The Besties - Saros is More Bullet Heaven Than Bullet Hell

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Saros is the continuation of decades of bullet-dodging action games from Housemarque. But it has most in common with the team’s previous game, Returnal. Is this game welcoming enough to bring newcomers into the pseudo-series? We find out! Plus, a humongous collection of other stuff we’re playing and watching, including a Korean reality TV series that pits different types of spirit mediums against one another! Look, we’re just as surprised, confused, and delighted as you are. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

The other day was May the 4th, you know, Star Wars Day. Yes. So I thought I would go and celebrate. Now I'd go to Disneyland because the people are going to be dressed up. It's a day that you can actually, as an adult, dress up in Disneyland. There's going to be some, you know, Kylo's there. There's going to be some Darth Vader's, right? Oh, you can actually dress up.

You don't need the color block or anything like that. You could just dress up as the characters. You can fully dress up. I'm talking about helmets. Can I be stitch? Cast characters. I think you have to be a Star Wars guy, right? you can't just show up dressed as

That was my problem right So I'm like Oh yeah okay like Kylo I get it Rin Who is Kyle Same character That's the same person

I get it So I'm walking around And out of nowhere I see a full on Predator Awesome The most elaborate Predator costume

I have ever seen More elaborate Any of the Star Wars character I mean, this looks like it was going to bite my face clean. I love it. They have the face tentacles and all that shit, man. To be fair, he doesn't bite faces. He does steal skulls.

So we have to be very clear. He takes a whole spine out. He's predators crazy, man. But where do you draw the line, you know? Sure. Because, like, is this the new world? Is this the world of corporate mergers that we've been asking for? It does seem like a loophole that no one really considered when they were like,

could dress up as anything. Like, could I dress up at the Magic Castle? It looked like the people who were working there were also questioning, is this a loophole? There was a lot of Disney people who looked very stressed out about what do we do. They're in the back, checking all the fine print. Can you imagine if you went up to him and you're like, hey, you can't be here. You're not Star Wars. And he's like, well, actually, an issue 234 of Star Wars.

of Star Wars X Predator and then you're screwed. Yeah. I mean, they would throw him in the Disney jail. They're just, it's pretty easy. They just throw them in the Disney Jail. There's a special Disney Jail for Predator. They have created a special kind of,

it's like a tank sort of for suspending the predator because otherwise he'll get out, man. No, he's a, he's a fucker. I didn't realize Disney even owned Predator, but they definitely do own Predator. Good for them. Good for them. When are they going to make their Super Smash brothers?

I guess that's what Kingdom Hearts is. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. My name is Griffin McRoy. 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 Furchick. I know the best game of the week.

Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home, interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year club. And you, my friend, just by listening. have become a member. We this week are talking about, let me check my notes, the first, first party PlayStation 5 game

in 17 years called Saros or perhaps Saros. The critics are, they have not reached a consensus. I've been playing the game for a long time and I don't know that I've heard anyone say it out loud yet.

It's one of those. Okay. Chris, what is Saros? It is the latest game from Housemark, the studio that built its name on kind of arcadey classic twin stick shooters but then at a certain point said we want to go big or we will go to home or house

and they did returnal and then they did this and they're all in this line of I don't know you and I'm realizing hard to talk about this sort of game succinctly so how about we just go right to the you know how smart games have red and blue balls in them this one happens too that's a good way of doing it yeah Yeah, buddy. It's a game about those balls.

It's a game about avoiding or sometimes collecting red and blue balls very, very quickly. And we'll talk about. Also trauma. Also trauma. And Lovecraft, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're going to talk about how that all comes together after this short break. Can one of the two, I did not play a ton of returnal. Okay, I finished returnal.

Okay. Like 10 minutes ago. Oh, about 10 minutes ago. Yeah, I was like, I'm close. I can do it. And I did it. You finished returnal. Oh, sorry.

I finished Saros. Okay, cool. I finished both of them. So please understand. I'm trying to set up a completely different thing, which is that I did not play much of returnals. So obviously this is a spiritual successor, if not a like narrative one to any degree that I've found so far.

And I'm curious sort of what the, as a setup for what Saros is, how it kind of has evolved on the returnal sort of premise. Sure. Okay, so if for those that played Returnal, which wasn't a ton of people, so I will kind of backtrack a little bit. Returnal was basically a roguelike in the style of like a binding of Isaac or something like that, but the gameplay was bullet hell style third person action. Pretty straightforward. Sort of Risk of Rain 2-esque. Yeah, but with like actual levels and exploration and like build crafting.

I mean, Riskorraine has that, but build crafting was a big part of Returnal. here's the thing about returnal it turned off a lot of people for two reasons one it was very hard which I get and the other one is they made a pretty boneheaded decision in the development cycle of not letting you save or quit a run in the middle of a run

and runs could take like three or four hours it's just incompatible with my life man and I could not fuck with Returnal for that very reason they have since fixed that so if you go and play Returnal today you can quit a run in the middle of it. And indeed, the first thing you see when you boot up Saros is, hey, by the way, if you need to stop a run,

you can do that so long as you don't quit in the middle of a boss fight. Right. If you do that, you will lose everything. But otherwise, you can stop whenever you want, and it's all chill. So good decision, y'all. At a glance, they might seem like very, very, very similar games, but structurally, they're actually very different.

Yeah. There was very little in the way of permanent progression And you more or less just like had to have a really good run to make it through This game is all about permanent progression every single run you're earning currency which you then spend on stats and upgrades and Things that'll make subsequent runs faster and also you're not doing runs from scratch You're doing runs you'll unlock like a checkpoint you'll you can start from that checkpoint Yeah, there's a really interesting kind of like this is this is very much or at least in my experience like a game about sort of farming because those upgrades are pretty important.

There is a stat called, what is it called? Not mastery, but something like... Proficiency. Proficiency, yeah, that you are sort of leveling up. You can get these permanent sort of like starting upgrades to your proficiency. But as you kill enemies and you pick up Lusite, which is the Lucanite. Oh, boy. Lusite is the fucking stuff that they make Pizza Hut cups out of.

I think that's what you're collecting. Yeah, I think you're collecting pizza hut cups as you down enemies. You're building this proficiency bonus and then every weapon or like a special power that drops will drop at that strength level. So there's there's a reason to like you could, if you just started the third sort of level, you can teleport to that and just like rocket from there. Or a sort of more consistent strategy is like start a little bit earlier and, you know, farm up all this stuff. You're also picking up artifacts, which you have a set number that you can pick up that usually. will give you some statistical benefit, some sort of more intangible benefit, like you're invincible for a second after you dash or whatever. And then a lot of the times a negative detriment that is

also associated with it. Like now you take fall damage or your gun jams whenever you take damage. And so it also becomes a question of like, well, do I want to pick this up? Because I'm early in my run and I'll probably find something a little bit stronger, you know, a little bit later on. So you're doing a lot of sort of on the ground decisions as well. If people are listening and they're like, that sounds like quite a bit of systems, the answer is you're right. Yep. And the challenge with this game, it has grown on me a lot after watching many videos and many conflicting videos, including one that we'll talk about that Fresh gave me that ruined, I would say, about two to three hours of my experience with this game. Oh, no.

Oh, it was, it completely ruined it. But we'll talk about it. It's not your fault. Oh, thank you. The challenge with this game is, in theory, you're going in. you're dodging the red and the blue balls and then you're using a shield that can like block some of them but not all of them and some of them need a parry that's like very familiar gameplay mechanics and then you're also going into a run and then you're collecting the the whatever the credits are and then doing the upgrades that all should be pretty straightforward and yet it's not entirely because of the things like you just talked about the weapons that have some have upgrades and some have detriments well That's only true. Once you've entered it, basically the quote, like red moon or red sun era.

Yeah, you turn on hard mode in the middle of a run and suddenly everything drops more currency, but the things you pick up can have these negative effects. Yeah. Right. Or you could just spend the time dodging, but if you shield certain types of blue bullets, you can collect the blue bullets and then you can use that to charge a special weapon. Cool. But if you watch Fresh's video that ruined my life. I didn't make the video. To be fair, I just suggested it.

You can also punch the bullets. Oh, yeah, bad idea. Don't do that. It doesn't take any charge. I was like, oh, that's how you're supposed to play this. Horrible. No, you got to use that shield, man. Much harder.

Yeah. And then there are yellow bullets that when you take them on, even if you shield them, they can like stick to you and they can lower your health, but you can recharge your health if you fire weapon. I could go on and on and on. And these systems ultimately are really interesting. But a thing that I think it struggles with compared to a Hades or similar roguelikes, and it struggles with this in the story department too is it kind of hits you with it all at once. Sure. And where I feel like traditionally in these games, it's like you do a short run and then you go back and you meet a new character who's waiting there for you.

And they're like, hey, have you ever heard of yellow orbs? And you're like, oh, interesting. And then you go and do that run. We're here like before you even go into the first run, there's like a whole camp there. like, do you want to go talk to 20 people? I think you actually kill someone before you even do a run. I think you literally like someone's gone crazy and you're like, well, I got to kill them. Yeah.

And then you do a run. The systems, plan is right. The systems are insane. There's systems in there that I watched this 10-minute video and many of them I didn't understand. Part of the problem is they decided to label everything in very funky ways. Yeah. Do you know what stat, just for argument's sake, what would you name a stat that increases your maximum shield time.

Shield. Shield. Shield stat. Okay, would you name it Command? Probably not. Would you call the stat that determines

how much Pizza Hut cups the enemies drop? Would you want to call that drive? No, I wouldn't. I don't think I would call it that. It's a car game. Yeah, it's, yeah, that's shit.

I genuinely, after about two or three runs and I was just like picking up all these items and it's like, oh, you've gotten more resilience. I eventually stopped and I was like, okay, I went through the menus like, Is there like a help section that tells me what the fuck these stats do? And there was like a data lore entry that like kind of, kind of explains sort of what they do.

It's not even just the stats. It's also like the weapons you pick up will have these sub-abilities. They're incredibly important to their capabilities as weapons. And there's just, it's like expand more information. Oh, you're just going to get the names of what those sub-abilities are. You have no idea what they do. I do want to say because this, this paints like a pretty brutal picture of the, Before you say the nice thing, do you mind if I has purge one more bit of negativity?

Yeah, of course. Because I got to get all these yellow orbs off me and then we can get into. There's so much good stuff. The correctional build up, by the way. The last bit of negativity. The game's story is, well, it's Lovecraftian, but really it's like weird fiction and it's supposed to be influenced by the King in Yellow, which if anybody watch True Detective Season 1, you'll be familiar with this.

Mostly it's like they took the names of love. locations and ideas like Carcosa is the name of the planet. Anyway, the thing with weird fiction is you need to know what normal is before you get weird. You need to know who the people are before they start losing their minds. And the story from the drop is in Chaos Town. So you don't know, you have no footing for this story full of all these strange words and people. You early on don't know if people are alive or not. I am nearly certain that there was a bug in my game and a character wasn't showing up. So it was just an empty space, but there was subtitle going on.

And it took me like an hour after the game to be like, oh, I don't think that was supposed to happen. What was the message of the invisible guy? Yeah. So this is all just to say, it's like it is across the game where this like insistence on just dive into the deep end is a problem. But once you do get in. Yeah, the systems being sort of pretty opaque,

honestly stopped being an issue for me once I got pretty good at the game. Because it's so fucking fun. This game feels so good to go into a room that you have been in a dozen times like farming up these resources or like trying to get through a run and dying to the boss and being like excited to fight the dudes in there because it's just so fun to dash around and then shield to collect some blue projectiles

and then launching your power attack at an enemy and then they turn into a little turret and then you dash through that like it feels so fucking great all the time. They give you option. The game is mostly linear like it's not exploration heavy for the most part because contrary to a returnal. But they do give you moments where it's like, oh, this is a side path.

You can go here for more currency or maybe another battle or whatever. I always, always, always took the side path because it's just not only more stuff, but also like I want to do those fun platforming challenges or those fun like Dodge, whatever they are. Yeah, the movement, I kept reminding me of like, it kept reminding me of crackdown once you'd been playing for a while and collected like a ton of agility orbs and you were just running. There's very, very, very little aiming down sights that you do. Like there is a special function that most guns have that you have to like half pull the trigger, which is a little bit finicky in order to like access.

But most of the time, most guns like auto lock on and the bullets will just hit if you are pointed in the general direction of an enemy. And so when that is true, you can spend more brain and hand energy like dodging or shielding into blue projectiles to get your power recharge. Like, man, it feels so good. I think the real trick to the way it does 3D platforming and does movement is it handles like a ship in a 2D schmup, which if you have played any 2D games, there's no momentum needed. There's no sense of like, you know, gaining or lowering speed. You move it as consistent speed so that you can perfectly nail wherever you need to be. You stop on a dime, you start at 100 miles per hour. And that, not chasing reality in that one aspect while letting the game look like maybe the best looking game on the PS5 is such a big choice.

I think there are many studios that would say, well, it looks so real. The character needs to look real when they move. And nothing about this character looks real when it moves. The game looks amazing. And then you start hopping around and you are just like, you might as well be a little like pylon that happens. to have a human face on it. It's really, well, that human face belongs to Rahul Kohli, who is, who was in fucking midnight mass

and like a bunch of eye zombie, uh, haunting of Hill House, maybe. Uh, like, I, an actor I recognized pretty much instantly. And then to watch him be like, I'm acting and I'm acting, we just like, flicking himself up 30 feet into the air, was like, oh, that's great. You're having a lot of fun, man. That's awesome.

Maybe we're a helmet, but otherwise. Yeah, props that would be safer. Yeah, I bounced off returnal, and this is a thing I've heard a lot from people who have played Seros is like, I bounced off returnal because I felt like, one, the like not being able to stop in the middle of a run thing was pretty bad. Two, just like it's locked on PS5, right? And I, my PS5 is in my office and it is tough for me to like find time unless I stay up, you know, super late to like sit down at my office. play this game for for a long time. But three, like, I just never felt like I was making much progress. I never felt like I was, that my next run, I would have a better shot at it.

Because the enemies, you could be on the run of your life and fuck up a little bit once, and the enemies could just, like, combo you right into the ground. Whereas here, like, if that happens, it's like, ah, fuck, but taking home all this currency, I'm going to come back stronger. I'm going to have all this stuff. I do wish that the upgrades, I do wish that the upgrades, the upgrades, the artifacts that you were picking up were a little bit more impactful. Yeah, that was sort of the, you know, in playing this and playing Returnal, like the big

takeaway I have in Returnal, and I 100% get the criticism of like you feel like you're not necessarily making progress in Returnal. But you are making meaningful, like, build crafting decisions in Returnal, where, oh, I'm going to make like a melee-centric build or I'm going to make whatever, one-shot kill build, things like that. Whereas this, you can kind of sort of do that. some of the artifacts kind of have those things, but largely, like, you're mostly just picking up everything unless there's something that has, like, a very negative, like a slower dash or something.

Like there's a re-roll mechanic that you, like, get through the armor upgrade, permanent upgrade thing, which is like now whenever you go into a run, if you find an artifact and you don't want it, you can roll it to try and get it to be something else. And, like, that's an idea that exists in, you know, so many games in this genre. But it's like, do I want to re-roll this artifact that, like, barely increases my shield capacity, and maybe it'll give me one that, like, makes me a little bit stronger whenever I'm, like, low health. Like, it doesn't, it just doesn't.

Whereas in Hades, it's, like, every choice you're making is like, well, fuck, okay, well, now I, I'm, this is going to be a very helios sort of centric run. I'm going to be playing this way, this way, which matches with this weapon style. I did find, and maybe this is, like, a personal preference thing, I did find that some of the weapons, especially like as you get later into the game,

just like I could not get going. I could not make them as effective as like some of the earlier weapons that I found. The shotgun, for example, like... Shotguns are tough, yeah. Required to get like right up in the face of the enemy and the game does not encourage that at all. Well, okay, it does because there's also a stagger mechanic in the game

where if you can, you know, hit an enemy with a certain heavy enough weapon and shotguns do it with one shot. If you get up close, it will stun them, which then you later unlock the ability to like melee someone in that state and basically one hit. Right, but then you're risking getting hit.

Right, you're not making a bunch of other choices that are like, okay, I've built this guy to be an up close, like, high health. Like, you could maybe try and get a lot of resilience through the artifact. I'm going to watch like late game builds or like, I don't know, YouTube builds of this stuff because they emphasize melee so much in the game. Like, you can get this upgraded arm that I keep thinking there must be a, way to play that is much more melee focused. You do get to a point, at some point, I guess, spoilers on just functionality, where if you

stagger enemies, you can melee them basically from any distance and you'll dash right to them in melee, which is effective. It's good. But I just found, like, I'm pretty risk-averse in these sorts of games. So, like, I was doing incredibly well just hanging back. And any time I, like, got up close, I would, like, get hit, lose a combo, lose a whatever it was. The adrenaline.

Yeah. Yeah, things like that. I want to add one quick thing on the stats and upgrades too. For people who are listening who are like me who do not like rogue likes where it feels like artificial growth, where it's like, oh, I play and then I get good by just doing the grind and I get better and better and better. This game does that. Like you're going to need to grind to not just get like your stats increased, but to like unlock your basic abilities, like a grappling hook and things like that. but and it's a big but it moves it moves very fast like you get a lot of upgrades very very quickly each time you're coming back from the run and i found that to be a bit it felt like a nice compromise for me even if that's not my personal preference for how to play rogue likes i felt like it was upgrading me at pace with about how good i was at the game so versus i was saying early on on. Like, I was like, yeah, I mean, it would be nice to have the grappling hook, but like, I'm not going to get much harder than this either way.

In that, yeah, I don't know. The balance there worked pretty well for me. Did either of you guys get through the second boss? Yes. Yeah, the last thing I got is, I mean, I don't know if it's a spoiler because it's so obvious from the start of the game that there's a grappling hook thing that you will eventually get. So that I am now on that sort of level. the third and fourth actually sort of chunks of the game. And that is crazy. There's a mechanic that unlocks there that lets you put modifiers on. And there's positive ones and negative ones. And you have to kind of balance them out. And that has made the game so much more enjoyable for me.

And it's not something that is available to you until you can beat that second boss, which is a tall. It's a weird choice that it takes a good six or seven hours so I get to that point. And then what you're able to do is, let's say, for example, you don't do a lot of the sucking up the blue balls thing with the shield, you can turn it so that like, oh, instead of being able to do that as much as you want, you're getting more currency overall if that fits your play style. So you can really craft it in a way that fits your place style.

And once I started doing that, I was flying through the game. Yeah, one of them is just a damage boost, just a flat damage boost, and you can like level it three times. And then you do have to pick quite a few negative modifiers to weigh it out, but like, man, it's, the game's pretty fucking fun, but you can just mow down guys. There's a lot of sort of quality of lifestyle stuff that you can grab in there.

It's a very smart system. Yeah, I like that a lot. A last thing before you wrap, we haven't even talked about the biomes and how this game looks. It makes me so sad that they have not announced a blood-borne, like, remaster in the style of Demon Souls. It's really, there's so much,

Especially once you go into like spooky eclipse mode, like so much of that shit. Just like, man, I'd love to, I'd love to see Yarnum in this light. I mean, the boss fights especially, like, man, there are some boss fights in this game that are unquestionably the best looking visual things I've seen in a video game, bar none. Like stunning, jaw dropping, looked like they could easily be the final, final boss of the game. and in fact it's just halfway through the game because there are so many of those. The art design of those in particular I was just really floored by.

I will admit that from an environmental standpoint, I didn't think the environments themselves quite lived up to that. Like there's some cool vistas, but largely it's like, you know, metal pipes and like craggy rock moon face things. And like, it's just environmentally... Yeah, I mean, it's doing the progen thing, right?

Where it's like not... Well, it's not full procedural general. like it's like lining up different pieces. Yeah, they're picking up different pieces, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I like the general themes. Like the first one that Griffin is referencing is kind of blood-borne, decrepit castles, stonework, you know, gnarly trees, wasted landscapes. The second one is underground.

Basically, the real world and the Matrix, not our world. That was my thought. Which is, like, I enjoy this kind of. of tour of just cool sci-fi fantasy places. I'm down for it. It works for me. Again, not entirely sure how it connects to the weird fiction, sci-fi stuff. But, hey, sure, I'm like, I'm ready for vacation. I've really been enjoying this game. I'm going to, I'm probably going to keep playing it. It's been a fun exercise bike game for me, which I think is saying something, because I can't usually fuck with, like, twitchy, like super twitchy games. And this game is about

as twitchy as they come. But I don't know. Like House Market does such a good job at taking systems that are somewhat like there's a lot of systems. There's a lot of things you can do in this game. But like it's not that hard to kind of get something going. Yeah. It's not that hard to,

because you can always sort of dash away from a problem. And then there's like a lot of things you can do if you dash towards that problem. If you want to like take a slightly bigger risk. But it just, man, it's such a good feeling game, and I want to keep coming back to it just to like get, see what the new power is, to see what the new, uh, weapon is. Um, I am kind of dying now that I've finished this game to go back to Returnal, because I think this game is like almost a really good tutorial for getting

very good in Returnal. Unfortunately, I think this game might never come to PC, uh, which is just a new strategy that Sony is doing where they're not necessarily. bringing their exclusives to PC. But Returnal is on PC. It's on Steam. And so if you play through this game and you're like, wow, this is really good.

I want more of it. Check out Returnal. I fucking love that game. And I think narratively, Returnal kind of sticks the landing a little better than this one. But overall, this game is fun as shit. I loved it. Let's take a brief break.

And then when we come back, we can talk about more of House Mark's red and blue ball lineage. Okay. So it is a little bit crazy how long this studio in some fashion has existed. Yeah. One of the most senior active studios, I would say, making games today? Yeah.

They've gone through a few name iterations, at least early on in their period. They were originally called Blood House, which is a great name. That's a good fucking name. That's when they released the first Stardust, which will come back later. and then they became TerraMark I think the two separate studios that came together to work with each other.

Right, hence the name. So I guess, I don't know, Housemark was what they ended up as as the fusion of the two studios. And that's where you start seeing more games that you've probably played before. The first game that I remember playing of theirs was Super Stardust HD,

which came out in 2007. Is that a PS3 title? That was a PS3 title. But apparently Superstar Dost came out on MS DOS in 1996. Who fucking knew? It's crazy. And was a sequel to Star Dust by Blood House in 1993.

It was one of the like Amiga classics of back in the day. I think they're most known for that like Star Dust arcade style arcade game, which is like just score a lot of points, dodge bullets, things like, like Sectory in that style. The secretary was obviously inspired by house marks and early stuff. Okay. I was trying to, I had played Superstar D-D, and I remembered something weird about that, and so I was looking it up and found on the games Wikipedia page that Super Star Dust HD was one of the games given for free by Sony as part of their welcome back package due to the PlayStation Network outage in 2011. Wow. You guys remember that?

You guys remember the PSN? vaguely remember it. That's amazing. PSN was down for 24 goddamn days. And then when they came back, they were like, here's a great Housemark game for free. Please. I completely forgot about that. That's wild.

Yeah. Yeah. What's strange about Housemark is they were so small for so long. And how they got to making a game like this is kind of mind-blowing because they're mostly making arcade games, I guess, would be a way of putting it. Like they're keeping the arcade stuff alive, like you said, fresh like the twin stick shooter where they start to break away or I guess find some traction is with

Rezogun I think that's like the oh there might be something more here for this team before we get to Rezo gun I want to call out one other game which is in 2010 Dead Nation I thought it was an interesting this was a zombie game but in a lot of ways it was also an arcade game you like you combo scoring and all sorts of stuff like that

and giant hordes of enemies and that felt like kind of a progenitor to where they are now just in a very small, much smaller scale on the project. That wasn't like a straight arcade game. It felt more like a survival, survive the hordes kind

of game. And so they would experiment with other formats as well. Outland is another game that I love. This was a Metroid vania search action game from that team that used red and blue balls, but it was still a search action game. That game notably,

I can't find a place I can play it. Oh, wow. They removed it from the Steam store for some reason. It might be on... But it was probably on the Ubisoft you play online thing, right?

But it would have been... Oh, yeah. It was a Ubisoft game that came out in 2011. It was definitely on their dip shit launcher. Christ. Yeah, but that game ruled. And then, Plant, you can sort of dive into... Yeah, well, I guess if we're going to do that,

they also, they worked on Angry Birds at a certain point right before RezoGun, which is all just to say, this is a studio that seems to be just trying to stay alive. Yeah. Everybody's got to pay the bills even if it's like... You got to, yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Contract work. They were doing a mobile game. And then Rezo Gun comes along. And it's similar to what they've always done. It's like an arcade shooter. But what they said was, you like particle effects? What if he gave you all of the particle effects? What if we took the PlayStation 3 and the 4 and the Vita,

whatever it was on, and we pushed it to its absolute limit of what it could throw at you with these like spectacular, I don't know if it was actually voxel, but it has like a voxily look of just particles, filling the screen as you blow up the world. And suddenly they had this brilliant idea of what if we do a simple game, but make it a graphic showpiece.

And because people want to have a graphic showpiece on their system, you can buy it for cheaper than all the other, you know, $60. games that were out at the time. Well, actually, this was a PS4 launch game, right? So that takes that idea, like, to the max of people like, I want something that looks fucking great. Well, guess what? If you're subscribed to PlayStation Plus is free. So, like, yeah, there's a reason why I think a lot of people have a lot of affection for this game. And it's because, like, if you end a PlayStation 4 and you had a PlayStation Plus membership, you got it for free. And there weren't a ton of, like,

I mean, we mentioned it. No, this was the law. This. This was the law. This. This was the killer app on PS4 at launch. There was really not much else going on. Yeah. I reviewed it for Polygon. I have to check that. But basically, the studio then seems to split into two directions in terms of the opportunities they're getting. They're still making these arcade games.

This is where their bread is buttered. But then they're like, oh, you know, we should do some other bigger swings. And they do alienation, which I don't know if any of you remember playing, which is it was like an is. an is a met. It was also a twin stick shooter, but you could have like four players doing it. And it was a bit more of a not arcadey game. Like an earlier hell diver. They keep layering on. And they're basically layering on, I guess, like planes, because they do Matterfall, which is a side scroller. And then they do Returnal. And it's notable that when Returnal happened, that was the year that Sony bought them. They became officially part of the Sony family. It's a PlayStation Studio.

now. And so all their stuff is basically exclusive to Sony. And this was like Sony being like, what do you want to do? And they came back with a pretty fucking big swing. I don't usually get super stuck into this, the genre of games that Housemark kind of like specializes in. I don't know that I've ever like really score chased or like tried to complete any of the games on this list. But like, I'm always so fascinated by long running development. developers who have a weird kind of intangible connecting tissue between all of their games, whether it's like, oh, you know, all these quintet games use the same sort of sound font library throughout whether you're playing act razor or illusion of Gaia, right?

I feel like House Mark's fascination with red and blue projectiles and having different ways of kind of like interacting with those. it truly is a defining feature, I think, of their games. And I don't know, I find that so, so cool, right? From a historical perspective, but also from a design perspective. Because maybe you don't have to teach your players as hard, like, how this stuff in your game functions, if they've played another Howsmart game before. And they already have that, like, deep reptilian kind of red, bad, blue gig association.

Yeah. I was bummed when they decided to, like, leave behind the arcade stuff. I think the last one that they made was Nex Machina. Did you all remember that one? No. It is fantastic. If you want a taste of, like, what this studio could do at the top of its powers, they partnered with Eugene Jarvis, who is the designer of Defender and Robotron in Narc and Smash TV.

And, like, let's just make one more great classic arcade-style twin-stick shooter. It's fantastic. It did not do nearly as well as the games we're talking about today. And they're like, okay, we're going to move on it. And I was bummed, but now we get to have both because one of the former designers of Housemark went on to be the designer of Sectori. So basically, you get to have it both ways. You can have their like fancy, awesome games like Soros, Soros, whatever.

And then Sectori is, I mean, a perfect. air to what they were doing in the past. And obviously, like, Sarah's has, like, a lot of that DNA as well, even though it's not structured, like, a score chase game. Like, it wouldn't surprise me if DLC came out in a few months that was like, oh, and now you can play it in this way. And it's just high scores and shit like that.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a pretty remarkable studio. I'm a big fan of what they've been doing. And narratively speaking, like, they take swings in ways that, like, you don't often see in AAA development. anymore, which I love to see. It doesn't always land, but largely, like, yeah, pretty risky, especially for one of the few PlayStation exclusives.

There are not many that come out maybe two or three a year, if that. So the fact that one of them is like this weird, trippy, like dealing with trauma and also on a fucking space planet thing is pretty sick. I'm very impressed with what they're doing. Very excited for the future. It does slightly bum me out because maybe there's no better studio to make a third person

Metroid game than Housemark. Oh, man. That would fucking rule. But I'll let it slide. It's okay. Before we dive into the one reader mail that we have, we got a ton of other reader mail. I can't read them all because there's so much

of just like people shouting out Justin and Justin being great. And we completely agree. Justin is great. I'll pass that along. Yeah, let him know. Next time I see you. You know a guy.

I know, and obviously we appreciate you guys sticking with us, evolving the show into whatever it's going to become. Obviously, Besties goes through a lot of changes over the years. This was not the most fun one because we all love Justin, but we're doing the best we can. And we thank you all, and certainly we'll pass along all the messages to Justin in case he didn't see them in the comments. Okay, this letter comes from Zach. Hey, besties. Just wanted to drop a wreck in the comments because I know many of you are on our Taskmaster fans, but I'm not sure you've mentioned checking out the New Zealand version yet.

Season 1 is good, but season 2 features honorary Macroy brother Guy Montgomery and is considered to be one of the best all-time seasons of Taskmaster from any country. Best of all, it's on YouTube for free, so there's really no reason to check it out. Thank you, Zach. That is a great recommendation. Yeah. Have you guys experienced? Oh, yeah, I watched that for sure. partially because like I don't know we'd been watching taskmaster a lot at that point

and we found out guy montgomery was on it who you know were pals with uh and i i was like yeah i'll give this a shot and it's great man it's really great uh they have a different taskmaster i mean it's uh it's not gregg and i mean i wouldn't imagine it's a long flight uh yeah yeah i guess so uh but it's still i don't know it's it has its own kind of flavor and it's just really, really strong TV. Seems like something Risque Darby would do, but I guess it's not

not him either. Maybe he would guess at some point. Yeah, it's great. It's a really, really, really good season to Taskmaster. Really solid.

Cool. Should we dive into honorable mentions? Let's do it. Dude. I started playing blueprints. So, how's it going?

Okay, so funny story. So the patch came out, but the patch as of right now is still only on PC. And I do not have a great way to play PC games

in my living room right now. I theoretically can move it in, but I don't want to deal with that. You know, like a Steam deck or something? I mean, I do, but like, is a Steam deck? I don't know. Anyway, I've been playing it on Switch 2. It is on Switch 2.

The patch is not out on Switch 2, which is okay because I've been playing it exclusively with my wife. It is like the one game that we're playing together. But it should be out this week, right? That's what they've been saying. week, yeah, so any minute. And obviously, if you're playing with someone who can see colors, you don't necessarily need it.

I will say, though, that there have been puzzles where she'll be, like, making leaps and making decisions, and I'll be like, stop everything you're doing. Why did you pick seven? Yeah, right. Because I cannot, for the, I mean, there's a, I will, this is not really a spoiler, but there's a dartboard puzzle. Yeah. And, like, genuinely could not see that some of the numbers were highlighted in certain ways. Right. That will be fixed once the patch drops, which should be any day now.

It might be actually out by the time you listen to this. But, guys, that game's pretty good. I got to say. Have you had like a, I don't know what the statute of limitations on blueprint spoilies is. Obviously, I don't want us to get into anything too crazy. I don't think Fresh has seen any major, major spoilies. Have you had like any kind of, oh shit moment of like something comes together or you realize, something. Sure. Okay.

Yeah, absolutely. How do I even convey this in a way? Don't worry about spoiling. You're not going to spoil anything big. Any of the like permanent upgrade style like discovery? Yeah, I don't know anything. I mean, we upgraded a room to give you an idea. Like one of the rooms is upgraded. The last big discovery that we made was the code to get into the garden in the back of the house. Got you, got you, got you. which we use the maging light, so and so forth.

So that was like the big reveal that we made most recently. But I love the experience of like trying to min-max your resources in the house has just been. We had this moment where we were going and like we were down to like two steps and we opened a door and it's the fucking dining room and the fucking turkey dinner shows up in the dining room. And we're like, yes, life. So cool. The systems in it are, yeah. Once you start, I think I'm very good at the like meta game, like, min-maxing the like resources. And she's very good at the like raw puzzle stuff.

And so doing that back and forth has been so much fun. And it's a good game. I'm glad I'm the first to discover it. Yeah. So you guys should probably check it out. I would recommend it. I anticipate the day where I will have forgotten a lot of shit about blueprints so I can go back and play it again. I had that moment with Oberiden a couple of years ago

where I finally had kind of purged it from the old memory banks. I think blueprints will take me a little while longer to get out of there. Yeah, it's tough with things like blueprints and like Outer Wilds. Yeah, outer wilds I may never be able. Like there's some discoveries you make in Outer Wilds

that are so, oh, it's been staring me in the face the whole time that I don't know that I'll have. Really hard to ignore. but yeah it's it's fucking good man I'm really excited to play more of it it's it's the perfect like we'll just do a day or two structure that makes it really easy to put down you don't need to like binge it necessarily yeah so it's it's just been a good night ender I am really looking forward you in like two or three weeks please every every cool moment you have please text us I've seen everything that that game has to offer you will not spoil anything for me sounds good I have a few things, if I can run through them real quick. One, please. There's a lot of iOS stuff that's come out recently, some ports. I've been playing an incremental game called Idol Obelisk Miner

that a lot of people recommended to me after talking about incremental games a couple episodes ago. Just a really good, very, very traditional kind of like your mining stuff to get stronger, but they keep layering systems and systems and systems and systems on for a really slow burn kind of incremental experience that I've been enjoying. enjoying. But the two big ones are Nubby's number factories on iOS now. And that is a good one for iOS play. I finally like finished a run for the first time. And that game's so cool because it's, if you're not familiar, you're kind of like Pegel where you're like shooting a ball down into a board of pegs that are increasing in sort of number size and combining every round to form larger and larger numbers. But you're also drafting these sort of upgrades that will trigger certain things. Like now Nubby's shooting. out a big wall of radioactive energy on his first hit. Or like the lowest score peg on the board doubles every second and a half.

Like you're trying to combine all that stuff into something that can really break the game wide open. And yeah, it's really, really good on iOS. Gambonanza is out. This is one that Russ recommended to me a while ago before it had launched. This is Chess Balatro. you start out by spinning a roulette or a slot machine reel to draft three pieces, chess pieces on a five-by-five board. And then the game is split up into very, very short sort of chess battle sequences

where all the pieces move in the traditional sort of chess-like way. You have to take out all the enemy pieces without losing all of your pieces. And then between each round, you are buying new pieces or you are buying tiles that have special properties on the chess board or you are buying upgrades that have like different modifiers. Like whenever you capture a piece with a pawn, you get an extra turn or stuff along those lines. Yeah, we're going to be doing a deeper dive into this game specifically during Restes for an upcoming episode. It's, I guess, the episode that comes out in a little bit. So keep an eye on it. But I do agree, yeah, it's been a steady mainstay on my phone as well.

It's really solid. Really, really good. Yeah. The last thing is a show, a Korean reality competition show. Stop me if you've heard this one before. It's on the Disney Network. Disney Plus is how we are watching it. It may be other places as well.

It is called Battle of Fates. And it is a Korean survival show in that sort of survival 100 sort of milieu, very, very over-the-top production values. but it is a show about fortune telling. So they have 49 fate readers of different disciplines. So there's tarot card readers. There's people. I guess it didn't occur to me that people,

someone would be good at taro and not good at like crystal ball really. So the way that they handle that is very, very good. And I will get into that. But they have Saju, which is a, I believe, believe traditional Korean sort of birthday fortune telling, where they take a look at all of these different charts. There's shamanism. There's a lot of shamanism. There's a lot of shamans representing different sort of like spirits. There is, there are face readers, name readers. There's like people who are sort of of this discipline, but like across these various different

techniques, right? And the game, the show starts with like a disclaimer saying like this is entertainment purposes. We didn't give anybody sort of advance notice about whatever. And the game starts and what they have to do is just do a reading based on a certain thing. So maybe they will show you a picture of a kid. And it'll be like, here's his birthday. What did he grow up to be? Or a person, they'll bring out five people. And they say, one of these people won the lottery and one of these people was struck by lightning. Identify who it is. And so like they, one of them is just pictures of feet. And like, and you have to do a reading based on that. It is a somewhat gnarly hang from time to time. Because the first one of these readings is they show a picture of a woman and her name and a

birthday who has died, who has actually passed away. And they have to divine the nature of her death. And it's like, apparently they did a bunch of. of those and people there was a lot of backlash from people who were like that's fucking gross so they only left one in the show and it is indeed like it's the first one they show you

and it is so fucking wild okay and just just for my edification as a man of science aren't people just constantly like they're all getting it wrong so here's what's great right there's 49 people and every like round you get to buzz in if you think you got

something good if you like feel like you got a good thing And then they let seven people give their readings, and from that, they let one person advance. Okay. So like, what's wild about the show is they don't really show the bad readings. Sometimes they'll, like, do around, and it'll be like, which of these five people are students at this university? And they'll only show, like, one person who gets it, like, dead on right. And they do not show the other.

So, like, by what they are editing in and what they are showing, it really paints a picture of these sort of, like, fortune-telling. disciplines that have like, wow, this shit's really good. What's interesting, like, it's an interesting concept for a show, right? Sure. It is, I'm learning so much about, like, shit I did not know about, like, Korean shamanism and Sajju and, like, all of these different things. It's really interesting watching people coming at this sort of concept from way different angles sort of talk, right?

And so like tarot card readers feel a certain way about something or they'll get like a fortune thing where they're like, I don't know how to even do this because our thing is like people draw cards and then it's important that they interact with. Whereas shamans would be like, I have this granny spirit and she is mad at me, but she told me that he has ulcers and is, you know, whatever. It is, I don't know, it's a fascinating subject that is obviously fraught as fuck. and the show doesn't do a ton to kind of like get you over that hump. But it's also like, again, super high touch, super high production value Korean reality competition.

What was it called again? I need... Battle of fates. Okay. And we trust the Korean live reality show organization to like, I don't know what's, I know they're in the U.S.

there are laws about like not putting a thumb on the scale. Yeah. Do we know if those laws, exist. I don't know, man. I mean, the couching all of this is like, I watch a lot of Korean reality competition survival programs. And I am not at all knowledgeable about kind of like, not in the way that like I feel pretty comfortable. I know survivor or bachelor kind of back and forth. Sure. There's, there are, you know, cultural barriers there. There's a lot of things that like, I don't really understand. They have the disclaimer, but like, I don't know.

Yeah. Griffin, did you watch Dolly? Dondodon at all? Did I watch Dondodon? A little bit, yeah. Yeah, this has given me Don to Don vibes in a weird way, which is the premise at the beginning is that there is a high school boy

who believes in space aliens and is obsessed with them and a young woman who believes in ghost. And what I love about that show, even though it disappears very quickly, is that they both think the other one is totally full of shit. Yeah, yeah.

That, like, their thing is clearly real, but how could there possibly be space aliens? Everybody walks out. The stage is. like this huge winding garden path with these like circular stone plinths that all of the fortune tellers have a little table and a little seat and then they have their bag of ritual tools for the most part and for the shamans that's like they have these five colored flags that they spin around and then whichever one they draw like there's a divining sticks that they shake and whichever

like there's so many different things that they're doing but the saju guys roll up and they pull out a fucking laptop and they have an app that looks like fucking turbotak. that they punch people shit into and then they read it like that. The tarot readers have all their different shuffles and different styles. Like, it's interesting. If this kind of stuff...

I mean, if the Sajju guys had Wi-Fi, that seems... If this stuff doesn't piss you off, and I understand that there's lots of people who fully, fully, fully it does, like, you know, your mileage will obviously vary, but like, I don't know. It's deeply, deeply fascinating to me. I would definitely check for a cell dongle

on those laptops, quite honestly. A cell dongle? Yeah, someone's connecting to Wi-Fi and getting an edge. That's all. I think you can connect to Wi-Fi. Well, yeah, I guess. MySpace seems like an advantage. Yeah, I guess that's true.

Okay. The divining power. Versus a card. Right. Yeah. The tower. Okay, that's cool. Plant, you have anything?

Yeah, just very quick. It's another thing that will go in way deep run on the upcoming Restes, but I got to get y'all on chain staff. Okay. It's so good. It's so good. Chainstaff is the latest game from Nathan Fouts, who runs the studio Mommy's Best Games.

Nathan was at Sony for Resistance Fall of Man a long, long time ago. And if you've ever been like, man, I miss when they had these absolutely bonkers weapons in my action games. He basically has just continued that on, now inside scrolling 2D shooters. And these games are, if you converted the drawings in the back of your high school, like, workbooks at school into a video game, it would look like this. They are just hand, like hand drawn in a way that is almost disturbing, but also quite beautiful. And more so with each passing game, I think this is really his finest work visually.

but the attitude is high schooler gone truly cut loose you in this game are a super soldier shredded muscles who has a like basically a space alien slug that has bitten onto your head and now is just you don't have it you just have this space alien slug and if you were to remove it you will die

so you need to go through alien worlds saving your fellow soldiers to get powers to both increase your space slugness and also your various weapons. But what matters most is in the title, The Chain Staff, which is one of the coolest mechanics in forever. It is a single weapon. It is this like alien chain made of different lengths. And you will shoot it out and you can use it to grappling hook, like in Bionic Commando, but with like more like physics than Bionic Commando over the first.

past. Cool, very neat. You can also use it as an ultra-charge weapon that is almost a guaranteed one-hit kill missile that you can shoot. But again, if you do that, you can't swing or you'll drop from your swing. You can also use it as a shield, so you could plant it in the ground and have it go vertical, and suddenly you have this, I mean, fully impenetrable barrier between you and your enemies. Or you could use it as a bridge. It can be used for all of these things, Basically, everything you want to do in the game can be done with this object. But again, it can only be doing one thing at a time. So you're constantly having to think about how you're manipulating this incredible tool and prioritizing its various uses

while also blasting aliens with increasingly ridiculous weapons. That sounds really, really, really sick. It's absolutely sick. There's like so much more I have to say about this game. So like I said, we'll get into it and resties. But in the meantime, I really can't recommend it enough. And I think Nathan, what Mommy's Best Games has done is, like Housemark, a beacon of survival. His earliest game weapon of choice came out a long, long time ago, and he's just been, you know, plucking away at this ever since.

Cool. Cool. That's all awesome. I wanted to call out over at the Patreon. We have a new Bracket Battles episode that is live right now. It's actually Justin's not, I won't say final, but we're going to be having special guests join for a lot of the Brack Battles episodes. Justin will probably join for a few of them each year. He won't be every single month.

But this was his final as part of our besties regular crew. This is a very fitting because it was about franchises that should be turned into theme parks. Oh, what a good one. What a good one right here. Yeah, it's good. Silent Hill would be too big of a bummer. I'm realizing there is a Silent Hill ride, which is Mr. Toad's wild ride,

except for going to jail for, you know, like, driving too fast. You killed your wife. But either way, you're getting arrested and going to hell. Yeah, you're right. And I would do want to eat the green, if they made, like, green licorice herbs that you could just walk around gnaw on green plants and red plants, like red liquorish plants and green lichs.

I love that. Fucking briefcase. stuff all you like that idea. I love it. And Griffin had that great idea where everybody has a gun. It would be so obvious. It was fake, guys.

It would be like the Wemo rifle kind of shell that they made. Lots of fun to record that episode. We had a good time. So go over, listen to that show Justin some love by supporting the Patreon. It's only five bucks a month.

if you want to join or you can get ad-free episodes of the main show, 10 bucks a month plus all the bonus stuff. And we love all of you guys, especially some new members. We have Karen, we have Abigail, we have Ned, and we have the high-tech redneck. Thank you for joining and supporting us over at patreon.com slash the besties. Thank you to everyone else who continues to support us. We really appreciate you. Obviously, this is a transition time for the show,

but we hope to continue entertaining you guys with do. ass games for a long, long time. That's exactly right. What do we do in next week, though? Oh, boy. Speaking of dope-ass games, we have a game called Mix tape. This is a narrative first game. I don't even want to preamble it too much.

But it's really interesting. So stay tuned for that next week. I am so excited to talk about this game. I don't know when the Embargo Lips, but I can't say this. Frustick messaged me right away when it's like, are you playing this? And like looking into a mirror of my soul. Yeah, just because plant loves it, don't let that scare you because I also feel strongly about it. So keep an eye out for that.

That's coming next week. Awesome. So join us again next week for The Besties. And thank you so much for listening to The Besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games? The Besties is executive produced by Justin McElroy. You're welcome. Besties!