The Besties - Having a Playdate with Death's Door

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

This week on The Besties we've got a stellar indie action adventure, Death's Door, from the creators of Titan Souls. We're also diving into the unique handheld with a crank, the Playdate. It's yellow! Other games discussed on the show include: Zelda: Skyward Sword, NEO The World Ends with You, Tangle Tower, and The Ascent. 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!

so you know before you have a kid everyone gives you the tips the pro tips the strats etc and everyone knows you know exactly the right thing to do and i was given a lot of those and i watched a lot of videos and went to classes for safety and everything like that and not a single one of them no one no books no nothing mentioned how exactly to build a piss wall and honestly i've just had to guess yeah i'm so glad that we're going to talk about piss wall. Yeah, finally getting there. Which is a cool structure that I think at this point, Russ has sent images of to all of us.

And all social media. Yes. And my wife. And my wife. It's an amazing thing you've done, Russ. Thank you. And I'm no stranger to the dangers of how urine comes flying out of external genitalia.

Yeah. I get it. I get it. But I've never had to bring engineering into the equation. Yeah, it definitely is necessary. And just for people at home, if you're looking to build your own piss wall, really all you need to do, go to the store,

pick up two of those five-star folders, you know, the cheap folders that you get. Right, sure. Wrap those bad boys in duct tape. Oh. Yep, because you could just wipe down duct tape. That's true. And you got yourself a piss wall.

Now, it's important to seal the bottom, because you don't all the piss just floods right into the bottom of the changing pad and that's bad so mark two sealed that bad boy and we got ourselves a piss wall russ i feel i don't want to tell you your business man man but i never had to build a piss wall so there's something going there i feel like there's something else going on here just because just because do we go with es is that i mean you could call him by his full you know i just like es for brevity yeah just a little leg yes has these like thick blasts off ropey threads of urine capable of lifting russ off the ground in a comical fashion yeah like son of the mask sure son of mask everybody's favorite movie that they saw that they referenced baby p i'm just a guy you know what this is a bad it's all bad to hear about for sure and bad to think about

but it is nice to know that somewhere Russ is getting pissed on you know he can't deny it if getting peed on is cool consider me Miles Davis he does look like an Adam Sandler so good Oh, good. My name is Justin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McElroy, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant, and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Fraschek and I know the best game of the week. Oh my God, I goofed it. I can't even go back now. We're just going to have to live with that. Just going to have to sit in it. Welcome to the besties where we sit in it week in and week out. And by it, we mean the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment.

This is the Video Game Club. And just by listening, you yourself are a member. We've got a great new release this week. You know what I'm going to call this one? I'm going to say it's a, or bringing it back, Triple I. It's a Triple I game. It's independently developed

and published by Revolver. And it's called, no, by Revolver and it's called Devolver and it's called Death's Door. What exactly is Death's Door? Oh, Death's Door? Please. Death's Door is kind of like a classic Zelda game with little hints of Dark Souls in there, but friendly. That seems fair?

Yeah. Sure. Kind of wrong, but not bad.'s we're gonna take a quick break no just like many parts are wrong so we're gonna take a quick break then we'll get back with death's door i want to mention something before we like get into the game proper you know devolver digital has done a very good job as a publisher picking a lot of good indie games but it's important to note that like the developer behind this game acid nerve is like kind of the like star here i feel like a lot of people get a lot of attention to devolver well deserved but acid nerve made this game um you would know their work from the only other big game that i'm familiar uh with is called titan souls which was

a game that came out that actually has a lot of similarities with this game insofar as you're a little guy and you're dodging and you're rolling and it's isometric. That was a cool game. But that game was more about, it was sort of more Shadow of the Colossus-y.

Yeah, it was entirely bosses, that game. Every single fight was a boss fight. Usually you only had to hit them once to kill them, so it was like a question of figuring out how to do that. It game kicks so much ass. Yeah, so it's interesting to see them kind of bring a lot of what they learned from that game,

which was a very hard game in my opinion, and kind of make it more approachable and kind of broaden the whole thing with Death's Door, which, as people have mentioned is fantastic it really is one of the best games i played this year plan i want to apologize when i said you were wrong i was thinking about it during the ad break and i was counting all the fucking enormous piles of cash that we were getting for that ad and i was thinking like i can definitely

i had it not occurred to me the zelda connection like i did i didn't really i don't know i didn't really get that vibe but like i i can see how it's kind of a... There's a fucking hookshot, Justin. I think what set me off is when you were saying friendly, I was thinking narratively speaking, it's a lot darker. That is what kind of raised my hackles. Basically, this is a game where you are a tiny little baby grim reaper little cute little crow reaper that's supposed to collect souls and i there's a lot of bureaucracy in in

this world and and uh basically there's like a big soul that you lost it's it's a it's a little a little abstract the the you know some of the like narrative stuff it kind of reminds me of an ace team game where it's like it has its own internal logic clearly but like uh it's not it's a little bit inscrutable uh i would say for what it's worth it does get more direct and explainy as you play like there is as it gets deeper the narrative gets very clear but i but i would agree with justin like you start off you're in this bureaucracy where a bunch of crows basically act as grim reapers and they travel around the world stealing souls. But, yeah, there's this kind of conspiracy going on and everything's not working as it properly should. So it does get a lot more varied than that.

Yeah. The comparison to Dark Souls that I made is one it's a little difficult you know fighting enemies you have to dodge and evade and yada yada yada it's much friendlier than Dark Souls you also collect souls whenever you kill something and then you can go spin them unlike Dark Souls you aren't

punished for dying you just keep the souls that you collected but the thing that it does story wise that that i like um and i like from any souls game that kind of tries to do this is it it explores like what it means to have to die so much because really this is a game about people who don't want to die um you as the crow when you are out and about retrieving the soul that you've been commissioned to go get, time moves forward for you. But when you are done doing your job, you effectively are eternal. So you're motivated to do your job efficiently, at least in the canon of the story. And then as time goes on, you meet more and more people who are similarly motivated by evading death and all the problems that comes with that. So I think the story is a little muddy at times, but overall, it's, I hate to say like for a video game story, but for a video game story, it hits more often than not.

I think what really works for me about this game is just the combat. I mean, the similarities to Titan Souls are there. For me, it was a little bit, and it's not quite as I would say. The game I'm about to reference is, for me, the gold standard of this isometric action RPGpg style but it reminded me a little bit more of hyper light drifter where you are dropped into basically arenas um through this big you know

series of big sprawling isometric maps that you're exploring uh and then you just fight a bunch of guys and you only have i think four hit points hit points. So if you take four hits, like you are dead, it is punishing in that regard. And then also you have an energy meter that you use whenever you start with a bow and arrow. And every time you fire one off, you know, it drains your energy meter and you regain that by landing melee attacks. So it's fairly straightforward. Like there's not a ton of stuff that you can do in combat it's really just like doing these melee combos there's new uh there's different weapons you can unlock that have sort of different feels to them but really you're just doing these melee

combos using your your ranged weaponry and dodge rolling and using those things to avoid getting hit even a few times, which is enough to kill you. It's really smart, and it works really well, and it makes you feel like every hit really matters, which is also bolstered by the bizarre way that they handle healing in the game. Does somebody want to try and explain that? I still feel like I don't.

You collect seeds and then when you... It makes a certain sense. Okay. You collect seeds and you can come across basically planters throughout the world and you can pop the seed that you get in the planter

and once you do that, the seed is permanently gone from your inventory but when you pass through it by that planter on another playthrough it is now a place where you can refill your health permanently it's so strange right like it it's mixing a few things right it's mixing that estus flask sort of concept but it's also like it's kind of like um like expendable save points in in games that do that or it's like you you know here's a here's a place to rest up between these big combat arenas but you may or may not be able to afford like building that checkpoint up and i never quite felt like i knew when the right time to

use my seeds was which is the problem for so many seeds that you could just do it literally every time you pass okay i definitely had some pods that i passed up because i didn't have enough seeds but maybe i wasn't as diligent with smashing boxes and shit i will if i could raise my sort of like big complaint with this game uh plant earlier you mentioned that there wasn't a penalty for death and I would um strenuously disagree with that because this game is I'm not a game designer so I tend to avoid things like like passing judgments like bad or good I tend to try to think in terms of like what worked for me and didn't work for me. That being said, I think the level design in this game is bad. I think it is end of sentence bad.

I think it's bad. I think it's labyrinthine and confusing and not fun. And there's a lot of stuff that is like a lot of like go hit this switch, which you can clearly see the gate. It's going to open. And now the gate is open. And I'm sorry about wasting 30 seconds of your time. That wasn't mechanically interesting at all. And then when you die, after you've opened up some of these shortcuts,

when you die, and again, when I say bad, I've said this specifically to contextualize, for me, it is bad. Because when you die, some of the shortcuts have been opened and so it's even less guided than it was before and even more confusing to find your way around and like finding like oh i remember there was like a a little like in the metroid or zelda style where you get an item and later you can go back and unlock a thing. It's really hard, or at least it was for me, really hard to go back and find those things. There's not a map to speak of.

It's very confusingly laid out. That was really the biggest challenge for me in this game was literally just finding my way around the world. It really makes you appreciate games that have honed level design to such a point where it feels like you're being led organically through an environment and without being forced through it yeah that's interesting so i kind of had a different vibe from it and i didn't necessarily i i think art design was absolutely totally captured by this game sound music whatever i kind of agree the music's so

cool the music's really good. I kind of agree, but in a different way about the level design. The core structure of the game is basically there is a hub section and then there's individual dungeons, if you will. And within those dungeons, there are like mini spokes where you, oh, need to find five souls of this raven, you know, dead ravens to unlock the next door.

But the core structure of each of those dungeons is very ravens to unlock the next door but the the core structure of each of those dungeons is very consistent and almost to the point of like you know oh i know i have to do this in each area which was a little bit of a downer for me because i wanted to feel a little more lost in this world and i felt like it was more directed than i would have liked i did notice the like the the thing you mentioned about shortcuts specifically, I actually really liked because it felt like Dark Souls insofar as, oh, I was able to flip this switch on my last life. So now I can get back to where I was previously, much, much quicker, I don't have to like take this long, circuitous route to get back to where I was, this door is

now open, I can instantly get there i could see if you needed to like if you were in the middle of a place and you needed to take like a few days off from the game i could see getting lost in that scenario because it doesn't give you a lot of guidance but once you're there are very clear like i think stopping points and check and um checkpoints where you just like teleport to that location. And I think in those scenarios, it becomes easier to get around. I just would have, you know, my dream version of this game is something that is more closer to like a Link to the Past where I feel like I'm in a world

that is really just like stretched out in front of me and I don't necessarily know what it's going to throw at me. Whereas here, I felt like it was, each of the sections was kind of predictable in that way yeah honest to god just a map would have i feel like just a map where you feel the same way too i got lost a lot like this is this type of game is my jam it's just the way that the i i think the like artistic design of these levels and everything is like is gorgeous and and diorama like and it really worked for me but also like there just wasn't there were not enough i don't know like way way points not enough like uh points of interest i

feel like for me to navigate these mccher paintings on my own without some help. Yeah, I've completed the game and I kind of like, I feel like I had the same feelings early on and then kind of abandoned them over the course of the game. I get what you mean, Justin, about it feeling like a little confusing and labyrinthian. And i had that and i also get the need for a map i really don't know how you would make a map for this game um because of the way the camera works and i don't know if y'all have been getting into like the secrets but there are dozens of places where you can kind of go through the environment in a strange way. And the camera turns around to reveal the other side of the isometric world. And there are a number of times where like a map,

I, I just, I, I, I cannot picture how to create it to the point where at polygon, we've been like working on guides for this game and actually having to go about trying to do it ourselves. We're realizing like,

Oh, so this is why they didn't do it like this is actually quite the challenge um i do think the game is only like seven to eight hours i do think you get your bearings really quickly especially in the actual world the one part where i do agree with you is so the very central hub is the the office that you work at and you go through these doors to get transported back to it. And then as you go across the world, you open more doors in that office. So you go from having like one door that transports you somewhere to having like 20 doors. And remembering, even though it says the area on top of the door remembering exactly what that area was is is a bit of a burden that said i i again like about halfway through the game i kind of had it all in my head the other thing

that i'll say very quickly to fresh's point about the sameness i was actually shocked how different at least the visual aesthetic was oh yeah sure i, sure. I was prepared for the game to be very like, okay, now we're in a graveyard, now we're in a castle. And it ends up going to some pretty unexpected, I guess, biomes by the end of the game. It adds a lot more color. It adds a lot more just different energies that I think, for me, prevented that that sameness issue yeah i i do want to

mention one other thing that justin mentioned that i thought was incredibly cool and haven't really seen this in a lot of games before so justin mentioned the thing about how you unlock abilities and then you can go back to areas and get secrets using those abilities and you're right justin like i don't remember those points either there is actually a guy an npc in the game that you can talk to and he actually feeds you a meal and while you're eating he will tell you three areas that you should go check out because there might be something interesting there and as i can as i understand it those three areas are limited by your ability. So he will not recommend stuff unless you have... Where is his cat?

I would say probably halfway through the game. There's like a town area that you... You're also forgetting the most important part about this guy. Oh, yeah. I mean, he's an octopus, basically. The guy has a dead body with an octopus moving around his limbs and the octopus keeps talking about how he's definitely a real person with human digits who just wants to make you food that's very good i uh narratively i

kind of um enjoy this game's approach to to death um i think it's something that games are like getting a little bit more comfortable talking about um and i like that it is not treated as something of like like to be terrified about but there is like reverence you know what i mean like i don't know if this continues to have the game but like after you beat the first boss there's like a funeral yeah you know what i mean for the boss which is weird like you never see that in games and maybe it's good like mario would certainly be a lot slower paced if every time you squished a mushroom mario's like now let's take a moment to think about this bro that we have done squished um i want to i want to also mention very quickly how many sort of like i think a lot about there

is this is a very well-considered game. Like, my complaints about the map aside, like, one of the things, a small thing that I love about this game, there's no consumables. And this would have been a game. Aside from the seeds. No, no, no, no, no. They're not consumed. They're utilized. They're not consumed.

Okay. Right? I mean, it's not like you use it and then you get hit and, oh, my God, I just wasted it. That's true. So, it's not like you use it and then you get hit and, oh my god, I just wasted it. That's true. So it's much more incentivized to use it. There's a great system that I guess is kind of reminiscent of Doom, where they keep you from spamming magic, or they rate limit your magic attacks by you refill your magic by doing melee attacks which is cool because you like it forces you to like kind of use both and sometimes you would love to do a magic attack but you need to get in and do some melee to to refill that meter so i thought that that was really um

really a smart way of of of like i just don't love i don't like consumables in games i feel like you never know when the right moment to use it is and like this doesn't do that um yeah and talk about getting in there i i struggle with um the from software games and like sekiro especially i just don't have the reflexes but i have the skill and and by that i mean like i can learn it what the game wants me to do i just for whatever reason it just is too fast and I can't compete. What I really liked about this game and its enemies is it gives you a beat to prepare for the attack. Like, it forecasts the attack that's coming to you. If you are willing to learn how the enemies work, you should be able to dodge and like hang in the battle.

I found it very fair. Fair is a good way of looking at it. I mean, I died mainly when like I let myself get overwhelmed or it's really bad. Like if you die and you just want to blow back to where you were before, it is not as simple as like, oh, just run around these dudes. No problem. Yeah, no, I think it handles balancing really well it felt challenging but not overwhelmingly so to me uh which again was an issue that i had with titan souls um i think it's it really honestly for me is one of my favorite games of the year um i i'm totally enraptured by it i think they

did an amazing job and um I think really anyone that digs was into say Hades, for example, or as Plant said, I think Legend of Zelda is a good comparison. Definitely checks a lot of those boxes and kind of from a studio that like has done good work, but nothing quite on this level. So it's really exciting to know what way

to think about what they're going to work on next. One other thing I want to go back to that Justin mentioned is, you know, the reverence towards death. And I think something I really appreciate about this game is it feels like a mature game, like not mature, like,

you know, M for mature and like so many games that try to be adult or try to like be about very, very, very heavy things. And it's a little over the top. But the way from the music that we talked about, which I think is just subtle and relaxing and nice,

it's beautiful piano music, to the way it talks about death, which is that escaping death is toxic, that the need for eternal life is bad, that fearing death is not helpful to you and is a distraction from life. I think it is engaging in conversations that are heavy and like adult without making it without being, I guess, so proud of itself or without kind of lingering in it. It kind of says what it wants to say, and then it throws you back into chopping up zombie ghouls or whatever you are with as a crow.

And I really respect that. And I hope I hope to see more games like this that are comfortable talking about heavy things, but not having that be the only thing about the game. Yeah. Great game. Highly recommend it. Yeah. How much does it cost? I think it's $20.

That's the real fucking question as far as I'm concerned. How many hours is it? How many hours do you get for your dollar box per minute right yeah is it really 20 yeah it's it's 20 bucks which this is extremely this is a steal get in here and get this game guys that is ridiculous this is gonna be a sneaky creepy like this one's gonna sneak out this is gonna be uh one that a lot of people are talking about i i i think uh i think i saw a story on pc gamer where it reached a hundred thousand players in its first week i think it's going to be

a big a big title get in there uh we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back with more great content hey everyone it has been a while this sounds like i'm reading something but i'm not it's been a while since we've talked about uh folks doing reviews for the besties um i have absolutely loved reading some of the comments and reviews that y'all have written we really really appreciate it if you haven't done one yet um please do it really helps us out a lot and it helps spread the show if you have an iPhone you just go on Apple Podcasts app go to the besties page scroll all the way to the bottom

and drop a star or a review thing in there and we'd really appreciate it I'd love to see us get we're closing in on 4,000 it'd be awesome if we could hit 4,000 so please review the show thank you

now Plan I believe you and I have a date. A playdate, that is. Oh. Oh, hey, everybody. Are you excited about the playdate? The new indie video game portable console

that plays indie games? Is it twee? It's very twee. Do any of you know what this is have any of you did of course man it's a weird piece of uh handheld gaming electronics of fucking of course i know what it is i'm a fucking pervert for this stuff i could do it it's powered exclusively by a crank anytime you want to play you crank it up to generate power incorrect like a well like the well is fun and it's a fun well

that you have to crank the bucket down into to scoop the fun out. Still not right. It is a, I would say, odd looking, like perfectly square

yellow gaming console. If you are familiar with Teenage Engineering and their products, they are the ones who are building it. And it does have a crank on it, but the crank is a gameplay crank and not a power crank. It's an analog controller that flips out of the thing from the side and then you use it to play games.

There's also buttons and a D-pad, but yes, that crank is a big deal. And then it has this black and white dot matrix screen that is very, very cool looking. It has, the screen sort of reminds me of the Obra Dinn aesthetic, which is appropriate since Lucas Pope is already making a game for this thing. Which is, by the way, the only reason that I am like,

oh man, I think I really, really need to get one if Lucas Pope's making a game for it. I mean, it's a weird thing, right? It's not going to be for everybody. This is going to be a very specific thing that plays very specific games that are made for it. And I think it's only sort of going to work for you if that is a thing that you very specific games that are made for it and i think it's only sort of gonna work for you if that is a thing that you care about but like that's also a a bit of a

luxury right they're not going to port anything to this to this machine the people who make stuff are going to make things specifically for it what's cool is that the uh sdk for it is fairly uh accessible there is a uh a sort of side application called pulp that they're releasing which is like a click and drag game editor that you can use in your browser so you don't need to know like a bunch of code and stuff like ostensibly you can make games in a browser window using pulp uh for it so like that idea is very exciting to me the idea of like you know being able to play people's weird rpg maker like shit on on this little specialized handheld is is is super cool um plant you've played it no yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so it's okay so far so the the the real selling point of of the device and again like to picture it picture just like two business cards

side by side uh and roughly like an itty bitty game boy the d-pad there's only two buttons like a game boy and then yeah the crank and i've played four games on it one of them is co-designed by the creator of uh katamari damacy and there zach gage has a has a game that's gonna be on it right yeah releasing 24 games one a week after it first launches that are i believe free for yeah they're releasing games in seasons um but right now the four games that i tried are like they're okay um and and i i i don't know why i would expect much more than that because again making a full original game is hard and doing it on a new console with only limited inputs and one of them being a crank that

you have not designed for is also hard um so it reminds me a little bit of the early days of the original game boy where you know like nintendo itself made a couple of great games but a lot of the games on the original game boy are duds you know worst, or just kind of like weird experiments at best. And that's kind of how I felt playing this. There's a surfing game that you control with a crank that is incredibly difficult to control. And in that way, it reminded me of California games back in the day. I think what's weird about it is when the original Game Boy was out, it was such a novelty to play a video game on the go that you would make it work.

Like if the game was too hard or it just wasn't super fun or whatever its problems may be, it didn't matter because you could play a video game on the go. And now there are a trillion other things for you to do um including playing video games on your phone so i think this will appeal to kind of retro gamer fans who are cool with you know the limitations of a you know itty bitty uh device like this that feels just like a game boy and uh i i i can't imagine this having a huge audience with you know people who expect you know to play fortnite on their phone nor do i think that that it was made for those people to be clear like that's not the intention it really is made for gear weirdos like like like myself i feel like i i have a a collection of teenage engineering like

music uh synth shit just because i really like having having little gadgets and gizmos and this is a a like a really slick looking one of those but also like i don't know the the developers who are making games for this thing uh like i feel like that is enough alone for me to bennett fadi has a game that's that's coming out on it like all of my favorite indie game developers are making making games for this little thing and i i don't know i find that very exciting here is my here is my question and like plan i don't feel like using time like even spending time with this will like give you the answer you need but like it is hard to especially in the environment that we're in right now we've heard nothing but the challenges of like spinning up any sort of hardware manufacturing whatsoever like all the consoles have obviously been hugely limited there's a planetary chip shortage um we just saw like valve get completely shat racked with demand for

the steam deck which is obviously a very different product but like scale wise this certainly seems like it could be overwhelmed the same way like what what level of confidence do we have that panic who is a company that has obviously dabbled in video games before, I think they, you know, with Firewatch and a few others, like what confidence do we have that they're going to be able to deliver? Like first that anybody's even going to be able to get these things that they're going to be like, the quality will be there that like the first time out, they're just going to nail this. I think that they will be okay for three reasons. I think one is the company itself seems to be very cautious.

They like to dot their I's and cross their T's. And I don't think that they would put this into the market if they weren't prepared for it. And I think that's why – This has been in the works. They announced this a couple of years ago, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it was supposed to come out in 2020.

So I think they've been waiting until they feel comfortable. I think the other thing is it feels like it's roughly as powerful as like a graphing calculator. So I'm not sure that they need the same type of chips that we're seeing international shortages for. And then three, like we said, I'm just not sure that this is for like a major audience. I think it is like a niche product. And I think it is a passion project for Panic. Like I think even for them, I imagine that they know that. It feels like a thing that this first season will be the proof of concept. If you know, people like just getting a new game on their, you know know device every week and

talking about it on on social media and if the games themselves are really good personally for me like i really hope that they abandon the crank um i'm sure there'll be one or two i hope there are one or two novel games i hope we get a fishing game but I would love for people just to be making Game Boy games again and a new Game Boy game coming out every week that uses the D-pad and the buttons. The crank is fine. It's very charming. It's a toy, but it is not a great way to control video games, at least so far whatsoever. So if you buy it, you get this first 12 weeks of two games a week for for free i believe that's right yeah yeah no extra charge the economics of that are wild to me

right well the con the device is 180 dollars yeah that seems very reasonable too right i mean that doesn't seem i mean i hardware, that is extremely expensive. For what you're getting just for the hardware, $180 is like way more expensive than the hardware. But again, you're getting the games and you're getting something that's like pretty, you know, designed within an inch of its life. It's like, obviously they spent a lot of time

on the hardware design. So I'm not saying it's not worth that, but factor that in. Yeah, some of the games are very bite-sized. Obviously, they spent a lot of time on the hardware design. So I'm not saying it's not worth that, but factor that in. Yeah. Some of the games are very bite-sized. Like the surfing game reminds me more of kind of like shareware than it does, you know, a video game. Yeah. Which I don't know if we need to explain what shareware is to our listeners.

But like it reminds me of the old kind of free games you would download. I feel like this could be like, I mean, I also feel like the idea that everybody who has one will get the same games in a week, like maybe some discussion. You know, maybe it would harken back to the days of like iOS where for a couple years there, when a new thing

would blow up on iOS, everybody would be playing it. Everybody would be talking about it. It was a big deal. It would be cool to see this. I'm not a skeptic about Playdate. I think everything about it it was a big deal um it would be cool to see this i i'm not a skeptic about play date i think everything about it is great and i think that that is going to be what it makes it very challenging i feel like there is like a very like if you look at the economics right now saving especially in like america and in other countries is like off the charts like people have not been spending money for 15 months. Savings, disposable income, they're at an all-time high.

And I feel like that's what you've seen with like the Steam Deck, the PS5, Xbox, the demand for those. Even the OLED Switch, which people are like, ho-hum, ho-hum, gone, sold out, gone. I feel like the what the only thing that makes me nervous about this thing is I think there's going to be massive demand for it well pre-orders

are tomorrow which is the day before this episode comes out so we'll know by the time this comes out we'll see how well this ages um we got any uh any letters any mail yeah uh I mean I asked people for questions about death's door and uh quite a people quite a few people asked why there is no map um though i think that i love

how i was treated like a pariah for bringing it up and uh like plants like clutching his pearls like what poorly designed levels and you like have been inundated with communicate from people like help i'm lost please send breadcrumbs i'm lost help plant a good idea that i did see here um that uh patrick mentions on twitter was why is there no compass and i think that could be a way to kind of solve for the problem rather than you know, a full map. You want to talk about fucking annoying. There is a person who's like, this camp, it's to the north.

This is an isometric game where you can only go in northeast. Diagonals? Yeah, you can only go in diagonals. What the fuck are you talking about? I mean, north is up. Justin, come on. North is up. There are two different ups because you can only go northeast or northwest. Infuriating.

Infuriating. Anything else? Another question and comment from Andrew Pothead with surely a love letter to Siegward. Is that the pronunciation of it? The onion guy?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he also says, i'm enjoying the puzzle secrets in this the one you had to solve using reflections to open a door was really cool that one is great um but the question that he asked for us what are your favorite weapons so far and what stats did you uh invest in uh i focused on speed like running speed and attack like main attack which both seemed the most useful to me um and weapon wise once i found the daggers i use those for quite a while those are like super fast attacking shorter range and that seemed really handy but i've also found unlike a lot of games

where you like find the weapon and just stick with it depending on the encounter i definitely will switch and be like okay i'm gonna use a long sword or whatever instead uh which is really cool you could just do that you could do it in the middle of the you just pause and switch weapons which is pretty neat so yeah one one last question and i promise that we won't give spoilers here but i do think it's worth addressing for people who are playing the game uh chris asked uh what did you all think of the end game after the final boss so no spoilers but i will say for people who are playing the game uh chris asked uh what did you all think of the end game after the final boss so no spoilers but i will say for people who are getting to the end of the game there is an entire another ending and you have to pursue the tablets of knowledge

and that's like all the kind of hint that you need and there's a lighthouse in the game i guess not a lighthouse a bell tower um but that kind of sends you on the path for the end game. Is this something where you should be doing it as you play normally? No. Or does something go back? You can't do it until the end game. I'm going to give one more little pro tip. There are circles in the game on the ground.

They're like stone circles with kind of runes on them. You might think that they're teleport pads and you're going to unlock some sort of ability to use those teleport pads. They are not. They are sewer grates that you need to slam down on. You can do that right at the beginning of the game. I literally played the large percentage of the game not waiting for the ability to use those.

But you can't jump, right? No, you have to be above them and you attack while you're above them. Okay. Plant, did you figure that out or am I crazy? No. No. You didn't know that until I just said it.

That is hilarious. Yeah, that's really funny. Yeah. Because I was just looking at one like, can't wait to start teleporting with this bad boy. But yeah, it's a really good level design. Anybody been playing anything else? level design um anybody been playing anything else uh real quick i've normally honestly when it's a game that i really do not care for i'll just stop after we've talked about it on besties i can have continued to play skyward sword which tells us says a lot because there are bad points

as we've discussed but god damn those dungeons keep getting better and better last week griffin referenced the um the pirate ship dungeon that is i'm gonna i'm gonna go ahead and say the very best dungeon in any zelda game ever is that pirate ship dungeon so if you can stomach the slow parts of which there are a decent amount the way i think of it is basically i think skyward sword is 20 hours of some of the best zelda i've ever played and 10 hours of some of the worst Zelda I've ever played. So if you can stomach through those 10 hours, you will enjoy yourself.

And it goes a lot faster now that you can skip dialogue and stuff. Would you say that the magic doesn't come in the form of a bold reinvention of the formula that served as a backbone for these podcasts? I'm going to start a podcast with people that aren't bullies. i'm gonna start a podcast with people that aren't bullies um all right do we have plans to talk about neo twooey in a standalone episode or can i talk a little bit about it okay so there's a new the world ends with you game that's why it came out

yesterday which is fucking wild it's out on i believe switch and ps4 uh which is also pretty wild uh i don't i i i'll probably end up circling back on this next week because i've only put like a couple hours into it um but it is very the world ends with you it's so weird that is fun because i really liked the world ends with you but i don't know if I'd have the patience. Oh, man. It's cool. Like, it's very flashy, and it looks very nice, and it has, it's very stylish, but I don't know, the combat hasn't necessarily swept me off my feet in the same way that The world ends with you did because the big thing for the world ends with you is when it came out on ds you were basically each fight was taking place in two different sort of screens you had one where you were doing you know kind of mini games and then you had the other screen where you were using these pins that you collected to uh execute different attacks and uh they are basically kind of replicating that where you collect these different pins

and you can level them up and each one has a sort of psychokinetic ability tied to it. So you can summon flames or do a sword attack or charge up a kick and let it go. And then you want to string together combos to build a meter that lets you execute like super attacks. But it's been pretty brain dead simple so far um and maybe maybe it

will escalate and maybe like the complexity will become a little bit more rewarding but i don't necessarily see what the path is to that um i am also playing it on switch where there is i would say four to five second uh load every time you enter and exit a fight which is just enough to be fucking annoying like just enough to be you can a returning feature of this game is you can chain fights together so you can turn on this scanner that lets you see noise, which are the enemies that you see floating around the world map. And you can kind of run through a few of them to chain a few fights together, which increases the difficulty of those fights that you then have to do in sequence. But it also increases like the experience and drops that you get. I have started

chaining as many fights together as I possibly can, not because of the rewards that they give, but because it means I don't have to wait through quite as many loading screens to get into the fights. So I don't know if that's as bad on PS4, but obviously Switch is what I play most of my shit on these days. But all that said, I don't know. It has a lot of the charm of the original. You have to figure out the character's favorite foods to increase their stats and you have to go into shibuya like clothing retailers to find like gear in order to

not not aesthetically change your appearance unfortunately but you know finding different brands that you can kind of sync up to increase their stat boost like it has all that shit so and the story is just as incomprehensible as the first so if that was a feature you enjoyed uh this this will probably scratch your itch um so yeah that's that's where i'm at it hasn't it has not grabbed me but i think that there was so much that was specific to the the platform that world ends with you like had that i do not think i don't know if it'll be able to recreate with a single screen straight up so yeah playing anything uh yeah i have been playing the ascent which comes out today when people

are listening to this do y'all know about this game no well yeah is it the climbing game on quest no it's an action rpg that is set in like a cyberpunk future kind of going for a blade runnery vibe but i would say it reminds me of diablo and one of my favorite games as a kid crusader no remorse which for people who played that game they will definitely remember it it is incredibly violent and brutal uh and just weird um and that is this game it looks like an unreal engine tech demo um is the best i can say and it is uh similar to what we've been playing with death's door uh isometric so beautiful um cg world 3d world uh but this old school isometric view and it's a little simple right now and a little messy at times um like i have trouble with the camera going in funky directions or its waypoints are a little goofy. I keep fighting the

same enemy over and over again, all of which sounds bad. And then you get a new weapon that just completely tears through the environment and everything in it and turns everything into physics objects. And suddenly, it's just very fun. I'm not sure where it's going to go from here. The writing so far is not my favorite, which is a problem for an action RPG, but it could get better. I'm still very, very, very early on in it. And I think if people are into those sorts of games, it might be worth checking out. i think it's similar to death's door i don't think it's a quote full price game i also think it is on game pass i'm at least on pc so that might be a good place for you to check it out uh real quick i am playing one on um it's an apple arcade game so if you're if you're subscribed to that you you can get it for free. It is a terrible title, which is Tangle Tower, which sounds like – what would you think?

Bad Tangle Tower? Tangle Tower. It just feels like a Match 3 garbage title. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, where I could cut the rope type of game. Exactly. So it's nothing like that. It's a murder mystery adventure.

I know, right? adventure um i know right it is actually the sequel to a game that came out in 2014 called detective grimoire um which was a uh murder mystery game that came out on ios whatever it is now seven years ago this is the sequel to that you play a guy named detective grimoire and you have an assistant named sally and you it is a murder mystery adventure, which is sort of like, it has sort of like a double fine sort of feel to it a little bit. That's a little bit of that aesthetic. It has a lot of really smart ways

of interacting with like the mystery part of it. Like you, when there's something to be solved, you'll have like a sort of sentence to form by pulling in pieces of evidence and then figuring out like what ties them together. Like this paintbrush was used to, you know, highlight this thing and you can pull like very organically pull together things that feel smart. Like it feels like you've, you have to solve it. You can't just sort of stumble your way into it. It's fully voiced and really well acted. The vibe is cool.

It's basically like there's a murder, and the lead suspect in the murder is a painting. And it is like that is where you – this is where this begins, right? And you're going from room to room investigating the different people there's lots of like puzzles that you find to find pieces of evidence which you can then go back and confront people with um but it's like it's moody but pretty fun and real quick on that was the was that murderer framed oh yeah yeah that's the good stuff that's the good shit right there i've i've now lost my appetite to continue talking about probably for the best indeed continue with the podcast or perhaps my life uh because of russ fresh tech yet again that's how i know i've got all the things we

talked about we talked about death's door which hey for people who don't play a lot of games but you want to be involved in our year-end conversation about the best games, I'm going to say it right now. You should play this. We will be talking about it again later this year. We also talked about Skyward Sword, which is, you know, it is what it is, but it has a pirate ship dungeon, which is the goat. We talked about World Ends With You 2, which is actually called World Ends With You Neo 2. I think it's actually Neo The World Ends With You. Okay. And we're going to wait and see on that one. Griffin's going to bring it you too which is actually called world ends with you neo i think it's actually neo the world ends with you okay and we're gonna wait and see on that one griffin's gonna bring it back next week we're gonna learn a little bit more about it we talked about the ascent which is an action rpg

and the cyberpunk aesthetic and it's on game pass uh and i will probably bring that back next week too and then we talked about tangle tower, which is an Apple Arcade murder mystery, which honestly, those four words have sold me on it. I have become quite an Apple Arcade fan, which I did not think would be the case. Justin, it's time for you to wrap up the show. Folks, thank you so much for listening. Next week, we're going to talk about the great Ace Attorney Chronicles, so that'll be fun. Until then, we would ask that you recommend the show to somebody you know and love, and you think might enjoy it. Review it, just like

FreshDick asked for. And just, you know, talk about the besties, so we can get more people on board. That is going to do it for us for the besties, so 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 Besties!