The Besties - Chowing Down on Cuphead's Delicious Last Course

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

We hope you're hungry, because this week brings us Cuphead's shiny new DLC, The Delicious Last Course. Also, we bought egg sandwiches for everyone, and man, we just bought waaaay too many. Take as many as you want. Bring some home to your family.Other games discussed: Neon White, Hero Emblems 2, Teardown, Clap Hanz Golf, Fall Guys, AI Somnium Files 2 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!

I got Chris Plant in the studio, in the ATX, where the magic happens. That was, and you know that was too loud, right? Uh-huh. Yeah, no, I knew right away when I looked at you. And I had to pot you down, man. You got so feisty. Russ, baby, I wish you were here, man. We are having ourselves a great time.

Are you guys launching like a new South by Southwest? Yeah, it's called atx boys only and um no it's called it's called south by southwest by west west um just sort of respecting your sort of california journey that you're on true west the true west moment that you're living right now sam shepard's oh my god south by southwest west west west west and um if you want in on this russ you're living right now. Sam Shepard's South by Southwest, West-West. West-West. And if you want in on this, Russ, you're going to have to fucking move because you're sort of...

No East in that title, you might have noticed. No East, there's no North. It's all happening right here. I mean, I got the whole, this part of the country I covered, though, so this might just be kind of a... I mean, for two more weeks, you do. And then I'm going to be...

And then we're going to be fucking East Coast rivals, just sort of elites battling for territory control. Snapping in the streets of New York City. What's the full name of the show at that point? So that show is going to be called Griffin and Chris Presents South by Southwest by West West by Northeast, but only D. only DC not North Northeast New York City

because we don't want to step on any toes by Sam Shepard presents thank you yeah there's lots of names and lots of words in this one my name is the best game of the week my name is Christopher Thomas plant and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. And I know the best game of the week.

My name is Russ Froschek. And I know the best game of the week. And this is the besties, the show where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It is a video game show club. And by listening, you, my friend, are a member. And this week, we got a special one. It's not a game. It's a game. Well, it's not a game as much as it is sort of a booster pack. It's not a game. It's a game.

Well, it's not a game as much as it is sort of a booster pack. Expansion. Oh, yeah. A boss rush. Which, man, you ask me, they should have just had this stuff in the original game, always trying to nickel and dime us these big AAA studios. We're talking about Cuphead, the delicious last course. Chris Plant, who is in front of me, when I touch you, tell me what okay touch him in the face oh okay um the it's a dlc expansion to cuphead it

was uh announced in 2018 was supposed to come out in 2019 it's 2022 baby it's finally here five years after the original release we have more cuphead there is no platforming stages this time around it's just bosses good stuff yes but there are platforms in the bosses let's not there's platforms in the bosses yes it took them many years to make these six bosses and we will be not just playing it's a lot of work but we are going to talk more about it just after this quick break um so this this expansion i have been playing cuphead with Henry, which has been a bad idea. Yeah. Yeah.

That feels like a lesson in frustration. It is a, yeah, we realized this yesterday when, um, we're, we got a, the run around by those frog boys and, uh, there was, there was a lot of grumpiness happening. there was a lot of grumpiness happening uh and so i i feel like my cuphead experience was tarnished somewhat by that but boy howdy it's like falling off a log with uh with this dlc does he get mad at you when you lose like is he embarrassed for you what's his reaction uh no he gets mad in the platforming level specifically when a jump doesn't go the way that he thought it was going to go and then the game is glitching or hacking him. Uh-huh. Which it may be.

Who knows? It's 2022, you know? Privacy is nothing. Where did he learn those words? YouTube. Uh-huh. Yeah. I feel like we should tell people what Cuphead originally was

because there might be some people that never played it. Yeah. Super hard platformer with lots of boss fights that it made up sort of the majority of of the game kind of a mix of mega man meets gunstar heroes and a little bit of ikaruga and if you don't know any of those games oh my god that's totally okay because really the appeal is the art and the sound right yeah imagine like steamboat willie but a video game but you can play it and i think it was all hand-drawn i think i mean that sounds that isn't right aren't all video games hand-drawn in a way wow no no they use a keyboard and a mouse sometimes well that's your what do you use to

activate those chris you're noggin you know no you're being obtuse okay okay okay uh so this this dlc uh adds six bosses to the game on a whole new inkwell aisle i forget how many bosses are in the original i don't know how i think it's like 20 or 30 yeah i don't think it's 30 that seems like way more than but there's a lot. And also, technically, there are more than six bosses in the DLC. Yes, because there's challenge. There are these little challenge mini-bosses that you can do. There's some secrets. Ultra secret boss.

But the big thing is that it adds a new character, Miss Chalice, who... A star. Is a star. Breakout star. I mean, she was in the original game as sort of an NPC, but in this one, you can play as her. And she feels,

she controls way different. She has a dash instead of like her parry has a dash through. Right. She can double jump and she can do kind of invisible dash to dodge. Yeah, an invincible roll that you have to activate on the ground,

which takes some, that movement particularly takes some getting used to. Yes. dodge yeah an invincible roll uh that you have to activate on the ground which which is which takes some that movement particularly takes some getting used to yes she also comes with an extra hit an extra hit point yeah she also i mean she her super abilities which you charge up by hitting the the boss uh are also different one of them also gives you an extra like hit point essentially Hit point, essentially. I had heard, mostly from Justin, that this DLC was super, super hard. And that was not my experience, because I found playing as Miss Chalice to be profoundly easier than playing as Cuphead or Mama. Did you have a save file already? Yes. Okay, so I think that's the key thing here.

If you have a save file and you have all of the like different types of ammo already unlocked sure i think this gameplay is really smooth i played on xbox i lost my effectively lost my save file by switching over to steam and having to play this from the beginning with nothing unlocked yeah a little bit more of a not a headache it was just it was it was a harder grind if you are coming in fresh though you only have to like make it to the mausoleum the mausoleum i think you can walk right to from the beginning no you've got to be i did it myself you have to beat a few bosses before you can do that okay but they're aisle one bosses who are pretty yeah pretty beatable yeah if you can't beat that fucking carrot good luck to you yeah right

um the but the boss is all six of the new bosses and the like uh there's so there's like a a king in this claymation castle in the sky which is wild to see sort of this completely different art art style in this setting uh who challenge you challenges you to take down these like five mini bosses each of whom sort of force you to utilize miss chalice's different skills in different ways using the dash parry instead of uh what was essentially kind of a double jump parry that the yeah yeah uh and yeah i don't know between the like invincibility role and the dash Perry, which is a lot easier to execute than the, the, the bounce Perry that the other, the other boys do.

Um, I, I did not, I did not struggle nearly as hard as I did just playing the regular game with Cuphead and Mugman, uh, with, with Henry. I think they intentionally, they were aware of sort of the reputation of cuphead sure and the idea that a lot of people kind of bounced off so to speak the difficulty even though they i think a lot of people myself included love the artwork the idea that oh i'm gonna throw myself at this boss fight 30 times until i get the patterns and everything is a lot for people so i think miss chalice is an acknowledgement that hey we want more people to experience this that maybe didn't yeah i mean it's still that being said even with miss chalice this is not an easy game like you will still no we're just pro

gamers well the boss the thing is that the bosses are the all six bosses are fucking great like they are uh wildly entertaining to watch but they also uh challenge the the challenge that they present is uh varied and frantic in like the best way yeah they are as good as like the best boss fights in in cuphead uh the the original so like all of them are firing on all cylinders so so they are all still very difficult you can also go back and play the other you know yeah with this chalice which makes some of those boss fights like pretty trivialized and kind of completely changes how certain ones play especially the parry yes of course boss fights uh yeah i i agree with you fresh that like i think it's an acknowledgement of how difficult the game was i'm like kind of mixed

on on all that though because you have a simple mode and you have a normal mode for each boss and the simple mode is a great place to like train to beat the big boss right but beating the simple mode doesn't give you the ability to reach the end game you have to beat the game on it's like traditional difficulty to see the end game which is so weird to me when you have all these other things that seem to recognize hey for some players yeah this is too difficult and like i don't know i think a lot of people are here just to see what the game looks like and it sounds like and it feels like so i don't know having a god mode doesn't seem bad i i reviewed this for polygon and i absolutely loved it i thought it

was great uh but but one thing i did mention is that it does seem just a little bit out of step with i think where games are at right now that a pretty decent chunk of the game is locked off to people that are only able to complete it on regular mode yes so like the final boss which is probably like one of the most visually spectacular bosses in the game you cannot see unless you beat the all the other bosses on regular mode right the same was true for uh the final bosses in the main game of Cuphead. It just seems for a game that has such a stellar art style, amazing music, amazing animation, like, you know, you talk about Henry Griffin, the idea that like a kid, like realistically,

like a five-year-old, six-year-old, never in a million years is going to be able to beat this on their own. Well, yeah, but I don't think, I don't know. I don't think you should make a game necessarily that, you know, every game doesn't have to be made for five and six year olds but i do think even like an adult person who maybe just plays like stardew valley and stuff like that like i want them to be able to experience something that's like later in the game and it just seems like you know a little bit gatekeepy sure to some extent well to to that point simple mode is still pretty pretty

hard yeah yeah it doesn't tune down the difficulty all that much um yeah my my my only issue with the game is that um it makes playing as cuphead andice. You get so used to how her mechanics work that then trying to revert to a time before that. The way you play as Miss Chalice is you replace your charm and your charms are these special abilities with a cookie which turns on Miss Chalice mode, effectively. But by doing that, you effectively get rid of the whole concept of charms in the game. Yeah.

Like, you know, there's not really a reason to turn off Miss Chalice. Well, hold on one second. Yeah, yeah. Because there are, I will say, to counter what Griffin just said and plant, there are boss fights, especially in the original game, that aren't necessarily designed, certainly not designed, with Miss Chalice in mind, such that they actually play into how the parry and double jump mechanic worked with the original characters.

So playing with Miss Chalice, you can actually have a real challenge uh nailing the parry attacks because of the way she parries versus them so there are instances where i think it makes sense to revert and go back but um i do agree with you that generally speaking it is easier that being said if you feel like it's too easy and you are like the elite cuphead best of all time real gamer there is a charm in the dlc that you can unlock yeah that if you equip it it it gives you one hit point in total for any boss fight so if you get hit you're done and every time you fire it changes your weapon to a random weapon yeah that you no control over. So for people that are really looking

for the total opposite of the accessibility spectrum, we now have like ultra, ultra hard mode, which I'm sure people have already speed run and crushed. It is clever in that though, in that when you use that charm, if you defeat bosses with it, you charge it up and it becomes stronger and it unlocks like uh pretty pretty like broken uh upgrades oh i didn't know that yeah so so that is like a reason to uh you know it's just more more content more more time to like

go back and play as these other characters did you all have favorite bosses god uh i really liked them all it's it honestly the uh i like the fight that you do against all the bugs there's like a fight that you do it's one of the first ones like the jazz age yeah that one you're in like a jazzy ant speakeasy yeah yes and you have to and it has these phases that are just bonkers on this like three-tiered level like that fight in the early kirby games i feel like every kirby game has that kind of fight uh it was just so much fun the the ice giant one is also fun but i can't say that one because there is a vor element to that fight yeah and we don't want to put you in a box yeah i i appreciate that they're all good yeah i like the boss gauntlet and like the claymation castle thing i liked a lot of those just because i love

the parry yeah i love when it switches from being pure like aim and shoot i mean really it's never really aim and shoot like it's kind of hold down shoot yeah and dodge like hell well it depends on what weapon you're using that this game also adds i think three new weapons one of which became just like i never turned it off was the crack shot and the crack shot shoots straight forward wherever you shoot it but after like a second or two it just zaps toward the nearest enemy like a like a homing shot which i think the original game had a homing shot but this is sort of like a halfway measure homing shot uh and you can literally just hold down x and then focus on surviving and then just wait for the wait for the

bosses to die which is yeah i think i think what's really cool about the dlc is just the idea that they knew this is going to be a very focused endeavor like again six or seven bosses and that is going to be it so we're going to make each of these like very very special whereas i think in the main game even though the early bosses are great they tend to be pretty simple like maybe they have one or two phases but realistically like there's not going to be anything like that dramatically different whereas like that the bug one that griffin mentioned starts with like a snail and then there's like a jitterbugging ant uh wasp woman that's shooting out these like waves of sound and then a giant anteater shows up and then like the phases are completely different yeah yeah completely every single phase was wild and all of them had that that like crazy moment of like oh my god i

was not expecting this at all it gave me that same high that i i got when moral combat went 3d or like dead or alive and you would punch somebody through the floor and then you'd be in a totally scene and be like oh my god yeah yeah uh yeah i i it's weird to talk about uh this dlc on this show just because it's like do you like cuphead because you're gonna you're gonna really like this if you like cuphead if you bounced off cuphead i think you also know how you're going to feel about this because it's more Cuphead. It's more Cuphead. And if you did not scale the learning curve of the original Cuphead, you will find no solace here. I think it does depend on like how much – like if you hated Cuphead, the original, don't even think about it. Don't worry about it.

But here, if you, again, found the difficulty like a little too much, but maybe you could conquer it if you had the time, whatever it is. This does, because of Miss Chalice, dial it back slightly such that you might want to consider it. Especially if you like adore the art style adore the music the presentation everything this kind of gives people an excuse and it's also like what is it nine dollars eight dollars something like that it's also pretty it's been five years you might just be at a different place in your life like i think that's a huge part of this is like you've grown up well or or the opposite i mean i reviewed cuphead originally in 2017 and the thing that i wrote about then was it's actually a pretty

forgiving game if you aren't in a rush if you don't if you don't want to rush you can beat most of these bosses i wouldn't say easily but it will teach you how to do it pretty well yeah and uh you know i noticed it felt a little different playing it in the year 2022 with my four-year-old uh having no patience watching me play on a steam deck and like why are you taking so long how is it on steam deck i didn't runs like you know smooth as all runs great yeah i mean everything runs great on it it's perfect you know not everything everything crisis three has never looked better. Crysis 3 is the example you pulled from 10 years ago.

I really liked it. I wish it was, I think you get your money's worth if you want to look at it that way. But I did, it left me wanting, I want to say. I finished it in a few hours. It's good. But also, I know there ain't going to be more Cuphead anytime soon. So that bit was a little bit disappointing. You got that TV show.

Yeah, yeah. But you can, like, you know, now you have this new character, you can go back and play all the old bosses. You can do this, like, you know, broken cursed relic challenge mode. Like, there's, you know it transforms the original game somewhat but it really reminded me how much i loved cuphead when it first came out

and uh it kind of recaptured that but just for a little bit and then i just wanted more cuphead um which i guess is yeah which i guess is a good yeah it doesn't overstay its welcome it is like very it gives you a lot of good stuff in a pretty short amount of time uh and and i certainly appreciate that yeah i'm hesitant to criticize the length or wanting more because it feels like the rare video game that was like edited sure they were like you know what we actually don't need any of these platform levels like i would love to know how much they cut over the last five years. Because it feels like, again, knowing it took five years, it feels much more like things were trimmed rather than things were added,

which I admire. It's very refined. Shall we get to the second half so I can ask you all an important question? Yeah, and with that cliffhanger, we'll be right back. Okay, everybody, welcome back. I have a very important question. This is inspired by just a bounty of questions on our Twitter about the, let's say, anatomy of Cuphead.

Yeah. Cuphead has a cup for a head. Yeah. So does Mugman. Yeah. So does Chalice. Yes, so does mug man yeah miss chalice so does chalice yes chalice red they all have liquid in them so the question is well there's a lot of questions one is is the liquid part of their bodies interesting so let's start there well let's start with the fact that they have bodies underneath the cups right oh sure so we can talk like we can skip over like circulatory systems skeletal like i think they've got all that normal stuff

going on below the neck i think it's kind of like person-esque simpsons like right and then they have this and then they have the cup and then they have head milk it's really yeah the liquid is really the question so like i i don't know i haven't watched the cartoon but i feel like at one point it must be addressed where like someone trips and the milk spills everywhere are they just dead are they drunk are they like i don't know did y'all watch it did y'all actually watch the cartoon no no i didn't see it. The reviews put me off. They're so mean. Yeah?

Wait, the reviews or the characters? The characters. I mean, the characters are a little bit mean in the game. Miss Chow is in particular is like a little devious in the game. A little bit. But in this one, Mugman and Cuphead are brothers. And they fucking just fight constantly and they're they're bad people oh and it made me not really want to watch the henry was like

stoked for this one because he likes the characters yeah so much but then these these boys are just fucking scoundrels so you've seen it does it come ever come up where the liquid gets like tossed out no we only watched a few episodes a few episodes, and it was not appointment viewing. Sure. I mean, I think you put that in the first episode or you don't use it at all. What the goo is? What the goo is, yeah. You start there because you know that that's going to be what keeps everybody entertained,

or you save it for the finale. Sure. It is milk for the most part, but that's not the vessel that I get milk from the bottle to my mouth in. Ooh, do you, did you, you know, an alien or aliens? Sure. The white goo inside of the robot bodies? Yes. Do you think that maybe it's that?

Like it's a robot blood. Cyber blood. Uh-huh, cyber blood. Okay, but I got a follow-up question. Is the straw part of their body the straw is like a hat i think that's right a hat that goes inside of your milk you're right inside of your important anatomy milk which is to say why would you ever put a straw hat in your anatomy milk such that you're almost begging people around you to suck it all

up i think it's more like a port like when you are at the hospital and you they like install a port for like giving you medicine right so it's like sure somebody could suck out your goo through your medical port but like is that what you call it a port nothing yeah oh you can they make more of the goo um Nothing. Oh, you're good. Can they make more of the goo? I mean, it has to be generated in time. There's a baker in the DLC that implies that there's a lot of pretty fantastical things.

Bakers don't make milk. They use milk. Well, they use milk. Thanks, Russ. Is there a cow boss in the game somewhere? Well, no. There is. I know, but you're like walking over the obvious answer, which is

cup sex. Which is like a child. Cup sex! Cup sex! There's only so much. When you're born, it's like your teeth, right? They're the same size forever. Thank you, yes. And you have your milk ready to go. Oh, but if you

lose that milk, that's it? I hate that.'s that that really makes this a a much more sort of high risk oh okay but what if it's like your teeth where there's another repository in your body with your like grown-up milk so you just get two milks you get two milks okay so like if you spill the first milk which is probably going to happen because you're a child cup yeah right and then it's like okay here's the first milk, which is probably going to happen because you're a child cup. Yeah. Right. And then it's like, okay, here's your second milk. Better be careful.

Me and Chris are both masked up right now, which makes this conversation we're having feel very like clinical. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. In a way that I'm really enjoying. Well, if they're like teeth though, does that mean, oh, I think teeth might be our answer here. Because if they're like teeth. You seem really stuck on teeth. No, I am.

If they're like teeth, you could lose teeth no i'm i am if they're like teeth you could lose all of your milk but that doesn't like it's not like your brain right like where's the brain though if it's not the this i think it's i think it's like a cup shape the brain and then the milk oh the milk is like a natural coolant that now okay now that's interesting and you need it like your body body they have evolved to need that to cool or heat their brains depending on the climate they're in so maybe sometimes it's cold they have coffee

okay so I was thinking about it in a sort of like a Vex milk way from the Destiny games where the Vex have this white sort of neural network goo that that powers them and connects them um and i was thinking it was more like that in that it is

the brain the milk is the brain um they have a bond you know uh the the cup people uh have a sort of hive mind situation which makes them extremely susceptible to the vices that the devil the vexes the no the vices that the devil puts before them like like gambling i guess the big question i would ask is if and we've established that it is if this goo is extremely important to the ongoing survival of the cup people yeah put a fucking top on it y'all man get a traveler going that's outrageous so here okay one more question that somebody brought up if cuphead came to you and said griffin we've been together for a long time yeah i would like you to drink my cup milk and i would

say will you die am i killing you i mean i don't think i don't think they will okay because i i mean i agree i want to believe it's brain juice but i just see so much of it spill and they seem to not be bothered by it at all but it might also just be like a parasitic situation where then griffin just becomes a Becomes a cup person. Yeah, I would worry about sort of my- Ooh. And I don't want to be a cup person. No.

And I don't want to sound closed-minded or anything like that. Sure. But I like my enclosed head. Right. I like the way that my head, it keeps all the sensitive stuff on the inside of the bones.

Yeah, that's true. It's like one of my favorite- Take one of my favorite people it's one of my favorite things about me i mean if i had to say favorite things about you it'd probably be like number three or four yeah my all my important sort of face and brain stuff is in the yeah in the ball oh and even who so even if so you drank it yeah your head stayed exactly as it is today, right? But your brain turned into juice, then you would just have to stay perfectly upright because if you lay down, it would leak right out. I mean, there's lots of reasons, okay,

more reasons not to drink the cup. Yeah. I mean, I think even if you take it in the most simple form, which is the head, the cup head, is a cup-shaped brain container. And they use milk and or cocoa or coffee as a coolant or heater, depending on where they're at, right? Because their brain needs to have a match temperature. Even if you take it at that, so it's just milk and coffee, it's still going to taste pretty bad.

You think so? Well, I think it's a lot of cup sweat. And how long are they changing that? How often are they changing that? Well, that's what the straw's for. Oh! Oh, what if... Okay, so what if there's another animal that we have not met in this world

that drinks the cup juice when it needs it? Kind of like the creatures, like the shrimp that eat the the cup juice when it needs kind of you know like uh those the creatures that like the shrimp that eat the the skin off of whales sure they have like a mutual relationship nasty shrimp nasty shrimp yeah what if there's another creature that that's why the straw needs to be there so it can drink the juice and then maybe and then they like walk over to the cow and then the cow's like i gotta got to get rid of this milk. Thank goodness I have these cups perfectly shaped to suction onto my udders. And it's kind of, you know, the circle of life.

Yeah. So maybe the next DLC we can explore that more. Yeah. I would love to see where the, where's the, H-D-M-R, is that the name of the company? Where's the goo come from, guys? M-D-H something? M-D-M-D-M-D-A-M. Yeah, that's right. hdmr is that the name of the company where's the goo come from guys mdh md md md am yeah that's right i definitely had it in my notes it's studio mdhr so i was pretty close you're close i read it i read the acrostic the wrong way um i don't have anything else to say about

cup physiology it's troubling no matter what the like they've made a a a really like hrg you're eat your heart out this thing yeah this thing poses some existential questions that i am it's too early for me to really well then if it makes you feel any better griffin they find you and your physiology troubling so well that that makes two of us um yeah do uh do we have any mail i know why I asked that. That was kind of the mail. Okay. There was a lot of questions about the anatomy. Okay.

But we do have honorable mentions. Hell yes. Griffin, I want to hear yours first because it is a game that- You know what mine is. Y'all got my number, and it's why I appreciate you all as collaborators and friends sure uh neon white i am happy to report is 100 my shit um do you now i'm looking back through my dms june 22nd is when i emailed i dm'd you oh did and i is that true that is true june 22nd i said neon white is 100 your shit. Yeah.

And I described it as Olly Olly World meets Paradise Killer. Yeah, which is a good way of describing it. Thank you. Here's why I was worried that Neon, we've talked about Neon White. Sure. It's like a first-person run-based platformer, essentially, where you try to clear courses as fast as you can using these cards that have weapons but you can also discard the cards to do like special platforming tricks right um i am not big on like super twitchy first person shooters like it is not uh it's not a a space that i feel like particularly comfortable in and so when i saw like videos of it it hit me

with like you know if you are a cs go like speed freak or like a quake arena that's kind of what it looks like in video form i saw one like rocket jump and i was like i don't like that's not yeah that's that just ain't my my thing but this game is so meticulously designed each level is so meticulously designed um i watched the like the first half because i'm about halfway through the game i didn't want to spoil anything but the first half of like a developer's commentary on a speed run of it. And it really helped me to appreciate the fact that like every like piece of geometry in every level and the placement of every enemy in the placement of every like weapon card is so thought out. Yeah. To maximize like that feeling of fun and discovery and trying to figure out what the fastest way through a level. Yeah.

And Neon White does that so well in so many ways there's uh you know when you finish a level based on your speed you can either get like a bronze silver or gold medal and then there are ace medals for if you like really beat ass and then there's a secret red tier of medals i've only gotten one of because they are like to ruin the brains of people they are they are brutal but if you get a gold on a level then it shows you a little hint icon if you replay that level that shows you like here's a shortcut here's this way that you can just like cut through the level and so i will just pretty much every time i will beat a level get gold on it and then immediately replay it to try to get that shortcut. And then I will beat it that way. And then I'll look at the friend's leaderboard and see, like, you guys and Justin and, you know, some of my other Steam friends and just say, okay, now I have to beat that.

And so I've been replaying each level, like, five or six times after I've already beaten it once just to, like, climb up that leaderboard. And I have not done that with a game yeah since like fucking geometry wars 2 like it has been a minute since i have given a shit about that but this game just has its hooks in me and it is so satisfying to shave time off that even though i don't have like great uh you know twitchy aim and games like this like i it does everything it can to help you yeah because like so in normal shooters you have recoil right like you fire and it throws you off this game it really is there's a little dot in the middle of the screen and you aim and if you shoot at that you're gonna hit it yeah it's not going to adjust your point of view at all yeah so i think it it

even has some decent auto aim as well like if you get close it's gonna hit and same with like rocket jumps like it it tries to help you a lot um it's it is uh the the story is like uh i i love the aesthetic of the game it does have big paradise killer vibes yeah um the story and writing is not my favorite it is presented in a sort of visual novel style. And there's like this mystery of, you know, everybody here is dead essentially in the afterlife. And what was your, what was going on in your previous life?

And you need to find the book of death. And like all the, I, I, I don't care so much. I really tried to make it work. And now that I'm at the end, I, it's not bad. It's just like, it's Chris and I were talking about this before we started recording. I don't think it's bad. I think it's like, it also appeals to my

aesthetic sensibilities in a way. And I think in any other game I would be enjoying taking my time with that. But you get in the pocket in this game when you start grinding out better times for the leaderboards. And they present levels in these like you know

big clusters that they separate into different missions and so you just like you're in the shit for like an hour trying to ace all of these levels and then by the end of that like you are so plugged in you are so like you're so on the wavelength of of speed that then coming to a stop to like eat ice cream with an anime cat is like that's great and that i that's fine but i really just want to be continuing to like yeah speed running this i saved all of that stuff for steam deck so i play the normal game on pc and then just like build up my yeah visual novel it's not long i say visual novel and that probably like conjures up like uh you know uh virtue's last reward like you know 30 hour long it's it ain't that like it's where's like eight hours i don't know the

the interludes are are are brief uh as brief as you want them to be because you can also skip a lot of that shit just go right back into the thing yeah um what did you play on griffin i'm playing on my my computer uh okay which like have you tried it on steam deck i have not no uh i tried it and it was a little much for me from a controller standpoint because like and i i played it with a controller on pc and it was snappier and then i realized the default um dead zone on steam deck is huge oh wow and it was like really messing with me that's so if you have difficulty it's worth checking into i never do mousing keyboard with games but i am doing it for this one because it felt like it makes that level

of precision is required which is another thing that like i thought this is not going to do it for me yeah uh but even that i feel like i am getting it uh it is it is it is definitely going to be in the game of the year consideration for me yeah it is uh it's it has captured me in a way that uh a game like this has maybe never done and i am i am just in love with it now we just got to get hoops on it i think I think Hoops would dig it too. I love it. I'm surprised that he hasn't hopped in yet. We'll take care of that. I would recommend it to anybody. Even if

these types of twitchy shooter games are not your thing, I think this game like y'all said is accessible enough that you can sort of puzzle it out yourself. Neon White. Chris Pint, want to do yours?

AI, Somnium Files, the Nirvana Initiative. Okay, how much reading is involved in this game? Because the title alone screams visual novel. It's entirely reading. Well, it's like a detective game where you look around, mostly in first person at like scenes and poke at things and then read about them and you uncover a i don't know cyberpunk-ish mystery i don't even know how to sell this i can't believe how much i love this game so far

i feel like i've become a different person oh boy I feel like this is the type of game I would have made fun of like two or three years ago. And now I'm here and I'm in love. It's all vibe and it is good. And I don't want to say too much more about it. I want to play more. And once I feel like I know what the game is, then I'll talk about it.

But I did want to just mention... What? Is it on Steam? I'm playing it on Steam Deck, yeah. Okay. And you're playing the first one or the second one? I'm what the game is, then I'll talk about it. But I did want to just mention... What? Is it on Steam? I'm playing it on Steam Deck, yeah. Okay. And you're playing the first one or the second one? I'm playing the second one. You can very early in the game, they basically ask you a question in the context of the game that's like, hey, do you know what I'm talking

about right now? I'm like, no. And it's like, cool. To be clear, I'm not going to talk about anything from the first game ever again. Oh, so this is a sequel. Kind of. From what I understand, it completely stands alone. Okay. There's just going to talk about anything from the first game ever again oh so this is a sequel kind of from what i understand it completely stands alone okay there's just it will make references to the first one if you let it know that you get what it's talking about okay that's interesting um which yeah it seems smart um but yeah i i'll talk about it more once i'm a little bit further but i wanted

to yeah mention it here because i think people who like visual novels should check it out i can say that confidently yeah griffin you liked zero escape right oh for sure oh yeah yeah it's the same writer same team oh is it really yeah it's zero escape team i think is what the dev studio is called okay is it spike chunsoft yeah yeah okay cool well yeah i'll definitely check that out yeah yeah yeah yeah um can i do another one real quick because i forgot i've been playing an iOS game. They're still making these things. Called Hero Emblems 2. And it is just a very slick match three RPG.

Oh, that sounds nice. That's it. It's got like a very cool, almost Ghibli-esque art style. And it's been in development for a while. The first game was kind of a hit. And, you know, this is a genre i adore and is is i have not played a lot of games that have been that have hit that sort of puzzle quest watermark for me but but this is doing it so yeah russ what are you playing okay so i'm playing uh teardown on the steam deck it's tremendous uh teardown for people that don't remember

is a first person destruction heist game where you basically have to steal a variety of thing things but there's no stealth really it's just once you steal the first thing a timer starts and you have to escape stealing everything else within the minute that you have. So most of the game is just setting up each map. And because there's full destruction, you can basically knock holes in walls, blow up buildings, anything that's going to make your path to grabbing everything as smooth as possible.

It's a game that I really liked when I first played it several years ago. It was in early access for a while, and now it's in 1.0 and released and it's the first game that i've sunk like tremendous amounts of time on steam deck and i think it's actually perfect for steam deck just because it's so um it's very uh kind of thoughtful and a little bit slow and there's a lot of um trial and error yeah and that kind of makes the like pick up and put down nature of the steam deck kind of perfect for it but i think it'll

be great on pc or whatever it is if this sort of game appeals to you i'm just like constantly blown away by the physics engine behind this game and how it allows these like really non-linear solutions to problems uh there was one example of like okay so i had to steal a bunch of stuff one of the things was at the top of this tall tall tall like antenna tower and because i only have 60 seconds the idea of like running all the way up the tower and then running down was basically impossible so i knocked the tower down before the timer even started, which was fine, but the tower was in terrible positioning for where I needed it to. So I found a tractor trailer,

hooked up a bunch of cables to the tower, and then dragged the tower to where I needed it, but the tractor trailer didn't have enough juice for it, so I hooked cables to the front of the tractor trailer to create enough tension such that the whole thing was being pulled. And it all worked. Like, it all worked exactly how you think it would because of physics and genius game design.

I'm amazed it works on Steam Deck. So generally the performance is quite good. There are times where you'll, like, blow something up and things will not get chunky like they won't uh it won't get framey it'll just like slow down a lot which is honestly it doesn't even impact the game like it just looks fucking cool that i could see each and every moment of the explosion i'm sure that's not by design i think it is because the game is kind of processing everything uh but otherwise it runs at a very smooth yeah i run it at 40 frames per second just for the battery life reason but it runs very smooth and and uh i'm

loving it i'm like uh almost at the end of the campaign and it's been so satisfying and i really couldn't recommend it enough i'm also playing fall guys mostly on xbox but it's on basically everything at this point i played a little fall guys like yeah i played a little fall guys it's fun henry henry likes all the characters and so i played it in front of him and came in second fucking place again never won that game got in second more times than i can count maybe if you were master chief fall guy if i was a Master Chief Fall Guy. Yeah, Master Chief Fall Guy always wins. Yeah, they just added a bunch of Halo stuff. It's cool.

I just like the fact that, you know, it's a living game, but they've been very smart about having an event basically every single week there's an event going on. So this week was Halo. I think they're doing an Assassin's Creed event next week. And each of those have like new modes or they modify the map slightly I know there's

Sonic the Hedgehog event coming up called Bean Hill Zone which will be very cool so I you know I really dig it I know Mr. Bean crossover yes in that line he has that new movie on Netflix where it's

man versus bee I've never heard of this I have it's man versus bee. I've never heard of this. I have. It's a television show, not a movie. Oh, my gosh. It's an episode and it's an exception. God, plant. God almighty. Hey.

A Mr. Bean Fall Guys event. Wait, just with everybody dressed up as, like, Mr. Bean, like, wobbling around and falling off of shit? Hey. I mean, they're doing a Chapel in Colorado crossover soon, So I think that Mr. Bean seems very viable. It's only a matter of time. I'm going to call it before the end of the year they will announce a Mr. Bean Fall Guys thing. You think?

Definitely. Definitely. I feel like it'll be limited to the UK where people give a shit. Maybe. I will buy a UK. I like Mr. Bean. Sure.

The last game I wanted to mention is Clap hands golf yes always fans it came out on uh ios like a year ago or more somewhere around there and uh it was great it was it was still my favorite golf game on ios unquestionably not even close it's part of apple arcade golf blitz and super stickman golf and all those well i don't consider super stickman golf like a golf game uh and golf blitz i don't know uh multiplayer is not really i don't play a lot of multiplayer games on um on ios but clap hands golf the one sticking point the one thing that was keeping me from really going nuts on it is they decided to do this like tap to drag aiming shot system which they added i guess to increase some level of difficulty but it desperately made me miss the original uh aiming and shot system of uh hot shots golf which is just like tap three times you tap once to like set the target moving tap another to set the power

and then tap another to set accuracy obviously mario golf uses the same thing um and that is like my preferred video game golf input system and it just wasn't in there and uh i think they heard it enough from people that it needed to be added so it is now in the game you can you can do that in any match totally easy it's weird you have to select it every time you are about to start a match which makes you you're basically selecting either like motion shot or three tap shot which makes you wonder are there like different leaderboards for each control yeah maybe because i'm definitely doing much better with the triple yeah it's easier thing it is easier and more i yeah maybe because i'm definitely doing much better with the triple yeah it's easier thing it is easier and more i mean for me i'm just like chilling and not i don't

need to be late and it also makes putting uh like backspin and stuff on the ball like possible yeah yeah easier so uh yeah it's it's it's a game changer literally and. That sounds great. I also do wish it was in, and this is a silly complaint I recognize, but I do wish that it did have portrait mode. Sure. Oh, yeah. Just because, like, I don't know. I feel like that triple tap thing makes one-handed play a lot more possible. Yeah.

But, you know, holding it sideways is a little unwieldy. One thing before we wrap up because it's sitting in front of me oh yeah griffin do you want to give an update on what i'm holding right now uh i am i am moving i am moving uh at the end of the month to uh washington dc and so i've been packing shit up and i was cleaning out the garage yesterday and for some reason we had this big box of old like outdoor christmas decorations i was like well we can get rid of all this uh and then for some reason inside that box was the cursed uh mario paint cartridge that i have discussed on this show wow that has

seen my video carved into the back i didn't describe just how sort of like i think melted into the back is i think oh maybe yeah i think they were like heated up something and then kind of like melted can you describe the state of the front of the card so the front of the cartridge has the i mean imagine a normal mario paint cartridge now imagine black tape making an x over it as if to cross out the idea of Mario Paint. But that black tape has also been kind of like semi-removed. Then there is a phone number that was written on the cartridge directly. Yeah.

But that is hard to read because it also has been covered with black tape and that black tape has also been kind of removed. And then there are just mysterious things where clearly somebody wrote i'm assuming very privileged information oh wow and then wrote over it with black sharpie yeah does the number work i it's it is not it's not decipherable it is not okay you can tell it's a phone number i would say that's about it is this a tunic puzzle oh interesting it's a tunic puzzle I would say that's about it. Is this a tunic puzzle? Oh, interesting. It's a tunic puzzle where if you solve it, you see a really rudimentary animation of, I think,

Yoshi having diarrhea or something like that. Oh, huh. So, yeah, definitely glad that I pulled that one from the fire. I can't stop laughing at the letter C, my video, because it looks like see my penis or whatever. Like somebody would write it inside of a bathroom stall. Yeah, except they melted it into a cartridge. It's an astonishing thing.

It's an astonishing relic. Oh, God. And does it work? I don't know, probably. I don't want to try that. There's a sticker with the number 83 on it, too. What the fuck's that all about? Anyway, yes.

Very glad. Very glad I could save that. Are we going to post that on the Twitter so people can see it? Yeah, sure. We can post a photo of it. That's it. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you had a good time.

We certainly did. Hey, what are we doing next week? I want to thank the following people for writing reviews, then we'll that's not what i asked is it you're jumping way ahead uh kohaku 07x brego stink lord's friend yeah he has a friend now uh zeer gear zeo z oh my god zur gearork. We'll go with that. Okay. And Barreled Blue Jorts. Thank you for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts.

Thank you to everyone else for writing reviews for the besties on Apple Podcasts. It means a lot. Helps us a lot. It's a good thing to do for your old pals here at Besties HQ. And we are closing in on 5,000 reviews on Apple Podcasts. Hot dang. And then we get the platinum clock. We get a super iPhone. we get a super iphone super iphone hey what uh what are we doing next week so it's been over we just passed the sixth month

which traditionally is considered to be june uh which means we are one half we call june the sixth month yeah i agree with you there we are one half of the way through the year 2022 which seems like a good time to take a look back at the first half of 2022 and explore whether we have oh let's say a short list of the very best games of the first half of 2022 and why they are in there okay i have a feeling neon white will be one of them for sure but uh quite a number of very good games came out in the first half of 2022. So definitely check in. I suspect we'll show up. Will AI Somnium Files make the cut?

We'll crack the cut. We'll see. I don't know. Tune in next week to find out. Until then, this has been the Besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games. Besties!