Triple Click - Soma's AI Horror Story Is Even More Relevant Today

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

The Triple Click gang talks about SOMA, the 2015 sci-fi horror game that tells a riveting story about brain scans. They talk about the game's strengths (the story!) and the flaws (the voice acting...) as they prepare to send their consciousnesses into space. One More Thing: Kirk: Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime Maddy: Savant-Garde (podcast) Jason: Heather (Caitlin Mullen) LINKS: A recent (fairly harrowing!) WSJ article about the “jury duty” scam Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member 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

This is not an episode of Triple Click. It's actually a copy of the original episode, but it's completely identical. So, does it matter? Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about Soma, a futuristic sci-fi horror game in which you play as a copy of a man's brain scan, and then a copy of that copy, you get it. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shrier, and I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello, my friends.

Hello. But is it really us when you think about it? Who can say it's my voice. It feels like me. When I look down, I see hands. Human hands. The listeners have no way of knowing. You can tell it's us because our noses vibrate while we talk.

Wrong game. No, no, no. That's next week. That's next week. But hey, you listener, you might not even know which video games we're talking about. Yeah, we'll get to that in a minute. Before we do, I just want to say, we also like movies here at Triple Click.

We also talk about movies every now and then, especially on the bonus feed. And that bonus feed is something you can only get if you're a maximum fun member. So if you went to maximum fun.org slash join, for example, you could become a member and listen to our episode about the Odyssey, the Chris Nolan movie that we all enjoyed very much and had a lot to say about. And way back in the archives, you can hear us talking about all kinds of other games. and other Christopher Nolan films from time to time. You're making it seem like that's all we do is talking about Christopher Nolan. We're actually Chris Nolan podcast, but we have done that in the past. But, you know, we also spill the beans about all kinds of video games we've played,

that we don't spill the beans about here on the main feed, and talk about ourselves, talk about our personal lives. There's just a real diversity of content in the bonus feed. So it's kind of up to whoever is introducing the show in a given week to decide what they want to focus on. But today I went with Chris Nolan, apparently. But what's coming up is another cool bonus ep next time around. We're going to do another in our series of Spilling the Beans about the Sopranos episodes. We're going to do a big episode about seasons four and five.

We're watching those right now. And then we'll be convening to discuss them. And you would have to go back and listen to our episodes on seasons one, two, and three. before you listen to those or not. I don't know your life. Listen to whatever order you want. And that is, of course, assuming that you're listening to that bonus feed at all, which you would do by going to maximum fund.org slash join being a member and supporting

our wonderful, wonderful show. But hey, you're in the main feed right now. Let's get back to main feed business, shall we? Kirk, you have a public service announcement for our listeners. I do. I really have two. Really, one very quick one is that last week I talked about using a no zone machine to get a gross smell out of a room.

I kind of underplayed how ozone is not healthy for people. And I added a little update to make that clear, but I do want to just say, there are instructions on the ozone machine, you should just follow them. You're not supposed to just like breathe ozone. It is not healthy. So keep that in mind. So you're saying we should be destroying the ozone layer.

Right. Right. Well, I still haven't actually looked into that, so I'll have to do an update about that next week. You'll have to do an update on that later. Okay. Okay. The real public service announcement, though, I wanted to tell a quick story. And it's the story of how I won't say I almost got scammed, but I encountered a scam, and it got a lot further than I would have thought it would. And I wanted to tell the story as a way of just sort of sharing with people how this can happen and a little bit what it feels like. So yesterday I got a call,

I got a message on my phone from a man saying that he was a sergeant with the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, and could I call him back? And it sounded just like. a guy. So I just called him back. I had been taking a nap. I was just sort of like, oh, the sheriff's office. Okay, I guess I'll call them, because I don't really know how the sheriff's office contacts you. I call him, and really quickly, things kind of escalate. And he's telling me that I was supposed to be in jury duty this day. Now, here's the thing. I did get a summons for jury duty for either that day or the day after. For this week, we're recording this on Tuesday, and it was for this week. So I was kind of thrown. I was like, oh, wait a minute, but I deferred that because I couldn't come. And I told

him that. I said, oh, well, online, you can defer to a later date. And I did that. And he's like, well, this was a grand jury summon. So this was a different thing for a different court. And you weren't in court. And the judge called your name and you were absent. So now we have you down as absent from court. So I'm immediately like kind of on the defensive. And I'm like, this is really weird. What's going on? But I also, I think I'm talking to a sheriff's deputy. So anyways, I won't tell the whole story, but it kind of proceeds. And it's this fairly breathless, like, very aggressive scam where they're pushing me and telling me this is a really big problem because this grand jury is a really big deal. And you can't actually talk to people about it because

of the way grand juries work. But we just have to verify that someone else signed for you because you were supposed to receive this thing. And it was really interesting because I just was kind of going with it for a while. And I was kind of freaked out. Like, I was like, this is really upsetting, like, wait, what's going on? Like, I, you know, I deferred the thing. Like, I don't want to be in trouble, mostly thinking, I'm going to have to go deal with some paperwork. This is going to be a huge pain in the ass. But also, you know, you're talking to people who you at least think are the police, and it just kind of puts you in this other headspace. And then at some point, while I'm talking, Emily, my wife is there with me, and she holds up a piece of paper that says,

scam on it. And I was like, and I kind of finally slowed down enough to be like, oh, like, wait a minute. This is ridiculous. And then I started realizing like, wait, they're calling me back from like unlisted numbers. And they're like, this one guy keeps saying 10-4 every time I say something to him. He was getting in character. Right. She's like, I'm a cop. And then the more, like the farther I get from it, now that I am very sure it was a scam, the more I'm like, wow, there were red flags all over this. But it was interesting in the moment to be kind of taken in. It was very creepy to be just talking to these guys, you know, to just have this conversation. And then, And I kind of want to share that partly because I think this is a very common scam.

I wound up, you know, I talked to a lawyer friend of mine. She's like, dude, none of that is how things happen. Like, the sheriff doesn't call you about jury duty. They don't tell you the details of a grand jury, like, over the phone. You don't have to drive down inside. So none of this happens. They'll email you or, you know, like you. Send you another angry letter.

Yeah, this is completely unrealistic. And, you know, and of course, like I said, it became very clear in retrospect. But it is a very common scam. I called the courthouse to tell them it happened. And they're like, oh, yeah, this happens all the time. One happened just earlier today. I'm like, I think you should warn people about this a little bit more. Did they actually know that you had jury duty that day, or was that just a coincidence?

It's an open question. I don't know. The guy at the courthouse said it was a coincidence. I'm not so sure. The timing was so perfect. Well, the reason I asked that is because the Wall Street Journal actually just published an article about the jury duty scam. And apparently they go after just people randomly, not necessarily going through like lists of jury duty. I don't know how they would possibly know.

know that you actually had jury duty that day. That coincidence is wild though. Like the fact that it was a coincidence, I feel like as part of why you were probably taken in because it was so creepy that they got you right on that day. Yeah, because I was already thinking, oh, right, I had jury duty today. It could be that they play like the odds and there are certain days that are more likely to be jury duty or something. I really don't know. And I actually don't even know what they were going for. I think, because I got to a point where I basically, I put the guy on hold for a second. And Emily was like, I think this is a scam. And then I just slowed down. And then I, I unmuted him and I was like, is this real?

I was like, sir, now, sir, you have to stay on the phone. And I was like, oh, this, I was like, I'm going to talk to my attorney. I'll call you back. And I just like hung up. And that was the end of it. And then they tried calling me a bunch of times and then they stopped. So anyways, it's, you know, it fell apart very quickly. But yeah, I really don't know.

And they didn't get to the point where they were like, we need to verify your identity. What's your social security number or whatever it was going. Right, which I'm sure that's had to be where it was going because they couldn't actually direct you to go. somewhere because where would they have you go? Bing. Kirk here with a little update as I'm editing just in light of what Maddie said. I actually read the Wall Street Journal article that Jason referenced. It was from just a couple of days ago, which means, yeah, the scam must be getting pretty widespread. And it is a pretty harrowing article. It talks about an even more aggressive

version of the scam that got a woman in Tampa where they were telling her she was going to be under arrest and she had to make bail. And she was driving all around. And in my scheme, they were actually trying to get me out of the house as well, get me into my car, even though I'm not sure if there's actually an in-person part of this scheme or if they're just trying to destabilize you and then get you to send them money on PayPal. Anyway, just wanted to mention that and recommend that article since we've temporarily become a true crime podcast. Okay, anyways, back to our conversation. I just feel bad for this guy. He thought he had you. He thought he was going to make thousands

of dollars. I bet you that they actually get this far with a lot of people and then it falls apart. I have been kind of, you know, this has been helpful to kind of put things in perspective of how easily you can get pulled into this, or at least I can. I do think that once they asked for my social security number, I probably would have been like, wait a minute. Hang on a second. Well, he was probably going to ask you to go and withdraw some money to pay for like bail or something and drop it off in a sketchy location. No, they've built a fake police station. It's very elaborate. It's kind of like Ocean's 11. Nathan Fielder shows up when you get there. And the way this works is they give you the real addresses and real names and stuff because it's very easy for them to get all that information and just

make it seem legit enough. Anyways, I just wanted to tell that story because I don't think of myself as a gullible person. It was more just a matter of the minute you get into that mindset, the inertia hits. And it was really striking being a part of it. It was kind of disrupting. Like it really kind of messed me up. I was pretty out of it for the rest of the day. Just like it was really jarring to have this like crazy stressful situation drop on me and

then to just realize halfway through, wait, this whole thing is bullshit. And I wanted to mention that because I think these scams. are getting pretty common. I think the one thing that I will be doing differently going forward, this is something I already do with email, but the key whenever you get a message from someone that's like, this is important, you're in violation of this, or this is so-and-so notifying you of this. In email, right, you never click the link in the email. You just go directly to the website in your browser. If it's like, I'm from the IRS, go to the IRS and contact them through their website, and then if it's for real, it'll be fine, like they'll tell you.

And the same thing is true with your voicemail. Like, go and look, if someone from the sheriff's office calls you and leaves you a number, don't call that number they left. Go to the sheriff's office, call them, and say, hey, this is so-and-so, you know, did you call me? I got a message from someone. And maybe they did. And if that's fine, then if they did, they'll tell you whatever they need to tell you. But that's kind of the rule I'm putting in place is any inbox, anyone I don't know who contacts me, assuming that it looks legit enough to at least warrant a follow-up, I'm going the long way around to get back to them, like through the official channel,

rather than using whatever contact information they sent me. Hopefully that'll pair things down. And that ends my scam PSA and my scam story for everyone. Ooh. And that puts us on a spooky journey. And now that we're hearing strange voices and we're not sure who's talking to us, it is time for us to talk about Soma, about my pick for this year after I won the prediction. bet, Frictional's game Soma, which we have played through and are going to talk about complete

with spoilers. You have been warned for this now 11-year-old game. We're going to spoil the story, which is, you know, an interesting one to spoil because it's not actually full of shocking twists. It's just a very complex story, I think, with a lot of interesting ideas. But it is something that I think would be more interesting to listen to us, talk about it if you've played it. So just a heads up on that.

Yeah, we're going to talk about Soma. So this game, just some really quick background on it. It was released in 2015, created by the Swedish developer Frictional Games. They had a breakout hit a few years earlier with Amnesia, the Dark Descent. They made a name for themselves in the world of kind of first-person spooky horror. And this was kind of the rise of the horror game where you don't have any way of fighting back. So you're just hiding from scary things that are hunting you through a level. But this was a much more ambitious game for them than Amnesia, the Dark Descent.

narratively, in terms of design, really all of it. It was a big moment for them and has wound up garnering a real cult following. I think a lot of people really respect this game. And actually the timing is pretty cool on this because Frictional will be releasing a spiritual successor to Soma called Ontos, which is coming out. I think now they push it to 2027. There's a pretty cool reveal trailer for it. It's got Stell and Scars Guard. They definitely upped their budget for their voice cast for this game. And it looks neat. It looks a lot like Soma. And I'm excited for it. Which is good, because the voice acting in Soma is a little tough. I'm guessing that they marked that as an area for improvement. So anyways, we played through this game. I had already played it, but I played it

again. I at least played it on safe mode so the monsters couldn't hurt me. And I'm curious what the two of you thought, Bing, Kirk here editing the episode. And just wanted to mention because we're going to be talking about Soma that suicide does come up in this conversation because it is a topic that the game wrestles with in a number of different ways. So just wanted to mention that. That is something we will be talking about in this conversation. All right, back to the episode. Bing! Jason, I'm going to start with you. I'm nervous because I'm worried that you're going to be just like I hated it. I hated this game. I had a bad time. But I want to know what you thought of it.

And I am looking forward to talking with both of you about it. So Jason, kick us off. I probably would have had a real bad time if I hadn't played on safe mode. but I'm so glad that I did. I'll tell you something funny, which is that I was playing through in safe mode, and I kept finding these little kind of like masses, biological masses and sticking my hand in them, and like the screen would shake and like get weird for a minute.

You'd see like cracks on the screen for a minute. And I kept thinking I was like doing some hidden thing behind the back, behind the games, like mechanics that would like lead to some ending changing if I got all of them or something. And only much later when I was like looking at a walkthrough, I realized that it was. a health refiller that I never needed because I was playing the game in safe mode.

Yeah, I'm so glad I played in safe mode because the couple times I did die by like falling off of something. The checkpoints were so annoying that I was just like if I had been dealing with monsters killing me, I would have been so annoyed by this game. No, I enjoyed it. I thought it was pretty cool. I enjoyed the story. I enjoyed poking around in this world and like space stations and exploring. I thought it was really striking looking and they do a lot with what they have and ask some interesting questions about identity and control and personalities and what humanity is what it means to be human.

I definitely had some gripes, but my gripes are not like I didn't enjoy playing this. My gripes are like the characters are behaving in ways that I like wouldn't expect them to. particularly Simon, your main character, how quickly he just is like suddenly calling Catherine Cath and like just all buddy buddy with her when and just like has grown a, just how quickly he adapts to this situation rather than being like, what the fuck, where am I? Is this some sort of psychological torture or experiment? And he just accepts the reality that he's in rather than just like asking a bunch of questions and being totally horrified the way I would have.

But aside from that, I actually did enjoy the game. Nice. Well, I'm very glad to hear that. Maddie, how was this for you? You've played this before, right? So this was your second time? I had played this before, which will be interesting to talk about because I don't totally remember all the choices I made the first time around.

But if I know me, I made the exact same choices this time around. Yes, as we've established. And I don't need to remember it all. But, yeah, the first time around, I actually played it through side by side with a friend of mine who had. played the game before and who's very good at horror games. And I notoriously on this show, I get very scared by things. And this game, not in safe mode, is pretty scary and stressful.

And as Jason said, annoying because these these bonsters are kind of slow and kind of irritating to avoid at points. It's no misdirects in Resident Evil, too. They can't move that quickly. And you can't direct them around or kind of kite them around. the way that you might want to. So I do wish that I had had the opportunity to play it in safe mode back in 2015. I don't think that was available then.

But I had the next best thing, which was somebody I could pass a controller to and just be like, please get through this part for me. So I did get that experience at that time. And that was a very positive experience. And I liked the game a lot. It was really cool to replay it in safe mode. Way better experience. And I might even say the preferred.

experience because there's no break in the story this way. Like you aren't constantly being reset back to where you were if you die and you can actually just experience the environmental storytelling and read all of the logs without really having any potential anxiety of, oh, what might happen if I stop and read something right now. And you can just enjoy how spooky the circumstances of the game are, which we're going to get into and which I have always thought are really cool, really fascinating. I, I love this idea of people scanning their brain and putting it into a robot and the nature of who you are. That is what this game is about is the idea of scanning your brain and putting it into something else, some other object. And what would that mean about you and what is the nature of the self?

And I think that is a strong part of this game. And it's still strong, I would say, 10 years later, I still really like the story this time around. Yeah, I had a similar experience to you. I found that I still really liked the story and was struck by a few things about it. Like I said, I played it on safe mode, so we all did. The first time through, I did not. I played it all the way through in dangerous mode.

So I had dangerous monsters. It's called normal mode, but it should be called dangerous mode. Safe and dangerous. Yeah, and it definitely changes the experience. I think it's interesting that Frictional decided to add a safe mode after, I think it was like in response to players saying, you know, I really am bothered, like it's just annoying being hunted by these monsters, and I just want to experience the story.

And I think there were a number of reviews of the game that said as much. Just this is a really cool story. It honestly doesn't need the monsters. You could just move through these, you know, this series of underwater habitats and uncover this narrative, and it would be really neat. And I think they decided, yeah, okay, you know what? That's not the exact vision we had for the design of this game. Obviously, they designed it to be this,

very tense experience where there are these moments of sort of real trial, where you're trapped in the bowels of some station trying to power on some generator or something, and there's this horrible thing down there with you, and you're a long way from safety, and you finally get it turned on, and it's coming for you, and he run down a hallway, and it chases you. A lot of these horror sequences that are really intense and are very clearly, like, they're designed to gradually get more intense over the course of the game until in the final few chapters, you're doing these really awful, like really scary, dark, long sequences. When you get to the abyss and you're on the, like, floor of the ocean, there's this huge

anglerfish monster hunting you, and the wind is like in the water, you know, it's like a current is blowing you. It just feels like you've gone through so much to finally get to the end that when you do get to the end and you're finally making these big decisions and, you know, learning how the story ends up, it feels much more like you've gone on this really intense journey. And that's the experience they designed. It's cool playing it through it the other way, though, where it's less intense. It's a little more like Simon walks through a series of creepy environments and sees a lot of messed up stuff and learns about a messed up thing that has happened and then gets to the end of his story.

It's a little more even keel, I guess, but that doesn't make it any worse. And yeah, the questions that it's raising and the various plot developments are just as interesting and just as thought-provoking. And scary, arguably. I think there's still a psychological horror element. that is present regardless, especially with the kind of two endings that we can talk about and the idea of that.

I just want to point out it's called frictional games, not frictionless games. So true, Jason. Safe mode is really not the intended way. Yeah, it's really off-brand. We all played this the wrong way. That should have been developed

by their sister's studio. They should have had like a frictionless games logo that came off. That would be funny if it changed the name of their studio. I think their logo is a gear, so it's just like a circle. Yeah, right. Send up the edges.

Yeah. Yeah, I think in particular, the most horrifying idea that this game introduces is the idea of copying yourself and then being left behind or like facing the fact that there are now two copies of you. And I definitely found that this landed differently from me now that we are in an age where that kind of copying is happening in slow motion right in front of us and is actually a reality in some ways that we're kind of not even dealing with as a society. And I guess I want to talk about the game, the design, and all of that. But let's go there first, since that's such an interesting and juicy idea. It's an idea that's come up in some conversations I've been having

with people about AI lately. There's just so much with AI to think about. It's hard to like pick a lane. So it's one thing that I hadn't really been thinking about until recently. the privacy idea of AI specifically related to an AI making a copy of you. And that, you know, like Google, for example, they have a profile kind of of all of us. They just have been building it for years and years where it's kind of anonymized, but they basically know a lot of stuff about you. And they know your age and marital status and whether you have kids and like what you like to buy and where you live. And kind of increasingly granular data to which they have had just basically unfettered acts.

for years and years, and we just kind of treat it like that's fine, that they just get to have all that data, right? Obviously, data rights activists don't think that that's true, and there are increasingly loud voices arguing against this. But there are a lot of people who think it's, if not fine, inevitable, or they just don't think about it at all. So as you get all that data, you can feed that data into an AI and create a version of you, of anyone. And a lot of offices are starting to do this. This was most famously happening at Facebook most recently. If you remember, Zuckerberg talked about how he had done this to himself. And then he was going to start doing it to all of his employees.

And I don't know. I can't remember where they're at on this initiative now. There was a lot of backlash. So maybe they slowed this down. Really? But basically they're like the idea was, and I'm, you know, this is kind of speaking broadly, not an expert here. We're going to log all of your inputs into Slack or, you know, work messaging, all of your work, everything that you do, it's all going to be required. And what you're doing is you're not just training your replacement.

You are training a copy of you that will then be owned by, in this case, meta. So then if you get laid off, they just fire up the clone. And the clone can literally sit there and, like, respond to people over text in the same way that you would and do the work that you would do. Now, I don't know how totally possible all that is yet. But this technology is out there, and this is happening. So we're kind of in a world already where there are people who can just. start building copies of all of us. And, you know, we're not that old. So over the next 20 years, this technology will improve to the point where it isn't even going to look like it does in this

game where you go into this big machine and they scan your brain and then there's a copy of you, you know, under the sea 100 years later. It's just going to be that there are these eternal, weird kind of digital amalgams of every person. And that is, I think, a really pressing issue that we need to be dealing with as a society and, like, drawing lots of. lines around and drawing boundaries around because it's essential to ourselves and who we are and kind of us as individuals. So anyways, it made me think about all of that. I'm curious if it made the two of you think about that stuff too. How would you like society? Do you deal with this and confront this issue? I mean, we can begin by passing some laws about it and we can maybe

a regulation of any kind? Establish some better privacy laws. Should the law be, should the lobby that if the copy left behind gets killed, gets disconnected? Is that how we should do this? Like, which copy gets priority? People should look at Oregon's Senator Ron Wyden. Our two senators are doing a lot of good work in data privacy. And data privacy is something that we should be taking more seriously because it isn't just, you know, abstract, like advertising profiles.

It is stuff like this. Like it is coming down to your history, your memories, your actions and activities can be owned and controlled and cloned by someone else. and it is something we should take seriously. And this kind of fiction does, as much as it is, you know, a little bit outsized. I think that it does really underline the urgency of these issues and why we should be taking them on head on. Yeah, this version of the story is probably speaks to the fact that it came out 10 years ago. Because I do feel like the 2026 version of this is one that really speaks directly to the idea of a corporation owning yourself and having that self continue to work.

And maybe you have no say and what that work looks like or what it, what it is. And it might be moral quandaries against what you would have believed in, et cetera. This game does not navigate that. And instead is much more concerned with the idea of the soul and this almost like idealized version of a copy of yourself that is much more pure, at least as depicted in this game than the version of like, okay, the version of Google, that has read every single Google document I've ever written, for example, which is, in my case, at least a huge amount of writing and work that would at least make somebody who had a really powerful LLM be pretty good at imitating my writing style.

But this version, the SOMA version, would be the version that has all my childhood memories as well and doesn't just have my digital self or my writing voice. It has like every memory I've ever had. Like that's kind of this brain scan fantasy. And the characters in Soma are really, there's like kind of this implication that those personalities were used to make robots more productive, perhaps,

but that's not really the meat of this game. The meat of this game is this idea of whether your memories constitute you in some more cerebral way and whether that memory file living on is something that is alive and something that shouldn't be deleted because it's alive.

And that central question, is a kinder one. It's a very 2015 one, whereas I feel like the modern day one would be more about corporations owning us and our work and what we create. Yeah, that is definitely a different, like a sort of something that locks it to the time in which it was made because it was developed, you know, even earlier than 2015. So this was kind of Obama era. We were still feeling pretty good about technology. And Carthage Industries is the name of the company that does own everything. So there is a kind of Wayland-Utani behind all of this stuff down on Pathos 2,

but they're not really villains in the way that you can very easily imagine that they would be today. Or even if you look at something like Horizon Zero Dawn, like Ted Farrow's, that, like this was already the rising age of the evil Elon Musk type, like tech oligarch, evil dude. And this game is not really interested in that, even though playing it makes me think about all this stuff because of where we are right now. And yeah, you can very easily imagine that a modern-day, version of it would be a little bit more like that for sure. Yeah, it is interesting, though,

that like characters like Catherine and her aims are not presented as necessarily villainous, and I would say are largely heroic. And that's like the happy ending is the idea of preserving these brain scans. Do you think that's a happy? I don't know. But I, I, well, I guess we could get into it. Before we get into it, I think, so let me summarize a little bit of just what's going on in this game, just because I think some people listening to this won't have played it. And also I can just refresh anyone who didn't play through it for this conversation. Just to give a very, very quick overview, that what happens is this guy, Simon Jarrett, has a car accident. His brain is horribly injured and is bleeding.

He's bleeding internally and he's slowly dying. And there's nothing really medicine can do. So he goes and gets an experimental brain scan. He lives in Toronto. This is in like 2015. The brain scan will allow these doctors who seem fairly shady when he shows up there in this kind of run down office. It's like one of my favorite scenes in the game, actually. Yeah, that's good.

non-doctor's office that you go to at the beginning. They're like, don't worry about it. We're going to scan your brain. And they're going to help him diagnose like new treatments that he could try. So he scans his brain and then immediately just wakes up in this bizarre underwater facility where there's no other people and there's horrible kind of amalgamated robots that are talking like they think they're people and there's these awful sea creatures everywhere. And there's like this growth, this like black growth that's covered all the technology. And he kind of slowly realizes, oh, he's in a robot body. He's not in his own body. And his brain scan that was taken back in 2015 was stored as one of the like early prototypes for this technology that then later turned up down in this

underwater lab where to actually run it down, I'm pretty sure this is what happened. They were using this technology to allow engineers and technicians to control robots remotely. And then by supercharging an AI went to this like bio-electrical thing called the wow W-W-A-U. The wow developed a way to actually copy someone's consciousness into a digital construct. And then as that was happening, a comet struck the earth. It is now 100 years after 2015. The comet killed all life on the surface. The people on Pathos are the only people left alive. And they wind up coming up with kind of on the fly this plan to copy everybody's consciousnesses onto a hard drive and launch it into space in something they call the arc. which will then allow them to live for thousands of years in a digital paradise,

free from the world which has been destroyed. So that's kind of some of the questions that we're dealing with, and that's like the gist of the storyline, though there are a lot of developments and plots that happen. Simon really just grows to accept very quickly his new reality. I was convinced for a while that this was like some sort of hallucination or like that he was, I don't know, in like a nightmare or a psychological experiment. Or something before it's revealed that this is the real future.

And you don't find out for a while until, like, more than halfway through the game, that Simon actually died pretty quickly after he gets in that chair. It's like maybe a couple weeks afterward. It's like a month or two. Yeah, you get a lot where they're like, sorry. It's funny because the, like, the treatment they prescribe is like, well, do those exercises, you know? And it's like something, drink that tea. Like, it's nothing.

And then he just is like, dies. And then it's like, oh, turn for the worst. He's dead. Yeah, it's funny. This idea of like, it's a coin flip if you're going to stay in your current consciousness or move to wherever you're transferred. Simon, I guess lucked out this time and then was not so lucky at the end of the game. Yeah, that's a really interesting question that is kind of unclear to me, like, how that works.

This is one of the fundamental questions in this game is that when you're scanned, a copy of you now exists. And there's initially a theory, so something that happens on pathos when they begin scanning people. There's a guy, what's his name? Oh, Mark Serang, this is one of the characters who comes up.

And I would say that one of the shortcomings of this game, and I have plenty of critiques of it as well, is that there are so many names and so many people that it's just hard to remember who's who because you don't see the faces. You're like just reading logs for the most part. And then you start to see some faces, I guess, a little later. But this guy, Mark Serang,

he was like an intelligence analyst. And he gets scanned for this arc project that Catherine came up with and then kills himself immediately afterward. So he decides, okay, I'm going to die because then there will only be one copy of me and that's how I can ensure that I get to live on the ark forever and not get stuck down here

at the bottom of the ocean of a dead world. And then that kind of becomes contagious, which is a very scary and believable idea that when he says that he starts telling people like this is what you have to do, And then more people are doing it. Yeah, before he does it, of course. Right.

He kind of creates this like pseudo-religion almost that, again, I agree, feels very believable. It's a Jonestown situation. Yeah. It's very scary. It's like a AI version of Jonestown where they do actually have consciousness in this arc. Like, it's real and documentable in a way that heaven is not. And so you kind of understand the logic of it in a really sad way. I do.

And it seems like the kind of, it seems like a real. leap to think, oh, well, why on earth would my consciousness jump into the computer? But then we actually do see it happen. So it is kind of, because it happens to Simon at the very beginning of the game. So it is kind of demonstrated that that does happen, which the one bit of kind of metaphysics in this story where it is a science fiction story for the most part. But the fact that when Simon gets the scan, he then awakens in the robot body as if no time has passed does indicate that this actually happens. Like, you can get scanned and wake up in the other person. And then it happens again later. He scans into the deep sea body. And it happens yet again. And he then sees his old copy

that he left behind. And like... Just foreshadowing. It's a cool, it's a cool device because it allows them to play with this question of the coin flip, which is very scary and kind of like a dread-filled moment, even though it's the one thing in this story that is just kind of impossible or it just feels like, okay, well, we're just going to add a little bit of magic to this whole thing, even though everything else is kind of fantastical. It is sort of scientifically based a little bit. Yeah, it is an attractive scientific concept, though, right? Like the idea that you could freeze your brain and all of its memories perfectly in time and then transplant that somewhere else and that it would, again, maintain every memory that you had up to the precise second that you froze it. Like that,

I think is, it is magical. It's not, I mean, how are they uploading the brain? reins. Like, these are the things that it's like, you've got to just not think about that. Like, where are they going? You were talking about before, oh, if it used all my Google documents to create me. But, you know, as we live our lives online, we work online, we, you know, exist online more and more and more. Like, it is more and more possible to copy what amounts to memories? Because there's this question of, you know, well, what is a memory other than just a record of something that I did that I kind of created for myself? And if you, you know, really pulled together all all of someone's chats, their work chats, their personal chats, all their text messages, every

voicemail they've ever left, every FaceTime and Zoom call that's ever been recorded, and their Google documents and their email and on and on, you do start to get something that starts to be somewhat indistinguishable from the version of them that is still separate, the version that remembers their childhood and all that. But like, it at least raises these questions of like, where is that line? And obviously by presenting it the way they do in this game, that it's, you know, this perfect snapshot that's just all of you, and you don't even detect like any kind of a transition that happened. Like that is pretty extreme. But it does, it raises the question for me

in a way that I found kind of challenging at times. So the question that I find really interesting is, is it saving humanity to send our consciousnesses to a little satellite that is pretending that we're all in like a paradise and idyllic fantasy world? It's kind of interesting because it's like, wouldn't you rather be there in the metaverse of it all than the Ready Player One universe than in the reality of being in that underwater hellscape? It's, I don't know if you could call it save it humanity, save a humanity, but seems, seems preferable to be in the Matrix than to not. I guess, I remember the first time thinking that the arc sounded like this dream that was out of reach. And the way that this game ends, we should say, like to just throw the ending out there to provide context for this conversation. So Simon gets all the way to the end with Catherine.

They have this kind of prickly relationship. Catherine is like not a people person, but she knows how to get the arc fixed and working. I love Catherine. Can I just say I really enjoyed her as a character? She's good. As a sort of disembodied head that he's carrying around. As Jason has intimated, Simon is kind of frustrating at times. And like, I don't know.

For lack of a better word, just slow. Like, he just is slow on the uptake. And, like, a lot of times I felt like I was one step ahead of Simon, and so is Catherine. And at various points, she's sort of, like, leading him along. To be fair, he does have a serious brain injury. He does. And I wondered about that. And I wondered if that was actually part of the implication of Simon is that we, the brain scan that we have of Simon is a very damaged scan.

And so then, in that sense, I'm very compassionate to Simon. Of course he's... Convenient way to having trouble picking up. Perhaps. I mean, I don't know if that's intentional. but we can supplant that idea onto Simon and help have some compassion for how frustrating he can be

in the sense that when you get to that final choice that you're about to describe Kirk, it was very obvious to me what was going to happen, especially after you've already experienced it once when Catherine transfers Simon's consciousness from one power suit into another power suit and one of them is left behind and it's a perfect copy of Simon

and you have to decide whether to delete it or not, I was like, oh, there's going to be a copy of Simon on the Ark. And, like, clearly Simon is just merrily traipsing along, like, can't wait to get to the Ark, Catherine. And she's like, sure, buddy, that's where we're going. We're going to the Ark together. I don't know. I liked that for her.

I do relate to Catherine's frustrations with Simon sometimes where she's like, dude, I've explained this to you multiple times. Though I think she does kind of lead him on. I think she allows him ignorance and doesn't explain things. She has flaws for sure. She's a bit manipulative. Though actually that final moment isn't a choice, to be clear. I had remembered it as a choice, but it is not.

The ending of this game is the ending of this game. There are choices in this game. I'd say the biggest one, well, yeah, the biggest one is whether to destroy the wow or leave it. We can talk about that maybe a little later. But the way that this ends is you get all the way to the, what's it called, the rifle or something? The space gun. Oh, it's just the gun. It's like a huge, like gun that will launch this satellite into space.

It's pretty cool. like at the bottom of the ocean, where they can fire it from there because it generates so much heat that you have to put it at the bottom of the ocean, which is just a cool idea. So you get there with the arc, you go through hell to get it there with Catherine. And then Simon keeps saying, and we're going to copy ourselves onto the arc, right? And then we're going to launch it into space and be on the arc. And Catherine's like, yeah, totally. And then you're at the very last moment.

You're outside, you know, next to the gun. You're hitting the copy button as it's counting down to launch. The like progress bar is going super slow. And Simon is like, come on, what is, what is Ken? And Catherine gets copied and then Simon hasn't copied yet and it's about to launch. And then it pushes to the very end and it copies. And he's like, yes, we did it. And it launches.

And then of course, Simon is just alone at the bottom of the ocean. And Catherine says, well, yeah, you copied over. But he's up there and you're down here. And now you're just in the darkness forever as a robot. And that's the end of the game is Simon. he breaks the screen the Catherine is on. So he's truly alone and is left in the dark. And then post credits, you wake up as Simon on the arc and you get to kind of see that a little bit.

Or what I would call the other Simon. Sure. Simon, I guess it's Simon 3 at this time. Simon V3. No, Simon 4. Original Simon was human, Simon, then Simon 2. Simon 3 was Deep C, Simon, and then this is Simon 4. So just throwing that out there to have context for this.

I think the arc is a nightmare. This time playing through it, every time I read about the ark, it gave me so much anxiety. Because it's just like a hard drive in space. It's so unstable. She says it'll last thousands of years. But first of all, well, what happens after that? Second of all, what happens if something goes wrong? Or what if we all lose our minds or there's some corruption and like we all go crazy and it becomes hell and we're just trapped in it?

There's this great questionnaire that you'd find on Pathos that you then, it kind of comes back when you wake up as Simon on the Ark. And it's this question of like, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable do you feel? Would you say you feel like yourself? You know, do you feel lost? And you can kind of give these answers ranging from, I feel like it's a brand new day and I'm a new me to I feel alienated and frightened. I don't know what's going on. I'm crawling out of my skin. And then at the very end, it says, would you like to?

to die instead of carrying on like this. And you can answer yes or no. And then it says, cool, your answers have been logged. Enjoy your time on the ark or something. And playing it now, I was like, this is a terrible outcome. I think there's a really interesting, like, sort of thematic thing going on here, where the ark is heaven and pathos is hell, because the wow has created this sort of self-perpetuating hell, where it's keeping everyone alive forever, even though they're suffering. And then Simon three, I guess, winds up trapped in purgatory where he's basically just like alone in darkness, which is neither, you know, neither up nor down. None of the outcome seems very good to me.

And I was like completely, this time, I was like, no, keep me away from the arc. I would never want to go on there. It all seems awful. It's true. It does. I mean, on the arc also, there's so much implication in this game where I'm like, I began to explore this in the future version of the game. I'm like, where is that set? Is it on the arc?

Because I want to know the answers to these questions I'm about to say. Like, Catherine describes her coworkers disliking her. She's very socially awkward and struggles with them and is like this engineer. And she's very devoted to her projects. And find some comments about her and people's emails. Yes. And they're very rude about her. They kill her eventually.

Well, yeah, they kill her. And she is horrified by that one of Catherine's rare moments of being like, oh, I actually am really upset by this. Like I thought they were my friends. Yeah. But she's stuck with those people. Those are the people that she uploaded. And I'm like, so she's going to be hanging out with the people who don't like her and killed her. And also maybe there's another Catherine up there.

So like she's stuck for thousands of years with possibly another version of herself and a dozen people that hate her. And now she knows that because she's now had this opportunity to learn all of this information about them. So like that's already terrible. Also like no one can eat, sleep or die on the arc. unless they unplug themselves. So really boring. Just like what are the joys of life? They've all been taken away from you.

You can't breathe. Like you can't experience any of the things that make us people, right? I mean, this was a game that had me like thinking about the biological definition of the word life and being like, oh, yeah, it includes like taking in matter and expelling matter. You know,

you remember like seventh grade biology class and all that? And I'm like, these people, quote unquote, on the arc aren't doing any of that stuff. Are they alive in the joyful sense of it? I would say no. Yeah. I thought about this too. This is something I've articulated before when talking about The Matrix.

This is a very like stoned dorm room thought. Yeah, the whole game has that vibe. But in a complimentary way, it's fun. Yeah, and I think this has some basis in some schools of philosophy that I am not that familiar with. But to me, the Matrix has always been real enough because we're interacting with other people. And it's compromised because we're in a like controlled environment. and we don't know how the machines are controlling us.

But as long as you're having a real interaction with another conscious mind, to me, that is a very meaningful thing. Like, I think that gives a life meaning. I've thought a lot about how Emily and I just are kind of spending our lives now, just gradually talking things through and getting to know each other better for the next many decades, hopefully, as we just live and get to know each other. And that that is actually a really rewarding and cool thing to do. And you do that with everyone.

And it's what the three of us do on this show every week. Every week I get to know the two of you better. We have some new conversation. That could be true on the ark as well. You're right, Maddie, to point out that these are people who didn't really like Catherine. But still, you know, over thousands of years, anything could happen. And those interactions are real. And it is something that even purgatory Simon would have had with Catherine.

She was still there in his little PDA. They could have just hung out and talked about movies and stuff. And I don't know. Like there is room for a future, even at the bottom of the ocean. of this destroyed earth. But now that he's alone, the fact that he broke her and is truly alone is that is the thing that makes that ending so pitch black for me and really distressing to just think about then suddenly being alone.

Well, I assume he'll just kill himself pretty quickly after that. I don't know. I wonder. So let's talk about that wow choice because that kind of relates to the earth as it stands. I'm curious, Jason, what did you do? You have this choice to destroy the wow or leave it be. What did you do? I guess I didn't realize it was a choice.

I figured I would have to destroy it to keep making progress. So I destroyed it. A video game response to a video game problem. Yeah, you can walk away. Yeah, I didn't realize he could just walk away. Right. There's this guy, Johann Ross, who is like very set on you doing it. He created.

He is the creator of the wow. Right. He created it. Which is essentially he like, it's such like a bioengineered intelligence that exploded out of Alpha Station and took over everything. And is the reason, like it, you know, combined with strength. structure gel, which is this kind of all-purpose material. There was a similar thing to that, actually, in the other fictional game, Amnesia Machine for Pigs.

They really like gel. Not to be confused with Omni-Gel. Right. And so it's the thing you, like, pour into at one point really awesomely into a corpse, and it just, like, bonds everything together and, like, grows it into this living chimera that you can walk around inside of. So anyways, he's very insistent that you destroy it. And I think I may have done the same thing the first time, Jason, where I just destroyed it because I didn't know. and then learn later it was a choice.

But something in my head reminded me. And I started to leave, and then I had to really think about it. Because it's an interesting question. Like, there's no life left on the planet, and the wow is pretty monstrous. It seems pretty messed up. It's, like, kind of taken this directive of save humanity to an extreme, and it's keeping everybody alive, you know?

But then that means that there are these people that you come across who are, like, trapped inside the sort of those machines that he makes. What are they call it? It's not dragonfly. mocking birds. They're like half human, but they think they're human. And there are living people who have like merged with the machines who are alive. There's even a actual woman you find who's being kept alive by the wow. And she's like, kill me, please, like just unplug me and let me die. Sarah, yeah. I totally, totally marked her. Oh, I think that's a need. I feel like most people probably are willing to do that. But with the wow, I got to thinking, the wow also made Simon. And the wow is improving at what it's doing. It's trying to make. make new life. It is this, like, very powerful being that is still alive on Earth. And otherwise, we're assuming that the surface is totally wiped out, or at least I was for this, you know,

exercise. Maybe it's not, but who knows. And then I started thinking, well, maybe I leave it alive because this is life. And it did a pretty good job with Simon. Like, Simon is actually pretty balanced. It's an interesting mix of, like, this dead woman's body and his memory, and it's, like, stable. He's not totally freaking out. So maybe the wow could get better. and it could start making new life or something. And I wasn't totally sure. And then I killed it. Anyways, I decided to kill it anyways.

Yeah, I killed it. I don't think, according to what we learn about the wow, I'm not very confident in its ability to do that effectively. And also it appears to be actively mutating sea life. And I was kind of like, okay, I don't really want the wow to continue to actively mutate other life on earth that is still alive. And I actually thought that was kind of a cool side tangent in the game was this concept that, okay, all of human life is destroyed. But there are sea creatures that survived this comet's impact.

And I was like, okay, yeah, life goes on. I'm no human supremacist. Like there's fishies down here. Protect the fish from the wow. So I was like, we got to help this guy. I don't know. Those anglerfish, I don't know if they need protect. No, those ones have been infected.

Those are. Right. That was an already modified fish. Those are infected by the wow. Regular angler fish I'm fine with. I'm cool with those guys. chill. They're downright adorable.

Just like in Outer Wilds. I did think about Wilds. I did think about it. Anglerfish really a recurring villain in a lot of different games. They really are. I think just we find deep sea to be very troubling because it's very hard to survive down there. I mean, you guys ever Google, you guys should Google the anglerfish. I mean, look at those chomper.

Yeah. The angler fish in particular looks like something out of like HR Geiger. Like it looks like something out of horror movie. And so I think that's why. People use them in games because it's a real thing in the real world that feels like it should be fictional. It feels out of science fiction. And I think that's why that's the setting of this game is because it's the deep sea and you get to include the anglerfish, which are already so upsetting to look upon. And so you get the creepiness of the setting.

Did you know that one genus of angler fish is known as the Black Sea Devil? No, I'm not surprised. That's the one that the Wow decided to revive and make into its minions. Yeah, I did destroy the wow. I think I deleted everything while we're going over the choices. I deleted extra Simon. I was like, I'm upset about him being here. I left him.

Me too. I kind of like, I think that what I did was I hemmed and I hawed because like I was just describing, I kind of talked myself into this well, but we should leave something behind. Like going through as the cleanup crew, which is something Simon can do. It just felt so sad to me. I wanted to leave something behind and believe that, well, maybe Simon number two, two could find his way to the surface or do something or maybe there's life up there. Like I don't want to deprive him of that chance.

Just like deleting those saved memories, it's like, well, maybe those could be put in something. But then I blinked at the last minute and destroyed the wow. So then I just left everybody screwed because I didn't make up my mind. So I kind of should have committed one way or the other. I guess I should have saved the other Simon, Simon V2, so that Simon V3 would have somebody to hang out with after he kills Catherine at the end. That's true.

hang out and be like weird twins. I don't have a Mickey 17 sort of multiplicity situation. Yeah, I suppose so. So something else about the wow that the game doesn't really get into, but that I did find fascinating as this concept of Simon, Simon's brain architecture being the genesis of the creation of AI in general. And I really wanted that to come back. And it doesn't in a concrete way.

Like I was expecting the wow to be like, I'm also Simon. Like I was like waiting for like everything to be revealed to be Simon and I was like, oh, this is going to be so weird and cool. Like I'm going to find out that like all this stuff I've been destroying was like also inhabited by Simons. But that's not the case as far as I know except in perhaps some sort of distant, spooky way that like maybe Simon is in there in some way that we can't quite fathom. And I like that too.

But I did have some other predictions and I first played this game that did not pan out. And that was one of them. Yeah, that's true. That's a cool idea. And like, you know, the kind of thing that I think is, you could be true. So you might as well entertain the thought, even if the game doesn't fully go the, yeah, 700 Simons appear. And I'll say the same thing in synchronicity. Yeah.

There's always a Simon. There kind of is always a Simon. I feel like that's part of why I'm glad they're making another one of these because I'm like, there actually are some weird directions that they could go with what they already have. Yeah. I think I'm really, I really had not clocked that follow up. And I think the timing is actually really cool. I think that game will be interesting to talk about.

I'm hopeful that they can improve some things. We kind of put a pin in all of the gameplay stuff. But I do want to say, like, this story, the stuff that we talked about, that to me is Soma. That's what I love about it. And that's the most interesting thing about it. I think as a game, it has some pretty serious problems, actually. Like, both as a puzzle game and as a stealth horror game. The stealth, as we've mentioned, almost feels like it's getting in the way of the story and can feel pretty frustrating.

I think this type of, you know, totally powerless. you're just hiding, you know, not alien isolation where you have some tools at your disposal, but like where you're really just kind of stuck in a sequence where this thing is going to follow you until you turn the right levers and leave. I just am not that into that anymore. It feels like it's wasting my time. It's friction that I don't need. But also, the puzzles themselves, I think just, I hope that frictional has been chewing on puzzle design because I found very often the solution to the puzzle was just, oh, that's a lever I didn't even realize was there. And so I would get stuck. I would just be walking around.

a couple of hallways being like, how do I open this stupid door? And then I'd finally just go look it up and be like, oh, there's like a button that you walked past in the last room. Like, it wasn't like there's some puzzle that I have to figure out. It was just, did you notice that there's like a light shining on this lever or there's a little hole in the wall that you have to crawl through? And that happens so often that it just kind of kills the momentum. And it's not, there's like a missing layer of friction, actually, with the puzzles because

you're not having to do any thinking most of the time. I mean, occasionally there's a little like, can you? you connect, you know, the, like, do the pipe maze connection of the power conduits or whatever. But mostly it's just, did you notice the thing that, you know, changes the pressure in the room so you can move forward? And I hope that this next game that they're making has kind of better puzzles, like is a little bit more, makes you think a little bit more to proceed. Yeah, totally agree. There were definitely times when I had to look things up. And this is after I had played it before.

Yeah. At least that was with somebody who had already played it and remembered all of those moments that can be frustrating where it's like, This button is just in kind of a dumb spot, and it's over here. But in this time around, I just, I hit several points where I was like, not lost, but just kind of like wandering around a couple of rooms being like, I actually don't know how to proceed here. Yeah, what do I do? And you move so slowly. It's just like, what?

I just want to keep moving. Like, why I'm, yeah. So hopefully something they can improve in the future. Definitely a game that is like, it's so strong in this one area of the narrative and the questions it raises and the way it puts you face to face with these concepts. that it just totally for me makes up for the fact that it's like not a great adventure game. It's not, I don't think, like, it's got great atmosphere and vibes, but the actual gameplay horror stuff isn't that great. It just totally, you know, it has this one really great strength.

I will say just one other thought. I kept thinking throughout like, does this have to be a game? Would this have been better as a TV show or a book? Because it is, the story is such a strong piece of it. And I think there are some arguments that it could be a good, good, adapted into those other formats or having been created in those other formats. The characters aren't quite there. Yeah, but I think what makes it helpful that it's a game is that you can't see yourself.

And so it preserves some of the weirdness of who Simon really is in a way that only a game can do. And you are inhabiting Simon, who is inhabiting this other body. I like that rhyming nature of the story. And so that was enough for me to be like, okay, yeah. Yeah, this is a cool idea to have a specific video game as the format that they chose to tell this story in. Yeah, I think also the, I mean, this kind of thing has been explored in fiction. And you can explore a first person narrative where it's not clear what kind of a body the protagonist is inhabiting.

And I mean, sci-fi, you know, has been exploring these ideas of consciousness and being trapped in these kind of hell. You know, I have no mouth and I must scream as like seriously, clearly a formative text for this. It's clearly a formative text for this game. But I also think the game part, like, there are interactive sequences in this game that work very well because they're interactive. When you have to keep loading the one guy up into the, like, simulation, and he keeps freaking out every time you wake him up, and then you delete him, and then you have to try again and, like, get him comfortable so he can tell you some password. That stuff is really gross and, like, you feel very complicit in some kind of torture. And I think that is like very effectively done through gameplay that you're trying to figure out, okay, how can we make this guy comfortable?

What is it? He keeps asking me, he's in the wrong room. So we changed the setting of the room. And then you just keep doing it. Catherine is like Milgram experimenting you and being like Simon, you have to do this. And you're like, do I, though? I guess I do. It's great.

That was a great sequence. And I like that about it. And a thing I like about this game is that there is no huge shocking twist. I think it's very easy to go into this game, especially. because of Bioshock, because it looks kind of like Bioshock, and then especially as you're kind of talking to Catherine, you have this voice in your ear the whole game telling you where to go. It feels kind of like Bioshock. And you're even kind of revealing yourself to be a big daddy or something like in Bioshock, too.

There's this feeling that there's going to be a rugpole, that, you know, Catherine's actually behind it all and she's evil, or she's actually the wow and was never a person. Or like you were saying, Jason, maybe this is all in my head and it's all a dream, and actually reality is something else. And I kept expecting that through the first time and even misremembered the second time, like how little of that there really was. And I very much appreciate that this game reveals pretty early on that the world ended. It reveals very early on if you're paying attention that it's way in the future. When Simon turns on his flashlight, it's clear that something is up because he's like, wait, why do I have a flashlight?

So it doesn't try to shock you with any of these developments. It just slowly unfolds and explains itself to you and then allows you to just really take. take your time and think about what's happening and then have all these thoughts like we've been articulating. And I think that's really cool. I think that's something very mature about the storytelling in this game is that it doesn't feel the need to do a big rug pull, to do a big fake out or a shocking reveal. Even the ending, which is so shocking and nightmarish and really sticks with me, was actually set up, as we said, by everything that happened before. And Catherine's like, why are you surprised that this happened? This is exactly what I said what happened.

You should have seen it coming. So I think that's another real point in this game's favor narratively. Yeah, I mean, to elaborate on one thing I said before, I think that when you're telling a story in a video game, you don't need the same kind of character development and character arcs and good acting, frankly, that you do in a TV show or a movie where a lot of the story is character-driven. And this, since the story is so idea-driven and because the story doesn't need to be driven by characters doing things, but instead it's driven by the player doing things. It can kind of leave you with these big, interesting questions

and never really give answers to how the game makers feel about them. And it winds up feeling like a compelling story by the end of it, even though you haven't watched any sort of character growth or change or interesting development on that front. And so in that sense, I think this could only really work as a game. And I think it works and is a strong kind of narrative because it isn't heavy-handed and its delivery of this stuff, it leaves you with just a lot of interesting ideas

without really kind of moralizing about any of them or proselytizing about any of them, which just leaves you thinking a lot about the story, which I think is the most effective part of this game's methods of storytelling. Yeah, it says something maybe about how I think of video games, related to that, Jason, that when I picture a novel version of this, I basically picture a version with better characters. Yeah, yeah.

You know what I mean? It just would have to have stronger characters and like more fleshed out, you know, better dialogue and stuff. That would almost have to happen. Otherwise it would be, you know, it wouldn't really work. Yeah, but I also, I think to this game's credit, I think a lot of games would be a little bit more just kind of hamfisted with the ideas that they're trying to get across. I mean, Bioshock is a good idea or a good example of that, especially Bioshock Infinite,

where it's very clear what message the kind of storytellers are trying to get across by the end of it. And a lot of it is just kind of shoved down your throat. I think this game does a good job of not really doing that moralizing at all about this question. You're just kind of left with like, holy, like that holy crap moment at the end and just thinking about what it means and who's in the right and who's in the wrong. And I don't think there are really satisfying answers there, which I like. Yeah. Yeah, there's a confidence there that I appreciate in the storytelling. And I mean, to your point, Kirk, by the way, you don't, I mean, because of the way that games operate and because of the player's role in it all, games don't need to have a stronger character.

Yeah, yeah, no, I, of course. That's, I completely agree. It's, that's why I would think you would have to add a whole bunch of other stuff because, you know, you would need it if the player wasn't there experiencing it all and having the experience that we had playing the game, which is a great experience. And having the choices and that kind of, um, the fact. that I mean, I think it's also to this game's credit that so much of the story is told through peripheral means through reading emails and discovering logs and you can miss huge parts of the story if you're not out there poking around in terminals and stuff, which I think is a cool way of telling a story. I always appreciate environmental storytelling in games. Yeah, the environmental storytelling works in both the rooms and then just the fact that you are constantly going

deeper and deeper and darker and deeper and darker as you're, you know, entering these deeper and darker philosophical questions. I think that is also a very effective feeling. Yeah, yeah, that's true. It's metaphorical, a good metaphor. You're descending into hell, literally and figuratively. Yeah, it is a dark descent until you get to the darkest point at the very bottom and then you just are left there forever. Or you're really, really high up in the sky, depending on how you interpret it. You might actually be in outer space. You know, in Sweden, winters, it's, It's night all day. It's kind of just a fun fact that I'll throw out there.

For Swedish people, this is actually paradise going down to the bottom. Yeah, it's actually an uplifting story. Pretty much just December for me. Well, this game is a lot of fun. I'm really glad that we played through it and got to finally talk about it. And I think it'll lead to a more nuanced conversation about Frickshanels next game too, which is always a fun bonus. Thanks to both of you for playing through it with me. Let's take a break and come back for one more thing.

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International Waters is back, baby. Do you like fun, silly conversations? Do you like fun, silly games? We got them both. And it's on International Waters. I am the host, Dave Holmes. This is a panel show that pits American and British comics

against each other in a lively and hilarious competition. What is gentlemen's relish? Who is bagpuss? Why is the Oscar Meyer Wiener Mobile so emotionally resonant. And why doesn't American cheese have its own anthem? Get the answers and be left with numerous questions about that and so much more nonsense and or codswallop twice a month here on international waters.

You can catch international waters on maximum fun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back for one more thing. Jason, how about you kick us off? So my one more thing is a book called Heather by Caitlin Mullin. this is kind of a dramatic literary thriller sort of book, sort of reminiscent of God of the Woods. And you both will get a kick out of this because it is set in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, a location that is well known to both of you. And in fact, in the book, towards the beginning of the book, is the mention of the Sopranos episode set in the same location. It's about a woman named Callie Hauser, who is a who is, who is,

kind of newly installed as the police chief of the barons. And it's about how she kind of, the story starts off with her having to arrest this woman who turns out to be her mother, who is drinking while driving or seems to be drinking while driving. And upon this arrest, she learns about this kind of deep, dark secret from years and years earlier that winds up just kind of clashing with the present and getting resurfaced in all sorts of ways. And she tries to find out what happened and how it happened and how it's linked to the present and who got away with their crimes many years later and so on and so forth. And it's a really cool book with a really riveting mystery, I would say,

and asked a lot of really interesting questions and is very much about like the awful things that men can do to women and how they manifest in this story. It made me a very angry reading through the book, but I also really enjoyed it because it's a really good story, and it's propulsive and written very well. And yeah, I really enjoyed it in the same way that I enjoy a lot of these just kind of literary thrillers like God of the Woods, which I mentioned and several others.

And I recommend it. really cool book, I would say, that is sad, tragic, but very good. Have you watched any True Detective? That sounds a little True Detective-y. No. What? That new season of True Detective, do you watch Night Crunchy? Yes, I've seen All of True Detective.

For some reason, this makes me think of Night Country. I think we talked about it on the show. Yeah, we did. We must have. It makes me think of Night Country, which is a great show, Jason, and kind of a similar. The True Detective shows have a lot of that where there's usually an older crime that goes with the newer crime and then as you uncover it you wind up uncovering so much more and night country was really great and had that kind of feeling of uncovering this

kind of old wrong that happened that then led to a new crime and it was a really great story really cool well there's always something very fascinating something fascinating our culture i think about cold cases and the idea that like because we as humans just hate nothing more than the loose ends and like unresolved plots and mysteries and things just will never be concluded or satisfyingly resolved in our heads. And this idea, it's so just kind of tasty for us as humans to just see something that is 30 years old that has been haunting people's minds forever, just somehow, some intrepid person, an intrepid young woman figures out how to resolve it.

That's always just red meat for human storytelling. It's like, it's that and that, you know, cold case is kind of a misnomer that, you know, if somebody killed someone 30 years ago and got away, with it, there's a good chance that they're still around. And moreover, that the, whatever, the circumstances and the systems that, you know, they exploited are the things that caused that crime to happen are also probably still around and maybe have even gotten worse. So in solving the crime, you can learn something and reveal something about the world we live in now, which is certainly also at the root of a lot of these stories. Anyway, that book sounds great. Yeah, it's cool.

I'll put it on my list. Such a good fantasy to be like, I can solve this mystery. I feel like a lot of podcast try to do that. I can solve this mystery that nobody else has been able to. For sure. Yeah, but a fiction version of it, it can actually happen. And that's great. Yes, that's nice about fiction. Maddie, how about you? What is your one more thing? My one more thing is a podcast I've been listening to called Savant Guard, like Savant. And the premise of it is that an ex-wife and an ex-husband host it together. And that in and of itself is very charming because somehow... X's to one another? To one another. Somehow

they are now best friends seemingly. They have an incredible powerful, compassionate relationship towards one another. And what the premise of the show is so Lucy Valentine, the ex-wife in question, has autism and Jesse Black. The ex-husband has

OCD and they were both undiagnosed when they were married and I think they've never revealed what led to their breakup but now that they have diagnoses that's like a big part of the show. And so Every episode, they watch one episode of Monk, the TV show about the OCD character Monk, and one episode of The Good Doctor, which is about the autistic doctor, Sean Murphy. And they often criticize both shows in ways that are extremely humorous and also really

illuminating. I have many autistic people in my life, friends, peers, et cetera. And so I wouldn't say that's been super revelatory to me to hear Lucy Valentine's experience there. but I don't actually know a lot about OCD, and Jesse Black has the cleaning focused version of it specifically, which is also something that Monk exhibits. And him talking about his experiences has been really fascinating to me because I'm learning a lot about just something I don't know about.

And also he's extremely funny and does voices, incredible impressions, of all the voices of all the characters on these TV shows, which for an audio format is truly a wonderful gift for any podcast. host to have and definitely recommends the show. It makes it funnier to listen to. You're saying we should do more voices. I don't. I can't do voices like Jesse Black can do quite frankly, but he's he's a, he's phenomenal at it. So yeah, the result has been that I've learned a lot about OCD actually. And that's been really cool and also learned about these two television shows. And every now and then they have a good episode and that's really cool to hear about too is like what what these shows do right and

wrong. So yeah, it's called Savant Guard. And It's really fun and funny, and I'm enjoying it a lot. Cool. That sounds great. So what's the general take on Monk? Because I remember that show pretty well. Like, what's his take on the depiction there of Monk's OCD? So the interesting thing about Monk, I would say, is that although he is described in the show as having OCD, he is often also depicted with autistic traits, which the two of them find really fascinating because the characters in the show, which came out in the early 2000s, don't describe him that way.

And I think some of that is like a lack of understanding of what those traits signified at the time. You could perhaps hypothesize that maybe the writers of the show are basing this on people who had these traits, but were undiagnosed. And sometimes Monk also just has traits that are exaggerated and make absolutely no sense or have nothing to do with OCD. And it's funny to hear them describe that as well and like kind of break down moments when either Sean Murphy on The Good Doctor is relatable to Lucy or Monty. is very relatable to Jesse and sometimes they'll surprise each other and be like, oh, this part was so stereotypical and the other one will be like, actually that's happened to me. And like, here's the specific example of that. And that's been really cool to hear about too. Nice. That sounds like a lot of fun. That sounds very interesting. Yeah, it's great. Well, I'll go last.

My one more thing is a 2015 video game. So we're just, it's just the episode for 2015 video games. If in 2015 you felt freaked out by Soma, you could then get some friends together and play lovers in a dangerous space time, which is a game that I've been playing kind of a lot of over the last couple of months and just been having so much fun that I just kind of wanted to shout it out really quick. I don't have any groundbreaking thoughts on it or anything, but it's so much fun. Are either of you familiar with this game or have you ever played it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard of it at the time. I never played it, though. Yeah, I think I knew of it but hadn't played it either.

Jason, you've played it cool. So this is a same-screen co-op game, a couch co-op game for up to four players. It came out in 2015, made by a small Toronto studio. Toronto, 2015. What is it with this episode? A small Toronto-based studio called Asteroid Base. And it is sort of, describe how it works. You're on a little spaceship.

This is in a kind of fictional, very colorful kind of Powerpuff Girls future, where there's, you know, you're these little guys and you pick your little guy, kind of like an Among Us character. just a little sort of alien creature, or maybe it looks like a rabbit. There's all kinds of different figures. Each character just or each player picks their little guy. And then there's a spherical ship, or I guess it's a circular ship that flies around the screen. And then on the ship, like the ship is presented in cross section. So there are kind of ladders and little, like different levels within the circle of the ship. And so then there are stations that you run around within the ship from station to station.

So maybe you play with two people, maybe you play with four, but like all of the characters are running around inside of the ship. And like one person gets at the station to drive the ship. So then you like control which direction the ship is moving. And so that's your whole job is just driving. But there are four gun turrets at the four points of the circle, and there are little chairs that you can sit in to fire each of those. But crucially, you can only do one thing at a time.

So if there's only two people, one person can fly while the other person is running around the ship, you know, from turret to turret to shoot enemies that are maybe coming at you from different sides of the ship. But then there are other things. There's a shield that you can also control that only shields part of the ship. So if you have three people, maybe one person's on the shield. And they're kind of controlling the shield as it goes in a circle around the outside of the ship, blocking attacks that get through while another person is on the turret shooting and another person is flying.

I've played a lot with four people, which is really fun. You can get almost all the way covered, but there's always a little more, like there's always a little more that you need to be doing. It's very much designed so that you're always a little bit having to improvise and react. So then the game is basically just making your way through these levels where you have to rescue a certain number of little critters while fighting off various threats. And then once you've rescued enough critters, you unlock the gate to go to the next level. It's very straightforward. This game is just so delightful. It's really approachable. It's very easy to play with all kinds of different people. I played this a bunch with Emily and my nieces when they were up there 15 and 12 and they were having a great time.

But then I was having game night with my D&D group, and one guy couldn't make it at the last minute. So we just kind of were down a D&D player. And we kind of decided, ah, let's just wait for him to keep the campaign going. And we're at my house. So I was like, hey, you guys want to just go play this game? And so then we went upstairs and played together. And, you know, two of my friends had never played it before and just picked it right up. And we were just having so much fun.

It's a great level of co-op chaos mixed with actual teamwork. I've played a lot of overcooked. That's kind of a go-to for couch co-op. That's what it's sounding like to me, yeah. And it's a little bit like that because there's some kind of friction between players. Like you can knock someone out of their chair if you press the X on it. There is a lot of kind of frantic communication. Wait, wait, wait, upgrade this one.

No, no, go over there. Ah, sorry, I'm crashing. Ah, no, you need to get on the shield. Like, there's some of that. But it's not as much of a pressure cooker as overcooked. It's not designed to, like, really make you just fall apart and have to be, like, failing and re-systemate, like, reworking out how you're going to do things, which Overcooked kind of requires, at least for the groups I play with, like, a lot of trial and error.

Oh, yeah, it's hard. You get to a new challenge, and it's hard, and you're like, okay, so we have to figure it. Here's our game plan. You have to talk for a while and then do it. This is much more, you're able to just kind of improvise, and it's not that hard. You can kind of just make your way through it. And it's just delightful. And, you know, it's out on all major systems.

I was actually looking at the developer's website. Their most recent update is that they released this on Amazon Luna. And this was in 2025. They're like, ah, it's so cool. Lover's in a Dangerous Space Time is out on Amazon Luna, which my understanding is that Amazon Luna is not doing great. Is that right? Am I correct in that?

I almost ever hear people talk about it. I have no idea. I don't know. I have no clue. I don't either. I never hear about it either. But my sense is that they're kind of cutting services. So anyhow, I was just looking, I was hoping that this studio, Asteroid Base, a very small studio, was still around in making stuff because this game is so confident and so great.

It looks like it's kind of just been this game for them. But I hope they're working on something new because they are still around and they made this game, which is wonderful. And I hope they're making, yeah, a new one or something like it. But in the meantime, I just wanted to throw it out there. For anyone who is thinking of, you know, has a group of people that you like to play co-op games with like together, couch co-op, this is a really great option. And I'm very glad I played it. So it may be 10 years old, but it's getting a lot of playtime in my house, and I'll probably keep playing it because it's really fun. Right on.

It sounds good. We got a different co-op game to play, you guys. We do. We do. We have some laser pointers to accidentally drop off mountains. We'll be talking about Big Walk next week, which is very exciting because we've been playing it together, and it's a lot of fun. Yeah, we have. First we've got to play some more Big Walk.

First we've got to play some more Big Walk, which I'm excited for. Well, let's go do that, and we can sign off of this podcast. And we'll be back to talk about it next week. Until then, yeah, I will see the two of you on Big Walk Island. See you guys next time. 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

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