Video Gamers Podcast - Deep Dive: Resident Evil Village - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: May 17, 2021

Gaming hosts Paul and Josh are doing their best to avoid creepy dolls, giant vampires and more in this week’s deep dive episode where we tackle gaming’s hottest new release: Resident Evil Village. We chat best moments, gameplay, story and more before telling you what we think and whether your gaming dollars are well spent on picking up RE: Village. Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon Join our Discord Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe on YouTube Visit us on the web Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You get to come be a part of the best gaming community out there. You'll find the link in the episode description and over on our website at multiplayerpodcast.com. Now, I know what you're thinking. We do definitely still need your support. All right. So if you love the podcast, if you love what we're doing and you are just thinking to yourself, this is awesome. I really want to support these guys.

Head over to multiplayersquad.com. That's where you can help support the show. You do get some awesome perks, but more importantly, you get our eternal gratitude. All right, now enjoy the episode and we'll see you on our Discord server. Hello and welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. Come on in, pull up a chair to the dad's table where we're going to spend the next hour having a family-friendly conversation about gaming. Make sure to subscribe to the pod, rate us five stars, and leave a review. Today is a deep dive episode where we are going to spend the entire hour breaking down one game, and today that game is Resident Evil Village. I am your host, Paul, and with me,

he's the fifth lord of Mother Miranda's theme park of horror, it's Josh. I am the king of the trolls. I feel like that would be my gist. It's just like a bunch of bridges, a bunch of trolls, you know, like it just spins you around. You don't know where you're going. You don't know what you're doing. You just get frustrated. And then you're like, dude, this level sucks. I can totally picture it.

I feel like you would fit right into that. Yep. Or like on Game of Thrones, you'd be the master of trolling. Yeah, exactly. Definitely be your title. Also, I like your reference to the dad's table, because when you're younger, you can't wait until you have the seat at the dad's table, or standing around the grill with the dads and stuff like that.

And now that we're older and much less cool, I'm sure, we get to pretend like the dad's stuff is really cool, and that's what everybody wants, right? Yeah, everyone knows the dad table is the coolest. Plus, get the big dad jokes too i mean exactly what's left to want all right so before jumping into our regularly scheduled content we do have a new patreon supporter to welcome and that is a person by the name of nWC Zinu, who has definitely been one of our more active Discord users. Hey, man, I got to give Zinu credit. He came on the Discord.

It was one of those like, hey, I heard this was free now. He jumped in. He absolutely loved it. And he was like, dude, this is great. I'm going to sign up because I want to support you guys. He's like, I love the Discord. I want some of the extra privileges. Maybe just to lord it over some of the free people.

Who knows? And that's fine. I'm okay with that. But yeah, he did sign up and we appreciate it. And we made sure that he knew he was getting a shout out. And hey, if you want to hear your name on the show, you can get a shout out too. Absolutely. And Xenu is definitely an OG of the podcast because you said he's been listening since our GTFO episode, which is actually our second episode. So that's going back a long time.

We actually had a good conversation about some of our older, like original episodes. And yes, he is one of the OGs because he knew about those. So we had some laughs about how our initial episodes maybe weren't as good as the high quality standards that we have now. Let's just say that. Yeah. It takes time, right? So for those of you listening, if you want to come join us on Discord, it's completely free. You can check out the link in the episode description. And then also, if you want to support us on Patreon, you can head over to MultiplayerSquad.com, where you can help support the show starting at $5 a month, and that helps us keep this podcast running for the foreseeable future. And then, Josh, I understand you've got a couple of reviews that you're going to read for the show? I do. It's been a little while since we've actually read some of the reviews for the show, too. So I thought this would be a good time, because we've gotten a lot of them lately. I mean, it's really nice to see people leaving these. But one thing, I don't know why, man. It's like, I love seeing reviews from other countries

because, you know what I mean? It's just one of those things where it's like, you know, it's just, it lets us know that like we're out there in the world, right? Like not just in our own little country or something like that. So actually I pulled two that are from other countries as well.

So first one is titled, Always a Pleasure to Listen. And this comes in from Monster Energy One. And they say most podcasts lose my attention after just a few episodes. But with these guys, my time is very well spent enjoying listening and learning about games that I would otherwise not have even thought of trying. Thank you, guys. Keep up the amazing work. And he is from great Britain. So,

Ooh. Yeah. So thank you for that one. Monster energy. Um, I also love monster energy drinks. Um, I'm assuming that's where that comes from,

but I don't drink this anymore cause I'm getting too old for that stuff. So, uh, no caffeine after 4 PM for you. Yeah. Right. All right. getting too old for that stuff so uh no caffeine after 4 p.m for you yeah right all right and then this next one comes in from d pong uh and he d pong is from belgium so how about that yeah i think this is our first review from belgium um and it is titled exactly what i was looking for uh and

d pong says great podcast I've been listening to a Belgian gaming podcast for years. I really like the format, but they are only uploading one episode a month. So finding you guys a few months ago was like discovering a gold mine. New stories and gaming info weekly?

That's how it should be done. Keep up the good work and thank you. P.S. Ark survival? Maybe? Oh, okay. That's a it should be done. Keep up the good work and thank you. P.S. Ark survival, maybe? Oh, okay. That's a good suggestion. An Ark fan there, you know. So, yes. I just, I don't know why.

Like I said, I love seeing these reviews from other countries come in. It's always nice to know that we're reaching the world, Paul. We're going worldwide. All right. Now, I know we have a lot to talk about here today so let's hit the audio track and get into it all right here's the description of the game on wikipedia i pulled this one from wikipedia because the steam description i didn't think was very good resident evil village is a survival horror game developed

and published by Capcom. A major installment in the Resident Evil series and a narrative sequel to 2017's Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, the game follows Ethan Winters, who after a fateful encounter with Chris Redfield, finds himself in a village filled with mutant creatures in an effort to find his kidnapped daughter while village maintains the series mainstay survival horror elements the game adopts a more action-oriented gameplay style compared to its predecessor so i think a key thing in that description is the fact that village ties back directly as a sequel to Resident Evil 7. Yeah, it does. And I played Resident Evil 7,

but as I am wont to do at times, I never finished it. Okay. You know I have game ADD, Paul. Don't pick on me. It's a condition. All right. So I did not remember a whole lot about Resident Evil 7,

other than the creepy house with the hillbilly scary people in it. But what's awesome about Village is when you first start off with Village, it actually says, like, hey, do you remember the story? Would you like to go back and remember? And when you click yes, it actually takes you back to some of the gameplay highlights from Resident Evil 7 to catch you up, which I thought, like, dude, this is a great thing that they did, because I didn't remember a lot of the story, you know? And so it was really nice to kind of just get that little, it was probably like a 60-second video. It wasn't a whole lot, but it was just enough to say, hey, you don't really need to know much more than this

to be able to play Village and just jump right in. Yeah, I think the best game to compare it to would be Red Dead Redemption 2. Can you play Red Dead 2 without ever playing Red Dead 1? Of course. But if you remember what happened in Red Dead 1, it makes it a more enriching experience because both games inform one another. And this game does exactly that. If you remember the events of Resident Evil 7, you will enjoy 8 more because it will provide more context. You read a lot of journal entries that better explain what happened, not just in 7, but even the entire Resident Evil universe. So this one definitely,

that kind of surprised me. I thought it would be a little bit more of a standalone game, but this one is absolutely a direct sequel. And the video was nice because like you, I played it four years ago. I didn't remember anything. I remembered something about mold and hillbillies, and that was literally it. Honestly, the 60 second video video i don't know that it really helped all that much like it kind of just confused me like i had more questions so you might be better off watching a more detailed recap on youtube or something but it is nice that they hit you with it right off the bat yeah it was it's it's a nice start to the game it did make me realize that i did not see parts of Resident Evil 7 that I probably should have seen, because I was like, I don't remember this happening at all.

So there's a really important question here as we jump into the content. How spoilery do we want to get? Because we have not really talked about this yet. Oh, man. How much do we want to divulge? How much are we going to hold back? I feel like to talk about this game, we have to get mildly spoilery. Nothing story, no plot reveals or anything like that. But I think we have to talk about some of the levels, some of the characters, some of what makes it scary.

You know what I mean? So it's like, I don't know if we want to preface it by saying, hey, we will talk about different parts of the game and different levels in the game, which I personally only view as like a 2 out of 10 on a spoiler level. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I think that's fair to say. We're definitely not going to spoil anything in the end. We're not going to spoil where the story goes, a slightly different mechanic. But I think, like you said, we'll keep the spoilers really, really minimal. And the only spoilers we're going to have story-wise is just going to be stuff that happens

in the opening cutscenes. Honestly, it's stuff that we already read in the description. We might just talk about that a little bit more. I mean, I do want to talk about one of the areas. So it's like, because that part, we got to talk about one of the areas, you know, so it's like, because that part we got to talk about, you know, but that's not really a spoiler. You know, it's just like a different level in the game. It's like saying, hey, you know, if we're going to talk about Mario World, we're going to talk about World like 8-1, you know, and you might not know what 8-1 is if you've never made it there.

But that's not a spoiler to talk about a level that's further in a game, is it? Like, it's not... I don't think so, as long as we're, yeah, not divulging major reveals. Yeah, we're not gonna, like, let on that the princess is in another castle. Oh, man. Dang it. Sorry, guys. So once you are done watching the 60-second recap video of Resident Evil 7, the game has this really beautiful opening cutscene that I didn't really expect,

where all of a sudden you see a book open, and it's called Village of Shadows. And it tells this two to three minute fable that really looks fantastic. It looks straight out of a Tim burton movie or like hellboy two or sure and it's this like really creepy story about a girl who wanders away from her mom in the forest but then it like takes this really weird dark turn where the girl's thirsty so a bat bites its own wing and she drinks from its blood and then she's hungry so a fish gives her one of its fins and basically like any good fable you know there's like a life lesson so she starts like taking more and being greedy so then a witch

shows up and casts her to be stuck inside a mirror and then the camera zooms out and it's your wife reading this story to your six month old daughter. I was going to say that kid's going to have some serious issues later on in life, Paul. I couldn't believe it. It was a great story. It really was. Like you said, it was very well done. It was like, like you said, like a Tim Burton movie. I was instantly like, hey, this is pretty cool. I don't know what this has to do with the game yet, but I'm enjoying this. And then you're right. It's like, this is the story that you're reading to your baby daughter. And I was just like, I don't know about that.

Maybe she's too young to know, but these are not things you teach your kids if you want to sleep that night, because they're going to be up all night with nightmares. Yeah. But I love that Ethan, your character, does address that. He's like, honey, this story is wild. Why are you reading this to our baby? So she says it's tradition or whatever. But yeah, I did think it was super funny. But I thought that it perfectly set the mood for the whole game because the whole game is creepy, but beautiful and atmospheric. And it really, to my surprise, it got me pumped up to actually play the game because I was already excited to play it. But for that to be the first thing you experience, I thought was actually really neat. So yeah, basically there are some shocking events that we won't go into the details.

However, like the description said, basically you wake up after an auto accident. You realize that your daughter has been kidnapped, and so you're completely alone, and you start walking down toward a village that you see below you. And this is where you're going to spend the entire rest of the game. And if you played the demo that came out right before release, this is where you got to explore the castle just a little bit. But you have this outlying village. And Josh, I'll just toss this to you for a moment here. What are you doing once you actually start the game? Because prior to this, it's basically all cut scenes. Now that you're in control of Ethan, what's the game like once you're here in the village?

Yeah, it's a lot of exploring the village. And I'll say this, man. This game blew me away from a graphics standpoint. I can't think of a game, honestly, that rivaled this game in graphical quality in a while. I mean, I have a really good graphics card. I have a really good monitor. I was able to play this in HDR 4K, and it was absolutely incredible. So that was my very first wow moment, was just when they put you in the village and you can start exploring. It was just like the attention to detail on everything was just off the charts. So kudos to them for making an absolutely incredible looking game.

The village is interesting because you don't know what's there. You don't really know. I mean, you're there to try to find your daughter, but you really are from a standpoint of you don't know what's going on. And so you're looking around this village, and of course, there's no people around. These houses are empty. You're trying to figure out what the heck is going on. But then there's just these little glimpses of like a sound over there. Something. Wait, what was that that moved over there? Like, did I just hear something on the roof?

Like, whoa, wait, there was a horse carcass right there. And now that horse carcass is gone. Like, what's going on? And they do a very good job of, like, just teasing. Like, setting the mood, so to speak, in the very beginning. Oh, absolutely. And you start to see blood kind of just everywhere. Like, you can tell someone must have died here.

Maybe a body was dragged. Whatever it might be. So it's an incredibly creepy atmosphere. And then you start fighting these creatures that are called Lycans. And you can tell maybe they're like transformed people. Maybe they're some kind of weird werewolf creature, some kind of mutant or whatever it might be. And in every good Resident Evil game, they are not difficult to kill, but you have such limited ammunition that a lot of this game in the beginning is not just straight up fighting. It's a lot of searching, trying to find your daughter, trying to find clues. You're not necessarily killing all of the Lycan that you

run across. You might shoot them once to stun them and then run past. And a lot of times when you duck into a building, you can actually move and drag like a bookcase to keep them out. And so there's definitely more of a survival element at the beginning as opposed to action. Yeah, they do a very good job of setting the tone of the game kind of right away. And I thought that was really neat because it's like, oh, okay, this is like a horror survival game. We can talk about the survival elements a little later, I guess. But it's one of those, it is very, you do get the sense that this game is going to have a lot more action than some other Resident Evil games.

And they do a good job of slowly introducing what's going on. And like you said, eventually a lycan comes out and you do have to fight it. And that's when you're kind of going like, okay, this village is overrun with monsters. I don't know why. I don't know what's going on. But man, did I pick the wrong village to be in. Exactly. Yeah. If my kid's going to get kidnapped, this is not the village that I want my kid to get kidnapped in. Yeah, exactly. Like,

why couldn't this happen near Cleveland? Or why does it have to be this village? Yeah, with all the gothic architecture and filled with mutants. Yeah, there's also a lot of puzzle elements. So there's a lot of areas that you can't necessarily reach. However, as you play village, you continually come back to the village at large and so new areas get unlocked there's lots of things to discover there are sometimes things that you cannot use or move until you get the right tool or the right gear um i don't know what happened in my playthrough josh i was pretty good at checking almost every corner somehow i I never got the wheel. So the whole game is filled with like these wells where you can turn a wheel and pull things out.

You never got the wheel? Never got it. I never found it. You don't get it till later. That's the thing. Like you don't get it until later on in the game. Like I'd say halfway through to maybe even like two thirds of the way through the game before you get that stupid wheel for the well. Dude, I found so many wells that are like, this is missing a piece. And I'm like, I don't have the piece. I wish I did.

Yeah, somehow I couldn't access any of the wells. I don't know how I missed it. To be honest. But that was one of the things that I kind of forgot about the Resident Evil series is that they do like their puzzle lights. They're not really puzzles these are not brain benders these are not anything that's even remotely difficult to do but it's

just enough to kind of give a give a taste in the game it adds a certain element i don't know that it's like a great element but i don't think it would feel like a Resident Evil if it didn't have those elements to it. So I do enjoy them because it's that like reward of like, oh, I found the wheel. You know, sorry you missed that reward, Paul. Well, let me give you a perfect example. Like one guy's got a combination lock on a cabinet and it's like, oh, how am I going to find this six digit code to get in? Well, it's written right next to the safe. Look out the window. And if you look out the window, you see all these numbers that are very obvious. 07, 04, something else. And so like the puzzles

are kind of like that. If you tend to need a code, it's going to be in the same building, or you just have to look for 10 seconds. There's not a whole lot of difficult puzzles, but I do appreciate that it's in there. I was going to say, it's one of those things I do like that it's in the game. I almost feel like they dumb it down a little too much, though. I don't know if they just think people are dumb, or they really just don't want the puzzles to be a focus you know like yeah you know one of the things that the game does is they highlight everything with yellow tape you know so it's like yeah it's important it'll be highlighted with yellow tape so it looks like it's part of the environment instead of like a big red arrow pointing to like this thing that you need to

notice it'll have like yellow duct tape on it and And so it's pretty hard to miss. But at the same time, it's like, I get the whole like, I don't want to just wander around and be completely lost and not have any clue what I'm supposed to be looking for. But at the same time, like, man, you must think I'm dumb to really feel the need to spell out this combination for me, you know, at the same time. Or yeah i i don't think this really counts as a spoiler but i remember in another room there's another combination you need and it literally says like the five-year anniversary of my daughter and then there's just a calendar that has a giant circle around it with the six-digit code i'm like come on. The whole house is ransacked and run down and everything is brown.

It's her birthday. And then on the wall is this super colorful crayon picture with the date of her birthday on it. And it just so happens it's six digits. And it's like it doesn't fit into the house at all. You know, it's like they could not have made this thing stand out more if they had put a neon sign around it and made it light up and blink to grab your attention. And it's like, I mean, you know, it's just, I don't know. Like, I get it. It's nice that it's in the game. Personally, I think they could have tweaked the puzzle difficulty just a little.

Just a tad. Yeah. Make me find the code, like, in the next building over for, you know, maybe on a body and you can read through a journal entry or something. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it's not bad. It just is rather simplistic. All right.

So without getting bogged down into details of the story, basically you learn that there are basically four different parts of the village that are run by four different lords, hence Josh being the fifth in the intro. And all of these lords serve underneath Mother Miranda. And you read a lot about her, you run into journals that tell you about her. And basically you just have to go to each section that the Lord is over in order to do some objectives. And so this is kind of the structure of the middle of the game is these four areas. To give you a very brief rundown, you have Castle Dimitrescu, which is run by the giant vampire woman, Alcina, who you have probably seen. She's very hard to miss. And if you were curious, yes, you do find out why she is so big, as long as you who you have probably seen. She's very hard to miss. And if you were curious, yes,

you do find out why she is so big, as long as you read all the journal entries. There is Beneviento Manor, which is the one that has lots of dolls, because if you're going to make a creepy game, you're going to have a room filled with dolls. There is Salvatore Moreau's lab, which is run by this really hideous hunchback creature. And then you have Heisenberg's factory, which Osha would say is the scariest part of the game, because this factory's got saw blades that are going over the walkways that you gotta duck and dodge between. Yeah, that factory is not safe. No, no. It is zero days since the last incident at this factory. All right. So out of those four areas, Josh, are there any that stand out in particular? Any that have like

memorable moments or memorable mechanics that you want to talk about? All right. So first we have to talk about Castle Demetresque, right? That's the one that everybody sees in the demo. This is the giant 10 foot tall vampire lady that broke the internet. This is what they really kind of showcased in the demo and in a lot of the gameplay footage. So the castle is the first one that you go to, right? And so it's very early on in the game. The vampires that are there, they have personality and interacting with Lady Demetrescu is pretty cool.

And I think the castle served as a good lead up into the rest of the game. But then at the same time, each zone is just different enough from the other ones that each one feels unique, which I really, really liked because it was not just a rehash of like, here's this castle with these vampire ladies. Now here's this giant house with werewolf guys or something like that. The zones actually felt different enough that I thought that they did a good job of making the game feel like it was broken up into unique areas. So you ask me which one stands out. I'm going to tell you right now. What is it?

Benevito? The Benevito house? Beneviento Manor. Beneviento Manor. That has to be the one that's most memorable. I'm telling you, when they talk about survival horror game, right? I'm like, yeah, right. Resident Evil, it's got zombies and big scary guy chasing you.

Like, yeah, okay, whatever. Dude, nothing in horror is creepier than a house full of baby dolls. Yes. So they play on that baby doll theme so bad. These are the creepiest freaking little dolls, man. And they don't move. They're just staring at you. And you just keep waiting.

You just keep waiting the whole time. You're like, I know one of these dolls is going to try to murder me. It's Chekhov's gun, right? You see it in the first act. It's going to fire in the third. You're just on high alert. Which of these is Chucky? Which one is gonna come out and get me? Yes, exactly. And that stupid level, man, I'm telling you, I played that level at night with no lights on. I have the cool hue lights that are all the different colors in my office and stuff

like that. I had all the lights off. I had my headphones on and it just so happened that this was the part of the game that I happened to be playing at the time. And that level freaked me out. I'm not going to lie. That one, that one got me. Yeah, no, it's by far the creepiest part of the whole game. And if you want to talk about the creepiness factor, that one section nails it. Like we played a lot of Phasmophobia and I always kind of poked fun at it. I never found it to be scary. I found it to be slow paced and a little creepy.

But this game really does a great job where the lights feed into the atmosphere. The dolls are around you. You end up having this encounter with what I wrote down in my notes while playing. I wrote down creepiest monster ever. Yes. Because I thought it was the creepiest thing I've ever had to face in a video game. And let's just say... We have to do spoiler right here, Paul.

I have to be able to talk about this stupid thing, man. I can't hint around it. So spoiler alert, if you don't want to know what this monster is that we're talking about, skip ahead like two minutes, okay? Because if you don't mind, it's a mild spoiler. It doesn't ruin the story in any fashion, you know, as far as that goes. But here's your warning. Okay.

Dada. Dada. Dada. Dada. Dada. Dada. okay da da da da dude so this part look I freaked my dogs out by doing that right so this part it's like this stupid doll lab factory house thing

that this lady is making all these dolls so that's creepy enough but at least the lights are on and it's like I could swear that level like it was quieter than all the other levels. So like they really nailed the atmosphere at one part. You finally are, you're exploring around and you're like, dude, this house sucks. This place is creepy. I hate these dolls. And then you come back up and all the lights are off and there's just this red glowing light. And you're just like oh heck no man like no no no i'm not doing it get me out of here open the door yeah i'm not doing it i'm out i'm getting

out of here i don't like this anymore and you start fumbling around in the dark and you know where the elevator is you start going to this elevator and then you round this corner and there is this creepy gigantic slug baby monster thing monster that has this gigantic mouth and this thing just talks like a baby and it is just giggling and and and dude you just run. And I just remember, I got chill bumps on my arms and I was like, dude, this sucks, man. I don't want anything to do with this anymore. Dude, when you finally power up that elevator and then you're trying to get to it, the monster's there and you got to kite it away and make it run around a table and then you go back. I was mashing that button to get onto the elevator like it was like a mario party mini game i was

just mashing it and couldn't wait to get out of that house it's true they so kudos to them they did a phenomenal job there is not many moments in a video game that freak me out like that one freaked me out man yeah like there i I think we both enjoyed playing Resident Evil. I mean, we're going to get more into our, you know, overall thoughts a little bit later. But to me, that manor in particular was really the standout moment. I always assumed it would be more about Lady Dimitrescu, but really it was more that manor that will stick with me as being the creepiest and the most interesting. But that being said, you know, you did touch on something that I just

wanted to maybe expound on a little further. Each of the four lords in those areas really are radically different. They have different monsters. So even though overall you're fighting zombie-like creatures, they are different and they each have their own mysteries. So when you're learning about, you know, the Dimitrescu family and you're learning about the daughters, you're reading these journal entries about, you know, why do they seem to be like vampires? Why is she so tall? Why is it that they can turn into flies and then like, you know, swarm around the house? Why is it that they freak out if you smash windows? By the way, I don't know about you, Josh.

I vandalized the crap out of that house. I smashed every window. I smashed every dish. And I was so worried that, and I'm not gonna say whether or not this is the case, but the whole time I was like, this game is gonna turn me into one of these freaking creatures

and I've already smashed all these windows and it's gonna make me weak in the second half of this game is going to turn me into one of these freaking creatures and i've already smashed all these windows and it's going to make me weak in in the second half of this game and i was so worried because i left nothing to chance i smashed everything that i could with my knife i mean let's be honest they deserve it right you know if i'm going to castle demitrescu you're getting stuff smashed because you you don't deserve nice things you know if you things if you're a vampire lady like that. The property damage was real. Yes, exactly. I'm sure she's got insurance. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know what? I would actually say that this middle part of the game

was probably my favorite. Not to downplay the second half of the game, but I thought that discovering the stories and the mysteries of these four lords was done really well. Because you hear about them, you see a little bit, but then you get to experience them more fully. And I thought that was really neat. I thought that was done rather well. I'm with you 100%. Castle Demetres, to me, because it's the opening area of the game, I felt like that was almost like the, not the tutorial, but it was the intro, like the prologue almost, right? Like the tone setting. Yeah, because the game, in my opinion, really takes off once you get out of the castle, right? That's when you start finding more puzzle stuff know you start finding more puzzle stuff you start finding more equipment you start finding more journals and notes that are actually explaining what the heck is going on and like you said you know you get these little snippets of insight into why these lords are the way that they are and who they are what's going on in this village and why is everything so freaky

and what happened all the people and that it really takes off after that initial part of the game. And so I'm with you a hundred percent, dude. I thought the middle part of the game was hands down like the best part. Yeah, I completely agree. All right. Well, let's take a moment here to hear from one of our sponsors. This episode of the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast is brought to you by the Blizzard Gear Store by Fanatics. If you're a long-term listener of the show, you know how much we love Blizzard games here. We even have Overwatch as our number one game on our leaderboard. And I've got great news for you guys out there. You can actually help support our show by purchasing Blizzard gear through multiplayerpodcast.com forward slash blizzardstore.

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All right, we're back. So Josh, let's talk a little bit about the weapons in the combat. What'd you think about the action part of this game? I have mixed feelings, to be honest. It's fine. You know, it's fine. It's like, it's not great. For a game that they tried to lean on the action side of things, I felt like it was a little lackluster in that regard. And I get that it's also a survival game. So like you had touched on earlier, ammo is very limited. You can't just Rambo your way through everything. But at the same time, you really don't have a lot of choice other than to kill everything that comes at you. It's not like, what's the Resident Evil 3 or 4

where there's the big hulking brute guy? You can't kill him and you just have to run from him every time you see him, right? I can't remember which one it is, but it's not like that. You're fighting almost constantly and it got to the point where while it was fine and I didn't detract from the game, I also felt like it didn't really

add a whole lot to the game. The gunplay is not super impactful. It's one of those things where you can get a lot of different weapons, but no weapon really stood out as my favorite. None of them felt super impactful, like the pistol, right? It takes eight bullets to kill a Lycan. And it's like, if you headshot them, they don't really act like they got headshot. I mean, maybe they do, but then they fall down, but then they kind of twitch and then they get back up.

And it's like, it's fine. It's very similar to VII, very similar to to four it's not an action game but there's action along the way it's not purely survival and so i think they tried to just toe the line between both i did think that discovering new weapons was fun because like every resident evil game you start out with your pistol. It's pretty weak. You end up finding your shotgun, and you get later a sniper rifle and a magnum, and you get some other stuff.

There's also some crafting, so you can make pipe bombs. You can lay down proximity mines. And so there is that element as you loot and find things, you know, like scrap pieces of metal or gunpowder or chem fluid. You can combine these things to make different items to make your game easier. And I don't know about you, Josh, but I always just rolled with the handgun just to conserve all my ammo. And then I remember at one point I had something like 68 sniper bullets. And I said, screw it, I'm sniping everything in this factory. And so when I did Heisenberg's

factory, I ran through the whole thing, sniping everyone. And that was actually pretty fun. I loved sniping in the game. It must be the part of the game because I was not sniping very much at all. And I'm with you. I mostly used the handgun because I'd upgraded it a good bit. And the shotgun when I needed to, because there's just not a ton of ammo for the shotgun either. But at one part, I was very low on ammo on both the handgun and the shotgun. And then like you, I was like,

dude, I have like 50 bullets for this sniper rifle. I better start using them. And yeah, so I'm sniping guys at point blank range just to try to conserve ammo from my other stuff. So that's funny. So it makes me feel better that that wasn't just me. But I mean, I don't want to make it sound like combat is bad, because it's definitely not bad at all. It just didn't really stand out as a highlight of the game for me. I do love the fact that you get to progress, and you do unlock new weapons, and that you can upgrade these weapons, right? Like for me, that was a lot of fun because it's like, oh, I can finally afford

this extended mag for the pistol. Or you find a shotgun variant that is a lot better or different or something like that. And so, you know, you can play the like play style, I guess, that you want to play. And there are explosives in the game, which I found to be a lot of fun. And that was kind of cool to be able to try to tinker with those in certain situations and stuff like that. So I don't mean to make it sound like it's bad, because it's not bad at all. It just wasn't super impactful or memorable to me. Right.

Like, if you're playing a shooter, the focus is on all the shooting mechanics in this game the goal is survival horror so it's more rounding a corner and then you get freaked out by seeing this guy in a in a little butcher wood shop i don't know if you fought that i did any boss like that that's that's like the whole lead up though. Like as soon as you start looting mine, mine, explosive round, mine, it's like, okay, I know what's inside this building. All right. I got the hint Capcom. And then you round the corner and then you're in these tight quarters trying to run and

then shoot and run, reload, shoot, kite around the table. You know, so the focus is more on survival. However, your guy is relatively slow even while sprinting. It's a lot of ring around the table. So the focus is more on survival. However, your guy is relatively slow, even while sprinting. It's a lot of ring around the rosy. Oh, he's not slow, Paul. He is molasses, man. I mean, that's one of my complaints that we can get into in a little bit. But oh my goodness, man. When you give me a sprint button, but I don't feel like I'm sprinting, we got issues. All right, so just a couple last things

and then we'll move on to our normal segments here. But this game has cooking? Did not see that coming, Josh. I worked hard for that cooking. You'd be proud of me, Paul. Honestly, I was thinking about you when I'm hunting down fish and poultry and that perfect, you know, I forget what the term for it is, but the, you know, the high end meat.

Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, and I got it, man. I did my part. I got the, you know, the Duke cooked me a few good meals. And it was great. I didn't know you just had to saute some chicken and pig and it's going to give you a bonus to health for the rest of the game. Who knew that's how food works, you know? Yeah, the cooking is here in this game. I thought it was kind of funny. It's not really fully blown out, but it's another thing to collect. I'm not going to complain about it.

You know, this game has a ton of stuff that you can do on the side. There are these little wooden goats that you read that they bring protection from Lady Miranda or Mother Miranda. And she is going to be wrathful if you destroy them. So, of course, I start knifing all of them. I broke every single one of them goats, dude. Yeah, I did too. So there's collectibles like that. You have the cooking.

You've got where you can find little marbles, and you put them into these little labyrinths. And if you complete them, you get a treasure that you can sell and get more money. So there's a lot to do in the game. It's not just run and gun. The game's also littered with hidden gems. So just like the old Resident Evil games, if you ever see a little glimmer on the ceiling or a wall, you can shoot it. Maybe yellow quartz drops or something like

that. And if you want to try to find all those, you could spend 100 hours on one playthrough if you really wanted to, to try to hunt down every single hidden thing. But to kind of close out this segment here, Josh, was there anything in particular that stands out, whether positive or negative to you?

I mean, yeah, I mean, both, to be honest. You know, I mean, I've got I think this game did some things amazingly well. I kind of already mentioned the graphics. I think it did a phenomenal job in the atmosphere. You know, I kind of talk about the gunplay being a little lackluster, but on the flip side, the reason you need to use your guns is phenomenal.

Like they throw situations at you and events at you that are great. You know, it's, they're either, they're freaky or you're like, oh my goodness, you know, where did this guy come from? Like you had hinted there's bosses and gigantic, crazy, optional psychopath guys that you might come across out in the middle of the woods in a barn somewhere, that kind of stuff.

So I think they do a very good job of having those little side, I don't want to call them missions, but like you said, just things to discover that if you're willing to take your time and not just go from point A to point B as fast as you can, it really rewards you with a little bit of that exploration. And hey, why don't you just try some different things for a little bit? So I really enjoyed that aspect of it. I hinted at it, but man, you just move so slow in this game. I want to be able to run. And I get that maybe it's by conscious choice that they want to kind of slow things down so you can't just

blitz through certain things or pass certain monsters or something like that. So I get it from an artistic standpoint. You got to feel the dread as you walk into each area. You know, maybe, but at the same time, I feel dread when I can't move very fast in a game where I have to cover a lot of ground. It's the wrong kind of dread. That fills me with dread too. I guess I hadn't thought about that.

There's no fast travel. I mean, this game is not large. This is not like witcher i mean my goodness you know it's a rail it's relatively small map but the game is relatively open world you retread a lot of the same areas one thing that i did kind of want to poke fun at is every single door in this game is locked on the other side oh my god you will see that message 400 times and every time you finish a certain level you unlock doors and now you have the shortcuts but you do have to run back and forth a lot the map is also terrible i no lie who designed this village no lie this village is so confusing there's one point in this game i don't know do you remember the house with the

violin on the door it's door? It's like the... Anyway, you eventually have to get into this house, and you find a way to do that. I spent legitimately 30 minutes wandering around the village trying to find that particular house because I could not remember where it was. Oh. I mean, your guy moves slow.

So I walked all the way over to this side of the village. Nope, house isn't over here. Let me turn around and walk all the way back over to this side of the village. Nope, house isn't over here. And then I'm like, I'm looking on the map in the game, but nothing is marked. It's just outlines of houses. And I'm like, I don't know what shape this house

is, man. Where is the house? And I got super frustrated because I couldn't find this stupid house. And it was like the next place I had to go. And I was like, this is dumb. I want to be able to sprint around and just find this house. And I couldn't. So yes, you'll see what one huge complaint is when we get into the reviews on the game. There is an overarching complaint about this game. It didn't bother me necessarily, but a lot of people complained about the field of view. Oh, okay. You know, because I guess the field of view is like an 80, which is really, really low.

And I think that also lends itself to feeling like you're walking very, very slow. And I guess what a very narrow field of view does is it can make people dizzy. I guess if you have a wider field of view, it just doesn't affect you. Now, I don't get dizzy playing video games, but it's a huge complaint about the game that they did not allow any field of view changes. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I hadn't heard about that. But yeah, I didn't experience anything negative with the field of view. It didn't make me dizzy or anything like that. But yeah, it's definitely slow moving. Maybe that 120 range of view where you feel like you're running at an incredible rate of speed.

So what about you? What stood out for you as good and bad? You know, I don't think it's good or bad, but playing this game definitely requires a pretty healthy amount of suspense of disbelief. I mean, this is just a game. You have to accept the fact that there are going to be magical elements

because it's resident evil. You know, this is a game where you can have sickles thrown through your hands and into your legs through your calves you're gonna take an axe to the chest multiple times in this game and all you got to do is sprinkle some herbs mixed with chem fluid and you're just gonna immediately be better so that's not like good or bad that's just the nature of the game and you're just going to immediately be better. So that's not good or bad. That's just the nature of the game, and you just kind of have to accept that. I found myself asking a lot of questions during the game that are just parts of your brain you have to turn off.

But what's funny is Resident Evil actually does answer a lot of those questions because they hit you with 20 minutes of exposition at the very end of this game that actually do answer a lot of those questions because they hit you with 20 minutes of exposition at the very end of this game that actually do answer a lot of questions it's kind of like you know why is this old hag just walking around and no one cares like why does the duke want to buy the remains of some dude i killed in the village like what's he gonna do with this why aren't the enemies attacking the duke because he's upgrading my weapons do you find out why they don't bother the duke no you don't find that oh okay i was gonna say i missed a big part of that because i was wondering that myself no that that's one example you're not gonna find out unless i missed it maybe maybe there are some hidden

journals that i miss but it's kind of like know, when you watch a movie and you say, wow, if these two people would have just talked, none of this would have happened. There's definitely some elements of that in this game. And the game even ends up addressing it, saying, well, we could have just done this, but here's why we didn't do it. And I didn't find those answers to be terribly satisfying, but I did appreciate the fact that they at least addressed it. So you just have to understand, you know, I mean, you're dealing with mutated creatures that are fantastical beings. You know, there's going to be some magic. Not all of it is going to make a whole lot of logical sense. I would say the game is played for atmosphere, first and foremost, and I thought they knocked it out of the water. I thought this game brought so many oh crap moments that are going to stick with me,

and I think that's really what they were going for, and I thought they did great with it. All right, so one other thing to keep in mind also is that this game is including a multiplayer mode called Reverse. However, it got delayed, so it's not out yet. It will be coming this summer. Josh, can you picture yourself playing this game multiplayer? No, no, I don't. I really can't even imagine. The gunplay is not that good,

and every multiplayer game is going to just have a deathmatch mode or something. I don't know what else they could do. Unless you're going to let me be like Lady Demitrescu, and then I get to fight like five other people, like that would be cool. Oh, like an asymmetrical thing? You know, like that would be a cool game. But I have a feeling this is just going to be a deathmatch, a hide-and-seek, you know, or something. I don't know what they're going to

do with it. And honestly, I don't really care because I don't see myself playing it. All right. Well, I think that's all we're going to have by way of our opinions. Oh, I will mention one last thing. So as far as longevity of this game, you can actually beat it relatively quickly. I think somewhere in that 8 to 15 hour range, most people are going to finish it. But when you do beat the game, you then are given access to New Game Plus. And what happens is you get to keep all your weapons. It just resets all the keys. And so you can ramp up the difficulty, but it'll be a little bit easier because you get to bring your gear and you get to complete challenges, which give you a new type of currency called CP, and you can use that to

unlock new bonuses, new weapons, unlimited ammo cheats, and things of that nature. So you can actually be rewarded quite well on repeat playing the game over and over. There's actually a counter where it keeps track of how many times you've beaten the game, and I thought that that was rather clever. So if you drop 60 bucks on this game, it's not just going to be 10 hours. If you want to, you can actually squeeze quite a bit more content out of it. Yeah. Yeah. They do a lot to try to... That being said, I'm not going to play it again. No, I won't either. And I clocked... My play time, I was right at that eight hour and I think

50 minutes. And that was with me doing some of the side content. Like I did not just blow through the story without doing anything. Like I said, I hunted down some animals to make these dishes. I did some of like the side objectives and stuff like that. And I still clocked in at just under nine hours. So it is a short game. You know, it's a great ride for those short hours. But yeah, this is not a game that, you know, lends itself to longevity, unless you're the kind of person that likes like New Game Plus and 100% completion and stuff like that.

In which case, you'll probably get a lot more time out of it for your money. Just not us. Yeah, especially since we've got more games to cover for the podcast. All right. So Josh, how about you hit us with some of those community reviews all right so um i pulled some reviews on steam um and i'll start off with a negative one uh this person this is not recommended and they said it's a good game so far like many have said a mix between seven and four they mean resident evil seven and resident evil four but holy moly is the character movement bad making ethan turn is like navigating a bearing sea fishing vessel in 200 foot waves while whilst having no engine

to rely on which is a huge shame because it could have left a great impression on me so far. And this is an overarching theme with a lot of the negative reviews is just he doesn't run fast. He doesn't turn quickly. I guess on controller, like he turns really slow. I was going to say that sounds to me like a controller issue, because at least on mouse, I did not have an issue with turning. does walk and run slow yeah i thought the turning was fine yeah there was actually a lot of those um and so that was one of the overarching complaints this is another uh negative review uh this person actually refunded the product which steam tells you now and they say no field of view slider in 2021 guys we're colonizing mars yet simple essential features are not available even though hundreds of reviews complained about that on the demo page enemies

are bullet sponges they barely flinch when you hit them in the head with a nine millimeter the world building is gorgeous but that's it easily refund You know what? This is, in my opinion, if your biggest complaint is the field of view, I don't know. That's not the worst problem, honestly. I mean, it's one of those things where, I don't know, maybe if you are one of those people that gets nauseous with a really small field of view, I would not want to be nauseous playing a video game. I can't play certain VR games because of that. So I get it.

But I also get if that's your only complaint about this game, then that kind of says more for the game than it does against the game. Yeah. All right. So and then our first recommended review says Big Lady equals life. Good dollhouse equals life no good no good not what i love that's funny because people now get that um it's just you know that dollhouse sucks man oh oh i'm sure as soon as you and i i we did not talk hardly at all about this game, but we both said, we got to talk about the dollhouse, right? Yes. That was the one thing we both said. All right.

Next recommended review. I rate this game three out of five fingers. I would have given it a five. That's funny. But two of my fingers got bitten off by a lichen. I mean, this is not a spoiler because it happens in the first five minutes of the game. But right at the beginning of the game, you get two of your fingers bitten off. And it's like, why can't you just pour the healing potion?

I wasn't going to say it because I didn't know if that would be a spoiler. But 100%. Because without going into details, things happen later in the game. it because i didn't know if that would be a spoiler but a hundred percent because without going into details things happen later in the game that are way worse than losing that are way worse and you just snap your fingers and you're healed oh yeah that's you know yeah he i don't know that ethan had to be stuck with eight fingers the rest of this game but it's resident evil eight maybe that's maybe maybe they wanted i never even thought about that, man. Maybe you touched on it right there. Okay, so that was a positive review. I'll do another. This one kind of made me chuckle.

This is a not recommended. And all they say is, why can't I use a knife as a screwdriver or lock pick? That's a good question. Now, you will come across things that are locked in this game, and you can't unlock them unless you find lockpicks, which are super rare. You don't get many lockpicks in this game. And if you're like me, I want to know what's in that stinking drawer, man. You know what I mean? Why is it locked? There's got to be gold in there or something. And when i finally find a lock pick i will travel miles across the village to open that stupid drawer to find out that it's just bullets man bullets are just something you sell for two thousand yes and it's like but you have a knife i this big knife, why can't I use that to just pry open the lock?

I don't get it. So this review made me chuckle because I feel this guy's pain. I don't know why you can't use your knife as a screwdriver or lockpick. I don't know. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, and then one more. This is recommended, and this guy just says, I can confirm that the residents are very much evil.

I can confirm that. In this village, yes, they are. Yeah. How funny. All right, Paul. So that is some of the reviews. And then as we do on these episodes, we are going to guess what we think the overall score is to kind of give an idea of what we think people think of the game. I did write down my answer. So do you want me to go first or you

want to go first? I guess I normally go first. So why don't you go for it, Josh? I'm going to say I think it's a 93%. I've been doing really bad at these to be honest with you i've been low on a lot of them so i might be overcompensating here but i think that there is a lot to like about this game i think that the complaints that people have about it are minimal um and so i feel like this game's gonna be pretty well received by people and And so I said 93%. Okay. I feel like Resident Evil always does well with the number of sales, but I feel like there's always a narrative of something that people don't like. Resident Evil 4 was just such a classic. I feel like everything that came after that, there's always going to be some hate i think it'll be high i i'm not going in the 90s that that seems a little too high to me so i'm gonna i'm gonna say 85 i think it'll be

like a healthy b 85 of the reviews on steam i think are positive all right um i completely forgot to check the actual score so while you were talking i uh i scrambled and i looked it up so that just shows you i didn't cheat either so yeah um so what is it it is 95 it is overwhelmingly positive on steam and that's out of almost 18 000 reviews so dang yeah it's i wonder if that'll come down a little because you might get that early bump from everyone who's such a resident evil's i wonder if that'll come down a little because you might get that early bump from everyone who's such a resident evil fan i wonder if that'll come down a bit because it just came out maybe i mean i guess if you're a fan of resident evil you bought it but then again aren't those the fans that are hardest to please sometimes too yeah that's true you know

um so good point yeah i mean it's that that tells you. Overwhelmingly positive. It's very well received. I actually had a hard time finding negative reviews because the only negative reviews touched on the field of view, which apparently that's a big sticking point with a lot of people, and the fact of how slow Ethan runs through the game. Can I bring up one last thing? Of course. That's super goofy.

Not something that I would really count against the game can i bring up one last thing of course super goofy not something that i would really count against the game what on earth is up with the button layouts like to exit this game you press and hold delete oh like what on earth is going on with the buttons on keyboard and mouse at least these buttons are bananas you have right-click to close screens of dialogue, and you're pressing weird button combinations. I don't know what was up with that. The impression that I got, honestly, is this was made for console, and then somebody ported the controls to PC as an afterthought. Who's never played a game?

Yeah, because nobody uses delete on a keyboard for anything, man. No. Here's a tidbit. It's called escape. Yes, that's the name of the key for a reason. You know, it's to exit. I legitimately like mashed my exit button like 10 times until I realized in the bottom right corner,

it says delete to exit. So you had to press delete. And I think you had to press F to confirm. It was something like that. I was like, all right i don't know if i have to read to figure out how to exit a game something is wrong and you don't know mouse and keyboard very well oh man that's all right josh this is your first win in a while we're gonna queue up that music and you're going to take us into the next segment. All right. Hey, Lady Dimitrescu. I'm sorry I said your name wrong for so many episodes until I learned how to say it.

I hope you forgive me. Please don't murder me. Yes, you do not pronounce the U. Apparently it's a silent U. Who would have known? Who would have known? But if you want to hear me butcher this name, just go back a few episodes when we were talking about the upcoming release of Resident Evil Village. And you can hear some of the goofy ways that I tried to say this poor lady's name.

Dimitrescu. I think there were a few of those. What's funny is I actually watched a video on a Romanian vampire expert that was commenting on, like, they made her like the scenes from this game to see what her opinion was of how they portrayed this vampire lady and I'm like number one this ain't like no vampire I've ever seen so what do you think this poor lady's gonna say but she was from Romania

and so she actually pronounced the U now she said it with a heavy accent but she would say oh yes lady Demetrescu and she's like that's a very romanian name so you could say demitrescu if you wanted to but the u is not like a hard u either so okay there you go there's your romanian vampire uh lesson for the day paul all right so this this segment is one that we lovingly call Make Love, Marry, or Murder. This is kind of how we rate the game in our own funny ways. And it basically just says, hey, if we think a game is merry, we think this game is phenomenal. We think it has long-term

viability as being a fun game to play for a really long time. If we say, hey, make love, we think it's fun for a little while, but it's probably not going to stick around, but it's fine. It's probably worth the money at that point. And if we say murder, maybe it's best that you just kind of stay away from it or wait till it's on sale and pick it up then. So, Paul? You want me to go first? You go first, buddy. What do you think? All right. so here's the thing normally for me to rate a game mary i'm looking at playtime and i want playtime to be very high i think resident evil 8 despite being relatively short i think it is good enough that you should buy it anyway even if you just go through the game once and you never pick it back up

and you never check out the multiplayer mode coming later on, I still think it is well worth the price. I think anyone who's remotely interested in survival horror games should pick it up. I had a blast playing it. I really did. I loved it.

This was not a chore playing it for the pod. So even though my playthrough was the same as yours it was between eight and nine hours now obviously it's longer than that because you die and you lose progress but i'm still gonna rate it as a mary i thought it was very highly memorable well done warts and all i'm still gonna give it a mary wow yeah that's high praise man especially like you said mary for us is usually like, hey, I'm going to be playing this game for like the next year or I'll keep diving back into it or something like that. Oddly enough, I agree with you 100%. Really? I really do. I wasn't so sure.

Yeah, it's interesting because this was not a chore for me to play at all. I kept joking with my family that I had to go, you know, do work. And we had a short window to play this game. And we wanted to make sure that we played it all the way through and beat it so that we could actually talk about it with some knowledge and, you know, experience. And I was joking around that I had to go, you know, do my work and play this game. But I was loving every minute of it, man. Like, is it perfect? No. Is it great? Yes. Yeah. That's exactly it. Yes. It is a rock solid game. It is an experience like you cannot get very much anymore. You know, it's one of those, I thought that the story worked for what it was. I thought there were many moments of like, whoa, this is either super freaky, like the

stupid dollhouse, or wow, that was a cool cut scene or set piece. You know what I mean? There was just many, many times in this game where I was kind of blown away by what was going on and the atmosphere that keep the tone through the whole game. There's this doom and gloom, you know, you're fighting against at all times. I really thought that this was just a grade A, well done game. And like you, normally I would never rate an eight to nine hour game as a Mary. But in this case, like this game begs to be played.

If you're a fan of the series or a fan of the genre, I don't think you're going to be disappointed. Now, 60 bucks is a lot of money, right? But let's just say they say the average playtime is 10 hours. That's six bucks an hour. You spend a lot more than that nowadays for entertainment value. So I think it's well worth the money. And I'm with you, man. Even for a short game, I think it's well worth the money. And I'm with you, man.

Even for a short game, I think it's a Mary. Yeah, it's best experienced if you can play it yourself. But if you don't have the money, you can watch all the cut scenes on YouTube. It's three and a half hours if you just want to experience it like an animated movie. I think even that would be great. You can watch people play it on twitch my brother-in-law jason and his girlfriend kemi they just decided let's just watch the whole game on live stream and that's what they did so they didn't buy it but they you know i was able to talk to them and the dollhouse was the very first thing that popped up and we were able to talk all about it it you know creeped jason out as much as it did us so i think even if you experience it that way,

even that's worth it if you don't want to pay at all. I mean, that being said, nothing can quite experience what it's like to control the character and have to run and hide under the bed from certain monsters. So, you know, buy it if you can, but if not, still check it out. All right.

Let's go to the leaderboard and see where this game stacks up. Is it one or two, Paul? Okay, so leaderboard, we have historically reserved this for multiplayer games. So Josh, should we start a single player leaderboard? Because we've covered Cyberpunk, we've covered this, we will cover more single player games. Are we just going to leave it off? How do we want to handle the leaderboard? I mean, we have had a lot of positive feedback and people that have said, we really want you guys to start doing more single player games.

And I don't have a problem with that. I mean, we are not exclusive multiplayer gamers by any means. I know I love single player games. You love single player games. And there's just plenty of time where we can do that. I'm not opposed to starting a single player leaderboard. It's just, I think it's going to be much more up to personal choice for people. You know what I mean? Because multiplayer games, it's like, hey, they're fun for you and your friends, and they jive well for everybody. Whereas single-player games, it's like, how do you rank Resident Evil Village up against Mass Effect or something like that? It's like, they're just completely different games. So you're going to have people that love one genre and people that hate another one. And then we're going to wind up getting emails from people that are going, you guys are crazy if you

put this game above that game. And it's kind of like, dude, like, that's kind of the fun of it, right? Yeah. I mean, a little part of me even just says, just throw it on the main leaderboard. Like, who cares? There's already such different genres. We've got Phasmophobia up against Hearthstone. Let's do it, Paul. Let's throw it on the main leaderboard. Let's put it on there.

I'd be very curious to see where this game fits. And then there's going to be people that don't hear this episode that are going to be like, you guys are idiots, man. That's a single player game. One of these things is not like the other yeah now now cyberpunk we could not put on the board because you had limited hours and had not beaten it when we covered it on the show you never finished that game todd had like six hours or something into cyberpunk so i don't think we need to throw cyberpunk up here because uh that was such a long time ago and we weren't ready at the time it was such a big game but for

resident evil what are you thinking looking on our leaderboard so our leaderboard we currently have a total of 41 games i can't believe we're doing this paul oh i love it i love it i always say the more vague the rules the better because I just want to be able to argue and discuss. So we've got 41 games. We've got them in order of how we recommend them. We've got everything from It Takes Two to Escape from Tarkov to Sea of Thieves to Rust. How do I rank this? It's a single player game. Call of Duty Warzone. Yeah. So looking at our list, just to hit a couple of key points, we've got Overwatch at 1, Rainbow Six Siege at 10, Far Cry 5 at 15. Are you thinking it's somewhere top 15 or below that? when, oh yeah, I'd put this right under No Man's Sky, but then I scroll down and I see Divinity Original Sin 2, which for the most part is a single-player game. And I would play Divinity over Village any day of the week, but it's also such a completely different game. And then Village is good, so then I feel guilty putting it way down in the 20s.

Yeah. So I think here's what we have to do with the caveat that we're going to have to move divinity original sin the next time we review the leaderboard okay similarly rim world we rated solely as a multiplayer experience despite also being single player so i think those two games are going to have to maybe be moved later so kind of ignoring those two and ranking it i when i look at the list i think i would put it oh man this is very i'm very curious to see if we're even remotely close i'd put it below grand theft auto online which we have at nine and then rainbow six siege at 10 i would pop it right in between those. Wow. Where were you thinking?

I was thinking right by Far Cry 5 or Raft. So 15 to 16. So 15, 16? Yeah. Initially, when I saw it, I instantly saw Destiny 2, and I went, well, I'd put it above Destiny 2. So that was my first inclination,

but then I saw, man, No Man's Sky is such a good game. And then I saw Squadrons down there, like Deep Rock Galactic. So that's when it started kind of dropping, but then I hit that wall of Divinity Original Sin 2, and I was like, yeah, no way. I could be persuaded in the Destiny 2 range. I'm not a huge

fan of Destiny 2. Like, I've caught a lot of flack for that, but Village is a well done game so if you wanted to we could put it up there yeah if you were initially a little lower i'd say that might be a little high uh i'd be fine with it but maybe it's more appropriate to put it below call of duty black ops cold, but right above Among Us. I think that's probably perfect. Among Us was super fun

when we were talking about it and reviewing it, but Among Us is, I think would be fun in certain situations. Like we're probably going to have an Among Us night for our Discord server, you know, but Among Us is not my favorite game anymore. You know what I mean? So I'm fine putting this.

Let's do that. Let's put it at 13. All right. 13th floor, 13 at Survival Horror, right? It's fitting. It's very fitting. All right. So we'll lock it in there at number 13.

If you want to check out our full leaderboard, it's at MultiplayerPodcast.com. It's right on the main page you can just scroll down and you can now see all 42 games that we have done deep dives on and then uh i think that's everything here for today so if you guys wanted to know our next deep dive game is going to be i am 97 sure it's going to be hood, Outlaws, and Legends. It could still end up being Satisfactory. I think those are the next two. I'm just not sure of the order, but it's probably going to be Hood. Hood just dropped yesterday as of the time we recorded this.

We both bought it. We have not played it very much, but we're going to jump into that more, and then we will be back with our this weekend gaming episode on thursday all right thanks everybody for listening don't forget to go check out our discord server and uh hey if you want to support the show we could definitely use the support you can do that over at multiplayer squad.com see ya I gaze at you, Paul. I don't know that I like that word. I'll take stare over gaze.

Is it really? I guess gazing is a little more suggestive. Yeah, there's a little bit of an implication there.