The Besties - Whose Souls? Demon's Souls

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

The boys brave the fetid swamps and fiery dragons of the prettiest dang PS5 game around, Demon's Souls. Will they survive the Valley of Defilement? Will they find a lovely two bedroom in the Tower of Latria? Only one way to find out! 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!

Guys, I'm struggling right now. Yeah? I'm going to be honest. Something just happened. What is it, bud? It's Henry's birthday today, and he got up early, and we went downstairs, and we opened his presents. He got a batsman, ant man, a lot of animal mans, toys.

Somebody's got him a drone, and I was like, he's four, but when all was said and done, and wrapping paper littered the floor, he didn't get any video games. And that's about the saddest thing I can imagine, but it's even sadder as he didn't seem to care. And so now I'm worried that he's that i'm not raising a raising a gamer in a way that i should can i make you feel better yeah if i i'm gonna put myself in the mind of your

child right what i'm thinking is why would i ask for a single video game when my daddy is just a big boy who has all the video games. I'm not going to waste my video, my gift asks when old Papa Bear has all the games I need. What I'm going to get is what Papa Bear doesn't have,

which is this fresh Ant-Man suit built for a two-foot-tall body. Yeah, he also was given an XBLA card, right? Like, I realize he didn't get any discs. Yeah, no, I got him a gift card to the Xbox Live Arcade. Summer of Arcade is just around the corner, and you can't be prepared too early. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. my name is justin mccarroy and i know the best game of the week my name is griffin mccarroy and i know the best game of the week my name name is Griffin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I died. My name is Ross Frustic and I know the best game of the week. Yeah you do. Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year show that goes all year long. King of the Hill, book club, but for games, you know the drill. You've been here before, quite literally in this case, because we are talking about Demon's Souls for the PlayStation 5,

a remake of the original. Plant, tell me all about it. The original Demon's Souls came out in 2009 from a little developer known as From Software, and people did not like it except for like game spot it was like i don't know game of the year and then everybody's like wait is this actually good is this is this real good and and then they're like yeah let's try it again so they made dark souls and then dark souls 2 and then dark souls 3 and then bloodborne and sekiro and everybody's like hey you know what we gotta go back

to that original flavor let's remake it with those good pals at Bluepoint Games in Austin Texas we'll make it pretty we'll put it on PS5 we'll let people try this game all over again we are going to be talking about the experience of wading back into

the fetid swamps of demon souls but first we're going to take this quick break talking about the experience of wading back into the fetid swamps of Demon's Souls. But first, we're going to take this quick break. So, I'm going to start off with a hot take. One that was like, we're going to put it out there, and then I'm going to put it out there.

Demon's Souls is better than any other game from software is made, both in the way it plays and the way it looks. And every step they've taken away from Demon's Souls has been a mistake. I can't think of a wronger take. I can't think. Wow.

Let me just clarify something. Are you talking about this game, this remake, or are you talking about the original PS3 game that came out? Well, the core game is the same. Right, but if you're talking about looks, if you're talking about this game, this remake, or are you talking about the original PS3 game that came out? Well, the core game is the same. Right, but if you're talking about looks, if you're talking about looks... No, I'm not talking about looks. I'm talking about the play.

Here is why. This game is... I finally fully understand the appeal from software games, I think, which is it is about surprise it is about discovery of world it's about mastering the environment right and what uh the games have done i think to their detriment for people like me not for people who are hardcore gamers like our boy griffin um yeah is they've made it so much more twitch based securo being the guess, apotheosis of this. The best of it. That I have no ability to enjoy that game because I'm just not that type of neat gamer.

But Demon's Souls, I mean, I can just hop in. I can have a nice time, so long as I'm patient. Well, also, we should add that Plan is playing as a mage, which is very overpowered in this game. Regardless of the fact, I do agree it's a much slower game. I'm sorry that i'm playing the game how it is available to be played i'm not i'm not i played it the same way so i'm not dragging on you i do agree though with justin that we should set the stage a little bit and talk about what this game actually is okay okay yeah so just personally from my own experience um i had never played this and i've i've finished

every other in the souls lineage um and i had never played this one I've finished every other in the Souls lineage and I had never played this one I really like Souls games it took me a long time to get on board it was Dark Souls 2 before I finally got into it but I really like these games and I had never played this one in fact I knew almost nothing about it

because I had heard such just weird energy from people who like maybe just remembered it for the first time and it is a real uh master class in the gaming populace being educated or or catching up the culture catching up to a game or at least accepting of it not to say it was like ahead ahead of its time is weird it's ahead of its time only in the sense of this specific franchise no one else people weren't ready for it no one else lives in what it was right now it's like i was shocked at how i was shocked at how much this just sort of blends into the franchise. I thought it would be really out of step

with a lot of stuff from the franchise. I was really impressed by it. I am, I think, close to finishing it, and it is a delight. I will say I'm playing as a mage like my man Chris Plant because that's the way I've always enjoyed playing these games. And it is overpowered in a way that I feel like later games kind of fixed where if you had it was like balanced for every class. You know what I mean?

Like there would be some kind of thing that's going to screw you up if you're this kind of this kind of this kind. I'm I'm oneshotting bosses and it goes down smooth. I've never enjoyed the boss part of Souls games. I like the walking around the world and finding all the surprises and all the wild stuff that you encounter. I don't like the boss fights because

I find it very frustrating to have to go through again and again and again in the same area. So in this, I'm just just i cast one firestorm yeah that's it goodbye thank you i've won i've beaten you fresh before you go into your thing because i want to hear that too can you give us for people who literally have never seen this game which i do think there is like a real real quick did you guys play demon tools before this i just wanted that's all the stage i played it it like a year after it came out on PS3.

And it was, I think it was after, well, hold on. I played it after Dark Souls because I loved Dark Souls so much. I was like, I want to know what this came from. And then I played Demon's Souls. And to me, Demon's Souls was much, much harder a game. And I still think that. I feel like I got my ass kicked in this remake of demon souls far more i replayed uh dark souls 3 earlier this year and sekiro earlier this year

and those games i know how to get through i feel like demon souls still has enough like i can name off the top of my head 4-2 tower of latria climbing up to the boss there's one enemy on that spiral staircase who's a motherfucker. And he got me like 15 times. So I can like name the points from like, oh, that killed me, that killed me, that killed me. Okay, I can do that. So the things that have sort of become

part of the like game design nomenclature that came out of the Souls series. No, no, no, no, no, no. Let's not even talk about the mechanics yet. Literally, what is this game? Like, where does it take place? It's an action role-playing game in a dark and gothic world where you are a basically dead adventurer who can hop between these five different levels that have designations like Super Mario Brothers. So, one, one, one, two, one, three.

And you go through, and at the end of each little level, there's a boss and you fight them. You collect souls as you defeat enemies that you can use to level up and buy items. But if you die, you drop all your souls. You have one chance to recover them. And if you fail to recover them, if you die again, then they're gone forever.

And there's lots of stuff hidden all over and you can level up in any way you want, and there's endless ways to build your character out, and the bosses are super-duper-duper hard. And obtuse mechanically, I think, is one of the things that you need to know going in. It is designed to not over-explain itself. How's that?

And a few things on there. One, I would say... Had you played Demon's Souls, Russ? I have not. I had not. I had played a lot of on there one i would say with the with had you played demon souls i have not i would just i had not i had played a lot of all those games but this was the first time and i knew very little um and i would say i think the remake is very smart insofar as they actually have added elements to the game to better explain the really really complicated stuff stuff like again i'm not going to explain this because it's so complicated but stuff like world tendency stuff like uh soul form versus body form there's like a

lot of like opaque kind of bullshit that is cool once you understand how it works but the game puts no effort in so i think that the remake in particular is very good at least about explaining a baseline understanding of how things work but what i wanted to say was and why i sort of agree with plant uh shockingly enough um is i think the structure of this game as griffin presented it which is five separate levels that with this like central kind of hub world the structure of the game actually makes it more approachable to newcomers because you don't get into the situation that you do in a huge, huge game like Dark Souls. When I first played Dark Souls, I slammed my head against the ground trying to get through these skeletons that are right next to the starting campfire. I got to get through these

skeletons. There's no other way to go. It turns out I was just going in the wrong fucking direction. I should have gone the other way. and you don't have that issue of well i'm totally lost i have no idea if i'm going in the right direction i don't know if i'm progressing or not you don't have that issue here the levels in demon souls are still huge they still have shortcuts they still loop back on themselves they're really enormous but they're not open world enormous to the point where you feel like i have no semblance of an idea of where i am with regards to the entire world so it actually makes it kind of more approachable to be able to bounce from place to place also you can

still have that nauseating and infuriating experience of winding up uh down a path that is too difficult for you it's just you have the freedom to pick something else. So the example I'd give is you beat the first, you beat 1-1, Mario 1-1, right, in this big castle, and then it opens up the rest of the arch stones, which are effectively, you can pick any level you want and do the first part of that level. So I'm looking at, like, the stairwell

where you walk to pick your level, and I'm like, oh, the lowest one is probably going to oh the lowest one is probably going to be the easiest one so i pick defilement which is the basement of defilement or whatever you all it is is what if you walk down very thin wooden planks um down down down and if you fall off you instantly die and you're attacked by, like, plague doctors. Yeah, it's 5-1 for reference. It's 5-1. It's the last, yeah.

Big mistake. So what I did as a mage, you have a ring that allows your mana or whatever, Trefo, which is how you fire your... The fragrant ring. Yes, thank you. To fire your, like, blue spell and your fire spell. So what I did, it takes a long time, I beat three or four of these bad

baddies. I found a place where I was safe. I muted it. I wrote a Christmas card. Oh my god. I got my mana back up. The way it was intended to be played. Prepare to write Christmas cards. This is the shortest level in the game from what I understand.

I made it all the way to the boss. I'm like, great. I'm ready for this boss. And immediately one shot kills me. And I'm like, you know, maybe this level wasn't for me. Maybe I should have taken the hint that if I could not get through this in a normal way. Because it's not my time yet. So then I restarted and started playing that, I could not get through this in a normal way, it's because it's not my time yet. So then I restarted and started playing that, I don't know,

whatever the desert level is. Stone Fanny. And I'm back to having fun. I'm just back to being a hoss. Can I talk about the level structure just real quick? Because I wanted to dissent respectfully because for me, I really enjoyed Demon's Souls. I beat it in like a week. I went real hard in the paint with it i do not like the level select structure i do not i don't care

for that because to me um the way that i have always described like the the dark souls games is it's like a really really almost faithful adaptation of like Castlevania as a sort of, not a Metroidvania game necessarily because it's not really that, but the idea of exploring this huge and kind of scary Gothic environment with these twisting corridors and you don't know where you're going to end up.

with these twisting corridors and you don't know where you're going to end up, to me, that sense of discovery is remarkable. The sense of, like, you get that in the micro sense in Demon's Souls. Like you said, you can open up a shortcut. In some levels, some levels just don't have them. I think the entire fifth, like, chunk of levels where you're, like, going through these toxic swamps

and it takes fucking forever. not a great deal of them uh but there's nothing like in in the first dark souls where you're down uh in the the forest fighting the hydra and you can look up and see the castle where you just were a little bit like for me that sense of tone is super super important to the game and i think you like dark souls 2 you get level jump like once you discover an area you can hop between them dark souls 3 does the same thing dark souls 1 not so much until later in the game i feel like you lose a lot because i i you do 1 1 and 1 1 is easy and then 1 2 is actually a little bit harder maybe you should jump around to 2 1 or 3 or 1 or one of the like to me the linear nature of dark souls is kind of easier to follow where you're going when it's just kind of a guessing game of like okay can i do the tower of latria oh fuck no i can't better

go do three one i didn't find that especially satisfying as much as like just like pounding through the world of dark although i would say, you say that Dark Souls is linear, and you're kind of right. There is a right way to go, but knowing the right way to go is a whole other biscuit, and that takes a much longer time to figure out. And I think here it gives you a little more option. And I don't enjoy that.

I mean, that's a personal taste. I think we're at personal taste. No, for sure. I don't enjoy the... I don't like being lost, especially when I have a bajillion souls and yeah i don't enjoy the i don't like being lost especially when i have a bajillion souls and no idea where to go i don't like that um except when i pull it off in which case it's usually satisfying i want to talk about uh an element of most souls games i guess all souls games probably but there are these marks on the ground if you

never played one of these games there are these marks on the ground where If you've never played one of these games, there are these marks on the ground where players have left messages that you can read and either rate as, I think, fair or foul, basically good or bad. And these messages are always there and they're always kind of a kick. But this is a game that people have been playing for 10 years and know like the back of their hand and the messages in this game have been elevated to like i mean amazing it's like having an older brother sitting behind you that you do not know if he is fucking with you or not and every once in a while he'll be like try still it's like okay well wait i don't know the best the best one i found was there was a message that said try rolling and it was at a ledge and i looked down it looks so far but there was a treasure down there and i was like oh god yeah okay yeah and i tried rolling

and i fell fell fell and i just barely survived it and i got the treasure and there was another message and i read it and said i told you so it was great it was like it was amazing they're so so so i want to mention the really cool thing is the fair foul thing is like you can rate the messages either good or bad that doesn't mean that the bad messages disappear so when i first started playing the game i was like i'm gonna try to go as far as i can without dying i'm really gonna like get far into it so uh you you walk up towards that's a good strategy um anybody if you're looking for pro tips to the souls games go as far as you can without that honestly i walk up the stairs to the castle i take a left i see this like weird like hole in the ground with like swirling magic stuff and i'm

like i don't know if i could that'll be okay or not whatever but i read a message there and they say you can do it and i do it and instantly die like not even, I didn't even break the threshold of the hole before I instantly died. And I gotta be like, you know, game respects game. What does the appraisal do then? If it doesn't get rid of the bad ones. It heals you a little bit. I think it gives you a-

It heals the person that dropped it. Yeah. I also wanted to say that because this game has been out for 10 years, I found the messages, at least the ones that appeared in my world, to be cartoonishly useless. Because anytime I would come across a dead enemy whose body was slumped over a wagon or a fence or something, anywhere where they were sort of bent over, and I saw a message near it, I knew, oh, I know what that message is gonna say because it would always say like, use fist or try to plunge or hump this butt, basically, in fantasy Dark Souls terms.

Yeah, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed it. I just wanna share my one personal favorite. Mine were very helpful, like almost consistent very very very few trolls except for what is the desert one again stone fang the stone fang stone fang tunnel so i climb all the way up to this huge rock face i get back outside looking out at this beautiful view there's one right in front of me that's like hey take a picture or take a photo beautiful view and i look to the left and this very very very tiny ledge at the very end of it is effectively floating in midair.

One of these things. I'm like, wow, that's that's like there must be treasure out there. I walk all the way out there barely doing anything. I click it and it just says step back. It's like such an asshole of just, and immediately died, of course. Sometimes there's ones that are, that almost feel like they are watching

because it's so timed and people know the timing so well. I had a couple where like, I ran down a blind alley because I saw a message and I read the message and it would say like, behind you. And then there would be somebody behind, it was like the scene in the matrix you know what I mean where it's where they're calling neo and telling him like okay now duck down now turn left it was it's very cool I do want to specifically talk because we're talking about the remake here we're not talking about the original and normally I wouldn't do this but there has been really no game uh of this quote next generation that has looked more next

generation than this game this game is fucking outrageously gorgeous and i think you know i was pretty impassive about like this whole like shift over to the new consoles whatever they'll load faster big deal like seeing a game that is like really really using the hardware is amazing and the and weirdly like and maybe this is not weird but like it's it's 100 the lighting like the fact that the lighting in this game is as just like i guess realistic or consistent it just like is painterly and gorgeous and yeah you see it streaming through the clouds and i've but plant mentioned the photo thing like i've taken so many in-game photos because there's a great photo mode and uh you really like it's it's stunning it's like you're in nature are you playing

on performance or so god definitely performance which is 60 frames a second if you put yeah guys don't switch it is wild i try to switch back to cinematic it this is that talk about not feeling yeah it was like a slide i don't know what it gets you to play in the cinematic mode like how much nicer it looks that's for ps5 pro sorry i'm convinced that including all of these the the fancy version is for ps5 pro when it launches and then you can play it 60 frames. It's like future proofing it. More than the visuals, though, I cannot think of a game, franchise, or format that has better benefited from the PS5 Wild fast load times than this.

Oh, God, yes. Even in the levels where I keep coming back to 4.2 because it's just a real, I feel like every, I feel like every Souls game, I can remember like in Dark Souls 1 and Anor Londo trying to run up the roof while guys shoot arrows. Like that part, there's one like bottleneck shithead part, but dying to that was like,

oh man. And then a second and a half, maybe two seconds later, you're back in it. It's absolutely incredible. I really quickly wanted to mention, Russ talked about it before and i think it is maybe the the structure of the game the like level select structure is like not my jam i feel like the world tendency thing if i can try and explain that real quick is the game's biggest biggest failing because i it does not explain it

fucking at all you have a world tendency and a character tendency and you can basically think of it as the like paragon uh renegade like good and evil meter where if you invade other people's worlds and do pvp a lot you will get darker tendency if you kill friendly npcs a lot you get darker tendency but if you defeat bosses and you uh i forget what like the other things are because it doesn't fucking explain it then you get light light world tendency white world tendency uh and those add extra events to the game so if you're darker tendency your health is lower you get more souls and more treasure but there's more enemies and they're tougher and light world tendency

basically does the opposite it also adds like character interactions like there's a priest that doesn't show up unless you're in white world tendency uh character tendency i don't fucking know what it does i think it probably does the same thing it's similar it adds like it's similar i don't know why they needed two of those but like it doesn't explain how you change the tendency in game at all yeah doesn't really explain uh what that how that changes each level the only way you know is if somebody leaves a note on the ground like come back here with pure white world tendency which like after i finished the level i'm pretty hardcore about these games i didn't really feel like schlepping all the way back through you know that level just because there's

some new path that is open there when i've already beaten all that there's one that you can't or at least the one in um i wanted there's an event some white world events in the third world that after i had beaten all the bosses it still wasn't pure white and i don't know there are ways around that i i think that like as a system i think it's interesting insofar as it's not something you need to complete the game you could absolutely beat the game not knowing what the fuck is going on with this white world stuff it seems like given their nature of like making very opaque games it seems like the sort of thing that they're like we're gonna put this in it's gonna be weird people are not gonna understand how it works but we're gonna put it in any way and that people get that get really really into the game are gonna

figure this out and have these cute cool little bonus things that they can experience that's my read okay it's counter argument to that i didn't know how the fuck it was going happening and the paragon system parallel is only useful to a point because there's a lot of stuff that like that is i think is neutral morally dying that does impact role tendency is you die as a human right that happened to me in four one yes i died as a human a couple times because i went there after beating a boss and i died as a human and it took the world tendency down and then all of a sudden i started you start this fucking level with a skeleton, and then he's got a new glowing red, super hard skeleton friend that just happened. And I had no idea.

I was just like, what did I do? This is so mean. And the only way I was able to get past that is there's one enemy in each of the stages that you can kill, and it'll give you some white world tendency that got me back to neutral. If I had died as a human again,

there's only a few ways to get to elevate your world tendency if i died as a human again and went down to dark world tendency that's fucking it and i gotta figure it out like it is a it's a terrible system explained terribly it's not great it's it's yeah yeah so i want to talk about that really quick though at the very beginning fresh talked about how i guess fresh i guess all of you have talked about how it feels like it just fits in with the other from software games right and i i think what is wild going back and playing this now is how the how the hell did this get made yeah when it did because this is a game made for the modern world of being able to get a video game guide on your phone right next to you while you're playing the game and getting it quickly.

Like that is just, and, and getting it clearly right. Like that there are all, now we have 10 years of facts out there that are able to, I mean, game facts existed in 2009. It came out in 2009.

We had, yeah, but it is, it is a different world. Y'all to plant's point. It is really funny to like i would get i got stuck a couple times or like trying to understand tendency stuff or whatever and it is so wild to be searching for something in a 2020 game and finally it's like grody old

still helpful highly grody these angel fire pages with yeah it's what yeah there's still knowledge here if i could just get through how grody it is like i i think it's like i remember like i would never look at a fact back in the day that to me was like uh like i have given up where now you play zelda and you have a guide open the entire time like the the idea that you should just be engaging with a guide is just kind of part of video gaming in 2020. And I think that has changed since this came out. I will say, there's one correction I want to offer from the top. I mentioned GameSpot gave this game of the year. There were other people who obviously saw the value here.

IGN gave it best RPG for the PS3. Wow, that is like... Specific. Yeah, that's huge. There are some other people. PC World gave it a big award. But yes, I think it was Dark Souls that kind of elevated this form into the mainstream consciousness. I think, though, this is the first one of these that I haven't played with a guide handy. And I feel like because it's slightly, I think think at least playing as a mage i found it

easier to navigate and that allowed me the and because the fast load times huge i felt comfortable just sort of going through and not kind of looking for worried about missing items or worried about you know i i think that's true when i'm in the levels what's still hilarious to me and what i know in 2009 i would have just hated had i played this then was okay you beat the first level now you're back in the nexus like the central hub and okay now you need to go find whatever the chosen one which appears to be a statue from the cut scene you go upstairs and you stare at the statue nothing happens it's a little boy find a little door and you go all the way up that door and all those stairs and you go to the statue nothing happens then there are hundreds

of little boys who are like dead and then one of them is alive and it turns out that's the chosen one the last airbender is up guys it's the dumbest shit i've ever seen in my life that you cannot progress and it's the first time you can level up and you have these souls you're like please god just let me and there's one special magical not dead boy you have to find to progress and also after that you level up by talking to the maiden in black back at the like central hub and she moves around so every time you come home i just beat two buses i got 200,000 souls. Let's fuck it.

And then she's like, I'm trying to fight. I'm hiding from you. It is the best PS5 game though, right now. I genuinely, I don't think anything else comes close.

Bunger, bunger, bunger. I just want to, one final thing. So I bought a copy of this game, what special edition, the day it came out, Demon's Souls, 2009. And I was like, I'm going copy of this game, the special edition, the day it came out, Demon's Souls, 2009. And I was like, I'm going to play this game the day I get fired from UGO.com.

Because I knew I could never play it. So I just kept it in packaging. And then one day I did get fired. But then I was like, oh, no, I have to freelance to pay bills. I'll pay this once I'm done with that. Got married, didn't get to play it, started at Polygon. Literally this game has been sitting on my shelf

is the one day I will have actual time to play this game. And it turns out that I'm finally doing it. It's just this damn PS5 version. That was the least sad story structured as a sad story I've ever heard in my entire life. It worked out. it worked out it worked out it's like a reverse cats in the cradle i'm like dad's doing important stuff taking care of priorities living alone for five weeks so maybe that was true that's a fair point finally had

time yeah um listen we could i would love to talk about demon Souls for another half hour or so, but we got bills to pay and other things to talk about. So sit tight, and we'll be back with you momentarily. So it's been kind of a tough year for everyone, but you know what hasn't been a tough year? Real estate. Oh, yeah. Real estate is moving. Huge right now. Oh, man man my dividends yeah if you're looking to

make a big purchase on a cut rate deal holy cow you've come to the right place and you know what these interest rates folks oh they're good or bad the equity is something something i'm telling you and you know what i found some primo properties that are ready to go. And really, anyone could just walk up and steal these right out from under y'all. But I think, you know, because I like you guys. I trust you guys. I think you might be interested in, like, kind of hearing about this stuff right out of the gate. Well, I'm looking here at the listings. It looks like you have one for the Boletarian Palace.

And that, I'm going to be honest with you, Russ, is going to be a little bit out of my price range i think is a big palace and i i only need you know three or four bedroom two bath i mean we could we could swing like a servant's quarters situation or like a mop like room situation but the palace is pricey i'm like don't get me wrong schools are great slime it's got slime monsters which is like a huge thing for me yeah um but you're right it is it is kind of pricier you know if you're looking for like a more budget situation uh how do you feel about living in the valley oh which valley because i don't there there actually isn't one that yeah so the locals call it the vod but you know i call it the valley the, but I call it the valley. The valley of defilement.

It's good. Poisonous, though, and I have kid, and kid is going to get in the poison and get an illness and get sick. So maybe can we meet halfway on the mortgage? Sure. I mean, I don't know. In terms of mortgage negotiations you're gonna have to work that out with your bank but would you rather um okay i i've got i've got this one and you know if you don't like this there's really nothing we can do does it have let me stop let me stop

you right there does it have poison surrounding every surface uh no it doesn't. Okay. As a matter of fact. Cool. It doesn't. Griffin, how do you feel about a converted prison? Now it's converted. So like normally we're talking like, you know, one bedroom with like kind of like a sheet rock floor, but I think we can knock a wall down and really make that thing sing. And then if the kids get a little rambunctious if it's time you know if if daddy's trying to watch some football but the kids are running around with their squirt guns and their slime balls there's maybe let's call them fun compartments

let's call them let's call them safety compartments that we can put inescapable safety compartments we can put them in yeah and i should mention the locals are very friendly. They wear robes and have octopus faces. Right, okay. They're up for nannying if you need that. That's totally fine. Has there been a problem? Because I saw on Nextdoor that sometimes they shoot you with green electricity

and then pick you up with their crazy arm face and then suck your blood out. Yeah. So the neighborhood watch is a little intense. They're not super fond of outsiders. But honestly, if you move in, I think a couple months in, you're just going to like, you and them will get along great. What about the old lady living by the fire in the jail? Does she come with it or will she move?

Is she like subletting or what's her story? Yeah, so she's going to live there forever. Basically, this is this weird contract that she secured back in 1963. She's not dead, but she's not alive either. It's like a weird situation. So it's kind of a rent control. Yeah. Now it says here that it does have the gigantic beating heart of an eldritch god,

sort of like in the middle of it. But it also says that it has original hardwood floors. So those cancel each other out. I mean, the heart is basically just like a good conversation piece. You have that in the middle of your apartment, and you could really just sell the room just with that. Right, right. I mean, the devil worms it summons is not the best for again the kids

you could train them what sort of code precautions uh are in place yeah that's a good point yeah um masking is not great there so that's something to keep in mind but honestly i'm pretty sure they're pretty close to herd immunity at this point like so yeah i i i this is just me for like what i'm looking for right now um i'm as you mentioned i've been on my own for a few weeks so i've been eating a lot of takeout so i'm 50 poopoo pp um so i'm looking for a house that is mostly bathrooms and is very covid safe lots of masks It is mostly bathrooms and it is very COVID safe. Lots of masks. I would say like a one bedroom, 20 bathroom house.

Mostly people wearing masks. Okay, so I think you're back to the valley then. Yeah, that does sound right. Yeah, because you do like pee-pee-poo-poo and that valley has a whole heck of a lot of it. Pretty much anywhere I want. Yeah, basically anywhere. Yeah, you just toss it off the cliff, and it's fine. Got it.

Can we pause the bit for a second? Yeah. Can we pause the bit? There's not a toilet in this whole fucking thing. Yeah. I was just thinking about it. I mean, Middle Ages, they did not have toilets. So, like...

I guess. That's what cliffs were for. There's just not a single toilet. They just do it on the floor and then they use their magic to make it disappear yeah or send it to the valley of defilement maybe that's where all the ppp of the whole universe goes okay yeah so you're gonna take a few bucks off of that i would imagine if it is the world's um i'll take it yeah we're so amen um you guys uh we got questions or do you want to talk about other games you've been playing?

What do you want to do? Let's do a couple of questions. Uh, cool. So, uh, I'm going to cut to one of the ones that I am most curious to your opinion are. Uh, this is from Phoebe Bridger's Christmas EP. Is that real? Sure. I don't know.

I hope it is. I'm looking into that. Yeah. just is that real sure i don't know i hope it is um yeah did y'all prefer the more faithful remake of this or the remake of final fantasy 7 which changed a lot more i mean final fantasy 7 unquestionably changes a lot more uh yeah um i yeah there there is a new phoebe bridges christmas ep that's that's breaking news here on the besties um it's different it's two different things like they're both really great games in their own right um i think the final fantasy 7 remake excited me i think if final fantasy 7 remake had been a ps5 launch game that's the only game we'd

be talking about right now because i think demon souls remake is great and it looks great and it's fun but i think i don't know i think the ff7 remake is much more sort of memorable. It was a more ambitious remake. Yeah, far more ambitious. I think Final Fantasy VII was much more in need of gameplay updating to make it work in this generation. Yeah, I don't know. You're basically talking about the difference of, I mean, they're very different.

As somebody who thinks a lot about game preservation, the idea of taking something that is mechanically the same and making it more palatable aesthetically and more accessible to more people, I think is a net good. I mean, I'll take as many of these as you got, honestly. On that note, this is from NotLauraW22. Do you think a game needs to be difficult to be good i would say the fact that this game has a mage and i can actually get around these worlds and enjoy them would be the sign that no it doesn't have to be difficult to be good i mean yeah let alone short walk which is one of my favorite games of last year and it was incredibly easy like i think we've played a ton of great games

that are that are easy and approachable i think difficulty can create a rewarding experience but only for a very small percentage of the people that play it whereas yeah an easier game that's also great i think is uh almost a harder thing to do because you need to make a game that appeals to a lot more people i think uh obviously games don't need to be difficult to be good like animal crossing new horizons is probably my game of the year and i wouldn't call that a particularly difficult game but i do think having a game be challenging in a way that you can overcome that you can like reasonably overcome is like a very zesty spice that you can add to a game that uh it it is a different type of enjoyment that uh you know an animal crossing new horizons is incapable of giving but there's lots of different

ways to make games good but i i bet it's a hard i bet it's harder to make a hard oh absolutely it is yeah for sure uh based on the fact of how polarized people's opinions are of the souls franchise and like how everybody ranks them differently like you mentioned sekiro that's my favorite souls game and it is arguably the hardest because there are no cheatsy mages and like ways to hack your way around it but that's like that's that is my favorite game of theirs we didn't say this earlier worth noting though if you've never played a souls game this is a fine place to hop on i mean that is there's some uh world tendency stuff is kind of you know ignore it but like just ignore it and if you see a big red guy just delete your save and start over um but uh yeah i think this is a really accessible place to start if you if you ever want to try it

play a mage and just check it royalty is the class you yeah want to start as thank you griffin uh hey yo what else are you playing bunker bunker bunker bunker bunker uh i don't know how we got this far where i feel like we haven't talked about bug snacks and i don't know if you guys have you guys fucked with the bug snacks it's a little bit griffin uh i i haven't played it since it came out i got an early access version did you play with your child no i've not your child my children both adore bug snacks and it is a very rare video game that is enjoyable to play that my children actually enjoy watching if you have no knowledge of it um it hovers somewhere around sort of a more gamey Viva Pinata would be a good, that is more puzzle centric. You're in this world full of these creatures called bug snacks that are neither food nor animal.

They hover between and you, the main gameplay mechanic is you're trying to catch these snacks, um, by D through different mechanisms. Some are as easy as like put down a trap and catch them. But as you progress there, it's more complicated. You have to like use certain sauces to entice them or, or there's interactions between the different snacks with this guy hates this guy. And you can use that to knock this guy out and, and capture them. Um, which is very fun and rewarding and very cool. And there's also like a pretty decent, surprisingly decent story of like a mystery you're trying to uncover that is actually really cool. And the way the world interacts, these characters interact is much more satisfying than I thought it would be. And also like my my my kids love watching it.

It's like a really fun, cute thing that is still mechanically very sound and occasionally challenging. My six-year-old can actually, like, play it. She can get around the world. I usually have to help her with the capturing. But it's very cool. It's by Young Horses, the developers of Octodad. And it's what we're checking out. Got the theme song of the year, too.

That Cara Cara Bonito track. Good song. Absolute bop. I recently, I think we talked about the Zero Escape series. Oh, it was because Chris was talking about 13 Sentinels, and I suggested Zero Escape, and so I busted those games out again and played through all of them. They're really good.

They're like fucking great, weird stories and i really like them but the game i really want to talk about is fuser i streamed a little bit of me playing fuser the other day and it is a miraculous piece of software it's from harmonix it's basically a game like fully digital version of drop mix they're like card game mashup game where you can take stems from different songs like vocals from born this way and the drums of good as hell and the you know synths of take on me and you know the bass from regulate and mix them all together and it sounds good and you can shift it between major and minor key and change the tempo and change the key that it's in and change like all these things and

there's like i haven't unlocked them yet, but there's like, you can make riffs in various instruments and apply different filters to them and then add that onto the track. And I streamed 45 minutes of me playing this literally for the first time on the McElroy family YouTube page. So you can find it there.

And even when I was trying to fuck it up, like I'm gonna put on the drums bass and guitar of killing in the name of with the lyrics of smash mouth's all-star and i was like wait a minute this this sounds good too uh it's it is so fun uh it is so so fun i cannot wait for like the next time i can have a party like with friends over and just like have it open and I genuinely think it's just going to be a a game that I'm going to be playing for a long long time I wanted to talk real quick about Astroneer uh this is a game I've uh I think I might have mentioned a couple years ago it's one of the another one of those games that has been like was released a few

years ago and has since gotten like a ton of updates um i've been playing it on the xbox series x um and it is part of game pass so if you happen to have game pass you can try it out uh the game is basically kind of like no man's sky um but without uh kind of simplifying a lot of the mechanics uh of like oh i need need power to, you know, power this device. And oh, I need to set up all sorts of like systems. There are systems in the game, but honestly, it's just about like exploring this planet and finding the resources to eventually, you know, leave the planet and explore other ones to find other resources.

It's one of those games that like as you unlock different tools and components to your base, a lot of the stuff gets automated so you can take on more responsibilities. One of the really cool things is it's very modular. So I built a buggy, and I had this giant shredder back at my base, and I would bring scrap metal back to the shredder, and then I'd use the scrap metal to buy other resources.

What I didn't realize is I can slam the uh shredder on the back of my buggy and just drive it around the planet and then drop scrap metal as i come upon it like a garbage man and it was fucking amazing the game is filled with all sorts of like creative solves to those sorts of problems uh so if you dig that uh check out astroneer it's also on PC I've been playing more Assassin's Creed Valhalla here's a recommendation for you if you're playing that game use the mace the mace is the best weapon in the game

I was using all those stupid weapons like swords and axes and a spear like a real clown switch to the mace I murdered the entire London yeah you just bop people they're all they're all gone now um if you if you like the feeling of uh getting overpowering yourself before doing the main missions in the game is this the game for you because i spent 15 hours maybe 20 making myself

op before playing literally the second mission in the game, and now I am the destroyer of gods. It feels real good. Next week, we are taking a break because We've earned it. I think we can all agree this is hard.

Right after that, we are getting into the entire point of the show. The best games of the year. The bracket begins. We will have more information for all of you on that probably in about a week or so. So be sure to check out our Twitter at the besties pod so you can participate in the process with us. Yeah, so the first game of the Year episode will drop on December 11th.

So get ready for that. But as Plant said, you will be able to participate and you can make your voice heard at TheBestiesPod on Twitter. Yep. Absolutely. We're done. We did it.

Oh my gosh, we got through a year. Yeah. Wow, what a great podcast. Woo! Woo! All right, so that's going to do a year. Yeah. Wow, what a great podcast. Woo! All right, so that's going to do it for us for this week. Be sure to join us again next time in two weeks for the besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

Woo! A little Ric Flair there. The Besties is a Spotify original podcast in association with Fox Media. The show is edited by Jelani Carter and produced by Ben Hosley. And our theme song is by Ian Dorsch. Besties!