The Besties - Alan Wake vs. the best JRPG of the year [Resties]

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

In this, the first official episode of The Besties Resties: Alan Wake Remastered, Tales of Arise, and The Artful Escape are great games. And yet you may have missed them because there are so many new releases hitting all at once. Don't worry, we'll catch you up on the fall's OTHER great games. New episodes of The Besties Resties will drop on every other Tuesday through the rest of 2021. 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!

hey everybody i'm chris plant i'm russ frostick and this is the resties a video game podcast about the finer things in life are we dead set on that uh tagline absolutely not i knew that we needed a tagline and i spent a second and a half workshopping it yeah it's not good no it's okay we'll get there we'll get there eventually what exactly are we doing here chris plant this is very weird okay so we've received like a ton of feedback and requests for more besties you know people want longer conversations people want more video games they want a looser format um and they want just me and you i mean that's it i'm sure that's why everybody's here they're like i love chris i love fresh dick i love their wacky characters i need more of it so that that's kind of why we're here the macro is people might be able to guess

this have a pretty full podcast slate um so fresh and i have found some time to create this it's like a spinoff is that is that what you call it kind of like morgan mindy i think it uh yes i guess morgan mindy was also a spinoff that That's true. And a topical reference, so I appreciate that as well. Yes, we are going to bring a bunch of stuff that we genuinely enjoy, but don't always have the time to talk about on the main Besties show. So the games we talk about here will, at the very least, be very interesting and more often than not be games that you will go and want to play after you've heard about them.

That is our hope, at least. Yeah, and the plan is to do these right now, like every other week, and we'll be doing it through the end of the year, because that's when all these games are coming out. And then we can kind of like figure things out from there. If people enjoy it, maybe we keep it going. And any feedback and whatnot is greatly appreciated, because that's kind of why we're doing this in the first place.

Like I said, this is an idea that kind of came from y'all, and now it is a real thing. Let's do this thing. Really, really quick. Should we talk about why it's not a subscriber thing? Yeah, sure. So I talked a little bit about this on the main bestie show but basically like we thought about making this just like a subscriber only thing we get tons of people messaging hey why don't you have a patreon why can't we just send you money and stuff we appreciate

it we decided that we didn't want to split up the audience we know a lot of people out there enjoy hearing game recommendations and we thought maybe people would also want to hear this without having to necessarily pay for it so uh we're doing this uh we'll have ads here and there occasionally but generally speaking uh it's gonna be i mean it is literally free for everyone to listen to so worry not um it'll hit the uh the feed so you'll have normal besties and then you'll have resties once every two weeks. And yeah, then everyone is sort of hanging out in the same pool. What a great pool it is.

Here's why this is a great pool. There's no pee in this metaphorical pool, if you will. The way that resties is going to work... That's true. The way that rest Use is going to work is we're only going to talk about stuff that we like.

That doesn't mean we won't have criticism. But since Frosh and I are doing this partly for pleasure, for fun, to keep up with each other despite living on opposite coasts, we want to kind of focus on stuff that actually makes us really happy because we don't have a lot of time to do that otherwise so we'll be talking about stuff that we're really

passionate about some of that will be games that don't make it to besties uh some of that will be revisiting stuff that we do talk about on besties that we just don't have time for um or time to revisit you know a few weeks later um is there like what is like a thing that you just are aching to bring to our new little show? You know, I've been, well, I don't know when we're going to fit it in because it can be, you know, it's such a busy holiday season, but I've been playing the Alan Wake remastered edition. And I think maybe we should just talk about it here.

That sounds great. Let's start with that. I should just admit right now, we talked about doing Alan Wake before. I know I made it seem, y'all listening at home, I made it seem like on the spur of the moment, I was like, hey, let's just talk about Alan Wake. I knew.

I knew that's what we were going to talk about, and that's what we're going to talk about here. I'm just giving you a peek behind the curtain. So Alan Wake is not the latest game. It's a remake of an older game from remedy and y'all might know them from making uh max pain is the original one yeah if you're an old person you know them from making max pain definitely fun fact the face of Payne in the video game is the face of studio director, I believe, or narrative director, Sam Lake. And then they made this game, Alan Wake, for the Xbox 360 era games. It felt like it was going to be this big franchise for Xbox.

There was a kind of a sequel, kind of, but it never fully took off. Then they made Quantum of Solace. Quantum Break. Quantum Break. And then they made Control. And they made Control after kind of going different directions from Microsoft. So they made all this stuff with Microsoft, Rockstar, I guess, and then Microsoft. Microsoft and Rockstar and I guess and then Microsoft and then uh and then they split kind of did their own thing and made I would say like inarguably their best game right yeah yeah I think

I think that's fair in control yeah control is a fabulous game we've talked about it on besties before um but I think Alan Wake was the moment Max Payne was kind of their breakout game but I think Alan Wake was the moment where they got full creative control to like do something very very weird and wild and it definitely shows it is a weird wild game and one that i think we're going to be seeing more of because i think they're setting up for a sequel these days but maybe we're getting ahead of ourselves yeah it really feels like that so for folks who don't know the the Wake game, the best thing I can describe is like the most loving ode to Stephen King that you could make in the form of a third person shooter video game. Yeah, I would say Stephen King mixed with Twin Peaks. So the premise is that you are a writer who is kind of a Stephen King alike.

You're extremely successful. And you are going and visiting a cabin in the woods in this small, rural, I would assume Pacific Northwest town. Yep. Right? Yeah, it's Seattle. Near Seattle, I should say. Not Seattle. But immediately, you have a dream.

Because this game, Bold Move, opens with a dream sequence. Somebody, actually not even a dream because this game bold move opens with a dream sequence somebody actually not even a dream sequence someone recounting their dream sequence which you play and a poem that one of the characters recites of his own work so not somebody like quoting you know like famous poetry it's the game quoting its own fictional poetry which is profoundly brave um but anyway in this in this dream sequence you alan wake are uh attacked by a shadowy figure made of effectively darkness like oily sludgy cloudy darkness and he was a character in one of your stories and he's like i mean it's very on the nose like you can't do this to me alan you get to kill me whenever you'd like now i get to kill you alan and it's like who are you and it's like one of your characters alan like come on work through it um it the whole the whole game is kind of on the nose like this i think the writing of these

games has come a long way but credit to remedy and the team who made this i'm not saying that the writing in video games was a whole lot better at the time that this came out like full context this was kind of i think cutting edge for big budget games at the time yeah i mean i you know it's it's funny i i wouldn't say that it's naturalistic writing by any stretch of the imagination but alan wake exists in a world he is a pulp novel writer right and the writing of the game is also that same very over-the-top, very goofy, even the voice acting, everything is like this hammy, not naturalistic style. Because that is like what Remedy is a lot of traditionally at its core has always been that. If you look at Max Payne, same thing, very pulpy, very pulpy very over the top never naturalistic control started feeling a little more naturalistic and then played with that by making it even more

out there and wild so it is very much in the dna of this company and specifically sam lake who i think crafts a lot of these narratives himself to kind of create these like very over-the-top worlds and dialogue. I don't think it's meant to be good in the traditional sense. I do find it engaging, but it's like very wild. It's soapy even, I would say. Yeah, so this is a remake or remaster. I guess it's a remaster mostly anyway the point is you can play it on pc in 4k they touched up the character models so they don't look

i mean they still kind of look like they look a little goofy i wouldn't i think a lot of people might come at this thinking like oh i'm gonna get like a final fantasy 7 remake level of total revamp it is absolutely not that it still looks it looks like um it kind of looks like a ps4 game but like uh which is to say like the lighting is better the character models are a little bit better but it still has like a not totally modern looking feel there's a lot of like blockiness in the environments stuff like that but i but again i like the thing that you know i love alan wake as a as a franchise i actually find it super super compelling um and i think that still carries through regardless of whether it's the most eye-popping game ever. Just, like, things that jump to my mind.

I think, you know, we've talked about, like, the hamminess of it. I think the characterization throughout is, like, really strong. You meet a lot of, like, goofy neighbors that live in the town that, you know, you're introduced to them in a diner, and then slowly but surely those characters reappear throughout the story. And you develop this, like, real affinity for everyone that lives in town, which, again, is kind of hard to do in a video game. It's very rare that there are characters that, like, side characters specifically that really jump out. But I also think, like, even though the story doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense i'm still like kind of invested i you know

is this real is this a dream is he creating everything by typing about it or is it uh you know just like a fever dream i i like genuinely am like invested and want to know where this is gonna go and for those who have played alan wake originally this game ends on like one of the most wild cliffhangers I've ever seen in a video game like totally bizarre and like leaves you hanging and the fact that the game came out what is it 15 years ago now like people have been

hanging for quite a while yeah so the other thing this game did well with in terms of cliffhangers when it came out was it had these episodic – one, it plays out like an episodic TV show, like Twin Peaks with very purposeful little cliffhangers every, I don't know, like 40 minutes or whatever. And when you played the game, it had recaps, like television-style recaps, which at the time, I mean, even still now is like a pretty original idea and super helpful for, I don't know, folks who don't have as much time to play video games, where you can come back and get caught up on the story. I think that's part

of what makes it. I think that's part of why people love that story so much because it met people on their own level in terms of like allowing you to connect into it the other thing that i i really like about this game is the combat um yeah so the way it works is you have a flashlight in one hand and uh your gun and the other and when these like shadowy creatures attack you you have to first remove the darkness from them by like shining the flashlight on them and then you can like pepper them with bullets to you know obliterate them um it's again pretty simple now but at the time where every game uh like the most interesting thing about a third-person shooter was like how it handled reloads this felt really neat and it

still feels really good like yeah it's just one of those things that on a you know if you stripped away everything and it was just the mechanic it would feel great which honestly makes sense because again their pedigree is in max you know they started with max pain and kind of defining how like good action games felt and i think they carried over a lot of that information to this game and then later in um in control like you see a lot of dna alan wake dna in control itself yeah yeah so i mean speaking of control that's why you should you if you liked control you should probably play the remaster of alan wake if you haven't because like fresh said it's hinting at a sequel but more importantly uh all of these games uh quantum

break quantum break yeah thank you control and alan wake seem to be in the same universe and alan wake and control especially seem to have a pretty real connection. Yeah, I mean, I don't know about Quantum Break specifically. I know they've made references to Quantum Break a little bit, but I think it's kind of their maligned entry that didn't get a lot of love. But I definitely know that Alan Wake and Control exist in the same universe because there was an Alan Wake-centric DLC in Control with, like, recurring characters and characters and again kind of a setup

for a sequel in that there's also um if you're really like into the alan wake lore scattered throughout this remastered there are these qr codes that you can find and if you scan them it'll link to these unlisted youtube videos that I'm not 100% sure. But I think these are like new Alan Wake cut scenes that were filmed with the actor who played, who was Alan Wake, talking about things we haven't seen him talk about before. So there's like new content that may or may not lead into what will be this sequel. I think it's going to happen. That is my guess. But again, who knows?

They've been promising it for many, many years. So the other thing is Epic and Remedy have a partnership. And Epic has lots and lots and lots of money. And money, so much money, I don't even think it needs to worry about things being like a big success. So if they wanted to make another alan wake game with remedy that seems like like a kind of like open shut deal for for both parties yeah i think i i would not be surprised if that's how they could make the numbers work if it's just like hey this is like a good reputation thing for epic putting

this like beloved but kind of like dark horse franchise back on the map so i i am optimistic but again who knows uh do you do you recommend you do you recommend people play this game um i actually think for people that are like that don't play a lot of action games but like narrative games this fits in a pretty interesting space in between them i'd recommend you play on easy if you don't play a lot of action games because it can get a little hairy but there's so much narrative here and you can kind of like and the action sequences are like fun but not that complicated you're not like juggling a ton of different things uh so i kind of do recommend it for a lot of people i think it's for people that like uh twin peaks for people that like as

you said stephen king stories uh hammy over the top kind of soapy but also like weirdly mysterious uh lore stuff x files um i you know i i actually think it's it's one of the games that a lot of people should play so i definitely recommend it yeah i'd say if you have game pass i don't know if this is on it but i think the original version not the remaster is there that's not a bad option like i would i don't love the remaster so much that i'm like you gotta drop more money and give this one a try um this is not the shadow of the colossus style remaster also like fresh like you mentioned the geometry is still funky so it has this weird thing where you do like 4K, you know, high resolution textures

on a pretty old game's geometry, which is very blocky. And it looks weird. Like it actually makes the like the funkiness of, you know, the shape of the ground and the cliff sides and everything more noticeable, I find when you layer on beautiful high-resolution textures over it.

Yeah, I almost wonder whether it would have been better if they just, I don't know. Yeah, I agree with your point about maybe just playing it on old hardware is not the end of the world because it does kind of hide some of that, like,

aged technology stuff. Aged. Cool. So that's more or less Alan Wake. I think we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back, and we've got two more games to discuss. We're going to, like, hammer you with recommendations.

So many recommendations. We love it. Okay, so you have been playing a game that I have been skeptical skeptical about and this isn't fair to anybody that i'm about to mention but it looks like a game by double fine the studio i mean best known for psychonauts now i guess psychonauts one and two i like i always admire their games like costume quest or brutal legend but then i play then I play them, and the game never clicks with me as much as the art direction. Love how they look.

Not always in love with how they play. And this game is not made by Double Fine, but it looks like a Double Fine game. Okay. Can I say the name now? Yes. Okay. The name is The Artful Escape. And Plant is right.

It does kind of look aesthetically like a Double Fine game. And we've talked a lot about Psychonauts this year and Double Fine games in the past. And as I've mentioned previously, Plant's right. I don't always love the, quote, feel of playing through Double Fine games. I think narratively and the aesthetics of their games are stellar, but the feel is always a little bit iffy for me. You like the jokes where they're like,

I ate some cheese and now I got poopies. Yes, there tend to be quite a bit of fart jokes in Double Fine stuff. So yes, this is not a double fine game uh this is made by beethoven and dinosaur that's the name of the studio published by annapurna and um even though the aesthetics kind of scream double fine i think this game goes in a different direction a lot of game a lot of their games go this feels more like a linear narrative first adventure um then it's i don't know a traditional game i guess the premise is this you play as this guy francis vendetti um he is basically a early 20s musician living in the pacific northwest and he has a bit of a problem

his uncle is a world famous folk singer he is also a musician but even though he's trying to like make it as a folk singer as well that is not where his passion lies his passion lies in i guess it would be called i guess it's like a heavy metal prog rock like shredding guitar style like that's his preference for music and uh francis sort of goes about his life he lives in this town everyone knows his uncle he's sort of like begrudged and down about it and uh that's all fine until he meets this strange woman who invites him to go to this bar that he's never been to before and the game very quickly becomes an interstellar adventure where this you know nobody rocker is slowly like traveling through the galaxy trying to like find his musical taste um it is a bizarre mashup of like 16

different genres from an interaction standpoint if people have played a night in the woods like it feels like a night in the woods it actually borrows a lot of the interaction and interface stuff from a night in the woods uh when you talk to people there's just like little dialogue boxes next to them it's just like 2d side scrolling but i think in terms of the actual interactions of the game it's more like a movie you are like playing through this experience talking to people and always kind of pushing forward to see like new worlds and new uh performance venues to sort of grow as an artist as you know this guy francis wait so how do you play do you just talk with people yeah you it's you run you know it's like a side scrolling

platformer you basically can just run left and right and jump over things and then there are moments where you can um play your guitar they're like and and there are buttons assigned on your controller to like control different notes in the guitar it's not like a challenging game it's more like a it feels like a game i don't want to like call it an experience because it's really not that it feels like a narrative game but it's not challenging in the way that like limbo or something like that is challenging there aren't puzzles it's more challenging in the way that like Limbo or something like that is challenging. There aren't puzzles. It's more about like moving through this world, talking to people and just kind of experiencing it, letting it wash over you.

It kind of reminded me of Journey, if people have played Journey, because there's not really failing. It's just a matter of like kind of absorbing everything that's around you. Happy Kentucky Route Zero. kind of absorbing everything that's around you. Happy Kentucky Route Zero. Oh, yeah. Definitely not as depressing as Kentucky Route Zero or Night of the Woods, for that matter. Again, definitely an inspiration,

but I think tonally they are very, very different. This story is about, you know, kind of a personal, like, artist's growth while also trying to overcome a lot of the burdens that, like, family talent can kind of lay on you it is it's i was it's very rare for narrative games to grab me very quickly because the writing tends to be bad in video games sorry video games but your writing tends to be bad within i would say 10 minutes of me playing this game i

was already invested and a lot of that is just like presentation fantastic writing really great voice acting they hired like actual um known people to do the voice acting uh lena headley does a voice carl weathers jason schwartzman mark strong so there are like known actors not to diminish voice actors because they also dedicated voice actors because they also do amazing work and there are some in this game as well but those are some of the names that people might actually know and it kind of gives it this air of of really like it feels like a hollywood production um and kind of a big budget effort whereas you don't normally see that in narrative-first games. And I know that's something that Annapurna is trying to bring to their,

bring to the world through their publishing arm. Yeah, this also sounds like the better scenario than, was it 12 Minutes? Is that the name of the game? Oh, yeah. Yeah, which was also published by Annapurna and also is like a story-heavy game with like Willem Dafoe in it. Yeah, which was also published by Annapurna and also is like a story heavy game with like Willem Dafoe in it. Yeah, very similar.

The difference is that this game, A, doesn't rely on like torture porn to move its story along. And B, doesn't rely on the most horrifying twist imaginable to move its story along. This is far more family friendly. I would recommend this to like seven and eight year olds like it is like right up that alley it's it's kind of got like a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy vibe yeah i find it like enormously charming and and kind of i'm always struggling to find games that are like short but also leave an impact and this game is like five six hours long and really is very memorable and and just like gorgeous and chill i i it's terrific it's also on game pass so if you happen to be subscribed

to game pass there you go very easy so if this is a colorful and like nice narrative game in contrast to a world of you know dark and dour narrative games i'm bringing the grim dark rpg to the world of happy colorful rpgs this is i mean there are a lot of grim dark rpgs yeah and also like this one's not really that dark i'm bringing tales of a rise uh and I've been wanting to get into the series for a while. Okay, that's not true. I've been curious about the Tales games for a long time. I know like nothing about them. I've heard people say, oh, Tales, that's a franchise.

That's literally all I know. I always feel like Tales games are where it's like, you know, mainstream people are like, yeah, I like Final Fantasy. And then people who are like a little bit cooler are like, yeah, I like Dragon Quest. And then people who are like really cool are like, oh, I only play the Tales games. And then everybody else is like, oh, wow, like that must be great. And then like somebody like me pops up and like, yeah, I playing rpgs after lunar on my sega saturns yeah um anyway tales of arise it is a colorful semi-action rpg okay so it's not turn-based i'll say that up top and more importantly what's the story you ask because it's an rpg uh thank you is it stupid

is it stupid i okay so i don't think it's stupid i think you have to you have to be ready to ride the wave or else you are going to wipe out my friend uh here's here's the premise there is oh no you're gonna think it's stupid yeah there's a world of have and have-nots right and this one group of people they are the have-nots and they're effectively being used as slave labor on a planet um where it's revealed quite early that not only are they being used for like to make things or to do manual labor but also they literally are stealing the energy out of their bodies for a competition i believe this is stealing the the poor people energy yes they're stealing their the the energy out of their bodies while they do this work and then there are

are like five overlords of the habs group of this like these you know the the wealthy right sure and those five leaders they're in a competition with each other to i believe see who can steal the most energy i i know what you're thinking and i know what the listeners are thinking chris this sounds bad and maybe but it sounds like hunger games a little bit kind of yeah okay now that sounds better that sounds nicer um but what's like good with it and what's good about like so many rpgs i mean if you tried to explain the top level story of like most final fantasies come on it wouldn't sound a whole lot better. Sure. The moment-to-moment stuff is very enjoyable. You first play as this dude who wears an iron mask over his face,

and you do not see his face. They make many jokes about how he does or does not eat food. And he does not feel pain, so he is this this kind of like typical hero uh you know getting in the way of like a a wampum to protect a little kid and he's like doesn't bother me sure i'm like bleeding to death but i don't feel it so is it really that bad and everybody's like yeah actually you're bleeding to death stop doing that that's bad um and he's like okay um and he's he's like his own little treat he's he's you know you'll be surprised here he doesn't remember much about his past

oh gosh uh-huh and then was he a rich person before oh i don't know but but he does have magic powers and it seems like the only people who have magic powers are the rich people. So, you know, read between the lines. Then there is a nice young woman who joins your party. She is from the Habs, from the rich people party, right? But she's against him. She's on the haves from the rich people party right um but she's against him she's she's on the lam from them so you have a you know a very tenuous partnership going between the two of you

her when anybody touches her it electrocutes them oh no which would be a problem unless you didn't feel pain you see oh you see they're a match made in heaven. They're kind of like a match made in JRPG heaven. And again, you might say like, this doesn't sound good. But it is. Moment to moment, it's good. And this is a thing that I am just like, I'm really falling in love with anime. I'm really embracing this new interweave of mine that has like been born from the the the

seed of near automata everything's just so sincere the music is incredible the opening theme is just a banger anime anthem but then the actual score the world music is great it's just can we can we go back for a second and talk about i understand that the guy can't feel pain and i understand that she electrocutes people when touched yeah but you realize that even if you can't feel pain constantly being electrocuted is still a problem no i think it's more like oh for once like somebody was able to like you know just like hold her shoulder and be like i care about you so it's not like always like you know like oh hey like let's let's like dance for kids you know let's just do like some swing dancing while i yeah no i understand incinerate my insides yeah um no they're not doing that. They're like, you know, taking down the man.

Okay. So as far as I can tell, my job now is to, you know, go across the world, destroying these five bad dudes or people or I don't know what they are, monsters. The first one is a kind of a fire world. I believe the second one is an ice world. Oh, my God. Uh-huh. The first one is kind of a fire world. I believe the second one is an ice world. Oh, my God. Uh-huh.

I don't know why I'm really struggling to talk about why this game is so good. What is it? Is it the combat or is it just like aesthetics? Oh, that's a good point. So visually, it looks great. We talked about Scarlet Nexus earlier this year. It is from the same publisher and I believe part of the developer. It feels like a more polished version over a lot of things they do in that game one of the things that i love in terms

of the storytelling is you have the usual like mandatory cut scenes right and you have the option to talk with people in the city but then you can also uh while you're just like walking around with your partner hit a button and it triggers a motion comic with them where it kind of just catches up on what's going on between the two of them. So they'll just have a little conversation or a little argument or share some personal history. And these are scattered throughout the game. They're totally optional.

There are some people who would be like, hey, I prefer that in the final fantasy games where they just you know like kind of chat while you're walking along but i i i like that like i stop catch a break i get story if i don't want story i don't need story you know like they're not doing that thing where they artificially make me walk for 15 minutes sure they know that they can get that dialogue in the slow walk mission yeah yes i i despise it the other thing that's really really great and this is why i actually think i am coming back to it i love the combat and i do not love combat in most rpgs um ironically i liked the

combat in scarlet nexus i think this is even better the way it works is you kind of spam an attack button to just do very minimal attacks that builds up a power gauge but then you get effectively spells or magic moves that you can assign to the face buttons and then you can combo those um so you could like do one spell that pounds somebody in the ground then throws them up into the air and then you can do a few hits in the air with a normal attack and then you do another move that throws them across the map and then one final move that like slams them to the ground um and then on top of that you have these like specials for every character and there's like a special that um your partner she pulls out a gun from i don't know like another

dimension and it knocks down every enemy that it's shooting out with its massive beam and brings them all to the ground so if you're going up against you know like flying creatures it brings everything to the ground and then you can like pulverize them with uh you know the man in the iron mask i understand this all sounds simple and maybe like something that you played done in other games but i can't remember it working this well where it feels like i am playing anime combat sequences like i feel immensely powerful within the first hour and a half and they there aren't random enemy encounters you actually have to kind of run into them and then it transports you to like a good fighting my

preferred yeah and you can dodge most of them if you want but i've actually find myself like running into encounters just because i really enjoy the combat um and i want to like test out how i could use like the different abilities against different enemy types. So, I don't know. Maybe I'm discovering that I just really love this genre that I don't have time for. Or maybe the combat is really just that good. Or maybe the story is just that good, you know? Like, people probably heard that story and they were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, Tolstoy.

Like, calm it down. Yeah, it does sound like the sort of game that i might never ever play but yeah i do understand that there are many of those games and a lot of people really really like them so i'm happy for you thank you that's all but i don't think i'll ever play this no that's i understand i respect it it's also like and it's one of the short ones. I guess all the Tales games are like notoriously long. Yeah. I think this one's only like 50 or 60 hours. Oh, cool. Great. Cool, cool, cool.

Yeah, so it's okay if you skip it. It is actually quite freeing to know the games that I'll just never play. Like I was watching people playing, what is it called? New World. The MMO that Amazon just dropped. And I was watching it. I was it called new world the mmo that amazon just dropped and uh i i was watching i was like wow i'm never gonna play this game ever ever and uh that's that is freeing that like think of all the time i'm gonna save by not playing these games feels nice

it's a game i i can't wait for people to tell me about eve online same thing tell me all about it i'll read a book on it. I've definitely read more about Eve Online than I've played of any MMO ever. Which is zero hours. So that's what we've been playing. We've been playing a lot of video games. What do you want to share with our listeners who have

joined us on this wonderful inaugural journey? This is the part of the show where we're going to be sharing our one recommendation of the week which is funny because this week we've recommended a lot of good video games but this could be anything um because you know what it's our show we have the space we don't have to talk about just games we know why you're here you're here for those criterion channel recommendations and you know i've got them um but let's start with you is there anything that you that you

recommend people check out uh yes i have been watching a show called the other two it is on hbo max i think it's also on comedy central if you just have cable but if you have hbo max that is the easiest way to watch it it is in season two now it is um a very funny comedy uh it is about the siblings of a tiktok star more or less that's effectively the how it's boiled down and his siblings are like in their 30s and miserable and not really having a successful career and they're sort of in the shadow of their brother who is 15 and this huge mega sensation uh it is one of the strongest comedy pilots i've seen in many many years uh it's rare that like a comedy grabs me in the way that this does it reminds me tonally of if you've ever watched um happy endings or don't trust the

b in apartment 23 uh definitely that same kind of sense of humor uh so yeah highly recommend it it's called the other two i have another thing on hbo max i'm going to recommend a little movie called the return of the living dead with a lot of caveats it is a zombie movie as you probably guessed, set in the 80s. And it is the most 80s zombie movie you can imagine. Was it filmed in the 80s? Yeah, I believe. It was directed by Dan O'Bannon, who is the guy who,

he's like a notorious, he was a lot. I get a sense that he was just a lot to have to deal with. He was a co-writer writer of alien the original alien oh uh then he also made life force which i don't know if you're a fan of other obscure horror movies but that movie is also a trip that uh comes with some caveats anyway this movie i watched it on an airplane which was bad um it's really really really gory one of the first sequence you see is like a just a body decomposed rapidly and it's extremely gross

and it just goes from there there's also a lot of like pretty not great nudity. Okay. Dan O'Bannon, I kind of get the sense from some of his other movies that this is kind of a thing for him. This is the recommendation segment, Chris Plant. So, no, I get it. I get it. So, like, I'm just giving those cautions up top because I think like that's kind of recommending any movie from the 80s. I think it's really hard to recommend movies from the 80s and not be like, so a few things about this, please don't judge me. So that's out of the way.

That said, as a zombie movie, as a 80s nostalgia movie, as somebody who just likes really trashy music over gory special effects when it's the halloween season this movie is so good it is so ridiculous um i don't want to spoil it for people other than to say it is uh it's not a zombie movie we're shooting the zombies in the head actually kills them okay um so you're gonna see like a lot of things moving around that otherwise should not be moving around in uh in normal zombie movies which sounds more sexual than i intended yeah i was gonna say no no no it's like a like a dead butterfly is like flapping around stuff oh no um or like vivisected creatures um yeah it is Oh, no. all um but is 80s gory fun it's so so good um if you are the type of person who enjoyed malignant um you would probably enjoy this which i think is a very specific type of person steven king yeah not not me i'm i'm too scared but other people horror movies are the jrpgs of cinema for you i i read the wikipedia

entries for horror movies and learn the plot that way that's how i learned about uh wicker man is that a horror movie yes it is there's two of them okay i learned about all the things that happened there just reading the wikipedia entry i read about that movie where the blind the guy is blind and they try to rob his house read that whole thing oh yeah it's the best way to experience a horror movie other than watching it yeah i'd have to other than watching it yeah uh thank you plant that that is a good rec thank you i think that's our show i think it is i think we did it i think we did our first episode but we want people to do something before we end it oh yeah do you want to tell them what to do yeah hey how's it going people at home that are still listening um if you dug this or you have any um feedback you can reach out to us on the besties pod on twitter if you really really enjoyed it and

you'd like to see more of this it sure be great if you left a review on i guess you can only review the besties as a because this is on the same feed so leave a review on the besties on apple podcasts but hey mention the resties if you dug it uh in the review that'd be great uh if you have constructive feedback maybe leave that out of the review and just tell us on twitter because otherwise that'd be bad uh i don't know if I'm legally allowed to say that from an Apple point of view, but broadly speaking, yeah, don't leave constructive feedback in the reviews section because that penalizes everybody.

But I would say tell us and we will make the show all the better. I think that's basically it. I think that's good. So we'll be back in two weeks for this show. We'll be every Friday for Besties. For the next Resties, for people who are listening to this. It's too early.

We're not going to tell. No, no, no. I want to tell people to play something so that we can talk about it. I really want to talk about some stuff for the Outer Wilds DLC, Echoes of the Eye. Oh, yeah. So if you are interested in

that give that a try now i would say if you're just interested in it whether or not you're listening to the show you should try it now because uh there is a great reveal in the first hour of that game and i would hate for you to have it spoiled for yourself so check that out and we'll talk about that and some other stuff in two weeks. But before we do that, can you just recap all the games we talked about? Oh, yeah.

I will try to do that. Let's see. We talked about Alan Wake Remastered, and while doing that, we also talked about Quantum Break, Max Payne, and Control. And then when we talked about the games that we recommend, you talked about The Artful Escape, and I talked about Tales of Arise. And then you recommended people watch The Other Two, which is a delightful comedy by Chris Kelly, either former or current showrunner of SNL. And I recommended The Return of the Living Dead, a problematic, but, you know, just seasonal delight.

The pumpkin spice lattes of trashies, 80s, horror movies. Cool. Well, let's wrap it then. Cool. Well, thank you all for listening thank you fresh for doing uh the rest is with us until next time with us who's the other person uh okay until next time until next time this has been the resties a video game podcast about the finer things in life