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S2 Ep41: The Forest
70 Plays7 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they complete the careful construction of a cozy, coastal, cannibal cabin in this week's episode!
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Transcript
Survival Tactics in the Wild
00:00:03
Speaker
Here we find the crashed survivor in his unnatural habitat, chasing a bunny with a rock. It is essential for the survivor that he finds some nourishment in this wooded landscape. As night approaches, he decides to make a shelter to protect himself from the elements.
00:00:32
Speaker
but he remains unawares that others nearby seek nourishment as well. As the light fades and he goes inside his shack, he spots several figures outlined on their eyes.
Introduction to Soapstone Podcast
00:00:51
Speaker
How's it going everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, David Attenborough. How's it going tonight? David.
00:01:01
Speaker
It is going good. Yeah. So what do you want to talk about today, Dave? What have we got? The forest. It is the forest. Or in Spanish, el forest. I didn't do the research on that. That's 50% Spanish. Actually, it might not even be that, depending on whether a forest is a male or female pronoun in Spanish. It could be law forest.
Exploring 'The Forest': Game Mechanics
00:01:30
Speaker
Anyways, we're talking about a game, a video game. And this is one of those kind of spins forever in Early Access survival crafting games, right? It's- Yes. Yeah. It didn't actually, it actually is not in Early Access anymore, but I think the first time I played it was- Yeah, I think we looked at it initially
00:01:57
Speaker
Within a couple weeks of when it was put up on Steam, we were, I mean, we are always in this kind of survival crafty binge. Yeah, we're kind of basic, I guess. Yeah. Well, we get the urge again, you're like, man, I kind of want to play a little bit of Minecraft or something. Yeah. But we sold the trailer for this, and it had crafting, it had survival, and then it had some other, like, threats. We're like, oh, that seems pretty cool. Yeah. Remember, we watched the trailer, we're like,
00:02:23
Speaker
Yep. This is 20 bucks. Yes. Yeah. I got to enough of an investment for like, Oh, see how bad it is type thing. I remember this was on my, my, uh, watch list. Uh, that sounds bad, but wish list, I think there you go for, uh, for a long time before I actually picked it up. Cause I was like, this kind of came out in the, um, the surge of.
00:02:45
Speaker
early access survival crafting games, and a lot of them were not good. Yeah. It's like, hey, Minecraft made money. Um, let's make almost that. Yeah. And some of the ones were actually near Minecraft clones, but shit. Yes. Uh-huh. Where it's like, parentheses, not Minecraft. And I'm like, this looks oddly similar. Pixel craft or something. We use voxels instead of cubes.
00:03:12
Speaker
But this one's not that. The forest kind of has a distinct feel entirely away from Minecraft where Minecraft is like you survived the first night by digging down a couple blocks and putting a log on top of you. The forest has this kind of a more tense atmosphere and possibility of actual failure.
The Game's Plot: Rescue and Survival
00:03:34
Speaker
Yeah, because the game starts out where
00:03:37
Speaker
I think it only shows the animation in a single player or the cut scene. Very cool. For the, uh, you're talking about the plane. Yeah. The plane approach.
00:03:46
Speaker
I saw the plane approach for me, but it could be because I was the host for multiplayer. Do you, an asshole? Yeah, I know, right. But essentially, just like Bioshock, you're just minding your business on a plane. You're with your son, Timmy. Things are grand. I don't remember Bioshock that well. Plane crash lands, and you kind of look up at your bloodied hands and be like, oh, I guess I'm alive, but things aren't ideal.
00:04:14
Speaker
You see this kind of like tribal painted guy, like come out of the darkness, grab your kid and book it. Yeah. And then I think he also like hits you unconscious type thing. Yeah. And then you wake up, there's like dead bodies around. You're at like the literal tail end of the plane. And you have to kind of like grab supplies and like a hatchet that I think the guy put into the stewardess. Yeah. It was the, uh, the plane X is what you start out with. Yeah.
00:04:44
Speaker
Um, but there's just like some food strewn about from like your mid flight meal. And I think you might be able to get some pill pills there from like a laboratory or whatever. I don't know why I said that bathroom. I'm an American chicks. Very classy. I don't know if anybody knew. Um, but yeah, you grab like some basic supplies and then there's luggage everywhere around the crash site. Yeah.
00:05:10
Speaker
But, I mean, you don't have a way to get into somebody's luggage because usually they have locks on them because if you're flying and you actually care, you put a lock on your stuff. So you take the plain axe and you just smack it and then it pops open. Yeah. In my headcanon, actually, like none of them are locked. They just have zippers, but the guy is so lazy he chooses to use the axe.
Resource Management and Threats
00:05:33
Speaker
He's like, what if I use this shit for?
00:05:37
Speaker
But yeah, that gets you some kind of basic materials, right? Like opening luggage will most often get you a cloth. Tennis balls. Yeah, which is less useful.
00:05:49
Speaker
I can't remember actually what else is out there besides cloth, duct tape. Yeah. Which, explain that for a travel flight. Yeah. There's some odd stuff in there. Some things you could see, maybe like batteries. I don't know if the TSA lets you do that anymore, but maybe when the game was made. I think they don't like certain types of batteries or certain sizes of batteries. But usually if it's stowed in like luggage and it's not like overhead, you're good. Okay.
00:06:15
Speaker
I'll have to consult the TSA list. We can come back and then have some TSA around it. But yeah, you get some basic supplies doing that. But at this point, you're covered in blood still, which is its own risk in the game, right? Whenever you're covered in blood, you're at risk of infection.
00:06:35
Speaker
And if you get infected, then you have to combat that by getting some aloe vera, which you have to like find on the first forest floor. Interesting. It's like a very gone infection. Yeah. And it's also not really, it's not super obvious when it happens. It's like a progressing disease or whatever. And, um,
00:06:53
Speaker
Aren't they all right? Yeah, right. Death also cures. So I had no problem with that. I'm really hungry. Better kill myself. Old school auto new old strats. But yeah, after you kind of like find some water to rinse off the blood.
00:07:12
Speaker
You have a little handy dandy crafting guide. It's like, hey, here's some, like a little survival booklet. Here's how to do some basic shit. So you can collect leaves, sticks. If you use the plain axe on trees, it will eventually timber down and you can take those logs and kind of like put those into a blueprint or template and make simple basic structures.
00:07:38
Speaker
which for me is like the fun part. Yeah. This is where I spent like an absurd amount of my time in the game was just like building our base. So Dave and I were playing co-op and we're like, all right, let's, let's build a base out near the, uh, it was your idea near the,
00:07:54
Speaker
the ocean, basically, right? The shoreline, at least. That was supposed to be our initial tent base. Yeah. And I'm just like, all right, got it. And then it started to work on the fort. Yeah. But you were talking about chopping down the trees. That's where I spent most of my time, I think, playing, honestly. Because it's strangely cathartic. It takes like 19 swings with the plane axe to knock a full-size train down. The fact that you're counting, I think, is interesting.
00:08:21
Speaker
But there's a visual you're visually like chopping at the tree like The area of the cut graphically like grows wider as you're continuing to like knock the tree down which is really cool and The game is really customizable. You can change like a lot of settings. One of those is allow trees to regrow Basically, but I had that off So we got this nice aesthetic as we were like clear cutting. Oh, yeah of like
00:08:49
Speaker
Here's the hill above our base where there was a forest previously and it's now clear except stumps. It actually changes the name of the game to just the stumps. The stumps. Yeah, less evocative perhaps. But one of the things I like about the crafting and building things is they'll have things for utility as well. So when we're chopping down trees, you can carry up to two logs at a time because you're apparently much stronger than I have in real life.
00:09:16
Speaker
And you can go over and put two at a time into whatever you're building. Yes. Um, but Jake's like, Oh, there's a log sled. So he made that out of sticks. So we can put like 10 to 15 logs on at a time and take it all at once. Yeah. Cause I, like I said, in all games, I'm like, let me try the brute force method first. Then someone's like, Oh, but if you do this, I'm like, eh, that's it. That doesn't seem necessary. Yeah. We ended up having a.
00:09:43
Speaker
a really nice structured base. It was walled. There's a place to sleep and save. We had to make a turtle shell rain collector for water initially. Yeah. Cause your main stats, you have to monitor health, which is pretty common to games. Thirst and hunger. Yeah. And initially like that goes down pretty quickly. If you're doing a lot of
00:10:07
Speaker
aerobic activity, like, oh, I'm running around, or I'm chopping down trees. Your body's like, calories though, what's up?
00:10:16
Speaker
And you're also penalized if you're running around with low thirst or hunger because it represents your maximum stamina as well. So if you are just bare minimum living off of bugs in the forest or whatever you can, but the minimum amount of caloric intake, then you have no stamina to run away from any of the game's threats, or in my case, chop a bunch of trees down.
00:10:43
Speaker
So what are some of those
Unpredictable Cannibals: Unique Tension
00:10:45
Speaker
threats? I know. Yeah. The early part of the episode alluded to something spooky. Yeah. The turtles, actually. No, that you mentioned. We actually spent a lot of time looking for a turtle. But the main threats of the game can be categorized as cannibals and mutants. So that's what you got to watch out for. Yeah, initially, as we kind of
00:11:13
Speaker
clued you into at the beginning. Candles just kind of like show up within like the first 10 minutes of the game. And they're just like other people and they just, they're like half naked. They might have like a stick or they might have to be full naked. They're just kind of like see you from a distance. And you're like, oh shit, like what are you, what's the deal? Are you just like an NPC? Are you hanging around? Are you going to try and fuck with my shit?
00:11:38
Speaker
you don't know what it is. And usually like a couple will kind of show up, see you, and then kind of like scamper off. I'm like, I don't have good feelings about this. Yes. There's actually, and this is one of the things I love most about the game, is in games, usually the enemies are just hyper aggression, or you can learn their AI and you're done, right?
00:11:59
Speaker
In Minecraft, for instance, the zombies just go straight at you, try to pat you, try to kill you. Yeah. Like, and that's predictable. And maybe you get jump scared like once when you open a door and there's one there or something. But the fact that it's predictable makes it less tense. The cannibals in this case are designed in such a way that they are not always aggressive. Sometimes they just want to learn about you.
00:12:23
Speaker
And that is in itself also scary. You know when you chill at the club, this one person just stares you for two hours? Yes. Yeah, it's unsettling. Because you don't know. Are they going to attack? Could you run away from them? Will they chase you? If you run, will they attack? Those are all actually factors. You can actually scare them off.
00:12:44
Speaker
You mentioned those early scouting parties. That's actually a key part of the escalation of the game because the game doesn't do the whole, we'll spawn enemies around you at nighttime just because they have to find you and they'll identify where your base is. And that's the start of the escalation. And they don't really have a formal base per se. They're kind of scattered throughout.
00:13:09
Speaker
this whole island you're on and like they do have some like villages like small villages or a lot of times you can tell where they've been because there's like little totems yes which is like let's say like a six foot stick well on top of that is like face skin kind of stretched out yeah it's meant to say like ward off
00:13:31
Speaker
people like you or? Yes. There's actually a, you're talking, the totem there. There was one spot near our base where I knocked down a totem that they built like five times because they kept building it. It's like a, like, we're going to attack this spot. Like I don't, I don't know exactly what their intent was for it, but I was knocking it down every time. Thanks for the cloth. Yeah. It does have a nice,
00:13:59
Speaker
Aesthetic to it because I know we talked about like in Minecraft days the main draw of the game is Exploration. Yes, because I mean building stuffs obviously fucking great. It's minecraft Yeah, but there's not really a threat outside of that initial nighttime as soon as you have like walls It's like come at me and fuckers because nothing will attack you through walls exactly But I like this because it's initially it's like hey
00:14:30
Speaker
build a base, and so you do. And you're like, oh, I must be safe now, I have a base. No. When cannibals decide that you're a threat and want to attack you, they will just start wailing on your shit. They can break down your log walls.
00:14:50
Speaker
and you have to either like repair it or build a new one. So a lot of times, Jake and I will be collecting resources for doing game objectives. Camels will come nearby, we'll call them out. And we just run at them with the plane axe and we're just like taking turns, hacking them down. Going to town. But that's like the second time we played through. Yes. Usually we would try and like group up because you don't really have a lot in the way of defense. So you want to go with a buddy.
00:15:18
Speaker
Yeah, like two cannibals, two fast cannibals can take you out. There's an armor mechanic, but you have to craft layers of armor, so it's not always something you want. It takes effort. It's not damage reduction in the same way like Minecraft is. It's like, hey, that block to hit, which is just like a slap, you know? And the other thing that's really creepy about the cannibals is let's say you knock one down,
00:15:45
Speaker
You're like, oh, good. They're dead. I'm going to go worry about the next one. Yeah. Um, no, they're still on the ground, like shallowly breathing, covered in blood, but they will get up and regenerate. So every time I knock one down, I do like an additional two full on ax swings to like the chest or head. The coup de grâce. Yeah. The extra coup de grâce, the double tab.
00:16:07
Speaker
until I see the option to pick up their body. So I'm like, okay, they're definitely dead. And then I'll take their body, throw them on the fire, and cook their body for bones, which I can then use to make armor. Yes, or arrows. That's true. Yeah, you can use them for the advanced arrows. And yeah, the cannibals are awesome. Like, the interactions with them just maintain throughout the game.
00:16:33
Speaker
diplomatic relations are not going so well yes and the game kind of ramps up as they continue to like assault your base they send stronger cannibals eventually the mutants trying to like wipe you out basically yeah because the game tracks how long you survive
00:16:51
Speaker
and like in days. And I don't think I ever got like in this, this play through, I didn't get anywhere near your longest survival. Cause I died like every two days basically. But yeah, you'd either be like running from a zombie and get ganged or you'd be like, oh, gravity's a thing and just die. Not to say I did not succumb from that, but typically while Jake was at home taking care of the house, cooking nice stuff for us,
00:17:20
Speaker
I would be going and exploring. Yes. Yeah. Because I still really enjoy exploration in these games. But what's really cool is there's obviously the top level island.
Cave Exploration: Clues and Tension
00:17:33
Speaker
Yes. So there's like forest. There's like.
00:17:35
Speaker
Pals of water, there's like a lake or there's other, there's a whole giant thing. But there's also these like little caves. And usually it's like, hey, there's a little crack in the wall you can animation into or there might be like some rope. What does it mean to animation into something? It's not like your character can fit through there. You have to do an interaction. There's like the little animation of you going through a tight crevasse into the cave. But once you're in the cave,
00:18:05
Speaker
It's like pitch fucking dark. Yes. And you have like a little shitty Zippo lighter that, you know, goes out every 10 seconds, but it adds to that fear and excitement of the exploration. Yes. Because in the caves, like there's bats, there's random body parts. There's usually other cannibals.
00:18:26
Speaker
but you're looking for clues throughout the game to help you find your missing son. And then maybe like tech options. Yes. Cause like, um,
00:18:39
Speaker
I think one of the first times I went down the cave, I found dynamite, and I was like, hey, what's up? I'm now a prospect. Stinky Pete. I'm not stinky. Or Pete, really. I was gonna Pete. Yeah, the caves are kind of the other half of the forest. There's everything going up above ground, and the caves are this.
00:19:07
Speaker
an expansive amount of content that they added in. There's 12 around, I think, total. There's a couple hidden ones that are single rooms, basically, that a lot of people find themselves.
00:19:24
Speaker
The game is really different in caves like in either case the game is not afraid like you're talking about the darkness right the darkness Jackie But the game is not afraid to submerse you in darkness and let you feel the immersion of it The lighter barely provides like any light whatsoever you get like seven feet maybe ten feet of distance it's if that yeah, you really have to hope that there's like a
00:19:54
Speaker
A temple of doing like skull candle in the distance to help map out where walls are.
00:20:00
Speaker
But the main thing is because there will be enemies in the caves, you want to see where they are first, ideally, to be like, okay, I'll plan this out a little better. Exactly. Maybe go in with like a bow, because it really sucks to like go into a space and you're like, where are things everywhere? Fuck. Yes. That last minute thing is never ideal. You want a clear room as opposed to being in the middle of the room surrounding.
00:20:27
Speaker
And there are flares that I think you have to find. I don't think you can craft them. I don't think you can craft them, no. But those are super useful for like just, hey, I'm going to go down a rope. How far down does it go? Is there stuff at the bottom? And other things like that. Yeah, the cave exploration is really important.
00:20:45
Speaker
We haven't really talked about the plot, but it's important there too. It's like it's how you move the game kind of forward and you move from the above-ground survival into getting through the game. Yeah. It's one way to do it. To hype about the kids a little bit more, it's my favorite part of the game entirely. Okay. That's interesting. Why? Why'd you say that? It's interesting to me because it's kind of the more
00:21:11
Speaker
the more tailored part of the game, right? Like each cave has distinct like loot in it, you know, kind of some gear, equipment. It's less open-ended than the surface.
00:21:24
Speaker
right but i'm not saying that's bad i'm just saying i like what i like yeah but i do like the initial survival and doing stuff for the base because you do really get a lot of flexibility as far as that goes you can make tree houses you can make traps and all this other cool stuff yeah but
00:21:42
Speaker
Just like in Minecraft, I like going into a cave, a naked boy, and coming up a naked man. Jake's like, oh, I'm doing some stuff, cooking food, making the base. I'm like, cool, I'm gonna go down in this cave. Jake, I found this dynamite and like a tooth and something else. He's like, nice, awesome. I'm like, I'm going back in.
00:22:03
Speaker
This is inaccurate, too. I think, like, you went in the cave and you came out with, like, the full scuba gear on, basically. And I was just, like, at this point in a ghillie suit covered in leaves. I mean, like, we've picked different tech pounds. But it is a really reliable way to kind of, like, tech up at the risk of expiration. And if
00:22:30
Speaker
The game is split into multiplayer or single player and there's some different mechanics depending on which. We were playing multiplayer so if we died we dropped all of our stuff where we die. Yeah there's just like a backpack. And sometimes like a game will be forgiving and when you die it's like oh you'll respawn with full health, full life, full food, whatever. This game is not that game.
00:22:53
Speaker
You respawn, it's like, eh, maybe we'll fill your water bar, I guess, but like, you're gonna be starving, you're gonna have almost no health, and uh, mild criticism, I think, of the game mechanically. You can immediately just get gimped by a zombie. That's like, at the plane where you spawn.
00:23:14
Speaker
Yes, but typically they'll still provide those in-flight meals. Yes. That will kind of respawn if you die and get re-birthed. So usually you can grab meals, sodas, meds, and you'd be like, all right, I'm good to go. You grab the plane axe and you go out. But there have been times where one of us have died in multiplayer. Yeah. It's like a respawn at the plane.
00:23:38
Speaker
There's nothing here. There's no wax. There's no food. I hope I can make it back to the base. Yeah. And thankfully we didn't build too far. But there were times where it's like, hey, I died over here. I'm going to spend 20 minutes getting back to that stuff. Yeah. And the plane crashes. The location's random.
00:24:00
Speaker
It's actually not fixed. Well, I mean, per game. Per game, yeah. It's not like you die and the plane's like, I'm here now. The plane goes down somewhere else. Dave, where are you? Another world. That sound means it's time for intermission where we talk about whatever we want to talk about. What's been cooking, Dave?
00:24:26
Speaker
Recently, I made honey bourbon salmon, which is just you take a cut of salmon, you put it on a pan. You get oil or butter a little bit so it doesn't stick and burn. But then you keep pouring honey bourbon on it. Is that honey and bourbon? No, it's like a sweetened whiskey. Oh, okay.
00:24:48
Speaker
You just keep pouring that on and then you flip it and you pour it on and you flip it and you let it cook over time until it gets like this nice golden brown. The sugar is kind of caramelized and it's nice and gooey sticky. And that's it. Fish is cooked, has like a nice taste to it. But also in a separate pan, you roast up some almonds, add a little bit of honey bourbon there, a little bit of butter. This time I also added some orange zest.
00:25:15
Speaker
and got that cooked, then put it in the blender quick, and then cooked it again. But I kind of sprinkled that over the fish. And then I let it sit another minute or two, but it was so fucking good. That does sound good. And that's what's cooking. I gotta be careful with these, because I'm going to want to take a break from the podcast to actually eat is the problem. If I just listen to you describe a meal. We should cook as a podcast episode. I keep saying this.
00:25:43
Speaker
Other stuff going on other than just the cooking, which is clearly the most important. Blizzard has started teasing the next Overwatch hero. The name that's most prominent looks like Baptiste, but in the past they've never teased the name and what a character would do this early.
00:26:03
Speaker
It's always been like a red herring. So who knows? It's probably like a fish in like a spacesuit or something. Nobody knows. Well, what do you think, since you play competitive more than I do, I mean, you play competitive at all. Yeah. What do you think is lacking in that space currently? What role do you think they can put in? Yeah. Like, are they missing another DPS? Are they missing a tank? I feel like they have pretty good coverage for DPSs right now. And they've been kind of bouncing around with them.
00:26:31
Speaker
if this character Baptiste is the correct that he's explicitly mentioned to be a sharpshooting medic so possibly another healer but the meta is in pro games all tanks and healers so
00:26:49
Speaker
I mean, who knows, right? If they're adjusting it based off of what the meta currently is, that seems less likely since heroes take like a year to make or whatever, like three months. Who knows? Not a lot of information. We'll keep you guys updated.
00:27:04
Speaker
Next thing we were talking about here is, so we have a Discord, we talk to a lot of our friends. This is not a public Discord, you cannot join it. You cannot join, yes. These are just people that we've known for a while. Statistically, if you're listening right now, you may already be on the Discord. It's only people we know listening to this.
00:27:22
Speaker
but people are just talking about playing survival games. I don't know if that subliminally led into today's episode because we were also thinking about playing survival games. It took every couple of months. So we might go back to, it sounds like seven days to die or rust. That one's likely. You said two things, I said that one's like... It's probably going to be rust because we haven't played that in years, at least three years. And that's still an early access, but keeps getting updates over time.
00:27:52
Speaker
But it sounds like they've done a lot with it. And I just want to relive my glory days of Old Spice 94 and build a base. I just want to run between weapon spawns, looting things continually, and not playing PvP in a primarily PvP game.
00:28:08
Speaker
It's basically my goal. Funnel explosives into the group. Down for that. And kind of last thing I had to cover here is I know I mentioned Anthem in the previous podcast saying like, oh, we'll see roughly how it is. We both fight destiny.
00:28:23
Speaker
Uh, it's released and a lot of people's fears have been realized and that it is reviewed very poorly for a triple A, um, multiplayer Ludo shooter. What? No way. Yeah. So, uh, 60 on Metacritic as of this recording.
00:28:40
Speaker
Which is bad. It's pretty bad. It's real bad, actually, for a AAA game. I feel like they put, I shouldn't say they, a subset of them kind of put all the effort into Apex Legends. I almost thought it was kind of like... The thing is, it's a different team. Those are two different development studios under EA. So Respawn made Apex. They're the Titanfall guys.
00:29:06
Speaker
And Bioware made this. So Bioware shit, I think, is the moral of the story. And it might be true, unfortunately. Rest in peace, good Bioware. A whole new world, even. Those caves down below the forest. But, uh...
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah. Jake, just open your eyes. You also mentioned a little bit of the crafting, which is like really key to a game. Oh, I know where Jake's going. I love the survival crafting game. So you have a really interesting inventory system in the forest. Basically, every time you hit a full screen,
00:29:48
Speaker
transitions to a tarp on the ground with your backpack in the corner. And then depending on what's in your inventory, it'll be on a location on the tarp. So everything you can pick up in the game has a location on the tarp. It won't be there until you have it.
00:30:06
Speaker
And then the game has this nice feeling mouse over effect whenever you like mouse over something. The item slightly displaced as though your hands like rummaging over it and there'll be some sound like, you know, rustling rocks or whatever. It's got this nice audio visual vibe to it. Downside, this is a full screen window if you're inventory. So things can happen when the game's not paused as it turns out.
00:30:36
Speaker
And not having any awareness of your surroundings is not always ideal in the forest. Yeah. This is why I like to craft near Jake. A lot of times, like, let's say we're down in a cave.
00:30:52
Speaker
And I see something in the distance and I just have my plane axe. I'm like, this is not enough. So I'll open up the inventory. I'll be like, all right, how do I make an explosive? I'll like throw some things together, duct tape it all. I'm like, okay. I now have a throwable thing, which is going to deal decent damage and a small as fuck AoE, but it's more useful than going and fighting with an axe.
00:31:17
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of preparing for situations, building out that armor. You're like, all right, I'm going to combine some cloth. I'm going to combine some, was it cloth and? So it's alcohol. Oh, it's alcohol. That's right. Booze. Booze. To make the Molotov. I'm sorry, were you going to make a Molotov out of a fizzy drink? Is that why mine never caught fire?
00:31:41
Speaker
Also, while we're on the Molotov note, there are so many times, because it just, you bring out the Molotov and you have like, you're lighter if you're, you know, in a cave and you want some degree of light. And you can just throw the Molotov. Not lit. You just throw it, I'm like, oh shit, I really wanted that. You have to actually light it first and then throw it. But so many times I've been like,
00:32:06
Speaker
Jake, or like a flare. And I'm just like, I'll throw down like a dud of like, nice. You can recover the flares. The Molotov's unfortunately like shatter as you would, right? Like you haven't breached the structural integrity of the bottle by lighting it on fire. So it always shatters. That's a, that's a sad feeling. We were actually like facing off against a mutant at one point and we're like, all right, what resources do we have? We were, we had the high ground. So we had our time and, uh,
00:32:37
Speaker
I was just like, all right, crafts and molotovs. And I'm like, throw. Literally no fire happens or anything. It was me. Dave's like, Jakey didn't like that, did you? No. No, unfortunately. It could happen so more than I'd like to admit. But the crafting system is quite solid.
00:32:57
Speaker
most of the recipes you kind of have off the get-go building like kind of uh you can either build like a shack custom walls you can pick like the link so you can kind of like design your base not in like a full minecraft do whatever you want way but you have a lot of options and you can build traps outside of your base which i didn't do at all first time we played but i did this time i've got these deadfall traps which are like uh
00:33:25
Speaker
basically a long log suspended by like a small triangle of sticks. And if something displaces the sticks, the log falls and just like instantly kills cannibals. And I just had them up all over the place. And then I was making like large triangles of like logs facing towards each other with the sticks in the middle as like these like impromptu gateways and things.
00:33:51
Speaker
around your tree house. Cause they made a tree house. Which I made and slept in once and then never went back to. I used it. It was the, uh, the bait base outside of our, our main base to protect the structural integrity of the wall. Oh boy. But, uh,
00:34:12
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of crafting options and there's kind of a cool mechanic that unfortunately they don't really tell you about where if you place one ingredient for what you're crafting in the crafting section of the tarp, you can mouse over a gear that pops up and it'll show you all the ingredients, the permutations of what you could craft given what's already there. If you have a stick, you can make these ten things. Yeah.
00:34:37
Speaker
And you can keep adding things into the pile. Because I think for the first time, they didn't really tell you. You kind of had to figure it out. So you'd put random ingredients into the center. And the first ingredient would be like, oh, I'm going to fill up this much of a gear. Because you have this much of ingredient toward making something. So you're like, and I put in soda. And you see if the gear fills up. If it doesn't, it's not a part of that recipe.
00:35:03
Speaker
And you actually need to move it back out. Yeah. Cause you want to make a Molotov, not a Molotov, like an explosive and it's like with soda. It's like, no. Yeah. And there's, there's a lot of stuff you can accumulate and it is like a trash collector kind of game where you just like have everything on in your inventory at once. Um, but it feels good to like make a track through one of those caves, come out the other side, you open your inventory and you're like,
00:35:31
Speaker
Huh, I'm like a well-stocked adventurer now, you're like inventory full of snacks and soda. Snacks, soda, booze, animal skins, dynamite, bones, yeah. Yeah, it's definitely, it's got the balance between the above and below ground, which I think we did pretty well on our playthrough. Yeah, you were above ground, it was below ground. Eventually I started going in the caves, but like my life expectancy is just
00:35:58
Speaker
poor in this playthrough compared to yours. Dave's just like, all right, I've got like some teeth and some twine and like a rope or whatever. I'll go in the cave. And he comes out like a rich man. I'm like fully stocked. I've got like bone armor, everything on me. And I like fall down a hole and die immediately. Yeah. When we were doing end game content, um,
00:36:24
Speaker
First, I want to go back to when we did the initial playthrough. We had like five people. We were kind of exploring. A lot of it was above ground. You get these pictures of clues of where to find some other things. And we spent a lot of time doing stuff. And then we kind of went to this one cave and kind of just like fell our way down and then
00:36:46
Speaker
Jake and I just kind of found the end of the game. We're like, oh shit, this is end game content. So we went through it again. We tried doing a similar strategy because I still don't know the actual correct way to get to the end of the game.
00:36:59
Speaker
But as we were doing it Jake again died along the way a lot, but it wasn't tenable for him to get back Yeah, and I was already past a certain point and he's like I'll just watch you do it And I'm like, okay, this will be fine. I and I looked and I had like no hunger Sorry, I had I had no food. Yes, they're like I'm very minimal supplies So I just got
00:37:23
Speaker
the weapons and resources they had. And just like, okay, rolled up sleeves, murder spree. I ran out there with like a bow, I was like shooting cannibals. And then I ran out, I had like three arrows, I'd run out of arrows, but I'd still do the draw animation, but nothing would happen. So I'd go up to a- It's an intimidation tactic. So like maybe a low light, it looks like- Yeah, they don't know what I have. So I'd run up in there, I'd grab the arrows from their body, re-knock my bow and try and shoot them again.
00:37:53
Speaker
But it's like this whole whole thing, but it is possible for like one person to go through Everything and I should hope so. There's a single player Yeah, I really do like I don't want to get into it because that's part of the joy of the game specifically. Yeah is Seeing the end game kind of evolve But it was just a really cool
00:38:17
Speaker
transition. Yes. I'll phrase it that way. You become a woman. I think that's the biggest surprise the first time we played it for me was the fact that there actually is a plot. It's easy to get
00:38:35
Speaker
to see the intro would be like, all right, that's the stepping stone to just an open survival game. And there's plenty of open survival games where like, there's no reason to complete the plot or the plot is just a footnote at the end of like something. And this one has, it is still like fairly distinct. Like here is the path that leads to the end of the game. Here's all of the open world content and a lot of stuff in caves, but
00:39:05
Speaker
If you just spend time in the game, you're likely to eventually end up completing it. Yeah. It's a very organic progression because you wouldn't know that the game has a plot, like you said, until you start finding things throughout. Maybe you explore the above ground and maybe you find a cave. You go in a cave, you find some other stuff. You find some pictures. You find some clues. You're like, okay, something's going on here. This might point me to this next area.
00:39:35
Speaker
but you were initially just going out for supplies or food. Survival is always your priority in this game. We were talking about Minecraft, right? Survival matters the first day. And then you're like, everything else is just, eventually you have a killing field set up for zombies. They're falling down a hole and you're just macro killing them with a sword or something that repairs itself off of their souls. You stop by the factory, you're like, hey, how are things going, Jim? How's the wife and kids? And then you just take your cut and you leave.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah, like this is not that kind of game. Everything that you do, well you have the option of building just because, but it has a utilitarian purpose of furthering your survival.
00:40:17
Speaker
And it gets hard, which I can say, I think, with honesty for myself more than I can say for Dave, because he made it to the end. But I died like 30 times. I've become good at cheesing certain things. I understand certain game mechanics. But if we're talking about the first playthrough where we had like four or five people as a group and we had a base, our whole goal at that time was just to have a perimeter and how that exists.
00:40:47
Speaker
But as days progress and you haven't died, cannibals will attack. You're hitting the walls. And maybe mutants come out. And we haven't talked about this yet. We haven't talked about mutants.
00:40:59
Speaker
There's, let's say, three basic types of mutants. I think that's right. Roughly. I think so. Yeah. There's arms. Yeah. Armsy. Which is like humanoid, a bigger upper body, and just kind of like extra bits of arms and flesh. No real face. It's just kind of a skin monster. Yeah. But that's spooky. There's also legs, which we'll call that the inverse of arms.
00:41:25
Speaker
There's also a cow man, which is just a really fat, a lot of extra flesh. It's a humanoid, basically, yeah.
00:41:33
Speaker
And it's very slow and has deliberate steps and it kind of has like stomps that kind of echo throughout. Yeah, you can hear it from a great distance. You're just like, what is that? Okay, there's something out there in the forest. And it's slow until it's aggressed, in which case it fucking books it. Yeah. Like it's full Reinhardt charge actually, like no, no, no, no, no.
00:41:55
Speaker
There was one of them that tried to, it was just out in the open world and came near our base. I was like, this is my chance for supplies. So I went outside the base and I had some deadfall traps, as I mentioned, set up all over the place. I was like, all right, I will aggress it. So I took out my slingshot with a little rock. I'm like, fire, hit it with a rock, does like nothing, except piss it off.
00:42:17
Speaker
it charges at me straight into the trap but uh the trap takes too long to fall and it actually he hits the trap first demolishes the thing completely destroys the trap and i'm like my plan may have been a little bit advised yes um so i let it into like a large group of traps that i had and it managed to actually die to those but
00:42:39
Speaker
Always have a backup plan. This is the advice here. They're interesting encounters. They have a lot of health and they can very quickly punish any mistakes that you make. Yeah. I know I talked about the bow a little bit. It's initially for hunting and then for some ranged combat because even if you have an axe
00:43:03
Speaker
It's really easy for some like you're surrounded by two enemies and one will just kind of like slap you from the side. Yeah. And then you get hit a second time, third time and you're down. So any other options are ideal typically. Um, but if you use a bow into one of these mutants, they're kind of like.
00:43:21
Speaker
That's cute. Like what's up? Unless you get a headshot. Or the mutants, the mutants. So a lot of times we'd be crafting molotovs and be like, fire, get some damage every time on that bitch. Or let me make an explosive and hope to god it blows to pieces. But I remember we threw
00:43:40
Speaker
like 10 projectiles of this one cow man that's kind of like in the corner and was too dumb to like know where we were. So we just kept like throwing out these molotovs like taking turns. Yeah. It's not it's not a game where like you're gonna have a very conventional
00:43:57
Speaker
I'm going to run up and smack it like medieval exchanges fight. You want to cheese things out as much as you can. There's a lot of interesting melee weapons you can get, and they'll have a variable amount of attack damage, attack speed, and block.
00:44:15
Speaker
and clubs have like really good block mitigation but unless you're like have a dedicated two-man squad where like one guy's blocking attacks the other guy's like you know flanking with his katana or whatever um it's much safer to hide on a rock and skyrim it out you know yeah i will find a place where you cannot path to me but i can fire upon you
00:44:46
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of cheese. The one enemy I do feel very confident in, besides birds, which birds are not really an enemy, but they're so easy to kill. The source of food and feathers. Are the little babies. Yeah, mutant. So if you imagine a baby, like a fat baby, and then you remove a couple limbs, and you combine that with a raw chicken,
00:45:10
Speaker
That's kind of what it is, but it also squeals, and it's kind of like Play-Doh. It kind of looks like it's from Binding of Isaac. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a bubble. Like a more realistic Binding of Isaac. But it will kind of like crawl, then when it gets close enough, it'll kind of like squeal, but like then like throw itself after you in this comical, like flinging your own body way. Yeah, yeah. It's like, hey, here's some physics on this baby. But I love taking the axe and just hitting them once, and then they're dead.
00:45:39
Speaker
Because they do hit you, they are enemies. But I love killing babies. Right, that's the... Yeah. Keep taking away there. I know we already talked about the cannibals.
00:45:54
Speaker
But there's one extra anecdote I wanted to mention. At one point, I set up outside of our base because you don't want enemies to hit your walls. You have to come back, you have to repair them. It takes all this effort. So I set up a drying rack, which you can use to put meats up. Hunting is a big part of the game. You can get skins that you can use to craft pouches to hold more of your basic supplies, sticks, rocks, whatever.
00:46:19
Speaker
Really beneficial if you do that. But I set up this drying rack, and I put a bunch of human parts on it. Because much like Dead Space, you can take a melee weapon and strategically dismember these cannibals. It's not strategic in this game, but that's the term they use in Dead Space. Take their parts, like human arm, human head, human leg, and then put them up on this drying rack. Other cannibals, as it turns out,
00:46:45
Speaker
you may guess by the name, like eating human parts. So you set these up in the open, and I'm like, and now I surround it with traps. So I had this drawing rack out here where it's like, if enemies ever got close to our base, instead of just wailing on the base, they'll try to go for the food.
00:47:04
Speaker
and get destroyed by all these traps. I'd run out, pick up their corpses, run back, throw them on the fire, get tons of bones and just make layers of bone armor and bows or not bows, arrows. Firing bows is less efficient than firing arrows. I just, I take the bow, I hold it by the string and I just kind of like throw it as hard as I can. But it's, it's fun little like emergent strategies like that that I really appreciate in the forest.
00:47:34
Speaker
I get more out of the opponent's AI in the forest because they've got layers to them. Yeah. And like you said, the cannibals are actually interesting, whereas the mutants are kind of single-minded like, fuck that guy, and they'll just try and murder you. Very much, they're like the specials kind of like in Left 4 Dead. Not with the same nuance, but they're there for murdering.
00:48:03
Speaker
So I guess what is one of the things that spooked you most about the game? Did you ever have any like, oh, holy shit moments. There's, there's a couple of things like in the game that kind of are, they unnerved me like significantly more than others. Well, I know I know one, but I don't want to spoil that. Yeah. Well, I'll mention what I can think of. You can,
00:48:27
Speaker
Tell me about the thing I missed that scares me a lot. One of them is spending any time outside at night. The game has really good audio design for the most part, with some exceptions. My main exception, which I didn't really like, is sometimes you'll get like an ambient cannibal screech.
00:48:46
Speaker
that doesn't seem to be audibly, at least with my headset, didn't come from an audible direction, it just happens. And I don't think that was attached to a particular enemy. It could just be like a general, hey, it's nighttime, you're unnerved, go. Yeah, it's like the Legends of Zelda, a crow crows somewhere, right, and you hear it. But other than that, like you can hear things approach.
00:49:10
Speaker
Um, so if you're out like moving slowly crouching, you can stealth and then you can like sprint while in stealth to make me a little faster. Um, I don't know what that looks like, but it sounds funny. Wobbly legs. Um, you can like hear cannibals like running through the forest. The crushing of the leaves. Yeah. Yeah. And so that combined with the fact that this game has no problem being very low light and
00:49:39
Speaker
If you use a light that'll attract cannibals because they'll see it, like you can choose to sacrifice your own awareness in order to be safe for yourself.
00:49:51
Speaker
but you don't feel safe because you hear all of the sounds around you. That's like one of the, that's the one of the biggest things. And then just being in caves by myself as an adult, almost 30 year old man, like makes me uncomfortable because it's really dark. And sometimes you just see the silhouettes of things ahead of you in the, in the night. It's always night in caves, by the way. There is no, there's no natural light source for the most part. Yeah.
The Role of Darkness in Exploration
00:50:18
Speaker
Those are the two things that stood out to me.
00:50:21
Speaker
What was, what was your thing that you were thinking of? Um, trying to think back to the first play through. Cause second one, I remembered a lot. I'd say a good deal of like the, the gimmicks. So I would just like sprint through caves and like hope to God, I didn't find like a ledge. I was going to run off. Yes. In the most part, there's a lot of those, but like you said, the game is very dark. It doesn't have what I call moonlighting where.
00:50:47
Speaker
I remember I made this analogy when we were talking about it. So let's say in TV, a couple has just made love and it's at nighttime because that's the only time you do it.
00:50:59
Speaker
Like there's like a moonlight effect coming in, they're under the covers, even though like, I sweat to some degree. But it's in this situation, but there's just enough light that you can see things perfectly fine. Now in games, a lot of times when you're in darkness in caves, and Minecraft does this, where like you'll have like, it's pitch black, but because it's so dark, we will adjust the lighting a little bit so you can see the outlines of things. Right. You're never just trapped in the darkness, unable to tell which way to go. It's not pitch black, you know?
00:51:29
Speaker
But this game does not do that.
00:51:32
Speaker
So, um, I think that one of the first times was when I was using the lighter to explore a cave is you're like, okay, I'm looking at a thing. I see an enemy and then your lighter goes out. Yeah. And then like your characters kind of like clicking the lighter back on and you're like, Oh shit. Yeah. Because that little bubble of safety that you had this perimeter of vision just disappeared and it wasn't like, Hey, your light source is running low. It's like, and it's gone. Yeah. It's.
00:52:02
Speaker
absolutely terrified. There's other sources of light you can use. You can actually wrap your plain axe with cloth by just combining it with cloth, one piece of cloth, and then you can light it like you would light a Molotov and it'll temporarily burn for a few minutes. Interesting. Yeah, you can use that as an emergency light thing or add a little bit of fire damage to your attacks.
00:52:27
Speaker
And there's other kind of like impromptu things you can do. I know I did this playthrough, um, essentially duct tape a flashlight to my bow. Yeah. So when I would be aiming down the quote unquote sites of the bow, it also be like shining a light in their face and like, I'm going to shoot you. Fun random fact about the flashlight. I actually, I saw this on the Wiki. I didn't experience it in the game this time, but flashlight is usually as many flashlights. It produces a white light.
00:52:53
Speaker
You get a little bit of a circle on the inside, which I don't know how realistic that is, from the light shining around the aperture. But if your flashlight gets blood on it, it produces a red light. What? And the red light is easier to see and brighter for some reason than the white light. So there's a strategy of trying to get blood on your flashlight
00:53:22
Speaker
which will go off if you go through water or something else that would clean you in order to improve your light in the darkness. Interesting. And we're not really going too much into spoilers, but there's an effect on certain opponents. They'll react to the color red. So it's something you can look into on your own time. Mask. I like how there's still things I don't actually know about this game.
00:53:53
Speaker
Cause I remember like first play through, I went up and like started to build a base at the foot of like a snowy mountain. Yeah. And I'm like, I remember this year. I will take my, I think I got a gun at a point. It's like, I will shoot deer. Yeah. I'll come back and have deer skin and I'd have like the, uh, the tennis racket shoes for the snow. Yeah. I'd be like, this is my life now. Yeah. We, we have like a cold weather hunting cabin is basically what it was. We're just like, clearly the cannibals will not be able to reach us here up in the mountain.
00:54:24
Speaker
They can, they don't give a shit. They run around naked, like it doesn't faze them. Freaking hippies. Alright, what about gripes? Gripes. So some of these do exist for me in the game. The main thing I think for me was kind of some of the balance peaks where it's like
00:54:49
Speaker
I mentioned respawning right at the plane with very low health, very low food, very low water. It's easy to make your base the first time significantly far away from the cave. And you start off with like, unless the food manages to spawn in for you.
00:55:04
Speaker
which normally it does, but sometimes it doesn't. You'll have very low stamina. So you're just like doing this desperate crawl through the forest back to your base, hoping that you don't run across any enemies because no weapons fondant for you either. And combined with the fact the game gets harder as it goes on, the game adds more enemies, literally. You're less and less likely to be able to make it back to your base as the game has gotten harder. Yeah.
00:55:33
Speaker
The other main grip I had for me is the caves are from a meta perspective or mechanics perspective a little bit cheap and that things there respawn. Some of that's out of necessity in case you die and you lose plot progression items that you need.
00:55:50
Speaker
Oh yeah, you're saying item wise. Yes, but like supplies, if you like enter a cave, leave the cave, enter the cave, all the supplies will be back. So you can just grab a bunch of flares, grab a bunch of TNT. It's actually because the enemies in the caves don't increase as the days go on, and the difficulty doesn't increase in caves.
00:56:08
Speaker
caves become increasingly a better, safer place to be compared to the overworld. Because enemies will not spawn in caves at all. And once you've cleared out a whole cave, it's safe. Yes.
00:56:21
Speaker
So another reason I'd be down there a lot is because I can just be like, what's going to get me? I've already thrown explosives at everything. I'll hide in bodies on the ground. I don't care. Yeah. Like I have nothing to fear. Yeah. And so I kind of wish that the, there was a kind of some sort of mechanic to like escalate the caves as well, um, to make it match the overworld a little bit. Um, that being said, I can't think of a way I would do that where it wouldn't also upset me.
00:56:48
Speaker
You're just like, ah crap, it's day 20, I haven't gotten into any caves. They're full of mutants now, right? You're like... You actually can't crawl in, it's just, it's so packed. I'm just like, flesh.
00:57:00
Speaker
You go down a rope with just a hundred babies at the bottom. Yeah. So kind of what I wish was, um, this would be a concession on the difficulty a little bit, but, um, the game tells you how many days you lived when you die. I kind of wish that when you died in the overworld, it would reset. Yeah. Like, or at least go back a little bit on the difficulty slider. So like the enemies are a little bit weaker. They're like, you're actually on day 15, but they're day 10 enemies or something like that. Um, okay.
00:57:32
Speaker
I mean, immediate counter argument, I would kill myself five times in a row and just go back to like, hey, it's just me and one other guy on the island. And you can, but I mean, if you're playing it in, like, it ultimately is a co-op or single player game, so you should be able to play it kind of however you want anyways, right? Yeah. Like, yes, that does make it more casual, but on the other hand, if you're trying to play it for progress,
00:58:00
Speaker
I think it was actively telling you like hey, you're at day 15 day difficulty right now and you're still alive Then it's like a challenge because you're like, oh I died crap now I'm down to like day 10 or something like that difficulty I feel like that would be more of a push for people who enjoy that hardcore gameplay I could see it because now death is like not just I gotta reclaim my body It's ah crap. They put me down to like casual mode again, you know, whatever but
00:58:29
Speaker
That's kind of all tangential to the plot of the game anyways. Surviving is important, but you could speedrun this game if you knew where everything was, since it does have an ending. I think you just need two core items. Yeah, you don't need a lot. You really don't need a lot.
00:58:50
Speaker
And people do speedrun this game. We always come back to talking about speedruns, but maybe next time we can do that. But other than that, I think the gameplay is really solid. The main things that surprised me that I enjoyed was the fact that, like I mentioned, it has a plot.
00:59:06
Speaker
The visceral feel to the crafting feels a lot better than just dropping things into a crafting grid like all of Minecraft. It feels cool to combine things, put logs in a cart, push it back to your base, gather a bunch of sticks, like stockpiling and hoarding supplies.
00:59:24
Speaker
is a viable strategy that feels good. Yeah. To that end, like you don't have a chest where you're like, oh, stuff's in there. Yeah. Where it's just items. Like Jake had crafted these little boxes or baskets out of sticks. Yeah. And one was like for bones, one was for rocks. And like you see them physically in there. Yeah. Which is nice. So you'd have like, you can carry most things in your inventory, but you can only carry so much of it.
00:59:50
Speaker
So it's, there's an incentive to go back to base and like, okay, drop off all these stones I accumulated. Here's all the sticks and the bones. Um, it kind of, I like hoarding and my survival games, if there's a reason for it. And, uh, this game has that good, I'm accumulating stuff that's going to be useful in the future feel. Yeah. Um, but.
01:00:15
Speaker
Yeah. What about, what about you? What gripes did you have kind of, cause I know you were more successful than I was in this, this play through as far as surviving. I honestly can't think of any, I feel like any mistakes I made as far as like death were my own. I don't think the game cheated me out of anything. Um,
01:00:42
Speaker
It would have been maybe nice to have a better way to find certain things. Like we found a turtle for a turtle show. Yeah. Never saw another turtle. To be fair, we were not exploring beaches a whole lot. We're kind of like setting up a base.
01:00:58
Speaker
Yeah, I eventually found like a pack like three turtles on the other side of the map during a mass exploration Like where I was just looking for stuff. I mean, you can only carry one turtle shell at a time. So This isn't sort of power at all Huh, that's that's I mean, it's pretty solid it is a solid game Yeah, hmm I guess
01:01:25
Speaker
The biggest thing is if you touch water, like in most games, it's like, hey, you're kind of essentially a naked man. The water's not warm. And then you're immediately like, ooh, I'm cold. So you kind of get like this frost effect around your screen. But what I love about the frost effect is when you go next to a fire to like, hey, I'm gonna dry off, warm up. Also you can like put paper or like money into the fire. And it kind of goes,
01:01:53
Speaker
flares up, but you actually see it slowly melt. It's not like it's, oh, here's static ice. The ice is gone. Like it's a nice progression. That's a positive thing. So I like that, but I felt a lot of times I'd be going to do a thing and I'd be out for like five minutes and I feel like
01:02:17
Speaker
I'd either be like cold or starving or thirsty. I'm like, okay, I have to stop what I'm doing to go back and manage those resources. So you would have like like deeper pools for resources? Like maybe just a little bit. Yeah. Because I'm fine with like, I need to manage my resources of food and water. But like I'd start off with like a Kit-Kat bar and I go and like
01:02:43
Speaker
I'd go down the beach, cut one tree, come back, and it's like, hey man, what about that snack? I'm like, oh, come on. And it just seemed a little too frequent. Later on in the game, I was like, OK, do I have a stockpile of stacks? Do I have all these sodas? And I want to make sure I had a shit ton of everything, so I didn't have to go back.
01:03:05
Speaker
As a counterpoint to that, they do have the ability. You can grab some dried meats off your drying rack, like some lizard. Yeah, you can store stuff. I had a water skin at the end of the game, which helped a lot. Thanks for sharing that, Jack. But there's also blueberries that you planted, which is nice.
01:03:24
Speaker
You can't store them in your inventory, but you can go and be like, come on, blah, blah, blah. Actually, I think you can actually make a berry bag. I never did that. What? Yeah, I know. That would have been useful. So ignore everything I said. Yeah. There's ways around everything. You just need to do it. Yeah. It's not always obvious what you can create. It's not all explicitly pointed out to you. And it's not all in the crafting book either. You don't have a visual, like, here's what you should do to survive. Yeah, it's literally like, hey, here's basics. Yeah. And you're like, OK, what can I do with these basics? Yeah.
01:03:53
Speaker
It took me a while to realize like, oh, I drag animal skin in and I can make all these different pouches. Some of that could be more clear, I think, even if that's provide the clarity as you go through the game, like more recipes. I know we're like a little long here, but the last thing I wanted to talk about is the fact that there's an insanity meter for your character.
Sanity Levels and Gameplay Evolution
01:04:16
Speaker
Because I love this and I feel it would be a mess to not talk about it. There's a percentage basically as you encounter things in the game that disturb your character. Mutants, monsters, the fate of other passengers.
01:04:33
Speaker
your insanity meter basically like fills up and uh once it reaches a certain point there's like bloody pages added to your guidebook yeah that are like here's how you make effigies out of human body parts they're like huh all right well i guess we're getting there and uh i just really appreciate that i think that's great um no it's definitely a solid touch i completely forgot about the other passengers
01:05:03
Speaker
Yeah. They were there. They got fucked. The one I remember is there's like one dead guy in a cave. He's hanging upside down. You can steal his watch, which is a crafting ingredient. And his shirt just comically says, I love travel. It's like, look where that got you. But
01:05:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's just, it's for environment building. That's pretty much it. Yeah, there's like, as you encounter things, your guy will get like, he'll hear like a scribble sound, which means that in your notebook, he's got a to-do. I can make a pile of his body parts to scare off. It'll be like, explore hanging cave or something like that. And one of the first ones you'll get is like, find out what happened to other passengers.
01:05:50
Speaker
That's an objective you can do in the game. It does actually, I think, check off each passenger on the manifest as you find them. Interesting. But you'd have to be playing like hardcore completionists to really, really find everybody. Where's Susan from 6B? I don't know. But that all being said, I would like to thank everyone for listening to another episode of Soapstone.
01:06:14
Speaker
As always, you can reach out to us on Gmail at soapstonepodcastgmail.com, or you can like us on Facebook and contribute to the discussion there at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. Always happy to hear about what you guys, guys' thoughts are on this episode and other episodes. Until next time, we'll see you in the next one.