The Besties - A Spoiler-Free Big Walk Bonanza

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Big Walk is the game everyone wanted during the pandemic. Not-so-coincidentally, that’s when the project began development. The multiplayer open-world adventure is developer House House’s follow-up to Untitled Goose Game. But where Goose Game hinged on you pestering NPCs to solve puzzles, Big Walk tasks you with pestering and supporting your friends. Or to put it succinctly: Big Walk is a game about communication. Though, as we explain, it’s an experience that requires some careful scheduling. 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!

Let me hit you guys with this. Let me know what you think about it, okay? Okay. So now you're gonna take a big walk on to solving puzzles with your friends. It's like that struck, like you can do a lot with that structure. Was that Billy? Did Billy join us? You're gonna take a big walk right now where the fun will never end.

You know. I dropped into sort of a minor key there, but it's just, it works so good. And it's fitting. It is fitting because it is fitting. after all the DUIs, he did take a lot of big walks. I can only take a big walk. Can't I? Because I crashed into a house.

Listen, if somebody's had a car crashed into his house, I'm a little sensitive to this opening. It must be tough for you to even hear this Billy Joel reference. I apologize. Was it the piano man that did it? You never said. Every time I'm an Italian restaurant, I start having flashbacks. Every time I ask you about this, you get so cagey.

When that car smash a crash right through your house like the Kool-Aid man, I was like, was it him? And you were like, I'll never tell. Listen, the NDA is keeping me afloat right now, baby. Don't you go and call it friend, slop, it's not, it's a fun that never ends. Rachel must be really confused what I'm doing over here. She loves it. Is Griffin Macaurelli, I know the best game of the week.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plan, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Russ Fraschuk. I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the Bessies, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year club. And just by listening, you've become a member of it. This week, we're going to be discussing a game called Big Walk. It's a tough one, I think, to sell.

But I think if you're a certain type of gamer who likes to play games with a certain group of buddies, It's going to be a real special time. Chris, what is Big Walk? Big Walk is the new game from the developer House House, who you probably know as the creators of Untitled Goose Game. You might be thinking that was a long time ago. What have they been doing ever since then? Well, they've been making this game,

basically beginning during the pandemic and leading till now. I mentioned the pandemic, not because I want to, but because this might be the most pandemic video game ever made. It's a pandemic. wet dream. It's the dream we all had of communicating and hanging out with our friends during the pandemic. Let's take a break and then get into it

because it's going to be interesting to discuss, I think. Really quick, before we get into this discussion, I just want to let you know, we are not going to be talking about spoilers for any of the puzzles or any of that stuff in Big Walk. This is more of a top-level conversation. There is still a ton that we're going to talk about. Let's tackle

the top of the line question, because I do think we sort of dipped a toe into it. It is not friend slop even though at a glance it does look like friend swap so let's explain to people why Big Walk is not

friend slop well first of all I think the friend slop sort of title is like functionally pretty useless like I think it just literally I think it means like usually somewhat lower budget

lower fidelity like indie games that are multiplayer And silly. Yes. Like funny multiplayer games, usually about overcoming some sort of tremendous obstacle together against great odds. I feel like those are the sort of hallmarked things. And I think they associate themselves with like some jankiness and also some like preposterously difficult platforming stuff.

It's usually in that. But you're right. It is a little bit tricky to like narrow it down. I will also say spiritually or philosophically, friend sloped games are about communication. And that is where the overlap with this. exist. Friends slop games are games that are taking a lot of the fun from your friends, not necessarily from the design of the game, but from the fact that they're giving you a space, a playground

to hang out in with your friends and have a chat without a whole lot of pressure to do much else. Why it is functional use is it is technically an umbrella that covers repo and peak and I think Metcha Chameleon people have been called it. And like those games could not be more different, I think. Like they are really doing very different stuff. So I don't think it works. I also don't think this game fits into the title like that, that sort of, I don't know, that sort of milieu at all.

As evidenced by the fact that this may be the way that I, the shorthand I use that is probably not useful for most people. But like, I think Big Walk would be a bad streaming game because it is not like, It is not funny, sort of at face value, and it requires a level of kind of like cerebral commitment maybe that some of the other titles that we've discussed so far do not. That's not to say it's a bad game. I disagree. Just that it's not silly, I think, on its face. I think it has the potential to be very silly but in subtle ways. But before we dive into that, here's, I'm going to just give like a quick rundown of like what you're actually doing in this game.

You are like a bird person. it's a first person game, and you are joined by other bird people. It requires at least two people to play online. You can't play it solo. I mean, you can, but you can't accomplish any of the tasks solo. And what you're doing with two or more people is you're running around a big open world solving puzzles,

and these puzzles can be a variety of different things. Some of them are just as simple as throw this ball in a hoop bunch of times until you get a prize. Some of them are more complicated. Like, for example, they have puzzles where you have to sort of hot potato a ticking clock time bomb thing from one place to the map to another place of the map. And the only way to do that is with like coordination and planning. So there's a wide range of those things. But the big key here and the design really lies into this is that sound, specifically your voice chat, is proximity based.

And most of the puzzles require using that in some interesting way. Because, for example, if you're standing behind a wall, people on the other side of the wall will not be able to hear you speaking in the game. Right. It's a game about communication, not just voice communication. There is text chat-based stuff in the game. There is also basically semaphore. Like, you can control your little bird guy's arms, making them go straight out to the side or kind of up in the air. And using that, you can kind of gesture in a way that, you know, sometimes if you're solving a puzzle where you are,

half a mile away and a person is looking at you for prompts through a telescope, you have to get pretty creative about like how you are communicating information back to them to solve the puzzles in the game. And and it's just, I mean, they really take that idea and, and they explore it in like a billion different ways. It's really very, it's so clever how much it uses this like somewhat limited set of kind of ideas and mechanics. It really explores them all the way. You will find tools throughout the game and most if not all of them are to make communication easier. So you will have walkie-talkies which can help if you're trying to chat between long distances. You'll have a laser pointer so you can show people exactly what you're trying to look at. You can have a flare gun

So if you get lost, you can shoot it up into the air. And the getting lost to me, I think is my absolute favorite part of this game. Yeah. The fact that you can be playing a game with friends where you can fall off a mountain or you can, without just looking, turn left when they turned right. And if you get a little bit away from people. It's so easy to get separated. You can get very, very, very lost. And then suddenly you have to make a decision, which is, do I think I know where they went?

Should I go that direction? Are they probably trying to do the same to me, which is going to get us to get even more confused? Should I start hiking to the nearest kind of like camp where I can fire up a flare and give them an idea of where I am? And that silence that you have where you're playing a multiplayer game, but you are suddenly alone, is such a unique feeling. Yeah. married to the fact that you can find yourself yelling in your room, hoping that somebody will hear you. And man, it's fucking funny every...

I shouldn't make it sound like this game is not silly, because you are right, it is silly in subtler ways, because there is nothing funnier to me than playing this game online with someone chatting it up. You get a little bit separated, and then you can't find them for 10 minutes, and then you see a flare go up on the other side of the aisle. I talk about the moment that Griffin and I had,

because Griffin and I played a little bit. Oh, right. We were doing this basketball challenge, which again, you stumble on relatively early, and the objective of the basketball challenge is to throw this bouncy ball into the hoop pretty straightforward, but you have to do it like 15 times. And so I started doing it,

but we didn't have a second ball, and Griffin wanted to try as well. So he ran off to get a second ball, and while he was... Notice that Russ didn't share the ball. I think that's important. That is. I have always been more of a Reggie Miller type,

I will be honest. So while he's gone, I start getting very good at scoring baskets and actually end up finishing the puzzle. And so I'm waiting there for about 30 seconds and he's nowhere in sight and I'm calling his name, calling his name, and I'm like, oh, well, this is boring.

So I'm going to go deposit the gourd. Gords are basically keys in this game. I'm going to go deposit the gourd in the tower that's nearby where I need to drop it off. And he'll figure it out. and so I go and leave, and then I guess Griffin probably showed up sometime later,

realized that was completely gone, and then I guess you heard me on the walkie-talkie? I heard you on the walkie-talkie much later, yeah. I mean, we got separated a few times. Here's the thing that's interesting about Big Walk that I really didn't like it first, but I've come to kind of appreciate as part of what it is doing. When night falls, as it does,

I don't know how long the day cycle is, but it happens often. You can't see shit, man. So, like, a bunch of the different items that you have that you are finding that are basically tools to aid in communication. Like, there's a flashlight. There's, like, night vision type goggles. There's these sort of spherical lanterns you're finding all over the place that, you know, you can pick up and carry around with you. But we were looking for some sort of thing to help with a puzzle on a beach, like a craggy beach. and it was night, and Russ was like, this sucks.

I'm going to go get a light. And I was like, no, Joe, but he was already God. And then we really went a long time without seeing each other until a flare went up. And then it was like, well, shit, man, do I keep stumbling around in the dark trying to find the solution to this puzzle we were already working on? Or do I backtrack all the way back there to find them? This is why I think this game is a tough sell. I think most people hear the things we're talking about. You get separated from your friends while playing an online multiplayer game with them and you don't see them for a while and you're alone.

Or, oh, yeah, you got to backtrack because you got separated and then you got to, that sounds bad. Like, that sounds like not fun stuff. But the game, I don't know, man. Like, it really cultivates this feeling of like when you're with your friends and you're with them, actually like, you know, your characters are physically close enough to be communicating with each other. It makes you really treasure that because you know, like, there's a version of this where we get split up and now we have to spend some time doing this before we can. you know, go find the next puzzle or whatever. I think this is also the COVID of it all. So, you know, during COVID, everybody's playing different online games.

They're supposed to give you that sense of being with other people and being outside of your house, right? And what a game gets when it allows you to make a mistake to not be close to your friends, that's how it feels to be in the real world. It feels like a being out on an actual big. hike versus all of the other games that are again whether you like friends slop as a term or not are in that category they are meant to feel like hanging out on discord they are not meant to feel like hanging out in an actual physical space yeah think that this is chasing that and in doing that it also ends up revealing a lot of things about you and your friends that you wouldn't get from those games i am not surprised that this reveals that russ fresh is a little brother who maybe didn't have the right to the controller all the time as a child and now is holding tightly onto the ball and needs to score all the points. I'm also not surprised to take the shot at myself that I am an only child who needs attention

and will run and grab the player gun and intentionally get lost and then be confused why people aren't following me. It is a great personality test of a video game. I also want to call attention to maybe my favorite feature of the game, which is unlike a lot of the games that we played during COVID, Animal Crossing being probably the most memorable. When you're playing multiplayer in Animal Crossing,

it's like a real production to get anyone to your island and that you see them fly in, but it's a huge hassle to get anyone to your island. In Big Walk, there is the option to just jump into any friends game. Now, you can lock them if you want to, but if anyone is playing and the game is unlocked and they're on your Steam Friends list,

you can just pop right into their game. And I tried it with our good friends over at the Triple Click podcast, Maddie, Kirk, and Jason. And they knew that maybe I was coming by, but I did not offer specifics. And I did not message them on Discord. I just showed up in their game. And I entered and I set off a flare sort of at the near entrance. And I didn't see anyone. And once again, I got kind of bored.

So I climbed to the top of the tower that's nearby, which is a bit of a high. climb to the very top, picked up some binoculars, and looked down back at the entrance to where I set the flare off, and I could see all three of them talking and trying to figure out where the fuck I was, and then they look up at me because I set up a flare at the top of the tower, and then trudgingly, begrudgingly, they, like, slowly make their way back up to the tower, and then we all meet up, and then we go on adventures together and solve puzzles and have a good old time. So, like, thrush.

So you sabotaged a rival gaming podcast? I didn't. I added to it. In fact, we were able to solve puzzles easier because the game was designed when they made the server. They designed it for three people. So then they had four. That was great. Yeah.

Yeah. This reveals a lot about who we are as people because, Frush, I did the very same thing to friends from Polygon, Ross Miller, Chelsea Stark, and a large group of people that they were playing with. I didn't tell them that I was coming into the game. know most of them. I got in. I immediately went to the top of the tower where I could get on to the walkie-talkie speaker system and just mumbled, I'm coming to kill you. I'm going to find it and I'm going to hurt you. The wide band ham radio is intoxicated. It's a level of power that should be. It's O.P. Balance. We need a balance patch for the wide band ham radio. Also, most people don't know that you can get into other games is what I discovered after. So I

proceeded to in the night, you can see them actually easier because they're using lights. So I hunted them across the map for about 10 to 15 minutes, found one who had been broken away with a gourd, stole their gourd, went to the edge of a cliff, and told them if they stepped any closer, I would throw it. See, that's sabotage. That's the shit I like right there. And you know what I did? Jumped off the edge.

The besties aren't going to, we're not going to get ahead if we don't take out the rifle. That's right. You're damn right. You are damn right. And you know what? I gave them content. I gave them a story to tell. Switch content.

Yeah, that's good stuff. The greatest gift. I agree with what Griffin's head up top. I don't know if this game is a great streaming game, but it is a game that gives you funny stories to tell. Absolutely it is. I think the best thing about this game is what I think limits it in the kind of grand scheme of things, right? You talk about if I wanted to go play repo or Metchocameleon or Pique or, or, or, or, or Peak, whatever, I can do that and get in a game with like a pickup group in in no time.

This game, like whoever's hosting the island has the save file for the island. I feel weird about like starting over or bringing in someone other than the people I've already played with on my island where me and another group of people have already solved half the puzzles. It kind of, I think, works. This game has a really specific use case for where it works best. And when you get that use case right, like it's amazing. Playing it with friends over, I would say longer kind of sessions usually is a better fit.

Playing with the same group of people, you know, throughout almost like a D&D campaign or something like that where you're not tossing new people in there every, every night. You can do that, but you're going to be starting over. You're going to be hopping into someone else's island. Maybe they've done a thing you've already done or, you know, whatever. It gets a little bit complicated. So like if you can get that situation sort of locked in, if you have, friends you play multiplayer games with and you have routine gaming nights or whatever that you can set up with those people. And you don't use Discord. You don't use SteamChat. You don't use any for,

you can't play it locally, right? Like, I mean, I guess you can, right? It's actually pretty easy to do like crossplay. If I wanted to get Henry to download Big Walk on his Switch 2 and I had it on my Steam deck or whatever, we could play it locally. I just give him the code for the game that I'm in and he can hop in and like that shit works so easy. But if we're sitting in the same, same room together, we can just talk. And so, like, that kind of defeats a lot of the limitations that are sort of core to the design of the game. So it's really, like, playing online games with set groups of friends at sort of set times.

If you can do it like that and split the uprights, I think it's one of the most fun kind of multiplayer puzzle games I've ever played. Outside of that, I don't know, man. I think it's... I mean, outside of that, I think the avenue is doing what Planner I has done, which is I'm fine like cameoing in someone else's game for a little bit and having a good time with people and I like intentionally don't give solutions to puzzles I've done before and things like that. So like I think there is that avenue, but you're right. It's not, there's a reason why this game is.

It's not as fun because you're not discovering, you're not discovering those puzzles and the mechanics and stuff at the same time. If one of you has kind of like all already done it, they're still hard if you haven't, if you know how to do them, they still require you to do like the solutions are random, I think sometimes. But like, I don't know, you're not having to figure out how to do it with the other people. I guess as a platform

for having fun with your friends, it's a pretty fucking good one. Even though I agree with you, the core of the gameplay is finishing the puzzles and like figuring out the best way to complete them, I still think, like,

what they've done with sound and like, just the idea that you have so much going on with the way sound projects from people. Like, there's a moment where you can go into like a giant cone and everyone's in the cone

and you'll actually hear the reverb of your voices bouncing off the inside of the cone like shit like that is very cool and there's even like jokes tied to the sound where so Maddie Kirk and I were playing and we're at a very high height and we need to get down to a lower height and we all agreed that we're gonna jump down

but Kirk I guess stayed up at the top and we all jumped down Jason was holding a walkie-talkie the walkie-talkie when he lands on the ground goes fucking flying and slowly slides at my feet and out of the walkie-talkie I hear Kirk's voice saying, where are you guys? Are you guys okay?

That is fucking the funniest fucking thing I've seen in forever. It's super duper-diver-during. I think the main selling point like this main strength of the game is that you and your friends have to invent entire forms of communication, entire lexicons. There's no writing really

that the game provides outside of tutorials. So like when you find your first gourd, it's not like, this is a gourd. We call them gords because that's what Russ told me that it was. But like it's kind of gourd shape. What do you call the big light, light balls? When you're far, far, far away from each other and one of you has relayed the answer to the other person, how does that person communicate? Okay, I got the answer. Now you can go on to the next thing.

Like for Russ and I, it was a three jump sort of sit. If you saw the character a million miles away going, beep, beep, beep. You're like, okay, I could go on to the next. Like, you have to invent all of that stuff yourself and that, like, I've not gotten super far into the game. But I have to imagine if you can play the whole thing with the same group of people, you're going to have a whole, like, language that you have invented using the game's sort of variety of communication tools. And that's like, I've never seen a game, let alone a multiplayer game really do that before. Yeah. One quick last thing, which is about the friend's stop of it all.

What's so strange about playing this game now is it feels like the game that should have come first. It feels like the game that discovers a lot of the things about friend slop, and then we get a lot of games that are like the rougher around the edges. Lower effort. Are emphasizing the freedom to play however you want, whenever you want. And it's strange to get this after it. And I'm curious how much this game may have influenced that movement just because it has been. advertised publicly for a very long time and people were drawing comparisons between this game and things like peak when peak came out but don't you think it was this more simple approach would

have come first doesn't that make what you would qualify as the more simple approach right like because this game doesn't have the mechanics of peak like peak is a very mechanical game you're having to manage all these different i wouldn't even consider peak friends thought per se i'm more thinking about the games like those games where like each of you has an oar and you try to hold the oar as you go up a fucking cliff. Like that's what I describe as

friends. Yeah, I don't know. Whether it's like chicken or an egg, here's what I would say is I really hope that this developer house house follows this up with something that is a bit

more free form and less interested in the puzzles. Because as much as I loved the puzzles. Just hanging out in this space is pretty great. And having something that has the same communication mechanics, but maybe is prochgen, procedural generation of like spaces to explore. You're given like mini quests and things like that. Yeah, I just like this space and I like hanging out in it.

I find it just very beautiful and calming. And I hope that we do get something that, to Griffin's point, you have to nail the setup for it. And I'm not quite finished with it, but what I have heard from people who have finished it and tried to play it again is like, it's kind of a one and done experience. Yeah. And that's not bad. Like, that's the type of art that it set out to be. But it is the experience that it is.

Yeah. I almost wish there was like a no holds barred matchmaking like rando mode. Because like I always loved in Destiny 2 doing like raids. with pickup groups that I found online before they, you know, for the eight years or whatever, before they added matchmaking for raids where it was like there's a very specific set of things you have to do here and you have to communicate in this, you know, certain, certain way in order to achieve those things. Like doing that with strangers was often bad, but sometimes, like, really remarkable, like remarkable moments of sort of human connection. And this game definitely,

definitely prioritizes doing that with people you know and friends that you know, but I, you know, I'd love to see what it looks like when applied to strangers. I think it only works if you know that everyone that you're playing with for the most part is at a similar level of knowledge to you. Because what you don't want to have happen is someone to join your game randomly and be like, oh, you've solved this puzzle by throwing this ball or whatever it is. Right. Like that is not the, oh, we need to execute this destiny raid challenge. Like that and that's why it's a little bit of a one-and-done thing is because, like, you're only going to have or gain this information once.

So, I agree. Like, it's a narrower field of playing. Like, the number of people that could possibly play this is pretty narrow relatively. But that is why I think it's so special and why it's definitely for sure going to stick in my head for a very long time. I have a scheduled appointment for the next foreseeable weeks with a group of people, including Chris Plant. And we're going to see how we're going to see how we.

do over the course of, I think, a few weeks. So we'll keep checking back in occasionally, but this game is really... Thank you for the invite to those that is awesome. I did invite you and you rejected it out of hand. I think you want to spend more time with your family. No follow up.

I think you should join. I would love for you to be a good. I would love for you to be there, Griffin. I mean, send me a Google invite, I guess. I didn't realize it was so... I'm not going to play this card. I don't give a shit. No, I do give a shit. I want to play more of this game because a lot of the sort of like games press are talking about it with like Goody Heat.

And I get like, I think I get why people are feeling that way because like the couple of sessions I've been able to play with folks I know have been really remarkably fun. Have you been able to play with more than like one other person? No, I've only played two players. I think it really soars with three or more. So like this is what I'm saying is I could see why people are talking. talking about this game with this level of, uh, of buzz,

because it is doing something so novel and it's doing it so well at where I'm at in, in my life and like the timetable with which I play games. Yeah. And I know people get annoyed when I talk about not having a ton of gaming time. It's more coordination. Like it's, but it's coordination making that work with like for me. It's usually after everyone else in my house is asleep like 10.30 at night.

And then like I ain't staying up until I stayed up for three. hours to play to play this so it's like it's tough to find to find that specific window we'll create some windows with you so we can do a big group sesh I want to do that walk my last thing is don't cheat don't use discord chat the entire game breaks if you do that like it's not even cheating like cheating's not the right I don't think that's the right I mean that's how house house refers to it in the fact they call it cheating but but but yes but it but it breaks the experience It removes that loneliness that you feel is fun like I know it's loneliness doesn't sound fun Trust me it's not just fun figuring out to get to each other

It's the game like if you can just find each other on Discord and meet up and then do puzzles like the puzzles aren't so great Objectively that you're going to be having a great time like the puzzles only work because they are Based on communication and and if you take that away like you're just not If you speed run the game to the edge, you're going to have a terrible fucking time because you've whittled off all of the, you know, interesting stuff. Great game. All right. Highly recommend it. That is Big Walk. I'm going to probably want to talk more about it, you know, eventually once I've had a little bit more time with it. But I fully understand why people are so gaga for it because it's really a great time. Let's take a brief break. And then let's come back and commemorate one of our dear, friends, our dear gaming platform friends, who is now old enough to run for president. Did I get that thought right? It's 35. You have to be 35 to be president, I think. That sounds right. I think you're right on the year. Yes. I think it's 35. And that's, that is how old the Super Nintendo entertainment system is as of recently. As of basically a week from whenever people are

listening to this, yes, you will be able to finally celebrate the Super Nintendo. I wanted to bring this up because I wanted to hear both about y'all's favorite games, but also, when did you get an S&S in your life? Did you even own a Super Nintendo as a kid? Were you having to go to the neighbor's house and just kind of set up camp? I got one. I did get one. And in my memory, I got one because I finally learned how to ride a two-wheeler. Hell yes. Dude, I love that I think that's what did it. My parents were so frustrated. My dad's back was fucked up from having to bend over and hold me on the bike.

Dude, it sucks. I don't know if either of you guys have done that shit. It sucks teaching kids to ride a bike. Man, it hurts. So I guess at a certain point, they just needed leverage. And indeed, that worked very effectively. And it was fucking life-changing. It bums me out that these days, and maybe for the rest of time,

we will never have the leaps in technology that you saw from the NES to the S-NES or the S-NES to N64, like, fucking hugely impactful. So obviously Super Mario World was like the first I played. But I played like F0 and that blew my mind. And like that, I have very, very fond memories. Whenever I have to like decide on a colorway for one of these like new handhelds that's coming out, I almost always do the like gray S&ES colorway. Because it's just so struck in my mind. Yeah.

I mean, we got one fairly early on. We were not super duper early. adopters of a lot of game hardware. I say that, but we also got the N64 like the year it came out, which was no easy feat. But I remember having the S&ES. The S&ES came out when I was four. But we got it, you know, before I was really old enough to have core memories of that time. But I do remember like being a toddler and playing NES and it not really being anything. I really hung with very, very deeply because NES games are hard, too hard, I would say, for a four-year-old to tackle. All of my core sort of foundational gaming memories are all basically on S&S.

Or, you know, Game Boy or whatever, like obviously Pokemon coming out, but Pokemon came out eight years after the S&S, I think. Do you have a game that you're like, oh, that was the first game that I knew. I was in love. Yeah, I mean, the one I always kind of come back to is Final Fantasy 2 in the States, Final Fantasy 4, came out the same year as the S&E.S. I want to say a few months after in 1991. And I played that game when I was like four or five years old. And, you know, I would play it with my brothers or my dad so they could like read to me what was, you know, the dialogue or whatever that was on the screen. and eventually I got tired of waiting for them. So I really, really cut my teeth reading, like playing Final Fantasy 2 on the S&ES. And I mean, that really probably ruined me for the rest of time because I still love that shit so much. But I was obsessed with everything Squarespaceoft put out and some of the stuff that Enix put out.

So like for me, when I think about the S&ES, obviously there's more classics than you can probably remember out of hand. But for me, it's, you know, chrono trigger and Secret of Mana and Secret of Evermore and just the incredibly strong library of RPGs on there. Yeah, I would also just call out as you were talking the memories that I have, probably the strongest memories for the S&ES is like the beginning of Link to the past. Because imagine playing that game and you have no context and you start, like maybe you played the original Zelda fine, but it starts in this giant fucking rainstorm. And shit is like bad. Scary. And it took me like a good half hour to like figure out, oh, I have to go to the castle and go underneath him. Wait a minute.

My uncle, is he stabbed to death or is he just taking a nap? I don't know. Yeah. It gets really fucking intense very early on. So environmentally speaking, like, man, that still hits really close to home for me. We weren't bringing new video games into the house all willy-nilly. like none of us really had money to do that. For us, it was largely like birthdays and Christmas, and that was pretty much it.

You would get an influx of some new games from Santa Claus or Birthday Santa. And that wasn't a thing in our house. I don't want people to think that birthday Santa was a real. No, that's real. I've heard of it. It is good. Adding it to the Wiki. So, like, if we wanted a new game in the middle of the year and we didn't want to wait,

we would have to go to, like, Babbage's at the mall and trade a bunch of shit in, usually for not great sort of ROI. But I remember Justin and Travis talking me into trading in a bunch of my like Game Boy games mostly to buy a link to the past. And they were like, you got it. You know, it's Zelda. You're going to love this thing. I had no sort of like religion on it.

I was very much bullied into it. But it ended up being not the worst trade off. Yeah. I mean, I remember coming home and playing that game and being like, you guys were right. This is, this is groundbreaking. You were a Genesis kid, correct? I was a man of taste, you know, a young man. I had a real taste for the finer things.

But I did eventually have a Super Nintendo in the house. It was just later on in its life cycle. One of my aunts bought a Super Nintendo at some point, had it for a while, got bored of it, and then it ended up showing up at our home, which was also, let me be clear, very generous of her to do. But we had two TVs in our house. We had like the family TV, which is where the Sega Genesis lived. You had to put that thing on, I mean, at least 20 inches.

You know, that was a huge TV. And then the Super Nintendo lived in the kitchen, which is where I could hang out when my mom was making dinner or my dad was making dinner or my mom was a hairstylist. So she did a lot of work in the evenings cutting people's hair. I just have this very sense memory of her being like, I don't want you running around, I don't want you making a mess, hang out with me while I get some work done,

stay quiet, and play usually NBA jam on the Super Nintendo because it is a game that's not going to offend people. And it really was like that Donkey Kong country. And then I feel like I didn't become a big RPG, person because I didn't have the system early on. I didn't have the Final Fantasies. And it was Earthbound that like kind of was the exception to the rule and really got me

into that. I think Earthbound like of all the Super Nintendo games had a Sega Genesis spirit. It is very strange and weird and like kind of like the awkward kid in school of video games. And yeah. and it really stuck with me. But it's strange. It is like this, I feel like I was like in a different world

when I look back amongst friends our age with like the games it influenced you because to me, the Sega Genesis was the biggest thing in the world. And what I discovered later on in life was like, oh no, everybody's core memories are with Super Mario World in Donkey Kong Country and Super Metroid

and Link to the Past. It's basically like you only went to... until later. It's like you only went to Knottesbury Farm and everyone else went to Disney. Yes.

100%. The catalog on the S&S is also pretty much unparalleled. Like I can think of maybe the PS1 can kind of hang with it. PS2 is pretty fucking strong.

PS2 is pretty strong. I've been doing this streaming series called Every Game Ever on the Macroy Family Channel where I'm trying to like make a list of every game I've ever played. And the SDS took so long to get through and I,

I ended up, hold on, let me pull it up. I ended up playing, I've played 236 Super Nintendo. Jesus. Which is like a fucking lot. But man, we've only talked about two or three of them. Like, I could go to any sort of section of this list and pull up like, hey, pilot wings. That game was fucking sick. Mega Man X.

Like, hell, hell yes. And there were 1,700 total Super Nintendo games. There were so many of them. And yeah, I mean, maybe Biker Mice from Mars is that maybe Bill Lambere's Combat Basketball is not the best game in the world. I don't know. That game was pretty fun. I think another reason I really love the S&ES is like when we got newer shit, when we got the PlayStation in, what, 97 probably. I didn't get to have that in my room.

And there was always competition. I remember at one point, me and dad and Travis and Justin were all playing Final Fantasy 7 at the same time on different saves. And so it was like getting time with that was not really doable. But when it came into the house, no one really wanted to play the S&S anymore. So I put that in my room and I could play S&S games like as much as I wanted. I could go back and replay Secret of Mata if I wanted to. And so like this kind of like retro gaming mindset for like a console that was one generation old at that point, I don't know.

I felt an ownership of it because I was able to really hoard it and make it mind because there all of a sudden wasn't very much competition for it. And I also think like those games have because it is the more advanced of that 2D era, those games have aged much better in history. Much better. Such that like I can't really go back and play a lot of like maybe three or four NES games I can like really enjoy. But the list of fucking Super Nintendo games is endless of Yoshi's Island and fucking

super Metroid. and you just go down the list. So, yeah, no, it's spectacular. I feel so strong about it. Looking back through like a top 50 Super Nintendo games list on the Internet, it is funny the games that influenced my taste that I wouldn't even think about if I was trying to make a list, which is the Legend of the Mystical Ninja. Oh, yeah.

Or zombies ate my neighbors, right? These games that were the Lost Vikings, which was made by, Blizzard, right? Yeah. Like games that you would maybe get as a rental on a lark, Sunset Riders, because they had great... Sunset Riders. A great box art. And like you were at Blockbuster or a local rental shop and I don't know, it seems like a good way to kill a weekend.

And then you end up kind of chasing that flavor for the rest of your video game live. Right, yeah. We don't play games the same. like we don't acquire games the same way. Renting games was another huge vector for us to like get stuff. And I remember renting, um,

I remember renting the Kirby superstar collection, uh, a few times because I would play it and be like, I beat it. And it'd be like, actually you just unlocked this campaign. And I'm like, oh,

God damn it. This is not me kind of like waxing sort of poetic about a long lost bygone era. Cause like, this is the generation that I feel like I come back to them playing on a, you know, a gaming console. And it's not like they, they don't make them like they used to. But there's some, there's truly some classics on here that, have, I don't think, really ever been surpassed. Like, and, and that may have less to do with

the hardware or with Nintendo, like, as a company as much as it's just like, I don't know, when certain artistic creative minds were all, I'm thinking of, about like Chrono Trigger, right? Chrono Chigger is fucking crazy to me. It's really, really insane to me that like, let's get the, let's get the designer of, you know, Dragon Ball and let's get the creator of Dragon Quest and, you know, the composer of Final Fantasy. I forget exactly who all, but it's like this super group comes together to make this game

that has never been touched, like Chrono Cross I love, but not even close. And there's so many examples of that happening on the S&ES, because I think it's just a time where people, people who were making games felt like anything was possible because of the escalation from the NES, because like all of these ideas they'd had in the 80s were all of a sudden achievable on this hard way. And teams were smaller.

Like the single few like people that like really made an impact on Final Fantasy, for example, could go over and make a huge impact on another title because they were 10% of the entire fucking team. Whereas now you need fucking 600 people to make the game. Earthbound had between 15 to 20 primary staff members making. It's fucking crazy. That's really, really, really outrageous.

I think Super Metroid was 15 made over the course of two years, something like that. So, yeah, it's... And it's like the industry is not even bill for that no more. I mean, it is on the indie side. You look at... On the indie side, yeah, for sure. I'm talking about the triple. Sort of, you know, the Nintendo side of things.

And there is a slight difference there because, yes, indie studios can and do make games like this. What was so unusual, though, is you had games made like Earthbound or Cronin Trigger or Super Metroid by people who had tons of experience working together who knew the actual hardware, like sole hardware that they were designing for, maybe even knew the creators of that hardware and like how to make it work to maximum effect. there are things that you could get, if you were working internal at Nintendo, that are just different than the experiences that indie developer is having today. And the sheer amount of, like, sweat and resources that would go into these games is bonkers.

So, yeah, I agree. It is, it reminds me in some ways, and again, it's also not a perfect comparison, but of 2D animation and Disney. And, like, the technology moves on, and it focuses on something new, and you can still go back and look at, something from 30 years ago and there's nothing quite like it happening today.

Even if animation is still happening today. Cool world. I'm telling you. Cool world. You're right. We really haven't made to turn this into a cool world recap podcast. And I went back because that was one of the games I played on Super Nintendo. It was the cool.

Oh, my God. And it's one of the worst games I've ever played for sure. But I was watching like gameplay footage of it on every game ever. And I was like, let's, I wonder how it ends. and it jumps to the end and it's like you just walk through a door and then it shows a word real big on the screen that says, cool, congratulations. And it just like cuts back to the title screen. I love it.

You know what? I take it back. They don't make them like they used to. Fucking cool. Okay. Let's jump into honorable mentions. I've been playing a lot of fields of mystery, which I believe we're going to be discussing as our main sort of topic next week. We are.

I'm pretty excited. I haven't played it since early access and I fucking loved it in early access And I was like oh I better As I often do with early access stuff I'm like I'm enjoying this too much I better hold off Yeah, so I'm pretty excited

I think was the wise wise decision to do It has been my experience that a lot of the Stuff that has been added is not so apparent At the top so I think you know If you did spend time with it before our discussion next week you should try and put a little bit of, a little bit of progress into it. I think I'm almost done with summer of the,

of the first year. And like I can see where some of the new stuff is, but I feel like most of it is like how they completed the story of the town or how they, you know, added X-Marry the dog, that kind of thing. You marry the dog, whatever. But yeah, I mean, it's fantastic. If you like Stardu, it's fucking fantastic.

We'll get more granular than that, I imagine. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, we just guess it at, like, Been playing a little bit more EQ, Legends. I was traveling recently, and I didn't have a ton of time to spend playing stuff. I did play Metcha Chameleon finally. I streamed that the other day, just playing with, like, viewers. And Rachel joined me, like, just kind of, like, sitting next to me

and helping me find people who were hiding and helping me, like, sort of find, you know, clever hiding spots. I get it, man. That game, that game does its thing really, really good. That game does its thing really, really if you're not familiar, did you guys do like a resty?

No, we haven't. It feels like we've talked about it. No, we haven't. You can give a quick primer on, like, how it works. All right, so you're a little blob guy, and you're running around, and it's hide-and-seek, and there's, you know, a team of people who are looking, and they have little paint blasters,

where if they see someone, they can paint blast them, and then they're either eliminated, or they join the sort of hunting team, if that's sort of the setting that you have enabled. Everyone else is hiding. You're a little blob guy or a little Minecraft blocky guy, but you're just kind of a blank kind of gray canvas. And you run around different maps and you find a place to hide.

You can pose your body in different positions. You can do like arms straight up in the air. You can curl up in a little ball. You can spread your body out in an X or whatever. And you can scale walls or other objects to like reach different points in the map. And then at a certain point, you lock yourself sort of in place and you paint. You paint yourself using, you know, somewhat, if you've used a Photoshop or an M.S. Paint even sort of canvas, like, will be very, very familiar to you.

And then it's up to you to kind of make yourself blend in with the environment. You can do some clever stuff like you can. Once you've painted yourself, you can leave a stamp of yourself. So you can basically clone yourself. You can do that to build more kind of complex shapes using like multiple different versions of your body in different poses, but you know, you only have a certain amount of time to hide and paint. And then you go out and seek and it's, it's just like, how much is, this game's like five bucks or something, right?

Like it's, it is dirt cheap. And six bucks. Sorry. That's a huge difference. It's just, it delivers like this moment of like, realizing someone was hiding in plain sight or hiding in plain sight and having people look at you. The clever thing it does is when you are hiding, you only get points when you are in someone's field of view. So like if you're hiding and you go and you tuck under like a coffee table and paint yourself pitch black, like no one's probably going to find you.

That's like a pretty good hiding spot. But you're not going to get any points because you have to be in someone's field of view. And I don't know, seeing, I've seen so many clips of people with actual genuine artistic backgrounds, you know, perfectly recreating a like, complicated tartan plaid pattern and then just like laying down on a rug in the middle of the room and no one's seeing them or like someone painting their arms and legs with like um luminescent sort of paint because you can change the values to be somewhat luminous or metallic and shiny and then like climbing up on the ceiling and turning into an X and just rotating and people running around like oh that's a ceiling fan keep on going like there's it's there's just a lot of ways that

you can be super duper, duper, duper clever with the tools that you are given. I made myself into a cow because I was in like a farm level. So I had like one stamp of me on all fours and then another stamp of me kind of in front of that. And then one stamp of me going forward. And I just painted it all sort of black and white spotted. And it looked fucking terrible. But no one clocked it because like no one was really looking for for that. Like there's so many ways that you can kind of outsmart people.

It's just a very, very clever game that is really. easy to pick up and play. And I don't know, man, six bucks. That's, that's truly, truly wild. I hope this person is doing well

with their absurd influx of revenue. That is a life-changing situation. A life-changing amount of money, I imagine. It was also really fun playing it with, like, Rachel as co-pilot, because she doesn't play,

like, a ton of games and doesn't love sort of, like, controlling kind of first-person games like this. but having just another set of eyes, it really gives you like an advantage, I would say. Do you have a Halloween costume picked out yet, or are you think you're going to go with this cow? Because I'm thinking that this cow look could be real Halloween.

The cow had six legs. The cow didn't look great. The cow looked fucked up. I showed Henry the stream because I was like, you got to see this cow, and he thought it was the funniest thing you'd ever seen. But again, like, no one was looking for the cow. You just ran by this six-legged mutant cow thinking like,

that's weird. I've been playing blueprints. It's a game about a house. You go through it. Pictures. I'm... How is there anything left? Apparently, at every turn,

it just... I mean, it does feel like the tunnel is narrowing to the point where, and I've talked to Griffin and Jason, and I've gotten a couple nudges here and there as the tunnel narrows, and I will admit, as the tunnel narrows, not as much,

fun stuff happens per run, although there are still fun moments here and there. Mostly at this point, I'm just trying to get to the end of it. And for people that are familiar with it, I am dealing with some crates, shall we say. So that's not my favorite part of the game, but the overall package is so fucking stunning. And I think about it regularly. And I take notes in the middle that I won't play without my wife. We play together. but I will take our notebook that we've been working in

and, like, jot down notes and look at screenshots we've taken throughout the day as, like, things occur to me. And then waiting to the end of the day to, like, actually act on those theories and have it play out is, like, fucking awesome. Sorry, who do you play with... My wife. Sorry, one more time. He wants it.

He wants you to do it the right way. Moly off. Okay, there we go. Thank you. Thank you. You have reached a point in the game that I think became much more kind of collaborative for me pre-release, like with the other kind of game

critic people who are playing it at the same time. Because some of those late-game puzzles are... Yeah. Like, I would not have found them without nudges and sort of...

Yeah, props to Jason because he knows how spoiler or verse I'd been and I'm really been... I was a stickler for a very long time. Yeah. And once I started asking props to him because he is still only giving me nudges to be like, hey, maybe check out this room.

and won't give me more than that or maybe look through your notes on this topic and that's enough to at least make me feel like I'm putting things together myself which I think does really help but I think you're right the best way to probably experience it is probably in a group larger than just two people

that are playing together if you do decide to get to the end. I do think two people, plenty of people to get to what I think is a pretty good satisfying ending which is like finishing the sanctum key thing. But yeah, once you get people, on that it gets much harder, I would say.

I've been just playing more Persona 3 reload, talking about things that we're just working our way through very, very slowly, but damn if it is not just the best excuse for my I in AY in Thor, that's the correct

name, to exist along with another game that I don't think we can talk about yet, that I really want to talk about very soon, and we will. But, man, having the... What month are you at? Can you give me an idea of, like, where you're at?

Oh, very early. I'm still in July. So I'm about, probably like 35, 40 hours. Are you even trying, Chris Plant? Are you even, like... Do you even know who Jun-S is? Okay, that's a different persona. Okay, let's be careful here.

No, it's a delight. And it's a delight to be able to pick at it at a pace where I'm not burning myself out. I like went really, really hard at first and then it was like, you kind of have to you, right, to get over the hump of like the beginning. Yeah, you kind of

do. And it's not as big a hump. For persona three reload, I will say they've trimmed it down significantly from I don't know, persona three portable is the only other way that I've played the game. Yeah, but now like the big, I think, mysteries of the game are kicking in

and I'm just really enjoying it. It's a nice end-of-day chill out game. I will tell you this, Chris, just to advise you on something, as a seasoned persona vet myself, we are six months out from persona four revival. So you do need

to finish this thing, I would say relatively quickly, because you're going to want, I mean, at least four months to really recover, to really come down before you hop into the next sort of hundred hours. See, no, I think I'm going to just ready to just go right into it.

The idea of just always having a persona that I can pick at and chill out with. And I think that timing-wise, that it'll nail it. I have a feeling that I'll be done with this by, like, Christmas when I have, like, a few more long breaks. But it is, it's like my... I'll be about when Russ finishes blueprints. Yeah, yeah. Just time for our gody conversation.

We should have an episode where you just talk about persona three and Russ just talks about blueprints and I just talk about EverQuest Legends. And it could be like, we just send it to, like, nine perverts who that like van diagram would... Someone asked for a spoiler blueprints episode at one point in the comments on one of the newsletters. I don't know that I ever want to do that.

Like, I would feel so bad to steal the magic from people that... I don't know. It's the whole magic of the game is what I've been talking about of these like weird mysteries that you're putting together. Hey, real quick, you guys see that new Spider-Man movie? No. Yeah.

Okay. I can't saw it. Okay. I don't know, man. I don't, I haven't seen one of these in a long time. and I usually bring movie stuff, but I went to see this the other day just because we had a window

of time, and Rachel and I wanted to go to the films. And I think Shang Chi and the Ten Rings is the last one that I did see. Yeah, it was a cool one. I haven't seen any of them since then, and I don't think I've really watched any of the TV shows except Wanda Vision, which is pretty good. And Hawkeye, that one kicks out.

And I thought it was a good time. I didn't like it nearly as much as really the other one. ones. I like the last one a lot with all the Spider-Man's in it. And I did feel, I enjoyed it kind of objectively as a blockbuster kind of action movie, but it confirmed my fears, and I don't know how you felt, Chris, but my lack of investment in this world, in this cinematic universe, sort of post-end game, has made it a truly daunting, a truly daunting. I went to see it with Rachel, who like at the end of the movie was like so who was his friend frank who was like so angry

oh okay yeah i mean they don't really say the punisher at any point in the film and so like i guess if you didn't know just have to assume based on what he's doing in the film you have to assume punishing he punish he does punish so like you do got i i don't know i it made me uh i felt a little bit i still enjoyed the movie i feel like i'm not going to be able to hang with avengers you don't Oh, definitely not. Inger's entirely that. Avengers is like, the trailer looks cool. It looks fun.

It's a bunch of characters. I don't, like, I didn't watch your TV show. I didn't see that sequel post-end game. I didn't, like, I don't know, man. It makes me worry that I'm not going to be able to party with that. I really enjoyed the Spider-Man, the new Spider-Man, because one, it basically is like a Spider-Man video game. Two, the soundtrack is really going for post-college life, specifically a post-college

life from 2007, 2008. It seems like a who wrote it. For me, yeah, exactly. The soundtrack is a killer and old. And also, compared to everything else, yes, it doesn't explain who Punisher is, but like, it really does, like, ask so little compared to what, from what I can tell. Yeah. All the other Marvel movies are.

Very much agree on the, like, I saw that Avengers trailer. I, this is me recovering from having to, you know, oversee an entertainment publication, but like, I see that and like, I just like get nauseous. It's like, this is everything wrong with the culture of there is no story, there is just faces that you're supposed to point at like the Spider-Man meme and be like, I get it, I recognize them. Deeply weird for a movie that big to be very unclear on what the hell it's actually about other than seeing famous people.

So yeah, it's weird. I enjoyed the movie. That being said, Wolverine Deadpool was a lot of that? I take it back. That's one that I did see. That's one of the best times I've had watching one of these fucking things. And I've said this before about the MCU and more superhero movies and like franchise movies in general. You can have, if you can have a standalone movie that doesn't require any pre-existing knowledge,

which I think Deadpool and Wolverine comes pretty close to doing, they kind of like bring you up to speed. it should just stand on its own. I do not give a fuck about the continuity and whether this makes sense and who died and who was friends in the previous six movies. I don't care. It should stand on its own.

So that's really all I hope for. But yeah, I agree. I think Avengers has no fucking chance of being that because it is once again the we're going to bring in all these old people you remember and we're going to bring in new people that you need to know for the next six properties and it's just going to be movie to movie.

And some movies are going to be bad and some will be good. And because I have to pay for a babysitter, I'm only going to pick the really, really good ones. The real good ones. The ones I have, yeah, that I've received a firm endorsement. And I'm not even joking. It needs to be that consistent. Last time, oh, we are all old folks saying before we go, Griffin, are you a Lord of the Rings

War in the North person? That feels like that would have been your shit. No. No. Okay. Well, four listeners and tell those what you know. Lord of the Rings War in the North one of the iconic PS2

games that is actually really good. Just beat the shit out of things in a fantasy land game. Inexplicably is now on Steam and even Switch 2 and people should go check this game out. Is that a way to end the episode? No. It's actually

not because we're going to talk about Patreon over at patreon.com slash the besties. Oh yeah. Please go over there and subscribe. We have a new new content going up. We have a new bracket battles with Jacob Geller who joined us this month. We also have new resties that just came out just a couple days ago. So we've got new fun stuff to talk about.

Oh, we talked about that golden eye game, Agent 64, which is fucking cool. Oh, yeah. Highly recommend checking that out. We have some new backers, Nick H, Ryan F, Rip M8, and Steve R. Thank you to you. And also all the other new backers or old backers or everyone else who supports the show and makes it all happen. Last bit of business, as a reminder, we are doing. live show in New York City. I know we've said it before, but I will reiterate it.

It's on October 9th. You can get tickets at besties.com. There's a big link. Click on that baby. It'll bring you over to the ticket page and get tickets because we're pretty excited. We are planning some really fun stuff for that. Yep. Next week, Fields of Mysteria, 1.0. Love it. Come and play that jam. And join us as we talk about it next week here on the besties. Because should the world's best Friends are the world's best games. Besties!