The Besties - A Great Game for Every Genre

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Want a prehistoric riff on Metroidvanias? Crave a life-consuming multiplayer survival adventure? Yearn for the olden times of point-and-click adventures? This week, The Besties spotlight new delectable delicacies from across the video game spectrum.Music featured: "Primal Planet (Reprise)" by Michael Kirby Ward from Primal Planet: https://michaelkirbyward.bandcamp.com/  Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

You got any gross food stuff fresh? Oh, I'd really rather not. I don't, I don't. I don't. That's too bad. I mean, what do we even talk about without hoops? We don't got gross food stuff. We don't got...

I think we can all agree. Hoops is the thread that binds us together. It truly is. Like, you guys have always felt more like Hoops' friends. And I know that, like, to you, for me, it's like, I'm Hoops' little bro. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, like, I come over sometimes to, like, watch you guys skateboard or whatever, but, like, He is kind of the middle ground that we all kind of meet on.

I'm glad we have a safe space to like finally just kind of air all this stuff out. I'm so fucking good as skateboarding. You have no idea. Russ can do 10 kick flips. And even when Chris was my neighbor, it still was sort of like juice was the spirit in the room. That was always kind of like the topic on our lips. Yeah. Well, we did have between the two of our houses, a little kind of hoops mural.

Yeah, so we could, you know. And there were houses between ours, but like if you were driving fast enough down our road before they put the speed bumps in, you could, it would sort of blend and blur. Yeah, it's like that mad magazine. If you fold the page at the end, it kind of makes it into one. Yeah. That's probably why that car drove into my house, as they were trying to see the hoops mural by going at the top speed. And then they just lost control and, you know, crashed into my room. As they came just sort of barrel rolling into your bedroom, they were like, sorry, Chris, I really wanted to see the mural of hoops in the way that it was intended.

And you were like, no, no, for sure. I get it. I get it. I understand. The only way I could do it was by having a blood alcohol percentage of 90% being strong. It helps. It helps get the hoops mural together because otherwise you're like, well, there's a, it looks like a really lovingly painted picture of Justin with his hand up. But if you don't see your house with Tony Hawk on the other side holding his hand up for the high five, it's like, what's it all mean?

Why'd you even bother, right? Yeah. And I mean, it is the best way to go is, you know, 150 miles per hour seeing hoops giving a high five to Tony Hawk before you. Chris, I know this is a terrible traumatic thing that happened to you. I do feel like every time you tell us about it, the speed increases, the size of the car increases. Yeah, it does seem like you're kind of blowing out of a portion. You put a little extra mustard off. every time.

I know the best game of the week. Welcome back, everybody, to the besties, the show where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's the game of the year club, but just by listening to you, my dear friend, are a member. This week we are Sands, one Justin McRoy, but we are whatever the opposite of Sands is. We are pro so many games. And we're going to talk about all of them in just a little bit. I guess a quick rundown, quick teaser of what we're going to be discussing this week. Grounded 2. Chris, like three words.

What's that? A small survival game. Cool. Teenage Mutia Turtle's Tactical Takedown. What is that? It's a... Ninja Turtle Tactics. Oh, you're doing it.

System Shock 2 remastered. Huh? System shock, more. The Drifter. I'll do this as an Australian adventure mystery. And Primal Planet? Survival Metroid, Castlevania? Amazing. Why don't we only do it this way from now on? Because it's, it gets the people what they need and it gets them right out the door. We're going to talk about all those games and more coming up just after this short break.

Why didn't I not play Primal Planet after that pitch? Yeah, I know. Well, he didn't give you the three power words behind it. Yeah. If only somebody had handed you a code and said literally this and said, fresh, this is your thing. But somebody's a real big shot now. Somebody's gone full holly. Hollywood, full holly weird, and doesn't have time for old Chris Plant. He says, I can only play the games, the kind of funny guys says I'm allowed to play. I'm like, damn, Russ. What kind of fucking... Greg has to approve them.

What kind of deal did they give you, man? That's crazy. Emphasis on kind of. Yeah. Here we are. We're here to talk about some video games. Yeah, can we start with Primal Planet? Because I am actually...

Sure. I have this one downloaded, and it is next on the list, but I was playing a lot of stuff this week. What am I in for when I tune in to Primal Planet, Chris? Not sure why I picked this one because I'm not a big survival game or a Metroidvania person, but it turns out when you put those flavors together, get something delicious. It looks like the Super Nintendo Sega Genesis 2D platformers of your Salmon Mac, I think, Bonk. I'm going to go way back and say my immediate thought was like abuse.

You ever play that game abuse with the aliens and the 360 Ames? No, sir But it sounds made up And it sounds like a bad dream you had There's gonna be an old person listening That's gonna be an old person listening that remember Okay, describe the game a little bit more Just so we don't leave on

Have you ever played abuse It's got Dino? Oh, wait, you want to know about abuse? Sure, just tell us specifically the Dinosaur game Oh, just like art wise It's kind of of that era It is like between NES and S and EAS Okay, I'm looking at this

Kind of, I see what you're saying So yeah, the way of thinking about it is a pixel graphic game, side-scrolling, but you are gear-gated or doing the Metroidvania stick by collecting materials and then crafting it. So for me, it really helped once I started to think of it as, oh, all the materials are just different currencies that I spend to buy the new upgrades that I'm going to need to go further into the game. And once it clicked for that, it stopped being, oh, this is stressful. like so many survival games, which feel like work to me and feel like a bit of a grind,

where this is much more about exploration. As you're exploring, you're going to find the materials that you need to progress through the game. It's just kind of more of an aesthetic hook for it. It's structurally like did you play Subnotica? Sounds like that. Oh, but even lighter in terms of the survival expectations here. Because again, it is a 2D. the Metroidvania game. So you start out and it's like, well, you need to create a spear to be able to fight certain enemies. And then you can light that spear on fire to create a torch.

And torches create kind of like save points or community points. And then you need different types of poisons to fight bosses. So you're just getting different unlocks that are going to make it so that you can actually get past the different barriers in the Metroidvania. type of world and then there is a little bit of like build a hut where your characters can live but really what that's doing is closer to the um assassins creed did this where you would like build out a city and then you get it's not like you get to choose where to build the the hut and like design it yourself it's already there you just put in the resources and it's going to give you

some different awards there's a bunch of different upgrades it sounds pretty light on the survival craft kind of it seems like that is a it sounds like terraria a level in terms of like how well no because in terraria you can pretty much build whatever the fuck you want when it wear it you want but this is like you are getting the stuff you need to build the house that is already there yes yes it is definitely um elusory the survival vins which i like yeah i like that too i don't like survival stressful yes and i but on the flip side it made me enjoy the metroidsvania stuff which fresh i know you enjoy these games much more than i do but it felt less wrote.

For me, sometimes Metroid venue feels like, okay, I'm running from one into the next to get the thing so that I can progress. And it feels like a bit of a chore list to do because I can see

the mechanisms of the game. In Cheer, it felt much more like exploring, even though once I kind of zoomed out and could look at the map, I was doing the exact same thing. A thing that I surprisingly really enjoyed

about this game is the way it conveys its story. It is dialogue-free, but these pixelated characters interact with each other in a really sweet way. So you are a, I guess, like, caveman or whatever. And you are separated at first from your family, your wife, and I think your daughter. And once you reunite with them, the characters will just hug each other if they're standing still. The hugging's been around for so long. It's been around for so long. It's been around for so long, but rarely a feature in a video game. Is it?

It has just... That's like a couple has been in games? Oh, come... No. You're telling me that you went back and played Joe and Mac or whatever it was back then, and they're just hugging each other? No. It takes...

I don't think there's much caveman hugging representation. There just isn't. The other thing that I enjoyed about the game? Great. soundtrack. And there are space aliens. That's right. Couldn't just have enough with the dinosaurs. They said, you would also...

needs, and these aliens with giant powerful laser guns. Are the cave people surprised about the aliens, or is that just part of their day-to-day? You know, I think... I don't want you to speculate. This is not an improv. I'm, like, genuinely curious. No, I'm not trying to be funny. No, so we save that for hoops, and he's not here, and Griffin's much...

I wouldn't get it. I wouldn't get the jokes, guys. Thank you. That's... Too young. Too little. Mostly, I'm asking... Well, here's what I'm asking. I'm like giving you a real answer here, which is like, no, they're not surprised because everything is a fucking surprise. They're cave people. They look at the stars and it's a miracle.

What I'm asking is, is this a dinosaur world that eventually gets invaded by UFOs? Or when you arrive, is it like a half dinosaur or half UFO world? I think we're supposed to believe that it is a dinosaur world that is being invaded by UFOs. And I'm glad that you got that clarification. Okay. Yeah. Very important. Um, this looks really great. I love the pixel art style, a whole bunch. I'll, I'll include some music in the, um, the show notes because it is, it is my new background music for like working and chilling out. It is such a good vibe. So yeah, I enjoyed it.

But speaking of survival games are way more survival. Sure. I want to hear about Grounded 2. Yeah, man. I played quite a bit of this. The early access version of Grounded 2 launched on July 29th. I've been really looking forward to this one because I, like, I don't know if it was earlier this year or later last year, but I just played through all of Grounded 1. Sort of after giving it a shot right after it came out of Early Access and then not playing it when they added.

bunch of shit to it. And it's, grounded one is one of my favorite games in this whole, you know, open world survivor, survival craft genre, which if you're not familiar, like Chris and Russ kind of suggested earlier, it's a genre where you are able to collect resources and build and upgrade tools and armor and weapons and you build a base and you outfit that base with everything you need to survive. And it had the stuff the plant was talking about, right? The like Metroid vania like exploration you need this unlocked to explore in this area so there were story beats and through those story beats you would unlock new kind of like systems in the game like one of them was like a zip line that would allow you to like quickly traverse from one area to another

and i would not say it was remotely sort of like metroidsania focused like i think if you but there was a critical path to the game in so far as like well in order to to beat the game, you have to do this underwater lab. In order to do the underwater lab, you have to kill this one bug to unlock the blueprint for the diving mask. And then you would need to, so like that, that is kind of like how the whole genre handles that. Same with your somnodicas, the forest. I mean, Minecraft to, not to put too fine a point on it. Anyway, grounded two. It's in early access now. What is out is a lot when grounded launched in early access. It was pretty heavily criticized for fairly bare bones. This is a lot. What they have said is that grounded to the, which takes

place in a big sort of community park this time around, rather than the backyard of some disgraced scientist, is going to be three times larger than the map in Groundham 1, and there is about a third of the map available in the early access stuff, as well as a bunch of story quest content and a bunch of other stuff. I know this is always like a big, I don't know, it is a big hang up for me playing early access games now that I know I'm going to play the shit out of once they are fully featured and released, but I do also think that is going to be a while before that happens, and I'm glad that I dipped into Grounded, too, because it's doing some pretty neat stuff. How much of grounded, I know, I think we all played Grounded at some point together, but did

you guys, like, get particularly deep into it? Because I don't know where to start sort of, like, explaining the systems. I didn't, I remember, yeah, when we played together, but I didn't play a ton of it. but every time you've talked about it like previously your time with it sounded very enticing because I think what scared me off was like what scares a lot of like me off from a lot of these survival games

is even though I feel like I'm progressing it's like oh my house is bigger and I have a silver sword instead of a bronze sword whatever the fuck whereas this had like narrative hooks to it you were seeing more new stuff like that's really the beat and then the other thing I think was I found really impressive was just like the building I thought was like

The building is next level, really great. The whole game, if you're not familiar at all, listener with Grounded One, you play as a teenager who has been shrunken down, Honey, I Shrunk the Kid's Style, and you basically have to figure out what happened, where you are, how to undo the shrinking process, and you go on this great big miniature adventure, fighting against a bunch of bugs and harvesting their components and building bases at certain, you know, landmarks around the map. And those landmarks will be like a grill that has toppled over or a picnic table. Um, and like, I don't know, that whole aesthetic is so rad. And by the time that game was like fully, fully, fully finished, it had so much great stuff going for it, uh, as far as like making a base that looked really cool. All the gear, uh, felt really different and gave you like certain special abilities. So it wouldn't be just like, well, now my sword is silver. It would be like, well, I just crafted a magic fire staff out of a shard of spicy candy.

Uh, and I'm using armor that, you know, gives me this benefit and this benefit. Anyway, grounded two, very much sort of pitching the same pitch, right? You're a miniaturized teen, the same four teams from the first game. They very quickly get through like, and here's why you've been shrunk again in this new place. Oh, you do actually get unshrunk in the first game. I guess spoilers. I think there's multiple endings, but yes, it is possible.

The ending I got involved being unshrunk. And what they have added is, I think it comes in a form of like, and this is not obviously reinventing the wheel as far as sequels go, but like a lot of quality of life stuff as well as like a few, I think, tint pole features that all seem very fucking cool. Quality of life stuff includes, so a big part of the first game is you have tools like an axe and a shovel and a hammer. you use those to chop down this big weed so that you can get the components from it and you use this hammer so you can smash up a pine cone but you need a certain strength of hammer to do it and all that stuff like you had to keep in your inventory and you had to keep repaired so they didn't like break while you're out in the field in this game there's none of that you have what's called I think an omni tool and you can upgrade that specifically like at little like

you know science stations or whatever but it doesn't even show up in your inventory you just run up to a collectible interactable item and there's a single button and you automatically like do the thing it's pretty fucking yeah that's great um the game feels a lot better combat feels great it's all the first game i think was only first person or only third person you have your choice in in this one um it is made by um obsidian uh and so the combat is it feels kind of like elder scrollsie a little bit like it's a lot of hold right click to block uh left, left click to... Does it feel like the game they just put out?

What was it? A Vowed? I mean, yeah, I guess so. I didn't play a ton of a Vowd. It felt like that one really... Evolution of the Oblivion combat engine. That one didn't like super click for me. It is not the deepest combat in the world.

What makes it work is the survival element of it. Of like, oh shit, I'm pretty far from base. And I've got some pretty good stuff on me right now. And I just got jumped by a score. And I really need this fight to go well for me. Like that sort of thing makes the somewhat simple combat of like you block. There's perfect blocks if you do it like right before you get hit. And when that happens, like you don't lose any stamina and you can stun your opponent so

you can like get in a few hits. They have made this idea of like specialties much more surfaced and a lot more accessible. So whenever you craft a piece of equipment, a piece of armor or whatever, it will show you like, this is warrior armor. And that will give you this benefit. And then usually if you're crafting, you know, fighter armor or whatever, it will give you a little bit more health, a little bit more whatever. Then there's like rogue armor, range armor. It like tells you pretty much on the tin.

Like if you want to play this play style, this is how you do it. And that was not quite as easy to kind of understand in the first game. And it seems like they're putting a lot more emphasis on that, which kind of dovetails with the sort of co-op focus of the game. Can you turn off the survival like you need water? I don't know if you can do that in this early action. And grounded one, you could do whatever the fuck you want to, any of the options, which I really did appreciate a lot. I do like some of that stuff. Like, I like the economy of having that hunger and thirst. And then all of a sudden, once you build a machine that can harvest, you know, do drops in the morning. Like, that feels like a big deal. As artificial as that is, maybe mechanically, like I do enjoy some of that stuff. I don't, I didn't look actually in grounded two early access. But I would be completely shocked if it was not in the game at some point. I imagine they all. have the arachophobia mode, which I also appreciate. Ragnophobia tells you right at the top of the game as you turn it on, like, hey, if you don't like spiders, this is going to be a rough fucking ride for you, but we have a thing that's going to.

I didn't click it. I think it just like blurs them out. No, I've used it before. So in the first game, I'm sure it's probably similar in this one. The first game, the more you turn it, the closer they turn into just like big 3D circles. I love it. That's great. Awesome.

Which they made those fucking spiders heinous in the first game. So I'd imagine. Yeah. And they're just as scary. There's the same bugs are back in this one. There's new bugs. There's scorpions this time around who are just fucking awful, really, really terrible. So, like, quality of life stuff is what makes me kind of excited.

The big sort of tent pole stuff, the biggest thing of all is now there are mounts. And the mounts are bugs. And the first one you get access to is a red ant, like a soldier ant. You find its egg. You have to go in this mission where you go into a red ant hill. You get the soldier egg and you have to, like, make it back to your base before. or every other ant in the whole park kills you. And then you can ride around on this ant.

He's fast as hell. You can use him to fight. You can use him to harvest resources. You can switch him into basically vacuum mode. And he'll just kind of like slowly trot around and absorb up everything and keep his own like little inventory slots. And then there's like a, you know, you can build your own like barn essentially for your bugs where they will live

and you can call out whenever you need them. And then there's other mouth. that are, I think you can ride one of those big orbweaver spiders to, and then they're talking about adding more stuff to the game. I have honestly, to be perfectly blunt, the timing of this is not great because I just played the shit out of grounded one, and I know I'm going to play a lot of grounded two. So I did hit a point where, I don't know, maybe after 10 hours or so in grounded two, the early access, I was like, I think I've good.

I think I've seen what I need to see, and I'm going to, you know, you know, hop back in as soon as you try to get to like a point where it's like, okay, things are relatively stable. I would be able to pick it up from that point in the future. I don't actually know because I am not one. I'm usually one where if I go a year without playing a game, I'm not going to want to hop back into the same like save that I had. But I am very, very, very much into like I spent a lot of time in Grounded One

building this like tree top base that I'd like scaled my way up to with like these leafy slanted roof pieces. so I had this incredible, I spent hours and hours and hours on that, and I don't want to do that if I know that I'm going to not finish it on this save or whatever. But I do really, really like what is there. I played it mostly on my Rog Ally X, and it works great on there. And it seems to be not performing as well on my PC, which I don't know what to make of that. But there have been some complaints about like optimization and stuff like that. But, you know, Yeah, for me, if you're a grounded fan, like it seems like a no-brainer. I guess the big question is like, do you want to wait? And I don't think they've given a timetable

for when the full game is going to come out, but I do assume it's going to, like it probably won't be this year if I were to wait. Yeah, usually it's like a year, is the typical. Yeah, they also just released two games. I mean, well, they released one already, avowed, and then they have Outer Worlds Two coming out. So it's like, they got a lot crack in.

I I this this whole sort of like franchise just really really works for me like I just really love the idea of a you know honey I shrunk the kid's survival game and I love like finding some big real world thing and then figuring out like wait is that actually going to do any can I use that in my war against the against the spider folk like that that stuff I think is really really I don't know it hits really good and they've they've also done a lot of very smart changes to sort of the grounded formula that I don't know. At the very least, this has got me frothing at the mouth for the full release of this game because I know that it is going to have a pretty big impact, I think.

Yeah, it sounds great. I love it. Should we take a quick break? Yeah, let's take a quick break, and then we'll come back and talk about the rest of the stuff we got. Okay, we're back. So the initial plan was to do an entire episode on the game that I'm about to talk about, but I'm pretty glad that we didn't. because

I thought I was certain everyone was going to get so mad at me because I played it and I didn't get it and it's such a classic and it was one of those like uh-oh moments

well okay so the game we're talking about is System Shock 2 remastered which is it's worth noting not a reimagining not a reboot

it's not like Metal Gear Solid Delta where they totally like modernize the whole thing it is the same game more or less before, but with like up-resed graphics

and some quality of life changes, broadly speaking. But like the enemies you're facing, the environments you're in are going to look like a game that came out in the mid-90s. In the last millennium, yeah, for sure. I think the big draw for this

is the original game became increasingly impossible or at least very difficult to run on modern devices. So I think for fans of system Shock 2, of which there are many that are probably very old at this point, you can now run it on basically anything. I've played it on a Steam deck, but you can run on PC, whatever. What I find about, what I find interesting about System Shock 2 is a lot of the team that

worked on this would go on and work on more, I think, currently relevant, or at least quasi-relevant titles, like, Bioshock, for example. This was the precursor to, like, when Bioshock came out, it was, hey, the system. System Shock team is making this new thing. Yeah, correct. Which was an interesting thing because BioShok was a console game or it was targeting console gamers. Right.

System Shock 2 was hardcore PC. Back when that distinction fucking meant anything at all. Yes. But at the time, it was like having people, you almost needed somebody to translate why it was exciting that BioShack was being made. Yeah. With System Shock 2, I think is interesting because it does feel like the progenitor to Bioshock and not just in terms of plot.

Like, the plot is very similar as well. You basically land on a space station in this case. And you're arriving after shit has popped off. In this case, an AI named Shodan caused some fiasco to go off in the first game, whatever. And it has progressed to the point where she has a major threat and you've got to take her out. And so once you arrive, the ship already has, like, fucking zombies running around and psychic monkeys running around and things are really bad. You find bio-regeneration pods that are your checkpoints if you die, which is pretty much right across the bow by-Bi-Shok. I mean, in many ways, it feels a little bit like a prototype of what they would later do in Bioshock.

You're finding notes, you're finding audio logs, you're finding like little keypad codes to type in. This game, when I first played it originally many, many years ago, I remember being incredibly, incredibly difficult. And I was like, I've since played so many of these immersive sims that I'm going to be fine. And man, I was not. No. I think a lot of the issue is that you start and like your only weapon for the most part is this wrench that you have. You do get other weapons. But ammo is such a valuable commodity that like using them on a rare, on like a random zombie that's running around is a total waste.

Shooting a bullet feels bad. Yeah. It feels like you're fucking up with every shot. you take. Well, and part of that is because they have a skill system where you're investing the resources that you find throughout the world to level up different skills. And one of those skills is standard weapons that you would pick up like a pistol or whatever. And, but to get to like a high enough level where shooting a gun feels okay requires probably seven or eight hours of like getting through these very difficult levels. So you're just having to min-max every tiny

little thing. It, I think it feels- You are not told by the way what any of the stats do or or mean as far as I can tell and then there's skills stats as well and so like you start the game by making all of these choices of what branch of the military you're going to go into and what different training regimen

you're going to do and I was like okay I guess I'll just do like all tech and like hacking I'll go like specialize I'll just take the pick things that make me hack better and then like the first handful of machines I came up to was like

your hacking skills not high enough man I'm like well then why the fuck did I just do all that why did I do that then I think they more or less in later games, Bioshock, whatever,

streamlined all the things that, like, were impossibly obtuse or difficult and just made those choices feel more meaningful the second you were making them where you'd instantly know,

like, oh, I'm better at aiming or, oh, I'm better at hacking, and it would, like, feel palpable, and that was, like, a big change from this original game. They did add a co-op mode, I should say, for this. Yeah.

Which is, in theory, a nice solution where you could have somebody who knows what they're doing guide you through what's happening right i mean griffin you did that for me with grounded one like that's a great way for me to get into those survival games that i'm otherwise terrible at but this game was not made for co-op and if you look at the reviews or especially just the general player feedback this is um a buggy novelty more than it is a real way that you're going to want to play this game

Yeah, I don't know. I didn't dip into the co-op mode. I played the single player story until I just, I really, I want to think I gave it a fair shot because I know that this is a game that like, if I had played it in 99, would have blown my fucking gourd. But there's a lot of games that came out in 1999 that I would still happily play to completion. And I didn't, I just didn't get it, guys. Like, I just didn't. I thought everything was so clunky and unpleasant to interact. with, and I feel like I gave it a shot, but just could not hang. Yeah, I would unfortunately agree. I don't think it's aged well. I think there's just a ton of other games prey and Bioshock games that, like, do what this game is doing just in a much better way and not just, I mean, I appreciate the, like, groundbreaking nature of this title, but I think this release in particular is just for the hardcore fans that, like, don't want to have to go through the hoops of running this

game on their device currently. I would, you know, earmark this game if you're curious about it, though, because there is such an intense fan base around the SystemShok games. And even before this remaster, they were doing a ton of modding to do all sorts of cool stuff with it. And I think we will see a similar push from the modding community with this game over the years. But that's more of a... That's assuming they don't die before they finish the mods because they're very old. Yeah, for $150. Jesus.

I would love to talk about my next game because it came out of nowhere, blew me the fuck away. And I think it's one of the better games I have played in the year 2025. And that game is called The Drifter. The Drifter is a very traditional point-and-click sort of adventure game. I say sort of because one of the big kind of selling points is that they have also, the developer's power hoof, who I believe is just two guys in Melbourne. Australia.

Their last big game, as far as I can tell, is crawl, which came out in 2014. You guys remember that one? It was like a co-op competitive multiplayer dungeon crawling game. Yeah, so one player would control, like, all the monsters and traps. And if you killed one of the adventures, you got to take their body and take their place, it fucking rules. It's so good. And the soundtrack is great.

And I didn't realize that until today when I was, like, trying to look up more about the studio and was like, oh shit, I remember that game. That game rules. So the drifter is the point I didn't finish making. They included a special sort of like controller control me like design where you use one stick to move and one stick to kind of look around and then kind of just like point at things you want to interact with. It all works so fucking while I played the whole thing on my ROG ally. But it is very much in that sort of traditional LucasArts, you know, monkey island, the dig, that whole kind of milieu. It is about a man named Mick Carter who travels home after stowing away on a train to attend his mother's funeral and he gets embroiled in this like wild

sci-fi conspiracy where people are going missing and there's been a string of murders of other drifters, you know, living out on their own. And he starts, he realizes that when he dies, he flashes back in time, which is kind of how they get around like, oh, no, you fucked up in adventure games. If you mess up and then you die, then you, whoosh, fast forward back in time. Does they animate the, like, gory death before you whoosh? Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, no. I mean, Crawl was pretty gnarly.

Like, there was a lot of impaling and evisceration. And in this game, Mick gets, like, absolutely destroyed a lot. And it is dark as fuck. It, like, you need to be ready to hang with that. If that is your interest, I would suggest you watch a trailer for the game because it definitely touches. He is, Mick is a dude who is running away from this horrible, personal, family tragedy and a lot of the story is sort of about him and how he ran away instead of kind of like dealing with the aftermath of this tragedy and the game really does

I mean it hits that stuff really very very very hard and also has some truly gnarly deaths and stuff like that happening but the acting and the writing and the storytelling are all absolutely top-notch fucking amazing stuff how how does it not fall into the adventure game, the point and click adventure game traps? I think, so I think it does. I think that there are a couple of sequences where there's a lot of like investigating that you're doing, right? There's a lot of like trying to get to the bottom of this big conspiracy, trying to figure

out what is happening to you, trying to figure out like at one point, one of your family members gets kidnapped, you're trying to figure out what happened to her, and so there's like some sequences that you're kind of bouncing around a map, like getting something from here, taking it to here, trying to figure out, the other sort of like trap that it does fall into, but it does so in a way that I think is kind of cool is you do hit these moments of tremendous peril where it's like there is a group of soldiers who are storming this office where I'm hold up or I'm handcuffed to this hospital bed and someone is coming to kill me. And if you don't do it exactly right, you get killed, right?

But then those sequences are so short because he can only flash back in time like a certain amount of time. And so while you do have that frustration of like, okay, I know the game wants me to do something here. I know it's going to involve, you know, reaching to get this remote and then hitting this button. And I know I need to distract this guard so that I can do this, but like, I feel like I keep fucking up with the order is. But because it's hitting you with it in such a short, like, easily repeatable burst, like it actually kind of works. Like, it kind of feels like you are kind of stumbling into the solution of like, oh, okay, so I definitely need to do this first so that I can get this and then do this. Those sequences, there's only a handful of them in the game,

but they end up being like pretty exciting because you are, I don't know, you try very desperately not to get killed and you will over and over and over and over and over again. It is, I don't really know, because it is so traditional and it's styling, like I don't know that there's, like, a lot more to explain. If you look at it, if you watch a trailer for it and you have played any of those old LucasArts games, like I do think it is going to, you know, resonate with some deep part of your core memories. Yeah. I will say it looks phenomenal, the, just all the pixel art and the animation and the, just the lighting effects,

and just everything looks, looks really tremendous. Yeah, it looks gorgeous. But just, it is a really, really, really, really positive. thing. And this is not, this is, I have a really hard time, uh, hanging with adventure games. I didn't like, I don't know. I feel like I didn't really click with a lot of the double find stuff, a lot of the, uh, other telltale stuff. Like some of that was worked for me. Some of it didn't. I find the genre to be kind of just like, what is the cheapest and easiest and laziest way that we can like tell a story? I think there is the most, you know, it's like the only recent one that I've

which one? There is no game wrong dimension, that one. There is no game wrong dimension is a great example of not doing that, right? Because, like, it is a fairly traditional game, but they do it in such a brilliant, like, a constantly evolving way. This doesn't even do that. This is just, like, this feels like a golden era point-and-click adventure game. It's just done so fucking well. And all of the production, like, aspects of it are so top-notch.

And I not only, like, I'm surprised not only that, like, I finish. it, but I finished it fairly like breathlessly over like three or four days. Like whenever I had free time, it was the thing that I went back to because I was so desperate to like figure out what was going on and figure out how to get past this sequence that, you know, seemed like this impossible death trap. There's a, there's a few clunky puzzles, but they are offset, I will say, by a few really, really great and exciting puzzles. And yeah, this one came out of absolutely nowhere. And I, I really, really, really liked it a lot. I, I I just checked it is playable on Mac, too. So, like, I'll have this immediately for my laptop. Yeah, I will also say if you have friends that you play games with locally, get crawl also. Because not very many people played that game, I don't think. And it, like, handles this hack and slash dungeon crawler genre in a way that I think is,

like, really, really, really novel and fun. I feel like that game, it was just at the tail end of the local multiplayer boom and maybe missed out on its moment in the sun but I completely agree. Fresh, you got one more game? Yeah, one more game. I was trying to remember if we talked about this game or not. It feels like something that Justin would talk about

and might have talked about it, like an honorable mentions, but I just wanted to call it out. I don't think we have. The game is Teenage Mutiny Ninja Turtles tactical takedown. It came out on PC in like May, but it just got a re-release on consoles, I believe it's on Switch and maybe one other console.

It is a turn-based, tactics game featuring, obviously, then into turtles. What's interesting about it is it uses things that you've seen in turd-based tactical games. They'll, like, use this ability, it costs this many action points to

whatever, leap over someone on a skateboard, and it has this effect. But all of this is presented in, as like, a board game. Like, the turtles themselves are, like, board game pieces, and the, like, foot clan that you're fighting are, like, board game pieces. And it gives it kind of whole,

like its own kind of vibe in that way. It also allows them, I think, to scale the project in such a way that they're not having to animate every single attack or movement that the characters are making. But I just think it's like a smart design approach. There's also this element of time, which is weird in a turn-based game,

but you have to progress through these maps. So you're kind of racing through these maps, killing or I guess beating up Foot Clan members, and the area behind you will actually start disappearing after like a certain number of turns. So if you're not keeping the pace up where you're constantly moving forward, you will actually

lose and you'll like lose a life. What did you play this on? I played this on Steam Deck. So it works great with a controller, but it presumably works well on everything. It's not exactly pushing the hardware too hard. Yeah, sure. But I do think it's a good example of just like an interesting, unique approach to this genre that I haven't seen before. It's It's made by the team at Strange Scaffold, whose games you might know as, they made El Paso Elsewhere, which was that, like, Max Payne vampire dope game.

And they also made I Am Your Beast. So they've been putting out a lot of, like, really creative games that aren't necessarily what I would consider to be, like, mass market. And this is... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You're saying that click-olding, a game about cucking through clicking is not mass market? That feels pretty mainstream. I found it very interesting that they were able to get a studio

to agree, specifically like a studio as big as Warner Brothers, whoever owns Ninja Turtles these days, to agree to like control their IP for a project and they did a really good job with it. It reminds me of cadence of Hyrule in that way. We're like, oh man,

this indie developer got hold of like a huge property and let's see what they do with it. And they did like a really cool job. I was pretty pleased with it. If you want to hear more about the strange scaffold and all the stuff they're doing. I actually did an interview

with Zalviar Nelson Jr. who oversees that an entire studio. Over at Post Games? Over at Post Games. Brought you by Post-Series. It's just like that. It's the Post-Malona of Podcasts.

Looks like you got a piece of reader mail here calling me out, dragging me out to the middle of town for a good old-fashioned standoff. Yeah, so I wasn't here last week, but I guess you had a strong take on Donkey Kong country. Oh, I shit-talked donkey...

Bonanza. Yeah, I love Bonanza, but I did... Yeah, let's get into it. Okay, this letter comes from Brideuck. It's an interesting... It's interesting, my take on Donkey Kong is very different from Griffiths. I find the solo mode

much more compelling than the pure chaos of co-op. I also think Bizzing... I almost said Bizzinga, didn't you? Bananzas! Overall design is superior and it released rivaling Odyssey. My big problem with Odyssey

is the vast majority of moons in that game. do not utilize Mario's awesome movement at all. The capture mechanic is fun, but most of the capture movesets are not nearly as fun as moving around with Mario. I agree with that.

Whereas the majority of bananas are in some way utilizing DK's core moveset, digging and surfing and platforming, and the Bonanza abilities are an additive to his move set as compared to the restrictive capture abilities.

I think in this way, DK is a refinement on this formula. I think that's a fine point. I would agree with everything that you said. I think it's just a question of, I don't know, design philosophy, puzzle and collectible design philosophy, where it feels more footloose and fancy free for most of the time in Donkey Kong Bonanza, like just smashing your own way to the thing as opposed to like hitting this very specific line. It's the difference

between like having to, you know, having a Tony Hawk challenge where you have to clear this gap versus like a skate challenge where it's like just get this get this score or whatever like it is a question of they're both doing the same thing it just i feel like being able to uh i don't know know exactly what i'm supposed to do is something that i felt like was missing in bonanza and that's not the worst thing in the world it's just why i think the co-op mode worked better for me as because playing it with my my son in that way was very uh was very rewarding i imagine it is harder to you know, jazz together some bullshit solution to get to get a banana if you don't have a, you know, bazooka-wielding toddler on your shoulder, but, uh, yeah.

Yeah, it was also a big co-op hit in our household as well. Yeah, I like the, I like the middle ground because they do have those challenge rooms that feel very, like, sectioned off and they allow you, like, have a very specific challenge, but just having the fuck around big areas felt really, really good to me. Yeah. And to make it clear, I love Donkey Companza. I think it's, doing two different things. What do we have? Do we have some honorable mentions? I've continued to play Pippistrello and the cursed yo-yo.

That game rules. It does. I think I got to the third, like, battery or whatever. Yeah, I'm at the third battery area, which is, like, inspired by, like, a Comic-Con thing. Yeah. And I think I'm pretty close to the end at this point, but it's the game that, like, If I need like a good 20 minutes of like chill out, not think about anything and just like have a fun time, I keep going back to that. I just love the art.

I love the controls. The like upgrade systems are very smart. It just feels as close to that GBA era of Zelda as I've seen from an indie developer, which is pretty impressive. Yeah. Yeah, I'll probably return to that one. It's definitely one I'm keeping installed because I really liked what I played of it. What are you doing here? Are you copying my thing so you can paste it into a browser?

I wanted to see what it was. Okay. I think I've used this, and I think I even talked about it. Did you really? Yeah, many moons ago. Y'all have too many handhelds. You don't even know which ones I do. Man, if I actually just dug some out of my office closet to like put them on some shelves that I have in the back here, and it really sunk in.

It's a problem. I take good Russ's advice, which is I hit a certain threat. threshold and then I just give them way to people. I think I'm done. Right. I like having one small pocketable one and one powerful one that I can, uh, you know, play whatever the fuck on. Right now, for me that is either the Retroid 5 or the flip two, um, both of which I have kidded out to play basically whatever I, I want. Arguably, I could probably do this much, much better on my ROG allies, like set it up with some, you know, uh, suite of emulators or whatever. But I wanted a new small one because

all the ones that I have that are kind of pocketable or all vertical orientation like your trim UI brick is like great and one that I would

fully recommend. I wanted a horizontal one though so I got the I Aeo Pocket Micro Classic. The IANeo makes great handhelds that are pricier

I would say than you know an Amber Nick or a lot of the other sort of competition but you pay for like pretty great build quality and this thing feels fucking great. I've got it right here.

It's horizontal layout. Imagine sort of like a Game Boy Advanced Micro, but like, you know, scaled up twice. Scale it to the point where you could actually use it. Where you could actually use it. Yeah, like it fits in my hands really great. It's got this sort of like rectangular design, but the edges are all like

rounded in a way where it feels pretty great actually in my hands. They originally, I and EO made the pocket micro that had two thumbsticks on it that were okay, but it's not like the most powerful of the of the handhelds. It can only run up to like a dreamcast sort of thing, sort of unreliably. But like I just kind of wanted something that I could play S&ES and Game Boy Advance and Genesis and other sort of games on. And so I didn't need the sticks. They made this new version, the classic that doesn't have the sticks, which is like perfect because now it just slides right in and out of the pocket so easily. Runs Android. which is not my favorite.

I would much rather have a Linux, like, dedicated front end that I could kind of tweak and not have to fuck around with all of the other Android stuff that comes along with it, but I can play some Android games on it, which is cool.

But I just love the form factor. It's full metal, so, like, it feels really solid, really sturdy. The screen looks amazing. Buttons all feel really great. But it's also, like, I think it was 220, which is, like, a trim, UI break you can get for, like, 50, 60 bucks.

so it's considerably more expensive. Do you know the internals? The version that I played, that's why I'm remembering it, was the one with the analog sticks. So it was a little while ago. I think it's the same. I think it's the same internals.

I think the only thing that's different is just, they had a lot of reviews that said, like, this thing is great, it feels great, the size is perfect. It's just what I want in like a horizontal. If you're not like in the scene, like there's a lot of, it's basically like Elvis versus the Beatles

pancakes versus waffles like do you prefer a vertical old school game boy DMG style thing or do you prefer a horizontal like original game boy advance style and I do think I prefer the horizontal just because it fits in the hands a little bit easier and you don't have to take a game gear if you will game gear is the worst example because it's actually is horizontal but it's unholdable because of how large it is um but it's it's my new off-court buddy it's my new like I put it in my pocket and I can actually take it places because it fits really well. I've been playing Final Fantasy 6 with the sound restoration. Oh, good.

I was worried. I did my first ROM hack by finding this project that people had made of fixing the terrible, really, really grainy, hissy, compressed audio that they took from the Super Nintendo version of Final Fantasy, I guess, three in the States. When they put it on Game Boy Advance, just the audio quality sounded absolutely like dog dirt. But I do love the Game Boy Advance version of that game. I think it looks great and has some extra stuff. So I downloaded this ROM hack that made the sound marginally better. And it's been a while since I've replayed this one. And it is truly, truly a staggering achievement, Final Fantasy Six.

I inadvertently have two things that are both recommendations and plugs. The first one is... Castle Crashers, new DLC, including the first new character that you can play as since 2011. When you say new, how new?

Like today, Painter Boss Paradise came out and it lets you add your own characters that you can design. It has a new playable character that is like new stuff. There is new content in Castle Crashers.

As of today, my friend, my friend that is listener i guess listeners maybe haven't heard that i don't know if that episode has come out yet but we discussed this game at length as part of our most recent besties bracket episode it is out that is also out right now so if you want to listen to an entire episode about co-op games you will hear about castle crashers in quite a bit so they that's fucking rad man you know they wanted to time it with us they've been sitting on this for probably at least 10 years you know waiting for a good moment you saw that the besties was out here and they said let's put it out.

The other one I want to shout out is last week on post games, I talked with one of the writers of Ambrosia Sky, which have you all been following this game? No, I don't think so. So, Ambrosia Sky is basically what would happen if you merged Power Wash simulator with System Shock. Yeah, all right. And it turns out sick, that it's a great, great, quick. thing. There's a new demo that just went out on Steam. So once again, I think that we are just

inspiring people to make things available to the world. This is, I believe, the same demo that was shown at Summer Game Fest. It was kind of a hit demo of that show. The story is so grim. You are basically a cleaner of mass death incidents on off worlds in like the far distant future. and you are using your different like power wash tools to clean up these toxic scenarios and recover bodies. I fucking love that. That sounds awesome.

It's such a cool, cool, cool, cool game. This game is nasty. So yeah, you could check out that game and if you want to check out an entire podcast about how video games help us process death, you could also go listen to post games. Those two things are just waiting for you right now. Definitely going to get over there.

gotta get my post games um hey thank you so much that's gonna do it for us this week on the besties uh chris do you want to try and summarize all the games we talked about this week oh we talked about so many games but the way i put it is a little bit for everybody we talked about the system shock two remaster the drifter teenage mutant ninja turtles tactical takedown primal planet abuse the video game grounded two and also p pp strello the i nintendo Neo Pocket Micro Classic with Final Fantasy 6 that's been modded and kidded out. Castle Crashers is a new DLC, and Ambrosia Sky. The demo is now available.

That blows my mind that there's Castle Crashers' DLC. That's so great. I haven't thought about that game in years. Talked about it extensively for our Patreon listeners. By the way, patreon.com slash the besties. Thank you to everybody who supports the show directly there. Go get yourself a membership. You can gift a membership, too.

you go to patreon.com slash the besties slash a gift. But we do bracket episodes every month and there's episodes of the resties that go up there. If you like our show, there's a lot more that you are not hearing if you're not a patron of ours.

A couple quick shout-outs for new members. We have Mike, we have Charles, we have Johnny, and we have The Cliff with a K. Thank you all so much. Again, patreon.com slash the besties. They're like 60 episodes now. There's a lot. It's bonkers how much stuff you get.

for signing up for a month of that next week join us again we are going to be discussing i think mafia the old country now let me take you behind the scenes listener this is one of those where before we started recording there was a lot of ringing of hands uh about whether or not this was going to be the the one uh and we we don't want to lead you down a you know some primrose path if this is not the game we end up talking about next week we will find ways to tell you via the social channels Right now, the plan is Mafia, the old country, a game I don't know anything about. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. Find out by joining us again next week for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Besties!