Video Gamers Podcast - Down And A Way Out (A Way Out) - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

Gaming spartans Josh and Paul escape prison, evade the law and dive into A Way Out in this week’s episode. A rather unique foray into co-op gaming, A Way Out is a character driven, split screen, story based co-op game filled with great characters and funny moments. Join us as we dive into this co-op gaming gem and tell you what works, and what doesn’t in this week's episode. Support us on Patreon 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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what works, what doesn't work, how we felt about playing the game. And Todd remains on paternity leave, but I think he will be joining us here maybe within the next couple of shows and with me i do have the diamond thief the man who went to prison for grand theft assault and armed robbery the hothead himself who can take out an entire police force with just a lamp stand leo are you talking to me wait that was just his character's name in a way out. It's Josh! Yay! What's grillin', Mr. Villain? Oh!

I did that just for you, Paul, because we know how much you like to cook meat. And, you know, your show intro's there, so. How the turntables. Back when Todd was hosting, I come in with the rhyme and now the uh the protege has become the master i intentionally picked a really bad rhyme there because i knew i could not begin to touch you know your your mad rhyming skills there uh yeah i don't even remember some of the ones i pulled out like what's cooking good looking is is you know a well-known one i don't even remember the other i think there was a i think there was uh what's shaking bacon yeah yeah yeah that was one of them i'm for it what's grilling villain i'm i'm for it all right so before we start to take a

look at a way out which is what we will be taking a look at this week we generally like to just kind of catch up on our week in gaming, just kind of see what we've been up to. So what's been going on in your world, Josh? What have you been playing lately? I, you know, it's funny, I've been playing, I mentioned it last show. You know, I mentioned Firewatch is one of the games during the, that, you know, we mentioned during the bonus round. And so I was like, dude, you know what I'm doing? I'm going out. I'm buying Firewatch. Found it for five bucks. Started playing it. I've had an epiphany.

You know, you guys pick on me because I'm the crazy junk rat and I'm the mad flanker and I'm the guy that just wants to go in guns a blazing, which is true. The wild card of the group. But I'm finding out that I really like like story based games. So like you guys know, I'm a huge fan of Subnautica, right? If you haven't played it, go pick up Subnautica. It's great. But that game really blew my mind, like caught me completely off guard, you know, and I remember bragging to you guys about how much I loved it. And I was like, oh, you guys all need to go out and buy this game.

And you're like, no, the game looks stupid. I don't want to play it. I've played The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, which was very similar as a story based game. What Remains of Edith Finch is another good title that's along those lines. And now I'm playing Firewatch and they're just like, they're the most like chill games that you can get like invested in and you know there's not a ton of like gameplay mechanics but i think i'm like i think i'm finding out that i really enjoy that like calm like breather type game i actually don't know anything about firewatch are you talking more of like an interactive movie type of game or just a more chill laid back

let this game unfold while you just kind of like explore in an easy to navigate world correct it's not i mean a lot of people kind of call them interactive movies the gameplay elements are very minimal i mean it's you know picking stuff up running to a place, interacting with an object, you know, and that's really about it, you know, as far as that goes. So it's not, there's not much in the way of actual like gameplay mechanics. And it's like, there's stuff that is unfolding and I have to run through the woods and I have to do this, but there's, it's really just like, it's like a movie. It's, you know, it's like, it's a story like i'm living this story basically i'm definitely a huge fan of games like that i like when they have you know just some

calming type mechanics like i loved the game abzu where it's just like really beautiful lush underground world you just get to explore it kind of learn more about the world i think journey is a lot like that uh flower i never played but yeah i think there's definitely a place where sometimes you want to go out and just murder people and create chaos and then other times you know sometimes you just want a nice calming game and i think like all things you know good measure of each is where i like to be yeah it's i mean like even golf like we've been playing a lot of golf together lately, but I'm way too competitive to be able to just like sit back and chill playing golf.

You know, like I am, I am like, I better be making those putts. I better be like beating you guys. And so I'm like, I'm very like, Ooh,

I want to win. And so I'm focused. Whereas like these other games, I can really just chill and play these games and not stress about it. And I generally have found that I really enjoy them. It's so funny that you mentioned feeling too competitive to play golf with our friends, because I don't even know if you saw this in Discord the other day. Me and one of our friends, James, were trying to explain to other people in our Discord who don't have the Golf Club 2019 why we like to play. And he was mentioning how it's a very wholesome

experience because we're not very competitive and you can just, you know, sit down with a snack or a drink and we banter and we talk. And I always joked that I was like trying to be the caddy of the other people where I'd say like, oh, dude, you're going to way over hit it there with the five iron, you know, cut it back to the six. And then I was like, well, it is quite wholesome, except for Josh. Josh will will be a little bit more of that competitive edge that he'll bring bring to the table. Yeah, I just it's not in my nature to not want to win. And I yeah, I mean, I don't get wrong. I relax and I have fun. But if I'm competing like I'm competing to win. And I, yeah, I mean, I don't get wrong. I relax and I have fun, but if

I'm competing, like I'm competing to win. Yeah. I totally hear you. Yeah. I actually haven't really been playing a whole lot of games this week. Although I, I, I have been watching a lot of the series avatar on Netflix and I got to tell you, this is a great show full stop not even a great kid show as an adult i love this series it's probably gonna end up in my top 10 of all time and you know how much i love tv i mean i'm all about the sopranos the wire breaking bad mad men game of thrones and this this show honestly is right up there it's incredibly mature there i've shed a couple tears watching this show i haven't i haven't laughed as hard as i have at a show in a long time as i have with avatar so i kind of feel like that's been displacing a lot of my gaming time

because we'll knock out two or three episodes as a family we're about to start the final season and i'm already a little bit sad because we're going to be coming up at the end. Well, now you got me wanting to check out Avatar, so I might have to dig into this. Yeah, it's still in the Netflix top 10, even though it released a few weeks ago. So even tonight we ate dinner in front of the TV, which we normally don't do because everyone was asking to watch more avatar and my my two-year-old runs around yelling oppa yep yep which i know doesn't mean anything to you not having watched it oh and we'll say anna do your earthbending and she'll start busting out her earthbending moves and it's

the funniest thing even our our two-year-old loves it and it's such a good show you know we're not getting paid by nickelodeon or avatar but seriously go watch it it's like a 9.3 on imdb for a reason and if you haven't seen it since you're a kid watch it again it's a pretty pretty emotionally complex show surprisingly so anyway uh as far as gaming games do go i did pick up the command and conquer remaster but i've only played about 30 minutes so far but i was such a big command and conquer fan back in the day i was really you know feeling a lot of nostalgia opening this game back up all the old music because i don't think command and conquer is anywhere on your radar is it it's i don't i never played it believe it or not i don't know when when it came out, if I was just on a different level of life than you guys, maybe?

I don't know. It's kind of like Pogs. Like, I never played Pogs, and I know you guys talk about those all the time. So it's like, I think I was just a little bit too old to get into some of that stuff. And Command & Conquer, I think I just missed out. You were too busy playing Jax and and kick the can no not on the street that's sucker those are the only games they had um back back in the back in the 50s yeah oh this is i keep getting older every episode save me you're now in your 70s i was was going to say, I just skipped right over the 60s because I think you called me 51 last time. I did. I did.

All right. Well, I think that's about all I had here for this week. Are you ready to jump into A Way Out? Let's jump in the game. With this game being completely story-based, more or less A Way Out is an interactive movie. And so I kind of feel like there's no possible way that we could talk about it without any spoilers but we will keep the major spoilers especially in the final quarter of the game uh we won't divulge any of those so if you haven't played a way out yet still stick around just know that we might you know spoil a little bit as far as where the game goes in the beginning in the middle. But we will definitely give you warnings if we are going to go into any major spoilers. So still stick around. I think you can

still enjoy the podcast and then you can still enjoy the game afterward. Yeah, the goal is definitely to get people some knowledge if they haven't played it, but not ruin the game for them at the same time. Exactly. And a lot of this game, honestly, is just having to experience it. So even if you do share a lot of details in the beginning and having to experience it so even if you do share a lot of details in the beginning and in the middle i really don't think it'll alter the experience much at all yeah all right so to kick things off i do have a description here which was written by ea from the creators of brothers a tale of two sons comes a way out an exclusively co-op adventure that follows two prisoners,

Leo and Vincent, making their daring escape from prison. Together with a friend on your couch or online, you'll explore notions of trust and consequence as your decisions begin to catch up with you. So for our listeners who have maybe never played A Way Out, maybe they haven't watched any footage of this, Josh, do you want to tell them a little bit about what this game is and how it works? Yeah, this game's unique, man. I mean, that's one of the reasons we wanted to talk about it. But I don't, there's not another game out there

that I can think of that falls into this category quite so much. So what A Way Out is, is it is a co-op based game where you take control of two different characters. They start off in prison. You know, I don't want to get too in depth here right now, but they start off in prison and you have to, you know, work together, interact with each other. It's split screen. So you're constantly able to see what's going on with the other person that you're not controlling. And then it's very character driven. It's very story based. And you have to solve problems along the way.

You get into difficult situations. And you got to get out of those situations. The game does a really good job of varying the gameplay, which I think is really neat in this game, because it's almost like three different games in one, because it'll go through these weird, not weird, but it goes through these transitions of almost genre. Right. And it's really cool that it does that. I mean, that's really kind of like a top down you know we're obviously we'll get more detailed but story-based co-op character-driven game is the best like summary i could give i guess yeah it's kind of hard to succinctly explain what this game's like so i think one of the funny

things about this game that that does make it unique like you pointed out is that there is no way to play this game solo you have to play this game with another person you cannot play with an ai as far as i know there's no matchmaking through origin or through ea so one of the interesting things with this game is you buy it but then you can extend a friend pass to an unlimited number of friends online they can download the game and as long as you host it as the game owner any of your friends can join and play with you for free so in our case i bought a way out back when it first released and none of my friends did and yet i played through it with you and i also played through it with my friend andrew so it's kind of neat that only one person buys it and you can both experience it. That is an amazing thing to do and I really wish more game developers would do that. I would not have bought this game along with you initially.

It's actually a really cool thing that they did because they knew you can't do this game with an AI. Even if they tried to develop that i think it would ruin it yeah there's no way it would work you mentioned a little bit about the simultaneous split screen and what's interesting about that is there's always something interesting to listen to or to follow on one or both sides of the screen we might both be talking to characters simultaneously and they're talking about completely different things and so it's it's interesting that you're trying to like follow both storylines simultaneously and yet it does work together in harmony in a lot of different cases where i might be able to see you in the background of my screen and on yours you're doing

something else talking to someone or we might both be riding motorcycles and then they're going to cross each other and so you see it in action from both angles and so the game does this really interesting thing with playing with perspective and with you know just your field of view between the two characters. It's a very clever way to do co-op. It's a little bit different in that regard. It's definitely unique. Yeah, it's very original. And something to mention too is when we say split screen, this isn't like a couch co-op split screen. Even though Paul and I are playing online together, like remotely, you still have that split screen.

Exactly. Right, which is interesting, because most people hear split screen and they think, oh, I'm sharing the same TV or the same monitor with somebody, and no, that's not the case at all. This game is 100% split screen no matter what, which is neat. Yeah, sometimes one character is just walking to the next objective, but then the other character is going through a cutscene. And so it's kind of fun where you're just walking, which would normally be boring, but instead I can actually just watch and see whatever my partner is doing. And that was very clever, and I do wonder if we'll see that type of element in future games, because I think there's a lot that you can do there.

There's a lot of creative freedom in how to mesh those two together. So I thought that we could, you know, go back a little bit in time. Do you remember first finding out or hearing about a way out? Do you remember how you ended up playing it to begin with? I do actually, I had played brothers,

which is a great game. And then I remember this is what's funny i don't know if you actually know this but i remember i'm not a big talk show guy but or late night especially but i was watching some talk show conan o'brien or something back in the day and they were interviewing the developer of a way out it was one of those things where it's like you know how they have the guy on like they did that with no man's sky there was a lot of hype around that and i just remember watching this part where they were interviewing the guy and he was talking about this game and how they developed it and what their goals for the game were and how they really wanted

to make it each part of the game different so that it didn't get like stale and boring for people and then shortly thereafter i think you had, hey, guys, this looks like a really cool game. Who wants to pick it up? Only one of us needs to buy a copy of it. Thanks for buying a copy there, Paul. Yeah, I got nominated for that. And then we started playing it after that.

Yeah, you mentioned the fact that this is the same guy who made the game Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons. And do you mind if we take just like a short detour just to talk about that for a minute or two? No, because that game's great, man. Okay. So for me, I had picked up and played Brothers, and I found that game to have a profound effect on me in a lot of ways that anyone who wants to say that video games cannot be art have not played games like Brothers. Oh, yeah. Because Brothers investigates grief and death and healing and all of those concepts in a very profound way. So if you haven't played Brothers, I am going to spoil a

little bit of that ending. So you can just maybe skip ahead like 60 seconds here. But in that game, you have the two brothers who are out trying to get some healing water that's going to heal their dad. Their mom has already died. And so they go out on this adventure. And the older brother can do stronger things and the younger brother can do weaker things. And you always work them together and you would hold like the left trigger for the older brother to do whatever he was going to do and the right trigger for the younger brother. Well, at the end of the game, the older brother actually dies. And so now you're playing the very end of the game as just the younger brother and all of a sudden you get to a thing that you can only operate as the older brother you would think and so then when you go to activate it the younger brother then takes that action and the

rest of the game he's able to perform all the duties that the older brother did and so through that character's you know loss of his brother then he's able to learn from him. And now it's like he's now the older brother and is able to operate like him. And I remember thinking, I would have never thought that you could make the controls of the game an actual element of the story. And at that point on, I thought, that's so creative. I'll try anything that this guy makes in the future. And so as soon as I heard about A Way Out, and at this point now he's way more famous because of what Brothers did, and so I couldn't wait for it to come out. I gladly ponied up the $30 to buy it because I

was very curious to see what he would do this time around with a bigger budget. When you first start playing with a friend, you do have an option to select to play as either Leo or as Vincent. And when the game starts up, you don't know anything really about anything yet. It just pops up and you invite your friend and now you each have to pick a character. And so I just jotted down the very short snippet of what they tell you about each character. And for you guys as the audience you can probably guess who josh and i each picked but vincent is 43 he worked as a banker he is serving a 14-year prison sentence for fraud embezzlement and murder and his personality is rational disciplined and

reserved then on the other side you have leo he 36. He grew up in an orphanage. He's serving an eight-year sentence for getting caught during a diamond heist. His personality is confident, short-tempered, and a joker. Yeah. So Josh, when you and I first looked at those characters, did you identify with one more than the other? Yeah. You know, I've always wanted to work in a bank and I've always wanted to work in a bank and I've always wanted to be responsible. And no, I went with Leo right away. As soon as I read that description where it was like, okay, this guy's a joker and he's confident. Uh, I'm not sure tempered, but that's okay. You know, you can't, you can't get them all right there. But

yeah, I instantly was just like, okay, I'm going Leo. And you started laughing. Cause you were like, yeah, I kind of figured that fits you. it was so obvious that you were meant to play leo and i was meant to play vincent yeah it really didn't we both just immediately knew yeah there was no arguing over who got to be you know vincent or anything like that so the game does let you switch characters anytime you reload the game so it doesn't lock you into one but we never wanted to switch we felt like those were the right avatars for our characters we stuck with them yeah and that's something to be said too like i you know we could have switched but i had zero desire to like try like i was attached to leo at that point like that was my guy you know and so

i was gonna see things through with him and that, that was my guy, you know? And so I was going to see things through with him. And that was pretty cool. Yeah, absolutely. I think we both really identified with those characters. And since the game does take a lot of emotional turns over the course of the story, even though this game, like, it's not a perfect game, we are going to poke fun at some of the issues with this game. But I still found it to be incredibly engrossing, especially toward the end. You know, the beginning and the middle maybe didn't quite fully engross me into the story, but by the end, I really did. So I felt like I really identified with the motives and the character of Vincent. I know you felt the same with Leo. And what's kind of funny is when we first played this back in 2018, we actually didn't finish.

How far into this game do you think we actually made it? Because it's not even a very long game. When we played it a while back, I mean, an hour and a half, two hours, maybe playtime. I think we played one session. Yeah. So I want to say like, yeah, an hour and a half, I think, playtime wise. Why did we not finish this game? Dude, I have no idea.

I don't remember. The only thing I can even remotely think of is that some other game released where it was like, oh, okay, everybody's playing this. And we just shelved it for some reason. Something must have happened, because I remember not really loving the beginning of this game, and I played the first hour and a half with you, and I played the first hour and a half with my friend Andrew, and something else must have released, because none of us played it for the next two years. And then here we decided to pick it for the show and i was a little worried jumping back in because i thought oh man i'm gonna have to play the beginning of this game for the third time it didn't really grab me before is it gonna grab

me this time and i gotta say i still thought the beginning was a little bit weaker compared to the ending but i really did love the experience. I thought it was really fun. You and I just finished it actually this afternoon and I felt, I felt really pumped afterward. I loved the story. I loved the ending in particular. It was better than I thought it was going to be, to be honest with you, because I remember playing the initial like hour and a half and then having to go redo that, I remembered everything about it. And so it was like, all right, well, we kind of have to go through all this again. And then I remember getting to the point where it was like, okay, this is all new for me.

And it was like, I just kind of woke up. You know what I mean? I was like, all right, I'm ready now. We got through all that stuff. And the beginning is a little slow, to just touch base on that. The beginning is slower. One really funny element that we didn't touch on quite yet is that sometimes you hit a fork in the road in the game and it presents you with two options. There's what Leo wants to do and what Vincent wants to do. And you have to agree and come to a consensus of what to do. And what they want to do falls in line with their personalities. So like at one point, and this is not a spoiler, you do escape from the prison.

Right away, in the beginning, you know that because the two characters are talking while on a plane, and they are talking about the escape. So you know from the beginning these guys are going to get out of prison. I'm not sure what's going to happen after. And so, basically, after they first get out of prison and they're on the run they're trying to get out of the prison area and so there's a bridge and leo says well let's just go knock out that cop steal his car and let's go drive it past all the cops and vincent says no are you crazy we have to go underneath the bridge let's go ahead and cross on the under railings and so as a group you have to talk about it and decide well what are we going to do and sometimes we would make

the wise decision and sometimes just for the humor we're like oh no we're definitely going with tie up that couple and throw them in the closet as opposed to stealthily walking around because we just need to see what's going to happen yeah so that was a another really clever element i i want to thank you for you know being willing to go with the leo side of things we did we generally went with leo the only time that we really didn't was one of the funny elements of the game is that leo a fear of heights. And somehow that comes into play like eight different times during this game. And we did have an opportunity to force Leo to go parachuting. And we couldn't resist that.

No, and I'm glad we didn't either. Yeah, that led to some very, very funny scenes. So generally we did go the Leo route. But that does lead to a little bit of replayability you could go back even though most of this game would probably be too repetitive i don't know that i'm gonna jump back into it anytime soon but there is that element where you could test out the other choices so without us going into the major spoilers what i thought we could do is i i went ahead and divided the game into like four quarters so i thought we could do is i i went ahead and divided the game into like four quarters

so i thought we could just do like four mini segments where i'll just kind of remind you a little bit about that part of the story and then let's just talk about anything that stuck out anything that worked really well anything that didn't anything that we want to poke fun of or any you know plot inconsistencies anything like that so i thought that would be kind of a fun way to structure it yeah that's a good idea so the first mini segment here i've called jailhouse rock all right so you start off in prison leo and vincent meet for the first time and they make a plan to escape together. And then they actually do escape from the prison.

Is there anything during that time that kind of stands out to you? Dude, that is the least secure prison I think I've ever seen. Now, this game does take place back in the early 70s. So I don't know if security has really come that far in the last 40 years. This prison has some design flaws. Let's just say that. It's got some serious issues. So with as many guards as are walking around, there's some really dumb stuff and layouts.

I mean, I guess the game didn't want to get into how do you really escape a maximum security prison, because that might take a really long time. So they definitely took some liberties there. But there are a few times where you're like, come on, man, the guards aren't this dumb. Or why would they put a window right next to a metal detector? That doesn't make any sense. Let's talk about that metal detector. Okay, so in the game, you do have to go steal and smuggle some items to different areas. So, like, for example, you can go take an item that's in, like, the medical center, or you might have to your cell you have to pass through a metal detector but there's just a window right around the corner that connects the two sides so i would just hold

like a screwdriver you'd go through the metal detector and i would literally hand it to you through an open window and then i would walk through myself yeah this this is definitely a little bit little bit of uh a shortcut yeah in in designing the game i feel like you can smuggle stuff into prisons it happens all the time it's usually not by handing them through open windows yeah you know so that that was a little interesting also did you like how you could disconnect the toilet and there were no pipes oh there's no plumbing no pipes no sound of it scraping on the floor this thing was on the most well-oiled like just slick hinges that you've ever seen in your life uh yeah that part was

interesting too because that's a part where you kind of have to dodge the guards a little bit and you need you know you need your buddy's help he's kind of looking out for him but man you could open and close that toilet in like a half a second flat so i mean you know they definitely took some liberties there as well yeah that was so funny and one of the things that i really did like is that i even made fun of it when you and i were playing because it had been such a long time i forgot uh Leo and Vincent kind of make their plan and they kind of dig their way out of their cell and I was like oh I'm really glad that this came together for them in one afternoon yeah planning this whole escape but then actually to the game's credit they don't make it quite that easy it is a several process. So the characters kind of get out of their cell,

but then they stay run into another hurdle. Okay, well we need to go figure out a way to get past this. And I really appreciated the fact that the game did not force you to always walk all the way back to your cell. And then the next day walk all the way back there. The game would give you some shortcuts. So as soon as you ran into a hurdle,

they would talk about it. The screen would dim and then they would wake back up the next day back in their prison cell. So I really appreciated that in the game. That would have been terrible because that would have been the beginning is not the best part of the game by any means. But that would have really made it a lot worse if you had to backtrack the whole way. Yeah, it would have felt much more laborious all right so so first segment was jailhouse rock second segment alien ant farm all right so leo and vincent run across a farm in the middle of nowhere and okay look i know that's a bad segment name it's on purpose all right funny funny side story uh i saw alien ant farm open for 311 back when i was in high school really

and everybody booed alien ant farm off the stage so anyway yeah they were not the greatest of bands so anyway alien ant farm so be uh lynn leo and leo and vincent those are their names they run into this farm they have to do some things on the property and then it ends with a long chase scene with the police both on car and by boat. And I think for you and me, this was a real turning point in the game. Definitely. Definitely. Yeah, because up till then, it was just a lot of walking around and kind of interacting with characters and stuff.

I mean, the prison plays a big part of the game. This is the part of the game where to me, it really did open up because they started to show that this is not just like a walking simulator. This is not just, you know, walking around interacting with, with, you know, NPCs or something like that. And that's when I was like, okay, this is pretty cool. Like, I hope they keep doing stuff like this because the car chase, the car chase was a ton of fun. You were driving, I'm in the back with a shotgun. I mean, so that was really cool.

You know, the boat part really does stand out to me as well because you have to, you know, take this boat down the river and that ain't easy to do, as we found out many times. It's not easy because each of us can only control one paddle. And I will say with the exception of the ending, so other than the very end, the boat scene is definitely when you and I got our loudest. Yes. Because we were definitely shouting. Yelling at each other.

Are we going left or right? Are we going left or right? Go left. Left. Then we'd both start going left. But then we'd realize it's too much. So then we'd try to overcorrect. And then one of both start going left, but then we'd realize it's too much, so then we'd try to overcorrect. And then one of us would be left.

Yeah, it was chaotic. We legit died on the boat ride probably three or four times. And this is not a hard game. This is something that we might touch on later. This game is not hard. It's more the experience and the fun. But we did legitimately die multiple times on this boat ride that boat's really hard to steer man it is hard to steer but

it was so thrilling and it was such a prolonged chase where you go straight from the car to getting out and then running and jumping into the boat and then you have the whole boat adventure and so that was the the moment where the game for me went from moderately boring to oh i'm actually really interested to see where this goes and so that that that was what i had here for the the second segment third mini segment preparation h okay this is this is this is the point of the if you don't know what Preparation H is. I don't remember that part of the game. You can go Google it.

But, you know, the Preparation H segment is the part of the game where Leo and Vincent are preparing to go fight a man named Harvey. So early on in the game, these two bond over the fact that both of them are in prison in part due to some guy named Harvey. And as the game goes on, you start to learn more about it. And so kind of the goal of these characters, it's kind of twofold. They each have their own families, which is part of what they're concerned about. And they're also concerned about taking care of Harvey. And so during this part of the game, they're concerned about. And they're also concerned about taking care of Harvey. And so during this part of the game, they're doing research. They're trying to figure out where Harvey is. What are we going to do about it?

And so a couple things that might stand out for this part of the game is Leo asking to make a stop to visit his family. There's also a scene where you have to torture somebody who knows Harvey's whereabouts. Oh, that part was so great. So funny. And then you also both end up in a hospital due to a certain situation. You both have to go and visit a hospital. So what stands out here in the

in in the third quarter of this game oh the the torture part number one we can't i mean i don't care if we have to spoil anything the torture part is the one thing we gotta spoil man good old ray ray was the guy's name yeah you need so you're trying to find harvey harvey is like a he's just he's a big bad guy and you're going after him and of course like finding any big bad guy you got to find somebody that knows where the big bad guy's at and so you know where that guy is you wind up capturing him and he won't tell you anything so then you got to go okay well we're gonna make you talk yeah and there's so many different options to make this guy talk and you and i were just having a heyday trying out different stuff yeah it was i looked around and one of the options was a lamp and i was like how on earth am i gonna torture

the guy with the lamp and so i just clicked it and ray as he's like tied up in this chair he even says oh what are you gonna do like stick this light in my eyes great great idea and then my character proceeds to strip the wires and electrocute the guy while the lamp was plugged in and so the guy's just shaking in his chair and then it's like you know where's harvey where is he and of course he still won't give up the info and next thing i know what are you rolling up with oh i'm i've got the the nail gun the nail gun yeah i mean that sounds good right like makes sense to me yeah i thought he was just gonna threaten like maybe hold the nail gun up to him. But what did Leo do with that?

Oh, no, I put at least a dozen nails in that guy's legs, man. He just goes straight up to his thigh and goes, and just shoots him full of nails. He ain't getting through the prison metal detector after that, that's for sure. No, man, I mean, I'm not an advocate for torture, but in this scenario, it was so outlandish that we couldn't help but just laugh at the idea of like plugging in this lamp and electrocuting the guy. I thought I thought it was so funny. So, yeah, you you do torture Ray. And did you know that there's actually a hidden scene? Because we we let Ray live.

We got the information and then we left well like any normal good guys would do i mean we're not monsters paul we only tortured the guy we're not going to do anything more right they're criminals with a heart of gold right they that you can do a couple secret options and leo will kick ray off of that skyscraper and he'll fall to his death. What? I mean, not that I would do that. I'm just saying I didn't know that was an option. So this game, because I try to avoid any potential spoilers while we play,

but when we were done, I looked on YouTube and there's a bunch of secret trophies and hidden cut scenes you can unlock. It's kind of clever that that's built into the game. So I think the other thing that stands out to me was stopping by to visit leo's wife and son and i kind of feel like leo made a couple poor decisions during this part of the game that part of the game made me uncomfortable because as the father of my son in that game i'm not real happy with the way you treated my son, Paul. I've been in prison for eight years and I haven't seen my kid in a while.

Got to talk to my wife for a little bit. Tell her what's going on with the plan. And then you just go off and just completely replace me. I was being the father that you never were to that child. I was playing basketball with him. I was being the father that you never were to that child. I was playing basketball with him. I told, I was encouraging him. I told him that he could be a pro, which I thought was a little bold because I didn't see him actually shoot or dribble. Because as soon as you were done talking to your wife, you came and joined us on the court. And what level of participation did we give this this young child that we tried we tried to pass

him the ball and then he was just a garden gnome basically yeah all you and i did was just run up and down and they were actually dunking the ball which i thought was hysterical because these guys they're not like unfit but they did not look like guys who could go dunk on a hoop. No, definitely not. That did crack me up. You stay away from my son, okay, Paul, in the future. All right? Yep.

And then also in the scene where you and I had to go to a hospital to visit someone, it was like a very time sensitive issue. And you and I are just wandering through this hospital and one of the things that we haven't really touched on yet is that there are a lot of mini games within a way out and you noticed that there was a set of connect four in the waiting room and you and i just sat and played connect Four for a solid 15 minutes. Instead of worrying about the storyline, we're fugitives, we're not worrying about the cops. We just sat and played Connect Four and then had a competition of who could pop a wheelie in a wheelchair. In a wheelchair, yep. Out in the hallways. Yeah, you're really good at wheelchair wheelies, by the way.

I held that for like a solid minute until I said, all right, I'm bored. I'm just going to fall on purpose. So those kind of those really stuck out to me. I feel like we were definitely goofing off a lot more in this part of the game. Yeah. I mean, but the game almost encourages that because there's a lot of in between where and this is part of the pacing of the game, too, is there's just times where you're just kind of hanging out for a little bit. Yeah. You know, and, and so like, you know,

obviously that was kind of funny cause we were in a rush, you know, to play connect four, but there's other parts of the game where you just kind of walk around and check things out and play darts or, or, you know, an arcade machine that you come across or, you know, card throwing, you know, that kind of thing. I remember sitting in the hospital throwing cards at one point. And it's just neat that they incorporate that.

I mean, there's really no point to it other than just atmosphere, maybe, or to kind of slow down the pacing of the game and kind of say, look, not everything is this mission to go get Harvey. You're still just people that sometimes have to just kill a little bit of time. Yeah. to go get Harvey, you're still just people that sometimes have to just kill a little bit of time. Yeah, even in the middle of us stealing a truck, we stopped and played horseshoes for a while. Yeah, you're really good at horseshoes too, by the way. I was pretty good at horseshoes. I was killing the minigames in a way out. All right, and then for the final mini-segment, the last quarter of the game,

I have titled, It's the End of the World as We Know It. So I'm really bringing some timely music references here between Alien Ant Farm, R.E.M., Elvis. So there you go, kind of shows our age a little bit. So at the end of the game, the characters do leave and they depart to go take on Harvey and his crew. And I would probably just leave the story a little bit more vague like that. I think what really stood out to you and me is the fact that the game became much more action packed at this point. Yeah, I mean, I kept joking the entire game, even when we were in prison

going, when do we get rocket launchers? Like, when do we get rocket launchers? Cause I did not think this game was like that. And you know, I'm not going to spoil anything, but it definitely gets faster paced, um, towards the end of the game. And there is, there is some gunplay in this game. Um, and so that just became really neat and again that kind of goes to the whole there are different phases in this game i mean and and that's one of them and it's really cool to see that like progression and how they get there and then just when you think you're there then it like it gives it to you and you're like oh yeah like yes that's exactly what i wanted to have happen and then just when you think you're there then it like it gives it to you and you're like oh yeah like yes that's exactly what i wanted to have happen and then they do it so they're very

in touch with like the player in this regard and like what you kind of want to see happen with the story oh yeah yeah and so that was really cool yeah it transitions from a breakout of prison to these two guys who are fugitives out on the run kind of like butch cassidy and the sundance kid and then all of a sudden it's like this uh 80s action where you and i are running around where you have a choice between an m16 or a shotgun or an mp5 or i think a sniper i think those were the four options yeah and then all of a sudden we're just storming a compound and it gets pretty violent yeah and i think that it didn't like catch us off guard or anything but up to that point you're not really expecting a whole lot of violence and then they

definitely bring a lot of that toward the end of the game yeah i mean there's you know there we talked about the car chasing, the boat. I mean, there's motorcycles and, you know, all kinds of stuff. The game just changes frequently and it definitely keeps you on your toes. It adds a layer of fun. And just to me,

just when I felt like it was starting to get repetitive, it switches gears. And that is great that it does that. Exactly. Because this game is only about six. Six and a half hours. And so the fact that it kind of transitions. Like every hour and a half to two hours.

I thought was really ingenious. I thought that was probably the best thing about the game. Alright so. That kind of sums up what we have to say about the game. I do have some. Reviews that were written. And left on Metacritic. A Way Out can be found on Origin, so it's not on Steam, unfortunately. But I did go ahead and I pulled a couple reviews here that I think you will enjoy. So the first review that I have here was a 10 out of 10 perfect rating and here's what the user said a way out has to be the

best game i've played this year by far the direction the mix of gameplay style discovery with games within the game itself homages and throwbacks characters settings variety and that ending man i can't recommend it enough the fact one person can buy it and the other person downloads the game pass from Origin for free makes it even better. What a journey. First time I've played a game for six hours straight, apart for a 30-minute break for dinner. Some of the sweeping camera moves was just mind-blowing. Some reminded me of David Fincher. Can't recommend it enough.

Two friends will have a blast with it. Pretty accurate. I'm listening to the review, and he's touching all these points, and I'm like, yep, yep. Like, yep. It's not a 10 out of 10. It might be overstating the positives a little.

He definitely is stating what the good points of the game are, and I agree with all of those. Yeah. And David Fincher is my favorite movie director. And let's pump the brakes. Okay. A Way Out has nothing on Fincher movies like Fight Club or Gone Girl or half these other movies that he's made. But in any case, the next review here,

polar opposite. Ready? This is a one star, one star review. Had high hopes, but this game is so boring. You can barely ever actually play the game. Most of your played hours is just watching cut scenes.

The game is also ridiculously easy. There is almost no way that you can fail. Would have been better if they just made a movie instead of this failure of a game. This guy didn't know what he was playing. I mean, simple. This is you don't go into this game, you know, not knowing what it is. But then again, I guess that's our job, right? Like we're explaining what it is to, you know, you guys listening out there.

But he just this isn't his genre and he didn't know what he was getting into. Yeah, I don't disagree with the points that he's making that's just what this game is if you don't want to play an interactive movie that has some shooting elements then don't play this game if you're cool with having a lot of cut scenes and it being story focused then those points don't matter because this game is not supposed to provide nonstop action. Right. Exactly.

All right. So here's my favorite review. It is a little long, so bear with me. It is a three star review. It's it's barely coherent, but I'm going to go ahead and read it anyway. All right. This game does nothing well. You start the game as a man standing in a prison with your friend.

Your friend is next to you, and he's there with a knife. You are like, help me open this toilet, I need to go in. He is helping you get in the toilet, and a guard come. You get some beds, you get some tools, and you climb through the toilet. Leo is a very bad boy. Vincent is a very good boy. They they are different but they are the same they are close now even though leo doesn't want to be close they get out and are chased by dogs like wtf who would let dogs go that far this game gets so bad from here because it doesn't know what

it is is it a hospital drama or is it a crime thriller like leo is such a wuss he should freaking kill ray why did he not just drop kick that crap bag off the roof like for real he hold a blowtorch against his privates and not kick him off the roof this game was fun but not many times did i smile overall three out of ten that's the that's quite possibly the best review i've ever heard i when i when i read this the first time i legitimately started crying when i read leo is a very bad boy oh man and then he ends it by saying this game was fun but not many times did i smile three out of ten i i had to read that review i thought it was too funny oh my goodness i love it that is great all right and then the final review is a nine out of ten

i i thought this was probably the best most succinct review a way out is the best game i have ever played with a friend you should really get it it will bring some tears to your eyes jokes sadness chases and puzzles even my friend cried uh i mean i don't i don't remember getting real emotional. Not sad, anyway. I did get emotional, but sadness was not the emotion I got. Yeah, this game, I would say, maybe also depending on which player you've identified with more, it'll probably bring out different emotions. But I thought that was great, right? There's high drama, jokes, chases, and puzzles. What else do you really need to know?

Yeah, it really is. that's spot on yeah so let's let's take our guesses which we do every week we try to guess what the user score is for this game so this is from metacritic 0.0 to 10.0 what do you think users have rated a way out 8.4 wow that's pretty high i feel like that's a safe bet all right my guess was 8.0 and i thought i was guessing high it's it's a 7.6 oh i lost dang it's it's actually an 8.0 on PS4, so it's a little higher on console. I'm not sure why. But yeah, I think the initial hatred kind of got focused on the PC reviews. Almost every negative

review you read just says such long cutscenes, I found it so boring, you hardly shoot people until the end, and it's like well, that's just the genre. You just didn't know what you were signing up for. Yeah, not every game needs shooting man like even though this game does incorporate some it's definitely not like the pinnacle of the game or what this game is about like at all you know and so not every game needs to have shooting in it and these people that are like

man i didn't get my rocket launcher like that's why I was joking the whole time about when do we get our rocket launchers? You know, because it's like, you don't need that. Exactly. So, all right. Even though I was closer, I'm still going to give you the honors, Josh. Go ahead and set us up for Make Love, Marry, Murder. It's time for Make Love, Marry, or Murder. Wow. You don't even need the music for that part, man. Look at that. I'm getting so good at this. You don't even need the intro anymore. You really left, left nothing on the table there for that one. Um, this one's easy for me. This is a make love plain and simple. I mean, this game does not deserve murder unless you are one of those people that just didn't know what you were getting into or just hate story character based games.

I mean, if that's not for you, then, hey, I completely understand. Don't buy this game then. But don't don't play it knowing that you're not into that and then give it a bad score because you don't like story character games. Like, I don't. Yeah. You know, that part doesn't make any sense to me. But I mean, you know, yeah, make love all the way. I had a blast playing this with you.

It is super cool to have a good buddy that you can go through this game with and that you can make those decisions and laugh and, you know, just experience it. It's by no means a merry. I mean, I'll never play this game again. And that's not a knock against the game necessarily. It's just we've experienced it. The experience is over as far as that goes. I mean, I could see maybe if you had another friend that wanted to play it

and then you could play as Leo instead of Vincent and you could make lots of different choices. I see how there is some replayability there not for me i like i said i've i'm happy with the experience but i would not play this game again just because so it can't be a mary in that case for me so it's it's definitely a make love yeah i agree with you all the way. It is a make love mostly just because the games that I rank Mary means that I'm getting a great deal. I'm going to play the game for a long time. A way out is well worth playing. I highly recommend it. Just know what you're signing up for.

You know, it's $30 and you're going to get six hours of fun out of it. Since a lot of the fun and a lot of the driving force of the game is discovering the story as you go, and then once the story completes, there's not a whole lot of reason to go back and play. So, you know, once you already know how the story ends, you're just done. So it's a blast. The highs of this game I thought were very very high it's just limited gameplay so if you have the budget you know maybe instead of dropping 30 to you know rent a movie on demand during the covid outbreak or maybe if you're listening to this and life's somewhat back to normal maybe

instead of going out to the movies for 30 bucks you know buy this game instead and you'll get six or seven hours you can play this with, even if they never play video games. Anyone can pick this up and play. Yeah, that's very true. One other last thing that we didn't really mention that also made it super fun was intentionally letting each other die. So there would be parts. Oh, that part was great.

Yeah, there'd be like a part where like one character's like, they've already crossed a little ravine and the other person's sliding down and jump, and you both have to hold the left mouse button to grab each other. And so both people would be holding it, and then at the last second, you could let go, and their hand would come back, and they'd plummet to their death. And so every once in a while, we had to intentionally let each other die just to see the scenes it was great too because it was always at the like the most rando times too where it's like okay we're cruising along and then all of a sudden i just see you just i see your butt and just let go and i'm like oh you no no don't do it paul yeah and let's just just tease it that you know we went parachuting and there were some shenanigans during the parachute portion. All right.

So there you go. It's a consensus. Anonymous make love. All right. Well, let's move into the leaderboard. See where this game is going to compare with our others. All right. all right so this game is gonna be kind of hard to place yeah being story driven shorter gameplay yeah i it's it's definitely not gonna be at the top or the very bottom i don't know i think it's gonna be in the middle i do find it in it's going to be in the middle i do find it in

it's got to be in the middle somewhere all right so right now we have 17 games in our leaderboard for those of you who maybe are listening for the first time even though we're very much comparing apples to oranges to i don't know turkey we we try to compare what we recommend to our audience so uh i think this is probably going to be somewhere kind of near the middle so we've got six war zone seven valorant eight far cry five keep talking no one explodes the cycle civ 6 rim world gtfo it's going to be somewhere in that mix i i honestly have no idea where to put this do you have a starting spot this is why i love the leaderboard though because taking a game like a way out which is a story i mean it's a two-player co-op story-based game and putting it up against

the likes of call of duty war zone you know what i mean like how how do you justify that um you can't i mean it's crazy that's that's the fun of it though so i think i want to put it one under the cycle okay above civ 6 but below the cycle i i think it's definitely better than civ 6 so if you want to put it at 11 i'm okay with that that. Let's, let's do that. I think, I think the trouble is cycle is too low on the leaderboard right now because it's such a good game and it's hard to put this above the cycle.

And that's the, that's the catch there. If the cycle was ranked higher, I think it would only reinforce that it's somewhere right by keep talking and no one explodes or civ six. You know what I mean? So I'm with you there. So let's

put it under the cycle for now and then we're gonna we're gonna review the leaderboard in a in a show coming up here pretty soon because i think we all see some stuff where our our thoughts have changed or after stewing on it for a little while it's like hey this might be ranked too low this might be ranked a little too high kind of thing so yeah i think that'll be fun also to kind of you know maybe take a look back at some of these games yeah i think that'll be fun also to kind of you know maybe take a look back at some of these games and not go into them in a lot of detail but kind of just talk through why it might be too high or too low and try to convince each other you know we're strap in now we're gonna have to hear todd's case for halo yet again halo reach he's gonna want it

higher than fifth than uh 16 now each week halo gets pushed down that's my favorite i love it my favorite part of the show is just pushing halo down again oh man all right so we're good we're it's it's 11 now it's 11 all right i think that's a good spot for it yeah so if you haven't taken a look at our full leaderboard you can come see it at multiplayerpodcast.com and you can kind of use that maybe if you're looking for a new game to play, take a look at our rankings, see if there's something there that, that you haven't played and might be interested in,

go back and listen to the episode and then maybe pick up the game if you want. So that, that brings us to the end of today's show. Next week, we are going to be doing a two for one episode. We've done this once before when we did, I think we titled the episode co-op couch potatoes or couch co-op potatoes this will be couch co-op potatoes 2 we are going to be

taking a look at minecraft dungeons which just recently came out such a fun game and we're also going to take a look at the game raft so we have two games that are actually quite different so if you want to check those out minecraft dungeons is through the microsoft store you can play it on the xbox pass if you have it raft you can find on steam and then we will be back with our uh bonus round episode on thursday and then we'll be back to our fully scheduled episodes which will be minecraft dungeons and raft the following Monday. Anything else to add, Josh, for the end of this episode? Just, I mean, if you're listening and you haven't left us a review yet, I mean, just please take the time to leave us a review.

Honestly, they're so helpful for us. We really love hearing what you guys say. I mean, honestly, it's really cool to just be able to go in and actually read reviews that people leave for us. So it doesn't have to be super wordy. You know, just write something for us. Let us know what you think. Obviously, five stars is the best,

and that's what we're really hoping for. But if you're listening and you haven't left us a review yet, do us a solid. Leave us a review. It really, really does help the show. Yeah, absolutely. And come check us out on

social media uh you can find us on twitter at multiplayer pod and come let us know if you have any thoughts on the leaderboard any ideas for future segments on bonus round any questions that you want to ask we'd love to hear from you guys and that's about it for this week so until next time if you see josh out on the streets with a nail gun, go run in the other way. Stay away. I'm coming for your thighs. He's not afraid to use it. All right.

See you guys next time. All right. See you, everybody.