The Besties - The Best Combat in a Metroidvania . . .Ever

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

2025 already has a fantastic Metroidvania, errrr, Search Action game! Ender Magnolia combines Metroid, Nier, Mega Man, and Pokémon into a single, beautiful 2D experience. Technically, this is a sequel, but no prior experience is required to enjoy this indie treat. In the back half, Griffin talks about his mixed experience with Civilization 7. 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!

Busy week in the news. No. This is a joke. This is a joke. This is a joke. Oh, God. We're all getting really into retro handheld stuff, like in a big way, even more than usual,

much to, I imagine, the chagrin of our listeners. And I don't know, I've messed around with a bunch of them. Russ, you know more about this stuff than I do. Maybe I should've asked this when other Russ was on the show. No, I know more than him. Okay, cool. No, I've messed around with a bunch of them. Russ, you know more about this stuff than I do. Maybe I should've asked this when Russ, other Russ was on the show. No, I know more about them, more than him. Okay, cool.

No, I figured. So I guess what I'm looking for, I haven't found one yet that, obviously, it's important to have a good screen and I want the processor to be really fast in the graphics card to be zoom in. And then what is the piece of hardware that goes in it that determines how it makes me feel like it did

when I was a kid? Right. So like I know a lot of people are talking about like the Snapdragon 3, like the CPU, the cost of it is really fast. Yeah, that's not gonna do it for you. But you're gonna need Gryphon, you're gonna upgrade your RAM,

that's really awesome memory. See, I got the upgraded Retroid Pocket 5 thinking this is gonna make it for you. But you can't. You're gonna need Gryphon. You're gonna upgrade your RAM. That's really awesome memory. See, I got the upgraded Retroid Pocket 5 thinking this is gonna make it feel like it did when I was a kid, but it doesn't feel like it does when I was a child. No, no. You're trying to find one that has a NPU. What's that? An NPU, a Nostalgia Processing Unit.

Right. Yeah. You keep buying the normal ones and the NPUs. I mean, they are expensive. You guys don't know what the fuck you're talking about. There's only one thing you need, and it's called a worm light. Worm light. You get yourself a worm light, and you're fucking set. You plug that into the USB-C, you need a converter, and once it's in there,

you lie in the back seat of your car, and... Ask your wife to close... You ask your wife to drive you around town. Okay, this is important. You put on your Spider-Man beaks. Your wife drives you around town. Turn the brightness all the way down. Yeah. Wormlight sounds like the thing that you eat too much egg steam

and then you go get an endoscopy and they use the wormlight. They do. It's a multipurpose. too much egg steam and then you go get an endoscopy and they use the worm light. Yeah. They do. It's a multi-purpose. They used to, back in the 90s, 90s kids remember this, they would shove a Game Boy camera down there. They would get right down in there. My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I have fallen in love with a Metroidvania. My name is Russ Frushek, I know the best game of the week and we called Search Action Games here. Oh God. Silk Song, who we can wait as long as it takes. Thanks to our Indra Magnolia, Bloom in the Mist, the game that made us forget all about that the other little guy running around with his needle.

We love Indra Magnolia, we love these crazy little toys. These fun toys that are fun for the whole family. We're gonna tell y'all about them right after this quick break. Well, do we want Chris to tell us what it is? I think I covered it. Actually, probably. It's a fun toy. It's a fun toy.

It's unintentional, I would never want to steal this thunder, but I described exactly what it is. It's a Hollow Knight with toys. It's a fun toy that'll make you say Silksong's a Hollow Knight with toys. It's a fun toy that'll make you say, Silk Song Who? Hollow Knight with toys. All right, Plant, you could try to describe it better than me, but now that we're back from the break. You need to say the word homunculus

more than once though, that's the key. Lot of homunculi in this one. I'm gonna take a stab at this. So it's a sequel to a game I didn't play. Oh, and you can't say near. You can't say the word near. That's impossible. That's not possible.

Not only is it possible because I can't say 10 words without saying near, but this game. Yeah. And no clock tower. You can't talk about clock tower eyes. There's no homunculus related. Here's what it is. It's a Metroidvania set in the Not Universe of,

a search action game set in the Not Universe of Nier, where there are a whole bunch of sad robots, and you basically have to take their spirits to make them fight alongside you, somewhat between like Pokemon and Mega Man boss fights. You know, you like kill a boss in Mega Man, you're like, hey, your skills are mine now. The cool shit about this game though,

is you basically assign all of these characters to different buttons. So where in a other game, you would have like, oh, this is a button for a grenade. No, now you have just a spirit of a dead robot who flies out and like acts like a grenade. Hit the Jeff button. Hit the Jeff button.

Triangle to Jeff. Press X to Jason. Press Triangle to Jeff. We should point out this is a sequel to Ender Lily's Quietus of the Nights, which was a game that I played and I thought was cool, and then I dropped it, and then I picked this one up, and I just finished 100%ing it this morning.

It's so fucking good. It's a lot better than the first game. It took a little bit for this to click for me. At first when I started playing, it feels like a fairly sort of standard search action, one of these. You're a really underpowered, and fairly sort of standard search action, one of these. You're a really underpowered, and not just a standard search action, like this specific kind of search action

where you are a little wispy nothing, right? Thrust into the scariest place in the world, and you have to like slowly build your skillset by like basically defeating these homunculi who will lend you their aid with their their like basically their cores, I think. The way that I was describing this to Griffin as this sort of congealed for me yesterday, but like the experience of playing it reminds me a little bit of if you were like, like playing an MMO RPG in a rating setting, where you have several different kind of plates that you're spinning.

And depending on how you've had your skills set up, there may be one that's like, for example, in my current loadout, I have an owl that I summon with one button and he just stays. And then I have like a big attack that's like a straightforward fire attack that is on a timer. So it's triggered. And then I have a shooting attack that's on a hold down. So I'm holding that down.

So it's basically like you have a lot of different abilities and the way they interact is very interesting. But it's also you're trying to keep a lot of different things going in your head at once. So a lot of times for me, the challenge is like, hey, don't forget, you have that fifth other thing that you can be doing right now. You just gotta layer that on. But what I think is really smart about that is they give you sort of like a suite of, at least this was my experience, it's pretty open-ended,

but I got a suite of like four powers for the four face buttons, and it kind of sat there for a while. And it was like, let me kind of get comfortable with those, and then it started adding ways to like vary that, but it did give me enough time to sort of like get comfortable with those, but it's a really interesting,

like a lot of flexibility, and it feels different. There's also a system of relics, which are equipable sort of modifiers to, you know, your different stats and how much damage you do in defense and they do all kinds of stuff similar to, oh God, what were they called in Hollow Knight trinkets, I think, something like that. Yeah, they work the same way.

And those also help you shape your build because you might find a relic that's like, this increases the damage of autonomous abilities by 30%. And you're like, oh, fuck, okay. I wonder what would happen if I just got rid of all of the abilities that I have that are on active cool down or whatever and just equip these auto abilities. Yeah, turn it into an auto shooter basically.

Right, which sometimes I had to do for some of the boss fights because you have to focus a lot more on dodging and parrying and when you're doing that, just having these three ghosts, these three ghosts, these three robot ghosts fucking dealing all your damage for you, is very, very cool. It's huge changes too, even like the individual abilities

have like alternate forms. So there's like that straight ahead fire attack that I was talking about, there is a variant that you get fairly early on that is an arcing ice attack, which doesn't seem that big of a deal. And in like running around, it's not as huge, but when you're in a boss fight, it's the difference between,

are you typically going to encounter this guy where he's like dead in front of you, or are you going to be guessing where he's going to be, where an arc would be more helpful? And like that kind of like analysis with the boss fight, I found really interesting. Before we go too much further into the gameplay, just to give some people to hold on to something here,

can anybody explain the story and what is happening? Yeah, I beat the first game, so I can- Oh, perfect. Thank you. This does not have much to do with the first game, from what I can tell. More stylistic than anything, there are subtle nods to the first game.

But it is not a necessary thing to like... Basically, here's what you need to know. This child, person, kid basically gets sent into this area that is filled with all of these basically rotten robots that have been infected by this steam. That's why they call the game Rotten Robots. It's evil steam that has infected them.

Rotten Robots Rise of the Evil Steam is the name of the full name of it. Russ is Rotten Robots Rise of the Evil Egg Steam. Holy shit, I would play the hell out of that for that fucking game, man. And you're basically just going around learning about the background of this world as you beat monsters

and they tell you their sad story after you kill the evil robot and they become nice and join your party. Seems like robots and humans used to get along a lot better. They used to be chilling together really good. It is staggeringly similar to the plot of Lies of P and no other games that I can think of. And it... Yeah, there's no other yeah, yeah, it's a lot like, yeah, it's a lot like, man, yeah, we need a narrowing of IP. I feel like we need a win, we need a MC, an ultimate universe, but for like all of gaming so we can just condense all these franchises down to one.

I would say narratively, like, I don't think it's as immediately intriguing as something like Hollow Knight or Dark Souls, where they, like, kind of obscure exactly what the fuck is going on. But I do think it gives you a little more to grab onto, and I would say the backstories that you get of the characters that you're defeating and then using as powers helps to humanize the powers they're using. It's like a short story collection for sad robots. Like, each boss you beat is like 30 seconds

of a little tiny story that stands out. And I, on the bosses specifically, just to briefly go back to the gameplay, I do want to call out, I think the one aspect, there aren't very many Metroidvania, sorry, there aren't very many search action games that do combat as well as this game, and I would include Hollow Knight in that.

I think the combat in this game is better than the Hollow Knight's combat. And why that is, is when you were doing a build, we were talking about builds earlier. When you were doing a build in Hollow Knight, almost exclusively, it was those trinkets that you were equipping. Oh, I need a little more range,

or oh, I need whatever, extra defense. And it was all in the trinkets. The fact that you are tweaking both the trinkets and the abilities at any given time. And your equipment, there's like different types of equipment that you can equip that also gives you like different ways to counter or. And there's a physicality to those changes

that aren't just stat changes. Justin was referencing like the ice arc attack. Like when I do a boss fight in this game, I will look and see, oh, this guy is flying up in the air. So anything ground-based is gonna be worthless. I'm gonna unequip that. I'm gonna use more automated things. I'm gonna increase my running speed,

or if I need a slightly higher jump, I can do that. The ice will sometimes freeze and it'll buy you like two seconds to maybe knock down a health potion or something. It all just coalesces into something that gives you more ownership over how you're playing through it. And therefore it actually makes the whole experience

feel better. Speaking of ownership, let me just say, I don't know if you guys saw. You pirated this. You can tweak every aspect of the difficulty and that'll, you can increase or decrease enemy health. You can increase your personal health, cooldowns, et cetera, et cetera.

And either you can make it like more manageable for yourself if you have struggles with these games, or if you find it too easy, you can increase the difficulty and that'll increase the amount of like resources you're getting on a given moment, which is really smart. I defaulted to easy on this one because I wanted to see a bunch of it.

And I found that to be a really good experience. Like it's, I'm not getting hung up. The bosses are not super hard, but I do have to think about like, what I'm taking into the fight. But it's kind of the deal, like once you get the hook or the gimmick of it, it's not too hard to actually execute it.

Even on normal, it's not as hard as Hollow Knight, by even like, I found it to be much more approachable. I enjoy that a lot, though, because you don't, I don't think these environments are interesting enough to where I would want to... Do it over and over and over. Yes, right, exactly. I agree with that.

I would not wanna be... I will say some of the later ones are pretty, some of the later ones, if you get careless for like a second, you'll be, I played it on normal and you get absolutely torn apart. Yeah. But there's no death penalty, you don't like lose souls or whatever, so... Right.

...there's like no reason not to kind of push your luck a little bit. I do want to... if we could just return to the story thing a little bit. I do want to complain a bit about a narrative thing that has been a trend lately, not lately, past five, 10 years. I feel like the success of games like Elden Ring and the Souls games where the narrative is more of a, it's more of like a plot-mosphere thing

where like it's an abstract. Did you invent that? I like that.'s an abstract. Did you invent that? I like that. No. Did you invent that? No, I think the first time I heard it was people talking about Bioshock or maybe even Slave No More, like plot-mosphere. Like it's like, the story is around you,

but you're not like going through a narrative. There's not a beat by beat narrative necessarily. Right. I think there's, I think that like, for a lot of games that makes a lot of sense because you're cooking in a world, you're living in a world, you're inhabiting it, and it's so richly created that they need to lay out the texture for you.

And you can kind of fill in the gaps of the aesthetics. It's all jiving together. But it's not like a shortcut for having an actual story, right? It doesn't save you from having to make it narratively compelling. I feel like a lot of games have gotten the wrong lesson from that and have decided to not do stories anymore and just kind of have like story fragments, like vibes, you know what I mean? Without actually adding anything to it.

Like, Nier was abstract, but... Or surreal is probably a better way of describing it. But there were those like points of narrative that you can like, cling onto that are at least helping to propel you. Like even with like surrealist or abstract film, you have some sort of like, something that is taking you through it, right? You're not experiencing the entire thing out of sequence holistically. And I feel like it's a shortcut

for having an actual compelling story that a lot of times just gets in the way of the rest of the stuff if you're not actually executing it. I think the thing that is supposed to be pulling people through the story is the characters, is the like different automatons that you befriend and recruit.

And that does sort of get fleshed out the further you get into the story. I agree with the plot-mosphere complaints. I feel like this game is missing a first act where it's like, explains what the fuck is anything and what's going on. You really have to kind of put in some effort to. Credit to them though, I did kind of know

where I should be going by and large. Like, you can cut, like, it's a pretty good pathing, but I just didn't have any idea what I was doing or why I was doing it. If we could talk about just sort of like, traversal and progress, I love the way this game handles it. You get double jump and air dash at the same time, 10 minutes into the game.

That's how we do it. What was that one that we just played, or Prince of Persia, where you didn't get air dashed until like almost the end of the game? This is how you do it. Give me my double jump. I think it's a good design sign. If they are willing to make a game,

able to make a game that doesn't give you that early. It didn't bother me here, but I'm always impressed by a game like Prince of Pers you that early. It didn't bother me here, but I'm always impressed by a game like Prince of Persia that's like, it's gonna be 10 hours. And it really gives you a lot of tools to mess with the game's sort of intended route, right? Like whenever you do your melee attack chain,

every time you do an attack, you get a little bit of height, right? And every time you do like a movement action, whether it's a dash or like a parry or a double jump, it resets that chain. So I was able to, more times than I can count, get somewhere I wasn't supposed to be yet because I could jump, do my attacks,

dash, do my attacks, do my double jump, do my attacks. Some fucking animal well skills right there. You really, like, it's very approachable tech. And I found myself, there was one area where I got to the final boss of the area after only being in the area for like a minute and a half, and then I was like, oh cool, now I have the traversal ability that this boss unlocked,

I can just run through this whole area real quick. I found that to be very, very exciting, and also a testament to the fact that it doesn't fuck the game up. Like that is, clearly by design, you're able to do this because it's not that hard. I wanna hear from Plant because Plant, we know, doesn't care for these games.

And I'd like to know, I mean, we've talked a little bit about the narrative being like there, but kind of light. So I'm curious what it is that's like pulling you through this in ways that hasn't previously done. Yeah, no, that's a great question. It's the action. It has to be the action. I think the combat is just so much more compelling than it is in like 99% of these games. And it's the type of action that I crave. That's because I want to be clear. Hollow Knight, great.

I, I, I'm glad people love it. I hope to one day fall in love with it. Maybe before a Silksong comes out, which means I probably have another 15 years. Um, but for here it is, it's kind of doing a platinum games thing. It reminded me of, oh, what was that? The platinum games one on the Switch where you were like, unchained, chained souls. Oh, unchained spirit?

Yeah, I remember. It had chains in it and you were a cop. Yeah, and you literally had a like ghastly robot thing that fought on your behalf and you can switch them out. You're thinking of geists. I wish, I wish I was thinking of geists. You're thinking of Omicron the Nomad Soul.

Yeah, it's interesting you make the Plat- I wanna just address the Platinum thing. Because I actually found- I hate Platinum games, as we know. I've just like- I don't hate them, but they've never appealed to me really. And part of that is because I think they're very busy, and I think they overload you with, here's a combo that you do, x, y, y, x, x, x, y, x, pause, y. And all that stuff goes right over my head.

And what I liked about this is that all of your different powers are so compartmentalized and relatively simple. So it's more just about equipping the things and then executing things rather than keeping a lot of like combos and shit in your head. That's interesting to me because I don't remember any combos. I'm not a combo person, action games. I struggle with games like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry.

But what I like about the combat here that reminds me of more modern platinum games is it's more like stringing together tricks. So it's, Hey, I'm going to charge that person. It's going to pop them in the air. Then I'm going to use my site, which can rally them up higher and higher and higher. They're going to drop. So I'm going to ground pound onto them.

And then I'm going to use like my my whatever my heavy attack is right then. And it's not all about oh I'm going to deploy the same combo over and over and over again because I've nailed the controls and it's the most powerful thing I can accomplish. It's this is what feels fun in the moment and takes the most advantage of the environment around me because that's the other part of what's cool about the combat here is, it's not just, oh, you're on a flat surface with your enemy. There are height variations and you have some enemies that are flying.

You have some that have, they're really slow, but they shoot out their weapon really far and like an instant. So you're having to use dodge. There's a great fight against a dung beetle where there there's just a giant ball that you cannot shoot through. It's just right in front of you, so you have to work your way around that problem in ways that did not match any other build

that I had used previously in the game. The combat and the action ends up feeling more like a puzzle or even just improvisation, which I really, really enjoy. So I think that's it. I think the other part is it being so easy to zip around the map. I just have so little patience for backtracking, even the game that I think the art here

is quite beautiful at times, but I have no patience for that, even in the best Metroidvania search action games. On that note, I know other games have done this. I'm pretty sure Prince of Persia did something similar, but this game is so clear about when you are done with a room, which I really, as somebody who hates backtracking,

I really love that because that says to me like, well, that room's still gray and I don't think I missed anything. So let me go back in there and like poke around and save me from having to like, oh my God, what did I miss? I'll just do it right now. And I look, for my brain, I need that.

Like I need it. I can't. It doesn't just make it more approachable. It makes it, I 100% of the game because I wanted that big blue. Whenever you finish an area and find everything that's in an area, you get this little blue seal next to the area's name. And I'm like, oh, that feels good.

I never have to step foot in that fucking nasty rotten place ever again. The game also does something that Metroid Dread did, which I absolutely love, is rather than having you have to keep in your head, oh, I saw a cracked wall over here, but I don't have the ability to go there. Everything is tracked in the map.

So if you pull open the map, it'll say, locked door, or oh, is a locked door, but you have the key now, or oh, you need to bash through this with the power you just got. So the map tells you, but it doesn't do the thing that I think some search action games do, which I don't like, is here's a fucking waypoint.

You gotta go here. And I don't like, is here's a fucking waypoint. No waypoints, yeah. You gotta go here. And I don't like that. That feels a little counter to the spirit of the genre, but it is in a way, like, just giving you enough kind of to lead you along. You also, and this is like, this is getting pretty ephemeral, but I really feel like this is a game that has a clear map that is well represented,

that you can actually visualize navigating. I think a lot of these games that feel so organic and textured in their map design, they start to get so nuanced that you can't even really tell, you know, where- I mean, fucking Elden Ring has like six layers going on. Exactly. Where am I? It's like, I don't know, this map is not helping me.

This is a good map, man. I know where I am. And the waypoints, you can automatically go to them whenever you want to. From the pause menu, you can fast travel right back. And I don't, there's not a penalty for death as far as I can tell. No, there isn't.

It's very generous in that way, which I really appreciate. The only thing that kind of annoyed me early on, I struggled with a couple of bosses where I felt like I would get in sort of like attack patterns that I couldn't break out of that would like wipe me in one hit. Like you would have a big attack that you would get caught

in and it would like literally like three hits and you're done before you even hit the ground. You can go, you can die really, even on easy, you can die really quick. Yeah, but I think as you play, you sort of unlock stuff that can mitigate that. For sure, yeah. Like you have these totems that,

I played the whole game with this one totem, which is like a piece of equipment that made it that if you died, it refilled your life once, one time. Which like is such a huge relief to, like the number of times that thing saved me. I don't know that this game does anything hugely inventive, right? Like I don't think it is necessarily a shift in the genre. I think it just really, it nails the fundamentals and layers on top of them, really good RPG

systems, like really good build crafting and really good, like fully customizable combat. And that's a lot of big change. You say no innovation, but like, a combat system as hard as this must have been to make balanced and nuanced. And to look good. It also looks far less like a great. And to look good, that's gotta be top

of the design document, right? When you're starting, that's gotta be the big idea because I feel like that does feel very different from a lot of these games. There are so many different, not just satisfying different combinations, but different weapons that very clearly communicate why you would wanna use them in one circumstance

over another without having to get out a graphing calculator. And that was a big change. I mean, the first game kind of started dipping a toe in this stuff. And the first game's combat is quite good. But they really all of the like flexibility that you have where each weapon has like sub weapons attached to it and things like that. That's all stuff that was added. So they've really spent a lot of time. I would echo this just to reiterate, I don't think there is a search action game with a better combat system than this.

This is the bar. And when Silksong does come out, which is never, I... Not now, after they play it, it's like, oh, well, back to the drawing board. Seven more years, baby. There is, I mean, we keep comparing those two games. I think they're pretty wildly different. Oh, yeah.

In the way that Hollow Knight and Silksong do not offer you that level of customization, you have to master, it's Dark Souls versus Sekiro, right? Like, Sekiro is like, you have to get good at this thing. And Hollow Knight is so fucking tight, so, so, so, so tight. In a way where this game isn't at times, which is fine, because that means

that the RPG systems are so rich that you could make a build that completely just shad racks this boss you've been stuck on for an hour. Yeah, I would also say for what it's worth, I find Hollow Knight's art design and tone to be more interesting, personally more interesting, just because they, I think, are a little more risky

and a little bit silly at times in a world that's like very fucking dark. Whereas this is like basically grim start to finish. I love Mineer. I, this is, it felt a little familiar at times, the art style, you know? And it's not bad, let me be clear. Better than like most of what's out there,

but I agree. I do wanna just say- These are minor criticisms of the game that I, this is my favorite thing I've played this year, pretty and-like. You guys think it's weird in gaming, it's getting more common to have, I feel like this and Magical Mr. Mistoffelees,

what was the Japanese RPG you guys liked so much last year? That metaphor refi. Yeah, that. It's like getting more common to have the games that are sort of like adjacent. They're like not in a franchise, but they sort of are. You know what I mean? They're like, they might as,

not even like a spiritual successor, but like it's basically understood that they are a part of the franchise without like. I mean, not even like a spiritual successor, but like it's basically understood that they are a part of the franchise without like. I mean, this is a different story. That metaphor with Fantasia was the same developers, same, you know, same people behind Persona. This is more, you know, this is a different studio entirely. Inspired maybe.

No, but there's like a shorthand, right? That we have started to establish. It's like you you get it It's like I guess I I would I agree with the art sad robots did not come from near like let's be real I wasn't really talking about it. Yeah What franchise were you saying? I was thinking more of like the with the the metaphor refontasio and persona like having these like I know you can't talk about Nier with this, but it is a,

the story of this makes sense to you. If the story of this makes sense to you, it is because of the groundwork that is laid by games like that, right? So they are building off of a story framework that you already have in your head, right? Yes. With no context, you play this game and you're like,

what is happening right now? But in conversation with Nier and LizaP and all those other homunculus video games, I feel like you kinda get it. For us, you're right that Nier didn't invent the sad robot, but I think a lot of people who are playing this have enjoyed Nier and are bringing MIR to them. There's one thing I would give you a saleable

Bioshock. Yes. Marketing point, if you're pitching it to a friend or somebody else, you're like, do you remember how you like persona? Remember how you like MIR well? I wanna go back to one thing Hoop said about the story here and like having something to hold onto.

And this is just a request before we wrap to developers and also to people who play these games. A really simple, you might even call it, tropey story is okay. In fact, it's great. And the best experimental filmmakers are already doing that. David Lynch, I would say Inland Empire, probably the most difficult Lynch film to get into. It is about an actress who is cursed and

is told that if you make this movie things will go very very bad. And then every 15 minutes you can check in on the most simple story imaginable. Holy Motors, very complicated movie. It's about an actor who wakes up and has to put on makeup between six different roles or however many that he's going to perform that day. Straight story? Don't even get me started. It's a straight story.

It's a straight story. I think we should not, one, artists should not be afraid about buildings. If you're going to build something really abstract, using something extremely familiar as a through line is a powerful thing. And us as the audience should not discount something just because it's like familiar and simple.

Like we connect with those things for a very good reason. It's a platform to do something new, but it's a gateway. I do think in a game, in anything other than like, where the pieces of the game have been abstracted out to like Thomas Was Alone, which is a bad example, but like, unless there's like completely abstracted, if you're talking about people,

I think that if you want me to play the game, you've gotta at least give me something that I am working towards narratively, so I can make that part of my brain shut up for a while. Right, you know what I mean? Like without that, even a basic like, I have to find my sister, okay. You know, I'll look around for my sister for a while.

Like something like that, just to get me started. And even like Minecraft is like, you need a fucking house, dude. You need to be able to sleep. When was the last time you played Minecraft? Cause I have never seen a message pop up that's like, hey, it's Notch. Hey, it's me, it's Notch.

I'm fucking grinding mine coins left and right. You haven't seen my, uh, mine coin grinding machine. No, I haven't seen your mine coin grinding machine. Astral Chain! Astral Chain! Astral Chain! Yeah.

Whew. Oh. We did it. You just got a bunch of people. You know a Minecraft movie? Russ is making another Minecraft movie coming in 2027. It's a different Minecraft It's gonna be so fucking good. I've got circles in mind. Oh my god. He got back to lack

The game is called the ender magnolia bloom in the mist. It's important got back a black Play it and let's go to break Hey, I played civilization 7 the seventh of Sid Meier's diabolical little world boxes that he loves to build. Griffin, can I ask you as a layman and have an outsider, and this is gonna sound kinda stupid, and I don't mean it to, but I thought all these were good. Do you know what I'm saying?

I thought this was a series where like each time, there's some series where like everyone comes out and everybody likes them all. I thought this was one of those. No, this is the seventh one of them. So like, obviously they've realized their mistakes every time and then like we gotta fix it, we gotta do it better.

I am not like a Civ expert. I picked up the series at five and I played a lot of five and I played some six didn't love it and Now there's seven I'd like to share my thoughts if I if I if I may I don't know if any of you guys actually played it I'm seeing a lot of head shaking. I found it very scary. Yeah plant played two hours. I played two hours It was a train. It was a trance in what way like I played two hours. It was a trance. It was a trance in what way? Like I played two hours like this is going to teach me how to play the game and it proceeded to tell me rules. But then by the end of the two hours, I had no idea how I had done literally anything. Probably any 4X strategy game is a thing where I feel like you have to have a couple runs at it. It requires almost the way that we talk about JRPGs requiring time before you get to the good stuff.

Like, it's such an insanely dense... It comes with its own encyclopedia of rules, and the encyclopedia in this one is not particularly informative. Even though all the games are different, is it also like the genre where it took me multiple souls likes before I really got into them, but all the hours I put into each one prepared me for the next one. Absolutely, they will prepare you. I felt prepared for Civilization VII

based on the time I spent with the other games. Even though Civ VII does make some pretty huge changes, in some ways, I will say they have streamlined, if you can believe it, the way a lot of the systems work. They have made certain processes automatic that before required micromanagement. Like, you no longer have to like spawn builders in order to like, you know, make buildings and produce buildings. Like all of that stuff happens sort of automatically as your city expands. There's a lot of stuff like that, that they have, that they have sort of streamlined.

The I will say like, I think the two big changes that they've made, I think one is great. I think one has really lost me. The one that's great is they've fully overhauled the way sort of diplomacy works in the game, which is obviously important for a, you know, a world conquering, a big board game, which is obviously important for a world conquering big board game, essentially, where you're going up against other world leaders. Before it was kind of abstract, and sometimes you would obviously see signs of aggression, like, oh man, this guy's really running up on my borders,

I hope he doesn't declare war on me, oh he did, now I have to go into war, oh no, all my citizens are super fucking unhappy. It was like, it kind of felt like a crap shoot every time. Now you have a resource called influence that you accrue just like gold and science and all of the other resources in the game. And you spend that to do different things.

Like if you want to get a city state on your side, you can spend influence to attract them. You also use it for like espionage stuff. So you can spend influence on espionage actions, like stealing somebody's like scientific discovery or forming a trade alliance with somebody. All of that stuff is like really mechanical now in a way that I find fucking rad, I think is, has, has made the whole idea of how do I get this whole nation on my side or

How do I defend myself or weaken this other nation all of that is like pretty? Understandable now and you have like a list of options and costs and and all that The big thing that this game does different is it separates the whole of the game into three ages There is like the classic age, there is the age of exploration, and then there is the modern age. And there's a set time limit that you pick, basically, when you start the game for each of those different ages.

And as different societies grow and hit these different sort of benchmarks and complete these mission objectives, like benchmarks and complete these like mission objectives. That clock moves forward and forward until the age ends. You kind of cash out. You sort of like, if you completed these different science missions, you will get a science point that you can invest

at the start of the next age. Got it. It's basically a sort of rubber banding system that stops the game from, this is why they did it, I think, it stops the game from snowballing on turn 10, where it's like, well, this is decided, we can play another 95 turns of this if you want, but like this guy is so in the,

instead there's two sort of soft resets that they have in a campaign. As you reach the end of the stage. And you feel like you could rally at the end of an era if things are going poorly, because you get some sort of you reach the end of the- And you feel like you could rally at the end of an era if things are going poorly because you get some sort of bonus at the end of the era. Yes, you get a bonus, right? So you're starting out stronger

if you did a good job in the last era and you have sort of a focused idea. It'll give you a jumpstart on the next one. But it also does kind of put everyone on sort of a level playing field, right? And then in the modern era, that's where you get your game winning objectives that you're, now it's a race to see who can get there first.

Um, I, I, I don't love it. And I think that it kind of goes hand in hand with the other big change that I don't love, which is they have unpaired like leaders from actual, uh, civilizations. Right. So like at the start of the game, you pick your leader. So it's like, oh, I'll pick. Gandhi is like the known one, right? Yeah, say like, I'll pick Gandhi,

and then you have to pick your ancient civilization to start like, okay, well, I'll pick Rome, I guess. What if Gandhi was the leader of Rome? Okay, cool. You get to the end of the age, you have to pick a whole new civilization, right? And it's the ones that are available to you are based on sort of like what achievements

you have made in the prior age. And maybe you're not sticking with Rome and Gandhi for the whole, all three eras? Sometimes you can, but like not into the modern era. Sometimes you gotta ditch Gandhi and get serious. So no, you stay with your, you, I'm pretty sure there's no way to change your leader, but you change the nation. And all it does is kind of like,

it doesn't wipe the map clean, right? Like all the stuff that you built on the map, the state of the board game is the same. I mean, shit will have different names, but then like the different abilities and the different kind of like modifiers that the different nations get, those change age to age. And I don't know, man, I feel like it takes away the thing that I like modifiers that the different nations get. Those change age to age. And I don't know, man,

I feel like it takes away the thing that I like about civilization, which is like, building. Like I am building this thing. It is the reason that that whole one more turn kind of idea works. And I know that, I think this is gonna be divisive. I think there's lots of people

who are fed up with the way civilization works, who are excited about this. For me, it got rid of that feeling of like, it's turn a hundred, I know exactly how I got to where I am. And I know exactly the state of the world. Having that sort of soft reset kind of, I don't know, it really, really took all the wind out of my sails every time it happened.

So that's like, that's the lay of the land. It is still, if you have played Civ before, like all the core systems are pretty identifiable, pretty recognizable. And it is neat, like it is very, very cool, especially once you start fucking around with like, what if this time instead of building a huge military, I instead tried to become this like diplomatic spy master

and try to win that way. Being able to do that stuff is very, very cool. It's the big structural changes I am not so wild about, but I also am a fairly recent newcomer to the series, and maybe there are people who are excited about this idea of this sort of rebalancing restructuring. My impression in reading the reviews is that people that are like old school Civ people

don't like the changes, but I'm also really sensitive to how fucking hard it must be. And this is not a pro or con about the game, but imagine having to make a new fucking Civ game. It's not like making Madden every year where it's like, oh, there's a hit stick now, and whatever, there's new players. You have to recreate chess a little bit each time you do it, and that's really-

Okay, but no one asked them to. I know, I'm not making an excuse for them making it. No one made them, they're the ones who wanted 60 new dollars, you know? I already gave them the 60 dollars. I'm not giving them a, I'm not saying they were right, whatever it is. I'm just, as an intellectual experience, if someone came to me and is like,

you need to make a new Civ game, I'd be shitting my pants. Right. And I think that they are taking some big, bold swings with this game. But, and this is, I think the case, this was certainly the case with Civ 6, some of the changes are fucking great,

and some of them I don't, I really, really don't care for. Your mileage is gonna vary a whole lot. I think that despite the fact that some stuff has been done to make this a more sort of user-friendly, beginner-friendly experience, I still think like Civ 4 or 5 is the gold standard, just because, I don't know, I think they are better games. Did this work on Steam Deck for you, Griffin?

I didn't try it, didn't even try it. The idea of it. I think it is supported on Steam Deck for those who have one. I mean, it's on consoles, right? So like a lot of the stuff seems like it is. The only way I would do that is if I paired my Steam Deck to a TV and then get a Bluetooth mouse and keep working. That's how I laugh.

So that's the Civ 7. Thank you for teaching us, Griffin. We appreciate it. You're welcome. We have just a couple reader mail questions I wanted to call out. This one comes from Archie Micaris. Did any of you finish Lorelei and the laser eyes?

I know there were some hesitations about the UI and the general obtusiveness, but in retrospect, every single aspect feels so intentional and it comes together as a really compelling piece of art. Did anyone go back to it? Nope. No, I played, I would say I got maybe halfway through it and did not, I really liked it.

I just kept hitting walls where I wasn't making any progress. I keep wondering if it's gonna come out on mobile because their games, that game in particular felt very touch friendly. Yeah. It's hard, yeah. It's, when you have to play a new, not have to, but when you play a new game every week,

that's, that's the kind of game that tends to fall through the cracks is the one that have some, some rough edges. Yeah. Uh, we have one more question. This comes from Matthew. Uh, hi besties. I'm having surgery in April, which means six weeks.

I have for six weeks. I have to avoid raising my hands above shoulder level. What games do you recommend for post surgery? Ideally something that you can sink a lot of hours into without raising your blood pressure too much I can always replay Skyrim for the time. Dragon Quest 11. Dragon Quest 11. It's so easy, it's right there, do it. Dragon Quest Builders though. What about Dragon Quest Builders? Not a bad idea either. Dragon Quest Builders 2. Dragon Quest Builders 2 please. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is Dragon Quest Builders 2. Dragon Quest Builders 2, please. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is, oh my God.

I just got something that's like stomach pain, except it's the feeling of wanting to play Dragon Quest Builders 2 so much. It runs like shit on Steam Deck, sadly. Really? Yeah. I would also say I had a really outrageously great beach trip once where I played almost the entirety

of Persona 4 on my PlayStation 4. Oh yeah, Persona seems like a good one because you're just stuck and you're just reading and that's not gonna jam your blood pressure up. I'd say Four Golden. If you've, if you're worried about that. Yeah, but if you're worried about that.

The one with Teddy. Even more with the blood pressure, I think is right. Is that the PS Vita? What if this person doesn't like RPGs? Okay, that's a good question. The binding, no, don't do binding. Why not? I think it's a good answer.

My fucking blood pressure gets jacked and I've been playing for 700 hours. That's a good point. I mean, that's data for Hades would be my other, I mean, that's when I put a million hours into. Hades is intense, man. I would say that like, Bellatro, I don't really get that tense about like, but I have played a bunch.

That's true. Bellatro is a good one. I would recommend on mobile rather than platforms. Oh, Solitarica also is similar. If you want to go for sheer content, I'll say Final Fantasy XIV has a lot to offer you. Yeah. If you want to go that route. Do I also recommend books? Books, yeah. Check them out. Was there one recommend books? Books. Yeah.

Check them out. Was there one in particular? Not Big Reader. No. I haven't had time. I haven't had time this week. Been really swamped. No, I only read Romanticie,

and I don't think our listeners care about an ember in the shadow. Should I be reading Onyx Storm, Justin? What? Should I be reading Onyx Storm? It seems like a phenomenon. Did you read, I mean, did you read Fourth Wing and... No.

I mean, Fourth Wing is the first one. So I read Fourth Wing first. That was a phenomenon. Onyx Storm is the third book. I will say this. I like them. A lot of shit happens in them. And it's a pretty good blend of dragons and kissing.

It's steamy? Yeah, in a lot of different ways. Cause there's dragons too. Love it. Do we have any honorable mentions? I mean, as long as we're talking books, I've been reading the Murderbot Diaries. Yeah, they're good, right?

Yeah, they're real fucking good. Martha Wells is a book series, there's seven of these bad boys, I'm almost done with number two. I've been absolutely just gnawing through these beauties. It's about a robot. We have done, I will say this, Griffin, before you go too deep down this hole, I've done this pitch on besties

within the past few episodes, so. Oh, have So, yeah, you could do like a concise version. Was I absent for that one? Yes, you were absent for that episode. Well, then I won't go too deep, but they're great. They're incredibly readable, incredibly likable, incredibly exciting. I hope Martha Wells wasn't listening to that because she's probably like, you motherfucker.

What a piece of shit, I hate Dustin McIlroy so much. All right, will someone else go, while I think of a thing? I've been playing the Binding of Isaac. Motherfucker. What a piece of shit, I hate Dustin McElroy so much. All right, will someone else go while I think of a thing? I've been playing the Binding of Isaac. Can I, do I get a, do I, Evita is it? Do you get a vote on if Russ can talk? I would love to know, no, I'm desperate to hear more Binding of Isaac.

I'm in one of my like, I- I'm gonna keep it small. I'm gonna keep it short on Binding of Isaac. I'm in one of my like, I- I'm gonna keep it small. I'm gonna keep it short on Binding of Isaac. I have 10 more achievements to go out of 640 achievements. Holy crap. It has taken me literally 10 years to get to this point. And it was one of my, as Plant can attest, it was one of my New Year's resolutions

to finish this game. So I am closing in on it. Finish this game? No one has ever used finish this game. So I am closing in on it. Finished this game. No one has ever used, finished this game with that context. I'm gonna do it. That's finished. There is a funny thing about Binding of Isaac. I don't think I'm going to do this, but when you 100% Binding of Isaac, uh, it

gives you like a, yay, you completed it. But it also changes your save file to say two more to go. And you have to a hundred percent the other two save files to get like a full infinity. I'm not going to do that. I really appreciate that. I can't wait to be able to play this in multiplayer. It does support online multiplayer. It's currently in beta, but I would love to play more. So maybe you guys will join me for my last hurrah. That'd be fun.

That would be fun. My recommendation is the Super Bowl. The Kansas City Chiefs are going to be there this Sunday against the Philadelphia Eagles. Whoever wins, it's going to be a great time, but I'm very, very, very, very happy about this. It is bringing me a lot of joy right now. How many years they got left? Is this it? Are they going to be done? It has to be, it has to be it for a while after this, right? Like I said last year.

Yep. Yeah. They should launch a podcast instead. Just do that. It seems pretty, they did. Well, not all of them. Yeah. They launched a hallmark movie, for God's sake.

Listen, you guys played old video games? Oh shit. What are you on now, Juice? Hey listen, I don't know. Having Russ, a good Russ on this show, awoke something in me, like something really scary. Sorry, did you just refer to Russ from Retro Game Corp as a good Russ?

Yeah, he didn't. No, good Russ, like the definite article like the good Russ. Okay. Having when the good Russ was on the show, it really unlocked something. I don't know what it is. Something broke deep down in me and I started really getting deep. So the first thing I made was I showed you guys the piecade. That's like a stand up arcade cabinet that has a Raspberry Pi 4 in it with a hat on top of it that plugs into like the joystick.

And you say hat like people just know, right? That's a hat is like a, sorry. It's been a long week since I didn't know anything about it. It's like a trilby. So it's like a, um, uh, the, the, the Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer. Um, uh, the, the, the raspberry PI is a tiny computer. A hat is sort of like interface components that if you put it on, we'll make that computer into something more like the computer that you want. So this little piecade hat slid onto the raspberry PI and had a place to plug

in controllers and a screen and stuff like that. So when you plugged everything in, did you say finishing the hat? No, I didn't. I didn't notice I didn't do that. So I did that and I put a bunch of old video games on it. And then that didn't, then my rocks still weren't hard enough. So I decided that I was going to,

so basically here's what's in my living room now is a mini PC that I have a jump drive connected via USB that has a Batacera image that I flashed onto the drive that is now the boot image for the mini PC that boots into the emulation station Batacera that's paired to an 8 eight bit dough controller in a dock that's behind the TV along with the mini PC.

So I reach behind my TV, I pull out a controller and I can play any game ever made. And what have you been playing? Oh, I don't play them. I'm not crying. I'm not too deep, my man. I don't play the games, baby. I'm knighted at the museum.

You know what I mean? Like I'm Ben Stiller walking around the Genesis 32X section like looking good tonight everyone. Keep it in place, girl party. What was the one we played Griffin? Girl party. Girl club, girls club. Remember on the CD?

Yeah, I will never forget girls club. The Justin McQuquarie Prize for getting CDI video cartridge emulation running on any sort of, like, any fashion is still unclaimed. $1,000 in Olive Garden gift certificates are waiting for you if you can make that happen. But no, I've been playing, actually, what I've messed playing, actually,

what I've messed with a lot is Daphne this week has been causing me the most consternation because it's a, do you guys know about Daphne? It's a LaserDisc emulator that is very old, like old thing, but LaserDisc game emulation is really hard because you have to have these LaserDisc video files and you have to have ROMs, right? And the ROMs are basically like both running the game

and also telling the game where the video files are that it needs to play. So like, if you think about the ROM for Dragon's Lair, it's actually like this incredibly intricate DVD menu, right? Where like you can go through the ROM for Dragon's Lair, it's actually like this incredibly intricate DVD menu, right? Where like you can go through the ROM pad, but that's the ROM. And then it's queuing you towards, so it's basically like file structure is really important with Daphne's ship because it's pointing to a lot of different places.

It's not just one file and each of the different emulators has that in different structures. So you can't have the same file format for like retro arch that you would have for retro pie because they format the stuff differently on Android or depending on what architecture you're in. So that's what I've been messing with a lot. There's that's not an advisement. I can't imagine that anybody would want to do this, but I can now play. Uh, a time traveler, Griffin, on my desktop. Fuck, yes, dude.

I can play- Right on a time reversal cube. I can play Space Ace in 4K on my desktop, but yeah, it's been fun. It's been great. I really have enjoyed collecting those games in a digital format is a lot more pleasurable than it used to be, and much more pleasurable and satisfying, and I will say educational. Yeah, like just kind of cruising around with like the ratings and the information on the games and like clips and stuff. I really do get the sense of like history when you wander into these like full game collections where the like logos are built out and it feels like you are seeing an entire

collection you've never seen before, it really is kind of amazing. All my shit is stuff I've talked about before. I leveled up all my guys in Heroes of Hammer Watch 2 and kind of slowed down after that. I don't really feel like pushing New Game Plus, but that game is still rad and I'm waiting for more stuff to come out for it. I did finish The Root Trees Are Dead. Oh, that's good too. I started that with Sydney this week.

That's a great co-op, play together game. I solved it and then I go back to the main menu and it's like, and here's the second one. And they have a whole second mystery. No, really? Like everything is different. Like you get the board from the first one still, you get everything that you did that you figured out in the first one, but now

it's like much later and there's the board is like twice as big and now there's a bunch of different much, much harder stuff to solve. Wow. And I honestly kind of put a pause on that. That's such an amazing game. Yeah. I've been playing it with Sydney. I will say that I usually find there is a point in each evening at which I'm no longer able to play. The root trees are dead. It becomes incredibly way too complex for me to try to organize and keep in my head.

That is like a, it's a lot less casual, I think, than like something like we were doing a Curse the Golden Idol. And that's a little bit more relaxed. This is very much like, okay, hold on, wait, I've almost got it, give me one more second. And yeah, I'm still doing my Godot training course. It's still very, very cool.

I get excited now when I see the little Godot icon before an indie game boots up and start trying to figure out how they did all the different shit. It's neat. And that's it. Love it. I wanted to thank some people. We have some members over at the Patreon.

Wampafil, we have Violence, we have Liv, and we have Felicity. Thank you for being patrons. Just for y'all being patrons, we have a new Br battles episode. This one is about We the best I think weird Nintendo failures Yes, I think it's the best into no failure is that we settled best weirdo Nintendo failure It's something to that effect. Here's a clip from that bracket battles episode. You can listen to that right here

Both of these I think think, are about, they provide about the same amount of entertainment value. That's really true. They're both sort of intangible, they're intangible in the same kind of way, which I appreciate. I do think Labo is more fun. Yeah.

Which is more weird. I think as a concept, Labo's more weird, but looking at this fucking box art, it's so weird why they made it look like this. It's so weird why they made it look so shitty and not have art from the games Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. Do you think?

Yeah, like we live in a time now where you make a marketing partnership and then you reach out to Nintendo and you're like, hey, send me over the assets, the original assets, and they send you a big file, right? And that takes five seconds. But back in the day, you're saying, hey, I need to get some Mario and Zelda assets. And somebody else is like, yeah, I'll reach out to Japan. Oh, they're going to fly Miyamoto out to draw screenshots?

You're getting a description over the phone like, yeah, he's got a red hat and black hair. That is what we were looking at. And one with the green hat. The green hat. He's like a little nasty guy. I don't know. I don't know, just like. That was a fun one.

We had a good time doing that one. Also on Tuesday, we have a resties on big helmet heroes, which, hoops, Griffin, We need to get you into this game They made another castle crashers. It's basically castle crashers. Just castle crashers, but in 3d Good stuff. It's a lot of fun I thought we told you guys not to have any good games on the rest ease here We didn't we tried not to and then it ended up being great. Dang it I know.

Best laid plans though, but I submit, do go after I. Also next week we have Avowed on Next Besties. Avowed is the new game from Obsidian, the developer best known for games like Fallout New Vegas. That's next week. I hope you'll join us for that because we want you to. Join us next time for the besties, won't you? Because shouldn't the world's best friends

pick the world's best games? Besties!