Triple Click - Triple Play: Mina The Hollower

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

It's finally here: after six years of development, Yacht Club's Mina the Hollower has arrived. And it's a winner. Kirk, Maddy, and Jason burrow into the crevasses of this new Game of the Year contender, which smashes Zelda, Castlevania and Bloodborne to great success. One More Thing: Kirk: Subnautica 2 Maddy: Doomguy by John Romero Jason: The New York Knicks LINKS: Jason on Yacht Club Games’ “make-or-break” moment Jason on Bungie planning layoffs after ending Destiny 2 Jason on the Subnautica 2 drama Clips from the Mina The Hollower OST composed by Jake “Virt” Kaufman Jake Kafuman’s 8-bit recreation of “Freddie Freeloader” from Kind of Blue And his  collaboration with Tommy Pedrini  on the Final Fantasy Opera House sequence for OCRemix 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

Meet Mina. She's a mouse. She's a hollower. She's an inventor. She's an adventurer and warrior. But to her friends, she's just memes. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're talking about Mina the Hollower,

Yacht Club's fantastic new retro style action game that our own Jason Schreier found to be so nice. He played it twice. Let's get into it. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello. Hello.

Oh, it's us again. Here we are. Here we are. Rained out Memorial Day weekend. What a bummer. Totally. Plans in place to do a barbecue. I know.

Had to spend all of it inside playing the game we're going to talk about today. Terrible. Terrible news for me. The weather in Portland was beautiful for most of the weekend, so I had a lot of lovely barbecues and hangs. And then it kind of rained on Monday, but that was okay because we were all ready for it by then. It rained almost the whole time. time for us. I can't quite relate. It was very nice here. We love to talk about the weather

here on Triple Click. And if you would like to support our weather discussions, if you'd like to hear more about what the weather on the coast is like, you can become a member and support the creation of Triple Click. Become a member at maximum fun.org slash join. That is the network of which we are a part, a proud part. We love maximum fun. And yeah, we love all of our maximum fun. And yeah, we love all of our fun members who support our show and make it possible for us to keep doing this thing. If you join, you get a lot of bonus episodes of Triple Click, like years worth. So many bonus episodes. We hear from people pretty regularly who will just go back and listen to old bonus episodes because they joined recently.

And those are a lot of fun. A lot of them are spoiler casts about games that we played or movies that we watch. Though we cover a lot of other stuff in the bonus feed as well. We kind of do fewer games. as we call them, spoiler episodes now than we used to, and just talk about all kinds of things. Lately, we've been covering The Sopranos, an amazing TV show that we just sort of kind of started watching and talking about. And we're up through season three of that show, recapping it sporadically in the bonus feed.

And we've also been watching a lot of documentaries about video games, which have been really cool. Indie Game, the Movie, the King of Kong. You can hear our thoughts on those in the bonus feed, too. And this month we're going to be doing something kind of like that. We're going to be watching a documentary that is, in fact, a mockumentary called Players, which is a fictional documentary about a fictional e-sports team, focusing really on a couple of fictional e-sports players. And it is a lot of fun.

It's very funny. It's made by the people who made, oh, wait, what's the Netflix show called? American Vandal. Thank you. It's made by the team who made American Vandal, the two-season mockumentary for Netflix, which is pretty tremendous. And it's really just as good. It was a little underwatched when it came out, and it's kind of hard to find. But you don't have to have seen it to enjoy this bonus episode that we're about to record.

I think it'll be cool for anyone who's interested in esports, League of Legends, just a lot of this stuff. It's a great story. It'll be really fun to talk about. Anyways, lots of good stuff in the feed. Become a member, maximum fun.org, dot org, slash join, support our show. so much to everyone who already does so. Bing!

One more thing that I wanted to add here that came in after we recorded. Last week, I talked about mixtape and my complex reactions to it. I generally liked it, but there was this one creative decision I didn't really like, which is that there are songs presented in the game as real songs that are actually fictional songs, and it's not clear where those songs came from. So just this morning on Wednesday, I finally heard back from the game's PR about those mystery songs that I'd been unable to identify. they clarified that they were all composed in-house by the game's composers at Beethoven and Dinosaur,

the studio that made the game. I had allowed for that possibility, though my uncertainty about it, the fact that it's not clear when you're playing a game, was definitely a big part of my problem with how they approach the whole thing. So now we know where the music is all from, though I'm still unclear on why the songs aren't accounted for in the game's credits, given the way that they're presented in game. I followed up to ask about that. We'll see what they say. but in the meantime, just wanted to provide an update since I just talked about the game last week.

All right, on with the episode. Bing! All right, well, we're going to talk about a really good video game today, but first we're going to talk about another really good and maybe sometimes not so good video game that I think we just kind of have to talk about. Jason, why don't you take us away on both topics? I saw you losing yourself in the construction being like, oh, God, I was holding on to it for dear life.

You shouldn't have done that. Well, it is a video game. So last week, last week the folks at the game studio bungee announced that Destiny 2 is coming to an end. And this marks the stopping of new updates for Destiny, the Destiny franchise after 12 years. It's essentially been going strong, getting stuff every single year, if not more often, since 2014. And since Destiny is near and dear to this podcast's heart, all three of us have been obsessed with it at some point or another. And it used to be back when we were Catacu split screen,

we pretty much, we started off as like a Destiny podcast, essentially. Not really, but that's all Kirk and I would play. Not so jokingly. One of our first episodes, I believe episode three was us having then director, Luke Smith, come on to talk about the Taken King, which was the first big fall destiny expansion, not the first Destiny expansion, but the big one, and the one that kind of improved the game

and made it go from zero to hero. Polarizing to pretty good. Yeah, they love it. So anyway, I thought we would commemorate a little bit. A little bit more context here is stuff that I reported at Bloomberg last week, which is that not only is Destiny 2 coming to an end,

there is no Destiny 3 in development right now. A lot of people had assumed, that there was. I can report that there was not. Marathon is the big bet that Bungi has at the moment, and then there's also teams that are incubating and prototyping new things, including destiny things and including other things, and none of those have been greenlit yet, so expect them ways from now if they ever come to fruition. And also, there are going to be some big layoffs at Bungy in the near future as a result of all these big changes. So yeah, let's pour one out for Destiny.

It's the end of an era. And yeah, should we have a moment of silence? It is sad. I mean, I know we're kind of laughing about it, but I was surprisingly sad about this when I heard about it. For somebody who hasn't played Destiny 2 in a really long time, I was like, wow, I just kind of thought it'd be around forever, like World of Warcraft or something.

I know that's not feasible and probably isn't even feasible for World of Warcraft while we're here, but it did feel like... It's extremely feasible for World of Warcraft makes a shell out of money. True, but I don't know. When we're 64, are we still going to be talking about World of Warcraft? That I can't promise. Forever is a long time. Yes, exactly, exactly. But it did feel that way psychologically to me, even though, of course, I was reading all the same news stories as everybody else about how things were going at Bungee and how

people were feeling about Destiny 2 and the player count, etc. I just, I don't know, it just didn't occur to me. Oh, and also, when I was playing Destiny 2 and talking about it a lot on this show, that was what became the inception of what is now my weekly Thursday gamer night. That began because of Destiny. So I was also kind of emotionally thinking to myself like, wow, like the reason why I really make regular time for multiplayer gaming in my life, as an adult, which is something that was so easy to do when I was a kid and a teenager.

You just kind of fall into it. But as an adult, you really have to organize it. And Destiny 2 was the reason why that even happened. So I feel like I have an eternal soft spot for it because of that. Yeah, I have a similar relationship. The group of guys that I play video games with still were initially sort of my destiny friends and the people that Jason, you and I played a lot of Destiny with, and we kind of bonded through our time with the game,

and of course, at times complaining about the game, the many missteps that Bungi made along the way, but also the really high highs, especially of those first few years. And it was, you know, so it was a big deal for me as well, socially. And, yeah, I think the comparisons to Wow are interesting, because when Destiny launched, it really wasn't trying to be a world of work or at least it was trying to set itself apart, even though Luke Smith, I remember talking to him about how much he loved World of Warcraft and how I almost got the sense that there was one faction within

Bungy who wanted it to be more like an MMO and more like World of Warcraft. And then another faction, Bungee, of course, a famously factional studio, another faction who were more the Halo, you know, we want this to be a console first person shooter. And in hybridizing the two things, they created something that was kind of neither fish nor fowler. for a few years and then gradually, especially in Destiny 2, became much more like World of Warcraft and more just an MMO that got kind of MMO style upgrades or updates and, you know, they handled loot a little more like an MMO. But it still wasn't really quite World of Warcraft. Like it had that kind of awkward console shooter that gets sequels. You know, it was just like the fact that there was a Destiny and a Destiny 2.

Yeah, there's a 2 in there. And then Destiny 2 became the platform. It just wasn't quite like World of Warcraft in some fundamental way. And I don't know how much that relates to the fact that it couldn't ever just become the perpetual game that's just fun for everyone forever that some people always kind of wanted it to be and that it felt like it just never could quite get to. But it does, I would have to imagine that some of that, you know, that kind of foundational, there's a bit of a fracture in its foundation. And that was always the sort of fatal flaw with the series that wouldn't allow it to kind of transcend its roots and just become an eternal thing. So when Destiny first came on the scene, it was published by Activision. Activision funded it to the tune of infamously $500 million.

And it was $500 million for this kind of 10-year plan that wound up leaking in, of all things, a lawsuit over Call of Duty. So this plan leaked out. And you could see in it that there was this content plan for Destiny 1, Then an expansion that was codenamed Comet Comet, a year later, and then Destiny 2 a year after that, and then Comet 2 after that, and Destiny 3 and so on and so forth, call a duty style cadence of just kind of yearly updates. And it's really interesting because what happened was, for a variety of reasons, including Bungie's engine and tools just being unwieldy and taking a lot of time to work with,

they found that that kind of content schedule was just untenable. And in 2016, at the beginning of 2016, they had to delay Destiny 2. their CEO was ousted as a result of that, unless some heads rolled because they had to slip a whole year for that. And then Destiny 2 wound up coming in 2017. And then a couple of years after that, there was this expectation from Activision, hey, you guys have to come out with Destiny 3.

And the people of Imagine 3 were like, no, like, this doesn't really work. We want a service game that is continually updating. And that doesn't really kind of fit with this plan for releasing continual sequels over and over again, especially because from Destiny 1 to Destiny 2 came a player reset and you lost all your stuff. and had to start from scratch. And that was something that players of this kind of World Warcraft-style service game

were not amenable to. And so as a result of those conversations, Destiny and Activision wound up splitting up. Bungy, or sorry, Bungy and Archivision wound up splitting up. Bungy kept Destiny 2 and wound up turning Destiny 2 into a service game a couple years later. They got bought by Sony and Destiny 2 just became this ongoing thing with the awkward title of Destiny 2. that it was just like, oh yeah, we wanted to have with Destiny 2 as a service game. And they made a lot of mistakes. Somewhere in there, notably, Destiny 2 also became free to play, I think, which is a worthwhile thing to

that. 2019, yeah, later in 2019 with Beyond Light. And I think one of the mistakes they made, there were a lot of mistakes along the way, but one of them was that they could never really figure out how to make the game approachable to new players. If you're a new player and you're logging into Destiny 2, it is really not approachable in any possible way. and a lot of the content that has been released for the game

has been taken offline because they've cycled out of old stuff I believe they've said because of storage issues and whatnot and there were a lot of just mistakes made along the way but the thought of a Destiny 3 I think for Sony's bean counters was a little out of hand the idea of spending like $500 million on this game before marketing I think was not something that Sony had the appetite for And so that never got off the ground.

There was a project that Luke Smith, who we mentioned before, was working on called Payback, was the code name. And that was kind of this weird spinoff thing. It was like third person and kind of like Genshin Impact E. So I don't know how that would have gone over, but would have been interesting to see. But that was canceled a couple of years ago. And yeah, Bungi has had a lot of kind of difficulties over the last few years. But yeah, like you guys, I have a very special relationship with Destiny. in addition to making a lot of friends through the game.

It also is responsible for me becoming an author because when I wrote a story about the behind the scenes of Destiny back in 2015, I got an email from my now agent being like, hey, we should do a book about game development. And that one, I was springboarding into my first book, both fun pixels and then other books from there. So, yeah, it means a lot to me, and I'm sad that it ends. Like you, Maddie, I kind of felt like it was always just going to be this inevitable thing.

thing that it was always just going to be, even though I haven't played it in years, six years at this point, seven years. And I'm sure we're not the only one. So why did we think that? Yeah, it was just kind of, it's, it's comforting to know that like, oh yeah, destiny's there. If I ever one day of the urge to go back or like get my buddies together and are like, hey, I actually, I never really got into Destiny 2, even slightly as much as I got into Destiny 1. I think because a lot of the friction that I really enjoyed in Destiny 1, they smoothed off, which I think is a lot of the complaining about it was part of the fun. But that's a conversation for another day. But yeah, I'm sad. I'm sad that it's over. And obviously, I'm very sad that they're going to be layoffs and that people are going to lose their jobs as a result of all this. And it's just a very sad situation. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, let's pivot to something less sad, which is a new video game called Mina the Hollow War that we're going to be talking about. Mina the Holloware is out this week. After lengthy delays, it was originally planned for last action. but really it was originally dated for 2023 and the original Kickstarter that came out a few years ago. This is a new game from Yacht Club Games, the makers of Shovel Night and all of its expansions,

which are essentially new games that just kind of are set in the Shovel Night universe and release for free, inexplicably, to Shovel Night users. This is a top-down 2D action game that looks, a lot like Link's Awakening, like Zelda Link's Awakening, but really feels more like a Bloodbourne or a Castlevania kind of crossed with the feel of Link's Awakening. And

it is quite a video game. We'll do some overall impressions. I want to hear both of your takes, but I will say up front that I have played through it, 100% at it, and then played through it again with the item shuffler on, which I think speaks

to how much I love this game. It is tremendous. It's my favorite game in the year so far by a long shot. I love it. But I would like to hear your thoughts. Kirk, why don't you go first? I love it too. It's fantastic. I think it is just, it's clearly such a labor of love. There's a ton of thought and care put into every screen, every character, every bit of dialogue, every item, every combat encounter. It has some of the best music I've ever heard in a video game. No surprise given the score. is by the great Jake Kaufman, but I've really come to have a new appreciation for him. I'll maybe talk about him a little later, but he's just such a great composer. Strong songs?

That'd be fun. I can talk about him a little later in this episode. He'd be fun to interview. Chip tunes are not something I have a deep expertise in, but I really admire his writing. I guess I'll just say that, like, I actually appreciate him as a jazz musician somewhat. He's kind of a jazz nerd in a way that I never really thought about before.

and I recently made an episode of Strong Songs about Kind of Blue, the jazz album. He made a chip tune version of Freddie Freeloader off of that that I had caused to just, I happened to be listening to it two weeks ago while playing this game. And his take on Freddie Freelder is so good. He like recreates Whitten Kelly's piano solo perfectly. It's amazing.

So anyways, Jake Kaufman is saying... You got a shout out the opera. His version of Final Fantasy Six is Opera 3. Yeah, massive. Also, really, really good. That was a collaboration. I'm forgetting the artist that he was collaborating with. But yeah, it's like a queen style thing.

Tommy Pedrini. Yes, there you go. But he's amazing. And, like, the music is such a big part of this game. There are so many great tracks. But, man, I mean, it's just so fun. And my main thing that I want to talk about later is that one thing I really appreciate about this game is that Yacht Club included a ton of modifiers, including difficulty

modifiers, and I've been using some of them and having a great time. And it's been super interesting and a great way for me to really just relax and enjoy this game. Man, there are more than 250 modifiers. You can access it. They're all optional. You can ignore them or you can access them in the menu. Some of them only unlock after you finish the game. But they range from, hey, well, you can now do like you're invincible. Or you can you do, you take half the day. or whatever, like a slider of damage that you take. Two, Mina is now twice the size and the screen spins around when you move and you can jump past the screen, like above the screen.

And so you're jumping in the air and you can't see Mina anymore. That jump one is fun. It goes out of control. There's one that changes the language to Victorian, like authentic Victorian style, which I won't spoil, but you guys should try that one. Maddie, what do you think of Mina the Hollowar? I also love this game. clearly it's getting a rave from all three of us. I really, really love it. I think we talked about

this way back when the Link's Awakening remake came out, but I think we're all, I know Jason and I are really big fans of Link's Awakening and like that old school Zelda style. Ooh, maybe that should be a bet game someday. You're giving me a clue here. Something, something I could pick one time. There's like a Switch version of that, right? Yeah, there is. It's really good. Yeah, I thought you played the switch version. Didn't we talk about it in the show? Well, I wasn't trying to get sidetrack. My point is I really love this style of game. And I think that, well, I mean, it's clear from Shovel Night that the devs at Yacht Club are really kind of fascinated by taking this retro game style and modernizing it and adding kind of modern sensibilities to it. And that is something that many developers try to do and they don't always succeed.

But this is incredible. I am just blown away by how strong it is. It is truly like if Zelda were very difficult and complex in terms of exploration and combat, but also I say it's difficult, except that as Kirk said, there's this massive suite of modifiers that make it so that you can transform the game into essentially whatever experience you want, which is incredible. I mean, I feel like I just don't have enough good things to say about it. I almost don't even know where to begin with all the things I like.

about this game. Are you using the modifiers, maybe? I have ended up using some of them, but we can, Kirk and I can get into which ones we're using. I don't know, Jason, if you've gotten into them. Some of them make the game harder, which is fun, and some make it easier or just different. They're incredible, honestly. Well, the thing I mentioned earlier is the item shuffler, so that's one of the options. There's so many options that we can't even cover them off. I know. It's like, the number of modifiers. It's insane. It's like, essentially, you're getting a suite of PC mods along with this game that are built into this game. You can skip entire sections. I mean, there's so much cool stuff you can do. But when I'm talking about the item shuffler, so it randomizes

the locations of every upgrade and trinket and special ability, everything that you can get in the game. It just like shuffles it up to a hilarious degree. So like it'll at the very beginning of the game, you get into this ship crash. And then the captain is like, here, like this will help save your life in a pinch. And he gives you these vials that you can use. to heal yourself. But in the item shuffler, he might give you anything else. So instead, I don't remember because I got a key or something. And I was like, oh, great, I got a key. And wait a minute, I can't actually heal myself. And, like, I had to spend the entire first hour of the game going without being able to heal myself, which was a very fun challenge. So that's just one of the many,

the many modifiers you can play around with. A couple other things we should talk about on this game. So this is, I think even though it looks like it's all done, we're making the links awakening comparison. I think it's actually really important to establish. This is more of an action game than the Zelda game. The dungeons in this game feel more like Souls Dungeons or even Castlevania dungeons, maybe the closest comparison, than they do Zelda Dungeons. There are no block puzzles or buttons that you're going to be, or like elaborate key labyrinths that you're going to be solving. I mentioned keys earlier, but those are entirely optional things. You don't need any keys to get through the main quest. And so,

it's a little bit, like don't come into this expecting big, grand puzzles. And you can also, you can do anything at any time without needing items. Like there are no, other than side stuff, there's nothing in the main campaign that you need specific items for. For some of the side stuff, you'll need like specific trinkets, which are these accessories you can equip that give you special abilities or enhance Mina's powers in some way. But other than that, it's not like a Zelda game where you need the boomerang to unlock this part of the map. It's not, There's no Metroidvania to this. That said, there's a bunch of really clever kind of environmental secrets that you can find that do remind me of Zelda, but in a very different sort of way.

I would add that there's also a sort of souls-like experience system. You earn bones toward leveling up, and you lose them if you die, and the enemy that killed you kind of gets them and you have to get back to them and, you know, hit that enemy or kill them to get your XP back. and if you die again, you lose it for good. So it's very much got that Souls XP system. However, there is a modifier to just completely turn that off. And you can kind of upgrade over time to make it more forgiving. Just the more you play the game, the systems that make it difficult become really softened over time

just through playing regularly without any mods. Yeah, it reminds me of Eldon Ring in that way, in that the first couple of hours are the hardest that you're going to go through. That's definitely true. And that's a I'm actually curious to hear about. both of your experiences with the mods and how you've used them because I think some people might come into this game and hit a wall right away because it's really tough right away until you A, get a feel for how the combat works and how you should be finding enemies and decide which

weapon is your best, like which one you're optimal for and get some more trinkets and get abilities, etc, etc. But B, because when you are low health, it is very difficult to like even know what's going on. And you're, you're like still mastering the 2D, like the space of it all and the verticality of it all and the platforming of it all. So yeah, tell me about the difficulty modifiers you guys are using. Yeah, the healing system in particular can be challenging because you have to hit enemies in order to build up the amount that you can heal, which I don't need to explain in granular detail, but can be very punishing if you're way, way on the ropes trying to score a hit on a boss or, you know, or a tough mob that you're fighting.

Yeah, I've used a number of, or experimented with a number of different difficulty modifiers, and I'm still using plenty of them just because I find it really enjoyable. Honestly, this is something that we talked about with Silk Song, and I installed my own mods on that game to play around with that. What would this experience be like if it was just a little bit easier, and I could tweak my experience. And I had made the argument at the time that I don't think Silk Song would have lost anything by including difficulty mods like Mina.

Mina just further underlines my belief that that is the case. Like, this game is fantastic. I love it. And I think it's so much more accessible than it would have been because of these mods. Like you said, it's hard, Jason. It is, like, freaking hard at first, especially was for me. I didn't have a Super Nintendo. I didn't have a Game Boy Advance.

I did not play games like this. There are just certain things about it. The platforming is a little hard to gauge if you're not used to reading a kind of strange isometric but also sort of 3D world. You know, you have to land aerial attacks, but it's not always clear, you know, unless you learn how to read shadows where an aerial enemy is. The platforming can just be punishing in general. You get shot back pretty far into the room that you're in if you fall.

You take a lot of damage. Like I said, the healing system is like very punishing at first. And as you've already said, Jason, you're at your weakest at the beginning. You don't have a lot of good items and a lot of healing. So it's really hard. Oh, also movement. Like, it's a four-way, four-cardinal direction movement. And I find, for example, you can't redirect in mid-air.

Like, there are just, like, things that I keep trying to do, or I kept trying for many hours, and just finding myself swinging in the wrong direction and constantly missing attacks, and then just dying over and over and over. And I was like, dude, I can't do this. So that was my early experience was basically the, after kind of clearing the town out and getting to the first level, just thinking, man, this is so cool, the music is so cool. love this. I cannot do it this again. I can't spend 60 hours, like making myself learn this whole new thing that's unfamiliar to me and is really hard. So I started playing with the mods. And we can get

into specifics. I've already been talking for a minute and Maddie, I'm curious what mods you use, but I will say the best thing they, the best decision they made about the mods is, yeah, there are seven million of them. You look through the list. It's overwhelming. But there is an option that is just easier difficulty. And if you select that, it explains to you in the game. It just activates a suite of mods that together just make the game the same. It doesn't randomize items or do anything crazy. It's just easier in a number of different ways. And then you can just check all the active ones and look at what you've got

and kind of fine-tune your experience from there, which is what I've done. Yeah, right on. So I had a somewhat different experience with the mods, which is to say I think the fact that when I was younger, I was playing stuff like Link's Awakening, and I had at least a little more experience with this type of movement. this is not to brag at all, but that didn't challenge me initially. And actually the combat I thought was really fun and cool.

And I still think that that didn't change over time or anything. And so I got through the beginning well enough and was like, okay, great, you know, I'm having a great time. But then I think around, I think it's called like shifting sands or something. There's like a bone beach. Yeah, Bone Beach. Yeah. Oh, well, the sandfall area. Yeah, yeah.

There's like this whole kind of suite of the map with. a lot of pits that you can fall into. And like Kirk said, the pits take damage. And Mina can jump. Her jumping is fine. You know, like there's some platforming elements in this game that I would describe as maybe the most challenging part for me personally. Can you describe the actual hollowing, like the tunneling and how that works to give you a

longer jump and stuff? Because we haven't actually described that. And it's a central mechanic. Yeah, that's true. So in addition to just kind of like the classic suite of weapons that you could imagine, like she has knives and a sword and like a mace and things like that. You could imagine she's like a little link from Legend of Zelda, but with a bigger suite of weapons like you might have in a Zelda version of Eldon Ring.

A little Sima and Alma. But in addition to that, Mina is a little mouse. We haven't even talked about how great the world in this game is, by the way, but she's an adorable little mouse in a world of animals and also people. and it's kind of medieval infused with some science fiction elements. And one of her powers is that she can burrow underground. And so environmental exploring also means sometimes you just try burrowing to see if you can get somewhere. And sometimes it's clear from visuals that you can get somewhere.

And it's obvious that you should burrow there. And other times there's environmental clues that indicate that maybe you should try burrowing somewhere. And also, when she finishes burrowing underground and goes a short distance, she jumps a little higher or further if she does that. So that is a piece as well. She's flying up out of the ground. It's like the game's great mechanical flourish, I think. I love it.

Like the feeling of popping out of the ground is really what this game is all about. It's very satisfying. That's what the whole game is built around. Is that mechanic? It's the whole thing. It's like the central thing. It's all hung on. Absolutely.

She's a hollower. She hollows into the ground. She's hollowing things out in a way, yes. And so that platforming aspect is very fun to master. However, as Kirk said, every time you fall into a pit, you take damage. And in some of these areas, there's no enemies really or not enough enemies that you could like charge back up, for example. And in my case, a lot of times I'd be like having to do this very complex series of maneuvers

to get across several gaps and then I would die or I'd be slowly taking damage just to teach myself how to get across all those gaps. And I'd be sent all the way back to somewhere way far back. And I'm like, this isn't even really like a test of my skill. This is simply sapping hours of my life. So one of the first modifiers that I turned on was the one that just doesn't damage me if I fall in a pit. And that alone was like life changing for me personally. It's a huge one.

I was just like, I just need to only get sent back to the beginning of this part so that I can just practice this part. So like that's my first number one recommendation with these is like just save yourself the time. But I mean, all of them are great. Are you using trinkets, Maddie? Well, sure. I mean, that's part of the game as well. Jason's about to tell you that it's actually easy. No, no, no, no.

Well, there are trinkets that I found that I just, like, wouldn't let go of. Oh, like the frisky, maybe. No, that's a sidearm that you're thinking of. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, the trinkets, yeah. The sidearms are your, you have two kind of different ability categories. The sidearms, which are your sub weapons, like in Castlevania, where you can, like, throw holy water.

And this, it's a whole suite of a, them, 14 or 15 of them. Trinkets are your accessories that you equip. And so there are a few that I, like, couldn't live without. One gave me an extra life. So you die and you come back to life when you use that one. Another one makes it so you can walk on a couple of pits without falling, which, like, gives you some extra runway to jump a giant gap.

There are others, too, that just, like, will make it easier to platform. There's one that gives you an air dash. You just press A and you dash in midair. There's another one that. just a huge bicycle. Well, that's, well, that's, that's another sidearm, not a trinket. I just want to be clear. Oh, sorry.

And then there's another that lets you float. You hold the button and you'll float down. So there's a lot of ways that you can mitigate the platforming without turning on mods. That's true. To be clear. You have to get that. I mean, I've played like 10 hours and I haven't gotten any of those things. Yeah.

At the beginning is where people are going to hit the biggest wall, I think. Yeah, the very beginning before you get any trinkets, that's where the real difficulty. It's kind of, it's really. And even like, like, I'm saying I'm very far in and I haven't gotten any of those trinkets you just described. Like, I don't have any trinkets that make platforming easier. They're all like combat trinkets. Oh, really? Have you been exploring a lot? It's not to say like the, whatever. I mean, I'm just, my point is that there's a lot of stuff. It is huge.

You can, and what's nice about the mods is you can turn them on and when you find you don't need them anymore, you can turn them on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just wanted to be clear to people out there that there are ways in game to mitigate the difficulty that aren't necessarily menu options. Right. Now, this is kind of related to, I want to stay on this for a minute, because this relates to something we talked about with Silk Song and the idea of like the artistic intent of the game and whether the difficulty was kind of accounted for by the developers, which was something that William Minari, the makers of Silk Song, talked about saying, well, we gave Hornet all these different tools. And that was frequently, I felt, brought out as a kind of a like rebuttal to the idea that the game should have some kind of mob. because, well, Horna actually has all these moves, and if you really dig into your toolkit, you can beat the boss without any kind of a difficulty mod. And I would just say, I still am unconvinced by that, because of Mina, because of what we're talking about here,

that the game, you can turn it on, you can turn it off, you can make the experience what you want it to be, and there are so many smart little granular things that allow for all of these cool abilities you're talking about and even allow you to go find the trinkets that you need, to get more powerful so that you can turn off the mods you use to get there. I find it's so player-friendly. It's the kind of thing I just wish every difficult game did.

Because just in the end, difficulty is going to be different for every player, whether it's a matter of ability with the game or disability. There are just so many reasons that each individual player is going to have their own difficulty, thresholds, their own relationship with difficulty. So the solution that makes the most sense to me is just giving the players the tools to decide how they want the experience to be, because only the player truly knows where they're coming from. And that way you don't have to account for everybody.

And it doesn't compromise the developer's vision because that vision is right there. I mean, in Mina, I can see the game that they made, and the intended experience is really cool and probably will be for a lot of players. So it's just a win-win to me. To list a couple of other mods that I've used, there's one that just makes save rooms more frequent.

There's one that only makes them more frequent before a boss. So just every time you're going to fight a boss, there's always a save room right there. So you never have to do a boss runback. It's a tiny little thing, but it's just really nice, you know? So they're not all as dramatic as no damage. Or you can just slow the game down every enemy except Mina by, I think the basic, the base level is like 2%. So the game runs at 98% speed. So it's just a little bit slower.

Or you can make it way slower. So Mina is, you know, basically the flash. There are so many settings like that. And I really just like really, really want to underline that for everything the game does, for every tool the game gives you to make it easier as you go, the existence of the mods and those like in-game assists, those two things are in no way mutually exclusive. And in fact, like each one makes the other thing better. Yeah, I agree. So, okay. So getting on what you were saying earlier, Kirk, I think, so most of the trinkets in this game, you have to really do some digging, literally unfiguratively to find.

because this is a game full of secrets. And one of the true pleasures of this game is just how many environmental secrets there are. There are every single screen on the map. There's like some little hidden cracked wall that you can smash open or a little place that you can burrow under that you didn't realize before. Or sometimes the secrets get truly ridiculous and I won't get into specifics. But like if you find a telescope, look into it and just spend a little time looking around and see what you can find. there's also a central hub, a town where there's tons of shops and also a ton of secrets to open up shops and like get into different areas and find secrets and stuff in there. And I think if you want to play this game and get through it, you really need to be spending a little bit of time doing that kind of secret hunting because that's how you find the upgrades, both for Mina's like health files and her weapons and stuff.

And also the trinkets that I mentioned that will make it easier for you to go. There are 60 trinkets in the game. Again, these are not the sidearms, the weapons that you can equip along with your main weapon. These are the accessories that you equip in your menu screen and you can customize them in whatever ways. And there are a lot of really cool synergies you can do with them. Like one of them makes enemies drop more bones, drop more currency, but then they bounce around a lot. So they're harder to get. But then you can equip that one.

And then also another trinket that gives you a match. magnetizes all of the bones and sends them flying to you so you can maximize. So those two make good synergies and there are a lot of combinations like that. And yeah, just as you're going, it's a really cool design. The entire world is connected in unexpected ways. And there are a lot of really cool shortcuts that you'll find along the way. When I first started, I was a little disconcerted that there was no map. But then I grew to appreciate that actually because you really you really learn the world so much better and in such a more intuitive way by actually learning it and experiencing the space and finding the shortness.

No map in Dark Souls, is there? Yeah, exactly. It's very souls. No map in Bloodborn. Yeah, yeah. And you kick the ladders down or in this game. You kick ropes down and other various shortcuts in much similar way to a Dark Souls or a Souls born game, whatever we want to call them, where you're like, oh, this is connected

to that. And it's like everything's unlocking your mind. That's like the best part of these kinds of games. And there is also eventually like a very zoomed out version of the map, we should say. That kind of shows you like the big versions of the areas that you can go to. It shows you each region, yeah, essentially and how they're connected. But even then, like there might be unexpected connections between one region and another here and there. Different pipes that take you to different places.

And there are just so many cool secrets. Like so many, each new region introduces like one or two. central mechanics. Like you get to an area called September and it introduces this idea of like lightning shooting down and introduces this idea of like... Great music in September. Fantastic music. First September music is soon. It introduces these leaf piles that you can't smash. You can only take out by jumping on them. And then it starts playing around with like different secrets you can find by finding ways to do that. And it introduces Freddie Kruger. Well, that's a whole other experience. And yeah, I really love the way that it adds in secrets. And I think

this is a kind of game that really just rewards explorers and just curious players in that way that I truly love about gaming, where it's just like, oh, I'm going to poke around in this thing. Oh, can I borrow under this? Oh, yep, turns out I can. And there's a secret there waiting for me. It's also a very fun game to 100%. I'll say, as someone who found all of the collectibles in it, because after you make a certain amount of progress, you can actually buy this skull accessible.

like it's not accessible. It's a skull upgrade essentially that does this brilliant thing. Essentially, it changes your UI. So there's a skull on it. And the skull will glow blue when you are next to a room that has a secret in it. And it'll glow red when you are in a room that has a secret in it. So you can scour the entire map and find all the secrets just by using that. You don't actually need any other kind of tools. And then also what you can do is you get on your map a checklist for each region. So it'll say you found 16 out of 16 secrets here. You're good. and it'll give you a little gold star. And so it's a very fun game to go and backtrack and collect all the secrets. And that combination of upgrades, the map and the skull, make it so you can do it in a way that doesn't feel tedious or monotonous because you have a good idea of what is where and how much you have left to find.

Yeah. Yeah, the secrets have been my favorite thing about the game, too. Just exploring and finding stuff is so fun. I always love that in games like this, but I really love it in this game because it's so clever and so. so intentional about where it puts everything and how it tells you about each secret. You know, you'll be, I don't know, I was on the train when you unlock a train and then you can ride the train. And instead of just getting on the train and it's like a loading screen and then you go to the next, you know, to the next area, you're actually on the train for a while.

And actually, things happen on the train and there are adventures on the train. There are secrets on the train. But you can just talk to NPCs on the train. And, you know, one of them, I can't remember what he said basically, but he just told me a rumor. He heard that if you go a certain direction in a certain area, there's a, you know, a haunted ship. It's like a sunken ship there. And so that's just kind of nudging me in one direction. Or there are newspapers that Mina can buy after beating each chapter. They're so good.

And the newspapers, they're very funny. They have little headlines and images that reflect what you're doing. And they also kind of indicate what might be waiting for you in a new area. It's all so well thought out. And so, I don't know, handmade feeling. It's also, I use the word intentional, but it really just feels like people made it and they thought through everything. There's little jokes everywhere, the little NPC character names. Early on, you go into an orphanage and there are two little animal orphans kind of playing around.

And, okay, I'm going to try to remember one of them is a kid, but it's like a baby goat. And so his name as an NPC is kid, but his portrait is a goat. But there's just like tons of puns. There's tons of very clever little writing. And then a lot of it is also kind of functional writing. It's telling you where to go. It's playing with your expectations. It's giving you nudges.

Yeah, pretty much every secret in the game is hinted in some way by talking to an MPC. And their MPC is walking in town constantly. And if you stop them and talk to them, they'll give you some hint or little treasure or a little indication of how you could solve a puzzle or what you should be doing. Yeah, I also just really like this weird world

that Mina exists in, and I like how under-explained some of it is. Like, we've kind of talked about how from a kind of exploration perspective, it's its own reward, and like that's like the wonderful part of playing the game is that there kind of is an answer to every question in terms of collecting things and getting an item and understanding what it's for. But in terms of how this world works or how it came to be, I mean, I feel like some of it is mysterious in a lovely way where it's like, well, okay, there are all these sort of anthropomorphic animals, but there are also people seemingly, or at least creatures that look human to me, and like, what's the situation with that?

Bojack rules. Exactly. I was thinking of Bojack Horseman and I was like, what would I compare this game to? And I was like, Bojack Horseman. But like, comedy-wise, it's really not like that at all. Totally not in any way. It's family-friendly for one thing. But also, like, it has this sort of whimsical charm and also this undercurrent of doom at points

where, like in a Zelda game, like the stakes of the world are really clear to you. And like, it's clear that Mina really is up against it at various points, but also unlike Zelda, which has very simplistic rules in the sense that it's like, here's the bad guy, here's the good guy, you know everything, off you go. I feel like in this world, I'm, I don't always know everybody's motivations and I appreciate that in a game, like not having every single piece of the world spelled out for me in the story. I love Mina as a protagonist. Oh, she's great.

This game, like a lot of games of this era, you know, it only has occasional, you know, big art portraits of her. Usually when you go to a new area, you get a little cutscene as Mina kind of looks out over whatever the new area is. Her character art is so good. She's just so cool. She's this steampunk inventor. And her whole deal is that she's already known to everybody. People know her. Oh, Mina, you invented, you know, this incredible invention that gives us all power and, like, gives us so much.

So she's already a highly regarded person, which is a fun role to be in in this kind of game. Since a lot of these games, you're like a nobody or you're, you know, you're kind of rising up. And every man, perhaps, yeah. Right. Mina is this established, like, artisan. She's a tradeswoman, basically. She has this one thing she's very good at. And then much of the story is her both reckoning with her own inventions, fixing them at times,

and kind of building and problem solving, which is just like a fun thing for a character to do. Like she's a masterfighter and a brilliant, you know, adventurer, but she's an inventor first and foremost. And that's just kind of cool. Like she puts on reading glasses when she writes in her little notebook. She has a lot of great character animations. And probably my favorite thing that Mina does is that when you beat a boss, you do this kind of grueling tower ascent.

Actually not really my favorite thing in the game, kind of like, I don't love them. A necessity. Yeah, I guess it's like mode seven style, almost like it goes 3D and I don't know. But then you make it to the, she makes it the top and she fixes the big generator. and then she takes a nap. She just is like, oh man, and she just goes to sleep up there for a little while and she does it after every boss

and I can totally relate. You do something hard and then you take a nap. Mina is really all of us. Yeah, we should say that the story of this game is essentially that Mina has been called back to this island, Tenebrus, by the Baron Lionel. He's a lion, get it?

Yeah, he's definitely a lion. I think maybe that guy isn't on the level. I don't know. Just the theory I've got. No spoilers, to be clear. I'm not that far. Just a vibe I guess. His former Captain of the Guard, Thorne, has gone around destroying these generators that bring power to everybody.

And so me and I must go around and fix the generators. And there's six of them. And so there's six main regions of the game to go to. But like I mentioned, I mean, you can, first of all, you can do them all in any order. It might be trickier to do some first than others. And there's kind of an intended way to do. them all. You're meant to start with the crypt and then go to the bio, et cetera, et cetera. But you could go and do like the Astralori, which is one of the tougher ones first if you really

wanted to. Levels do not scale. So the doing the crypt first is always going to be the recommended way. Otherwise you might get just destroyed by doing some of the hard ones. Yeah, I did the crypt second and I did the swamp first and it was very hard and then the crypt was pretty easy. And I was like, oh, nice. Okay. This has gotten easy. It's funny. You did. No wonder you had such a hard time first if you were doing the slomp first. I think I started. started going toward the crypt without any mods and then I added mods and the game just was not as hard and so it was easier for me to go do this one. Like Maddie mentioned in the newspapers, those are indicating to you where you should be going next by being like, the crypt is like facing all these problems now and stuff. There are a whole lot of bosses kind of soul style action bosses each of their own mechanics and some of them are super fun.

Some of them have really clever ideas. and the dungeons I found to be just incredibly well designed and full of interesting mechanics. It's just they, the designers of this game, this game took six years to make and there's a whole saga behind it that I'll link my Bloomberg story from last year in the show notes because I told the story behind why it took so long. But the developers of Yacht Club, a small team, but they stuck so many ideas into this game. And each region just has so many unique mechanics. and just bespoke ideas that you learn and then figure out how to master. And it just keeps going. Even by the time you get to the final, final dungeon, you will find that it's like full of

unique ideas that you can't find anywhere else, which is just so cool to see. And the way it's designed is just really cool, also full of shortcuts and just cool interlocking levels and mechanics. And man, it is so, it is such a well-thought-out game and such a meticulously designed game. That's the word that kept coming to mind as I was playing. It's like this is so meticulous. It's so well thought out. It feels like the designers just thought of every possibility in every area.

It's so polished. It's so like things do, things react in ways that you would expect them to. People react when you do things to the areas around them or when you burrow underneath them or to the side of them. They might react in unexpected ways. And yeah, it's just so charming and clever and brilliant. I love this game.

It's great. Yeah, it's amazing. It is second all of that. It does really feel like they made it with love. And sometimes I think like something that's really meticulously crafted can feel almost overwrought or overthought not to not to rhyme. But like in a way that's opaque to the player where it's like, oh, you like overcreated this and there are too many systems here and it's confusing now. It's like the opposite of that almost where it's like we made a bunch of little surprises and toys for you. and we're just excited to lead you through this maze.

And the modifiers kind of speak to that to me as well, where it's like they just really want to make sure that you're here with it along for whatever they wanted to shout. And I just, I'm so appreciative of that design ethos. Yeah, it's the rare game that's elegant and complex, which a lot of times elegance connotes a kind of simplicity, like a cleanness. And there is a cleanness even to the complexity of this game.

But it is quite complex. There's a ton of stuff in it, and that's not even considering all the modifiers, but it is also elegant. It's so well made and so carefully considered that everything feels in its right place, no matter how many things there are. And that's super rare, and just something I really admire about it, in addition to everything else that we've talked about. What weapons are you guys using? The daggers. Oh, yeah, interesting. I've used the flail.

The flail is so much fun. That's been my name. Oh, okay. Do not sleep on the shields. The shields is unexpectedly good and useful. That'll be my next one. Okay, I'll try that. And it lets you, there's like a parry mechanic that you can use with it that can be very effective. Yeah, it's very powerful. And you look at it and you're like, oh, shield, I don't need that nonsense. But it's actually, because it's very

short range, but like, it's actually very, very useful I have found. That's very not blood-borne, a game that notably only includes a shield as a joke. Yeah, although it's a good shield. This is an offensive shield, to be fair. It's like a shield. It's like a coffin with an arm coming out of it. So it's like an offensive shield. Cool. Well, Mina the Hallower, it's amazing.

But it's going to be extremely highly reviewed. And we'll certainly it's going to, I suspect it'll be a game of the year candidate. And we're going to see the game of the year. Game Awards orchestra playing Chiptude music, which will be very funny. That would be amazing. I would love to see that. Which would love to hear it. But we shall see.

All right. Let's take a break. And then we'll be back with one. more thing. What's more action-packed than prestige television? With more continuity than comic books? A more reality than reality television? It's professional wrestling.

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And you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years, I know where this has ended up. But no. No, you would be wrong. We're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing. Yeah, you don't even really know how crypto works. The only NFTs I'm into are naughty, funny things, which is what we talk about on my brother, my brother, and me. We serve it up every Monday for you if you're listening. And if not, we just leave it out back and it goes rotten.

So check it out on maximum fun or wherever you get your podcast. And we are back, Kirk, Maddie. It is time for one more thing, Kirk, start us off. My one more thing is Subnautica 2. that I've played kind of a lot of. Didn't expect to play a lot of it. Just thought I downloaded the early access version that came out a couple weeks ago

and see what's what, and then it just kind of kept playing it because it's really, really good. It's also just really, really subnautica. And I guess that's maybe my main, the main thing I want people to take away from this one more thing, is that if you think it sounds interesting

and have been seeing all the buzz around it and didn't play the first game, Subnotica, I think you should just go play that because it's not that different. And that's not a bad thing. Subnotica 2 is made by unknown worlds entertainment. It has had quite a fraught development with lawsuits, all kinds of really messy stuff between the game.

It's publisher or former publisher. Stuff that I've kind of followed. I know that it's a big mess. But at the same time, I mostly followed with dismay because I loved Subnotica so much. And that game just seemed like it just was begging. for a sequel. It was so good. I completely fell under its spell and loved it. And just upon finishing it, thought, I can't wait for these developers to make another game. Bing! Kirk here, as I'm editing the episode, I'm realizing I didn't mention the fact that the developers did actually

make another game. They made this kind of expand alone called Subnonica Below Zero that I at least found kind of disappointing. I think that's a pretty common opinion. It just kind of didn't have the same magic that Subnonica did. It tried some new ideas. There was this truck that you had to drive around, like an underwater truck, though you were actually on land a lot, which was also sort of weird and didn't feel like the thing I liked about Subnonica. So anyways, I just wanted to acknowledge that because that is a chapter in this narrative. And Below Zero wasn't a bad game by any stretch. Like it got positive reviews, and it's still Subnonica, but it's just, it wasn't quite the game I was hoping for, which informs how I've been feeling.

waiting for Subnotica 2. Okay, just wanted to mention that. Let's get back to what I was saying about Subnotica 2. Bing! And I knew they were working on Subnotica 2, and it just felt like this wonderful promise, and then all of this difficulty surrounding the game and the creative decisions behind it,

its direction, people forcing other people out, these battles, and I wasn't even following it that closely, mostly just feeling like, oh, this sucks. Like Subnotica 2 should have been a sure thing, and I'm worried now about it. So I'm happy to say that Subnotica 2 is, at least in its early access form, really good. I believe they say it won't be finished in 1.0 for like two years.

So it will be in early access for a while. That said, I know that the early access chunk they released is quite substantial. There's a lot that you can do in it. I have friends who've played more than 20 hours. They're talking about stuff I haven't even seen yet, parts of the map and giant, subterranean or I guess subaquatic, giant subaquatic creatures that I haven't seen. But it is not the full game. So if you're going to kind of wait for 1.0 person, you can wait.

However, like I said, it's very polished. It feels there's a lot to do. It's really cool. But then, really, I just want to tell people to play Subnotica 1. If you haven't played Subnotica 1, go play it. Wait, can I ask something about two? I feel like I keep seeing this controversy over like things attacking you, but you not being able to fight back or something.

There's like a lot of people complaining that it's nonviolent. Isn't that, is that a story? Is that real? Oh, I guess I've seen that. So this was true in the first game as well. The games, I think the first games director actually gave a really specific quote about how there are no guns in subnotica. I believe because he was like, we were making this game shortly after Sandy Hook

and the school shooting there. And I just like didn't want another game with guns in it. So there are no guns in subnotica. and there are no guns in Subnotica too either, nor is there really any way to violently respond to a fish that's attacking you. I'm not totally sure the extent of this controversy. I've seen it floating around. It's sort of funny because people say you can't kill fish in Subnotica, but you can grab a fish and then you go cook it and eat it, and I think that kills it.

So you can kill some fish in this game. But what they're really talking about, though, are the bigger and the kind of aggressive fish. that kind of hound you. There's one really annoying one that like head butts you, another that kind of nibbles at you. It doesn't take a lot of health, but it's like stressful. It makes really loud noise,

and they're always kind of around. I think this, some of this is like an early access polish thing. I built a base consciously away from all fish that would mess with me, and yet outside my base, I am like constantly being harangued by these stupid, like, barracuda fish that just bite me.

So I'm just outside of the base trying to build new additions to it, my like sea base. And then I'm just getting, bit all the time and there's nothing I can do. So the more that happens, the where I'm like, I do kind of wish I could like pull out my Uzi, like press three and pull out my shotgun and like board these stupid fish away. So I can just get back to like building the satellite that I'm trying to put on my base or whatever. But at the same time, I think I generally support the

game's ethos of like nonviolence. It's not a violent game. You're exploring, you're crafting, you're discovering. And then you're sometimes coming upon huge, terrifying creatures that you just have to avoid or like cleverly subvert and get around. And that's like the design. I feel like Outer Wilds has forever ruined me on games with giant fish in them because of the angler fish that just creep the hell out of me. Well, so I think actually Outer Wilds is one of my first comparison points for the first game and for the sequel. And if you, people who liked Outer Wilds should play Subnonica. That was actually why I got into it. It was a listener who heard me raving about Outer Wilds with the two of you on the show and wrote me and was like, man,

if you like Outer Wilds, you should play Subnotica. It is so similar. And I had thought at the time, I'm sure I've talked about this on the show, I had thought Subnotica was like a procedurally generated Minecraft, like Terraria kind of thing. But it isn't. It's a completely authored world that you gradually explore. And it has survival mechanics. There's a lot of crafting.

You're collecting materials to make upgraded oxygen tanks so you can go deeper and stuff. But the world is completely authored. There's a whole story to it. You discover this amazing environmental story as you work your way through it. It's not a puzzle game exactly, but you do have to solve puzzles in like figuring out how to get to new environments or get around new beasts that you uncover. And so it really is, it's very similar to Outer Wilds. I think the two of you would like love Subnotica one. It's so good.

So anyways, I really want to urge people to play that. And then just report back that so far, Subnotica 2 seems to really be on the right track. The story, there is a story you're kind of uncovering the tale of your sort of fellow corporate indentured colonists and who all live in clone bodies with like an artificial intelligence governing what they're doing. There's like a lot of interesting residents with things that are happening today, like critiques of capitalism and artificial intelligence and corporate control. At the same time, it hasn't like, it doesn't lose track of like what makes the game good, which is just the Subnotica thing. Like Subnonica 2 has you doing this Subnotica thing right away. It feels very, very similar at the beginning. There are a lot of echoes of the first game.

And that's fine because people loved the first game. All I really wanted was, let me just play Subnotica again for the first time because you can't really replay it. Once you've played it, you've kind of discovered all the things. And that's what this game is letting me do. And that's really cool. I think that was a great decision for a sequel. So I'm so far really optimistic about Synodica 2.

The Early Access version that exists is very cool. for anyone out there who loved the first game and is thinking about the early access, you'll get a lot out of it. And for any of you out there who are looking for something to play that is just a really cool exploration game who like games like Outer Wilds, love discovering things, maybe overcoming their phobia of the deep, dark ocean like me. Subnotica 1 is still great and great in bunch of the same way as the sequel. So I really recommend giving that one a play as well.

Can I just add real quick beyond the game? the drama surrounding this game is quite worth reading about. I'll throw a couple of links in the show notes, but I mean, essentially the developers of this game were due a bonus, and the CEO of Kraftin, the company that bought Somnodica's developer, asked ChatGPT how to get out of paying this bonus.

The CEO, he fired the CEO of Unknown Worlds, and a judge forced him to reinstate that CEO, Ted Gill, who is currently now the CEO again. Imagine being in those meetings between Crafton and Ted Gill when he was fired and not hired back out of Crafton's own volition, but because the judge forced him to hire him back. I mean, it's a wild story. It's truly wild. And it's a nice sort of, you know, it must be affirming for them that the game is doing really well.

It's sold incredibly well. And it's great. I mean, people really like it. So that's very nice for the creative folks behind it. Sold more than 4 million copies at this point. So I imagine that Crafton is asking Chachy Petitie how to. to stop people from buying a video game, because they will trigger that bonus.

Yeah, I mean, part of the whole premise, Kraftin said that they fired the CEO and the two co-founders last year because Subdata Kutu was not ready for early access. The developers, speaking to me and also the founders in this lawsuit, all argued actually it was ready for early access last August. From the sounds of it, Kirk, were now, I don't know, nine months past when it would have been in early access. Sounds like it would have 100% been ready for early access last year.

It's pretty freaking good. So, yeah, I'm inclined to believe him on that, given what I've played. Yeah, so just a crazy story and worth reading. And I will certainly be writing more about it down the road. So stay tuned. Definitely looking forward to your reporting on this. And this is like a great wrinkle in the story that this game is fantastic and so successful so far. Yeah, yeah, good.

And I mean, I'm sure the developers are cheering. because, yeah, they will be getting their bonuses. They should be very proud of what they've made so far. Maddie, what's your one more thing? My One More Thing is a book. It's called Doom Guy, and it's written by John Romero. So a couple months ago, I had my One More Thing be the 2003 book, Masters of Doom, which is by David Kushner, and it's kind of like a famous video game reporting example

where Kushner interviewed Romero and also John Carmack and American McGee. and Sandy Peterson and Adrian Carmack, no relation hilariously, like all the original, original Doom team and like tons of other people associated with it and obviously, you know, did his best to portray what that time was like. The Doom guys, you might say. The Doom guys, if you will. Guys, plural. Doom guys too.

Doom guy. Yeah. Sure. That's why. That's exactly what their game was called. I think we all remember that correctly. So I talked at the time about how the book, Masters of Doom, kind of has some known flaws. And like one of them is that Kushner has this propensity for like fully recreating conversations at a level of detail that I am personally skeptical of.

But I did neglect to mention, although I did like tell some jokes about how no one can remember things that well. But I did know this at the time and I wish I'd mentioned that John Romero kind of famously has hyperthymia, which is to say he is one of those people who can remember. every single day of his life, or so he says, with accuracy. And so in his case, I think he's someone who's come out and said that he had disputed some of the things in the book. And that was interesting to me, especially because he's since written this memoir that is extraordinarily detailed. Like, it's much longer for starters.

And I just, I just want to give you guys a sense of it. So, Masters of Doom, if you were to listen to the audiobook, it's 12 hours and 43 minutes. already pretty long, right? And Doom Guy is 17 hours long. So like, it's covering a lot of the same ground, but in far, far more detail, which I think is a benefit, but also is something where I'm like, you need to really, really want to hear a lot of detail about this. And I'm personally very interested in it. So I was happy to enjoy every word. But I do think it's like really worth hammering home that John Romero truly remembers a staggering amount of minutia about the day-to-day happenings at its software. I will also say a big chunk of the book is just his personal life story. And I also

thought that was really interesting. He had a pretty troubled childhood, like an abusive alcoholic father and then abusive stepfather. At least I would describe the stepfather as abusive later on they seem to kind of make up in certain ways. Same with his biological father. And John Romero speaks about that with a lot of candor and compassion. And I think that that part of the book is also really fascinating and at times really heart-wrenching. And like speaks a lot to just the kind of person that he became. And I think that is a big part of why he wrote the book. He starts it off by saying that he really feels like he was a product of just where he

came up and his childhood and so on. And like that kind of spoke to the kinds of games that. fascinated him and the person that he was later in life. And I think that as insofar as any person telling the story of their own life can do, he does pretty well at painting that picture and illustrating all of that. But I would also say, I would not recommend reading these two books within a two-month period because they are, they go over so many similar events that I did personally start to feel like I was going insane at various points. Because when they released the two fire festival documentaries and we watched it.

It was a little like that where like you start kind of being like, wait, so I did already hear about the sequence of events previously. It was slightly different the first time, but like now it feels like some sort of weird dream I'm having. This is really just a me problem. But if for some reason you're listening to this and you kind of want to read both books, maybe like split them up by a few years. And as for why you might still want to read Masters of Doom, even though I think it's

it's probably true that there are parts of it that aren't entirely accurate, as would be true of any book. I mean, people's memories are fallible. If you're not John Romero, I suppose. I will say John Carmack has said that he feels it's accurate. And as far as I know, he has no intention of writing a memoir. And there's a lot of really cool details in the book about his childhood that speak to the kind of person that he became. And those are, as far as I know, only in Masters of Doom and probably any other interviews Karmax done over the years. So I feel like I'm getting the full picture, but I also don't know that I recommend reading both books back to back because it's a little crazy making. If you had to recommend one, like if people listening to this, you're like, I want to know this story.

Which one do I read? I would say Doom Guy, in part because it's a more complete picture. It's, it's written more recently. It includes more of Romero's life. And he still includes the full recounting of everything that happened in terms of how they were making due. and writes in a very accessible way about the development of some really, really exciting gameplay tools. And the fact that John Romero is capable of explaining those things in a way that I can understand as someone who's never written a line of code, I think is a great credit to him. And that many, I mean, we talk to game developers. We know that not all of them are gifted at describing how they make the things that they make.

And David Kushner, obviously, when he was writing Masters of Doom, I think also did a pretty good job of like trying to put that in plain language. But I think it's a real credit to Romero that he's also really capable of doing that and that obviously I play games. But since I don't make them, I think it's worth noting that the game was the game. The book was still really easily understandable to me, even though he was describing some pretty heady stuff in terms of what they were building and how significant it was. Nice. Cool. All right.

My one more thing is about a sports team that has really taken over the town of New York these days. I don't know if you guys have heard about this. New York, it's funny. New York is not like the most successful sports town. It's not, even though, I mean, it's had a little success. The Giants have won a couple of Super Bowls. The Yankees obviously were dominant for a long time, especially in the 90s. And I've spent a lot of money.

but like New York, the Jets and the Mets and the Knicks and the Nets, I mean, all kind of a joke for a very long time. And now the New York Knicks are in the finals. They just swept the Cavaliers. They won, I believe, 13 games in a row. So they are like the hottest team in the NBA playoffs right now. They had a miraculous comeback last week that I posted this on Blue Sky that if you look at the probability chart, it looks like Ubisoft's.

stock because it spikes all the way up to here for the calves and then goes all the way down. This is very narrow cast to Jason Schroeder's blue sky falling. That's what I'm here for. Specific jokes, specific humor is what I'm here for. The calves had a like 99.9.9 chance of winning and some of a loss. They were up 22 points with seven minutes left and the Knicks came back. And the series was over when that happened. Even that was game one, I think the Knicks just kind of ate their hearts. And yeah, New York is is blowing up right now. It feels like a truly. Nick's town. Everyone's, you see Knicks gear, everywhere you go. Everyone's talking about it. Every time I go to the grocery store, the barbershop, like everywhere I go, bodega, like just people are talking about the Knicks. People are talking about the Knicks. Which would be very exciting if I were a fan of the New York Knicks. Unfortunately, I am a fan of the Brooklyn, which are very, are a sad sack team. Whenever you go to a Nets game at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, probably a solid 75% of fans are there for the other team and are just rooting for the the other team the whole time. The Nets are a cursed franchise. They like tanked this last year to try to

get a top three pick and wound up with the number six pick in the draft. They're just a mess and a joke of a franchise. And I've always kind of hated the Nix. And now I don't really know what to do because like part of me wants to root for New York. But then another part of me is like, no, fuck the Nix. I can't stand that team. They've always been rivals to the Nets. They've always been annoying. Nix fans are very annoying. I've always had to grow up around surrounded my Nix fans and school and stuff, and I've always found them very annoying. So I'm not sure how to feel about this. I guess if it's any solace for me, it's that the Knicks will probably get crushed by the San Antonio Spurs or the Oklahoma City Thunder. Have either of you watched the San Antonio Spurs

over the last three years or seen the man named Victor Wenbanyama? No. Nope. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Well, if you get a chance, maybe they'll be in the finals, but you should you should turn on a spurs and thunder's game or like watch a clip on youtube where victor wambaynama is playing because he is roughly eight feet tall and he makes he when he plays with other NBA players is he really roughly eight feet tall yeah yeah he when he plays with other NBA players it's like a grown up playing with kids on the playground except the other NBA players are all like six foot six um you just have to watch him and the way he moves and the way he shoots it's like people call his nickname is the alien because humans shouldn't

be like this. Like nobody should be this big and also this fast and this dominant in every possible way of the sport. But anyway, that's the story for another time. Go watch footage of Victor Wimaniama if you get a chance. Watch a clip or two because it's really, it's really a treasure. But yeah, but the Knicks, I think they'll probably lose in the finals, but maybe they won't. I don't know. For me, it's kind of a win-win, right? Either I get to watch the Knicks lose and I can make fun of all my annoying Nick fans friends or I get to watch the Knicks win and it's like New York will be exciting. Everyone will be happy and the energy here will be

fun to watch. I guess I kind of want them to lose. So, fuck the Knicks. My favorite Nicks. Fun fact is that, of course, Nixon is short for Knickerbockers, which is the full name for the team, and that Nickerbockers are shorts. They're like short pants. So they're the New York

shorts. I mean, once again, Kirk, I root for the Brooklyn Nets, which are named after the thing you put the basketball into. You got the shorts. We got the Nets. We need like the jerseys, like the Staten Island jerseys. The Long Island shoes. We're just naming stuff that we can see.

I mean, there's some out there names. The Cleveland's football team is called the Browns. It's just a color. It's just, I think it's named after the, it's someone's last name. It's named after like the last name of some NFL guy a hundred years ago. That's like the worst thing for it to be named after. It's just like a guy. You know, the New Orleans Jazz, it's actually named for Charles Jazz.

He was the first owner of the team. that's not true. I'm just making that up. It's like one of those. Kirk, it's actually the Utah Jazz. I don't know if you know that. Is it in basketball? The New Orleans Jazz were traded to Utah where they don't allow music. One of my favorite jokes from that movie. Just so classic. Yeah, the New Orleans team is actually the Pelicans, the New Orleans Pelicans. The jazz is of course fitting for Utah. But anyway, yeah, New York Knicks have taken over this town. and I'm not really that thrilled about it. All right, on that note, it is time for us to say goodbye.

I hope everyone out there enjoys me in the hollower because I will probably be playing it a third and a fourth and a fifth time. I'm just the only bummer is that Yacht Club is not making more of it. I mean, unless something changes, maybe if it sells a billion copies, they'll be like, right, I guess we have to make it Google. But their plan is to go and now work on 3D shovel night. That's like they're going to be their next big thing

because they put that on pause so everyone could work on, you know, the hollowar. So kind of bum that we won't get more of it. But I love what we got. And I think people out there will really dig it. And on that note, we'll be back next week to talk about another really cool video game that we haven't mentioned this week, which is, of course, 007, First Light. We all got that really late. Review code went out really late.

So we will talk about it next week. Very short version, I'm very much enjoying it. So it'll be very fun to talk about another good game. Yeah, a lot of good games this year. Dangers. Good games. All right. Kirk, Maddie, see you both next time.

Yeah, see 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. 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 artists-owned shows. Supported directly. By you. I'm Kirk Campbell. I just did the same thing before you. Oh, one, two, three, four. Just had coffee.

Yeah, I got a little bit of morning voice happening. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers. And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello.