Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - We Played Sonic Frontiers & 16 Other Games At Summer Game Fest! - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

Tim, Greg, and Bless tell Andy all about Sonic Frontiers, Cuphead The Delicious Last Course, WrestleQuest, Star Trek Resurgence, Soul Hackers 2, and more games they played at SGF PlayDays 2022. Time Stamps - 00:00:00 - Start 00:01:45 - Housekeeping 00:03:53 - Sonic Frontiers 00:24:46 - Ads 00:27:01 - Cuphead The Delicious Last Course 00:35:19 - WrestleQuest 00:40:50 - Escape Academy 00:47:00 - Star Trek Resurgence 00:50:49 - Soul Hackers 2 01:00:01 - QUICK HITS Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up and welcome back to the kind of funny games cast. Of course, I'm Tim Getty's and I'm joined by the new face of video games blessing at E. E.O.J.J. What's up, Timmy and Bobby. Ah, Timmy Bobby. I love it. Do you hear about this, Greg? No. You got a new name to me, Bobby?

We got the big daddy, Greg Miller. How you doing? Great Tim and Bobby. Yeah, when I was little, starting when I was little and you hit every once in a while. Kevin will call me Tim Bob because my name's Timothy Robert Geddes, which blessing you thought you just made up as a name for me. He didn't know that was my real name until he saw my driver's license at the airport and he was blown away. And Kevin was like, yeah, I actually call him Timmy Bobby all the time. And it's like, no, you don't, Kevin.

You fucking liar. Now we are. Now we do. Now we think it's stuck. Bobby, yeah, yeah. Timmy Bobby, baby. How do you feel about that Texas treat Latino heat clicking heads and ripping them to shreds? The globe trotten head shot in nitro rifle from Twitch.

Dot TV, Andy Cortez. Sounds like you all had a lot of fun over there. We did. We did, Andy. We did, Andy. I want you to know, Andy. I personally thought about you multiple times wishing that you were there, because I think you would have had a really, really good time.

We had our own fun here, you know. Yeah, that's cool. I will say like you might have been sad to see us do our thing in LA. I was sad when I saw you guys doing your thing here. I was like, man, I wish I was there. I want to be where the people are. You could have experienced Nick trying to be a wingman at a bar. But you should be glad you didn't have to witness that.

And I am glad I didn't have to witness that because this is the year of our Lord, 2022. Of course, I'm Tim Getty's again. We went through all of a sudden this is the Kind of Funny Games cast. I am off today and I apologize for that. But we as a group are about to put on a fire ass show because we just played an insane amount of video games at Summer Game Fest. We're going to talk about all of them.

Of course, we do the show each and every week. You can watch it on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games or roosterteat.com. You can also get it as a podcast by searching your favorite podcast service for Kind of Funny Gamescast and we'll be right there for you. If you wanted to watch live as we record it, if you want the exclusive post show, and if you want to get the show ad free, you've got to go to patreon.com slash kind of funny games. Just like our Patreon producers, Gordon McGuire, Fargo Brady, Tyler Ross, Delaney Twinning, First Responder, ND, Olive Party, Julian the gluten-free gamer, Alex Jay Sandoval, Casey Andrew and James Hastings have all done. If you do not have bucks to toss our way, that's totally cool. Anytime you're on the Epic Game Store, use our Epic Creator Code kind of funny,

and it'll send some of those dollars to us at no additional cost to you. So it's really cool, and it helps us do a whole bunch of cool things, including pay a whole bunch of editors to make dope-ass TikToks that you can get all over our Kind of Funny Games TikTok. Roger and the team have been doing a ton of previews on the games that we've been playing. So as some additive content, everything you're about to hear here,

If you want to get a little tight, fun thing, you can go to TikTok's kind of funny games and see a whole bunch of our previews there. And then on top of that, we did a spoiler-free review of the quarry last week and a spoiler-filled, spoiler cast, spoiler cast, of the quarry that you can check out now on the games cast, podcast, feeds, YouTube channels, everything I just went over earlier. So that's all great. Today we're brought to you by Shopify and Athletic Greens, but I'll get to that later. Final thing I want to say, housekeeping-wise, is if you've ever been a fan of kind of funny, right now is a fantastic time for you on both the kind of funny and kind of funny game sides.

It's been a while since you've clicked around the channels, I highly recommend it. There is so much dope content going up, so please check it all out. But without further ado, we got to start this off right, bless. Me and you have been holding on to this information for so long the last couple days.

We have played Sonic Frontiers, everybody. And now we get to talk about it. Blessing. Andy, I saw him do it. What do you think about Sonic Frontiers? I want you to lay the land on everything going on around Sonic Frontiers. Like in terms of like what the world stuff was, what we experienced as Summer Game Fest in terms of like what the plan was, how chaotic it was. And you can only talk about so many things.

But if you can provide some context to it, because I feel like it is also very like, I feel like it paints a picture of what our time with Sonic Frontiers was. Yeah. So the big top level thing I want to say is Jeff Keely through an incredible event here for Summer Games Fest. This is one of him partnering up with IM8Bit. Greg, you've been doing this a very long time. At this point, I've been doing this a very long time. This is one of the best venues I've ever had for game demos, just the amount of games that were there. Sure, there wasn't that many big AAA stuff, but there was a couple heavy hitters, a ton of amazing indie games, a ton of great people. It was just good vibes all around. Everything was kind of just available for you to play. any which way you wanted to, with rare exceptions, Sonic being one of those exceptions.

If you wanted to play Sonic Frontiers, I swear to God, they made you do a whole freaking obstacle course to be able to play it. So unfortunately, I wasn't able to play as much as I would have liked. I think Bless, same for you. We went in there super excited.

We thought that all three of us were going to get a sizable amount of time with the game, and we ended up getting severely circumcised on that time. So Bless and I kind of had to split half of the time we thought all of us were going to get individually. with it. So that is kind of like the top level with all of that. And on top of that, they were the only group there that had embargoed information for the game. Everyone else was like, oh, yeah, cover, record whatever you want, put it up and go for it. Sonic was like, you can't

shoot off screen anything. You can't talk about XYZ to lose date. Just Sonic at the event. Oh, dude, it was, my favorite thing about it was like, there was a point early on where they moved bushes that were like, or there were like plants that were around the event, right? They moved plans to like block certain fields of view so people wouldn't be able to take footage

of the game. Well, no, yeah, yes and no. It's just like it was the most nonsensical thing because I'm sure ladies gentlemen you've seen someone's coverage, whether it was ours, whether it was a photo, whether it was Andrea's,

whether it was Jeff Keely's, of this giant open air space with all these different pods and all these different screens. So that is awesome and great. And then a fucking nightmare if you decided to put two embargoes into your game. Because, like, clearly, if you're taking a photo with a friend at the bar,

the background is Sonic fucking Frontier. They didn't, you don't even have an appointment to go sign it. You didn't even go sign an NDA. You didn't go play it. You know nothing about this. You're going to take a photo anywhere. You're going to get this fucking game. So, yeah, when we went over there, we find out all the stuff.

He started and there's like, oh, my God. And then people would be tweeting about the stuff we're embargoed from saying because they didn't, they were just watching. You can walk by any of these booths and look into what's happening. And then, yeah, you're taking the photo. Then they moved all these shrubs over to block one very specific angle. Even right there. Look at the,

look to the top left. There's Sonic. Oh, you can see. It's just a flash screen. Just the splash screen. But you can imagine every other person's photos or videos or the walkthrough or the Twitch streamers with those,

they were doing the robot, the iPads getting rolled around stuff. God. It was the most Sonic the Hedgehog thing to ever happen. Exactly. And so that's, it set the tone for what we're expecting. And, you know,

everyone out there understands. Me and Bless are Sonic fans. For better or worse, we understand what this shit is. So this whole experience, it added to it. It added to the insanity of it all because we played it and so did hundreds of other people. And bless, you keep saying this, but what surprises you most about Sonic Frontiers in terms of people's opinions? I asked so many people who got to get hands on with Sonic Frontiers what they thought of it. Nobody could give me the same answer.

Everybody learned it on a different place. Some people were like, that was fantastic. I talked to quite a few people who I respect their opinion, like people who I respect their opinion dearly. I think I'm Ron already put up his article. He was like, it was terrible. I fucking hated it, right? I'm somebody who I played this demo. I was looking forward to being bummed out because I, I saw the trailers that everybody else.

I was looking forward to being bummed out. I was really looking forward to being bummed out by this thing because I saw the same trailers that everybody else did. And then that first trailer, right, it was that initial reveal of Sonic on the, you know, Skyrim-like, Breath of the Wild, like, Open World Hill, looking, looking out of horizon, right, and us seeing the world and us go, and I went, oh, man, this looks, this looks good. This looks like something I really want to experience. I hope you're able to pull off an open world Sonic game. They released that second trailer, which was the combat focus trailer, right? Part of the IGN first.

And that is where I started to lose all hope. Getting my hands on Sonic Frontiers for 30 minutes at the dental kiosk, that hope has been somewhat restored. I actually had a really good time. I had a lot of fun with it. The biggest fears I had with it, being the combat, being how empty and how weird the open world can play, because I think both me and Tim are on the same side of, man, this game just needs to feel good.

How does this game feel in terms of running around the world, doing the, doing the platforming stuff, right? Finding enemies, all that. Combat is actually better in your hand than it looks on screen. You know, control scheme-wise, it seems like the game is giving you two different control schemes. They have the more modern newer control scheme, which makes it play more like a character action game where it is you are pressing R-Speed or action are the names of the two ones. Yes, and I played action, right? So that made it so that R2 was sprint. You don't have to go fast.

I don't have to go fast. No, I'm pressing R2 to sprint, right? I'm pricing square to do combat stuff, right? Get my combos in. Ex-to-jump, obviously. But then, like, there's also a lock-on that feels almost souls-like, in essence. Not a soul's-like, but it has that lock-on system where you are, like, you know, shifting around an enemy, jumping in, getting your attacks, dodging, countering, doing all that stuff.

It plays like a character action game in a lot of the open world segments, which was something that surprised me. Like, I actually had fun running around the world. The world is, it's open, right? And the article me and Tim read today about it from the director was saying that it's, they're calling it open zone. But it's open the way that like a Mario Odyssey level is open, right? We got to play in that initial, the first zone that you see from the trailer. And it felt very open.

You can run anywhere. You could do whatever. You can get, you know, carried off by a rail or a platform or whatever grabs your attention. The world is littered with a bunch of platforming challenges to do. And I had a lot of fun with that stuff. It reminded me of playing a Mario Odyssey in the way that I'd be walking around the world see a point of interest go oh what's that oh it's a puzzle let me solve the puzzle i solve the puzzle i get a little heart right oh man what does this platform thing take me up to i go all the way to the top of

tower i'll cool a little heart right like the game is formatted like a traditional platforming game in a way that i really like in a way that i think really works uh there are some aspects of it that don't come together at least yet in the build that we were playing uh there is like weird those weird bug stuff there was weird frame rate stuff the resolution uh was off in the build that we were playing and i think some of this is the build i'm sure some of this is just where they're at with the game as well um but technically i i did have more to desire um that said like i really enjoyed how it felt to play in my hands tim what about you i'm i'm pretty much right there with you like honestly this it it is as strangers of paradise as that you could possibly hope for from a sonic game where it's like

it is that so bad it's good and i think that it's working so far for me where i'm right there with you first trailer, I was like, I'm interested in this combat trailer. I was like, oh, no, this is going to suck. And the two different gameplay modes, I think, kind of allow it to not suck nearly as bad as it looks like it might. I played the high speed mode, which is way more classic Sonic. And then when I ended up having to shift over to your demo station, I got to play some of the action mode.

And they were a lot different than I expected them to be. You can switch back and forth, which I think is a cool function. But on top of that, we've been talking a lot about this needing to just feel right. in order to scratch the itch that I'm looking for for a 3D Sonic game. And I was shocked to go into the options and see as many sliders as there are for being able to change your acceleration, your stop speed, your drift, all the stuff to make it feel how you want it to. So I think they understand what they need to accomplish with this from a momentum point of view

for the open world stuff in particular, right? You brought up Mario Odyssey. I think that is my favorite thing about this is while it looks a lot more like Breath of the Wild, It is, it plays more like a Mario Odyssey where every single little area has something to do to achieve something and get something immediately from it. And it was fun. Like it was fun to move around and do dumb things. And the cutscenes you get are very, we got to go kill chaos vibes. But with Sonic and friends.

And there was more than one genuine surprises where Bless and I like lost our shit. Like we're sitting next to each other with Greg behind us like laughing at us. Like being like, oh my God. Not only laughing, writing down the quotes, the actual quotes. The one I know I can say is when Blessing took off the headset, Andy, turns to Tim, hands Tim the headset and goes, bro, listen to this. And then they both nerd out about whatever the fuck was happening there. And then another thing happened that I'm pretty sure I can't, but it was something popped up on screen a character or whatever. And Blessing just goes, what the fuck?

Like super audible. Extreme deviant behavior. Yeah, straight up. But it's like, it's kind of... I would have had you all arrested on the spot, both of you. It's delivering the things that us devians are kind of looking for so far, and I am surprised by that. Now, look, if you do not like 3D Sonic games,

if you do not like any 3D Sonic games, because at this point there's been a bunch of different styles of them, I don't think that this is going to get you unless you're in it for the memes. But I am happy to say that I am extremely excited to get more time with this game, and I'm extremely excited to talk about other stuff, that they were showing off and just with where this game seems to be currently,

it makes me simultaneously more hopeful for what it could be and more scared of how bad it possibly can get. But there's something excited about that too. This is what I'll say. This is the most hope I've had for a 3D Sonic game and maybe ever. Like, and not to say that this is going to come out,

it's going to land, it's going to be an absolute masterpiece, but like, I think the direction of this game is kind of brilliant in terms of how to shift a Sonic game into something that feels more natural and more interesting and dynamic. You know, I think we've had the back and forth for years and years and years

about Sonic games. And there are plenty of people. I think Andy Cortez, you're part of this group, and I've heard you say this. And I've heard plenty of people say this. And to some extent, I agree in terms of how 3D Sonic feels to play

of like the roller coastersness of it, right? Like it varies like, you're on a rail. You're pressing R1R1L1 to like ship between, you are doing the lock on shit. And then you get to the end. And it's like, I, like, Sonic is the only game that plays like that. And I like it because I just like the on-rails-ness of Sonic. And I like the spectacle of it.

And, of course, I have huge nostalgia for it. This direction feels more along the lines of how a platformer should be experienced in terms of exploration, in terms of puzzle solving, in terms of platforming challenges and bringing these different elements together in a way that feels more free and dynamic in a way that Sonic games, except like a lot of the 2D ones and some of the more classic ones, Modern Sonic games don't give you a lot of player choice in terms of how you want to play. It really is, all right, see how far you can get without maybe accidentally falling off a ledge or see how far you can get and do the automatic lock-ons to take out enemies. There are the automatic lock-on enemies here in this game as well, but they feel like they're meant as platforms. They have purpose in terms of getting you to a different location, right?

And like, the way the world is formatted feels very fun for exploration. Like I just enjoyed my time playing it as not even just a Sonic game, but also as an open world platformer. And one of the things that we haven't seen from the previews, at least to my knowledge, that I was really kind of taken aback by and impressed by was the HUD itself, where in the bottom left and bottom right of the screen,

on the bottom right, there's an actual like speedometer, like miles per hour of how fast Sonic is going that like is goofy when you just think about that. Like, why would you need that? But on the left side, I feel like you're going fast. But on the left side,

There's this kind of like four-way cross system where left up, right and down, one is shield, one is attack, one is rings, and one is speed. And each one has a level from one to 50. So it seems like you're kind of like gaining skills as you rise up. And I think it'll allow your top speed, top speed on the bottom right of the screen to increase and like kind of allow you to do different things and reach different areas in an almost Mediterranean type way. And that just kind of seemed like it opened up the possibilities for what this game can be beyond this one zone that we've been seeing so far in ways that I'm like, that could really work because that gives you the incentives for why you're going around collecting all the Mario Odyssey type trinkets here and there.

And that's that's kind of like a fun reward for the random bullshit you're doing. And a lot of people I've seen who like Sonic and have seen the gameplay and are like, oh, what about this? about this, right? One of the things I see being being thrown around is the speed. It seems like Sonic runs slow. And yeah, like once I saw that of you can level up your speed, you can get collectibles, level up different things, right? Like, that filled me with way more confidence of where it would go. And, you know, I still have a lot of critique, or not even just critique, but I have a lot of hopes in terms of I really hope there are varied zones. I hope it isn't just this like lush green 4C environment. I hope I get somewhere in its desert. I hope I get somewhere and it's snowy,

And I hope they even get more creative than that. I want to see some of that stuff. Those are questions that we don't have answers to from me and Tim's time playing. But one thing I do want to shout out is the gameplay loop. When I go over to IGN's article for their hands-on that they have as part of IGN first, toward the bottom of Mitchell Saltzman's write-up, he writes this, right? He talks about the Sonic Frontier's world bosses, and he says that they're near Shadow Colossus-esque in their scale, which I love, and you've probably seen in the trailers,

I didn't get a chance to fight. One thing that he shouts out that I, I'm very curious to see how it goes, right? He mentions Sonic must hunt down and defeat these in-world bosses in order to collect portal gears, which open up portals that lead to bite-sized linear stages, done in the style of previous Sonic games, giving Sonic Frontiers a nice mix of both old and new styles.

These classic levels each come with a handful of optional goals, like beating the level under a certain time, collecting all the red rings, and so on. With each goal rewarding you with a vault key, which are needed to unlock the coveted chaos emeralds. I absolutely love like the flow of it where exploring the open world, I did fight some of the in-world bosses and beat them, got the, the key, right? And I can easily see how that would flow into the, okay, cool, let's hop into one of the linear levels he's talking about. Cool, beat that, get the chaos

emerald and go through that. That sounds like a really great gameplay loop that I would love to see develop further. Yeah, the one thing for me, somebody who didn't get to pick up the controllers, because like we said, it was kind of a trash fire over there for what was what we were told and what what would actually happen. Watching it, I walked away with the same impression from the trailer, that first trailer that dropped, where I'm like, I'm interested in this.

I want to play this. You know, obviously I grew up as Sega kid, so I have a soft spot in my heart for Sonic from Sonic 1 and Sonic 2 and Sonic Spinball and so on and so forth. But the 3D Sonics have never been my jam and never been something that's made me go, oh, I want to try that. Watching you guys run around,

platform, collect, you know, do the little puzzles. I was like, I can see inherently where the hooks to this are and why I would enjoy this. And if it is, you know, just like you're talking about blessed, if you're running, you see something, you stop, you get a little piece of heart and you move on with your life, right? And to the speed question, like, I do think when you're running from little points, a little point objective to figure out where you want to grind, yada, yada, there is that thing of like, he doesn't look like he's going that fast, but when there was one point blessed where you took off and just tore into the open world.

And that, I was like, damn, that looks fun. Like, you know what I mean? In terms of just running off to what actually, you know, traversing the map and going. So again, if you're going to get faster, if you're going to have more of this stuff, like, I'm still cautiously optimistic that I'm going to enjoy this game and want to go play it and want to go unlock whatever their version of shrines are and figure out these puzzles and etc. and so on. Andy?

How does the gameplay differentiate from any of the older 3D Sonics? Because, like, I'm still seeing the grinding and the homing, which is like, we can do better than homing. Like, I'm just so tired of the homing, y'all. I mean, it's entirely. different because it's open world. Like there's just never been a Sonic game that has this much freedom in terms of 3D movement. Like a lot of the homing stuff, you're in a very linear kind of path, even in the adventure

games like Sonic Adventure 2, right? Like the city escape, it's like, sure, there's parts of it that you can kind of like choose where you're going. But like the levels are always more crash bandicoot than they are Mario 64. And there's rare exception for that. But that's when the game start falling apart. I think that this one is kind of like taking it and all the grinding and all the stuff is,

and you can see this in a lot of the trailers that we're getting, those are all kind of like the individual moments where I don't want to call them puzzles, but like you can go do the homing thing up in the sky over there or you can go do the puzzle on the floor or you can do this or that, whatever. It's kind of like it's just a different style of gameplay that's broken up, I think, a bit better

because this one is so much more combat focused than we've had in previous games, especially with the different control schemes. And Andy, when we were playing it, I was thinking about you where I was like, I don't think that this game, you're going to like it at all. Like, honestly,

I'm not trying to say that. But I do think that from a combat perspective, like they are trying to make it where his combos seem more like his combos and Smash Brothers with his like punch, punch, punch kick, all that stuff. And in the combat scenarios with the combat controls type,

it does feel more like a platinum game than a Sonic game ever has. And I feel like, When you look at it, you're like, oh, yeah, this just looks like 3D Sonic always has. But it's like, no, no, no, it has those elements, but there's so much more balanced out in a way that I think is going to surprise people. Yeah, like he has a counter, right? Like, he has a Perry. Like, he has a dodge. Yeah, he has the things that you'd see in a typical character action game in a way that feels way beyond what he's been doing in previous Sonics.

And for like the homing attack stuff, right? Like those do feel like they are, not instance, but like specific, all right, this is a puzzle solution to get to the next thing. Like it feels that stuff feels way more like platforming than combat. And combat is the thing that is the thing that's been sorely lacking from Sonic games in the past. Um, was your final question there. Yeah, one more thing about the open world stuff. Like, do you, I know a lot of this conversation you all have talked about just, yeah, there's a lot of choice.

You can just kind of do whatever. But are you at any moment given like a little light shove in the right direction of where to go? Well, it's, it's not so much like, oh, you do whatever the hell you want. It's more like Mario Odyssey, where it's like, there's not really a shove to go in a direction because there's just so many things to do that is the point, you know? It's like, is there anybody talking to you? Yeah, there's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it is the open zone thing. It's like you are trying to like finish this zone to move on to the next zone. Similar to Mario Odyssey, where it's like, yo, there's this many moons in this level.

But once you get this amount of moons, then you can go to a different level. That kind of feels more of the vibe, which is where I think it differentiates. much from Breath of the Wild despite looking like Breath of the Wild. But that's all we got for Sonic Frontiers right now. I am sure we will have way more to talk about next time we get a chance. The game is set for 2022 despite fans begging them to delay it. That's my thing is I want to grant some context now that we can actually talk about it in preview form because during our KMGD this morning, I was like, yo, please delay this game.

The big reason I do want them to delay the game is I do think that visually and in terms of like how stuff continues to feel, right? Like, I still think there is a janky feel in there that you can just eliminate that will bring this game up from what right now, like, I don't know. If I had to put a score, I'd probably put it in like a seven range of how, of my hype and what I think this is. I think if you delay it another year, give it the time to iron out the bugs, right? Like get that game running smooth, fix like weird animation stuff that goes on.

And even bugs that I experience my building, which again, early build, all that stuff. If this game comes out and it actually hits, right? I think it could get up to like an eight or a nine and like nine might feel like I'm pushing it but I don't know man As somebody who... A nine? As somebody who really like Sonic

and really wants to see Sonic thrive, I think it could get there and I think this direction is it. Like I think this is how you make a good Sonic game. We're gonna talk about a whole bunch of other games that we played at Summer Game Fest, but before we do that, let me tell you about our sponsors.

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That's Shopify.com slash KF games for a free 14-day trial. Shopify.com slash KF games. So Sonic Frontier is definitely one of my favorite games of the show, despite it not being necessarily the best thing ever. But I'm right there with Bless. I think there's potential. There's some hope, hopefully. But my game of the show otherwise is no surprise,

and it would be Cuphead, the delicious last course. I had such an amazing experience with it. It's coming out super soon, June 30th. which is just two weeks away, coming to all the different systems. And I think some of the more the facts of it all is that it is DLC for the original Cuphead. You do need the original Cuphead to be able to play this. It's a separate island you can go to.

They're talking about it being like the most expansive island from the game for context for people that didn't play. The original game has three islands that each have a handful of bosses, four or five, some like that with a couple platforming levels. With this one, they're saying it's just going to be like the biggest island yet. I got, Barrett has the foot of a jump right now. This was the one boss fight that we were able to play. There we're playing as Miss Chalice,

which is the new character for this game. She plays very similarly to Cupheaded Mugman, but the difference is she has one extra hit point. So four instead of three, and she has a double jump. And her parry, instead of being, hitting jump twice like it is for the other two characters, is tied to her dash.

So it actually does change the kind of flow of how you play as her in the different fights. definitely was not my favorite. I'm going to be going back to Cuphead or Mugman when I play the game for myself fully. And in the demo we played, in the demo we played, in the demo we played,

I couldn't change the controls. It was stuck to default, which is not how I prefer to play Cuphead. I know a lot of people that were around me who felt the same way. But I tried my hardest to beat this day one. I did not. Day two, I'm very, very proud to say I did.

I did it, ladies gentlemen. I beat the Cuphead demo. Thank you. Thank you very much. But it's utterly fantastic. The levels of animation in this are unlike anything we've seen before. There's a verticality to the boss fight that we're in that I was really impressed with.

And it's Cuphead, man. My Cuphead, I think, is one of the most special games that have ever existed. And this continues to prove why. I can't wait to get my hands on it more. Every single person that played this that enjoyed the first one was like, yep, it's more cup head. And that's really all you can expect for this or want from it, but they absolutely nailed it.

Do you think the challenge of learning Miss Chalice was what led you to beating it on the second day rather than being able to download just the boss itself? Yeah, totally. It was wrapped my head around my controls being an issue. You and all these people complain about the original control team sounds like a bunch of Cuphead Joe's instead of a bunch of cuphead pros. You know what I'm saying? There you go.

I'll take it, but I did it. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'll accept no bullshit. And the interesting thing, so she's also got like some specific weapons here as well. Are these specifically tied to her, do you know? Or is this more stuff that you can purchase as Cuphead and mug man in the store and stuff like that? That is an excellent question that I don't have the answer to.

And what I did find weird is, so the demo was just this fight. We didn't get to walk around the eye. island or anything. So I was pretty limited. And I don't understand why, but every time I would go back to the demo station, she had different weapons that I had. So there was no way to change and control it. So I actually got to play with a handful of the different weapons with her. But I didn't understand why they were changing. So yeah, sorry, I don't have the answer to that. I'll tell you what. I think I'm going to be into her parry style because that's one thing I never loved about Cuphead was that whenever you do parry something, it pushes you.

you higher in elevation where there are more dangers. And I like the idea of just kind of like being parallel. I'm going to hit this thing and stay on the same sort of vertical plane. Because the amount of times that I died trying to parry something and I'd go up to the next level and there's a bad thing up there, having quite often. So I think her kit looks pretty neat. Any back paddles? Did you have any back paddles there?

No, no, no. I just played on the classic Xbox one controller there. I mean, Andy, here's the other thing, though, is like you're going to have to start being careful of because they're playing with verticality here, you're going to have to be careful with her horizontal kind of perry dash thing going on there. Like, just because you know, you're

moving to a different horizontal thing, doing the classic dash with cuphead, you know, it's not going to be that different. I feel like dashing to a thing feels way more natural to me than double jumping, especially because of where my thumb placement

usually is, and I had trouble with that. I had to move the jump, or I had to move the shoot button to one of the triggers because I was doing the Mario world thing where you hold run with the left button and then you use the fat part of your thumb to jump. And double jump in on those motherfuckers was so hard with the fat part of your thumb to where I had to kind of switch up how I play. Yeah. And I'm right there with you, Andy.

I totally feel what you're saying about the bounce back being kind of weird. I feel like that is just part of the design of the game. And I think that they knew that. And it clearly did because of what you just explained about her with the more horizontal. Donald thing. And Barrett's absolutely right. In this more vertical level, it made it more difficult. But I can see her making some bosses easier and some boss is harder.

And I think that's kind of cool. And with that, her special is that the big kind of vertical mega hadukin thing going on, where it takes up the whole screen, which is something we haven't seen before. And it makes a lot of sense for these type of boss fights that are a little bit more vertical in nature. So I can't wait to play more. I think this is great. I think Barrett, you're going to absolutely love it.

this is exactly what we'd want from from more copped, but we won't have to wait too long. Hell yeah. I'm already seeing more than I want to. I told you, like, I think a few weeks ago. Like, I want to go into this as blind as possible, almost like the first cupbed. So, but yeah, I can't wait. We're only a couple weeks away. My only question for you, just to go back to the weapons, any new weapons that, like,

to kind of stand out to you because we've been kind of seeing this red one and this green one that they've been going back and forth with on screen here. Yeah. You know, in the original game, I was pretty tried and true with my weapon sets where I would try different things out, but I would always kind of go back to the ones that I like, oh, I like these the best. I'm going to stick with them. And one of those usually is what we see here, her little, the green boomerang disc things. Like I like as a good default, but there was a new weapon that she had that shoots out these three lightning bolts. And that's what actually I ended up using to win. So there is some cool stuff. It sends out more of like a, it's like a spread shot in Contra. But it goes like all the way across the screen, as opposed. to the spreadsheet in the original cup that I think eventually has a shorter kind of range. Andy? Just one last question. How long was the demo again?

I mean, the demo was as it was one boss fight. So as long as it takes you to beat it, I think beating it was probably like a minute and a half, maybe two minutes, something like that. But I had two extended sits with it. And I think both of them were about 20 to 30 minutes filled of. retries and attempts. Some of them, some of them I got hit early in my cool start down, retry, you know, over and over, but.

I'm already downloading this, bear. Do you downloading this? I'm downloading it right now. I'm trying to, I'm trying to forget as much as possible right now. I just look at this boss file. I already know by maneuver is, you know what I'm doing. The last thing I want to answer is Alex Chase Sandoval in the chat says, do you get penalized in any way for playing as Miss Chalice? Like, does the game mark you as playing on easy mode? Like if you grab the Tadukee, not from what I can tell.

And, like, it, I don't want to say she makes the game easier. think she just kind of is a different style of play. Like, yeah, her having the extra hit point, I guess, is one of those things. I mean, but there are upgrades for both Cuphead and Mikeman that give you an extra health point, but then it takes away certain things. So, yeah, it's just a different, it's more of a different play style and giving you another accessibility of like maybe a way of play that makes sense for a certain group of people that maybe it doesn't for others, right?

Yeah. It's all about options. And I think that this is opening up a lot of options, which is fantastic. The next game I want to talk about is one of Greg's favorite games of the show, Russell Quest. Russell Quest is my game of the show. It's the one I left and I was sitting there in the airport and like, God damn, do I wish I had that right now on Switch, ready to go. Russell Quest, of course, might not be completely unfamiliar to many of you because I know a lot of you went to Pax East and you saw that there and had tweeted at me about it. Obviously, when Russell Quest got announced a lot of you tweeted about it.

The idea here is that you are getting a turn-based RPG wrestling game. You play as the Mucacho Man Randy Santos. That's who I saw in this demo. There is another character you will play as, but we didn't get introduced to them to the very, very, very end and didn't do anything with them. And the idea is that you are toys, you are wrestling toys in the world.

And so it sounds goofy. It is goofy. It sounds like this would all be unlicensed stuff. It isn't. They actually work with a bunch of different wrestlers in their estates. So Macho Man Randy Savage is in this game in terms of his name. There he is. Diamond Dallas Pages in this game.

Jeff Jared is in this game. Andre the Giant is in this game. Jake the Snake is in this game. Mean Gene O'Korland is in this game as the announcer. And so the idea is you are in a toy world. You are an action figure. That's what everybody else looks like too. They're all toys as well. And, you know, Randy Santos has loved wrestling his entire life.

He sleeps in the gym and dreams of being a real wrestler. And we start with him even being a backyard wrestler. And you go off and do it. And it's turn-based combat in a wrestling ring, as you see here. You wrestle outside of the ring, obviously, and fight a lot, too. And what I found is that it's actually active combat, which I appreciate. So even if you do a simple move, you saw a second ago, a B button popped up. There's, you know, somebody who pounds off the ropes when you punch them, you have another shot to hit them there.

The bar you saw there was for the pins. As it goes back and forth, you have to nail it and get it in there. And then your special moves or, you know, what would be magic in a lot of RPGs is called gimmick. And these are the bigger moves you can do stuff with. So this is where I was doing a stunner. And that's also where you'd go to pin. And it's clever, it's funny, and it's a nice take on wrestling, right? I always want more wrestling games, and I'd love for them to get out of just being, you know,

the traditional thing is what we want of, okay, well, is it a sim wrestling game or an arcade wrestling game? Taking this and putting a lot of humor and infusing it into a wrestling world, I think, works really well. And, you know, you are exploring different environments on that you have an overworld map. You go to these different things for quests. When you're there, there are treasure chests to find. You will find doors blocked by tables, and the only way to get through them is to use a table token, which will then do a move that would throw a wrestler through a table and

stuff like that to then advance. I found the entire thing incredibly clever. I think it's got a really great art style. I think it's got a really cool world for it. Great art style. I want to play a lot more of it. It's just not there yet. When I asked when is it coming out, the developers were there, Megacatat Studios and Skybound Published game. You know, I asked when is it coming out. They might actually just been telltale, or I'm sorry, skybound publishing people. They were like, well, we're targeting 2022, which means you will not see it this year at all. all, but it was awesome and I really enjoyed it. Sorry, I don't know.

No, just real quick, I'll talk about the visuals. Yeah, the game looks fantastic. And I unfortunately didn't get to play this one, but I watched you and Bless Play a little bit. And I was taken aback by how stunning this looked. Like, obviously, it's an old school pixelated type game, but the resolution of it looked so good and just kind of the shadows and the effects that they did. The style is so great that on a giant 4K TV, like I knew this would look good at a switch.

See it on a giant TV. like, yo, this looks really damn good. Yeah, and to be clear, too, I think I said Switch earlier, but to make sure it's, it's Switch, it's PC, it's Xbox, it's PlayStation, they're all listed over there, obviously, for, you know, backwards or whatever, you know, Smart Delivery, and then, you know, PS5, PS4. Yeah, I thought it looked good. I thought it looked good. I thought it played really well.

I thought it was interesting. Blessing you played a bit. What did you think? I thought it was cool. You know, I had pretty much the same takeaway as you. I thought it was really dope. I love the, what they're called gimmicks, the move. Yeah, the special ones are called gimmicks, yeah.

You can choose from the special moves to bust out actual WW moves, or like not WW, but like professional wrestling moves that, you know, I thought was super awesome. I thought it was super fun. And yeah, walking around the overworld. The vibrancy of it reminds me a bit of nobody saves the world. And I really liked how that game looks when you're walking through the overworld. Sure.

Yeah, it's one that I'm very much looking forward to. And you saw it to be the bottom of some of the stuff earlier there as a height meter, not this. This is the pin minigame or the kickout submission mini game. Right there you see a height meter that determines how much money you'll get. In these early, early tutorial battles, you weren't really getting to explore that and see what that's all about, but there could be something there. And like I said, you know, like, it's playing with a bunch of different ideas. So the idea is that, you know, Randy is very much believes professional wrestling is real.

The other person that we'll get later is very much in it as a business kind of thing. So you play two different sides of it. But, you know, like Randy's living at the gym and the guy who's helping him train, you know, ask him to go help another guy from, I want to say the BWF, but or whatever, or something like B, or maybe it's B, or something like that. They have a bunch of different monikers. And you go to that guy who needs face paint, so you help him by going to the face paint shop,

but of course there's bad guys there. You beat them. You get the face paint. You come. And the guy's like, well, should I be a cool surfer dude or should I be super intimidating? Obviously, illusions to sting right off the bat.

And you get to make that choice, which will then influence the character and what happens in the world. And I'm sure that is all superficial. But again, it's not just, you know, wrestling to climb the ladder of whatever federation you're in. It is wrestling as a way to move these little storylines that are tangentially connected to wrestling forward.

Can't wait. It looks so damn awesome. Another one that I unfortunately didn't get to play was Escape Academy. And I think that this is one of the smaller indie titles. This is from IM8BIT. And I would say that just from talking to everyone at the show that had played things, this was definitely a standout where everyone that played it was like, hey, keep your eye on this. It's a lot cooler than you'd expect.

You guys got to play it together. Bless, what did you think about it? Yeah, I thought it was super cool. If Street Fighter 6 wasn't there, I think this might be my game of the show. It is a first-person co-op escape room puzzle game where the immediate comparison I draw for it is Operation Tango. Folks remember that one that came out. Sure. Lapt to you're around this time for PS Plus where it is you're working together with a co-op partner.

You're going through these puzzle rooms. In Operation Tango, you are a spy and an agent. In this game, you're a student who is attending. Is it literally called Escape Academy, Greg? Yeah, yeah. So you're going to an Escape Room Academy to train you to be the best escape artists you can be. Yeah, so like in the demo that me and Greg did, me and Greg did it co-op, we went through one escape room, I'll say like challenge, right? Like one escape room level, that was four parts.

And for the one we did, it started off on like a first floor where the water starts filling the room. And me and Greg had a seemingly a limited amount of time to figure out what we needed to do. So it was us figuring out, all right, like look around, you know, interact with the things around us. All right, it looks like we might need a key. Okay, how do we get the key? Okay, use the code. All right, what's the code? And it's a lot of going back and forth based on.

what each other is seeing and what each other can kind of feed to each other in terms of the information that's helped that that'll help solve the puzzle. And for the one level that me and Greg did, I had a blast with it. Like all the, all the, the callus that we made in terms of it being like, oh, I need a letter. Oh, I need a number. Okay, no, I see this number here. Try typing this five digit code here to see if the thing opens. There's a lot of that kind of experimentation that led to really good back and forth cooperation. I mean, you nailed it. Yeah, we got nay. Yeah, we got nay. Yeah. Only one other team at the time had gotten an A plus blessing blamed himself because he accidentally used a hint at one point.

So I think that's what might have brought us down. It doesn't matter. My biggest critique is that the hint button is I think X, like square if you use a PlayStation controller, way too easy to hit that button. I hit on accident. And so that was, you know, for me, I was really impressed to this as well. And I was definitely on the, not that I wasn't looking forward to it, but like, okay, like, it reminded me a little bit of keep talking nobody, or coming in, keep talking and nobody explodes, which is fun but frustrating sometimes where it's just like, okay, like, do what I really want to do a lot of this. And after me and Bless played it and, yeah,

went through the story mission, I would. And I think what's interesting about it, you know, bless you called out that, you know, seemingly like you have a limited amount of time. We did it. There was no fail state for us drowning. It was very much like at the end, you get graded and it's based on your time

and how many hints you did. And they break it down for like, not only how each floor, if you want to think of as a big puzzle, they break it down to the minutia of how long it took you to figure out like fuses or how long it took you to figure out, the combination or whatever. Like there's a lot of little nerdy details to really go in there.

And that was what was interesting about it for me is that how do you do something as weird as you are a student in an escape academy, right? How do you make that make sense? And this was a narrative thing where we were with the custodian. It started to flood. He had to run off and then we had to figure our way out. And again, coming into it is like, all right, cool. Like this is a video game version of an escape room. And if you watched, of course, like you said, this is being published by AIM, 8bit.

It was part of the devs. Coing Crew games is who's making it. If you came in and watched Day of the Dev, they did a whole thing of like, oh, we actually made escape rooms before. So we're trying to bring that experience to a video game. And we've done those, obviously. I've done an escape room in person.

I know we've done them on the kind of funny podcast before. Coming into this, it's like, well, how are you going to make that feel, a video game feel like a real scaperum? And this definitely felt like a real scape room. Because again, it was, me and blessing going to opposite sides of each floor. Okay, there's a combination lock on this.

I see this. I have half a number here. Well, I've picked this thing up. And then I have box cutters. we need a key and you start, you know, tracking it all together to get where it is to the, you know, eventually where blessings got his, he's found the cipher, he's got it pulled up on his screen. I'm looking at the words on the wall and I'm using a notepad then to translate or, you know, actually figure out what the code break, what it's going to be, what we need to go from there.

Like it had that level of teamwork. It had that level of pressure, but I really appreciated that it wasn't like, you're going to drown in five seconds. It was working against your own time, working against your friends. I thought that worked, Andy? Timothy Gettys, Fred Not, my young friend, my young friend Timothy Gettys, Frednott, Academy, or Escape Academy and Russell Quest are both a part of Steam Next Fest. And the demos are up and downloadable.

So you should all go get those, yeah, because it was a lot of fun to get in there and figure it out. And, you know, at one point we solved one of the new number. We had like all the pieces in place, and then it was like a combination lock. And then before we actually set the number of the thing, I was able to stumble into it. We're like, got it, nailed it.

And then, like, the next puzzle wanted us to know some part of that information. We're like, fuck. But it was, like, a fun way of trying to figure that and get back to it. How much interaction was there with, like, NPCs and stuff like that? And our demo none. Like, it was set up by the guy. Like, you know what I mean? Like, the custodian called and was like, oh, no, I'm sorry.

I'll get back to you guys in a second. And then you were off to your own. In the actual game, I don't know how much it'll be. I think they showed some in the day of the devs trailer where you have, like, you know, persona like talking. Yeah, you're talking to, like, the headmaster and like... Yeah, the text pops up like that. The Dumbled Door.

We didn't... We only got to experience the level, but right after we beat the level, they did kick us back to a dorm room. And I was actually surprised that it seems like there's a lot more there you can do in terms of just like different modes you can get into. And when I say modes, I'm like, you know, maybe exploring like the campus or like, you know, being able to find how you talk to different people. It seems like there's way more depth in there than just the base. All right, jump to a level, solve a thing, bust out. Like, no, there's an actual dorm and seemingly story element in there that seems like it's going to be cool. as well. I can't wait to play. This is one I legit

can't wait to play with friends. Either it's going to be Yami because I did Operation Tangle with Yami or Janet me and Janet, me host to the Skybound Game Showcase. This is one of the ones that stood out to us as well. I'm like, I could see me and Janet going crazy with this one. And my notes say, of course, it's coming to everything but Switch.

Game Pass is included and I have July 14th jotted down, so I do believe you don't have to wait long. Yeah, definitely. Next up, Greg, Star Trek Resurgence kind of got you going. Tell me all about it. Yeah, you know, put up a TikTok about this and it was harkening back to when I was super into Star Trek discovery during season one. I went out to host a panel out there, a red carpet for them for season two. And so I was

marathoning all of discovery and it was my first real time outside of the movies getting into Star Trek. And what I loved about it was obviously the decisions happened, the relationships that happened in there. And so I wanted a video game that was Star Trek. And I, you know, I downloaded Star Trek online and did a bunch of things. None of it was really working for me and I kind of gave up on the dream. But now Star Trek resurgence is coming out from dramatic labs. I wouldn't expect you to know that name off the top of your head. But what you need to know is that it's a development team of like 30 to 40 people. Obviously, they are, you know, moving people around as they get closer to the game releasing.

And half of them are people who worked at telltale. So these are people who know narrative games in story-based games. And so I got to play this. If you're a big fan like Nick, and I know Nick's played it as well, actually at demos before. This is set after Star Trek Nemesis, which is the last of the next generation movies. And it's five years before the Ron. supernova that would then reset time and make the JJ Abrams universe. And this is another game we're going to be playing two different perspectives.

You're playing a guy named Carter Diaz, who's like an engineer. He's lower on the totem pole. And then first officer, Ridek is the other person you play who was the woman there with the, I don't know which alien species it is, but she has like the spine on the front of her head there on her forehead. And, you know, what I played from and what I've seen from the get-go, even as you look at this trailer, right? This game is not going to win awards for visuals. I don't think it looks bad, but it definitely does not look like, oh my God, what a PlayStation 5, NextGen, push it all.

Andy's moving his field of view around to go play this thing. You know what I mean? Like it looks like a small indie Star Trek game, which I'm not against. But what got me, and then Alex Jay Sandoval says, cling on, no, not a clingon. That woman right there. She's not a cling on. I know what a cling on looks like in this universe. Anyways, that's Diaz, and that's not her.

That's woman with her back to you is the other woman. That her right there. what is she uh Alex J sandival you smart ass anyways uh I just lost the thread of what was happening we're debating what kind of alien it is uh anyways though back to what I'm saying visuals won't win any awards but what was there for me was the choices and the story right I've played three distinct scenes one was uh Carter Diaz and his friend who you saw there in the bay having to interact with captain and you know are you smart ass are you not a smart ass you're talking to this you're doing that and then the next one was

was right at going to with actually Ambassador Spock going to a, you know, they've been called in to help negotiate a piece between two warring races. This is one of them if you're watching the video. And so like, how do you play that? What choices do you make? You know, at the very end it is like, well, it's from the one of the really fired up. I think the queen of the one race. Like what would you do?

Something similar to happen to your people. Would you, you know, like you make a choice there and that can obviously get you in trouble with Ambassador Spock or do this or whatever and really negotiate out of that? And then the final one we did was another. talky, talky, talky, I'm back to being Captain, Carter Diaz, I'm flying through, I'm talking to some other guy, and we're flying in a space shuttle to, you know,

to drop these probes with then, obviously, there's more under this than we thought there was. There's a bad guy over there. But the conversation was interesting enough, but flying the ship wasn't fun, which I thought was interesting, because these are always the push and pull of these kind of games that I do love.

Like, can you make the story great and the gameplay fun? This very specifically flying the ship, I was like, all right, well, like, it's, you know, I'm flying through this asteroid field. I'm not shooting even the asteroids or whatever. And it's just, you know, steer, strafe, accelerate, de-accelerate. Like, it wasn't much. But I enjoyed the conversation I was having.

So I'm excited for this game. This is on my short list of things coming out of Summer Game Fest. I'm like, fuck yeah, I want to play a lot of this. Bless, Soul Hackers 2 was another one that the two of you guys played. Yeah. This is one that it's a Michael Higham special. Like a few months ago, they had Atlas announced this one during like some stream that was going on in the middle of the night.

during the day in Japan. And 3 a.m. I hear yells from Michael Hymn's room. I'm like, what the fuck is going on? Like, I hope he's good. And I check Twitter real quick because I'm like, oh, these seem like hype yells. They don't, these don't seem like, oh, I yell. And I look and it's like a Soul Hacker's 2 thing.

I'm like, oh, all right, cool. What is this? I don't know what this is. But seemingly, it is another game in that tree of Shimagami Tense, like persona, like those types of franchises, right? Like, it exists in that family. And the thing that Gabi and Greg can speak more to it, is Greg got, I think, a bit more hands-on with the actual world segments of it.

I played a bit of the dungeon gameplay. It seems like it's kind of an in-between, between persona and Shimigami Tensei, where it takes place in a, is that a future Tokyo, Greg, do you recall? I don't remember that telling me where it was. Yeah, it's definitely futuristic, yeah, neon splash city. Yeah, yeah, and it has like, you know, you look at the gameplay here, bright now Barrett has pulled up combat.

This is the thing that immediately got me in. You know, one thing that I wish I was able to push past in Shemagamagame Tense, but I think that game was a little bit more hardcore about was the dungeon crawling in the combat. Like that is very traditional, that game was very traditional Shimigama Tensei talking about SMT5, whereas this is taking a lot of the elements that Persona 5 introduced in terms of the one button, like, you know, hit a, hit, you know, X for attack, pull up menu, like the Y is leading towards some of the persona bits in terms of how quick you can kind of manage around the combat, plus like, you know, press the assist button, pull up an automatic attack, be able to go from there and keep the flow going of it.

It has that stuff. It has a really interesting dungeon mechanics in terms of you being able to take a member of your party being one of the demons that you typically see Jack Frost and the like be able to call on one onto, uh, what's called Pixies? No, yeah, I mean, yeah, Jack Frost was there. A pixie was there. I'm saying. If you played any persona like I have, you would be like, oh, I know, I recognize this. Yeah, like you recognize the different assortment of demons and monsters, right? Like you can take them the ones that are in your party, send them out to do, um, uh, what's the word, Greg? Where you like somebody searches, through a dungeon before you go into it. Oh, Scout? Recon missing? Recon, yeah, they're basically reconning the... My demo didn't tell me about this. I don't know what you're talking about.

I think this is when they passed the controller to me. But yeah, you'll send out your monsters to recon the dungeon. And, like, as you're exploring the dungeon, you run into them and they give you items, right? So it's kind of like a fun, different way to do this kind of a dungeon crawling. But Greg, you've got to experience more of the overall stuff. Like, what was I take on that? For me, I thought it was awesome. Like, I thought I really dig the style of the game.

right and i think we come to expect that from in atlas you know turn-based RPG like this but you know one of the things they were talking about me was like you know how soul levels are so important obviously they're similar to you know your relationship links in a persona game but going out and drinking with them and like so they took one of them one of my you know characters or one of my comrades to a bar to drink with them and like had a conversation that was so over my head because we're deep into the game and i don't understand what they're talking about it like because she just you know some eternal god or some shit i don't know what that was going on that was cool you know we went to the weapon shop i thought it was it was cool that they use this what your weapon is called a comp and so everybody has a comp right and it's that's what

your weapon is this not like you can switch around your weapons or do anything so like you know the one woman had size the other guy had a Tommy gun I thought that was rad I thought that was yeah here you go drinking just like this at the bar to you know have those conversations and move it forward and move the story forward and who you all are but then there's the hook to them that you know they were telling us this is a detective story you know this is what they is a hard-boiled detective magical story for what's going on in this world you know, to be a sole hacker and to go in there and do that. And so I think the combat is going to be very familiar if you've played a Shimagantense or a persona before, right?

Like that turn-based stuff, it has the assist feature that I was excited. I was like, well, I was in persona five. I was like, I don't even remember that anymore. But auto-picking, you know, right to the weakness if you've already discovered that animal, that enemy's weakness and getting to go out there and fight them. You know, they were one of their things they were talking about of trying to make it different and also not easier, but a bit more. Hey, you want to go grind and have fun, you know, to.

to recruit a demon, right? It's just to give them an item. It's not like how it is in persona, five, right? Where you're having that conversation with them and trying to out-think them and having the list and go back and forth. And then you screwed up on the third try like I did all the time and they run away. This is like, oh, cool, can I get X? Yeah, sure, here it is.

You go for the, you go. They were predicting, you know, playthews are like 50, 60 hours, which is obviously down from certain of them, which is better if you're mean, can never have the attention span anymore. And then, you know, they were talking about, one of the things, another person who was getting the demo with us was asking that I thought was interesting is there's no fast forward for battle.

but if you're using auto, obviously you can speed through your other people's turns to get to you faster, but I thought that was interesting. Yeah, one of the things I mentioned to going back to combat a little bit. Like Greg said, right, you have the assist feature, it automatically target weakness on an enemy and you press X and it goes. When you hit a weakness, it's not like persona 5 where you get the extra turn. I forget if Shimonthansa 5 has that as well. But when you hit the weakness, you build up a certain meter. It goes up by numbers, right? So it starts off as one.

If you hit a weakness of an enemy, certain times that meter will tick up to two or three. that meter then determines at the end of the turn you get an all-out attack automatically and you're all-out attack Barrett knows I'm talking about persona fans of what I'm talking about, right? Extra attack that you get in a turn. The power of it is determined by

the amount of weak spots that you hit as opposed to like the flow of. All right, cool, let me... Yeah, it's typically in like in a persona 5 or any of the persona games, right? You just have to hit the weaknesses of all of the enemies in a combat scenario to kind of down them and stun them

and when they're all stunned, then you would get an all-out attack, but it seems here it's more of like a meter. Yeah, they have a stack meter, yeah. That's exactly what is. Yeah, the stack meter that builds that up. And so it's a different flow of combat, but I actually really like it,

one because it makes things a bit fresh from a persona. But then also, one of my frustrations playing Persona 5 before I even got Royal was if you have a bad turn or if you have bad luck and you somehow get ambushed or something goes wrong, your enemies, in the ways that you can just fucking slap your enemies by using the, abusing the weaknesses and all this stuff. They can do the same thing to you.

And so you might get into a flow where the enemy goes first and automatically you're just flucked because they get into a good flow, hit all your weaknesses, and all of a sudden you're done. That isn't going to be the case in this game seemingly. It seems like if you have that frustration, if you're like me, you'll have maybe a more fun in the time in this game, not having to worry about that.

But yeah, it's one that seems to split the difference between persona and Chima Gama Tensei in a way that, you know, I messaged, bear it immediately. I was like, yo, you might like soul hackers. You know, the world seems cool, the stuff going on in the overall seems like it's more adult focused as opposed to being the teenage high school story of persona, which appeals to me, I'm down to go out drinking with these people and figure out what this detective story is. And fall in love, fall in love, maybe. The dungeon crawling seems like it's going to have that similar loop there

as well that, that I'm looking forward to. Yeah, when you talk about the gameplay aspects, all of it, like, it definitely checks the boxes of, like, what I'd be into. I think it's, I don't know what it is. It might be the very anime futuristic style that kind of loses me a little bit. I don't know if that's just something that like, maybe. I dug it. Like that was the thing is we ran around and explored the world. That was something I was like, oh man, it's actually kind of pulling me in.

Yeah, maybe I have to actually get my hands on it and actually see the world for myself. But like seeing it in kind of like trailers and images and stuff, it's not a vibe that really speaks to me, which is weird. Because I like sci-fi stuff. I like futuristic stuff. But I don't know what it is here specifically that like isn't really pulling me. but everything else sounds cool and like I definitely want to try it out because it's coming this year right it's coming pretty soon

it's a couple months away yeah graphically and stylistically I think it doesn't have as much like cool pop as a persona game right which is fair because it's different right shema gama tends to have the same thing where I was like oh this isn't this is poppy right this is more hardcore and dark but this does have some cool stylistic stuff

again you have the cyberpunk setting and the the UI invokes cyrump in a way that you know the detail of it reminds you a bit of persona four more still than a than a five in terms of the amount of the style of UI they're going for there. Sorry, Barry, you're about to say something. Yeah, I was just asking the demo, did you guys play was that localized. I forget if, like, I remember they revealed a little bit of the localization, like, last week for like 10 seconds.

Is that coming out at the same time, or is that doing like the weird persona thing where it's like, you know, we have the Japanese version for a few months and then, the English version comes like four or five months later. It's a great question. We saw like 900 games. It didn't stand out to me that it was in Japanese, so I would assume it was localized when I listened, but I couldn't tell you at this point.

Yeah, I do not recall hearing the voice acting, but I would be surprised if it's not local. Because it's coming out day and day, I believe in the West and in Japan. So I'd imagine that it had to be. Do you think they'd put me in the game as a voice? If you asked, yeah. Sure.

If you asked nicely. If you asked. So those were all the big main game. that we played we also played a whole bunch of other stuff that I want to touch on all of it just just a little bit so now we're entering lightning rounds of all of this stuff just uh impressions quick of what we played because uh we're about to get into a lot of the day of the dev stuff that i do want to give some time because i really do think that day of the dev showed up at this event and had a ton of really really cool games to play this isn't one of them but i want to talk about the samsung gaming hub um

which was the xbox uh the game pass all that stuff the cloud being of on new Samsung TV starting June 30th, 2020, and going forward, all of them will have it. And you get to access everything you can on Xbox Cloud with your TV and a controller. And let me just tell you, it just works. I was very impressed with this. It was 1080p. 60.

Any game that you can play on XCloud, you could play here. In the demo, we did. We could only play first-party titles, but we were playing on Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi at the event was utter trash, and this thing worked. and it worked well and I was extremely surprised by that. Being able to pop into Halo Infinite,

walk around for a little bit, pop out, pop into Ori. It all happened seamlessly. There's this little like loading screen that comes and goes within 20 seconds or less and you are just playing the game. I was very, very impressed with that. Any follow-up thoughts on that, boys? No, you know, I went out there. I played Minecraft that, you know, I jumped into Minecraft,

I jumped into something else. I jumped out, jumped out. Like, it all is doing what. it should be doing and it is feeling like you know there isn't latency there again like i wanted to do fortnight they wouldn't let you do fortnight it was you know the select stuff they had available there but it was neat and it's you know definitely something that'll be cool if that's you know not even if it's not your only option if you buy a new tv and you have it i think that's a great option to not lug your xbox over if you just want to do something did they answer any questions or did they have any

information about non-samsong type stuff or like a little box or anything like this was Samsung demoing it technically. So they were pushing the TVs. And the best thing is it's not just Xbox. Like there's other things that they weren't really talking about it because it was a partnership with Xbox there. But like pretty interesting, it really did feel like a step towards progress to getting a streaming situation for any TV.

And if it works this well, I'm very impressed with it. Because like Greg was saying, I think that this is going to really fill two voids of needs, one of them being I have my Xbox downstairs. I don't want to have to lug it upstairs, but boom, you can just pop into a game real quick. And God, how seamless it was with your account and the saves and everything, very impressive. And you mentioned it was on Wi-Fi? Yeah, we were playing on Wi-Fi. I think that was hardwired.

Oh, was it? Yeah, I asked them about it. Okay. Well, if that's the case, then it worked hardwired, which I guess should be too big of a surprise. But because I was shocked at how good it was working off if it was Wi-Fi. So, yeah, there you go. Yeah, even still, right? Like, even with that, I was very impressed by it.

I played a bit of Halo. And the only thing I, the only even like critique I have with it that I'm sure long term will be figured out is there was, um, the like, like the small squares. There's like a word for it. Artifact. Artifacting going on, um, on the screen every now and then for Halo. But I was shocked by how smooth it felt. Like the actual first person shooting felt snappy. I forgot at times that I was playing off of a Samsung smart TV.

And it had me excited for it, uh, for the idea that I could do it on my own. Only thing is that they mentioned that right now, imminently the release they're piping up is. for 2022 Sam-Sung TVs and further. And mine is like a 20-21. Not a new TV. That's a two-year-old TV. It's time to buy a new one. I mean,

it might be talking about a new one. But for the similar thing that Tim was saying, right? Like, I love the idea that I can just keep my Xbox series X on my monitor or on a specific screen and then be able to walk towards the TV or walk toward the TV in my living room and start and pick up and play Xbox games that way.

And I have to worry about transporting a thing back and forth. And I have my fingers crossed that. They start to support more Samson TVs, but I'm also like, you know, they're trying to sell those 2020. Yeah. But I might buy the one. We'll see.

Very impressive stuff. And I think that we're like, we're just getting to a point where the foundations are in our past. And we're moving towards the future where this thing's, it just works even better than it already just works. Next up, Metal Hellsinger. Andy, I kind of want your thoughts on this one because you've been playing it back at home. Yeah, I've been playing a lot of Metal Hellsinger. I got pretty addicted to the demo of it. Been posting a lot on social about it because they have leaderboards for the demo.

which is really sick. But it's essentially, Doom, if it were a rhythm game, it's all set to music from, that's specifically made for the game, so it's not licensed or anything like that. You don't have to worry about DMCA taking you down. But they have a lot of different artists

from the metal world, a bunch of different vocalists and guitarists and stuff from like Lamb of God, and they have Surge Tankin from System of a Down. And they just have a lot of people from the music industry adding their talents to this. But it is incredibly satisfying.

Like I just was mesmerized the whole time I was playing it because of how good it feels to play. And everybody tells me to check out BPM now, which is something I definitely should check out. But this felt so great. And the music just kicks so much ass. And the higher multiplier you have, more of the song is revealed. So once you get to 60 multiplier, the vocals are there. And if you fuck up, you will lose your multiplier. and then the vocals will be gone.

You'll kind of feel like, all right, I need to get that momentum back in. But it plays so smoothly. It is fast as hell. It's super fun. The abilities are a blast. It is like immediately shot up to one of my most anticipated for the rest of the year. I believe it's out in September. So I can't wait to get the full release of this.

I can already tell that this is going to be one of my like top 10 of the year. It's funny. It's funny you mentioned BPM because I play. I played a little bit of BPM bullets for a minute when that first dropped. And it kind of ruined my appetite for Metal Hellsinger, because I remember afterwards seeing Metal Health Singer and go, I didn't really like BPM. Am I going to like this Metal Health Singer game?

And getting to play it at the show floor, I'm right there with you. Like, I can't believe how good this game feels to play. Like, it is a Doom-inspired game that somehow hits a similar level of intensity and, you know, smooth gunplay and great enemy play. and great enemy placement, all that stuff, but then also every shot you hit has to be on rhythm. And they somehow nailed that in a way that playing BPM,

I didn't really feel like they nailed it. I felt like I was held back by this stuff. In this game, I'm like, oh, fuck yeah, let me hit that reload, wait for the yellow dot to come through, hit it perfectly, and now I'm feeling real great about it. And I'm right there with you. Like now this game is up there as far as, oh, man, I got to play this when this comes out.

Yeah, and it, it, not only just kind of hitting on beat, but you can also active reload on beat as well. And if you get an enemy weak, you sort of get they light up like they do in Dume Eternal, where you go do the glory kill or whatever. But in here, it's just really dope to hit it on beat as well, especially when you're kind of just almost crafting like a musical experience where it's like, I could hit this finisher here, but I'm going to wait for the next bar to hit because it's going to feel so fucking sick to hit it there. And like, yeah, I think like this song will forever be burned into my head because of how much I've played it. I played it on stream last night for like three hours in addition to the two hours. I was playing it before then. Just I'm ranked everybody.

I'm ranked 132 in the world. Hell of God, Andy. Yeah, I'm up there. But it is just so much freaking fun, dude. And I can't believe, like, it initially was one of these videos that I saw SkillUp post. And that's why I mentioned it during the presentation. I guess it was Subur Game Test. So I was like, how many copies of SkillUp sell for this game?

Because I'm, he's the one who I first started. of it from. And then obviously we saw that presentation at Summer Game Fest. The demo is available, I believe, on PS5 series S&X and PC. And I could not recommend it more. Go give it a shot. Even if you're not into metal as a music genre, which I don't really listen to a whole lot of metal either, but it kind of just harkens back to my teen years listening to metal with friends and stuff like that. It's a fucking blast. and it is just like as hardcore as you would want from a game in this genre

and then the boss fight brings in a different song at a faster tempo and they've got sort of returnal bullet hell type mechanics where they're shooting waves of shots at you and you have to jump over those attacks and you have to duck here and dash to the left and you can dash on beat as well and it's so much goddamn fun

I could not recommend it anymore continuing lightning round anger foot Andy anger foot fucking hysterical so much fun it's basically hotline Miami if it were a first person shooter you're kicking down doors you're kicking bad guys but you can also pick up weapons from bad guys that they might have while they're shooting at you it's basically you know you get you can get killed a couple of times or shot a couple times It's not like it's a one time you're out and you have to restart the run. But your help will regenerate if you just want to hide behind a wall. It is absolutely like just hysterical.

It's so funny. It's so just twisted and weird in that sort of devolver humor type way. It's very unhinged. You were essentially this weird looking dude and you have a everything you do is with your feet. There's a sequence where you feed your girlfriend popcorn. with your foot and then you get a fax machine you get a fax in they tell you hey check your fax machine and you check it out and it's a photo and they kidnapped one of your shoes and there's like one of your shoes is tied up and there's a gun to it oh so you have to go save your shoe from

these like gangsters or whatever it's so much fun it's funny as hell and it it just understands what it wants to be and it's going to seem like one of those that and also the demo is super meaty It was a long-ass demo that lasts quite a while, so go check that out. How many levels are in the demo? Because I tried it myself, got to level two, and I finished level two, and will let me go past that. Is there more than that? Yeah, like there, you get, level 11 is where the boss fight is. Oh, shit.

It just keeps on going and going. Oh, I got to go back. I don't know what I did wrong then, because, yeah, I picked it up. I finished level two, and I was like, oh, that's weird that it ends here. It must be that there's only 10 levels in the game. I guess the game is going to be real short. That makes way more sense that, like, for some reason, it just didn't let me keep going. But yeah, no, I'm, dude, I played this game on the plane, on my Steam deck, on the way down to L.A.

It didn't run well on the Steam deck. But regardless, I was like, I'm going to push through this because I'm having a blast playing it. Like, it does feel exactly like Hotline Miami. Music kicks. Music kicks in and it's fire. Like the, I mean, kicking the, kicking doors into enemies and then kicking like other enemies into other enemies. It is ridiculous in some of the best ways. And yeah, like, it has that addicting quality to it where it is,

all right, I've died eight times. I know exactly where the enemies are going to be placed in any given room. I got to make sure that when I enter this room, I dodge left because I know they're going to be at the right and they're going to be aiming this way. It's my favorite kind of like arena-style gameplay. If you're out of ammo, throw it at the enemy, you stun them. Maybe they have a gun, kick them, they die,

grab their weapon that they dropped on the ground. It's so much fun. It's so ridiculous. Next up real quick, I want to talk about Vice undercover. It's spelled undercover spelled NDRCVR So they can get the trademark on that one It's pretty early And they the day that I played it was the first day

They ever revealed the trailer or anything I just think this one's really cool because it is a paper please type game I liken it to if Emily is away met Overecooked Where it's Emily is away in the sense that you are playing This old school 80s computer Opening up different apps to do tasks and all that stuff.

But there's a timer that you see in the upper right there counting down that you have to get a whole bunch of tasks done in that certain time or else you lose. And that's the end of it. So the pressure is on in an overcooked way that is really kind of like, yo, there's a lot of story. There's a lot of stuff I need to take in. But I got to click. I got to move. And you really have to learn the mechanics of the different apps and what they all do. It takes place in alternate history, 1980s, Miami, where the entire idea of the game,

of the story is what if Pablo Escobar had access to 90s or 2000s-level internet, but back in the 80s? And what would that have done to the drug scene and all the crime scenes out in Miami? And the story essentially is you play this character that is the wife of somebody that is about to get busted for a multi-million dollar drug bust. And you are essentially sneaking into where one of the people that are doing like detective work on you, is going to get caught, like get your partner caught. And you realize that every day,

they leave their office for one hour a day at the same time for lunch. So the game takes place each day is one mission. And it's the one hour that you have access to their computer. So you're logging out of the computer and kind of like hacking into their email and like using information you get to access other files. It gets very mission impossible. There's knock lists. There's all this crazy stuff, Andy.

that I was like, yo, this is just cool as all hell. And the timing of it all. So it's an hour per day, but the hour is 12 minutes in real time. So you've got to move. You got to go. You have to keep checking security cameras because janitors might come by or people that got word that you are doing what you're doing might come in and like with a gun.

And you have to pull a gun out and make the choice, do I shoot? Do I not shoot? Is it worth hiding the body, all that stuff? It seems ambitious as hell. is indie as hell, it is rad as hell. Andy, how does, how do those choices get communicated to you? Is it all just like tech stuff? So yeah, people on the outside that are essentially old school aiming you or like emailing

you and they're like, here's the mission, here's what I need from you. But they think a lot of people are emailing the computer thinking that you're the person you're pretending to be. Sorry, sorry, I mean, go for. I mean like you as the player, like are you getting text pop-ups or is it like happening text pops ups. Okay, got it, got it. Yeah, a lot of dialogue choice text pop-ups for stuff. But most of it is kind of like, we need to get this guy's address. So it's like you'll go use an app to get the database app. You find the guy's name and then you link to it and there's an address field. You copy that

address and you paste it into a different app to send to someone else to get a different mission going. Someone's bank account number you have to log into to transfer funds to different ways. Like, it is ridiculous. And the whole time I was just like, Mike and Nick are going to love. of this like this is like the most perfect uh stream game for them i'm very i'm stoked about it they really won me over it was like it's such a small weird game but like it's cool as hell and i i hope that it comes out they were saying next year i hope it hits because i think that this is going to be one of those real niche fun ones for for people to give it a shot uh next up nightingale gregg he wanted to talk about a bit yeah and it's lighting around so i'll go fast this is uh nightingale is a new shared world survival

crafting and building game coming to PC early access in 2022. This is off their Twitter bio. It's actually the way it stands out as it's inflexians game games first on one. This is Aaron Flynn's new studio. He used to be over a fireware and he left. This was a hands-off demo. So it was just the game looping footage while we watched and me and Aaron talked about it and I haven't talked to him in quite some time. So it's good to catch up. And then for him to actually sell me on this game, this is pretty much This is one of the things we were watching, right? It is a Victorian-era shared world survival game, right? And it's a crafting thing.

And when I read it on paper survival and crafting, I immediately kind of like, okay, not going to be a great game. Like, you know, Arc isn't my jam. Rust isn't my jam. I hate that. Like, I don't hate it. But crafting and building a base and then sitting there and having to defend it from people is never really what I'm about.

I think this one has a great narrative backbone. It is, he was pitching it very much as a story game, right? in the early 1500s, fairies that appeared. They taught us the magic of portals. Humans founded this town called Nightingale, the study magic. And then in 1889, there's this global cataclysm. It fucks up the whole portal network. You jump in and kind of like a slider's quantum leap almost, get blasted and don't have

the ability to get back to where you were in Nightingale. So you're trying to get back there to figure it out. But of course, you have to set up a shop somewhere and get going. And so you're playing, you're, you know, obviously fighting off hordes and stuff like this, but you're able to set up camp and, you know, invite your friends into your world and have them hang out with you and live there for a while and figure out what you want to do before you get back to Nightingale or whatever. But the thing about it is you have these cards, right, that you're earning throughout the game or finding throughout the game that then you can use to open the portals and then go to these new realms. And so when you go to a new realm, if you want it to, you can move your base there. You can set up the base there and be there.

you're seeing some of the realm stuff here and people coming and fight with you. And so yeah, like the idea that there's these NPCs, they are giving these quests, these things, it kind of sounds to me like, you know, more of an RPG, but I really fucking like what I saw here. And I'm excited to play more of it when it comes out this year on PC. Hell yeah. Another day of the devs want to give a shout out to is Skim, S-C-H-I-M. You're a little frog that is only able to move if you're popping into different shadows. It is a puzzle-based game that it has the same kind of isometric camera system that Captain Toad has. The visual style of it is really, really cool, really simplistic minimalist where everything is kind of just like the basic, like white,

which is like real simple black outlines. And then every level has like one pop color palette that they add to it. Really fun, cool stuff. Real simple. Never really broke my brain in any way from what I played. But I really dug it. I enjoyed it. It seems like the type of game that might be a super.

fun, super interesting, like three hour experience when all said and done that is cute as hell and has a ton of really good ideas. But I know people were a little more torn on this one, but I seem to really dig it. Yeah, I really like it. Cool as hell. Yeah. Maybe the soundtrack

puts it on another echelon, but yeah, this was one of the games that I think during Day of the Devs that was easily a standout for me where it's like, I need to play this. This has a really cool concept. And I just appreciate a different a really different art style.

I love devs kind of taking chances like that. I didn't dig it. I liked it a lot when I saw it in the trailer and then playing it. I was like, oh, okay. This is going to be hard to maintain my attention even if it is just three hours personally. But good for everybody.

What I told you, the frog's mom got divorced? Does the dad have a drinking? Does the dad frog have a drinking problem? Yeah, the dad frog. There was another one that I don't have on the list here, but time flies. Greg, what did you think about that one?

another one that I thought during the day of the devs presentation looked really cute and quirky and is and then I played it and I was like yeah I would not want to play this beyond this demo I've done yeah I did not like time flies at all I'm with you where like the idea the pitch is like oh this could be fun playing it I'm like this it feels a little pointless and if you miss the pitch you're an audio listener right it's this black and white game very minimalist you are a dot on the screen which is of course a house fly and you have the life expectancy of a house flying whatever country you pick to do whatever you want in the house so there's a you know a to do list that it has a whole bunch of stuff of like, you know, get drunk, uh, you know, go over here, find friends, all these different things. And some of the, it's almost, it's like a puzzler when you started because you don't know what to do. And some of them is like, oh, this is a, I want, I was, I forget which one it was that I saw. I'll start a revolution. I was like, that sounds like it's going to be weird or hard. Am I getting a much of flies? And then when I found the solution, I was like, oh, that's kind of cute. But in general, I was like, cool, this is good enough for me. It reminds me a bit of a title of a game, except you plays a fly. And yeah, the art style,

The art style is very like hand drawn like you know like almost coloring book like black and white. MSP paint is actually the perfect way to put it. Yeah. And like I didn't dig it that much either to play. I did like looking at it. But also like you know, for a lot of these games, we didn't have much time to play these ones. And I, um, there was kind of like a rotating demonstration. And I was playing shim or skim right before this one, the frog shadow one.

And I was actually having blast with that one. I was like, oh, this is great. Like my puzzle platforming brain is really, really digging this. and I didn't want to stop playing it. And then they put me on to time flies. I started playing it like four, five minutes in. I was like,

all right, I think I'm done here. I think I've played. What do you need to play? And I just walked off. Then next time we got a double whammy of similar games. We have a little to the left, Greg.

Yeah. A little left is the one you saw on Day of the Devs. That's a puzzle game about tidying up the house. And so, like, it was the one, like, I got to play it.

It's cute. It's fun. You know, there's 75 puzzles at launch. There's different things to do. One of the ones I had, you know, it starts a little to the left. It's like a framing joke and there it was, you know, get the frame centered. Great.

It reminds me a little bit of like a warrior where a brain age, right? You're seeing keys get organized by size here. It's about tidying it up. But as you also see there, there's stars, meaning there's stars for when you finish a puzzle. And I think it's easy to go in. Like I didn't be like, oh, it's about speed. In the fruit one, you just saw, that was the one I played. And I only got one star at two.

And I was like, what the hell? And they're like, well, there's actually alternate solutions to do things. And you have to go in there. And again, there's going to be the. in your face, as you just saw there, straighten this out, get the spoons in the right order of, you know, smallest to largest or largest to smallest, sure, but then there'll be little things to think about more.

I don't want to ruin the fruit puzzle thing in case you get it, but I thought it was really clever. One of the things I think is the most clever about this, a little of the left, again, in the brain age way, is they're doing a thing called the Daily Tidy, and it's going to be a daily puzzle that gets served to you. Everyone will get the same, like, genre of puzzles. So if it was the fruit one, you get the fruit one or whatever,

but the solutions would be different for everybody. So it wouldn't be like you're getting the exact same puzzle. Somebody could spoil it like a wordle, but you'd have a same. If wordle was a puzzle, you'd have a wordle, not the same word of that. I didn't get to try this one.

What's up with the cat that was in the trailer just now? Did you get to play around with that? So it's their cat. The owners have a cat. And that's kind of their whole idea here. It's like, you know, anytime they try to tidy stuff in their house,

their cat fucks it up. And so you see here like the cat kind of will mess things up. So it adds a little bit of difficulty where it's not just, puzzles at certain points. Like it felt kind of random with the demo I played. But every like third or fourth random puzzle, the cat would do something.

And it's like, oh shit, I need to do this quickly. And it just had a little bit of fun. That looks really cool. Yeah, it was fun. I like it a lot.

I'm looking forward to it. And then the next one that I played that I actually really, really dug was called birth. And I think one of the reasons I dug it so much is I got a little bit more. I got two demo times with it as opposed to the one of us shifting around really quick. So I played a little left for maybe five minutes, but I actually got about 10 minutes with birth. It's a very similar idea where you're kind of just figuring out

these warrior-ware-esque puzzles. But this one's dark as shit. I described it as weird in a good way, where it's more of a story of somebody that's like very lonely and sad. And you kind of explore this city. And I was often really wowed by the scope of it, where it's not just random puzzle after random puzzle. There's like, you can see the bottom left there.

There's like a city that you can click on it, and then a backpack. In the backpack, there's different things that you're gathering to solve other puzzles later. The city you go to, and it's like this really, really intricate world where you get to click on into different buildings. You go to the coffee shop, you go to the bookstore, wherever, where each one has its own set of puzzles. And some of them work where the puzzles are all in the one place, but some of them are things that you're collecting to go to the city to bring them to a different place to solve puzzles elsewhere. Really, really damn cool. And again, weird as hell. but I just, I love the, the aesthetic of it all.

And it's, it's creepy as shit. Bless. Yeah. Oh, sorry. A quick question. Did they talk about platforms for a birth and a little to the left? Yeah, they did. I kind of want to play those on mobile.

Those look like they'd be really dope-ass mobile games. Or like Twitch games. I was playing, I was playing birth on a PC. So I don't know, but I was really digging it. Okay. I mean, that's a Steam deck join for me then. And I do believe, it's coming in August. I do believe for the other one who's not,

And I always talked so many times with my name is escaping me. But the one we just talked about, a little of the left, I'm pretty sure. No, a little of the left for me, sorry that I was just talking about. I believe it is PC and Switch. Yeah, they have a switch. They have it on Switch here at the end of their trailer. Gotcha. But yeah, Berth was really fun.

And it was very similar, but it was also very different. And again, I think it's worth pointing out that the whole point here is that you're so lonely. You're constructing a creature from spare bones and organs found in the world. So that's what you're doing is you're going through and doing these physical-based puzzles and getting things and moving around. and you're trying to assemble a person or a thing. And then the next game I want to talk about has a similar vibe of sadness being dealt with in a cool gameplay mechanic. Is Desta the memories between?

This is from the Monument Valley team. It's a Netflix-produced game or Netflix-published game. But what's interesting about this one is I thought that meant play it on Netflix because the whole Netflix games thing. No, that's not it at all. This is a, it's on PC or it's on a, yeah, PC and iPad is where I was playing it on. And it's a turn-based tactics game. kind of similar to a Mario Plus Rabbits Kingdom Battle type battle system,

combined with the physics of like dodgeball, almost Pagel-like, where you're pulling back the ball to attack and you're throwing it at people. The battles are you dealing with what you wish you would said in conversations? So it's somebody that's like really the main character, Desta, they're looking into themselves and like being like, oh, man, like why'd I say it this way to my former partner or why do that at the grocery store or whatever? And the battles are them kind of like trying to come up with the, the, if I could live back that moment differently, this is how I would do it differently.

And that's all backed up with like story and dialogue choices and stuff. And I thought it was pretty damn cool. And it definitely looks beautiful. Yeah, the art style is gorgeous for this one. This is one that I got to demo as well. And as the developer was explaining it to me, it was one of those, it was one of those, you know, fun ones where I sat down to do the demo. And like, I didn't know what the game was. Like, Greg had already scheduled everything.

And as I sat down, I was like, this is not my kind of game. I do not like any sort of like strategy like Marion Rabbit's like that kind of gameplay doesn't really do it for me The more the dev explained it the more I was like oh shit I can kind of dig this right and especially playing it off of the iPad where it is you know you do the thing you set up exactly like Or you figure out exactly who you want to hit and it is Dodgeball gameplay where you are doing the angry birds You pull back on a character angle them and hopefully you can get the angle right to then release and then the dodge ball will hit that character and you use that to effect damage It looks really cool. It seems like it's pretty fun.

And like as a Netflix game, like this is beyond what I even thought that like Netflix would even be doing. It's interesting, again, that's from the Monument Valley team because like that kind of takes me back to like Monument Valley and House of Cards now that kind of comes full circle. I'm sure that's kind of part of talks. Yeah, right? But yeah, like it's one I'm looking forward to.

The next one that we all played together that we might end on actually is glitch busters. That was a small game for Skybound games, and it is really quirky. The idea and concept of it is it's a four-player, multiplayer, third-person kind of like action game where you're working as a team. It's very Ghostbusters-esque in ways where you're going through cleaning some shit up. But the things you're cleaning up are internet-based stuff. So the whole game is like you're jumping around on like app icon images and things like that. It's like you're kind of in the internet, really cute, really colorful, definitely a family, friendly thing. The one thing, my biggest takeaway from this is how much it made me realize I want

a modern ratchet and clank all for one type game where it's like play with your friends online and you know, it's a third person shooter where you're all working together to fuck around in a fun platforming element. The gimmick here is everything's about magnets. You can jump on top of each other and kind of extend your reach and stuff. It was fun. I don't think this is anything that the three of us are like, yo game of the year. But it was like, oh, it's kind of a cool idea. Your style is so chaotic in this one. That was my big takeaways as we were playing it. There's so much going on on screen in terms of like you're playing in a digital world and everything is, everything is inspired by the internet. And so like you'll be jumping on platforms and the platforms will be

icons from like your phone, right? Like here's the Wi-Fi icon. Here's the fucking phone icon. You're hopping on those boxes. And like a lot, like there's like a lot of emoji shit going on. Like it is legit if you jumped into a modern iPhone as a digital world as a platforming level. and there's again so much going on that I honestly don't know if I like the art style or not like I kind of want to see more of what are the different theming for different levels and does that stuff come together

because for the one level we played I was like oh this is I you could tell that they went for it right they have a very specific vision on what they want the game to look like but my eyes just felt like they were being attacked at times by how much there was going on it looked very greedy in a lot of sections but then there was a clip there that Barra just showed where it was 2D sort of a side scrolling type thing is it

are they just like different Mario Party type levels no it was 3D it was all 3D there was a 2D section we played that was us going through oh that's right yeah like that wasn't linear yeah that was really that and I think that honest I think that was like a Mario Party style like oh that was a separate game play mode yeah it seems like the main bulk of this game is third person co-op shooting and I had a fine time with it I thought was pretty cool

any final games go for correct no don't worry we're done is there any other final game you want to talk about that we didn't mention that we played i played a little bit of jojo's bizarre adventure all-star battle r is what i think it is uh that's a fighting game that is jojo's bizarre adventure though it's like a revamp of the one that came out about a decade ago they mentioned how it's a new art style new mechanics new all this stuff i had a pretty good time with it usually i don't fuck with the anime band an i bianicombo published games this one is a bit more on the side of a Budakai style game where it is 2D, but you can kind of shift around in the 3D space.

And I had fun. It played a little bit more like a street fighter than a Nartal Ultimate Ninja Storm. But it was also one of the ones where in the same event as Street Fighter, everybody was flocking a street fighter. Nobody I talked to you was really talking about Jojo. But, you know, it seemed like a pretty fun time. I actually would be down to play a little bit of it when it comes out. And with that, for anyone wondering where our Street Fighter 6 impressions are, that is actually

on our Capcom Showcase Reaction video that we did. It's labeled. You'll see it. It has Street Fighter 6. We played it as the thumbnail. So you can go check that video out as well. And with that, that's the end of this episode of Kind of Funny Games cast. We're about to do the Patreon exclusive post show for people over at patreon.com slash kind of funny games. But until next time, I love you all.