The Besties - Echo Weaver Is Like Outer Wilds in 2D

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

Even though we were traveling for the live show, we still made time to play new games! Echo Weaver is a Metroidvania in the style of Outer Wilds, but simplified from 3D to 2D. It’s a little rough around the edges, though not enough to tarnish its big ideas. Plus, Griffin joins Plante on the Dragon’s Dogma train with the updated Dragon Dogma’s 2: Dark Arisen. But have some of those changes led Plante to reconsider his fandom? So many mysteries! To get the answers, I suppose you’ll just have to listen! 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 was in the Trader Joe's the other day, and I did blow up a guy's spot a little bit. Oh, okay. What'd you do? Okay, so I was checking out at Trader Joe's, and there's a guy, for lack of a better term, like a bear-type character from obsession, like a fucking loser, weirdo. Oh, okay, okay. I haven't seen it. I'm just casually judging everyone at the grocery store. Well, I only...

What's a person look like that makes him look like? It's not looks. It's not looks. Okay. He was being... Energy. Well, it was specifically energy to another cashier. Oh.

Who I think he was doing his utmost to hit on, but doing it in a way... There's no other way to summarize it, but say he was talking about how great he is at Fortnite. Awesome. Awesome. Got it. She was like, oh, yeah, I'm not that good. And he was like, well, I'm number one. in Brooklyn, let me tell you.

That's crazy that he would be able to measure that. I know. There's no leaderboard. There's nothing. There's no way to determine. There's no regional. For each of the boroughs, there is a king of fortnight. That's not possible.

So this goes back and forth. And she keeps like underplaying her skill level back and forth, back and forth. And then as I'm checking out, I'm right next to them. Like I'm in a different cashier, but right next to them. As I'm checking out, I turn back around. And to her, I say, I think you're underplaying it. and I point to him and I say, I think you're overplaying it. And his shoulders slump.

Wow. Wow. Did you feel empowered to do this because he seemed weaker than you? Because I've never seen you pull an alpha move like this before in person. I don't think I've ever done it in my life. And it felt so empowering. I think it was my wedding ring empowering me to do this. The total lack of giving a fuck.

And having to hear this for a good five minutes as a moment as a lot. I was checking out was just like, no, this can't, this can't be allowed to happen. Yeah. Gosh, it's hard to think about what would have happened if you hadn't been there. Like, this may have been a real love connection spawned off of this person talking about how good they are at the video game for it. Sure. Or it could have been six years and then a divorce after that.

Could have been. You could see it. You could tell this is unhelpping. I think if you are a Trader Joe's cashier and someone's hitting on you, you should be able to ring that bell, just to sort of scare that. That's four rings for that one. Four rings for, I got a weird beard. My name is Griffin Mack where 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 Ross Frasicke. I know the best game of the week. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year club just by listening. You've become a member. I know what we said.

I know we said we were going to do Acecom. I don't know if that actually made it in the show I think it did make it in the show We did try There are technical limitations That we ran into I was traveling for basically The entire week after we recorded the last episode

At Ace Combat on a handheld Does not simply doesn't Too many clouds Too many clouds, too many jets Instead this week we're going to be talking about a handful of things But primarily a new game called Echo Weaver

Possibly a game you've never heard of before Yeah, I talked about this game to a lot of people while we were traveling for our live show, which by the way, great success. Thank you to everybody who came out to it. It was a fucking blast, and I think for sure we'll do one. Did you like my borat, Chris? Well, I was wondering, Frustick, who came to see the show for you? What? Who came to see the show for you?

Like, who attended the show? Would you say that your wife came to see the show for you? Awesome. I definitely saw. Russ is wife. It's a wife. Echo Weaver kicks ass. What is it, Chris?

Oh, that's a, you know what? I want to save that question for after the break because I don't know what genre this game is. I'll try. I'll take a swing at it. It's a search action information game. Oh, that's terrible. It's a search action knowledge, knowledge-based game about learning and iterating and discovery. And it's called Echo Weaver.

And we're going to talk about it after this quick break. It seems like you take umbrage with my description of echole-you-could. You called it a search-action information game, which sounds like the dullest fucking shit imaginable. Yeah, no, it's probably not the best sales pitch. We know what search action is. It's the words we use instead of Metroidvania because it hurts. Also, no Metroid-Brania exists. Yeah, we didn't invent that.

What is a Metroid-Brania? It's this. Metroid-Branias are outer wild. So these are games where you don't necessarily unlock. things as you play, it's more you unlock, as you said, information, which in turn could allow you to succeed. So Outer Wilds is an example. This is definitely an example. The problem is I don't like how Metroid Braini feels on my tongue when I say it.

But it is. Well, we need to work search action in there. So maybe Smart action? Oh, smart action. I did not realize that this terminology existed. But yes, what this game does is it takes the Metroid Braini genre of an Outer Wilds, where, a lot of the game is about learning about the game and the world and learning about what you can do in this world

and how to interact with it with the conventions of a Metroidvania or a search action game, if you will. And I would even say more, even more like Outer Wilds because it is a time looping game. It's extremely, extremely, I think, inspired by Outer Wilds. You play as a little guy called a Weaver, and what he does is he runs around and explores the,

world. You fall down into a trash pit. It says cycle one. And then it's up to you to just kind of putter around. Look around. Check out what things are. It doesn't tell you what any of the buttons do because that's an important facet of the game. And you'll, you might do a couple things. You might open up a little hatch that drains some water. You might go and figure out how you can summon a weapon and then, uh, then you die. That time is taken down. That time, that time, the bar up top, it's ticking down. And uh, you get one minute to start. And then if that runs out, then you lose. And now you start over. Cycle 2. You splash down into the garbage pit and you go again. And maybe you make it a little bit further. Maybe you find a little crystal. And the little crystal extends your time limit by a minute. Or you can spend that a minute to heal yourself. You learn how to do that. And then you're going to fucking run out of time again. And now you start over and you splash down the garbage pit. And it's cycle three. And as you play, you are learning what you can do and what the rules of the world are. Imagine, Imagine a Metroid game where Sammas starts with everything.

It's just she doesn't know what the buttons do to interact with them. Or imagine in the Metroid game, doors don't open when you shoot them. You have to crouch down and hold the down button for two seconds, and then you enter a special door opening mode that you did not know existed until you learned about it by exploring the world. That is the whole deal with Echo. Yeah. There is a lot going on where the game,

I think on its surface doesn't present as quite as mind-blowing as it actually is. Because on its surface, it looks like, again, platforming, indie game, 2D, etc. But because of the game is so smart about nesting that information in clever ways, you have these moments where, I mean, what are we allowed to really tell? I'm going to give you... I think we should be pretty... careful not to spoil any major kind of mechanical things. There's one of the earliest, I think the first thing that you learn in the first five,

just to give you an example, give people an example of like us thing. Okay, yeah. Okay, so you've got, you get this weapon. It's called the glave. It's basically a frisbee, and you can lodge it in walls if you need to. Through the use of like audio logs and things like that, you find out that you can throw the glave, and then if you down smash it, into a fire, like a torch,

you will automatically teleport to where the glave was. And so that's an example of something that like, why would you ever fucking down smash into a fire? Exactly, yeah, there are these arcane combinations of mechanical sort of inputs that you would not... You simply wouldn't do organically unless you do,

and the game still rewards that. I definitely had one major breakthrough. that I was so confused by because I had no idea why the fuck, like, I had done something to the world that was so weird

and I didn't know what happened and I could recreate it, but I didn't know, like, what the purpose of this weird state that I was able to enter into was until much later in the game when I found, like,

a memory log or whatever that explains sort of what this power is. You're going around the map and you're like discovering things and most importantly, you're finding shortcuts. Because, again, that time limit is always there.

There are progressive sort of elements to the game where you'll find a power-up that will let you start with an extra minute or extend your health bar or things like that. But the real main sort of thing that you are finding is the shortcuts and you are finding these secret kind of mechanics, these powers that you do have from the jump. I finish the game and then to make sure that this statement was true, I erased my save been started over, you can beat the whole game on the first cycle. You can find, if you know everything, there is no special unlock that you have to do before you're allowed to like reach some, some point in the game. You can do everything right in the start. Which was true of Outer Wilds as well.

If you could do it. Yeah, for sure. If you knew kind of what you were doing in Outer Wilds, it was very much the same, the same thing. I think that's, I think that's so rad. And the constant sort of revealing of like, oh, fuck, those things I've seen all around the map that I've been running around and had no idea what they were there for, it was so, like, it was so, I was pooping in those. The answer was, yeah, I was pooping in those. I didn't know that I was supposed to use them for a different thing. We're being kind of cagey talking around all of this stuff because I think we could spoil it

pretty easily. Yes, a challenge talking about this game is that stuff, the stuff that we don't want to talk about because we don't want to spoil it for you, is by far the most interesting. And then, like, to me, a run down from that is the actual mechanics of playing. in this world, which is weaker. And then below that is like the writing, which we can save, but it's like rough. But I'm curious, like, let's stay on the mechanic side because I think this game makes a pretty poor first impression that it quickly gets past.

But that first loop where it drops you in, it is not the best that the game has to offer is the platforming and the rolling and getting around. And I'm curious, honestly, I'm just curious if you bashed your head against literally the very first thing that you need to do because I found myself quite frustrated for the first like 10, 15 minutes. Do you mean getting through that door?

Is that what you're talking about? There's a point where you go into, you have to jump across a thing and then it's dark and then you need to dodge a, I don't know, like a pointy plant. And like, it just like literally just like, to jump over them, buddy.

I don't know. That's 101 shit, man. I just, I found my, pretty repeatedly struggling with like wrangling the controls and like getting around versus a like traditional platformer. It does not have the polish that you would find in like a silk song or even, even like, what do we just play? Well Dweller, for example. It doesn't have that level of precision, which at times can be pretty frustrating because you're dealing with at certain points like pretty intense platforming challenges that does kind of require it. And granted, you could just restart or restart a run, and it's not that big of a loss, but it can be a little bit frustrating. I think the larger challenges that I had weren't necessarily like core difficulty challenges as much as readability challenges.

I think there are areas of this game that it makes it really hard to understand, like, what is in the foreground, what is in the background, what is in the background, what can I jump on, what can I jump on? And also, like, the way the maps connect. So you'll be in moments where you'll be in the sky. And you know that there's an area below you, but you're not falling in the right spot to, like, connect down. That shit drives me crazy of, like, there are parts of the game where you'll be up way high. And you need to get down low really fast because you're up against a time limit or you have to. There are events that happen around the map only at certain times. And you know, like, I got to be here by the sixth bell.

you can actually jump off and you can fall all the way down and then you'll be in that lower area unless it's like one of those arbitrary killbox places up in this guy where you fall and then it's it just sort of breaks their like uniformity of the world and like it is a incredibly clever puzzle box I just wish it was more consistent in the way it were and since since we already said the thing about you know the the glave teleport the first thing that you learn which it's so cool the way it teaches you that it will teach it teaches you everything like this which is that it will trap you in a space and the only way out of that space is to do the thing that you are then going to learn about. It is rarely is it like, I don't know, telling you something that you're not

immediately kind of in need of doing. But you can throw your glave like way up in the sky and you might hit some shit and then you might teleport to it and be somewhere that like you're not maybe supposed to be at yet. Maybe you were supposed to learn a bunch of other stuff. I definitely hit story beats that like then all of a sudden you have like a note log sort of like Outer Wilds the lead board that you have that you can access from the ship you can do that

in Echo Weaver you have leads that you're looking at. I had one where I was trying to figure out the password to access like this elevator but then like I ended up teleporting past where it was supposed to be and it gave me the answer to like that code was like I figured out the elevator code was this and I was like I actually didn't I just kind of fucking teleported where I maybe wasn't supposed to go you. I feel like

there's a lot of stuff like that that is... I'm glad it gives you the option to like skip that stuff. It does bum me out that the game like can't say like, well, you didn't figure that out. But you didn't figure that out, but you made it through this thing. There's moments like that that are very, very cool and rewarding. And then there's moments like that that feel like, oh, man, I just kind of clipped through that. I just kind of clipped through that wall and found that shortcut to that area. I'm not supposed to be out yet.

The Outer Wild's comparison is interesting because I'm really... realizing now how much trouble a lot of people had with the controls of that game. And what I think both these games get at is if the ideas are good enough, if the little surprises and the discoveries are great enough, you're willing to put up with a lot. I bounced the fuck off of Outer Wilds for like two years. I was not able to get over that first hump of like, what the fuck am I doing for so long. And just I kept hearing and hearing and hearing how amazing it was. And I was able to like play it. a situation where it didn't make me motion sick, and it finally clicked, and it clicked like huge for me. But yeah, that's a...

Outer Wilds at a glance is not a pretty-looking game. You know, you learn, obviously, as you sort of appreciate what's going on, how incredible it is. But it's not like, when you're on that first planet, it's pretty ugly. And then solely but surely, you kind of, like, realize the majesty of it. And I think there are similarities here... Don't get me wrong. I think Outer Wilds is like a top 10 of all time tier.

I don't think this is that but I think this does this does the thing and I know Chris in particular I think gets a little just like bored by Metroid Brain and search action games in general just because we get a lot of them

and we have to play a lot of them and I think this is a good representation of why I really like the genre is because at its core even if there are like consistent elements to them people use it as a sand box to explore some really, really divergent ideas.

Yeah. I think the only thing that I think Outer Wilds is a better game. There's a lot about this game that I did not think was very good. But what's very cool is that the things you learn in Outer Wilds are more or less siloed off to like the individual puzzles they correspond to. True. You learn about how black holes work. You learn about how the, whatever, what's it called? The quantum moon.

You learn how to like do that. And that's like a really satisfying solution to that puzzle that you use for that and maybe a couple other things. What's rad about this game is the things you discover are so transformative. You mentioned like having trouble with the platforming. There's a dozen different traversal mechanics that make the game so much faster. There are time trials. There are these little obelisks sort of all over the map that have time limits on them from each restart. So at the start of the cycle, the timer starts going

and then it's like how fast can you get to those things. And I tried doing a bunch of them and like could not even come close. There are doors that will shut a certain number of seconds or minutes. You'll get like one of the doors is like, you have five seconds. Good luck.

You have five fucking seconds. Yeah. And you know like I'm clearly missing some. Like there's got to be some. But like after I had learned the many sort of traversal mechanics that you can just use from the start, from the jump,

it makes getting around. the world, like, it is something you're going to use constantly. It's something that, like, inherently transforms what you thought you were able to do in this world. What, like, what platforms you thought, you know, I can't act. I can't reach that. I just, there's got to be another way up there. You can't actually. It's just, there's like a couple of different mechanics you've got to learn in order to do that. And that is maybe, you could maybe say it's a one trick pony, but it's a fucking cool trick. And it does a lot of stuff. Yeah. No, I think there's a lot going on with this game.

Plant sort of alluded to it. I think the writing is a little bit millennial cringe to some extent. It's like dogos. It has that. Yeah, you have a cat, a pizza cat that lives in your brain. He's like an advertisement for a pizza restaurant. And you're like trying to figure out what the identity of this thing is. And also just kind of like the world that the game takes place in.

There were these scientists doing experiments with the weavers and there. there's this long lost alien civilization that you're kind of trying to put together and you're getting kind of in the business of a bunch of different NPCs. What's very cool is that all of those different side quests, there is a groundhog day-esque element to it where it's like when you're trying to like put together a perfect run, you're like also trying to route through those things because like, do I want to actually, do I want to help these people? Can you save this guy from this giant?

Can I say everyone? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, that stuff is very, very cool. But on the whole, the writing, I don't know. It left me a little bit cold. It does the thing that games do sometimes where it's like, they assume you're going to absolutely adore these characters without necessarily earning it.

Earning that to the degree that they're, like, trying to go for. So, like, yeah, I mean, between that stuff and the, just kind of buggyness of, of this very, very ambitious kind of mechanical sort of design. Like, it is far from a perfect game. But I fucking could not put it down. I picked it up after we talked about it after, I guess, last week's recording, and then over the course of like five days, just, like, beat the shit. I remember right before the live show, you were just slamming on it.

Yeah, I just, like, couldn't stop, like, I don't know, couldn't stop my wheels spinning in my head of thinking about, like, oh, wait, shit, if I can actually do that, then I can get to. this area way faster and so on and so forth. Just while we were talking about this, I was like, things were a little bit clicking for me. Yeah, and that's like, I don't know, that's a cool little satisfying experience. I, you know, almost 100%ed it in, I don't know, like eight or nine hours. Maybe it's not like the biggest thing in the world and it's, it just scratches the brain itch

in a really satisfying thing. What are these people, sorry, these people clearly spent years working, I don't know, I don't know the developer. To release it in fucking October, in the heart of nightmare town in terms of releases. Sure. Like, there is a difference, right? Like, at least for the PC side of things, people are looking for games. It's not all Grand Theft Auto.

Like, it could. I don't know how it's doing on Steam. It's not even a Grand Theft Auto thing. Like, a fucking Castlevania game comes out this week. Like, really hard. Yeah. Really hard. And it's tough.

But I don't know when a good time to release a game like this is. February. January. Yeah. January is unfortunately. August. I love doing this show because I am playing three Metroidvania games right now. And I can't say which they are and definitely won't nod towards one that was already mentioned.

But it really hammers home. Like this hobby is a collection of entire other hobbies. Like you could at this point just like Metroidvania, the way you like Winer. coffee and just get into all of the different flavors of it and enjoy all of the little details. Again, like you said, fresh, it's not my favorite genre, but there's a game that I'll talk about honorable mentions that is very much in the same scope of it. The people who love it, it's their entire own separate thing. Yeah, this, yeah, I'm, I'm really glad we played, check this game out. I'm really glad Ace Combat would not work on any of my devices because otherwise I

probably I probably wouldn't have played this game. I had heard nothing about it. I will give it up. Props to friend of the show, Jason Shrier, who recommended it to me. And when he did, I had not heard of this game. And I probably would have passed me by. So. Yeah, same.

But I think it's real cool. And if you like, you know, the feeling of discovering a secret that was kind of there all along, that's like a thing that kind of only video games can do. and this one does it so well and I really hope that they keep making them like I would love another sort of search search action Metroid Braini because I think there's so much about this game

that is really special and really so many moments that are just really satisfying and I don't think I need much more than that. I would recommend for those that didn't get the chance go back and play Tunic. Tunic is in a lot of ways. You know what? I never got too far into Tunic And this made me think, like, I struggled a lot with the sort of core gameplay of Turek. I never really got to the secret, the real shit.

I think for a lot of people that, like, want to play it more as a puzzle game, you can lower the difficulty on the combat to make it, like, pretty manageable. And then the rest of it is so much of this shit where you're piecing together, like, what is it saying on this manual page that I'm trying to read, but the language is not English? And what does this little icon mean and all that stuff? If you like this stuff, Tunek is like one of my favorites of all time. Yeah, I'll have to check that out. That one is like probably at the peak of my pile of shame of like games that I did.

Yeah, that can't fucking rule. A fair enough shot. That's Echo Weaver. Let's take a brief break. And then I think we're going to talk about some other stuff. Are we going to talk about Dragon's Dogma? Yeah. Just some Dragon's Dogma.

Fuck yeah. All right. Quick break. Then DD, too. BRB. Does this mean you're back on the Dragon's Dogma beat? Do I have another friend on the show who responds? who respects one of the greatest video game series of all time.

I mean, I liked Dragon's Dogma 1 quite a lot. My only issue with Dragon's Dogma 2 is that it ran like absolute fucking dirty dog water on everything I owned. On everything I owned. It also only gave you one save profile, so I started the game. And then we had to do a monster factory about it. So I had to fucking delete my save. And that I was like, I don't really feel like starting over or playing through the whole game is Kilford Brimby. are Monster Factory creation.

They have fixed... So we're specifically talking about this because Darker Risen, the DLC for Dragon's Dogma 2 just came out. And maybe, Chris, you can talk a little bit about the lineage of this. I know that Dragon's Dogma had its... One, had its own Darker Risen sort of version

that was expanded and improved. And that's the one that I sort of sunk my team. I like that they're both called Darker Risen. I'll do... I'll do the speed run of all of this really quick because it will make sense. Dragons Dogma comes out People are like, I don't know, this must be like a Souls game

Or it must be a Zelda like And it's like very much its own thing The best example I can give is It is like playing D&D without the numbers It is about going out and having these kind of like surprise adventures On the way to whatever you think your main quest is But people are very fretted by it It's really janky

Dragons Dogma Dark Arisen comes out And it mostly polishes that stuff And then people are like, hey, whoa Maybe this series is actually pretty good but doesn't sell enough. We don't get Dragon's Dogma forever until Dragon's Dogma 2 announced. People are like, wait, what?

They're actually going to bring this thing back and it looks gorgeous. And it comes out. And it's the exact same thing all over again. It runs terribly. It is extremely off-putting in how much it will punish its players. And I think it's fair to give a spoiler here

because we've been doing this for long enough. The Dragon's Dogma 2, the actual title card doesn't appear until the end of the game because it's kind of a remake of Dragons Dogma 1 and then after the game there is a I guess you can call it a post game an entire extra thing that is more that builds upon what you played in that first game and now Dragon Sogma 2 polished cleaned up

I heard that there wasn't really an ending to the original release of Dragon's Dogma 2 as well like it just ended very abruptly Yeah, I mean, not like Metal Gear Solid 5. Not an ending, but like it definitely was open for what they've added in the darker risk. I mean, I don't want to get lost in the sauce here. I fell off because it wouldn't run on fucking anything. Like even my desktop PC, like it was, it could, it was okay. It would not run on Steam deck, wouldn't run on my Rog L.A.X.

Wouldn't run on anything. And then like the quality of life stuff was just so fucking big. bad just so bad like uh you want to fast travel you better have enough ferry stones and there's like two fast travel points on the whole fucking map and uh uh oh one of your one of your pawns got sick uh you don't know what to do about that it's gonna fucking destroy like a whole city you fucking dork why didn't you do it uh so things they have fixed i want to say i haven't even gotten to the dLC yet but i have played more of dragon stoggman two than i have had before i've like gotten way deeper into like the main story and just had a great time running around the world

and exploring my character is griffin and he looks a lot like me and my uh my like road dog is elphaba from wicked who i made a green wizard and she's cool and she goes around and um does not like any of the other pawns i bring around because they'll be like great job and she'll be like arrogance is an enemy unto itself we should instead strive to do better and And it's like Elfabha, elfie. She had a tough upbringing. I get it. Yeah, no, it's hard to blame her.

It runs amazing. It runs so well on my Rog. Ally X. There is a casual mode, which makes, from what I can tell, the combat's the same. It doesn't affect the combat. It doesn't affect the difficulty of, like, the core game. It just does things like make it so that you're not weighed down by items as much. And it gives you an eternal fairy stone that you can use to teleport,

to fast travel points at your leisure without having to worry about if you have like the consumable fairy stones that that you needed before i think you get that no matter what i think oh do you spread across the game now yeah well then why is there why do you get the consumable fairy stones if you have the infinite eternal fairy stone that's residual there's some choices that are strange maybe it's kind of weird when you get them for like a reward for a big hard quest it's like thanks a fairy stone i don't actually fucking need that um I feel like a lot of stuff has kind of gotten out. The game has gotten out of its own way a lot because now it really is just I'm running around the world and I see a cave and I go into it and it's creepy and I see a type of monster I've never seen before or I get jumped by a huge boss monster and it's like there's a lot of times where I'm like I actually need to run away from this fight because this thing is going to clean my clock and it feels so vast and so adventure.

and so cool. And I don't know. I'm just really, really having a good time with it. And I feel like I'm seeing the stuff that you kind of preached about Chris when the game first came out, what, two years ago, three years ago? Yeah, I think about that. Yeah. I'm very torn on this game for me personally. I'm very happy it exists.

And I think a lot more people are going to finally play this game. And I think all the things you described are generally good. But I don't necessarily see them all as like. fixes per se because for me the most exciting time i had playing this game was when those decisions to make it so that you couldn't save a game whenever you wanted so that when you like died and there wasn't an auto save you were punished that you couldn't fast travel you when you went out exploring it felt like you were taking tremendous risk and like my my best memory of the game was going out and getting past a boss fight and like, great, I did what I set out to do,

and then moving forward rather than moving back, because I'm like, you know how I can make it to the next town, and getting to a campfire and realizing I didn't have the equipment to camp, and then realizing, shit, I need to keep moving. It's getting dark. I need to see where I can go. Getting through the night by the skin of my teeth, only to find as the sun comes up that there are two dragons fighting each other. And I need to keep. moving. So I scoot past them and let them go into battle against each other. And by the time I get past

that, once again night is falling and I see a castle and it's glowing on the mountain. And I barely make myself up there just as knights once again coming down and I enter the castle and it's not actually a town that I thought I was going to. It's literally just a fucking bunch of skeletons

and ghosts waiting to kill me. And that shit of like, I have no choice but to keep going. I have no choice but to keep taking these risks. I need to be smart every second that I'm doing this. That was so thrilling. All of that said, that is not how I get to play most games. I was playing that game in a very fortunate period of my life when I could like, be like, you know what? I guess I'm just going to keep playing this for five hours. That is not the general experience. And especially now that this game is

on Switch too, having a version of this game where, like you said, you don't have to have one save point that you go and place somewhere in the world to then like teleport to whenever you want that you can actually go back to town as you need and use it the way that like most RPGs work including D&D, that makes a lot of sense. But it's just a very different game. When you can teleport back to town

and take your quest and recoup whenever you want, it fundamentally changes what the game was setting out to do. It is amazing because I think about my experience. when playing it and like liking core moments, but so much in my memory was like, well, it's going to be 45 minutes of walking to get back to town. And maybe nothing of interest happens. Maybe I just fight the wolves that I already fought before. And so there was a lot of like downtime, which sometimes would pay off and sometimes it wouldn't. Quite honestly, more often than not, it didn't. But I like the core of it and I love

the exploration stuff. So this definitely, I haven't pointed yet, but this definitely sounds like more my speed. I'm curious, Griffin for you, like, again, the selling point was the adventures that happened on the way to the adventure. Like, you could take a cart from point A to point B and then go to sleep and you might get woken up because your cart's being attacked. Or these, like, surprising things that are unscheduled would happen. Were you still, like, running into those things? Yeah, for sure. You know, you still got to go from point A to point B.

It's just that like when you get to point B, you can set down a port crystal and then go back to town and do your shit and then go back to your port crystal and pick it up and keep on rock. It's like they invented the internet in that world. It's like some of that stuff I had done during my first attempt at playing Dragonstalking 2. It's just like I ran into shit that Russ described of like, well, this is just, I've just done a lot of running and I haven't done like an interesting quest or like a fight or like. I feel like, Chris, I'm seeing more of that stuff. That's good. Because the waiting around and the repetitive kind of parts of the game, those are the parts that I feel like have been have been whittled down quite a bit. And I feel like you still get a lot of the, a lot of that feeling of danger and discovery, even though there are auto saves.

There are abundant auto saves and stuff like that. I should point out, I'm also point out. playing it on the casual mode, which gives you a lot of these quality of life things. You can also just play on normal or hard, which just got added. And I don't know what the fuck that would do to the game experience, but it would take it so far from the light of Christ in my eyes. And the frustrations I've talked about, even with the original version, like that's not the point of the game.

The point of the game is to get your pawns, like, get a group together, Lord of the Rings style, and those pawns could be the... characters that you are borrowing from your friends and going out on adventure and having this kind of group combat that feels like multiplayer even though you're playing with NPCs and the combat is very it's not it kind of looks at first like monster hunter or dark souls but it's not really either of those it is using things in the environment to bring down enemies it is jumping and climbing on them and like oh fuck can I talk about yeah I had a fight I had a fight against

a Cyclops, which is like one of the first big boss guys. It's like the basic big boss guy. Only this one was at the tail end of one of these like expeditions that I was going on. It was nighttime. Lanterns were out. I had me in my three ponds and we find this guy and he's asleep right next to like a wooden bridge that we needed to cross to get to our destination. So I was like, all right, let's fuck this guy out. Let's get some points. And so we start fighting him. and in the course of the fight, he smashes the bridge while trying to kick our ass.

He destroys the bridge. The bridge goes down. And I'm like, uh-oh, shit. I'm going to have to find another route to our destination. Or what I ended up doing was I jumped up on him and I climbed up to his head and I stabbed him a couple times for good measure. But then while I was on top of his head right next to the cliffside,

I jumped off his head and cleared the gap and landed on the other side where the bridge was. And then I was like, wait, fuck, how are my pawns going to get across? and right when I had that thought, he stumbled backwards and fell across the pit and landed. So his feet were on one side and he was holding on to the other side of his hands. Like it was programmed into the game that the cyclops would turn into a fucking bridge. And all my crew like ran across and then I just hit his hands a couple times and he felled out into the chasm. And that whole thing like came out of nowhere and was so rad and so exciting.

And like, I don't know, so dynamic and unpredictable. and like that that is the stuff that is so cool. I think the main story quest so far have been kind of a snooze. Like, sneak into the castle and find this note from the Queen's Regent because she's up to no good. And it's like, okay, I did that

and ran into literally no resistance and it took me 20 seconds and now I have to wait for the next day. Like that stuff is whatever. But the actual adventuring out in the world, I think, is, I don't know, it's just the best. It's really cool.

I'm so glad you had one of those moments because there's so many other things. like that. Like your ponds can catch you as you're falling from high height. In the original version, I at one point was riding a giant hawk. I don't know. So I'm trying a giant bird. And didn't realize like, oh, it can literally take me up into the clouds. So I think I have like the edge on it. And suddenly I am hundreds of feet in the sky. Yeah, yeah. Trying to figure out like, well, I can kill it. How do I not die? But like that doesn't seem like the right choice for me right now. I played a couple hours of this on the Switch 2 just to see how it works,

shockingly well. It really works well. So if you're considering it and after hearing all of the issues with the original version, wondering like how the hell can it be portable, well, they figured it out and it's working. I would like to keep playing it if nothing else kind of comes after my time. I know we got some big stuff sort of coming out. I would really like to see the DLC.

The DLC adds like a whole new continent and like a whole side story and a bunch of like specialized dungeons to explore. And like I'm sure that stuff is great. I'm sure that stuff is really, really cool. I just, I don't know. I feel like I'm finally enjoying the original game,

Dragon's Dogger 2. I do want to provide one last little bit of insight into the developer mindset. I remember this is before the original Dragons Doggo came out. So we're talking like 15 years ago, right before it came out, I went to a press event for Capcom, and during those press events, they would show presentations about the game

and then show gameplay. There was a presentation for Dragon's Dogma that was about 40 minutes of the most boring slide deck I've ever experienced in my life, like top 10, most boring slide decks, talking about the currency and the world and the lore and the who these guys are.

And it ends with like, three minutes of climbing up a fucking giant and stabbing him in the face. And I was like, lead with that, guys. Yeah. But it is, again, more insight into who these folks are that are making these games is like the stuff that they care about. I mean, they do other things amazingly well, but it's always interesting to see what they actually deeply care about. One quick pro tip, and then we can get to honorable mentions and everything. But if you are playing this game for the first time and you get your pawns, listen to where they want to take you.

They will shout like, hey, they're always trying to show you things. Are they still talking to ladders? I have not gotten a single ladder mentioned. I'm disappointed. I feel like the signal to noise ratio is much improved. There's so much that the developers were able to, like, very much hide in the game, knowing that the NPCs would guide you to it, which makes the adventures feel really cool. And it makes the NPCs feel like they're actually helping you.

Yeah. No, I've had a number of times where, like, I've been running somewhere, and one of my guest pawns will be like, master, I know. And first of all, I'm going to be like, don't call me that. Please call me something else. There's got to be another. Just Griffin. You can go Griffin is fine.

You follow me because I know the house. Oh, that was the bird I was riding. What? It was a Griffin. Oh, yeah. That makes sense. It seems, I know they know how to say that word. It's just they refuse to.

And I was like, no, I know where I'm going. Thank you. And then reach like a dead end because the, you know, pass had been blocked by boulders. And then I feel like the pawn was really holding back, not being like, all right, did. now will you listen to? There's a deep throat clear.

There's a secret forest that only I know about. So yeah, they always know. Yeah. They always know where they're going. Any mail? Yeah, we have one letter. This one comes from Ethan.

Really surprised that droid deck wasn't mentioned in this episode. The Steam deck is now a native Android app. We'd love to hear your thoughts about it. So before our live show, Justin actually mentioned this, I don't think any of us have tried it yet. I'm so curious. is, I mean, the only thing I want to know is, like, does it require an internet connection for a compatibility layer that will get, like, like, what?

And that's still the case with, uh, game native and, uh, like, game hub like that shit works, it works. It works really well. It's just sometimes when I put my thing to sleep, it disconnects and then I lose all my, my progress. Um, yeah, that's the only issue. So like, if Droid Deck can do that, I'll, I'll check it out. I'm, I am curious about it. I also know that there are teams. right now indie teams that are like because SteamOS natively supports sorry I'm gonna throw some jargon Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 or whatever the fuck and some teams

outside of Valve are trying to like port that over to other handheld so that's kind of what I've been waiting for but it's cool to see that we're getting closer and closer to like a world where we can just run our Steam games on fucking everything God, God, it'd be so good I've got a game right now that I'm playing

that definitely does not need the fucking raw power of my raw ally, yes, and therefore does not need the 25 pounds of video game hardware built into this thing. Let me play it on my little, you know, retroid pocket Nova or some shit, because that would be a much better experience, I imagine.

Yeah, we'll check it out. Honorable mentions? Yeah, I want to talk about Breath of the Wild. I have, for people that are curious, have taken a break from blueprints because I need to get through the live show and all the logistical, everything

thing that was going on there. So I did not have spare brain power at the end of the day. To do 50 more Ajai puzzles? What's wrong? Are you scared? A little bit. I will get back to it very soon, but for now I continue to play Breath of the Wild with my child. And there's

an element that I did not really, I kind of rolled my eyes at it when it first came out. And now I kind of appreciate it. So when Breath of Wild got remastered for Switch 2, if you get that bonus upgrade pack, it included 60 FPS, and all sorts of stuff, but the other thing included was Zelda

notes. Did either of you guys try this? I did with the Tears of the Kingdom switch to version. Zelda notes are just at least in Breath of Wild, it's probably comparable in Tears of the Kingdom. 120 short audio logs from Zelda

scattered around the map. And so you'll walk up on like an arch and she'll be like, people used to have commerce here. And I remember meeting some guy and having a good time that day. And all it does is like more fucking context for this world, which more and more I'm like realizing just,

I think maybe the most in-depth lore that Nintendo has ever built into any game is in both of these games, Tears and the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild. And they clearly spent so much fucking time on it that hearing all that stuff has been really interesting. And in addition to that,

I went out and bought the Dark Horse, I think it's called Building a Champion or something like that. It's like a 400-page fucking art book and maybe the nicest art book I've ever owned. It's like 20 bucks online. But I'm like blown away by how nice it is and how much detail. You get like the different designs of like the Jigas and what the champions look like at one point.

And then they change them. And there's just like so much insight on the overall art design of the game that Nintendo generally does not offer. They usually are pretty closed book on that stuff. So if you are a fan, definitely worth going back because it's just been kind of a feast. I have been mostly playing

Echo Weaver and Dragon's Dogba too, but I also, I went to Annapolis this past weekend. We got tickets to go to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, which I've heard is incredible, and my kids were super excited, and we got managed to get tickets. We've tried to get tickets

past years, haven't been able to, this year we finally did, booked an Airbnb, went up to Annapolis, and then it got rained out by the Tropical Storm, which was a huge bummer. So we took the boys, they dressed up in their Renfair costumes, and we went to the mall just to, like, you know, put her around and do some stuff. What about you? Were you dressed up?

I did not dress up to go to the mall. No. We went to the Lego store. I was like, oh, we'll get the boys some Lego, something they can build because the weather sucks. And I saw there the PlayStation. model Lego set, which I did not know existed, did not know had been made, and I impulsively bought it right then and there,

and it's started building it, and it's been a primo. They don't like it when you build it in the store. Right there. They do not like that. It's so fucking cool, you guys. Like, the, it has like a spring-loaded top flap, which I don't know that I've ever seen on a Lego set before. The sides of the PlayStation, like, slide out,

and on one side is like a tiny, little diorama model of Grand Turismo and on the other side is ape escape. And it's just, it's incredible. It looks so fucking cool. I loved the, um, the Game Boy model build. Me and Henry did that one together and, uh, that one was very cool. And I, I don't know, I'm really, I'm really enjoying putting this one together. It's very satisfying, snapping all those ridged, sort of gray pieces around the outer shell of the thing.

Yeah, I tried it as well. And it reminded me that. like these video game things in particular can be very hit or miss because if you look at the like Pokemon collab that they did it was like a lot of the Pokemon shit is not so great but but some of it's really cool I should talk about that too we did some of the smart brick uh Pokemon sets uh which like they have some big ones there's like a huge Charzard one or there's one that it looks like a pokea ball but then you open it up and it's like a yeah that's cool that's cool what we've really enjoyed are the much smaller sets that are just like here's a set that are just like here's a

and it's got Bulbosaur and Bedouf in it, and you can build it in 30 minutes, and then they make some sounds, and this is a real issue with the smart brick shit. That don't sound fucking anything like these guys. I don't need it to be one to one, but when Bedouf is like, it's like, what the laser sound of the Star Wars ships

is like really butt, really busted, like really fucking terrible. The smart break stuff, I don't know. Take a step back. What is Bedouf sound? I'm not talking about Buduf like in the, anime but like in the games maybe he sounds like that no this doesn't sound like i know what bulbosaur sounds like what is bobas down like pat like you know this but choppy or more a more

bit crushed than that uh and this doesn't sound like they all sound kind of the yeah yeah um i don't know i thought the smart brick shit had a a chance of being like kind of neat and we've not really we don't we've they've been uncharged for the most i think the blockier the best And I think because the PlayStation 1 is like a rectangle, I think it helps a lot. Because it looks pretty damn close to the original. You don't have to use your imagination. And obviously the Game Boy, same thing. And they had an NES one too, didn't they?

Or like a TV or something. They did. They had an NES one. They had like, they, the one that Henry really wanted that we missed the boat on and now they don't make anymore is the Mario Diorama one. It looks like a CET TV. And you can like turn the wheel and it looks like he's going around the, didn't get our hands on that one. When you miss it, they like cost a billion dollars now.

Is that how it works? They do, yeah. No, if you wanted to try and find one, it would have to be on, like, eBay or something, something like that. There's a Donkey Kong arcade one that looks cool now. I just really, I enjoy at night putting on a hockey game, drinking a cup of tea, and working through two or three bags of a Lego set for adults.

That's nice. It's been a really nice wind down. What did you play? My wind down game during this trip and playing a lot on the plane on the E. and Thor was Warhammer 40K bolt gun two. Okay. What's this game? Yeah.

Well, I did not appreciate that I am a boomer shooter person. That's crazy. I know. You love talking about them. So clearly. I could have. Yeah. Well, what I've, I like that they've evolved into being something more than just like, hey, we made Doom 2.

Yeah. And I think that's why the genre or the subgenre is growing on the. Warhammer 40K Bolt Gun 2 is a sequel to a game. I think we talked about on Resties. Yeah, it was a Resties. But it was evolving the boomer shooter formula even then. It was these kind of big open spaces, more like I would say kind of quake than Doom, mixing 3D space with like 2D pixel art. This game is very interesting because.

It feels like the history of Doom in a single game. At first, it has that kind of, yes, Doom 2 corridor things. But very, very quickly, you are running through these humongous environments of tons and tons of enemies zipping in and out and wheeling through your weapons like the modern Dune games. It just looks like low, poly or pixly. But the actual play of it has so much in common with the modern id stuff. and that I think is the sweet spot. I love these games so much more when they actually add mechanical complexity,

and it's not just go find the key card, use the same two or three weapons, and get back and forth. The boss design here is really interesting. Like a gillion enemies are in it. Whenever I try to learn more about the series, I feel like how other people must feel listening to us talk, because I'm like, oh, it's got no. Nergel and Zinch and corn in Slanesh.

They're all here. But I like it. Is this ever going to convince me to care about the Warhammer 40K universe? Absolutely not. I do not find this aesthetic that appealing. And yet, like, on a purely mechanical, classic FPS level, damn, this, like, they have really figured it out with the series. And it is, as we were talking about, being able to have steam on anything.

This is exactly the sort of game that has the potential to take advantage of that. I think with Warhammer, it's probably very similar to Star Wars because my impression is they're doing the thing that we've been cheering Star Wars on for, which is making these very narrow genres. So I think there's like a space trader game in Warhammer. There's the RTS. There's the like third person gear style action game. Now there's the boomer shooter. So the idea, I think they're trying to like gateway people in. that like the genre but don't know a lot about Warhammer and maybe that's going to be it.

I agree. I played a few of them and it hasn't happened yet, but I like the games. And I think they've been doing that, to be fair, to them, like way longer than the Star Wars saying. Like, that's been their formula for decades at this point of, hey, you like Left for Dead? Well, guess what? Warhammer likes Left for Dead too. Yeah. They really do just go anywhere and everywhere with the series.

And it mostly works. Again, I like the video games. I never quite look forward to them. and then I end up playing most of them. For sure. Yeah, I've never, I've never gotten into, I've never gotten into him. He's too cool. Yeah, no, they seem very cool.

No, no, you're too cool. That's what I'm saying, you're too cool. Oh, no, I don't know about all that. I always, I don't know, I'm the type where every time I am at, like, a friendly local game store and I see people playing Warhammer, I always think like, that looks fucking. I wish my life was completely different, so that I could enjoy that, Because I feel like I couldn't get I couldn't start doing it now and I also don't know how I would fit that into my My day to day, but man, it seems like the painting

You can't have one or the other right like you kind of you either are going home and then drinking the tea and doing the Lego set or you're going home Drinking the tea and you know yeah I'm sure people who play Warhammer also don't fuck with Legos in a major way I could see you I could see you with like a loop like a jewelers loop Carefully painting the pants on like a little Warhammer guy oh I don't I don't have much you specialize in pants Yeah, that makes sense. Folks, that's going to do it for us this week on the Besties Plant. Would you mind summarizing the games we talked about here today? Oh, my gosh.

We talked about so many great games. We talked about Echo Weaver. We talked about Dragons Dogma 2, Dark Arisen, Breath of the Wild, specifically the Zelda notes, the PlayStation Lego set and Warhammer 40K Bolt Gun 2. I want to mention certainly the Patreon, Patreon. Patreon to come on there, support us. you make the show possible. We really do greatly appreciate it.

And we also greatly appreciate everyone that came to the live show, which happened last Friday, and it was a total fucking blast, as Griffin alluded to. We had so much fun doing it. If you have any photos that you took, you can email them, besties at Mbimbam.com.

I guess people know how to spell that, probably. Email them there, or just tag them Besties Live on socials, and we'll see them, and maybe we'll drop in a few more photos that we've collected. But we greatly, greatly appreciate it. appreciate everyone for showing up. We also greatly appreciate these new backers. We have Jasper. We have Ava S. We have Chance B. And Jacob W. Thank you for being backers of the besties over at patreon.com.

Such the besties. And yeah, we have a new resties out just this week. And fun stuff coming. Yep. Speaking of fun stuff coming, next week we're going to be talking about Castlevania, which almost certainly has a subtitle. Castlevania Belmont's curse. I'm going to say it to that just off the top of my head. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, Castlevania Bum wants a curse. Can't wait.

So join us for that and join us every week here on the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games? Besties!