed in this day and age. So yeah, like everyone was like, I was like, oh man, I didn’t really think the tutorial was very good. And everyone was like, oh no, you go into the cave and there’s a tutorial. I was like, I didn’t do that. I thought people were saying like, oh, you go into the tutorial cave and then there’s a hidden better tutorial in the tutorial cave. No, that is not true. There is one not very good tutorial in a cave. Yeah, that’s true. It doesn’t explain all the systems to you, but then like there are so many systems, like that slowly unravel the games. Like I think the game’s not as bad as some of the previous games explaining your systems, honestly, because it layers them on quite gradually. Like you go to this little abandoned church and it explains how like weapon crafting works a little bit, not entirely. And then you kind of find like this sort of ash spirit, which is like a key system in the game. And each time you get like a new thing or like the horse, they kind of explain to you like what the thing is, but not all of the specifics of how it works. That’s kind of left you as a player, so, yeah. Yeah, and it definitely ties some of its big features to progress, I think, not massive progress, but like, unless it’s just like the first save point you sit at, you get given a horse or something, but there was, you know, I spent a fair amount of time without a horse until something happened and I couldn’t tell you, like if I was writing a guide, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what triggered it, but eventually some sort of strange woman gave me a horse. And the same with the woman who lets you summon creatures, like she’s at a car, she’s at like a church at night or something, but what if you never went back to that church? Would you never get that? Like, could the game cut you off from its core feature set like that? It’s funny you say that actually, because not to jump ahead too much, but when I was trying to beat the first major boss in the game, as in like the first king, you have to go and hunt down. That’s the whole premise of the game, right, is you’re looking either to find or become the Elden Ring or something, and you have to kill these kings across this like vast continent in order to do it. Something like that. So the first king you fight, I read in a walkthrough that said, oh, if you’re struggling, before you start the fight, go to this little room and there’s like a woman there, and if you talk to her, she’ll like come help you as like an NPC in the fight. And I went there, and because I was being pursued by like about 17 different enemies, they all just like went in, batted her, she died, and then she was permanently out of the game, and I was like, right, I have just missed out on something that would have been quite useful in this boss fight, which I thought was really funny, but definitely speaks to what you say of like, there’s some permanence to your actions that you may not understand until they’ve happened, you know? Yeah, that’s kind of wild. So I’ll give you my first thoughts, Matthew, because I think I messaged you on, when I first started playing this, I think I fucking hate this game. Yeah, and then I was instantly like, uh-oh, is this podcast gonna be like a nightmare? Yeah, so, okay, I’ll just, I’ll put my cards on the table. I think this game is phenomenal. I think it’s an extraordinary piece of work. There’s like, things about it I think are imperfect, but they’re mostly subjective, and I think it’s like fucking great. Like, I just really, really, really got into it. It’s very rare I play a game 15 hours of a weekend. When I started out, I felt very overwhelmed. I got fucked up by the horse guy like you did. I was super annoyed that I was just dodge rolling instead of like my beloved parrying system from Sekiro, because those dodge rolls are so nebulous. I have no idea when they work to not get hit by an enemy, or when they don’t work. That’s still really confusing to me after all these hours. I assume it’s like some invincibility animation frames in there or something, but God knows if I’ll ever fucking work that out. I certainly haven’t after this amount of time. But it’s an obviously wonderful open world. The first area they put you in is fantastic, to the point where I thought, if all I ever saw of this game was this part of the world, and I did some of the bosses hidden in this world and explored this part of the world. If that’s all I ever did and then I beat maybe one boss, that would still be an amazing game experience, because this is a great open world for investigating, pulling things apart, that sort of stuff. I don’t want to get too into that side of things, so I know we’ll talk about it in a minute. But the other thing I was struck by in my first impressions was, the different tiers of NPCs. So the lady who gives you your horse, she’s like PS4 quality, I would say. Some of the NPCs out in the world, they’re like PS3 quality. His face lacks a bit of detail. I was slightly amused that instead of being one of these big money bags open world, where it’s like, look how fucking amazing this looks, it cruises on the strength of like great art direction first. And like, looks, doesn’t look like super up to date. It like, on the technical side. Would you agree with that? Yeah, yeah. But you can see like huge landmarks everywhere. And just the shape of the landscape is really fun and interesting. Like the horizon is very knobbly and not just with mountains. There’s all kinds of like weird crumbled masonry everywhere and strange little hidden corners and these like plummeting cliffs. I think in the same way, actually, that like it’s one area where it is quite similar to Breath of the Wild. And I know we’ll chat about some similarities in a bit, but is, you know, it has, it kind of gets that like, you know, huge kind of impossible scale is a key part of the sort of fantasy playbook in a way. It’s more like how you imagine these fantasy worlds. It’s not really a realistic place. You couldn’t imagine people living here, but it’s like a place where there’s this huge chunks of like history studying the landscape in a really improbable way, but it’s just really satisfying to look at. Yeah, for sure. Like, you know, I never really quite know what’s going on in the story, but like you say, it is just, it certainly has a vibe, very underrated part of what it does is the, it has good open world ambient music, like really good open world ambient music. Isn’t it just one long ominous note on a cello? Oh, maybe it is, but I found it very atmospheric regardless. So let’s go to the open world side of things Matthew, because that feels like a logical next step. So what do you make of it as an open world game? And how do you feel about the breath of the world comparisons that have been rife with the discussion around this game? Yeah, I don’t see a lot of the breath of the wildness. I think the key difference isn’t necessarily something about world construction, but more like your abilities as a hero. I think breath of the world is primarily an exploration game and you have climbing and gliding, which basically give you like complete command of the landscape. This isn’t as open as that you’re on foot or on a horse. The horse can do some pretty good jumping and there are these like air vents that kind of fire the horse up. It’s quite ridiculous how high that horse can go actually. And like because of that, like they have a bit more control over where you can and can’t go. Like it’s quite an authored open world where Zelda is authored, but it also feels a bit more organic and natural because that’s sort of how you approach it. You can genuinely come at everything from any angle in Zelda because you can climb on pretty much any surface. Here, if they want you to find a boss from a particular angle, if they want to frame a particular thing in a way, they have plenty of ways of doing that. You know, steep cliff walls, huge plummeting drops, all this kind of stuff. Like it’s people who are saying like, this is a breath of the world type killer or beater or whatever. I actually, I was surprised actually, it felt a bit more artificial as a space, but then like artificial as in authored, handcrafted, which is like 100% what I would expect from Iizaki. Like that was the thing I was interested in is, you know, he’s known for these very ornate labyrinths and how do you make an open world that’s ornate? And his version of that is, you know, is a place where he remains some control over the pacing of how you’ll see things and discover things. It’s sort of my broad take based on the opening areas anyway. My thought on the breath of the world comparisons is they’re not quite accurate, but I get why people are saying it. Open world game design has become so kind of like settled into a pattern that we don’t have many points of comparison for a game like this, where like discovery in open world games has become all about the things you see and hear rather than about the things you learn. And I think that that’s where here, the storytelling of From Software’s previous games benefits from that larger canvas. The side quests it doesn’t shout about, the kind of bits and pieces of information you hear about going to one place, the things you learn from going back to a place with new information. Like I can see why a more organic, I guess like structured open world, it’s sort of like warrants that comparison because it’s not the kind of open world that just says, here are all these icons, go to these different places. And those games are rife still. That is they are the dominant games in this genre, like for sure. And that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. This is a game about discovery in a different way. Like it will fill your map with locations and save points, nice and generous with save points to make exploring the world very gentle, which I think is actually like lowers the bar for entry compared to some of the other games, which I really like. But it reminded me as much of like Shadow of the Colossus’ open world or Final Fantasy XV’s open world as it did Breath of the World, really. It was like, I could see little bits and pieces that kind of made sense. Did you make a Xenoblade comparison Matthew on Twitter? Yeah, definitely. Xenoblade was the thing it most reminded me of in that it’s another, it’s a vast space. You know, it’s great big rolling planes. It’s really epic in every sense of the word. But it’s also, it can hide stuff away in that and it can hide quite big stuff away in that. Like, you know, you can often see impressive things on the horizon, but when you get there, you know, things are so big in this world that they can basically disguise big things behind them. Like, there’s a lot of, like, constant reveals and surprise and wow moments. It’s one of the things I’ve really enjoyed about the first 20 hours of it. And that to me is very true of Xenoblade, which is like a huge, a huge open world, but like the surprise is that it’s much bigger than you think it is. Also, like structurally in terms of like difficulty, like Xenoblade from the very first areas you’re in, it has the low level stuff that you’re gonna grind through, but it will also have like level 99, like end game monsters. And they, you know, they are blocking things off and the kind of reward for being able to deal with them is that you get to see like another spectacular cranny. And that sort of is what this game does. Like there are lots of places where there are big, horrible things to scare you away. I mean, you have, I would say some freedom to explore those places without fighting those things. Like there’s a lot of stealth. You know, you can, it’s quite generous with like skirting around the edges of things, without upsetting them. So it doesn’t feel like, you know, you are not getting through here unless you kill the dragon. There tends to be a way around that dragon, but the general like flow of it and the fact that like the easiest and the worst stuff sits quite close together, that’s very Zenoblady to me. Where like, you know, I think even in like Breath of the Wild, there is, it feels like there is a difficulty progression throughout the world. Like certain, there are nastier things in certain places and there is a clear kind of pattern to how that world is maybe optimally explored. Where here, it’s quite hard to like, it would be quite hard to say that or draw that logic out because it’s also sort of mushed together. Yeah, it’s sort of like one of the things that happened to me was on the first day on Friday when it came out, you messaged me and said, oh, my brother said he did this thing where like he opened a chest and then found himself in like a terrible place or something like that. Yeah. And then on Sunday afternoon, that thing happened to me. And without spoiling it because it is super cool, first of all, what happens, I think. But it takes you to a location that is clearly like a late game or end game space. And you can, like you say, you can skirt around the edges because you’ve got the horse in this. The horse keeps you alive basically. It gives you the ability to get out of any situation, which is actually very generous for a from software game when you really think about it. You’re not just like going down a series of corridors, waiting to get like fucked up by one monster and unable to go somewhere else. It’s kind of like, well, this place is a disaster. I’ll just go elsewhere and train for a while until I’m ready to go somewhere else. But because I teleported to this place, first of all, it was like, oh shit, like I can just fast travel back to the place where I was, but I kind of want to explore and see how long I can stay alive. And I did explore, I went around this entire area finding the different sort of grace points or whatever they’re called, the kind of like fire things where you save, found loads of those, got hunted by tons of enemies that could kill me in one or two hits, but survived and like kept going, got a couple of cool bits and then like did the whole kind of like journey, the whole ride back to where I was, like having teleported to the other side of the map. And that was an amazing experience. And like, it’s a nice example of them kind of like, kind of creaking the door open and showing you what’s behind it, if you’re, when you’re ready to go back. But like, it’s, you know, if you want to, you can just stay there and just try and play the game on the hard, in the hardest way possible. But also it is them saying, well, you know, you’re not just stuck in this one area. There are ways to get to the other parts of the world if you really want to go and find them. And that is a really exciting notion in an open world game, I think. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, that it’s like a punishment for some, but a huge opportunity for some others. It’s a really sort of fun, flexible part. I actually think the hunting for the Points of Grace is the thing which reminds me most of Zelda in that, like the way my head kind of deals with this world is that when I haven’t got a specific goal, like I know the story, the big story beat is in this scary castle and I can’t do the boss there, so I’m going to go and explore for a bit. Like the thing I am working towards is finding more Points of Grace and like creating my network of fast travel, which is basically the shrines in Breath of the Wild. That’s exactly how I explored that world too. Like if I saw a glint of a shrine, like I made it my mission to get there because that would be a further foothold, and it’s about getting those footholds and getting further out. Like the more choices I have open to me to travel quickly around and regenerate in a certain area, like the more comfortable I am then exploring in the immediate sort of vicinity. So that is one point where maybe not like the design of the world, but like the rhythm of play definitely brought me back to that. Yeah, I think like a kind of like key from software system that works really well in this game, I think, is the whole runes being the kind of like souls that you collect in this game. And obviously if you die, then you can go back and collect the runes that you dropped. But if you die again without collecting them, they’re gone forever. Because I kind of understand how these games work now. I know it’s no big deal when I lose like 1800 runes in like a fight or whatever, that doesn’t frustrate me because I have kind of set in my head, I’m settled down to like, okay, there are times in this game when I will just go out and grind to get these runes safely. And there are times where I’m just playing to get through a particular level or a particular cave or whatever. And I think that this game makes you delineate that better than any of their previous games did because you have the open world and because it just feels like you can start again and it doesn’t feel like it’s the end of the world. And yeah. It’s one of the weird things actually. It’s one of the weird rules of these games. So when you die, you lose your souls, but you don’t lose any objects you’ve picked up, which means that like a valid tactic is just to leg it and pick up stuff, knowing that you can die and you’ll basically teleport back to the safe point with what you picked up. So you don’t have to have to plan to get out of a place. You just have to get in. And I think once you get over that psychological hurdle, you get that piece of information in your head, a lot of places you’re like, well, this is just gonna be like a smash and grab operation. You know, almost good. I don’t have any ruins. There is no risk here. Like, this is gonna be an exploration run. I’m just gonna go in there and see what the deal is, get a feel for the place, you know, basically sacrifice myself. I’m gonna go, you know, it’s like, you know, sending Bruce Willis to the asteroid in Armageddon. You know, it’s like, bye bye, you’re not coming back. But that’s fine. I can’t even compare Elden Ring to Armageddon, like the dumbest shit ever. Anyway, but that’s been like a bit, once I kind of got that into my thick skull, I could start like enjoying the world a bit more. Cause I was like, ah, fuck it, I’m not even gonna think about the runes. I’m just gonna like see what’s around and see what happens. Yeah, if I can grab a point of grace along the way, then terrific. That’s sad. Yeah, and that’s a bigger reward in a way. You’re like, great. Now I, you know, I’m even deeper into this territory. There’s like one way that it is different and brilliant to other, you know, open world games is, you know, it doesn’t like draw your attention too much to those points of grace. You could be quite close to one and still miss it. And there’s like an area where you’re like, oh man, I really wish I had a point of grace, but I guess I’ll push on or I guess I’ll go back. And then maybe like the fifth, sixth time, you realize it was just behind like some hut and you didn’t notice it or whatever. I think that’s like one area where it, not signposting stuff is quite fun. There’s that kind of head slap moment of like, oh man, if only I’d known this whole thing could have been a lot easier, but I’m kind of used to it now. So something I love about the open world structure is that from the off, you can go and find a load of bosses in that first area that are all relatively simple to be. Like I think I’ve fought like six or seven of them now and none of them have been that challenging. I think there’s one I died on twice, but the rest I all killed first time. And that feels deliberate because they obviously want you to scout around that first open world to understand the systems from doing these bosses, to feel empowered doing it before you go and fight one of the quote unquote story bosses in the game, one of the kings. And I really love that structure because when it’s like, oh, pumpkin head’s here, it’s like, well, I beat pumpkin head in like 12 hits, probably, he was a piece of piss and like, that’s cool that you can go explore like a dark cave, you don’t know exactly what’s down there, might be something cool, might be something weird. And then there’s a boss at the end of it and he’s not that hard so you can leave and have this kind of like self-contained Dark Souls style experience, but all inside this open world canvas where you’re understanding how the game works before you kind of try and progress. I really love that about it. Yeah, that is good. I definitely get battered by a lot of those bosses. I’m definitely worse at this game from the sound of things. Like even the very first couple I found, the quote unquote easy, easy kind of finger food bosses. I was dying a lot to them, but like as in it took me maybe four or five goes to get on top of them as opposed to 10 goes and then I never play the game again, which is the difference. Also, if you don’t like it, you’re like, ah, fuck it, I’ll come back to this one later. The weird thing that happens because of like just how many bosses and how much stuff there is, is actually in this opening area, you’re working towards this big castle, Stormvale Castle, and I did all that and the boss at the end of that. And it was quite grueling, it was quite hard work. But then I went to like another castle in the area, I would say more off the beaten track. And I was at a point where my character was like leveled up and I’d upgraded a few weapons and I could absolutely whomp that castle. Like it was the first time I felt like, oh, this is actually easy. Like I am much stronger than this place. And I did wonder if, like you say with some of the bosses are kind of like about teaching you the kind of smaller things. If this castle, which is kind of quite southern sort of tip of the map is almost meant to be like a tutorial, like between those smaller dungeons and the big castle that you go to. And I just didn’t find it in time or I found it like out of sequence. Because by the time I got there, I know really like, I just ate through people. But then talking to people at work today, they’re like, I went to that castle first and it’s really fucking hard. There’s always horrible dogs. But I was just like whacking dogs left, right and center. It was dog whacking time. It was great. Yeah, so like the first time I come across like an encampment of like basically human troops, that seemed like the hardest thing in the world to go around sneak killing them. And then without realizing it five hours later, I could just go there and it’s like, well, this is so simple. This is nothing. Like fighting an elite guy is like no big deal. And then… That’s tutorial camp. That’s where I go to test new weapons. Oh, right, yeah, that’s a good name for it. The only caveat to that, of course, is that there’s that fuck show Gortnler afterwards with the giant who comes down when you run up that hill. But that’s pretty easy to go past on your horse. Don’t waste time on the giants. They’re just a waste of time, I think, unless they’re those ones pulling that big trolley thing, the carriage thing. But anyway, yes. Yeah, so I think that it does mean that it feels a bit more even-handed. And there were exceptions to that, Matthew. There were bosses who fucked me up. So the first time the game simulates a player invading you outside of a cave, that dude flashing red, I’d probably tell you about 10 attempts to kill him, I think. Yeah, and also the tree fucker, what’s it called, Tree Sentinel. He was like 30 attempts. Like that was a lot of effort went into that one. And yeah, so I could never quite understand if I was like the right level for it, you know. So there are definitely exceptions to that. There are deliberate areas you go to in the map where it’s like, well, there’s a giant dragon in the middle of this lake. Don’t fucking bother. Yeah, right. It’s got a weird like Goldilocks syndrome, though, where something’s wamping your ass and you’re like, fuck this game, fuck this guy. I really hate this guy. I hate everyone who made it. But then when it is too easy and you do it a little too easily, you’re like, well, that’s a bit of a shame. Like this feels a bit redundant or I feel like I’ve kind of broken it in a way. So when I eventually killed the tree sentinel, you know, I’d leveled up like a long sword like seven times. I had these two like ghost archer guys who had leveled up several times. And like they alone were doing like most of the health bar eating. I only had to jump and hit him a couple of times and then he was down. I was like, you know what? That like it didn’t feel hugely satisfying. I’m not saying I want it to like scale, but that is the downside to this kind of design. And like this is going to sound like hubris because I know that there are going to be things in this game that even if you had, you know, the power of the gods, they would still like stomp you easily. But it is funny how you go from, fuck this, to, oh, that was a bit of a pushover. The just right spot is very hard to hit in a game like this. Yeah, for sure. So one of the first major bosses you fight is that Margit the Wotsit. I can’t remember what it’s called, but like the thing that guards the castle, basically. Margit the Fel? Yeah, something like that. He says, I fought that guy so many times, I got screen burn of his name on my TV. Now whenever I’m watching foreign TV, it looks like everyone’s saying Margit the Fel. The first time I fought him, I think I’d only upgraded my sword once and I was like, this is just a fuck show and like I was barely getting to like half his health. Then I went back about 10 hours later, maybe a bit less than that, but quite a lot later. I beat him in like three attempts from that. I summoned my little jellyfish lad. He was just spitting poison at him and I just went by him and batted him. I still rely very heavily on those summons. I get the feel like it must be some design with that in mind. I’ve seen some people who are like, the traditional players as they refer to themselves, they don’t really use the summon. That’s kind of cheating. You’re like, this is a feature. This is a function in the game. They’ve designed this. There is a whole upgrade path. There is a challenge in finding summons to begin with. They are perfectly valid to use, and I refuse to feel bad about using them. That’s my other point with this game, Matthew. This is a good opportunity to transition into this design side of things a bit more, which is I think this game is designed to be broken by the player, however they see fit. I think it’s progression and the bits of help you can have and how exactly you can calibrate your character. It’s designed, I think, to be like, to even the odds as much as you want to. Like you were saying earlier, like how summoning in an actual human player to help you, it feels like easy mode. I’ve not done that so far, right? But I feel like the jellyfish that I summoned in to help, just to take just a few hits off of me while I go and batter the boss from behind, has made the game just so much more palatable. And like you say, that’s part of the game design. Like they want you to do this stuff. They want you to like play it the way you want to play it. That feels more like the design ethos of the game to me than don’t use any of these systems we’ve designed. Yeah, and it’s just, like from a visual perspective, it’s a lot more spectacular when you’ve got like an army of like ghost skeletons or ghost walls attacking something and it’s all kicking off. That just as a basic fantasy, those are really cool spells. I often hate in RPGs when you read a spell and you’re like, oh, this sounds great. And then you shoot it and it’s just like the weediest projectile ever. It’s like the chromatic orb or something in like the original Baldur’s Gate. You’re like, you know, it’s just like absolutely nothing. Here, you know, you feel powerful summoning those. It plays into the fantasy of being like a weird badass who can summon these things. I really like that. I love that you can, like, it’s not a piece of piss scaling them up. You know, you are committing to finding them, levelling them up, finding the items to levelling up, like working out just the logic of them, you know, because that’s part of all these games is they explain themselves so poorly. Like almost your award for parsing what the game has on offer is that you get to use these cool features. And I feel like, you know, that I have got these guys working for me is like a well done, Matthew. You worked out how our badly explained game works and that’s kind of good enough. Yeah, I think so, yeah. And like, yeah, it’s empowering to do that stuff. And I don’t know, they’re kind of like, I guess I’m feeding into this by not having used any summoned inhuman players yet, but I think it’s just because when they arrive, it maybe becomes too obvious to me that like the boss is just distracted by them and you’re just battering the boss from behind. Whereas the summons are almost like a kind of weaker version of that. It’s like, yeah, yeah. I think that’s what I felt when I killed that first king in the castle. There was just something like it looked wrong, like visually, to see someone else doing the fight for me and being like much better than me. And I must say, I actually had to throw like quite a few summons at it. Like it took me like five or six goes before I summoned a person who wasn’t shit or as shit as me. Like we’d go in and they’d instantly get killed. It’s like, well, thanks for wasting that summon item, you prick, I wanted to send them like a horrible letter. But then you’re like, well, I’m the one who asked your help. I need to be kind of a bit childish of me to do that. But when you summon the characters in this game, you don’t get told like what you’re really going to summon. You can see their name and like their picture. So you can like work out their cast from that. And I don’t know, some of them you’re like, if they’re called David, I’m probably not going to summon them because I’m like, that’s just a guy called David who doesn’t know how to play this game and is accidentally offered his services. But if they’ve named themselves after like some legendary samurai, I’m like, fuck yes, this guy is definitely going to do the job. But that logic does not hold to be true because most of the people who call themselves after legendary samurai are as bad as I am at the game. So it became quite funny about like a real like pick a mix of like, oh, let’s see what this person is capable of. And the person who eventually got it, I think they were called like Mintz or something like that. It was just really an unappealing, unimpressive name. But they, man, they knew their way around the samurai sword. I do love the idea that you was like an army recruitment person going, this guy is called David Smith. Oh, not sure about it. But this guy is called Jonathan H. Grenade. He’s fucking in. So I get really distracted as well, Matthew, when you say pick a mix now, because I just think of the game pass competitor draft. That’s good. I’m glad that I’ve made such an impact that I’ve changed the entire perception of a candy for you. So yeah, I think that’s an interesting point. So I’m not actually totally convinced by the bosses, right? Just yet. So the spectacle is amazing, and you’re not really rushed into tough encounters. But I haven’t fought anywhere I’ve thought I’ve truly mastered what’s going on. I feel like I’ve just muddled through and got on with it. Whereas I think every one of Sekiro’s bosses, minus the Demon of Hatred, which was very much like a Dark Souls boss and what I thought was the poorest boss in that game, just a wankery through fireballs at you across a vast field wasn’t into that at all. I love that that was a design document for it too. Yeah, GDD. They’re like, what’s next Miyazaki-san? There’s some wankery throws fireballs, and they’re like, nice one. I can’t wait to watch the 10-hour lore video. Hey, to be fair, that wanker with fireballs does have a tragic backstory without ruining it. He does, yeah. I don’t want to spoil it for people, but he’s a very familiar face. Anyway, so yeah, I can’t say that whenever I’ve been dodge rolling from the king or Margate or whatever, and sometimes it hits me, sometimes it doesn’t, with a big hammer or a big sword, I can’t say I really understand what the dodge roll is actually doing, because sometimes it seems like magic, and sometimes it doesn’t, and I’m just kind of annoyed by it. I never really know when I’m staggering an enemy either. I’ve done it a couple of times, but there’s no prompt to tell me how close I am to doing it. It just feels like a thing that comes out of nowhere. And that does seem like a step back from Sekiro to me. What do you think of that? It doesn’t help the first two. They’re kind of similar, in that they’re both quite big lads who get up close and swing stuff around. The second one’s got a few more projectile stuff, but I felt like it’s just an even nastier version. The King is clearly just a guy who employs monsters that are like him, because that’s the guy at the gate. Yeah, those two didn’t really do it for me. I found lots of weird stuff in the world, and it’s more from an art perspective, I think, that I dig them. I think it’s one of the earliest things you meet in one of the little sub-tombs. It’s like a mechanical cat that breathes fire. Yeah. But it looks like a taxidermied cat, and when you go into the room, its head cranks around, and it’s got this extremely cursed energy, for listeners to last week’s episode. This thing is, like, definitively cursed. Because it’s, like, taxidermy? Cursed. Back from the dead? Cursed. Breathing fire? Limited space? Obviously cursed. The way it, like, hops around. I thought that, like, it wasn’t too difficult to fight, but I loved looking at it. I loved, like, being near it. It was kind of like, oh, this is a really ingenious thing. And it got me excited that, like, even in these sub-dungeons, you might find something really weird and creepy like that. Yeah. I thought, I’ll tell you what, the best fights I’ve had have been out in the open world. And the way they’ve used the open world space. So there was, like, a big lad at the bottom of a tree. I’m trying to avoid, like, massive spoilers by naming anything, but I actually don’t remember what any of them are called. So there’s this big guy at the bottom of the tree, but there’s, like, giant pots. And as he’s going after you, he’s, like, shattering these pots, which is visually, like, really exciting. It is just a variation on, like, a big guy you roll away and then hit him when he’s out of breath or whatever. Have you fought the ghost boat? Yes. I love that. I thought that was really good. Yeah. Yeah, I am… Admittedly, I did look up a walkthrough to see how do you get the little fucking skeleton men who follow you around, and it was, like, you have to go kill the ghost boat. But it wasn’t called visual. Yeah, like, I liked that it was just a village in the open world, and it’s flooded, and there’s something clearly there in, like, a boat, and you’re like, oh, that looks like bad news. But, like, the arena for it is sort of set by the environmental design. It’s like the lake of this flooded village, and it’s sort of… this little boat is kind of powering around. But that, to me, is, like, that’s the marriage of, like, open world and dark souls I was kind of hoping for. I think that is the fight where, like, the whole thing sort of clicked into place for me. I was like, oh yeah, this is really, you know… This feels like a really high-grade, focused encounter, but I kind of stumbled upon it outside, you know… It in itself is exciting, but it also makes me excited for, like, what else there could possibly be hiding, like, just around the corner. Like, I was not expecting this. No one was like, go to the village, there’s a ghost boat! You know, the writing in this game is obviously way more sophisticated than I could possibly do. So, yeah, that for me was like… That’s the stuff I’m more interested in. I think rather than you’re going to be stuck in an arena with just, like, this giant fucking horrible thing which takes up, like, half the arena. Yeah, yeah. I think, yeah, so the ghost boat thing, one elegant design touch about that I really love is that when you get the summon off of that boss after you’ve defeated it, you summon these two skeleton men, they run into battle for you, and when they got knocked down, they can actually, like, get back up and, like, basically revive and then fight again. Unless the enemy destroys the bones while they’re on the ground. And you, fighting this floating boat when it summoned the skeleton men itself, it obeyed those exact same mechanics where the skeleton men would just keep rising unless you hit the bones and then those skeleton men would be gone. And I thought that was a really beautiful little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve never been disappointed wandering into a cave in this game, either. There’s always something there. They’re all quite different from each other. Like, it feels like that team has relished having an open world to hide secrets in. The funny thing about listening to people talk about the open-worldness and how unlike, you know, the kind of opposite of, like, a Ubisoft game is, is actually it does have a lot of the logic to it. It doesn’t explicitly put it on there with icons and stuff, but like, there are statues that if you activate, they point you to where a hidden tomb is. You know, there are things that, there are, there are, you know, little obelisks that if you find them, they will fill in a portion of your map. Like, as an illustration, it doesn’t fill it with icons or anything, but it gives you, like, more stuff to play with. And then that map itself, you know, it’s kind of drawn by hand, but there are, it hints at secrets. Like, if you look very carefully, you can sort of see the hints of caves, you know, and or maybe things secluded by tree lines that you can’t see. So, like, for all this talk of, like, you know, oh, it’s truly revolutionary, you know, open world game. We’ve never seen anything like it. I actually think there are conservative elements to this map. I think there are conservative ways that the world works. Like, it isn’t, there’s stuff you’re like, I have seen this before, you know, you’ve made it slightly more obscured, but it’s the same thinking. Yeah, I mean, I don’t really agree with the notion of using this game as a stick to beat Ubisoft open world games with, which, you know, are very enjoyable in their own right. And you can argue as well, Matthew, that the player messages in this are like the most obnoxious form of, like, sort of like points on a map or points telling you where to go or what to do. They’re like tooltips from like YouTube commenters, basically. Oh, they’re awful. The worst thing about it is, two bad things, is one, people are like, jump off here when it’s obviously just a cliff and you’ll die. That is so lame. And you find it. And then like ten steps down the coastline, there’s another message saying the same things. It’s just like endless shit patter, you know, lining up across the coastline like bird shit. It’s just awful. And the other thing is, one of the key bits of terminology in the game is about his fingers, because the things that guide you are called the fingers. And so you have like a limited pool of words that you can make the messages from, I believe is how it works. And because of this, fingers has just opened up loads of like really weird, creepy shit. I’ve seen, I don’t know if you keep seeing this, the fingered butthole thing. Yeah. So many people use fingers, but with a single T and then whole, H-O-L-E or whole, you know. And I’ve seen that message so many times and everyone must be like, ha ha ha. You know, I’ve worked out to write something rude using the limited words, but it’s so tedious. There’s a system in place that when you find these messages, you can like vote. You can say they’re good or bad. I think if you have any interaction with them, it heals the person who left them, I think is the rule. But I would honestly make the case that if people vote down, it drains your health. I think that would be so good. I think you should be able to punish the pattern merchants by just down voting them into death. So they’re in the middle of a boss fight and their health starts plummeting for no reason. I want them to know it’s because I didn’t like their butthole joke. Sorry, the 50th butthole joke I found in the same tomb. I love the idea as well that if they boot the game up and their health bar is suddenly like 2 HP, and that’s why, that would be beautiful for sure. And it should just say like in that giant sort of From Software font, like Get Better Patter, just across the middle of the screen in like giant gold letters. I was there thinking like, A, I might yank my Ethernet cable out the back of my PS5 so I can enjoy this while turning off this, like, like a live YouTube comments on an E3 conference horse shit, turn all that off. But also, I was kind of there thinking very bold of From Software to spend years crafting this beautiful open world game only to let people turn it into a fucking National Express coach toilet, like, on like a stag do. That is, that is like kind of strange. And I remember what the player messages are like in like Dark Souls. But here, because of the vast amount of space, people are allowed to be more obnoxious. And there are so many like bits you shouldn’t be able to go to when you see a message there. And it’s like, yeah, it’s just going to say, I shouldn’t be here or whatever. And it’s like, they’re very rarely useful. A couple of times, they pointed out an item have been like very good. But yes, every butthole, a little piece of me dies forever. So, yeah. So Matthew, is it fair to say that you’re clicking with it more than previous From Software games? Yeah, I’m really into it. I think it just the freedom to not butt heads with like one bottleneck. Just I can appreciate so much more of what they have to offer. Like I can see just so many more enemy types and boss designs and all their mad art. You know, I can see that stuff and I can really enjoy it. I can, you know, I can just survive for a lot longer. Like the game has a bit of momentum that I’ve always been missing from these other games. So stop start, you know, here there are lots of subtle things, whether it’s the, you know, finding a new point of grace and being able to fast travel back there so that you can push deeper, sort of faster. Or the fact that it’s got this really neat little mechanic that when you kill like a group of enemies that are sort of together in an area, it replenishes your health or magic. So you can sort of use a couple of pots of like health flask to fight like five wolves as long as you kill all five of those wolves. And that’s like a, yeah, great, you know, there was no cost to this. Keep going, keep going, keep going. And because of that, like a, I’m making much more progress. And also just, you know, it’s how I played, you know, 20 plus hours over the weekend. It’s just more, way more moorish because it’s constantly like you can do it. There’s something here for you. You know, there’s always something there you can do. You know, you may have to go looking for it. You know, you may pick the wrong thing and keep bouncing off something. But I think after so many deaths, you know, like this isn’t for me right now. Like this particular place isn’t for me. That is the message you’re meant to take away from it. And so just go and find something else that is for you and you probably will find it. And that for me is just like the revolutionary thing, I think, about Elden Ring. Yeah, for sure. Like you say, no bottleneck. So it’s not like I’m just going to butt up against Ornstein and Smaug or whoever the fuck it is in Dark Souls. Who I got stuck on because my big sword wasn’t good enough. Like, yeah, it’s sort of just like, oh, OK, well, this is hard. I’ll just go somewhere else. And even when you do go to a tough place, yeah, like you say, because you can get out of it on horseback, it’s not a big deal. And so there’s loads to do before you even get to the critical path, really. I mean, that’s, you know, early on in my first maybe 10 hours with it, I was constantly fretting like, oh, should I be doing the critical path? Am I actually playing this wrong? Like, if it sends me to you, you can get to the first big castle quite early on. It’s like, well, if I can get here, like, shouldn’t I be going here? Like every bit of my brain says it’s funneling me towards this place. But the difficulty there is so stiff compared to the rest of it. And I think it is like a big, big jump up. You know, that first boss opens up like the castle and then the castle is full of some really nasty shit compared to like what you’ve probably been encountering outside the castle in the immediate vicinity of the castle. But then, you know, you can spend, you know, I know people who’ve played 30 hours and not gone, you know, not even done that first boss outside the castle. You know, there is a way to go around the castle and get to the rest of the open world without even going through it. You know, there are, I think we’re so used to knowing like how to play something. I think we’re so used to games sort of subtly teaching us how to play or what to do that, you know, the sort of almost the mega shrug of this one sort of throws you off a bit. You have to kind of get your head around that and go, oh, I’m just allowed to do whatever and like that’s perfectly valid and it is perfectly valid. Yeah, for sure. So Matthew, are there parts of the world without spoiling too much for people you thought are cool or unexpected events that kind of like dazzled you in your first 22 hours of the game? Yeah, I think the main castle, the Stormvale Castle, which is like the first big thing you go to, it’s kind of weird because when you go in there, it becomes what I would identify as a more traditional Dark Souls level, which I think is fair. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, and it’s like, but it’s actually, you know, you’ve just done this place where you’ve got wide open planes and quite simple tombs that maybe take like 10 minutes to clear out and you’ve suddenly got this really like ornate chunk of game design. And that is quite exciting because it’s just a completely different flavour to the rest of it. It slowed my progress right down because you, I think you actually have to start playing it a bit more like Dark Souls. You have to be a lot more cautious. It’s here where they start doing all that shit, where they like hide people around corners, you jump out and kill you, which is quite hard to do in an open world where, you know, the corners are not as obvious. But I, you know, maybe because by the time I got in there, I had more equipment and more stuff and more kind of tools to play with. I actually got further in that than they probably have any like piece of game design in their previous games. And, you know, I loved it. I just loved how riddled with secrets it was, how even the most obscure route you think this couldn’t possibly be taking me somewhere good and the way it kind of links back round and snakes back round. And this may seem like really dumb because I know that this is what Dark Souls, I know that this is what all these games are about, is this kind of interlinking, looping back world design. But to be able to like appreciate it and actually get through it, it’s kind of a wonderful thing. So, you know, it’s kind of as dumb as it is, it’s like discovering. Oh, right. Yeah, I get it. Like this is cool when you can do it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like I found that way about that castle too. I was actually surprised how quickly I got through it. Like I think it took me about two hours until to get through it. Like it wasn’t like an all day thing or anything. I think it’s because I was very, I was like level 39 when I was doing it. So it’s quite. How do you level up so fast? There’s a place you can go to that has enemies that drop a thousand XP each time you hit each time you kill one. And they can kill you instantly if you’re not careful. But if you are careful, you can just do like seven of them at a time. Rest spawn seven at a time. Rest. And like I just I just did that as a kind of time saving mode, I guess. Yeah, I think I’m only like level 32 now. That’s impressive. That’s impressive. I did read that level 30 was recommended for the king there. So, oh, yeah, it’s I’m trying not to read anything online about it. Yeah, I’m trying to like be like pure to see if I can work it out. Not from like, oh, I’m better than people. You know, I just want to see what it’s like to not, you know, look at stuff. That’s fair. I didn’t use that castle. I mean, that took me like five, six hours. I mean, it was it was a slow going. There were like two bits in it. I just couldn’t get through. And yeah, I eventually like jumped off some battlements onto this tiny ledge. And it took me like all around the houses, but like opened up like a completely new route for the whole castle. And that sense of like hitting a switch and suddenly you find yourself back where you, you know, you previously were and you’re like the sense of comfort and warmth of like, oh, yes, I’m back on safe ground. You know, I have made permanent serious progress. That is really, really cool. Yeah, I think I know like the elevator had the really Eureka moment was the one next to the grace point. There’s got like a bunch of eagles of blades on their legs outside and like a little knight with wind powers next to a shaft. Like just near that, like that lift was the one where it’s like, oh, yeah, that feels fucking good. Like, yeah, that is mega piss. Those birds with giant spikes on their feet. Yeah, do you know what? I’m not entirely convinced by the Z locking in this either. Like sometimes that’s like just does not work at all for some types of enemies, really. I particularly found the bosses struggling with the Z lock for that. But yeah, so yeah, that’s true of that castle. But like even there, there were like locations where you come to a vast courtyard that’s absolutely packed with enemies. Like basically like a battalion of enemies. And if you stay and fight there, you’re fucked. Don’t do that. Just run away and just go and find the next point of grace. That’s what I did basically. Like I got through it fairly quickly. I lured every single one of them one by one through a door. That is crazy. Why don’t you just run past them? Because I tried that several times and kept getting killed. I just couldn’t work out where I was meant to go. So this one time I made it to that courtyard and I had like the most health I ever had at that point. And I was like, I’m going to do this man by man if I have to. Let me tell you about how I killed the boss in that castle, right? So on my teleportation adventure to an end game part of the map, I’m just going to call it Mordor, because that’s basically what it felt like. So first of all, I found like a golden seed in like a chest there, which felt like an amazing reward for being there, because obviously you collect those to give yourself more flasks to heal. So then I went into that boss fight with seven heal flasks, which was good. And the other thing I got there was this summon of like a mangy dog If this mangy dog, when you summon it, manages to land like 10 hits, I think it is, it basically causes like a rot effect on the enemy. And so I basically just had to distract the king long enough for that dog to just like bite him from behind. And once he did, his health bar was just ticking down constantly. And all I had to do was back away while he slowly died, like the end of Metal Gear Solid 3 or something. Like it was just like basically slow, slow kind of like death while I just kind of… And like it took a few attempts for that to work and I tried to do it on the legit. But that’s what I mean by the game wants you to break it. I was never supposed to be in that land I teleported to or was I because this chest is there. So clearly you’re meant to go there. By going there, I found a reward for exploring and surviving that I was later able to use to help take down this boss relatively easily. And I think that’s like beautiful game design, really. It’s the narrative of that I love, where it’s like the pet talk to the dog is like, I’m going to distract this guy long enough for you to very slowly poison him. You horrible mangy dog. You need to bite him ten times on the arse. Because for me, the summons are, you look at the summon and I will hit you in the back with a long sword. I like the idea that in your fight, like the dog saw the hero and you’re the bait. That is exactly right, yeah. It’s like, we’ve all got to do this to make this one awesome opportunity for Luke Skywalker to blow out the Death Star. Oh wait, no, it’s for one mangy dog to maybe give someone rabies. I love the way that that’s like how this king died as well. It’s like nothing has beaten me except the spirit of a mangy dog from this land far away. That is so good. Yeah. On another note actually, I do like the names of the places there, but I think they could have done with being more literal. I would have gone with that place I got teleport to, I would have called that the Fucklands. That’s a good name for it. There should be Dragon Prick Lake. That should be another location. In fact, most of the east side of the map should just have the letters NO written on it. That would be a bit more literal. Welcome to the NO plans. There was one thing that happened. I won’t talk anymore about the place I teleported to because people really should discover it. There was something that appeared there where I went, oh shit, that is one of the raddest things that has ever happened in a game. It is linked to how I described it. It’s really, really good. I’ll wait until people get there. How did you feel about the fact that I feel like Sean Bean must be in this game, Matthew? There’s a lot of sad northerners. There is, but surely one of them in that round table room is definitely Sean Bean. It’s like the guy sat on a chair slightly away from the table. That guy is Sean Bean for sure. I’m nearly convinced that’s Sean Bean. I thought one of them was… Do you watch Staff Let’s Flats? I swear one of them is his sister. Wow! I could really. See that though. They’re like millennial age. It might just be my mind playing tricks on me. One of the sad women characters had the similar twang that her voice has. I thought, is that her? Because I know that they call on a lot of quite weird British talent to be in these games. Yeah. Go on, sorry. I think one place I really loved was that… Have you done Mourne Castle? Tell me about it. It’s the castle on the southernmost tip. Someone tells you about it being full of horrible dog men. No, I don’t think I have done that, no. So, it’s like… A, it’s just a really old school cart. You can see it. It looks massive and you think, well, I’m going to have an adventure there. And it’s something that I think Miyazaki taps into a lot, is the idea of quite broad adventure tropes. And here, because the world is a little sunnier than his usual thing, it isn’t totally fucked. It’s like, it feels pre-apocalypse, which I wouldn’t say is true of his other games. You know, a castle is still sort of a functioning castle when you get there. It’s kind of exciting. From just a swords and sorcery perspective, you’re like, oh great, I’m going to invade this castle and see what lies inside. And it taps into that quite Zelda-y kind of sense of adventure. So that’s fun. But there’s this basically huge, there’s like a giant who guards it, which is why I think people don’t go near it, because they look at the giant and go, that must be bad news, that must be endgame. And he’s got like a sort of, he’s carrying like basically like a ballista. And in the approach to it, he fires this sort of ballista at you. And the run up to it is a huge field. And to get to the castle, you basically just have to ride around this giant bolts that are slamming into you. And you would swear it was scripted. Like when you approach it, the first arrow thunks into the ground, and you’re like, wow, where did that come from? And it’s only when you get closer, you realize there’s this guy with this bow. But it’s not, it’s just an enemy doing his attack from afar. And it feels so authored and exciting. It feels like those moments in Metal Gear Solid V where you’d be open-worlding it, and then occasionally it would be a more cinematic thing, like the sniper fight with Quiet, for example, where it suddenly becomes a lot more controlled. It sort of felt like that. It felt like an open-world story moment, which is something I really love when open-worlds do that. Because most open-worlds are like the space in between. Nothing happens. All the story happens when you get to a place. And actually seeing it play out on this grand scale was so exciting. And once you get into the castle, it was a really fun little mini adventure. You should definitely do it. It’s rad as hell. But the moment where these bolts just started raining down, I was like, Oh, fuck, get on my horse. Just go for it and try and get there. And that was really great. That’s just a pure fantasy moment. I will say the horse in general is really well done. There’s just a tiny bit of whimsy to that horse’s double jump that I think is delightful. And I’m not used to seeing whimsy in these games. You know what I mean? But it’s kind of like a ding and a little blue flash. And then your horse has got a bit higher. And it’s just quite pleasant. It’s very fast and quite easy to steer. It’s quite an arcadey horse. You’d think that Miyazaki would make a really messed up horse that doesn’t function. But actually, it’s like a horse in a gun or something, rather than a horse in Red Dead Redemption. It’s got a bit more kind of slides around in a kind of decent way. I’m surprised this doesn’t control like a bomber in Armour 3 or something. That’s kind of what you expect. I shouldn’t be able to use this at all really. But you can do some quite finessed platforming. You can jump in all over the place. Yeah, and it is super fun. I’m pleased that they let themselves have the kind of fun sort of traversal bits of an open world game when they want to as well. That’s just good. Just very, very well done. Any kind of further thoughts, Matthew? Or should we wrap our Elden Ring thoughts there? I was just going to say, have you met the giant turtle with a bell yet? No, I haven’t. Is he in the next place after you beat the king? No, no, he’s in the opening area. No, I’ve not seen him at all. How is that possible? I’ve been there for so long now. Yeah, I know. It’s just head south, honestly. I think south is genuinely the true tutorial area for the game. It looks scary, but actually things there are way more doable than anything in the castle. I wouldn’t say what you’ve got to do, but you see this thing and you’re like, oh shit, I’m going to have a really nasty time now. But what they do with it and what it is, is actually more sort of riddle-y. It’s more kind of quirky and weird. It’s, you know, there’s like magic in it. It’s got the same sort of magic as like the treasure riddles in Breath of the Wild where that weird bird kind of sings songs. And he kind of tells you just to do actions in strange places and it triggers weird stuff. There’s a lot of that kind of sort of slightly mysterious layer to this world where you think there could be stuff all around me. Like just on the opening beach, there’s these sort of very strange symbols appearing in the sand and you’re like, well, this is definitely something, but I cannot make anything happen here as far as I can see. You know, it feels like there’s going to be stuff to unpack for like months, if not years. Yeah, for sure. In general, did you have any thoughts on the kind of like world itself? I could help but think of like the British Empire, like the idea of just like this decaying place, because everyone’s British, I guess, it feeds into that, but decaying place occupied by these kings holding on to power in a world that’s like already kind of beyond them. Like, do you have any thoughts, any kind of like top level thoughts on the sort of story side of things? I mean, only, you know, the top level thought is only that, like say it’s, it doesn’t yet, the world doesn’t yet feel like totally doomed. And that is a big thing. Like, I find the other, his other games very, very impressive, where even if you’re making progress, it’s just like, well, I’m making progress in this like dead world. And, you know, the aim of the game isn’t to like fix the dead world. It’s just to not be dead yourself. And, you know, this, you know, you meet, you know, there are slightly more traditional NPCs who give you more traditional quests. There are funny people who don’t talk in like super broken sort of Miyazaki speak. You know, there are people who will literally say, my dad is over here and I need this and go and deliver this thing. And, you know, it’s a bit like, you know, it feels like there’s a bit of life in it. And just from a motivational point of view, like that’s quite important for me. Like I have to feel like there’s some reason to do something. Like I want, I want this place to sort of be okay. Yeah. So, yeah, and that’s, you know, don’t underestimate the kind of power of that. Yeah. And whereas like Bloodborne just felt mega fucked from the off. You’re like, well, you know, you know, I don’t know what happens at the end of Bloodborne, but I imagine you just find out that, yes, it was all fucked. It was like how in Sekiro, basically, everything is rotten from the inside in this kind of like, I would like that. One other thing I kind of wanted to shout out actually was, now I’ve played enough of these games now to know when different elements kind of recur. And so when I fought the Tree Sentinel, I immediately thought of the horse, the boss on a horse in Sekiro, who you encounter after you dodge the snake in that valley. Like, he must be like a similar model or animated the same or something like that. He was one example of that. That’s happened a few times, or I’ve seen elements from other games in there. And like, you could call them like recycling assets, right? But I don’t really see it that way. I kind of see it as like he’s almost remixing trademarks of his and different bits and pieces. And like, each game kind of builds on the next one. And even if they’re not technically linked by story or series, and like they kind of, it’s like an accumulation of elements of like things he’s interested in. They’re interested, you know what I mean? And yeah, I think the kind of the effect of that when it all comes together, is that like the world, you know, the world is almost what you imagine the inside of Miyazaki’s head to look like. It is this open world where like all the elements of his games sort of live together. It’s almost like a Walt Disney Land of like Miyazaki, because it’s got like regions. It’s like, welcome to the fucking plague zone. This is where all my plague bullshit lives. And here’s the fire zone where all my fiery bullshit lives. And this is the kind of green one where like the little gobliny things live and it’s a bit more chill. Yeah, there is a hint of that. Like you occasionally see things and you think, I swear I saw that prop in Bloodborne. Like those gravestones look very familiar to me. Yeah, it was something I saw Rich say on Twitter actually is, one thing I really didn’t expect, but I’m very happy about is a number of Souls lore references. God knows what George RR Martin did on this, because it feels like pure Miyazaki to me in a direct three line from the earlier games. I also enjoyed the visual and thematic callbacks. Godric, for example, is clearly the successor boss to Father Gascoigne. Look at how he drags his axe, and serves a similar gatekeeping function in the wider world, tarnished all over the shop. One of the winning elements of Miyazaki’s approach to world building is that idea of parallel worlds twisting in on one another. It lets them remix stuff constantly and use the same ideas in different and often surprising ways. Patches is the only true constant. Patches being an NPC who you fight relatively early in the game. If you find him, maybe you haven’t, but you probably have done. So yeah, I thought it was really eloquent by Rich. It’s kind of a good point, but it’s really interesting to see this kind of intertextuality emerge over time over a series of games that aren’t sequentially linked by story. That’s just really interesting to me. I think the Disneyland approach is apt. It’s odd then when you see people say, people who clearly love these games enough to see all these similarities, saying like, it uses a load of the enemies from Dark Souls 3, and one of the benefits of having bounced off all their previous work is it all seems quite new to me. I’m like, wow, I’ve never seen anything like this. For all I know, it’s absolutely recycling like hell. I have no idea. But you think if you were into the whole Miyazaki lore and cult thing enough to see these similarities and to notice these things, then surely you’d be enough of a fan to understand that there’s, like Rich says, there’s obviously more at play here. It’s also quite a kind of like, how to put it, it’s like it’s an open world of the ambition that I kind of appreciate in the sense that it’s not like we’ve spent $400 million making this. It’s like it’s a sustainably made open world. Like they could make another one of these. It doesn’t have to look the shiniest because like it does other things really well. And like I’m fine with the level of fidelity that’s here because and it’s the same with Breath of the Wild. You don’t need to be technically at the top of the pile to actually kind of win here. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. I just, I don’t know. The scale of it like it’s the same as it’s got again like Xenoblade. It’s just so big that you’re like, yeah, I’m like, I’m wowed either way. Yeah. Well, let’s revisit it at some point down the line, Matthew, because I’m sure we’ll have more to say once we’ve if we ever finish it or whatever happens next. So I don’t know how long it is. IGN reviews said it took him 80 hours. Well, yeah, a long way to go. People only had it for a week, 80 hours in a week. So I have one bonus question for you here, Matthew, which is if you were an Elden Ring boss, what would you be? I mean, it has to be something big. I don’t think I’d be a small, fast boss. I’d be like a big, probably like a something kind of gimmicky, like something that’s like a gimmicky way of killing me, because I’m so big that you could like slash at my ankles for like, you know, an hour and maybe not make a dent, but you find out that you can like chuck a baguette over a cliff and I’ll fall to my death or something trying to reach it. Probably something like that. The sad truth is I’ve came up with basically the same answer. So I’ve actually came up with a name for myself. I’m Greater Rotten Lad Sammy. I thought that works quite well. Nice big Sammy holding chapter in there as well. Yeah, a bit of Miyazaki style intertextuality there. Parallel universes connecting as Rich says, the various Sammies. So you have to throw meat obtained in the open world into a pool of oil, then lob a little fire bomb to set the oil on fire and burn me alive while I’m in there. And I’m fine with that because I die doing what I love, which is eating cooked meat because the meat becomes cooked while it’s in the fire. But the other thing you can do to me is that I’m wearing this kind of like sort of slightly open robe, and my tummy protrudes slightly when I’m monologuing mid-battle. And so if you go whack, go back to the tummy with a pike of some kind, and then you’ll do a bit more damage. So that’s kind of my answer, Matthew. Surely we’d be more of a, we’d be a pairing of bosses, a kind of Ornstein and Smeltide deal. Yeah, just two like really quite languid motherfuckers who are out of breath when they do like one swing with a club or something, you know. But when you, yeah, but the thing is when you kill one of them, the other one, well, actually, no, it pretty doesn’t get faster or better. It just runs off, that’s it. It just becomes apologetic, you know. They become apologetic, runs off and sets up their own podcast by themselves. Oh, very good. Okay, so it’s Greater Rotten Lads, Lads Sammy and Matty, that’ll do. Two big lads who just keep trying to get people to sign up to a Patreon. People are like, how much’s the Patreon? And they’re like, 20,000 rubles. What do I get for it? Nothing. Oh, very good. There you go. That went to some places. Really glad I asked that. So Matthew, let’s close out with some listener questions. Now we’ve talked about a very good game for a hundred minutes. Do you want to read this first one? Yep. Hello, large men. This is good. Good start. After hearing Samuel discuss how Resident Evil 4 VR feels fresh and new, it made me curious. Do you think any other classics would benefit from a VR remaster? The game I’d love to see is black and white VR. It makes so much sense to me. I remember you had to physically drag yourself around by grabbing the ground with your hand, cast spells by flaining your severed limb about, stroke your creature, pick up its shit and throw it at your enemies. It would translate perfectly into VR. I know it’ll never happen because black and white has been lost to the void. An RTS slash god game feels like a missed opportunity in that space right now. It seems that there’s a glut of FPS games like Rez and Tetris. I sort of see what you mean. Anyway, thanks for the work. I love and cherish the show. It’s a beacon of positivity and avoids the intolerable modern day video game discourse. Apart from this episode where we’ve just talked about Elden Ring. PS, when you refer to yourselves as large men, it always makes me wonder, how tall are you guys? We need to know for lore reasons. PPS, I feel like you both missed an opportunity to be food writers regarding Astro Johnny and his email asking what you’d write about other than games. A sausage roll the size of a fist is something I think about daily. That’s from Nathan Brady Easton. Yeah, so a common pattern that listeners may or may not have detected over the past few episodes is when I’ve had listener questions, I don’t have very good answers. That’s because I’ve pasted them into the doc at the last minute. So when someone’s like, oh, yeah, if you can make a game combining two different series, what would you do? And I just went, sidescrolling Devil May Cry? So this week, I thought I’d like properly plan. So I’ve got loads of answers here for Nathan Brady Easton. So in the Rez and Tetris fame, I think that Child of Eden, another Q Entertainment game published by Ubisoft, which I’ve mentioned on this podcast before, would be most welcome in VR. Originally, a Kinect game would play, plays very similarly to Rez. I think that’d be spot on in VR, probably look fantastic. I’d really love to see that done. Of all the GTAs, GTA IV is the one I’d love to see in VR because the scale of Liberty City would be perfect, looking up at those skyscrapers like being in New York. Though I am excited about San Andreas, of course, whenever that comes. I think I mentioned Silent Hill 2 before. I think seeing Pyramid Head from inside the closet that first time in the game and running through the fog in that town would be legit amazing and terrifying. I would love to see that. MGS 2 and 3, of course, whether it’s the Big Shell or the Jungle, those would be fantastic environments to experience in VR. From a first-person perspective or third-person? First-person, because they have first-person modes anyway, right? Yeah. I think the more accurate aiming you’ve got would offset the fact that you don’t have as much visibility of what’s going on around you. So that could work. I had a couple more, which is, I thought something like Outrun 2 in VR would be cool. Just a racing game that doesn’t have loads and loads of crashing in it, but it’s still quite colorful and nice. I’m really curious about this version of City Skylines they’re doing in VR, which I think is just called Cities VR. A great idea of a city builder in that sense, which I guess is, I feel like the black and white thing is tapping into that a little bit, the godsome thing. Do you have any answers to this one, Matthew? Yeah, I’m not too into my god games, but I was thinking about some like using VR, not from the first person perspective, but looking down onto things, maybe interacting with some kind of turn-based battle system, like a fire emblem or an XCOM where you’re moving the pieces around. Could be quite fun from that kind of perspective. I also wondered about the Nintendo DS Classic 3D pit cross, which was, you know, pit cross in 3D where you chip away at like a big cube to make these weird structures. I could see that working, kind of hovering in front of you, and you’re kind of, you know, manipulating the object. You could hold the 3D pit cross grid like in your hands as a 3D object. That could be really cool. Yeah, good answer. Classic Matthew there. Any excuse to bring up, you know, a bit of Nintendo software that you’ve not thought about? That is true. And what about the height thing? How tall are we? I think I’m 6’1, Matthew. How about you? Am I taller than you? Yeah, I think so. Aren’t you like 6’3, or something? 6’2? I’d say 6’2, 6’3, at a push. Yeah. Well, the giant men thing is like, it’s more kind of like a wide thing, rather than kind of a tall thing. Yeah, we’re like big. Neither of us are like bean poles. No, definitely not. We’re just like big. I wouldn’t say fat, just big. Yeah, I would say we look like men who were in shape once, I would say. I don’t know if that’s true. As for the food, I don’t really have really eloquent things to say about food. Games, as you can tell from this episode where we talked for 100 minutes about one video game, I’ve got loads to say about games. Food would be kind of like, I don’t know. I sometimes think about those MasterChef guys where one of them takes a bite of the steak and goes, the texture is extraordinary. And I’m like, what is this? Do you just need a book of adjectives and then you’re kind of good to go? I’m too fussy as well. All the things posh restaurants do I’m not mad into. You begin to add ingredients that I’m like, organs and things that I’m not particularly into. And so it would just be sort of, I didn’t like it because I don’t like liver. And no one wants to read that. Matthew, I’m really tempted to go down a tangent here. I’m going to just do it. I’ve never asked you about this in the podcast, right? But one of the funniest things you’ve told me about in the last year was when there was briefly a pasta hut near your house. It lasted for weeks at most, but I kind of walked past it. It was in a car park for some buildings. Even that, you’re giving it too much credit. It was kind of like a little yard where they put some tables and chairs down. There was a taped up sign saying pasta five quid or something. It looked like a trap. It looked like they were hiding from the police. You told me something so funny about this when you went there. This pasta hut, tell me what your experience was. I also walked past this pasta hut and thought, that’s interesting. An interesting place to start a business because it was basically hidden in someone’s back garden. Not even their back garden, the drive up to the back of their house. I went in there and there was the guy running the pasta hut and a couple of sheepish students who were eating food. I was like, okay, this is obviously legit enough that it produces food that you can eat. So it’s not entirely a trap. They only did two things. They did a special pasta and they did a cheese wheel pasta, which was spaghetti that they swing around on a big wheel of parmesan, which I thought looked a little unhygienic because it’s just the same… Anyway, let’s not get lost in the parmesan thing. Halfway through cooking, the power went out on his pasta truck and he was like, oh God, the fuses have gone. So he came out of his pasta hut and I was like, oh, he’s obviously going to put some new fuses into the pasta hut. But instead he left the pasta hut and he walked towards the house that he was near. The house, a person’s house, a residential house, I should say, with all the lights off. He opened one of the windows, climbed in through the window and I was like, what? And that’s when I saw there was like, literally like a power cable, like a plug socket splitter coming out of the house. And he was basically running this pasta hut out of this house’s sort of mains. And I could see him inside the house with a torch, trying to put the fuses in there. And he’s like, what is this operation? That he’s like, do they know that there is a man siphoning their electricity into a pasta hut? Like, do they know that a man is basically set up a restaurant at the back of their house and he’s feeding off them? It was one of the craziest things I’ve seen. It was so funny. And it was like, it was gone, like within two weeks of me seeing it for the first time. And I was like, not surprised, but so curious. It was like the worst location I’ve ever seen for a restaurant. You wouldn’t know it was there unless, like, because we tried to go back there a couple of times, because the pasta was alright, actually. And every single time, like, you can only just see the top of the pasta hut over the wall, which is a big problem. And it’s not until you turn the corner and go up to it, you see if it’s open or closed, and it was always closed. It’s never opened again. I’m assuming it’s a failed business, or that the people who own that house returned and didn’t want a man basically stealing their electricity to make weird cheesy pasta, which is perfectly fine. The first time I went there, he gave me a voucher, and it was like, next time you come, it’s 20% off. And when I came back the next day, because I did go back the next day, there was no one there, and he looked so sad that I had the voucher in my hand, but I quietly balled it up and put it in my pocket and just paid full price, because I felt like I’d be like, robbing his children of a house or something if I used this voucher. I just didn’t want to see a man ruin himself financially in front of me, just so I could eat some macaroni cheese. Anyway, I can’t do this right now. Climbed into the house and just went to bed in a bed that wasn’t his. That’s so good. I honestly… Only by coming to Bath would you ever truly comprehend what a bad location this was. This was like… This is up there with Jack buying the magic bean as far as bad business decisions go. It’s like, this is obviously going to be bad. Yeah, it was kind of next to a pub that’s on a main road, but it wasn’t facing the main road, it was facing away from the main road. You wouldn’t see it unless you drove down one very small quiet street, and then that’s the only way you would see it. It wasn’t on Google Maps. There was so much wrong with it, it was kind of hilarious. But I’m so glad I asked you about that, because that should be on the record. I like that we get very hung up on the success of businesses, because we were both fretting about the Goulash Hut. It’s opening a Goulash restaurant. I swear I was talking to you about this. Yeah, we came over and we were like, that is audacious, they’ve upgraded the Goulash Hut to a Goulash-like fixed location you can go to. And it’s like this doomed shop that never ever succeeds, because it’s in a really weird place. It’s next to a graveyard. And a Papa John’s, right? That’s probably the best way of describing it. And yeah, it seems to be the least popular of the food huts in the row of food huts. And you’re like, if any of these people were going to like swing for a permanent restaurant, it would not be the Goulash shop. No, it was like, I feel like he, or whoever owns it, they got a foothold during the pandemic, because they were like the only hut that was open for like months and months. So whenever you went on to Deliveroo, it was like 16 sort of like, sort of fake fronts for one chicken restaurant in Bath, with loads of different wacky names. And then like the Goulash hut and McDonald’s, and that was basically it for like a year. That was like a year of living in Bath. So the Goulash hut, I feel like they probably thought, well, we’ve plied our fortunes during the pandemic, it’s time to move this baby to like brick and mortar. And like, I’ve been past it, I’ve seen one person there, and the four times I went past it, that one person was like a just eat delivery person. So that’s it. I’ve not seen anyone sit inside there and think, I fancy some Goulash tonight. I’ll just go to this one place called Goulash. What is it just called Goulash? Like that is something we’re like, what did we sell? Goulash. What do we call it? Goulash. How many cities have you ever been to where Goulash is like the main focus of a restaurant in that city? Do you know what I mean? Like, how? And yeah, if you want Goulash, there are now two places you can get it in Bath. Like, I don’t think Bath even has like two Japanese restaurants, for example. You know what I mean? Okay, good stuff. I’m so glad I asked about that. That’s our food portion done, Matthew. So this question, what I’d like to know is, when it comes to Renny, is Matthew a spearman or peppermint kind of guy? That’s from Lee on Discord. I always forget when I buy it, and so I get a mix. I’m like, which one do I like? I can’t remember the difference, so I just buy them both at different times. Yeah, Matthew creates his own Renny pick and mix. He just puts them all into a bowl and mixes them up. I like to have one spearman and one peppermint together. Very precise. Another very quick one here, Matthew. I have a very simple and exciting question. How come Samuel and Matthew seem to prefer their full first names? No, Sam and Matt. That’s some Scientologist on Discord. You’ve always been a Samuel, as long as I’ve known you. Yeah, you know, I just, I think as a kid, there were like lots of Sams in my class, so I thought I’d call myself Samuel. Bit distinctive, that’s kind of it. I don’t know, like, yeah. I’ve got a very similar origin story. Just too many Matt’s. No other Matt wanted to be called Matthew, so I stuck with Matthew. Yeah, also, I think quite a lot of people just call you Castle and stuff, and I was never really into that, so I just thought… Yeah, plenty of people call me Castle. That’s fine. It’s whatever. Okay, well, there you go. That’s that question. A simple, unexciting question with a simple and exciting answer. So that’s good. Do you want to read this next one, Matthew? Pothos Gents, what games are you looking forward to for later in 2022? That’s from Sam via Discord. Yep, so for me, the ones I’ve listed here, this is just a few of them, but Weird West I’m looking forward to playing. That’s not really later in the year. That’s in March, I think, from published by Devolver and developed by Raph Colantonio and some other developers. This is kind of like an isometric-y immersive sim in the Wild West. That looks cool. Bayonetta 3, of course, assuming that comes out this year. Excited to see that series return with scale-bound mechanics bolted onto it, which is quite clearly what’s happened there. That game Neon White looks cool with the cards. That’s like an Annapurna published game. I think that just had quite a nice demo on the Steam Next Fest. That’s like the sort of Cart deck game meets Mirror’s Edge type thing, right? Yeah, that’s right, yeah. I thought that looked rad. Starfield, of course, I want to see what that looks like, the spectacle of that next-gen-only Bethesda RPG, which is out later this year. Hellblade 2, which looked fucking rad in that Game Awards presentation they did. Big cursed man in that trailer. Yeah, exactly. In fact, that’s what we’d look like as Elden Ring bosses. Just imagine two of those, but one’s got glasses on. Except moaning about having spears chucked into their face. The whole time, like, oh, come on, don’t do that. And podcasting. So those are some of mine, Matthew, how about you? Ghostwire Tokyo coming up in March. A Mikami game, well, a Mikami studio game, always something to be excited about. I just really like the art style, the colour of it. Breath of the Wild 2, if it comes out. I’m on a big, big open world thing at the moment. And yeah, I need that to come back. I need the King to return. I’m quite excited about the Marvel’s Midnight Suns. More for the pedigree of the team, rather than any particular interest in Marvel, like, you know, for Axis doing something new in the sort of turn-based tactics space. I mean, come on, they did such amazing stuff with XCOM. I’m super, super up for this. My other one’s a bit more of a wild card, but it’s that ridiculous Square Enix for spoken thing. I love a big, weird AAA Square Enix swing. You know, I just want to see what they do. You know, at the very least, jumping around that world with like mad magic leaps should be fun. Yeah, I’m up for it. I really want to play it. I think it looks really fun in the footage. Like, it looks real pretty, as you’d expect, from the developers of Final Fantasy XV. That part is exciting. On the same note, Matthew, kind of like big Square Enix swings, the Stranger of Paradise game that’s coming out, great name for a game. I love that name for a game. Stranger of Paradise, Final Fantasy Origins, which had the My Way, like the actual My Way they paid for in that trailer, that like preposterous trailer. I thought all of that was great fun. Really curious to see how that ends up, you know. Yeah, and people who are into that kind of thing say it is like legitimately very good. Yeah. People seem to be warming to it, having like memed it, like almost memed it to death, it’s come back, which is like my favourite like character arc in video games. Also quietly like really good Square Enix time as well. They’ve got like that Triangle Strategy game out. They’ve got the Live-a-Live, is that what it’s called? Or Live-a-Live, I’ve no idea how you pronounce that, but that RPG that’s been brought back in the Octopath Traveller style. They’ve brought back Chrono Cross, a PS1 RPG. And yeah, Forspoken, Stranger of Paradise. And I think they’ve got these like voice of cards, is it? Or some kind of like series of card games that’s been released? Yuka Tarou wants… I didn’t really like the first one too much. Still like quite a big variety of stuff for a AAA publisher in 2022. So yes, good answers to that one, Matthew. So, hey guys, I love the podcast. This one is a cheeky two-parter. What has been your favorite podcast to make so far? And assuming Yujin Naka wasn’t available, who would be your dream guest? That’s from Nash IVI Discord. Do you want to answer this one first, Matthew? Yeah, in terms of episodes I liked, I really liked when we talked to Simon Parkin. Because I know Simon a bit from events and seeing him around and stuff, but it’s probably the longest we’ve just chatted about, you know, his roots and everything. And that was really fun, I really enjoyed that. Just generally all the guest episodes, it’s always nice to have powers on and have a good chat. I liked the Pokemon episode. I was surprisingly interested in Pokemon. I thought you and Jay both bought a lot of really interesting stuff and really good chat for that. And of course, you know, the drafts. Probably the N64 draft was probably the most chaotic. Maybe I’m misremembering that, but that was a good one. It had the like anime betrayal moment of me like, you know, taking Gold Knight and Perfect Dark. That was really fun. Yeah, I echo what Matthew says about the drafts. Part of the reason we vary the episodes up so much is to keep it fun for ourselves as well. Like it’s fun to have different things to talk about. And this time, this is one of the few times we’ve done just an episode about one new game and nothing else. That’s quite rare for us. But I’ll be honest, I started with the title Two Giant Men Play Elden Ring. I worked backwards. That was basically, I just thought that was funny. So that’s good. Yeah, I like the Simon episode too. I don’t know Simon that well, but he obviously like listened to the podcast and then was really engaged with discussing the stuff that we talked about. So I thought that was great. I love the Metal Gear episode with Rich. I’m looking forward to doing more Metal Gear episodes with Rich. Probably in April, we’re going to try and do Metal Gear Solid. So the first one. So yeah, yeah, those are some of them. But it’s just a pleasure doing podcasts with Matthew. Well, it is. It’s just really good. It’s really good having a little thing. You go talk about a thing you like and then thousands of people listen and people feedback and like it. It’s nice. So in terms of a dream guest, this is a really weird one, right? But I have a kind of a dream podcast of doing the making of GTA Chinatown Wars, where we talk to like three different devs and stitch them together over like a podcast and talk about that one game. Don’t know why, but I just think that’d be quite fun just to talk about a sort of, I think a DS only, well, DS released exclusive GTA game, doing a making of on that would be quite on brand for this podcast. Do you have a dream guest, Matthew? Yeah, it’s sort of difficult because we don’t really do like developer interviews, do we? We haven’t done. We could. We could. Yeah, we could. I mean, are we talking about like, you know, if it’s a fantasy universe where like the language barrier isn’t a language barrier, you know, obviously, the mighty Shootakumi, I’d love to have him on and run all my boring Ace Attorney theories and takes past him. Kimura, who made Little King’s story and Dandy Dungeon. I think he does actually speak reasonably decent English. He definitely can write in English because I’ve seen him, you know, he wrote some stuff in NGamer. He wrote a letter and things. Actually, that could have been translated. I don’t know why I assumed it came from him direct. But I’d love to talk to him, just really into his games, really like his sensibility. I think he’d have fun and be up for our daft shit. Like in terms of like games, journals and mags people, like I feel like we can make most things happen. I think we’ve got like a few fun ones sort of lined up and people we’re taught to and stuff. Imagine if we ever got Tony Mott to come and talk about Edge. That would be good. Yeah, that side. It’s on the dev side. I can’t think of many more Harvey Smith would be fun. Like he’s just had a really interesting career, obviously, working on Redfall at the moment, I think. But you know, now Arcane, but obviously was there during the Iron Storm days, which itself is an amazing story. So he’d be fun. Probably like a lot of people who work at Arcane, to be honest, to be quite fun level designers and stuff, directors. Yeah, there’s a few people. But yeah, good stuff, Matthew. So that wraps up this podcast. I can’t remember what next week is about. I think we’re coming up to the episode where we have to do a history of Kirby games, which you asked for this year, Matthew. How are you feeling about that one coming up? Yeah, good. I’ve actually just this week, I will have played and written about the new Kirby game. So I have played it. I’ve been using that as like a sort of unicorn chaser after playing Elden Ring. That really bums me out. And then I go into like the super mad world of the new Kirby, which I’m really, really enjoying so far. But we’ll obviously get into that in more detail in the Kirby episode. That’s good, because I’ve done no research for that one yet. So hopefully Matthew can carry that one in the way that I carry the Pokemon one. Oh, God. I’m not a big… Yeah, we’ll come to it. I’m kind of late to the Kirby game a bit, but you know, I think it’s worth celebrating. Even if we just mostly talk about the new one, I think that would be fun. So that’s… And then do like a top five or something. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. If you’d like to follow the podcast, we’re Back Page Pod on Twitter. That’s where we’ll tweet about new episodes and stuff. That’s also where you can go if you want to find the link to our Discord and join our community. About 244 people, I think, in there at the moment. And really nice conversations going on. Quite a pleasant environment, I would say. We’ve cultivated there, Matthew. Really good. We’ve got a Patreon coming soon at some point in March. Not sure the exact date yet, but my intention is to launch that with every episode already in the feed and then the bonus episodes go in there too. So, I think all you’d have to do is copy and paste. If you sign up to the £5 tier, you’d copy and paste the RSS thing, read the thing into your podcasting app and then you’d get all the podcasts in one place, including the bonus ones. It’s kind of how I’m trying to do it. So, watch out for that. But yes, that will take a little bit of work and research on my part. Where can people find you on social media, Matthew? MrBuzzle, underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. There’s also BackPageGames at gmail.com if you’d like to email us a question. And we’ll be back next week, as ever. Goodbye. Bye for now.