The Besties - Repo and Inzoi Will Terrify You – For Very Different Reasons

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

We’re talking REPO. (Not the genetic opera! Not the Emilio Estevez movie!) The co-op horror game blends laughs with thrills by dropping some deeply strange characters into a terrifying world. Plus, we talk Inzoi. Is it a legitimate threat to The Sims? 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!

Griffin, I found myself in possession of 726 big mouth Billy basses, and I want to know what you think I should do with them. Well... And sorry, I messed up. It's actually big mouth Billy's bass. It's like Attorney General. Is that true? Yeah. That's interesting.

I think that, first of all, how handy are you with a pair of pliers? No. Not at all, okay. No idea how pliers work. I was gonna say, you could crack all of those open, and there's probably just trace amounts of rare earth minerals inside of each big mouth Billy Bass, but you add it all up over time,

and all of a sudden you're a very wealthy man. Yeah, sure. I should mention I don't actually have physical contact with the boxes. Yeah. It's more an assurance or a verbal promise. You have a verbal promise from a Big Mouth Billy's Bass supplier.

Yeah, pretty esteemed out in Hackensack. Okay. Has, yeah. What are they doing with them now? As far as I'm aware, they're just storing them Esteemed out in Hackensack has, yeah. What are they doing with them now? As far as I'm aware, they're just storing them because they've got a warehouse and they're really just like looking to unload.

And they did show me one and it was in very good shape. And then they showed me a bunch of boxes, which I was assured also had Big Mouth Billy's Bass in them. I think they may, this sounds like a shell game. They may be scamming you a little bit. Where they show you one piece of it, and this happened to me with the new Furbies, where I had a supplier and they were like,

yeah, all 600 of these boxes are filled with the new Furbies. Here's one to look at. I was like, hell yeah. I dished out probably $350,000 for that. these boxes are filled with the new Furbies, here's one to look at. I was like, hell yeah. I dished out probably $350,000 for that. But then I opened up the other 600 boxes. You're not gonna believe this, rocks. In every single one there was rocks.

So sometimes some of the Furby variants do look like rocks, so it's possible. But I was gonna do like my thing with the 600 and I guess one Furbies was going to be sort of You know fetish related not for myself, but like for production of content for For people that like that yeah for people that and I'm not gonna yuck any yum actually I will yuck this one yum really the Furby yum. I will yuck this one yum. Okay. Don't hey you put that down Stop it. Yeah, that's a Furby. Don't, hey you, put that down. Stop it.

Yeah. That's a Furby. There's nothing for you there. You can fuck these fish though. What started this? What started this in your mind? You don't have it. You're just shaking your head.

I, I've been singing. Take it inside the bed. I've been singing, give me back that filet of fish, give me that fish to my son such that now he sings it back to me. That's beautiful, man. Just went from there. What a well adjusted child.

You're creating over there. My name is Griffin McElroy. I know the best games of the week. My name is Ross Froschagina, the best games of the week. My name is Ross Froschick, I know the best games of the week. What a quick introduction. That's fucking right, guys. Maybe that should be how it is all the time. There's just two, just the two of us talking about some random games,

cause Justin and Chris fell into the same toilet. Yeah. But that's okay, we're gonna be doing just a really cash hang sesh with DuBois, and we're gonna be talking mostly about two games that Russ and I have been playing this week. One is topping the Steam charts, and one almost certainly will top the Steam charts when it officially launches, I believe next week. We are talking about Repo, the survival multiplayer horror. Robot people game.

Robot people game. We're also talking about Enzoi, which is also sort of a robot people game by way of The Sims, but also Unreal 5, and it is pretty wild. We're gonna talk about both of those games after this quick break.

Repo. Repo is apparently an acronym, and I don't know what it stands for. Really? Excellent. It's got periods in the title. Pick up orders. Yeah, this is, so did you play much,

what was it called, not Brutal Company, was that what it was called? Lethal Company. Lethal Company, yes. Did you play much of that? I didn't, I do have, for some reason, I have the Fortnite scan, and that's really where my knowledge begins and ends.

I'm not sure why that happened. I played it a few times, mostly for like stream with Justin and Travis. And I feel like it's important to talk about this before we get into Repo, because it does feel like there's a lot of sort of similarities. My knowledge of this like sub genre,

this very specific sub genre of like multiplayer, survival, horror, treasure hunts. It's like an extraction game. An extraction game, yeah. I guess that is a good way of putting it. It's quite limited, but this game really does feel like it was informed by Lethal Company. I think that's right. Like Lethal Company, in Repo, you control a little robot guy.

But you were robots in Lethal Company? Those people were, you control a little robot guy. It is- But you were robots in Lethal Company? Those people were robots? No, I don't believe so. I think you were just sort of faceless clones, sort of. In Repo, you play as these little robots, and it is fully a roguelike. Every run, you start over from scratch. You go into one of a selection you know, a selection of levels

that are randomly selected for you. And you have- They've got like, what is it, like a wizard castle, they've got like a haunted mansion. Scary house, there's like a scientific facility, there's all kinds of stuff. Yeah. You and I think up to like six players.

Yeah, Max is out at six. Which is wild. Seems chaos, but yeah. You go through these different locations and you try to collect valuables and get them to an extraction point where they will be cashed out and then you get back on your truck that you came in on

and you get the hell out of there. And then you get to shop for wonderful little upgrades and tools and weapons and stuff like that. Things that set Repo apart, that was all true of Lethal Company too, things that set Repo apart. It is entirely physics based. So if if you are creeping along and you see one of the many horrible monsters that will absolutely kill you in one one hit in this game,

if you are carrying like, you are carrying a lamp, you can chuck that lamp right at that fucking monster. Bonk him right in the head a few times, maybe you'll kill him, probably not. You might daze him. I'll tell you what will happen, that lamp's gonna break. That is the other sort of humor vector of Repo,

is that you are trying to get all of these little extremely fragile items into a, a hovering cart that you can take back to the extraction point. And man, if you bonk anything with them, they are going to shatter and you will lose the money from it. It is hysterically funny when all of these things

start happening all at the same time. Yeah. So, so you've got those, those base gameplay mechanics, but then they also layer in just silly voice chat visuals because you're playing as these characters that are, as Griffin mentioned, they're robots. They kind of look like the alien on the Android logo. That's the closest I can think.

Yes, the way that they talk, so this is another sort of lethal company thing, is you are encouraged not to use Discord or whatever while you play this game. In fact, I would say it's pretty much necessary that you don't use Discord or something like that while you play this game, because it is proximity chat based with your team. And what that means is when you talk into your microphone, you see the character's mouth move sort of like Terrence and Philip style,

just like opening and closing a trash can lid. But it also means if someone gets too far away, you can't hear them as well anymore. And so you hear someone turn a corner in the distance and be like, hey, what's up? And you're like, well, did they just leave my proximity or were they just murdered by a monster? Because if it's the latter,

you're not gonna hear them anymore. Yeah, if someone gets knocked off a cliff, you'll hear their, yeah, it'll trail off automatically. It's really, really, really funny. But then there's also lots of stuff where some of the treasures do wild shit to you, right? Some of the valuables that you're trying to collect do wild shit. There's a doll that of the valuables that you're trying to collect do wild shit.

There's like a doll that when you, it's worth a lot of money, but as soon as you pick it up, it starts throwing a fucking crazy tantrum and anything it touches, it will just sort of obliterate as it whirls its arms and legs around, including you or other players. Yeah, I don't even know the strat. I guess you have to like fling it.

Just yeet it and hope for the best, yeah. I usually do not pick that one up because usually it does more damage to the strat. I guess you have to like fling it. Just yeet it and hope for the best. Yeah, I usually do not pick that one up because usually it does more damage to the valuables I've already collected than it is worth. My favorite is there's an hourglass that when you pick it up, it makes you move very slowly, but it also makes your voice extremely low and slow, which is when that first happened

when Russ and I were playing together, it was like so unexpected and so fucking funny that we just like passed the hourglass back and forth for a while so everybody could hear what it sounded like. Yeah, there's some other, I looked on YouTube, I didn't know this when we were playing, but there are other pro strats where it's like,

if you're looking up, it'll pitch your voice up, and if you're looking down, it'll pitch your voice down. That's very, very funny. There's also voice to speech, text to speech. So if you're typing, it'll automatically use robot voice to communicate to the other players. Yes, I like that a lot. It is, there is a thing about,

there's a few things about this genre of games, these extraction roguelikes, that do not, I don't know, they don't really light my fire, particularly. This is a roguelike. As far as I can tell, there is no progression between runs. Not that we've seen. Not that I've seen, yeah. Maybe I, I mean, I have not played enough of this,

maybe to speak a thought. It seems counter to the spirit. I could see them adding like cosmetics or whatever, but. And that's fine, right? Like you don't, I like stuff like that in a game, but since playing Wonder Stop, I'm trying to play away my childish thing. No, I like that kind of stuff in a game,

especially one that is as brutal and difficult as Repo is. Because the other thing is, the monsters in this game will fuck you up really fast. There's one called the Huntsman, which is just a guy, and he walks around and he has a shotgun. And if he shoots you, you die, and you run, if you're playing single player, he runs over. If you're playing with other players,

they could run in and grab your head so that you can revive. But like, it is a hard, hard game, which lends itself to the fear factor of it, right? It makes every monster encounter pretty scary, right? And as you play through the game, you get money and you go to a shop between each level where you can buy things.

There's exorbitantly expensive stuff like a shotgun, right? Like that's pretty obviously useful, but then there's like grenades and stuff like that. But when you start out, you have very little in the way of defending yourself or, which I understand that there's sort of a power curve to it, but I have had so many runs where just in the first level, I turn a corner, there's a Huntsman, he shoots me

before I even have a chance to like duck and hide under a thing, which is sort of the go-to strat when you start out and then my run's over. And that's not especially fun. I don't know. Yeah, it does make me wonder if it's a Spelunky thing or even like a Noita thing. I've been playing Noita recently,

where there are mechanics that we just don't know that will make those earlier runs much more fair. Yes, right? Like we didn't know the thing where you could pick each other up. Right, yeah, so you can, there's only certain objects that you can pick up, right? Valuables you can pick up and then items that you can use

like health packs and grenades and whatever. I haven't, those might be scattered throughout later levels. I have not found any, but you can also, there's a button where you can turn yourself basically into an object that other players can then pick up and throw around and put up on high shelves and do all that stuff. You could also launch yourself with that button.

Yes, there's a tumble dive, right? So there's, if you're sprinting forward and you hit that. Now, you can use that to damage an enemy or knock them over, it also does damage to you. It is hard, it's hard to pull off, right? There are ways to like counter each of the monsters that you face, as far as I know. I'm sure I could watch a YouTube video

that could like inform me what to do when that fucking horrible little duck starts following me around. I think the point with the duck is that so long as you don't touch it, it's just chill. It's like Psyduck. Okay, well, that hasn't been my experience. Again, I think that's sort of my point,

is I think there's a lot that the game does not bluntly explain to you that will eventually spread through word of mouth. Right, that's cool. It is a really funny multiplayer. Like I think that it has its own sort of siloed off single player mode. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, it does. And it's not really any different from the multiplayer mode except that like, you know, it doesn't make you wait around quite as much, I suppose. Oh, sure, yeah. But it's, I don't really like that at all. It's not really the point. It simply is not the point.

The point is like, it is a really funny, stressful game to play with like buddies. And I think it fills that role very, very nicely. Yeah. And I think that that was also true of Lethal Company. But I don't know, this probably speaks more to my own kind of like preference I think it fills that role very, very nicely. And I think that that was also true of Lethal Company. But I don't know, this probably speaks more to my own kind of like preference

and where I am at with my gaming time and gaming habits. Where like, I don't really spend a lot of time plunked down from my computer and microphone playing online games with a bunch of friends. And so like, I don't know how hooked it's going to continue to keep me. Aside from like, I don't know how hooked it's going to continue to keep me, aside from like, I can see us streaming this one

like on clubhouse and stuff quite a bit. Yeah, that would be very good. I also think when you and I played, obviously just two players, I think it is designed with the difficulty in mind, I think it's designed for like three or four. Yes. Because I could see there's an element of like,

I'm gonna draw enemies away from the pack to like distract them or you kind of gang up on enemies to like take it out. When it's two people, one person instantly gets killed. Right, and the other person just kind of like, well, do I, can I save them or should I just like, cut them in run? Yeah, and invariably it just ends the run very quickly.

So that is sort of a pro tip. I think from a core, like, in the way that Helldivers I think is a really perfect, like, oh, we've got 45 minutes, no one has been like leveling up their characters, not like Destiny where you have to be caught up. I think this fills that role really nicely. Like, this is the sort of thing that I could easily see

someone filling an evening with, with a bunch of friends, rather than having to, yeah, again, go through the process of making sure everyone's like ready and kitted out and things like that. I think, if you are familiar with Lethal Company, I have been enjoying Repo much more than that one, because that one was, it felt a lot more, like a lot more sort of slow creeping around cautious, you know, maneuvering around different

things, trying not to fall down off a broken bridge and die instantly. And this one is much more, I don't know, if a monster spots you, you can run and crouch and hide under a table and like the game is pretty tactile in that way. You can hide in anything, I was kind of stunned. Yeah, sure.

Because you can get your body to be so tiny. Right. Like the tiniest little cupboard you can get into. And it's also, I think, just because of the physics and the, you know, hiding under a table with someone else and looking at them as they whisper to you and seeing their tiny little robot mouth flapping up. When Russ and I were playing yesterday,

he was like adjusting his headset or something and it was making this awful, awful, awful rocket over the microphone. And while that was happening, his character's robot mouth was just like, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. It is just a very, very, very funny, very funny game. Yeah, it gives me hope that like people,

I mean, this has happened time and time again with a bunch of different genres, Battle Royale and whatever, Roguelikes, et cetera, that one installment comes out and it's kind of like a base version of the concept. And I'm not saying, I don't know the history well enough to know if Lethal Company was like the first take on this like micro rogue-like extraction game horror thing.

I mean, that has been a mode I know in like lots and lots and lots of different games. Yeah, Get the Fuck Out I think is also similar to that. Yeah, for sure. But if you- I cannot believe you said the full name, the full title of that. Maybe it's not, maybe that's not what it stands for, I don't know. But this one I think is just an evolution of that genre in a way that is very creative

and looks completely different from any other games in that genre. It has a PS1 3D look to it. Oh, I would say it's more... A PS2, early PS2 maybe? I don't know, it's a little bit slicker than that, than all that. It definitely has like a sort of stylistic kind of grainy-ness to it that I think it looks great. And also, genuinely pretty scary.

Like, in the way that like, when you're on a Dark Souls run and you have like, you know, a million souls and you're just trying to get to a bonfire, all on a Dark Souls run and you have like a million souls and you're just trying to get to a bonfire, all of a sudden every enemy that you run into is the scariest thing ever. Like in Repo when you have a cart full of valuables and you turn a corner and fucking No-Face is standing there waiting for you, it's terrifying

because you are so stressed out. You're so- Yeah, this is not good No-Face. This is not nice No-Face. No, this is mid sort of gross frog transformation. Yeah, he's not riding the subway in this one. No, he's not. He's in the baths and he's barfing out gold nuggets.

My funniest, the funniest moment that I remember was you were in the other room and you're like, oh shit. And I'm like, what? And you were like a giant face and I didn't even see it. And I just like ran away and hid in a cupboard and you joined me in the covers that were chilling in this cupboard. And then we've like, do a little peek out and holy shit.

It's the biggest fucking face of everything. It's like an Android face in a tiny little, um, haunted mansion room. Yeah. So funny. The, I just like, like they take so many swings with the different monster types and you really never know what you're gonna be up against.

Yeah, and I tell ya, it feels extremely expandable, this like, this concept. Oh yeah, totally. Like it seems like there is a lot of stuff you could add into this game. Even like new modes and stuff like that. We even talk about the fact that when you are playing multiplayer, if you lose, if everybody dies and you get the game over,

which will happen over and over and over again, before the game is like really over, it sends you to this scrap yard arena where you and all of your friends drop into an arena and you have to kill each other using the tools and objects that you have been maybe utilizing against the monsters in the game. And it's really very, very, very funny

because you could find a tranquilizer gun off the ground and try and pop one of your friends real fast to knock them out and then you just kind of pick them up and drop them gingerly over the edge. Or you just like, as someone's coming at you with a sword, you can topple a statue over on top of them. Just all of the different- But the physics is like so awkward

that like trying to do anything deftly is nearly impossible. Right. So it just looks very, very funny. It seems someone hits another person with a baseball bat and watching their tiny little robot body just fly 300 feet into the sky as they scream like Jesse and James blasting off again.

It's truly, truly hysterical. And I really appreciate a game where like, I don't know, humor is so inherent to like all of its different systems. And it's fucking $10. Yeah, sure. Jesus Christ. It's great. Yeah, it's really $10. Jesus Christ. Yeah, sure. Like it's great.

Yeah, it's really, really good. I'm glad we pointed. Yeah, me too. That's repo. I think people are gonna be playing this game for a while. I think streamers are gonna be playing this game for a while and it's 10 bucks. So that gets our seal of approval.

I don't know what that means. Like we don't do that here. And also it'd be fucked up to give anything the seal of approval without Chris and Justin's endorsement. I think we can just do it. Okay, I guess we have a quorum. Yeah, we do it. We're gonna take a quick break.

When we get back, we're gonna talk to you about a wildly different game called Enzoi right after this. Do you know when the last Sims game came out? Do you know? So I think it's Sims 4. Well, yeah. Okay, so last mainline Sims game,

not kind of like the mobile one and all that. Oh, yeah, yeah. So am I right that it's Sims 4? Sims 4, yes, is the last mainline one. Okay, I'm gonna guess it came out in 2013. 2014. Okay. It came out in 2013. 2014. Okay. It came out, that's a long, that's quite a long time.

Yeah, fucking over 10 years, Jesus Christ. It's 11 years ago, basically. 10 and a half years, it came out in September. That's wild, obviously that whole kind of franchise has become, like the whole model of it has become different. I just did a, on Wonderful, I did a segment on The Sims, and so like I was looking at kind of the history of it,

and it was wild to see like Sims comes out and gets seven little, you know, fun packs, then Sims 2 comes out, and it gets like eight little fun packs, and then Sims 3 comes out, and there's like 10 little fun packs, and then Sims 4 comes out, and then nothing else comes out, and it gets like 38 different DLCs and eventually becomes, it's free to play now. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, so like obviously that is sort of the model and Maxis is working on, I think it's called Project Renae. It's like the next Sims title, but there's like nothing out there about it. And so the market seems pretty, pretty ripe. The soil seems rich. It's kind of wild that there just hasn't been anyone that's like really tried to go at the Sims.

There's been a couple, I don't remember the name of it, but in sort of like playing Enzoi and reading about it, there was one other game that people were talking about as like, you know, aspiring to the throne a little bit. Enzoi is, man, it is pretty wild. It is really very, very, very Sims. It's extremely like explicitly the Sims. Insofar as you make little, they call them zoys and you have the whole,

you got the needs meters, there's a build mode, you can give them jobs. They- You got to shit, you got to talk to people. You got to shit and wash your hands. There's- You don't have to wash your hands, that's sort of optional.

Like in real life. It's good to, it's good to. So like, if you have played a Sims game game like it is very very much very much that Yeah, developed by crap crafton which made well published published by crap published by crafton Yes, the studio that made it is called in Zoey studio, right? They're kind of kicking off a Korean Korean game publisher. Yeah, they publish PUBG and a few others. Crafton does, yeah. Crafton does. The bar of quality is like pretty crazy. It's

Unreal Engine 5. The game is quite demanding of your computer, of your home computer. I mean, let me ask you this, Griffin, have you ever seen more realistic character models in a video game? It's hard to say. There is an aesthetic to this game and it is very striking. And I don't know how to kind of describe it aside from like comparing it to like,

a lot of kind of like Korean MMOs. I'm thinking like, God, what's it, Black Desert online. I feel like there is a kind of like soft beauty to like the way that the character creators in those games work that feel very much like this. The facial animations are pretty insane, are pretty crazy. Yeah.

And you can hold, like you could have a webcam pointing at your face. Yes. And it does a face mapping thing. So I don't think it does a face, I couldn't get it. I don't know if it does like a face scan and then like the fucking EA game face shit that they had in like Tiger Woods or whatever.

Yeah, no, no, no, it doesn't do that. It does your animations. So if you're like opening your eyes or talk, whatever, you could, effectively it's like a VTuber. Yeah, right. Where you're seeing like your full facial animations within the character model of the game. I wasn't able to get it working for whatever reason.

It's crazy, it's a single- But I have seen videos of it. It's a single player game too. So like- Oh, there's no multiplayer? I didn't know that. No, so they've talked about like, they may add down the line,

but like, I don't know why you would want to do a, I don't know. There's probably people who are deep enough into the like the life sim genre that the idea of face mapping, you know, their facial reactions and stuff into a game that nobody else is going to interact with appeals to them. For me, it just kind of feels like a bit of a flex

of like how powerful the software is. Yeah, I mean, it's also Unreal Hat, like the app already existed. So it's just them taking the data from the app essentially. So like, I don't know how familiar you are with the Sims, but like I feel like... I mean, so my experience with The Sims was I played Sims 1, Yeah.

probably like 10 hours, I'd like had the loop, and that was like very engaging for those 10 hours, and then very depressing right when it ended. Right. And that's not me nagging people that like The Sims like fucking do you, you do you. No, different strokes, right. But my, it just, was, I was, any game where I'm like, oh, I'm washing my hands and pooping,

like I can wash my hands and poop at home. Like, it just doesn't feel like a fantasy to me. But I do get it. Like I designing your house and like all that stuff, the animal crossing stuff, like I totally get. So I jumped into this really having almost no context. Oh, so you didn't play like two, three, four, anything else? Wow, okay.

So yeah, okay, this will be interesting because I have played all those games. So I'm curious how this- I didn't know what to do in this. And I don't, it's gonna be hard to ask you to this, but please don't try to judge me for what I'm about to say. I didn't know what to do, cause it's a life sim.

And I was like, how long is it gonna take me to fuck someone? So that's interesting. That is a lot. That was my immediate, because I was like, or I could go to a job. Yeah, no, I mean,

you have a bevy of options available to you, right? When you create your ZOI, and those options include going to work, becoming a volunteer firefighter, or trying to take one of your thousand beautiful neighbors to Pork City, and that's fine that you went that way, I'm not judging you. Okay, good, I appreciate it.

I guess I should just- It's not like you hacked, you know, that into the game, that is there, it's available to you, they're normal. And you're just, you're a sexual being, Russ. Apparently. Okay, so you want me to talk through my romance? I wanna talk about actually anything else. I did enjoy the primer that Russ did send me

the day we got code. And we should point out that we were playing like an early access. It's basically what's gonna be available to the public in early access next week. Yes. Felt pretty far along to me. Yes, absolutely.

In Fort Worth. The release date of Enzo is March 28th. So yeah, this is next week. I'm gonna gist the experience. So I was walking through the town as my Zoey. Yeah. And I met someone, I was going, I started on a town that looked like Santa Monica

in California. Oh, the one with the pier. Okay, cool. The pier. And I met a nice lady on the pier and I started talking to her. And she didn't seem interested in talking to me because she kept walking by.

And let me just reiterate. This is not my MO. I do not stalk people. Jesus Christ, Russ. I just wanted to see like how realistic is this gonna be? Because in theory, the realistic scenario is I try to talk to her again and she's like, get the fuck away from me, psychopath.

I don't know how you built your character. Every conversation I have had in the game, anytime the options start to lean towards, compliment their hair, I do that, and they're like, no, and they run away. They do leave instantly. Okay, so because I knew what my objective was before starting to play, I picked socialite,

which is the social butterfly one. Yeah, sure. Which apparently helped, because when I talked to her again, she was really having a good time, and we were chatting, chatting, chatting, chatting, chatting, chatting, touched hair. You touched hair? Touched, well, not, we didn't touch hair and hair.

Slow down, dude. Like a Navi? Is that what you mean by lovemaking? You did it Navi style? So I was like, oh, things are going great. You want to go on a date? We set up a date. This is about six minutes into me talking to her.

We set up a date. We met at the fountain, which was nearby. Wait, you set up a date and the date was, let's go over to that fountain in four minutes. Like that was- It was at about, yeah. I mean, I think that a Zoey day is like 96 minutes. Yes.

So it was probably like an hour from then in real time. Okay. So we set up the date, we meet there, we have paninis, I ask if I can kiss her, she says yes, then she says, I think we're true loves now, and I agree, and then she texts me, hey, things have been going so great, She says, I think we're true loves now, and I agree. And then she texts me, hey, things have been going so great,

I don't wanna forget about our great memories. And I text her back like, yes, I completely agree, things are going great in these 30 minutes that we've known each other. Yeah, it's been special. And then I go home, because it's been a long day, I poop, and then I call her and I say, hey, do you wanna come over? And then we poop, and then I call her and I say, hey, do you want to come over?

And then we smash, and then she starts cleaning my apartment. Did you wash your hands after you pooped? No comment. And then she starts cleaning my apartment while I'm asleep after smash. OK. This is insane. And I have photographic evidence to prove it.

Yeah, he sent me a... It was Ferris Bueller's day off style, whirlwind romance. It's very strange that that was your experience because my experience of like socializing, and when I built my ZOI, my ambitions were much more like personal growth and so maybe- Be not a fucking monster was your number one goal.

And maybe it's a skill issue. You are a Lothario. I was picking some good things. Good conversation points. My experience with communicating with the other zoys in the game, I don't like saying that word. No, I don't either. It doesn't feel good. Talking to other people in the game,

you have lots of different conversation topics to discuss and it will increase or decrease a few different social meters. So you have a friend meter and a work colleague meter and a love meter. And I'm really good at the first two, but those things build very, very slowly. Okay, let's start.

I very much enjoyed that that was your experience. Just some brass tacks stuff, right? Yeah. There's a needs meter, there's eight needs, your hygiene, your hunger, your, you know. One of them I thought was interesting was validation. Is it mean?

So like the need to have people kind of like recognize your stuff. Mission accomplished. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, I can't imagine any more validating of an experience for a socialite. And so like some of the game is kind of managing that stuff, right?

Yeah, and you can automate it. Like there's AI where it'll just do that stuff. There is some AI stuff at the game that is like actual AI and we will get to that in a second. So like some of the game is managing that stuff. You have moods that you will get into if you are, if you have to shit and you aren't doing it and the meter gets bad, you'll become uncomfortable.

Now you have this mood and that affects like your ability to talk to other people or like increase these skills or whatever. So you're also kind of trying to manage your moods. Then there's things like ambitions where you, you know, I want to become a great painter and I have a few little side quests for that. And you have like little random, I forget what they're called, but just like little small goals that you have, like flex in front of the mirror that will pop up that are sort of informed by your skills and your values and all of this different. It is a pretty complex system

that I think works really well. Do you think that stuff feels very different from The Sims? Not, no, that stuff not particularly. Yeah. What does feel different from The Sims is, gosh, it's honestly kind of tough to come up with stuff. There is-

There's a couple things. One, I had a question. So The Sims, and again, I haven't played one in a thousand years. Right. In newer versions of the Sims, are you directly controlling your character or are you using a mouse to like just give it points to walk to?

Yes, so you are, it's the latter. In this one, you can, there's like WASD controls. Yeah. Weirdly, there's- Which I kind of- I do like it. I like that. It felt a little more direct. Yeah, you can jump the the framing of the game is that you are like this deity

That is in charge of a whole city and like it views that through the lens of the Sims Oh, is that what the cat thing is? Yeah There's like a weird metal air of like a magic cat and you're like managing everything through a computer Anyway, that is reflected in your ability to truly change like anything about the game. There is, you can change elements of the city, right? Like everything, like you, oh, that street corner, I wanna make it look like dilapidated and that tree should be different.

And like, so like you have these extremely broad ranging sort of powers of customization. There are studio modes where you can really get granular with like character creation or like home decoration. And then I believe this is not available in the build that we played, but then you can upload that stuff to what's called canvas, I think.

And then other people can can download these prefabs that other players have made. That is also something that is kind of also in the Sims, but I don't know, the amount of stuff you are able to change, especially with the home decor stuff. Or even just clothing. The idea that you could have any t-shirt and then the sleeves, there's six different sleeve options for any shirt.

You can also, and this is where we start to get into the, some of the like generative AI stuff. You can, and I was not able to get this to work and also wasn't particularly interested in it. You can, with your phone linked up to a, you know, this specific, I guess, Enzoi app, take a picture of a graphic or a shirt or whatever, and then like get that in a shirt or whatever in the game.

I didn't even know you could do that. Supposedly you can like take pictures of objects in real life, and then those will, you can put them into the game. I don't know how to do that stuff, but it seems a lot like witchcraft. And then the even more blunt generative stuff is, oh, I want a heart pattern.

Yes. You could type in hearts for a t-shirt, and it'll use generative AI, which this is where things get oh, sketchy, because I honestly don't know where this is being pulled from. They say it's like- They say it's all internal copyright free stuff, right? We just realized that- I don't know how one fact checks that, but yeah.

There's no way to know for sure. They also say it's all client side, so it is not like the things that you are generating are being, you know, uploaded for other people, I guess, unless you share it on canvas. I don't know. It is... What's weird, here's where I feel, obviously, the genre of AI, like art generation stuff, like I want human beings designing scripts for this. There's also the like horror show scenario

that The Sims has fallen into, which is, oh, you need to pay $6 for a fucking dust bin upgrade. So like, I don't know, those are probably two different things, but like. I think so. I think there's a lot, when you start talking about generative AI, especially how it is utilized in games or media in general,

there's like a few different angles to it. How is it trained? Is it just wholesale stealing shit from other artists and then using that to like train its AI? They say no, but who fucking knows? The other thing that gets like kind of weird is like, it is being used specifically for user-generated content, which is its own kind of like kettle of fish, right?

I think that user-generated content is very cool because especially in a sim game like this, it gives you the tools to create, and that is very satisfying in a way that just interacting with the thing is not. And so if the generative AI is being used on the user generated content side, the question becomes like, is it replacing

an artist who would be working for this game developer? That's the big question. Is it taking away a job from a human being? And because it is being sort of like utilized for UGC, it's like, you know, it gets weird. If you say yes to that, then the question is like, well, does user generated content in general take work away from people?

Which, right? Like it gets very, very, it spins out very, very wildly. There is also like a reality where you could play this game without fucking with that stuff at all. I honestly didn't know, which is not good reporting for me. I was clearly focused on a specific task. But I didn't know that there was the AI stuff until Griffin mentioned it to me.

Which isn't, again, that was my fuck-up, but, like, it did seem like the offerings, just like the base game without touching any of that stuff was pretty fucking robust. Yes. So if you don't wanna touch any of that stuff, but again, you are still supporting a company that is very much engaged with AI stuff.

So that is, it's really, again, very tough to talk about this stuff, but we wanna kind of give you a full picture. Especially because we are not smart men. We're not, we aren't. One of us is a Lothario, but beyond that. And my shit was all about like self-improvement, which basically meant I sat in front of my computer.

I built my own house. That was cool. I genuinely enjoyed. Like your real life house. No, not my real life house, but like, you know, I got deep in the gully works of the build mode, which is sort of true to form, kind of like how I also played the Sims games.

Like I would create these wonderful villas for myself and sometimes my family, but mostly myself to live in. And I really love getting in there and really making a space my own. But I did something fucked up where like, my Sim wouldn't sit down to eat anywhere except my desk in my office. Oh no, that sounds realistic. my Sim wouldn't sit down to eat anywhere except my desk in my office.

Oh no, that sounds realistic. Which felt like the game clocked me in a way that I was not really comfortable with. Yeah. Whenever I would have a gathering of other Sims, they would only go into my office with me. There was some weird shit that got very annoying. One reason why I didn't pursue a lot of social activities

is because when you're having a conversation with somebody, you can sort of switch topics at will from this huge list. Sometimes it'll suggest stuff in the list that would be a smooth transition to the next topic. But sometimes when you pick an option from that list, both of the characters who are talking will stop and then turn around and sit down in a chair and then they will do that part of the conversation.

And then they will stand up and kind of walk in a circle and then stand somewhere else and then continue that part of the conversation. Like there's a lot of kind of weirdly clumsy stuff. Anytime I cooked anything, anytime I cooked anything in my kitchen, I would make the food and I would have this plate of English breakfast and then I would walk

into my living room and I would set it down on the coffee table and then I would walk away. And every single time I'd be like, no fucking, you gotta eat that. And he'd be like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And he would walk over, he'd pick it up off the coffee table, walk right into the fucking office, sit down at the desk to eat his egg with breakfast.

There's some, I don't know, that pathing shit is the difficulty of making a game with this complex system of interactions and stuff. It feels like I ran into a lot of that shit, but. Yeah, it doesn't feel, again, assuming that the public build is the, which I'm pretty sure it is, the build that we played, it doesn't feel like rough, rough in the way

that like a lot of early access stuff right when it launches is rough, but it definitely doesn't feel like a 1.0. No, yeah, it really doesn't, and especially insofar as like, I don't know, I've played a lot of Sims and I spent my first hour and a half, two hours of this game, like absolutely spinning my wheels because I was not,

there was a lot, there was just enough that was kind of different from how the Sims worked that I was having to kind of, I also haven't played the Sims in a while, full disclosure, but I was having to kind of like relearn how like a lot of this stuff worked. And it really drops you into these big cities with

very little guidance and so like day one you feel this Paralysis of like well should I fucking have that problem? No, you didn't did you know fucking perv? It's I think it's too soon to tell I think that it is I think it's too soon to tell. I think that it is gorgeous. It is a... I mean, I couldn't, for what it's worth, I had to run it on low with ray tracing. Oh, did you?

Yeah, my computer's getting there. So I'm due, but yeah, my setup's a few years old, and to get a stable frame rate, I had to run it on low. But I'm sure if you jack it up, it looks fine. I've seen video and it looks fucking stunning. I got, I didn't have to do that. My load times were pretty bad, pretty gnarly. Where were you seeing load times though?

Cause it's all fluid, right? Sometimes transitioning like between build mode and like city mode or like looking at one plot and then leaving and going to another plot. Sometimes it instantly loaded, sometimes it did not. I don't know why. And maybe it was like a, you know, caching textures or something.

I'm not a smart man. So yeah. I'm glad we really showed the range of possibilities within and so between the two of us. Yeah, right. You can live a sort of like, Aramite existence where you build shitty puzzle apps on your laptop while you eat an English breakfast by yourself, or you can go out and fall in love

and boink in the span of- Well, let's not go crazy on the love part, but yeah. Well, it sounded like you guys made a really deep connection. Well, one of us did. Jeez, Russ. It is, yeah, I don't know. It's too soon to tell. I feel like it's, it is a game that a lot of people

are going to, a lot of people with more experience in this realm are going to have a lot to say about. It seems crazy to me, again, this is me speaking with very little context, because I haven't played. It seems crazy to me that Sims people wouldn't definitely at least try it and not find this to be like a pretty significant like enhancement to what they've been playing for many, many years.

Yeah. Like it just- I mean, I don't, okay, here's the thing. If we're gonna get into that, if you have been playing the Sims 4 for many years and you have the 38 expansion, like the amount of content available to you is unimaginable. It's so much shit and this doesn't.

But I think the argument is there's a lot of stuff in here that like is either in a lot of those packs that you had to pay for. Right. Or you can make it. Or you can make it. There's shit in here where like you can make a movie theater and then upload a video file

and then watch videos in your movie theater. You can make cut movie theater and then upload a video file and then watch videos in your movie theater. You can make cut scenes in the game. Like you make a room and then you can put characters in it and kind of like make a cut scene. Like it truly gives you the keys to the kingdom. You'll eventually be able to drive like cars, like GTA, like actual driving, not just like teleporting places.

Oh really? Yeah. I didn't know about that. It's pretty fucking wild. Again, I don't know, but I think it's, my guess is it's gonna be a huge fucking deal. I think it's really gonna like do incredibly well for them. It is certainly going to be,

I believe in South Korea where the publisher is based, I do believe it is going to be a pretty big smash hit. There is something very neat, I will say this to sort of like cap this off. There is an element of like Korean kind of culture and sightseeing almost. I guess depending on like which city you live in. I lived in, it sounds like we lived in different places.

There were only two cities available in the build that we played. And you went with the one that is like a, you know, beachy. California basically. Yeah, boardwalk town. And I went with one that is like a metropolitan Korean city. I think it's meant to, yeah, like inspired by Seoul.

Yeah, and like it's cool. That's not really an experience I ever had in the Sims. And I think the other city that's in there is also an Asian city. I don't know what it's inspired by. In more rural it looks like, but I don't believe it's even available. But that's cool that it's,

because all the Sims stuff, as far as I'm aware, at least a lot of it is very Western-centric. Right. So it's cool that they are focusing. I'm sure that there's DLC packs and stuff that like go out, but I don't know. That has been an element that has like kept me kind of coming back and playing is like, Western-centric. Right. So it's cool that they are focusing. I'm sure that there's DLC packs and stuff that go out, but I don't know. That has been an element that has kept me kinda coming back

and playing is like, it's just kinda neat. It's just kinda neat to go in and play and explore. And that is, I think, the appeal of sandbox games for a lot of people is that, yeah, it's just kinda neat to hop in there and see what they do. You can set up a schedule for your Sim, which I really like.

You can say, okay, every day at two o'clock, we're gonna go to Central Park or whatever. You can augment that schedule however you want to sort of like automate the process. Like that stuff's really neat. It has a lot of really, really good ideas. It does not, it has not hooked me in the way that I remember the Sims doing, where it's like, well, I gotta get back home

so I can, you know, as soon as I get home from school, I'm gonna boot up the computer and play Sims 2. Like, I don't necessarily feel that way about it. That's more of a you, it feels like a where we are in our lives thing than it is anything else. Maybe, but like, I don't know, I play a lot of other Simulation games that I very't know, I play a lot of other simulation games that I very, very, very much enjoy.

It feels like you kind of need to understand this game to like have a great time with it. And it feels like there is a bit of a learning curve here. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's true. And that's maybe even putting it generously. But yes, again, Enzoi, a game I think people are going to be talking about for a while. I will be paying attention to how the kind of like AI conversation shakes out about the game. Because, I don't know, I could understand any level of skepticism and distrust

around this entire conversation based on some of the bad actors who have been using AI in gross and unethical ways. Yeah. But I think there's going to be a lot of things that people talk about when they talk about this game for probably quite a while. So, you know, get ready for that, I guess.

Yeah. Do we have anything else, Russ? We could do some honorable mentions, if you got anything I've got a couple things to talk about. I've been playing a lot of a game that we can't talk about yet. Is it publicly even that it exists? Oh, I know what it is.

Yeah. We can't talk about it yet. I mean, I think there's a demo out on Steam. If that's true, then I think I could talk about it a little bit. I don't even want you to talk about it, quite honestly. Oh, wow. Because I will say the only way this game

has been described to me as like a new Animal Will. Okay, yeah. That's kind of the extent to which I want to know about it before I actually start playing, but the embargo is not up for another three weeks, so... You're right. Okay. Then I'll just say I've been playing a game called Blueprints. Yes. And that's all I... Oh, I just got the pun. Did you get the pun?

Holy fucking shit! Russ! I've been playing this game so much, and no, that's the first time I've said the name of the game out loud. Yeah, okay, so it's blue B-L-U-E Prince like a king, like royal prince. Like a royal prince.

But it also has a secret meaning. I think there's a demo. See if you can figure it out. I think there's a demo on Steam. We will talk about it, but again, the embargo doesn't lift until mid-April, so it's gonna be a few weeks. Yeah, gonna be a while. I have also, it is the MaxFun Drive,

it's MaxFun Drive time. This is not technically a MaxFun podcast, so I'm not gonna make the pitch here, but... You can do it. Part of, okay, MaxFun.org. Wait, Jordan, Jesse, go, what do you got? What else is on there? I mean, my brother, my brother, Maine, Taz.

Oh, that's a pretty good one. Part of that is we stream every day, What do you got? What else is on there? I mean, my brother and my brother are meeting Taz. Oh, that's a pretty good one. Part of that is we stream every day and twice over the drive, I do a DJ set in Fuser. And I don't know, I feel like every besties around this time of year, I talk about Fuser because I get insanely deep into it where it's all I can think about.

I did see a clip on social media of you being a DJ. Yeah, it's just a genius, brilliant, you know, DJ game from Harmonix that, you know, has been delisted. It is not available. My understanding is there are some features of Fuse, maybe not one-to-one, that are now in Fortnite, or at least some element of that. I mean, that's being extremely generous, I think,

to what is available in Fortnite. Like, you can do some of that stuff, like you can do a jam sesh, or you have different parts of different songs, but the tools available to you to modulate that stuff in Fuser and throw some shit together in the fly is unparalleled. Fucking just amazing little toy box. Really, really, really amazing little game

to play with music in and it is- You can't buy it anymore. Can't buy it anymore, it's a fucking tragedy, right? Yeah, it's too bad. This is, there's a community of people who build custom songs for Fuser. And that is what has kind of like fueled my interest in it, you know, for these, for these streams every year.

Because it is, this community is quite small, but they are quite enthusiastic. And so there's like deep cut shit. I like, and you will find people in this community, like there's someone who has done a lot of custom songs based off of music from the Hotline Miami soundtrack. That shit all goes very, very hard. And then like, you can mash that up with,

it's a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake from LazyTown. Like the tools are obscene and they are so brilliant. And I genuinely, it is hard to think of a bigger tragedy in like the loss of games history than the fact that this game that is like the most fun that I've had playing with music in a video game is just like, you just can't get it anywhere. And I get that there's like licensing issues and shit

that make that quite difficult, but. At least there's sound shapes. That's an insane comparison. That's a- I mean, they're music games. Yeah, but yeah. Yeah, they're wildly different music games, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, you got anything?

Yeah, I wanted to mention two things. One, Josh Johnson, who's a correspondent on The Daily Show, also has a YouTube channel where he's been posting his, like, sets, his comedy sets. I am fucking blown away by the talent of this gentleman. He is doing, like, full 45-minute sets on, like, current events from like the last three days.

That feel like produced in a way that like, these are like special ready. Like you could go up on HBO and I wouldn't be surprised. I'm like, he explains the like, the Drake and Kendrick Lamar Kendrick Lamar rap battle in a way that is like fucking hilarious and also like incredibly informative for someone that is only picked at the edge. I do prefer the Chet Hanks explanation of the Kendrick Drake beat. Oh, I haven't heard that one.

Oh, fuck man. I'll send you a link. I'll have to check it out. But his stuff is great and there's like tons of free shit on his YouTube at length And new stuff is going up every day. So his stuff is awesome And the other thing I want to mention I mentioned it briefly earlier I started playing Noida again because I've been on this like action roguelike kick Where I played Gungeon and to the Gungeon for a while and now I'm playing this

Noida in case you don't remember, was the wizard side-scrolling action rogue, where all of the pixels are generated such that they can be set on fire or you could have pools of water. There's all sorts of fluid dynamics things. And then you're crafting wands using these different spells to get you further in levels. The game is punishingly difficult,

maybe even harder than Spelunky when you're starting out, just because it's so complex. I did go into the Steam Workshop and downloaded two Steam Workshop mods that I found to make it a lot more approachable. Okay, I'm curious to hear this because I have tried Noida a bunch of times and I have never cracked it.

Yeah, one of them adds a mini map, a small top right corner mini map that just gives you a little more visibility into what is around you at any given time. You frequently get one-shotted by a random ass guy across the map, and this kind of helps alleviate that a little bit. And the other upgrade, or the other mod I installed,

was adds just random health drops occasionally. Normally you have to go to the end of each level to like fully heal up. And this just allows you to get deeper into the game and experience like the true magic of the game, which is again, the wand crafting, which doesn't happen until you get to like those level breaks.

I am so like, after my experience getting deep into Binding of Isaac, using some straight up quality of life, I cannot play that game without the item descriptions mod that tells you. My experience after that, I don't know, it has become so much more on the side of like, this shit should be available. this shit should be available. Like, this shit should be available.

It helps you play and enjoy the game that you otherwise would not play and enjoy it. People who hardline, you know, say like, oh, you're ruining the intention. Like, yeah, but I didn't like that. Yeah, honestly, and I've seen this with Binding of Isaac, I've seen this with Noida's community as well. Those people, those snobs that are like,

you're ruining the pure experience, I think are in the minority. I think the majority of the people that love the game and love the community also love the fact that people can make changes to the game in ways that not only prolong the game's lifecycle, but also make it more approachable for new players. So I think that stuff is great.

I will say my patience for doing non-Steam Workshop games mods is very, very low. Sure. I'm not going to, generally speaking, do that, although I did replace the missing songs in the GTA remakes. That was the extent of my willingness. That's great. But any game that has Steam Workshop,

I'm almost always dipping in there and saying like, oh, what are people like, what's the most popular mod right now? And that invariably like there's going to be two or three quality of life things that will just make the game a lot more fun. Yeah. So those are my things. I think that's going to do it for us this week. Yeah, I want real quick.

Let me just thank some new members of the Patreon over at patreon.com slash the besties. We have John, we have Dave the birder, we have Trenton and we have Russ, no relation. Thank you for being supporters of the Patreon and us and thank you to everyone else who's been great supporters. We have a new Resties coming to you on Tuesday. We also have a new Bracket Battles episode coming to you

in the beginning of April to look forward to. What are we doing next week? Patreon.com slash the besties is the link. Oh yeah, I thought I said that. Oh, I don't know. Next week, we are putting on the cowl and grabbing our blades to play Assassin's Creed Shadows. And hopefully we'll have the whole crew back together

for that, thanks for sticking with us as we ran a lightweight ship this week. We hope you enjoyed yourself and learned something and stick around next week for the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games? Besties!