The Besties - Slay the Spire 2, a Big Hole, and a Resident Evil 9 Spoiler Chat!

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Welcome to The Besties March grab bag. There are simply too many new games, so to cover as much as possible, we split up the workload. Griffin talks about the surprisingly complete Early Access release of Slay the Spire 2. Plante, of all people, explains how to get into Marathon. And Frushtick . . . well, he found a big hole. To avoid Resident Evil 9 spoilers, skip from 36:48 to 56:45. Get the full list of games (and other stuff) discussed at www.besties.fan. Want more episodes? Join us at patreon.com/thebesties for three bonus episodes each month!

I can't stand small British children. Wow, man. I'm sorry if I'm coming in hot. It's just the first thing people hear. When they turn on their device and they pick besties, the first thing that they expect to hear is like, Mario's got a new hat. But then you come out here with...

I can't stand small British children. And here's why. Yeah. Who do they think they are? Who do they think they think they? They are sitting at breakfast. I've got an anecdote all lined up to prove to you. To prove that all British children are bad, you've got an anecdote lined up to prove that every British child is bad.

Yes. I was sitting at breakfast with my family. British family comes and sits next to us. That's all fine. I have no problem with that. Thank Christ. We were looking out the window of breakfast, and out the window, was a hummingbird.

Fantastic. A moment of pure nature visiting us in the middle. Was it Zip-Zooping around? Or was it still kind of like looking at you? It was British? Was the bird British? I don't believe so.

It was flying on the other side. Okay. Here's the thing. So we're all excited about it. The British family's excited about it. Also, totally fine. If this story does not end with the child going outside and eating the bird out of the air,

you are not going to prove to me. That this anecdote has anything to do with all British children being bad. The mother turns to the daughter who is probably like five or six and says, did you see the hummingbird outside? And the daughter who, again, is like five or six, says, no, mommy, I just saw the flutter of a wing. And I was like, who the fuck? Okay. Do you think you are? Yeah, yeah.

Five-year-old child saying, I just saw the flutter of a wing like you're a fucking poet. You got me, dude. That was exactly what I needed, and you got me and you got me there. And the whole audience agrees, dude. That was exactly what I need. The flutter of a wing? Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.

Uh-oh. Sylvia Plath over here. Wait, yes. Let me open the door. Sir. Sir. I'm but a young man May I have some video games

Okay So was the E sound there the door Or is that just kind of how you start your sense? That's how his bones work E! Sir Video games Oliver

Oh never Never before has a boy wanted video games My name is Griffin MacGore I know the best game in the week My name is Christopher Thomas Planton I know the best game of the week My name is Ross Fraswick. I know the best game of the week.

And welcome to the besties, Game of the Year Club. And you, my friend, by listening, I remember Justin is absent this week on a spring break voyage with his wife and children. But the three of us are not on voyages. We are landlocked.

And I don't think Justin's on a boat, so I don't know why I said that. But we've been playing a bunch of games this week and what we like to call a grab bag episode. We call it that. because you grab it, you upend it, and a bunch of stuff falls out, and you never know exactly what that's going to be. But Chris, let's go ahead and tell them exactly what that's going to be, like what games are going to be talking about. Oh, we're going to be talking about so many games, and one of them is Marathon, and I bet you can't guess which of the three of us is the one talking about that game.

Spoiler, it's not me. We've also got Slade the Spire 2 and a little game called Barry, Barry, Barry, Barry, which I'm very excited to hear. I'm Barry excited to hear more about after this quick break. Where do we want to start? Because we have quite the range of games to talk about today. What are people most excited to hear? I think Slay the Spire is the talk of the town. I think Slay the Spire 2 up front, then Barry, Barry, Barry.

And then we finish with the marathon kind of kicker. That sounds good. That would be a good rock. Okay, well, I've been playing Slay the Spire too, a bunch. Did some traveling. a live show up in Amherst last, last week, week before last. And then I was in Boston like three days later to promote Stoweway out now. Ten bucks. Get it. It's a great book. And while I was traveling, thank you, Russ. While I was traveling, I played Slate the Spire 2 pretty much constantly and had

myself a great time doing it. I will say this, because I weighed this, I weighed a lot whether or not to actually play it now, because it is in early access. And, I really had a rough experience. I feel like getting into Hades 2 full launch after, you know, we played the shit out of the We all remember the catastrophe that was last year in Hades 2. Yeah. And so, like, I didn't want to do that to myself, a Splay the Splay this Blire. But then I remembered that I have played the original Slay the Spire about 19 different times on 19 different platforms.

And so maybe this game would be somewhat immune to that effect of me spoiling my dinner. And I still feel that way after playing, I don't know, maybe a dozen hours or so with it. And I think I've reached a point where I'm like, okay, I've seen what is going on here and it's fucking rad. But I am going to, instead of getting deep into the Ascensions game, I'm going to call it here. I finished a run with all of the classes and was like, okay, this seems like a pretty good place to stop. You guys are both familiar with Slate Aspire, I imagine. Yes. Usually do a very base line.

element that might be joining us. I would say that Slade Aspire is the quintessential video game deck builder. You play as different classes climbing up a series of acts they're called, which is basically about a dozen or so encounters, and you choose some like branching paths. Some of the encounters will be fights against enemies. Some will be random events. Some will be shops. Some will be boss enemies. And you get to choose, like, which direction you're going. So you can kind of tailor what the, what the runs looking like based on what you need at the time. After every fight, you draft a card from a selection of three, and you build a deck. Every turn, you draw some cards, you have a certain number of energy points.

You can spin to play those cards, and you want to win fights and not die and reach the end of the run. The whole time you are also collecting relics, which imbue you with sort of upgrades that are not tied to your cards. Like this type of card now does more damage, or now you start with one extra energy or what have you. And that formula was enough to sort of cement Slay the Spire's Place in the Cosmos. I don't know if it was the first game of its type, almost certainly not, right? But it is the one that I think everyone who has made these types of games afterwards have used as the, you know, the identicate. Yeah, it dialed in the format. Obviously, it owes a lot to Magic the Gathering and a few other games.

But in terms of video game representations of that stuff, yeah, dialed in the format. Yes. There were different classes in that game, and each one sort of had like different types of strategies that it could employ. And I believe a couple of those classes were added sort of like after the fact. So that's Slater Spire One of my favorite games ever, probably one of the games I've spent the most time playing across my whole history of playing games. It's really, really fantastic. Before we go into two, did you feel like, oh, this game is great, but we need a sequel? It felt like it was going to happen, right? Like, there is a, there's an argument to be made that, like, you could just keep adding stuff to Slay the Spire 1. But there are some surprisingly

subtle kind of systemic changes in Slay the Spire 2 that I think would be very difficult to sort of retrofit onto Slay the Spire 1. As for, like, whether it could use a sequel, I don't know, man, like so many different places have made this exact type of game so many times. and a lot of them absolutely rip ass in a good way. And I kind of like, I don't know, I was stoked when they announced that. I also like, I know Chris doesn't really care, but I also like when hardworking game developers are able to sustain their business. Yeah, Chris hates that. Famously, it's from game developers are able to sustain their business.

I'm not asking that. I'm asking like, there are a lot of games right now where they just keep adding on to it and then they keep making money by adding on to it. And I'm, from what I understand as an outside. who is not like this is not my number one genre. Part of what makes it a sequel is, is the multiplayer? Is that right? Oh, I don't know. I think that's, oh man, I don't know.

There is co-op. Yeah, I did not do that at all. So that'll be a fun. I played it on airplanes almost exclusively. So I don't even know how that would have worked. Yeah, I am most curious specifically about the systemic stuff because, you know, unlike a Fortnite or something where everything gets added on, but realistically, the stuff that's being added are like cosmetics and things like that.

You can't constantly add gameplay altering cards without there being some sort of major long-term impact, whether that's skill curve growth or things like that. Power creep. Power creep. Yeah, there's a lot of different thing. That ends up kind of killing these games. I love the fact, yeah, I love the fact that Slate Aspire 1 is its own, like, it's gold, right? It's like cemented in, locked in.

It is the game that it is, and there's not going to be, it's not going to become, like, like hearthstone, which is not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but like, I can't play Harstown. If I tried to play Harthstone now, every time I see people talking about the new Harstow Expansion, they put up a card and it's like, oh, well, this card has Fitness 9. It's like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. I don't know what that means. Slate the Spider 2, again, surprisingly, doesn't change so much of the fundamentals.

You are still drafting a deck. you are still going through these branching pathways and drafting cards after fights. Like, it is in so many ways, like, a direct sort of mechanical successor to Slay the Spire 1. The things that it does differently, I think, would be maybe hard to pinpoint if you did not play a lot of the original. It is things like adding way more variety to the random events, right? These represent maybe half of the things that you're going to be doing as you're moving

through the map. and I feel like I saw all of them in the original slated, but there's a ton of them, but they would all boil down to like, you know, some sort of devil's bargain, right? Like you're going to lose half your HP, but you're going to get these cards that heal you,

or you take damage, you might get into a fight, and here's a low percent chance to get a relic. Like stuff like that that would either just like, it was like a chance card and monopoly. It's either going to like help you out a decent amount or it's going to just like totally fuck you over. or sometimes it's just a treasure chest or a surprise fight or whatever, right?

In this game, and Slay the Spire 2, I don't know that I've seen the same random event twice in all the time that I've been playing it. And they are truly, truly wild in their variety and the impact that they can have on your run. You are making some pretty major decisions while you are going through. And it is stuff that can really make or break your build or, like, force you to kind of like change your strategy. there's one event where you're going across a rickety bridge. I lied. This is the only one I've seen twice. You're going across a rickety bridge and your two options to go across are lose this card

that we pick out for you. Or you're going to take like five damage and we'll pick another random card for you. And then you can decide if that's the one that you want to. So like that's a really good example of a very smart event, right? Because a big part of these types of games is thinning out your deck. Maybe you do want to like lose that card and that's awesome. but maybe that's like a car that is sort of important to your build. So you take a little bit of damage.

Now all of a sudden you're removing a different card that is chosen at random. But you still get to confirm it before it goes, right? That is the kind of stuff that is like so great. Certain things that are really important strategically like deck management. You get so many more opportunities to do that across these different events and, you know, the shops and everything. And so, like, I've not had the experience so much that I had in the original Slayespire where, like, I would be halfway through act one and I'd be like, this isn't fucking coming together. Like, I'm not getting, I'm not getting the relics I need. I've taken way too much damage. I'm not getting right cards. I'm just

going to scrap this run. You're trying to get a build going and it never comes off the ground, basically. Right, exactly. I, I, I, that has not been happening as much in this run. Another thing that's different sort of structurally is you start each run off by talking to the big whale. He's back. We love big whale. And he gives you like a few boons that you can choose from. But then at the start of each additional act, you are talking to another major NPC who gives you a different choice of boons. And they are like themed to like what that guy does. Like there's one who is, uh, all of his stuff is like wax based. And so there's a relic that's like, uh, this will last only for this act, but you'll have an extra energy the whole time.

Or, uh, you will get five relics randomly, but they are made of wax and one will melt after every, uh, other combat encounter. Right. Uh, some of it, one of them's like all about wealth and opulence. And it's like the next vendor that you go to, you are going to automatically buy everything. that they have at their stock for free. And I picked that one. I was like, fuck yeah, baby, let's get. And it wrecked my deck.

I ruined my deck because I picked up all these cards that I definitely didn't want. That's very funny. There's so much more variety in that stuff. And that is to me, like the big kind of the selling point for it. There's a new method for like unlocking stuff. In the original, say, the spire, you are playing as the different classes, leveling up those classes individually and then unlocking cards and relics sort of related to that class. Now there is a thing called the timeline, which reminds me of like a more recent mortal combat style like purchase sort of walls.

You're not spending currency. Each little block on the timeline, you unlock by finishing acts as the different classes or getting through a run. But then there's like other ones that are more kind of like context sensitive, like beat 15 elites as this class or whatever. And those are going to unlock like new NPCs that you meet at the beginning of the acts. they unlock new cards, new relics, new, like, areas for you to go down. As far as the Early Access game, this sounds massive. Yeah, it's, it is huge. The Early Access stuff actually shows up a lot in the timeline because each, like, thing

you unlock has a piece of key art, and I would say about 75% of the key art in it is just, like, straight up five-year-old fucking doodles. Genuinely, like, played, I think, a little bit for laughs. Yeah. And I've hit a couple of things on the timeline, like, Unlocks that. are like, this straight up isn't here yet. Yeah. But the things that are there are amazing.

The other big thing is there are two new classes. There's three returning classes, the ironclad, the silent, and the defect, I believe. Yeah. That's the one with like orbs and stuff. The orbs, yeah. Then there is the regent. The regent is one of the new classes who is all about casting spells with like a secondary energy pool that you can kind of manage.

And also summoning a giant floating sword that you can kind of empower as you go through the fight, which is very cool. My favorite is the necrobinder, which is probably, I think, going to be everyone's favorite class, which is like a necromancer style class that can inflict doom on an enemy, which is like a, it covers up their health bar, and if their health reaches that point, they die instantly. Yeah, cool. So instead of having a deal bunch of damage, you can just make their, like, death point lower. He also gets a skeleton that, that, she summons a little skeletal hand that you can like buff up, and the Skeletal Hand takes damage before you do.

And it can also attack for its damage value. So you want to like fucking boost it up. Get it super strong so it can be both a shield and like an insane weapon for like. It's so satisfying. It's so so great. Okay. So here's my, here's my, here's my, my big problem with everything you're saying. It sounds real good.

And I've done a good job of not playing these games. Again, it's not even that I don't like them. I know that they will be all consuming. I know that when I sink myself into something like this, it will take over my very being. Yeah. But at the same time, I'm like, maybe it's time to start, you know? Like, maybe it's time to just let go. I mean, yeah, man.

I think so. Maybe wait for full release. I don't know when that's going to happen. But, like, it's a fantastic game. And, like, it is, I don't know, there is enough there for me to feel pretty confident. Like, this is going to be just as big as the original slate. buyer and I would recommend it. I think, you know, even if you don't want to wait, Chris, I think it would be a fine jumping on point. I don't know that there's like a ton of,

a ton of stuff that is going to like really fundamentally change it still yet to come. But it's fucking solid, guys. It should be noted. I also looked up while you were focused on your own experience, what people might experience in co-op. And it sounds like So it's up to four players in co-op, and every player has their own deck, and you can, like, buff other players. The complexity of that sounds through the roof crazy. Yeah, I mean, there's a whole element of this game that I don't know yet, gang, because I just kind of, it was my airplane friend. No, I think we're going to come back to it certainly at one point out. Oh, my God.

I mean, of course we are. We're going to be talking about this game for a very, very, very long time. But first impressions are fucking through the roof. That's very exciting. Yeah. How about Barry, Barry, Barry? Okay. So, we have a bit of a hominem issue with the name of this game, so I'll do my best.

This game... I saw you, I heard you try to sidestep that in the way that you told us this morning the game you were going to be speaking of. Yeah. You hit the... You hit Boer. Okay. You sound like an old Southern lawyer. Ah, do declare.

This game is called Barry, Barry, Barry. and so the first berry is like the fruit and the second berry is like you're digging a hole and putting something in it and then the third berry is the fruit again that's the title it's a good title it's a good title Barry Barry Barry is an incremental game

it is in first person and your primary goal is to put blueberries in a hole this takes place in a small very colorful somewhat off-putting environment like a children's like TV show set. It looked like a squid game.

Yeah, but it's clear that there's like a dystopian bit of a saw thing going on. I have not seen any clear violence in it, but it does have that undertone. Like in between days, like the day runs out and you start over again, there's like a VHS tape overlay thing that just makes the whole thing feel very creepy. But I was mostly just enjoying the berry part of it, which is this flower is spewing out these blueberries and you pick

them up and you put them in the hole. And like any good incremental game, obviously new elements get added. Pretty soon you're able to buy little berry friends that will scramble around the environment randomly spewing out berries on their own and you can pick those up and drop them in the hole. Obviously, it keeps going from there. You eventually... Where's the whole go to? Who's benefiting from this whole process in the hole? Is it the devil? I mean, if you had a hole in there and the hole wanted berries, would you not put berries in the hole?

Yeah, but does it talk to you, the hole? Is it like more buried? No. Because that's the devil, dude, and I'm not going to get tricked again. The hole does spew out money when you give it berries. So that seems like a good win-win situation.

It's kind of a mutual response thing. You eventually get a vacuum, increasing the berry speed as well. You eventually get a methodology for upgrading your berry friends. you can have them start spewing out strawberries or eventually Kiwis, which I don't even think is a berry.

Maybe it's a berry. It's got seeds in it. And so you're upgrading that way and obviously those count as more money. Where the game starts getting weird is you eventually, within the first half hour, unlock a sledgehammer. And now Griffin, I'm going to ask you,

if you're given a sledgehammer in this environment, what would you do with the sledgehammer? Jump in a hole kill the devil. Okay. Set everyone free from the burden of sin. That just seemed like the right thing to do. Yeah, I solved it. Well, if you jump in the hole, all that happens is you lose the money that you had on that day and then you start the next day.

So that's not an option. So you've still got this sledgehammer. Okay. I guess I got to squish the berries. That's terrible, Griffin. How could you do that? What you should be doing is knocking down the very small set that surrounds you to reveal an even larger set that has all sorts of furniture and little garden gnomes scattered around it.

I guess that makes sense. And from there, the game changes pretty dramatically because you now have control of where the hole is at any given time. You can move the hole around the map and suck in elements of the map, like different furniture pieces, which in turn will grant you stars, which in turn will allow you to upgrade your berries faster, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's sort of a hole.com. kind of situation at that point.

Right, but it is, I guess, first person. Was hole dot I own first person? I don't know, man. It's like a mobile game. Yeah, probably not. I don't think they've figured out first person in mobile games. So from there...

How are they going to get another stick on there? You can't. There's a very interesting strategy that goes on where you're trying to move the hole as much as you can. It moves faster if you're feeding it berries. But then the bigger the map gets, the more scattered your berry friends are.

So you have to sort of wrangle that component to it. Eventually, you get a pop gun to shoot the stars, to upgrade the berries, etc., you know, kind of a classic incremental thing. But you're also finding these cassette tapes that reveal that there's a narrative going on. The vibes I was getting was like, what's that? It seems slime ranchery. Yeah, it feels very slime ranchery. That's true. I got vibes of slime rancher.

I mean, narratively speaking, the vibes I was getting was like, what? is it, the back rooms. It kind of felt like that. Okay. Oh, okay. Where there's like an undercurrent. Yeah, creepy, creepy, creepy, creepy. Like the A-24 movie?

That's not even out yet. How the fuck you know? I'm just from the zeitgeist. I don't know how it ends. I haven't beat it yet. I'm several hours in. I find it very compelling and probably a disturbing, unhealthy way. But it's very satisfying to shoot berries down a hole and upgrade the berries.

Yeah. And I like the idea that you get. get into this weird situation where the hole isn't quite big enough to fit like the parasol that you want to suck in the hole to get more stars to upgrade the berries. So you have to come up with like fun physics-based ways to like force things down the hole. Okay. That's cool. I'm downloading this. It's been a while since I've had a, I don't know, an incremental game absolutely kind of wrecked my shit. Yeah, I will say early on like in the first 10 minutes, it's kind of miserable to play in a controller just because you were individually picking up the berries.

but very quickly, like any incremental game, it gets much easier because you get a vacuum. It seems like it's not too long. I'm looking at the Steam reviews. It looks like everybody has played for about like between seven to nine hours. That's a fucking dream. That's a win. I would say for an incremental game,

that's a pretty good chunk of time. Yeah, it's good. Sometimes you get into an incremental game and it's like, oh my gosh, 40 hours. Well, I mean, there's so, especially on iOS like games as service incremental games and those those just, they don't do it for me. I will say how I found this game was I frequently,

when we're looking for games to play, we'll go on, I think it's the Steam database website and just sort by reviews of games that came out recently. And this is legit, the top reviewed game of 2026 right now on Steam. Amazing. And I was like, I guess I'll try it. It's pretty fucking fun. And what is it, eight bucks?

It's like really reasonable. So if you're looking for something that is like a time, limited, you know, incremental game. It also reminded me of dig the hole, that one. You have to dig the hole, indeed. You do. Was that the name of the game? A game about digging a hole.

Yes. I was thinking of you have to build a boat. Yeah, different. Understandably, you got this mixed up. There is a match three element in this game that I haven't quite figured it out, but I'm sure people have. That is such a huge endorsement for me to get excited about this. Yeah, it does a slot machine.

I don't know, man. there's RPG. I don't really understand how. I don't get into these usually. I like the fact that everything you're doing is in game. You don't have the thing where it's like, you check back in three hours and your thing will have exploded. Like, it's all stuff you're actually doing.

So, yeah, I've been enjoying it. It's a good afternoon killer. I want to hear about Marathon, please. Please give me Marathon now. I want to tell you all about Marathon. How did this happen, though, before we do that? Because you two are my destiny boys. And yet I'm the one here talking about Marathon

before we do like a full big episode of it. next week. How, how, what went wrong? I, I, yeah, well, a couple things. Um, uh, even before we jump into why I haven't personally played this game yet, which is a valid question. I do want to clarify the record a little bit. I think I misspoke previously when I said that there was an AI generated a art controversy about this game. No, there was a it was a plagiarism issue and apparently they did, uh, credit the, the plagiarized artist in question. Right. And the credit's money. And the artist is happy now. So we, we, we did. We did. We did. We did. We did. We did. It get all over that hump. Okay, why haven't I played the game? Um, an extraction game scare me.

Yeah. Simple. Like, I don't want to waste my time. I, I, I, I, I, they stress me out. Like that's, yeah, they stress me out because there's a really good possibility of me wasting it while playing. I even, I have played some arc raters. I don't know that we've ever talked about it on the show. And it's like, cool. And it's like, really, really, really a super solid game. And I've had some like, really fun encounters in there. And I've also had times where I've played for 20 minutes and then lost everything. No, no. And it's like, I, I simply, uh, I simply, uh, I know people bristle when I talk about not having a lot of gaming time on our gaming podcast.

But like my between the work and the kids and the self-care and rest and everything, like I don't, I just don't feel great about playing a game for like a chunk of time that I have to sit down and do. And then, you know, not having any progress. And even if it was like fun, like spare time that I want, like I want that spare time to also be used adequately. Yeah. Okay. So it's faulty reasoning, I admit, but also it's just kind of. No, it's totally reasonable. There's a huge difference between picking out a game on like a handheld and a game like this where it's like, you need to know that you are sitting down

for at least 20 to 30 minutes. That's never. Like the only games I'm really playing these days are on Switch 2 or my Rog Ally X. Like I can't sit down and say, well, I'm going to do this for an hour. It's that that's not reasonable. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to talk briefly about the game. We're going to do a whole episode on it next week. We're all going to squat up. It's going to be great. But before we all do that,

I'm going to give you just like a reframing of your expectations that I think will help and put you in the best place going into this game. Can I tell you what my expectations are? Yeah. It's going to feel great. It's going to feel like destiny. And it is also going to be a stressful extraction shooter experience. No, no, no.

That's what I'm going to fix. That's what I'm going to fix. Oh, okay, okay. Those are your expectations. It's going to be terrible. We're going to feel so shitty. It's like, you are going to feel so good for two reasons.

One, you already played battle royals, right? You're already used to the idea of playing a game where you don't keep any of the things that you get during it. And then also, you lose more often than you win. So you already are doing great in that it's way, way friendlier than a battle royale, in my opinion. Because everybody, in theory, could extract. That is totally possible in the...

these games. The other thing that you can help reframe yourself with is there are kind of roguelite growth, I guess like XP goals throughout the entire game. So you are going to go in from the beginning and it's going to say, hey, your goal is to go to this one area, columns, you need to hack some terminal and then you need to kill five robot enemies. And if you do that, and you don't extract, you still complete that goal. So you've made progress and you're getting various unlocks. And then the biggest thing is, if you are thinking of it as I am going into this game to get, I'm going into a match to get great items and great guns and all that,

who gives a shit? Because you're just going to play another round and then lose it all. Or you're going to just keep it in your bank and never touch it. So you're saying this game has instilled in you a sort of zen-like acceptance approach. It's basically it's no different than deciding to play a battle royale. I am playing this game because I want to hang out with some friends and then also fill the XP bars that give me new things to play with. So tell me about that stuff. I want to hear about are there classes?

What is the stuff? Let me tell you about my sweet, sweet thief. So I play as a thief. and are I think like four or five classes plus a character called rook, which we'll talk about probably more next week. Again, I don't want to ruin all of it. But I'm going to sell you on Thief. That way you can go in and give this a try.

Thief has the ability to grappling hook basically any point in the world. It doesn't have to actually touch anything. Just zips them into the air, Titanfall style, right? And that's a recharge. But it's so useful because being able to get elevation and get onto the top of like a really tall building is huge for clear. out whatever your like XP goals and also just avoiding people. Thief also has the ability to turn on a visor that shows you the like top rarity color of anything

around you. So if you walk in a room, there's like 20 boxes, you flip that visor, you see a purple pop up and you're like, oh damn, that's the only one I need to go to. You can do it from outside buildings so you don't even have to go into things. Thief also has a drone that you can zip out into the world and basically scout out if there are any humans that you need to worry about. U.S.E.S.E.S.E.C. the robots that you need to worry about. And you can use that drone to steal shit from other human players and then just bring it back to you. So you didn't have to go engage with them. That sounds nice, but like, but then people were using the drone against me to steal my stuff.

That feels bad. Very rarely. Like that's because there are other classes that people are more incentivized to use. You might want to be an assassin where you can drop smoke grenades and go invisible. And if you want to play that class, great. Like you don't even need to get in fights. You can just go do your run, expel, and you're gravy, man. Okay, but now people are using invisibility and smoke on me.

Yeah, dude. I think maybe there's a fundamental nature of this format you're struggling with. The problem is you keep thinking that. you're going to come across humans. And that's not a guarantee. I expo. I'm not good at these games. You've played shooters with me.

I expo way more often than I don't. Like, it's, I am not running into trouble. It is the interesting thing about this type of game in that, I think it varies from title to title based on how chill the player base of that game is. We're like, in Arc Raiders, I had very few, like, really bad experiences. with other players. Almost always they were cool and willing to kind of like help.

And maybe that was just because I was so obviously new to the game. But they were more willing to help than they were, you know, let's fucking get this guy. Yeah. Yeah. And everybody has different incentives and you're kind of aware of it while you're playing.

Like you might be playing for a faction that's like full chaos. And they're like, hey, you need to go out and you need to like execute eight human players in a certain way. And you also might be in a class where it's like, you just need to go out and break 10 windows and kill three robots. And don't worry about any humans.

Yeah. And because you know that the people you're meeting are also on that same page, there's kind of like a I get it, man. And you're in the middle of that run. Totally. You're going to have to knife me. Yeah, because if you end up like, yeah, I guess encountering people, like is your general back and forth like kind of a wave nod?

go in our separate ways thing? No, it's definitely a shoot him and don't even give them a chance to talk to me. So that's the other thing about this game is the time to kill is very short. So if you are bad at competitive shooters, but you're good at strategy and you can get the jump on people, it's not like Halo where it's like, I got the jump on you and you still somehow took me that. I got to tap you seven times with the battle rifle to take you. Have you played enough Destiny and Destiny 2 to, like, be able to compare it? Oh.

Because I stand by, those are my favorite feeling shooters. Yes. The actual moment-to-moment shooting is just so delicious, so much like Destiny. It has the sound, as always, is incredible. Everything is, like, 3D printed. So it has that weird, like, plasticy clap sound. Yeah. When you fire the guns?

Just so good. Dude, yeah, I mean, again, I want you all to play. This all sounds very fun. I've been willing to. And the story is awesome. The story is like full on dune shit. You're working for companies like cyberacme, which goes by sciac, which is just the funniest sci-fi shit. You're working for a new caloric, which is just basically McDonald's in Monsanto merged.

Good video games. Yeah, there is a caveat, Griffin. You should know this caveat going in. It will not run on a steam deck. Yeah, no, I figure. Or Linux specifically. Like, it won't run on Linux because the kernel. So if you're running Linux on any handheld.

I mean, that is also true of destiny. Yes, it's a destiny. No, I mean, this feels very much like a, if I'm playing a multiplayer shooter like this, I'm probably going to want to do it. You know, I'll have to stay up past my bedtime. Oh, yeah. But, yeah, I am enticed.

Like, look, I was very skeptical going into this because Chris Plant, like, realistically, you're right like as you were saying at the beginning of this show like Griffin and I would be the one trying to convince plant that he wanted to play this so it is interesting having it flipped back on us so I am open I will be your tour guide of Tau Setti 4 just you let's perfect a time in a place and I'm gonna I'm gonna walk you around okay all right let's take a quick break when we come back we're gonna be talking

about Resident Evil Requiem getting into spoilers we will make sure to edit in a sort of time code you can jump to in order to avoid those spoilies if you're not interested, but that's the plan. We'll be right back. Okay. And so if we're about to do our talk, if you want to skip ahead, you can jump to 5645. That's 56 minutes, 45 seconds. Go go right ahead. Have you guys both finished, I know Russ finished the game. Chris, how close did you, how close did you get? I'm just so relieved that Leon did not shoot any of. of Emily's vital organs, you know. That sounds like he made it to the end there.

Yeah, I mean, yeah. Good work, Chris Plant. I'm very proud of you. I want to take a step back. For those that didn't listen to the first Resident Evil Requiem episode, which came out a couple weeks ago, at that point, Griffin had been the only one that finished it. I was probably about a little over halfway through,

and I think Plant was pretty close to where I was at that time. Yeah. And I will say, Are you changing your opinion based on having completed the second? Yeah, I will say from my side, Griffin, I was a little bit tough on Griffin because he was really pretty down on the latter half of the game. And I would now concur with his assessment of the latter half of the game. Oh, that's good. Here's what here's, and again, we're going to go right into spoilers here.

the first half of the game is, in my opinion, a 10 out of 10 Reson Evil experience, one of the best Resident Evil experiences I've had. That, when I say first half of the game, I made everything through the, like, helicopter action sequence with fucking Leon kicking people in a church, all that shit, fucking rules. Great job.

The blood and the ugly lacoon city. Right. That is where the wheels start to fall off for me a little bit. So I would say, okay, so we have this 10 out of 10 experience. Loved it. Leon now arrives in Raccoon City, the outskirts of Raccoon City, and the game turns into something a little bit different. The game turns into an action game where you're earning points to kill zombies and use those points to upgrade weapons. And to be honest, I liked this part.

I thought it was fine. I enjoyed myself playing it. It's like fun gameplay combat. I like upgrading guns, things like that. But I did not think it was as exceptional. I'd give it in like a 7 out of 10 if the first half is 10. I think it overstays it's welcome in a major fucking way. Yeah.

I think that you, I think that it is, it very intricately sort of designed the sort of routes that you're going to be going through and there's like a whole chain of like, you need the gasoline to power the generators to get the crank, to get the thing, to get, and so you're constantly looping back around, which is like, cool, to an extent, uh, around the fifth or six go around. I was like, I, I am so ready for the next part. I've been killing the same fucking guys over and over again. Yeah, there's like two enemies in that area.

Yeah. It's also a drag because from an art design standpoint, that area is like, look straight out of Army of Two. It's like all grays and brown. Primo, Brown, Xbox 360 shit. Just a weird choice. I know plant, you like that area quite a bit. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I get what you're saying. I don't think it's so different than the Resident Evil formula in general of go on Easter egg hunt and go back and forth and back and forth. You do that earlier. I think two things are different. Like you said, one, aesthetically, because it is this big open space. It doesn't have that, oh, yeah, I'm walking back and forth, but it's in this really cramped and, like, very visually dense building, which is cool and exciting. And I've, like, learned the space. It's, I'm just going through these big warehouse areas. But I think what it does well, is each scrimmage and fight that you have is its own idea.

So, oh, hey, we're going to go through the mortar sequence where these giant mortars are being fired at you and eventually you get to turn the mortar shelling on the zombies or the sideways skyscraper sequence where you're shooting out glass from underneath zombies. Yeah, that was great. I think each of those on their own is really interesting. The problem is, for me, not that whole sequence. I think that sequence is largely good. It's maybe like 30 minutes too long. You do all of that to then get on a motorcycle and leave. And then you go and do another action sequence that's weaker than that.

Okay, hold on one second. I need to make sure. I need to clarify that you're not saying that the motorcycle fight is a weak action sequence. No, okay. So here's... Because it's fucking the highlight of the gate for me. I can't. I can't.

I'm definitely not saying that. I think that there is a complete Resident Evil game if you actually just keep this part. Because this is what Resident Evil games do. They start out really small. They get big. People get grumpy about it. But I enjoy the silliness of it. I still think it's really fun.

I think the action is really strong. And such is the build of a Resident Evil game. I really don't have much beef with this second half. I think it is made worse because there is a third sequence that is utterly bizarre. Is that the lab sequence? That is, yes. Where are you starting that third sequence, that third act, if you will? Where do you start after the motorcycle?

Before we get into that, like, is there any other stuff? Like, I mean, the big issue for me is like you spend the first half of the game changing perspectives between Grace and Leon every hour. and then this marks the point where Grace is not going to show up again for a very fucking long time. And it's just so bizarre to me. It's so I cannot think of a of a justification for that. I mean, I would be fine with it if Leon was given more interesting things to do. But after the motorcycle fight, like you get through that period, which is a fun little bit.

You go to the Raccoon City Police Station. That part's cool. Well, I actually don't think that part. I think it's bad. Oh, okay. I mean, I think it's neat. Like getting chased around by, by, by, by, Mr. X again and then having to fucking fight him and like the the flashback scene at the armory shop with the dad and the daughter.

Some of it is my bad because what I ended up doing in the Raccoon City Police Department was spending like a good two and a half hours trying to figure out this fucking photo puzzle that requires you to do it in a very specific order of steps. And if you don't do in that order of steps, you're just going to be wandering around like an idiot for two and a half hours like me. I did appreciate that the tofu guy shows up in the middle of the police station. That was funny. But I kind of killed all my momentum. That's in the lab, I believe. No, the tofu. Well, maybe he shows up in two ways.

It's definitely in the police station. Okay. Yeah. And again, you do this big puzzle and the thing that you get for it, which comes back to another one of my big complaints from the first time we talked about this game is like, you'll get a charm. Yeah. That's like, and this makes your thing a little bit stronger.

And it's like, that's not fucking even a little bit exciting. Where's my fucking Resident Evil 4, you know, auto shotgun, like 12-barreled monster shotgun? Like, I don't know. The power fantasy there is just like, during the Leon seconds. Yeah, weird. It's just like not a weird thing. I like the Mr. X stuff. I actually don't mind any of the fan service stuff.

I think that's all fine. I think it's great. And like whatever. There's hunk, wherever the fuck that is. And there's a big spider. Like, that's all fine. Oh, I got hunk and tofu confused. The issue that I have, and plant, you were kind of getting to this, is like, RCPD, whatever.

That was a little bit my bad for being an obsessive weirdo trying to figure out a puzzle. The arc stuff is genuinely some of the most boring shit in the entire game. So explain what the arc is for people. The arc is the, like, major scientific home base where this thing that they're trying to get the whole game called Elpice is being developed. and you mostly play in the arc as, what's your name? Grace. Grace. You mostly play as Grace and her sequences

reasonably go back to like her just having a pistol and having like some bottles to throw to distract enemies and you're mostly, it's like a lot of stealth where you're sneaking around Lickers, another throwback. It adds a new, yeah, lickers is like the main mechanic they add which are just like fast, creepy, tongue whipping zombies that you have to throw out.

acid on in order to like kill them. And so that's not the most. And it turns into like use this computer to find this key to go back here. And it and in in hallways, like you counter that to the like environment of the first half of the game, in hallways that are like bland and like white. They're just like white tubes. And plant, I know you were saying that some of this is like, do they need to pay homage to the movies? Because.

Well, I mean, there's an art. There's a you end, I would say half the resident evil games at some weird kind of. sterile lab environment. It's not a fun place to be in. I think if the second half of the game was about two hours long, it would maybe be my favorite Resident Evil game of all time. And that's the problem that I have is like, whenever I think about the action sequences of Resident Evil games, there's a reason that they're about maybe 10% of the overall runtime.

So it's like half. I think part of the problem here is action sequences. And I know that's like a thing that I've said before of, yeah, the games eventually they turn into action games and they kind of lose their luster. I would reframe it here that the series has gotten really good when it is not about the series, when it is its own original story. And the first, you know, five or six hours of each of these games is that. And then the further it goes and the longer it goes, the more it gets into like Resident Evil Mythos.

And sometimes I really like that. Something I've liked about seven and eight is that they are kind of reflections of. of previous Resident Evil games. I think that's a neat idea that they are working through. The challenge for this game is it is kind of echoing Resident Evil's 4, 5, and 6 all in one game. And also feels like they want it to be the end, the conclusion of something. Because the title is Requiem. you ultimately learn about the man who started it at all

and its connection with the characters that you've been playing. And I guess the big scientific thing that is happening in this lab is that they've figured out how to clone basically everything. And you can buy these things. You can, you know, they are selling liquors or they're selling Mr. X or they're selling all these copies of it. When you see Hunk, it is presumably not Hunk. It is a clone of Hunk.

When you see West. Wait, wait, wait. It is not West. It's a clone of Wesker. Wait, I agree about Wesker. You're saying there's infinite hunks? I'm saying there's infinite hunks. I thought that was just hunk, and you kill hunk.

Nope, I'm pretty sure it's not hunk. I'm pretty sure it's a clon of hunk. Okay. TBD on that one, but I guess, well, what's your point? What is the point? My point is that it, I am ready for them after this three series of games of, hey, we are using the games to reflect. on the series to finally like let go and move on and go do their a new thing. I love metatextual stuff.

This is truly the overload of it because that is why we end up having these three hours in a very strange flat corridor is because we need to basically recap. Here are all of the familiar faces building to this. this dramatic big conclusion. Cool. If that's the last time we do that, cool. Also, I don't give a shit. Like, it's not good, guys.

The story, the story is not good. The story that you are telling that now we are slowing down for a few hours to make sure I really, really know who all these fucking people are because I didn't play Resident Evil Outbreak, and the payoff for that is a story, that is bad. So, like, I will say this. It's coherent. And that immediately.

Oh, sure. It's not the worst resident. evil story by any stretch of the imagination. But like I I would push back at the idea of this game and the last two games being part of some sort of conceptual set. You mean seven and eight? Seven and eight. Yeah, right? Because for me, seven and eight are like wild offshoot super hypercorrections of like the franchise's worst sins in Resident Evil Six. And then that was seven. And then eight was just a bonkers, self-contained kind of Grims Ferry Tales. thing we're like there's not even zombies anymore now they're werewolves and shit like it was

so out of pocket i mean they do end up linking it in with everything but in a very light of course they do but in a very very minor way when i say they're tied i'm not saying literally story wise i'm saying seven is a misconception of what resident evil one correct like you go to a a building right spooky scary haunted house you know eight is a reconsidering of the weirder like code veronica era and past that. And now this is like big corporations, the president might be involved, which is very much five and six. I think I'm going to be, I'm going to play devil's advocate as someone who agrees with everything that has been said about the story of this game. I think what they wanted to do here, and they kind of accomplish it, is say, I never want to hear the names Wesker or umbrella

corporation ever, ever again. That's the end of it. Shut the fuck up. And so what they do is they end the game by basically closing the loop. There's a cure out. for everything that Umbrella ever made, and there it is, and you can use it if you want to, and they even end it with a 30-page text document that you can read through from Grace, saying the entire story start to finish regarding Umbrella and why you shouldn't care about that stuff anymore.

And 7 and 8 do introduce, for lack of a better term, a mold that technically has nothing to do with the thing that Spencer made. He was just like inspired by it. So the opus thing that they released the cure won't cure the mold. So there's still going to be zombies running around, still going to be BOWs,

whatever the fuck it is. But I think what happened was they were like, well, we got to wrap this up and we've got to close every little loophole that we've ever had and we're going to include Mr. X

and we're going to include the spider and we're going to include whoever else so that we can put this to bed. And I think that's what they were trying to do here. I agree with mixed results. But hopefully it means that they can kind of, almost kind of start

from scratch moving forward, maybe. I never want to hear the Spencer name again. Like, we're done. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, these games are so excellently made. Yeah. They are like, they are so polished. It looks beautiful. Feels great to play. Yeah. And, and, and I don't know, I feel like the other games, the more recent games, have benefited from that more than, than this one. But I don't know. My, for me, the Cardinal Sin comes back to, you had a really, really interesting dynamic. This like, uh, split between the Leon gameplay and the, the, uh, the, the, the, the, uh, the, not Ashley, the Grace.

Grace. Grace. And I think of those two, I enjoyed the sort of more stressful, more sort of resource conscious grace gameplay. And then all of a sudden, like, you are going to take a big long break. And then when you do come back to Grace, it is in the most boring environment in the whole game. It's just a really, really weird series of decisions. For whatever reason, people are listening to this and they have not played the game, but they're still thinking about it. I do think you can play the game.

Get it on sale or whatever, whenever that happens. Play it up until really the sneaking around the police department. And then just watch a video of the ending. And you're crazy. That's the Chris. Yeah. They call that the Chris. Just go for it.

Like, that's totally, I mean, what you get up until that point is better than most big budget video games. Yeah. And I think it's like a very complete experience. Final Boss Fight is kind of a wet fart I don't know man Like if this is the The conclusion of the Of the like

This sort of arc of it It's not a very memorable Boss fight guys You need like a big octopus Yeah so there's two endings Whether you decide to release Elpice Which will then cure the whole world That's a good thing

That's good The password is hope Not even an ampersand Or like an exclamation point in there Yeah, it's really shitty. You would think that they would not even allow him to, like anything shorter than eight characters. It's like, what the fuck are you doing? And then that is the good ending.

And then you have to, then, you know, Zeno gets killed by the other guy. And then he turns into get this, a huge monster. And he, like, sucks up electricity. And you just have to, like, shoot him a bunch of times. Yeah. In his red. In his red birds. I don't really think there's much more to it than that.

I don't know, man. compare that oh the bad ending is you destroy elpice and then leon gets fucking massacred uh by zio's head explode in ways you've never seen it explode yeah and then you just kind of leave i kind of like that ending better in in the happy ending there's a few more details here you then uh escape the scene you're saved by chris redfield's agents basically grace goes back to work and grace is like you know i'm just so sad that Emily, the little girl that turned into a giant monster that Leon brutally, like shot like 5,000 times. I'm sad that she's gone.

And Leon says, don't worry, I don't think I shot any of her vital organs. Even though the last time we saw this character, it had dead. Literally melted into the floor and a pile of goop. Turning goo. Also, she was covered in like giant mutant part. There was no way to tell where the vital organs were. Well, what we learn is that it was the mutant stuff around her was kind of like a cocoon. Oh, sure.

Yeah. And she was in almost like a mech, a biomech. Yeah, yeah. And now Grace is raising Emily. That seems like a good. That's nice. That's great. It seems like a really good idea.

They give us almost no time to like give a shit about that relationship. This is a young girl that we did need to solve one puzzle once and then rescue and like. there's not a ton of not a ton of kind of buildup of that they were like biologically tied together but that's not true we find out yeah i don't think so i also deeply resent the fact that that puzzle could have very easily been solved just by uh like elimination and yet we needed to drag a blind girl through a haunted through zombie fucking where the world's biggest zombie was like yeah yeah i mean i still i still honestly i still love this game minus that that other part the The highs are just so high, and grace is such a good character.

I just love hanging out with grace. I just love that somebody is finally in the rest of the evil world. He just keeps me like, what the fuck? What? Yeah, it's a fun sort of bystander representative of like... I think Ethan was that, too, in seven and eight. Ethan was definitely that in one. When he gets his arm sawed off, he's like, what?

What? Then his arms back on. He's like, holy shit. Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know that I'm going to be eager to replay this one in the way that I happen with other Resident Evil games as well. I thought it was, it's disappointing.

Half great. Not so much. Let's stop the talk here. We have one piece of reader mail here that I wanted to call out. This comes from C.C. I have something to add about the way the Pokemon in Pocopoeia speak.

My spouse has been playing the game in Japanese for practice, I guess, and I've been able to compare my own English playthrough with hers. Magicarp says yo in English because of how it speaks in Japanese using Chris Plant, can you tell us what is written here because it's in Japanese? English because how it speaks in Japanese using the suit instead of Deu. So it's like instead of a polite form, it's using a slightly less polite form.

Right. So they say that others saying that a teen or a part-timer might use in fiction. As far as I can tell, most of the Pokemon have stylized modes of speech that you've seen in manga and anime. some are talking like young boys, Tang Growth has a stereotypical older professor. Gredent is almost like a middle-aged woman vibe. Localizing these matterisms is notoriously fraught, which I guess is why Kiyoger,

who talks like an old Japanese man, gets a thick southern accent drawl in English. None of this is unique to the game or anything, but I mentioned the Magic Carp saying yo thing, so Cici thought they'd write in. So thank you. That's good insight. Yeah, that's for that. That is good context.

I believe Bulbussar speaks like Yadu, which is like a not quite Jersey Shore girl voice, but not so far off. It's like a very like bleached hair, very, very bold makeup. And I love that Bolbuchar is that going on. I will jump off this with my honorable mention, which is I've been playing a lot of Pocopia as well. And I don't know that I have like a ton to add to my thoughts, but like it continues to get. bigger in a way that is just kind of shocking. I think I have unlocked the last area and I am like kind of getting close-ish to like the wrapping up the storyline in that area and then I assumed the storyline of the of the game. But it's it's it's a real special one y'all. It's a really really

really super excellent game. You know what I like about it just to contrast it I know we did a bit bit of this last week, but to contrast it with Animal Crossing is the tasks that you're given, there's like a very easy way to solve a task that you're given by a Pokemon. Like the Pokemon will be like, I want a toy or I want a house or whatever. And you can do the easy way. You can just make the easiest toy you can make. But because the game is so open in terms of your creativity, like, if you decide you want to make a fucking ball or greenhouse for Bulbosaur to live in and, like, grow his plants, you can

fucking do that. It's fun to build that. So much fun. It's fun and very easy to build cool stuff. Like there's an area in the game called Palette Town that is basically not like story heavy, nothing really going on there much at all. It's up to you to just kind of like customize it and do whatever you want. When you play multiplayer, like Palat Town is where you are doing your stuff.

And it has become sort of a staging ground for Henry and I to like build like, oh, the town needs power. we could just like drop a water wheel here or we could build like a big tall tower and put a windmill at the top of it and then you know come up with a solution from there or like oh we need a workshop where we can set up some sort of automated thing where this Pokemon drops iron ore and then this Pokemon will pick it up and throw it in a furnace for you so there'll be iron bars waiting for you whenever you come back like it's so much fun to design that stuff and have it look really great and very functional and um I I I keep coming back to it there is so much other things stuff competing for my kind of gaming time and attention and I just keep coming back to Bocopia. Yeah, I totally agree. It's been a big hit with my son as well. And it seems like something that's just going to be a mainstay of like, oh, we can get in 15 minutes and like do a quick build and have fun before dinner or something like that. It seems also very right for like DLC. There's an event going on right now where you are picking up cotton spores that you can trade with Hopip at the different Pokemon centers. And the stuff for that is not so exciting.

but it's still kind of a, I don't know, a blueprint, I guess, of like what events could be and how they could expand. I mean, it's very, like, the game is very obviously designed to be very modular. Like, you could easily just do,

oh, here's a DLC, and they add an area, and it adds new block types and new missions or whatever. I'd be shocked if they don't just do, like, every six months. They just add a new area. Yeah, would be smart.

Yeah. What are you, about you guys? I have been, watching Delicious in Dungeon. I'm almost done with the first season. I think I have one or two episodes left. I watched it with the dub on, and I know some people feel strongly one way or the other.

I did want to call out Songwan ProZD on YouTube, does the voice of Senshi in the dub, and he fucking crushes it. Oh, that's great. One of the best voice acting performances that I've heard in a long time. He's incredibly talented. But honestly, everyone, like I find out. everyone incredibly charming.

And just like story-wise and the art, it's just such a fully thought-through project that is just executed to absolute top-notch precision. I'm very, I don't know how long it's going to be until season two happens. It might be years. But season one is just. I watch this one a lot while I was traveling a lot. Yeah. And I watched like one season in the course of like a couple weeks.

And then it's just really, they did a fantastic job. So that's on Netflix. It's the wishes in dungeon. Mine is a game actually that we're going to be talking about on Restes next week. But Screamer, been getting into this. Do you know about this, Griffin? I do not. Screamer is basically dispatch, but with racing.

So it's doing the kind of like, what if we have a big, interesting story of intrigue? And it has a very anime aesthetic. And you are in the distant future where a mysterious scientist has created a vehicle that even after it explodes, both the car and the driver will be brought back from the dead. Now, you might be thinking, why are they using this technology just for racing? I don't know. I think everybody in the game is trying to answer that question. Not like, for real day, everybody's like, we got to figure out the answer to this question. What's cool about it is the racing is sick and you can dig into all of that. If you have ever

wanted to get into racing games and you're like, I just don't, I'm not good at it. I don't know how to do it. The campaign for this game is designed for that express purpose. It is, I mean, truly like piece by piece teaching you how to play a racing game to the point that if you are a hardcore racer, you might find the campaign a bit tedious. I find it to be like about the sweet spot. I am, I'm overall enjoying it. It has a really, well, not super, but like, it has a unique drifting style where you use both joysticks to create your drift. So you are, I almost recall it like how MLB the show or those other games where they really focus on using sticks versus anything else to control movement. I dig it. And the story is overall pretty good.

They, they, unlike dispatch, were like 95% of the game's budget went into the storytelling and the visual sequences. And there's just like that, you know, there's some game there, but that's not the focus. This is, I would say, more like 50-50. So the animation is not as elaborate. There are more sequences where you're looking at static images of people with, like, text. But everything is voiceover. There's great voice acting on it. And yeah, I'm enjoying it.

This looks really sick. Cool. Well, that's it for the Besties this week. Do we want to thank some patrons? You bet we do. I wanted to thank Nile M, Aaron M, Nick D., and Inland Tangerine. Thank you for being patrons of the besties over at patreon.com slash the besties.

As Plant mentioned, we have a new Rusty's coming at you on Tuesday. We got bracket battles every month, all sorts of fun stuff. coming at you. So yeah, we appreciate all your support and everyone that backs the show really allows this to happen. So we greatly, greatly appreciate it. Yeah, thanks everyone. Patreon.com slash the besties. Go get it. There it is. Get up on there. Next week we're going to be playing marathon and sharing more of our sort of thoughts on that. Maybe a couple of other things too. There's a lot. There's a lot popping right now. Yes, it's very busy. But I think mostly, mostly marathon. So join us for that, won't you? Next week. And join us again. here on the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games? Besties!