Triple Click - Mewgenics Is Out, And It Only Took 14 Years (with Edmund McMillen)

Episode Date: February 12, 2026

Jason, Kirk, and Maddy bring on veteran game designer Edmund McMillen (Binding of Isaac, Super Meat Boy) to talk about his latest game, Mewgenics, which was first announced in 2012 (!) and is out this week. They talk about the long development cycle, why McMillen parted ways with his Team Meat partner Tommy Refenes, breeding cats, and much much more.One More Thing:Kirk: CairnMaddy: Code 3 (2025)Jason: The Chair Company (HBO) 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

You ever think about how dogs and cats are both predators? It's weird to think of my dog as a predator, since the main things she hunts are treats and scritches. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we're talking with Edmund McMillan about the wacky, battle-tested cats of his new game eugenics, a long-end development feline, tactical road like, that finally comes out this week. Let's get into it. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers.

And I'm Jason Trier. Hello. Hello. It's us again. It's good to be back. Yeah, it is good to be back. It's always good to be back. It's good to be back on Triple Click making our favorite gaming podcast.

My favorite gaming podcast to listen to, actually. I listen every week. And I like to listen to Triple Click. It's pretty good. It's fun to listen to. It is. It's fun to listen to. It's fun to listen to your own voice.

It's good to enjoy the things that you make as this episode will dive into. That is true. That is going to come up. That is going to be a running theme of this episode. And we feel really grateful to get to make this podcast that we enjoy making. And the reason for that is that you all support our show. If you would like to support Triple Click, you can become a maximum fun member. That's the way to do it.

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That's typically where we put those. Also, just all kinds of other random stuff. It's a really fun grab bag of triple click material. Maximumfund.org slash join, become a member. Support our show. All right, this is a very exciting episode. We have a very exciting guest. Jason, how about you tell our listeners who we're going to have a

on the show. Yeah, today we're going to be talking to Edmund McMillan, who is a long-time indie game designer. He was profiled in Indy Game The Movie, which is a movie we talked about as a bonus episode just a few months ago. Yeah, speaking of bonus episodes. Edmund McMillan became kind of prominent with Super Meatboy,

his 2010 platformer, but really, his claim to fame is the binding of Isaac, which came out in 2011 and became a humongous success story, wound up selling more than 5 million copies. In the years that followed, he kept updating it doing DLCs and patches, and the game got humongous over time.

Super cool, kind of rogue-like, I wouldn't say pioneer, but certainly helped popularize roguelike and set the stage for a lot of roguelikes that have come in the 2010s and 2020s. And Edmund has a new game that is just out called Mugenics. I am obsessed with this game. I have played a lot, many, many hours, 50, 56, 57 hours of meogenic. And just to kind of give you guys a description, give everybody a description. You two have played a little bit also, but give listeners a description. It is essentially part roguelike and part simulation game.

So for part of the game, you are in this house. And you can, and it is a house that cats live in. And in this house, every time you go to sleep, there is a chance. The house the cats built. The house the cats built. It's kind of like you were going to say. This is the house the cats built. The cats don't build like the house.

Which is not entirely untrue. The cats scratch and destroy things. No. Every time you go to sleep, there's a chance that two of the cats will copulate and make a kitten. And that kitten will take on some of the stats and potentially skills from its parents. and there are all sorts of kind of crazy, crazy things that can happen with the system that I won't get into, but that's kind of part of the game.

And then what you do is you take some of these cats, you can pick up to four cats and take them out on an adventure, and you take them through various roguelike stages. The first act takes you through the alley, and then from there you can go into areas like the sewers or the cemetery, the bone yard it's called, and so on and so forth, and you go on to like more than a dozen of these different areas on rogue like adventures.

And as you go through the roguelike, you fight battles with these cats, which are grid-based, turn-based strategy battles. And so each cat has a turn and you move them around and you try to take out the enemies before they take you out. And what's really special about this game is the way that each of these cats gets abilities that can be combined and synergized and used to break the game in all sorts of fun and clever and creative ways. you can assign different classes to your cats. There are more than a dozen of these, and they get pretty elaborate and fun. You can use them to do all sorts of cool things from, I don't know, shooting fire to freezing enemies, using electricity on water to take out all the enemies in the water, to summoning rocks and then eating the rocks and then summoning more rocks that will turn into allies

and sending them out after opponents. But, uh-oh, this person eats rocks. What is he going to do with that? and so on and so forth. The possibilities are endless. And it's really fun to breed the cats and figure out, like, get them really powerful with all sorts of inherited abilities, then take them out on adventures, and then you bring them home, and you breed them some more. So it's a very satisfying loop that I think people are going to really enjoy. So we're going to bring Emin on, and we're going to ask him about the development of this game, which was quite a saga and much more.

So without further ado, let's bring in Edmund. Hello, Edmund. Thank you so much for coming and welcome to Triple Click. Thank you for having me. Hello. Hello. Yeah, man, I am very excited to talk about me, Genics, because it is taken over my life over the last few weeks. It's all he talks about. Yeah, imagine if it was six years.

You could probably relate to this experience. How much of that six years was you just playing the game instead of working on it? It still work when I'm playing it. I mean, it's work when Jason's playing it too, right? Yeah, it's my job, right? Yeah, technically it is. I've done a run every day for the past two years. Okay, okay.

I want to start from the beginning, and I want to get to the development of this game because we're actually not going to talk too much of the gameplay because the three of us are going to get into it more next week without you when Kirkomadee have had more of a chance to play it. And when we can really say what we think. Yeah, of course. Yeah, without you.

you're watching. But I want to talk about the development of this game because this game was announced in 2012, 14 years ago. Yeah. Yes, it was. Was there a question? And since then, it was, it was canceled. It pared in ways.

Can you tell me a little bit about this? So let's go back in time. It is 2011. You've just released Binding of Isaac. You thought Mugenics was going to be your next project at that point? What was your state of mind then? Definitely. I mean, I was fully in belief that it was going to be the next thing,

the big project that I was going to be working on. And it kind of was for a little while. Yeah, I knew I wanted to make a rogue like, a big rogue like with Tommy. And Binding of Isaac was a practice. It was like, I'm going to dip my toes in the water here. I'm going to learn some stuff. I've never done this before. We're going to figure out what works and what doesn't.

So I can apply it to this other game. And the game that we started originally was called, a thousand cats, I think it was called, and eventually became eugenics, especially when all the breeding stuff was added to the game and became the focus of it. And I absolutely loved it. And it wasn't the game it was now.

So it's not comparable. It's the core of the game has not changed. The core of the game is you breed cats in a house, in a hoarder cat house, and you use these cats, and they have genetic. and they pass on their genetics and how they look and everything else. And you use these cats as avatars in another game or other mini-games.

That was always the design of the game. And it took place in this world. That was binding of Isaac adjacent where there's all these characters in this town that were off-putting in strange and kind of just generally bad. And I loved everything about it. The vibe was really cool. A lot of the music, I think, like 14 or 15 tracks were made then. You hear it on the radio now.

most of those became radio tracks. And, man, yeah, I was just head over heels in love with the project, but I was the only one that was. And it's kind of hard to finish a game when you're the only person who was enjoying it. And I think, I mean, Tommy got really cold feet because, I mean, as you would assume, this game is a weird game, much like Binding of Isaac. It could be controversial and strange and off-putting and weird. and it's not a guaranteed success.

And I think that's kind of what Tommy was looking for. And he felt like a guaranteed success would be another meat boy game. And he pitched the idea of an auto-running phone game. And I thought that that would be fine. And yeah, and then it got to, I think he just couldn't work on eugenics anymore. I think he showed it at Pax. And he just says he wasn't feeling it. And he said, asked if we could just kind of put it on Pollyanna.

and then focus on Meat Boy so we can feel good about you know something that's more fanfare I guess So essentially you canceled it You guys outwardly canceled it in 2016 I didn't cancel it I thought we were just pausing it

But then I heard In an email from My Valve contact Because Tommy lives up there And I guess he had lunch with him or whatever And he was like oh yeah sorry about Sorry to hear about the Mugenics cancellation but I'm looking forward to the Meat Boy stuff

and I'm like did you you know it's canceled? You didn't know it's canceled oh man but can you really cancel an idea once you know yeah you can't

I mean not my brain at least it was haunting and for years I was trying to re rewrap this thing to make Tommy like it and like kind of pitching it

like oh maybe it's like a Spalunky it's got platforming elements I don't know it wasn't it wasn't happening and um when when i left the company um i took the IP with me and at that point i had bit off way more than i could chew i had started a bunch of stupid projects that took forever to to come out so for people who aren't familiar this is you're referring to to tommy refennaz who was the co-creator of super meat boy also uh prominently featured in indie game the movie and so you left the company why did you leave the company was it because of

this were there other reasons as well there's an infinite number of reasons it was it wasn't working i mean and i think it was very apparent that it wasn't working i think we just had a lot of different opinions on what we were doing and motivations i think we just clearly had different motivations i think we we started out and when we met we jived very very well and he was my best friend for forever and i think I don't know, just time, time changes people, success changes people, you know, everybody has different things that they want. People start having families and getting married and, you know, things carry you in different directions. And it happened. I mean, it's happened in the past. I've, I've had situations where I was sure I was going to be working with these people for forever

and then it just hit a wall. And I was the only one that wanted to continue to move forward. And I, I'm like a shark. I need to keep swimming forward or I die. And that it's not an uncommon thing where I will get to a point where I'm like, yeah, isn't this fun? Let's go, go, go. And then everybody else is dying. And I just got to keep going.

And I have a sense of guilt about that too. But the thing is, is, you know, when I'm not happy, when I'm not being creative, I'm not happy. And when I'm not happy, I'm a terrible husband and a terrible father and a terrible person. And I'm trying to avoid that. That is a good mission statement. So let's back up a little bit before we get more into Vugenics, because something else that happened that I think surprised many people

was that Binding of Isaac became a smash hit. It's funny, you watch Indy the game in the movie and it's like, Super Meat Boy was a huge success selling 100,000 copies. And then Binding of Isaac, which you guys think is going to be this weird experimental thing that is just kind of, as you mentioned, a prototype for what you would do in the future, that goes on to sell millions of copies. What was that like for you? How did that impact your life?

not much personally, but in my relationships, it obviously caused some issues. Yeah, it could have been a point of contention definitely between me and Tommy. I heard a lot about that. I tried to get him into it. Like, I tried to get him on board, but he just didn't want to.

I think, again, it was like a, I don't know if I want to be associated with that sort of stuff. And I'm not going to force people. And so, yeah, but otherwise it was just normal. Like my life, what? Like I have money for pinball machines now. I don't know. I'm not a big spender.

I'm not like a flashy person. And I'm not, you know, I'm comfortable enough to be able to hire a small team now, which is really neat. But nothing really changed in my life. It was kind of just like, well,

okay, let's move on to the next thing. And I was trying a bunch of different things. But I kept getting pulled back to Binding of Isaac, mostly because my wife was playing it. She played it so much. And she was kind of like, well,

I've finished it. Am I right that the development on Isaac was really short? Yeah, it's three months. Three months. It's a pretty huge difference, right? It's wild. It was a small game. It was like a simple little thing.

And then you kept tempting it because your wife was playing. Yeah. Most definitely. Like she, thousands of hours, an obscene amount. Before we had kids, that's all she would do is play Isaac. So how was that just creatively where you put the game out and then, like, it's not a service game exactly, right? people aren't paying a subscription, but it was a game that I watched change so significantly over a really long period of time to where it's, it's not unrecognizable, but it's very different now compared to

what it was, you know, after those three months. What was that creative process like, this live game that you're changing? It was neat. It was neat because I got, I felt like I got to have this kind of interactive storytelling in a very abstract way with the audience, where I got to see people's interpretations of the game and be able to understand what they assumed so I could subvert expectations. You know, I knew what they wanted. I could give them a little bit, but then I could also give them what I wanted. I don't know. It was this cool marriage of ideas that slowly became more about the audience than it was about me, which was somewhat hard in the beginning, but eventually when I was able to let go of it, I mean, it's just kind of like

passing of the guard. Like, the last thing that I did was hand this off, basically. Like to the biggest fan in the world who made a DLs, the final DLC with me. Who is that for listeners? Who don't know who that is? That's Vin. Nice. He's an amazing creative person. He started a, it was almost a rival mod called Antibirth.

And I saw it and I instantly knew. It's one of those things where like I see people modding the game all the time, but there's, there are certain rules that are very hard to define in my world. And he was abiding by the rules in ways that I would. And they're impossible for me to explain the rules. And I was just so impressed. I was so impressed by everything. And just the work ethic of him working on this project for like six or seven years.

That's interesting that you describe this kind of, not give and take, but like an interactive relationship with the audience. As this game kind of exists and they're finding things and you're putting out updates, where with meugenics, you're kind of, you're kind of, you were in. a, you know, six-year pod. I mean, I know you have testers and stuff, but it's a really different experience. Are you trying to, like, create that process, or does you want to do something different after doing something like that on Isaac? No, I mean, because, I mean, initially, Isaac was similar where it's like, I've got this thing. It's very much how I want it, and we're going to put it out there. And I, in all honesty, I can see myself working on Mugenics for five or six more years. Easy. It's very fun. Yeah, are you hoping to have the audience participate in

eugenics as well because it are it does feel that way already from playing i want to know i like i machine gun so many things that are everywhere they're in the subtlety the things that people say they're in the background they're in the randomized graffiti on the wall um and i'm i'm looking to see what hits and what misses and where i can move with this it's it's very it feels very much like um being a dungeon master in D&D or whatever where I'm really listening to the audience so I know what they expect, what they want, what they think, and make, and doing some sort of marriage of ideas, um, where it's like, okay, I accept that you like this character and everybody likes this character. So I should probably lean in this to this story a little bit so I can give a little fanfare here and there. And I did that

with Isaac. It was, there was a lot of, um, like everyone assuming that mom is this horrible person. and I felt like I did mom such a disservice in the beginning. But I didn't think the game was going to be anything. You know, it was like this nothing thing. So in DLCs, I wanted to paint this pictures of like who, what made mom this way? Like, she's not, she's not the villain. You know, the world is the villain. They're all victims here.

And I wanted to be able to paint that picture. And I wouldn't have done that without people saying, and saying things like, oh, mom's terrible and, you know, she's the bad guy and she's evil and she's this and she's that. And it's like, well, are you seeing that I'm, when you're seeing cutscenes that are drawn from Isaac's drawings, you're not necessarily supposed to assume that that's real. You know what I mean? Like, and that's not coming through. So I need to really push that a little bit more where I show reality and perspective from a child.

And, yeah, I think I, I think I, the book has been is closed on Isaac and I think I'm very happy with the whole picture now. Nice. I can think of a couple of characters in Mugenics who will become fan favorites, Tink

specifically, but we'll get into that. Tink is maybe my favorite. Tink is good. It's hard to say. So, okay, so going back to this timeline in Mugentics, so you quit team meet, you leave the company, you say you go on to do your own stuff, you wind up releasing the legend

of Bumbo, still working on Isaac. At one point, at what point did you really kick back into gear on Mugenics, pick it back up and say, okay, we're going to go into active development on this thing. We started at like right when COVID hit. And by we, I mean Tyler, because I was still working on other things. But Tyler had to make the whole engine. So everything in that in the game is like all running off of his engine and exporters and all the stuff that he's made himself. And so he had to get all that rigged up. And, it was the same engine that we used for the end as Nye, which was, it's a good game that I didn't have the, I didn't want to cry in interviews, so I didn't do interviews. Yeah, I just didn't feel good about talking about that game. But it was a significant game and I'm very proud of it. And the remnants of the engine of that became the Mugenics engine, but we didn't even know what genre it was. So we tried a few. I mean, we tried like, um,

Castle Crashers style brawler with cats We tried a pickman-like Where you would choose an alpha And have a bunch of little kittens that would follow And you'd use those Was there a genre when you were first working on it? Yeah, the genre It was mini-games

So the main one was the Pokemon turn-based strategy So it was really bare bones turn-based strategy So you would breed cats And then take them out into the world And then do this kind of turn-based stroke-like But there were other mini games too There was like a cat race Where you would just

You're racing your kids cat. And then there was Teen Cat a beauty pageant that you'd participate in. You know, your cat would just be ranked on charisma and that sort of stuff. It was pretty, it was all really, really basic stuff. But, uh, yeah. And we kept kind of like coming back to this turn-based strategy thing and then moving away from it because it's like the hardest thing to do. Um, and then in the end, we're just like, oh, whatever. It's a challenge. What else are we going to do with our lives? Yeah, I mean, it fits perfectly because this is very much a game about finding, like, playing around with systems, finding combos, finding ways to break everything. Yeah.

And strategy, grid-based strategy, returns feels like the kind of the perfect way to explore that because you can sit back and think between each action in a way that I think breaking systems. I mean, it can be fun in other games too, but it's not quite as, I think, satisfied. when you don't have that kind of extra 30 seconds to be like, okay, this is what I'm going to do. This is not going to break the game this time. Or even hours. Like, I'll sometimes go to sleep and be like, well, I have that, I have that item that I just got at the end of a run.

Is that going to work if I do, like, how can I break that? Like, how can I make that work, which is neat? Yeah, I love the game. I think it's cool. You can always tell. When a game is great, oftentimes you can, you can tell. tell this sort of thing, especially a systems-based game like this. So, yeah, so you guys are prototyping. You come up with this term-based strategy. You land on that finally. What is the next

five years look like? Because I know you guys had thought you would be out much sooner than it actually was. Yeah. I think for Tyler, it was just a bunch of busy work, a tremendous amount of busy work, getting all the systems in place and making sure that they were all there as early as possible so we can make it work and make sure that everything talk to everything else. There were a lot of systems that were just hypothetical. Like, this works in my brain. It should work in the game, kind of trusting it, and then tweaking and tuning as we go. On my end, it was me accepting defeat and realizing that I have two children and a wife,

and I cannot kill myself working all day long. I have to be somewhat of a father and a husband. And so I'm hired, I started hiring people. And I started hiring fans. I like people that did fan art that drew like similar to me. And most of them were inspired, like grew up drawing like me. So they really knew it. They really knew my style, the things, you know, the no-nows and the yes-yesses.

And yeah, I started working with a bunch of different people that were handling backgrounds and the animations. There's so many animations in this game, like thousands and thousands and thousands. thousands of animations in this game. And over the course of six years, I think we went through like six, six or seven animators, but we've had three for quite a while that have always been there in one lead, Marty. Marty has like done the lion's share of the craziest animations, all the boss animations and cutscenes, a lot of the cutscenes, the craziest stuff. It's very fun to hear you talk about hiring fans who were inspired by this game because, I don't know if you remember this, but in any game the movie, which I guess this was 2010,

this is film, maybe 2009. You talk about your own inspirations and how much you want to inspire people with your art and with your work one day. You show some drawings and you show you talk about like playing Nintendo games and being inspired. And now... So really this was a hiring strategy. It was all my business plans.

Years later. Yeah. I mean, this is, you pulled it off. Yeah, I guess. I mean, I guess it was just natural. I've never, I don't even know what some of these people look like. like I don't know their birth gender. I don't know.

I know nothing. Like I have an idea of who they are and I'm, and I'm careful with what I call them. But I don't know what's going on here. And I don't know if they've ever been to college. And I don't care. Like, you know what I mean? It's like they're all really cool people who are really good at what they do.

And I don't know anything else about them other than that. And they're great to work with. And, and I mean, I just, I assume that since their fans, We're on the same page for the most part. When you say they know the yes, yeses and the no-nows,

are you making a joke that they know that none of the characters have noses? Or you're just saying that they know the no-nose. I'm curious what the no-nows are, whether or not you were making a pun there. Like what are the actual kind of, you know, just some of the things that they understand coming in. It's hard to fucking say. It's so hard to say. Like it's, there are just, I'll say this. like a lot of like when modding started with binding of Isaac the first thing people did was they put

like Jesus in the game or guns in the game or stuff like that and those would be no-noes and can I explain why those are no-noes I don't know I don't know it doesn't feel right and um I don't know they just they really get it it's I it's so cool to be able to be to just give somebody this kind of loose suggestion of what I like what I need and then just say you do you I know what you do and I like it. That's why you're here. And you do your thing. You make it special to you because I want you to have fun because it's going to come through. I'm not going to be this anal controlling person, every little detail or whatever else.

It's just like make it look like this. However you want to make it look like this. And you give it back to me and then I'll notice something about it that I think is really cool. And then I'll pull that into the game. Like it'll just, it's just a really fun collective of, and they don't even know that. I would imagine it's an advantage to having some. such a, you know, established body of work that so many of the people coming to you are very familiar with, where, you know, if you were just putting together a team and no one knew who you

were or what you liked, you'd have to be explaining this to them. You'd have to articulate it. But this way, you don't actually have to. You can just say, well, you played 300 hours of binding of Isaac. You either get it or you don't, and then they can kind of just demonstrate that to you. Yeah, and that's very true. And I've heard it many times. I'm not, I'm not good at explaining. I'm just bad at it. I don't know. Like in a way you're good at explaining it because you made all these games and then that explains it better than maybe words could. Yeah, those are the texts. Yes, exactly.

It's like I don't have to do it because they know. Yeah, I'm not like a great teacher when it comes to that sort of stuff. And like even like, like even Tyler, I think will say like Tyler trusts me and doesn't need to understand some of the stuff. But he knows that the way I work is very hard. to put into words and explain because I'm working very abstractly when it comes to the themes and story and characters and XYZ. All he cares about is the structure and that's very specific and I can be very specific about that and everything else. I can just float around and grab what works and make it happen and everybody can just trust that I will come through

the other side and it'll all make sense. Based on how you're describing this, it sounds like all of you are remote and long-distance workers, which in watching Indygame the movie, you and Tommy were that way, like way before COVID, way before everybody was having those conversations about how to work in that way. And I'm curious how you feel about that, especially given you're saying, oh, I have trouble explaining things to people. Do you feel like it would be easier if they were in person or that doesn't really matter to you? Maybe never did. It would just be awkward, right? Yeah, it's kind of weird to think. I think I've only met Matthias and Tyler out of all the people in person. Am I wrong in thinking that? I'm pretty sure that's it. Everybody involved are, you know, they're internet kids.

Like, this is just as real on the internet as is in real life. And I think a lot of people are just completely fine with that. Like, I think one of the more prominent people, Takara, involved in the project throughout. She's very online. She does a lot of VR, social VR stuff. She'll watch movies with her friends in VR. So I think, you know, I lucked out.

It's just a bunch of people who don't require that sort of thing. I'll do calls sometimes with people, rarely sync up and talk in person, but everything else is just remote text. And it's worked very well, remarkably well. It's weird to think, because I mean, you're making me think about it now and it's like, I don't even know what Joey sounds like. I've worked with him for six years. I have no idea. Like, he's done all the sounds in the game himself. Well, then you do know what he sounds like. He's right there in the game. I know what his cat. I know his cat, meow.

I know his cat voice. Maybe that's just how he talks. Yeah. Maybe he's a cat. I guess, I mean, I guess to me this stuff doesn't really matter. Can you, can you help us understand the workflow here? So you, so it sounds like Tyler is doing a lot of the programming work, a lot of the systems work. Are you kind of going back and forth? This is, of course, Tyler Glell, your partner on this. Are you going back and forth with him on, you're telling him, this is what we have in mind, this is what act one is going to look like? Let's make this.

Like, what is the exact? You're drawing stuff. He's programming. Like, what is the exact workflow? And then how does that kind of disperse to other employees? What exactly does it look like? It is so weird. It is, there's nothing.

Nothing. It looks like nothing. Like, it looks like we both are doing our own thing and somehow we know what we're doing. and we're both doing our thing. And we're just doing our stuff over here. And then we'll go, whoop, and then go to our stuff over here. The best structure that we have is a Google Doc,

which is mostly multiple spreadsheets of items and abilities. Everything else is just kind of like going by feel and knowing what needs to be. We paid a lot of games, man. I don't know. Like it just, we know it needs to get done. Tyler is incredibly structured, incredibly structured.

And he keeps me from floating away. And he keeps things in line. And he knows the dates we need to hit and everything else like that. And he'll remind me of X, Y, Z. And we've been able to just hit all those things. And with everybody else, it's just like, nobody's working. I mean, right now, maybe they're working full time. But nobody was ever really working full time.

It was just like, can you think you can get this done in like two weeks? And if you can get it done sooner, I'll toss more stuff at you. and it's it's my my side of things is waking up in the morning delegating checking in making sure I'm getting files here here and here going through my my list of of nonsense that I need to do taking notes making sure all that shit's done and then doing like like this sort of stuff like PR stuff making sure all that's done talking with Steam you know all the the business nonsense that goes into this as well and then it's just chaos

it's just chaos and it's working so how did you know how big to make the game I think something that I found we did it we had a whoopsie we did a whoopsy yeah I remember more about that because I think I found I'm something like 57 hours in which is going to sound intimidating

to a lot of listeners out there and I feel like I'm still discovering all sorts of new stuff that it's kind of breaking my brain a little bit with how much there is did you just start Act three. I just unlocked the third area in Act three. Yes, that's about right.

And so I guess how do you know when you're adding so much stuff to this game? Tell me a little bit about the whoopsie. And how do you actually know when it's done when it's ready to go out the door? Yeah, the whoopsie was. And we had, I mean, I guess I'm ambitious when it comes to these things. And I was like, well, I want to, it got to the point where I felt like this game was better than the binding of Isaac. And I wanted to be able to do it enough of a service for, At least someone, one person other than me to agree.

And I had a plan on paper and I wanted these acts to happen. They all seemed doable. It all seemed very feasible. And we just kind of went for it. And then I think when we had finished the game, you know, had a full play-through, which is probably about three or four months ago, we're like, shit, we could have just done two. Like, we could have just done two acts.

have the third one be DLC. So really the game is kind of like a full game and then a DLC. But that's fine. I mean, people, it sucks with me. I'm like painted myself into a corner with Isaac because they see Isaac as this thing

and they don't see it as this thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, thing, that stacks up into this bigger thing. And they expect Isaac this in terms of features. And I didn't think that that was remotely possible in mid-development. but then by mid-development when we had 1,200 different abilities in the game and I'm working on items and I'm like, I want at least 300 items in this game.

And then I got to 500 items in this game. And I'm like, well, Isaac has 750 items so I can might as well do it. And at that point, I'm like, I'll program it. I don't know what I'm doing. Because Tyler's like, if you really want to have over 750 items, you're going to need to learn a program. You're going to need to do this because I'm not doing this. I have other things I need to do. And I'm like, I'll do it.

So I'm just like copying, pasting shit from the existing stuff and hodgepodging it together and making it work. And then I hired VIN to come help me with the harder stuff. It seems like a bug tester's nightmare. Yeah. Tyler doesn't like it. He's just a rogue programmer. Oh, my God. I'm imagining this happening on like a AAA project.

But he trusted me. He trusted me. And it worked out. I mean, he... The director has gotten into the engine, guys. Watch out. I'm sure it was very hard and scary for him. And I've heard him many times be like, oh, I bet I know who did this item.

I'm like, well, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just copy and pasting. Am I remembering correctly that you finished a complete play-through in 270 hours? Is that the number? 240. I mean, my safe file is well over that at this point post-game. Jason, are you managing your expectations? Yeah, I mean, something that.

it's worth noting is that like a lot of the play-through is you, the game gives you multiple reasons to revisit locations. There are a lot of side quests, there are a lot of just kind of activities that you're given or incentives you're given to do the same areas over and over again. I'm guessing that there's a way to beat the game in significantly less than 240 hours. It's just if you want to see everything and keep experimenting. And it's also worth noting, and I want to talk to you a little bit about this, Edmund, is that the joy of this game comes from going out with this team of four cats and picking abilities for them and figuring out over the course of that run how those abilities can synergize, how you can

break everything, how you can destroy enemies as quickly as possible by making them explode, like, summoning enemies from their corpses and then getting an ability that, or sorry, summoning spawned allies from their corpses and then getting an ability that damages enemies when they kill those spawned allies, so then you can just kind of send them as cannon fodder and make all your enemies blow up. There are all sorts of insane combos you can play around with. I guess something that I question for you is, at what point did you realize this was such a heavily systems-driven synergy-based game? Was that the plan from the get-go, or did that just come about as you kept adding new skills and items to the game? It was the plan from the get-go because what we were kind of attempting was a Magic the Gathering Foundation.

Like the core of the game is Magic the Gathering. It's a very Richard Garfield design. That explains a lot. As many systems as you can possibly fit into this world, right? And then you just throw pieces of the systems. Like you, if you've got 1,200 abilities and then these items and then all these mutations and then those is furniture, as long as there are this cohesive thing and you've got this rule system, like you pointed out, it's like the other day I was doing a stream with somebody and they were like, oh, there's a dead body over there and he hits the dead body and some stuff. falls out and he's like oh so a dead body's just just there so you can break them um and then

stuff spawns and i'm like everything you're seeing in the map will be used in about five different ways throughout the game and we use every single resource you can imagine um in this game in some way and most of the time we don't explicitly say that to you we just let you figure that out um and that's what Magic does. I mean, it's the very similar design where it's like this one element like a land or whatever else will serve a thousand purposes. And when you make a game or a foundation like that, you are allowing people to, it's not full sandbox, but more playground. You've got all these structures and stuff that they've built. And you're allowing somebody to be like, here, here, I'm going to give you this really weird design. and it's like, oh, this actually fits into this part of the playground. Wait, no, it fits over here too.

And I can swing from here. You know, it creates this like living, breathing world where you feel smart and clever because you are being smart and clever because I didn't come up with those ideas because I don't even know they exist. It's just in the game. Like, it's vast enough that I don't know if everything's going to work as you would assume, but most of the time it kind of does. But yeah.

I really like sandbox versus playground. Like a playground has more structure. It's a little bit more mechanical. And the sandbox is just open. I'm going to hang on to that. That's pretty good. I made that up. Yeah, that's good.

I'll be sure to credit you any time I mentioned. We'll put. Yeah, it's really exciting. Well, like I said, we'll get into this game more in-depth on the show next week when we can really talk about it in full. But I am having such a good time with it. So, yeah, I can see what. you've been enjoying playing it for all of these years.

Do you have a favorite kind of combination or synergy or cat lineup that you particularly enjoy playing around with? I'm a fan of nude runs. So like no items. Like sometimes I'll just force myself to take abilities early that I wouldn't normally or don't usually take just so I could see. Me and Tyler will go back and forth on abilities and argue. about power level and we both have very different perspectives on everything and I'll be like I don't

think this is any good like this doesn't seem worth this manna and he's like well I'll give you 17 different abilities that it combos with that would make it insane and I'm like okay is that that is strong I guess you're right so there's there's just a lot of going back and forth on that and we whittled down and we try to we try to power power balance as early as possible so we don't have to do a ton of that after launch. But, uh, I mean, that is the part that seems insane to me, just the balance of it all, because there's just so much. And like, I mean, even knowing what the right meta cost for an ability should be, how much damage it should be, how difficult a fight should be when you can

take it on in so many different possible ways. Like, how do you even know what the right difficulty level for a boss is when you could come in with a gang of cats that just like takes it out easily? And you could come in where it was no way. to possibly beat it. You have to allow for people to... That was a hard thing too. It's like how much control do we want over this? We don't want...

If you find a combination that takes three different things and you feel so big brain because you figured out how to break the game and go infinite with these three items, I think I'd be an asshole if I took that away from you. You know, I want you to be able to do that. And the way the game is structured, usually you can only do that once or twice.

And then you've got to move on to the next thing. And I think it's okay. I mean, I think that's why a lot of people play Isaac is to get busted and just kind of walk through the game, destroying everything. And we don't want to take that away from people, especially with this game, because they usually have to work for it. And we just have to let, sometimes it's okay. Sometimes it's okay to completely walk in and destroy a boss like it's nothing. But most of the time, you'll usually be in situations where it's a challenge and it's a nail-biting fight that you can just barely, barely finish or die. And you lose all the items.

You got to start over. Yeah, that's what I've really noticed about it. I'm not as far as Jason, but I find the game is still pretty fun and compelling even when I feel that the forces are stacked against me or even if I die and lose all my cats because I'm like, okay, well, what can I learn from that run? And I was kind of curious, like, how you thought about designing a game that's also fun to lose because when something's run-based, you obviously want the player to not be giving up or and really fully understanding, like, oh, you have a lot of chances.

And, like, how many cats should the player feel like they're getting, like, one cat a night, for example? How often do the cats copulate? Like, what kind of went into that process of, like, helping that early game not feel too hard? I think going in, and it's a misconception that we're still trying to kind of get over, most people will see the turn-based structure of this game and think, this is like into the breach, this is like whatever the last, you know, know, hardcore structured turn-based strategy game that they played was. And what I don't want is to people to think this is chess in it because it's not.

It's not chess. It's forgiving enough that lets you experiment and lose and be okay with it. I think that's what really makes it special too. And designing a game and trying to pitch a game that says like, listen, it's this really structured game you can play and it's really structured and you can go crazy with it. And if you're really smart, then you can probably just destroy it. But sometimes shit's going to happen. like and that's life and that's just the way it works and you need to some of the best aspects of this game and it's such a hard sell are recovering from something bad happening and making the best out of a really bad situation because then you're like I'm so smart like the game tried to fuck me over and no I took it back I took back control and I made it work it's like I saw my wife get um she's

playing a lot right now. And I saw her get blood frenzy. Now, blood frenzy is one of the most harsh disorders in the game that you can get. And what it does is somebody with blood frenzy, when they kill something, they will get an extra turn every single time they kill a unit. And during that extra turn, they will have madness, which means they cannot differentiate friend from foe. They will just go on a killing spree. And it is terrible. And usually you'll strategize and be like, okay, well, as long as I don't kill. That's the rule. Don't kill something. So I can go around and damage stuff and not kill it and let the other guys kill it and you can play that way too. But my wife threw the murderer to the back lines and then let let him just destroy it all and then just crossed your fingers at the end because

eventually he's coming. He's coming back. And you can strategize around that. I think she purposefully made him slower so he couldn't move as much, so he couldn't come back and kill all over cats. And there are literally hundreds of these different disorders that are just like that that have a big downside, but have a silver lining that if you don't give up and you try to make it work for you, you can just recover in a grand way that will make you feel great. Yeah, there are some incredible combinations with some of these, even the negative disorders. There's one, for example, that you can get that is, I believe, called Savant Syndrome, which ramps up, gets one of your characters intelligence to something like 18, 20,

which is pretty high. That kind of what's considered good is a 7 or an 8, so 18 or 20 is remarkable. But it lowers all their other stats, but then if you combine that, if you're lucky enough to combine that with a passive ability called, what is it, baseline, something baseline. Oh, yes, yes. that makes it so none of your stats can go below five, then that makes up for the downside of the Savant syndrome, and then you have this massive, beefy, super cat.

I think one of the interesting things about this game is actually learning to let go, because you'll go on this run, and you'll have four cats that you turn into this powerhouse team that wrecks every boss, and you're just doing awesome, and then you bring them back, and they're retired, and you can't take them out again, and all you can do with them is either breed,

and then there's one more mechanic. won't spoil that you can use them for later or you could donate them get rid of them. And I think learning to let go of your powerful teams is something that is an interesting aspect of this game. Typical of roglykes, I suppose, but there's something about this one where you really got to learn to let go. Yeah, a lot of people initially went and be like, I don't want my cat to die. I'm going to fall in love with this cat or these cats and I'm not going to want them to die.

And it's like, please make it so they don't die. And it's like, you have no idea how important that is. Like, it's so important that there's permanence here that you care because you'll start caring about these cats. I just had a cat start going on a murderous rampage in the house and killing a bunch of cats. And I'm going to take him and put him in another room. But it's like, oh, my God, you just killed like a significant person just because you're an aggressive cat and maybe the room was too crowded. And it happened. and I felt it.

And it's important. That's why those sort of things are important. It's also important just because once you kind of shed that and kind of get over that, you start to have a lot more fun with the game. And you start seeing it less of, these are my cats and I love them. And more of this is my bloodline. This is my history. This is the giant DNA strand that I've made.

And I don't know if you have it in the game, but Tink unlocks it. The family tree. Do you have a family tree? Yeah, the family tree like, really. really brings it all together because you'll be playing through probably I'm depending on where you where you go but at least for the first 15 20 hours of the game and you don't even know that there's a full family tree that's behind the scenes that you'll unlock and you can see all your past cats from the very beginning as long as you know you haven't had a full wipe or or whatever else uh

which I think is really neat you can see all the imbreeding along the way and sometimes sometimes you wind up slightly inbred sometimes you're very of bred. Yeah, a couple more questions and then we'll have to go. One is I want to talk about, actually, we'll save, we'll save DLC and future plans for last, but I actually want to ask about Super Meat Boy 3D because something that has happened recently is that that game was announced, a 3D version of Super Meat Boy. Seems like it's imminent. We haven't heard much from it in a little bit, but it's supposed to be out this year at some

point early part of 2026. How do you feel about a game that you had such an intimate creation in just kind of continuing in new forms. What's that like for you? It's odd. I played it. I played the demo. I've never played forever.

I don't think I ever will. It's just I can't. I don't think I can bring myself to do it. But I played 3D and there were some things that I was fairly impressed with. I was mostly impressed until I jumped. That makes sense. If you played it, I think you know what I'm talking about it. I am not, but jumping in 3D games can be.

Jumping in three. So that, I mean, the first thing I thought, I'm trying not to talk shit, man. I'm not disparaging anyone here. But yeah, no, I would say if somebody said, hey, and of course they have, you should make a 3D meatboy gamer, a 3D platformer. My first response was if I made Meatboy a 3D platformer, I don't think I could make that good. That's very hard. Very, very, very, very hard. and for such a very, very, very, very, very hard thing to accomplish,

I think they did a pretty okay job. And the art is interesting. There are certain no-noes I wouldn't do. Like it's weird to not be any, I have no control. I'm just watching whatever. This isn't mine anymore. And definitely a lot of choices that I'm just kind of like, hmm, do they think I would do that or are they just doing that?

I don't know. I don't know. And then it's weird, too, to get people like, being like, I saw, you know, you're releasing two games this year. And it's like, well, no. I'm not. It's awkward. But I don't know.

I've got a few little birdies that tell me things. And I wish the best for everyone involved in the project. I mean, from what I've seen, it seems like it's a, I think they're called a slugger fly or something. And head up. And I know Dieter personally, he's published a bunch of. my games and I think he's kind of heading the whole thing and I, you know, wish him the best. But it is very odd. It's very odd to see.

I don't know. I kind of had a really profound realization, though, through it when I realized, like, if I would have stayed at team meet and if I would have made things work, I don't think I would have ever been happy with a sequel. And I don't think I ever would have made one. So if what people want is more Meatboy, maybe it's better that I'm not there and I'm not involved because I don't I don't even know if I'm going to make up another binding of Isaac you know if I'm being real like unless I come up with some fucking phenomenal idea that I want to

waste 10 years on um I think I don't know I think it's done I think I'd just much rather make something new than something that I've already made so yeah that is a good segue for our final question which is it sounds like you want to keep working on meogenics you said five six years to come uh before but yeah what is your is your idea here to like keep working on new stuff in addition to like meogenic's dealc. Do you want to just kind of dedicate yourself to meogenics for the next decade? Like what is your kind of future plan look like now? The only future plan that I have is I need to be a dad.

I need to be a father. I need to be a husband. And I have not been as available as I would like to be for at least the past year or two. And I need to, I have two homeschooled girls. And how old are they? Five and ten. And what are your favorite traits that you've breeded into them? Well, one of them is ADHD and the other is autism.

There you go. That is exactly what me turning off. Dyslexia, the oldest one, dyslexia. And with that comes homeschooling. No, but she's a fiercely funny and creative girl and very, very smart. She taught herself how to read by herself, by putting subtitles on YouTube and watching movies with subtitles. And it was just kind of phenomenal.

Because growing up with dyslexia absolutely sucks and you feel not good in school. And absolutely stupid. And it's nice to have the means to be able to not torture her and force her to do things the way society is averaging them. Because it turns out, when left to her own devices, she's very good at figuring things out by herself.

And that's really how she learns is by doing. But yeah, so very creative, very funny, and very challenging. You'd never believe it, but they like to push the envelope. They like to challenge authority. They like to go against the grain. And I don't know where they would have got that. I don't know who instilled that in them.

Um, but yeah, uh, those are the traits that I bred into them. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. But so, yeah, so you're, you're going to spend some time being a dad, uh, hopefully still being able to do some eugenic stuff in addition to that. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to figure it out, you know? I'm going to, I'm going to figure it out.

Uh, and, uh, I just need the dust to settle on this and kind of, if I fucking, if my wife hears me say, I'm going to start a new project, she's going to fucking kill me. Like, it's, this is not fun. for her. I mean, she's, she's enjoying it to the best of her ability and we have help when we have help. But I'll tell you this, any game in the movie has been back. They've been filming this. And I hear the interviews from the other room and there's a lot of, oh no. There's a lot of, when is this game going to get fucking done? I want this game fucking done and I want my husband back. How often are they, are they filming you? Like, or have they been filming you for years?

They come back tomorrow. So, yeah, they've been, they've been filming me on it. They filmed the release of The End is Nye. They filmed a follow-up for the Binding of Isaac. So they came down in, like, 2012 or 2013, and then again, in, like, 2017 or 18. And then more recently, this year, they've been down here three or four times. Filming. I don't know.

I think they're trying to figure it out, too. They're trying to figure out what they want to do. But it's kind of crazy because they're like, the more I talk to them, the more they're like, you know, do you remember this thing that happened in 2009 at GDC? And I'm like, yeah, and they're like, you know, we were filming you. And I was like, what? You fucking, what? And they're like, yeah, we couldn't put it in the movie, though, because it didn't make

sense. But we filmed this. And like the first time that they had ever filmed me and Danielle was when I lost to Monaco for a super meat boy, Monica, and the IGF. And I guess that like Daniel was like consoling me and the first shot is like is her turning

in like like shooting evil lasers and saying you're like telling them to get out of here. We didn't know who they were. Oh my God. Well it's it's worth noting we talked about this on the on our show a couple of months ago but it's worth noting that of the people prominently

featured in Indy game in the movie, Phil fish has just kind of disappeared. John Blow has become polarizing, we'll say, and you're just making hit games and just doing your own thing. Hey man, I mean, I'm sure there's people who whatever.

It's cool. Great way of it. So Mugenics is out February 10th. It'll be, have been out by the time this episode. Airs, I highly recommend it. Emin, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks, man.

All right. We are going to take a break and we'll be back with one more thing. Hey Alexis. Hey Ella. What animal has the most teeth? I would guess a shark. A snail. No, snails don't have teeth. They have thousands and they are freaky looking. No, I don't want that to be true. Okay. Did you know that the hippocampus in your brain is named after the half horse, half fish sea creature found in Greek mythology? I didn't know that, but we're meant to be doing animal trivia and hippocampus isn't a real animal. Well, that doesn't matter on comfort creatures. You're right. It doesn't matter at all. Cover Creatures is a cozy show for lovers of animals of all shapes and sizes, real and unreal.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, then join us every Thursday for new episodes on maximum fun.org. Are you a celebrity? Are you searching for meaning, connection, and a little levity these days? Hi, Uncle Mel Nanchion, actor, writer, and yes, a celebrity too. And I've got four words for you. Bullseye with Jesse Thorne. Are you tired of junkets? carpets, sick of the endless spicy snacks you have to eat. Do you want to connect with someone who gets your work and laugh with you a little?

Join me, Andre 3000, Tom Hanks, Tina Faye, and many more and become a guest on Bullseye with Jesse Thorne from NPR and Maximum Fun. And we are back. Thank you again to Eminemann McMillan for coming on the show. That was super fun. Let's do some one more things before we say goodbye. Kirk, why don't you start? What's your one more thing?

My one thing is a game that I've been playing that is incredibly cool, a game called Cairn. Have either of you played Cairn? Surely you're both aware of it. I am aware of it. I've not played it, though. So this is a rock climbing game from the game bakers who have made kind of a lot of games. This is an indie studio that made Fury among other things. And let's see what else. Oh, yeah, they made Haven. So they've made games that I have not actually played.

I did not get into Fury, though I know. Some people really dig it, but they've been around for a while, and this is their new one. It's a game about rock climbing that is really, really cool. I heard enough people on enough podcasts talking about it that I thought I'd just give it a run since I had it installed and have been just totally bowled over by it. It kind of was exactly the game that I was looking to play. This game tells the story of Ava, who is your character. She is a very stoic and hard to read, at least at first, woman who is obsessed with climbing this mountain, a very dangerous mountain that kills people.

It has just killed tons of people who have attempted to summit it. And she's sort of leaving behind her relationship and her friends to go and attempt this incredibly dangerous thing. And that's kind of the narrative framework. And this is actually a narrative game to an extent that I didn't totally appreciate it. in and I'm really enjoying it so far. I think it kind of gets at the heart of some of the emotional and philosophical ideas behind rock climbing in a way that I have found really cool. But the heart of the game is the mechanics, and that is what I've found so amazing about it. I've played like coming up on a couple of hours, so I'm not super far, but I know it's not like an incredibly

long game, but I'm well up the mountain and I'm making some pretty good progress. And so I feel like I can at least recommend it because I just love what I've played. And I'm not a lot. definitely going to keep going. But I am excited to see how the mechanics kind of develop. So this is a rock climbing game in the vein of Jusant, if the two of you remember that game, which was actually one of my favorite games from a couple of years ago when that came out. That was another game that kind of focused on the mechanics of rock climbing to an extent that you won't see in all of these other, you know, these Sony games, for example, God of War or Horizon, where you just hold down a button and you go up the wall uncharted as another example.

Like we've all climbed up a cliff in a video game a million times to the point where it doesn't even feel exciting anymore. And for a long time in an uncharted game, this has kind of been the weird disconnect where these animations are so kind of engrossing and you're watching Nathan Drake hang by a single hand, free hand climbing over a cliff. And you just kind of can't feel the feeling that he must be feeling. It just, for me at least, it does not really connect that feeling, that thrill that I should be feeling. Do you remember they tried to do a more elaborate climbing system for Uncharted 4? I wrote about this in Bloods Modern Pixels, my first book, because that was like a big prototype phase during Amy Hennex version, especially. They were really trying to do like pitons and like all sorts of crazy stuff, but it didn't

wind up working for various reasons. Yeah, I remember reading about that. And it makes sense because it's just that's the kind, not the kind of game they're making. It can't quite support that sort of really dense mechanical, like, naughtiness. When you're, when you kind of... It interrupts the flow. the rest of the game. Right.

It's just the wrong kind of game where a game like Karen, or previously I mean, Jusant also, and I would say Death Stranding is also very much in this lineage, these games demonstrate that if you build the game around the simple but also, like, deceptively complex, or deceptively simple, I always forget which one it is, the simple seeming but actually quite complex mechanics of walking across rocks or climbing up a wall, then you can make a really amazing game. It's just you kind of have to build your game around it a little. bit more. That is what they have done for Karen. When it starts, it looks like it's almost going to be

like a Bennett Fadi, you know, like baby steps or getting over it. You begin to climb, Ava begins to climb the wall, and you start out in a training course. And I at least ate shit on the very first climbing attempt. But then I actually have been surprised, I've really picked this up pretty quickly. And I've been listening to people talk about this game and just following some impressions. And it's pretty variable. There are people who find it really, really intimidating. and difficult and people who don't, I've found at least for my part that I am doing pretty well. I have a kind of an intuitive sense of how this is supposed to work. I'm not much of a rock climber.

I'm a little too tall. It's like just hard for me physically, but I've done some rock climbing, and I have some friends who are really into it. And so I think part of it is just maybe a little bit of that kind of physical awareness, because this is a very physical game. If it walks up to the wall, you press the square button, at least that's the initial mapping and she just puts her hand, you know, onto one of the sort of, you know, outgrowths on the climbing. This isn't a climbing gym, so we're not on the mountain yet. She puts a hand on the

outgrowth and then you're kind of just using the stick to move her right hand around. So the hand is kind of doing this quop looking. It's a little awkward because it's moving to just every direction in a radius and you just move it over until it's on, you know, a little ledge and then you press square and her hand automatically grabs that little ledge. And then her foot starts moving around. And this is where it really starts to look kind of goofy sometimes, because the foot is like going way up or stretching around and it almost looks like cartoonish. But then as you place it and you begin to move her, it stops feeling cartoonish. And actually, the more I've played, the more I just really feel completely connected to this other person's

physical body in a way that feels very believable and cool. And I'm watching her, you know, she is amazing. I mean, Ava is like, strong and agile in ways that I could never relate to. So in some ways it's like playing a superhero. But it's because what she's doing is so hard. You know, when she has two feet, like, wedged into a tiny chimney on a cliff, and she's leaning her, you know, physical body over to the right to brace as she pulls her left arm up and then stretches her left leg and then can kind of thrust up to catch, these moves feel

incredibly real to me. It's a very visceral game, I would say. And then the effect of playing this game, especially once you get going, is that it just locks your attention on what Ava is doing and just it locks my focus. I am totally locked in the minute I'm climbing, you know, a cliff. So the difficulty in this game arises from like her stamina. A lot of these systems are happening in the background. It's a very complex simulation of her physiology and her strength, her hands, her stamina. Actually, there's a whole survival system.

I'll talk about in a second where you're like eating food and managing her hydration and her rest and stuff. But even just in the physics of it, you know, her body on the wall, like that is being very deeply simulated. But a lot of it is just kind of communicated intuitively, a lot through her breathing, actually. And then her arms will start to shake if she's holding an untenable position. So watching this happen, you begin, you already feel or I already feel so connected to her as I'm watching her move. And then you're hearing her breathing as it's picking up and she's getting a little more stressed and she's under a little bit more duress. She's maybe holding onto a really narrow ledge that hurts her hand and she's pulling over and kind of trying to brace. And it just makes me focus even more because, you know, if you push her too far, she'll fall.

And if you've stuck a peaton in, you can, you don't necessarily die, but you can lose a lot of progress. There's a whole like, there's a whole peaton system where you can use it. kind of as a checkpoint, but you have a limited number of them so you can start to run out. So the whole vibe, like the flow of the game is just this slow process up a series of cliffs that you're really having to read organically. Like it's not, there are no yellow markers. There's no, you know, detective vision that highlights every grabable point. You really just look at it.

It's a kind of a cell shaded art style, I guess. So you can kind of freely move the camera around and you just look and think, okay, while I see there's this little, there are these two, you know, not a chimney, but I don't know what you call it exactly like a diagonal. A crevice? Yeah, I guess maybe a crevice. Like it's like a kind of a bit of, you have a wall on one side and a little bit of a textured surface on the other. And you know she can push against the wall and go up there. And then something that's happened to me every time I've tried to rock climb, there inevitably comes a point where you look up and you just think, I don't understand how I am going to get past this next five.

feet because there's just not an obvious handhold. It just is going to require some kind of crazy move. And so a lot of times I kind of just throw Ava at it because I'm like, well, she's really strong, so we'll see how this goes. And you can wind up over your head. And when that happens, when she's shaking and she's panicking and you're trying to hold on, it gets really, really intense. And you're like, oh, my God, oh my God, I find myself as I play, this will not surprise either of you just talking to her. I'm like, you got this, you got this. Good. Don't die. And she'll, And she'll talk back to me. And sometimes when I do a really smart move that gives her purchase, she'll be like, good, like that.

Like she'll be talking to herself, but I feel like she's telling me that I'm doing a good job. So I feel so connected to her, like in this very, like a kind of, in a visceral way and a really deep way, just because I'm kind of coaching her through this incredibly physically difficult thing in a very dangerous scenario. And it's so cool. I mean, it's made me connect to the story so much more because I just feel so like elementally connected to her. And I find it to just be this amazing experience. I haven't felt something like this in a video game, this kind of a relationship with a protagonist in a long time where I've just been watching them and guiding them through this incredibly physically grueling and very precise process. And that alone has just been amazing.

My friends who are rock climbers talk a lot about why they like to do it. And a big part of it is that you are required to focus. You have to be in the moment. And hobbies like that are really cool, right? I find that sometimes when I'm really practicing music, I can feel that way. And I really like that kind of an activity. This game really simulates that feeling of just like, I have to think about what's coming next. There is no time for me to stop.

I can't daydream. I can't space out. I've got to like lock in and just we have to get to the top of this rock. And it's really, really cool. I'm finding it to just be like an emotionally and mentally rewarding game. And I'm so excited to learn more about just sort of what's driving this person to do this crazy thing, to take this risk. And to get to the top of the mountain, I think it's going to be a really rewarding adventure. And I'm loving it so far.

So I really just like, I'm blown away by this game. For me, at least, it's exactly the kind of game that I like. And I'm finding it to just be a really enchanting and engrossing experience. Well, you just described where you're staring at something and you're like, I have no idea how many get past this. But I'm just going to throw myself against it. It sounds like a good metaphor for the creative process in general. Yeah. Making something.

Yeah, it's definitely a game that lends itself to metaphor. I think that's true. Climbing is the ultimate metaphor. Cool. Cairn. It sounds pretty cool. Are you playing on Steam Deck? No, I'm playing it on PC. I gather it has some performance issues on Steam Deck, but I haven't tried it, so I don't really know.

but it's cool. I'm playing on PC on just like on kind of the monitor. It's nice to really be able to see everything because there is a lot of that kind of reconnaissance where I'm just really thinking through, okay, how am I going to get from here to here to here? And because you're really looking at shadow, you know, well, that looks like it's coming out a little farther that ledge because there's more shadow. Like it's nice to have a little more detail and have a slightly bigger screen. Makes sense. Maddie, what's your own more thing? My one more thing is a movie that I just watched that came out in 2025. It's called Code 3.

And it was written by a couple people, one of whom was a paramedic. And that's what the movie's about, which is to say somebody who works in an ambulance, rescuing people, but who isn't really considered a medical professional legally, but also saves people's lives every day, multiple times a day. as part of their job and is, I would say, underpaid. And that is a significant kind of piece of this movie. The movie is kind of a dark comedy. It stars Rain Wilson, who people probably know is Dwight from the office.

And in this movie, he plays a really different character because he's like an older, super burned out, bitter, paramedic, who's been kind of like underappreciated, but is also like the best at what he does compared to like, all of his coworkers and knows it. So he's kind of irritating, but also is like indisputably extraordinarily good at what he does. But also it's Rain Wilson. So he has that dry wit and is, he talks to camera a lot in this movie, which is like

a the office technique. But it's really different here because there's so much darkness inherent in the job. Like a lot of times they're just literally discovering dead bodies. And you don't really think about like how much of the paramedic job is like that. I don't think until you see something. like this. And I think Rayne Wilson really sells that mixture of comedy and darkness that's

part of the job. Is this like a mockumentary style or is it more like fleabag thing where he just starts talking to the camera? It's a fleabag thing. It's like the yeah, like fleabag's a good example of people have seen that show where like it's not a mockumentary. It's like his diary.

Think of it that way. Like the him talking to camera doesn't take place in our reality. But it's like as though he's telling us about his day. And it kind of chronicles this one day that he has with his coworkers. And it's like a particularly important day. And there's like a few other kind of notable comedians in it, like Yvette Nicole Brown and Rob Wrigal are in it. But it's mostly Rain Wilson's movie. And I really liked it. I thought it was pretty interesting. I wouldn't say it's like riotously funny, but it reminded me of what it's like to be a paramedic. I've never done it myself. So I graduated college in 2008,

which was like the recession that we all remember. And I had several friends who ended up becoming paramedics, EMTs during this time, specifically because you get paid for training. So these were friends of mine who couldn't find a job at the time. And they were like, well, no one will hire me, but at least like I can become an EMT. And they'll pay me for training. And I heard a ton from them about how difficult it was. And I kind of watched them over the years, like get really burned out by it.

And it really feels like a young person. game in a lot of ways and like one of those roles that's invisible but that is really important at the same time. And this movie reminded me of that and I thought it was pretty cool that a paramedic worked on it and that it ends up being pretty accurate. And I went on, there's like paramedic subredits and I was reading some of their takes on the movie and at least the threads I found people really dug it. So if this is something you don't know a lot about and you kind of want like rain Wilson to like take you on like the kind of dark sarcastic journey through it that will sort of help the medicine go down but also genuinely teach you something about this

underserved job. It's called code three and it's a it's a really interesting movie and I liked it. Code Vane 2 came out this week so you could play Code Vane 2 while watching Code 2. That's right. Yeah. How does it compare tonally to the pit? It's you know the pit is so romanticized compared to this movie in that the paramedics in this are often really cast off by the doctors in the in the ER that they meet up with and those doctors are presented as like being annoyed by how many people they're bringing in which I think is probably closer I mean the pit depicts some of that but I think there's much more of a symbiotic relationship depicted on the pit I mean I'm sure it depends on which ER your EMTs happen to be taking their patients.

too and like everyone's experiences are different but in this movie there's kind of like an acrimonious relationship between the EMTs and the hospitals that are like we don't have the space for these people and they're like but you're the closest hospital there's a lot of like tension around that in the movie so it's interesting I thought about the pit a lot while watching it too and was like wow I'm watching a lot of ER stuff right now and like really thinking about this part of our culture yeah it's like maybe there's a few feeling of emergency that we're all feeling or something. It's almost like these are people who were burned out recently en masse by some sort of social

phenomenon that might make them want to like make art about their experiences. I can't imagine what. My one more thing is a TV show called The Chair Company that I watched actually a few weeks ago, but haven't talked about until now. This is a show by Tim Robinson and Zach Canaan, the people who also made a TV show called I Think You Should Leave. Tim Robinson always pretty much plays the same person and she does the same in this TV show

where he is a ridiculous person who fixates on things to an extent that it's very fun to watch but would be very unpleasant to go through in real life. Have either of you seen this show? I haven't. I'm excited to hear about it. I've watched three episodes and then I fell off, not for any real reason. I think it was because you told me you were waiting to watch it

and I thought it would be fun to watch with you. Oh, okay. Well, sorry I didn't tell you. No, no, whatever. But I will come back to it. I enjoyed it. It's a little excruciating, but enjoyable. It is excruciating, yeah. It's hard to watch. Okay, so if you're familiar with, I think you should leave. I mean, it's essentially the same sort of humor in that it's very much like people, usually Tim Robinson's character just dragging things on for way too long,

making everybody around him uncomfortable. Like if I think you should leave did a paranoid thriller. Sure. Yeah, that's an interesting mix. Which is interesting. And it turned out, of course, that the conspiracy theory was real in some way. The extent of it, I won't spoil. But, you know, in the first episode, it's very clear.

So the premise of this is that Tim Robinson works at this office job, just kind of typical corporate America office job. I think they, like, develop property. They're like a real estate firm. And he is promoted. He's supposed to be leading this big shopping mall project. And he gives this presentation and he sits down on a chair and the chair collapses and he falls and everybody laughs in him. And I think in the real world, if that's happened to someone, they would be embarrassed and they try to laugh it off.

And then they try to move on with their lives. Maybe it would be a running joke or something, but that would be the end of it. In this world, Tim Robinson starts looking into the company that makes these chairs and becomes convinced that there is, is a conspiracy involving the chairs that made it so this chair collapsed because it was hollow in some way and he becomes fixated on this obsession of figuring out what really happened to the chair and the company behind it and he starts getting into, like digging into the company behind it and finds out that they're a shell company that like doesn't really exist and then he goes on this rabbit hole for eight episodes of trying to figure out what the deal is. We also meet his wife,

Blake Bell and his family, his kids, and learn the story with all of them and have some fun side plots involving them as well and involving his daughter, who is getting married, has a fiancé, and there's some interesting plots there. His daughter is queer, getting married to this woman who has their own kind of outlandish personality. And yeah, it's a really fun watch. I don't know if it's like, I don't know if I would recommend it, as thoroughly as I would recommend, I think you should leave because I think this style of humor is better suited to sketch comedy than it is to an eight-episode thriller show where each episode is 30 minutes. And there were points also Kirk where I found myself not bouncing

off because I stuck with it, but like wanting to stop watching because it was so hard to keep watching. Yeah, it's worth mentioning like his life is falling apart. Like he isn't just going down this rabbit hole. His whole world is unraveling and he can't stop. And so, So it is, I mean, he's an I think you should leave character, right? And that's what an I think you should leave version of Tim would do. So, yeah, there's this feeling of just like, oh my God, like, how much worse can this get for this guy? How much more damage can he cause his life? And, of course, the answer is always more than he'd think.

Right. And of course, like, his family, it seems, it's actually, it's never really explained whether he's done things like this before. I guess he kind of has. He almost has to have. He's such a weirdo. Yeah, but it's not really explained. I guess I should phrase it to say. It's unexplained why his wife puts up with him.

But there is some interesting kind of story involving his wife and her own just kind of like business and just kind of the deal she made. And there's some stuff actually Kirk that you haven't seen left that's interesting between their families. But anyway, but like this guy, his name is Ron, Tim Robinson's character. He is quite a character. There's some side characters also who are just out of this world. It is very much like a cartoony show, like a sketch comedy kind of like sketch comedy combined with a thriller, which is really. interesting mix. Anyway, I recommend it. It's not quite as good as I think you should

leave, but it's fun. It's fun to watch and I guess part fun, part excruciated to watch. Yeah, I'll probably watch it. I enjoy it. I love Tim Robinson and I don't know what it is about that guy. I am obsessed. Yeah, I mean, if you like Tim Robinson. I can look at him just sitting there

and I will just start laughing. Like he can just be sitting still, not doing anything. And it's funny. He's just got this magnetic physical presence that is just impossible to look away from. Yeah. And so yeah, I mean, if you like Tim Robinson, you'll like the show, I think. And I believe it was renewed for season two, which is good because it ends on a cliffanger, which is fun.

And yeah, I'll leave it at that, the chair company. It's on HBO. Nice. Yeah, I'll watch the rest of it at some point here. I'll check it out. Cool. So that is it for this week's episode. Thank you again to Edmund McMillan.

We will talk way more about me, Genix, next week, once you two have had more of a chance to sing. because there's so much to talk about. It is such a cool game. I love it so much. And I highly recommend that everyone out there go check it out because it's really, really good. All right, Kirk. Maddie, I'll see you both next time.

Yeah, see you both 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 ethics 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. Email us at triple click at maximumfund.org and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artists-owned shows.

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