Video Gamers Podcast - Steam Festival Demo’s, Gamestop Update and Josh Forgets a Month - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Video Game hosts Paul and Josh are back with another incredible episode of This Week in Gaming. A quick update on how we won or lost on Gamestop stock is followed by a truly embarrassing confession from Josh before we dive into the various video game demos found in the latest Steam Festival. We pick out some of the best and most hilarious video games to chat about and give our thoughts on and see which caught our eye, and which you should be on the lookout for! Connect with the show: 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

Hey, don't press that 30 second skip button. Yeah, I'm talking to you. I saw what you were about to do there. But don't worry, I'll make this quick. The Multiplayer Gaming Podcast is run independently by a group of dads. And if you enjoy the show, we'd love to have you come join us on Patreon. Our tiers start at $5 a month and it will give you access to our Discord server where you can come game with us and make suggestions for the show. Now look, unfortunately, it does mean you'll have to suffer through Josh's trolling and his bad takes, but don't worry, it's still worth it.

You can find our Patreon at MultiplayerSquad.com. Hey Josh, make sure to close all the doors to our Rust space this time and hurry up! It's time to start the show! Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We're here for some family-friendly discussions about gaming, and we are recording here just minutes after the end of the Super Bowl. Tom Brady, man, what a career. That guy is good. He's still got it.

Anyway, today is Thursday, which means we are here for an episode of This Week in Gaming. And I am your host, Paul. And I'm joined here by my number one, the Commander Riker, to my Captain Picard, Josh. Engage. I know that's... You don't really strike me as a star trek guy i loved the next generation man that show was amazing i loved star trek i always loved how reicher always had to step over the back of the chair oh the compilation of him doing i know you've seen that oh yeah it's just like

three minutes straight of him stepping over the chair. I feel like they had to stick that in every episode at least once. Oh, yeah. Just for the running joke. All right, so we're here for This Week in Gaming. Now, Josh, do we want to give the people an update about our stock portfolios? Oh. I got paper hands, Paul.

I'm not going to lie. Have we ever had an episode of This Week in Gaming that felt more outdated? Where we recorded that like four days before it got released. And it was already like Tuesday night. And I was like, Josh, this episode is going to be so old by the time it comes out. That's why I posted on Twitter and Instagram with just a GameStop and then written under it said, well, that didn't age well. Yes.

I mean, to be fair, we did say multiple times, we'll either be on the moon or sitting in a crater. And unfortunately, it was a little bit of the latter. I'm in the crater. Yeah. You don't lose until you sell, right? I did sell, though, so I lost. Still some room. But I did. I'm not going, right? I did sell though, so I lost. Still some room.

But I did. I'm not going to lie. I got paper hands, Paul. And I'm glad I did because it was about $190 and I was going to bed and I was like, man, either I just sell it now and I take my losses and I live with it or I just let it ride. And then I was like, but what if it just goes back down to like $4 a share? And then I was like, I can't, man, I can't. So I sold. And then now it's sitting at like 60 bucks a share. And I'm like, I'm really glad I sold when I did. So I definitely cut my losses there. Yeah. Well, before we jump into this week's subject, which is going to be the Steam Festival, where we got to play some demos of some upcoming games, do we have anything

else to talk about or cover before we jump in this week? I had one of those really dumb moments that I want to share with everybody. Oh, okay. You should be used to those by now, Josh. You guys really should be used to these. And it's like, I don't mind just sharing my stupidity with the world from time to time. And this one's kind of dumb. So, you know I'm super pumped about my next hype train,

and I know you're hyped about this, is Outriders. Right? And it's like, we're trying not to jinx it. It's already gotten delayed. I'm really trying to not put this in the limelight so that the you know the curse of the podcast doesn't continue and it gets delayed again so i have for the last three weeks now been thinking that i only have to wait until the end of this month and then it's going to release. And I even told my wife, I was like, hey, I need to schedule time off of work because I want to be able to just relax and play this game. And she kind of looked at me funny and she was like,

well, why would you do that so soon? And I went, what do you mean? And she says, well, didn't you say it came out like April 1st? And I went, yeah? That's only like three weeks from now. Leaving out a whole month. And she went, did you forget about the month of March? And I went, wait, February, March. No! So it's virtually delayed now for you. Yeah, it got delayed again! It got delayed. I really, really thought.

I only had another few weeks to go until we would just be in Outriders Nirvana. And then I got reminded that there's a whole other month in there. And I just was like, oh, man. Like, that sucks. That's so funny. That reminds me of how my wife is really bad at geography. And one time her and I got into an argument because she kept insisting that our state of Arizona shared a border with Texas. And I kept telling her, you forgot the whole state of New Mexico. The whole state's there right in the middle. And it was like an argument. I had to pull up a map and show her so yeah i guess you just forget about march and my wife forgets about new mexico so i'm just bummed man now i got a whole nother month and like three weeks to go and i don't know what i'm gonna play in the meantime although there is a game that you and i were talking about oh that uh that uh i don't know if we want to mention it yeah we know know nothing about it other than it's getting really, really good press so far, I guess.

Yeah, we don't need to torture the people. I think we can tell them. On our episode coming out on Monday, we are going to be covering Terraria. And then the next game that we're going to cover is Valheim. So Josh and I have not yet played it, but we do know about it. We're going to be picking that one up and squeezing as much time in as we can in the next couple of weeks. That way we can come to you guys ready and prepared to talk about it. So I'm excited to have another game because quite honestly, I'm getting tired of playing Hearthstone Battlegrounds and I need a new game. I feel like I have either mastered Battlegrounds or I hate that game and want to uninstall it at this point.

So it's, uh, it's, yeah, it's either a source of like, Oh, I'm so good, man.

I'm so good at this. I mean, the other day I know I was annoying everybody in our discord, but I won like seven, seven first place wins, like almost in a row. And I just kept taking screenshots and sending them to you guys and taking screenshots and sending them to you guys. And I was like, I'm being so annoying right now. And then the ones I

didn't send were the ones where I came in like eighth place and couldn't get a minion for anything. And it was just terrible. But yeah, I'm ready for a new game, man. So here for the rest of today's episode, we are going to be talking about the Steam Festival, which is running here. By the time you you hear this it'll have already ended but it does run through february 9th and we previously covered a steam festival and i think these are pretty neat if there's anyone out there that doesn't know what steam festivals are do you want to clue them in yeah we actually did an episode it wasn't dedicated to the steam festival but they had an autumn steam festival uh and it's just it's it's where steam showcases games that are either in early access or are like releasing in the next like six months or so and what they do is they let the developers put uh

up a bunch of like demos so you can actually try these games out uh and there's a bunch of them and then they also do like streamer uh highlights where you can watch streamers that are playing these different games. And honestly, they're usually games you've never heard of. They're not like showcasing like well-known AAA titles that are upcoming or something like that. These are games from smaller like indie developers. And again, I hadn't heard of any of these games, to be honest with you, that we're going to talk about. And even scrolling through the list of games, there's hundreds, I mean, hundreds of them that are on this festival. And you can just download, every single one of them that's on there

has a free demo that you can download and you can try, you can spend hours. Now, unfortunately, by the time people are listening to this, like you said, it's going to be over. So you're a little late, but it also will help put games on your radar because I know there's a couple that I'm actually looking forward to releasing now from having played the demos. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's what makes it so cool is just the ability to discover games. And on top of everything that Josh just shared, the developers will also stream and play the games and talk about where they're at in the process. And so it's a great way to also get to know the people who are making the games and what their plans are. And I think it's

a very neat idea. And I love when the festival comes back around. I love that this is a new thing. And I love playing demos of games before i buy them and when you participate in these festivals like this you find some gems you find some real clunkers but it definitely helps kind of weed them out just say no or no say no more say no more that's it i know that was wrong when i said it oh yeah yeah uh that yep somehow still not released all right so let's break down a couple of the demos that we had a chance to try out are there any in particular that you wanted to bring up first um since we were chatting about hearthstone i love i've made no no secret that i love card games i love card based games you're seeing a lot more of this becoming popular.

Have you ever played Slay the Spire? Is that a game you play? No. I know how much you loved it, but I did not. Slay the Spire is super good. There was another game that came out called Monster Train that I actually like more than Slay the Spire. That was a card-based game. I really enjoy that mix.

You have cards that do different abilities and have effects and things like that. And then you can play them to do various things. And we're seeing more and more where they're mixing those genres. And so the first game that I tried out because I was very excited about it is a game called Rogue Book. And most of these games, they kind of do them as a roguelite game. So as you play, obviously you'll lose and then you have to start back at the beginning, but maybe unlock more cards or there's some sort of permanent progression there. And so when I was reading about this demo, people were like, it's another roguelike card game. It doesn't really, you know, this is becoming very popular. But what interested me on this one is the creator or one of the creators of this game is actually the guy that created Magic the Gathering. Right. So then I kind of go, well,

this guy obviously has a good pedigree. So let me try this demo out. I liked it, man. It's, it is a collectible card game based game, but basically you have a, a, like a world map that has hexagonal tiles and you explore that map. You get like this weird, it has this like weird paintbrush mechanic to it that I'm not sure I was really a fan of, but the combat was really neat because you can get different allies that help you out.

Now, they only had one that was available in the demo itself. You played this, right? I did. Yeah. Okay. I think about an hour or so into it. So you can only play one of the allies, but there's different combos. And they've said in the full release, you'll be able to play with different allies that pair up and combo well with you. And the one ally they give you is kind of like a really tanky guy. But I was a big fan of the art style. I was a big fan of like the animations and the combat and stuff. And I can see where there is going to be a lot of depth to the card building and the gameplay because a lot of the cards combo off of each other and positioning. So if you had like your tanky ally on the front, you get bonuses for having him up front,

but then you have cards that will change positions. So it's like, hey, you can do a lot of damage, but your main character is then going to move to the front line. So then you either have to spend a card to move them back or things like that. And the monsters were neat. There was, I don't know, four or five different monsters. There was boss fights that I got absolutely wrecked on. I don't know if you got a different monsters. There was boss fights that I got absolutely wrecked on. I don't know if you got a chance to fight the boss or not. I did. You did?

Did you win at all or even come close? I did not because I did not know how to heal. You can't heal, apparently. They kept dropping in health, and so I kept going out of my way to fight other elite fights or other mobs. And I was able to win those fights. Maybe someone gets downed, but I would resurrect them. in health. And so I kept going out of my way to fight other elite fights or other mobs. And I was able to win those fights. Maybe someone gets downed, but I would resurrect them. But then ultimately, I died on that boss. So I wasn't sure if I missed something. I felt like Roguebook was thoroughly mediocre. I thought it was fine.

It felt mediocre, but I like that genre so much that even being mediocre, it's a game that I would just sit and play. I like those mindless games. And as goofy as this sounds, sometimes I'll want to eat a snack or a sandwich or something. And it's one reason I like Hearthstone so much, because there's no keys involved. So I can eat my sandwich with my one hand, and then I can just click mouse cards with the other. We've talked about the number of crumbs in your keyboard yeah you got to turn it over and shake it out it's my survival kit paul i can i can feed my family for a long time with those man when times get rough yeah i i thought that the and obviously the game is still in alpha stage so it's gonna change and it'll be more complete later the one thing that i did think was awfully strange you alluded to with the paintbrush mechanic and the honeycomb hexagonal world so in

each level you get to explore it but the problem is that most of the terrain is shrouded and what you do is you have to use your paintbrush ability in order to reveal tiles. And so you kind of just have to pick and guess what areas you want to unshroud. And then you might find some gold. You might find a well that gives you a gem or the ability to buy a card. But you're kind of just guessing. And then pretty soon you just run out of paintbrushes. Thank you. And there's nothing to look at.

I did not understand the paintbrush system at all. I don't know why it's there. That was my biggest complaint about this game was I was like, hey, the card abilities are neat. There's merchants. And they had a gem system where you can infuse cards with gems that would make them significantly stronger. So you could kind of pick how you wanted to build out your deck, which I thought was super cool. I like that amount of customization there. But this stupid tile system with,

they give you five paintbrushes. And when you use a paintbrush, it unlocks like a three by three area around you. But the problem is, is that half of that three by three area is already unlocked. So you're not getting like, you're not getting a full circle of like, Oh, here's new map. You're getting like a third of a circle. And then so you can move three squares and then now you're stuck because you can't move into squares that you haven't like opened up, I guess. So I would wind up just running out of paintbrushes and now I can't move anywhere. And then it's like, they expect me to go fight a boss with no health and no extra cards and nothing else. And I'm like, this is dumb, man. Like the boss fights seem like they're fun, but I was nowhere near prepared for those at all. And I couldn't keep exploring because I had

no paintbrushes left. I wasn't terribly impressed. This one, I don't know that I really care about. All right. So the first game that I'm going to bring up is a game called You Suck at Parking. I do not. Excellent. Now, Josh, you know I am a sucker for game titles like this, right? Like, I do not fall for clickbait articles or anything, but if you give me a clickbait video game title, I just can't help myself. If it's called Say No More, if it's called You Suck at Parking, if it's called a game I'm gonna talk about later, Rain on Your Parade, those are titles that I just think are very funny and I can't help but find out what it is.

So do you know anything about You Suck at Parking? I know zero. Other than that, you laughed and said, I'm going to talk about this tonight. And I went, I'm not even going to look it up because I just want to see what you have to say about it. So yes, I have zero clue. All right. So, yeah, we'll just clear the lane and we'll give me a minute here to talk about You Suck at Parking.

Now, I know this is not the best way to start off selling you on it. But the levels look like Overcooked when you're driving in between the worlds and the levels. Like, you know when you're on the open world and you drive your little car? That's terrible. This is starting off terrible already. I know. It looks like that. But what you do is you drive through obstacle courses, and you have to drive kind of like a stunt driver. So you're whipping around corners, you can do like 180s, and you have to park your car within a parking space

and then each level will have anywhere from two anywhere from two to three parking spaces 2.5 and if yeah two to three and if your car uh if it ever stops then it counts as a miss and then it puts you back at the spawn in another car and you start over. But now your car, wherever you stopped, it's still sitting there. You can run into it. It's now an obstacle. And then later they will change the bumpers in the levels where if you touch them at all, your vehicle explodes. And so the levels get progressively harder if you keep failing because they'll get loaded with more junk. And it's very neat to be driving like a sports car racer, whipping around these corners. The thing that impressed me the most is that the controls are crazy responsive. You know how good it feels like driving in Grand

Theft Auto? Yeah. It feels like that, where the vehicles vehicles they turn and they drive exactly how you would expect them to and it does let you whip around corners like crazy so at first i was like oh this is kind of neat but ultimately this is kind of just like a mobile game like what's really the appeal but the levels progressively get crazier and crazier so they start adding jumps well then they start adding fans that will push your car as you drive around then they add magnets so there's like a rotating magnet and if you let the the the one side of the magnet anywhere near you it grabs your car and then it crashes you into the middle and you have to start over so now you have to like evade these magnets and you have

to adjust your angle to deal with the fans. And then you also have a gas meter. So if you take too long and you hold forward on the gas, you'll run out. And then there's also stations where that gets refilled if you run over it. So pretty soon, you're like working through all these things. They start adding warps like at the end of the game. And then if you run through the warp too fast, you'll immediately crash. So you have to kind of manage all these things together. And I thought it was incredibly fun. The music is incredible. It has the perfect music that you could just hear a thousand times in a row and it's not going to bother you. I felt like everything in this game is already incredibly polished. I would highly recommend checking it out.

I have never heard of this, but you've definitely got me interested. I like games that, like, it's just chaos. But it's slowly introduced chaos. It's like you said, like, they teach you the basics. They say, hey, you just got to drive and try to park this car. I'm assuming that you're trying to park the car at the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah, okay.

So if it has, has like three parking spaces, that's also part of the strategy. Do I park in the closest space, which then adds more to my time? Because if you run out of time, you fail and you have to park in every space. So sometimes you just skip it. You try to go to the end.

Sometimes you have to get the time bonus. It's kind of neat that they work those together. Yeah, but I like games that do that. I like the progression of here's the base mechanics. Now we're going to throw something else at you. And then when you get used to that, now we're going to throw something else. And before you know it, you're juggling 80 things at once, like you said, like dodging the magnets, slow down for the wormhole, don't get blown off the road, all these sorts of things. Because I like that it's that progression.

And then your brain, before you know it, is just just scrambling trying to do all this stuff at once and it makes it a lot of fun so i'll have to check that out for sure yeah they start tossing ai controlled vehicles that try to crash into you and then all of a sudden there's steamrollers so these steamrollers if they hit you they immediately flatten your car and you die And so it's very funny that they keep introducing more and more like that. So it's very much exactly like you said. It's chaos, but it's chaos built one level at a time. All right. What's your second game, Josh?

What else did you mess around with? So I know you and I both played a demo. We'll save that for last. But so I wanted to play a game that I would not normally ever play as like, this is my genre. This is something that I would be interested in. And I saw a game called Potion Craft. And I thought like, okay, like, let me give this a try. And I don't, I don't even know what kind of game this is, man. Like, what is the genre? The only way I could describe this, and I know that I'm talking to only four people who are listening to this that's going to get the reference. Do you remember the crafting in Wildstar, the MMO? I do, yes.

That's all this is. This is just the crafting system from Wildstar where you combine different ingredients and it moves it on a map. So a certain herb will move it toward maybe a poison or a healing potion. And if you add the right number of herbs, then you can try to make it land on a spot where you can craft a potion and then sell it for money. Yeah, this game, I played it for maybe 30, 45 minutes. And it's just weird, man. It's not bad. It's just weird. It's like you're an alchemist. And so you have this map that when you take a certain herb, it'll either move you up or down or diagonal or sideways or in a loop-de-loop. And so as you combine these herbs, you're basically like drawing a line through like

towards the quadrant that you want to kind of move towards. But then scattered around that map, there's like skull and crossbone fields where if your potion bottle touches those, then you lose your potion. And so you have to like... It's a failed potion. Yeah. And then you have to like shift it around. And so it's like, before I realized it, it's like, you're trying to just draw lines on this map by using these different herbs. You don't get to like actually draw them on there. It's like you have to pick the herbs to move around the map. But then what I figured out is if you can get your little

potion bottle to hover over the potion bottle that's on the map, that's when you discover a recipe. But if you can actually get your bottle inside that bottle, that's how you make the stronger potions. So the potions you make by like touching it is like a lesser healing potion. But if you get it inside, now it's a regular regular healing potion but if you can line it up perfectly then it becomes like a superior healing potion and it's like okay cool but then there's this weird other side of things where it's like you have to sell these potions to customers which like that part was weird because a customer comes in and they're like oh i hurt my leg or a bin and shot me through the arm and I need something for that. What do you got? And so it's like you plunk the potion down on like a scale. And then it goes into this really terrible haggling minigame where you just click the

button to try to haggle. And then it's like you might get like three more gold out of all that haggling, which was like, where did this come from? The haggling which was like where did this come from the haggling makes no sense so it brings up a meter that just keeps moving to the left and right and it just marks little areas and if you hit space bar when it's in one of those areas then it tips the scale a little more where you'll get paid more but then if you miss any then it can go the other way and essentially it's a really bad Mario Party minigame that makes no sense when it comes down to haggling. It would make more sense if you had like dialogue options or I don't know, anything different other than this

weird minigame. Yeah, it was really strange. I had some guy, he wanted like a frost potion. He was like, oh, I got to go fight fire elementals today. Do you have something to help me? And I hadn't unlocked frost potion yet. So I was like, no, do you want a healing potion? And then he got mad at me because I offered him the wrong potion. It was an interesting concept. I didn't mind it necessarily.

Like I said, I played it for 30, 45 minutes. And then at that point, I kind of went, what's the point of this game, man? I don't understand. I don't think there's a goal. There's not really a gameplay loop other than exploring more of the potion map. But even then, the potions don't really do anything. You're not using them. Right.

I'm not throwing them on people and then quenching this guy that's on fire that runs into my shop or something like that. So it was very lost. I didn't get it. It's like a simple game. I could see people liking it maybe, but it's not for me. I was really sad because ideally, this is a game that is made for someone like me. Like, my college degree is in chemistry.

I love chemistry. I love the idea of alchemy and, like, creating potions. That's right up my alley. I love cooking. I love following and discovering recipes. And the fact that I didn't care for this game really made me wonder if anyone is actually going to be interested in it. I hate being the negative Nelly, but this one did not really grab me at all. It didn't grab me at all either. But I felt proud

of myself, Paul, because I branched out. I gave myself that pat on the back and I was like, hey, Josh, good job trying a game that you wouldn't normally play. And then I kind of went, yeah, that game sucked. It also got really boring just using the mortar and pestle on every herb. It's like, can you just gross grind all of these at once? Why do I have to keep doing it? What is the point of that? Because the game teaches you, like, you can throw these herbs into the pot and boil them and stir them. And then they were like, or you can use half the amount of herbs if you grind them up with a mortar and pestle.

And I'm like, why would I not ever do that? It doesn't make any sense. That's how I felt. And it took me a while. Boy, we're spending way too much time on potion crap. But you also have to stir your pot and you can control how far you stir it. So it's kind of goofy that ultimately you're just playing timing games. That's everything. The haggling is a timing based minigame. The potions, you're just playing timing games that's everything the haggling is a timing based uh mini game the potions you're just kind of tossing stuff and then you just stir it until it matches up on the map and then you apply some heat and you get a potion whatever i i couldn't care less all right the next game that i'm gonna bring up is the one that i mentioned a couple minutes ago, Rain on Your Parade.

Now, this is one that I thought was going to be awful, and I ended up really enjoying it. So this is another very goofy game where you play a cloud that just has dreams of living in Seattle, where it rains all the time. Is that the cloud mecca? Is that where clouds aspire to be? Yes, that's the cloud mecca. All. So you're just this poor cloud that's just had it with all these happy people, and you got to work your way to Seattle, and you are just going to rain on everybody's parade. So literally the opening level is a wedding, and it pops up your list of criteria, rain on the bride and groom, knock over all the chairs and soak every guest at this wedding. And so you just start moving your cloud around and raining on everything. And they all just run and they're screaming and they're running for cover.

And you just keep hitting them with rain. And I was like, okay, this is just kind of funny. It's just kind of silly maybe this is how you would like work through a bad day just go take it out on some of these cartoon people but then pretty soon this game gets out of control you can change what your cloud soaks up so all of a sudden they're like they're like burn it. And it puts you in a warehouse that has sparking machinery. I start soaking up oil. And now I'm raining oil and everything's exploding and going up in flames.

And my cloud's all happy. Like, yeah, we're destroying the warehouse. Oh my goodness. And I'm like, what is this? And then the next level says, protect the bomb. And so all these, like, army soldiers are trying to disarm a bomb and I just keep raining on them. So they run away. That way the bomb will go off.

And I'm like, this game is bananas. But then they start having you do like good missions where they say this park, all the trees were cut down. Don't soak anyone. They're paying us. You just got to go create a new park. And so if you keep raining on grass then like a tree will pop up so it's so weird that in some of these levels you're causing pure mayhem other ones you're just growing a nice garden and then they teach you the power of lightning

so now whatever you soak in water you can like shock things and you can put down a line of oil and then do thunder and it'll light that on fire. And so the last level just says to cause as much mayhem as you can. And so you start putting all of these powers in combinations. You can soak up corrosive acid and then you can like drop it to kill crops and to corrode vehicles. And I have to say, it's's actually fun i'm starting to like the sound of this game paul oh it's so silly i mean i would not spend like more than 20 on it but the developers also have a really good sense of humor so like at one point i don't remember what they call it like the papa cloud or something comes out to teach you about the game and they're like

hey you can even learn the power of thunder and lightning all you got to do is get enough thunder bucks which you can earn with in-game currency no i'm just kidding all you need is in this game you just have to play it what a concept so it's like poking fun at microtransactions uh a caterpillar pops out of the ground and says hey this game is still in alpha. So if you get any bugs, you know, it's going to be fixed by the time the game comes out. And then the bug says, and that's all I'm here for is just to tell you this.

You'll never learn about my love of 13th century literature. And then all of a sudden the bug is like, yeah, you'll never get to know me because you don't even care about me. I hope you do get all the bugs and hate this game and hate the developers. And I'm like, okay, these people are just here having a good time. This is just silly, fun. I loved it. Honestly, I have a special place in my heart for developers that don't take themselves too seriously. I really do. You're making video games. You're making things to entertain people.

If you can't have a good time doing that, man, something's wrong. Have a good time. Make jokes. Put funny stuff in your games. It doesn't mean your game's not going to be good because of it. Yeah, exactly. And so this developer might be right up your alley. I enjoyed it. It was a very fun 30 minutes of just running through the full demo it's pretty short it's not a difficult game but i did find it to have a lot of charm and a lot of humor which i appreciated how do you find these man i've not seen either one of these and i scrolled down the list like do you just go to like the last page in the in the demo like i just scroll through all like 300 and i just find the ones that have the funniest

names and i just click install and i i installed probably 20 demos and if i play the first three minutes and there's nothing there i just close it out and i just move on to the next one until i find something interesting yeah see there was a couple games that really looked neat to me but then it was like their action role-playing games with storylines and stuff like that. And I'm like, this game might be great, but for a demo, I don't want to spend like two and a half hours getting through story about a demo. I might not ever buy this game and care about it. So I don't want to spend that long starting to know the characters and stuff. Yeah. I want a game where it's like i'm gonna

be able to jump in and kind of get a good idea of what this game is going to be so that i don't have to like buy it and then be like oh yeah this game sucks yeah well that's what i loved about both of the games that i brought up you suck at parking and rain on your parade those games have like four buttons and you can just jump right in you You immediately get it. And even if you just play the demo, it's a great time, even if you don't end up buying it. All right. So I think I know this episode went on a little bit long, but Josh, you want to bring up one last game? I was going to say this game. I was actually pretty impressed with this game. I think it's got a lot of potential, but it's called the Riftbreaker. And out of all of the games that I looked at or watched videos of, this game looked the most polished to me.

And it's got a neat mix, man. It is like a mix of a base builder game, almost like StarCraft. I mean, I got some definite StarCraft vibes from it where it's like you're mining carbonium and you've got a robot and you can do this stuff combined with like a horde defense game yeah like that's exactly what it is yeah it's the it's super it's super neat the graphics were good the effects were great you're in this like super tough robot thing that's got a blade on one hand and like a gatling gun on the other hand and you've got some AI that's telling you, Hey, you need to build the space.

You've got to set up a mine and then you can build walls, but you need more AI cores. And it kind of walks you through some of the building and progression there. And then they're like, Hey, there's a horde of native creatures. It's coming. You better prepare some defenses.

And then it looks like the Zerg. I mean, I got definite like Zerg vibes from this horde of monsters that came in but then it turns into this action game where you're taking your giant robot guy and you're wading into these hordes and you're slicing them with your sword and you're galling gunning them and then you have like nukes that you can set off and it's like and you've spitting out mines and all this stuff and you've got dashes and i was like the combat in this thing is great i was so impressed by this game it is everything

that you love from a tower defense game where they come out in waves but then you build your walls in a way that you funnel all the enemies and then you build all of these centuries but instead of it being passive where you just watch the combat, you're running out there with your mech. You're joining in the action. And that is great. And then I know for me where the demo really turned

is when they started giving me quests outside of my base. So you survive the first wave, they have you build some defenses, and then they say, hey, if you can go take out one of their nests, then their next attack won't be as strong. So now you actually take your mech outside the base, you go and you fight these zerg-looking creatures in the wild, and then you just start attacking their nest. And I destroyed it, and then I was able to get a bunch of resources from that,

and then take it back to my base, and then start building it up again. So it's neat that it kind of combines tower defense with a very RTS build system. So you do have like prerequisite buildings, build this building. Now you can make something that's more high tech, which gives you more abilities. And so it really does combine a lot from those two worlds while looking fantastic. The other thing, I don't know if you noticed, did you know that you have like three guns? Like you have three options for each arm on your mech. i don't know if you noticed did you know that you have like three guns like you have three options for each arm on your mech i don't know if you like i didn't realize that until like i was halfway through the demo but all of a sudden i was like oh it says q and e like what does this do and then all of a sudden my gatling gun turns into a flamethrower or like a missile launcher where you can like lock up like you can load up like four or five missiles at a time and then unleash

them. Uh, I just thought the combat was, I could play just the combat portion of this game and have a blast with it because it was so much fun at one point. I don't know if you got to see like the giant creature where they were like, we're getting some giant anomaly on the radar, go take a look.

And it was like this huge fire looking lava elemental thing. And I was just like, Oh, this is great, man. So I ran up to him and dropped a couple nukes. And it was like this huge fire looking lava elemental thing. And I was just like, oh, this is great, man. So I ran up to him and dropped a couple nukes. And then I kited him, throwing mines in his path and all that. And I was highly impressed. This is a game that if this is an early access demo, I can't wait to see what they actually do with this. I absolutely agree. The only thing that I wish it had that it didn't is some kind of multiplayer component because it's only single player it would be neat if you could somehow work with a partner it just doesn't have that capability so i think that's all the time that we have today as far as breaking down the games i would just mention as a side comment that winter survival simulator is

fantastic josh i know you did not play it but I know you would get a kick out of this. The game has a sanity meter. The colder you get and the more creatures you run into, your guy starts to go crazy and you start getting hallucinations. What? So it's very much like Eternal Darkness, Requiem of Sanity. Yeah, they pull in a sanity meter. My guy was hallucinating these magical

wolves that disappeared and he was freaking out. It's great. That's a fantastic game that I really enjoyed. Definitely check that one out. And then Glitch Punk, I tried playing. I ran into an error. The game froze and I immediately closed it and I didn't play it anymore. True to its name, then, is what you're saying. True to its name. It's those glitchy games. Yeah, so I really can't even speak to Glitch Punk. I just had too many demos to try to work through and I just, nope, closed it, moved on to the next. That's funny. I love the ability to try all these games. These are games that we never would have seen. They would have released on Steam at some point. And unless they started getting really good feedback,

it's like they would have just never even made it onto the radar. So that's why I love that they do this, because it's like now there's games out there that I'm kind of interested in. I would not have heard of. I wish listed some of them. So I'm reminded of it when they release six months from now or something like that. It's just it's a cool thing to do. And it's a lot of fun to dig into these. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. So thanks so much

for joining us here today for this week in gaming. As mentioned earlier, we will be back with an episode on Monday for Terraria. Hope you guys enjoy that one. Please check us out on social media. You can find us at multiplayer pod. And if you'd like to check out our Patreon page, you can come help support the show. Obviously, we run the show without any ads. pod and if you'd like to check out our patreon page you can come help support the show obviously we run the show without any ads and so if you want to help support us and keep the show running that way we can release two episodes weekly you can find us at multiplayer squad.com and also come check us out on youtube our channel is multiplayer podcast and todd has been working hard releasing some content there. So please subscribe to our YouTube channel and then we will see you guys on

Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday. Pretty sure I've used that one before, actually. Yeah. Monday,

Monday, Monday. It's just so fun to say, man.