The Besties - Games That Make Us Go AHHH!

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

It's October so it must be time to give you the straight up willies. The Besties dive into Twitch phenomenon Phasmophobia, and Justin burns matches in Amnesia: Rebirth. We also explore some of our favorite scary games from throughout history. Join us ... unless you're scared? To be honest, we kinda are. 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!

Okay, I have a question for everybody. In the song, I Miss You by Blink-182, do you know this one? No. The one that starts like, hello there, the angel from my nightmare. You know this one, right? No.

I know the hello there part. Hello there. So shortly after that, the singer Mark Hoppus says, we can live like Jack and Sally if we want, which is a reference to Nightmare Before Christmas, correct? Okay.

There's probably a lot of Jack and Sally's over history. No, then he says, where you can always find me and we'll have Halloween on Christmas, which I think we know for sure. Okay. All right. Okay, Mark. I watched this. Okay. All right. Okay. So.

Okay, Mark. I watched this movie like three times in the last week because this is now my son's favorite film. See, we can't make it to Oogie Boogie. We get to Oogie Boogie and my kid's like, actually check, please. I don't, I can't interact with this. Mosey, he covers our eyes. He's like, this is too much for you.

Yeah. But the problem that I realized, Jack and Sally basically no spark at all until the very final second. Literally Jack is like, he's done his whole thing. And then Sally like drifts off and he's like, hey, do you think she's into me? And that's the end of the movie.

Yeah. Where is the archopist getting you? Not a lot of sexual chemistry there. Yeah. Like this is not an aspirational couple goal. Do you think it's because when he sings he's an entirely different human? Oh, interesting.

Okay. Now for people that aren't aware, Danny Elfman does the singing in Nightmare Before Christmas, but some random other actor does the voice talking. Incorrect. Incorrect on some random other actor. You're talking about West Virginia's own Chris Sarandon. Alright? That's how you know Jack Skellington can fucking party. incorrect on some random other actor you're talking about west virginia's own chris sarandon all right that's how you know jack skellington can fucking party because he's a west virginia boy

when he's he's he's got a whole you know the huge stack of pepperoni rolls that you always see in his kitchen he's west virginia through and through baby is it true that they hired him originally to do the acting and the singing but every time he tried to sing, he could only sing Country Road? That is absolutely true. You are really a movie buff, Chris. It makes karaoke very difficult for me and Justin. You know, Danny Elfman was mad about that because he wanted to do the talking parts.

Yeah, he would have fucking crushed it. Which is like, well, no, it's fucking typical New York types wanting to take jobs from west virginians what do you mean by new york types justin new york types always rolling up into west virginia coming into our minds yes our minds our coal our coal i'm not i'm not gonna work those mines thanks fracking fracking our cc's i don't know what you Some people are wanting to stop the fracking. Are you hearing about this? Which one to me? Give me that gas.

This show got so political. I mean, that's something that we could all find common ground on, right? Yeah. The show has started. The show has already started. This is no longer a Clinton show. I like to call fracking cool fuel. Okay. You know what? i call it mountain dew because it's right mountain dew cool fuel love that stuff it's right there

can't build a skate park on top of a mountain unless you cut the top off of it first that's all i'm saying cool fuel i'm gonna power my car and heat my house with earth farts. My heart goes out to Jelani, who now has to choose between a hypersexual nightmare before Christmas bit and a full-throated endorsement of fracking. Why not both? my name is justin mcgeroy and i know the scariest games of the creek. What? The creek I was trying to do

like a creaking floorboard. The scariest shames of the creek. You know, like that. I don't know why it would be shames. This is Griffin McElroy and I know the scariest game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the most ghoulish game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the most gruelish game of the week.

My name is GrossRossRossDick and I know the best game of the ween. Did you call yourself Gross? Did you bungle your own name? Yeah, I fumbled my name, but then I said ween instead of week. Oh, of the ween. Yeah.

Cool. It's happening. This is an episode. That's what they call it on TikTok. The ween? Yeah. The ween. Yeah. Cool. It's happening. This is an episode. That's what they call it on TikTok. The ween? Yeah. The ween. Thanks for joining us for the besties.

This is a roundtable discussion of the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's the only podcast with the guts to never do the intro the same way twice. It's the only podcast with the guts to never do the intro the same way twice. And we are continuing that powerful trend now by easing you into not a discussion of the single hottest game of the week, but a little bit of a survey of the state of scary games as they're out there. We are going to be focusing on Phasmophobia. Chris Plant, can you tell me a little bit about it? No, I can't. plant can you tell me a little bit about it no i can't how about you tell me a little bit about it all right look behind you do you see the ghost oh my gosh you just played phasmophobia my friend we're gonna talk a lot more about it

right after this break chris plant were you and be honest too scared to play Phasmophobia. Absolutely. I don't play, outside of PT, which I was a real big boy for, I don't play scary games because I'm a scaredy cat. Chris Plant, this is the third week in a row that you have not played our assigned besties game. Are you about to Yoko on us? Because you have to

tell us if you're going to Yoko. No! Here's the thing you might not know. Two video game consoles are about to get launched what and i have to oversee okay that that doesn't seem likely chris plant because it seems like i would have heard about new games coming out for them if if two new consoles are coming out that's that's true um i can i can i think i've probably played the most phasmophobia out of anyone. Go for it. Ever. In the world.

I'm the real pro gamer of Phasmophobia. Phasmophobia is a first-person horror game that is available on Windows PCs. You can also play it in VR, which, I guess, full fairness to Chris, I have been too chicken shit to attempt because just the regular old playing it on my old widescreen computer monitor is enough to actually genuinely make me quite scared. It is a ghost hunting game, although I feel like

that terminology makes you imagine a thing like a Ghostbuster. Yeah, Dan Ay a ghost buster yeah dan ackroyd dan ackroyd it's more like the the the cable shows the like learning channel it is much more like what is it ghost adventures i think it's the one with any permutation of of ghost and verb you're going is going to it's going to get there but it's gonna get you there i think ghost adventures is the was like the first big one that i remember watching where three fratty idiots go into say an asylum and it's like fight me ghosts and that's basically what they do no ghosts are slain or trapped in crystals or banished with salts or whatever. They just kind of go and rile up some ghosts.

In this game, you are- We should mention, though, in those examples, there are no actual ghosts. It's just idiots in a room. Do you mean, are you feeling like we needed to mention the fact that ghosts aren't real here on our podcast? Is that what you wanted to get across? I would say that you never actually see any ghosts on those shows right the main reason for that russ is going to be that the that ghosts aren't real is what's going to get you on that quick show of hands uh raise your hand if you think a ghost is real a ghost or a ghost in general a ghost in general i could be

convinced but i'm not currently occupying that space. Yeah, I think the science is still out. In this game, the ghosts are very much real because they will get angry and kill you. They'll choke Griffin to death. Yes, they kind of wrap their nasty, nasty hands around your face, and then you are dead. So it's a cooperative game.

There's a team of four. You go into these haunted locations. you use a variety of ghost hunting tools to uh discover where in the house this spectral energy is concentrated and then you gather evidence three pieces of evidence to determine what type of spirit or wraith or poltergeist or demon uh you are dealing with um yeah that is the main like the experience of like just so justin griffin and i had a multiplayer match yes we where'd we go into like just a random like suburban home there's a lot of different sort of houses of various like layouts and sizes uh there is a school uh there are a a different number of maps of like increasing size and difficulty uh there's a school, there are a different number of maps

of like increasing size and difficulty. There's a leveling system. So as you progress through the game, you unlock new tools and you also unlock more difficult maps and, you know, difficulty settings. In the situation that we were in, we walked into the suburban house

and, you know, I was running around with a thermometer. I think Justin had like a camera that he placed down on the kitchen table. Griffin was doing like EM reporting shit throughout the house. And eventually we found that the kitchen seemed to be pretty damn haunted. Yeah. All the things were spiking.

And we got really scared. Yeah. So there's a sort of setup phase for five minutes so whenever you arrive at a location you have five minutes before the ghost will become aggressive and you use that phase to locate the haunted area and start setting up in that area which is a really cool like idea um because it's incentivizes like trying to be strategic and spreading out as soon as you roll up into the house and then like going into a fairly tense like detective mode um there are i think like

five or six different kinds of evidence that you can get so you can uh using the thermometer or just looking at your breath you can find freezing temperatures so you find that you mark it in your journal right uh if the you have an EMF reader that will almost always detect the ghost, but if it hits like super high levels, then that counts as a piece of evidence. There is a book that you can lay down and if a ghost writes in it, that is obviously evidence that the ghost is there. So there's using the three pieces of evidence, you figure out what type of ghost it is. The different ghosts have different ways of pacifying them, different ways of pissing them off. Almost every ghost gets very angry if you say their name, because the game uses voice recognition over voice chat, which is a

really cool thing. There's a spirit box, which is like a radio that you ask questions of the ghost. And there's like a preset list of questions that that will work things like uh how old are you uh and sometimes they will respond through the spirit box which is pretty creepy every time you're like how old are you you're like adult you're like okay that's evidence that is a weird thing to say to that question though all right that's how that's what three kids in a trench coat standing on each other's shoulders say when they're trying to buy booze. What do they write in the book? Like, do they blog? Yeah, they write sort of about their emojis.

No, it's like... Yeah, don't forget to drink your Ovaltine. Yeah, it's like creepy patterns for the most part. So anyway, five minutes ends, and after that, sort of the grace period is over, and then the ghost activity will begin to get pretty wild and then the ghost will occasionally enter a hunting phase and during that hunting phase typically the front door of the house shuts and locks and you have to find a place to hide and stay safe until the ghost activity ends but while the ghost is hunting they will manifest. You can take pictures of them. There are, like, side objectives, like take a picture of the ghost.

Stop a ghost from hunting you by, like, using a crucifix. Things that are pretty high risk, high reward. And the more of those objectives you fulfill, the more money you get. And, yeah, there's this really cool idea in the game where you use your money between missions to purchase these hunting tools that whenever you like join into a lobby you add from your personal inventory to the like the hunting vans like inventory and if you die you lose all that stuff uh there's insurance on the lower difficulty settings where you can get sort of a refund for some of the things you lose when you die but like it really adds a lot of tension because it's it's kind of hard to get

enough money to like have a good stockpile of hunting gear and if you die and your party wipes like you just lose all that shit yeah the um so the time that we played with justin and the time i played with justin and griffin um we found a shitload of evidence we were things were doing great and then we wanted to just see the ghost because like where's the fun in just like taking pictures and checking the temperature of nothing so as griffin mentioned you can say the name of the ghost and they'll get angry with you and attack uh we tried a lot yeah well yeah we were also playing in the very first level on the lowest difficulty setting so it is that is the level that like is the training

level that uh has like hunting turned off uh which i don't think it was in the specific mode we were playing but it is not surprising that it went down like that although it is hysterical to see three grown adults walking around the house with flashlights and cameras just yelling, Richard Martinez! Richard Martinez! Tricky Dick Martinez! Yeah, we did start discussing him. Bobby!

Maybe he prefers, it was Robert Miller. He prefers Bobby. Bobby Miller! Bobby Miller, the idiot ghost who got killed like a dumb dumb uh yeah uh if i can get if i can offer a the opinion of someone who did not play this game a lot uh and did not was not fully indoctrinated into it is uh in my whole opinion uh if you are looking for something a bit more casual or something that's easy to jump into, this is not that it is still, I think,

uh, a decent way away from being ready for prime time. I know a lot of people are getting into it and overcoming that, but it's like, it's early. Like if you, we could be pretty direct. It's,

and it's, yeah, there's a lot of really bizarre, even the basics of like picking things up and setting them down and stuff is like is just very weird and unintuitive um it feels more like three bumbling idiot ghost hunters who are like drop their camera and it fell in the crib oh no i dropped my damn crucifix in the toilet i gotta come get it because i pressed the wrong button it's also funny because if you try to look down and pick something up if someone is looking at you at that point oh you are bending at the

waist at a 90 degree angle it's hysterical the animations are not great um two things it is there are uh for its its uh earliness there are so many cool ideas here that i understand this game is if you if you don't sort of pay attention to this stuff is like hot as hell right now like it is uh up there with among us in terms of like the thing that everybody's talking about right now i think part of that is because like if you go on youtube and type in like pha you're going to get flooded with like youtubers screeching uh while playing this game and fat farm clothes and that And that too. Yes, thank you, Russ. But for its earliness, there's so many cool ideas.

There is a van, right, where you start out each mission and it's kind of your safe spot where the ghost can't get you and it's where all the tools are. There's a interactive computer monitor that you can watch all of the cameras. You can get head-mounted cameras later

so you can just see the first-person perspective. And that's not only like like, a cool effect. Like, you're looking for spirit orbs. You're tracking everybody's sanity levels. You are tracking ghost activity in certain parts of the house. You're looking at all the deployed sensors. So there can be, like, one person who just hangs back and is kind of the operator,

which is always such a cool idea. But the other thing is, like, I don't know that it's ever going to be super intuitive i think part of the game that that makes it cool and this sounds like apologetics but like the thing that is cool about this game is that it is kind of it is not completely codified like every single thing that you do like i would yeah i would like to be able to know the buttons to crouch. That's obviously not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about like, even if you are experienced at the game,

you can't just roll in with a winning strategy every time because like the ghosts behave a little bit differently and the area that they're located in is a little bit different. And things like what trips their hunting phases and what makes them super aggressive. And you can lay down salt, but it doesn't feel like everything works all the time,

which feels kind of realistic to how it would work. Real ghost hunting. Justin, I know that you played another game this week that is not janky, from what I understand. Would you mind telling me about this one? I'd love to highlight that. I do want to say one more thing about Phasophobia is that the run speed is too slow. Okay. I love it. And that can be very... No, it's boring.

It can be really boring if you're just trying to get back to... It's not scary when you're in the phase when they're not attacking and you're just trying to walk back to your van and you're just slowly... I'm just going to walk back to the van, you're just slowly i'm just gonna walk back to the van get a cruise fix come back to you guys in a bit uh they need to fix that anyway uh amnesia rebirth is the newest in the series of amnesia games is this the third one i i i'd love to tell you griffin but i don't remember so yes and no so it's the second one

made by the original developer not including their dlc for the first one but there was a second one there was one in between these two that was made by a separate team um because the original team of amnesia went on to make soma oh yeah okay yeah this is a you know horror game very light on the like mechanics in the sense of like interacting with the world you don't get like uh at least in the i played the first two hours or so like you don't get a big gun to shoot them or anything uh to shoot the scary stuff it is uh in in the first two hours i played um actually much more about like environment i did not play the other amnesia games but i wanted to hop into this one so we could have uh be able to speak to it a little bit

uh as we as we talk about scary games uh it's set in algeria um in 1937 uh which is kind of neat it's 100 years after the first amnesia game i guess uh and it follows a woman named tossy who is a french woman whose plane has crash landed she can't find her husband she can't remember who she is um and her sort of like bringing back her memory is the way the narrative is sort of uh laid out to you you you see things that spark a memory and that's sort of how you learn who you are how you got here what you're doing i'll be honest i have always wanted to play the amnesia games but i can't because as i mentioned earlier i'm scared and um the original amnesia has a reputation for being like pretty heavy on the jump scares

the original Amnesia has a reputation for being like pretty heavy on the jump scares. And I'm not keen on jump scares in horror movies in general. Is that a big thing on Rebirth? I would say not a lot when it is deployed. It is good. It is. It is. I screamed a couple of times like full.

But was it? It wasn't mean. It wasn't like even that scary. It just was a couple of things I wasn't expecting to happen at certain moments. Like you, um, so the main sort of, uh, at least in the, in the sections that I was playing, the main battle you're having really is against darkness from an environmental perspective you the main thing you're picking up as you walk around is matches and you have a very limited supply of matches and you're in a darkened caves darkened temples what have you if you stay in the dark too long you lose your mind and you die so you have to sparingly use matches to light your way. Sometimes it's like, oh, there's a candle right here. I'm going to light it. So I have like a little bit of breathing room to figure out my next plan. Sometimes you're walking with just a lit match,

hoping it stays lit long enough to get you where you need to go. You can watch it burn down. And if you move too quickly, it'll go out. So you're like slowly walking with this single match like hoping against hope that you find a lamp or something a candle anything that you can light that'll give you a little bit of reprieve is that kind of an artificial time limit on the entire i'm thinking of like shadow gate in shadow gate there were only a certain number of torches in the game and if you moved too slow you would run out of torches and the game would literally become unbeatable is it like on that level of punishment it doesn't feel like that um because you there are

areas that are naturally lit or pre-lit so like make a run at it maybe and it seems like the environment there are a lot of matches around but it becomes this thing of like do i want to So like make a run at it, maybe. And it seems like the environment, there are a lot of matches around, but it becomes this thing of like, do I want to stop and spend the time to like search for matches? I never had more than seven to give you an idea of like where we're at. I've read an embarrassing amount of these games

because I keep trying to build up the confidence to play them. From what I understand, you can die in this this game but it doesn't set you back but it does impact your endings so so there's like and i think that's actually more of a punishment than even the first amnesia i think a lot of it is like psychological but there's no real punishment at the end of the day it's always completable i'd like to take a moment to uh talk about something that is revealed in the first hour of this game um if that would be okay with you guys sure uh two minutes so uh if you just skip ahead i'm gonna mark myself at two

minutes if you skip ahead two minutes uh there'll be no more spoilers starting now uh one of the things you discover and you don't discover until you are, like I said, about an hour in, is that your main character is pregnant. Oh, no. And she doesn't know when the game starts that she is pregnant. And it is the fact that she is pregnant that is pushing her towards escape. Who tells her in this plane crash situation it's a memory it's the amnesia jogging her memory is jogged and she remembers like oh shit i'm pregnant from that moment on you can press a button to check in on your baby to like

kind of just check in with yourself to see how are we doing okay but this is why when this situation is like truly fucking desperate she decides like i'm not gonna die here because i'm carrying this kid so i refuse to die and like that is what that is what the whole thing is is sort of launched uh by and you can do you can check in on that throughout it's this constant stress but as somebody who's a parent like it's it's it's cool to see that kind of motivation uh aside from like something like vengeance or something we see in other games and that is the end of the spoiler section um i did want to mention one other kind of cool mechanic um you have a it plays with this idea of rifts between realities and at one point you kind of stumble into a tear between our

dimension and some sort of demonic hell scape uh and you have this like bracelet on your wrist that has sort of a compass kind of thing on it that will point you towards these rifts in the world and uh can open these rifts with your bracelet uh it's called a traveler's bracelet i think uh and and you don't know why you have it you don't know why it works you don't know what it's doing and you're trying to like you're uncovering that as well i mentioned specifically that there wasn't a lot of the way mechanics this is one kind of cool way that it points you towards uh what you need to do next because you have this watch that's attuned to these riffs in uh in reality um there's also some weird uh i will say like surprising amount of physics that i did not expect like physics type puzzles like an example

um there was a uh elevator that i went and found a crank for. Someone had used the crank to load a crossbow trap. And I went and found this crank. And when I started cranking it... How did you do that? Was there yanking involved? Russ, I've never been more disappointed in you. The elevator started going up, but I didn't go up with it

because the floor had rotted out on this elevator. And the solution that I came up with, and I guess it's the right thing, I don't go up with it because the floor had rotted out on this elevator and the solution that I came up with and I guess it's the right thing I don't know I went and found a long board that would cover the floor of this elevator that I could stand on this long board and it wasn't like you have found long board used on elevator it was just like I'm gonna carry this around and fucking put it here I don't know um so there's some like light physics stuff. Those sorts of games that don't give you a lot of weapons kind of lean on this. Even like Half-Life 2 leaned on this before you had gotten like a huge arsenal. And I think it's like a much more naturalistic way to do level progression rather than just like, yeah, you found like a special item.

It's neat. It's really cool. You know, I want to go back to it and play more. Too scary. you found like a special item. It's neat. It's really cool. If you know it, I want to go back to it and play more, but too scary. I think it sounds cool. I think I've been kind of bored by the past amnesia games that I played because they're like,

you better hide. Doesn't like, that's not my jam. Like, that's not what I'm looking for for a horror game, but this sounds like genuinely very cool. I'm two hours in and I have yet to, in an interactive way, encounter an enemy.

Oh, okay. I saw what, there was one time where there was a little jar of oil for my lamp that I had found, a lantern that I had found. And I was walking over to pick up the oil for the lantern and it was next to a crack in the wall. And I was walking over to pick up the oil for the lantern, and it was next to a crack in the wall, and I was walking over to pick up the oil, and this hand shot out and snatched the oil away.

And that was like, okay, well, that sucks. That's actually, that's all the enemy interaction I have had at this point. It's much more about implied terror. Yeah. It's cool. Very cool. Okay, so we are going to take a quick break

and we're going to come back and talk about other scary stuff and maybe some not so scary stuff. I don't know. It's our show. Why are you getting so bossy? We'll be right back. Chris Plant, what's the scariest game you've ever played? Oh, I'm probably like

Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog. No, PT. If I'm being honest pt is by far the scariest game that i've ever played um but if you're talking about like scary games that i like i was thinking before this episode about what are the things i played recently that are good kind of scary things for people who are more like me, who don't actually have the stomach for scares. And I realized there's a lot. I'm just going to list off a few, but I'll focus on one. I mentioned Kill It With Fire on a previous episode.

That's that you hunt spider game. If you have arachnophobia, pretty scary. I think Carrion, where you play as the monster, scary game. But you're the bad guy so not too scary scary for other people i think it's yeah i think it's an anti-horror game yeah empowering you're getting a little scarier here return of the obra den solving a scary mystery but at the end of the day you're the detective right you know it's not that technical can't actually hurt you it's in the past right uh yeah and and then now we're getting into it prey it's a shooter

but like that you don't know if that that coffee mug is is a is a is a bad okay that is quite scary that was pretty pretty scary but the game that i want to recommend to people just because it's a thing that i think uh the vast majority of our listeners have probably never heard of is a game called slayer shock um did any of you play this game no no so slayer shock is extremely ambitious um and it doesn't quite deliver on its goal but it gets pretty dang close um it is made by minor key games they made the game eldritch which i think a lot more people played it has this kind of like minecrafty aesthetic and it's a immersive sim roguelike it's very cool slayer shock is kind of the spiritual sequel and it is basically procedurally generated ish

immersive sim buffy the vampire slayer cool inspired by all the like system shock bioshock games this game was made by like one two people um uh david pitman i believe is his name um so it's rough like don't expect perfection here but it's also the closest you will find to a like very cool buffy ish game um and that means like before you go out on your missions you like all right you're like hangout area together um and coming up with your plan and then you go to the the school area or you go to like a collection of suburban houses or you go to the farm and you fight vampires with all of your silly vampire weapons. It kind of rules.

And it's, I think, 20 bucks on Steam. It's not super cheap, but relatively reasonable. It's on sale often. I would keep an eye out for it. But yeah, if you're looking for something that you've almost certainly never heard of and uh don't mind something that's a little a little fussy and busted i really really recommend checking it out um griffin yeah uh i mean my favorite it's it's i will admit not a great game

but i think the one i always come back to is eternal darkness uh on the gamecube uh just because i don't think that there have been a ton of great sort of cosmic horror games and eternal darkness has for all of its many many flaws has like a really really cool way of dealing with you know elder gods and it tells a story that spans like millennia of all these people whose lives were touched by these big, evil, unknowable entities, which is like my absolute shit. But that said, it's been a long time since I've gone back and played that. I already mentioned Shadowgate, which I think is a classic. Until Dawn has a very dear place in my heart, just because I love horror movies,

and I love sort of like, you know, campy slasher flicks, which I think this kind of falls in the category of. Did you play Dark Pictures? I've not played Dark Pictures yet because I thought it would be more fun to play that with like other folks and I could just never really get a squad together. Yeah. But we are planning on, for what it's's worth playing the next one in next week's episode just oh okay fantastic um the best the like capital b best scary game i feel like is is

uh i i always vouch for the whole soul series as being very scary just because of the the you cannot get much scarier than the risk rewardreward nature that it kind of invented. But Bloodborne has that in a big way, but is also really scary, just because it takes place in a pretty scary environment with terrible enemies who look really gruesome, and there are kind of jump scares every now and then. and there are, you know, kind of jump scares every now and then. I think for me, a good horror game has, you know, it can be scary, but it also has a setting that feels so, like, cohesive and, like, thorough and original.

And, man, God, there's a reason that, like, people are still playing bloodborne a lot today and are desperate for you know more yarnham adventures so um i think that's probably that that one probably takes the cake for me uh i wanted to call out thief deadly shadows uh this is not what i would necessarily call entirely a scary game it's certainly not a horror game you You play as a thief in kind of like a Victorian era city. The game is obviously a stealth game. So most of the game is like you sneaking in the shadows, bonking people on the head, stealing gold, et cetera, like normal thief stuff.

But deep into the game, there's this level called Shalebridge Cradle, which again, this game came out like 2003 or 4 um and almost the entire level has no enemies in it um they're like very very very few and so that idea of like you discovering like the history of this place through uh reading notes and audio logs and and like recordings stuff like that um was like a really new idea again this is before uh stuff like gone home etc and i remember playing it originally and it just shattered me like getting through it was so difficult because the audio design is so strong and every like little sound you make just kind of echoes through this place um and i've i was just so impressed by it and uh i um since gone on to

learn that uh jordan thomas was actually the person who worked on that as well as the bulk of the game um and he's gone on to do work on bioshock and a number of other projects and sorry in the blackout club the blackout club which is his newest one. And they all sort of evolved from, like, I think the core environmental ideas that were shown off in Thief Deadly Shadows. Not a lot of 3D games from that era age super well, but because of the lighting and the, like,

really good audio design, I think this game holds up great. So I'd really, really recommend it. It's still on Steam, and you can get like hd mods for it to make it really quick on that and sorry justin we'll get into your games right after that no worries for all the people who are uh enjoying the game that we spoke about earlier in the show phasmophobia you should really check out the blackout club that game rules um and just did not click in the same way that uh phasmophobia has uh so if you are looking

for a very good uh halloween friendly game i i definitely recommend that one real quick i have two old games i don't know uh clock tower you guys play clock tower what a fucking throwback it's a very scary point and click adventure game where you are constantly hunted by a uh a person with scissors named scissorman they're trying to kill you all the time it's really scary it's a scary idea to have a point and click adventure game where you're just kind of like walk around point and click and get the rubber chicken put the pulley in it and then oh shit it's scissorman that came out on on playstation right yes that's one game i think there was a weird like early ps1 era that was like clock tower resident evil and legacy of kane blood omen was that the one the

first one uh and i was like 10 when the playstation came out and we had that in our house and we had all three of those games and they fucked me up man those games are terrifying um i also wanted to call out and this is just a personal i know this is just gonna apply to me but um dracula unleashed was one of the very first uh fmv games to use like for a lot of video and it was a like walk around town and try to hunt Dracula. I find FMV games really unnerving pretty much all the time. It's almost always unnerving to me to play an FMV game. I don't know why, but having an FMV game

where every once in a while you get killed by Dracula or you stumble upon a dead body that you could have saved but didn't because you did the wrong things is so genuinely uh unsettling there's just this weird jank that fmv brings that kind of like uh you know the one um oh griff did you and i play it it's um slayer is that the name of the fmv game um oh harvester harvester yes harvester that's like a really creepy it's a it's a very very creepy fmv game that is just made more unsettling by the fact that it is uh poorly crafted i had a question justin about dracula unleashed yeah when is dracula leashed i mean

when he's been i guess recently slain by simon belmont mean, when he's been, I guess, recently slain by Simon Belmont. I mean, when he's in his coffin. He's just taking a nap. It doesn't mean he can't do whatever he wants. Not if you nail it shut. Or during some of our more experimental sex play. Okay.

So now that's just out there. Can't unhear it and I forgot also Dead Space. I've been thinking about Dead Space a lot lately. I don't know about you guys. Dead Space fucked up by making it less scary. You turned into a fucking super cop. Dead Space 1 and 2, though, rip ass, and I would love to get back out up in space.

Y'all, I got some questions for you. Yeah. Are you ready for it? Dead Space 1 is like, I'm going gonna use this space screwdriver to kill uh alien dead space three is like i got a chain gun that shoots space screwdrivers here's some questions this question's from lily what if anything would fill the pt shaped hole in all of your hearts or our hearts was it never meant to be what made it so

phenomenal according to you guys i mean i i'm most curious about the beginning of that question is there any type of game that fills that void or has has nobody quite nailed that sense yeah i don't think anyone's nailed it i think the second part of that is what made it so phenomenal i think it's a it's a scale thing a scope thing it's so narrow in scope and scale but it nails that so well um because like those 15 minutes or however long it takes i mean a half hour or however long it takes to play through the game is just like every single moment is so precise and thoughtful. I don't think you could ever do that for six hours or 10 hours. It would never be feasible. But that I think is why it nails so hard.

Again, I could barely play it because it's so paralyzingly scary, but... The scale and the domesticity. I think, you know, having a whole game that is set... Yeah, I mean, that was the appeal of the original Resident Evil and nobody lived in a mansion. But this made it even more similar to just a very generic i guess american house um i yeah i i don't i don't know if we'll ever quite see anything like that because i think even the real

game you know obviously you leave the house at the end of PT. There's a plan to go bigger, and I don't think that was necessarily the appeal. I know this makes me a bad games industry person, but I'm not technically really in it anymore. I liked PT, but I do not quite understand why it occupies such a venerated place. And this is not me uh

yeah this is not a read on the people on this call like it is a it is a widely like beloved game that like people when they talk about like oh god i don't know if i'm gonna get a ps5 because i don't want to lose pt like i don't get that level of of yeah i i'm not there but it it's probably one of my top 10 games of that decade i i think for me um it's two things one it's a horror game that it's like you said it doesn't make you uh wait i don't like horror games like alien isolation where it's like the game is sitting still um that i just i just don't have the patience for it i confess the other thing is piecing together the story was so fun both with the internet and i mean even just in playing the game that it was the rare thing that motivated me

to keep doing loops and because each loop is so short it was like well i can let's do another loop it like it just had all of those little hooks that were able to keep me into a genre that i love in film but just don't really enjoy in games um so it brought me into something that i i know i would normally like it's just most horror games turn me off yeah i would be more interested in like the idea of you know obviously guillermo del toro worked on this um the idea that you bring like a bunch of like well-known horror folks in and you have them all do a game that's only like an hour or two long and you like bring that all together like those are the sort of horror games i'm most interested

in because i don't have the stamina to necessarily go through it and usually horror games as you know we've talked about become you know action games towards the end of them and i kind of you know the most interesting part is usually the beginning so just having a lot of beginnings would be very cool question from jay what is one scary game that you refuse to play? I already said mine, Amnesia 1. Yeah, it sort of depends. I've played the beginning of Resident Evil what was it, the most recent one, the first person

one, a few times just the demo and stuff like that. I can't make it past the mannequins moving around. The second the mannequins aren't where I thought they were, I'm like, nope, goodbye, and i just stop and i thought that was a motion of motion sickness also the motion sickness i refuse to play games that are very like that sort of gothic horror you saw a lot of it in the like um the the

xbox presser there was the one game you remember um the geiger inspired sort of stuff that's very like demonic and and like bones and and all that stuff i find that so complete that like metal aesthetic i find that so completely non-frightening this where you tell us about the game that you shared with us on slack oh oh lust from beyond scarlet. Yeah, thank God, Chris. The extremely sexual H.R. Giger-inspired gothic game? Oh, boy. It's a psychological horror game with occult and erotic themes.

Which means sometimes you put your hand in a keyhole that looks like a vagina. All right. Y'all let me know when he's done. I'll bring it down here. You begin this one in a spooky club, and you've been lured there by someone that wants to have S-E-X with a Y-O-U. And it gets just sexier

from there. Basically, you have a special gift that you can see into a demonic dimension, but you can only get there by having sexual arousal. So you have to do that

to get to the other dimension of you have to be sexually around people could be listening to this show is free people could be listening to anything else right now i have so i watched the trailer through you know like through my hands does it end with a sexual act upon a corpse? It's not a corpse. Oh, it's not. They're not dead. Okay.

Yeah. I'm going to read you. I'm watching a full playthrough right now. It's not my playthrough, but it might as well have been. And I want to read you some of the lines. I'll just read them as we go. This is what you get for thinking with your cock. All right.

Alan, please be aware. If you don't follow our instructions, we'll kill you. I'd hate to mess up that face of yours, but I absolutely will if you do not obey. The guy is naked, by the way. He's chained to a bed naked. Quiet and listen. I will be addressing you as the seeing one

from now on. That is the proper title for those who are attuned to the vibration of lust-ga. Right. The land of ecstasy and pain. Probably should have added a parental advisory. I've lured you here because I believe your connection to this world is powerful.

Mine's not anymore. We will try to bring you to Lustga. To do so, you will be administered drugs during sexual arousal until your gift triggers. By gift, do they mean their virginity, their treasure from the Lord?

I'm fully dissociating right now. Can we do something else? John Steen. I have one last question. It's in a different direction. From Fred Wood, we'll wrap up with this question. I'm too scared to play scary games how do i get over my

fear of scary games and the answer is simple don't just there are so many other games to play you don't need to be brave go go play the the brightest happiest game that you can find honestly right now all the better i love a good happy game right now. I've been playing Pikmin 3, and it's such a nice tonal shift from the world around me. There's a giant cell phone. I find the way that I feel like I got into scary games was I focused so much on the gaminess of it. I am the type of person who scary stuff is effective on, but if you say you're playing a Soma

and you see those scary, terrible robots stalking the hallways that you're supposed to creep around and be very, very stealthy and if they find you, they're going to chase you and be very very stealthy and uh you know if they find you they're going to chase you and they might kill you if you think about that like uh i hope i don't get a game over here because then i'll have to do this whole segment again and you stop thinking about it like this thing's gonna actually physically fucking kill me it really sort of reduces its power over you when i when i watch movies i was watching The Godfather and I just kept reminding myself, these are actors.

These aren't actors in the mafia. And this story was written by somebody. In fact, none of it's real. I mean, if you are the type of person that wants to play a scary game, but you like physically can't. Just remove the magic. Well, no, I'm saying like,

I have played scary games before. Outlast was a good example of like, Outlast was like, Outlast was annoying in a way that a lot of those sneaky, sneaky scary games are, where it would be like me creeping through this asylum trying to make it to the objective, and then the bad guy would show up, and it would be so scary and annoying that I'd be like, I quit. But if you load into the level and you just run right up to the bad guy and let him just kill you real quick so you just get a

feel for it like i feel like it just takes it i feel like it makes the game sort of uh progressable i don't necessarily play games like that anymore but i think it is a good way to kind of like uh immersion therapy your way into it yeah i think if you once you learn the rules of the game like that's how i was able to get over the the giant um man in resident evil 2 remake is once i knew that i could move faster than him at all times i was able to deal with it but before that i was like no fuck this there's steps coming at me yeah yeah uh hey what else are y'all playing are you just it sounds like you've played quite a bit this week have you played anything else i've mainly like trying to check out like

horror stuff um not things that i would say are worth necessarily mentioning um i don't play world of horror that's really cool but it's it's a little older so i didn't bring it up have they had has there been can you tell if there's been like updates to that game because they launched it in pretty early alpha phase and there was only like a handful i didn't play it initially so i i don't have much of a frame of reference uh i'm still still playing hades yeah how do you guys uh lord teach me how to stop playing hades i just want to stop i i beat it this week i I beat it. Oh, you get credits. Yeah. I beat it. And you know what I did after I beat it?

Can you guess, Chris? Can you guess what I did after I beat it, Chris? Probably played it again. I played it again, Chris! They keep... The game is actually monstrous in the way that it continues to be like, well, you've beat it. Hey, there's one other thing that we were kind of thinking about

maybe you could help us out with can you do you want to reunite the entire world and actually fix things it's like I've beat you twice stop it you have to clear it 10 times to beat it and then after you beat it they're like actually we've got some other stuff we got cooking we'd love for you to check in real quick

and just keep playing this fucking game I can't stop playing hades it i still i think i'm gonna say i'm gonna put my foot down here i'm gonna say this it's the funnest game ever now i know what you're thinking there's been no game that i've continued to play for this long just because it's fun i think hades is the funnest game ever if If you get bored, change your weapons. I just discovered two things this week after probably 100 hours of Hades at this point. I just, for the first time,

found a sack of gold behind Charon that I could go steal, and he was like, what the fuck? And we had to fight, and that was bad. And I just remembered, I guess maybe I knew this initially, your mirror there are alternate yeah alternate perks you could take yeah literally i had all the all of them completely maxed out and i was just getting all this uh all the what is it shadow money yeah or whatever and i was like what am i gonna with all this? And then at one point I was just like,

I looked at the achievement and I'm like, I don't have half of these perks. And I remember that you could like flip to alternate perks. It's not super clear about that. No, it probably taught me months ago when I first played. The mirror is the one thing in the game that I think is pretty unclear. Justin, do you know what I'm playing?

If you say mirror automata i'm gonna lose my fucking mind i'm playing hades oh yeah it's good right are you enjoying the video i do runs while i'm on my bike and uh last night that sounds uncomfortable it's good is that how you use a bike chris we've talked about it you gotta just ride it you can't run at the same time uh yeah i cut my uh time down got my first sub 25 minute run last night feeling pretty good uh but here's here's the thing everybody in our our email uh you know sending us questions and their replies they're all very nice they're always saying hey like what what's your build right y'all i've beaten this game a lot i do not plan for builds whatsoever

that that is the least interesting thing to me i like just being like the heart wants what it wants right now i'm gonna see where this takes me yeah absolutely i i i do switch my weapon around constantly i don't have a favorite weapon i I just like whatever I need at that point to play through. They're all fun. I don't love the spear. Have you unlocked any of the hidden aspects? I've beaten it with two aspects. I'm trying to get through all of them. With the hidden ones? Yeah, the hidden

aspect on the spear is fucking great. It is so wild. Talk about changing the energy of the game. Okay, this is... Listen, I would just talk about Hades, but we can't, we gotta move on with our lives. Next week, we're gonna be talking about Dark Pictures, Little Hope, which is this sort of sequel to Man of Medan, which I guess I should play that as well.

When is that out? When is Little Hope out? Soon, before we record. Well, one would hope. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening to our show. If you have any thoughts about the Dark Pictures saga

or any stories from that or Until Dawn or what have you, you can send them to mail at besties.fan. Besties.fan is the link to share if you want to get other people on board with our program. We really, really appreciate it. I was going to say, we are also creeping steadily toward the

next-gen console launch of next year. This year, rather. I should say this year. It's happening this year. Next month. So, get jammed for that. We will have more and more. Get jammed, he says. Yeah, I'm making it happen. Powerful. Powerful stuff.

So, follow us for free on Spotify. Share the link to the show besties.fan and uh oh follow us on twitter at the besties pod you can also find a link there to join our mailing list which we'd love it if you did that as well that is going to do it for us though for this week so until next time uh be sure to join us again next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch.

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