The Besties - Uh Oh! We're Drowning in Games Again

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

This week, we throw our own summer festival of video games by opening the grab bag! There was so much stuff to play, it took all three Besties working on different piles to separate the “Yes!” from the “Yuck!” Want a meta Sherlock Holmes mystery? How about overlooked DLC to a Besties favorite? Or maybe you want to hear about Steam running on Android emulators? Friends, we have something for everyone! 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!

Don't you think there should be more berries? Like different types of berries like in life? Just like there are prime berries, right? We can all agree on the prime berries. Straw, blue, black. Yeah. Sure. Seems like too few.

You want the whole rainbow. It's just like for a genre of, that is such a staple of, for example, cereal to have so few options to pick from. Well, there's the bullshit classifications. And before you, dearly, listener pushing your glasses up but i'm actually a banana is technically a very like i'm not no small plump juicy sweet these are berries i don't need like a apple slipping in there because its seeds are

you know in the right place there needs to be a a drawing of it when you open the encyclopedia like a stipple drawing of an actual berry no one's putting a fucking stipple apple in your encyclopedia yeah is strawberry a berry though yes i'm not i don't chris i just explicitly said i don't get a shit I just wanted to ask about aggregates, but it's okay. Yeah, it's an aggregate berry. It's a super berry. Give me an orange berry. Ooh, I don't even know what an orange berry would be, but it would just imagine the exotic flavor that it could possess.

Would not be good in cereal, though. It would make the milk curdle. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it's not a stipulation. It doesn't need to be good in cereal, but. Yeah, but that's your main berry consumption. It should be. I think there are a lot of green berries, but you probably shouldn't eat any green berries.

Wait. Wait. Is a grape? Is a grape of a berry? Again, I can't, I don't, I can't stress this enough. I don't care. Yes, a grape is a berry. Look at it.

Juicy, sweet. Okay, okay. That's why I asked. I think it is a berry. Especially champagne grapes are like great berries. Oh, yeah, those are berries. There might be a science. No, I don't care about the science.

I care about what feels like a berry to me in my heart and my soul. It feels like a berry. Watermelon's berry. No, it's not. Watermelons is not a berry. It's too heavy for me to pick up. Yeah. can't buy right into it either

how can that be a berry we need to be drying we need to be raisining more stuff also because raisins slap ass they are so good and I think they're the best byproduct of grapes and time

and I know that's a controversial position I love me a cran raisin but let's cranberries give me a dried up black bear Give me a dried up a banana. We dry everything up.

Let's see what's good. Let's see what's not. We've got to stop living in fear of dry, dry food. Yeah, I am frequently astounded by the experiments that Trader Joe's does on dried fruit. And it worries me to some extent because they might be going too far. Yeah, dry mango. That's okay. Yeah, that's fine.

That's fine. Dry papaya is kind of nothing. Hold on. Dried pineapple? No. Yeah. Can allow. I do absolutely can do that show.

Can allow it. Anyway, I think we have another 10 minutes on a new topic. Why don't we have more nannas? Yeah. You know? I don't have any any. Oh, no. My name is Griffin McRoy.

I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant. And I know the best game of the week. My name is Ross Frasick. I know the best game of the week. Welcome to The Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year.

club and just by listening to you, my friend, have become a member of said club. This week, we're going to be talking about a bunch of different stuff. We've all played a handful of games here in one of our classic grab bag segments. So we're going to be covering a ton of stuff. Then we're going to circle back in the B block to talk a little bit about the Adventures of Elliot, the Millennium Tales. So a big one. Stuff to the gills this app. But maybe we should take a break first and catch our breath because that was two and a half minutes of recording we just did, and I'm freaking tired. I'm exhausted, too, just listening to it.

Yeah. Where do we want to start with this magical grab bag episode that we've planned for the team? I think we should start with the new. I want to go back in time. I want to be crushed in time. That is my fetish. It's funny that you guys said the opposite shit. It's really funny how Russ was like, I want to start with something new.

And Chris was like, I want to start with something old. And we could just be crushed. time. You know, I think we should, I think we should start with being crushed in time. Okay. I would love to talk about crushed in time. I played through all of it, mostly over this past weekend. I was traveling, as was Chris to go to our friend's wedding in Austin. Sorry, you didn't get the invite, Russ. I was there at the window banging and no one heard me. Yeah, okay, that makes, we thought it was the wind ago. But now that I know that it, it's It was you that makes a lot more sense.

Question time is the new adventure game, sort of inspired by classic point and clicks, created by Draw Me a Pixel, whose name you may not recognize, but is a studio that made a really delightful adventure game called There Is No Game, where There Is No Game dealt with, I don't know, the state of modern gaming

in a sort of parodical way. You went through like a handful of different gaming genres solving different classic adventure games style puzzles, all the while kind of like dismantling the games in which you are exploring. Crush and Time does a very similar thing in a way that I thought was a lot more sort of cogent than there is no game. Did either of you guys play it? No, I haven't had the chance. I love There is No game. But yeah, I do get the sense that like it was like five or six disparate ideas sort of. melded together into an anthology?

Sure, it starts out and it's like you're looking at a main menu and you have to like rips buttons out of the main menu and use it. So like the wrench icon for the settings, you pull that off and now you have a wrench item that you can use to, that was sort of where that game started. Then it went all kinds of different directions. The one you should know about is that there is a point and click adventure game in a very classic Lucasart style featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, which is the focus entirely of crushed in time. The reason it's much more cogent is it's a Sherlock Holmes and

Watson story more than it is anything else and it sort of sticks to it. The subject that it explores, and if you'd rather go in sort of pure to this thing and not kind of know any of those sort of twists, I'm not going to like fully blow the thing wide open, but you may want to skip forward a couple of minutes. What this game explores is that same style of like what if video game characters were aware that they were in a virtual simulated sort of style thing. And they were solving, you know, these classic point and click adventure puzzles, but they were doing so while traveling between different versions of the game. So, for instance, you might get pulled into alpha.

And now, like, the environment is, like, all wireframey and, like, not quite finished. Then you hop into, like, a brainstorming. phase. You hop into like the, there's like an eight-bit era that you go in and explore and then a four-bit sort of game and watch style era. Like you are moving between all of these different things as these characters are sort of learning the truth about the nature of their world. That is kind of the hook. It is more about game development as a creative process and kind of everything that goes into that. Sounds like a delight. Does it still hold together as like also a Sherlock Holmes mystery? Mostly. Yeah. I think so. I mean, this version of Sherlock Holmes is mostly just kind of played up for laughs. Sure. He is a total dummy. And Watson is the one that like actually knows what is going on. I mean, that was always kind of the case. That's always the case, right? But Sherlock in, in this game is just profoundly useless. And in fact, a lot of the puzzles that you're trying to solve most of the time are like, Sherlock is standing in your way. Sherlock won't let you drive the car. Sherlock won't do this. You have to figure it out. So that's like the tone of the game, whereas there is no game was sort of a scattershot, like, and now this is the micro-transaction world. It's an RPG, but everything's micro-transactions.

And we're going to say something about that. This is purely a start to finish, like, here's the creative video game process and the characters in the game are, know that they're in it and they're sort of learning about. That's really cool. I was worried because, you know, obviously there is no game format can be done a lot, but it can be also. kind of a box that you can get caught in. Right. So them finding a way to make an entire game and an entire narrative that's consistent,

but still working in that video game framework is like, cool. That makes me more excited to try it, quite honestly. They've made one big choice that I'm a little bit torn on. I finished the game and I really, really enjoyed it. I think it's a great follow-up to There's No Game. I think in a lot of ways it like surpasses it.

Do you have a sense of how long it took you? Not too long, maybe five hours or so, five or six hours. And most of that, by the way, spent on the plane with my son Henry, and we were just kind of like passing it back and forth, which was like a really fun little time because the puzzles are not so difficult that he like couldn't quite understand them. But the main, the only means of interaction you have with the world is you're this like omniscient, you know, cursor that they can't see but they know has some influence that they always explain away like, oh, something slapped me. There must be a bug in here

or something. The only interaction you have with the game is grabbing and pulling. on things. So like to interact with a button, you have to like grab it and you pull it and then when it snaps back, it like interacts with a thing. Or if you're launching a thing, you pull it back in one direction and let go almost in like a Super Mario 64 like face manipulation type thing. That's it. Like all the puzzles are like you have to help Watson get across this train by like pulling different parts of it into the right place and then launching in between different point. Like it's comprehensively run out of options. You would think so, but because the game world is changing with every chapter,

like the stuff that you are doing is, is like pretty dramatically different, even though the mechanics of interaction are exactly the same. For instance, there's a prototype world where, because it's a prototype world, like the mechanics are a lot looser, and you can, like, adjust them and connect different sort of like, this is interactive, this is a button that means this is interactive, if I can drag it onto this item,

and now that is, I can use that for that. Like, it's pretty clever how, um, and, and I feel like there's no games like this too. Like it doesn't,

none of these mechanics or puzzles like overstay their welcome. Yeah, that's great. You get like a handful of pretty clever sort of solutions to these things. And there's a whole hint system in the game too if you usually bounce off of stuff like that. Um, I feel like maybe there's no game was a bit cleverer. Because there's not quite as much of the like,

I don't know. it was so sick, like, popping the screwdriver off the one icon and then turning the computer around and then you could unscrew it. And, like, that felt really, I don't know, satisfying and exciting. And the puzzles to the solutions in this game are satisfying, too. But I do think it suffers because of this strange choice that they made, which is, like, there's only one way to really interact with stuff. Yeah, that makes sense. But I had a great time with it. I think it's a fun game.

And it's got that great sort of, like, I don't know, sense of humor about it that is a, tricky thing to kind of nail. I will say their games couldn't be more French. They are the most French games. At least the older one. There is a bit, yeah. Yeah, I mean the... Be careful.

Raymond's just waiting behind the corner. Rayman is coming soon. Yeah. But that's question time. It's neat. I haven't gotten stuck into like a point-and-click adventure game in a while. And I'm happy that I checked this one out. Is there a smartphone version of this on the way?

I don't know. I mean, there's no game had a smartphone. Yeah, this seems like the sort of game that I would want to play in that. Yeah, so I played it on my Rog Ally X, and it was like you move the cursor with the thumbstick, and then you grab with the A button and pull it back. It's not particularly like... There wasn't any touch support for that? There was, but like, I don't know, I don't, I feel silly when I use my Rog Ally X with its thousand buttons and then just use the touchscreen.

But it is probably a better sort of experience to, you know, actually point and click. It sounds like there will be iOS versions coming later this year. Okay, perfect. Love it. I've got a new release that I wanted to talk about, specifically, Teardown has a new DLC. I've talked about Teardown a lot over the course of the years. Yeah, you've really stuck to this game as it's kind of evolved. Can you remind folks?

Because it has been a few. It has been a while. So Teardown is the game where it's like an open-world-ish, sandbox environment and everything's made out of voxels and everything is fully destructible with physics. So for example, you can knock a building down from like the base of it and no matter how tall the building is, it will all fall and crumble and crush in a realistic way, despite the fact that it has like Minecraft looking graphics. And most of the game, at least the core game, is about planning heists where you set up a scene and come up with like

the best route through that scene to like steal a bunch of objects in a row. And they have different variants on that. The idea being there's like a prep phase where you're smashing routes through the world and then as soon as you pick up the loot, the timer starts going and now it's up to you to like execute the route. Correct. It's very, very clever. I absolutely love this game.

It has captured me. And it's not the sort of game that I play all the time, but they've been very good about releasing updates and DLCs over the course of the many years since it first came out. the last D.L. Which came out a couple months ago is actually multiplayer, which I have sadly not had chance to play, but you can now play it in cooperative multiplayer,

which seems like it would be super, super fun, and something that I would want to do probably with my kid once he's a little bit older. But what I have been playing is a new DLC that just came out called Relics of Barcuna. They've had a number of DLCs. I think it's been like five DLC packs,

and each of them has like a different themeing to it. So they've done Sivefew- they've done like art heists and things like that. This one is like a straight Indiana Jones riff. Oh, wow. I'm looking at the like key art and it's literally voxel Indiana Jones in the best way. Totally. So you've got things like hidden objects and traps and things like that.

It uses like an incredible lighting system and lighting things on fire. Like that's all like an incredibly natural format. And it ties in with obviously the tropes that you would see. in an Indiana Jones thing. So, yeah, I mean, the reason I bring it up is mostly twofold. One, if you ever played it previously, you should definitely know that it has multiplayer now, and I would recommend at least trying it

and letting me know how it is, because I definitely want to try it. And two, yeah, this DLC has been really fun. I love how they just keep approaching this relatively simple idea in like completely different ways every single time, and it's got like a really strong mod component, the mod community.

Did you play the mod? Did you play much multiplayer? No, I haven't tried the multiplayer yet. Oh, okay. But that is something that I've been meaning to try. It seems like it'd be really, really fun in co-op. I don't know that you would need a lot of great communication to like make that. I mean, yes and no.

Like, this seems like the sort of thing where if you just wanted to fuck around, it'd be a lot of fun. Like, I think my kid would have a blast just like knocking buildings down. Obviously, if you were trying to like do a mission or something like that, it might require more of that. But, you know, I think there's a lot of. opportunity to have a lot of fun in this. And I've probably played like 50 or 60 hours of tear down over the years. So it continues to stick with me. Do you have a recommended starting point?

Because there is so much stuff. Like, should people just play the base game first? Yeah, just play the base game and see if it's your bag. I think the base game does a very good job of like easing you into the mechanics. I think some of the later DLCs, like there's a Wild West DLC and things like that, I get the sense that they kind of assume that you know some of the tricks and stuff from the base game even though like most of your gear does not carry over

you usually start the DLCs with like no gear at all and you're unlocking new stuff as you go so yeah I would just start at the beginning it's a very good place to start I dig it hey y'all I have to talk about the Ein Thor again and I have to talk about it so much that while I was supposed to be enjoying my friend's wedding in Austin, Texas, the first thing I needed to tell Griffin, the second I saw him was, have you heard the good word? Which is that game native 1.0 is now available. And at least in my experience, Steam works very well on the ion thor.

Let's take a step back because I barely even remember what the iron thor is. A lot of words. A lot of words. You see, now that Justin is not here, somebody needs to really step up and be the, there's a new handheld. The I and Thor, it came out actually, I think, like mid last year, but has developed this humongous following amongst a relatively niche group of people as the hot emulator handheld of the moment. It looks like a Nintendo DS, but unlike a Nintendo DS, it has dual OLED touchscreen screens, which is just total overkill. Everything about it is beautiful and overkill. And the appeal of it as an emulator has been that people have been designing all of this custom stuff for it. So it just looks fantastic.

Still not plug-in-play. Like, you need to set it up. You need to go watch the Retro GameCorp's video for an hour. and get it all good to go. But relatively, compared to how these things were years ago, really easy. If you watch a video, you're going to have it set up within an hour. It's also a thing where if you set up one of these Android devices, it's pretty easy to set the rest of them up.

The gamble that I made and finally deciding to do this and selling all my other emulator handhelds was the game native support. And I think we had checked in on it maybe a few months ago, Griffin, where you had tried it out. Yes. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of these types of compatibility layer, steam emulators, I guess, that you connect your Steam account to, and then you can play games, most games, a lot of games on your Android handheld through Game Native or, I forget what the other one is. There's like another game hub. Game Hub, thank you. Yes. Yes. But it had issues because you are playing the Steam game with cloud saves and everything.

I know that Griffin, your big issue, which is a huge one, was that the save stuff was just not working at all. There were also issues about it being stuck if you were offline that you couldn't get the game to actually boot was a problem people were having for a while. From what I can tell, most of that stuff is just gone, gone. And also, you can run things that wouldn't be useful in the past because it has things like, I think, full on frame generation. but it has FSR, so you can make games like Persona 3 Reload, which I have been playing on this little handheld look and run really well. It still is a little hitching now and then, to be fair, to Persona 3 Reload. It was doing that on the Steam Tech, too.

So this machine is able to play some pretty intensive games, and especially if you were up for playing things that are. not like super Twitch based, it's a perfect match. It works so well that I was also able to play a number of Steamfest demos on it. Oh, cool. You know, nothing, like these are these are the things that should break that could break on your PC and they're in their working fine here. I'm realizing just how important form factor is to me right now. And I always thought I was the opposite.

I thought like Steam deck is good enough. I'd rather it just work, et cetera, et cetera. etc. Man, like you all, Griffin, I know that you've been championing this for a while, but like that ability to just clam shell shut your thing and have it be light and just toss it in a bag is huge, especially when I have an RPG that I want to be picking at throughout the summer, right? And that's exactly how it's worked.

I mean, I literally put it in rest and I hop in whenever I can and then I toss it back and I don't worry about it. It is great. I love my Thor. I have been, I got the Retroid Pocket 6, which is kind of now the sort of like entry level-ish thing that looks fucking amazing and can play a ton of stuff and doesn't cost like $800. It's like a really nice size. I got it right here. It's like the size of Vita.

I really, really like it a lot. Is it the same size as the five? The five? Well, I'm glad you asked. Yes, it's virtually. It's almost entirely the same size of the five. but they fixed the thumbssticks.

They did. Well, you can get whatever orientation you want. The left thumbstick can be on the top or on the bottom depending on what you prefer. I got it because of game native. I got it because of game native

and game hub of like there's types of steam games that I don't want to hold my big Rog ally X to play Mina the Hollowar that does not need all of that sort of like raw power. I would wait, Foreign Factor is huge for me. It is so huge. and while I agree that the game native

like compatibility stuff is insane I downloaded Dragon Quest 11 because I hadn't played that one in a really long time and I love the way it looks and got it going while I was in Austin after you gave me the recommendation and was playing it a little bit before our flight

and then got on our flight and then it lost connection to the Steam servers and then the thing just shut down and then I couldn't relaunch it again until I got back to the game at it. It's that. That is still And maybe it's game to game, but this has been my experience like every, every single time. And that is like the context in which I want this thing the most is when I'm traveling and want like a little light handheld that I can play like a lightweight steam game on.

It's just, it's impressive and there are definitely contexts in which I would I would definitely want to use this. Just sitting around the house. I think I would rather play most Steam games on a smaller device than the Rog Alli X. But I feel like until Steam native... Which is going to happen. It's going to happen. But until that happens, like, the compatibility layer thing is just going to make traveling with it hard. And it's going to be like every emulator handheld thing where I almost certainly know exactly what happened there.

You had Wi-Fi on and then you got on. a plane. A plane. Right. And the like trick, this is not to say that you did it wrong. Clearly Griffin did it wrong. It doesn't. No, this is like...

No, no, no, Chris Plant. Please mansplain Griffin on how... I know, I want to hear how to fix this. Griffin's point that these things, like all of the emulator handheld things are like, well, in this case, I just left Wi-Fi off the entire time I was traveling. And then when I got back, I turned it on and then uploaded it. So, wait, with Wi-Fi off, you could still, like, launch games and stuff? Yeah.

So, yeah. So with the trick, again, and this is insufferable. I'm sure there are people like, why would you even bother? If you just turn off Wi-Fi before you leave your house and before you open your games and then you go out, you can just open all your games. As long as you've opened them once, you can then continue to open them, but you have to leave Wi-Fi off. But this is exactly the, like, that shouldn't be how things work. But for people who use emulator handheld, that is like, oh, there's always... You're used to stuff like...

Yeah, I did not know that. I assumed if you turned Wi-Fi off, then the whole thing just fell apart. But that's- Video games. I am still super excited about this world, about like the Android and Linux, like, gaming handheld world. I feel like everyone is kind of holding their breath a little bit for, for Native Steam. It's going to be a fucking...

The hardware advancement since the AY and Thor have not been anything to write, like anything. The retroid pocket six, I like a lot, but it's like not, it looks identical to the five. The screen's way nicer. Steam running on every one of these things natively. On whatever you want, right? That's like, that's going to be fucking huge. And because of the, you know, world economic situation, sort of keeping hardware from, you know, evolving as quickly as it has in the past, like, I feel like this is the thing that everyone's sort of waiting on. Yeah.

They have to be working on it, right? Yeah. No, I think, I think so. Yeah. Like an official. There's been leaks and arm version. They've said that, okay. I don't know if they've publicly said it, but it's for sure happening.

Oh, yeah. And just a matter of time. I got two quick ones, if I can add on. There is, both of these on Steam. One is called Voidling Bound, which is a third-person sort of run-based action game. You are sort of an astronaut, a space explorer who is traveling between these planets that have been taken over by this corruption. And the means that your organization has come up with to fight this corruption is to train up space creatures and evolve them in a sort of more kind of risk of rain style third person action thing, not a turn-based Pokemon style thing. Yeah, they don't want to get sued.

No. So like the basic loop is you'll you'll have a little critter go into a world and collect a bunch of different like resources and like elemental mutagens and then you go back to your base and then you spend those to evolve your critter and you know they get different abilities. You can upgrade sort of their stats on a skill tree. You go out into the next mission and you find eggs to hatch new creatures and it is it is very neat. It's had a, It's got a lot of heat this game, and I've played it for a few hours. I really like what they're doing. It feels fantastic, and it really encourages you to experiment with, like, making lots of different voidlings. Yeah. They're called, so there's a reason to really engage with, like, the mutation system and, you know. It looks like spore. It does.

I think the vibe of the game is very spore-coded, yes. Which, like, I don't even know if that's even irrelevant. It's not a relevant reference. I know for sure that's not. No. It does look like sport. I think I have wrapped up my time with it. It has gotten a little bit repetitive because of this like mission-based structure of like go out, you know, find some stuff, destroy this corruption and fight a final boss.

And then you come home and you get your rewards. And that's been a complaint that I've sort of heard leveraged at the game. But I think it's really neat. And I'm always excited by a game that can like introduce a fold into this sort of tried and true pet training. formula and do it in a way that feels really great because they're running around and shooting and dodging and all that jazz is really terrific. I've also been playing pronoun palace, which is a Scrabble combat rogue-like. And it is a it takes place in this dystopian world where the fascist government has taken away everyone's pronouns. And it is a game.

that is pretty explicitly about the like bureaucratic barriers that trans folks have when it comes to transitioning. Yeah. And that stuff is so, I don't know, unlike stuff that I'm typically exposed to in games while being aware of that sort of. Let alone in a puzzle game. Like, let alone in a puzzle game. But it is also like a bookworm adventure style. Like you go into combat. You have a set of like 16 tiles with different letters and different,

values on them. And so your Scrabble style, like spelling out big long words. You get access to spells that allow you to sort of like change the board. So like you can replace one tile with a super powerful TH tile. And those spells recharge as you like use certain letters. So like to recharge your TH spell, you have to like use a bunch of use. But as you use those, it like recharge. But then there's also like, you know, passive upgrades. It is very rogue like you where you're going through like a few acts on your way to, you know, take on the head of the party that is taking away everyone's pronouns. They throw a lot of stuff in there that is very, very, very clever. Like, each fight has a different, like, this enemy inflicts this kind of status effect. There's one enemy that

makes it, I forget what they're called. It's like a pair of enemies and they will change rows into specific colors and you can't touch those same colors together while spelling a word. or they'll make letters capital and then those can only be used to start a word. And so you're like trying to figure out ways to get through all of that. Holy shit. I'm looking at screenshots right now and this game does not hold back in a pretty incredible way. Just like very dark things that you're fighting that are like not pulling punches on God. There's like a woman in like a coffin and there's like a child connected to her still with the umbilical cord.

Yeah, no, I mean, it goes fucking, it goes fucking hard. And it is like, I don't know, there is a, I think a principled earned kind of rage maybe. Yeah, no, 100%. But it is also like, there are moments of like kind of joy that, that happen on like a successful run in the face of like all of this stuff. I don't know. I found it incredibly, just incredibly fucking cool. Yeah, looks really good. And I played through, I was up really late, just like trying to finish a run because it was going really well.

And then I ended up completing it. And it was like 1.30 in the morning. And I didn't realize it. So it can really, really get its hooks into you. But yeah, it's just a, it's a banger sort of all around. That's cool. Yeah, I got to check this out. Let's take a short break.

And then we'll come back and we'll talk about our old pal, Elliot, the time traveling adventurer. So this game's about E.C. Is that right? You didn't play this one. What the hell are we talking about? Why is Elliot going on adventure? Well, he's an adventure, Chris. So you sound like a real fool.

Did you not play Elliot the Adventures of Elliot the Millennium Tales? No, everybody came tell him and I shouldn't play the game. Okay. So this is an amazing moment. I was just trying to listen to my friends. You know, I trust your recommendations. Okay. We originally were going to do a whole.

episode about this game because it's I've been looking forward to it for a very long time. Square Enix's new HD 2D, uh, sort of, uh, inspired by classic, uh, manna series inspired by Zelda, top down action sort of RPG style thing. Like all of that. Yes, yes. Check, check, check, check, check. Love it, love it. Um, and I have really not enjoyed my time with it. and I think we were all sort of on the same page and didn't just want to dump all over the thing for a whole episode of the show. Well, let me take a step back because I was very excited about this game for one main reason. And as we all know, JRP's largely don't stick with me.

And I understand this is not technically a JRP, but it has a lot of the elements that are in those games. Sure. But part of the reason those games don't stick with me is because I don't necessarily find the turn-based combat to be super engaging, usually. So the idea of having an. action-based combat system very enticing and also visually speaking very enticing like and i i think griffin you'll probably agree with me i think this game looks fucking stunning like it's really nice to look at it it does the the game looks stunning as octopath looks stunning as uh you know all the the the dragon quest

remakes like i'm i'm a sucker for this stuff yeah pixel work that they do is incredible it is malpractice to have a game that looks this stunning and then put a absolute fucking toilet tier mobile game-ass UI over the entire thing for the entire run of it. It's crazy to me. Yeah, the UI is not pretty to look at. And I realize that that is probably a quibbling complaint. This is why I feel nervous talking about this game because there are a lot of people out there who like it. So please like your mileage certainly may vary with this game.

But there's things about it that just seemed like such bad decisions that ultimately. kind of detracted so completely from the the stuff I enjoyed about the game that I just didn't want to stick with it any longer than I absolutely had to. And the UI is chief among them because about an eighth of the screen is occupied by a little circle where your helper sits and you get a couple different helpers throughout the game. One is the princess who has magic healing power. She's pretty chill. And the second one is a fairy. And they tell you what to do fucking constantly. They tell you what to do all the time. Is there some overlap happening between mobile and like, I guess, portable or even console games that we're not quite piecing together yet? Because here's what I mean.

We have that, um, the Octopath Traveler Zero, which is a like pseudo adaptation of a mobile game. We have this new Final Fantasy that just got announced that is also a pseudo adaptation of a mobile game. We have this that is like, sounds like I, I referenced the mobile game. I referenced the mobile game. thing. The only similarity is it, when you are playing the game and you defeat a certain number of enemies, you activate like a chain bonus and now they drop more currency when you defeat them.

And the way that shows up on the screen, it just looks like a big banner promoting like a limited time gotcha event and Fire Emblem here. Like it looks crazy. That is a small complaint. The UI is pretty bad,

but the main thing is really just the constant input that you get from the little, the child that lives in the corner of your, of your screen. And I know that there's like this whole trend of like, what if, what if Ocarina of Time was a modern game? I think it'd go a little something like this.

Link, you got to use the small key. You got the small key. Like, I find those largely kind of annoying because I don't think that's particularly representative of modern gaming. But holy shit, guys. You cannot walk past a cracked wall in this game without your little person saying, like, that wall looks like you could get it with a bomb.

Thanks. Why, if you do it every single time, like, why not just make them doors then? Okay. Do you think it was meant to be like a starter RPG? Like, it does feel. Well, they have talked a lot about their intention being like accessibility. They want the game to be accessible. But like, that is an insulting interpretation, I think, of a game being like accessible.

to a younger generation to have like you already the cracked walls thing i'll use that as an example they're bright yellow orange glowing crack it's not like in you know zelda we're like oh if you look carefully you can see it's bright yellow it looks like a bright neon tree is like coming out of the wall like okay you've communicated that to me and then you went ahead and you double communicated it to me and i know there's people out there thinking but you can change how much the character talks to you in the settings menu there's a setting called like standard and then one called reticent, which is fucking great. And folks, let me tell you, not nearly reticent enough.

No. I did not, I did not notice a difference. I read a Kataku interview where they were talking about how surprised they were at the fan reaction that this character is, they're chiming in like way, way, way too much because they just love, they just love Fay the fairy. And it's like, man, you're in too deep. This is not good, dude. I love the idea that if you put reticent on Fay the fairy just kind of is like sweating. It's like, I really want to tell you something about that wall over there. I want to talk about this game in the context of me and how this had the potential to sort of open me up to this world. Griffin, you haven't really, apart from the chatty fairy who's there, you haven't really talked about the narrative of this game.

Okay. So the narrative of this game could best be described as like how in my brain when I think of a JRP and I like copy that over. to like what the game is actually like this is what this game what you imagine what i imagine someone the most like tropey magic crystal evil like second hand to the king like yeah the princess the king the mustache twirling advisor to the king who from line one you're like yeah evil that's him i think he has like a pause where he says something like yes sir and you're like oh well okay so he's the bad one and elliot is a is a is a is a pure your unblemished

perfect adventure. I'm like, there's got to be, when I'm playing these games, I like, I need a little bit of conflict where like there's some, like someone that's like a little jerky

and someone that's too nice or whatever it is. Elliot is an outside the town adventurer. He goes about, he's basically a Han Solo. He goes completing quests for people, but he doesn't live in town. He's like,

people go to him when they're really in need. So I'm expecting like when Elliot gets introduced, fine, He's basically Superman in terms of tone. Like he's Karkent. So he goes and saves a bunch of orphans shit, like within minute five. And then continues to be this like utmost sweetheart. Just not interesting.

Not interesting. Not interesting. The story is. And I don't even blame the voice actors because I think the voice actors probably directed in a way that just makes everyone seem very flat. My pro tip recommendation comes from friend of the show Jason Trier. Turn on the Japanese subtitles. Do not drive yourself nuts. in terms of the chatty angel and also just general VO.

Yeah. Assuming. Yeah. So. But even that, like, I don't know, man. So there's a whole time travel mechanic. So you are going through different versions of the overworld. And there's lots of dungeons, right?

Like, so there's a lot of stuff to do. There's a lot of stuff to explore. There are little mini dungeons where you can go and you'll find an item that makes it. So now you can equip more accessories or now Faye has learned a new magic spell. And there's some interesting stuff in that stuff. Sure. Absolutely. Like different passive abilities with active abilities to like really customize.

It feels almost like a like a Metroidvania kind of thing. You have your sort of action ring like in a mana game where you're switching between the different weapons because you have access to like I think eight or so different weapons and they all feel different and are useful in different circumstances. And then you have this system called Magasite where you collect these crystals and you take them to a merchant who gotcha style draws sort of random upgrades for these weapons that you like equip a certain number of, depending on what your magicite capacity is, but you're like creating different builds. I dig all that stuff. The combat is fun. It feels good. I found a sprint spell,

and now, like, the world is actually pretty fun to get around. I wasn't loving it before that, but there's a lot about this game that, like, I could play a game where I just go into different sort of short dungeons and solve a few puzzles and beat some bad guy asses and I get an upgrade for my weapon. Like, cool, man. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm down for that. But it gets on my nerves. It just gets on my nerves all the time. Before we go further, there's a thing that was said earlier that was just so bonkers.

I need to make sure I understand this. The advice that Jason Trier gave you fresh stick was to turn on the Japanese subtitles. No, no, no, turn on Japanese VO. Okay, okay. I was just like, I was like, wait, so the trick to liking this game is to not know what's being said. Although probably maybe, yes. Here's what I will say about this game. I feel better.

I think there's a version of the game that Griffin just described that you can play right now today because unlike a lot of square RPGs, you can skip every fucking cutscene in the game. You can skip all of it and just have objective,

chase objective, get upgrade. And it is, I think it's fun. I think as that game, it is fun. So if you can ignore the, in my opinion,

weak narrative, bad VO and all that stuff, like, it's a pretty fun action RPG, and I think there aren't a lot of those these days, especially not in this art style. And it actually gives me a little bit of hope that maybe, if this game is successful, Square will explore more action RPGs in this format or other studios will. But yeah, just turn your ears off if you can, because yikes.

I mean, okay, but I think it is limiting to say that the only thing's wrong with it is that, you know, the characters are paper thin and the setting isn't particularly interesting. because like the whole world is is not interesting. The enemies that you fight aren't very interesting. And there's like, I've played for a while and I've run into maybe six different enemies in like different color palettes and like different, you know, they do maybe some different shit here and there. There is a lot of stuff that it does beyond the scope of like the world building or whatever

that I find to be pretty. lackluster. I don't think it's great. I think it's okay. I think it's like good to okay. But that is not like, that's such a huge disappointment. I don't know. I agree.

To have like Timisano, who makes stuff that I really like, go after these classic sort of genres. I adore the Manas series. This is not, this does not come anywhere even remotely close to that in my opinion. I don't know. It just, it feels like so many decisions were made that I, are so perplexingly bad to me. And the ultimate sort of nail in the coffin for me being like, what joy will I find in exploring this big world that you've filled with like treasure

and activities to do if I am being instructed literally constantly how to do it? It really is a real buzzkill. Well, you wouldn't understand what they were saying if they were speaking in January. That's a fair point. There's a lot. I say all this. There's a lot of people who are wicked into the game. And that is cool too.

I fully understand why it just made a lot of decisions that I did not enjoy. Hey, people at home. Can you drop into the comments? You can go to the newsletter comments if you want, besties. That fan. Give me some recommendations of games in this style of action RPG. beyond like the Zelda's of the world that you think I would enjoy.

Because I'm genuinely like, I want to explore this genre more and yeah, I want to hear. So please write it. Have you played Secret of Manna? No. Secret of Evermore, those classics? You played Crosscode, right?

I started playing crossword. I didn't necessarily care for crosscode. Okay. I'll bet the people at home. I mean, I can, Secret of Manna maybe that might be an approach or I'll bet the people at home have some other wrecks.

Thank you, people at home. Appreciate you. You have one reader mail question I want to call out. This comes from Wick. If my partner has played the recent Atlas games and loves persona and enjoyed metaphor, which near game should she play first? Hmm. Okay.

So this is a question for me. I'm going to assume here, right? Like, is the real sicko? I assume so. I think you definitely want to play a game that has near in the title, is what I would start with. I don't think you want to play like Dracengarde 3. I Is it

There's just two near games Right am I wrong Basically There's Yeah there's near Replicant And near Automata Those are going to be the real choice That you have right now

Unless you want to go back and play Older versions of Neer Replicant I think you should just play Which everyone looks the most enjoyable to you New Replicant has kind of a semi-fancy aesthetic

Near Automata has a more sci-fi aesthetic. I think you should chase either in either direction. There are advantages to playing either first. Like, you will appreciate some things in automata if you played replicant first and likewise the other way around. I think automata is like a guaranteed banger. And, like, you do need to play through it multiple times. We've talked about this on the show before. When I say multiple times, the game evolves pretty significantly by round three. but even at its base level,

it's really exciting and entertaining where replicant, I think, it's just based off of an older game so it can be a little bit more of like a slog. So I'm saying this all out loud. I think near Automata is where you want to start. Yeah. I'm going to pull you over here and just say,

I don't think that those games are anything like persona or... Yeah, that's true, actually. That's a good point. It's a very great metaphor. Yeah, there's not a ton of games that do what those games do. That's why they stand apart so much. There's stuff like a Rune Factory that does like fantasy stuff with social simi kind of stuff almost. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of persona games.

Hey, there's a lot of persona games. Hey, I'm going to plug a thing. We just did an episode about persona summer at post games in which we talked about all the different persona type of games. in which we talked about all the different persona type of games like Tokyo Mirage session. So if you are looking for more info about the sort of games that fall into the persona camp, I think that would be helpful for you.

Guys, I'm so excited for the Persona 4 Revival. They keep releasing more and more video of that. I can't wait for that freaking thing, man. It's going to be pretty cool when I play it for the first time. Yeah. You never played the Vita version? I played like four hours of the VDVOR version. Okay.

There was a convenience store. There was a little girl. She seemed excited about the convenience store. Murders started happening, and then I fell asleep. I will say, of course, the onboarding now, like having done Persona 3 reloads first 10 hours or so, they've really figured out how to make these games digestible in a way that they just weren't in the past. I mean, I think metaphor did the best. Metaphor is fantastic, yeah.

God, I've been having the hitch to go back and play metaphor, and that's crazy. Same. I saw that switch. to release? I was like, oh, no. Yeah, man, I've thought about it. It really feels like that game is due to get its golden or royal or, like, expanded version of it. Because they're parts of that game, especially in the back third or so, if memory serves, that just kind of seem rushed. It feels like it's ripe for one of those. Anyway, do we want to do honorable mentions? I've talked about so many games. I don't know that I've saved anything for this bit.

I will talk about two games that I've been playing. I continue to play Subnotica with my child with the passive monster settings on. The console command is invisible in case you want to do the same thing. It's been very effective. It works on Switch 2 and PC. And it's incredible. We met our first Reaper. And if you've never played Synodica, you should probably know what a Reaper is.

they are 50 foot long just death machine shark creatures that have giant fangs and teeth and look horrible and because of the setting we are able to like just swim up to it and scan it and he was so excited to read about the description of what it was in the like pda and it's been such a fucking delight I'm like through the roof happy about it and so excited to play synodica too once it's a little further on in early access. The other game I want to mention is a game called Blueprints. It's a first person puzzle game

where you explore a house. Blueprint status update. I'm at day 44. I continue playing with my wife. We have six sanctum doors open. We have two to go. Obviously, we don't know what remains after that. We've done some of the things

inside the sanctum doors. Some of them remain. uncompleted, but progress is being made, and it is a very good video game. Yeah, dog. Yeah, man, I'm so excited for you. I continue to be so excited for it.

It's fantastic. I don't know what I'm going to do with my notebook when we're finished, but I want to make sure we save it and keep it safe because it is such a fun, visual representation of the journey that we've been on.

I thought of something I can talk about. I played a little bit more No Man Sky, which I think I mentioned last week, having brought, there's a whole thing that they added to the game that I didn't know about and didn't mess around with until after last week's episode.

I did learn about it. There's a class of ships called corvettes, and you can build them, which is not an entirely new thing, right? Like they've had sort of ship crafting if you want to make this type of fighter. They had like a freighter, right? A freighter ship builder.

And then, yes, there is a freighter ship, which is like a huge, like, a star destroyer size like ship that can be like kind of a mobile base of operations, but it's like it's enormous. And you can customize it. And that's like very, very cool. Corvettes are something in between. And you can build them using parts that you find while like exploring the world.

You go out hunting for these parts. They're rewards for missions. You can find derelict ships in space that you can salvage and you're finding all these different parts. And what you're building is a ship that is, uh, smaller and controllable. You don't really control your freighter. You can't drive it around.

It's just kind of there, a big floated. These you can control. They have stats. They have like the different technology slots that you can like customize. Can they land on a planet? They can land on a planet. And you can add whole rooms and furniture and, you know, machines that are doing like the different processes that you have to do for your resources or you add like a med bay or

you add a room full of plants that you can harvest at Will and you can add like a captain's quarters. It can be as big or as small as you want it to be, but you can also now just get up out of the pilot seat at any point while the ship is still moving, you know, set to autopilot, like, coasting over the planet side and you go up and like chill up in your room looking out the bay windows like that into the world. That's fucking sick. Or when you're in space, you can step up from the pilot seat, do some shit around the ship. and then open up the loading bay doors and just do a quick spacewalk, just like hop out into free floating and outer space and come right back to your ship. So like it is the best of both worlds. You have this entirely customizable ship that you can turn into your home base.

You can have a whole room that you just fill with cargo containers. And now all of a sudden like storage is no longer really a concern anymore. But also then you blast off and now you're doing space fights in it. And it can just be sort of... It never... It never gets old that this game is now so much better than even the over-promising trailer from the beginning. It's insane. It's crazy.

It's crazy. And it's... I don't know. I really love coming back and playing this game. I'm done. I finish the expedition or at least this expedition is a little bit annoying. They're like time-gated and you can't complete it until the whole community has come together to, like, do a certain number of missions, sort of hell diver. style. I don't love that. But like, I'll come back and do an expedition or when they had a new

thing like pet battling. Like, I'll come back and dip in. And I'm never disappointed, man. I'm always absolutely surprised and delighted by what they've done. And it's fun to just kind of like check in every once in a while. I am so curious to see. God, I'm so excited for Light No Fire, which is their next game. How the fuck do you go from like all of this to starting a new game? Because there's no possible way in the same way that like you think about destiny two's launch there's no way to implement all of the stuff that you your previous game had and some of it thematically wouldn't even make sense so how do you match just the slate or even come close to the slate that no man sky is offering i don't think they need to right like i don't think you need to have critter battling in the

like some of the things are so kind of like uh tacked on yeah but it does i think it does set a standard of like it kind of needs to be a full game. It can't be the like half game that launch. That is the thing. That's the thing that like no man sky needs is like a light no fire. Light no fire. Well no I mean I'm saying like the difference. The thing, no man sky they have updated for 10 years and added all these content and

it's fulfilled far more than fulfilled the promise of like what those original trailers showed you. It still doesn't feel great to like getting a blazer fight. Sure. Like I don't think that the combat is like particularly great. And like there's there's just certain parts of it that. do feel like still kind of antiquated in the like inventory management side of things. And like there's like core stuff that like if they changed it,

it wouldn't be no man sky anymore. So the idea of like a whole new thing that can take the great lessons that they have learned making updates to no man sky, uh, but have it be built on maybe a stronger foundation. I don't know. Light no fire is such a, I'm, I don't know anything about it. I don't know that really a lot of people do. We just know that it's on a single planet, the size of, our earth and it's in yeah there's no scale like it's actually the size of our earth yeah and everyone's

on that same planet cool that sounds cool sounds fucking cool that's not much but um yeah yeah play it Chris you been playing anything watch anything no I went and saw Disclosure Day the new Spielberg movie yeah pretty pretty mixed feelings on it I love Spielberg I love even modern Spielberg uh this movie I think uh it's probably great for every person who has never had to work in a newsroom, and any person who has had to work in a newsroom and does not have faith that people change their minds just because big information is given to them, I think it will be skeptical. That said, I do want to offer a different paranoia thriller, which is Cutter's Way,

which just got re-released by Radiance. It is a lost classic, in my opinion, starring Jeff Bridges and the five. from home alone giving an absolutely bonkers performance. And if you love like 1970s conspiracy thrillers, if you love neo-noirs, honestly, if you love the Big Lebowski, this is for you big time. It is an absolutely incredible movie. So if you see Discozier Day and you love it, hey, fantastic. If you see it and you're like, I would like something that is a good movie.

getting at conspiracies about how the powerful keep us under their thumb, I think you should check out Cutter's Way. Cool. Sick. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for listening to the besties. Do you want to talk about everything we talked about so far, Chris? Oh, boy, we talked about so much.

We talked about crushed in time, voidling bound, pronoun palace, new tear-down DLC. It's called Relics of Barcuna. We also talked about traveling with the Iron Thor and playing Persona 3 reload a little bit and The Adventures of Elliott. And then for our honorable mentions, we had Subnotica, Blueprints, No Man Sky, and on the film side, Disclosure Day, and Cutter's Way. Cool. Wow. What a beefy one.

Hey, if you still haven't gotten enough of us and are prattling on, you can go to patreon.com slash the besties and you can get access to our monthly bonus episodes. where we do bracket battles on different topics. And you can also get access to episodes of the resties that Chris and Russ do talking about games that we didn't have time to cover here on the rest of the show. Do you want to thank some folks? You bet.

We have some new backers, I want to thank. We have Andrew A. We have Cooper de Duper. It's great. I hope that's your real name. David L. 7 Hemlock and probably Cool Dad. Thank you for being backers of the besties over at patreon.com slash the besties.

And thank you to everyone else who has supported us through the years, you make this show possible to exist, which is... What do we got next week? Next week, we are at the halfway point of 2026, as outrageous as that seems. And so we're going to be taking both a look back at our favorite games of the year so far, starting together a bit of a hit list for each other on what we, you know, should go back and check out some of our personal favorites shared with the class. And we're also going to take a look at what's still due to come in the rest of the year

and put together a list of our most anticipated stuff as well. A celebration of time, past, present, and future, much like the Adventures of Elliot, the Millennium, Hale. We'll be hopping between eras to find the bad advisor and to stop them. So, yeah, stay tuned. Join us again next week for the besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games. Besties!