Triple Click - We Seriously Can't Stop Playing Balatro

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Balatro is one of the best games of 2024 so far — and certainly the most addictive. This week, the Triple Click gang dives into the new poker roguelike and dissects what makes it so great. They talk about the three phases of Balatro players, the appeal of randomness, and the thrill of this game's parade of interesting decisions.One More Thing:Kirk: Dragon’s Dogma 2Maddy: Princess Peach Showtime!Jason: The Last Murder at the End of the World (Stuart Turton)LINKS:Preorder Jason’s Book! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jason-schreier/play-nice/9781538725429/Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

So my egg hadn't hatched, but I had a credit card, which meant I could afford a ceremonial dagger. So I murdered a hiker, and thanks to this photograph, I was able to beat the needle and make it to the next blind. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the cards to you. Don't call the police. That was just me describing my latest run in Bellatro, a poker-themed deck builder that the three of us can't get enough of. On this episode, we talk about why we love it so much, even though I still haven't gotten campfire. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers.

And I'm Jason Shrier. Hello. Hello. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to Max Fun Drive. Yeah, it's still going. The drive is on. Week two of Max Fun Drive 24. We're having a lot of fun. It's been a great drive so far. And yeah, we hope that you'll consider joining up and joining in. So Max Fun Drive is something that our network maximum fun does every year. We'll tell you more about it during the ad break. But it's a great time to sign up and become a member. There's some rewards. There's other stuff you can learn about at the usual place. Maximumfund.org slash joins. So go there if you want to find out more. But yeah, we'll talk about it more during the break.

So mysterious. Just go there if you want to find out more. There's so much more you can learn there. There's a lot of rewards and I could list them forever. But we'll get into that later. Though the thing to know is that this week, if you become a member, you will get a bonus episode from us focusing on Final Fantasy 7 rebirth and talking about the ending of that game.

And everything that happens in the story will be spilling the beans and really getting into it, which is going to be super fun, because I think all three of us have quite a bit to say. We do. We're about to record that after this episode, and I'm very excited. And we've restrained ourselves largely in our group chat, but can't wait to get into it. So yeah, Maximumfund.org slash join, become a member, and thanks so much to everyone who supports this show.

All right, let's get into it. Maddie, what are we talking about on this episode? Well, we're talking about a video game called Balatro or Bombatrow. Balotro or Balotro? Nope, nope, nope, nope, it's Balatro and I will hear no other variations. Balotro, balatoro? You could roll your R if you're fancy. So, okay, I said this in our Discord.

It sounds like it's an Italian name. I know. And the way you would say, like, the way you pronounce Italian is Palatro. Exactly. You would put the emphasis the way we do in America. When the moon hits your eye, like a big piece. pizza pie, that's Bellatro. Yeah, exactly.

And that's, you know, I say Bellatro. And I'm going to say that for this whole episode. And if the listeners pronounce it some other way, it's okay. We can all get along on this. My reasoning for this is that I've been saying it in my own head that way for so long that I'm just going to stick with what I've been doing. Yes, and the developer of the game who has chosen to remain anonymous. We don't know their actual name, but they go by local funk, has said that anyone

And you can press it however you wish. You can do whatever you want. But I guess the way that the word Bellatro is pronounced is Balotro. And it refers to like a jester, a joker, if you will. And that's very important because Balotro is a game with a heck of a lot of jokers in it. So what is it? I feel like I didn't understand what Bellotro was until I started playing. And there's a wonderful tutorial really slowly gets you in.

And then you're fully hooked and you play it for the rest of your entire. life. But almost every explanation that I heard prior to didn't really make it clear to me why the game is as appealing as it is, but I'm going to do my best. So it looks like a poker game, a digital poker game. It's 2D graphics. There's cards spread out on the table. It looks like you're playing poker at against AI, against a virtual dealer. And poker hands are part of Bellatro. You do need to kind of know which hands are stronger than other poker hands. so that you can advance in the early going of it, except that then the real game is actually nothing like poker at all.

And it becomes a roguelike that makes math fun. And you introduce kind of much like Hades. We compared this to Hades when we talked about Bellotro on the Twitch stream that we did at Triple ClickPod on Twitch for Max Fun Drive. We did a Twitch stream last week and we talked about this. And I compared it to Hades. And in Hades runs, you get different boons. You get to select a different boon that kind of,

powers up Zagrius on each of his many runs. This is similar to that. In Bellatro, in between rounds of this weird approximation of poker, you go into a shop and you can choose Joker cards or a varieties of other cards that are sometimes one-time use only. The Joker's apply to your whole run until you get rid of them. And those modify what happens to each of your poker hands in ways that would never happen in a real poker game.

Like the modifications are absurd and ridiculous. Like, nines will suddenly become a far more powerful card than any other one and will give you oodles and oodles of points, hundreds of thousands of points, or two pair is suddenly the most powerful thing. Or you can get multiple jokers that will just power up two pair. And then, of course, you don't even care about getting a straight or a full house anymore. You just want to get two pair every time because that's going to get you the most points. And that's the same as any other roke-like, where you just have a certain strategy or build, where you're like, okay, I'm just going to level up Zagrius is. boomerang or whatever it may be and just use that the whole time. It's like that, but with two pair, for example, or a straight. And I think it's a lot of numbers on the screen. It's very

intimidating, but despite all of that, despite looking at how the game looked, reading articles about it and being like, I don't understand why anyone would like this. I am now fully ensconced in the world of Bellatro. All I want to do is play Bellatro. And I want to talk to you, too, about it. Because I think we're all in it now. We're all in Volatro. mode. But Jason, I want to go to you first. What has your journey been like? Have you slept since downloading Bellatro? It's a real problem. Especially if like me, you get it on a steam deck and then you can take it anywhere with you. Yeah, I'm playing it on Switch, which is the same idea. The same idea. It's over. And then every single morning, your wife is like, why are you in the

bathroom so long? I need you to help me watch these children. And I'm like, I'm finishing a run here. Yeah, Bellacho is a fascinating game. It's really quite a phenomenal game in many ways, although it has one kind of glaring flaw that I will get into a little bit later. And I've been thinking about this. I think you kind of, like, as a player, you are in one of three phases with Bellatro. You start off in this phase where you're like, okay, I'm learning this game. Oh, this is pretty fun. Let me see how far I can get. Oh, cool, what's this Joker do? I'm going to check this out. This is before you've really learned. a lot about the game. We've learned a lot about the combinations and what interest means and all that stuff. Then there's phase two where you've learned stuff and you're like, okay, great. Now I can really, I can get a flush build and I can get a smeared joker and a short and a four finger joker so I can make flushes with four cars and yeah, I'm going to kill it. I'm going to win. And this is a point where you're kind of, you're winning maybe half or maybe more of your runs. And that's kind of phase two of your understanding of the game. And then phase three is,

when you realize that you just have to get glass cards and re-triggers for everything. You've lost all of your friends and family. Everything's over for you. Phase three is when you realize that like pairs and high cards are actually more powerful than flushes and straits. And this is when you've gone like full meta game to the point where this is sicko phase. Phase three. Yes. This is really sick of phase. This is where you're like, okay, how am I going to get over the hump from anti-12, anti-11 to anti-12 where it goes from like like 14 million chips that you have to get past to 300 million. And that's the real sycophis.

And I've gotten to sicko phase. And now I'm just kind of totally trying to min-max every run that I go on, beat every challenge, beat every, get that gold steak on every deck and so on and so forth. That's all going to be gobbledygook to people who don't understand this game. And I will say that if you listen to that and you thought it sounded like gobbledygook, don't play this game because it will ruin your life. It'll turn you into a sicko. Don't.

You don't understand what we're talking about. You're still safe. It hasn't gotten to you yet. So, Kirk, how are you doing? I like tying that to Anties in that I think when you're in phase two, you're really trying to figure out how to get through Ante 11, which is where the blind that you have to beat goes to seven million. I don't even know that I'm in phase two yet. I think I'm still in phase one. Yeah, it sounds right.

Phase one is, yeah, that's when you're still kind of trying to get fast phase. I'm still seeing new jokers I've never seen before or new cards. And I'm like, oh, okay, that's interesting. Yeah, so the structure of this game is that you're trying to beat eight rounds that are called antis and each round has three bosses. Or there's basically three numbers you have to hit that are escalating in height. And at the end, there's a boss that has some kind of a modifier. Sometimes the modifier is just the number is really high. But yeah, sometimes it's like face cards don't do anything.

Or cards are flipped over and you literally don't know what cards you're playing, but you can kind of put them in order and be like, okay, this is probably a strong. great. I'm probably good. And the boss modifiers are an important part of what makes the game really cool, at least to me, which I guess I can get into in a second. But yeah, so when you're trying to beat anti-8, and that means you've beaten the game. Like you get a congratulations game over screen there, and then you can choose infinite mode, which keeps going and the bids increase exponentially. Yeah, it's actually only just begun when you quote unquote beat the game.

You never truly beat Bellatro, it beats you. Well, right, because numbers are infinite. So there is no real end, or at least that we know of. So anyways, that's kind of, yeah, phase one is trying to beat Ante8, phase two is trying to beat Ante 11. I get to Ante 11, and then it's like, forget it. Like I haven't gotten to $7 million yet because I can't quite engineer a build that can do that. But once you can do that, you're probably getting into exponential numbers, and then you get into places where I don't know what the peak number is.

Someone made like $400 million on a single hand or something. Like you can build these machines. No, that's nothing. 400 million. Let's be clear. Yeah, okay, right. So I was trying to pick a high number. And as Jason says, like, that's not even close to the top.

Jason's regularly getting $4 trillion. When you get into SICO mode, you're seeing the ease, like, as representative of the number. Because there are too many zeros and they need to just get into exponential math. Yeah, they can't include all the zeros. So what I love about this game, it's not actually the high numbers. It's the way that the game encourages you to make lots and lots of decisions. Jason, this was something you pointed out in your newsletter. A quote that you invoke often, it's Sid Meyer, right?

Is that right? Civilization designer who said, a good game should be a series of interesting decisions. And this game is very much that philosophy, just distilled the whole time you're playing, you're making interesting decisions, which is actually a really fun thing about these kinds of roguelike games in general, is that you're always having to make new decisions

because you're always creating a new build. So you're starting from scratch, which means lots of decisions. in a game, like a long role-playing game where you commit to a single build, you know, 40 hours in, you're maybe not making as many decisions because you've already unlocked all the abilities and you're kind of just playing. So this really encourages that at every turn. Every time you go to the shop, every time you're looking at New Jokers,

every time you're deciding how to spend that money or whether to bank it and earn interest, you're making decisions. So that's one part of the fun of it. And then the other part for me is it also always throws these modifiers at you or these challenges that force you to adapt. And I think that's the secret sauce. Like that's the thing this game does so well that's so remarkable. I mean, it's all pretty remarkable.

It's amazing that one person made this game. I know. But the fact that I can make a hand that I think, okay, yeah, flush hand is like a really common kind of starter hand because it's pretty easy to focus on. You're making a flush hand. And then you see a boss that says, okay, you can only play each type of hand once against this boss. So now you have to look at that and you have two stops at the shop before you get to that boss. to think, okay, I need to somehow get something else that can beat this boss. Got to diversify those jokers.

Maybe. Or I could level up flush and just get my flushes so juice that I can drop a single flush. And that's going to win for me. So there are like different ways that you can navigate each of those challenges that it throws in your way. And I think it's very good at like retaining that flexibility, even though you do wind up building a very specialized machine as you go through a given run. I mean, that was one of your main tip. Jason, right? Do you want to kind of elucidate that? It helped me a lot in the early going. Just focus on one hand. Yeah, when you're just starting, that's the best way to do it and to find success is to be like, okay. I mean, the best way is to be, is to kind of adapt based on your starting kind of luck. And really by, by like, so the first couple of aunties you should think about as like your set up kind of aunties. And the first ante alone, I mean, you should be able to beat that for the most part without any jokers or like grab.

grab like one extra joker that you know you'll get rid of later that just helps you out in the early rounds. Because really you're thinking about, okay, when am I going to get a card that I can start building my deck around? When I'm going to get a joker that is like so useful that I can start building around that. And then those, I won't get into every single possibility. But like a good example of that is like the vampire joker, which gives you, which like kind of eats the enhancements off of your cards and turns them into a times like a modifier. that multiplies your multiplier by X, whatever, and that keeps growing. And so if you get that early, you can just kind of design your machine based on that and start tailoring it to try to get as many enhanced cards as possible, or find combos that

work really well with that. I got a crazy combo earlier today that was like, so there's this one kind of perk you can get, this voucher you buy in the shop, that makes it so any planet cards that you're storing in your little inventory thing, add a 1.5x mults. They multiply your multiplier by 1.5 if you store them there. And then I got a legendary Joker that creates a negative version of like a randomized slot in your consumable slot in your inventory. So if you have a planet there, this legendary Joker will keep like spawning new ones with a

negative slot so they don't take up spaces so you can get an infinite number. And then you combine that with the 1.5 modifier, and you've got a good thing going. It's endless. Yeah. This is, that's a good example of a kind of build that can actually generate those like hundreds of millions of. Yes. And so, Kirk, to your point earlier, I think the third thing that's really appealing about

this is building the synergies and kind of that things. A lot of video games are really good at kind of giving you the tools to create a broken system, to build a machine and to try to break the game as much as possible. And that's part of the fun of a lot of different types. of games. And this is one of them because this is a game that allows you to play around with jokers and combinations of different modifiers in ways that make you feel like you're breaking the game. And that's just part of the fun. It's just like seeing like, oh my God, like I'm just like completely destroying every single hand. Like I'm winning on every single firsthand just

because I found this broken combination. And then the game is very good at kind of cutting you down to size when it presents these ridiculous exponentially increasing chip counts that you have to hit. Because you have to break it to win in the end. Like, you eventually need to create hands that are so, quote, unquote, broken that they are, in fact, precisely what you need to do. So anytime you ever feel like, oh, I'm really getting one up on Bellatro, like, this is so easy.

It's only going to be like a couple more rounds before you're like, okay, I now need to either completely change everything that I was doing previously, or. or the numbers that I thought were high are, in fact, not high enough to continue onward. The house always wins. Yes. Well, so that really, I think that actually presents one of the biggest flaws in this game. So this game is not, and this is, it's a balanced flaw. So it's something that is pretty easily fixed.

It's not a design flaw. The game has exceptional design, and that is not going to change. But the balance flaw is just the way in which it scales up and the way that the difficulty is set. There are two kind of points of difficulty. is the antis, as Kirk talked about, where you go that 11 to 12 kind of leap is pretty, pretty gnarly. And that's the point where, like, most decks will just die. But also, the other kind of difficulty modifier is the stakes. And so once you beat a, so the game, the kind of structure is you pick a deck and each deck has its own sort of kind of unique feature. So, like, there's a,

there's a gold deck where you start with 10 extra dollars. There's a red deck where you start with an extra hand. And then there's some that punish you and there's some they're more creative. The final deck and you unlock randomizes all your cards. So you'll just start with the deck of just kind of random like. And you can always have duplicates. That's a fundamental part of the game. It's not just the regular 52 cards. You can always be adding in additional cards all the time just as an additional elements. Yeah. Yeah. So each of those decks also has a stake and you start with a white steak, which is just kind of the normal kind of base. And then you add modifiers on top of that and they keep kind of, they're all cumulative.

So they add to one another. By the time you get to gold stake, which is the highest one, it's pretty rough. It's pretty hard to beat that one for a variety of reasons. It's like at this point, everything is super expensive. You have lost minus one discards, minus one hand size, like everything you get. You're just punishing yourself essentially. And that is a really big obstacle. And so those two kind of difficulty obstacles, I think, are a little.

little too unbalanced and make it so you have to really play in like one specific way, especially the chip modifier. So as I mentioned, when you get to that kind of phase three in your balatro playing, there's really only one way to win. And that only, that one way is to kind of create a cumulative effect where like every card in your deck is like a steel card. So it's giving you a X1.5 multiplayer. and then finding ways to re-trigger them using red seals or cards like mine that re-trigger every

special ability in your hand. And that's the only way to get to the insane numbers that you're hitting past anti-12, like anti-12 and beyond. Which strikes me as kind of, it's like it almost runs counter to the spirit of the rest of the game because the rest of the game is so much about experimentation and playing around with all sorts of different types of decks and seeing how far you can go with them, and then you just hit this wall. So it's kind of a bummer, because the more you play, and I've played a ton of this game, the more you're like, oh, well, it doesn't really matter, like, what synergies I'm using or what kind of experiments I'm playing around with here, because I will always just die once I get to Auntie 12, because there's no way I can hit those

numbers unless I play this one specific way. And that, to me, is not very fun. But it's something that can be fixed. And you, as far as you know, there isn't any other additional way to defeat that part. I feel like just even introducing that as a concept is going to cause people to write in. No, well, it's, no, no, no. I mean, it's like mathematically, there's no way to get those numbers unless you are doing a specific type of multiplier. Like, it just doesn't, the game doesn't work anymore past that unless you are doing one specific thing. That one specific thing, I'm not saying it has to be one specific deck. It's one specific type of strategy. And that's the only strategy that works. Like there's no other way to get those kinds of numbers is what I'm saying. You know,

this is interesting. I think that a lot of what Bellatra does that I find really helpful just for understanding video games is that it makes mechanical, the mechanical aspects of a game very visible because it's so straightforward. You're just putting together decks like hands of cards that multiply in certain ways to reach a certain number. So it's doing what a lot of video games do. It's just that instead of having an axe be the thing that's causing them. number and an armor class and a bunch of modifiers that are being, you know, as the axe hits the orcs head, and that's all happening behind the screen, it's just like, here are the numbers, play them out, do they multiply to a high enough number? So as a result of that,

you can kind of see all of these design elements working. You can kind of watch them firing off, and that can be a thrill. I love the way some of the synergies work. I'm glad you called that out, Jason. I love when you arrange things in an order that you didn't realize would cause some synergy to happen, which happens often. This game really benefits from being played faster than more you play it. You can speed up the game speed. But for a while, I liked playing it at regular speed because I could see everything happening. And it kind of took a long time.

Sometimes I would get impatient. But it was nice and like, oh, interesting. So that Joker is causing all face cards to count twice. But that face card, when it triggers twice, it adds to the chips. And the chips are actually calculated before the multiplayer or whatever. And you kind of see these sort of Rube Goldberg machines fire. off and realize that you've built a more complex one than you thought you had. That's really cool, and it's fun that the game shows you all of that,

because it just lets you see what's going on in the machine that you've built. And what you're talking about, Jason, this kind of endgame challenge, that it's really whittled down to this narrow set of possibilities because once you've reached a certain point, there's no longer any joy or discovery or newness in everything that came before because you've already done that. So now you're trying to get something new, and the only thing that's left to get new is like blood from a stone.

And really, this is a very common problem, right? game with an end game. I think back to Destiny 2. Yeah, but we all have the same guns. You have to have the y'all are hard. Yeah, we're like, it's like, okay, there's a meta gun, there's one rocket launcher, there's one group of classes that can beat this boss on this difficulty, and soon

you realize, like, oh, we've just been doing this really narrow, boring thing for like a month, and there's no joy of discovery left. It's just down to like, how can we eke out the most efficient thing? So it's funny that it's the same problem, but it's just very clear in Bellatro because it

where's all of its mechanics right face up? So here's why it works, though, on the flip side of that, almost kind of to counter what I was saying. Face down. What actually, yeah, right. What actually makes it work is that it appeals to that part of all of our brains in the same way that gambling does, which is the endorphins of getting exactly what you want

exactly at the right time. The random chance aspect. So this is the big difference between this and something like destiny, where destiny you have to be prepared, for the thing by getting the Yallerhorn in advance and you get excited and you get that endorphed rush when the Yallerhorn drops, but it's not part of the rating experience. The reading experience requires you to come in with that. In the Belacho, let's say you're going for a high level run, the phase three of Belatro mindset, the hardcore full nerd.

Sicko. Sicko mode of Belatro. You still get that endorphin rush when the Joker appears that you really needed or when that tarot card appears that you really needed. And so, so on and so forth. And there's enough, the way this game uses randomness is really brilliant because it's, it's just, it appeals, it gives us so much dopamine and endorphins that it's just, I mean, that's, that's a large part of what makes it so addictive is because you're continually chasing that rush of like, oh, yes, I got exactly what I wanted at just the right time. And so even when you know that it's kind of, you're limited in what you actually can do, you are still chasing that dragon and that provides a certain level of kind of satisfaction.

maybe in an unhealthy way, but still makes it satisfying to play. Yeah, maybe. Maybe a little unhealthy. I mean, I was thinking about how fun the game is when you lose, because, again, I'm still in phase one, so I'm losing a lot. And roguelics and roglytes can be really tough when you lose sometimes, especially if you have a really long run and then you lose, and you're like, I have to start at the beginning.

And Bellatro, that length of time that I feel that way is so much shorter than I felt in, say, Hades, where sometimes I'd be like, I made it so really, like, and just, especially if the rolls aren't in your favor and the boons are crappy at the very end or whatever it may be. And you're like, but everything was going so well. How dare you video game. Bellotro, I think it's just fast enough, especially because each individual hand takes only the length of time for you to pick out a poker hand from what you have based on if you're at the Joker's, however many abilities you need to to synergize. But that doesn't actually take you very long to do, even when you get better at it. I mean, maybe, maybe Jason, you're just pouring over every choice. But it doesn't sound like it.

You're making decisions pretty quickly because there just aren't that many decisions to make per individual hand. And then the real decision making for me comes in at the shop. That's where I'm really looking over everything and I'm looking at how much money I have. And it's like a fun decision because there's the random chance aspect of what will be in the shop. That's random. And if it really sucks, you can decide to spend a couple dollars to re-roll the shop and get something new. But that in and of itself is a decision you have to make where you're like, do I want to chance it or do I want to put up with these cards? And that kind of the dopamine hit of like, oh, the joke or I want is here.

Or, oh, do I want to like pull the slot machine essentially, like pay three bucks or whatever the cost is for the shop run that time to re-roll and see what the new. slots are going to say all of it is just short enough of an amount of time and just few enough decisions that you feel like it's all gravy. Like you feel like the gameplay experience continues forever and the sense of like, like, I could actually go to bed when I completed a Hades run and I lost. Like I was capable of putting down the game at that point. Bellatra was not that way because you're like, it's going to take two seconds. Like I'm just going to quickly start another run.

See how we can get something. And then once you're seeing how it goes. And then once you're seeing how it goes. There's also that Joker that makes fun of you at the end, which is just very stinging every time he makes fun. It is. But I don't know. I just think it's something about the pace of it combined with the randomness of the shop. I don't know.

It just works. I think because it's also the skill ratio is very high. Like, yes, there's some randomness involved. But it's not so much randomness that you're like, who cares? I don't care about this game anymore. Well, it's always randomness that you can find a way to overcome. Like it always feels like if when you lose it almost I mean I'll unless you get really screwed by a bad boss or like a couple of chips below what you needed to hit or something like that. But most of the time it feels like if you lose it was your own doing and your own wrong decisions.

Yeah. So there's not like a rage quitting balatro moment. Like it doesn't quite feel that way as a game because a lot of times you're like, well, I can fix that though. Or like I understand exactly how we got here. And that was just that run. And I'm just going to do great the next time. You can definitely have that feeling like you've got a car that's kind of just not running that well. Yeah.

And we're trying to get that final part into the engine to get it going, but it's just puttering and it can't quite get up to speed. And then it just crashes into a ditch. And you're like, all right, that thing was kind of a hunka joke. That was a crappy car. Let's just start over. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.

I'm realizing that Maddie you're in phase one. I'm in phase two and Jason is in sick of phase. So we're in the three phases. I find that where I am, I've played enough that I'm pretty familiar with the game. and I have my chosen strategies, but also I still get surprised often by what is working for me. There are times where I just kind of pick some jokers because they add molt in some way that seems like maybe it'll be helpful because I just kind of need that to get through the next couple of antis. And then I start to find like, oh, this is really working.

For example, actually, so we played Bellatro on the stream after Helldivers last week. There's actually still an archive of that. If anyone wants to go watch us play, if you haven't played the game. It'll still be up for a couple more days, right? It'll be up for a couple more days if you're listening to this. And you can just kind of see it. And that's a good way to get a sense of the game too. For sure.

Just like watching me play while we talk and Jason gives me tips. And one of the jokers I got, Jason, you know the name. It's the one that gains maltz every time you use a tarot card. Fortune teller. That's it. So this is a joker I'd never encountered before. Or maybe I'd seen it in the shop and never bought it. But I bought it because I just was like, I need malt.

Like I need to increase my multiplier. So I bought this thing. And that run, which I stopped in the middle. middle of the stream and kept going on. It wound up being my best run ever. And it was because, it was because of that card. Like, I just went at it with tarot cards and just used them and use them and use them and use them. And, like, the molt on it was, I don't even remember, like, 85 or something like that, like by the time I was higher up, which I'm sure is nothing if you're going for super highest scores. But for me, it was very good. And it led to, you know, it led to, I think,

the highest score I'd ever gotten. So I didn't see that coming when I started building the hand, which is still a fun thing about where I am. right now. Sometimes I'll just pick a card and I'll be like, this seems maybe good and then realize it's amazing, which is a very fun surprise. Yeah. So, okay, so when you're in phase two of Balatra play, in other words, when you're trying to get, you're trying to beat a run and you're trying to get past it and see how far you could go. And basically you'll, you'll hit that wall at NT12, but anywhere up until then, you'll want to do well. Um, the, those cards, cards like fortune teller and like Castle, um, Castle is a card that gives you like, um, uh,

like builds up X number of chips every time you discard some suit of cards and the suit is randomized every time. And basically the cards that are cumulative and they keep adding over time. That's another thing that makes the game really addictive because you're watching the numbers go up in those into like on a micro level and you can build it. And it feels really powerful to be like, oh man, I am doing this. I had to run once where it was the checkered deck, which is a deck where it's only hearts and spades. We have 26 hearts and 26 spades. I love that. And I got the castle.

And the castle is really powerful with that deck because it'll cycle between hearts and spades. And since you only have those, you can just keep, like, building that cumulative chip count every time. I got it to like 600, 700 chips. And I made most of the run up until the anti-12 cliff. It made most of the run a breeze. But even just the act of, like, being able to build up those cumulative cards and watch them get more and more powerful every time is just incredibly fun. and satisfying to do. And those cards, I think, are ones to keep an eye out for,

especially if you're early in a run and you can actually start building around it, anything that kind of like builds up throughout as you do a certain action or as you accumulate a certain thing or destroy a certain thing. There's a legendary Joker that, like, adds to your times mults,

so you're multiplying multiplier modifier, every time you destroy a face card. And that's super powerful. I got one up to like times 20 at some point, which is pretty, pretty wild. Well, because you could get the Joker that makes all cards count as face cards. Uh-huh, uh-huh. That's a good option. Those are some of those synergies that would, woof, that would be mighty.

Yeah. Oh, God. Yeah, that would be wild. Although the hard part of that is actually not so much getting the cards, but getting them destroyed. Yes. Because there are only, like, so many ways you can destroy cards. Yeah. Yeah.

One of them is a tarot card. There's also, but I realize, like, far-end. to that run that if if one of her face cards is a glass card and that triggers destroying it, which is like a one in, oh sure, two chance or one and four chance or something like that, that counts as destroying it too. So that was pretty cool. Again, unexpected ways in which things work to your point earlier. Yeah, those little surprises. So we're talking a lot about mechanics, but I actually want to shout out this game's aesthetics and also its writing since I think those are also really big parts of why it's so successful. The aesthetics, first,

So this game looks unlike any other game. Like when you first look at it, it looks kind of like Solitaire or it looks like an old Windows 95 card game. Like an old computer playing Solitaire with almost like the VHS crunchiness of it. Right. It has like a kind of CRT pixelation. And important, just one thing real quick on that point. One reason it looks like Solitaire and not like Poker is because it actually you get eight cards to start with, which is not poker. Like, poker doesn't work like that.

It's just a random number of cards. I'm sure it's not random and that in fact they like in designing it decided like this is a fun number of cards to start with and you have a certain number of disc cards. But yeah, it's not a poker hand and there aren't other players. So it has that solitaire feeling as well where you're just trying to arrange the cards yourself. So it has that initial look. But then the more you play it and even from the beginning, it's clear that it has this very psychedelic undertone. Everything is swirling. The background is always swirling. There's just this feeling of melting to the way the world looks. And then the music. So the music is by a composer

who goes by Lewis F. The music is amazing. It's so good. Yeah, he just wrote this one track, and it's this unbelievable track. I can't believe how good it is. Like, I think people don't always appreciate how hard it is to write a piece of music that's just going to play on a loop for people in this kind of a game for basically ever. And yet, I've listened to it so many times, and because it's constantly changing and shifting and modular. and building up and then adding new layers and removing them. It puts on this really cool, like, high-pass filter when you're in the store. Yeah.

Like, it adds all these nice effects. It just has this beautiful swirling effect. It's in 7-4, so it's in an odd meter. Yep. You can just kind of count 7 to it. It's not showy about it, but it's, like, a really remarkable piece of music. So I think that that and then the swirling look, there's just this, like, you're in this, like, vivey groove in 7 with these synths and these kind of undulating oscillators

and the graphics are swirling. And it really is very cool. Well, I really like playing it faster. Like, I think as you speed up the game speed, especially once you're getting into it, that's nice to do. But it does kind of interrupt that just, like, lazy, hypnotic feel that the game has at base speed.

So I do recommend if anyone's going to start this, start at base speed, and like listen to the music. Let the whole thing wash over you. Because it's aesthetically amazing. And pay attention to how the cards look because eventually you kind of get to know the Joker's just from their appearance, but like, there's just some super subtle animations where like the cards feel a little alive, but in a way that's not like creepy, but it is almost like

the paintings in the room are moving their eyes at you or something like that. Like it's just like a slightly haunted poker table that you're playing at. It almost feels as though you're playing both against and with the Joker's themselves as characters or something. I mean, the writing, I mean, you kind of mentioned it, but it's very minimalist writing. because the game has to explain how every single card works in the least amount of text possible, because it just has to fit within a really limited area and use kind of this like pixely text format. And just the fact that that's even possible. I mean, we've already referred to the fact that multiplier is shortened to molt.

But like the language of Bellotro just goes beyond that. And eventually you're just only thinking in terms of numbers and like signifiers and symbols because of just the visual. arcana of the game and I don't know it's like it's its own visual language that is a unique yes the jokers are amazing looking the art on them is so wonderful they're all very different and also they're so funny so writing also is the the humor of the jokers themselves so yes there's a joker oh i have a couple examples here one of them there's a joker that's the radio joker and that gives you bonuses on 10 and 4 10 and 4 so right you think about it and then you're like oh right Right, 10 for like a radio. That's a pretty obvious one. There's one that's driver's license,

where if you have 16 modified cards, you get a bonus. So driver's license. Oh, sure, so 16. Yeah. We were talking about this on the stream, and I had started sharing banana trivia, and then realized that the banana trivia I was sharing is reflected in the mechanics of the banana cards. There are two banana jokers. There's one called Groschelle, and there's one that's called Cavendish. And Gromichel is, like, not that great. It gives you a pretty good molt, And it has a one in four chance of being destroyed. The Cavendish is pretty good. It gives you a strong malt bonus.

It has a one in a thousand chance of being destroyed, which is just sort of funny, like that there are two banana cards with very different chances of being destroyed. But then as it turns out, and as someone in our chat reminded us, the Gromichael banana was a type of banana that was dominant in the market through the middle of the 20th century and then lost its market dominance because of like a fungus that killed it. It's actually the real estate. reason that people slip on banana peels. They used to be slippery and they were very different.

Yeah. And they were apparently delicious and then they kind of went extinct or at least you can't buy them anymore. So that's why the girl Michelle Card is more likely to vanish as a one and four chance. To be destroyed. Yeah. And what I didn't realize is that when it gets destroyed, that's when Cavendish or Cavendish becomes available in the shop.

Yes. The Cavendish Banana is what we eat now and that's still got a chance of going extinct as well, which is apparently a thing. But it's only a one in a thousand chance. So it's like, that's like really pretty rich mechanical humor for a video game to dig into. And you could totally like that stuff could pass you by. But it's so funny and so smart. Yeah.

What do you mean that stuff could pass you by? Do you think a lot of people that didn't pat? Like a lot of banana experts are. I guess that's true. I don't want to assume most people play in Volato or banana experts. Yeah, it's probably passing by most players. Yeah. I think that's a safe assumption.

It's a fun thing about playing the game, though, is where you'll suddenly get a joke that you've looked at 10 times and then realize like, oh, right, that's very funny. Yeah, I was very excited when I got the 10-4 times. Yeah, there's one fun one that's like, it's like a to-do list, and then you realize that it spells out Joker and the to-do list. Yes. Oh, nice, yeah. The to-do list one is good. And then, of course, also the to-do list one makes you do something different each time.

Like, it is you're having to act out a to-do list. Yes, it changes every time, much like a real to-do list. Yeah. So, Jason, I have a question for you as a long-term threes player. do you feel like Bellatro is of that echelon? Or do you feel like eventually it will be a solved game for you? And it won't appeal anymore. Because I'm only at level one, phase one, as we're calling it.

But I already feel from this level like I will eventually see it as a solved game. Because I will have seen all the Jokers, if you will. I will have seen all the synergies. Yeah. I mean, I already kind of feel, I certainly have felt, the hooks coming out a little bit on Balatro just because I played it so much to have a lot. The novelty isn't quite as much there when I get a combo that I've already played around where they're synergized, especially because of that that kind of cliff that I mentioned earlier

where you kind of know like, oh, this is a cool combo, but it's never going to work to get past anti-12. And there's some other kind of balanced stuff that I hope gets changed in terms of like the different challenges and decks and stakes and stuff. I don't think it can really be compared to threes, because threes is more like Tetris, where it's just kind of like, it's more of a flow game that will just last forever, and I'll just be, like, playing mindlessly, like, while doing other things, watching TV or whatever for the rest of my life. Like, that's just never going to, nothing can really replace that.

Yeah, I find it hard to play Bellatra while watching TV for what it's worth. I find I can't really pay attention to TV. Yeah, I get sucked into Bellatro. You have to think, yeah, you have to think, a little bit harder with Bellatra than you would with more of a flowy game like three. So yeah, I think they're a little bit different. I actually, I think Bellatro is a little more like Sin Meyer's civilization or like another one of those kind of just one more turn.

Like I'm going to keep making decisions constantly. And I think that's why it can be a little harder to multitask with it because you're having to make a lot of decisions and use a lot of brain power as opposed to just kind of following the flow of your fingers. But I don't know. I'll see what happens when it comes to phones. and I'll see if it ruins my life then. Yeah, it is coming to mobile.

It's going to be huge on mobile, I think. I could see so many people getting into this, even people who don't regularly play games, just finding themselves for the first time playing a hardcore deck building rogue light and getting super addicted to it, and then realizing. Yeah, well, Slay the Spire,

which is the closest comparison point. That game penetrated a lot of people who you wouldn't, like a lot of audiences who you wouldn't think. Yeah, who don't normally play games. Yeah. I think there's something about these types of games that can be really appealing. It's one of the reasons Diablo is so mainstream and so popular. And I think there's a lot of kind of that random generation is really just kind of can

get its tendrils in you and really never let go. And like everyone plays cards. It's speaking a familiar language. Very approachable. Saying something very creative and wonderful with that language. It is a language that everyone pretty much knows. I mean, that so many people grow up playing cards, that you can look at it and just understand what it's saying to begin with. Yeah, yeah. Kirk, do you feel like you're going to be addicted forever? What are your thoughts on that? I think I'm going to play for quite a while longer. There are definitely, like, I want to get at least dip my toe into sicko mode. And I'm kind of getting there. And just I want to kind of get to where I'm breaking anti-11 and I'm, you know, really doing some of those campfire builds where you're getting, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of points or chips, I guess, per round. Like, I want to get there. And I'm still in the zone. Like, it's still my go-to game when I'm just. playing for a little while. Like I'm not, you know, with a controller playing whatever, like a role-playing game on my computer. It's still my go-to. And I'll play it when I'm traveling this month.

So I think I'll keep going for a while longer. Though not forever. I don't think it'll be a forever game. But it will be a game that I'll think about for a very long time. Like, I think it's an all-timer. It's really a special video game. Yeah, it's really fascinating. And I'm also wondering, like, how will updates work with the game? Because I feel like if you keep releasing too many different kinds of jokers that could really alter the way the game feels to play, depending on how many there are. And if there were too many, would it feel better or worse? I think if he's smart, he would make it so that you can pick different kinds of joker decks to play. And then it would just be like, here's a new one you can add it in if you want a bunch of new

modifiers or not. Expansion modes. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting way to think about it. That'd be great. I mean, I would love it if the game gets updates like that.

That'd be very cool. Yeah. I'm very curious about that. And I'm also curious about how it's going to work on mobile because it is just complicated enough. Like it does take up quite a bit of real estate on a switch handheld screen. It's perfect size for that. But on my phone, I feel like it would be a lot of numbers. That I'm just legitimately curious about like incorporating the touchscreen,

being able to still visually understand everything that's happening, seeing the cascade of effects of like the line of jokers actually helps you understand what is happening in the game. Like that helps give you literacy of like, oh, I get how that's affecting the multiplier and to not have the full screen. That's the thing about it being on phones that I'm like, I wonder if it would be as effective or if just having that bigger screen helps play off all the cards against each other. And you get to see those effects. And that's part of the dopamine reward that you're getting. I've wondered that in the past about other games. And it's been fine.

Right, that phone adaptations are fine. Like they find a way to make it work. or it just works better than you'd think. Yeah. Which I feel like this game probably will be that way too. But I will be curious how the phone version works. I want to know how they're going to do it. I will probably buy it and play it again on a second platform when it is available on mobile.

And with that, we have not healed our addictions from Bellatro. But, hey, we got it. We got to stop talking about it for five seconds. So we can tell everybody about Max Fund Drive. So we'll be back in just a second. All right. It is week two of Max Fund Drive, as we have already said, and as I'm sure a lot of you know. And that's an exciting time because it means it's the last week that you can sign up to

become a member during Max Fund Drive and get all the special Max Fund Drive stuff. So we will run until Friday the 29th. So you have a couple days left as you're listening to this. Yes. And it's the best time to become a member because it supports our network, our worker-owned co-op network. It supports our show, or at least it does if you put Triple Click as one of the the shows that you listen to. You can support any of the shows that you want. I mean, you're listening

right now. I think you should probably put it down, but you probably should. You know, you don't have to, but we would appreciate it if you would. And it gets you a bunch of rewards. So as we have said, and as you probably know, we make bonus episodes every single month. We're a little unusual in that respect. So you would get a ton of bonus episodes from us, including the FF7 rebirth one coming up. But you also get a lot of cool bonus stuff from the other shows on the network. Even if you don't listen to them. There's some pretty good stuff. Yeah, there's some other really good shows. Like, I subscribe to Stop Podcasting Yourself's bonus episodes, and they've been watching every episode of Mr. Bean and analyzing them episode by episode, and it's extremely funny. So that's bonus content that you can have access to if you're part of Max Fun.

And even if you don't listen to Stop Podcasting yourself, you could listen to those episodes and maybe consider it. It's a really cool network. A lot of really good podcasts on there in addition to us. So there are always prizes for Max Fund Drive. They do it every year. If you, you know, if you kind of boost your membership or you get up past $5 a month. They start giving you better stuff. And I think rewards not prizes. You don't have to win anything. You're right. It's a prize, though. It's like your prize coming out of the machine.

I like to think about fabulous prizes. I just, that's just where my mind goes. They are fabulous. They are. With this kind of this kind of thing. So yeah, they are fabulous rewards. And we've done enamel pins in the past. We've had some pretty fun ones. And they're always like

limited edition. Yeah, we have a triple click one. And we have a spill the beans pin with some jelly beans on it. So this year anyways, the pin is a Bing pin for every time that I go, Bing, and then make an edit on the show. And it's fashioned in the style of a Phoenix Wright objection, which is my favorite thing ever. And I personally am extremely excited about, and I want so many of them.

It is very, very good. It's a good one. It's a good one. So we are psyched about that. There are other rewards, too. We will keep you no longer, though, we'll get back to one more thing. So maximum fun.org slash join. happy Max Fun Drive. Thanks to Maximum Fun for being an awesome network. Thanks to all of the members

for supporting us as we make this show. And thanks to you for considering becoming a member. All right, let's get back to it. And we're back for one more thing. I will go first. I played a game called Princess Peach Showtime, which is not quite for my age group, as it turns out. But nonetheless, I highly recommend if you have a six-year-old in your vicinity, especially a six-year-old girl, but really any six-year-old will do, or somebody around that age group. This game is really, really cute. It's so adorable. I'm a big Kirby fan.

I've talked about Kirby games many times. They're one of my classic soothing, frictionless. I don't want to use my brain at all. I just want to look at cute pink items and Kirby eating little slices of cake for a while. This game has Kirby vibes all over it. It is Princess Peach trying on different outfits in a theater that has been taken over by bad guys,

as this want to happen in the Mushroom Kingdom. There's always bad guys taking over various locations. Yeah, to be honest. I mean, I don't know. I can't speak to that. But in the world of this game, bad guys have taken over this theater and all of the Little Toads are freaking out,

and they, of course, enlist Princess Peach to help. And so she goes around backstage to check out all the different costumes and sets from all of the previous plays and each of them gives her a different superpower. So there's like a really cool ninja outfit. And she does like a stealth mission. But it's a very like kid friendly stealth mission where even if you fail,

like you hide in some tall grasses that are made out of cardboard. It's great. Like everything looks like a set. The visual design is perfect. But if you fail, she just kind of gets like bumped backwards. And then you get to redo it. You kind of can't die in this game.

There's another level where she like puts on this adorable chef outfit. And she decorates cakes with different colors of frosting. Again, these are like sort of unfailable outcomes, but the visuals are just so adorable and cutesy and feel good. And I just really love that Princess Peach has her own game. This isn't like, oh, it's a Mario game where you can play as Peach, which of course I also love. I love that that's become really normalized in Mario games across the board.

This is like, it's her game. She's the hero of the game. And it's all about trying on different adorable outfits Kirby style. and every single time she tries on a new outfit, she gets like this huge splash screen where she poses and looks totally badass or cute or whatever she's supposed to look like. I loved it. I took a thousand screenshots of it.

That's like kind of the best part of the entire game. So yeah, Princess Peach Showtime really recommend if you have a kid in your life that you're like, a lot of games seem a little too hard for them, but they like playing dress up. They like putting on plays or whatever it may be or they like Kirby games, Princess Pete Showtime on Nintendo Switch.

they will probably really like it. Jason, what's your one more thing? I got to have my daughter play this game. I asked her if she was interested and she said she wanted to see Mario turn it into an elephant. That's valid because he is so cute when he turns into an elephant. That's true. My one more thing is a book called The Last Murder at the End of the World by Stuart Turton. This book doesn't come out for another couple months, but I got an early copy and read it and very much enjoyed it. So this is by the same author of the seven and a half deaths of Evelyn Hard Castle and Devil in the Dark Water, which were both books that I really enjoyed. Both seem very heavily inspired by video games in a variety of ways. Devil in the Darkwater was my one more thing a little while back. Yes, it was very heavily inspired,

or at least seems a lot like Return of the Oberdinn, whereas seven and a half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was very time loopy, and I guess I think it came up before the game death loop but it was more like I don't know what's what's a good time loop game that it kind of like was inspired by I don't know it also just kind of had video game logic yeah I've had a lot of game logic um and so this new book is really cool I have really enjoyed it um it is a book kind of about it's about this island where these people live I almost I don't want to say too much so I'll give kind of a very brief summary Because it's very, it's like, people. They do some things. Yeah, there are some people and they do things. There are some events. There's a last murder, and it's at the end of the world.

So the concept is that the entire world has been destroyed by this fog that has just kind of killed everybody on contact. And then there's this island at the end of the world where people have survived, and they're about 100 something, 130 or something people on this island. And they're kind of broken up into two groups. They're the villagers who are most of them, and then they're the scientists. They're only three scientists, and then the rest are villagers. And the villagers have this kind of unusual life, where they're all very kind of kind and selfless and serving, and they all have these kind of bizarre protocols where they, like, fall asleep at a certain time that they call curfew, and they fall asleep no matter what, and then they wake up at a certain time, no matter what. And they call the scientists the elders, and the scientists kind of have a little bit more. a little more authority, and they have more say over things. And they also, all of them, live with this voice inside their head called A-B, who can communicate with all of them and tell them. This sounds like silo or something.

Tell them what to think and tell them what to do. Or like a Stephen King novel or something like that. Well, the fog part does, yeah. Yeah, it's got some king to it. It's got all interesting stuff. And then there's a murder. and if it is not solved, the entirety of their island will be destroyed. And so there will be no more people anywhere.

And I'll leave it at that because there's a lot that you just come on to uncover as you go. Yeah, we can find out the rest when you read. I'll certainly read it. I like his book. Yeah, you can, it's very layered. It's very much one of those kind of onion-like mysteries where you're kind of learning new things constantly, which is actually fun. I read this book not so long ago. I don't think it was my one more thing because I really didn't like it. And it was kind of, it was a mystery book, but it was written by someone who's more of a literary novelist and it was trying to be a literary novel at the same time as it was a mystery. And it really didn't work for me. And the biggest reason was because it didn't reveal new information like as you went. And three hundred pages in, I realized that I still knew just as much about the murder and what had happened than I did at the beginning of the book. And I was like, this is not working for me. Whereas this book is extremely good at kind of doling out new information. and teasing you along the way.

Stu Turton, he's just a fantastic writer. I really have enjoyed now. This is three for three. So yeah, it comes out in May. I'll probably, hopefully I'll remember to give people a reminder when it actually comes out. It's May 21st, I believe. I mean, you can go pre-order it.

I'm sure Mr. Turton will appreciate that because pre-ordering books really helps us out, helps us out as authors. May or may not have mentioned that a few times over the last, last few weeks especially. So yeah, Colbuck, last murder at the end of the world. Cool. Nice. Speaking of Bellatro, I feel like the way that he writes is similar to Bellatro,

where he starts building the story and it just gets more and more crazy and starts going like faster and faster and faster and by the end you're like, oh my God, how are you doing this? And then he's like, I don't know, let's end it. It'll be fine. It kind of lands and does a little to that gesture. Yeah, which is amazing. Yeah, that's very much his style. All right.

Kirk, what have you been up to? So I've been playing Dragons Dogma, too, and thought I'd offered as my one more thing since I've been really liking it. And I hadn't grabbed me in the first couple hours that I'd played. And I thought I'd offer it as a sort of second opinion since Jason, I know you didn't really care for it. And I find it to be like a very interesting game, or at least one that clicked with me for a number of different reasons. So I won't get super in depth because I think we're going to talk a little more about this game and also about this type of game next. week. But yeah, what it was for me that made this game click was realizing that it is by

and large, a comedy game. It is a game that is very funny in which funny things are constantly happening and that a big part of the appeal of it is just how weird and silly it can be. So Jason described this game last week, but to describe it again, it is sort of a spiritual sequel, but also a kind of remake second crack at the idea of Dragon's Dogma, which was a game they came out quite a while ago. The title screen only says Dragonstogma. I know, it's very confusing. So they're really just trying to do it again.

Because in the fiction of Dragon's Dogma, there are like infinite parallel, you know, multiverse. It's a multiverse kind of a situation. So it's just totally within the fiction that you would just be in another world. And then this world is pretty similar to the one from the first game, but it's bigger

and has better graphics. So that's kind of what this is. So it's a third person game where you play, you know, a warrior or, you know, a thief or a mage. And you're the chosen or risen who can kind of, command the pawns, and the pawns are these sort of summoned semi-immortal soldiers or people

who come through from other realities to join in your cause, and then you send them back through and recruit other ones. And one of the central mechanics of the game is that you make your main pawn, who's like your friend, and if you're not careful, you actually name them main pawn, because that can happen. And then I'll come across other people's ponds that are named main pawn, and I realize that they just clicked through the menu without naming their pawn. Anyways, you make your own pawn and then your pawn goes off into the other worlds of other players and sometimes we'll come back with like rewards because they went and helped somebody else out.

And that's one of the many kind of hidden mysterious and interesting mechanics in this game. So it looks more or less like a third person action fantasy game. The world feels very generic at first, almost to like a humorous degree where everyone is speaking this kind of tortured kind of fantasy English way of speaking. and people repeat lines of dialogue. There's a lot of jank to the way that it moves and holds together. And if you start playing it, it does just kind of feel like two worlds or, yeah, one of those weird, like 2008-era games. But then the more you play it, or the more I play it, the more I started to see all of the ways that these hidden or sort of obscured mechanics fit together

and the way that all the frictions of the games start to bring out these really interesting experiences. And then I also just have gotten really pulled into exploring and finding. new things. There are so many cool little adventures that you'll have in this game because of the emergent way that it's designed. It really feels kind of like Skyrim plus Dark Souls, plus like the three stooges, because you're walking around with this team of three pawns who are all kind of maniacs. They're chattering away all the time and just saying stuff like, did you know that some pawn groups are all bistron? And, you know, I noticed that we're all different classes. Well, we must each play to our strengths. And they're just like constantly saying

stuff like this. But then sometimes one of them will say, hey, you know, in another life, in another world, there was a chest over here. And then they'll kind of guide you over to something that they found when they were accompanying someone else in someone else's game. And you'll realize, like, oh, that's kind of cool. So my pawn could then go show somebody else, like in another game, where to find this thing. And there are some really good hidden treasures that the pawns can show you how to find. Or there's this whole thing going on with this blight that's like a totally like hidden disastrous mechanic that I guess I won't spoil but I will say that if you're playing the game and you it's probably worth knowing what it is because it's like a very wild mechanic that's

completely hidden but then can like infect your game and cause crazy things to happen without you even realizing. So anyways I could go on and on and on about the specifics but I will say that what made it click for me was realizing just how funny it is. Getting into our Discord and talking with my friends who are playing and like sharing anecdotes and tips and like explanations for how things work and starting to kind of plumb the deaths of it, similar to an Eldon Ring or a from game, where there's all these little secrets, and the more you learn about how things work,

the more rewarding it is. Leveling up some has really helped. I'm now playing a mystic spear hand, it's called, but I was playing a fighter before, and the melee combat in this game is super fun. It really feels kind of like Monster Hunter, and I'm a huge Monster Hunter fan. So I'm already kind of, like, keyed into some of these rhythms.

Like you have to prepare before you go out, you have to cook food, you have to make sure you're carrying the right amount of stuff there's kind of a lot of micromanagement. Then when you're in a fight, it's really about big picture planning and not quite so much about unbelievable reflexes and, like, DMC style moves. It's actually interesting. This game's director, Hittaki Yatsuna, was like the director of the original Devil May Cry games.

And this is very much like his passion project. It's nothing like that, though. No, it isn't. Well, it kind of is in some ways. Like the melee combat has a really amazing verticality and can feel that way, but it is closer, I would say. to a monster hunter in that it's like a little more methodical. And it's just a lot more about preparation and like putting your party together and making

sure that you like understand how to fight the enemy that you're fighting. And I mean, the game is going to go way beyond where I am right now. There are really tough enemies out in the world that I can't begin to fight yet. And I'm just leveling up. But I really have found it to be like an enchanting journey of discovery into this weird, very particular game that is wrapped up. like it's the most boring fantasy RPG ever. And I find that even to be a very funny thing about it.

The more you play, the more you realize this is more of a Monty Python world than a Skyrim world, even though it kind of looks like Skyrim at times. So we'll talk about it more next week, but that's my loose sort of endorsement of Dragonstalkment 2. It is a weird game. It's certainly not for everyone. That's like a cliche, but it really is a divisive game where there are people I talk to, friends of mine who just don't like it and they just don't. Like they just don't get the thing that I like about it.

And that's cool. It's like a specific taste thing. And it's not everyone is going to like it. But I think some people will really, clearly a lot of people actually really, really like it because it's doing very well. And it really does have a lot to recommend it. Cool. All right.

Well, I don't know if I'm going to like it or not, but I'm going to find out before next week. And then I will be the tiebreaker. I will be the arbiter. But I'm not surprised you like it. Emergent Play. Yeah. It's like deadly premonition meets Far Crair.

too meets. Like a Far Cry 2S, Kirk Hamilton video game to me. So not too surprising. But we can talk about that next week for now. Let me just say to the listener, Maximumfund.org slash shoy. You ever checked out that URL? Should go over there. Check it out. There's a lot of stuff there. A lot of cool stuff going on at that URL. So type that in your address bar. And we'll see you next week. Yeah. See you. 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. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpod. send email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes.

Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.