Video Gamers Podcast - Darlin’ Demeo - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Gaming hosts Josh and Paul are bringing you our very first VR gaming deep dive as we delve into the world of Demeo! Demeo is a VR Dungeons & Dragons table top game with a lot to offer. We talk gameplay, characters, campaigns and everything you could want to know before rating it in a game of Make Love, Marry or Murder and then we see where it ranks on our gaming leaderboard! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we hop into this week's episode, we would like to ask you to consider supporting our show through Apple subscriptions or Patreon. We are an independent podcast run by two dads, and each of us have our own day jobs. We are supported by listeners like you, so if you enjoy the show and would like to see it continue, just think of it as tipping one of your favorite pods. You can subscribe for as little as $5 a month on Apple or Patreon, and either way, you will get ad-free episodes a full day early, and more importantly, you will get two extra Quick Take episodes every single week. That means that you will get a grand total of four shows

every week to listen to. Thank you to all of you for tuning into this episode. We especially want to say thank you to all of you who already helped support the show through Apple or Patreon. All right, guys, we're done with all the boring stuff. Let's get into the episode. Hey, everybody. Thank you for joining us here on the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. Each week, we deliver two family-friendly episodes about gaming. If you have not already done so, come check us out on Discord. It's completely free. It is a great way to come chat with the hosts of the show and with other listeners. We really do have a very friendly community, and we have all become very good friends on there. We would love you guys to come check it out.

There is a link in the episode description. And then also, before we hop into the episode, our show is funded by our listeners. So if you have been enjoying the show and have the means to do so, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Visiting MultiplayerSquad.com will take you to our Patreon page, where you can support us starting at $5 per month all right today is a deep dive monday which makes me very excited let's set the stage here with the players i am your host paul the guardian of the podcast leading the way into battle ensuring that we're victorious and then joining me the one and only rat king himself it's josh i i i mean the rat king's really hard he's very powerful initially i was like wait a minute are you calling me a rat but then i was like i mean that dude's

tough so i think he was maybe the hardest boss overall yeah for sure i thought you were gonna introduce me as the guy that just goes stealth and abandons his team. I thought about it. The assassin going stealth, leaving the team to take all the damage. Oh, man. All right. Today, we are so excited to be talking about a game that is apparently pronounced Demio, which I learned today. I'm not calling it Demio, by the way. We have been calling it Demio for literally months,

and I started going through the YouTube videos on their official channel. It's pronounced Demio, but I've also heard Demeo, Demio. I don't think anyone really knows what to say. Hold Demeo, Paul. But in any case, we're going to be talking about Demio. I guess I'm going to try to say it correctly. I'm not calling it that. You can either call it the right thing and sound professional. You can join me, Paul, and call it Demio. Okay.

So let's just say. Wait, no. Dang it. I just called it the right thing. Let's just say Josh and I acknowledge we know the proper pronunciation, but we don't care. We're calling it Demio because that's what we're used to saying. But before we hop into that, Josh, I believe you've got a couple of reviews that you're going to read for us. I do indeed.

We have gotten a few more reviews. We are creeping ever closer to the 300 review mark. For people that wonder why 300 is a big deal, when a podcast has over 300 reviews, it makes a huge deal in Apple's podcasting algorithm, really, really helps people find the show. Plus, it's just kind of like a badge of honor for us, too. So if you're listening and you haven't left a review yet, please leave us a review. If you're listening on Spotify, there's no review to write. It's just a five-star rating. If you're on Apple Podcasts, that's the place to

write one up. Rate us five stars. Good chance we're going to read it on the show. All right, so I have two today. First one is titled, Never Knew I Needed a Podcast Till Now. It's five stars. And it says, my girlfriend had been telling me to get into podcasts nonstop for the last year instead of listening to the same music. And I always thought they weren't for me. I started looking into gaming podcasts and I kept listening to different ones for like 15 minutes and got bored or didn't enjoy what they were talking about. But I have to say, as soon as I found Multiplayer Gaming Podcast, I was hooked.

I've listened to multiple episodes today. It's really nice to listen to such chill, funny, and genuine people who always enjoy the same games as me and have so much detail to give. Keep it up, guys. Definitely got a new listener from the UK. And that comes in from, I believe that was Louie Lou, who's also been in the Discord server and has been active lately. Yeah, I was going to say, I know who that one's written by because I remember him popping into Discord talking about how it was really like his first podcast. So what an honor. How cool. Thanks so much for leaving that review. Yeah, that helps a lot. So thank you for that. And then this second one comes in from Jedco27. It's titled Great Hosts, Great Topics, Great Podcast.

Jedco27 says, this is a fantastic podcast. I've been listening since almost the beginning, and the hosts are always funny, have great takes, and truly enjoy gaming. Family-friendly and enjoyable. From the deep dives to the best, insert topic here, tournament-style episodes, to the episodes where they just talk about what they, their friends, and even their family have been playing are all great listens. Keep it up, and thanks for the great listens. Oh, how cool. Well, thanks so much for the review, and thank you to you guys for listening to the show. This is a great example. Jedco27, thank you very much, but I am going to call you out for just a second, but in the best way possible. Jedco says he's been listening since the beginning.

And he's just now leaving us a review. Hey, that's okay. We're okay with that. Better late than never. But this is a good example for those that are listening right now and have not left a review yet. What are you waiting for? Exactly. and if you don't have an apple account we've made it very clear you know someone who does so borrow their phone write us a review we'll read it on the show it's win-win it is truly for everybody oh very nice well we love getting those reviews keep them coming we love reading them on the show we love being able to give you guys some shout outs and like josh said you know it does help our podcast get discovered as well so um all right i think that's it by way of housekeeping it is let's hop into this deep dive on demio

no demio all right let's get into demio all right the description of Demio here reads, Demio is a cooperative turn-based strategy board game based in VR. It features a fantasy pen and paper inspired world where you select an adventure, defeat monsters, and work with your fellow adventurers to complete your objective. And for those of you out there who are curious, Demio released on May 6th of 2021, and it is currently going for $30 either on the Oculus Store or on Steam. Now, I did want to start out by saying that Demio comes to us from Resolution Games, which is a development team that brought us Blaston, which I believe

you're a big fan of. I am a big fan of Blast On. It's one of those VR games that number one is cheap. It's only like nine bucks. So it's very accessible to a lot of people. And it's just fun. It's a great multiplayer. It's a 1v1 experience where you just face off in this arena on this pedestal shooting these kind of cartoony like guns at your opponent, who is a real life person as well. It's just a blast. I think that's why they call it Blast On. But yeah, same developer. These people know how to make VR games. Their history so far is pretty impeccable. Yeah. I think as soon as the trailers had dropped, we were initially interested in Demio. We just did not buy it in the beginning.

We kind of felt like we weren't sure we could get a team of four, but we did like the developer. You and I have always been a fan of board games. You, me, and Todd famously went through Gloomhaven for months until the pandemic started, and that kind of came to a crashing halt. But let's just cut to the chase. Demio is just a good old-fashioned fantasy-style board game. It's got a little bit of Dungeons & Dragons, a little bit fantasy board game, very similar to something like Gloomhaven, except it uses VR technology, I would say, to really heighten the experience. How would you describe the general gameplay of Demio to someone who's never played it and they've

never seen any videos? If somebody hasn't seen anything at all, basically, this is a virtual reality tabletop Dungeons and Dragons-like experience. You can play with up to four people in one game. It's got various classes. I think it's got something like six classes now, five classes, somewhere around there. Uh, so, you know, you, you definitely have a choice of the type of class that you like to play. Uh, I'm sure we'll get into those here in a little bit. Uh, as of right now, it's got three different campaigns. Each campaign consists of three levels and, uh, on their roadmap, this is actually really cool, is on their roadmap

for 2022, they're releasing two more campaigns this year. So that gets me very excited because this game is still very much being developed. In the general gameplay sense, the way this game kind of works is you pick your classes, you start off in this dungeon, in this entry room. There's a narrator that kind of really adds to it. She kind of describes the area you're in or the boss that you're going up against or something like that. And then the way that the gameplay works is each character gets two actions, whether that is two movements, one movement and one attack or two attacks. You get two actions, and then your turn is done, and it moves on to the next character until everybody takes their turn, and then the monsters go.

When you engage in combat, you do combat by playing cards out of your hand. And there's a lot of different cards, and some are unique to each character and things like that. What's neat about it, though, and where it gets a little bit more interactive in the VR sense is when you play a card, you roll a die, a virtual die to see if you if you hit, if you crit or if you miss. And, you know, it just depends on the dice roll. And so that's kind of cool. I like the interactivity that they do there. Right. So basically, every stage that you're on has some kind of objective. Everything is either

go find the monster that is holding the key and kill it, and then find the exit of the dungeon, or you're fighting the final boss on the third level of that campaign. So I think the entirety of a campaign is probably pretty close to about two hours. Would you say that's about fair? I'd say that's pretty accurate. It really can vary. There's a lot of variation in the levels and the difficulty and kind of what happens. And that's what makes this game fun and replayable. We have completed a level in as little as like 15 minutes. Right. We cheesed it a little bit, but I mean, hey, sometimes you get the right cards and the right things happen and you can kind of get through a

floor pretty quickly. But I would say the overall time for a campaign is about two hours, give or take like 15 minutes. Yeah, I think that's about right. Now, why would you choose to play Demio over just inviting your friends over and playing a game literally on your tabletop? What's the benefit of this? Well, Paul, let me ask you a question. Do you remember back in the days when we were playing Gloomhaven, which is a phenomenal board game? Very, very similar. D&D Lite is what we called Gloomhaven.

How long would it take you to set up and put away Gloomhaven? I would say if you and Todd were coming over at six, it was about 520 or so that I would start setting up the map because there were so many pieces. It took such a long time. Now, cleanup wasn't as bad because you guys were already there. But the last thing I wanted was for you guys to show up and now we're setting it up for half an hour. Yeah, I think not having to do any kind of setup or cleanup is huge. I think that's definitely a big benefit. Yeah, I think so too. So number one, just time saving. This game is ready to go. It handles everything for you.

Let me ask you another question, Paul. People occasionally ask us, for those that are newer to the show, we did have a third co-host that helped start the podcast by the name of Todd. Yep. And people ask, hey, are you guys still friends with Todd? Yes, very much so. But Todd lives on the East Coast and we live in Arizona. Guess who we can play Demio with all the time? We can play with Todd.

We play with Todd all the time. As long as it's not too late. Yes. It's a very tight window where Todd's kids are in bed and he's not up too late. But if we can find that sweet spot, we can hop into Demio. You're in the action within two minutes and you're straight up in a game and you can save along the way, which I think is a huge benefit. You can save in between those three levels. So you don't have to knock out a full two and a half hour campaign at once. You do hit those checkpoints so you can save and restart again later. Right. So in that regard, you know, there's, there's the ease of ease of use. There's the fact that you can play with anybody anywhere in the

world because there's the online multiplayer aspect. The VR aspect is super cool, in my opinion. This is a VR-only game at the time. There has been a lot of talk that this is going to release as a PC game to where people don't have to play VR and it will be cross-play compatible. That doesn't exist just yet, but that is coming down the pipe, which I think will be really cool. But there's something about being in a dungeon, playing this Dungeons & Dragons-like adventure, and saying, Hey guys, I'm going to go use this ability. I'm going to throw this poison bomb at these monsters to kind of create this choke point and that way when they run through everybody will get poisoned playing the card rolling the die and then watching my character in 3d yeah grab a poison bomb off of their hip

say something you know cool and ominous as the assassin and then lob this thing through the air where you can watch it arc it bounces off the ground bounces again and sh assassin and then lob this thing through the air where you can watch it arc it bounces off the ground bounces again and shatters and then poisons all the monsters so the effects that are in this game are they just really heighten everything to me and i think that's something that you do not get with a board game that you're only going to truly experience in vr or you know i think in VR, it's really cool because you can zoom in. That's one of the things that we can talk about how you can rotate the table, you can zoom in, you can kind of move your point of view around to see what's going on.

Okay, so I think this is exactly what makes Demio such a special experience. It defaults to where you are kind of like a top-down view as if you were sitting at a table looking down on the board game. You can pick up the pieces and move them. You can click on your cards and drag them and put them on the table, things of that nature. But you can zoom in the same way you would like with your, where you put down your two fingers and you spread them apart. It's the exact same thing, except with your hands. You pull both triggers and you can zoom all the way in to where you are basically in the action.

You're completely inside, like looking over the shoulder of your character while you're basically living inside the world of the board game. The VR lets you get that full 360 degrees around you. And if you're the bard casting a hurricane, you know, a couple feet in front of you, you can look up and it looks like a 50 foot tall hurricane directly in front of you. And you get to see it wreak havoc across the battlefield. It is so immersive. And I don't know, I have nothing against Dungeons and Dragons or Gloomhaven. You know, those things just really rely on either narration or reading the text. Being able to see it play out, I just find to be so incredibly fun and so satisfying.

It really makes it a special experience. It really does. It's hard to describe. It's kind of like, you know, for people that haven't experienced VR, you can describe it all you want, but until you put on that headset and see what it's like, it's very difficult to describe that experience. And so for this game, that VR experience really, really adds to everything. Now, you don't have to go and zoom way in and be over the shoulder of your character For this game, that VR experience really, really adds to everything.

Now, you don't have to go and zoom way in and be over the shoulder of your character or looking them in the face or things like that. You can play it from a top-down, almost like Diablo-style point of view if you want. You have full control over how you want to view the board and how you want to see things. The cool thing about this game is that you can zoom in almost infinitely, which is really neat. So you can get down to ground level and see your characters as if they're almost like life-sized people, and then zoom back out to get an overlay of the board, where the monster's at, which room are we heading to, that sort of stuff. And what's really neat about it, even though it's a small thing, is that you can see the people that you're playing with. They have these little face mask

kind of like avatars. So you can see where their head is and you can see where their hands are in the game. And it's funny because I always like to be down in the thick of things. And I will look up and I'll see you and Todd or whoever else we're playing with... Towering over you. Towering over me. And you guys just laugh at me. Cause you're like, dude, why are you like,

you're always right there in the action. And I'm like, yeah, this is great. This is where I want to be. I didn't even realize you could get that close in until I started seeing your hands where I was like, Oh no,

Josh is like living inside Demio as if it were all in proportion to real life. And yeah, it's, it's so neat to be able to see all these abilities play out. Now in Demio, you do have five classes. So you had mentioned like it was either five or six. It is five. You've got, well, actually, let's just start it this way.

What class do you like playing the most? I like the Assassin. I have played all of them with the exception of the Wizard. I have found that... Yeah. What is the difference between a wizard and a sorcerer? I'm a fantasy nerd. You'd think I would know this, right? So I've played all of them with the exception of the sorcerer.

I have found that I really enjoy the gameplay of the assassin. That's your just typical rogue. Backstabs, creatures, fairly good mobility, can go stealth so that nothing can see you. They scout in this game a lot. They do very high single target DPS. They have very low AOE abilities and stuff like that. And then oddly enough, I find that I kind of enjoy the Bard. And the Bard is the newest class that they've introduced, but I have played the Bard the second most to the Assassin, and I do enjoy the Bard.

The Bard is pretty much fully like a support character that they introduced later on. But yeah, I find that I enjoy the Bard as well. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah, the Assassin, I think think does by far the most damage like out of any of the classes the bard plays very differently because you're oftentimes not dealing direct damage you are oftentimes buffing your teammates it's absolutely purely support you get to sing a song of courage and that puts a positive buff on your ally and it can stack up to three times.

And after a certain number of turns, you lose all of that courage unless you've been re-upping it. So the bard oftentimes is doing a move and then singing a song or maybe putting courage on an ally or maybe singing a song to heal the group if you have a card that allows it,

something like that. I have had the most fun with the Guardian. So the Guardian is a tank, as you might expect, and all the characters in the game have 10 hit points, but the Guardian can apply armor to himself, bringing that up to a max of 15. So the Guardian can really soak up a lot of damage. It's basically a self-heal ability to add five points of armor every turn. And so I found that class to be a lot of fun because you do not die as often as the other classes. They're very survival-based. And then also when you hit an enemy, you knock the enemy back a space on the play grid.

And so sometimes you can use that to your advantage where you can go up to a choke point, hit an enemy, and now you're blocking the choke, but the whole team can focus on one guy. So it does give you some positioning advantage stuff that I really liked. Funny enough, my second favorite character is another one that you did not mention, which is the Hunter. The Hunter has super far range. And oftentimes when I i played the hunter i would not even move for an entire campaign i would sit in the i would sit in the middle of the map and just rain down arrows on whoever we could see and on occasion you might have to reposition a bit so i find it very funny that our top twos have no overlap i don't't like the Archer, the Ranger at all.

Really? Why is that? I don't know, because normally I would gravitate to that class. If I was playing Dungeons and Dragons, I would probably roll a Ranger or something, because I like a lot of their abilities. And I've played the Ranger, I want to say once or twice, and I just found it to be the least exciting class. You're right. You're standing back, you're shooting things. You know, it's very helpful to have a ranger in your party because that ability to shoot things and do damage from a long way away is very helpful. Uh, I just found that it wasn't, I like to be in the action. You know what I mean? I want to be in the thick of things, like getting hit, doing damage, hoping that I'm

going to survive this round, that kind of thing. And I felt like the Ranger just avoided a lot of that. And I found it to not fit what I thought I would like. I hear you. Boy, if you thought the Hunter was boring, I can't imagine what you thought of the Sorcerer, because that was the first character. I never played the Sorcerer, thankfully. Oh, you didn't?

Okay. See, I've played all of them a couple times. The Sorcerer, I thought, was so far dead last, in my opinion. Because when I think of a Sorcerer or a Wizard or a Mage, I'm thinking huge damage. The Sorcerer has such inconsistent damage. Basically, they have... So, all of the classes, you have cards that get put into your hand, and

some of the cards are class-specific. A lot of the cards are single-use only. It's just burn it, and it's gone. But, I think every class does have at least one card, if not two, that refresh every turn that you get to use on a continual basis.

And the Sorcerer's card that regenerates every turn that you get to use on a continual basis right and the sorcerer's card that regenerates every turn is a shock which will stun an enemy but it only does one damage very boring but it's necessary every turn you have to shock one enemy and oftentimes your other ability your other action is just to move or reposition. Now they do get some massive damage AoE cards, but you may go a full round and not even get a card that lets you do major AoE. So I found the Sorcerer to be very boring. It's funny because Todd, who plays with us a lot, really enjoys the Sorcerer.

He likes playing that class, which I have not even attempted to play the class because I don't think I'm going to enjoy it. I love the fact that Todd likes playing it because you need that crowd control. The Sorcerer is not, like you said, your typical damage dealer. It's more crowd control with the occasional nuke that can help blow up a room. But once you burn that card, like you said, that card's gone. And you don't acquire cards in this game very quickly. There's only a few ways that you can replenish the cards in your hand. That actually gets into some of the strategy. But yeah, it looks to me like I am least interested in that class out of all of them. But man, is it really handy to have. Yeah.

You like having a friend to play the sorcerer as long as it's not you. Right. Yeah. All right. Now, as we have mentioned, there are a total of three adventures at the time of this recording. Hopefully, we will soon have five. The three are called The Black Sarcophagus, Realm of the Rat King, and Roots of Evil. And they all have unique enemies.

And there are a couple of differences. You know, like when you're down in the sewers, your line of sight is not nearly as far as when you're outdoors, like in the Roots of Evil. So they do feel different. But ultimately, they all boil down to the exact same strategy. You have to run around and explore the map. You have to check out points of interest. You have to kill mobs. You're collecting gold along the way. And then you exit the stage, whether going through a door or beating the boss.

Now, points of interest are really important in this game. Do you want to talk a little bit about what those are? So when you start a map or a level, like I said, it puts you in the little starting entry room. That's all you can see. There's usually doors that you have to open up. So a lot of the map is shaded. You can see the overall layout. So you can definitely form a plan and say, hey, let's go around clockwise or counterclockwise, or we'll just be lining straight through the middle. So you can see the overlay. You just can't see anything that's going on anywhere. The one exception to that are there are markers that are in certain points of the map that you can see, and they call these points of interest. And a point of interest is one of two things.

It is either a healing fountain, which are very crucial in this game, because other than healing potions and if you have a bard, there is no way to heal in this game. So it becomes a little bit of a war of attrition because if you continually take damage, you have no way to heal that damage. And so that can make things very dicey. So what a healing fountain does is it heals everybody in your team to full health. And if somebody is downed in a down state, it will revive them and heal them up to, I think, like seven health or something like that. So those are pretty crucial in the strategy of a level. And then there are treasure chests. And the thing about a treasure chest is that is how you accrue cards for your hand. And so as you play these cards, these cards are fairly strong and you have to kind of plan on when you

want to use them. And if you play one, it's gone. So replenishing those by going to treasure chest and opening up and getting new cards for everybody becomes another crucial part of trying to beat a level. So those points of interest, that's those two with the exception of one more, which is the exit for that level. You do not know which points of interest is the exit so there's a lot of exploration that kind of has to happen to discover where the exit is and you know get cards kill your party and stuff like that yeah so the points of interest are definitely key to beating a stage because you have to be able to replenish those cards and to heal you can't just simply run in the middle of the map and kill all the mobs and then beat it.

There are situations where you might be able to do something similar to that, but for the most part, you are relying on the points of interest. And not only can you get a card when you access a chest, but the items that you find in chests are literal items in the game. They are not spells. It will give you an item that you can use on the battlefield. So it might be a poison bomb, or it might be a vortex lamp, where if you shoot it, it has a giant vacuum and it sucks any nearby enemies, and setting them up for a massive AoE attack or something like that. You can also replenish cards by doing abilities on the battlefield. It will slowly increase your experience meter, and it actually does go up

fairly quickly. Every couple of turns, as long as everyone's using abilities and doing attacks, every time that that XP bar maxes out, it will give you a powerful spell card. So the game actually has like a weird economy of spending cards, finding enough treasure chests while also doing enough abilities to get new cards. But you do have to be careful that you're not holding the max because you can only hold a max of 10 cards. And then if someone accesses a chest, you're not going to get anything out of it. So you do have to have that right balance of using stuffes a chest you're not going to get anything out of it so you do have to have that right balance of using stuff as much as you're finding it yeah there there is a little bit of randomness as well that normally i don't like random stuff but i found that in this game

it does add to it because when you get a treasure chest you can get something terrible right you can get like a web bomb and it's like oh this is what am i gonna do with this man but then you can get like really good cards there's a card that's like summon elemental and now you've got this giant ice or fire elemental that's on your side that's that's wreaking havoc there's the what's the one with that shoots all the swords down from the heaven's fury heaven's fury yeah and like that's one of the best cards in the game and you can get that out of a treasure chest. It's just random. And so there is that neat aspect of... And the cool thing is you can see the card pop up in front of each character.

So I can actually see what card you get when we open up a chest. You can see what card I get and stuff like that as well, which I think is a neat little touch. Because it's like, oh, Paul, you just got Heaven's Fury. Oh, that's great. And it's like, yeah, guys, I got my third web bomb. Yeah. Or we all get ice lamps.

All four people. You know, something like that isn't quite as fun. Now, we have also mentioned collecting gold. So at random, there will be piles of gold on the map. You have to stop on a pile of gold to pick it up. And then in between each level, you have a chance to spend that gold in the shop. Some cards are as cheap as 25 gold, and then other cards are 500, 600 gold. So there is also an element of, do we beat this level or should we go searching for more gold?

But you have to keep in mind, if you're very low on health, you do not all of a sudden get healed in between stages you're going to stay at the exact same health so there is that extra little bit of strategy that i really do love where you do have to also figure out you know where the gold is and picking it up yeah there's definite risk reward there because the monster there's a lot of combat and you do feel like you're adventuring through these levels. They're fairly large. I mean, these are not small maps. They're not so big that it takes forever to traverse, but your characters can only move so many squares per action.

And so it's one of those things where you start off on the first level, and then you find the stairs or the exit, you go down to the the second level so you actually feel like you're getting deeper into these dungeons or these campaigns and when you go from one level to the next that's when you can access the shop now you do actually get healed a little it bumps you up to five health once you complete a level if you're under five health and that's it yeah so you don't just go into the next level with one health. You do get a small heel. It's kind of like you rested, I guess, but you're not actually healed up. And so that is a neat aspect, but you really do feel like you're on an adventure.

You know, I've seen a lot of people ask, well, it just looks like it's kind of like combat. And it's like, no, there's exploration. There is very strategic combat. You have to actually work together as a team. There's plans and strategies that happen. Things fall apart very quickly. But I really do enjoy the aspect of you feel like you're in this campaign, so to speak, versus an individual level and then that's it. Yeah. Now, I think in order for this kind of adventurous board game to function well, the difficulty level has to be dialed in properly.

So how do you feel about the difficulty of Demio? I think it's great, to be honest. Like, it is hard. It is not super easy. Obviously, if you play with friends, you guys will start to gel and you'll start to figure out strategy and things like that. But there is a slight randomness with number one, the dice rolls. You know, if you, if you with, there is a complete, like if you're a dungeon dragons person,

if you roll a zero, that's like a critical miss and, or I guess it's a one, right. But it's like, yeah, it's a critical miss. and those happen a good bit in demi oh and terrible things can happen let's talk about what those misses look like so if i'm playing guardian and i'm just gonna you know spear a guy in front of me and i miss my character is gonna spin in a circle and then randomly do the same jab in another direction, which very well could be a teammate. Yes. So when you miss, you will sometimes end up attacking a teammate, which honestly could

not delight me more. Every time it happens, it cracks me up. We will root for it. Yes, we do. Oh, it's a miss. Hit Todd. Hit Todd. Please hit Todd.

You have killed me. You have actually killed me before in a terrible series of circumstances where I missed two. I whiffed twice in a row, which meant the monster didn't die. The monster now gets to attack. Monster attacks me. It's the new round. Paul, you have to finish this guy off. You've got to finish this guy off or he's going to wipe everybody. You're like, no problem, guys.

I got it, Josh. You whiff. You spin around, and you guy off or he's going to wipe everybody. You're like, no problem, guys. I got it, Josh. You whiff, you spin around and you stab me in the face and I die and everybody just loses it because it's hilarious. These are some of the things that can happen. This game is about playing it with your friends, but there's natural storytelling and events that happen and things like that, like you killing me at the worst time possible. So there is a lot that goes into it. Yeah, I think the difficulty really is spot on. I feel like every time we play, like 10 minutes in, at least one person says, oh, well, we're done.

Like, it's over. We're all going to die. And then I would say a good 80% of the time we figure it out and we get through it. And then you start the next part and you feel like you're all going to die. And then you usually work your way through it. I do think that it's actually dialed in quite well. Uh, and it does lead to hilarious stories. All right. So I don't know if you have any of that come to mind for you. I've got a couple jotted down. But are there any specific stories or any funny aspects of Demio that come to mind as we're kind of sharing that side of things?

There are a lot. One thing that I'll say real quick, too, before we get into that fully is one of the beauties of this is that the monsters in each level, you have your basic trash mobs, which are very easy to kill but can quickly overwhelm you. You've got your slightly tougher ones that you need to watch out for. They demand attention because they can do a lot of damage. And so, hey, you might want to focus those guys down. And then you have your big monsters. They're not bosses because the boss is only on the third floor. But you get monsters that it's like, oh, crud. We either need to run or we need to focus this guy down and you need to strategize. And either they hit like trucks or they can teleport people or they'll bring in monsters. There's just a lot of different stuff that they can do but i love that aspect of the fact that you it's not just the plane you're not only fighting goblins all the time you know

you might run into like a giant cave troll or a you know a big gigantic slime that can summon other slimes or things like that there's a pretty good monster variety and it really does add a lot to the campaigns that you never know what you're going to get um yeah that that's a pretty good monster variety and it really does add a lot to the campaigns that you never know what you're gonna get um yeah that that's a really good really good point uh i know for me when i think back on some of our adventures one of the things that really made me laugh was maybe it was even the last time we played i believe it was you, me, Todd, and legendary supporter Jake. We were in a campaign, and somehow Todd just got like 15 cards in a row that would spawn allies. Oh my goodness, yes. So Todd just kind of, he keeps chuckling the whole game, and we don't really know why. But Todd just keeps summoning spiders.

And he's throwing bones to enemy dogs, which now convert them. It puts a heart above their head. Now they fight for us and he's summoning ice elementals. And before I know it, Todd's got like 14 NPCs on the board that are playing on our team and they stay with you. So if you have all of them on the board on the second stage of a campaign and you finish and you go on to the final boss fight, all of a sudden you spawn in and it's your four characters and you're surrounded by all of these allies. And Todd just kept getting card after card after card. And I just know that we kind of lost it in the middle of that match because there were just so many spiders and dogs on our team it was a zerg it really it really was it was there was so many spiders and rats that

he had summoned and the the ai controls even if they're charmed like if they're on your side the ai controls those so it was really funny because the ai the turn where they would control the monsters and the charmed pets started taking like two or three minutes for it to move all of this award of things. It really was funny. And you know, it was helpful though. Those,

those things racked up the damage. They distracted the enemies. Like we, it really worked out really well in our favor, but it really was hilarious because Todd would just giggle. And we're like, Todd, what are you going to do this turn? And then you just see two spiders appear. And you're like, oh my goodness, again?

Yep. So for me, this has happened to us twice, but this is one reason I think this game is so great. We are fighting the first boss, and the boss fights are not easy. If you do not strategize well and have, like you said, card economy, if you burn through all your cards and you go in not prepared very much, you're probably going to die. And I remember we were fighting the very first boss in the first campaign, the Black Sarcophagus. It seems like things are going well, but things can turn on a time. A couple lucky hits from a mob or a new mob that runs into the battle or something like that can really change the tide of things. And things are going south. We just realized, hey, we're going

to get overwhelmed very quickly. Let's just try to burn the boss. And so we throw everything we have at the boss. Boom, Todd goes down. And it's like, oh, no, guys, we're going to lose. We're going to lose. Boom, I go down. And then it's like, Paul, I don't know. Do you res me? Do you try to attack the boss?

Do you have any good cards left? What's going on? You go in. You hit the boss. The boss is poisoned now. Oh, yeah, yeah. But the boss turns around and just wrecks you, dude. I mean, just obliterates you. And we're like, well, we lost.

But the boss moved and the poison took effect and it killed the boss. So all three of us are downed. You got to have somebody to res you in that case. All three of us are downed. We're going to lose this campaign that we spent two hours trying to do. The boss gets poisoned and moves. The poison kicks in and kills the boss, and we wind up winning the campaign on literally the last move of the entire campaign. And we

lost it, man. We were just like, what? What? We did it, boys! Like, yeah! And it was such an awesome victory in the way that it happened. I don't know. It was great. Well, it was so funny because we assumed we lost. And so we're all like yelling, like, oh, that sucks. I can't believe we spent all that time. And the narrator's talking in the background, but none of us can hear what they're saying.

And all of a sudden you see the treasure chest, it like unspools and it opens. And then we realized that we beat it. And it was just such a funny moment uh the other one that comes to mind for me kind of the last specific story that i have is that we did not yet know that accessing a fountain would res dead people we also did not know that you could access a fountain when you are downed. And so there was the very end of one stage where basically things have gone very far south very fast. No one's got any heals.

We have the key and the team is very close to getting to the door. Now, I don't remember if I got like banished or teleported by someone. Somehow I was a little separated from the group. And I did not tell you guys what my plan was, but I decided in my head, the only way we're getting out of this is if we can reach a fountain to heal everyone back up. Todd's got the key. You guys are already by the door, but the game does not let you exit when there are enemies next to the exit. You have to kill them them first so i start beelining it toward the fountain while the other three of you are fighting around the door i believe two of you ended up being downed i get downed but when you get downed you can still crawl on your turn and so my character

like with his dying breath is crawling on the ground touches the fountain it reses and heals everybody and then you guys were able to kill the last mob and exit the stage and that was really fun to find out that you could actually use the fountain while downed and that was the big kicker there is that we had never tried to have a downed person use the fountain and we didn't know that the fountain actually brought downed people back so you you were crawling there. And we're like, it's not going to work, Paul. It's not going to work. This one's over. We'll try again another time. And then you hit the fountain and all of us pop up. And we're like, yeah! We're alive! It really was great. Yeah, this game really lends itself to those experiences.

When you're working as a team and you have friends that you're playing with, or even randoms, right? There is random matchmaking. You can join a campaign. And the first time we did that, it was pretty hilarious. We got some guy that had been playing this game for a very long time, was a complete expert in it. Some other random guy joined. Those two did not get along very well. They did not. No, but it was hilarious. It really was funny, dude. They started trolling each other,

and you and I were just along for the ride. And even though we were all working for the same goal, it was really funny to hear these two kind of going at it in the game. They were bickering, like an old married couple yes it really and the thing is here's the other thing friendly fire exists in this game if you know it's not only on a width if if you know if i cast a fireball and you're in the area you're taking damage and so you know not that these guys were doing that but that is something to be aware of as well because it really does add to the like what do we do and it's like dude just shoot the fireball kill me you know like we got to clear out these 12 mobs that are here you know so there there is a lot more that goes into it versus just the gameplay in this case and that is kind of one

of those unquantifiable things that really helps make this game. Yeah. Now, I think one thing that's really important about Demio is that there are only three adventures. Once you've beaten them all once, you can replay any of them at any point. I think it has somewhat diminishing returns. I think it's very fun the first time you do it. The second time, it's a little less fun. And by the time you've cleared everything like three times, I kind of found myself kind of in that mode of, I really love this game, and I'm probably just going to wait until there's more content. It kind of felt like once we hit the end of Valheim, super fun, and now I'm just out of content. It kind of felt that way with demio but i think what might be a real game changer is that in the roadmap for 2022 not only are they coming out with two

new adventures they are dropping a pvp mode which will be teams of four going against each other in an arena now you're talking my language that i think is going to have a lot more replayability and i think that's a bit of a game changer. I think so too. I'm with you. The campaigns last a while. I mean, you know, if you burn through all three of them, you could argue that this is six or seven hours worth of gameplay for

29 99. If you beat them the first time, if you beat them the first time, I think there's much more to that. And it's one of those things where I'm with you. It's like, Hey, you guys want to play Demio?

And it's like, well, we've kind of beaten all the bosses. We know what the floors are. But when we play, I find myself having fun regardless, even if it's very familiar, because the dungeons are procedurally generated. Now, they have overall the same layout, but they're not exactly the same. But that doesn't really change the feeling at all. And the campaigns are a little

bit different. You fight different monsters. There's different kind of, I don't know, schticks, right? Like you said in the beginning, the Rat King is in the sewers. You have very limited line of sight. And so you're much more... Everything's dark and you can't see what's around corners. On the third one, the Roots of Evil, it's outdoors, but there's a lot of water that comes into play and your characters can get wet, which does various things. And there's a lot of other things that go into that. There is some variability amongst the levels, but it does start to feel very familiar. And I think that's one of the few lacking points of this game, is that it does start to feel very familiar very quickly.

Yeah, and I think that's a nice segue into nitpicks about the game. It is relatively short. Now, there are a million cosmetics that you can grind your way. You can get different colored dice. You can get different masks that your character wears and uh so there is stuff that you can earn but you're really just replaying the same stuff over and over now i don't know about you i do have a couple of nitpicks about demio these are not like groundbreaking things but the battery life oh oh my goodness dude out of all the vr games i've played i've never run into an issue with battery

life but when i get on my quest 2 there is no way i can finish all three stages on one battery charge i i always get the notification that i'm low battery basically as soon as you start phase three so a lot of times i ended up being tethered because i would have to plug it in and keep it charging while playing yeah this is a long game i don don't think I've ever played VR for more than like 30 minutes at most. And with Demio, you're talking two hours, two and a half hours maybe if you actually just play consistently through an entire campaign. And I'm with you on that one. My headset was about to die. I had to go plug into the wall with my little three-foot charger cable. So I'm leaning sideways with my head

near the outlet so that I can finish this campaign with you guys. I don't think that's the game itself. It's just one of the limitations of when you're playing a very long two and a half hour game on your Oculus Quest, the battery just does not hold up. Yeah, I don't know how long of a charge you get playing something else, maybe like Blast On, it would be the same or maybe it would last longer. It does seem like in Demio, there's an awful lot of graphics going on at all times. So I can't help but think it pulls out your charge quickly the other major nitpick i have honestly this is my biggest nitpick with the game you were talking about it almost as if it were a positive that i can see the hands of everybody else playing it drives me

bonkers josh because i am just sitting still trying to look at this board and all of a sudden there are giant hands almost as if they're extending through my head that I'm seeing on the screen they do and I can see I can see hands moving the board around and if you have three other sets of hands moving at all times and getting in your way and blocking your vision I actually did find that very annoying at times there were multiple times that I said, will this game please just give me the option to turn off the hands? So it's true because it kind of breaks the immersion.

It does because I'm with you. I'm down in the thick of things. I'm zoomed in really close to all the action. And then this gigantic, like 50 foot giant hand comes clipping through my character. And I look and it's tied, like reaching for his character to move it or to pick up a monster because you can look at the monsters and see like stats about them and stuff like that. Um, there should be the option to just turn them off completely. I don't need to see your hands to understand what's

going on in the game. That's for sure. For me, biggest complaint for me, hands down, is the fact that you can orient the table, you can turn it, you can zoom it in, you can zoom out. There is a tilt function, but it tilts the table either to the right or the left. And so what happens is you wind up basically staring directly at your crotch for two hours straight. And my neck starts to hurt because you're looking down at this board, right? Like your head is, your chin is on your chest. You're looking down at this board because that's just the viewpoint that the game defaults

to. And there's no way to change it. You guys have heard me ask in game, guys, is there a way that I can tilt the table so that I can just look straight ahead in real life, but be looking down at the game board? And that does not exist. I don't understand why you would tilt the board to the right or to the left. And it really kind of messes with the perspective. So I never use that. But dude, after two hours of staring directly at my crotch, my neck hurts. And it's just one of those things where it's like, oh man, can I please just look up for a few minutes? That's my number one complaint.

There's really not a whole lot about the game that I find to feel like I need to nitpick, to be honest. Other than that, it can be very uncomfortable after a while. Yeah, I think we both really enjoyed Demio. These really are just nitpicks. It's not like huge criticisms of the game. But just to share the fact that, you know, no game's perfect. There's always going to be a couple things here or there. And this game's no exception to that. All right. So those are a couple of our thoughts about Demio. Josh, you've got some reviews here from Steam. I do have some reviews. As we do on any deep dive, we give you guys our thoughts. We break things down, but we get, hey, everybody's different when it comes to gaming.

Maybe you guys don't agree with us. And so we go to the Steam reviews just to give everybody an idea of how this game is rated overall and what are some of the nitpicks that people have. If somebody doesn't recommend the game, why? And we feel like it just gives a better overall picture. So I've pulled four Steam reviews. I'm going to start off with this one. This person rated the game not recommended. They have eight hours on record. So they've probably played through it all. And they say, I like the game, but it hurts my neck to always be looking down with the VR headset. If when the game comes to desktop PC version, I will continue to play it. But for now, it's not worth the cramp in my neck.

Now, it's funny because I had to pull this one because it's really my only complaint. That's very funny. I have never once had an issue with my neck playing this game. And on top of that... Okay, but you have to admit you're looking straight down the entire time. You are basically looking straight down, yes. I don't know exactly where you sit or what you do, but I like to sit on the edge of my couch. So I'm basically leaning forward. So I'm not so much

looking at my crotch as much as I'm looking between my knees down into the ground. And I don't know, it doesn't bother me. But furthermore, I don't know that I would really enjoy this game on desktop. I think the game works really well. It is perfect for VR. But honestly, this game is very simplistic in terms of the mechanics. I would be far more likely to want to play something more complicated like Gloomhaven on desktop. I think this game is like a must play for VR. I don't think I have any interest on desktop. I'm with you 100%. Play it in VR or there's definitely better options out there. Gloomhaven released on PC and gets fairly good reviews. I think that would be a much better actual PC game.

This lends itself to VR very, very well, but I agree with you. I don't think it would be nearly as good in 2D. All right. So this next one, this is a recommended review, 29 hours on record. Turns your average gamer into a Dungeons & Dragons nerd. Before Demio, Demio is just some geek's turn-based game. During Demio, if I cast my wizard spell upon that poison lantern, I can then ignite it with fire blast, wiping all that hairy witch's hit points. After Demio, orders Dungeons & Dragons and a wizard's costume on Amazon present tense. I go by the name Warlock Huntingdale in real life. Now this name was cast upon me during the great

battle for the frog kingdom. Oh, there you go. That's great. I love role play going on there, but it is, I mean, this is a fantasy environment. It's a fantasy, you know, role-playing type Dungeons and Dragons game. Uh, we have not role-played in it no but but i can see that being very fun to jump into some randoms game and then be the wizard and be like i am magnifical dude there are some great videos on youtube of a guy who goes into games and just fully narrates the entire experience while trolling people oh so he's like you know and the sorcerer is attempting to milk the spider and then they're like miss and he's like and they missed and you know just like funny narration the whole time it's pretty great oh

that's i i gotta try that now so yeah okay this next one not recommended uh seven hours on record overall a polished proof of concept really nice user experience but quirky rules no character progression sorry new dice don't count no overworld and severely limited content only make this fun for a couple hours if demio doesn't get a major overhaul i fully expect other developers to hop in with significantly better versions. That's completely fair. I think this is the first game that did it really well. I do not think this will be the best tabletop game in VR. I'm sure other developers will take it the next step further. And it could even be Demio through their own updates. But that's completely accurate, everything that they just wrote. Demio is a great game. This idea,

if a developer... Think about Half-Life Alyx, but with this format. A very high-end developer with a ton of options, character progression, lots of campaigns uh shops where you can buy you know permanent spells and upgrades and things like that this could be groundbreaking i would be so into a game that is fully fledged out it's unreal uh because demio is great in and of itself but it could be so much more amazing with some things like character progression and stuff like that. So I agree with this negative review a lot. Imagine Gloomhaven in VR. Right. Exactly. That looks and functions like Demio, but it's fully fledged. I would pay a full $60,

no question. Oh, easily. Easily. If you have a story, like a plot, if you have character unlocks and character progression and development and things like that, I mean, the world is an oyster when it comes to that. I would love to see this genre really expanded. Okay, one more review. This one is recommended 12 hours on record. And it says, gold medal, Half-Life Alyx. Silver medal, Beat Saber. Bronze medal, Demio. One of the absolute best VR experiences available to this day. Cross-play between Steam and Oculus storefronts.

Four-player drop-in, drop-out cooperative gameplay. Moving minis that are fully articulated. Earning and playing cards from your hand. Physically rolling dice that triggers detailed animations. Account progression that makes you stand out. I don't know about that. Friendly community, which we haven't played with a lot of randoms, but the two where everybody was working together, and lively developers with a solid roadmap. I agree with all that, really. I mean, other than the account progression, who cares about having a different colored die or a base

for your characters? I mean, that stuff doesn't interest me but you know that did remind me of one last thing that we should mention if you get downed in demio anyone else can res you and you have a certain number of of turns before your character permanently dies if they don't res you and if you get downed a certain number of times, you will immediately die and be eliminated from the game. But with them talking about four player drop in, drop out at any time, if you get eliminated, you can rejoin the room, start over as a new character. Now you've lost all of your gold and all of your cards, but it's almost as if you started with a brand new level one character and it starts you

at the entrance. So you do have to catch back up to your team, but it still lets you drop in. So you're never permanently eliminated. And I love the fact that anyone can drop in at any time. Yeah. And it does start you at the starting room as well. So it's not like you're instantly, there is some penalty there. So it's not, it doesn't trivialize anything because like you said, you lose your cards, you lose your gold, your gold you lose you know that's progression in this game and you have to then spend several turns to get back to the fight to where your companions are but it is a really nice touch that it's not like hey you just got unlucky and got killed sorry paul you have to sit here and watch us play for 30 minutes now right right so all. So, all right. Well, that's some Steam reviews. And then

what we do after that is we like to take a guess as to what we think a game's overall review score is. Kind of gives you a hint into what we might think about a game, but also shows what people think of this game overall. This is based on Steam's rating from 0% to 100%. What do you think, Paul? I won last time, I believe, didn't I? Or did you? No, it was me. Actually, I think you did. Yeah, you did win the last one.

All right. Well, you get to guess first then. All right. My gut tells me 84%. And my reasoning is I think most people like it. I think it deserves higher than that. I think you're going to have some people who just don't like the overall progression or they're going to think it's too short or they're going to think it's just not worth your money.

So I don't know. My gut just tells me 84 and I'm going to stick with it. Okay. My guess was 88%. So you and I are pretty on par with each other. I do think that this is a great game. I think it has a lot to offer, especially for a VR game.

There's not a lot of really good VR games out there. Now that pool is growing. But I do also think having played it a pretty good bit, that there are going to be people out there that are exactly that. Like that's it. Where's the progression? Where's the storyline?

I've done all the campaigns. Give me more. Oh, you haven't given me more, so I'm going to rate you a little bit lower. So I guess 88%. The actual overall Steam score is 91%, which I'd love to see, to be honest. I love that. That's fair. I think that's a right on score. Some of the things that we talked about could really put it up into the high 90s, in my opinion, if those things were to ever come out down the line. But I think this is a really enjoyable experience. Yeah, I do not have any real negative thing to say about the game. I

think it runs incredibly well. I think it's great. The randoms I have played with have been very helpful in teaching the game to noobs. There's a very active Discord community that I was checking out earlier today. I think even if you don't have any friends to play with you, you can easily make some through Demio. I'm really glad it's in the 90s. They really deserve it. Yeah.

All right, Paul. That means I'm back to being the winner. I get to introduce this next segment. Guess what, Paul? I'm ready this time. Oh, you are? All right. Well, let's hit that music.

Hey, baby. If you were a chicken, you'd be impeccable. There it is. I like it. I like it. Coming in with the cheesy pickup lines. It was working so well, Paul, I had to jump in there. So, all right.

So this is where we play Make Love, Marry, or Murder. This is how we rate a game. You know, it's pretty self-explanatory, but Murder, we think this game's terrible. Make Love, hey, this is fun, but maybe it's not long-term. Marry is, I love this game. I'll come back to it time and time again. I think it's a phenomenal investment of your time and money. So I am going to give this a Mary, believe it or not.

I think that the reason I say that is in its current state, I would say it's a make love. The fact that they're releasing two full new campaigns this year brings it up to five. I cannot wait to play those campaigns when they come out. The fact that they're adding PVP to this game is phenomenal. I think that this is a game that I will definitely want to play a year from now, two years from now until something better comes along to replace it. I think there is an awful lot for it to offer. You know, I think it's it's a little bit more than just that make love to me because they're so active in the development of this game that they're not done with it. And that makes me excited.

I am completely with you, Even though the game's relatively short to experience everything once, I do think you can play the campaigns multiple times. We went through all of them more than once. Now, if I only have the money to buy one game and this is the only game that I can play, I don't know that I would say Demio is the right one for that.

But to me, this kind of falls in line like when we were talking about Resident Evil Village. It might be relatively short, but what it does is so good and so fun and if there is new content i'm going to play it so i think it's mary i think it's marriage material now it might not be my only family i might have my East Coast and my West Coast families, okay, with Demio. I'll admit it. But yeah, it's marriage material. I love Demio. It's so fun. It really is.

I have enjoyed playing this game every single time we've played it. I can't wait to play it some more when there's new content. Like right now, and we will play it some more. We have a lot of friends that have picked it up and played it. And it's a good time every time. It's one of those things where in my brain, I go, oh, I told the guys I'd play Demio tonight. I don't get super excited about that. But then when we're in it and we're playing, I am having an absolute blast every single time. Yeah. For me, I start to get the itch. If I haven't played Demio in like three or four days,

I'm kind of like, you guys got any more of those adventures? Like I kind of want to get back into it. And I love hopping back in anytime. So yeah, I think we both highly recommend it. With VR, I think you have somewhat limited options for the real high-end VR experiences. And this one belongs up there. It's not as good as Half-Life Alyx, of course, because no game is.

But as that bronze medal VR game, it's well worth your attention and your money if you have it. It is one of those, in my opinion, I think it's one of those top three or four VR games that everybody, if you're going to get full use out of your Oculus Quest 2, you should pick this game up and you should play it. And you should talk a friend into getting it because the experience with close friends is so great. Yeah. Completely agree with all of that.

All right, Josh, let's go to the leaderboard and see where this game stacks up. All right. If you're new to the show and don't know about our leaderboard, every time that we deep dive a game, we have to take a look at every game that we have covered on the show, and we decide to rank it. We currently have games spanning from number one all the way down to number 63. So we've got things in here like Splitgate at 15,

Shovel Knight at 28, The Cave at 42, The Forest at 57, Hood Outlaws and Legends at 61. And then basically as a team, Josh and I have to look at the list and agree on where we're going to place it overall. I think it's a helpful starting place when we both rate it as a Mary and we both enjoy it. It means we're already kind of on the same page. So taking a look at our list here, Josh, one to 63, what kind of range are you looking at for Demio? I don't see it being in the top 10.

No, definitely not. Definitely not top 10, but somewhere in the middle. I'm right in the teens, to be honest. I'm looking at our list. I keep looking at like Splitgate, Destiny 2, Rainbow Six Siege, The Forgotten City, Black Ops, Cold War, Resident Evil Village at 20. And I feel like Demio fits right in there somewhere. My gut shot reaction is to put it in between Destiny 2 and rainbow six siege i'm guessing you would want

it to leapfrog destiny 2 since you're a lot lower on that one than me but i think we're in the right range i would put it below split gate and risk of rain 2 and terraria i can't put it quite that high those games give you so much that you can experience but i'd be fine putting it 16 17 18 anywhere there to put it at 16 all right right i mean i said right in the right in the teens and that's right in the middle of the teens and it knocks destiny 2 down again which so this is just a win-win all around yeah and uh you've just set the clock to uh our good friend Glap on Discord posting some crying faces as Destiny keeps getting lower and lower on the leaderboard over time. All right, fair enough. We will lock in Demio at number 16.

I think that's pretty high praise. I was going to say, if you didn't, that's very high praise. That's above No Man's Sky. That's above Deep Rock Gal Sky. That's above Deep Rock Galactic. That's above some big titles. It's just really that much fun. And the fact that this is our first VR game that we have reviewed and that it is so high up on the leader board should tell you that this game has an awful lot to offer. It really does rank up there in the upper echelon of really, really good VR games.

And it really makes me excited for the future, both of Demio and other competitors making similar games. Dude, give me a AAA Dungeons & Dragons-based game like this. I would spend a lot of money. I have this checklist in my head, right, I've mentioned it a few times. Give me a good story. Give me character progression. Give me weapons and armor that you can find. Can you imagine if you open up a treasure chest in Demio and your guardian got a battle axe or something? That you get to keep?

That you get to keep. I mean, I'm starting to nerd out in my head because there's all these things that it's like, oh, if they just had this. And so somebody is going to make a game like that, and I am going to just live in the Oasis for a very long time, man. Oh, I think of like in Gloomhaven where you could spend money in town to add permanent modifiers to your cards or your weapons. Think about being able to have that battle axe and then maybe in the store you get to permanently increase its damage by one

or whatever i mean yeah having that kind of carryover between mission to mission of a longer story and a longer campaign uh you and i would i mean legit i'd pay a hundred dollars yeah i mean no one's gonna charge that yeah i mean i'd only pay 40 but you know uh yeah i can't wait to see where the future of vr tabletop games like this is because tabletop simulator is fine for what it is but my goodness this takes the immersion to a whole another level it really is incredible watching the video on youtube will not at all show you what it's like to play this game. Find someone who has a quest to, or whatever,

and then try to experience it for yourself. It's a blast. Yeah, it really is. All right, well, for those of you out there, if you're curious to know, our next deep dive is going to be Hollow Knight. I am very close to beating it. I know you and I have been putting a lot of hours

into that game. That is going to be our next deep dive two weeks from now. And as always, we will have a This Week in Gaming episode on Thursday, where we will talk about gaming news, along with what we've been playing in our solo gaming times. And I think that's it. Anything else to tell the people? No, no, this was a very fun game to play. This is one that was not a chore at all, which is really nice. If you don't have VR, hopefully you get an idea of some of the stuff that it has to offer. I feel like it's becoming much more accessible to people. I love seeing people getting VR headsets and trying it for the first time and stuff like that. But it's really an incredible experience. It's kind of like you said,

find somebody that's got a headset because chances are you probably have a friend that does, or, you know, their parent that does or something like that. And it's something that just has to be experienced to understand. Yeah. So try to get out there and try to experience it yourself.

And then as a reminder, if you want to help support the show financially, you can go to multiplayer squad.com. And also please write our podcast, five stars, leave us a review and come check us out on discord and you can come play Demio with us. Uh,

I think that's it. We'll be back on Thursday for a 30 minute episode on this week in gaming, happy gaming for you all until then. We'll see you next time. All right. See everybody.