Triple Click - How To Make Good Video Game Lore

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

When is video game lore good? When is it bad? This week, the Triple Click gang talks about Skyrim books, Elden Ring item descriptions, Destiny guns, and all the other delectable morsels of plot that exist underneath the stories of video games. One More Thing:Kirk: Heavenly Creatures (1994)Maddy: Tales of Kenzera: ZauJason: Eiyuden ChroniclesLINKS:Mossbag’s Hollow Knight Lore video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XDiWYFGGqYTriple Click LIVE in LA! Saturday, June 8, 6:30PM at the Teragram Ballroom: https://teragramballroom.com/tm-event/triple-click-podcast/Preorder Jason’s Book! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jason-schreier/play-nice/9781538725429/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Greetings, traveler. I am Prince Tetradon and, oh, that glint of recognition in your eye. You've done your research, haven't you? Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we talk about lore, as in background and backstory. That book you find while exploring a cave that tells you all about Prince Tetradon, he's a real dick, by the way. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Schreier.

And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello. Hello. It's us again. we made it back. Welcome back. We sure didn't. Back to the three-sided table once again for an episode of Triple Click. The TriForce table.

And who else is sitting at the table but a silent maximum fun.org entirety of the co-op. They're all here with us. Oh, so that's like Kirk on Discord the other day said like all four of us. So I've played the most of the four of us. Yeah, let's call him out for this. That was bizarre. Earlier today, Kirk forgot that we all only have three people on this show.

But in a way, we have all of maximum fun.org with us. And we also have all of you, the listeners with us. Our silent fourth host. And in seats of honor, we have people who go to maximum fund.org slash join and become members of maximum fun. Now, why would you even bother to do such a thing? Well, maybe because we record monthly bonus episodes. And if you become a member, you can listen to those. And this month, we're going to record one about the Fallout TV show.

That's really good. And we're going to spoil the heck out of it. We're going to spill the beans on it. And that's what we call a beans cast on our bonus feed. But there's a whole bunch of other bonus episodes in the backlog there that you can have access to if you go to maximum fun. org slash join. But that's not the only thing I have to say. I also want to say that we are going to do a live triple click show on the West Coast.

We're going to L.A. baby. Sunglasses on. We are LA triple click. We are doing it at the Terragam Ballroom on Saturday, June 8th at 6.30 p.m. Come on over. There will be a link in the show notes to buy a ticket. Please buy a ticket. Please come see us.

We're hilarious and amazing in person. And I know it sounds like I'm just saying that. You sound a little desperate there, Maddie. I'm not desperate. I don't even care if you go. Like, should I be more punk rock about it? Like, I don't know, whatever. Go if you want.

We don't need you. We don't give a shit. Yeah, who cares? Not us. We would prefer you came, though. We would like you to come, however. Yeah, I think we should, I think you should go. Anyway, Kirk, what are we talking about on the show here today?

On the show here today, we are talking about lore, and I'm not talking about Dada's evil twin brother. Well, why not? Just going to get that joke out of the way up top. Great character, really funny naming convention there. One character is named Data, the other one's named lore, can't go wrong. All right. Can't go wrong. Anyway.

But no, we're talking about the rise of lore in storytelling and world building and in video games because it's become a more common term to the point that it's just kind of a generally accepted concept. People will just talk about the lore and, oh, well, this is explained in the lore. And, you know, oh, well, if you know the lore, you know that that guy was actually supposed to be the king and the lore and et cetera. And everyone kind of knows what that means. not really a term that we've specifically dived into and tried to kind of pick a part and understand

a little bit better. So I thought that would be kind of a fun topic to talk about here in relation to all of the games that we've been playing recently and just our thoughts about it in general. So I guess before we get into it, I'll say some sort of a definition of lore. It can mean a lot of different things. I think for our intents and purposes, it basically refers to the background writing that supports any fictional world. And this doesn't have to just be video games, though it's common in video games. So it's the historical events, the geographic and geological features of the world, the different cultures, the things that you only learn outside of the main story. Like not, you know, things that are explained to you by a character and

are central to the main conflict of the story, but more just, oh, well, the reason that you were in that kingdom and the reason that it was all decrepit was there was this plague a thousand years ago. And you only learn that if you go read this one book in this one cave, but It's actually really interesting once you know that. You know, that's lore. The minute you're starting to talk like that, you're talking about lore. So, yeah, I guess this is a pretty broad topic, and we can talk about it however we want. I certainly have a lot of thoughts about it, and I'm sure the two of you do too.

So let's just kind of start with general thoughts on lore and how that sort of world building and that sort of extra writing can help a story and how it can hurt a story. So any general thoughts, Maddie, maybe you go first. Sure. I guess I'll start by saying that I'm really bad at reading encyclopedia entries in video games. And I think that's to my detriment in the age of lore that we have now entered into. And I have had to get myself on board with lore in the past five years or so. Because it used to be that I could really ignore that shit. I really didn't need to read it all. I could just kind of. play a video game and I'm not out here reading all the books on Skyrim. I'll admit it. I haven't read a single one. And that was just fine for me. I don't think I needed to read those. You haven't even read the Lusty Argonian maid. I mean, I'm familiar with the bit, but I haven't sat down and thumbed through the whole thing. It's a real page turner. The thing about Skyrim actually is that the

books are quite short. So you really don't need to spend very long on that. No, and they have very big texts. They're very easy to read. In sort of like a modern Final Fantasy game, for example, the one that we all played recently, what is that, 16, I've lost track of how many numbers there are. Oh, in 16, yeah. Yeah, there's quite a bit of encyclopedia entries in that game that are actually super helpful if you read them. So that's a recent example of a game where I was like, I actually feel like this is going to help me understand what's going on. Well, that wouldn't be the lore. That would just be like a reference guide to what's going on as opposed to like background in from context. It's a little bit of a fine distinction. 16 did that cool thing where you would pause it

and the Amazon TV style like pop-up would come up and you could select people. I kind of, I appreciated that too because I was like, I need to follow. I need to follow this. And I do think that that, I mean, whether we're going to call that lore or not, it is backstory, relevant information. Some of it is certainly lore. Yeah. And it is something that for somebody like me who doesn't typically explore a cave and read a book in it, or maybe I'll explore a cave and I'll find a book, but I won't read it.

it. I'm there to play a video game. It does help me to have that additional invitation to check out the lore. The reason that I drew that distinction, Maddie, is because the lore for the intents and purposes of this conversation is I'm thinking of it as stuff that is supplemental, not stuff that is integral to understanding the story. And what you're describing is kind of like everything in those guides is like essential to understanding what's going on is the stuff in 590s 16. Whereas, right, it's a good question. Mostly. Like, it's all stuff that has been explained, as opposed to when I think of Laura, I'm thinking of, like, this deep backstory about this new cave you just went into, as Kirk just described it. So, for example, I always think of, when I think about Laura, I always think of the Sweet Kodin games, which is relevant to my one more thing, which I'll get into later. And the reason I think of that is because those games are all set in the same universe. And so they have this deeply, deeply, deeply, like, detailed, shared background where you can understand. you can play the games and understand the story without knowing the kind of the backstory behind this country of harmonia that is kind of this ever-present kind of figure within the games. But if you do understand that, you'll have a deeper appreciation for when this character from Harmonia comes in and does something crazy. That's, I think, is kind of, I think lore is really interesting in a way that it kind of, it can really enhance your appreciation or

understanding or enjoyment of things. Whereas if you ignore it, at least if it's done well, then you're perfectly fine. So Final Fantasy 16, if you ignore it, you don't need to know the deep backstory about the cities you're going into to understand the story. But if you do, maybe you appreciate it more. And so I find that, like, lore is most

kind of useful and insightful, and it's something that I want to get more invested in when it's shared across multiple games that I'm enjoying. And so, therefore, I can get connected to all of it like I would, a big TV series or something like that. That makes sense. It is an interesting distinction, and there's just some fuzziness here between lore and just the world. And just character back story.

There's always going to be some overlap because I think the first time that I finished the Witcher 3, I didn't really know that much. And I didn't know really what was going on. Like, I didn't fully understand some of what was happening. Like, by the end, you're talking about, you know, there are those elves from another plane and they're working with Siri because she has the elder blood. and it's the confluence of the spheres, I think it's called, is happening, and that causes this opening that's going to, like, cause some huge apocalyptic event, like a winter that kills everybody.

Right, and there's, like, Nilfgard and the emperor who wants her to become the emperor. It's a lot of very complex shit to keep straight because it's based on this, like, long-running book series that's really complicated. And the first time I played through it, I was, like, I kind of just became a, like, a goldfish. I was in the moment.

I was just like, whatever. I like Siri and I want Girl and Siri to like be safe and okay and friends with one another and to have a good relationship and that's all that matters. And then I kind of let all that stuff fall away and still really enjoyed the game and thought it was really grand and exciting and liked it. And then the second time I played it, I went back. I think I wrote a lore guide for Kataku and I went and read some of the books and learned more about what was really going on. And then I was like, okay, playing it the second time, it was way more rewarding because I was like, oh, I totally know who all these people are. and all these conflicts and there's all this subtle stuff going on with different sorceresses and their history with Gerald and like it's all there and it was really rewarding.

So it really enhanced the story almost to the point where I would say it's like essential story and it's not lore, it's just a very complicated story with a lot of characters in it. And so there's always going to be kind of a like loose, you know, it's a little bit fuzzy between those two things depending on the game. But yeah, in a lot of games it really is just like it's inessential. It's not stuff that you really have to know. And like you were saying, Jason, it can go from game to game. I think that's actually a really interesting thing that happened recently with the Remedyverse,

with Alan Wake and then Control and Alan Wake 2. Where in Ellen Wake 1... Good lore in there. Great lore, but I wouldn't describe Alan Wake 1 as being a game that really had lore. You're like this writer, some weird stuff happens. You kind of get sucked into it. I think there are like some hints at like other remedy games, I believe, because all their games kind of have them, but they feel more like Easter eggs,

not like a connected universe. Which, by the way, we did a whole separate episode on Connected Universe. Yeah, we did. We won't get too deep into that. But I think that when Control came out, by making it setting this bureau that pulls together all of this information and has files that you can go read about all these different, you know, supernatural paranormal events, including the events of Alan Wake, suddenly it became much more lore heavy, where you don't need to know this stuff. But then the more you learn it, the more it kind of enriches the world. And then Alan Wake 2 comes out and very interestingly is a much more lore heavy game because it's like folding in everything that happened in control and the Bureau of Control turns up. And so suddenly you're in a world where there are now lore explainers for the Remedyverse in Alan Wake because it helps people better understand what just happened in the most recent game.

Yeah, that is definitely something that I notice in control that I was doing that I don't typically do in games. And I think it's because reading stuff in that game. then by extension, Alan Wake 2 feels so rewarding. And that really just tells us what we already know, which is that writing lore in any form is difficult because you're writing a long explanation with probably some fantastical proper nouns if it's a sci-fi or fantasy video game. And there's going to be some complex stuff that you need to explain. But control does it in a way that is so fun and often funny and tells you a lot about

the world in these little missives that don't take. too long to read. They're about the length of a Skyrim book that I apparently didn't think was, I was capable of reading it one time in my life. But I do remember having that feeling while I was playing control of being like, wow, I can't believe I'm reading all this. And I'm really liking it. And I'm actually trying to find it, which is truly just a compliment for control. But it also makes me wonder why I struggle so much with the lore in something like Eldon Ring, which I sunk hours upon hours of my life into and yet I couldn't tell you anything.

I think what is going on in there. So from a storytelling perspective, I think one of the things of video games, so video games traditionally have been kind of mocked for their storytelling. Chops in many ways, we're not going to get into the history of video game narrative, but video game story has always often been considered a weak point.

And I think the main reason for that is that video game stories are oftentimes missing the kind of the fundamental nature of a story, which is that a character kind of has a desire and then over the course of overcoming obstacles to achieving or not achieving that desire, they change in some way. Video games don't really do that. Often it's just like you,

the player, are inhabiting this character. But you're getting power up. What are you talking about? You have a whole skill tree. You do. You change in your powers. Yeah, well,

that is what kind of video games do in lieu of actual character growth and change. It's what they substitute. Yes, yes. And I think that, Like when you have a game that is dense with the lore in some way, but you don't really have characters that you can kind of glom onto that you can kind of get attached to you and enjoy, then it's very hard to really care about the lore for the lore to do much for you.

And that's why so many fantasy books just like lose people with kind of like endless prefaces of proper nouns before actually introducing a character that you care about. Drawings of maps. The maps, the maps are always there. The maps are fun. So that, I think, is a reason that Alan Wake and those games, with their very strong characters who do grow and change quite a lot, can really grab you into their lore, whereas something like Eldon Ring for you, Maddie, might not grab you quite as much. It's a lot more. The barrier for entry is a lot harder when you don't have a character, a main character, a protagonist, or someone who is changing in some way to kind of latch into. you. Eldron ring is an interesting one. All those soul games, they do have Souls games. They do have characters and those characters go through their own stories, but none of that is reflected in the game.

You have to kind of piece it together by watching videos later. And so that's kind of another way of telling stories is having the story just been this be this kind of like undercurrent that you have to kind of figure out if you really want to. But that I think is the main reason. Like I think that maybe you'll find Maddie that like the games where you get into the lore, games where you care about the characters. Skyrim is a similar way. There's no real character to care about in Skyrim. Like you're just exploring a world and you can have fun along the way with Seqqis and stuff, but it's not like you have a main character who's going through some sort of growth or anything like that. And I think that to get into lore can often be aided by

having that compelling character in the first place. You know, that's interesting. There's a lot that you just said that we could go and follow a little bit more. I think that one interesting, Sorry, too many thoughts. No, that's great. It's all really interesting because, you know, lore can be used in so many different ways. It's interesting. That's true that you can, I find myself more drawn into learning about the lore if I've been drawn in by the main story. Because first off, I trust the writers.

And a lot of it really is just writing. Like, Remedy has good writers. And those control missives that you're reading. They're funny. And they're interesting. And you're like, I'm like looking forward to them because I know each one is going to be a little delightful weird mystery or surprise or something where to be you know in skyrim a lot of them are just like blah blah the history of uriel septum the fourth and you're like

i don't care i read a couple of those and i'm good you know i get it and then sometimes those are fun or interesting like there are certainly you know some books in morrow wind or skyrim or whatever that are fun but you never really know it's a little more patchy but also there there are games where there is basically no character development at all And I'm thinking here of Souls games kind of, but also MMOs are games like Destiny, where you're playing a character who is like ostensibly the most important chosen one, but your character doesn't even speak and like isn't really a character. And in Destiny, for example, that was a game where,

that was one of the first games that I encountered as both a game's journalist and as a person playing the game, where the lore became the story. It was a very common thing to hear people say, actually destiny has great writing. It's just not in the moment-to-moment things that Peter Dinklage is saying to you as you go into a cave. It's in the weapon description of like the last word and thorn, which are these two guns in the original destiny where if you read the weapon description, the little flavor text, it winds up describing this really cool, like epic gunfight between this dark and light gunslinger. And then eventually you kind of learn more of their story and it winds up being this really awesome story of like, the ago time before the fall when these two gunslingers faced off and they're like the last word,

you wind up finding out what that name of the gun means. And it's this really cool story that you only uncover if you, probably if you watch a YouTube video explaining how it works, but or if you really take the time to read these long descriptions and kind of piece it together in your head and fill in the blanks. But it has nothing to do with the story of destiny, which is like, especially the first game, super thin and almost non-existent to the point that it almost left people with nothing else to do, but start reading these item descriptions and putting together the lore and treating that like it was the main story.

It's interesting you say Destiny because that really changed with Destiny too. Starting around Forsaken when Cade died, I think it started becoming a game about the other characters and the way you often see that done with an MMO and also other types of games where you're kind of a generic, silent, like customizable protagonist. The story happens to characters around you. Final Fantasy 14 is like beloved for its story and the story is told through the characters that you are spending your time with as the kind of the silent hero. And so I think that is a good way to tell that story and to make you care even more about the lore. Destiny was an interesting phenomenon because you could really, you could sink your teeth into the lore if you were already committed to the game to the point where you spent like so much time on it and you were like, well, I might as well learn more about this world than I'm spending all this time.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, it's like sunk cost, I guess. Like, as much as you might say, Kirk, that it's, like, really good writing. And it was, there was some good stuff, but there's no one in the world who would care about the last words backstory, unless they're already a destiny, like, devotee. Yeah, yeah. Like, what would happen if you just showed that flavor text to someone who hadn't played any of this? Like, would they...

No, it would not. You would need, like, a short film or something. You would need something to, like, create the character and stuff. You would need to put it in context. Of course. I think you could explain it as, like... Which I guess is the purpose of lore. It has to be in context.

Yeah, this is like an item description and it's cool because it's doing this certain thing. I think that person who doesn't play the game would at least understand that that's cool. But yeah, if you just read them like, and then dredgenior and shin mouth were faced off at the bridge. They would be like, what are you talking about? Very dumb. I'm sorry. Yeah, I think that, I think even with Skyrim, like, if you either had, if you like were so into it that you knew exactly what these proper net. where then it would be interesting to you to read the history of, like, Tamreal and all the different domains within it and all that stuff, either if you were, like, kind of role-playing

on your own and getting really into it in that way, or if there were characters that could kind of, like, compel you to be interested in it. But there has to be something else. I think lore is best thought of as a supplement to other forms of storytelling, which is often how it's used. it's just that so many games are so dense with the lore or like putting a lot more into the lore than the actual kind of storytelling arcs of characters changing and so nobody can really find much to hang on to there. And it makes sense, right?

Because lore is kind of easier in a way. I mean, a question that I just wrote down that I hadn't really thought about is, is lore generally conveyed in games through writing rather than through, you know, spoken characters actually talking to you? Like it is, I don't know if there's a clear answer to that question, but I do think that it's more often than not, it's stuff that you're just going and reading or maybe audio logs that you're listening to. That's how I think of it too. And I don't know if that's fair on my part or not, but I also think that there's something to it is.

And I do think that, and it's funny because I love to read and we all do. I mean, we talk about books all the time on this show. But there's something about playing a game, especially an action game where I'm just like, I don't want to sit here or stand here with my. my character just literally standing here, looking at a piece of paper, it just feels like a weird use of my time in a game. And that's definitely part of my struggle with how it's implemented in so many cases. And it does help me, in part because I like kind of role playing in the sense that I like to imagine myself in the game. If Jesse in control, like her picking up missives and reading them makes sense for her to do. She's trying to figure out what's going on the same way that I am. But in Eldon Ring, I'm like, okay, am I just going to stand in the great room and like look at my sword for a really long time? And then that's going to like tell me something about the world, I guess.

Like there isn't even really an analog in that game that explains how I, the character, am even finding out any of this information at all. It's pretty different. I mean, the two games are pretty different. Of course they are. I'm being a little hard on Elgin Ring, a game I love. Well, yeah, it's right. I think I wouldn't criticize them along the same terms or along the same lines because especially in FromSoft games, but in a lot of these games, one characteristic of lore is that it requires some work on the part of the audience to fully figure it out. It's not given to you primarily in the story.

You have to go and learn it. I mean, this is true in like Star Wars stuff or like Marvel comics, like where if you really know all the characters, you'll understand better what's going on. Like, this is true across a lot of types of entertainment that people are into. I mean, this is true in Fallout. Everyone's watching the Fallout show. It's true. It has all kinds of really deep lore. And there's a ton of it in the show if you watch it.

You know, I'm watching with Emily, and I'm always like, oh, so, okay, let me tell you about the enclave. Like, that's who these guys are. And because I kind of know that from the games and from the reading. But I think, like, with a game, like a FromSoft game, the work is being done often by people like Vati Vidia. Or there's a really great, I think it's a mom. Mossburg, it's something like that, who made a YouTube video about the lore of Hollow Night. That's this just wonderful explanation of the whole story and the world that's very similar to Avati video kind of thing.

Bing! Kirk here, as I'm editing the episode, just to give proper credit where it's due, the hollow night lore videos that I'm referencing is by Moss Bag, and it really is wonderful if you like Hollow Night and you haven't seen it. You should check it out. I'll link it in the show notes. I'm guessing a lot of you have, because it's a pretty popular video. Anyways, shoutouts to Mossbag for a terrific video.

Okay, back to the show. Bing! People who are really good storytellers, like those two YouTubers, who do that work for you, can create something that kind of exists outside of the game, and it isn't that experience you're describing of, like, going around and reading stuff, because you can't really play Eldon Ring that way. It's a little more like you're a detective, and then, like, I imagine Vati Vidia plays these games like a detective. Like, he goes right.

He'd actually be really fun to talk to about how he plays something. like the new ELDN, the DLC that's coming out. Like, I wonder how he plays it. Because he probably goes around and, like, reads everything and has a notebook and is kind of, like, sleuthing out the story so that he can then assemble it and tell it to people because that's, like, his job. It's, like, what he does for his channel. And that kind of work is really cool.

Well, that what you just described is also the way you experienced a lot of games, like Outer Worlds is a good example, or Outer Wilds is a good example of being a video game detective and learning the lore. I mean, that game is an interesting one because it does. of a story in the traditional sense. There's no character making changes, but you kind of uncover what happened in the past and what happened to kind of

lead to the events that you're experiencing in the present day. And that is really all lore in that you, I guess you don't have to know what's going on. I guess part of the story, the point of the game is to learn the lore. But it's

it manages to make it compelling, I think, because A, I think it creates enough characters as part of the lore that you are watching these interesting characters and kind of glombing onto them in the same way I described earlier, but also B, because it just dangles enough mystery and kind of the premise is intriguing enough that you want to know what's going to happen next, which is another kind of integral part of making lore matter to the player is having mystery, having something to kind of hang your hat on. I think Horizon Zero Dawn is

another good example of this, where this is this kind of like overarching mystery of like, what happened here? Why are we in the future yet they are finding relics from our modern day and what's the deal with this? And you're kind of like uncovering the lore along the way. So I think games can be good at that, figuring out like a story that happened in the past and watching it unfold. Yeah. So I totally agree. I've got both of those down here in this show dock next to one another, Outer Wilds and Horizon Zero Dawn, because I think they're great examples of a very specific thing that kind of merges lore, like world building, with like directed storytelling to the point that your, the primary narrative experience is uncovering what would maybe

otherwise be lore. So Horizon Zero Dawn, the first game, is a great example of this because that is like the best backstory, like audio log story I've ever found in a game like this. And so many other versions of Horizon Zero Dawn would just have that stuff, just be kind of color. It would just be lore. You would be playing through a story about Eloy, this outcast who finds a way to have more power than everybody else and becomes the chosen one and saves everybody. And then you would be uncovering audio logs that are explaining what happened to the world. But what

that game does that's so brilliant is that it makes Aloy's story and her identity, like the mystery of who she is, tie directly to the story of the back story, like the backstory of the world, the lore. And as a result, it transforms the lore, which starts just feeling like lore into something that's integral to the story into her character. And then it all knits together in the end for the last few hours to the

point where I was like, wow, this is amazing. I've never really seen something like this before. And it was definitely like a narrative shortcoming of the sequel. As much as I did like that game, it just couldn't do the same trick again because it had already done it once and you just can't do it twice. Yeah, I mean, we already know who Aloy is for one.

Yeah, exactly. They could have tried to invent a similar mystery, but it's difficult. Well, they did. They did. they did invent a similar mystery in that Aloy had a clone and like, you were just kind of like, what's the deal? It's not a lot messy. No, I'm not saying, I'm not saying it worked. I'm just saying that's what they tried to do.

Yeah, they did. Yeah, that's true. And I also, I mean, I guess I'm using the word reward in a weird way here, but it does feel like a reward to me when I read something, like in Horizon Zero Dawn, I just was reading a lot of the emails anyway that Aloy is finding because a lot of them are funny. And so you're getting the reward of reading an email. and being like, wow, this seems like an email somebody really wrote in the past. That's fun. I'm going to keep reading these emails.

And then later in the game, it turns out that all of those were actually clues about what was really going on. And that feels like a double reward where, like, not only are the individual pieces of lore that are extraneous, like, you can understand who Aloy is if you don't read anything because they have too many out loud audiologs to like make sure you get it. I don't mean too many in a bad way. I mean, they make sure that you really understand what's going on, even if you don't want to engage with every other piece of lore. But if you do, it actually does feel like you were rewarded for doing so. And that kind of encourages you as a player to read everything, which I feel like is what a lot of people who are writing these

lore entries would want is for you to actually read their hard work and see what they did and feel like it actually added something to the experience. Yeah, I think a big part of the success of that game was the mystery that they threw at you at the very beginning. And lore has to be answering a question that you're interested in answering. Like a lot of times, if you're just in some fantasy kingdom and then you're just reading books that are just like about how there's kings and stuff and like there was a war, like it's just, if you're looking at some kind of generic kingdom with dragons and you're just not really wondering why any of it's there because it's just kind of taken, you know, at face value, you're like, well, I don't know,

like a fantasy kingdom. There's no, like, of course, it's just whatever. There was some king before the next king and then the dragons came and they fought them. Whatever, it's not very interesting. But in Horizon Zero Dawn, it's like you walk into the world and there are robot dinosaurs everywhere and like relics of our modern age, but no one seems to know anything about it and have any knowledge of history. No one has phones or the internet or anything. They're just like rubbing two sticks together to make a fire, et cetera. Right. And so you're like, what the fuck? You look at it and then you're immediately, at least I was like, I am dying to know, if they're ever going to explain this. I didn't actually expect them to. I was like, I don't know,

whatever. There's robot dinosaurs. Yeah, this might just be a video game where we never find out. And that's fine. Like, that would be a separate approach to world building and lore. But that's not what they do and they wind up explaining it all. And as you go and you start to read that story, you're realizing that you're going to get an answer to those questions. And in addition, just going back to the quality of the writing, I think also just the apocalyptic yarn they spin, why it happens, the rise of this AI that like mulches the world or whatever is just like kind of horrifying and engrossing. And I just found that to be like kind of like World War Z or something. Like it felt like a just series of little stories depicting the end of the

world that I just really found compelling and well written. The mystery is really the key, the curiosity gap, the kind of driving you as a player to want to know what happened there. And then on a smaller scale version of it, I think the fallout games are really good at kind of putting you in these little micro mysteries where you want to figure out the lore of what happened. What happened here? You get somewhere and you try to figure out what happened here. And then you go on the computer and you read some emails and it's kind of the little, the story of the You get the overseers computer opened up. Exactly. Yeah. The vaults. Here's the history of the vault through these ridiculous emails. Something they're doing well on the show. Very well on the show. Yes.

Extremely well on the show. And I think that that is a very good application of lore. that goes well beyond the kind of, here's the history of this tiny little village and how they used to make cheese wheels, but then a dragon burnt their crops or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, it's not ideal. I wanted to mention Zelda here, because you have this written down. Do you, Kirk, I don't know that I would consider Zelda's lore. I mean, I guess I'm using the word lore, but I think of it as just the story, but that's because so little work in Zelda is written down. But that doesn't mean that it isn't lore, I guess. Like, you're not walking around as Link.

I'm not convinced Link can read, for one thing. This is our ongoing theory about video game characters that can and can't read. Are you talking about one specific Zelda game? Or you talking about all of Zelda? No, because I'm talking about, like, the lore of all of Zelda and the fact that there is a lore of Hyrule and what it is and isn't. And it's not known. And instead, maybe I would use the word legend to describe how it's very effectively used in

those games, in that it's like it's kind of stories that characters tell to one another that you hear, as opposed to books you find or codex entries or emails, although I would love to see Link reading some freaking emails someday. Yeah, exactly. He would be getting text messages on there. But it feels, it doesn't quite feel like lore to me. It's more of a myth, a series of legends and mythology that everyone in those games is dimly aware of in various ways. It's really interesting that you say that because I think there's, I think that Zelda has its own approach to this. That's actually closer to the more proper definition of lore, which is like, I think

I wrote this down and I was going to open with a dictionary definition. Oh, boy. American heritage calls lore, accumulated knowledge or beliefs held by a group about a subject, especially when passed from generation to generation by oral tradition. That's American Heritage Dictionary. So that's not like lore in terms of video game lore, like the way that it's used when people are talking about video game writing. But the Zelda approach is a little closer to like when we just think of lore as like that's just what the lore says. It's kind of like what word of mouth over the generation says.

There will be a hero. He'll wear a green shirt. Exactly. And I mean, it's presented in world that way. It's like this is a story from a long time ago. and that the hero would return. And it's different in each game. And I think that Nintendo, the writers of those games,

have really approached it consciously in that way. Like, there are consistent things across Zelda. When you play the games a lot, you kind of have a sense of the broader, fictional, like imaginary space that the game lives in. But there isn't like this codex of information exactly that's consistent from game to game to game and is being elaborated upon in really, like, conscious ways.

It is a little closer to a legend. like you say. I think that's certainly in line with this type of storytelling. It's not really about being super strict about what does and doesn't qualify. Each game approaches it differently. I think that the Zelda games take an incredibly cool approach to that kind of world building and storytelling because it allows them so much freedom and allows us to just kind of vibe with it and interpret it however we want and let it be different from game to game. Yeah, I really like it too. And it's not to say that I don't also enjoy something like Horizon Zero Dawn that is so

kind of more regimented in its storytelling where you really know what happened at the end of that game? You're like, okay, great, I know who Eloy is and so does she. Like in Zelda games you kind of never do know. Like, we know there's going to be a Zelda and a Gannon

and a link, but we don't really know a lot else about what could happen game to game and we can't necessarily look at some big book and be like, okay, well, these are the, this dragon's going to show up. here and then. And I really dig that. And I think it would be kind of, it would be a completely different series if there were timelines that actually made sense. I mean, I think this can

frustrate Zelda fans sometimes, and in that people really like to make regimented timelines of Zelda games, despite that they buck underneath that presumption. Because they themselves, like, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in particular, like they don't really seem to fall anywhere in the timeline that quite works. And that is part of what's interesting about them. And their lore. I get the sense that it frustrates people, even though, yeah, I think that it can often make for stronger storytelling.

I mean, so many times a game series goes on and the people writing it start to add more and more lore. And then eventually they kind of ruin what made it special in the first place. It's a very common thing. I mean, the Star Wars prequel is not in games, but that's like one of the most famous examples of this of just being like, okay, midi-chlorians or the reason the force exists

and then suddenly you're like, wait, it was a lot cooler when you just talked about the force and I was imagining it, you know? And there's so many examples of that in Star Wars where less was much, much more than what they eventually explained. But man, I mean, Dead Space.

Talk about a series that started out really compelling with just like no idea what the hell is going on. There's definitely some world building going on. There's like this cult, the people who worship, this weird religion, There are hints of this at the fringes, but mostly you're just on this cursed ship, and there's like horrible monsters coming at you.

By the time they get to Dead Space 3, it's like totally ridiculous how much they've added to it, and it all just feels like extra weight. There are a lot of series that have done the same thing. I mean, Metal Gear is another example. I know people like love, some people love the world building and lore of Metal Gear, but to me, just the more complicated it gets, the more distracted I feel from the core of the game and like what it feels like it's trying to say. It sounds like what you're describing is less the kind of historical elements of lore and more the explanatory or the kind of like attempts at connecting things, connectivity of lore.

I guess what I'm describing, yeah, it's the way the one thing can kind of become the other thing. It's maybe it's that in some games what starts as just vague, you know, lore at the edge is just because in the whatever, when you first play it, there's a little hint that this is there and that is there and there's like a little note you found. eventually as the writers just have to keep generating more stories and flesh the world out, they start turning that stuff into the text and it becomes what the game is actually about. This is something that happened in Destiny actually, in Destiny 2, where what's his name? The Titan? Oh, St. 14. There was this helm in Destiny called the Helm of St. 14 that you could get at the very beginning and it was really cool because St. 14 was a famous Titan. And then the Helm of St. 14 was a really powerful exotic helmet you could get in the first game.

And that's all you really knew about St. 14 was he had the ability to like, I don't know, his shield was really good or something. And then over time, he became like fleshed out more and more and more until eventually he like turns up in the game and you're like, I think you meet him or you're trying to find him. There's like a whole thing where they really like lean into it and the lore becomes the text of the game. And to me, I don't know. Like I get why they did that. Like they needed to add some characters, but it was kind of cool when it was just a vague thing. I mean it can work. It's really, it's up to.

It's kind of like writing dependent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Going back to Suikoden. Of course. Cut us back on track, Jason. Finally. In Suikodin 2, there's like a tiny throwaway line because there's this character

named George Prime who you meet. And like, if you investigate his backstory with the private detector, he'll be like, I heard he killed the queen. And the entirety of Sukeodon 5 is based on that one premise of that entire, like that one throwaway line. Right. I think it's neat when a game does something like. like that, where it's like, we're going to take this little thing that you might have heard about here.

Or even better, Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. Breaking Bad has one throwaway line in the episode where you meet Saul, where he's like, did Lalo send you? And Lalo is never explained. Did Nacho send you? Like, neither of them are ever explained. And then they both become major characters in the show Better Call Saul. So I think it can be cool when kind of a throwaway line or a throwaway piece of lore is turned into. an actual plot. It's really, it's more about how deft the writing is and how adept everything,

like how competent it is at the execution than the concept of turning subtext into text. It just has to be as good as better call Saul. I mean, I feel like, why can't everything be as good as a deal? Well, it's easy. It's easy. Just like take a little throwaway line and then make him into one of the greatest television shows ever devised. How hard could it be? I mean, I feel like my go-to example is also Star Wars and it's like, why does Han Solo's name have an explanation? I'm not sure if that qualifies as lore exactly, but it's more like answering a question no one had. Yeah, that never had. I don't know. It's like inventing lore for something that didn't need more almost. Yeah, that's, that's it. That's it's, that's what it is. Which is like a third category of lore

that is rough. Well, that's, it's kind of like over-explaining. That's a big Star Wars problem. Middichlorians, it's over-explaining things that don't need to be explained. I think, um, looking at a show like the leftovers for some reason I'm thinking of that because that's a show that is good it kind of like adding lore to you it has this really rich interesting history and backstory and lore to its world but it doesn't bother explaining a lot of things like it's not going to explain to you obviously the core conceit of the show isn't explained the whole rapture isn't explained but also it's not going to explain to you why the uh the cult's uh what's the name what's the name of that uh the guilty remnant it's not going to explain to you like why they do all the things they do or

how they came together or the meaning behind each of their rituals. Yeah, it's just kind of like, this is what's going on here, and we're going to give you kind of backstory without over-explaining. So I think over-explaining is really a big problem in storytelling in general, and that is really the problem that you guys are kind of identifying there. Yeah, there is a kind of lorishness, like a sort of implied backstory, to just symbolism and implication. I mean, Han Solo is a freaking.

and cool name. And when you hear Han Solo, it's like, damn, his name is Han Solo. You know, it has that. Like Luke Skywalker is the same way. You're like, you know, there's no story where it's like, oh, well, you know, old Jeff Skywalker. Well, one time he walked on a tightrope and it was so impressive that they called him Jeff Skywalker and the name stuck. That is the backstory, though. Right. And where, yeah, when they then explain that with Hans Solo, it does feel like this unnecessary thing. But it's not lore, really, because like, there is no explanation at all, but the symbol does kind of conjure something in your mind.

I think a lot about our friend Matthew Burns's joke about Dark Souls. I'm going to mangle it, but it's something along the lines of most fantasy RPGs. King Tyber Septum was the fifth king of the eighth line. No, no, no, no, no, Kirk, let me do it. I'm what Charlie on. No, it's what he said was Dark Souls fans. Oh, the lore in this game is so evocative and mysterious. Dark Souls.

This guy's named Big Hat Logan because he has a big hat. Yes, his name is Big Hat Logan because he wears a big hat. And I think of that all the time. A Big Hat Logan wears a big hat. Because that's, you know, it is evocative. Like you're like, well, wait, why does he wear a big hat? And there are little things like that in those games that they do kind of flush the world out in this very light touch, like gentle way that leaves a lot of space for you. And then, yeah, I mean, if they did then go and explain Big Hat Logan and have a whole thing about him.

No, they did. That's the joke. It's like, and it's one of the prompts in the game is like, like, during, in between the, like, loading screens, you've got, like, these little prompts. One of them is, like, this guy was named Big Hat Logan because he had a big hat. That's the joke. But that's actually good explanation. It's better than Mont Solis name. I mean, like, a thorough, like, that's almost a joke of an explanation.

I mean, like, if they explained it in a more thorough way, it would dispel some of what's cool about it. Where it was like, and he was from the legendary town of Big Hat, and his mother named him, low gam because he was low to the ground and it's like we wouldn't want that. Right. Like how much more do we need? And I mean, Dark Souls is full of that kind of thing, right? These games are full of that kind of thing where like the name of a character or like a random guy that you find who has a slightly different moveset and has a different weapon. And it's implied that that means he's somebody but you don't really know who he is. And then it leaves a lot of space for you to fill in the blanks where, you know, in other games they would they would just not be able to resist filling it in and telling you what's going on. Yeah. Well.

I don't know if lore's good or bad. Have we figured it out? Do we have lore? Yeah, I hope if everybody's listening to all 202 episodes of Triplik, they will understand our lore. Yes, that's true. Does Triple Click have more? It does. I think we do.

We do because of split screen. Exactly. There's a whole history. Split screen is lore. Yeah, there's inside jokes. There's references. There's kind of a connected universe. I think anything that's been going on for this long generates some sort of a lore.

And I think we do have some kind of a lore. But hopefully we've gotten a little bit to the bottom of what lore is and come up with a better understanding of it. Let's take a break and then come back for one more thing. Hey, when you listen to podcasts, it really just comes down to whether or not you like the sound of everyone's voices. My voice is one of the sounds you'll hear on the podcast, Dr. Game Show. And this is a voice of co-host and fearless leader Joe Firestone. This is a podcast where we play games submitted by listeners. and we play them with callers over Zoom.

We've never spoken to in our lives. So that is basically the concept of the show. Pretty chill. So take it or leave it, Bucco. And here's what some of the listeners have to say. It's funny, wholesome, and it never fails to make me smile. I just started listening and I'm already binging it. I haven't laughed this hard in ages.

I wish I'd discovered it sooner. You can find Dr. Gameshow on Maximumfund.org. And we're back for one more thing. Jason, you already alluded to your one more thing, so why don't you go first? I played a video game called Auddin Chronicle 100 Heroes. This is a game that is a spiritual successor to the Suikodin series, which is a personal favorite of mine, old JRP series from back in the day. This game was created by a bunch of the folks who worked on those games, including

director Yoshitaka Morayama, who passed away a couple of months ago, so this will be his final release. And it is designed, and it was kickstarted. to feel like a new Sweet Coden game. And I've completed it. I've played about 40, 42 hours, something like that, finishing the game. Oh, wow, you played the whole thing.

I played the whole thing. I have not recruited all of the characters in part because it's a pain in the ass. Oh, so you haven't played the whole thing. Yeah, you haven't beaten it at all. So get this, there is a bug in the version of the game that I played. Hopefully it's fixed on release, but there's a bug that like prevents. Oh, I saw people talking about this.

Prevents you from recruiting one of the characters. That sucks. not actually recruit all the characters. So the game is unplayable, really, is what you're saying. Kind of. Well, I couldn't actually see the true end. But I mean, the characters are such a pain to recruit. I think there are a lot of bugs in this game.

Like, there's a cooking competition, and it seems to be super bugged because all the judges just keep giving bad scores no matter what I pick, and there's nothing I can do about it. Maybe your food is just trash and you don't know how to cook. This game is very frustrating. I'm sorry we keep ribbing you. I don't know. I'm having trouble. I'm reconcile.

I'm trying to reconcile. a lot of feelings about this game because in many ways it feels a lot like a brand new Suikoden game and it's kind of it's going to be what a lot of Suikotin fans would have wanted from a sukotin game except it's really frustrating in a lot of ways and it's missing kind of one fundamental part of Suikotin which is like an emotional connection to the characters and character relationships that is just completely MIA from this game so we all played Suikon and tomb I think you guys might agree with me but the highlight of that game for me is a relationship between the character and Joey and how that evolves over the course of the game and seeing Joey's evolution.

And Annami and like their childhood. Yeah. Yeah. The trio. Yeah. The relationship between the three of them and how that changes over the, those flashbacks and all that stuff. Aidan has nothing like that.

It has like a shallow kind of like facsimile in that as two main characters who look like Raiu and Joey. Yeah, I played a little and the main character looks just like Raiu. Except they don't have any sort of relationship. They don't do anything. that's interesting in any way, they don't have any sort of interesting conflicts. It just kind of like, it sets up some grand ideas at the beginning that just kind of fizzle out. The main character in this game has no personality other than like wanting to help people and that just doesn't

change at all over the course of the game. It's just like starts off wanting to help people, ends the game, wanting to help people. That's his story. It's just, it's missing something. It's missing an emotional heart. It's got a lot of things that I think are interesting, like political battles and armies and stuff like that. It's got all of the Sweet Codin touches, like so many little references and feelings of a Sweet Codin game from like big things, like the

good book characters and the castle and stuff to little things, like the fact that when you go to a shopkeeper, the shopkeeper will have like little quips and sometimes garbled English and true sweetgoden fashion has a lot of frustrating mini games, really, really bad mini games, especially

after playing Final Fantasy 7 rebirth. which has awesome mini games, mostly. Mostly. Or at least mini games that feel good to play for the most part, as opposed to Aodin, which has a lot of bad feeling mini games. And yeah,

I just found it really frustrating in a lot of different ways. To recruit all the characters, you have to do some of these really frustrating, kind of poorly explained, tedious minigames and other sorts of TDM, which I found really frustrating. And yeah, I don't know. It was kind of like, I was like, this is kind of what I want from a new sweet golden game and that it feels like this kind of like what a sweet golden six might look like, but it's just missing so much of the heart that I really loved from those old games, which is especially disappointing because so many of the people who worked on those old games worked on this one, including Yoshitaka Miriama, the director.

And it's unfortunate that I find myself so frustrated with his final game. But yeah, that's that's the short of it. I don't, I think that like the reason that I, played 44 hours over like the course of a week and finished the entire thing is because of that nostalgia. And I think we'll talk about this more in a couple of weeks when we talk about this game a little bit more in depth and how nostalgia can kind of like convince you to get into a game or what the effect nostalgia has on people. But if not for that, I definitely would not have played through this whole game because in a lot of ways it just feels like kind of like a, I don't know, a C budget JRP with a lot of generic anime tropes and just kind of really frustrating mechanics and stuff like that. So yeah, I don't know. It's hard to square this game with like, and then the flip side of that is that maybe

my expectations were too high because of my personal love for this series. So I don't know. I'm very curious to read the reviews and see what other people think. But I think overall I was not, not exactly thrilled with this game, which is too bad. That's too bad. That is too bad. I have a code for it and have played a little bit of it. And yeah, we'll play more before we talk about it more on the show. Just because I don't have your same

attachment to Sve Codon and to Succoated too. So maybe, yeah, I don't know. I'm curious What if you love it, Kirk? That'd be funny. That would be funny. We're like, it's really good. What's wrong with you, Jason? That'd be a real switch for all of us. That would be so funny. I think that'd be great. Stay tuned everyone to find out in a few

weeks. All right, I'll go next. One More Thing is a movie that I watched over the weekend. So I've been a friend of mine and I have been watching all of the movies nominated for the 1994 Academy Awards. I think I've mentioned this before. Yeah, you have. We've been slowly working through it because it's taken us like years because there's so many movies and we only do it like once a month. But we've watched almost everything now. We most recently watched one of the movies we watched yesterday was Clear and Present Danger.

Pretty interesting movie. Kind of better than I remembered it being. A very cynical movie, but pretty good. Not really the like raw, raw patriotism that the cover with the American flag would suggest. But anyways, that's what I'm going to talk about. My one more thing is another 1994 movie that I watched for the first time. Neither of us had seen it called Heavenly Creatures, which is an awesome movie that I want to just like wholeheartedly recommend everyone watch. So this is an early Peter Jackson movie.

It was made in New Zealand. and it's an adaptation of a true story from the 1950s of two young girls who became infatuated with and fell in love with one another in a way that made their families very unhappy and made them both increasingly unstable, both through like the ways that their parents tried to keep them apart and also through what seems to be maybe some sort of like real delusional mental illness, maybe even like psychotic tendencies from one of them. They were like pretty troubled young women. They had this extremely intense friendship that kind of grew over the course of maybe a year or so in the early 1950s and eventually killed one of the girl's mothers. And then were immediately caught for it and sent to prison separately and like separated for the rest of their lives. A condition of their release from prison was you can never see one another again. So this is based on a true story. And the journals of one of the girls were found by the police and like exist.

they're like out there. So her journals are kind of the basis for this movie. And that sounds like an interesting enough movie. The thing that makes this movie great, at least to me, is that Peter Jackson directed it. He made it with the entire team, his DP, his editor, his life and screenwriting partner, Fran Walsh, the Weta Workshop that he then would use only a few years later to make the Lord of the Rings. So it has this like absolutely wildly engaging camera that is like flying. around all over the place. He's such an exciting, and I at least think very entertaining filmmaker. His director of photography is like fantastic. Everything looks so cool. So it's like a

very fun movie to watch. It is just movie people having fun making movies. This is the first movie he made after Dead Alive, which is his super gore zombie movie. Have I thought of you seen Dead Alive? Have you seen that movie? No. I've heard of this movie too. Both are things I'd like to see them. I think you would like both of them. Dead Alive I saw a long time ago. It's one of It's like a classic in the super gore horror kind of subgenre. And it's early Peter Jackson, similar to how Sam Ramey's early, like Evil Dead movies. It's the same thing where it's like a really talented filmmaker, having a great time making a zombie movie that actually when you watch it, you're like,

holy crap, this is like the most talent and like creativity I've ever seen in a horror movie. It really feels that way. This feels very similar. The other cool thing about this movie is that its debut performances, the two leads, are Kate Winslet and Melanie Linsky. Whoa. Who are the two leads. Melanie Linsky, of course,

who we know from Yellow Jackets and Kate Winslet, we know from everything. Melanie Linsky was, I think, 17 when she made this movie. Both of them were making their debut, and both are amazing. Melanie Linsky is, like, absolutely incredible in this movie. Like, she's so, so good. And so these two central performances are great.

They're so good together. And just everything about the movie, we were sitting there watching it, my friend Sam and me, And I'm just like, I have not been bored for a single second of this movie. We're like an hour into it and just loving it because it just kept going in these wild, weird directions. Anyways, Heavenly Creatures, it's, I think, currently not streaming. So it's a little hard to find.

But this is like a long-term recommendation, just something to put on your lists out there if you like movies. It'll be on To Be's some day with ads or something. We went to the movie store and just rented it from the rental place that is still in business near me. Movie Madness. I was just going to ask you have a. movie store near you? That's wild. Portland's movie madness is an institution.

They're really awesome. We just read it there and watched it on Blu-ray. And man, just what a hell of a movie. I just really, if any of that sounds cool, I recommend it so much. So that's Heavenly Creatures, 1994, early Peter Jackson movie. Just totally kicks ass. Great movie. All right.

So last but not least, Maddie, tell us about your one more thing. All right. So mine is a video game called Tales of Kanzara Zau. I guess look in the show. It's if you want to know how to spell this, because... You know, Tales of Cancera's out. This game has a really cool story, but that's weird to say about a Metroidvania, which is what it has marketed itself as, and perhaps to its detriment, because I think the Metroidvania part

of the game is fine. And mostly playing this game, I'm like, it's really hard to make a Metroidvania. You know what I mean? Like, it's really hard to do. That's what I've gathered. And this game is pretty linear so far. I'm about five hours in. by the time this episode comes out, this game will be out, and maybe we'll have beaten it,

and maybe I'll feel differently about it. I don't know. But five hours in, I'm really into the story. And I think the game plays okay. It's fine enough that I'll play enough, play through and see what happens. And it has a pretty cool backstory in terms of who made it. So it's made by Abu Bakar Salim, his studio that he founded. And I say his name because he's an actor, originally. He played Bayek in Assassin's Creed Origins and really likes video games and just wanted to make a video game, which is a highly adorable backstory. He had a great speech at the game awards in December. Yeah, so people might remember him from that. And the other reason why he made this game is because his dad died and he really liked the idea of like negotiating grief through kind of revisiting old places

that you've seen before, and a metricvania is sort of about that. And so that's also what this lead character, Zau, who's a shaman in this sort of like Afro-Futurist world is going through. He's trying to bring back his father from the dead. I'm remembering this game now. This was at an EA showcase. I'm looking at it. And I totally remember this now.

I just didn't remember the name. It's very cool looking and sounding. The music is really cool. It has a lot of like Bantu mythological figures in it. I love a game where I can learn a lot about something. And I like that. Like Prince of Persia. Yeah, like Prince of Persia.

But it also is like clearly a game made by a small team. So it's rough around the edges. Like I've certainly run into some things. I mean, I'm playing a pre-release code, I should say. So some of these edges might have been sanded off. But I've run into a couple points where I'm like, I really can't tell where to go. And I'm just like wandering around a lot. And then I'm like, okay, got it, figured it out.

That sort of thing. But also, it's, I just, I'm really digging the writing and the story. Everything's fully voice acted, just like Prince of Persia was. I'm not sure how this game's going to do. I think it's a tough sell to have a lot of characters talking in a Metroidvania. And so some people might not like that in and of itself to just be like, you need to kind of keep track of who these characters are. A lot of them have names that aren't in American English.

and like that that can be a stumbling block for some people, even if it isn't for me. And I understand that that for, like, especially if you're like, I just want a cool metrovina where I'm just going to collect a bunch of shit. That's really not the point of the game. It's very much a game about grief and this character's story that they're going through. So kind of a tough sell. But I think it's interesting. And I also think it's cool to make a game about that topic, especially a game about

revisiting old areas. So I'm going to keep playing it. And something else I thought that was interesting about it is that they give you, um, the dash and the double jump just right off the bat and you have them the whole time. Oh, salt. I know, right? I was like, are they going to take this away? Like, I was really scared.

I was like, I can do this. I can double jump and dash immediately. I'm loving it. Those two mechanics feel really good. I really like how the double jump and dash feel to use. But they don't take them away. And I love that. I love that for me.

So that's like a pretty specific artistic choice that the game makes is being like, we're going to give you some other kinds of ability. And so enjoy that. So it's called, just look at it in the show notes, but it's called Tales of Kinsera Zau. And it kind of is a Metroidvania. Tales of Kinsera colon Z-A-U. Colin Zau.

Yeah, I feel like they should have gone with one or the other. Like, just call it Zau. That's the main character's name. Tales of Zah. Kinsara is the name of the fictional place that he's exploring. I don't know. They could have shortened it. That name is going to hurt them.

When they were going to make an episode about names where we just like workshop names. We might have to do that. We have a lot of name takes. We really, I think that game developers should run their names by us and we should share a consultancy where we like approve or deny games. Let's pivot to that. We're just like, is it hard to say? Is it easy to remember? How do you spell it?

Game names. What should be called? The name game. Yeah. Yeah. The name game. That's the name of our consultancy. Yeah.

A lot of like former journalists go on to do like mock reviews and stuff. I have no interest. that. What I want to do, I want to review. I don't have time for all that. I'm not going to play your game. I just read me the name and I'll tell you a better one. Or like tell me a little bit about the plot and then I'll tell you what the right name is. Then you can make the checkout to cash that's $10,000 for game suggested.

This sounds like a winning business strategy. It's perfect. It's perfect. We did it. We did it. All right. Well, that is one more episode of Triple Click in the bag. Great name.

Thank you so much all of you for listening. I thought of that. Yeah, we really did that. We came up with that. I would trust them to think of other names for me. I think so. Came up with a name like Triple Click. That's true. Yeah, whoever came up with that. All right. This was a lot of fun. I will see the two of you next week. See the next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethical. You can find a link to our ethical. policy in the show notes. Triple click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun podcast network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpod, send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.