I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how are you doing? It’s a Sunday evening, quite hot outside. There are quite obnoxious children playing in the road outside my house, like it’s the 80s or something. Not happy about that, but you know, otherwise I just ate a goat’s cheese and red onion chutney roll. So I’ve got a bit of Kay Cal in me, ready to chat some games. How are you doing? Yeah, I’ve just eaten a very large dish of curry, so, and a lot of rice, so I’m feeling quite stodgy. So yeah, I don’t know, we’ll see how light I am on my feet today. That’s good. So 45 minutes in, Matthew will just be asleep in this. 25 minutes in, I imagine we’ll get the old Rennie rustling going. Was it a takeout curry, Matthew, or like a homemade one? No, it was actually the height of indulgence. It was one of those cook curries. Oh, okay, fancy. You know, where someone else makes a homemade meal for you basically, and then you buy it from a shop. But you can call it cooking technically to yourself if you want to. Yeah, it’s fine. Like it feels quite sort of wholesome. It’s indulgent, but it is nice. So Matthew, in the time since we recorded our last episode, well, actually this did happen before the episode went live, but the episode last week with Tim Clark on it, you had predicted that Starfield wouldn’t be delayed as a result of various factors. And me and Tim both said that it would be. And then it was delayed to the first half of next year. So how are you feeling about that situation and how that played out? Well, I mean, what the fuck do I know? I guess is the answer to that. Yeah, I genuinely thought, like the way they were talking about it, it didn’t felt like there was a master plan at work. Like I said, in that episode, I think that the vibe it gave off and the fact that they had a promotionally friendly date in mind. I mean, yikes for this year in terms of like, there’s no shape to the year, you know? It’s just a vast void to be filled with interesting finds, I guess. But yeah, I wouldn’t like to be a magazine or website at the moment. It feels like there’s a lot of pressure piled on this next few weeks now of not E3, basically. So I imagine that after that we’ll have a pretty firm idea of what the quote unquote shape of the year is. I think it’s while Saints Row is now going to be the big open world game for the year and they’ll probably get a lot more attention because of it. Yeah, or like Forespoken, for example, that’s still due out this year. I think that’s like September or something. Yeah, yeah, I could do it. Yeah, I could do it. I’d imagine there’ll be a few kind of first party surprises. Yeah, isn’t it? All eyes on God of War, whether or not that sticks around. It feels like it a bit. All eyes on that, like you say, and a new shiny Forza. That’ll probably be this year, won’t it? Yeah, you would think so. I’d be very, very surprised if it wasn’t. But then I’d be very, very surprised if Starfield slips. So let’s not base our expectations on what I would or wouldn’t be surprised about because, as we’ve established, it means nothing. Want to make any other sort of clanger, sort of guesses, predictions while we’re here, Matthew? Mario Odyssey will be out this year, Mario Odyssey 2, something like that? No, I mean, the only thing that the clear run in the second half of the year does mean is that we’ll actually be able to finish Center Blade 3, which will be nice, because those games are universally massive. Across the series, they’re all absolute behemoths, real-time sinks, so yeah, that’ll be good. Okay, cool. So next up, I was going to talk a bit about Patreon. So this podcast and all the podcasts we do are supported by patreon.com/backpagepod. We’ve got a lovely audience there that kind of backs us. There are two tiers. There’s a tip jar tier that’s one pound and then a XL tier for four pound fifty. That gets you two extra podcasts a month, one about games, one about pop culture. As we’re recording this, we’re just about to put up our MCU movies ranked list. We’ve previously done Japanese crime fiction episode on the pop culture side, and then we’ve done Xbox backwards compatibility games and also best boss battles we’ve done too. So we’re starting to rack up now these exclusive episodes and anyone who signs up gets all of them in like one RSS feed basically, or you can browse it on the Patreon app. So that’s cool. Yeah, so next month, Matthew, we’ve got best and worst E3 moments ever and best TV shows of the century. How are you feeling about those? It’s like a thing to come. Yeah, both good. I mean, I watch a lot of TV, as you know. So yeah, plenty of thoughts on that. E3, yeah, I mean, loads of classic stuff. Where does annoying Eugene Acker fit in the grand scheme of things? We will find out. Yeah, yeah, it’s exciting. Yeah, and I hope people have enjoyed the Marvel episode by the time they listen to this. Yeah, and not been too put off by… Well, I was going to say put off by the hot takes, but then we sort of mentioned this on the Discord, like warning, there may be a couple of spicy takes in this. And then it triggered this sort of tidal wave of listener hot takes and all of a sudden we seemed quite mild by comparison. So I’m not too worried about that anymore. Yeah, there were a couple in there. I was like, OK, that’s a bit bonkers. I’ll just close that and go away for a bit. Hopefully it will resolve itself. But yeah, our takes are like… There’s a few out and out apologies as well for our takes in the episode. So it’s a fun one to do. So yeah, the XL tier gets you access to that, if you’d like to listen to it. It’s about two and a half hours of complete bullshit. Matthew’s lagging on theme tunes, all of that fun stuff. Content worth paying for, asterisks. And listen all the way to the end. Oh yes, exactly. Actually, as we’re discussing this, Matthew, I haven’t cut that in yet. It will be in there by the time people have listened to it. So yeah, it’s just making me laugh thinking about it. Okay, so I thought I’d give a quick preview of what’s coming up in June, Matthew, before we jump into the games we’ve been playing. Yeah, listen to the main episodes. Yeah, basically, yeah. So we’ve explained what’s coming up in the Patreon, like I say, best and worst E3 moments and best TV shows of the century. So that’s those two exclusive episodes. But for everyone, we’ve got an ode to the Dreamcast with a returning guest. We’re going to be recording that very soon. Looking forward to that, should be good. And some of our listeners have been able to guess who that person is. But I haven’t said just in case it doesn’t happen. It’ll be fine though, I’m sure it’ll happen. It isn’t Eugene Acker. I should warn you. It’s good to head that off, I think. We let our patrons vote on the next Draft episode, actually. I think it’s March now we did our last Draft, so we’ve given it a big break there. We don’t want people to get tired of the Draft format where me and Matthew compete to pick the best games. People universally voted for an episode on 90s PC games, so we’ll be picking 10 of those each in a Draft format, and then listeners will be able to vote on the winners. How are you feeling about that one, Matthew? A few things I am absolutely rock solid on, because I was playing PC games in the time, and so the genres that reflect my tastes, I’m absolutely fine with. There’s definitely some massive gaps in my knowledge. I’m going to be winging it a bit, with a lot of research, I should add. But yeah, we’ll see, I don’t know. I’ll hopefully find some stuff outside of the really obvious things to talk about. Yeah, I think that should be nice for people. I’ve definitely got some personal 90s PC gaming memories to share in that one, so it should be fun. And we’ve got another episode on whatever E3 is this year, the version of E3 that’s rolling out, the Summer Games Fest, Xbox Conference, all that stuff. We don’t do much in the way of current games commentary stuff, but last year we did do a fun episode where we made a fake magazine out of the E3 pickings, basically. So we’ll do that again this year. And we’ve also got another episode of Games Court. We’ve actually got a massive backlog of Games Court purchases now in our Discord, so the twist with this one is that I will be the judge of our listeners’ purchases. Matthew gets to deliver the opening speech. How are you feeling about all of that, Matthew? Yeah, I’m excited for the shoe to be on the other foot. I apologise for the backlog. It feels like something that happens in real courts. You know, lots of people are waiting for their day in court, and there’s always kind of, you know, judicial problems because of that. I like that our fake court reflects the real world in this way. I love that courts are just destined to be chaotic. Actually, I’ve got a like point, jumping in to correct you, on Samuel Roberts’ Peninsula, the phrase is, the foot is on the other shoe. Just a little sample of the comedic chaos to come for the listeners. So yeah, Games Court Big Judge Sammy Edition, that’s coming next month. It’s difficult because I have read through what I’ll be defending and a lot of them I can’t stand. So yeah, it may be the classic judge defense attorney tag team. Yeah, I always found that’s a good shortcut to justice in my history. I set him up, you knock him down. Yeah. Yeah, I’m looking forward to that. The ones I’m actually I sort of get more angry about are the ones where it’s someone like who comes in and says, I just bought Panzer Dragoon Saga for £4.50. Be lenient, judge. And it’s like, oh, come on, mate. Like, you know, this we’re meant to have some peril here. I understand that the drama is part of the format. I’m only joking, of course. I’m very grateful for anyone who’s throwing their entries in. You’re not meant to want to get hurt. Like, this isn’t like a kind of one of those weird sort of fetish sort of things. It’s not like, yeah, like, won’t we, judge? It’s not, that’s not what we’re going for with this. It’s, it’s, well, you’re meant to want to live. You know, you’re meant to make the case for it. Or the whole thing doesn’t work. Well, the original fun of Gamescourt was like when I would say out loud the Sly Cooper collection on PS3 and then hearing you go, oh, like audibly. Like that was the comedy. So I’m just keen to make sure we got enough of that sort of stuff going on. Hence the, you know, the desire to be hurt basically. That’s where that comes from. So after that, I’ll probably cover all of June. I think, I think that’s four episode ideas. We’ve also got, in July, we’ll do our next big best games of the different year episodes. 2013 is next up. Still debating whether I’m going to bother trying to play Assassin’s Creed 4 Black Flag before then. Probably not, to be honest. So hopefully it’ll make Matthew’s list. We’ll see. But yeah. And I also want to do, Matthew, Nintendo Switch Games Hall of Fame Volume 1 as well, because you and I talked for a while about doing a best Switch games episode, but there’s actually too many Switch games. So Mimico and our indie format should be good. So any thoughts on those, Matthew? Oh yeah, for sure. It’s about time I can big up the, oh, what the fuck’s it called? Oh, Daedalus, The Golden Age of Jazz Awakens. Or whatever that fucking Bazzaro game is called. Yeah, I think it’s about time for some Switch love, and it straddles Generations a little bit. It’s a bit of a weird one. So yeah, about time we big that up. I’m excited to give the official tie-in to UK quiz show Bullseye, It’s Turning the Sun. That is always in the sales tab on Switch. Oh man, that sales tab. That is hard work. Talk about like panning for gold. There’s just grit, grit, grit in that thing. But that should be fun too. So we might have a guest on for that. I haven’t decided yet. But either way, it’ll be good to talk about Switch, like Matthew says. So that’s what’s coming up in the near future on the podcast. Hopefully there’s something in there that you’re excited about. And if you’re not, just come back in August, I guess. We’ll see how it goes. So Matthew, this is another What We’ve Been Playing episode, combined with some listener questions at the end. So let’s see. We’ve got seven games between us here. I’m sure we’ll talk about them in varying length. Do you want to go first up with your first game? I’m going to kick off with The Centennial Case, a Shijima story, which is a FMV mystery game from Square Enix that got announced sort of on the sly about, I think it was this year. It was like three months ago, maybe, after a Nintendo Direct. I think that was the deal. Yeah, wasn’t it announced during a Japanese Nintendo Direct and then we found out about it afterwards? Yeah, I think that’s right. And it feels like Square Enix hasn’t really known what to do with this one. It kind of had the stink of disaster on it, the fact that there weren’t previews and no one was really talking about it massively. But it’s got some real heavyweights involved, in that it’s directed by Kichiro Ito, who is actually the writer on 428’s Shibuya Scramble. So it’s got quite good visual novel heritage. And the question was, was that going to translate into the FMV game side of things? I don’t know, how do you feel about FMV games before we get into this? I don’t think I’ve really played a modern one, unless you count Her Story. And Her Story is such a specific format, it almost doesn’t count. Yeah, I just know that in the case of this game, I messaged you when they announced it and said, Matthew, they’ve announced a game just for you. And that is kind of how I’ve seen it. This has been boxed off in my head as the Matthew Castle game, and now here it is. So yeah, open to them is what I’d say. Okay, cool. I haven’t played every FMV game that’s currently out on the market, but a lot of the ones I have played I thought were quite throwaway and the kind of universal connection between them were that they were often budget in the actual filming. They didn’t feel like film or TV. They felt like something sort of noticeably shoestring from the talent involved to just the production values. Everything about them is little off. Often they’re very sort of throwaway, little kind of two hour, two and a half hour things. So probably the first thing to say about this one, which is quite unusual, is that it’s absolutely massive. It’s about 13 hours long. Really substantial and it’s pretty premium feeling to the point that I’m kind of amazed they didn’t promote this more because it must have cost a fair amount to make because it’s got like a TV season’s worth of mysteries and stories in it. It’s got a pretty big cast, I’d say like, it’s probably like 12 main actors and they’re all like TV names in Japan, I would say. Like you can look them up and they’ve all done a mixture of TV and films. A lot of stuff I haven’t heard of, but they’re not just sort of plucked out of obscurity. So it’s, you know, that’s quite surprising. Before we get into the sort of nitty gritty of it, I’ll break down what it actually is in that it is a story about a mystery writer in present day who is invited to go and stay with the Shijima family at their estate where there are some sort of mysteries that a member of the family thinks she’s going to be interested in. Like a body’s been found under a cherry tree and there’s this sort of weird legend in the family of this fruit that if you eat it you basically become immortal. What’s really cool about it though is that the kind of mysteries that are happening in present day lead this character, Kokugami, to find stories from the past of like mysteries that happened years ago and when she reads the stories she sort of reenacts them in her head so the story also jumps through time. So you go back to the, I think it’s the 1920s and the 1970s, they’re sort of 50 years apart. And so you get these kind of self-contained mysteries along the way which may or may not have an impact on or have an influence on what is happening in the present day. That I really like, just from a production point of view. Like it’s really fun seeing like the historical setting and then there’s like the 70s jazz club and then this quite kind of modern sort of sleek house. That’s all great. The question I was asking when I went into it is like why an FMV game and not a visual novel say, given that that’s what the director is sort of best known for. The kind of key to it is that when it does these sort of flashbacks, she populates the stories with the people around her in present day. So all the actors play lots of characters throughout. And I actually think having these kind of very recognisable through lines and these kind of human performers in the mix really helps kind of tie all these characters together because you’re like, oh, it’s that guy who was like the friendly gardener in 2022 is like this very rich aristocrat in the 1920s and then in the 1970s he’s this slightly bumbling kind of jazz cafe technician. And there’s something about like seeing a flesh and blood performer bring these different characters to life that kind of makes that connection feel like super, super tangible and interconnected. And it leans on that to draw out some really like fun stuff in the mystery because you start like thinking of these characters in relation to who else they’ve been like throughout history. You know, if someone was a murderer in the 1920s, when that character then when that actor then pops up in the 1970s again, like you instantly bring some sort of suspicions to it and it sort of loads the cast with all these like interesting sort of subtexts because of this sort of doubling up, which I really, really liked. So what does like a moment to moment interaction kind of look like in this game? The kind of first, I’d say 40 minutes of a case is basically you just watching like the story play out. Like they go to the location, it will introduce the characters, there’ll be some dramatic foreshadowing of murder, there will be a murder, they’ll investigate it. All this happens very hands off. Like you can make a few dialogue choices, but it doesn’t branch the story. It’s just to kind of like, I don’t know, make you feel present, I guess. And it has this mechanic where you can, the name of a clue will flash up and you press a button to record that clue. But you don’t actually have to do that. Again, like it’s just to kind of like make you feel like, you know, you’re not just watching TV, but it’s kind of like fake interaction, I would say. And then at the end of that phase, you enter what is sort of the big gameplay section, which is kind of you enter the detective’s sort of mind palace, where all those clues that appeared have to be matched to questions that are right, that sort of arose during the watching of it. So it might say kind of, you know, what was odd about the room? And you’ll be like, well, there was that like bit of burnt rope and there was a spill, you know, there was a vase had fallen over. And each one of these things you connect to it, it forms a hypothesis. And in that hypothesis, it kind of says how it thinks that’s relevant. Like, well, I think this burnt rope was here because this thing happened and this thing happened. I don’t think it’s wholly successful, but it is kind of interesting in that what this phase is basically about is creating so many hypotheses. It’s basically like having someone on the sofa going, you know, what do you think that was about? And what did you think that object was about? And what do you think that object is about, regardless of whether or not you actually felt they were important? And it kind of tries to tie them back in. And if you’ve listened to our episode on Japanese mystery fiction, part of the Patreon, one of the things I was talking about on there, and it’s one of my favourite things about particularly Japanese mysteries, is that you tend to have, like, the murder happens quite early on. And then the meat of the book is people sitting around, like, discussing kind of what happened, what they thought happened. And it’s basically the author suggesting all these different ideas to you for you to sort of go, oh, yeah, actually, I kind of like the sound of that, and maybe I’ll riff on that in my own thinking. And this phase feels like a kind of gameplay version of that. It’s trying to create this huge wealth of conflicting ideas, a lot of which you can dismiss instantly, but some of them you’re like, actually, I didn’t really think, yes, that is potentially, you know, I guess if that was true, and then this other thing was true, then it could potentially have played out like this, where I think a lot of mystery games work a lot harder. A lot of detective video games work like a lot harder to kind of hone you in on the answer. They don’t want you to feel kind of confused or puzzled, where this kind of like branches out. It’s very much about the kind of like the huge sort of possibility space that follows a murder, which I haven’t really seen someone sort of try to take that approach before. The flip side to that is like it’s maybe not like massively engaging in and of itself. Like you are just matching these tiles and the visual design of the tiles basically tells you where to put them. Like you’re not really making any deductions. You’re just sort of slotting in. Well, that’s the only thing that can slot in there. And I’ve seen like the reviews that hated this game are like, well, the only bit of game is just matching these tiles and that’s kind of nothing. And I kind of get that. But at the same time, I fundamentally like enjoyed the story and enjoyed the movie sections of it enough. And, you know, what follows the hypothesis thing is the unmasking of the killer, where you start accusing people and you maybe have to answer like seven, eight questions to do it. It’s like a very simplified, like, it’s not even Ace Attorney. It’s just sort of, you know, it’ll say like, what do you think the bucket was for? And then it will show you like three of the hypotheses that you came up with in the previous section. You select the one which is obviously right and then it moves on. But it does have this sort of dramatic charge to it. I think it does capture that moment of the kind of puero unmasking someone in a room and pointing the finger quite well. You know, it’s not massively complicated and I think I only got like maybe one or two answers wrong in the whole 13 hours. But like the fun of, I don’t know, triggering the next bit of this TV show and having like a very minimal input kind of won me over as it went on. So a bit of a niche proposition then, but like if it’s your sort of thing it will definitely… If you play games a bit like this you’ll enjoy it. I wouldn’t want to say like if you love Ace Attorney or if you love Danganronpa you’ll love this. I think you’ll find it like maybe a bit too hands off. But if you specifically loved the mysteries of Ace Attorney and the mysteries of Danganronpa, this is like kind of heaven. I could actually see this being like one of my games of the year weirdly. But then it’s just because the subject matter is like so in my bag. So if you’re Matthew Castle, play this. If you’re not Matthew Castle, ask yourself whether you like the stories of Danganronpa and Ace Attorney. Well, basically it just sounds like it kind of knows its niche, which I guess probably speaks to Square Enix trying to figure out exactly how to sell it. Yeah, it is like 50 quid as well. Well, you know, we’re talking to the guy who bought the Daedalus thing for 50 quid. Yeah, it’s much better than that. When you see the production values, you’re like, oh yeah, I get it. Do you play it on Switch? No, I played it on PS5. PS5 is the only one which has got the 4K footage. Even the PC one doesn’t, I don’t think. That’s weird. Yeah. Not too surprised, but yeah. I’m just thinking that maybe the Switch one works because you can just fucking take it around the house with you when you’re doing shit if it’s going to have an hour and a half for an epilogue. But yeah, interesting. So, The Centennial Case, available in all good games shops now, digital storefronts, Matthew. Oh dear. For the listener’s benefit, the audio, Matthew’s internet dropped out while he was delivering a delightful monologue about The Centennial Case. I think that what we got to Matthew was like which version was the best. We were talking about… I think I was making a joke about how… Oh, I can walk around the house with the Switch. Yeah, good times. Remember that? Ten minutes ago, great times. Who could forget? I was enjoying that riff. Yeah, but I mean it makes sense that we’re talking about The Centennial Case and there should be this big time jump in the episode where now I’m a DJ and you’re a builder. My life was always going that way, to be honest. I think the real direction my life is going is Bradley Cooper at the end of Nightmare Alley. That’s me, basically. I was born for it. Spoiler alert. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so very good, Matthew. Was there anything more you wanted to cover on that one? Only that there’s a lot of really good hats. There’s a detective who wears a very cool hat that I quite liked. Good soundtrack? Got a good soundtrack? Great soundtrack. Yeah, I’ve been listening to it actually loads by someone called Yuki Hayashi. Yeah, it’s just good mystery music and also really fun change ups as he goes through the different eras. So like the 70s is all kind of jazzy and the earlier stuff’s got more traditional instrumentation stuff like that. Yeah, it’s just, I don’t know, it’s just a real treat that came out of nowhere. So Matthew, in conclusion, The Centennial Case, buy it or bin it? Buy it! Okay, great. To the listeners at home, twice Matthew’s internet has dropped out now, so we’ve created all kinds of fucking continuity nightmares in the editing of this podcast. It will not appear seamless to the listeners at home, but hey, we’re doing it on a different day now. Oh yeah, and what a day. Yeah, a Monday. A crazy 24 hours. What did you do in the intervening time between recording part one and two of this podcast, Matthew? Oh, I can’t actually tell you it’s top secret. The Patreon episode came out and people seem to be taking it in the spirit in which it was intended. Yeah, for sure. I was quite surprised actually. It’s created a lot of debate in there. People do have strong opinions on this stuff. So I think it was the right thing in terms of fit for our audience, at least the ones who were talking to us on Discord. But yeah, it’s fun. It’s good to see you out there. We should do every episode like this, except we record a fifth of it on each subsequent day. And then as the episode goes on, you hear our developing thoughts on the week be very meta and strange. But in every single section, Matthew talks about The Centennial Case for 20 minutes. In a really boring way. You were really self-conscious about that, weren’t you? About having to redo it and stuff. Oh, yeah. I don’t know. It’s weird. I’ll tell you what, just to go back to it very, very, very quickly. I wrote a review of it and I’ve never reviewed an FMV game before. And even after 15 years, it’s amazing how something like that can throw me a bit. Where I think, oh, I don’t really have, not the vocabulary, but like, what is the approach? You know, it’s kind of, what do I think about this genre, you know, and where this fits into it? And it was just an interesting exercise. That’s why I was maybe meandering a bit. Yeah, that’s, that is fair enough. So, yes, OK, fine. But anyway. Now you understand why all those people who apply for Star Threat are jobs reviewing Telltale games, Matthew. What massive talents they were to even convey what these games were. Lol. What have you been playing? Oh, we finally got there after 24 hours. Oh, wow, what a relief. Let’s see. OK, Gears Tactics is first up for me, Matthew. 2019 game, released on PC first and released on Xbox later with bits and pieces added to it, I believe. So, lately I’ve been, obviously I bought an Xbox Series X. I’ve been dipping into bits and pieces of that. It’s lovely to go and find games that have already come out that I haven’t played that have the old Series SX enhanced label. And this is one of those. It was just in the mood for some sort of chunky tactics. And this was there to kind of tick that box. What I find interesting is that when they released on console, they actually added a bunch of stuff. So, there’s this thing called Jacked Mode, which is basically like it gives you a little robot helper where you can basically revolve your strategy around it. It will give you little buffs, throw you little limited use weapons, things like that. And at the same time, you get given new variants of the… I still can’t remember. After I’ve completed this game, and after 20 hours, I still can’t remember what they’re called. But the mushy gears of Warboys. The Locusts? Yeah, the big Greylands, that’s right. So, that means you’re basically fighting them, the ones that can explode and ones that have other kind of like different benefits and stuff. And they’re called like Deviant variants of the Locusts. So, you basically have a new tactical option and then a kind of new way to deal with the escalating threat. So, I played through that mode, which felt like the most complete one. Like, this felt like the equivalent of a kind of XCOM style expansion with a load of stuff added to it. So, did that. And yeah, really, really, really enjoyed it. Just kind of like perfect for a pad tactical experience. Really adapts Gears of War nicely. Has a very kind of aggressive approach to tactics where you’re sort of chaining kills together. You’re chainsawing through dudes and generally enjoying lots of satisfying animations. You sort of like, you’re still going to need to play it in cover. Otherwise, you take a bit too much damage. But you’ve got quite hardy warriors. They can sort of bounce back. There are ways to keep them going. And it’s generally really, really exciting. So the one thing like, you know, the one thing that surprised me here is that I am usually so switched off by Gears fiction. Because it’s not really my sort of thing. I’m usually one of the kind of like 50 dudes with giant muscles shouting emulsion every 10 minutes. But like, which always gives me a little chuckle. But like, I would say that it’s kind of to this game’s credit that even though I’m not like the biggest fan of the fiction, I was still able to kind of really engage with it and enjoy it. And the missions were like really nicely designed. Some great story missions in this, a couple of fun bosses. One thing it does that’s not amazing is it has the side mission content to bulk out the campaign. You might need it for the progression curve of the game, but it basically gives you the similar mission types to repeat in different areas of the game. And after a while, you see those mission types a lot and maybe they’re not as fresh the first time as they were. Sorry, the third time as they were the first. But I think in spite of that, it’s still really, really good. I’d probably give it a high eight if I was reviewing it, Matthew. I really liked it. You’ve played this, right? Yeah, I absolutely love this game. I think it’s so good. The thing that’s awesome is you can pull off some absolutely ludicrous kill chains. There’s lots of mechanics that re-energize your action meter in this. And the way you can stitch all that into just ludicrous. And I think you actually have to because it throws quite a lot at you. They tend to swarm you. And I also remember really liking the heavy gunner class in this, which is usually something I do not like in games. Like the heavy or the tank doesn’t really interest me as a trope. But this one’s got this really great thing where I think is it like the longer they’re stuck in place, like the more powerful they become. So actually it really rewards like hunkering down and it kind of represents things which are quite gearsy kind of ideas in a really like fun, tangible way. And you really see the strategic benefit in game. I think this game’s fantastic. And like you’re right, it’s kind of probably like a high eight, but there’s so much room for this to become something really awesome if they get to make another one. Yeah, for sure. Like it’s interesting. It doesn’t have a strategy layer like XCOM does. So like the old manage the battle from a base kind of thing. You do go around in this sort of little car, but all it really amounts to is managing progression for your different guys. But yeah, you’re right. What’s kind of really nice and gearsy about it is how it turns these kind of XCOM style mechanics into quite gearsy things. So I think Overwatch is one of the best things in this game because you’ll set up a bunch of Overwatch points, then your dudes will just absolutely mash through locusts when they run into it like a wall of machine gun fire. And they’ll just get torn apart. And that feels very gears. Yeah. And so it feels like they thought really long and hard about the core gameplay loop and how that keeps things exciting. So yeah, I think it’s great that it’s on Game Pass because it’s the sort of thing that I imagine that like a lot of casual players who maybe have enjoyed a Gears of War game probably wouldn’t have bought. But when it’s on the service like that, I can see them just playing it for years to come, just dipping in and saying, oh, well, this is actually rad. So I’m hoping it’s got an extended shelf life because like I say, there’s definitely room for it to grow. Yeah, I don’t think Xbox had any idea that they had something this good on their hands. They really didn’t talk about it at all. The first time we saw it was like a month before it came out. They did some previews where we did like Zoom previews, admittedly, because of the, yeah, we would have been. Would we have been COVID times? Just about, yeah. It was like it came out in April 2020. So if it’s a month before. Yeah, so, yeah, you know, they announced it E3, never showed it off. No one had high expectations for this. And then it was just a real, yeah, a real pleasant surprise. Splash damage done good. So I’m, yeah, I was very, very pleased by this. I played through the entire thing in my week off. Was that all you did on your week off? Basically, yeah. And drank red wine. And that was it. I think it’s time for me to leave Bath and go somewhere else. Yeah. So, yeah, that was basically my week off, yes. And then I got to the menu screen of Xenoblade Chronicles, and that was it, Matthew, to let you down. I was hoping to talk about that in this episode. Didn’t happen. So why don’t you tell me about your next game? So I’ve been playing Eternal Threads, which is a time-manipulating adventure. Are you aware of this one? I’m not, no. Okay, so a studio called Cosmonaut Studios. I’ve not heard of them. I think they’re based in Liverpool. The setup is that in the future, humankind’s basically being wiped out, or the remnants of humankind are living in some pretty bleak circumstances. And the way they’re dealing with this is going back in time and trying to sort of… My read is they’re trying to change the apocalyptic future of the Earth by making quite small tweaks to the timeline. In this case, the action’s consigned to a house where you’re trying to save the lives of six people who perished in the fire there. And someone sort of explains to you, well, like, these six people will go on to have kids, and they’ll have kids, and they’ll have kids, and maybe it’ll be enough to alter our overall timeline. Which is kind of like a cool hook. And so you’re walking around this burnt-out, sort of husk of this house, reliving pockets of time, which are kind of like played out as holograms. The thing I’d probably liken it to most is Tacoma, in that it’s kind of a walk around the environment and experience the past lives of people through a here kind of ghostly hologram type system. And the difference being that as you watch these events, you can manipulate them. It never really says how you’re manipulating them, but you can basically make people make different decisions. And by doing that, you’re trying to alter their futures to save them from this fire. Whether that’s averting the fire completely or just getting them out the house, or you know, you have to sort of figure this out. So you’re kind of like looking at their lives, trying to kind of work out the little kind of sort of branching points that may build up to some kind of grander, sort of safer future for them. It’s really interesting, because it’s kind of like super sci-fi concept, but it’s also incredibly domestic. Like, the actual tone of it and the kind of drama of it, it’s a little bit Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, in terms of, like, it’s everyday people. Like, these aren’t people who are like, you know, they’re not all like, you know, scientists and like future world saviours, they’re just like students and housemates in this sort of flat, and there’s a landlord character as well. And like, the drama that kind of unfolds between them is quite mundane. You know, there’s like, you know, a pregnancy scare and someone’s thinking about getting a new job and someone’s sister has kind of fallen on hard times and has moved in. And like, I’d say the biggest hurdle with this one is kind of getting over the kind of the gulf between the kind of exciting high-concept sci-fi-ness and how, like, sort of deliberately boring the actual stories are. You know, it’s not like some big, mad, like, you know, the stories are all very sort of soapy and low-key and, like, for some people that may feel like a little too low-energy. Like, the changes you’re enacting aren’t, like, particularly melodramatic or exciting. You know, it’s kind of, can you manipulate people so that they, you know, reveal this hidden pregnancy, say, and maybe that will cause a row, and maybe that row will cause someone to flee the house on the night of the fire, say. So it’s things like that, and I really like the setup of it, for sure. I think the problem with this, and it actually relates quite handily to a question we’ll talk about later, is that I think it takes quite a long time for you to see the kind of cleverness of the branching. Like, I feel like it could do with a really good, like, easy win early on, where you’re like, oh, okay, this is cool, I see this, like, I’m sending ripples through this timeline. Like, you can play for a couple of hours, not really changing anything, you know, like, it took me maybe three hours of playing before, like, someone’s eventual fate was properly changed. So that’s maybe too long. Like, I think you have to kind of forgive it, that slow pacing, and before you get into it. I must admit, I haven’t fully finished this yet. I think I’ve got, like, five of them saved. And even then, I get the impression that it’s not just a case of saving them. It’s can you save them and also not have ruined their lives in the process? You can kind of get them out the house by being quite brutal to them and causing like massive rifts and arguments. And I think there’s probably a more difficult way to get them out without doing that. So, yeah, it’s kind of like, yeah, Tacoma meets everybody’s gone to the Rapture, meets the kind of, like, very British vibe of that, is it Last Stop that we talked about last year? That kind of, yeah, just very, very familiar, but maybe too familiar, if you want a bit of escapism. Okay, cool. I do like the look of it, actually. I think this game did enter my orbit somewhat, like the key art rings a bell, so maybe I did see people talking about it last week. But yeah. Yeah, it just, there’s something quite odd about, you’re setting up all these, like, sci-fi gizmos and it’s all very kind of apocalyptic and, you know, it’s a little bit like John Connor, go back in time and change the world. Except you go back and people are kind of, you know, talking about cereal and you’re like, eh? It’s, that’s a little jock, you know, you almost, there’s not like a big villain in it. You know, every time you think it’s going to be like super dark or weird, it actually ends up being pretty straightforward because it doesn’t want to be that game. Yeah. Maybe there is, you know, maybe I can, like, fuck people’s lives so completely that they become, like, anime villains and start monologuing. I don’t know. But my current impression is that it’s kind of doesn’t, yeah, isn’t interested in that. Sounds like it’s, this features one of history’s classic villains, Matthew, which is the concept of fire. For some would argue that’s the greatest villain of all, wouldn’t you say? Yeah, it’s quite funny, actually. You can watch, like, when you do start changing their futures, you can, like, watch what happens on the night of the fire. And, you know, the people who are saved, obviously it’s like them outside being like, oh, thank fuck, I got out of the house because of the fire. But like the end, like, nodes that you can kind of tap into for the people who don’t escape, it’s just them kind of quietly lying in their beds, I guess, succumbing to, like, inhalation of smoke. It’s just, it’s really like low-key grim. Yeah. So, and you watch that a lot. There’s this one particular woman who have not been able to save yet, and have just watched her, like, you know, slip into sort of unconsciousness many times now, so apologies to her. This reminds me of one of the grimest deaths I gave someone in Dishonored. I can’t remember if I told the story of the podcast before, but like, in one of the DLCs where you play as Michael Madsen’s Dowd character, I sort of, like, darted someone in these kind of, like, swampy area outside this mansion, and they went to sleep, and I picked them up and then dropped them face first into the most shallow puddle of water you can imagine, like so, so, so small, and then, like, in brackets it just said, like, dead. And I was like, that is, like, such a grim death that you get, like, sleep darted and drowned in a puddle. Like, yeah. You drowned in an inch of water. See, I always remember that because I always felt… It felt weirdly harrowing. Yeah. So… Yeah. Well, that’s… Yeah. This has got that energy, too. I wondered if, like, it’s just too British for Americans because it’s very, like, all right, mate, what’s going on? Oh, yeah, I’ll go out and get the milk from the from the off-e or whatever. And you’re like, is this baffling to international audiences? I don’t know. Can something be too British? Well, it’s weird how we consider things that are American to be kind of universal, but, like, not the other way around when it’s the same language. And it’s like, yeah, that’s just that’s just like the weight of pop culture there. But like, I don’t know, you know, you watch plenty of things as subtitles. So who knows? To them, it would just be like the Austin Powers gold member, Shat on a Turtle thing, you know, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, I don’t know. It’s cool. There’s a guy in this game who’s got a huge poster for the video game Zool on his wall. Right. And I have no idea, like, how this came to be, like, why this one… It’s like the only licensed object in this whole game is this poster of Zool. I don’t know if, like, the people who made it have ties to Zool, but, yeah, that’s an odd poster to have on your wall, even in, like, I think it’s set in, like, 2002 or something. It’s… That’s odd. Right, okay. Maybe the localized American version has, like, Earthbound on it or something. Chrono Trigger, something that didn’t come out here. Yeah. Okay, very good. So, yeah, okay, cool. Why is it called Eternal Threads? What’s the name? I guess, like, the threads of time that you’re tweaking. I’d have called it Timefire. Well, you know, I would play a game called Timefire. I’d definitely click on its Steam profile page just to see what the deal was. It’s got big Fake 30 Rock Show Energy Timefire, hasn’t it? I want to check that out. I see it’s not got many Steam reviews, but I’d quite like to play that. Maybe it’s not out out yet. I think it is. Well, it’s, yeah. You know, if you like sort of detective walking sim type games, you know, Tacoma where you can alter the story a lot more, you know, you’ll probably dig it. Timefire available now on PC. I’ve been playing Trek to Yomi, Matthew, as ever. Game Pass merely tells me what games I need to play, so I don’t need to go and find them myself. I’m joking, of course. I play plenty outside of Game Pass, but it is handy when a lot of these quote unquote big Indies drop onto the service. So Trek to Yomi is a Devolver published game. It’s made by Flying Wild Hog, who are the Shadow Warrior developers. I assume they must have scaled up a bit to make this because they also just released Shadow Warrior 3 pretty recently. So I think that maybe there’s a different developer involved, but it’s like one, there’s like this creative director guy, they credit in the thing and then it says Flying Wild Hog. So I assume that’s him. That’s who made it. But yeah, this is kind of like a black and white Kurosawa inspired, mostly side scrolling, kind of. It’s got like adventure bits where you can move around in full 3D. Then when it’s in combat, it’s basically side on. And that’s quite cool because it allows them to do quite a lot of things with sort of perspective that I like. I think the camera work in this is beautiful. So you have this black and white aesthetic and lots of filters kind of mimicking the look of a film from, I don’t know, the 50s, something like that. Something that’s deliberately in that kind of Kurosawa sort of style, basically. If you know any of those films, then that aesthetic will be instantly familiar, I think. But then it has real… Because there are so many Kurosawa fans out there. Well, there are, right? I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. In teenagers? I don’t know. Well, maybe. I’m sure a lot of people have just watched one of them. That describes me. I’ve seen two of his films, you know what I mean? That was very snooty of me. Well, no, I just think it’s like… If you go into BFI Play, you will always find the most obvious Kurosawa films. I feel like in the US, you’ve probably got fairly easy to access. Yeah. I think so. That’s like… You’re on Disney+, and you’re like, oh, maybe I’ll check in on BFI Play instead. Well, you can get it through Amazon Prime, can’t you? So it’s on the old channels thing. HPMAX in the US, I believe, has Seven Samurai and Rashomon, I believe. So you can go find this stuff. But yeah, it’s true, BFI Play is perhaps more niche than I was making out there. So it’s inspired by those, but it kind of just amounts to a fairly simple sort of revenge story where you’re slicing dudes up in a combat system I’d describe as more casual Sekiro. Like heavy on sort of counters, and obviously it’s 2D, so that’s the difference to Sekiro. Heavy on counters, you carry a sword, you take a lot of damage if you’re hit. It does actually have save points, so it’s not quite as punishing as the likes of From’s games. But there’s a lot of like a dude swings at you, you press a counter just in time, then you kind of swipe a dude and then you parry just in time and you swipe a dude and kill them. So there’s a lot of that. Some of the enemies are pleasantly disposable. You’ll get dudes who just run at you on a bridge and you’ll just hit the heavy attack button several times, you just slice through them and they’ll just fall off the bridge each time. That’s really nice. So some enemies are more challenging than others. It has a few hidden areas to sort of pick out. I think this is, I think this might be like a touch underrated. I think it’s got some like, some apathetic notices from people. I think like the thing about it that isn’t like, doesn’t quite click on the level you might want is the combat. The parry window, quite hard to distinguish, seems really generous, but then other times I found it slightly fiddly. And like, there were some enemies where I just like, I was on a complete roll and I just, I’m a bit through them, but then I, I’d get to a similar set of enemies and then find myself struggling to work out exactly when I’m parrying and when the window is and why time was slowing down sometimes. And it’s not as legible as playing something like Sekiro, which always gives you the information you need to make decisions. I thought this was going to be one of those sort of limbo-a-likes where the momentum is kind of built into it. It’s not really designed to hold you back or really challenge you. You’re meant to just consume the cinematic flow of it. Is it not like that? Well, you have a health bar and stuff, and you lose bits of health and then bosses… Yeah, the other thing is that there are some hidden save points in the world. So you do a lot of your planning from save point to save point, much as you would with a From game. But because it’s a 2D game, it’s a 2D presented, it’s a little bit more calculated, I suppose. You just know you need to go in a straight line until you get to the next save point. So if you, say, crawl through a gap in a cliff and you find a secret save point, then that completely changes how you approach those encounters. Because you’re like, okay, there are 10 enemies between me and the next checkpoint. But if there’s a secret checkpoint in the middle, it’s like, okay, I only need to kill five. And so if my health goes down to one, that’s fine because I can save in the middle. But if your health is down to one and you don’t have a save point in the middle, then it becomes a lot harder. So it encourages you to unpick secrets. But I wouldn’t say it quite fits into that mold, Matthew, just because it is like it has combat as a kind of core loop, I guess. And so it expects you to die sometimes. I would say that it’s not like it’s not that hard. Like it’s how long to be has its four and a half hours. I’m halfway through it based on the chapter count. So it’s not that long. But I think it sort of has probably the perfect amount of game that it needs. And I think that the presentation is really impressive. Like the voice acting and stuff, like don’t know really where we’re at these days with like how we quantify cultural appropriation. Because I feel like I saw this around Ghost of Tsushima, but I’ve not seen the same thing here. This certainly, you know, it’s a Polish developer, I believe. And then the story is written by one of the co-founders of Rock Paper Shotgun, I believe. So, you know. Yeah, Alec. Yeah. But like I read a PlayStation blog with an interview with the creative director. And I think he said that like, well, they put loads of effort into understanding this particular Edo part of Japanese history. So you know, definitely like superficially, if you know the Kurosawa films, it will feel like it will look to you like it, I would say. And I think that’s fine for what they’re going for. Yeah. Yeah, I think the Kurosawa thing in Sashima was what kind of like actually annoyed people because they were like, oh, this is Kurosawa mode and it just sort of meant black and white and a bit of wind. And I think people found that like a little reductive. And then that kind of like drew the kind of jackals to it in a way. Where maybe if this is just a bit more kind of authentic or it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t sort of annoy you in an obvious way. Maybe you avoid that conversation would be my guess. Maybe. I think like, yeah, that wasn’t me. I’ve been watching. So I say jackals. I’ve been watching. There’s this stupid Seth Meyers late night chat show, right? He does this thing where he correct. He does corrections where viewers write in with all the things they got wrong. And he does it as a little online short. And he refers to all his all that audience as jackals. Like they’re they’re the people who pick holes in the show. Sorry, that’s pretty sounding as I was being dismissive of people who had problems with cultural appropriation. That wasn’t what I was going for. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t really read into the reactions of Ghost of Shima that much. I just remember there being murmurings of it and then a Kotaku piece on what Japanese players made of it and stuff like that. So anyway, this is I think this is a decent little game, a perfect game pass game that is finite. I think the Sword Combat, even if it’s like slightly fiddlier than Sekiro, it’s perfectly serviceable. This must be like a mid budget game. It feels like I was there playing you’re thinking if I played something like this on PS2, I wouldn’t like I wouldn’t like blink at it. I’d be like, oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense. Like it feels like the scale of like a PS2 game. That’s a weird thing to say. But like it’s just something I don’t know. The production values are like not sort of monster open world level, but they are like above what I would consider what a game like this might have looked like five years ago. It’s the 3D exploration bits. Are they a bit onimusha? I think onimusha probably just draw from similar sources in terms of storytelling. The opening actually really reminded me of onimusha 2 because that starts with a village burning and this starts with it in similar fashion with one person determined to sort of resolve it. So that feels like, yeah, I don’t want to be too reductive though because it’s not something I understand that well. No, I knew you were a fan of that particular series and I didn’t realise this even had that 3D perspective element to it. Yeah, it’s more like, it’s just like the amount of voice acting and the detail put into animations of people at the roadsides and these villages being attacked and stuff like that. It just feels very, it’s very, very cinematic on a level that doesn’t feel like it’s got any compromises to it. One of the weird things is it does actually have performance issues on Xbox Series X. At first, I thought it was trying to achieve like a sort of slower shutter speed to kind of like have that effect. But then there are times where the environments are empty and it looks more like 60 FPS. So I think it really does just have a few frame rate stutters here or there. But no, I think it’s a great game pass game. Like this is exactly what I kind of want on game pass is just is four and a half hours of game. Go enjoy yourself. This year’s Carrion. I think I slightly prefer it to Carrion. Just goes down a little smooth, though. It was a nice palette cleanser after Gears Tactics as well. I just needed something a bit shorter. But yeah, yeah, very good. So what’s your next game, Matthew? I’ve been playing a few hours of Vampire, the Master Grade swan song from Big Bad Wolf. And this is they made this game called The Council, which I don’t know if you’ve played. No, I remember reading about it at the time. It looked quite quite cool in terms of setting and stuff. Yeah, so they I think they called that and they definitely called this this narrative RPG, which is sort of like if you imagine you’re kind of like life is strange, kind of sort of linear, but a 3D world where you have a bit of freedom to walk around, probably a bit more open than like a Telltale game, say. But then it has this kind of like almost like tabletop conversation system with skill points and dice rolls and things to actually decide kind of how much progress you make in a conversation with people and I really like the council. It’s quite balked in lots of ways. Like it’s like maybe a sort of 6 out of 10, but it had some really interesting ideas. So this game is obviously quite similar to that, except it’s set in the world of Vampire the Masquerade, which I’m not a big tabletop guy. I don’t really know a huge amount about the game other than what I have played in like Masquerade Bloodlines, the game from 20 years ago. But like, Vampire Society seems like a really, really good fit for their kind of deal. It’s a world where secrecy is of the utmost importance, the whole kind of pitch of the Masquerade is that that’s the rules which govern their society, which avoids vampires from kind of revealing themselves to mortal kind, but then on top of that you also have the kind of political power structure of their society, and then within that you also have the kind of weird hierarchy of who bit who, like certain people kind of have a natural seniority because they may be, you know, someone else is their kind of vampire child, I think they call it, and so there’s quite a tangled network of power that you step into, which I think is a really fun place, albeit a slightly overwhelming place, like the big problem with this game is that it kind of throws a lot of shit at you and you basically have to jump into the in-game codex like every ten seconds to kind of pass it, so it’s, you know, expect to struggle from the off, I would say, unless you’re really, you know, you’re already really into this stuff. And you play as three characters who are kind of investigating, there’s been this big kind of slaughter of this kind of vampire peace treaty that was being signed in Boston, and you get set tasks by the kind of head vampires called the Prince. These three characters are kind of setting off on their own kind of little paths. I won’t go too deep into them, but they’ve got like different sort of vampire clans which grant them different powers, so there are sort of subtle differences between them. But like you say, there’s this weird like RPG level where you kind of level up their speech powers, because in this game there isn’t any combat, but you instead have these kind of like sort of verbal battles where you’re trying, they’re called confrontations, where you’re kind of locked in with a kind of key character who, if you fail, you might miss like a vital piece of information, which may branch the entire story off down like a more disappointing route, say. Sometimes I think as the game goes on, I think in the later parts, those confrontations can kill you off if you fail them, so like the stakes are pretty high. Stakes. So, yeah, very good, so yeah, but early on, you know, you’re just trying to kind of like absorb this quite weird dialogue system with these skill sheets. It throws quite a lot at you. I actually played a couple of hours of this and then restarted because I felt like I’d made characters who are totally abysmal and if there’s a big failing in the game, it’s that I don’t think it really, it either doesn’t establish like the rules clearly enough that you can make informed choices early on, or it hasn’t accounted for multiple characters enough, like it feels like there are a few powers which are basically essential to making any progress. And if you don’t make progress, you don’t get the XP, which means your character’s going to be equally shit in the next level, which is only going to snowball. So by the end, by all accounts where it’s much harder, you can really paint yourself into a corner, which is a big problem and I should say with this, it’s quite interesting the reviews came out last week and it’s had a huge range. The kind of range of scores you actually very rarely see these days, you know, all the way from like nines down to threes. Yeah, it’s crazy, really interesting and like different problems from different people, like a lot of people agree that there’s like bugs and things like that, and that’s fine. There is this like level of that, but some people love the writing and think it’s like very kind of sort of campy kind of hammy fun that fits the vampire world. Some people think it’s really underwritten. Different people rate different characters, like if you read all the reviews, they’ll all tell you one of the three is the standout and the other two are bad, which is kind of an interesting kind of, you know, look into how split this are. You know, there was a Rick Lane on PC Gamer wrote a really nice review of this. He gave it 50, like he had some big, big, big problems with it and, you know, really justifies his stance on it. But then I’ve also read like equally compelling nine out of tens. Just an interesting thing that I’m trying to pick through. You know, I think I, by all accounts, the earlier parts are stronger because it has this snowballing problem, like you say, that emerges. Right now I’m actually like really enjoying it. Like I feel like it’s a little bit janky and I did have to restart because I made really bad characters. But now I’m into the swing of it. It feels like like you’re playing as three like vampire detectives. There is a lot of dialogue, but there’s also these quite big environments to explore with lots of like environmental storytelling and some quite interesting puzzles. A lot more involved puzzling than like you get in Life is Strange or Telltale. Like there’s some quite big puzzles which if you don’t solve, you know, the level you can still complete it, but you might miss some quite key narrative branches because when you finish a level it says well you could have done this, this and this and you’re like holy shit I didn’t even realise there was like a whole other area to this level that I maybe missed or you know it feels like quite substantial in that way which I actually like, though I know some people kind of don’t like to feel like they’re missing out and stuff so you know factor that into your purchase decision. But yeah I like the world of this, like it’s very not as high budget, it’s quite hitmany and it’s quite a cinematic version of like very luxurious apartments and the vampire society is you know all very sleek and made of marble and reflective. It’s a very like visually appealing like art style and art design. Yeah I like I definitely have to play it through to the end to get a proper grip on it but I’m like I’m sort of digging it so far. Okay cool yeah interesting the score range of three to nine that’s like the deadly premonition range. Yeah yeah I don’t think it’s like funny or quirky enough to maybe like fall in love with it in that way. You know I don’t know if it has like the weird factor which I think is quite key to the the magic seven out of ten yeah but not to get into seven out of tens because I know this upsets our discord. The endless discussion of what’s a seven versus a seven. The Yakuza thing was particularly controversial Matthew. That’s for another episode I think that’s justified we should do an episode on seven out of tens. We have one on the Patreon. We’re coming up for the Excel tier. Oh yes of course you committed to it you may have even suggested it who knows yeah um where you go obviously a good idea if I thought of it okay um yeah oh yeah so I’m kind of I’m into it but I appreciate why others aren’t and I appreciate that it could go to shit so let’s let’s find out uh in a couple of weeks okay cool I said I’m not on the old Epic Games press account that’s like the it’s so I’ll play it immediately is it on there uh I believe it has oh shit okay great that’s uh great great news I will be playing that then fantastic okay um I too will have um a take on it at some point so uh my next game Matthew in fact um we’ve done your games now so it’s just two of mine left and then we get to some listener questions so I wanted to pick up the tunic chat again um my first thought talked about this in I think it was March at this point late March um in our last what we’ve been playing episode it is a kind of Zelda Dark Souls alike I’m sure a lot of A lot of people are aware of it. It’s one of the highest reviewed games of the year so far. You play as the little fox lad, or I don’t remember the gender of the fox, to be honest. Maybe they don’t tell you. A fox creature with this anthropomorphic. And the story is told to you through a mix of like exploring the world. And there’s like tiny little story instances, and then there’s also this manual, which is key to the game, where you go around collecting pages of it. It’s the manual for the game, essentially, but it also contains kind of vital lore information. And it is styled in the way that like a Japanese SNES or NES manual might have been stylized, and really is like a breathtaking work in and of itself. It’s the factor that differentiates it from other games in the genre, I would say. It’s an additional layer of magic that I think works really, really well. So last time I played it, I’d been lost for ages trying to get the shield. It became a recurring gag that I played this game for hours and hadn’t got the shield yet. I’ve now finished the game. Really, really liked it. It’s sort of like the combat- Yeah, I did, I did, yeah. I think the combat is pretty good, but it is like you have a stamina bar, so you do often find yourself just running out of energy and then having to sort of run away or roll away. That feels a bit dark souls-y, and you become more vulnerable when you’re doing that. That part, I’m not like massive on, and also like The Last Boss was just cheap enough that I had to completely redo the way I’ve been playing the combat throughout the game and spam this one move in order to win. So that was like my one sort of problem with it, but I absolutely like adored The Journey. This is going straight into my top 10 for the year. So yeah, really, really good. Some of the later sections of the game are fantastic in terms of the enemy types they offer. They’re sort of like visual sort of splendor of what they show you. A couple of really good bosses as well. And like there are multiple endings to this game. And I think that how they stack those is quite beautiful. And there is like one giant puzzle at the heart of the game. I didn’t do it. I’ll confess I got the old IGN walkthrough out to do this. There was one puzzle involving a closed gate at the very peak of the mountain in the game that there is a solution to solving it that you can figure out using the game. You don’t need anything else, but it is like a Jindosh’s Lock-esque puzzle of like, you know, you might not be able to do this because you need to be a bit of a clever clogs to do it. So I don’t know if any of that sounds appealing to you, Matthew. I assume you’ll go back and play this at some point. It feels like it’s close enough to your interests, you know? Yeah, I need to be in the mood for it. Yeah, I was making decent progress. I can’t remember why I sort of faltered with this one. But I was definitely digging the instruction manual. I think, actually, Catherine wrote quite a good article on RPS about how the instruction manual draws direct influence from specifically the original Legend of Zelda, maybe one and two manuals. Like, there’s direct visual, not trace them, but it’s very clearly riffing specifically on some of those art designs, and there’s parodies of some of the illustrations from that. So, yeah, it’s kind of a… Is this even on Switch? It seems mad if it’s not. It’s not on Switch, no. I think it might just be on Xbox and PC at the moment. Right, but very clearly made by someone who has a lot of Nintendo love, I would say, and kind of has that sort of playfulness. So, yeah, I will go back. I will go back and do it. Yeah, for sure. I’ll add it to the lists. Yeah, for sure. When I’m… Yeah, this was… I didn’t expect to get through this as… Well, I suppose it did take me a couple of months, but I kind of thought it was going to be like a Zelda game in terms of it would have eight dungeons or something like that and loads of items to unpick, but it’s more like three dungeons or four dungeons. And it’s a bit leaner and structured a bit differently to a Zelda game, so it’s not exactly the same. I think I thought the exploration was going to be… It’s going to be like Link’s Awakening, essentially, in terms of how the island was laid out. But it is structured more like a Dark Souls with unlocking new routes to get to places and things like that. So, yeah, really, really good. Gives us some great powers later on, actually. Some sort of game-changing powers that mess with the combat in some fun ways. So, they’re small and perfectly formed. This is fantastic. So, yeah. Yeah, I heard Catherine saying that there was like… I’m aware that there’s almost like a sort of… There are like secret mechanics in this. When you say you had to turn to a walkthrough, was that for that stuff? Or did you engage with some of that stuff and it was just like a massive, difficult, endgame puzzle that got you? Or what was the sort of… So… I mean, I don’t know if it is just like one thing, or like more of the witness. There’s more of like a hidden world to this that you can kind of tap into. Well, when it comes to the big puzzle, I just could not figure out for the life of me what it was, and I wanted to finish it and move on, basically. So I just looked that up because… And then when I looked it up, I was like, oh yeah, that is really clever, actually. I went back and sort of retraced how it actually like works in terms of how the information is given to you as a player. In terms of like the hidden mechanics thing, that is true, because there is… My tactic to defeat the final boss is that there was… They’re basically like… You get elemental powers in the game, and then you get like a magic rod, and they’re separate items. But basically, I read on IGN that if you press both buttons together, then the magic rod fires ice powers out of it. And because the magic rod has a lot more ammo, there is like a huge advantage to doing that. And so you can freeze enemies again, again, again, using this like hidden mechanic, quote unquote. And so that is essentially how I ended up finishing the game. And like that sort of thing does definitely exist in the game for sure. So it’s cool that it’s in there, but because I was never really much of a magic rod user, because it wasn’t that powerful, so it never ended up in my inventory that much, unless I needed to just do some quick ranged attacks. I was never like actively experimenting with it. So I don’t know if that’s the game’s fault or not really. I think it’s cool that it’s in there as a touch. If I’d have tried to like do it the way I play it, which is the way I play all Souls games of like basically just dodging around, rolling, using the shield and stuff like that, I was just going to come unstuck over and over again. So as ever, Matthew, magic breaks the souls like it just is always the way. God bless. So yeah, that’s Tunic, Matthew. My final game of this episode is a game called Little Cities. It is a VR game. It is a city builder on the Oculus Quest 2. A friend of the show, Jimmy S. Bowers, is in our Discord, works for the VR company End Dreams. They make VR games. Sent me a code for this very kindly. I’d had my eye on it for a little while. It’s funny because there’s been like two city builders in a row in VR that came out. So you had Cities VR, Cities Skylines VR, which is a version of sorts of the original game. But I think it is completely custom-made for VR. It’s not the same thing as the PC game. This, which is like, I would say closer to a mix between a game like Cities and a game like Townscaper in terms of like it’s a bit of a mood, a vibe kind of cozy game where you’re not necessarily stressed out about, oh well, I’ve got to build infrastructure. Yeah. I mean, it does have that to it. You do build things like police stations and fire stations. You start with houses, you add things like industry, you add shops and things like that, and you build roads. Then as your population grows, you unlock new types of buildings that you can add to your little island, all held up with this absolutely lovely control scheme, which is like using a Wiimote really in terms of how it uses the VR controllers, because basically you paint roads onto the islands, and then you even paint sets of buildings. You can just draw a whole row of houses on there using the controller. It has an in-game smart in-VR smartwatch that you look at, that has all of the different stats on it, tells you how happy people are, tells you what their needs are in terms of building types and things like that, tells you how much money you have coming in, stuff like that. But just the audio design is really, really good. You can zoom in and out and then the audio will change based on where you are. Loads of nice touches like when you level up your population grows, there’s little balloons that go off and stuff like that. I just sat in it for about two and a half hours yesterday. I really, really enjoyed it. I think it’s only like 15 quid on Oculus Quest 2. It was like a level of city builder I was really into. I’m guessing you’ve never heard of this, right Matthew? I haven’t. No, I’ve never heard of it. I like that vibe because I find city builders a bit stressful. I haven’t got the mind to run or build a city and it just ends up being like chaos as I’m desperately trying to appease all these virtual lives. The idea of something that’s a bit more chill, that you can just drink in from VR. Yeah, that sounds cool. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to ever have the cities thing of basically like a sewage explosion and it’s just shit all over the city. It doesn’t go for that. It’s much more relaxing than that, I think. Well, that’s good. Yeah, but it does seem to have enough of a tail on it in terms of you keep unlocking types of buildings and then you can keep optimizing, knocking things down, filling the space how you want to. Then I think you can expand to multiple islands. I didn’t get to that. But yeah, it’s certainly like you unlock more space on your starting island and stuff like that. Excuse me. So I think a key thing that differentiates this from some of the other VR games I’ve been playing, including some really good ones, is that the interface is really, really good. It feels good to use the controls, but the menus all have nice fonts and stuff and it feels like a proper game. When I’ve been playing stuff like my beloved table tennis game in VR, or even the thrill of the fight, which is the best boxing game you can play on the Quest 2, the menus are very prototype kind of game. It maybe feels like the difference here of having a major VR publisher behind it, is that they get things like interface really right. So it’s really slick and looks really lovely. Actually, all the buildings that have this lovely little model look, like you’re building a big model village basically. You see the little vehicles going around and stuff. But it’s really nice to pull in and out and just survey your island. It feels like an art style that’s perfect for the Quest 2, which is basically like a mobile phone in terms of visual capability. So yeah, I really like it. Little Cities on Quest 2, Matthew, it’s given me some good vibes the last few days. Nice. So everyone tap up Jimmy S. Bowers. Yeah, that’s exactly what the message is here. Please hound him on Discord. No, don’t really. It was good because I sort of like on off with the Quest 2 since I got the Xbox Series X’s, fell out of favor a little bit, felt slightly bad about that. So it’s nice having a reason to turn it back on. Also, Rezzy Mercenaries is out, so we’ll give that a bit of a try. We’ve had a Quest in the house for ages, a kind of hangover from Catherine’s hardware editing days, and we had to give it back. So we’re now no longer a VR household. Oh no, that’s gutting, what a shame. Yeah. Hey, what do you think the Patreon’s money is for, Matthew, if not for preposterous whims, gaming purchases? Okay, good. So now, Matthew, we transition to some listener questions. Do you want to read out this first one? Yeah. Should we have a break so we have a little tune? Oh yeah, let’s do that. Let’s put some game music in here, probably from a centennial case in my new happy castle. Oh, it’s gonna react to the music. Oh, yeah. Sorry, go on, go ahead. Wow, that was lovely. Oh, cracking tune. Absolutely just vibes. Oh, man. Do the hosts of this podcast have great taste? Okay, now for some questions, Matthew. So why don’t you go with the first one? Well, it doesn’t say deer, so that’s a lie. Lords of pulping, how do you go about managing this deerscord slash any other community channels you have worked on in the past? Years ago, I did a similar-ish thing for work and I completely bollocksed it. I couldn’t work out the right amount of time to spend on it and would flitter from happily engaging in chat to being deeply offended in the time it takes Vader to steal the life of an innocent wookie. That’s from PocketWatts, thank you for that. Okay, good. PocketWatts, okay, I always thought it was like Pocky Twats, but PocketWatts makes more sense, so yeah, that’s good. So I guess, I’ve still been doing it by the seat of my pants really, so we’ve got a Discord for, I’m sure a lot of listeners know by this point, we have more than 400 people in there now, Matthew. It’s pretty good, isn’t it? So we built a little community because we wanted to help people solidify, I guess, their interest in the podcast when we had a Discord. We had a Patreon coming. People can have that level of engagement, tell us what they think. We realized there wasn’t one place people could really go and share their deep thoughts on the podcast and give us precious games, court entries and all that sort of thing. We have one moderator so far, Sam, in the Discord. We may add another, thinking of asking John Cheetham if he fancies it, Matthew. Truth is, we just set the rules and then you just hope that some twats don’t jump in and hijack the whole thing, which could still happen. What are your thoughts on this, Matthew? Yeah, I don’t keep too close an eye on the Discord. I must admit, I sit that one out. I did used to manage the comments on the RPS YouTube. And I remember the first thing, when I joined Gamer Network, you get given ceremoniously a list of horrible words to put in your banned word list. Johnny Chiodini on You’re a Gamer had the go-to list of like, if you just copy and paste this in, this will cut out most of the really ugly stuff that can happen in comments on the YouTube videos. And it’s just the worst document ever, because it’s just eye-wateringly unpleasant and cruel and toxic. And then I added to it loads. I really, really policed that channel hard. I had a zero tolerance. I shadow banned so many people on RPS YouTube channel, because that way you don’t know your band, so you just keep posting your blithering shit and no one will ever hear it. It’s fantastic. It’s total limbo. But also, yeah, I was just really, really on top of it. Like I was super into like moderating it. Some would say it’s like extreme censorship. Like you literally, if you write a comment with the word cyberpunk, it won’t appear under the videos on RPS, because we had so many vile, vile people giving us shit. I think some YouTube hate preacher set them on us because Brendy didn’t like cyberpunk at E3, if you can imagine that. But we literally, I got to a point where it was like, well, if you have any opinion, positive or negative, you cannot say anything about cyberpunk on this channel. I banned the word cringe, because I couldn’t bear to see it under my videos. Did you ban dog, Matthew? I know you don’t like dog on Twitter. No, I’ve banned dog on my personal Twitter. I’ve silenced it. I don’t see the word dog on any tweets. So if you want to insult Matthew, just send, and he won’t see it, and just put dog in the messages. What I’d really love is a filter that filters out images of dogs. Like, I just don’t want to see them either. So that’s good. Yeah, so I policed it, but that’s just, I don’t know. I feel like if you want, if you want, if you’re trying to grow any kind of online community and you want it to be a nice space, you have to be super on top of it. I need to literally, people’s jobs to be moderators on like websites and things. It’s mad that that’s the case, but yeah, yeah. Our Discord is lovely, lovely people. And you know, even when they disagree with each other or us, and that’s fine, you’re allowed. You know, they do it civilly and it’s, yeah, a nice bunch. Yeah, I banned that one guy who told me I look 40 plus on my birthday. So that was, he’s gone. Yeah, I’ve got a massive respect for like I work with community managers now and I just have enormous respect for how hard they work. But I echo what Matthew says about our Discord. It’s really nice seeing people in there who get the vibe of the podcast. And most of them just want to like talk about the weird shit they’re buying. I realize that it’s become a bit like that on the Discord. Like it’s people who have the weird sort of buying habits as us, Matthew, sort of stuck in our little puddle. So yeah, all good. I’ll read out the next one, Matthew. Listening to this week’s Excel episode about backwards compatibility, got me thinking about the ways technological limitation could be the source of incredible creative solutions. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that. There are loads of examples from games, and if you have any favorites to share, but I’m wondering if you’ve noticed something similar in creating mags. Were there times when constraints led to interesting, unexpected or particularly creative magazine content? That’s some olly. Now, Matthew, working on a Nintendo magazine during the Wii days, I’m sure you were the king of restraint, being the mother of invention. So, yeah. What was the, have you got any particular answer to this one? Yeah, I mean, definitely towards the end where all they had was Mario Kart and nothing else, and we did do three Mario Kart covers in a row, and it was the same four levels that we played for the first feature as all the other ones. I think we did some quite funny writing around that. We did, yeah, like an issue where it was like me, Joe, and Kate in conversation for a slightly different perspective, and they were both, you know, they’re both quite weird people, and so they wrote quite weird stuff. And I still look back on those, that feature in Laugh at like the mania, which is just so inherent in the words. We did another thing which was like, and one of the issues was like a celebration of Mario Kart rather than specifically about Mario Kart 8. So it was like the Mushroom Kingdom Highway Code. I think actually Alex Dale wrote that for us. It was really funny. Whoever wrote it for us, it was properly, properly funny. Like just really nailed the kind of madness of the rules of Mario Kart driving. And we did like a breakdown of our favorite tracks or whatever. I mean, like that stuff’s quite commonplace in magazines. You know, that you could maybe account for, you know, you had like X number of covers you really wanted that you could probably get. And then, you know, there was always talk about trying to make like event issues or try and make your issue the event itself, which I guess is a kind of version of this sort of, sort of necessity being this sort of mother invention. You know, likewise, you know, I’ve talked before about how we covered E3 on NGamer and, you know, without going to E3 and then just using our sort of remote position to hoover up everything that was there to make what I felt was the most comprehensive coverage despite not setting foot in the convention center. You know, those things jump out as like big moments. There was also the time Geraint, former NGC and Games Master man, Geraint, came in to do some freelance for us and he plugged our grabbing machine, which was a custom made grabbing machine, into one of the US power converter plugs instead of the UK one and he melted it. Oh God. And it was literally like, well, that means we can’t take any screens for the rest of this issue. We’re stuck with press shots. And we had this jokey page 89, which was like the second back page in a way. And it was a, we did this stupid thing where we like drew all the games, all the big games from the issue on that because we couldn’t take the screenshot. So we kind of turned a thing, which was a genuine disaster into something which made us chuckle, which I guess is a sort of example of that. Right, yeah. Yeah, I sort of, I was trying to think of some fun ones for this, but I mostly came up with like depressing ones. So similar to Matthew’s one about drawing things, I remember like Phil Savage on PC Gamer when he was news editor on the website. He, one outlet had the exclusive screenshots for Just Cause 3, I think it was, and plastered their watermarks all over it. So he just drew his own screenshots based on those, which I thought was quite good, very similar kind of vibe there. So that was good. In terms of like fun limitations, there weren’t many fun ones, to be honest. It was tough to make some of this stuff fun. So I remember like the PS4 reveal when we had to write something like 20 pages in a day after it was announced or two days, something like that. And like we just had a spread on every single detail, so spread on the controller, a spread on the share button and what that could mean. And the truth is people do want to read about this and do want to read comment on this stuff, but it’s never quite as exciting as when you’ve just got the access to it, which obviously, you know, no one did because it was the PS4 and everyone just knew what everyone else knew, really, aside from the two or three outlets who’d get an interview with a big head honcho or something. So that’s tough being in those positions where it’s like, well, I don’t have the access, but I do have to write about this because there’s literally nothing better going on. So, yes, it’s tough. It is, yeah. So, yeah, like, it’s like when everyone doesn’t have access, fine, you’re like fine. When you know that there is going to be stuff out there, like, there’s so many issues I sent where like every passing day, I was like, is the actual information going to come out? Is someone going to kind of gazomp our sort of spirited attempt to cover this as best we can with like actual facts? You know, is someone else going to come out? You know, but also taking that as motivation for like, well, we don’t have it. We know O&M does have it. Let’s try and make our coverage better, you know, just to sort of spite them, even though we don’t have access. Like, the desire to kind of like, humiliate your rivals was the power behind a lot of end gamers, like best jokes and things. Yeah, because we’re a big old spy for a bunch of monsters. Well, that’s one of the best things about working on PC Gamer is that you didn’t have to weigh in on the covering games consoles. I just hate it as a thing. I just never enjoyed it. It’s like endless discussing, like endless waiting for information. Every tiny rumor becomes like news and stuff like that. Not my kind of coverage. Whereas on PC Gamer, it was more like PC gaming was a self-perpetuating, enclosed industry. You wouldn’t do a cover on a graphics card. You might do a feature on it. Most of the time, because you were a PC gamer, you got the access that you wanted basically. So yeah, it’s a big contrast to time. I think I definitely mentioned this in a previous episode, but where for a long time, Game Informer’s GTA V feature was the only thing out there on the game. Rockstar didn’t put the same amount of information out in any other way. You couldn’t go and watch the same stuff that Game Informer saw. So you just had to write up what they had in your own way. So you’re basically taking information based on someone else’s scene and then saying this is fact, presenting it as fact, which is like, you are in that position because you have screenshots, so you can write a feature, you can cover it. But it’s just like the opposite of ideal. I definitely had to do a few previews for Xbox World where I was literally handed OXM’s cover feature and it was like, turn that into a new preview and you’d be reading it and you’d be like, is this a fact or is this just their writers’ weird flourish or interpretation of this? Those are not fun writing exercises. Yeah, I think one of the things I like about modern games media, and Tim talked about it when he came on the episode last week, was that exclusives just aren’t quite as prevalent as they were. If they do exist, they’re kind of usually quite short-lived and they definitely have sort of value as someone who works in PR, they do, but they’re not the Beel and Endel like they were. They were like, it was a proper, even 10 years ago, it was a proper sort of like, we just need to get this and then shut someone else out basis. Now it’s a bit, it’s just things just a much more short burn in the age of the internet. So I don’t think that would happen again where just one outlet for months and months is the only one to see a game. That just wouldn’t happen now, I don’t think. And obviously you can do digital events, so things are a bit more easy to access. But yeah, try to think of some fun ones, but could only think of times where I felt under pressure from the restraint and therefore a bit sweaty. But Nintendo, you turned it into an art form, Matthew. So do you want to read the next one? Yes. Hello, hope you’re both well. What advice would you give to someone who is at the bottom rung of the ladder, i.e. zero industry experience, with aspirations of working in games PR? That’s from Quad, and that is definitely one for you, because I have no fucking idea. Well, it got upvoted a few times on Discord this one, so I thought people did want to hear about it. I mean, I’m a bit of a weird example with this, because I was in games media for so, so long, and then decided to, you know, make that career transition. You know, being in games media has definitely given me a good sort of basis for it. But if PR is the thing you want to do, I wouldn’t say go into media just to get into PR, because, you know, you want to go into media because you want to be in media, I would say. Yeah. So I would say that, like, if that’s your main goal, I mean, I think that starting with a kind of, like, probably, like, a low level position at an agency or, you know, or a publisher, like, there are companies where you can just start your career in games. There are companies that do that, that encourage you to do that. Games PR is the thing you can transition to and from other forms of PR. I work with a really good guy, a really good guy called Alex, who transitioned from working on, like, sort of like, basically, energy drinks. So, and like motorsport and stuff like that, very different sort of field. So, you can’t transition in from anything. Like, the skill set is as important as the expertise, I would say, with Games PR. It’s like, I understand how media works. That’s a really big part of it. But then understanding how the PR part works is, like, another thing I had to do. So, yeah, I would say that, like, find a way into PR and then find a way into Games PR, I would say. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s useful, really. But again, my experience is so specific. I hesitate to be, like, I will tell the young people how to do this job and how this industry works, because I’m not sure that’s the best place for that, you know? Next up, Matthew. Hi, a question for the guys. What are your favorite small but perfectly formed games? I’m thinking of something you’ve installed and complete within a single evening play session. Never blowed again, but I’m completely satisfied. As an example, I’d go with Minutes. That’s from Jam Warrior. I mean, that is the ultimate answer to this question. So I’m going to struggle to come up with one. What do you think, Matthew? I really like Sayonara Wild Hearts, the Samogo rhythm game, which is sort of fashioned as a playable pop album where, you know, I think front to back is probably an hour long. So about the length of an album. And I think there’s even a mode where once you’ve completed it, you try and complete it all in one fell swoop and it gives you like a score for the whole game. And like, you know, the emotional journey of that game and the musical journey, you know, is structured like you would a pop album. So it has sort of certain peaks and troughs to it. That’s like very easy to consume. I would want to consume that again, though. That isn’t just a one and done, you know, it just sounds too good to kind of like only listen to once. Like, you know, a bit of a cliche, but the kind of cinematic puzzlers like your Limbo’s and Insides kind of have that, you know, they don’t necessarily have like the mechanical depth that you that you’ll be revisiting for. You probably would revisit them just because of like the mad artistry of them, particularly inside. You know, the end of that game is just so sort of such just an astonishing feat. I think you need to play it a couple of times just to sort of kind of get your head around like just how madly horrible it all is. I really liked that Crows Crows Crows game about the backstage at the theatre. Did you ever play that one? Yeah, Dr. Langa, Skaven and Tiger or something like that. Simon Amstel. Yeah, where not to spoil it, but the concept is that you’re doing a first person gate, you know, you’re about to play this first person experience and then you get called backstage to basically help the person who’s running the game, like in the game, kind of make the game happen. So it’s kind of like what happens kind of off screen in a really choreographed first person cinematic experience. It makes perfect sense when you play it. It’s about 20 minutes long. Like that I’ve only played once and was like, oh yeah, that was a good joke. I was fond of that. So yeah, they’re kind of, you know, good, all good examples, I’d say. The Artful Escape as well, quite like that, a bit like Syner or Wild Hearts, like a kind of has that sort of playable album energy to it. It’s a bit longer than that. It’s probably like two and a half hours or three, but you can zip through that and shred a guitar as you skate down impossible ramps across the universe and things. It’s all a bit kind of galaxy brained, but quite, quite wild, quite fun. Some good suggestions there, Matthew, I would throw in, let’s think, I’d probably throw in Gone Home to that. Just I remember playing that in a night on PC many years ago. I haven’t revisited it, but that was the first of those types of games that I played and really liked. I would say that Tom Francis’ game Gunpoint is a really good one evening game. I definitely played that in one night. That feels like a very carefully edited game in that all the levels feel well considered and you wouldn’t add anything necessarily to prolong the experience for the sake of it. It does its thing, you master the mechanics and it’s done. I think it’s spot on. Yeah, really, really good game. Conflict of interest, I guess. I’ve been round his house a couple of times. He has fed me pizza. I did play Sonic CD in one evening, Matthew. A Sonic game will definitely fill an evening perfectly. He’s also killed me several times as a Cylon in Battlestar Galactica, so I don’t feel like that indebted to him. Otherwise, like Minute, as mentioned, Stanley Parable, as I mentioned in the previous episode, I haven’t played this new one yet, so I don’t know how long that will take to find the new stuff. Yeah, Stanley Parable is another good one. Indie games tend to be this sort of thing, but no mind blowing answers from me there. If you want a game you can complete in literally half an hour and play Echo Junior on the Mega Drive. It’s on most Mega Drive compilations. It’s like a more kid-friendly version of the very traumatizing Echo the Dolphin games. So yeah, good stuff, Matthew. Is this next on me? Am I reading this? Yeah, go for it. Dear Giant, the Giantal Men, it makes more sense written down. You’ve discussed before how you would be as Dark Souls bosses, but what about smaller and cuddlier? If you were both transformed into Pokemoner like Beasties or RPG animal-esque sidekicks like that round Persona Bear, what would you be like? What animals would you take the form of? What elemental affinities would you have? How would your stats skew? I’m guessing towards Renny-based recovery. And crucially, what would your irritating calls and or catchphrases be? Thanks for humouring me. Love the pod and its unique mix of informed takes and crazy horseshit. The ever chaotic Balladeer on Discord, Matthew. Do you have a take on this one? I was thinking, I’m like, not a big animal guy, you know, like there’s no animal I actually aspire aspire to be in truth, which is the boring answer. I mean, I was trying to think of animals that like chitter and chatter a lot because I talk a lot like chipmunks kind of chatter away like it could be a little kind of chipmunk might be fitting. I was thinking, like maybe something quite visually frail and unpleasant, like, like a really mangy dog. I thought about this and like that I couldn’t stop thinking about the Pokemon the like thing and I think I’d just be like fat Machoke, that’d be me. Just like Machoke if he had like heavy breathing and was a bit overweight and hadn’t done like leg day. That would be me, made myself chuckled out at my own stupid joke. Irritating calls or catchphrases, that’s tough. I don’t know if I necessarily am a big catchphrase guy. I don’t have a psychology of a Goomba in me, for example. One of those hasn’t emerged for me like it has for Matthew. So yeah, I don’t know, it’s tough. I like the idea of someone throwing a ball and a really mangy pigeon, that is me coming out of it and saying, it’s me, Blorko, and everyone’s sick of it because they’re either like, yuck the pigeon or just like, oh, that is so tired. We’ve all heard that, you know? Yeah. Do I have a catchphrase, Matthew? Have any like persistent phrases come up on this? I call you Matthew a lot, but that’s not really a catchphrase. It’s just your name, isn’t it? Catchphrases. I mean, none come to mind. It’s kind of a compliment because it just shows that you’re sort of a lot more sort of versatile and eloquent and I just fall back on catchphrases because my mind’s basically turned to pudding. If I feel myself struggling, I’m like, let’s just bring out one of the classics and get everyone back on board. Let’s roll Blorko out for the 80th time. Yeah, I also like, I think my entire generation was sort of like poisoned against catchphrases by quite self-righteous comedy from Ricky Gervais, which made it made catchphrases seem really uncool. You probably have a, you could have a sorted like Simpsons phrases that you know. Yeah, I suppose so. But then that’s quite… I don’t say you don’t go around just spouting The Simpsons all the time. You don’t do that. But I know that you are quite good on The Simpsons. Yeah, but that’s like very embarrassing, I think, to roll out. Like everyone’s seen The Simpsons. It’s a huge licensing issue as well for Pokemon. Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. I did just watch that Chipmunks film though, which has like Randy Marsh from the South Park in it, and Ugly Sonic and Batman in it, and I was like, okay, well, if you’ve got good enough lawyers, they could untangle any old shit, do you know what I mean? No further point to add there, Matthew, so let’s move on. You want to read the next one? Yes. Hi Samuel and Matthew. With the likes of The Outer Wilds, Deathloop, The Forgotten City and 12 Minutes all being released fairly recently, it would seem time loop games are in vogue. What are some of your favourite applications of this game structure, and where do games get the time loop wrong? Are there any other game franchises you’d like to see playing with these mechanics and tropes in the future? Thanks as ever for a wonderful listen. Hi Samuel and Matthew. With the likes of The Outer Wilds, Deathloop, Forgotten City and 12 Minutes all being released fairly recently, it would seem time loop games are in vogue. You get what I’m going for. I’ll stop now. That’s from Nasalin. Very witty. I would say it’s a bit rude to ask what your favorites are while also listing three of the best ones. That’s quite rude, I would say. I mean, yeah, like Hades is the one that’s not on that list, of course. Actually, that’s not a time loop game, it’s just a roguelike. I suppose it sort of is, right? It sort of is and it isn’t. Yeah, I don’t know, like those I guess are the ones. There’s probably more that can be done with the concept, but Outer Wilds is the big sort of galaxy brain swing at this, isn’t it, Matthew? Do any more specific ones come to mind for you? Yeah, I mean, I think in a way Hitman is a time loop game in that it is a mechanical place that plays out the same way every time, and you go in and you use that knowledge to your advantage. I don’t think that’s, like, it’s not technically a time loop game, but it in effect is, right? Yeah, I agree with that. So I think that works. I think what I especially like about Hitman is that it realises the fun of time loop is is like fucking with something and experimenting within that space. So it lets you, you know, save and try out lots of different things. It’s quite quick to, like, iterate on approaches in that game, which I like, because I’d say, while I love time loop games, and some of my favourite games of all times are time loop games, the sin they commit is, like, not having enough variation in the loop, or not having, you know, making you repeat too much stuff. You know, even the Outer Worlds, by the end of it, you’re having to just, like, retrace the same steps, because you’ve basically broken it down to the optimal route, and it’s whether or not you can complete, you know, step, you know, step 20 off 20, and those first 19 you get a bit sick of. That’s like the inherent flaw of them. I would also say, like, linking back to Eternal Threads, I think the thing these games need to do, and the thing that Eternal Threads doesn’t do, is like explain themselves really clearly or give you something quite early on in the game to kind of hook you into the magic of the loop, because it is really cool, but it’s also, you know, it can be a little tricky to get your head around, and you need to have a reason why you’re actually using that structure. So either like, you know, it’s quite quick to, you know, it’s quite a short loop, or the, you know, the branches within it, or what you can change is really substantial. You know, and in Eternal Threads, like I say, I was playing a little too long before I felt like it’s not really a time loop game again. Well, it is because you’re repeating the actions. But in that game, it just took a little too long to kind of make anything really special happen. So I was like, yeah, do I really care about this kind of loop? I don’t know. Yeah, that’s fair enough, Matthew. While you were discussing that, I think like the repetition thing is true to an extent. I think games to find a way around that can work very well. So we talked about the sexy Brutale in our indie games Hall of Fame episode. That works because you’re not repeating all the same steps. You’re exploring one thread of many by following one guest essentially and figuring out what the mystery is. It does have you do a couple of steps, but it deliberately is structured that when you get towards the end of the game, you don’t actually have to repeat some of the same stuff you did earlier necessarily to get the outcome that you need, unless you shortcut your way to killing them off. And I think that is the way you do it basically. To reel off, so sexy Brutale is one, Matthew, I assume that you’d want to give Majora’s Mask a shout out. So far in advance, it gets a lot right for sure, though even in that game there’s a fair amount waiting around because you’re like, well, this is the thing, this thing happens here and I’ve done everything else. It’s guilty of some of those things. One other slightly, I guess maybe this would make people groan, but I was going to mention the Bandersnatch episode of Black Mirror because that is a choice-based game or interactive TV show and then you watch it again and sometimes it’s got references to the fact that it is a looping game. So it’s not like you’re just watching the same episode necessarily again. Yeah, there’s one character in there who when you play it again, it’s like, oh, back again, eh? So something like that. So alluding to the fact that they know they’re in a loop. So that could be considered a time loop game, I think, as you try and exhaust all the different outcomes. So, yeah, I like I also I really like the way The Forgotten City dealt with the repetition in that there was like that bloke you meet at the start who, like, if you’ve solved something, you can basically tell him to go and do it and then it’s sort of taken care of. So you don’t have to do it yourself. You can just get on with trying new stuff or discovering new stuff. Like it’s maybe a little cheeky in terms of, you know, it sort of breaks the fourth wall a little bit to kind of do it. But it’s it’s actually a super neat solution to that problem. Cool. In terms of like game franchises, I’d like to see with Time Loop, but I don’t know necessarily. I think I think it’s I think the game just has to be calibrated around it. So it’s tough to say like make a Metal Gear Solid game with a time loop or whatever. So yeah, yeah, I struggle with that bit too. Like yeah, you know, yeah, if anything, The Forgotten City starting as an Elder Scrolls mod shows that like the potential of like, you know, how you can look at a game and be like, oh, I could turn this into a time loop game if you’ve got the right idea. And the right setting for it. So yeah. Next up, Matthew, I’d like to know some of your worst purchases from the PS1, PS2 era that you have a soft spot for despite knowing they should be thrown into the sun. Think along the lines of The Simpsons Wrestling, The Crazy Frog racing game, The Sopranos game, etc. That’s from KH2698. Now, Matthew, I did forget to mention on Star Wars Guilty Pleasures that I did peer pressure a friend into buying Jedi power battles on PS1. I always felt bad about that. But truth be told, my whole game collection was filled with these kinds of nightmares. Everything from Buffy chaos bleeds to True Crime Streets of LA, I had The Simpsons Hit and Run and The Simpsons Road Rage. You couldn’t stop me at the time from owning those. That’s the crazy taxi one, right? Yeah, yeah. They’re both fine. They’re both perfectly fine. Yeah, I think there’s probably… Oh, probably the worst one I did was actually the… was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on PC. Now, Harry Potter itself is very cursed, but this was obviously made without the film content to draw upon because it felt like a kind of book adaptation, more than a film adaptation. And the funny thing is, I think that Jordan Thomas, one of the designers of Bioshock and worked on Bioshock Infinite and was the creative director of Bioshock 2, worked on this Harry Potter game. That was his first game and designed a sequence where you get chased by a troll, which I think he listed as one of his game design crimes, which I found funny. So that’s one. I paid full price for that and then my dad went to some real pains to sell it on to someone who would take on the burden because I knew I had wasted 30 quid on it. I think my sister got that for Christmas one year. It’s not the PS1 one that has the cursed Hagrid. That was actually a slightly better game than the PC one, I think. Cursed Hagrid. That image makes me laugh every time I see it. That is just gold. Yeah. Never a disappointing day when you see that. How about you, Matthew? Yeah, we had Xena Warrior Princess on the N64, which was a fighting game based on the show Xena Warrior Princess. We didn’t buy it like, you know, we were pestering our parents for it. It wasn’t like well reviewed. I think we bought it in like a sale when we were visiting our grandma. It was like 20 quid or 15 quid or something is how we ended up with it. So our game collection was like solid. Everything was a 90% apart from this one Xena Warrior Princess. It’s not a fondly thought of fighting game kind of a sort of complete free movement in a 3D arena. It’s not a Tekken alike. You’re not constantly locked on to your to your rival. You can kind of run around and in a four, you can do like a four player battle in it, which means everyone can like choose who they’re fighting like, you know, imagine like a four player Tekken with everyone coming at different angles. It’s a bit mad. Yeah, I mean, like I’ve never watched an episode of Xenia Warrior Princess. All I know about the show is from the game. And, you know, I like the idea of like turning up at like a fighting game tournament with this and being like, you know, I challenge all of you. I’m a jocksaw main in FGC, you know, it’s got an unlockable character, Bruce Campbell’s character in Xenia. I think he’s autologous or something. So like a weird pocket of Xenia knowledge from that. We bought, I bought this terrible, terrible game on PC called Heads. Well, H-E-D-Z. The whole gimmick of heads is it’s like an arena shooter where you’re an alien. And when you put on a different character’s head, you become that character and you get all that character’s moves. But the gimmick is there’s like 300 heads. So in my, you know, this is when I was of an age where reading the back of the box where it’s like, wow, 300 characters, all different, 300 heads. Look, it’s got 300 heads. And you know, they’re all like just re-skins of the same fucking five heads. You know, one of them is like a seacat, well, I’m not going to list off 300 heads. But I had that and it came with, I remember because it came with this terrible free t-shirt with like the heads alien, which is a bit like the alien from Alien, except it’s pink. So I had this heads alien t-shirt, which like in a lot of family holiday shots, you can see this cursed t-shirt. It’s like artifact from this very strange time. Funnily enough, heads was worked on by Ralph Fulton, now creative director at Playground Games, mastermind behind Forza Horizon and the new fable. I was going to be like… No, but I remember joking about heads on Twitter, maybe him saying, oh yeah, I worked on heads. This is why you always have to be careful with what you slag off out there, because someone might have done that as a first job, or it might be important to them and that sort of stuff. Yeah, heads was bad. I can’t remember what it stood for, I think the E and the D were extreme destruction. Maybe it was something extreme destruction, heads, but yeah. Very cursed. Yeah, hugely cursed. Yeah, I was quite good at taking, I did really follow Games Magazine’s advice at the time. I built up quite classy collections for my consoles, really. So when I did plump for something that was shit, I knew I deserved it if it was bad. I could never be mad because I literally ignored the advice and bought it anyway. And it’s almost always licensed games where this would happen. Like a bad Spider-Man game or a bad Batman game. I owned the very average Batman game, Batman Vengeance. I don’t know if you remember that one, Matthew. Oh, I think we owned that as well. That was GameCube era, right? Yeah, it was okay. It was all right. It was sort of done in the start of the animated series. Yeah, yeah. That’s where I had Kevin Kogler and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was fine. Fine kind of brawlery platformy thing. Yeah, but you know, that sort of stuff where like it would be a six or a seven and I’d be like, well, I guess I’ll buy it anyway and see how it goes. Yeah, the surprise cursed things of that era are like where you’d buy like buying a very bad GameCube port of like a Splinter Cell game or something where you convince yourself because it got nines on Xbox, but then you ignored like the sixes it got on GameCube and you’re like, well, it was, you know, it was a nine on an Xbox and like it’s a very different prospect when something just technologically like doesn’t run on the machine at all. Yeah. So there’s maybe a bit of that along the way as well. Yeah, sounds good. So yeah, hopefully some good comprehensive answers there. I’ve not played the Crazy Frog Racing game. I’m sure that’s due for HD remake every any day now. I saw that Crazy Frog Twitter account a few days ago tweeted, not feeling crazy RN. And like I thought, okay, we’ve got to like fucking a Gen Z sort of like apathy of Crazy Frog to try and appeal to the new generation. I just thought, okay, very good. All lowercase, you know. Okay, the last mailbag for question for this episode. We’ve got a bunch more still that we’re going to save for the next episode because this one ended up running long. Read more than 24 hours at this point. So too late for the mailbag episodes behind the scenes discussion. How do you attract new people to listen to the podcast? Do you have any thoughts on this, Matthew? That’s from Graham S. Or is that Graham’s like the Daniels who directed everything everywhere? Oh, you’re sitting on that one. No, I wasn’t. I just literally came up with that just now. I think that like the idea of a film being directed by Daniels is the most A24 ass thing I’ve ever fucking seen. Yeah, I overcame it and enjoyed the film. The film is so good, it even gets you over annoying things like that. I’ll go see it. I’m looking forward to it. Yeah. How do we attract new people to listen to it? I mean, word of mouth. It’s quite difficult with this podcast because different episodes are very different. I feel like we make progress in different directions at different times. So like the Tim Clark episode, for example, is like, you know, I know anecdotally, it’s quite big without, you know, our peers are into it and people who know Tim are into it. And so I hear from people who don’t normally listen to the podcast. But then, you know, I don’t even know if they probably tune out the second we start talking about fucking Big Sammy Holdings or whatever. So yeah, we’ve made quite a weird podcast. It’s quite hard to grow it in any sensible way. Yeah, like the key thing is having guests on just tends to like put it to the spheres of different people because they’ll tweet about it and stuff. Our biggest swell of patrons recently actually came from the Gen episode that we did. We had about, I don’t know, 10 plus patrons off the back of that. So I feel like her audience of people who engage with like dreams and you know, her work on Edge definitely like helped us as well, which is why it’s tragic that Gen would let us buy some Pokemon cards afterwards. But what can you do? But then you also have that kind of, you want to always give that disclaimer where you’re like at the end of it, you’re like, it’s not always like this. Like this is, this is, Gen’s not on it next week, I’m afraid, you know. It’s tough because it’s one of those things where like, I think people like the fact it is a variety podcast, as in people who listen to it often like the mystery box element of you listen to it, you don’t exactly know what will happen. We could arguably make a more coherent podcast, but then I probably couldn’t make a weekly podcast. It was just what I’ve been playing because it’d be knackering trying to do it all. And I know that like a lot of the podcasts do that. And you know, thumbs up to them for being able to, I just don’t have the time or the energy to play like five different games a week and talk about them. Can’t do it. So whereas if you have a guest on, all I have to do is research what their history is and then ask them some cool questions that will get some good stories. It’s pretty straightforward. So yeah, I like bringing on guests for that reason. You know, they’re great. They make for great content. They add a bit of different voices are important. We always wanted to have more and more different types of people on here with backgrounds to discuss. So we’re definitely committed to doing that and will continue to be. And yeah, I don’t know. But I don’t I guess like I’ve never seen it as I think you have to grow because it’s not like, you know, it’s not like a website’s traffic. I don’t have to grow it to be profitable. Like the Patreon, you’re not going to make me redundant if the shareholders are not going to revolt if like the Tim episode only gets like 400 downloads or something like that’s not going to happen. So I see that the Patreon as a bit of a metric for like success. If that keeps growing, I’ll feel like it is growing. If it kind of stays the same, which I think it probably will stay about the same, go up and down as we go, that’s that’s probably a sign that we’re quite insular at this point. I do sometimes wonder if putting episode 80 in like a title of an episode might be a bit off putting to people because they’re like, oh, do I have to listen to the other ones or whatever? But you can’t worry about that too much. You’ve got to build a loyal audience first and foremost and hope that they create a bit of word of mouth that you can grow your own little little listenership. And I feel like we’ve done that, Matthew. Very good, very kind listeners who have helped spread the word. So yes, if you’re listening to this and you have a friend who likes games or something like that, it’s always cool when someone recommends it to someone else and, you know, they don’t need to spend money for us to be happy that they’re here. So yeah. On that note then, Matthew, we’ll wrap up for this episode. Where can people find you on social media? MrBazzill underscore Pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. You can back us on Patreon at patreon.com/backpagepod. If you like what we do, unlock up to two extra podcasts a month, depending on which tier you get. And let’s see, where else? BackpagePod on Twitter. BackpageGames at gmail.com if you want to email us. We’ll read out more of these questions in about a month when we do our next What We’ve Been Playing. And, yeah, thank you very much for listening. I will see you next week. Bye for now.