Hello, and welcome to The Back Page A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, we’re rejoined by one of our OG special guests. So Joe, would you like to reintroduce yourself? Hello, yes, I’m Joe Skrebels, previous, well, no, currently of IGN, previously of being Matthew’s underling. So yeah, hello. Thank you for having me back. I’m very excited. Oh yeah, of course. If there’s like a Back Page: word cloud, Joe Skrebels is in there somewhere. Oh, after last week’s episode, I was all over it. It was great. I was delighted. I mean, as you guessed correctly on the episode, Matthew, I was deeply embarrassed to hear you say nice things about me for so long, but it was also great. Yeah, I’ve been enjoying since my last appearance on the podcast, just hearing you both turn into increasingly memed versions of yourselves, just like these strange cartoon character versions of Samuel and Matthew that have appeared and loom large over every episode. It’s great. Yeah, it’s funny because people get into certain in-jokes and then kind of repeat those back at us until we kind of need to shake it off a little bit. So we actually haven’t spoken about sandwiches for quite a while now, probably in any detail, because we became a bit sort of conscious of that. So we’re waiting for the kind of like, the meme meta to shift again to whatever’s next. Look, I’m not talking about sandwiches because it’s kind of an emotionally raw topic for me, because the guy who runs Intermezzo retires this Thursday. Oh my god. And so it’s going to be quite an emotional moment, I think. You know, he’s passing it on to some other people who are going to continue it exactly as it is, but he’s a master. He’s a true sandwich out of them. I’m going to make sure I go there all four days this week then before he’s gone, and then attend his leaving party if he has such a thing. Joe, how’s it going generally? Like, it’s been a year since we had you on for the best 3DS Games episode, and you are definitely partly responsible for us finding an audience, which we really appreciate. So, how’s things been for you of late? Very good. Sorry, you’ve really thrown me off by saying that I’d be responsible for part of your audience. That seems absurd to me. I think you were very good before I was on it, but it’s kind. I’m good. The world continues to be exactly the same as it was, so I have nothing work-wise to update you on. But, you know, it’s all going well. The news continues unabated, unrelenting and unmerciful to, you know, social life. But otherwise, it’s great. Isn’t that now the official motto of IGN? It is. Unmerciful, unrelenting, unabated. Yeah, that’s what we go for. Because everyone always asks what the acronym is about. So we’re just going to change to Triple U. See how that goes for us for a bit. That’s good. Yeah, no, all I do now is play Elden Ring. I barely play games because that game is the only thing I think about. So yeah, that’s where I’m at. Are you still enjoying it or are you kind of getting this sort of like, this is going on for too long feel now that a few of my sort of friends on Twitter have been talking about? No, I truly I have not stopped loving it. I’m kind of I feel like I haven’t hit. I keep seeing people go, oh, the end game is a bit of a slog. But what I’m doing to counteract that is not going anywhere near the end game and continuing to find more and more things to do. It’s kind of turned into sort of an episodic game for me now. I’m treating it like I go on and I go to one dungeon that 20 hours ago made me feel like I was going to be sick and then go in and shoot everything with my new big laser and then finish it and turn it off and go, I have treated this game the way I want to do it. So you’re a sorcery boy. I’m a big sorcery boy. It feels so I know everyone’s like, you can play Souls games exactly how you want to. As long as it works, it works. But it does feel like cheating. Like, basically, I have a big laser and a potion that means I can fire that big laser for about 10 seconds without stopping. And it is just ridiculous. I love it. Yeah. It’s funny because for me, I’ve basically done the same thing I do with all From games, which is I will play a melee class because this is the way it’s probably meant to be played with dodge rolling and such. And then 20 hours in, I’ve sort of just like hit an iceberg and stopped playing it entirely. And that’s happened on about five different games now. So that’s on me, frankly. I do find it very funny. Like just the idea of my character, the sort of role play in my head is he’s this guy who is constantly acquiring like near mythical swords and looking at them and just sort of chucking them over his shoulder because they’re just useless to him. I can’t even pick him up. So he’s just like, oh, great. See you later. We’ll come back to that if I ever decide to rebirth myself from the baby lady in a castle that I met. But for now, I’m just going to shoot one spell forever. Matthew, should we address the fact that the Patreon launched and did really well? Should we like talk about that? I kind of like thinking, what’s a good way of saying we’ve got a little pile of money now? Like, and I just couldn’t quite theory craft that in my head. So I think you’ve done it. You’ve done it very aptly, ably there. Yeah, that was good. Yeah, so we set a 600 pound stretch goal. We blew through that in one day before the podcast officially launched because a listener went and found the Patreon before it was actually meant to be live because I was testing some RSS gubbins. So we sort of soft launched it. And then I was scrambling to kind of get all the different bits on there. But then it’s since made more than 1200 pounds, which we’re amazed by. So anyone at the XL tier has now unlocked like 24 episodes over the next year. So two extra episodes a month, which is really, really good. How are you feeling about it? Yeah, I’m feeling great. I mean, obviously I’m feeling great. I’m trying to be not too obnoxious or smug about it. I was going to make a clanking of Jewels sound or something in the background. Yeah, I can’t really believe it. Really not just being sort of humble and self-effacing. When I say there was a good chance this was going to totally crash and burn. You know, I’ve seen plenty of good people do stuff on Patreon and it not land or not really work for them. And I was fully prepared to be really embarrassed about it and for it to become a big running meme in the podcast about what a disaster it was. It was going to be the new, I don’t know, Wii U of Patreons or something. But yeah, luckily that hasn’t happened. So it’s crowns all round, baby. Indeed, we can offer to pay our contributors as well now. So Joe, if you want 40 quid, just shout, we’ll send over to you. Oh, can I have one of your crowns instead? They sound lovely. Yeah, so Joe, as someone who’s been kind of like, who listens to the podcast, I assume. I mean, I don’t have that expectation that you must listen to it. I am religious in my listening to the podcast, so shoot. Wow, any other kind of observations you wanted to pull out from the last year? I don’t think we’ve done a draft the first time you came on. So that’s all kind of emerged. Like, do you have any thoughts on the overall shift in formats? Just kind of curious to hear some outside perspective on the kind of nonsense within, you know. The drafts in particular, I’ve realised that almost every single time, I disagree with the majority of the audience. Every time a result comes in, I’m like, well, that is just wrong. And that’s not me biasing to one or the other of you. It’s just, for whatever reason, I will always choose the wrong side. I’ve enjoyed the slow shift into what will become a Fleetwood Mac style breakup between the two of you at one day, where you have to stand in separate areas of the stage to do your giant live shows that you’ll have to do. That’s going to be good, when one draft inevitably results in a powerful rift, that will be great. There was one, there was definitely one which was much like spicier, which I felt like was on the cusp of turning bad. Was that Xbox GameCube, baby? I think it was. I think it’s when I dismissed the Xbox. Like, we had to really pull that one back and we definitely thawed as the episode went on. Luckily, the healing was done in-episode with that one, I think. It was amazing. Like, that was listening to you in real time, like, realising your mistake. It was kind of incredible. Like, every single game that came out, you were like, oh yeah, that was actually really good. Just hearing the ice get chipped away from your cold heart, it was great. That’s good. That’s good to hear. Yeah, that one was, it was also right before I started at Frontier. So I was like, oh, if that goes wrong, it’s going to be bad. And it went well. But at the time, I thought this could like completely crash and burn. So I was more tense than usual. And then Matthew was like, fuck this console that has Panzer Dragoon water on it. And I was like, I’m not having that, frankly, sir. And it kind of like shaped the tone from there. So, Joe, we’ve just been covering 2012 this past week as you listened to. So you came up like we discussed. Do you have any kind of like memories of that early kind of period from listening to Matthew talk about working with you? I mean, it was mainly the thing that really sticks out to me about the Wii U. And so I came on. It can’t have been much more than like a month or two before the Wii U arrived, correct me if I’m wrong, Matthew. Yeah, that’s right. I think that’s right. And so my main memory of that really early period was, I think we may have touched on this last time, just not ever seeing the Wii U. Like we knew it existed, but no one had one. And the first time we saw it was some bizarre, like, 505 published farming game, where they brought one into our office. And the only reason we asked them to come in is because we knew they had a Wii U. And so we were just like, it was quite disingenuous. That’s so shameless. It was quite disingenuous, to be honest. But like, we were like, yeah, guys, come in, show us your like, mobile game knockoff that you’re releasing on launch day, so that we can finally see what the hell this console is going to be. Because I think they were the first people we knew who had a Wii U. They had the operating system on it, which is wild. Yeah, because there’s always, yeah, the rush in those early days is like, when can you get a unit in the office to take photos of it? Because you obviously want to do your own in-house photography, so you can start using it. So yeah, I think we did like whatever. We debased ourselves. What we should have done is expense to lunch and just had someone come in and take pictures of their unit while they were out or something. We could have, we could have been sneakier about that. Yeah, I was trying to remember like how it actually came in, because I’m pretty sure we didn’t get like a… There was eventually a debug, wasn’t there? Well, yeah, so we got a debug that didn’t have the operating system on it. So we didn’t know what Miiverse or the Plaza or any of those like weirdo menu elements would look like. And we had this debug. Again, I don’t know what stories I told last time, and I apologize. But the thing that really sticks out to me is the debug had menus that were useless. I don’t know what this is probably breaking some like decade old NDA. Oh, no. It’s all dead. Yeah, like there was a menu on it. We were just clicking everything in there just to see if it would get us somewhere. And I distinctly remember us turning on this one menu that brought up a blue screen with a floating 3D model of a teapot. Oh, yeah, that’s right. And it didn’t do anything. Like it wasn’t like the PlayStation showing you the rendering power of it, like the dinosaur demo or anything. It was just a floating teapot. And I couldn’t work out if it was a joke or if it was like a placeholder or something. And they never got rid of it. The teapot menu was there till the day we threw that debug. Were you in the trash or whatever we did with it? Yeah. Yeah. It was very strange. If only they’d included the teapot in the retail units. That may have changed the fortune. I mean, if they just secretly, you know, like, you know how Nintendo consoles will sneak into the music, like bits of the Fairy Fountain theme or like Tataka’s theme and stuff, if they just hidden the teapot menu somewhere as like an urban myth, that would have been amazing. They could have done some weirdo stuff with that. It would be much more fun to boot up your Wii U if you were like, well, today I get to see the teapot again. Yeah. Honestly, most of my memories of early Wii U are turning my brain off from the fact that there’s a warning sign in your brain of something’s going wrong with this thing. And I’m in my first job just having a lovely time trying to enjoy myself as much as possible. But you do have these moments where you look back and you’re like, oh yeah, you could see that things were going wrong. Like one time I went into Preview, oh, it was something like, was Wii U Play a thing? Like a mini game collection but not Nintendo Land. I can’t, it was something along those lines. I can’t remember what it was called. Not Game of Wario? No, it was, it was me based. And it had like a dude in like a, like a sort of ringleaders costume on the front cover. Oh yeah, it was a bit like, it was a bit like Mario Party, but with me. Yes, yes. Something like that. And I remember going into Nintendo’s office in Windsor to see it, like to review it, but from like an earlier build. And they were basically like, don’t worry, it’s feature complete, everything’s in there. You can come and play it. There’s just, and they kind of alluded to like, you just have to play it at the office for reasons that we can’t really explain to you. When I got there, a PR took me aside before I went in the room. And it’s kind of like, you know, when you see someone in a TV program about to go and see their badly burned relative, they’re like, before you go in, you have to know this isn’t, there’s something wrong that you need to see. And it was, they were like, the PR was just like, you can’t write about this. And I promise it wasn’t, this doesn’t change the game at all. But none of the me’s have heads. And so we were going in, it was me and I think Craig Owen, who was on edge at the time all writing for edge at the time and now is high flying script man. And yeah, we went in and just, it was so eerie. Like some bit of the code wasn’t connecting user profile me’s to the me’s in the game. And it just did it so that they had costumes, but no heads. So it was like floating hats all over the place. It was astonishing. It was so weird. Again, they should have kept that in. We Party You would have been better with it. That was We Party You. I genuinely was saying this, like in, when we were there, like going, this would be really funny if you left this in, you realize like this should be a hidden moat. This should be another teapot. So yeah, a lot of my Wii U memory is based very much on, yeah, just disasters happening and me smiling through them. It was great. So we’ve got a floating teapot and some headless me’s. That’s the kind of like Wii U’s launch sort of subdued up there very nicely. Do you remember when we had to play the games at the Wii U launch and Chandra was presenting it and we were basically like practicing for like, it was almost going to be like our own little E3 presentation where we were doing like live demos. Do you remember that? Yeah, was this in, was that in HMV on Oxford Street? Yeah. God, I really, that really blocks that event out of my head. Yeah, Chandra like volunteered himself to like host the Wii U launch HMV because people who don’t know Chandra, he’s a bit of a bit of a showman. Yeah, so we ended up having a bit like how you hear at E3 everyone practices the demos to do like live on stage to make the game look really good. We were having to do that. I think it was just Nintendo land. We were like demonstrating. And so we were off to the side playing like behind a curtain while sort of Chandra kind of prance around on a catwalk, and they beamed our footage out to the shot. That’s very much a description of the early days of O&M, of my period, us behind a curtain while Chandra does all the showmanship. He is very much like the Wizard of Oz frontman. He’s the big strange mysterious presence that everyone meets, but yeah, we’re all madly behind the curtain peddling away. Yeah, and just like, I think, because at that point it had already sort of been decided, I think, that we wasn’t going to be like massive even. I think, you know, on the day it went on sale, there wasn’t like a huge buzz around it. So just having to do this slightly kind of low energy launch event and just thinking, I’m so glad, like, we’re not on stage doing this. There will be no evidence of us on gamepress.com in 15 years. I know that you’re a big Monster Hunter guy and games that are a bit like Monster Hunter guy. So Dragon’s Dogma, that’s a favorite of yours. I think you’ve written a feature on it for IGN, I believe, when you spoke to the director. So a massive game for you. Didn’t come up in Best Games of 2012. We did mention this is a big Joe Skrebels game. We’ve got to ask you about it. Like, why were we wrong not to have it on our list? Well, I mean, first and foremost, you’ve missed a key progenitor of the Strand genre. So that’s a that’s a big miss from you. I mean, Dragon’s Dogma is… I totally understand why people wouldn’t click with Dragon’s Dogma. I just think that that’s a serious failure of imagination. It is, for those who don’t know, is a western style open world RPG with a very traditional sort of medieval fantasy aesthetic, or at least on the surface it is. It’s goblins and dragons and, you know, bows and arrows and all that stuff. But it was made by Itsuno who’s most famous for kind of leading on much of the Devil May Cry series. And it comes with this truly, truly bizarre set of choices. You can climb almost every enemy in the game. So what this was designed for is like, there’s a big ogre. You climb up it and you stab it in the eye. But you can do that to like passing wild boar. Like you can climb on a boar’s back and like shimmy over it like a little monkey and ride it around. You can pick up like almost any NPC and throw them. So you can just throw people off cliffs. And it had like it had real sort of like line in the sand, like design choices. Like nighttime is basically hard mode for the game. You go around in the daytime and everything’s fine. As it’s turning to night, you’re like, oh my God, I have to get to a town so that, you know, the goblin hordes or the ghost armies don’t come and slaughter me in my, you know, while I’m trying to get to sleep. And most notably, it had this thing called the porn system, which I will say again is the progenitor of the Strand genre, which was you didn’t just create your own character. You also created a second character who was a porn, who in the lore of the game is like this soulless rift creature who follows you around and can be sent or can be hired by other players in their games to act as a party NPC. And then we’ll do stuff with them and if you’ve done quests, that porn will give hints about those quests to people doing them for the first time if they’re using your porn. And then when they come back to your game, they bring treasure from the other people’s games. So it’s kind of this asymmetrical, it’s not multiplayer, but it’s helping other people through your choices and your creations, which is really genuinely extremely cool and there hasn’t been much that’s sort of gone along those lines since. The other thing to mention about Dragon’s Dogma is, I think a lot of people get to the end credits and they were like, well, you know, I killed the dragon and got my heart back, which is the story, not realising that after the credits, there is like an entire other game that is way, way weirder. And like, I mean, I don’t know how far I want to get into spoiling the game, but I mean, let’s just say, Matthew’s obsession with killing God is very much, very much reflected in the ending of Dragon’s Dogma. And then some. It is absolutely wild. It’s the Kirby of RPGs. Exactly. Yeah, that’s what we should be saying. I mean, like, to give you a sense of this, like the level of madness to which it goes after the credits, and this is like right after the end credits, the main capital that you spend loads and loads of time in in this world, a giant crack appears in it and leads to an infinite rift of monsters that you have to fight your way down in order to eventually meet God. Like, it’s completely insane. And it feels like it was written by like 16 different people who didn’t know what all the others were writing. They just had like a general world building document and they were like, right, go off, do whatever you want. And then they just jammed it all together. And it’s just like, it’s truly, I think it’s genuinely magnificent. Like, everything I’ve said makes it sound insane and bad. It’s also like a wonderful class-based RPG with some really interesting mechanical ideas about like, you’ll start as a sorcerer or a rogue or a guy with a big sword, but you can then subdivide those classes and turn into other things. So like, you can become a magic archer, which basically turns into like, a target painting shoot-em-up, or you can become like an ultra sorcerer whose spells will take like 30 seconds to cast, and you just have to not be hit during that time. But if you get to the end of that, you literally pull meteors out of the orbit of the planet and throw them at people and stuff. It’s just so many ideas in one thing. I absolutely loved it. The Sorcerer class in this, isn’t it a little bit like the magician character in Devil May Cry 5? Yes, yeah. Because you’re very frail yourself, but you sort of avoid combat, but summon all this mad stuff to happen. Yeah, exactly. There is a real… And I actually spoke to Itzino about that when the new Devil May Cry came out. I was like, is this a Dragon’s Dogma reference? He was like, I mean, not explicitly, but I do like it. So it does feel like they kind of… He is sort of living out some extra Dragon’s Dogma ideas there. There were some pretty big rumors about a Dragon’s Dogma 2 coming down the line. And I really hope it’s true because I just want to see more of like him playing in that space. He seems so excited by being really weird that I’m just, I’m delighted by. I’ve just started playing this on my Switch, the Switch port, which I think is pretty decent, actually. Like you think it holds up well, it looks nice. And you know, I’ve only ever really known Dragon’s Dogma through what you’ve told me about it. I think there’s quite a lot of Elden Ring in Dragon’s Dogma. There really is. Like the vibe of it. Considering that people were like absolutely losing their shit over Elden Ring, like nothing ever like it. When I was playing it, I was like, this is like aesthetically, it’s quite similar. Like the way the open world is kind of structured, the porn system is very, very similar to the ashes in Elden Ring. Like it’s not worlds apart. It’s also, it’s a game that resists sticking stuff on your map and more gives you kind of, you know, horizon-based landscapes to look at and go, well, I kind of want to see what’s over there. And it rewards you for going places, but it also will completely fuck you up if you go certain directions without checking. Like very, very early on in that game, I remember that there’s a set of woods. And in those kinds of games, you always go looking in the woods. And then there’s just a chimera in there that’s like 300 levels higher than you. And you’re like, well, this is ridiculous. It’s also one of those early games, kind of Breath of the Wild-y, where you can go and fight the final boss straight away. Like you can walk into the tunnel where the final boss is and see him have a go. And it’s all these little ideas that I think have become more and more prevalent in mainstream RPGs in the last few years, where it kind of feels like they were throwing a lot of stuff at a wall and seeing what’s stuck. And I genuinely think it was quite hugely influential, just quietly. No one wants to make another Dragon’s Dogma, but they don’t mind stealing a few bits of it. Yeah, it’s a very cool thing. Wow, so glad I asked about that. Like we’re half an hour into the podcast. Yeah, sorry. No, that’s fine. Like, you know, otherwise I don’t know if that game would have come up otherwise. So I’m glad we could ask somebody genuinely loves it. Here’s the question though, Joe. What’s better, Dragon’s Dogma or Fluidity 2? That’s my question to you. I thought you were going to ask me Dragon’s Dogma or Binary Domain, which is another one that I was very happy to see come up. I have never played Fluidity 2, so I wouldn’t possibly like to comment. But yeah, it’s… I do not like the hard ride that Fluidity comes in for in this podcast. For a game that only appears because we’re championing it, it gets a really rough time. But half of it is you, Matthew. Last week you were going, you literally said, oh, maybe I shouldn’t have put Fluidity 2 in this list. I know, we’ve got to stop doing it. If I was from Curve, I’d be like, oh, brilliant. Yeah, somehow that series has come up like three times. And yeah, it ends with it being kicked for whatever reason. So rough time. Joe, you posted a very good picture of yourself with a Steam Deck. So I have to ask, because I’m still on the waiting list. How’s that treating you? Is that fun time for you at the moment? Honestly, I have almost exclusively played Vampire Survivors on it, which will come up later in this podcast. It’s a very weird console. I’m not sure I actually think it’s good. But like, it’s… Put it this way, Vampire Survivors at the end gets kind of wild and the Steam Deck cannot handle it, which it’s a pretty simple pixel art game, which slightly worried me. It’s also just, it’s a little bit fiddly. Like, you can really tell the payoffs that are having to happen for it to also be a PC. Like, it feels, everything feels just like a little bit more tricky or annoying to get to than I would like it to be. I think it’s a really neat thing. And I do think I’ll use it quite a lot. But it does feel like, I think there will be a lot of people buying this as a handheld console. And I think they will be surprised by the innate limitations of… Well, it’s kind of the limitations created by being so open. Because, you know, I look at my Steam library and it’s like, 30-something games of my hundreds are actually great to play on Steam Deck and will work straight out of the box. And I’ve tried a few others. Like I turned on, what was it? Dr. Langus Gov and the Emerald and the Tiger or whatever that’s called. Just because I’ve been meaning to go back to it for a while. And I was like, and it’s a game that’s about, you know, it’s twin stick control. It’s just looking at stuff and walking about. And it’s fine once you get in the game, but it’s things like the menu, like when you use the touchscreen, the cursor appears in the wrong place and things. And you’re just like, this feels really strange that this doesn’t work quite right. And then having to go into a menu to change the control scheme to be like, okay, now it will work. It’s all just like one step constantly where I’m like, oh, I just have to fiddle about and make this work. But when it does work, it’s amazing. Your appetite for that one step is kind of what defines like PC gamers against console gamers. Yeah. And I think that is true. I just think that when you are playing on something with such a familiar form factor, it’s kind of jarring to have that put in front of you occasionally. I don’t know, maybe I’m possibly being a bit harsh. I think it’s a very clever thing. And I will say those little track pad things that are meant to simulate mouse movement feel amazing. Like they have this beautiful little rumble under your thumb. And as the console’s turning on while it’s booting, that turns on, you can just like muddle about with it and it feels great. So I will say that it’s feedback, it’s lovely. Yeah, it’s quite a confusing thing. I’m not sure I’m sold on it, but I do like having one. Oh, lovely. Well, I’m gonna ask you one more question, Joe, before we take a quick break and get to the subject of this week’s episode. Cause I know you’re a big remedy guy. Next week we’re doing like a Max Payne Games episode. So I was curious, how do you feel about the fact that they’re remaking Max Payne 1 and 2? I saw that while I was a little bit drunk and I lost my mind. I was just, I was so excited. Did you do a bullet dive through the nearest window? I did, yeah. And I did that thing in Max Payne 3 where he like jumps into a bookcase and crumples up like a strange little physics boy. Yeah, it’s, I think it’s amazing, amazing news. Like Max Payne 1 and 2, I think have actually aged quite well. Like they still feel quite nice to play, but the idea of playing them in that Northlight engine that Control was made on and just getting a sense of what like a really modern version of those like Grimey Noir New York locations will look like. You mentioned it briefly in a, maybe it was last week or another recent episode, but you mentioned the sort of theme park section of Max Payne 2. And just the thought of that in kind of Control looks is very, very exciting to me. And I love that there’s been a lot of complaints about Rockstar’s direction in recent years, but if this indicates that maybe with the other stuff they have, they could go in a more like Lucasfilm games direction and sort of license out those things to good people, I would be really into that. So I hope this signals Rockstar’s beginning to open up to like, well, someone else could play around with the things we’re not going to touch. Yeah, I think it’s tremendously exciting. Oh, great stuff. We’ve got to get you on more episodes, Joe. You always slide in there so perfectly. Yeah, like endless takes machine. Yeah, I speak too much. That’s the problem, sorry. No, that’s fine. We’re constantly trying to disguise how tired we are. So you talking does that quite nicely. Let’s take a quick break then, and we’ll get into this week’s subject, which is The Indie Games Hall of Fame Vol. 2. So we’ll be back after some music. Thank you. Welcome back to the podcast. So, The Indie Games Hall of Fame Vol. 2. Our last entry was about half a year ago. You may remember that someone called Catherine Castle. Don’t know much about that person, but you know, added five games. Me and Matthew each added five games. And we’re gonna do another, that format again, basically. So Joe’s got five games, I’ve got five games, so has Matthew. So 15 more games to add to this canon. I’ll tweak them out at some point. I’ve got them written down in a handy list here, so none of our listeners have to go through and listen back to them and write them down for us. We’ve got a unpaid labour force going on in our Discord at the moment, and I’m not feeling great about it, I’ll be honest. But Joe, because I think you specifically mentioned to Matthew you’d be interested in doing one of his episodes. What’s your kind of angle on indie games? What’s your relationship with them? They were very much like my… They feel like when you’re getting into music as a kid, when you start finding those things that are… It sounds very tired, but when you get into the stuff that the other people you don’t know necessarily don’t know and you can start sharing that, and it’s really exciting. I had the same thing with indie games a little bit later on, where when they started becoming a little more visible and easier to find, I really got into the idea of seeing what people were doing on the fringes of games development, because you grow up playing the stuff that everyone plays, and that’s great, but it’s really cool to… I think I grew up at the right time for it as well. I was probably not quite formative ages when indie games started becoming a big thing, but I was certainly in the right period of my life to be like, I’m just going to try everything and see what I can do and see what’s going on. And so, yeah, I’ve always had a real affinity for it. I think in recent years I’ve probably become a little more blockbuster-y. Maybe that’s just down to time and not having the room to experiment as much with my time. But certainly, I’m always keen to see the weirdness that’s going on that will become mainstream at some point. I think a lot, kind of like what we were saying with Dragon’s Dogma before, mainstream developers don’t necessarily copy these games wholesale, but they will often see a little mechanic in a successful one and be like, oh, we could do something with that. And I’m always keen to see that kind of thing going on. Good stuff. More stealth Dragon’s Dogma episode chat. That’s good. That’s the real theme in this episode, secretly. Sorry. No, no, it’s fine. I look forward to it coming up several more times before the episode is over. That should be good. Yeah, I was curious. What shaped your choices this time, Joe? Because I found that with them picking my five, that I wanted to like throw in something that was less obvious, but I ended up picking some fairly obvious ones too. How did you kind of approach that on the selection side? Honestly, listening to the first Indie Games Hall of Fame, Catherine’s choices in particular were like spookily close to the things I would have naturally picked. Including Hold Down, the brick breaker game that she brought up, which is a game I have probably played more than any other in the last three years. I continue to be obsessed with Hold Down. So what shaped it a lot was going, did Catherine pick this one? Yeah, okay. I’ll move on to the next thing. Also what shaped it, I really didn’t want to just do recent stuff. There’s a couple of… Well, there’s one very recent and a few kind of last five years-ish. But I think there is… I really wanted to kind of give a bit more of a broad swathe of time for these indie games rather than just go, like, what have I played recently that I think is good? And these are all the ones that I think really stick out to me as like, I could go back to this today and have a really good time with it all over again. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you’ve got some great games here I’m excited to hear about. How about you, Matthew? How did you approach this process this time? I don’t know. They all seem to be… Most of them are like detective games, weirdly. That’s not that weird. You know, I’ve got a longer list that I’m kind of picking from. I mean, some of these aren’t necessarily like my favorite games of all time. Like, there’s a lot of like, sort of four-star stuff, I’d say. But yeah, I try to pick some things that I don’t always hear about as much. Always nice to come away from these with a few, you know, weird and unheard of things. Yeah. Okay, good stuff. Well, let’s get into it then. So I’m first in the document, so I guess I’ll go first. But the Stanley Parable, I wanted to pick first. So I’ve been thinking about this more since watching Apple TV Plus as Severance, because it’s kind of like a workplace, sort of dystopia game. Essentially, you play an office worker called Stanley, a narrator tells Stanley what to do, and you can follow that through to the end of the game if you wish. However, there are loads of opportunities to deviate from this path, this kind of first person, not quite exploration, first person narrative game, and all sorts of outcomes emerge when you deviate from the path. There’s some very meta ones, some very sinister ones, and some where you break the game entirely. It was the first game I played on my new PC when I bought it in 2013, so it kind of felt significant. I was joining PC game and I was like, well, OK, what’s the hot indie game right now to play? And it has a new addition coming out very soon, I believe, with additional outcomes, which is good. It’s almost like a kind of branching story structure in the form of a game, in that you don’t really affect the outcome in any meaningful way other than a few basic interactions. So it is kind of like you can sort of see the narrative tree in your head as you’re playing it a little bit, but I still really love it. So, Joe, I imagine you’ve played this and you have some thoughts on it. I’m really keen to see this new version they’re bringing out. I think it’s called Ultra Deluxe, because they’ve sent out like a blast about it recently about the release date. And it had this little nugget in there where he said, I think it was William Pugh that one of the co-creators said, essentially, we were going to release this two years ago. And then we kept adding things. And it sounds like it’s either maybe a sequel or like very much like the big end of remake. Like there is it’s not just an upbreds. Like I think there’s probably a lot more new stuff in there. It feels like it’s going to be quite a new version of the Stanley Parable, which I’m super excited about. Like you say, I think the super interesting thing about Stanley Parable is it’s a it has the sort of fundamentals of walking simulator or whatever you want to call that genre. But really, it’s about not walking to the end of the story, but walking to the end of like a series of different stories that you didn’t necessarily know were there the first time around. I think I really enjoy it. Like it’s a very strange, very funny, like it feels extremely early. What do you call them? Tennies? Were they the tens? Yeah, it feels very of that time in a very pleasing way. Yeah, I really like that game. Yeah, I think it’s one of those games. It’s just like full of secrets and somebody picks up the pad for the first time to play it, to try it, will just not anticipate what’s coming. And I have shared this with my partner where she’s kind of played through it and seen what it can do. And it’s like it subverts expectations immediately. And if you avoid getting it spoiled, it will just delight you continually, I think. So yeah, I’m curious to see that the re-release too. Matthew, did you play this one? Do you have any thoughts on it? Yeah, I played it a little bit. I’ve never like mined it super deep because I know that you, you know, it almost becomes quite an effort to get some of the secret stuff in this. There’s quite a big time element to some of them in terms of certain things happening at certain times or something like that. And, you know, people go digging for the achievements and whatnot. I’m more taken with the idea that you just loaded up with Stanley Parable for this new job. This image of you starting on PC Gamer and you just keep talking about Stanley Parable. And everyone’s like, oh, this fucking Stanley Parable guy. What’s up with that? It was a bit like that. It was like, OK. Not everything’s like the Stanley Parable dude. It’s like, I don’t just play Halo. I also play Prison Architect. It’s kind of that sort of vibe. So, yeah, a little bit of that. But yeah, so I really can’t wait to see what this new version is like. I would love to have more opportunities to explore, because you can definitely… There are graphs that just map out the entire path of the game and how you access the different endings. It’s not that complicated to see it all inside a day. So, yeah, more to discover. Sounds good. So, Joe, what’s your first pick? It’s called Affordable Space Adventures, and it is predictably a Wii U game. I genuinely consider it the Wii U game. It’s the Wii U game. I consider this to be the great lost game of the Wii U, because it’s something that will never work on any other format. And quite frankly, I genuinely think it’s the best use of the gamepad that was ever made. Like, better than any attempt that Nintendo made. Because to me, the best moments of gamepad were always when it made the game harder rather than easier. Like, so many people went and put a map or an inventory on it, and it’s like, we’re simplifying your experience. Whereas the moments that really stick with me, the two that really stick out to me are The Wonderful 101 had a section where on the TV there was a spaceship flying through a city, and you realized that your characters were on the gamepad on giant buttons like the piano from Big that would move it around. And so you had to jump on these buttons with your team. And the point was that every time you had to move down, you weren’t looking at the TV, so you’d have to look back up and be like, shit, I’m flying into a skyscraper. And that was amazing. And Affordable Space Adventures blows that up to the size of a whole game. It is a 2D sort of narrative-led puzzle platformer, except you’re piloting a spaceship, and you’re just essentially trying to go left to right at all times, avoiding hazards. The amazing thing being that the gamepad is your cockpit and has a bunch of sci-fi style controls. So it’s like two different engines, an electric engine and a fuel-based engine, like various different toggles and switches that get added throughout the course of the game, and eventually you’re sort of having to micromanage the internals of the tiny little ship on the screen. And so it builds all its puzzles around this idea. It was made by two sets of Danish developers. One was a guy called Nifflas who made the NIT, or Night Games, I never know how you say it, KNYTT, which were sort of narrative platformers, always quite weird, like a vein of darkness under them, but they were presented very benignly. And then this group of strange guys called Napnock who made an indie game called Spin the Bottle Bumpy’s Party, which was very, very weird. Like a party game that was extremely physical and kind of used the Wii U more as an interactive board game screen rather than anything else. And the story was that they were just met over beers and playing games together and started like, if our two sides made a game together, what would it look like? And it turned into this game. And it’s just brilliant. It’s just a really fascinating little experiment that they’ve tailored over, I don’t know, 8 to 10 hours. And it has this amazing ending that used the Miiverse, which is another reason you’ll never see this on anything else. Can I spoil the end of affordable space adventures? So I was going to say, like, you can still play this game, but the Miiverse bit of it, like, won’t work anymore. So, like, if you really want to avoid it for whatever reason, you can jump ahead two minutes. But yeah, tell us how it uses the Miiverse. So the story of this game, it’s sort of a dark comedy. You are a tourist who has been given this spaceship as, like, a rental to go to a tour… like, a tourist attraction planet. I think it’s called Spectaculum. And the idea is you’ve been sold ally, and it’s actually, like, a complete nightmare out there. And the entire game is trying to find a beacon to send a distress signal back. And when you finally find a working beacon, it goes… it brings up the Miiverse screen, and it says, Draw your distress message. And so you draw it, and then you press send, and then the game ends. I can’t remember. There’s probably another cutscene as your character’s waiting to be picked up. And then it cuts to this sort of, like, really shitty-looking office. And a printer is just printing out everyone’s Miiverse distress messages onto an empty floor. And it’s clear that this company has shut down and all these people are stranded on this planet. And it’s just perfect. It’s such a brilliant use of, like, that system and that idea and, like, a little dark joke to put a pin on the end of this great game. I love it so much. And we’ll just never see it in the form it was made to be. It’s a real shame. I would say, like, if you have a Wii U, it’s not going to be killed by that ending being missing. And I think it’s still a truly brilliant idea. But yeah, you do miss that kind of wholesale, like, someone buying into every bit of the Wii U and seeing what they can do with it. I think it’s really admirable. Well, we did say if we hit £1,000 on the Patreon, I would get the Wii U out and plug it into the big telly. So I will do that and buy this game because Matthew’s mentioned it before. Is this a big game for you, Matthew, at the time? Yeah, Joe was very much like the cheerleader for this. I mean, it was big in that anyone who put, like, any effort into a Wii U exclusive was very important to us on the magazine because there wasn’t a lot of that. I looked back, I thought I’d done a review for this, but it came out after the magazine shut down and it was, so what I’d actually done was a six-page preview feature of it, which is wild. Like, that is huge for that magazine. Yeah, we really stuck some effort into it because they gave us quite a generous demo, I think, early on. And yeah, we really put some oomph into it. I would imagine there wasn’t loads of competition for those preview pages just, you know, off the top of my head. I’m putting the boot in there for no reason. That’s absolutely true. They… Interestingly, I think it was this week Nintendo Life did a big Affordable Space Adventures interview retrospective. Or maybe it just got updated and they did it years ago. You know how the internet’s a fucking nightmare for knowing when stuff was actually made? Because everyone updates their pages. But anyway, that’s another topic for another episode. And he cited Steel Battalion as a big inspiration. Because he was like, I love the idea of a massive controller and, you know, you can’t make that physical peripheral for the Wii U, but the gamepad sort of is that. Yeah, I think they called it a heads down display, which I really love the idea of. Like, that’s such a silly little joke. Yeah, it’s really fun. So Matthew, what’s your first pick here? My first pick is Hand of Fate 2, the sequel to the card dealing RPG, where the big hook of this game is that you’re on an adventure and that adventure takes place as you move between playing cards that are on a table. And as you land on a card, the event on that card either plays out as a little, like, narrative vignette where you make decisions, kind of choose your own adventure style, or it might be a fight and then you’ll get whisked into this sort of 3D arena. So if you imagine the story is a deck of cards, and they can be shuffled and cards can be replaced, so you don’t know what order you’re going to be hitting the story events in. So it’s slightly kind of rogue-litey in that way, in that the kind of the order that you happen upon events can change your fate in terms of you might get some equipment early on, or you might hit a shop early on, but you haven’t done enough cards to earn gold, so you can’t buy anything special. But if the cards are dealt to you in the right order, then potentially the game can play out very differently. I mean, Hand of Fate 2 blows the idea up in such amazing ways. Like, it added basically sort of 22 stories, each campaign is a little miniature story, which has its own goal and angle, which keeps it fresh. But as you start each story, you kind of build a deck of narrative cards that are going to be played in that story. So you’re trying to sort of set yourself up for the run you want. So if there’s a particular weapon you like, you’d make sure that weapon card’s in the deck. If you’re like, well, I know that that weapon’s really expensive, so if I load the deck with like, cards where there are games of chance, so I might get gold out of it, so I’ll have a better chance of buying that weapon. So there is like a higher strategic level to what you put in the deck. But then obviously once you’re in the game itself, you’re just dealing with how they’re dealt to you. You know, it is kind of a game of chance. I’ve always loved this game. I thought the first one was amazing. I thought this was just so complete. It’s sort of tinged with sadness because Defiant Development who made it kind of went on a few years after. They sort of ceased the trade. They didn’t go mega bust. Like they still kind of care take all their games, but they’re not like a functioning company anymore. And I never really feel like this found the audience it deserved because like mechanically it’s really interesting. I think it does really great stuff with the kind of the card deck building genre. I think it’s got a really like wicked sense of humour in that the cards are dealt by this Games Master character who you’re kind of in competition with. And he’s quite well written and adds some sort of character to it. Almost like a less scary version of inscription, you know, in that you have this figure who’s there kind of goading you, but he’s a lot more vocal. I may have said this on a previous episode because this was one of my top 30 games of the last generation, if you can remember, all the way back then. Quite low down on the list, but on the list nonetheless. I always felt like if this team had partnered up and made a Fable version, I think this game could have been fucking huge. Because, like I say, mechanically brilliant, tonally it’s very similar to Fable. It’s sort of slightly fairy tale-ish. It’s not super grimdark, it’s not mega D&D, it’s very much its own fantasy universe. It has a sense of humour, but I thought if they’d maybe been able to tie it into something that people were more familiar with, I think this could have found a much bigger audience. The combat’s very Fable-y too. You could absolutely hear Stephen Fry doing that narrator voice as you do your cards and move through that story. That is such a great shout. They made a great game and they won’t get to make another one, sadly, but this one exists. I think there maybe is an even grander version of this in some alternate universe. But it’s just really top stuff, absolutely massive. It’s on just about everything. I played it on Xbox, but I’m pretty sure it’s on Switch now too. Yeah, I think I’ll wishlist that Switch version and come back to it. It’s actually half price at the time we’re broadcasting. We’re sort of recording this, but by the time people are listening to it, it won’t be. So that’s useless information for me. Very good. Yeah, that’s cool. I’m actually kind of surprised, Joe, that Inscription didn’t make your list. Was it just a bit too recent? It’s one of those things. I almost feel like I’d need to quickly check my list. Is anyone from Devolver? No, I almost feel like Devolver stuff is kind of given such a big platform that I barely think of it as indie now. Like, it’s kind of weird. Like, they take in indie developers, obviously, and that’s possibly harsh. But it just feels like everyone sees that stuff. So it doesn’t feel like you’re giving… It doesn’t need the airtime. I absolutely love Inscription. And I love Hand of Fate 2 as well. For very similar reasons. I think there’s something so pleasing about having a game sort of tell its story to you through playing the game rather than like moving from beat to beat. It’s really nice. And like you say, the combat is surprisingly good. Very Batman Arkham in places as well. It really underpins it nicely. So my second pick is The Sexy Brutale, a time loop narrative puzzle game published by Tequila Works, who also I believe helped on the art for this game. And you can really tell, Tequila Works of course, who made Deadlight and Rime. Very nice looking games. I think this has come up on a previous podcast, kind of like Reverse Hitman, where there’s a time loop going on basically during this kind of masked party, and you have to save each of these guests from death while not being in the same room as them when the murder essentially happens. And so that involves kind of manipulating the environment before they arrive and essentially changing the outcome, whether it’s removing the magazine from a gun to stop a shooting from happening, that sort of thing. And then there is an overarching, wider sort of like meta story connecting all of the different murders together that kind of reveals itself once you reach the end, which will take you about six or seven hours. What I love about this is the sense of style is so confident. There is, I would say, the kind of like Final Fantasy VII almost, style diorama locations. They feel like the interiors in Final Fantasy VII a little bit to me. I can’t quite think of a better way of putting it. Just really vibrant and colourful and kind of look like someone’s gone and made them for some kind of art project. Lovely to kind of navigate. The characters are very distinctive. And yeah, I think it’s, while I think like it doesn’t entirely land, the kind of like larger story, the individual moments could be so dramatic. And at first, it’s so overwhelming to be in this mansion and to work out what the fuck is all of this different stuff happening? You’re seeing people move from different rooms and it feels so overwhelming. Then you kind of pick it apart piece by piece. Do you feel like you have a complete overview of what is actually going on in this place? So, yeah, I’m a huge fan. Matthew, you’ve played this one, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I loved it. It’s just so up my street. I remember meeting the developers of this. I can’t remember the UK outfit who teamed up with Tequila Works, their name. I should have written it down, shouldn’t I? But I’ll find it right now. Were they X Lionhead? Was that their, or X Rare? Yeah, they were. They were one of the many Guildford indie studios. Cavalier, sorry. Cavalier, that’s right. I met one of them, I believe his name was Charles, at Rezd. This was an Xbox. Idea Xbox were pushing this quite hard. This is a very self-serving anecdote. I was like, oh, I’m really looking forward to this game. He said, oh, you used to work for NGamer. I really like that magazine. He’s obviously good people. He made a good game. Came out quite close to a book I really love, which is weirdly similar, which is The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stu Turton, which is about a murder mystery in a similar house where the character is stuck in a time loop. I guess the similarities end there, but it was sort of noticeable that they were like two of my favorite bits of pop culture from that time, was that game and this game and that book. Yeah, and I agree with you, like the overall structure, I don’t think the ending quite lands for me, but I really like, you know, every chapter you’re excited to see like what new character you’re going to meet or like how they die, you know, it’s got a real pull through it in that you just want to sort of see what it does next all the time. Yeah, for sure. Joe, I imagine you played this one too. Yeah, I played this. This was like one of those games that I played the entirety of in one small chunk at Christmas one year. It must have been the year it came out. But as a result, I remember loving it, but remember almost nothing of it because you play it so quickly that it almost didn’t have time to sink in. I went back and looked at it recently, just incidentally, and I’d forgotten how like utterly grim some of it is. Like it’s really dark considering how it looks, which was like really like kind of took me back and went, oh yeah, that was a horrible game. But yeah, just a brilliant idea. And I really liked it. When they first announced the kind of concept of that time loop and working through and having to stop things and move on, it sounds quite overwhelming, but it does quite a nice job of sort of parceling out that house and get, you know, moving you through it quite naturally, which I thought was really good. I totally agree on the ending. I don’t think it wraps up perfectly by any means, but I think it’s quite a special thing, like it’s very, you know, prescient of where we got to with time loop games a few years later. Like it feels very of a piece with those things. Did Cavalier ever do anything else? Have I missed, like, their career? I don’t think they have. I have not seen anything else they’ve made. I’ve no idea if they disbanded or if they’re working on something else. I have a feeling they disbanded. But I think there was only a couple of them. I think it was two brothers and maybe a third person. I think they were quite a small outfit. So I think they all just went and got jobs at other studios. Which has happened with another game on my list, actually, where it’s like, I would love to have seen what you could do if you’d have had another shot. Still, a really special thing and perpetually available. It’s on basically everything. I understand the Switch version is a little bit compromised, Matthew. Didn’t Catherine play that and say it wasn’t as good as their console ones? Yeah, I think it is a bit choppy. Good deal, a bit of second hand info there. So, Joe, what’s your second pick? My second pick, the aforementioned Vampire Survivors, a game that came out last year and is super weird. It is essentially a bullet hell game, but the only thing you control in it is your character’s movement. Everything else is automated. And it’s sort of like a love letter to Power Creep in RPGs. It’s this amazing feeling of you start out and you’re incredibly weak. You are a pixel art character. It is absolutely brazen in its rip off of Castlevania aesthetics, which I love, to the point where I think people thought the guy had stolen sprites at one point, possibly. I may have made that up. I don’t think he has. Yeah, I believe it’s a one man game or at least started as a one man game. And then, yeah, the idea is you are a single tiny character in a big space and you move around and whatever character you’ve picked has a single weapon that will fire usually every few seconds. And you just get assaulted by bigger and bigger waves of enemies and stronger and stronger enemies for half an hour. And the idea is if you last half an hour, death comes along and kills you himself because you’re too powerful. But the beauty of it is that you are levelling up almost constantly. And every level up either gives you a new item that gives you a buff or a new weapon type and you get about five of each and then you can get to positions where you’ve levelled up a weapon all the way as far as it can be and then interacts with another item and evolves into an even stronger weapon. And some of them are just absurd. Like, they are designed to be broken weapons where you can essentially stand still and just watch, like, a thousand enemies a second run into your projectiles and not get anywhere near you. And it’s just, like, as I was saying before, it’s crazy enough that, like, the Steam Deck will literally move to about a frame a second once you get to the end when you have, like, five different fully evolved weapons all firing a thousand projectiles a second. It’s just completely absurd. And that’s… It feels like someone who loves that feeling of taking a mechanic in an RPG and making it completely broken. Like, kind of what we were speaking about with Elden Ring, like, just finding something and turning it into the best possible version of that thing to the point where the game literally can’t handle you being that powerful. And I think it’s beautiful. I think it’s a lovely idea. And it’s still in early access. I think they got a big update last week and they keep adding new characters, new ways to get those characters. I think it’s up to, I don’t know, maybe 20 characters now all with different types of weapons and different individual mechanics. I found one the other day just completely by accident who is, as far as I can tell, just is Bayonetta to the point where it turns on like Bayonetta-style chiptune music in the background when you play as her. And like, it’s just wild. Like, it’s such a weird game. I love that it exists. Yeah, I just think it’s so fun. Do you make any, like, strategic… You certainly control the movement. I’ve not played this one myself. Do you make any, like, strategic choices? Do you have any options of, like, what you’re upgrading? Yeah, so it gives you… Every time you level up, it gives you a choice of things to pick from. So you can kind of get towards, like, builds. And as I say, the only way to evolve weapons is to have a component item that goes with it. And you’re not told what those things are. So part of the fun of it is, like… Do you remember that? What was it called? There was a mobile game that was just about, like, combining elements to create new elements. And it was like… And it got into this, like, absurd… God, it was something… Oh, yeah, it was like… It was almost like a play on, like, alchemy or something. Yeah, and it feels a bit like that. You don’t know what’s going to go together, but you kind of guess, like… I mean, it doesn’t really make sense, but you kind of, like… There’s a, like, a special… One of them is like a Bible that floats around you and smacks things in the face. And you can find another item called an empty tome, which gives you cooldown reduction on those abilities. But you kind of look at it and you’re like, well, they’re two books, so if I level them both all the way up, will they interact? And they do. And it’s kind of finding, like, making those tiny little connections and going, OK, I reckon these will work together. And then it does a really nice way of sort of cataloguing. Once you’ve found that for the first time, the next time it will flag, this will evolve this. And so it kind of gives you the sense that you’re, like, piecing the game together over time. I think it’s a really interesting thing. And it’s such a good time. It is perfect for the Steam Deck. Performance issues notwithstanding. Like, I played it a lot on my computer, but as soon as I got it on a handheld, I just have not stopped. It is basically all I’ve used on my Steam Deck for. It feels like a big indie breakout game. It feels a bit like when everyone went nuts for Loop Hero last year. I’ve just not got around to playing it. I keep looking at screens of it and thinking it looks a little bit like Treasures. Bangai-O has a similar vibe where you’re a mech that fires a thousand rockets. And each rocket has a trail. So the whole screen is just like, ah, chaos. That’s where it gets to. I’ve certainly seen people question whether it’s mechanically deep enough. And to that I say, grow up. It’s just like, it is not a game that’s designed to be deep or thoughtful. It is just a game about making as many things happen on the screen as possible and watching skeletons explode. It’s really lovely. I think it’s really like comfort food. Yeah, that’s good. Just imagine you in the IGN comments just saying, oh, grow up. Every response. Yeah, good stuff. I’ve seen this break out. Am I right thinking this is free on itch but paid on Steam? Is that how it kind of works? I don’t know. I paid for it on Steam because I’m a nice boy. I have no idea. You should look that up, listener. I don’t have an answer for you. No, it’s fine. But yeah, available on itch and Steam regardless. And it’s only like, I think, two quid on Steam, something like that. It’s like almost no money. So yeah, that’s well worth a look. Definitely sold by the Bayonetta plagiarism there. That’s exciting to me. Almost no money is very patron. Yeah, that’s my new outlook. But what used to be sort of some money is now almost no money. And that’s how I’ve moved up the social strata as a result of our £1,200 a month, which just ticked up to £1,300 while we were recording this. That’s ostentatious, isn’t it? To just bring that up on the podcast. So let’s move on. Second pick, Matthew, go. Dark Side Detective. Have you played this? I have. I was a big fan of it. We’ve discussed it very briefly on one of the… I think it came up right at the start of one of the Game of the Year episodes. And you talked about how you’d just gotten into it for the first time. But it feels very you on the surface. It’s like a kind of micro point and click adventure in that it’s a series of small cases in this spooky town you play as Detective McQueen and you’ve got his sidekick Dooley. Yeah, the cases, they’re almost designed to be about 20 minutes to 40 minutes. They’re very self-contained. What I love about this game is they’ve taken the point and click game and they’ve basically stripped out all the stuff you don’t really need or care about and boiled it down to just funny dialogue, picking up items and solving puzzles. You don’t even control movement. The character moves between these static screens and stands in the middle. So it’s really, really fast moving because no one really gets any joy, I don’t think, out of watching Guybrush walk very slowly across ten screens in Monkey Island. That isn’t where the pleasure of that game lies. So I feel like they’ve really just taken out anything boring. It strikes this really nice tone where it’s obviously going for laughs. It’s incredibly machine gun fire in terms of its jokes. But it somehow avoids feeling too try hard, which is a problem I have with a lot of modern point and clicks or point and click games that were inspired by your Monkey Islands, that kind of era, is that you get a lot of people who aren’t quite as funny and they’re just trying to do a tribute act. And I think a lot of people mistake, like, snark for humour in point and click games. There’s a lot of smarmy heroes. There’s basically a lot of George Stummards from Broken Sword sort of going around, sort of sneering at everything in the world and people seem to think that that’s a substitute for humour. And this doesn’t do that. It’s very, very charming. It’s got a lot of affection for its world and its characters within it. And so it just feels very kind of pure. Nothing in it rubbed me up the wrong way. And because they strip it right back, you can just focus on, you know, collecting weird objects, combining them. Like, it’s quite silly, but it isn’t as totally obscure and impossible as some bad point and click games can be. I think it helps that it’s like ultra-minimist. Like, it almost looks like Maniac Mansion or something. It’s kind of that level of sort of 8-bit kind of pixels. So it’s very, very easy to kind of pass and see what you’re meant to pick up. I loved point and click games growing up. I thought I was sort of done with it because, like I say, I think the genre became full of like people trying to do Monkey Island. You just weren’t up to it. And the genre got very sort of bloated and unpleasant as a result. And this is just like about as good as it gets outside of those classic games, I’d say. So have you played both of them now, Matthew? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you should play both. Like they’re both, you know, one is just more of the other. Both excellent. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it was nice seeing this kind of take off as a sort of mini indie success story. You can tell there’s a lot of love put into the writing. And I think the characters are genuinely sort of fun to be around. And voiced, which helps as well. Yeah, it’s sort of like had a slightly Dirk Gently-esque vibe to it, maybe. It’s hard to exactly put how to place it totally. But yeah, it feels British in a way that’s not annoying, you know. It definitely goes into your kind of sort of Lovecrafty. You know, it’s sort of supernatural and paranormal stuff in it. But it does that without like going fully into it. You know, often I find, you know, again, Lovecrafty people are a bit tiresome, aren’t they? You’re like, oh, I fucking get it with your octopuses and your fucking infinite abyss of madness and all that bullshit. This kind of has enough of it. It has enough of it for the story to work, but it doesn’t go full into it. It like deftly avoids a lot of major potholes. This one pitfalls, potholes, pitfalls, one of the two. One’s got more of a kind of platforming game energy of those two, I’d say. So on Matthew’s shit list then, we’ve got New Generation of Point and Click Adventures and Lovecraft People. Those are on Matthew’s shit list now. You know what I mean? It’s just Lovecrafty people. They’re always a little bit like, oh yeah, we get it. You’re flirting with madness. I will say that earlier in this very episode, I brought up how Dragon’s Dogma has an infinite abyss of madness in it, and you’ve just basically thrown me right under the bus. Well, no, because, you know, well, I am not a Lovecrafty person. I know firsthand, you are not a Lovecraft north person, so… A sequence of words has never come up on this podcast before. So Joe, did you play these? These were like something that might have crossed your path? I haven’t. And in my brain, they were exactly the same thing as the Blackwell series by YGI Games, but they’re not. So, no, I haven’t played them. But yeah, they do sound right up my street, actually. I need to familiarise myself with them. OK, great. So my third pick, I feel like considering Joe’s rule on the Devolver, I’ve broken it by having an Annapurna game here, but Gorogara is my third pick. I wanted to pick this just because there is still nothing quite like it. And when I was weighing up games for this episode, I downloaded this again on my iPad. This is the perfect iPad game, I think. And then I played like an hour of it almost effortlessly. And enough time has passed. I forgot how to solve the puzzles. And I just think this game is just exquisite. So yeah, this is basically a game where you’re sliding tiles around on this grid of four to essentially find new bits in the environment to continue the story. And what I mean by that is you’ll see kind of like shapes loop between two tiles. Then realize you can place one tile on top of another in order to form a larger shape that then forms a new scene where the character moves into it. Really fucking hard to explain this. When you see it, you’ll kind of know it. But like it’s this storybook-y visual style where it’s just about like this sort of shape association and pokey around the environment. A bit of point and click adventure kind of vibe to it as well with this beautiful music. So yeah, I think it was like originally like an IGF breakout, if I believe. I believe so. Yes, it’s still phenomenal and quite tricky, but not that long. I understand it’s on like Switch as well and maybe some other formats, but it probably worked quite well on PC. But I think like when it comes to sort of indie games I’ve played on iPad and like, you know, mobile gaming is like a big part of, you know, playing indie games. Some of them don’t necessarily translate onto consoles and some are built very specifically for a touch screen system. This is like up there with like FTL for me is like a perfect iPad game. So, Joe, did you play this one? I imagine you did. Yeah, I absolutely loved it. And this is, was this Annapurna’s, this can’t be their first game, but it’s like early, it’s like 2017. Yeah, it feels like it started to set that tone of essentially if Annapurna publish it, I will play it. I think it’s absolutely wonderful. It’s kind of, it’s not quite on the same romance level as last, what is it, last story. Sorry, you’re beating your wife game. Oh yeah, last story. But yeah, very early on in my relationship with my now fiance, we played this together. And it has a very special place in my heart for that. It’s like, it’s a very pleasant game to play just lazily. And yeah, just a really cool idea. Kind of drawn out across just the exact amount of time that you want that idea to exist. Like it doesn’t outstay its welcome, but it does lots of things with it. I think it’s very, very cool. Yeah, like I understand this is in development for years and years. So Jason Roberts is a developer and then like had run out of money at a certain point. And then Anna Perna then sort of like stepped in. And it was this was one of its first published games, according to Wikipedia, Joe. So that would kind of line up. There’s definitely an element where like I got to a point in the story where I was like, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. So I’m just like, I’m just smashing the screen with my finger, hoping to find something. And it’s like exposing myself as a dummy. I truly am, but I’m comfortable with that, but I still adore it. So Matthew, is this what you played? Yeah, I did. I liked it. I think I’m a little cooler on it just because like narratively it’s a little bit lardy da for me. You know, and it has got that air of it where I’m like, yeah, I’m happy to put my hand up and say some of this like I don’t really gel with or like the aesthetic of it isn’t necessarily for me. But yeah, mechanically like super smart. I guess like part of me did wonder at the times if it was a little bit too like trial and error, like I didn’t necessarily get that you could just sort of poke away at it. And there’s only like, you know, a minimal number of things that could happen or could change. So if you just pour away at it like a dumb ape, you will eventually get there, which I don’t know if that’s like a flaw of it. But I don’t think it is because it is that there is like a logic to how it works that you can sort of understand. It just becomes more obtuse, I would say. And you kind of have to go down that path with it, you know. But, you know, I definitely, I respect everyone else’s love for it, is my diplomatic response. But it’s a bit lardy da. Very good. So I don’t mean to come over to edge with that, but… No, it’s all good. So what’s your third pick, Joe? My third pick is Towerfall Ascension, which improbably started life as an Ouya exclusive and then became… I genuinely… this is spice. But I genuinely think this is one of the best platformers ever made, while never being a platformer. Like, the feel of it is so perfect. It’s a… primarily it is a multiplayer 2D bow and arrow combat game. You know, ten a penny in these parts. But it has this really neat conceit of every stage that you play on is wraparound in the way that the original Super Mario Bros is. So if you go off the left side of the screen, you come back on the right side of the screen. And that also applies to your arrows. So it leads to these wonderful moments of four player matches, really frenetic. It’s essentially one hit kill combat in most regards. And you’ll start off when you first start playing with people, you’ll be sort of just bouncing from platform to platform, trying to get a pot shot, has a really nice level of targeting to the arrows. They will generally hew towards the person you fired them at, but they’re not sort of homing. They just they kind of follow the arc in a really pleasing way that feels natural, but means that you’re not sort of completely lost on how to shoot someone all the time. And so you’ll start off by kind of having these little pitted bits of combat. They’ll be over in about 30 seconds. And an hour later, everyone will be going for power ups, finding different arrow types, firing in wild directions away from people to get it off the map and on the other side of the map. And you like it turns into this like wild physics experiment amongst four people trying to kill each other desperately. And I just think it’s like it’s one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played. We played it almost every lunchtime for about a year and a half while I was on O&M and OXM. And to the point where one of the IT guys built a blog that would automatically upload gifts we’ve saved of it to do it every day with showing off our greatest kills. It’s just like a truly magnificent creation. And it’s made by Maddie Thorson who went on to create Celeste, which actually did use that fundamental platforming idea in an actual platformer. So I think it has a legacy beyond the game itself as well that I think is really interesting. It’s a very cool thing. I think this is like maybe up there with Nidhogg as the definitive modern party game. That’s kind of where it stands. It’s like there’s no evening among friends that won’t be improved by playing this. Yeah, yeah, there’s definitely like again, kind of sort of early tens sort of vibes to this. Like I remember playing this a lot like 2014 kind of time. But yeah, good stuff. Matthew, did you partake in the office playing of this? Or were you just kind of looking on huffily? Not as much as the others. I associate this game a tiny bit with me being very stressed at my desk and hearing everyone else roaring with joy while I was basically having a continued one year breakdown. So it’s just what you want when you’re like, oh lunch, the one time where my like ass doesn’t belong to Nintendo and then it’s just played out to this cacophony of, you know, as always the way. Sorry mate. No, that’s fine. It’s all part of it. I’m pleased the joy it brought to the office. You know, it’s always nice where, yeah, multiplayer game kind of gets its claws into everyone. Yeah, just a really like classic easy to pick up kind of. I don’t even know if it is hard to master particularly. Like there’s not a huge amount you can do, but it almost the limited moves you have and what sophisticated things you can do with them. It’s very, very easy to quickly be pulling off some quite rad shit in this game. Yeah, it has a really deft sense of like how much to complicate things. So arrow types generally are pretty simple. You know, you have ones that fly truer or you have ones that… My favorite is one that like lands and leaves behind a packet or like a layer of brambles that will deal damage if someone lands on them. So you’re kind of making bits of the map impassable by missing, which I find really interesting. And things like there’ll be interactive elements where you can knock a lamp off and if that lamp falls, it can kill someone. But it never goes beyond… It never goes to like vampire survivor levels of wild stuff is happening across the screen. It’s quite restrained in how much it adds to the screen. I think that’s always been… I think there’s a real kind of elegance of design to that. Great stuff. I should replace Les at some point. I’ve had it sat there on my Switch for such a long time. But yeah, do you think that’s a proper masterpiece, Joe? Would you have considered putting that in your list of selections? Honestly, that’s one of those ones where I admire it more than like it. I think it’s really, really well put together. I’m just not as interested in a platformer that’s so purely about mastery. I think the platformers I really love tend to be as much about experimentation or exploration as they are or anything else. And I think Celeste hews a little bit to the sort of super meat boy of things where it’s do it right or die. And I played it through and finished it. I think it’s great, but I never got into it in the same way. Great stuff then. So Matthew, what’s your third pick? So I’ll go back on my previous pick. This is my most lardy, dull pick for sure. This is Device 6, the Simogo iOS game. Have either of you played this? I know Chris Schilling is like the patron saint of a Simogo on social media, which is a good identity to forge, I think. So I’ve had this sat on my iPad for such a long time and only ever played it the first few minutes, but it seemed very stylish. Yeah, so it’s like an interactive novel in the most literal sense in that you are reading it almost like an e-book, but the twist is that the text warps and flows to kind of reflect the pace and direction of the story. So if you go downstairs, the lines literally form stairs. If you turn a corner, the text turns 90 degrees and you have to twist your iPhone or iPad to carry on reading. So it makes amazing use of the portability of a mobile device in that you’re basically flipping this thing around and in a couple of puzzles having to do slightly weirder stuff with it. There’s almost a Sing… Well, not almost, there is like a Sing level of ingenuity to this in that how Sing used the DS in Another Code, Hotel Dusk, whatever, where they had real fun with every unique feature of that device. I think Somogo have a pretty good go of that with this in terms of it’s a uniquely portable experience and specifically a device that you can move around in your hands to sort of follow the story. So that’s one layer of like, oh, this is really cool, just from a typographical point of view. And then embedded in it are puzzles, which are hidden in sort of like interactive gadgets that appear as illustrations in the story and their solutions are cryptically hidden in the text or in sound effects that play at certain points or in images that kind of change as you scroll past them. Again, a bit like Gorogoa, slightly hard to describe. Once you see it, you’re like, oh, I get this. Everything you need is like buried in the story and it’s about kind of excavating what the game wants you to do from this text while also enjoying the story. And then it’s all held together with this just incredible sense of style. Like it’s riffs very heavily on kind of surreal 60s television, like The Prisoner, The Avengers, you know, I guess similar things that Deathloop would go on to drink from, very similar kind of slightly out there, pop-arty, kind of very sort of like cool design, jazzy soundtrack. It sort of feels like a thing, like the game feels like a thing that exists within this world. Like it’s all a bit meta, like what you’re doing and how your play experience folds into the story itself is very clever. Probably all done in like three, four hours. It’s not like massively long depending on how stumped you get, but just a really complete, coherent, strange puzzle thing. Yeah, I’ve actually heard people liken this to House of Leaves, which I know that you’re a fan of, Joe. Yeah, it’s got a similar sort of, yeah, exploring the page is a big part of it. Well, that may sound a bit lardy-dart. It’s just very entertaining because it’s kind of, you know, written in the language of like mystery and spy fiction. So it’s very sort of accessible on the surface, I’d say, and kind of rips along at a good old pace. Yeah. Is this your favourite of the Simogo games, Matthew? Oh, God, I’ve completely forgotten the name of their last one. Cyanora Wild Hearts. It’s between those two. I mean, Year Walk is amazing, but it’s also like creepy as fuck and kind of upsets me. So from a pure pleasure point of view, this is maybe a bit more one and done than Cyanora Wild Hearts, but they’re an awesome studio. I absolutely love the stuff they make. It’s wild that that’s a studio that’s made those three games. Like, they’re such a bizarre track record. It’s amazing. This sounds obviously a lot more in common with Year Walk in terms of like the puzzle sort of design and like they want to make something that feels very bespoke to the hardware, which like Year Walk, especially if you play the Year Walk, like Wii U version, which they made like a lot of interesting changes to to really fit it to. I think they’re very, very kind of careful about that. I’m always drawn to developers who kind of go all in on something. You know, it’s something that our friend Rod Broadbent of Daka Daka, who made Scram Kitty on Wii U, was always a huge advocate of. And I bring that up because I’m pretty sure he voices one of the characters in Device 6. I think they all come from a similar pool of, you know, developers who love… They share a sensibility in that they really like want to build for specific hardware, and that’s something they really, really value. And I think that’s just a really cool thing. You should get Rod Broadbent on this show. He’d be amazing. He’s a fascinating bloke. So my fourth pick is the one I’m probably most excited to talk about, which is House of the Dying Sun. So this is essentially like a revival of the X-Wing style of game before Star Wars Squadrons happened. It’s kind of like one part sort of like in a spaceship cockpit dogfighting simulator and sort of destroying sort of specific targets, that sort of thing in a series of campaign missions. But it also has like a tactical layer where you can pause the game and basically command a fleet in like the kind of like midst of battle. So a really interesting combination of stuff. And you can even jump into the different fighters in order to strategically take the edge. You don’t have to engage that tactical layer if you don’t want to. You can use buttons on the controller to like basically just like give commands in real time. And you can just play it like it’s somewhere between like an X-Core, like an X-Wing and a Star Fox in terms of complexity. Like you could definitely play this on a game pad, but it does also feature like flight stick support and you can even play in VR as well. I’ve not tried it in VR, but I got obsessed with this about six years ago when it released. It’s by developer called Mike Tipple who used to work at Bungie and Pandemic. I think the studio was called Marauder Interactive. I think that’s the only thing they made. And I was just really fond of it. It’s like a kind of long time X-Wing fan. And at a time where there weren’t like loads of games like this about, it was nice to see a different spin on it. And the tactical layer was a genuinely new and different thing. And what I really love about it is that it’s got a variety of different difficulty settings. You can smash through the campaign, no problem. It won’t take you longer than like three or four hours. But then if you want to go and replay it and get different kind of like rewards for doing so, there’s loads of like incentive to do so, I would say. So yeah, House of the Dying Sun. It’s always like $5 in a Steam sale or £4.40 or something. So I’d recommend getting it for that if you can. It’s PC only, which may explain why it didn’t quite break out. But have either of you played this game? I realised very quickly as you started speaking that I had absolutely no idea what this was. I thought this was… Is it Race the Sun or Chase the Sun or something like that? Yeah, it was that, which was kind of another indie game that people loved a few years ago. Yeah, so this sounds brilliant and I had no idea it existed. The two sides of the game, when you say like, you know, they can kind of impact each other, can you play either fully exclusively or like, is it very much like a cockpit fighter game first or could you just play the tactical level of it? I don’t think you… I’ve never tried to play it just the tactical layer of it. I’ve only ever played it as like at most kind of 20% tactical to 80% just playing in cockpit. I think because of the difficulty settings, you can definitely just play it in that way if you want to and not bother with it. Like I say, because you can input commands from your ship in real time, you don’t have to engage that layer if you don’t want to. But if you get to the higher difficulty settings, you will need to think a bit more about what the rest of your fleet is doing, I would say. Luckily, I like positive reinforcement, so I’ve only ever really played the lower difficulty settings in this. But I really love it, and it’s like the missions are a bit briefer than playing something like Squadrons. It’s yeah, I think it’s really cool. It’s got a very simple kind of visual style, but a really effective one. The music’s by this guy who like I’d only heard of because he’d done a he’d done like a instrumental recreation of the John Murphy soundtrack for Sunshine. So he was kind of like one of those SoundCloud kind of like does space music kind of composers. And so they tracked him down. I think they seem to develop a track them down and then just hired them to make the music for this. And you get something that’s quite like Battlestar, I would say. What I really like to have booted up this morning to just give it another go. And there was like there’s like a 70s sci fi paperback artwork on this Steam page for it, which I thought was really cool. And it just generally has lovely fonts as well. I love some good fonts. And the premise is super simple. It’s like the Emperor is dead. And like there’s these four traitorous lords, 14 traitorous lords who are basically tracking down. That’s where the that’s the basis of each campaign mission. So yeah, House of the Dying Sun. It’s good. Love to blow up a traitorous lord. Yeah, so yeah, I thought it’s kind of like a more of a heart pick. But critics did like it at the time. It didn’t get like loads of attention, but it got a bit of attention. So yeah, there it is. Almost sounds a tiny bit like when you’re playing like Dynasty Warriors or Warriors games, you’re obviously focusing on yourself. But then it has this sort of like arcade tactical top layer to it, where you’re also like guiding other players around the map and stuff, which can aid you in the long run. Yeah, it doesn’t have Lou Boo in it, I will say that. For shame, frankly. Not one of the traitorous lords, sadly. But yeah, that’s yeah, that might be a good comparison. When people see it, it’s like it’s relatively light. It’s not super intensive managing that stuff. Like it’s just, but it’s just another layer to think about. The cockpit sort of like flight simulation stuff definitely comes first. Guns feel really nice. I imagine this would be good in VR, but I’m not prepared to plug all the cables in and find out. That can be a Patreon stretch goal, two grand maybe. Okay, so what’s your fourth pitch? Stop adding self-serving Patreon stretch goals, which are just things you should be doing. You’re like, if we reach one and a half grand, I’ll have a delicious roast dinner. And you’re like, well, that isn’t… No one benefits from that. No, that’s true. Okay, this is going great, isn’t it? So, what’s your fourth pitch? Question of etiquette. Sorcery is a series of four games that are effectively one long story. Am I allowed all four sorcery games, or do I have to pick one of them? You could go with all four, and then you can explain why one in particular stands out for you. Sorcery is by Inkle, who is one of those developers where I will basically play anything they release. Catherine last time around chose Heaven’s Vault, which I think is probably for me the standout game they’ve made just in terms of its sheer scale of thinking. But Sorcery was one of their earliest projects, and is effectively a recreation on mobile of an old series of Choose Your Own Adventure or Fighting Fantasy books. I can’t remember which series it was a part of. Sorcery? Was it just called The Sorcery Books? I didn’t know if they were part of A Wider Thing. Maybe they were. Sorcery is a very simple you are an adventurer and there is a mad king, go and kill him narrative. And the way these games work is they effectively take the original text but they place it over a sort of interactive map that you move across really beautifully created landscapes that you move a little playing piece across effectively. And it’s a text adventure in essence but with little additions they have made. So there’s a spell casting system that’s done by you pull letters out of the stars and so I think it’s like a fireball is find F-O-F in the stars and that creates a fireball spell. And any time you can cast a spell you’ll be given this sort of letter cloud that you have to pull letters out of so you’ll only be able to choose from a certain amount of spells depending on the stars above you, etc. It has like a little gambling minigame built in. It has this kind of strange, again sort of like a gambling based combat system where you have a certain amount of stamina and you’re wagering how much of your bar you want to use versus the enemy’s bar, which is quite interesting. And it basically uses these systems across four games to tell one long story. But the scale to which the connections and the decisions you make in that story go is ridiculous. Like the sheer amount of effect you can have on that story as you go is kind of crazy. And you won’t realise how much of an effect you’re having on the end in the early games until you get there. There’ll be characters that you’ve met three games ago reappearing effectively. And so it’s always the same locations, but the people you meet in them and the way your character reacts to stuff can be completely different based on each playthrough. And it gets more and more mechanically bizarre as time goes on. The first one is pretty straightforward, like go from here to here and do the stuff. The second one is set in a much bigger city, but with this time loop mechanic where you can effectively play the game forever until you’ve done all the stuff you want to do before getting to the end. The fourth one, just to skip forward, is like a sort of magical castle with this whole mechanic built around those spells we were talking around. And then the third one, which is my favourite, has this wild idea of like there are a series of lighthouses across this vast landscape. And you’re travelling across it and it’s essentially a sort of post-apocalyptic space. And then when you get into a lighthouse and turn it on, it shines a physical swathe of light across sections of the map. And those sections are going back in time, so you’re physically pointing lighthouses across the map and creating entirely different spaces, like painting time travel across this. And it builds puzzles around you going back and forth in time in these areas and meeting people and then even getting to like proper sci-fi horror speculative fiction stuff where it’s like what is the implications of bringing people to life and then moving them around and then turning it to the future again and essentially having killed them in new ways. It’s really grim. And they’re just like, they’re such… In terms of like the kind of choice and consequence mechanics of modern RPGs, there really isn’t much that I think has touched how far Inkle go with it in the Sorcery games. I think they’re really, really special things. I think they’re very underplayed. They’re very cool. Yeah, I’ve always kind of like had my eye on these. They’re just on mobile and PC, I think. I don’t think there’s anywhere else you can play them. Not on Switch, for example. They are… Matthew, to answer your earlier point, they’re a spin-off of the Fighting Fantasy series, so that’s where they come from. Does that make sense? Yeah, I suppose like, how exactly have they adapted the source material here there, Joe? Is it like a one-to-one, this is what you could pick in the book at the time, so that’s what we’ve put in the game? Or is there more sort of like poetic license taken with how they’re adapting those books? If I remember correctly, the core of the story is one-to-one, including like the language used, but they build way more around it to kind of allow for player interaction and, you know, like give you this sense of you having an effect on things. So I think there’s a lot added around the edges, and I may be wrong, but I think the endings are significantly extended. I would have to go and check that for sure. One thing I’ve missed out as well is they have a really neat way of building in the idea of putting your finger in a page on a fighting fantasy book and flicking forward to see whether you want it. They have a rewind mechanic that is effectively you pulling time back to where you want to go, and it is effectively allowing you to make those decisions in a book. So you don’t have to do it at any point, really. I think there’s maybe a couple of puzzles that are built around it. I may be wrong, but yeah, it’s mainly just sort of a difficulty mechanic that is effectively going, look, we know you could do this in the book, so we’ll let you do it here too. And I think that’s a really nice sort of harking back to playing those old games. Yeah, really, really cool. My very basic take on this is that this occupies the most traditional video gamey territory of any in-game game in that it’s a fantasy RPG. And I almost prefer them in this space. I think they maybe have done clever narrative systems or like weirder, sort of tighter little experiments. But I kind of, I do love their structure, their tone, their intelligence, their attention to detail in, you know, mixed in with these more traditional tropes. And I don’t necessarily get the impression that that’s left to their own devices. They’re obviously taking us in much weirder directions. But I would not be upset if they decided to make something which was, you know, Dungeons and Dragons and fights and monsters. You know, I love that they did something so cool in that space. It’s funny that it’s effectively a licensed game as well. Like, I don’t know what the decisions were around that. I wonder if, like, someone went looking for someone to adapt sorcery for modern devices, or whether this was Inkle going, we love these books, let’s try it out and see if we can get in touch. But it’s kind of fascinating as an experiment into how you turn Choose Your Own Adventure into something much, much more fully-fledged video game-wise. Yeah, really, really cool things. There’s some really good GDC talks on these as well, where you think AAA Studios working in RPGs, I guess, could learn so much. They could steal so much awesome stuff from these games that they haven’t. Structurally, the way it serves up some of its story, the way they have almost a bank of random events that they can bring into play at certain places, and the way they think about, or basically hide, the fact that they’re serving up all this pre-written, predestined stuff, but in a slightly randomised way in places is so clever. When he talks about it, you’re like, you could see that being the next step forward in a Skyrim or a Fable or something, but no one has done that. I think you could buy all these in a fat bundle as well, if I remember correctly, so you can bring the price down a little bit. Android, iOS, those are probably the places to play those. Great good stuff. What’s your number four, Joe? I mean Matthew, sorry, what’s your number four, Matthew? My number four is 2000 to 1, a space felony. Never heard of it. Same. I came across this quite randomly. This is made by National Insecurities, who, the game they made after this was in a humble bundle a couple of years ago. It was that Once Upon a Crime in a West. Did you ever play that? No, but I’m sensing a theme in their titling of things. They’re a small, I think they’re Scottish, indie collective who work in the crime mystery space. They make these quite short, hour-long, very cinematic games. They’re set in 3D worlds or 3D modeled. You can explore them. They’re right up my street. I don’t know why they’re not talked about a bit more because they’re very, very stylish. They’ve got a really cinematic sensibility, but it’s executed very cleverly probably to match their studio size and budget. So, like, quite abstracted spaces. You know, it’s not going for, like, photorealism, but it’s very, like, evocative of the space you need, you know, that you’re going to be exploring. So in this one, 2000 to 1, you’ve been sent to a space station, very 2001-esque, to work out what happened to the crew and why their onboard AI has… is not, like, responding to Earth’s kind of instructions. The game is most like Tacoma, in that you’re going to a space station to work out what happened. Here, it’s, like, a lot more explicitly a murder mystery. Like, Tacoma has… you know, the mystery of Tacoma is like, what the fuck’s going on here? Here, you turn up and you basically find all the crew in various crime scenes and have to work out sort of… basically, like, the order of what happened to everyone and, you know, how they died and did they turn on each other or was the AI involved? You know, you have to sort of discover this for yourself. With this, like, quite sort of minimalist art style, though fully 3D environment that you can explore, it just really conveys, like, the scale of this ship, the function of the ship. The crime scenes themselves are really striking because the astronaut suits are kind of crafted in simple colours. So, like, one, like, wears a neon green suit, one has, like, a neon red suit. They almost look like mannequins more than people, but they’re, like, you discover one has been, like, ejected out of an airlock with, like, a rope tied around their neck and they’re just sort of, like, eerily sort of hung in space from this space station, and when you see it, you’re just like, oh, wow, that’s, like, really stark. Like, it’s almost as effective as, like, LA. Noire with all its millions pumped into photorealism. Like, these crime scenes, like, convey something bad has happened just as effectively, which, like, I found very, very striking. You know, I love the drama of walking into a crime scene, I think is a really, like, exciting, kind of evocative thing. And this really nails that. And as you go around, you’re taking photos of everyone and then you basically have to question the AI who kind of exists in this sort of spherical core. And as you take photos of, you know, evidence or characters, they sort of flick up on these TV screens in this room and you can question the AI about those TV screens. You can sort of say, well, what’s this about? What happened here? And then if you think the AI is lying, you can then highlight another piece of evidence that kind of contradicts it. So it’s a bit like Ace Attorney, but you’re putting this AI on trial by collecting information about around its spaceship. It’s about an hour long, so very, very simple, very short. Set to a soundtrack of classical music, you get like the drama of like exploring a spooky space station to like Moonlight Sonata. It’s fucking cool, this game, which is really, really good. It sounds great. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it. There’s something really surprising about this, Matthew. It’s not actually on Steam. If you want to play it, it’s only on Humble. It’s a DRM-free game. Yeah, you can get it from Itch. I think it’s like a Humble, maybe it’s one of their like archive of DRM-free games, so you can like just sign up and get access to it. Joe, I think IGN owns Humble, doesn’t it? Yes, it finds if David’s product. Yeah, so you can probably get this as a freebie, that’d be good. Yeah, I think you can get it on Itch for like a pay what you want. Right, right. I think so, which you obviously should pay because it’s interesting. Yeah, I actually preferred it more to Once Upon a Crime in the West, which is like a Western follow up, which is a bit like The Hateful Eight in a way. It’s like what happened in this cabin with full of cowboys. Right. But that’s also very cool, very similar. They just really sell you on like the fantasy of what you’re doing, but without all the bells and whistles of like a hundred million pound budget that you might think you need. Right, right. I actually think this is better than Tacoma in a lot of ways, and no one talks about it. Yeah, it looks and sounds really cool. So, yeah, that’s awesome. What a great, great obscure recommendation there. And to think we both laughed at the pun titles, thinking what’s crazy old Matthew Castle? It’s a funny, that’s a good quote. That’s a good way of like tying your studio’s body of work together by like having these slightly naff kind of playing words. It reminds me of, you know that composer, Michael Giacchino, or I don’t know how you say his last name, I apologise. Oh, the Incredibles guy, right? Loads of his titles for songs are puns, and it feels like he just does it as like, look, no one’s actually going to pay attention to the titles if they’re called like, the overture. So he just gives them really dumb names, and I quite respect it. It’s a fun way to do it. Yeah, I like that continuity there between like, I don’t know, the soundtracks for The Incredibles and Rogue One or whatever. That’s good. Okay, cool. So my final one here. Really weighed this up because I almost put West of Loathing in here, but I just struggled to really like, remember everything about it. It’s been such a long time since I played it. Really kind of funny, sort of Western game. I may re-risk it on Switch and then talk about it on a future one of these. So I instead went with, I was looking through my PS Vita archive and thought, what did I play on my Vita on the indie side? Because feeling slightly guilty after the PS Vita draft that we didn’t select that many indies because so many of them are available on Switch now or PC. So they didn’t seem shiny when we were trying to aggressively win the public vote. I lost that one, of course, gutted. But yes, so I went with two games here, technically like Joe did with Sorcery. I’ve gone with Olly Olly and Olly Olly 2, Welcome to Ollywood. So these games, I’m sure people are familiar with them. They’re like side scrolling skating games, kind of a mix between playing Tony Hawk’s and like Trials at the same time. You’re kind of like trying to get to the end of a level while being stylish at the same time, but there are fail states. You can like land on sort of like red objects, which send you off your skateboard and then you have to restart the level. There’s like an instant like kind of like load element to it. The second one is definitely better. The second one introduces manualing, much like how Tony Hawk would, the first game wouldn’t have manualing, but they would introduce it later on. Yes, so they did that here. It also looks a lot nicer. The first game is a bit closer to like a Flash game in appearance or something you might see on itch. The second game is more elaborate. It has a kind of like a sort of Hollywood setting where it takes you on to like basically film sets to play through the levels. Pulling off tricks is done mostly with the analog sticks, which works incredibly well. So it’s kind of like pushing down on the stick to sort of grind and then you have to tap a button as you land in order to like safely land with all of your sort of like stunts or moves in this game. So it’s a lot of kind of like careful timing going on. You can do perfect versions of all of the different types of stunts by activating the command at like the last second in order to like rack up the most points and be super stylish. Works incredibly well, gets incredibly hard in the second game in particular. I know there’s been a new one this year, but I wanted to give them a shout out here because I think they really are like perfect to kind of pick up and play games. Joe, have you played these ones? I imagine that you were a bit of an ollie ollie guy, but that’s just me trying to preempt your whole deal. My whole deal? I was a huge skate person, so when ollie ollie came along, it seemed like a very cool thing to me. So yeah, I have played a lot of ollie ollie. I played a bit of ollie ollie too, and I’ve played a shamefully small amount of the new ollie ollie. But I think they are. I must say, I never quite got the full love of these, but I think that’s, again, kind of like with Celeste, I’m far less into the idea of mastery, or like speedrunning does nothing for me. That kind of challenge yourself to be as good as you can at one thing, rather than just playing through it and enjoying it, doesn’t get to me quite as much. So I think that’s why I haven’t truly fallen in love with these, but I love that this series, particularly the transition of the series from one game to the other, I like that they keep experimenting with how it should look, but while keeping the base idea in place, I think that’s really interesting. And yeah, they are very pleasant feeling games. They really nail that sort of easygoing, but you know, lots to it feel in a very nice way. Yeah, you can always pick these up for very cheap. They’re available as a combo pack on Switch, where they play very, very nicely. Assuming you don’t have like the Joy-Con Drift thing, which I imagine will turn this game into a complete fucking nightmare since all the stunts are done with the sticks. And so pulling off more elaborate tricks is done by like spinning the stick in a certain direction. And I’m not always like massive on games that use twin sticks for anything other than moving and aiming. That can always be a little bit risky. But I think they make it work here really well. And like you say, Joe, there is like this big skill ceiling. But if you do just want to fire through the levels and play it your way and just kind of like and get slightly better at the game as you go, even without unlocking loads of kind of like fulfilling loads of the secondary objectives, you can still enjoy on that level, I would say. So, yeah, I wanted to pick something in my list that was a bit more kind of pick up and play. A lot of the other stuff I’ve picked is less like that. So, Ollie, Ollie gets to shout here. Matthew, do you ever play these ones? I’ve only played a tiny bit of the first one and didn’t really click with it. Not for any particular problem with it. I just never really put the time in. But it sounds like I need to go back and give this another go. That’s fine. Well, despite the reticence of my co-host, I’m forcing this into the Hall of Fame. So, we come to Joe’s fifth and final entry. Yeah, Thumper. A rhythm action game that’s so unpleasant, its own creators call it a rhythm violence game. Which I always really enjoyed. I think Thumper might have the most indie cred of any indie game I can think of because it was co-created by two guys. One runs an indie collective in Seoul and the other guy by day worked for Harmonix and by night is in this insane band called Lightning Bolt who refuse to play on stage and always play in the middle of a crowd and wear creepy masks and play incredibly noisy music where you purposely can’t hear what they’re saying. And you kind of get the sense that if you could hear what they’re saying it would be really horrible. I really like them. And together they made this game called Thumper which is a game where you play as a metal space beetle flying endlessly towards a giant face that really reminds me of Willem Dafoe. And it’s bonkers. It is like a really noisy rhythm action game with the sort of aesthetic of a cosmic rollercoaster. But the ways you move around corners or the bumps you hit along the way form part of the music and the rhythm action sections are essentially you having to do certain button inputs to make sure that you hit those things correctly as you go along. It’s really, really hard, but very, very satisfying. The music is like almost purposely overpoweringly unpleasant, but like not in a non melodic way. It’s just like something really bad is happening in this world. And it’s kind of incredible and it is truly incredible in VR. I’m not a huge VR guy, but I once tried to show this to some people in the office. I was like, oh, let me just show you this. I’ll get it started and I’ll stick the headset on and I’ll show you. And quite genuinely, I still am very embarrassed about this. I think I sat there for like half an hour just playing it while they watched me. And eventually they just tapped me on the shoulder and were like, oh, we’re going to go, Joe. We’re going to go and go to the park. It was just me sitting alone in a dark room in the office playing Thumper for another hour. I thought you were going to say like you shit yourself. Well, you know, happened later after they had gone. It was so intense. I actually shit. I became the space beetle. Yeah, it’s it’s a truly like it’s a huge sort of sensory experience in VR with proper headphones on. I think it’s really, really special. Very odd. This the kind of company that made it drool, I don’t think have made anything since. And I’m not sure whether they plan to or not, but I would love to see what they could come up with because it is very one of a kind and like a really surprising thing. So you can’t play this one on Switch, but do you think it needs the big TV or like a monitor to really get it across? I would say as long as you have really good headphones on the Switch, it would still be quite good. I don’t know how it would perform. It’s quite a nice looking game and it really requires, it really needs to be smooth to work. So I wouldn’t be able to say, but I think really it’s the audio experience is the most important thing. I would say, I mean, you know, play it on a big TV if you can, but I don’t think it would be truly hurt by being on Switch unless you were playing it out of the speakers, in which case it might lose a bit of its impact. But yeah, I think it’s kind of amazing as a regular game and truly amazing as a VR game. Matthew is a big fan of abrasive, unpleasant music. Do you have a take on Thumper? Yeah, I have played it. I respect it, don’t particularly like it. I can see that. This music is pretty far from Randy Newman. If he played this soundtrack to Randy Newman, he’d probably die. I would love to watch you at a Lightning Bolt gig. It would be so amazing. It would be something. I only go to gigs if they’ve got seating. I just think of that Hank Hill meme with the headphones, like you listening to this music Matthew. Good stuff. I can’t imagine that band coming to Bath anytime soon. Good stuff. I’ve always wanted to play this. I have it on PC, so I should do it at some point. The fact that it’s rhythm violence actually appeals to me. Good stuff. Matthew, your final entry, what’s number five for you? Number five is Unheard, which is another detective-y crime game. This one isn’t critically beloved, but it’s got a big overwhelmingly positive reception on Steam. It’s just one of these ones which, I don’t know, just clicked with a lot of people for whatever reason. It’s a detective game where you listen to events around a crime and you have to piece together the solution from what you hear. So you’re presented with a top-down map of a crime scene and you can play the ten minutes leading up to… Each case is different. Some of them are set after the crime. Some lead up and contain the crime. And by walking around this 2D map, by getting closer to people, you can hear what they’re saying at any given time. And you basically have to eavesdrop on everyone and then keep looping it back and standing in different places to hear other parts of the conversation, to try and piece together what’s going on. And each level, like, the only… the actual solution to it will just say, like, who did the murder? Or who stole the painting? Once you’ve found out, you just click the person and then it’s done. But it’s kind of the closest thing to playing the film, the conversation, that you can get in terms of… you can’t see any of this stuff. You have to sort of work out what’s going on from… like, you may only hear one half of a phone conversation, but then potentially you could walk elsewhere, loop back the audio and hear the other half of the conversation. Sometimes multiple phone conversations are happening, so you’re trying to work out who’s actually talking to who and what makes sense. A big kind of foothold that you’re trying to get is to put a name to everyone in the level. So once you can work out what people are called, that maybe makes it a bit easier. It’s quite minimalist in its presentation. It’s like looking at the blueprints top down. The voice acting is quite hammy. I think this is a Chinese studio, but the Western voice acting is like super over the top. They sound more like sort of Suda 51 characters or something. They’re all like yelling their dialogue. There’s a guy who really sounds like Travis Touchdown, like one of the voice actors, which is maybe why we’re making that comparison. So it’s not particularly subtle, but I really like the idea of trying to solve a crime from like layering up the audio and working out like what everything means in context. I think that’s a really cool hook, and it’s executed about as well as it can be here. Not massively long, and maybe gets a little silly towards the end, but there’s definitely something here. I’ve never heard of this before, it sounds great. Like, is there a lore reason? Or is there like a… how do they explain you wandering around behind people but also rewinding time? The framing of it is that this woman’s talking to you in an interrogation cell, and they have this sort of advanced technology that lets you replay crime scenes and you have a perspective on it. Like, how it works and what the deal is is kind of part of the story. And that’s when I say it gets a little silly. I could almost do without that, the hook of, oh, this is the future and we have this technology would be enough. But they try to explain it in a slightly dumb way. Okay, good stuff. What do you recommend playing this one on, Matthew? I played it on PC, I don’t know what else it’s available. I don’t know if it’s on any other formats, actually. It looks like it’s on PS4 as well. Yeah, I mean, it kind of makes sense on PC because you can kind of, you know, click around with the mouse. You can also, like, you can annotate the timeline by typing in notes, which maybe makes a bit more sense on a keyboard. So you can say, like, I know for sure, you know, just to remind yourself, because, you know, the whole thing is giving you so much information, it’s like impossible to hold it all in your head. So you’re trying to make notes in the world of like, well, this guy definitely didn’t do this or this guy did that or whatever. So, yeah, PC, I’d say. OK, great stuff. Well, I’ve put that on my wishlist now, so I’m going to pick that up for sure. Sounds really cool. So we’ve come to the end of the episode. That was the fun, question mark? Yeah, it was good. So thank you so much for joining us, as ever. Joe, thank you so much for coming on another episode. I’m sure we’ll have you on again soon. Where can people find your stuff on the internet? They can find me on ign.com. I run the news team, and that’s nice. I also make a horrific podcast called Regular Features that I highly recommend you listen to, but don’t tell anyone you listen to. And I’m on Twitter at 2plus2isJoe. Lovely. I love that you refer to yourself as a podcast garbage year. That’s like such a wonderful sequence of words. I love that so much. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? MrBattle underscore pesto. Okay, great. So now we have a fucking long list of stuff that we do. So first of all, Patreon. patreon.com/backpagepod. You can back us at the £4.50 tier and later this month you will unlock Japanese Crime Fiction 101. You can also listen to our Best Boss Battles episode and there’s a whole roadmap there of what’s coming up for XL tier members. So that’s really exciting. A Max Payne related episode coming next week. That’ll be fun. BackpagePod on Twitter if you want to tweet at us. BackpageGames at gmail.com if you want to email us. And then there’s a Discord that you can find on Twitter as well. So fucking loads of stuff. Quite hard to join up to be honest. Maybe the stretch goal should be hiring a community manager. Thank you very much for listening.