Triple Click - Triple Play: Mewgenics

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

Fresh off their interview with Mewgenics co-creator Edmund McMillen, the Triple Click gang dives into the game itself. They talk about the gross-out humor, the brilliant combat, and that truly spectacular soundtrack. (All of my nights, I'm chasin' rats!)One More Thing:Kirk: Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future - Adam Neely, YouTube/NebulaMaddy: Overwatch updateJason: Lost Lambs (Madeline Cash)LINKS:“Eatin’ Rats” by Ridiculon from the Mewgenics OST, 2026 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

I've had my two cats for years, so I know all about their special abilities, like shooting bolts of lightning and commanding sentient butt maggots. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we talk about meugenics, a game about breeding cats and sending them into battle in a cruel world. These cats are magic and also gross, but they can probably survive this, unless they don't. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shire. And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello. Hi.

Hi, it's us again. Hi there. We all made it back here. We all made it chasing rats. We chased the rats and, you know, there was a lot of poop to clean up. We'll get to it. We got so much to get to. But that won't make sense for now, not until later in the episode.

But hey, I love coming back here with you two every week. Did you guys watch the Dice Awards last week? I didn't. And you were there in person, right? right, Jason? I was there in person. I was at the Dice Convention in Las Vegas. And Mike Drucker, a friend of the show, Mike Drucker, who wrote a great book that everybody should read last year. Mike Drucker comes up to me and he's like, hey, I wrote you a line in the awards monologue. I was like, uh-oh. A roast. Always ominous.

And people should look it up online. It's like you could watch the stream, I think, on IGN of Greg Miller's monologue at the Dice Awards. It's quite a shout-up. Whether you've been nominated or not, all of you have done such good work, and we really do appreciate every single one of you. Because no matter where you're from or what your job is in the industry, we all share one thing in common. Being afraid of Jason Shrier. Oh, shoot. I think he's in the room right now, actually. If you don't move, he can't see you. Okay.

And then at the after-party, everybody be quiet. Hey, that's a compliment. I appreciated the shout-up. People came up to me afterwards, and they were like, hey, you got a shout-up. That's kind of cool. That Greg got to do like a host monologue with bits in it. Greg does that every year. Oh, he always does a monologue.

Yeah, I mean, it's not. The reason people don't watch it is because it doesn't have new Hodeo-Kajima trailer. So it's just an awards show. It's good. They say it is better to be feared than to be loved, Jason. So you've achieved the better outcome. Who's they in that quote? Machiavelli specifically, says that as I recall.

Gotcha. That's, by they I mean Machiavely. I think that's one of my cat's names in Mugenics. It could be. We'll get to that. So before we do, though, I think it's worth saying. We really appreciate all of our listeners. We're a listener-supported show.

And we say it every week, but it's true every week. And we mean it every week. And I think about it even when we're not recording because of how meaningful it is. and we make special content just for our listeners. We make bonus episodes for them. And you can get them if you go to maximum fun.org slash join. And this past month we did a beans cast about pluribus, a really cool TV show with Ray Seahorn starring in it.

Cool sci-fi post-apocalyptic show. Very interesting kind of brain threats on display in there that we got way into. And this coming month, our bonus episode is going to be about a documentary called King of Kong, a fistful of quarters that I watched back in 2007. But I found out the guys haven't ever seen. So I'm excited for the three of us to watch that and talk about it on our bonus feed. And how would you get that bonus feed once again? It's maximum fun.org slash join.

Become a member. Support the show and support us and get those warm, fuzzy feelings. and warm, fuzzy bonus episodes. Pretty good. So I am actually going to speak at the Career Day at the school of a friend of mine's kids, the school that they go to. And I will be talking about making podcasts for a living and also making a video game podcast. I'm sure some of them will ask about playing video games for my job.

I made a little like slide deck and one of the slides says, how I do and don't make money. And under due, it says listener donations. And then under don't, it says paid sponsorships, reading ads, brand deals. And then it says anything that feels off. Nice. Nice. Yeah.

So our listener's support makes it possible for us to avoid doing anything that feels off. In quotes. Big air quotes. Can I give you a tip, Kirk, for your talk to them? Just throw in a six, seven and they'll love you. Just throw it in somewhere. I think they might throw me physically out of the golden. No.

It's a good way to make sure the slang term goes away is for older people to start saying it. Kirk called himself an unc a few weeks ago, I remember. That's true. Given that, I don't know, any time I, like I've made references to that kind of thing to my niece who was granted a little bit older than these students, but like the level of eye roll that I get when I engage in slang, even like discussion of slang on those terms, makes me think that maybe I shouldn't try to pull it off, even though it would be funny. And I could report back how it goes if I do it.

If there's sub 10, you can get away with it. It's like 11, 12 is where you start getting into Iroll territory, I would say. You have to really be strong to withstand that level of embarrassment. On their part, they're embarrassed of you, and you just have to withstand how they feel. Right. The cringe emanating from them. The cringe emanating. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, we've been teasing it. Jason, what are we talking about today? Well, speaking of cringe. here is a game full of cringe comedy. So last week we spoke to Edmund Macmillan, the co-creator of a video game called Mugenics, along with Tyler Glale. And since then, the game has become a massive success.

It is now, as of Tuesday, February 17th, that has sold a million copies. It is a smash hit, and I believe Mcmillan's biggest game to date. So you're welcome to... triple click for making that happen. The triple click bump. All are doing, I'm sure. Last week we talked about the development of this game of Mugenics with Emin, if you ever listen to it, you should check it out because this week we are going to talk about

the game itself. We've all been playing it. I have played a ton of it, and it is going to be quite fun to talk about. So Mugetics is a game that is half cat breeding simulator and half strategy RPG. You operate a house. You are a cat lady in a house where you hoard cats and old furniture and your cats live there and they breed and they make cats that are that kind of inherit the traits of their parents. And then as you breed new cats, you send them out on adventures to a whole bunch of different areas from sewers and alleys to increasingly bonkers areas. They get more and more zany as you go.

and they go on these runs that are essentially rogue lights where there are battles and these battles are turn-based strategy like grid-based RPG combat and you can use your cats abilities in increasingly powerful ways to take out enemies to try to break the game by sending objects hurling around and lighting things on fire and moving things with your mind and doing all sorts of bonkers things. It is so fun. It is so addictive. possibly 85 hours, something like that, and seen a good chunk of what this game has had to offer. I am curious to hear your thoughts and get into this. Kirk, why don't you start? What do you think of this game and how much have you played? So I actually haven't played a ton, and it's because this is a game that I think that I admire more than I love. I've had a little bit of a hard time getting into it, largely for aesthetic and narrative reasons.

I think it's really impressive what Tyler and Edmund have pulled off. It's clearly a design feat. It's so massive. It's so variable. It's so well made in a lot of ways, though I do have some gripes about some of the ways that it's made. But it's more that I, being aware of that as I play it, being aware that it is a game that will suck hundreds of hours that took its own creator 200 plus hours to beat makes me actually a little bit skittish of it.

And also, it's just, you know, there are a lot of things competing for my time. And when I sit down to play it, I do find it somewhat off-putting in its general moment-to-moment, like, experience. And while I can see, like, Jason, I can see your smile. Like, there is this, like, sort of glee in how nasty and sort of out of time, it feels. It feels very much like that Renan Stimpy. 2000s era gross cartoon aesthetic. That was never my jam. It's still not. And so the fact that the aesthetics of it and the story aren't pulling me in and making me feel enticed and sort of at home or comfortable and instead sort of push me away and make me feel a little alienated makes it a little

harder for me to super dig into it. Yeah. So a little context here that I mean if the name Mugenics didn't signal this to you, this is a very edge lordy game. It's full of edge lord. humor is the type of game where you're just constantly confronted with like poop and uh vomit and other gross out gross out things um yeah yeah the cat's humming well the cat's humping you can turn off dead fetus is yeah a lot of what appears to be edmund mcimmons style of humor if you played binding of isaac you saw a lot of that stuff too um it's interesting i wouldn't say that it feels mean spirited at all which is an odd thing to say about a game in which your characters can get traits like autism and down syndrome and other kind of mental disease like diseases and like I don't know what's the best

word to to describe that psychological conditions disabilities all sorts of stuff like that but and it's an odd thing to be like I don't know I'm still trying to reconcile with that where it's kind of like it's a game play trait to have down syndrome and I believe with that one in particular your strength is higher but your intelligence is down and something feels a little bit off about that but at the same time it's not doing that in a mean-spirited way. It doesn't feel like it's trying to make fun of people with Down syndrome. And in fact, Evan told us last week that he has two neurodivergent kids and he seems to love them to death and talks about their traits and qualities and stuff like that.

That's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it, Kirk, to your point, is the aesthetic of it all. And that's definitely not for everyone, although it's clearly for a lot of people. Me personally, I don't like, I don't know. I don't mind it. And I'm okay with it because the gameplay itself is so compelling for me. Maddie, what do you think of this game? Yeah, I'm somewhere between you two on it in that I think I do have a higher tolerance for

some edge lord humor. I feel like there's a certain type of like edgy cartoon that was around a lot when we specifically were growing up and that I think probably influenced Edmund. I'm not sure how old Tyler is, but I think this is like a really specific genre of cartoon that existed and like that I can kind of. see the lineage here. Ren and Stimpy. Ren and Stimpy is a great example, although I didn't watch that much of that.

But to just kind of like continue off that thought, I feel like the style of the game is therefore pretty hit or miss for me. Like sometimes the comedy really works for me. And I do think it's funny and other times it doesn't. But I kind of like roll with the punches in the sense that I'm like, well, I'm playing a game called Mugenics. That's sort of an inherent edgy title. but also this is a mean world that the game is set in.

I don't know that the game is mean-spirited, but I think the world that it takes place in is mean and that you are existing in this sort of like apocalyptic landscape of strange places. The cats may have some disabilities that remind us of the ones in the real world, but they also have magical powers and also they, you know,

some of the villainous creatures that you fight will like eat cats and some of them look like cats, cats that eat cats and like do things that real cats in the world that we know wouldn't do. And so there's like a lot of supernatural elements that are deeply disturbing like body horror stuff as well. And then also the various people that you meet in this world are very unsettling. And many of them seem unhappy or abused. And that's like an explicit part of what their backstory is and what they'll happily tell you about. And like that isn't always played for laughs.

It's sometimes just like these people exist in a cruel world. And like that is just a thing. We actually kind of talked about this with cyberpunk 2077 of all comparisons. But I remember kind of talking about being like, you know, hanging out with Johnny Silverhand, like that guy's a real dick. Like you kind of have to be willing to put up with somebody who's going to be shit talking you for the entire experience of playing that game. And that was something that I at times found kind of rough about that game.

And like it's a super different type of roughness here. But that's present in meagenics. And it's, when it hits, I'm like, I'm down for it. But when it misses, I'm often just like, ah, whatever, okay. And then I just keep clicking. I will say, I do agree, Jason, like the game itself, like the strategic part of the game is very much in line with the kind of thing I enjoy. So that kind of helps some of the medicine go down for me.

And we can get into that more. But like, the turn-based strategy and randomization elements scratch a very specific itch that not many games do. And I really like kind of of invaxing my cat teams. So it doesn't mean like, oh, I forgive all the things about the game I don't like,

but it does mean that there's a pretty big chunk of the game that I do like, which is taking my cats into battle and battling with them. Yeah, I'd say it's a very joyful game despite being set in a pretty harsh world. There's a lot of joy in it. It's clearly just,

there's a lot of glee in the way that it rolls. And I don't really have a problem with that at all. It's more, you know, that the game design is so clearly great. It's just, there are other strategy games that I could be playing instead. I mean, for me, it's Karen. I'm still playing that game. And I, you know, when I'm kind of sitting there looking at these two games to play, one of them has, like, blown me away and, like, has pulled me in with its, with everything about it, that being Karen. And, like, I'm like, well, I want to keep playing that, you know? And, like, I've played quite a bit of Mugenics, and I wanted to talk about it on the show. But it's not,

so much like, ah, meugenics, nothing like that. Like, the game is clearly great. Obviously, tons of people like it, and I get it. It's just kind of, it's not my vibe, and when I'm playing it, I'm a little, I'm like, it keeps me at arm's length. I am curious, I get the sense that playing more and more and more of it, that, like, the tonal stuff, it just becomes such a rich experience that you leave some of those initial impressions behind, and it becomes kind of something that you experience on its own terms.

Jason, is that something you've found to be the game? Yeah. think so or you just kind of get used to it or you just kind of ignore it. Kirk, how far are you? I'm in the first act. I'm like six or seven hours in. But like which part of the first act? I'm just curious. I just want to get a sense. What areas have you seen? Yeah, what areas? I'm like the hard mode of the sewers and I've unlocked the junkyard and the, I think the caves. Okay. Yeah. So not very far. Okay. Yeah, yeah. As the loop kind of reveals itself, that's when you start to just kind of get so sucked in that you just want to see how much you can break the game. How much.

far you can push these cats, what are their new things you can discover along the way? The most important thing that happens as you go is you'll unlock more classes. And classes are this game's version of, I don't know, anime made a lot of Magic the Gathering comparisons last week. They're this game's version of like colors in Magically Gathering. Each class has its own set of, I don't know, at least 100 skills that you'll start to randomly get as you build out your team and play around with more classes and they each class like has totally different types of builds that you can get. Like for example, one of the early classes you unlock is called the Druid. And when I first started playing around with that, I was like, man, this is kind of lame.

His only ability is this, or his main ability instead of an attack, it just kind of buffs your characters and it seems kind of weak. But then you start to play around with them a little bit more and you can do so much cool stuff as you unlock more abilities. and then what happens is as you start to learn how breeding works and get the hang of that, which takes a while, don't get me wrong. But as you do that, you start to realize, oh, I can breed characters with like some class abilities and then equip different classes on them and like multi-class and play around with combinations

and all sorts of crazy ways. One of my favorites, I'll just, just to give you a tangible example, is there's a priest's passive ability where any time an enemy just like kills. something, it will take 10 damage. And if you have that ability in your party, whether it's a priest or some other cat who inherited from a priest, you can combine that with like the druid's ability to just be constantly summoning things, or like an item that spawns maggots every time you move in a certain direction or something like that, all sorts of abilities that summon monsters with one health or low health. And then you just have your own guys everywhere getting killed by the

enemies and the enemies are just dying because they're killing your guys super fast and taking 10 damage every time. And it's just this amazing synergy that is just fun to watch unfold. It's like you've built this machine of death with your kitties that is super powerful. And that is the type of thing that is really appealing to me about this game. I'm still discovering new things. I'm still discovering items sets and combinations and how they work. So yes, Kirk, to your point, I think the more time you give this game, the more you invest in it and understand things like that, the more you'll get out of it. Yeah. And like the fact that there's so many items, which you kind of alluded to, those also participate with the different abilities that you unlock. And like, I think Edmund said like,

oh, 750 items, something like that. And that sense of just endlessness becomes part of the charm of it over time as well, is that you just discover more and more absurd items and they can interlock with existing abilities that you have, or in my case, like, between each battle, you'd be like, okay, like, do I, did that work that well? Do I want to re-equip all my cats with a different permutation? Because you can do that between runs or rounds, essentially, whereas with skills, you've made your choice and you have to live with that. So you can, like, continue to iterate as you're going down the line. And also, if you have a really great run, I mean, this is, like, something that I think is really effective about the game, is that you,

kind of get attached to that quad of cats that you have that just like end up having like some really great synergy and like take you all the way down a line to like fight a ton of battles in a row and like succeed in some way whatever you're trying to get past then eventually they will retire and there's like this sort of mechanic where once the cats complete this big battle you can't take them out again and like there's there's like one exception to that that I know of like there's a boss who you you have to use retired cats against. But by and large, that's not the mechanic of this game. Is it once a cat?

Okay. So what you're describing just to get a little more clarity on that is another thing, which is they're called house bosses. And there are a bunch of them throughout the game. And so, yeah, there's incentive to keep your retired cats around because then you can use them against these house bosses. They're kind of the ultimate challenges. Makes sense.

They're tough challenges, basically. And that's part of the gameplay loop is figuring out which retired cats you want to keep. which you want to donate to the MPCs to start unlocking stuff through them and getting perks through them. It's all just kind of this cycle of this flywheel of gameplay that, again, just makes it that one more turn thing, just irresistible. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that can be really rewarding because you feel like you've invested all of your time, but also you, the player, have discovered these synergies and you're rewarded for it, but also it's kind of bittersweet because you're like, okay, these cats are retired, but I don't know, it's like one of the few things about

the game that I feel like has a positive vibe where I'm like, yeah, these cats get to rest now. They've gone through all these cruelties and this horrible, dismal world that they've been trudging through, but they survived. And like now they get to just be grandpas and grandmas in the house and like hang out. Or they get donated to the weird guy in the sewers to do something. Look, it's a cruel world. I'm not going to deny it's a cruel world. It is. It's, it's, it's rough. It's rough for these cats. Yeah, I was struck by something Edmund said when we talked to him that he, in testing, had a lot of players selling him, I want to keep my cats. I really have become attached to them. And his response was, it is so important that you feel that way and that you can't keep them, like, that you have to move on and adapt. That's something that the game seems to do very well, is encourage creative adaptation on the part of the player. That's basically the whole gameplay loop is just this constant. like feeling of, okay, what have I got? How can I make this work?

How can I, you know, like you were saying, Maddie, the fact that you can adjust your items in between rounds means that you're always reacting and adapting to your party. And then, I mean, I can only imagine, like Jason, some of the things that you're saying that you've unlocked, you know, or the things Edmund was talking about with how many items and abilities there are. There's essentially an infinite number of possibilities

and no two runs may ever be the same. So you're both having an incredible experience and you want to savor it, right? You want to kind of hold on to it because it is going to end at some point and you'll keep playing and you'll have other cool experiences. You'll just have to trust that. But this one experience that you're having is one time only. It gets bonkers. I mean, you'll start getting these side quests from Dr. Beanie's who gives you these items that you have to take on different runs and they just like totally change the gameplay in all sorts of different ways. I just did one ridiculous run where I had, so you can also, from the shop, you can eventually,

you'll eventually be able to buy these blank collars and blank collars will duplicate one of your classes every time you go on a run and you could potentially, like, so you could potentially have four wizards or whatever. And so I just had a run where I had a side quest item that made it so only one of my cats would level up. And then at the same time, I had all four of my cats to the same class. class, kind of a mid-game class, I won't spoil the name of it. But these four cats were going out. They're all the same class doing ridiculous damage. Only one of them is leveling up.

Gets up to like level 24 by the time I'm done with the whole thing. It's just a ridiculous, ridiculous run. And yeah, I mean, again, it's very much about breaking the game and the kind of the classic, I don't know, classic systemic emergent nonsense type of mold. Tears of the Kingdom let you do, let you play around with things in all sorts of ways. It's kind of, it's in that same mold going all the way back to, I don't know, immersive Sims and Ultima

Underworld. It's very much about just kind of giving you all sorts of tools to play around with and explore and watch them break things. Occasionally you'll get into something that might seem like it's actually broken the game and then it'll find some fail safe. Like there are a lot of abilities and items and stuff that let you do

knockback which sends characters or enemies flying whenever you do something. And sometimes you'll have knockback between two characters. And so you'll watch like a cat or an enemy just flipping back and forth, bouncing back and forth between two characters until eventually they run out of steam and like stop somehow. But yeah, it's it's one of those games. I'm actually surprised that you're not more into it, Kirk.

I think that if you can get over the aesthetic stuff, I think it's very much your type of game because it's like it's got the grid-based strategy of. I don't know, an X-Com or a fire emblem combined with the systemic stuff that I know all of us love in games. Yeah, it's helped me understand, I think, that story and setting and aesthetics matter a lot to me. I think that it sort of helped me see

that you can make a game that is very much up my street in terms of mechanics, but if I'm not drawn in by the story in the world and the way that it looks and feels, it actually will be a little more challenging for me to play it. I mean, a game like Tactical Breach Wizards, I loved that game because it was so brilliantly designed. It was incredibly clever and, you know, you have a lot of really creative synergies with your party. But I also love that game because it's brilliantly written in my

opinion, you know, to my aesthetic. I found it so funny and charming and ultimately moving. And that actually drew me in. A roguelike like Blue Prince, for me, aesthetically, the feeling of this mysterious house of this kind of austere mystery buried beneath the surface, the stillness and quiet, the way that the music worked, that was a big part of that experience for me, even though I also really liked the mechanics of it and the puzzles. So this has helped me kind of understand that. It's interesting, comparing this with other tactical role-playing games, an element of a lot of those games, or I suppose tactical games, especially in X-com, like a kind of isometric tactical game. An element of those games is savescoming or the possibility of saves coming. Have the two of

you run into the anti-savescumbing feature in this game? Yeah, I was going to bring this up because I was curious. Do you want to describe it, Maddie? It's very funny. Yeah, I mean, it scares me. So I haven't fully experienced it because, like, there was one time, I've been playing this game on my Steam deck a lot. I think Jason and I have both been playing in this way. Yeah, entirely seem like for me. So there was a night where I was like, ah, you know, a middle of a run. whatever, it's not that great of a run. I'm just going to like X out of the game and I'll pick it up tomorrow wherever I was. And when I picked it up, there's a character who yells at you. I can't remember this character's name. Stephen. Stephen. But and he's like, I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to mess with the game file. And I was like, listen, man, I just had to go to bed. I was not trying to save scum. I was simply just trying to X out of my game and. And, I was like, listen, man, I just had to go to bed. I was just trying to X out of my game and. And, pick it up where I was. But this game kind of makes it seem like you can do that, like save, save and exit and come right

back in the middle of a run. But you can't. And I think that like a game like Xcom, I mean, it's funny. We talked about this a lot in our Blake Manor episode and like the idea of saves coming in a game like that. But XCOM is a better example of this because it's also a tactical strategy game, turn-based. Savescoming is like a big piece of the culture around that game. Like I, especially if you name all the characters after your friends or whatever, you're like, I got to save all my soldiers.

I got to make sure they're safe. But in this game, it's very clear that a run is a run. And I've gotten used to just putting the game in suspend mode overnight when I go to bed and just picking it up from there. Like I've had to just deal with that because you can't save and close it. That's just how it works. You're not supposed to do it. Well, you can one time per run. He'll let you do it for free.

And then after that, he'll punish you. clearly I was I never wanted to face the punishments whatever they were well but I mean you can still do it one time run without having to worry about the punishment so you don't have to worry about it's gonna do it and also if you like screw up in a battle or something you could do at one time well and if you if you try to save scum too many times he eventually just like takes over the run for you and plays the game for you he says you can't be trusted with yeah yeah and then it'll be AI playing as you against the enemy it's extremely funny there's an item in the game that is called AI that I let one of my cats wear. And then I was so mad because I was like, no, it's not letting me play as my cat anymore. It, like, it gives you a bunch of stat increases, but, like, you don't get to control your cat. I immediately took it off after that run. I was so mad. So, like, that would definitely bother me if Stephen, quote, unquote, took over my run.

This is why I didn't want to do it. When characters in this game tell me they're going to punish me, this game is so intense that I figure they really will. I'm like, I don't know what's going to happen to these poor cats if I don't protect them. I'm the only one who's going to be there for them. So I generally like this game's approach to permanence. I think that's a cool and different thing. And it's in line with at least the philosophy that Edmund articulated on the show, that he wants you to just commit to the play through, go through it, get to the next one.

Cats die and they really die. I appreciate all that stuff. I think that's really important. Yeah. I do kind of wish there was a way to, I don't know if it's preview and undo or have a little bit more flexibility. with like how I input my commands. So I have some issues with the controls on this game. I like playing it on Steam Deck.

This game is great on Steam Deck. It looks good on Steam Deck. The UI seems designed for Steam Deck. It's so great. I cannot figure out a control scheme that works for me. Like I've been kind of building one slowly where I'm using the sort of the triggers or the mouse buttons and I'm using the track pads as the mouse and then trying to like map keyboard shortcuts to the face buttons.

And that's okay. I find it to be kind of imprecise. There is crucially a button that allows you to shift to a tactical view of the battlefield that shows you everything in a simplified way. So you can see enemy pieces, almost like a board game or something. Without that, man, I don't know. There's so much junk all over the screen. There's so much stuff happening everywhere that it can be really hard to even tell.

Like, I'll kill every enemy. And then there will be some maggots somewhere that I haven't killed and I don't even know where it is. So it's nice that it has that option. Yeah, you could just hold why if you're putting in the controller. Or the top button, top face button. And having played this game also on PC with a mouse and keyboard, it's way better. Like it is a much better experience, in my opinion anyways. I found it much smoother.

And I wish there were some just a better or a different kind of controller setup, in part because with the controller I am much more likely to accidentally input things, to just waste an attack that I didn't realize I was about to do, send an enemy, you know, send a cat to a square I didn't mean to send them to. And there's no undo button or failing that, like, ability to preview. I mean, this is one of Tactical Breach Wizards' great innovations or one of its great ideas, is that you're always, you have this time manipulation so you can play out a turn and see how it plays out and then rewind and try again. And that really appeals to my tactical brain. I really like to try a bunch of different things.

And it's one of the reasons why in some of these games I like saves coming. It isn't so much that I want to undo a mistake is that I want to just try everything. I really like the feeling of looking at a really impossible situation in XCOM where, man, one of my soldiers is getting killed and then just thinking, okay, how can I, can I figure out a way through this keeping everybody alive? And I find that really pleasing. Obviously, this game does not have to do that. It's not trying to do that, and that's fine. But I do find that with the accidental inputs, the fact that there's no real way to cancel an accidental input is frustrating for me, at least at the point I met.

in the game. Yeah. So what's different about this game compared to some of the other tactical RPGs that you mentioned that we played in that we talked about on the show from Xcom to Fire Emblem to Final Fantasy Tactics, to tactical breach wizards of course, is that all of those games have a little bit more at stake in their individual battles and their battles are a little bit longer. With this game, you're doing a lot more battles over the course of the game. I probably played through several hundred battles at this point, probably even upwards of a thousand. Because each run, you're going through like between, I don't know, five and 25 battles. And they're on small maps.

They can be cleared relatively quickly, depending on how good your team is and how powerful the enemies are. Each enemy is unique and has its own unique abilities, but you learn them. You can learn them as you're going pretty quickly. and kind of learn the language of the game, to an extent where you don't have to spend that time. And I think that would be a drag on the game if it was encouraging you to do that sort of thing

to be like experimenting and then rewinding and then experimenting again. Right. And I do want to be clear that I don't want the game to do that. I know I said that already, just to say that again. I'm just saying, like, I like that, but not that this game should do that. Yeah, I'm saying the reason that it isn't in here is because it's meant to be a much faster-paced sort of thing.

And it's also, I think, one of the mentality that you have to have when you're playing this game is to just learn to let go. It's always annoying when you lose a good run, especially if you get really far and you lose a good run. And it's like you played an hour and you're like, man, that sucks. I just lost all that progress or something. But it's the cats are so disposable. You get so many constantly. You're constantly just getting new items and gold and food and all this other stuff that it's really not a big deal if you lose a run.

As opposed to, again, some of those other games in Xcom, if you lose a character. It's a much, much bigger deal than if you lose a cat in this game. Yeah, I think that that's true and even feels in line with the amount that I've played, the experience that I've had. However, I do think that if you are losing a cat or just making mistakes due to interface sloppiness, like due to the fact that the interface and the control scheme are just not, they're suboptimal in my experience anyways. it just feels like gumming it up, trying to tell the cat to do one thing and it does another.

Like that's just kind of a bad feeling. And you rarely lose a run because of that. But the fact that that's a factor at all is just a little unfortunate given that with a cleaner interface, it could just be better. Yeah, you'll get used to it. I also, I think the game isn't on consoles yet. It's coming to consoles eventually. I think they'll do a much better controller interface when that happens. Right now, the controller interface is, yeah, mediocre.

or it's mostly like you're controlling a mouse with the joystick and trying to press things. And yeah, not ideal. Yeah, it doesn't feel like it's meant for that. You know, it's funny, Kirk. I feel like the thing you're describing is actually more my issue in the kind of house building part of the game. Oh, it's certainly an issue there too. Where that's the part of the game where I would say I do have some issues with the design

and the tediousness involved with like, this is kind of like when you're back at your home, There's sort of a base building mechanic in this game where you have all your cats in the house, you level up the house by getting more rooms, you buy furniture for the house to like kind of increase the stimulation and fun that the cats have and you have to like keep an eye on their emotional well-being and also ensure that the right cats are in the right rooms to be breeding with each other because you're a meugenicist folks, just like the title says and you want your cats to have the right qualities bred into them. So like that stuff, I've played a lot of games that are of that genre. And having those controls be finicky stands out to be so much here as like a problem for me. And I wish that that stuff was stronger because like having to click, like you have to click on poop to clean it up. But like as near as I can tell, there's no like better way to do that that gets unlocked later. Like, it's just always tedious and it remains so forever. And cleaning up cat poop in real life, I'm not going to sing its praises.

It's quite tedious in real life. But, like, usually in a game at some point, these things become easier. And also, like, the process of, like, deciding who to donate your cats to, there's just something, there's, like, a few too many clicks involved or something there is, has a bottleneck. And I'm no UI designer, but I can tell just from the player's side that, like, there's, there's just too much clicking involved in order to get from one task to the next in a way that I often was just like, God, I just want to get back to the battle zone. I don't want to deal with this. And I was surprised I felt that way because I actually kind of like a life simulation game,

typically. Yeah, it's kind of an issue with surfacing information that the game tends to have. There aren't, this is UX stuff that is way above my ability level, but I can, I know it when I see it. And playing with a mouse and a keyboard in the house is way better, I found, because you can just really easily click on a cat and drag them around. But even then, it's hard to access the information about a cat or to just see all of your cats, like to just get an overview, which is something I find in the field as well. There's some UI stuff that could probably be fixed down the road

or could be improved. And maybe. But sometimes, like, there's a lot of information in this game, and sometimes it can be hard to find it. So a couple of things worth noting, One is that on the controller, at least if you press X on a cat, you'll see their stats. So that's a helpful shortcut. Two is that as you give more kittens to tink, you'll unlock things that are very helpful when it comes to cat breeding, including family trees and little helpful icons that you can assign to cats to keep track of them better.

Like you can put a star over their heads or a circle over their heads or all sorts of other icons. still doesn't make it that great the overall interface, and it can be tedious. But it gets better and you get more accustomed to it in general, I would say. That's good to know. Can I shout out the music for this game? Yeah, can we? It's so great. Unbelievable.

I cannot wait until the game awards and they have to play one of these songs. Tasty legs and crispy thighs on my mind. All of my days. Yeah. Or wears that. It's going to read that one. Oh, my God. It's so good.

Chase on, grab them, fry. So tasty, tasty, tasty, tasty legs. So tasty, tasty legs. The songs are incredibly good. So the music in this game is by Ridiculon, which is a duo, John Evans and Matthias Bosse. They also do the music for The Binding of Isaac, which is not a game I really got into, though I know people love the music for that. Man, the music is so good.

It's this kind of rockabilly. like psych rockabilly I suppose yeah kind of like 90s swing it's got that kind of modern sound to it it's like ironic swing which is why I say 90s swing and not 30s swing it's a little like squirrel that zippers or Big Bad Voodie Daddy put through a kind of

cat blender yeah yeah Dick cheese that's a good that's a good call I'm taking that and in my dreams I'm the king of cats he's a king of cats It kind of sounds a little like psychonauts. I think that Peter McConnell's music has a kind of similar tremolo guitars and wacky,

wacky since it's so fun. And I think the way that they've arranged it is just brilliant that you play through an area. And the music never changes. The stems are essentially the same, but it grows more and more complex as you go. And especially when you're playing through an area for the first time, once you know how it works, you know you're going to get to the boss. And then the singing will begin. And you're going to get some completely ridiculous song that will play during the boss fight

where you will be laughing at the lyrics while trying to stay live against the boss. What's your business on my street? So good. It's like, you know, for any complaints I have about other aesthetic properties of this game, the music is just like a total triumph, in my opinion. I've never seen anything like that before where it's like you're getting the kind of the background music and it feels like background music. And then it turns into an actual song with lyrics.

when you get to the end of the run. Like, that's so clever. Actually, Super Giant Games have done that kind of thing. Hades 2, I don't know if you two made it to the Sirens ever, but the Siren boss level did something similar to that. One going all the way back to Bastion. Oh, sure, yeah. When Bastion first did that and they sang a song and you realized you had been hearing

the pieces of the song, it was this revelatory moment. So it's been done. Yeah, I could see that being an influence. I think, you know, Super Giants certainly made a really wonderful rogue like that we talked about quite a bit. So it's entirely possible. It's a great move. And the music is just so fun.

I like it. It's one of my favorite things about the game. Yeah, it's great. It's wonderful. And I feel like that sense of humor and lightness, I wish some of the rest of the game were tuned just a little bit lighter. Like the dial just was turned up slightly. But yeah,

the music is a big part of like the kind of humor that I really enjoy in the game where it's like, yeah, this is a cruel world, but we're kind of laughing through it and dancing through it as it were. It really works for me. A couple of other things. One is that that first act might be the gnarliest in terms of aesthetics. You're going through an alley and sewers in a cemetery and gross spider caves. Act two gets a little brighter and no less grosser in some ways.

But also, I mean, in Act two, it starts off with the desert. And you go into other areas that are a little bit. lusher. There's one area that's like full of trees and stuff. It's a little bit nicer to look at than some of the Act 1 areas. Act 3 truly goes off the rails in

some ways that might be offensive to people. I guess, I don't know, we'll see. I'll let people that be the judge of that. The other thought is that something we haven't really mentioned in terms of the comment that I think makes this game really special is

the mechanics get so clever and creative, especially as you're fighting bosses. And they really, the designers, and Tyler, really, like, eeked every possible bit of fun out of the gameplay here. And some of the bosses, just like the tactics that you have to use against them, the techniques that the surprises and mechanics that they have are incredible. There's a ghost called a Dibuk at the end of the Boneyard. That's the boss of the Boneyard.

and Dibbock is like a in Jewish mythology. It's like a spirit. It's like a ghost and it brings bad luck. And it dodges all of your attacks and you have to find ways to like trap it in a corner to like take it out or use area effects on it. And then when you kill it, it haunts one of your party members because it's like, hey, this is a ghost. It's haunting you now. Now you have to take out your own party member to get it. And that's just the tip of the iceberg as far as like surprises and fun kind of boss mechanics that you'll fight.

And then on top of that, every enemy has their own unique mechanic and set of abilities that you have to learn how to deal with. Some of them you can only take out from behind. Some of them you can't use projectiles on them because they'll bounce them back and just slaughter your party. Some of them will spawn new enemies that then grow up and turn into more enemies. And if you don't figure out how to crowd control quickly, you're going to die. It's just really, really good. and I mean, this is the reason that I've played so many hours of this game is that the battles are just so fun and so satisfying and rewarding to finish that, yeah, I'm just having a boss. Still, still playing.

Sill was just doing a run before we recorded this. So 80 plus hours in, I'm still hooked. Yeah, it does get really hard as well. I feel like that's worth noting. Like, I definitely, in Act 2, it gets really, really difficult. I may or may not make it to act three. Yeah, it is. It does. It gets, you know, I hit like a brick wall and I was like, man, this game is getting really frigging hard. And then surpassed it in part by finally getting the hang

of breeding because as you breathe. I feel like that's where I'm at is that I need to. Yeah, you should try to figure it out and like find, figure out like how breeding works and like isolate two of your best cats into one room and see if you can set up a breeding room and put all the stimulation objects in there. Because once you get that and you see, start to see the kind of fruits of your labor, for lack of a better phrase, I think you'll find like, oh, okay, now I have a much more powerful group of cats that can actually get through Act 2 a little more easily. But yeah, that desert area, especially in Act 2 is a real, a real, it's a barrier. Yeah, it's because you can't heal properly. Yeah, that one is annoying. Yeah,

it's like a desert, you know? Sure is. All right, that's me, Genix. Why don't we take a break and go breed some cats and then we'll be back with one more thing. Hi, I am Jordan Cruciala and I host Feeling Scene. I'm here with Maximum Fun member of the month, Khalil Goodman. Hi, Khalil. Hi, Jordan. Thank you for having me. So great to see you. I gotta know what's made you feel seen. I figure you've thought about this if you've listened to the show a bunch.

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And we are back, Kirklandy. It is time for one more thing. Maddie, what is yours? So I played the huge update that came to Overwatch, which it's just called Overwatch now. And that's part of the huge update. Drop the two. There's no two anymore.

It's cleaner. Exactly. Blizzard dropped the two. I feel like there, maybe it's because it's the Mugenics episode, but I feel like we could be making a poop joke about that. I don't know. Anyway, the two is gone. There's also a cat in this game now.

I did not intend the synergy to happen. But here it is. There's a jet pack cat in the game. and it completely changes everything about how the game works. And I know that even though I haven't played this game in many years, I can still tell that this is a really big change. And I've been talking to friends about the cat. Wait, hold on.

Sorry, your one more thing is Overwatch update, but you haven't played the update. No, I've played it. Oh, okay. Oh, you're saying now this is your first time playing in many, many years. In a while. I'm sure I talked about it on the show the last time I've played. played it. But boy, so my friend Nico Deo actually came on the show and talked about Overwatch and she's been playing it this whole time and along with some other friends of

ours. And like, luckily I have people in my life who've continued playing Overwatch this whole time, who I can play with. And we did have a five-person team of four people who are really good at Overwatch and me. And I think that's probably the ideal way to get back into Overwatch is to have four people who really know the game. But let me talk about the Jetpack Cat, because I do think that this signal is kind of a design change, or at least I hope so, because Overwatch, Deco talked about this a lot on the episode that she was on, but kind of to really broadly generalize some of the points she was making as somebody's been playing it this entire time.

Overwatch kind of started out as a game that had like a whole lot of fun, splashy super abilities that, you know, intersected with each other and sometimes resulted in surprising plays and combos. And that was what was kind of fun and interesting about it. was that every character was super different. And then over time, it became much more of an esport and a business proposition for Blizzard. And the design of the game changed accordingly. And more and more characters were added that were kind of made with an eye towards competitive

viability. And now it's in kind of a weird place. Like the Overwatch League is no more essentially. And who is to say what the competitive e-sports future of Overwatch is at this time? And that's kind of the context in which this. big update is coming out. There's five new characters and you could play an Overwatch team with five players. So you could have an entirely new set of characters on a team, which is an interesting way to put out an update in and of itself to be like you could have a

team that is entirely five brand new characters. And to also introduce this character whose name is Jetback cat, that is a character's name. This character is a cat that rides a jetpack and it can just pick anybody up off the battlefield and throw them over the edge. Like you know how Kirby can like suck people in and Super Smash Brothers and like spit them out over the edge. That's kind of like the energy that Jetpack Cat is bringing to an average match. And Jetpack Cat can also pick up their teammates and drop them somewhere else on the field. And like ideally you're not playing with strangers and you're playing with your friends. So you can coordinate with whoever's playing as the cat and make sure that you're getting dropped in the right spot.

But mostly, I usually play as a tank character. And the tank is going to get targeted by that cat. every freaking time. So I got picked up by the enemy cat a lot and I got dropped off the edge of a cliff a lot. And it is nuts. It makes the game feel like Super Smash Brothers. And it's pretty wild. This seems way too overpowered. So I think it's really fascinating. And I'm curious. Is this an altar? Is this like a regular ability? You can just pick people up and drop off. So people are playing and it's like cat, the cat, here comes the cat? Is that kind of how it changes? Yeah, it's pretty wild. So I feel like it does signal like a change in how the game works, like in the sense that it's goofy again.

Like Overwatch is goofy fun again. But also like to kind of counterpoint the cat, it's just a cat. And like if you can click on heads, you can click on a cat. You can still kill this cat. Like the cat may be floating around, but that doesn't mean you can't shoot at the cat. So like that is the way you get out of this. If the cat is picking you up and you don't want to be picked up, you can shoot at the cat. That is an option.

And your teammates can shoot at the cat. Like there's still ways. to get out of this. It's not, it's not insurpassable. But it is such a massive change to gameplay that it's kind of fascinating to me that Blizzard has chosen to do something like this. And I think it's actually a good thing. I like games that are a little goofy. And I think it's kind of fun to introduce something that maybe kind of lightly breaks the game and isn't really e-sports forward and competitive viability forward and is more like in the name of fun. And there will always be people, you know, there's like kind of a banning system in Overwatch where like in competitive play people can like vote to ban characters and like I'm sure that people are banning the Jetpack cat in those in those echelons of play I don't exist in those echelons I'm playing unranked every time so in an unranked match I think you can just have fun with this and like enjoy the goofiness of it um that's what I did anyway and I think it's interesting and cool to see them having a character who's so different nice very cool seems like Overwatch is in a good place

I think it could be. I will say I tried like some of the other characters too and I thought they were pretty fun. So, but this is again coming from someone who is like coming back to Overwatch after a long time. But I think that's probably a lot of people's experience right now is that they're seeing the cat in they're like, I want to check out this new stuff and see these other four characters that they've added. And it's a good time to go back and see what's up. Kirk quits here one more thing. My one more thing is a video essay that I watched. I watched it on YouTube. It's also on Nebula, the creator-focused video network. But I think most people will probably see this on YouTube. It is by Adam Neely, who is a musician and kind of one of the sort of preeminent video essayists in the music space. He's a fantastic bass player, really great musician, makes really, really good videos about all kinds of things. This one is called Suno AI Music and The Bad Future. And he just released it, I think like a week ago. And it is really great, and I highly recommend it. I recommend it to the two of you.

I think you would both really like it, and I recommend it to listeners as well. Even if you're not following AI music specifically, if you have just been thinking about AI at all, which is probably pretty much everyone out there, if you are trying to figure out what you think of it, how to approach this age of AI that seems inevitable. I emphasize scenes as I am increasingly resistant to techno-determinism in all its forms, but it can feel as though we are being told it is just going to happen. We need to figure out how we feel about it and just for our own sake. But you can figure out how you feel about it, and that can lead you to do different things and to live differently. And that's part of what this video is about. So as I mentioned, Adam is a fantastic musician.

It also just puts a lot of work into his videos. This is a very well-researched video. in which he angles it more or less as a direct response slash takedown to Mikey Schulman, who is the CEO of Suno AI. Do the two of you know Suno AI in this company? I've heard of it, but I don't tell me more. Okay. Suno AI.

Suno is one of a few different music AI companies. Suno is valued at a couple billion dollars or something now. They've been outraising money for a long time. They are now beginning to ink deals with the majors, with Sony, UMG, etc. Warner, and get licensing deals with the major labels so that all the music that they stole can now legally be used to train their models. And Suno, I would say, is the highest profile.

It is pretty remarkable what it can do on a technological level. You can just put in a prompt. Write me a song about my cat. Make it sound like this and this and this. Put these in as the lyrics. And it'll crank out on a bunch of stuff. stuff for you. And it sounds like AI music, but it's at times remarkable how quote-unquote believable it sounds, how real it sounds. And this has led to, you know, a lot of discussion and a lot

of, I think, really important discussion about what this means, what this means for the art. I'd say of all of the, I mean, I guess it's something similar as happening in the world of visual media, specifically illustrators, have seen something very similar. But, you know, video games, movies, these AI generators are not quite to the point where they can create believable, you know, complete art. And Suno really can. So, you know, that's why we're seeing so much AI music on Spotify and everywhere else. Like, it is just becoming rampant. And there are so many people who are beginning to work with Suno. There are, you know, established producers, Timbaland is one. He gets, Adam talks about him in the video, who are saying, well, this is just coming. So you

You either have to learn how to use this stuff or you're going to get left behind. So Adam kind of takes that as a given and mostly is addressing Mikey Schulman, the CEO of Suno, and his general view of music, which I find to be completely whack. That is my unscientific term for how I think Mikey Schulman thinks of music. I think he thinks of music like a tech businessman, which makes sense, because that is what he is. In addition to being a musician, I will give him the benefit of the doubt that I think he thinks he is doing a good businessman. thing, democratizing music or whatever the hell they tell themselves they're doing. They're not. I think that it's part of a broader, pretty unfortunate movement that does not seem aware of all of the dark undercurrents pushing it forward. Isn't he the guy who said at some point,

like last year, he was like, it's too hard to make music. People don't enjoy the process of making music. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's really funny. That was what we first put him on my radar. is music is too hard and that's why people don't like making it. I remember that. I love it. Making music is hard, but that's the fun of it, right. And this is a big thesis that is explored in this video, I think, really well. The question of speed and ease and impatience versus patience.

There's a great discussion with a guest who comes on and talks to Adam for a number of very interesting and illuminating conversations, particularly about Aristotle's view of like friendship and flatterers. There's a really great thing about flatterers and collaboration, like how people will say, oh, this AI is like, it's like a co-writer. And I bounce my ideas off it and then it'll give me some new ideas. And I think, oh, that's really interesting. I wouldn't have thought of it that way and it's really helpful. And Adam makes the observation of basically, you know, I have a lot of, he says this,

this is true for me too, I suppose, I have musicians that I work with. and we have really interesting creative relationships. You know, they're kind of, they're like friends. And they're my friends. He's like, but at the same time, when you have a relationship with a creative partner, there's push and pull, there's conflict. And you have to work out that conflict. And that's a big part of creating with someone,

where creating with an AI removes that entirely. And then there's a great discussion with this ethicist about who's, I'm forgetting her name, but she's great. Bing! Her name is Dr. Mariana Noway. she is a virtue ethicist and a platonic scholar. So that is Mariana Noah, who really does add a lot to this video. Bing!

About flatterers and how Aristotle warns about flatterers, because a flatterer is not a true friend. A flatterer is not someone who will tell you when you've gone too far, or when you're making a mistake or when they don't agree with you. They won't push you. They're just kind of trying to ingratiate themselves. Anyway, this is like a very minor part of the video that I just thought was kind of cool.

Man, it goes all over the place, And interestingly enough, Shulman has said so many revealing and to me damning things. That quote about music being too hard to make doesn't even turn up in this video, I don't think. There are like a thousand other quotes from him, and he didn't even need to use that one, which I thought was really funny. Because I was expecting it to be the first quote since it was the first time I ever heard of him. So anyways, I could go on and on. You should just watch the video, though. I can't summarize it as well as, you know, Adam actually presents it in the first place.

just watch it, and I would make two recommendations in addition to watching it. One is read the Google Doc that he is assembled with all of his sources. It's actually really amazing. I mean, he's done a ton of research, and you can just look at them all and then go do further reading on some of the things he's talking about. Because it goes in a ton of different directions, this video, a lot of really interesting philosophy that's worth looking into. Also, there is a talk featuring Tressie McMillam-Kottom, the academic and thinker, who is really awesome. and I recommend watching that video. It's linked in the notes of this video and Adam references it in the video,

but it's really cool and kind of worth watching on its own. So the video is kind of a whole world unto itself. But really, I highly recommend this for anyone out there, even if you're not a musician, if you don't normally watch people like Adam Neely, it's really approachable. You could watch it with your kids. If you're like talking to your kids about AI,

I know my nieces have been chewing on it at school. There's a lot of people having a lot of conversations about this stuff. It's a really great framework for like how to view this mode of thinking that is driving this push toward AI and how to push back against it, not just practically, but like with your own philosophy, how to come up with what your values are and kind of identify them in contrast to the values that some of these AI companies and in particular, Suno, those values that they would want to push onto you and tell you are virtues, even when they definitely aren't. not. And they kind of inarguably are not. So really, just a thought-provoking and wonderful video. Again, that is called Suno AI Music and The Bad Future. It's on YouTube and Nebula. It's very easy to find. It's made by the great Adam Neely, and I really recommend it. Cool. I'll check it out. AI, man. A-I. Watch this video. I'd love to know what the two of you think of it. It will give you a lot of

concrete things to think about. What's funny about the whole our current climate, I I don't know, whatever, like situation is that AI was controversial enough, and that was before the memory chip crisis started. And when the switch two price goes up and like all the consoles are impossible to get, just imagine. Imagine the backlash and what that's going to look like. God. We'll get to find out.

Yeah. We will. We get to live through it. We get more into this. I've been, I like have been playing around with chat GPT and trying to use it for things. And it is so wrong, so often that it is like really hard to find. I just don't understand how people use it in their workflows regularly, given how wrong it is. Thank you for calling me out on that. I was wrong.

Yeah, exactly. I don't find the correct answer. You're right. You're right to call me out. You get it. And then more and more recently, I've been like opening up LinkedIn and I see just these giant posts with all of the tells. And I'm just like, why is this here? I'm just blocking people left. Have you seen the, you know, TLDR? Have you seen AIDR? That's good. That's good. My one more thing is a very human piece of art called Lost Lambs, which is a book by Madeline Cash. Just came out a few weeks ago, a very buzzy book in the literary world.

And that is for a good reason, which is that it's very funny and very human and heartfelt and meaningful. It is a book about a family in a small town, which I don't think ever is named, but it's in the United States. and it's about the dysfunction surrounding this family. The husband and wife are their marriage is falling apart, and they've just talked about potentially having an open marriage. They have three daughters, the oldest of which has started dating somebody who is nicknamed War Crimes Wes.

The middle is involved in an online like AOL-in-Semessage-style relationship. with someone who may or may not be an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist. And the youngest is too smart for her own good and keeps getting into trouble by doing absurd, preposterous things over the course of the book. And this book is about their lives. It switches between them. It's also about the lives of the other people in the town, including a bizarre tech billionaire who may or may not be trafficking people.

And it all comes to it. the characters all just kind of have these ridiculous convergences, and it ends on a very heartfelt note about family and dysfunction and what it all means. And I really loved it. I think it's a really good book, and I highly recommend it. Shades of Long Island Compromise, the other book about a dysfunctional family that I read a couple years ago and raved about. not quite as good as that, I would say, but, but, but, but up there and definitely plays around with similar themes. Yeah, very high bar. But yeah, I really enjoyed it. Really fun to read. Really breezy read, really quick, quick and easy read, I would say. And also has a lot of interesting religious themes. The group Lost Lambs refers to this kind of like, this church group of,

of people, or just kind of like a social working group. And yeah, it's a good one. I recommend it. Lost Lambs, Madeline Cash, good book. Nice. Jason, I'm reading King Sorrow right now. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, you are. It's really good. I'm up to the part on the plane. I'm wondering if that was the part you were talking about. That's the part I told you. Yeah, the other day, it's my favorite section. It rips really hard. Really good. It's very good.

I got to check it out. Jason, do you think Disfunctional Families is like your favorite genre of book? It's good. It's fun. There's something fun about like a group of, like a bunch of people who each just have their own kind of crazy anecdotes and flaws and problems. But they have to spend time together. It's also like a genre that is, it's a genre that's maybe overrepresented in American literature. It's true. Well, I think really, I mean, it's just a very well-populated genre.

Well, America's a dysfunctional family when you think about it, man. Well, I was going to say, if you think about it, all books are about dysfunctional families. It's just like sometimes they're not related by blood. So true, so true. A lot of most stories about dysfunctional families, whether it's, family, like related families or found families. I guess if I'm even going back like to Greek tragedies and Shakespeare, it's like, those are all just as structural families.

So I take it back. It's not a genre. It's just the story of the human condition. It's just everything we do. It is. It's just humans. I was renting about Sears a few weeks ago. Yeah.

That book about the witch, Searse from Greek mythology. And I mean, that entire story is, sorry, Circe. And that entire story is a dysfunctional family. True. Yeah, I mean, that's why Hades and Hades too are interesting. Dysfunctional families. I mean, Mugenics is all about a dysfunctional family. Sure.

That is sometimes inbred, which is a whole mechanic. Yep, yeah, yeah, that's true. All right, that is that for this week's episode. Stay tuned and we'll all be back next week. I will see both of you 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 maximum fun.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 artist-owned shows Supported directly

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