The Ringer-Verse - '007: First Light' and 'Mina the Hollower' Reactions | Button Mash

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Ben, Matt James, and Steve Ahlman earn a license to podcast about two early Game of the Year candidates: '007: First Light' and 'Mina the Hollower.' First, in Patch Notes, they discuss the future of 'Destiny' and Bungie after the end of development on the almost decade-old 'Destiny 2,' and what the huge hikes in the price of Valve's Steam Deck portend for the Steam Machine, the current console generation, and the future of gaming. Then, they share their spoiler-free reviews of 'First Light,' James Bond's long-awaited return to gaming at the hands of 'Hitman' maker IO Interactive, and the much-anticipated 8-bit homage 'Mina,' from the makers of 'Shovel Knight.'Intro (0:00)Reactions to ‘Destiny 2’ ending (1:28)Steamdeck price increases! (14:32)‘First Light’ review (32:22)‘Mina the Hollower’ reactions (1:05:04)Outro (1:33:37)Host: Ben LindberghGuests: Matt James and Steve AhlmanProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Wayfair, every style, every home. Into the Ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Lindberg. Ben Lindberg. Button Mash host, with me today is the Ringer's deputy art lead. The Matt with the Golden Gun. Matt James. Hi, Matt.

Hey, man. Matt with a golden pun, even. I don't know. Rounding out our trio is a ringer senior audio producer and a member of the Midnight Boys, Castivo Royale, Steve Allman. Hello, Steve. I'm always shaken and never served.

Well, look, fellas, we have a lot to talk about. Last week, I mentioned that there was a game that had set a new high score on Metacritic for 2026, but Forza Horizon's reign was brief. Forza was so last week. And now a new game is entering its initials on that leaderboard. We're talking about two heavy hitters this week. One indie throwback, one AAA with all the bells and whistles,

both the products of several years of development, both delivering 20 hours or more of meaty, good gameplay. That's right, we will be discussing, 007 First Light and Mina the Hollower. What a pairing. Gamers are eating good right now, but not all gamers. And that's where we'll begin

with two patch notes news items, the discontinuation of destiny and the Steam Decks price increase. So, Bungy is ending development of its 2017, massively multiplayer online, live service, sci-fi shooter, Destiny 2.

It's not dead, but it's dying. It's sunsetting. It is the end of an era for destiny and really for gaming, There will be one last update on June 9th, and then the game will live on. They're not shutting it down, so that's nice. It's not going the way of Concord or High Guard, but they will not be making more new destiny. And we got an email about this that could get us started from a buttmash listener and a Google Stadia player in the wild.

Estella Benavides, who writes, I was writing to ask if you would be covering the news about Destiny 2. It feels like we all saw this coming, but still I am sad. this is the game that got me into playing video games in 2019 via Stadia. I got a founder's controller for Stadia and everything. After they shut down, I kind of stopped playing because my partner and I would play together, but not having Stadia anymore meant buying only one console and losing our ability to play together. My first gamer friends across the world were through Destiny 2. Would love to hear what you think.

Thank you for the email, which was sent, of course, to Ringervverse Gaming at gmail.com where we welcome all your correspondence. And Estella, I'm sure, is one of many people who got into. to gaming via destiny. So what was your reaction? I guess the writing has been on the wall for this game and this franchise for some time, but it was still somewhat shocking to see this happen, given that we're just about a year removed from Bungee saying it was entering a new

phase of Destiny 2, the Fate Saga. And I guess the fate was for the game to be more or less ended. So they were supposed to include four expansions. A couple of them came out. but then some of them disappeared from the roadmap, and now the game has run out of road. So, Matt, what do you make of the quasi-ending of Destiny 2? Yeah, I think, as you said, the writing was on the wall,

but it also is kind of ending pretty unceremoniously for a game as important as Destiny 2. You would have hoped that they could complete the roadmap, so to speak, and go out with a bang, and this is much more of a whimper. But, you know, no one, I don't think anyone is surprised, about this, especially with Marathon Bungy's other game, the newer bungee game that has been released to critical acclaim and slowly diminishing player counts. I don't think that's a surprise to anyone.

It's a sad day for people who are fans of destiny, and especially knowing that there are no plans right now to make a Destiny 3, and rumors bouncing around on the internet that layoffs are indeed coming for bungee yet again again yeah it is a rough rough time Steve your eulogy for destiny I mean I would say that you know appreciate the living while they're alive and not so much when they pass it's sad to see a game like this go of course because it was very well played and I wouldn't say well-beloved because mainly for the fact that people are complaining now for the fact that it is dying and that it has gone away

and we've invested so much time and money and hours into a game like this. But I recall for a lot of the time, at least for the several years that we're leading up to its departure, that people were mostly complaining about it and mostly not happy with the direction that it was going in, only to know that it is now sunsetting

and then we're now sad that it's gone. Right. Which is, I guess, you know, the time in memoriam, types of sentiment that goes around with the online gaming communities anyway, but to not so much appreciated it now that it's gone

and the fact that Bungie doesn't have like a solid gold-plated hit on their hands to transition us out of Destiny 2 I think is a bit more of the you know, egg on our face Bungy moment that on the eve of assured

layoffs that is going to be coming with the less than stellar release of Marathon, that's going to be the real legacy that destiny goes out under is that it is going to be sacrificed to a perceived lesser game. Yeah, I imagine that there's some Destiny Superfans who are saying, wait, we just wanted to grouse about this game. We didn't want you to kill it. We wanted to continue to complain about it. Yeah. This is an overreaction. But it's been years since I have been a Destiny player. And I go back to the that wizard came from the moon days of destiny all the way back. But I fell off at some point,

as many people did, most people did. And I can't even blame that on bungee slash Sony mismanagement. I think the destiny phase of my life just ended because I tend to stop playing games. I am not so much live service brained. Even if I like a game, I'm not necessarily going to be playing it for a decade, I may just move on. So Destiny released the final shape. That was a couple of years ago, right? And then that was not the final shape. But for a lot of people it was because that was a good time to walk away. It was acclaimed that big DLC that brought to a conclusion that light and darkness saga. And then they kept it going. And yes, I think part of the fact that the way that they rolled out Destiny 2 content with new DLC and then would gate the old DLC and retire that so that you

could no longer play it. That was always kind of awkward in my mind. I understand why they did it. But between that and just the general fatigue that often inflicts a live service, yes, I think a lot of people had sort of soured on the game. And the player counts told that story. And they don't tell an encouraging story about Bungie Rit Lard. really, because Sony sort of threw Bungee under the bus earlier this year, right, and announced publicly that essentially bungee is now worth a lot less than Sony paid for it, you know, $3.6 billion or whatever it was. And they took a, you know, $700-something million dollar write down and said that it had declined in value, essentially. And whether that is

partly Sony's fault or not, that seems to be the fact. And there's nothing really coming. Not only is there no new destiny game in the works, you know, there are people reportedly pitching new destiny ideas internally, but there's no Destiny 3 in the works. There was a Destiny game, sort of a related spinoff that was in development that was axed at some point years ago. Maybe if they had just done Destiny 3, I would have been more likely to jump back on board because that would have been a more natural starting point or rejoining point maybe than just the latest in a long, long line of expansions,

many of which were inaccessible after a while. So I don't know whether you think that is part of the story here, that maybe they should not have continued to keep Destiny 2 going. Maybe they should have had a sequel. But then again, I guess that's sort of what Blizzard tried to do with Overwatch. And then they said, wait, no, it's Overwatch again. It's not Overwatch 2. But maybe that never felt like a true sequel.

Yeah, it's hard to keep a live service game. going for years and years and years. I mean, even Fortnite now is sort of panicking with some player drop off the Fortnite, which seemed to be just a juggernaut that would never go away. You're starting to think, like, could we see the end of Fortnite in the next three years? Yeah, Destiny 2 seemed to try to channel the spirit of Fortnite

by just doing a Star Wars expansion and being like, What if Destiny but Star Wars? Yeah, but Goku isn't in it yet, so it's not really going to be in, the Fortnite territory yet. Just saying the idea that Fortnite could end honestly feels impossible right now. Like, that's an idea of like,

I wouldn't say a cultural apex, but like a cultural crossroads of like everything that is either gaming and popular culture short of like Roblox and Minecraft. And those three things just seemed like kind of ubiquitous with what gaming is right now. And to think that even the destinies of the world, which were extremely well played, if not well-liked,

which is occasional at best. To think that we detransitioned from the live-service model that Bunchy seems to want to make its bread and butter from and with the, I'll say, complete and utter mismanagement of the reading of the market by Sony, a la the concords of the world and every other live service game that they just can't seem to let go of. I just got an email from my PSN account saying that All-Star Destruction Live is going to be going away.

I was like, oh, wow. It is. Destruction All-Stars. Wow. Never really proves your point, I suppose. Yes. Yeah. Great.

Can't wait to sunset that. I don't know. I think that seeing that just happened to coincide with Marathon going free to play for a week, just a week, we promise, nothing more. please God, it really doesn't show any good signs. Like, it's going to be all bummers around. By the time we get to the steam deck, I'm going to outright, like, rage at the status of the world right now.

But then we'll talk about 007 first sight and Mina, and our faith will be restored, hopefully. Yeah, a game that's also about AI ruining the world. Great. Timely, topical. Yeah. Well, look, I think part of it is just the destiny two entered a very different world than the one we're in right now, and it was a lot less crowded in the quote-unquote.

live service space. And that space really got taken over by a bunch of games that follow in Destiny 2's footsteps and took a lot of its players away. So part of it is just, I think, that it was an early adopter, a first mover, and now it's a much more competitive time. And I think it might be tough for people at Bunchy to pitch a Destiny 3 that's anything like Destiny 2 because those games aren't getting greenlit now because so many of them have failed, which we have lamented that live service pivot. I think companies are finally realizing,

yeah, this is extremely risky and we will start to see that manifest several years down the road because that's how long it takes to make games. But it is sort of sad as someone who spent many happy hours playing the destinies. And now Marathon, I think we pretty much pegged in our pot about it, which is, hey, there's a good game here, but it is not the mainstream appeal game that bungee or certainly Sony we're hoping for here. And the player counts have declined. Everyone's been watching that spiral on SteamDB down to about 10,000 or so concurrent players on Steam.

And there's still more people playing Destiny 2 than Marathon now, actually, even before this little dead cat bounce that happened after people realized that, oh, right, Destiny 2 still exists. I should probably play that while I still can. And we kind of thought, hey, there's a good game here that a lot of people will like, but it's not for everyone. And if you're trying to make a live service game like this, it's supposed to be for everyone. And so this game has not met sales expectations. And for now, at least Bunchy and Sony seem to be committed to it. Season two is starting. As you mentioned,

there's this open week. And also they're teasing new modes and they're trying to make it more approachable for people. So maybe that can work. Maybe they can change the narrative and reputation around that game. But it's tough to do once that's established. And now all of bungee's eggs are in that marathon basket. I actually, I asked former button mash guest, Simon Carlos at Game Discover Co. What his data said about whether Marathon may have cannibalized Destiny 2's remaining audience because you've got to figure there's a lot of overlap among bungee shooter fans. And he said that 73% of marathon players also played Destiny 2 at some point on Steam.

So naturally a lot of overlook there. But as I also noted, looking at the graphs, it's not as if Marathon came out and suddenly everyone abandoned Destiny 2. It doesn't seem as if there was any discernible permanent decrease that coincided with the launch of Marathon. So those do seem to be somewhat separate trends. But yeah, I guess contrary to Paul McCartney's theme song for the franchise, there is no hope for the future of Destiny, at least not in the near future. And that is sort of sad to see. Also sad to see SteamDeck getting way pricier.

Although, congrats to you two as Steam Deck owners, your assets just appreciated. Oh my God, my portfolio is stacked right now. I know. I've got a switch to and a Steam Deck. Are you kidding me? Imagine if we had invested our life savings in consoles, just say a year ago, suddenly our net worth would be skyrocketing because every console costs way more than it used to. And Steam Deck is the latest to join.

this trend and this is not a small price hike. This is not switch to going up 50 bucks. This is the one terabyte edition of Steam Deck going from $650 to $950 while the 512 gigabyte OLED model goes up more than $200. So I mean, I guess it's maybe better to rip the Band-Aid off and do one big price hike instead of death by a thousand cuts, we're raising it repeatedly. At least you only have one bad press cycle out of this, but that is some serious sticker shock. If you do not already have a steam deck,

it's about to be extremely expensive to get one, if you can even find one, which is not refurbished. So, Matt, you've been a big steam deck lover. So what do you think this will do to the reach of this system? And also just to gaming hard, wear writ large.

Well, it just doesn't make sense, really, to get a Steam Deck anymore, which is, you know, the meme has been just get a Steam Deck for years now, whenever anyone's out. Yeah, you know, what's a good entry point to this kind of PC, non-consul gaming? Steam Deck has been the answer, and there have been a lot of, you know,

pricier competitors. But now you're looking at the landscape, and, you know, the, what would you say, the one terabyte OLED is 950 now. Is that right? Is that what you said? Because you have the famously belovedly named ROG Xbox Ally X. Not enough X is in that for my liking.

It rolls right off the tongue. I'm sure they'll work on that. O'Sha Sharma is going to fix that. But that's $1,000 now. That's $50 more. And it's a much more powerful piece of hardware. It's not necessarily as easy to use as a steam deck, but you could also buy an ROG Xbox Ally X,

boy, I'm nailing it today, for $50 more and install Bazite on that thing and have it functionally be a more performant steam deck. So it's really a terrible turn of events here, and it continues this trend of gaming hardware becoming so expensive that we're at the risk of an entire generation just not having an experience of playing video games with controllers. Yeah, that's what I worry about.

We're just going to lose a lot of people who will not be brought into this ecosystem. And that applies to console gaming, which the reach has sort of stagnated and the audience has gotten older. It's never been an inexpensive habit, but now it's getting cost prohibitive, really. Yeah, there aren't enough longs in the neighborhood to mow for a child. to be able to get into console gaming in 2026. Rarely does like the increase of a single item make something feel as existential as the death of console gaming, but this really does do it.

Because for a company like Valve that has proclaimed itself to be as accessible and as consumer-minded as any company that I have known in my entire time in this hobby to dramatically and wildly increase their price because of the landscape of the world itself. Like, I'm not mad at Valve for doing this because it's been happening everywhere, and this is the status of the world that we live in.

And yes, like, it's annoying to hear, like, three guys to feel, like, at least for me, like, more politically motivated, to think about change in the status of the world when their little gaming consoles go up by $300. But aspects of these consequences in the world will be coming for every parts of our lives. And the status quo is not guaranteed.

The fact that we can and should be making this change because this is just the beginning. We don't know if the Steam deck, A, is going to exist ever again, but B won't go up in price. again, to know that every single console that we've ever had this coming generation has gone up in some capacity, this is the biggest tell of it so far. And for the like consumer and hobbyist level of personal computing, it's quickly going away. And it is quickly becoming not only cost

prohibitive, but like a way that it makes it actually inaccessible for anybody. And as conspiratorial as I'll be about like the landscape of streaming gaming and why that's getting pushed on us very hard right now. I am really, really miffed at like, this got me thinking about the entire picture. I was like, okay, so the straits closed and our lakes are running dry because of data centers. And now I'm thinking about like what my kids are going to be drinking as far as like, is it going to be Coke zero or is it going to be filtered water now for the rest of my life. And This thing did it. Congrats.

I'm thinking about the entire world. Wow, that's a real steam deck crash out there, Steve. Well, it's warranted. I mean, Nvidia has pretty much openly, you know, told us so much is that they don't want to sell us GPUs anymore. They don't want us to have the hardware. They want you to lease, you know, over the cloud hardware and pay for it every month.

And, you know, this is the reality that we're, we're dealing with here. The corporation, like, Nvidia doesn't care about gamers anymore. They want to build their AI data centers. All the stock is swallowed up by the data centers. No one will think of the hobbyists, the people who just want to turn up the settings on the graphics

so that they can play their games. And it used to be that even if you weren't inclined to or couldn't afford to buy a console on day one, you could get in the door years later when prices fell. And now that's not an option available to anyone because in complete opposition to every other console generation, prices keep rising the older the stuff gets. And in theory, the closer we get to the next console generation, though really, that's another takeaway here because that's going to continue to be a moving target too. Because there's no real outlook for this to change in the short or medium term future. obviously, what does this portend for the steam machine, which ostensibly is still coming at some point this year, but no release date, no price has been announced.

And before people were fretting about, oh, this thing's going to be a thousand bucks, and thus it won't expand the umbrella of potential players, it'll only be committed people who are willing to pay that for a gaming machine. This thing's not going to be a thousand bucks, right? If it comes out as all, if the steam deck years old is selling for essentially that, they're going to have to hike the price still unannounced on the steam machine too. You've got to figure that whatever their internal price for that thing has been, it has already been hiked multiple times. And so if they even have the stock to launch it, then it's going to be priced at a price point that is really going to be a turnoff

to anyone who otherwise might have said, oh, okay, PC in my living room sounds good to me. Certainly sounds good to me personally. I want my steam machine. but now there's going to be some serious sticker shock there. And as for the next console generation, I mean, we're at about the point where we would be looking at, okay, we're probably a year away from PlayStation 6, Project Helix.

Do you think that's going to happen now? I don't. It shouldn't, right? It can't. I mean, there's not enough RAM, right? That's what I'm saying. Like, Matt, when you drop this in Slack, you said that the steam machine may as well not happen.

And there's a pretty good chance. There's a non-zero chance that the same. machine doesn't happen. With the current specs that they announced, it was already kind of skating a line where it was going to come out the gate and only have like a few years of being able to keep up with new AAA game releases. It had, you know, they announced it has like, I think, like eight gigabytes of V-RAM when really it should be at least 16 in the modern era. And that at the time with, you know, a price point somewhere between 500 and 800 speculated seemed like, all right, maybe. But now as the clock keeps on ticking and that number that cost rises higher

and it becomes less and less relevant, they either are going to not do it or they're going to have to bump some of the specs up by the time it actually comes out. Yeah, I just, I don't know what you do if your valve. I really don't. And maybe this steam deck price increase is sort of a way of saying like giving a hint of like, hey, everyone needs to change your expectations about this steam machine. They have too much invested in it, I think, to not release it in some capacity. But, man, that is a real. And that's the thing. Like, to who? Because I know immediately how this is going to go. let's just say it costs $1,500, which is a conservative estimate now. It will sell out instantly.

You will see almost every single copy go up on eBay for 10x that price. And then that will be over. That will be like the only run that they go for. Because knowing that what the Steam Deck has now been increased to, it's certainly not like they're going to make any others. And by the way, making it prohibitively expensive, as of now, it is still sold out on the Steam page. All of that stock with the new price increase has been bought out.

And it's not going to go anywhere. At least you can get a controller. If not a steam machine, maybe. It's a good controller. But you might not be able to find those either. But don't need as much rent for that. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, seven years is the typical console generation. No PlayStation has ever been released more than seven years after the predecessor PlayStation. PS5 and Xbox series are turning six this fall. So you'd be looking at next year. We haven't gone longer than the eight years. between Switch and Switch 2 or Xbox 360, Xbox 1, we're going to be pushing these things to 28, 29, because all the projections are saying,

it's not going to get easier to obtain this hardware, these components, right? If anything, it might get harder. So it's a little different from when this console generation started, and it has a slow start for various reasons, but partly because of the pandemic and the supply chain disruptions. That was clearly temporary, though.

That was something that could be overcome, whereas this is just starting to seem like the new normal and that it's not actually going to improve. So on the one hand, okay, even though these consoles are five plus years old, it feels like they got a slow start. We're just getting to the first year that Call of Duty isn't coming to last-gen consoles, right?

Modern Warfare 4 just announced is coming to Switch 2, but no longer PS4 or Xbox 1. So there was a slow change over there, but I think we're going to be living with these systems for quite some time, if we were lucky enough to get one before the price doubled. I think it is good news for Switch 2 potentially, just because there is a two-year gap between the Switch 2 coming out and then the current-gen PlayStation and Xbox platforms. If those had come out, if we had had a PS6 and Project Helix coming out in two years after

Switch 2, let's say, it was three years, I guess, between Switch 1 and those coming out. and Switch 1 was struggling hardware-wise by the end of its life cycle, which was long, but nonetheless, now maybe there's a little more life there before Switch 2 gets clearly outclassed and is unable to run a lot of third-party games. So I guess that's good if you're Nintendo. But I see a lot of people now actively rooting for the AI bubble to burst so that they can get games, get gaming hardware again. But I've got news for you that that's going to hurt too in the short term, you know?

It's not going to make the economy better when the AI bubble bursts for a while until everything adjusts, right? So it's going to be a tough period of transition one way or another. But whether people can afford to play games, that is one question. But there are great games out there if you have the hardware. So that's the good news. Also, with GTA6 on the horizon, like, that's the other thing. GTA 6, like, you know, I haven't been like the most excited for a new Grand Theft Auto, but I have this new, this new lens that I'm looking at it through, which is like GTA6 as the last hope of indoctrinating kids into console gaming.

Yeah. Like if GTA6 comes out and there's no one even talking about it on Roblox, then we're in trouble. We're in big trouble. So you're saying the day GTA6 drops, we need to monitor Roblox columns. Yeah, pretty much. And be like, wow, we really need to be checking this rock star game out, huh? Yeah.

And I think there's a good chance that it doesn't make even a ripple amongst, you know, kids who are used to only playing games on their iPad, on their iPhone, not paying for games aside from the harmful monetary. forms within those free games. That's such an interesting take because this is at a very interesting apex of people getting quote unquote priced out of what they think Grand Theft Auto 6

is going to cost, which it doesn't matter, people will pay it if they have the hardware to play it. But to know that a lot of younger gamers aren't that typically on those consoles to actually play this game to get like FOMO

for that one game to actually get to play because they know that it's going to be the ubiquitous party game. It's going to be everything that's gone Twitch for the better part of a year. It's going to be everything and everyone's only obsession when it comes to gaming for the ones that

do afford it. To indoctrinate, to have this be like the arbiter of please preserve this economy of accessible hardware, I think is a good idea. But I'm curious to see, who actually buys this game and who keeps playing it.

Because you think it's going to be everybody, but it might not be. It will be a lot of people. It will be me. Yes, yes, it will be us for sure. There's something about the Grand Theft Auto formula that I think speaks to the younger generation who play free-to-play games as a social experience

with their friends. Just playing a narrative game alone is a little bit foreign to the youngest generation. generation of gamers. And I don't think that Grand Theft Auto has, you know, is going to have evolved in any way that, that, you know, onboards those kids. It's not an easy ramp from what they've been playing to GTA6. But I don't know, maybe if it's a big enough game, maybe it has a big enough impact. It can actually sort of crack in and have kids try this form of gaming that they've never tried before because I'm really worried about the landscape of video games 20 years from now

when, you know, people just aren't used to playing with the controller. What will happen to our hobby? Kids these days, won't anyone think of the children. Okay, hopefully GTA will actually come out this year and then we can talk about that at length. For now, just go get your $900 PS5 Pro to prepare. Okay. All right. Well, let's talk about happier thoughts. subjects here because we do a lot of hand-wringing in culture coverage these days, whether it's the state of

streaming, the state of the box office, the state of specific franchises, what's wrong with the MCU, what's wrong with Star Wars? And we've just done that version of this for gaming, and there's good grounds to do that. However, there is no need to worry about whether the games

are good. That is the saving grace of gaming, because the games are great and this month alone shows that. So we'll pivot here from Bungy, a giant that dates back to the 90s that now is facing another round of layoffs and declining expansion sales. And can you even have a company that is based in Bellevue and full of long-tenured employees who make good money and develop games on the cycles that it takes to make games these days? Let's talk about another 90s great. And pivot to IEO Interactive,

which has developed and published, 007 First Light. Out now, it's a game that we have been playing at great length, at least a couple of us, have finished in its entirety. You can go get it for most systems, PS5, Windows, Xbox series, Nintendo Switch at some point later in the year. I have played through this whole game.

We have been crawling through vents, swiping passes and key cards, seducing various vixens. This is big news for Bond because it's a fallow period for this franchise, both on the big screen and in gaming until now.

This is the first new major original James Bond game for PC and console at least since 007 Legends, which came out before GTA5 in 2012. That's how long it's been. Plus, we are in an interlude between big screen bonds here.

It's been five years since no time to die. And no new bond has even been announced. We don't know when Bond 26 will be covering or who will be playing James. And so into that void, 007, First Light enters. And we get an original Bond here. And this is the first time, really, that we've had a Bond game who has not been mapped onto any particular James Bond who exists in the movies since, gosh, I think Agent

Under Fire, which was 25 years ago. So now Bond is Patrick Gibson from the OA and Shadow and Bone and my fave, Dexter Original Sin, canceled too soon after a single season. Now he steps into the shoes of Young Bond, who is just making his bones as a double-o agent, who is earning his license to kill. We've got ourselves an origin story, folks. And the pitch here is uncharted meets hitman meets Bond, which on the surface, at least, that's a pretty compelling formula, but does it gel? Or do those things end up being sometimes an awkward sort of synthesis? I have thoughts. But Matt, I think you are probably high man on this game among the three of us, though. We have all played it and liked it. You loved it.

So tell us what you loved about First Light. That tends to be my role here, I think. I love it. I love it. You're the Van Leith of Buttonmesh. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love games guys. I love this game. This game, I had some pretty high expectations because Iyo Interactive has been a real hit factory for me in the past. And I think that they've executed this idea almost flawlessly. The idea of a James Bond game that borrows a lot from what they've learned with the Hitman franchise and, you know, weaves in some hand-to-hand combat that's like Arkham. some driving here and there, all of that put together in a really cinematic form with a story that I think is great and with performances that add a lot, even on top of that great story.

I really feel like this is firing on all cylinders. And it's tough to make a good game that is made out of several different forms of gameplay. That's really not an easy thing to do. And in my experience with this game, I think that they have nailed every single element

of that. I think the driving is, you know, there isn't a lot of depth to it, but it's also not, you know, one of the more prominent forms of gameplay in it. Right. But, but I think, you know, that's an example to me of how like they've, in my opinion, gotten the balance of all of those different forms of

gameplay, right? And just weaving it with the pace of the story well, I just, for me, it's everything that I wanted an I.O. Interactive James Bond game to be, and I love it. It nails a lot of what you want, which is a playable movie, right? Which is what people always say about Uncharted. And in this case, it's specifically a playable Bond movie. I will say that my opinion and Steve, I think you're with me on this shifted dramatically over the course of this game. Because the three of us had a Slack exchange after me. Matt finished it, and I was a little more than halfway through, and I had some serious

reservations at that stage, and Steve, you had some too, and that was raving about it, and I was thinking, did we play the same game here? And then in the second half of the game, it really does find its stride, and it is sort of firing on all cylinders, but it does take some time to get there. And not everything clicked for me. How about you, Steve? Okay. So I have to start by saying that when I heard that Iowa Interactive was doing a 007 game, I could not have been more happy because I thought that that was a match made in heaven for that property and what this studio is great at. And I think for the most part, I agree with Matt that they executed on honestly far more than I thought they were capable of when it came to making

a uncharted-esque type of scenario where this is a far more narrative-driven, linear story that is guided along a path that is like an uncharted to the point where gameplay sections are very stagnated, where the game kind of flips a switch and you're in a gunplay sequence and flips a switch and you're in a stealth sequence or you're in a driving sequence. there isn't exactly like a marriage or blend of all three of those. Yeah. And occasionally it was unclear to me when we had shifted from one mode to the next because Bond is not an indiscriminate killer, right?

He's always going to try to incapacitate you rather than run and gun. But there are some sequences that are explicitly run and gun where the screen will say, license to kill, right? And so then, okay, I can go to town and I'm just wasting guys. But sometimes you're shifting from having license to kill. to not having license to kill, and suddenly we're in more of a stealth-oriented section where you can do takedowns and stuff,

but you can't actually shoot anyone. And it was kind of arbitrary at times, I felt like. It's like, they're still trying to kill me, but suddenly I am muzzled. Why is my safety not off at this stage? And this is where I think I'm taking crazy pills in comparison to the rest of the internet when it comes to this game,

because I was actually kind of infuriated with the tutorialization that this game gives you in the beginning. Because it's very cinematic. It's very staccato in a ways that is shot like a training montage in a movie where you do something once and then it immediately cuts to a different set of months where Bond is in training and he is learning something different. He is learning how to use his focus. He uses his gun.

He learns how to use stealth takedowns. And I think the thing that makes, at least the things that I'm used to, with what makes a good tutorial is that there's a repetition and there's like a gradually inclining sort of progression with the things that you learn to do in sequence. This game

it teaches you something once and it's like, what you do it once? You're probably not going to see it for like another hour until you actually do it in practice. And that got me so disoriented when it came time to me thinking like, okay, I'm like three hours into this and I would like to go

on a spy mission, please. so that I can use all of these things in sequence. And when I stopped to actually get more patient with myself and to know that the game actually gets going with that, it's beautiful. It's actually wonderful. Because knowing the things that made Hitman World Assassination so magnificent was the fact that it allowed you to fuck up certain stealth sequences

and certain ways to infiltrate a scenario and you can still figure things out. Ways of inquiry or like sort of pass. has in which you can get information that lead you to certain points in these Labrithian-style levels are always open to you. And this making that sequence more linear and more narrative-driven is disorienting for somebody like me who loves the hitman games. But in a game like this, I needed to know that that worked.

And it absolutely did. And I'm sure that Ben, as this went on, it rang true for you as well. Oh, yes. Yes. And so there is initial frustration because there is a long, okay, we're just, we're learning everything. We're learning the ropes here. We're on Malta.

We're at double-o boot camp. And I did like the montage style. Okay, here's one skill, here's another skill, rapid fire. But it does take a long time before the game just lets the leash off and introduces you to the full-on gameplay. And, you know, I don't mind so much that it's an origin story. I think that's actually kind of appropriate because even though Bond is such a long-established character, we haven't really gotten that in cinema with Bond. It's not like Spidey or Batman,

where we have seen that and played that so many times that now it's better to skip it. With Bond, you haven't really seen that other than maybe briefly in Casino Royale, but I don't see this as sort of a, you know, surf Dracula to invoke the meme where it's like, can't we just be Bond? Why do I want to be 20-something Bond

who's not good at stuff yet? We haven't really seen this sort of origin story for this character. and I kind of enjoyed learning along with him, but it is a grower. It is a slow starter because of that. And it's not a short game. So, you know, it's longer than a lot of games of this type that are kind of like cinematic arcade. And so maybe it takes a little too long to get to the great stuff.

But it does, I think, lay some groundwork that pays off for the story at least a little later. but I mean complaint probably. And again, I liked it a lot on the whole in the end and had fun and was propelled through this whole game in, what, a week, less than a week. They didn't send the codes out very early. But, you know, it's kind of this mashup of all these different genres. And I felt that each of them was slightly underbaked, some more than others, because it's not the core focus.

And so I felt like the game was, I guess, a little less than the sum of its parts. because if you want the stealth spy gameplay, if you want hitman, you're getting a semblance of that. But it's sort of hitman light, which is maybe fine for some folks, but it doesn't really lean into that sort of spy simulator. And then it's also sort of,

you're taking the hitman engine and you're applying it to running and gunning in some sequences. And it's a little awkward just in terms of the movement and the cover system and all of that never felt fully natural. But there are most of the most of the movement, moments late in the game when everything clicks. And suddenly the full potential of all these

different systems is realized because you're in a combat situation and you can do this sort of simplistic Arkham-based hand-to-hand takedowns or you can use your gadgets and your Q watch or you can pull a gun and you can headshot someone or this or that. And suddenly it felt more like almost an immersive sim and oh, I can play the way I want to. But it didn't feel that way for the most part. And I felt that certain aspects of each style of gameplay were just a bit dated in my mind. But Matt, tell me why I'm wrong. I think that, you know, Hitman has evolved to be very much a game for fans of Hitman. And there's definitely a level of depth to it that I think would be a bit intimidating for a wide audience.

And I think that this game is intended for a wide audience. It's more accessible for sure. Absolutely. And I think that it would have been a lot easier to make a version of this game where the stealth sections are not even as deep as they are now in this game. And I think that they've done a good job of refining that for a wide audience. for example, when you are in a stealth section and you have drawn the attention of some enemies, let's say,

and they are in combat with you, and you're sort of worried like, oh, no, like I'm fighting these two guys in a room now. Does that mean I'm going to have to fight everyone on this level? And you take those two guys in the room out, and the game explicitly tells you, boom, situation contained. Yeah, right? There's a notification that like this will not in fact spread to the entire.

And that sort of decisive like telling of information there is made for a wide audience. And it is very helpful to anyone who hasn't maybe spent a ton of time in stealth games or, you know, has just been introduced recently. to stealth through Lego Batman, where people can't see you until you are directly in front of them waving at them. I think that it does a really good job of being a game for a wide audience. There's a

blockbuster feel to this through not only the movie nature of the game, but also that adaptability to players from all genres. And I think that they've done a it's way deeper than it could be

than it could have been. I think you're absolutely right and I think that the reasoning behind making this accessible to as broad of an audience as they can is actually done quite masterfully because of the fact that as much as I would have wanted something

a lot either deeper, leaning more towards the immersive sim levels that Hitman would be. I would also say that, hey, if you really liked the stealth sequences in this game, boy have I got a game for you and it's called Hitman.

And I think that the evolution of the stealth sequences here are really kind of something that I've found very refreshing in a mainstream stealth game before. Because it actually, I don't know if any other game has done this yet, where I have incapacitated somebody and their body is like lifeless on the ground. And another guard has seen them. And I have just like made a vacuum cleaner go off

or a pipe burst in front of them. And they actively, say, I'm ignoring this to focus on the dead body in front of me. And for that, I was like, oh, no, they're really thinking on another level here, because that's the type of thing that I've always

wanted to see. And, like, the attention to detail that I.O. is so well executing on for all of their games, but especially here, I think is wildly impressive. And I still can't actually sing enough high enough praises about

the story in this game because it is the actual kind of like pitch perfect note of serious, silly, humorous, and dower that I've kind of always wanted in the James Bond like movie. Yeah. I don't think I've seen a movie quite like this in the James Bond era that is actually kind of unburdened by not having a mainstay actor or franchise to goate.

Like if this were the Daniel Craig, Bond, it completely doesn't make sense. It definitely owes a debt to the Daniel Craig-era-Bond movies. I mean, it's almost like if you take Skyfall and no time to die in Specter and you kind of extract elements of each of those stories and put them all in one story, it's sort of like that. So there is more of a serious, you know, latter-day bond aspect to the story. But then even though it doesn't really lean into the pre-Krag camp, there is an aspect of

that. there's a lot of humor and comedy. And also, I guess, just pairing that more serious story and the, you know, it's kind of the classic spy trope of, oh, does it even make sense in the post-Cold War world to do all this human intelligence, you know, is the double O program in danger, is AI running everything, right? And so you take that, but you also have segments where you are slaughtering dozens of henchmen and lackeys. And so maybe that makes for an awkward pairing at times.

but I think it's kind of nice that different eras of Bond are represented here. And I guess it's kind of a compliment but also a critique. There is so much story in this game that if anything, there was maybe scope creep here

because there's like two or three games worth of plot in this game, I think. And I'm not complaining because it's at least a 20-hour game, but there are so many villains and romance, just like, who come and go over the course of this game. And by the end of it, I won't spoil specific aspects. But there are characters you're supposed to be emotionally attached to

and what happens to them is supposed to be meaningful to you. And there will be a reference to them at the end of the game. And it's like, oh, right, I forgot about them entirely. Because that was so many twists and turns ago. And I haven't seen them for hours. But the core of the game is really the, older agent who is reluctantly taking Bond under his wing

and then Greenway. Yes, Greenway played excellently by Lenny James who people might remember from Walking Dead and many other things. Yeah, he's great. It's great. And that kind of, you know, will they learn to get along this almost, you know, odd couple pairing of these two? That's the core of the game. And that works, I think, better than any of the

Bond girl aspects or the kind of colleagues, you know, because Bond's ultimately, he's sort of a lone wolf, you know, rogue agent almost. And so, yeah, the John Greenway pairing with Bond is great. But there are so many villains and I'm all misdirects and red herrings and you think, oh, this is the big bad. Nope, okay. I guess not. There's another bigger bad here. And apologies to the Lenny Kravitz fans out there. Again, no specific spoilers. But if you thought that he was going to the big bad, which I did, based on the initial marketing and trailers and everything. I got news for you. Lenny is used fairly sparingly in this game. But listen, Ben, here's the great things that I find ridiculous on paper, but in the game,

they make sense. Ridiculously Norwegian-looking evil twins. Yes. And a man with an actual golden face. Yes. Or mask at least. You got a James Bond movie. Yeah.

No, the big Bond beats are all here. It's true. Yeah. And, you know, all the iconography and. and the theme song and all the rest of it, right? The original theme song, the classic theme song, everything you expect from a, it's the full cinematic treatment in a game.

Jet setting to different locales. Yes, yes. Being a big part. As soon as you're kind of like feeling like you've been in a place for a while, they will kick it to a new varied location. And some of these locations feel like revelatory. Like sometimes you are just in,

an office building or, you know, the Q Lab or whatever. And it can be, you know, or you're outside somewhere in the nondescript place. But like there are showpiece locations in this game, a nightclub, like a, you know, a big old manner, like these social events that you go to. Like there are settings in here that feel so different from each other and so fully realized. That coupled with those performances really makes. this game successful. Like you mentioned Lenny James as John Greenway. That relationship that Greenway has with Bond as it develops through the game, to me that was the single most, you know, well-realized part of this whole game. Those two performances. The presence of Lenny James more

than makes up for the lack of Lenny Kravitz. Listen, we got the right amount of Lenny Kravitz. I will argue that. All right. Right amount. Maybe best. I was worried it would be the big bad as well. They'd be the big bad? I like Lenny Kravitz. I don't know. We'll see. I would like to see it.

Generally have a good feeling about Lenny Kravitz. Our producer, Dev and I have talked extensively about Lenny Kravitz's diet and exercise routine. His body is on my vision board, all right? He's not quite the actor that his daughter is, but he's also not asked to do anything like fully out of his

his comfort zone in this, which is great. But like Patrick Gibson is Bond. I think, you know, at the beginning of the game, I wasn't fully sold on the Bond casting. And I think whenever you have a bond property, and as you said, Ben, this is like the first time where we're encountering a bond that we haven't really like

seen cinematically for a long time. And that's a tough sell to people, I think, especially through a video game where like, you know, it can really easily feel like we, have Bond at home, you know, like, and, and throughout the course of this game, I think that Patrick Gibson really owns the role and, and becomes his own form of bond that very much feels like Bond, but very much feels like his own sort of spin on it. And when the credits hit in this game, I was just immediately ready for another Bond adventure. Maybe, you know, it doesn't have to be

20 plus hours like this one. I do think that you had some good criticisms, Ben, of it maybe feeling potentially a little overlong, but I understand that as a game studio, like to charge $70 for a game in 2026, if you don't hit 20 hours, you're going to see some people complaining.

You're going to see people waiting for sales, right? You can get Mina the Holloware for 1999. So you sure can. You've got to provide something compelling here. So, yeah, it's, I think that, you know, sometimes the individual gameplay aspects feel a little dated to me. I know that there's, there's nothing more hackneyed than complaining about explosive barrels in 2026, but maybe the only thing more appreciate than that is having this. Hey, I'm a yellow paint gamer. I don't care.

I'm embracing it. Right. So driving, it's very on rails, very abbreviated shooting. Man, that shoot is just go full. forward. I'll be harder than that. It's just go forward, man. The driving is, is disappointing. It's sparing, but it's disappointing. And then, yes, you have your climbing and you're jumping and it is very yellow paint kind of gameplay. And then you have your, I would say, lackluster boss fights for the most part, which are largely almost quick time event based or gadget based. There's a lot of quick time

events in this game. You know, I don't mind a quick time event here or there, but it just, you know, between that and I've honestly, I can't remember seeing this many explosive barrels in a shooter in this decade. It's, I got barrels next to tanks of barrels of materials in office buildings. Like, I get when we're outside in a construction site maybe, but like I'm in the office. Why is there an explosive barrel? Everything is explosive. I played video games before. I get it.

You are complaining about video game tropes. I know. in a property that has probably the most tropes in all of cinema. It's true. Like, this is where they belong. And frankly, I'm going to say this, like, to free your minds a little bit. We're in 2026. I'm sick of QTEs.

We got settings. Just turn that on autocomplete? You won't even see them. It's just part of a cutscene at that point. That's an option. I actually push back on the boss fights, actually. I think that some of them are actually quite inspired. Not to spoil, like, an entire encounter,

but there's a boss fight that's entirely. somebody has a gun on you and you don't have a gun and you've just got to use your gadgets to outsmart and beat this person. And I thought that was relatively like inspired. And I think that the ways in which that they can play with that formula to make a quote unquote boss battle

like they have in James Bond movies where like the ridiculous henchman has one advantage over Bond that he's got to overcome. I think this has done incredibly well. Yeah. It's hard to have a boss fight in a Bond game that's not something like that.

Just a dude. Yeah, right. It's usually just a guy who's sinister in some way. There were other things that, you know, I don't know if you guys ran into technical issues. It's always tough to know whether this is just because we're playing pre-release and pre-patches potentially. But I had some hard locks, some crashes.

I had some repeated dialogue. I had some sort of awkward timing with scripted sound bites. Like maybe this is a product of the fact that you can approach different levels in various ways, but I'd say take out a bunch of guys from afar and then advance and everyone's dead and Bond will be like, there's an army of them. And there's no one left because I killed them all already. But clearly he was just sort of programmed to say that when I got to a certain spot in the level, that sort of thing. And, you know, like I guess that if you are used to hitman, as you said with Art, with Batman, with Lego Batman, Steve, it's sort of baby's first

Arkham game. And this isn't baby's first stealth spy game, I guess, but it's, you know, toddlers first maybe. So if you're used to hitman, maybe that's harsh. But if you're used to hitman, some of the stuff that happens here, I think, you know, you're used to video games. But again, it's like there's one level where you're trying to enter this restricted space. And so you have to steal a press pass. And then you just get by, no questions asked, even though you're still wearing the chauffeur uniform that you were wearing. So you're like a journalist wearing a chauffeur uniform and they're just like, sure, come on in. Or a lot of the times where you know, you'll use your gadget on a guard or something and you'll shoot a laser in his eye or something.

And then there's kind of a recovery time. And then after that recovery time is done, oh, okay, he's back at his post and everything's fine again. And, you know, you can use the one to sort of make the guard sick. But then if you get spotted, they're suddenly not sick. Like, I think on the whole, the enemy intelligence is actually pretty impressive in the stealth sections at least. But in the spy sections, you know, it's a little dicey. But I guess that's to be expected, perhaps. But on the whole, I think they achieved what they were going for here.

There's just a little bit of, ah, I wish there were a little more polish here potentially. That extends to the graphics too, I think, which in many cases are quite impressive. and then in other cases are not at all, I thought. Like in the indoor sequences, I thought it looked great. But then when you're outdoors, I thought there were these weird sort of pre-rendered backgrounds that were almost like, am I in the Truman show or something, where they were just totally static and looked really weird

because it was almost as if like the playable space would meet this wall that was painted on to the rest of the world in a way. and, you know, like water didn't look good and fire didn't look good, like faces and bodies, I thought, didn't look good. But the environments, like offices and gadgets and stuff, looked great in a lot of cases. So there was a strange sort of discordance there.

Like, hair was weird. I don't know whether you had that experience. Hair is always tough. Hair is pretty tough. Strangest bald spots I've ever seen in a video game in 007 first light. I don't think I noticed this stuff that you're talking about, Ben. I played on base.

Did we all play on base PS5? I did too. Base PS5, yeah. Kind of long loading times too. Yeah, the loading times are long. Loading times aren't tough. We're spoiled these days with loading times, but these were lengthy. It did feel like a throwback in that sense, the loading times being long.

Some frame rate stutters here and there. But yeah, not terrible. And great quips and great banter. I thought that was the strong. aspect of the writing other than the Greenway Bond relationship is just when Bond's kind of talking to himself or talking to Moneypenny or M on the radio. A lot of good singers that felt very Bond. I don't know, man.

I saw a bad guy get impaled and Bond didn't say stick around and I was about ready to call this a zero out of ten. I honestly think I might want to pick this up on my, I guess, now valued at $10,000 $10,000 PC to see how this game really looks because I think that occasionally it's gorgeous. And I think that Iowa is really, really good at making, again, like you said, like these either urban dense or like these very big, grand spaces. Yeah. Hotels, ballrooms, nightclubs, stuff like that. And their exteriors, like there have been a couple of desert locations.

There's some jungle locations. Those look like fairly run of the mill, I guess I'll say, but like nothing offensive to the eye for me. I think that for the most part, where it counts, it looks very good. and the things that you need to be playing the most of, it looks great. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think we're all fairly high. I'm kind of the low man.

Matt's the high man, but we're all recommending and saying, MASH don't pass. This is definitely worth playing. Absolutely. I will always remember, because there's a lot of NPC shouts and barks. You know, they're constantly saying stuff as you're going around the level.

And my favorite, I think, is when one of the henchmen says, no way I'm going down like this. one milliseconds before I shoot him in the head. He does indeed go down like that. He did indeed go down like that. Narrator, he did. He died. So a lot of good stuff here.

There were some sequences where like I got stuck and I had to manually restart in one case. I don't think this was user error, but it was just like I had to get a key card from a guy at a certain point. And I advanced to this point where I could no longer get back to get that key card. But I thought there was a different way through the level. And it turned out there wasn't and I couldn't get back. to it. So sometimes whatever freedom it allows you comes back to bite you and sometimes the freedom is is not liberated enough for me as a hitman fan. But on the whole, you know, fairly well-paced, especially in the back half of the game, sometimes strange transitions from one

mode of gameplay to another. But does it feel like a big budget bond game? It sure does. And it does a whole lot of stuff well here. And even if I had some reservations, I couldn't really put it down for the 20 hours or so that I was playing this thing, even though it started slow. So yeah, good game and, you know, sort of know what you're going to get going in. There's no skill tree here. There's no currency. There's like light interaction when you're, you know, in a market, you can click on stuff, but you can't really do anything other than maybe talk to someone sometimes. I did learn that the key to Spycraft, though, is to stand near people who are having a conversation and just stare at your phone. And then that works every time.

What a better way to eat? I guarantee you all of us have eaves dropped on somebody while we're looking at our phones. That's literally all of SpyCraft. Yeah. And I like how British it is, too, at least, you know, from my American perspective. I know IEO is a Danish studio, but it felt very true to bond. but these MI6 folks having a lot of indiscreet conversations around headquarters is all I'm saying, maybe because it's an open plan office, not a lot of private privacy, which seems like a strange fit for MI6.

All right, let us talk about the other big game, though a very different kind of big game that came out this week. And that is Mina the Hollower, developed and published by Yacht Club Games, which is the author is known for Shovel Night and the VIII. various games in the shovel night franchise. This game has been in the works for quite a while and has been hotly anticipated. As I mentioned, it's 20 bucks and it is out for all platforms, and I mean all platforms, even you macOS and Linux players, Meena the Hollower, is there for you. And this is a throwback. This is an old school synthesis of a lot of great games. And you will definitely pick up on the references here. But it also puts a fresh spin on those games. And this has been the best reviewed critically game of 2026. And I don't disagree. I think this is this is really a

masterful kind of retro, but not too overly faithful and copycat spin on a genre of, you know, I guess the most obvious comp is the Legend of Zelda, right? But it's not just the Legend of Zelda. It's the Legend of Zelda meets Castlevania, meets FromSoft games, meets Silk Song. There's a lot in here, and it's all done extremely well. And so, Matt, were you as big a fan of Mina the Holloware as I was and seemingly everyone else was? I'm a huge fan of Mina the Holloware. I like games, as we talked about.

Although I will say that, you know, I'm seeing like the critical acclaim on this is sort of way, way, way, way, way, way high up there. Yeah, I was like, whoa, whoa, okay, I didn't know, like we were thinking like this. It's definitely the leader in the club has like, take heart haters of mixtape because there's a new, new favorite for indie game of the year. Was this more so an emotional response to it's like, no, we got to give a real video game a 10 out of 10. Yeah, it has fail states. It's interactive. Although IGN, I think, did give us a 10 as well. Not that, you know, the world revolves around IGN.

Candy these days, yeah. But yeah, I felt like if I were reviewing this, you know, I would probably give it like a 9 out of 10. I think it's a wonderful, wonderful game. I do think it has a few flaws. So it wouldn't be a 10 out of 10 for me. But, you know, it's just weird for me to feel like slightly lower than the general consensus of the game I guess.

So that's my own thing to worry about. But no, I think it's a fantastic video game. And I think that with it getting such high scores, you know, we're going to have a similar thing happen here as I think happened with Silk Song, where this is a game that reviewers are going to absolutely love and it's going to bring in a whole set of people who normally wouldn't play a game like this.

and they're going to try it, and they're going to fall off it almost instantaneously. Could not agree more. Because I think that you already, I think it is a tall ask for a lot of people to put 25 hours into a 2D video game. And I think that this game in particular has a bit of an uphill battle.

The difficulty at the start, I think, is probably the point in the game or the difficulty is the highest. At least that's how I found it. You know, this sort of way it works where, you know, it's similar to Souls games. If you can die and lose all of your bones that you've picked up, which is how you essentially level up.

The bones are their money. The bones are their money, as they should be. Yeah. But yeah, I just think that I could just imagine so many people like losing all of the money. the bones they've worked for in the past hour, two hours, and saying, nope, not for me, really. Now, the game does, as you progress, like, you get more orbs.

If you have no orbs and you die, you lose all your bones, right? And you have one orb at the start, I believe. So eventually you get, you know, more health and more orbs. And I don't think I, like, actually lost any significant amount of bones in the last half of the game at any point. because between that health bar and the orbs and being able to convert your bones into a saveable form, as you can often do from software games,

that element of the game that was so present at the beginning, that stress of worrying about losing bones was completely gone by the time I was at the end of this game. So that's one thing I think everyone needs to be aware of if they're playing this game, if they're jumping in and they're not like a veteran of the very 2D indie hard game space like stick with it

and if you're having some trouble they have more difficulty modifiers in this game than any game I have ever come across in my life there are you can modify everything you could possibly think of in this game to tune it to a more

palatable experience for you if you'd like I'm a person who plays games on default settings almost religiously and if I have to change them to make them harder or easier. I get kind of annoyed by that personally. But yeah.

Interesting. I personally have freed myself from that, obviously, with my QTE take and philosophy. So I was welcomed to this game to know that there are so many things about this that you can change. But I still walked away from this being like, hey, do you like Souls Like? Do you like Links Awakening DX?

Because you better. Otherwise, this is going to be a really tough sell for you. And the ways in which I think that this game can be beautiful, joyous, very fun to play on site, I think you'll know if this is for you or not. And I'm not going to say that this game is inaccessible and that it's not worth trying. But again, you'll know pretty soon whether or not you're going to like it. Yeah. And I think that's kind of going to be the harder thing for me. Did I personally like it that much. I did enough, but I certainly can't argue with the love and care that Yacht Club has put into this because they bleed for these types of games. They absolutely know

where the sweet spot is for all of these influences to make a perfect marriage of all of them to work. Yeah, and you use the phrase on site. And the first impression this game makes just visually, you comped to Wink's Awakening. And I think that's right. It is. a links awakening or Oracle of Ages slash seasons era Zelda look. I've seen a lot of people comp this to link to the past and say it's S&ES style. It's not. It's not a 16-bit look. It's an 8-bit look.

No, it is older school than that. And that is going to be off-putting to some people because initially, I had a hard time because, look, it's one thing to play an 8-bit game on a Game Boy Color screen. It's another to play, not to screen size, rag, but to, you know, play out a giant LCD TV screen in 2026. This guy, yeah, like, not everyone has a giant LCD screen. Screen size queen Ben Lindbergh over here. It's true.

It's true. I'm a shower when it comes to my TV size. But, but like, it's tough even to kind of make out the game world at first. There's a real adjustment period there because it appears so pixelated. I was trying to, you know, I have my couch against a wall. I can't move back any farther. But I wanted to, because Matt's advice was like, yeah, just move back. I can't.

There's a wall in the way. But like I felt myself kind of moving my neck back as I was playing just to get an additional, you know, few inches of perspective so that it would be clear what was happening. Because it was. And if you've ever hooked up an old console to a new TV via some device, you know what I'm talking about here. Oh, yeah. It's tough.

And there were times where that would kind of affect the gameplay because. I literally couldn't recognize where to go because, like, a key block, for instance, didn't really look like a key block or didn't really look any different from any other block, which is challenging because this is a game that is stuffed with secrets. It's always about, is there some hidden part? Is there a crack in this wall? You've got to discern pixels. You do. And when it's blown up on a giant TV or by any means a normal TV, it's hard to tell. So play it on Steam deck if you have a thousand bucks.

Play on your $1,000 Steam deck or your $400 switch too. Yeah. But it does nail that look. And it's very colorful. I mean, it's good looking. It's just obviously it's a tribute to a certain era of gaming and, you know, for better or worse. And it was really interesting because I was going back and forth between Mina and Bond. And these are both good games.

But, boy, they couldn't be any different, any more different in terms of appearance and just like budget. and, you know, Mita the Hollowers is less than a gigabyte file size. I was like, okay, I'm downloading Bond. I'll sit and wait for a couple minutes. Meena, oh, it's done, which is kind of nice. But boy, it's, and I'm glad that gaming has room for both of these experiences. I would never want to say, oh, sure, Mina offers more bang for the buck. But First Light offers more, you know, bang in terms of explosions and graphics and stuff.

So I'm glad that we can have both of these and that they can both be games, that we enjoy and that there is at least still some room in the gaming development world to make games like this. And honestly, you know, ping ponging back and forth between these two games, there was an adjustment period after I went back to Mina or when I started Mina, but not that long an adjustment period. You acclimate to that quite quickly, which I think just goes to show how important graphics are in the grand scheme of things. I mean, you know, if it's like Crimson Desert and it's blowing your mind. That can be a real differentiator. But for the most part, it's gameplay. It always has come down to gameplay and it always will come down to gameplay.

And so you can get great gameplay in an 8-bit package and you can get great gameplay in a AAA experience bells and whistles package and both have their virtues. But I think you might bounce off it if you're not used to that kind of game. I actually, I didn't bounce off this game the way that I ultimately did with Sok-Song. And I play. a ton of Silk Song, but it just frustrated me to no end. And this game didn't to the same degree, even though it is similarly challenging in some respects. You know, like there's a lot of silk song in, I think, the healing system where you have to attack enemies to recover health. And then there's the FromSoft aspect of, yeah, when you die, you lose stuff and you have to go back and get

it before you die again or you lose it forever. But also, you don't usually have to go that far to get back to that point. You know, usually there's a checkpoint, a save point that's not too distant. And there's so much customization here, as you said, Matt, and you know, discover all these trinkets and you can equip trinkets.

And then you have your secondary weapon, which is very Castlevania. There's a lot of Castlevania, like the sort of Gothic setting, the soundtrack, which is fantastic, by the way. Amazing. Yeah. And so you put all these things together

and there was enough sort of, okay, I can build craft my way to success in this game, that that was the redeeming factor. And even though we're copying it to Legend of Zelda, as everyone is, Mina is much more nimble than Link was in those games, because this is a game where the movement is much more satisfying than when you're walking around as 8-bit link,

because the core mechanic, the hook here of hollowing, which is burrowing, basically, is so good. you know. And so I think going underground has really been underserved historically in video games because it's all about jumping. It's all about going up and not so much about going down. I mean, sure, there's dig, dug and everything. But just that seemingly simplistic mechanic of Mina being a hollower who can burrow underground. And the key is that you actually, I don't know how the physics of this makes sense, but you move a little bit faster when you're underground than when you're walking on the surface.

And so even as you're just traipsing around, you just want to keep burrowing and hollowing. And you're also invulnerable when you're underground. That too. Yeah. And it becomes a key aspect of the combat because it's all about, yeah, I can reposition myself while because I can't be hit. And then it's such a core part of the puzzles and it's repurposed in so many clever ways

over the course of the game where it's this one simple thing. I can go underground for a few seconds. but they then unlock that in so many ways. It's really impressive. It's just this kind of gift that keeps giving. Yeah, that burrowing is the big solve of this game for like, how do you take Zelda-like overhead combat and make it dynamic and make it interesting and make it challenging?

Because that burrowing, that like invulnerability and speed boost that you get from burrowing just changes the entire dynamic of what a 2D overhead. fight can be. And when you combine that with the number of weapons that you have and the number of subweapons, the trinkets and everything, like, it's really satisfying 2D overhead combat in a way that I think is a huge step forward that we haven't seen in like, you know, 30, 40 years of this 2D overhead combat, they're doing something that feels entirely fresh and unique and deep. It's really something to be praised that build and the combat interactions with it.

It's ambitious. I don't know that Yacht Club has failed to make a good game yet, but this is going from the Mega Man inspired Shovel Night, which is sort of side-scroller. This is top-down, but it's open world instead of discrete levels. It's extremely non-linear. There are... Extremely. Yeah, there are six dungeons in the game, really.

You can go to most of them. You can go pretty much anywhere in this world from the jump. Yeah, we probably had entirely different paths through the game. Yeah, oh, definitely. Yeah, which is different from Bond. And it's much longer than previous Yacht Club games. And so even though you unlock stuff as you go and you do so much exploring and you upgrade, you can kind of get anywhere and go anywhere from the beginning.

And it's really impressive that they made that work. And it feels like they just kept refining the burrowing as you go. It was almost like split fiction. Remember when we played split fiction last year, Matt? And you know, you have this great co-op gameplay. And it felt like only at the end or toward the end did they fully unlock the potential of that? And it really peaks.

And you feel like, oh, yes, this is what they were really going for. Maybe they figured it out as they were. developing this or maybe they just saved the best for less. But I think that also applies to Mina too, because the way that the burrowing is used as you get deeper into the game, it's just like there are so many layers to it. Yeah, the more systems they add on throughout this game, the more depth it adds. And it, by the end of the game, you're right, it really is just an incredible series of systems. And, you know, the game that I kept thinking about while I was exploring this world was, was Metroid Prime 4, because we had a big discussion about how, you know, you get through the intro of

Metroid Prime 4, and they're like, here's the open world, all right, go do anything, and then you try, and it's like, actually, you should do this world first, and then you're going to go to that. It's like, now that you failed gloriously at that, how about you go for this? Yeah, and also there's nothing in the open world, and it's all a big desert. Yeah, and it was very linear, you know, levels, actually. Whereas in Mina, the ability to go to any of those biomes at the jump, as well as one that if you figure out how to get there, you could go to it pretty much right away.

This game just has so many secrets. And if you're like a person who enjoys finding secrets on a map and uncovering things and discovering things, It is such a joy. I know the comparisons that we often have for this to From Software around the bones and losing your experience and everything. But I think there's also a direct tie into From Software from the way that there is world discovery

where they are not holding your hand at all. And you can just sort of find obscure secrets that they would have been perfectly happy for you to miss, like completely missable sections of this game. That FromSoft is like influences is definitely felt in that regard. But the one area of that sort of exploration that I felt a little let down by was that there is a map in this game, but it is only accessible sort of in your recurring home base.

right and there is no kind of overhead tile to tile and no dungeon map sort of thing yeah so I did you know my playtime on this is

probably 25 hours I think I said but I I know that I'm going to say at least three to four of those hours at least was me just kind of stumbling around the map being like

you know I have ex I basically have almost all of these biomes unlocked, and I'm trying to get to the one or two that I haven't been to yet. And I'm just going all over the map looking for how to access that, and I cannot find it. And of course, we are playing pre-release, right? And I guess I could have gone on to the review Discord and really asked someone,

but I didn't feel like I wanted to. So I ended up exploring the world looking for those biomes, and I eventually did find them. It took a lot of wandering around. And in that process, I found a lot of cool secrets and stuff, so I wasn't too upset about it. But just having a single map

that I could have looked at, I would have found where I wanted to go almost instantaneously. Agreed. And I'm not a new game plus guy generally, but if you are, then this is the game for you. Fantastic.

Because you can play this thing several times, and it'll be a different experience each time. I'll also say that the Explore, is fun just because of how compelling a lot of the characters in the world are. You know, it's sort of like Silk Song in that respect. Mina herself is not particularly compelling. I mean, the concede of the game, Mina is this sort of genius inventor and mouse, who is part of this hollowing guild, you know, studies the earth and, and invents this

technology, this spark technology. And so she's going to this world to figure out why the spark technology has ceased to work. And she's sort of, you know, blank slate for the most part, which is not uncommon with the kind of games that this is modeled on. But the characters you encounter, a lot of character in those characters and a lot of strange settings, a lot of variety, a lot of just weird, almost sort of disturbing kind of characters who really will make an impression on you. So I do like wondering around this world. There's just a lot of personality that was injected into this thing. and clearly a lot of care that was taken to make it. So, yeah, whether it's as great as all the raves,

I don't know, your mileage may vary, but it's an excellent game. And if you're into this type of game, you're going to get what you want, which I guess applies to Bond as well, as different as these games actually are. Yeah. I just want to say that, like,

the developer here has done such an incredible job of making Mina like a celebration of the entire history of video games. it's incredible to see them pull inspiration from modern games, like from soft games, and then go all the way back to stuff like Chrono Trigger. There are very deliberate homagees to games across the entire history of games that if you're a gamer and you have been, there's just so much in Mina,

so many hat tips, so much inspiration. It just feels like a really heartfelt celebration of video games. To me, it's the difference between the terms reheating somebody's nachos and a tribute act. And this is a tribute act of the highest order because it's genuinely somebody who loves and appreciates all of this source material and wants to do it justice not only by making its own spin on it, but to honoring the spirit of all of the exercises that are put forth in all of these games. games. At no point in any of these like systems and art styles and themes that they iterate on, do I feel like this couldn't have fit in 1992? Does that make sense? There's never a thing

that's like overly advanced or inherently way too modern about this, but still reinvents itself in a way that is true to everything that came before it. And it's really, really beautiful. And there's a little bit of that in Bond, too, just because there's so many callbacks and references to famous Bond moments. And yet it does feel like it's not paint by numbers bond. It feels like it's trying to chart its own course and, well, or uncharted its own course and, you know, do its own thing. Strike off it's in its own direction. So it's not quite like a Lego Batman. Let's play the hits and remember this and remember that.

As great as that can be too in the Lego Batman kind. It is sort of an original, but clearly standing on the shoulders of giants here. And I did want to pay one more compliment to Bonds before we end, just because I was the main nitpicker on this game. And I didn't even mention all my nitpicks. Did you guys keep getting a message that said, like, you've been disconnected from the internet? Oh, yeah.

And it would pause. I'm playing a single player campaign here. I don't care if I'm connected to the internet. Why is my game being stopped so that I can reconnect? That's very annoying. Yeah, and like continuing to get the same tips. You know, I'm 18 hours into this game, and it's like, you can grab and throw this guy. I know that.

Stop nagging me. I'm not brawling well enough for you. You can take a tour in that sentence. Yes, I know. I promise you you can turn off those tutorials. I could turn that off too. It's true. And also, they're like batteries everywhere in the level.

Every table has like, you know, because you have to power up your gadgets, which I love that. No, I can, I love the idea of, of us international man of history. Just like touching everybody's smartphones on the table. It does make sense that there are a lot of smart phones. Sorry, excuse me. But yeah, it's like, I'm full up. I don't need any more power. How much hand sanitizer do you have here? I know. I need something. I need to

repower my poison by collecting all the hand sanitizer. But you have nothing to say at all about getting stronger and mean of the hollower by collecting bones. Well, that's true. Yeah. And all of a sudden somebody keeps their hands clean and that's a useful in-game resource.

Yeah. The gadgets were great, by the way, in even though I used the same four for the entire time, pretty much. Oh, and certainly. And in Mita as well. A real month for gadgets in video games. Oh, yeah, yeah. But I meant to pay a compliment to Bond, which is that even though the graphics were a mixed bag for me,

this was maybe the best game ever in terms of reflecting the protagonist in mirrors. Oh, bro, he checks himself out. Yeah. He checks himself out so much, which I get it. If I was that handsome, I would do that too. but it's a really good detail just to be like, huh. Yeah, right, because you know, like in video games, you're used to, you go into the bathroom and, what,

eight times out of ten, the mirror doesn't work for some reason. Like, it's streaked or cloudy, it's broken or dirty. Yeah, which, okay, I get it. It's probably, you know, it uses up a lot of resources to reflect the environment in real time or whatever. But in this game, it's really a flex, because every reflective surface you walk by, you can see yourself,

even like a computer screen or something. So they just, I think they stuck more mirrors in this game so that they could show off. Ooh, look, I can actually see myself. Pretty impressive. Yeah. All right. Games are great. Maybe gaming is broken in some deep-seated ways, but boy, our game's great.

So go get Bond. Go pick up your refurbished Steam deck. Maybe if you can find one, you can maybe, you know, go play Destiny 2 on. on PS Plus, where most of it is now, while you still can, and you'll get Mina the Hollower for a mere 1999. There is much value to be had, and I hope there is value for you all in ButMash as well. And thank you to you too, as always, for joining me on this adventure.

I'm happy to be here, Ben. And as you mentioned about Mina the Hollower on PS5, like if you can play this on PC or Steam Deck or, you know, because I played a lot on PC and you can make it a smaller window. So just be wary of that. Smallest screen possible for one of the best games that came out this year. We can't recommend this enough. Exactly.

And I have one more parting recommendation for everyone lost in the onslaught of big high-profile releases here. Is a new game that I have been playing with my daughter. And it has been delightful. And that is Bluey's Quest for the Gold Pen. So, Freddie parents out there, in the audience who are looking for something, you can play with your kids. Not that my daughter didn't also watch me play 007 First Light, which perhaps was not age appropriate.

I don't know. She's four, but nonetheless, that ship has sailed at this point. But, Louis' quest for the gold pen, blueie, super popular in my household and all households. It's the most popular show on streaming. And this game came out late last year and early this year for mobile platforms. And so you might think, oh, a bluey mobile game. Is that going to be any good? Well, now it's out for Switch and Switch 2 and PS4 and PS5 and Windows and Xbox series and everything.

This is like the fourth Blue game, but it's a true blue game, which was written by the series creator. Not a spiked-dewy games. Not a pretender. This is authentic bluey action. This is like playing, you know, and episodes of the show, but many episodes of the show. Because it was written by the series creator. It's voiced by the original cast. It's the true blue-bluey experience.

And it's also a great introduction to gaming because it's also kind of like a Zelda-like, you know, but for kids. And so this will be the gateway drug to Mina the Holloware maybe for my four-year-olds, play Bluey's quest for the Goldpen. So you can pick this up, but, you know, don't be dissuaded by the fact that it's a mobile game or that it's for kids. I mean, it clearly is for kids, but much like Bluey, the show, if you're a parent playing with your kids, you will be charmed and entertained. And it's a great introduction, I think, to gaming conventions. So I wanted to just make a recommendation. You know, we don't do a lot of parenting content here on Buttonmash necessarily, but you're looking for something to play with your kid,

Louis' quest for the Cold Pends. Thank you to Devin Milnotto for producing this episode to a vacationing Arjuna Ramgapal in absentia, still guiding us from afar. And stay tuned because the three of us will be back on Button Mash in about 10 days. As if we haven't been busy enough talking about the games that are already out, we are about to get wowed by all the games that are about to be out someday because we are entering summer showcase season and we will be back immediately following the Xbox Games Showcase,

which follows Summer Game Fest, which follows the Sony state of play. So we will have a whole week's worth of announcements to talk about next time and we will bring you the highlights. You can contact us, as always, at ringerverse gaming at gmail.com, button mesh like James Bond will return.