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Game of the Year 2023
4 Plays1 year ago
We have reached the temporal conclusion of the year 2023, which means only ONE THING: it's time for our Games of the Year! If you've been listening all year long you can probably guess a few of these!
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Transcript
Humorous Opening and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Yeah, unless you're going to a place riddled with cholera.
00:00:04
Speaker
Right, yeah, don't go to a gas station and pass him around, but you're probably fine otherwise, so that was good to know.
00:00:11
Speaker
Yeah, we're going to leave him on the counter next to the hot dog warmer at a Sheetz.
00:00:17
Speaker
It's what Jesus would have done.
00:00:19
Speaker
It's what Jesus would have done.
00:00:20
Speaker
What Mary would have done with Jesus, I have to assume.
00:00:24
Speaker
I mean, she was a teen mother.
00:00:25
Speaker
Yeah, she didn't have... You think she had her shit together?
00:00:28
Speaker
She did not.
00:00:30
Speaker
She did not.
00:00:31
Speaker
She did not.
00:00:32
Speaker
She was marrying some carpenter dude.
00:00:35
Speaker
She was banging mighty deities like there are no consequences to that.
00:00:41
Speaker
No consequences.
00:00:43
Speaker
None.
00:00:44
Speaker
Saying there's an immaculate conception, I'd say it's just a...
00:00:50
Speaker
godly condom that happened to break.
00:00:52
Speaker
It's true.
00:00:53
Speaker
It's true.
00:00:55
Speaker
Everybody gets unlucky, even God.
00:00:57
Speaker
Everybody gets unlucky, even God.
00:00:59
Speaker
And you know who else is unlucky?
00:01:02
Speaker
Who's that?
Game of the Year Discussion
00:01:03
Speaker
Hey there, everybody.
00:01:05
Speaker
Welcome back to Pixlet.
00:01:07
Speaker
My name is Kevin.
00:01:08
Speaker
With me as always is Phil.
00:01:10
Speaker
And on today's show, we're doing our Game of the Year episode.
00:01:14
Speaker
I'll tell you who's unlucky.
00:01:15
Speaker
Anyone who isn't on these lists.
00:01:19
Speaker
Anyone who is not on these lists.
00:01:21
Speaker
And you know what?
00:01:22
Speaker
Phil and I are giving you a bunch of games to check out today, basically.
00:01:26
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:01:26
Speaker
Because our lists this year did not overlap as much as they did last year.
00:01:34
Speaker
I really thought this year was going to be worse because we did play a lot more games at the same time, the same kind of games.
00:01:41
Speaker
And we went through the list together and it's just a few.
00:01:45
Speaker
I was genuinely shocked.
00:01:46
Speaker
Just a few.
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:49
Speaker
I think there was probably a bunch of, I don't know.
00:01:54
Speaker
I don't know why it was.
00:01:55
Speaker
I was on a real horror kick this year, but you're always on
Horror Games Focus
00:01:58
Speaker
a horror kick too.
00:01:58
Speaker
I was too.
00:01:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:01:59
Speaker
I was too.
00:02:00
Speaker
But let me see.
00:02:01
Speaker
Hold on.
00:02:02
Speaker
One, two, three.
00:02:03
Speaker
You know, and not as many of them as you'd think are horror games.
00:02:07
Speaker
There are a couple of horror-adjacent ones.
00:02:09
Speaker
Horror-adjacent.
00:02:09
Speaker
They're kind of iffy.
00:02:10
Speaker
You squint your eyes.
00:02:12
Speaker
Anyway, yeah.
00:02:13
Speaker
So you were saying something about games and how we play them.
00:02:19
Speaker
Yes.
00:02:19
Speaker
Almost all the games on my list are horror games, with the exception of... One, two...
00:02:28
Speaker
Baldur's Gate 3.
00:02:30
Speaker
I've got four definite horror games and like...
00:02:36
Speaker
one or two that are adjacent that have some moments.
00:02:40
Speaker
Right.
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:40
Speaker
For as many horror games as I played this year, because you're right.
00:02:43
Speaker
I, I, that's, that is kind of my bailiwick.
00:02:46
Speaker
Uh, I, uh, yeah, that's surprising.
00:02:49
Speaker
I hadn't even thought about it until now.
00:02:50
Speaker
That's hilarious.
00:02:51
Speaker
Uh, Baldur's Gate three has horror elements in it.
00:02:55
Speaker
Yes.
Deep Dive: Pizza Tower
00:02:56
Speaker
Without question.
00:02:57
Speaker
And so does pizza tower.
00:03:00
Speaker
Um,
00:03:01
Speaker
But other than that, you know, but... Wait, are you seeing pizza towers on your list?
00:03:08
Speaker
I don't remember you being that pumped about that one.
00:03:11
Speaker
Pizza tower.
00:03:12
Speaker
We like, we have fun.
00:03:14
Speaker
We have fun.
00:03:14
Speaker
We have fun.
00:03:15
Speaker
We have fun here.
00:03:16
Speaker
We have fun here.
00:03:17
Speaker
We have fun here.
00:03:18
Speaker
So let's put all these 20 bodies.
00:03:20
Speaker
We got 20 bodies here and we got to put them all in a March.
00:03:23
Speaker
We're like, we're like, speaking of pizza, we're like a guy in an Italian restaurant and we're like, whoa.
00:03:29
Speaker
And we're balancing like stacks of pizza.
00:03:32
Speaker
We're like a waiter.
00:03:33
Speaker
And there's like a guy, there's a couple of guys with like, they're moving like glass.
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:39
Speaker
For some reason.
00:03:40
Speaker
And there's an old woman with a fruit stand, like a little cart.
00:03:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:03:44
Speaker
There's, there's a cat.
00:03:45
Speaker
It's just running around.
00:03:46
Speaker
And there actually is a cat that's running around.
00:03:48
Speaker
There is a cat.
00:03:49
Speaker
On my lap.
00:03:51
Speaker
She does not waste any time.
Exploring Dave the Diver
00:03:53
Speaker
Thank you, Ripley.
00:03:54
Speaker
Welcome.
00:03:55
Speaker
She's like, oh, the camera's on.
00:03:57
Speaker
I'll be right over.
00:03:58
Speaker
I'll be right over.
00:03:59
Speaker
Would you like an extra 20 pounds on your lap?
00:04:01
Speaker
Here we go.
00:04:01
Speaker
Pretty much, Lord, she's gotten big.
00:04:04
Speaker
And now she's got her winter coat and everything.
00:04:06
Speaker
She is just... It's just all fat and fluff.
00:04:09
Speaker
I know.
00:04:10
Speaker
I know.
00:04:10
Speaker
But that's what we love about her.
00:04:13
Speaker
No fat shaming in this family.
00:04:14
Speaker
We can't.
00:04:17
Speaker
It's not going to be that.
00:04:19
Speaker
Definitely wouldn't make any sense.
00:04:20
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:04:23
Speaker
All right.
00:04:24
Speaker
So we're going to put these bodies in the marsh and kick things off with number 10.
00:04:29
Speaker
Cops are saying he's a cop.
00:04:33
Speaker
So I won't look for the cop.
00:04:36
Speaker
Phil, what is your 10th?
00:04:39
Speaker
Best game of the year.
00:04:41
Speaker
My number 10 for this year is Micro Civilization, which now this one is kind of weird, a weird choice for me, not because of what it is, which is a clicker 4X game, because that actually fits my bill just fine.
00:04:55
Speaker
But the fact that it's an early access game and in fact, like really early access, like I think the last patch was like 0.6 or something along those lines.
00:05:05
Speaker
But the fact of the matter is, is
00:05:08
Speaker
There is so much content in there already.
00:05:10
Speaker
They're doing so many things right with it.
00:05:13
Speaker
It's satisfying.
00:05:15
Speaker
It's fun.
00:05:15
Speaker
I love the art style in it.
00:05:19
Speaker
Ripley.
00:05:22
Speaker
It's a really nice way to while away an hour or two while you're listening to podcasts and still feel like you're getting something done.
Micro Civilization and Game Diversity
00:05:31
Speaker
It isn't like one of those clicker games that you could just leave it alone and it takes care of itself.
00:05:36
Speaker
It's definitely not that.
00:05:37
Speaker
You have to...
00:05:38
Speaker
You really do need to pay attention to it.
00:05:41
Speaker
Um, and, uh, and, and the stuff that they ask you to pay attention to is genuinely interesting.
00:05:47
Speaker
Uh, a lot of fun and it hits a lot of the same, uh, buttons that any great Forex, uh,
00:05:56
Speaker
will do in terms of research and leaders and even wonders and stuff like that.
00:06:02
Speaker
So for all of my Civ fans out there, this is a really enjoyable one.
00:06:08
Speaker
I don't have one, but I imagine that this would be a hell of a lot of fun on the Steam Deck.
00:06:15
Speaker
on a plane or on a car, you know, a, you know, a car trip, preferably when you're not driving or, or just hanging out, watching a movie or something at the end of the evening.
00:06:26
Speaker
I could see where this would be very entertaining for that.
00:06:28
Speaker
So I was weird with the idea of it being this in early access and putting on the list, but I can't ignore the fact that I've pumped a lot of time into this one.
00:06:38
Speaker
And so on number 10, it goes.
00:06:41
Speaker
So Kevin, what is, what is your number?
00:06:44
Speaker
10 my number 10 is the aforementioned pizza tower it's a tower pizza tower is a platformer in the molds of wario um the wario land games so if you don't know especially in the later see i want to say i'm not a wario expert hot cider
00:07:06
Speaker
is a Wario expert.
00:07:08
Speaker
So if you want to learn more about Wario, go to his YouTube channel.
00:07:11
Speaker
He has several videos on the topic.
00:07:13
Speaker
But I believe it was in Wario Land 3 or 4.
00:07:17
Speaker
There was a mechanic introduced where you have to, you go through the level in one direction, right?
00:07:24
Speaker
You have to collect things, get a high score, and then you get to the end of the level and you hit a switch and the level starts basically like collapsing and falling apart.
00:07:34
Speaker
And it's like a little, you know, the Metroid self-destruct sequence at the end of every Metroid game.
00:07:40
Speaker
It's like that, but every level.
00:07:41
Speaker
So you hit the switch and now you have to backtrack your way out of the level, basically speed run back out of the level.
00:07:49
Speaker
in a way so that you get out of there before the timer hits zero.
00:07:54
Speaker
So that's Pizza Tower in a nutshell.
00:07:56
Speaker
You play as,
Varied Gaming Experiences
00:07:58
Speaker
what is his, it's some really Pizza Tower guy name.
00:08:06
Speaker
Pizza pasta?
00:08:08
Speaker
No, his name's Pepino.
00:08:10
Speaker
Ah, Pepino.
00:08:13
Speaker
I'm glad they showed some restraint.
00:08:15
Speaker
Some restraint.
00:08:16
Speaker
Some.
00:08:18
Speaker
You play as Pepino, who is this real twitchy pizza maker.
00:08:26
Speaker
He is in danger of being run out of business because...
00:08:32
Speaker
This entity named, I believe it's, yeah, it's Pizza Head or Pizza Face has built a tower, a pizza tower that is overshadowing his restaurant.
00:08:47
Speaker
So Pepino Spaghetti has to...
00:08:52
Speaker
Wait, is that seriously his last name?
00:08:53
Speaker
Yeah, I think so.
00:08:56
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:08:56
Speaker
I love it.
00:08:56
Speaker
Okay, great.
00:08:58
Speaker
Great.
00:08:59
Speaker
Hold on.
00:09:00
Speaker
Peppino Spaghetti.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:17
Speaker
His name's Pepino Spaghetti.
00:09:18
Speaker
Pepino Spaghetti.
00:09:20
Speaker
Anyway.
00:09:21
Speaker
Fair enough.
00:09:22
Speaker
So basically, the art style looks as if it's been drawn in MS Paint.
00:09:29
Speaker
But it's so well animated.
00:09:33
Speaker
It's kind of like a really high quality version of home movies.
00:09:40
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:09:41
Speaker
It's very home movies in its style.
00:09:45
Speaker
So...
00:09:46
Speaker
You run through these levels and there's a few worlds or a few stages on each level of the tower.
00:09:55
Speaker
And you have to get enough money or points on each stage in order to gain access to the elevator that takes you to the next level.
00:10:04
Speaker
And you rinse and repeat and you go up.
00:10:07
Speaker
And then each level of the tower is themed.
00:10:10
Speaker
So there's one level where it's like there's horror scenes
00:10:14
Speaker
stages in it that are, you know, spooky.
00:10:18
Speaker
And every time you get caught, you get a jump scare.
Highlight: Hi-Fi Rush
00:10:22
Speaker
Nice.
00:10:27
Speaker
So, yeah, and there's boss fights and and and all that stuff.
00:10:32
Speaker
It's it's really charming, really, really weird.
00:10:38
Speaker
Just in terms of.
00:10:41
Speaker
what it is and the art style jammed with a genre or a game that, which is Wario land, which is very specific.
00:10:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:55
Speaker
Number 10 pizza tower starring Pepino spaghetti.
00:11:00
Speaker
Go check it out.
00:11:01
Speaker
It's if you have a steam deck, it's actually a really good game for the steam deck because it is a platformer.
00:11:07
Speaker
And I feel like platformers really shine on the steam deck.
00:11:10
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
00:11:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:11
Speaker
So yeah.
00:11:13
Speaker
Pizza tower.
00:11:14
Speaker
Phil.
00:11:16
Speaker
What's number nine?
00:11:18
Speaker
Number nine.
00:11:19
Speaker
Uh,
00:11:21
Speaker
I was in great danger this year of my Nintendo Switch becoming basically what I play retro RPGs on, because that's what I found myself doing constantly.
00:11:34
Speaker
I was playing Final Fantasy and Pokemon and that kind of thing as the evenings progressed.
00:11:39
Speaker
I've never even plugged my Switch into a TV.
00:11:43
Speaker
I've never done it.
00:11:43
Speaker
I've only ever played it handheld.
00:11:46
Speaker
That's why I wanted it.
00:11:48
Speaker
So I thought to myself, well, there are a couple of games that are coming out that are supposed to be really good that look like they would do well with the handheld kind of thing.
00:11:58
Speaker
And I was absolutely right with my number nine, which is Dave the Diver.
00:12:04
Speaker
This was my Nintendo Switch game.
00:12:06
Speaker
I'm still playing.
00:12:07
Speaker
I have not even beaten it.
00:12:10
Speaker
But it's fantastic.
00:12:11
Speaker
It's kind of perfect for...
00:12:15
Speaker
that level of bite-sized half an hour to an hour here and there kind of adventure.
00:12:21
Speaker
You know, you can go off and accomplish a few goals and pop back in.
00:12:25
Speaker
For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Dave the Diver is a lovely pixelated...
00:12:32
Speaker
role-playing game slash exploration game slash adventure game slash cooking simulator uh not really but kind of and uh it is not an indie game despite uh some of the uh
00:12:47
Speaker
It's been a bit of a discourse recently.
00:12:49
Speaker
Like, by the way, Dave the Diver comes from a major publisher.
00:12:52
Speaker
It's not a major publisher.
00:12:53
Speaker
And it shows.
00:12:54
Speaker
And here's the thing.
00:12:55
Speaker
It shows because it is pixelated.
00:12:57
Speaker
But my god, it's high quality.
00:12:59
Speaker
The animation is beautiful.
00:13:02
Speaker
The cut scenes are gorgeous.
00:13:04
Speaker
A lot of work went into this.
00:13:06
Speaker
This was not some scrappy three-person team.
00:13:08
Speaker
This was a big project.
00:13:11
Speaker
And it's huge.
00:13:11
Speaker
It's an enormous game.
00:13:13
Speaker
Basically, for people who haven't played, you play Dave the Diver, who is an adorable sweetheart of a fat man in either a suit or a diving outfit.
00:13:24
Speaker
I'm not convinced that he isn't me.
00:13:27
Speaker
I do feel like my likeness was stolen.
00:13:30
Speaker
Identity theft is not a joke, people.
00:13:33
Speaker
Not a joke, people.
00:13:35
Speaker
Not a joke.
00:13:36
Speaker
And but he's just he's this constantly he's just this sweet schlub of a man who's constantly kind of put upon by all the people around him.
00:13:44
Speaker
And you have days and there are morning, afternoon and evening cycles.
00:13:48
Speaker
And during the morning and afternoon and evening, you have the option of hopping into the drink, so to speak, and catching fish and finding treasure and their quests they'll take you on.
00:13:58
Speaker
that involve merpeople and, and giant whales and fighting sharks and all that shit.
00:14:03
Speaker
And then in the evening, you can get back in the boat and go across the pond to your friend's sushi restaurant, where he will make sushi out of the fish that you've caught.
00:14:14
Speaker
And you can upgrade and enhance these, uh, menu items.
00:14:19
Speaker
Uh, and while also running around, uh, trying to make sure everyone gets fed and their tea is full and their beer is full and, and, uh,
00:14:27
Speaker
And it's great because those kind of like time challenge games, I like them okay, but I can't play an entire game that's centered around that.
00:14:38
Speaker
And I find that Dave the Diver's section of that is just enough time.
00:14:42
Speaker
craziness to enjoy it and it doesn't overstay its welcome, you can kind of go, all right, that was fun.
00:14:48
Speaker
Now I'm going to relaxingly dive into the briny deep again, uh, with my shotgun.
00:14:54
Speaker
Uh, it's, uh, it's, it's really charming and really funny.
00:14:59
Speaker
And again, very accessible in the sense that you don't have to feel the need to, um, play it, uh,
00:15:07
Speaker
you know, for three or four or five hours at a time, although I could totally see where you would.
00:15:10
Speaker
Right.
00:15:11
Speaker
And I think that this is, and my experience with it, I'm getting so much more out of it playing it on my Switch, or if you had been playing it on your Steam Deck, I think it would have been the same, than I would have.
00:15:23
Speaker
I guarantee you if I'd gotten this just for my PC, and I wouldn't, I just don't see myself sitting and playing it at my desk for hours on end.
00:15:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's a game you play...
00:15:36
Speaker
when you're on the couch.
00:15:37
Speaker
Right.
00:15:38
Speaker
It's casual, but deep.
00:15:41
Speaker
It's a perfect second screen game.
00:15:43
Speaker
Yes, absolutely.
00:15:45
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:15:45
Speaker
Couldn't agree more.
00:15:47
Speaker
I think that's really what it's intended for.
00:15:50
Speaker
That's how I've enjoyed it the most, in any case.
00:15:54
Speaker
So, yeah, Dave the Diver.
00:15:57
Speaker
I highly recommend it, especially for a handheld of some sort.
00:16:01
Speaker
So, that's my number nine.
00:16:03
Speaker
Nice.
00:16:04
Speaker
Kevin, what is your number nine?
00:16:06
Speaker
My number nine is Homebody, which is... Yeah.
00:16:12
Speaker
I need to play this.
00:16:13
Speaker
You have gone on my case about this several times.
00:16:15
Speaker
I know I need to play this.
00:16:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:17
Speaker
It is a horror game published by The Game Grumps.
00:16:22
Speaker
Yes, those Game Grumps.
00:16:24
Speaker
You know, the publishers of Dream Daddy and also their own YouTube videos,
00:16:33
Speaker
They've got a little channel.
00:16:34
Speaker
They've just got a little YouTube channel.
00:16:37
Speaker
But yeah, Homebody is made by, I believe his name is Jory, who works in their office.
00:16:47
Speaker
It's a game that deals with...
00:16:51
Speaker
So thematically what it deals with is like anxiety and depression and social anxiety and all that stuff.
00:16:56
Speaker
And really does a good job of tackling those topics in a horror setting.
00:17:03
Speaker
And that horror setting takes a lot of inspiration from Alone in the Dark.
00:17:10
Speaker
And Resident Evil in terms of, and actually more, I would say, Alone in the Dark and Clock Tower in terms of stylings.
00:17:25
Speaker
So the basic gameplay loop is your character is going to a house to hang out with her friends that she hasn't seen in quite a long time.
00:17:37
Speaker
And then at a certain point, something happens and it's terrifying.
00:17:43
Speaker
And then suddenly, oh no, it's the, you're back at the, the time, the moment that you came to the house.
00:17:54
Speaker
So it is a time loop game.
00:17:57
Speaker
It does have aspects of,
00:18:01
Speaker
I would say it has aspects of outer wilds puzzle solving in terms you have like a big board of clues that you got to kind of put together to figure out, all right, this thing goes here.
00:18:12
Speaker
I got to go do this thing.
00:18:13
Speaker
And you, there is a, like, you have to hit everything in the right order.
00:18:20
Speaker
per on each run.
00:18:22
Speaker
Um, so it's really hard to talk about homebody without giving out, giving away too much other than if you like horror, outer wilds alone in the dark and, or pizza, not pizza tower clock tower.
00:18:39
Speaker
If you like pizza tower, you'll love homebody.
00:18:42
Speaker
No, you love it.
00:18:44
Speaker
Clock tower.
00:18:46
Speaker
then I think you really should give it a shot.
00:18:49
Speaker
And, uh, or if you just like games that have like the, the static camera, um, you know, angles kind of like in, in the first Resident Evil games and, and, uh, and alone in the dark, uh, it's really worth checking out.
00:19:06
Speaker
Nice.
00:19:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:09
Speaker
Phil.
00:19:10
Speaker
Okay.
00:19:11
Speaker
What, what, what,
00:19:12
Speaker
What would you say your eighth favorite game of the year is?
00:19:15
Speaker
Off the top of my head, and there's no way that I wrote down notes on this.
00:19:21
Speaker
My eighth favorite game of the year is Hi-Fi Rush.
00:19:25
Speaker
This one came out in January, and I think a lot of people said the same thing.
00:19:31
Speaker
Because, you know, January is not the time that you put out really good games.
00:19:35
Speaker
That's not generally when you see it happen.
00:19:37
Speaker
Because everyone wants to be on the game of the year lists and everything along those lines.
00:19:41
Speaker
They want to be considered, and it's not a great...
00:19:45
Speaker
idea to put yourself right at the beginning of the, of the year when everything else has happened.
00:19:50
Speaker
Uh, and this was one that I played and finished and I had, I said, I have to make, I have to make a point, a note of this.
00:19:57
Speaker
I have to recognize this one.
00:19:58
Speaker
There's I, if, if this game gets bumped out of, of my top 10, then it's been a hell of a year for games.
00:20:06
Speaker
And honestly, it has been a hell of a year for games.
00:20:09
Speaker
Uh, there was some really good things, but hi-fi rush, uh,
00:20:13
Speaker
just sticks with me.
00:20:14
Speaker
For anyone who hasn't played this one, it's done by Tango Gameworks, which is the same group that brought you The Evil Within, which is kind of hilarious because it has nothing to do with that.
00:20:27
Speaker
It is an action platformer.
00:20:29
Speaker
You play a guy named Chai in the near future, probably near, well, not far future, but maybe nearer than we want to admit.
00:20:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:39
Speaker
And you're basically this adorable loser who dreams of being a rock star.
00:20:44
Speaker
And you are labeled a defective by this this corporate government world that's going to send you to the scrap heap.
00:20:54
Speaker
But instead, they they put instead, they accidentally put this kind of like an iPod or something in your heart.
00:21:01
Speaker
And you get a rhythm constantly.
00:21:05
Speaker
And the gameplay works that you have music playing and you have to fight and move to the beat in order to enhance your abilities.
00:21:15
Speaker
And at first when I heard about that, I said, I'm not really a rhythm guy.
00:21:21
Speaker
I feel like that probably won't work out for me.
00:21:24
Speaker
But but it did.
00:21:25
Speaker
And it has a lot of great characters, very anime inspired.
00:21:29
Speaker
I'm not a huge anime guy, but it does follow the one anime trope that I know by heart.
00:21:38
Speaker
And that is the most important weapon of all is friendship.
00:21:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:44
Speaker
And that's that's what this is all about.
00:21:45
Speaker
You've got this lovable team of losers trying to bring down this corporate bullshit, you know, giant.
00:21:53
Speaker
And it's gorgeous.
00:21:54
Speaker
The colors absolutely pop out of the screen.
00:21:57
Speaker
The soundtrack fucking rules that the music on it.
00:22:01
Speaker
It's this great combination of songs I know by heart and stuff I've never heard before, but is now on permanent rotation on my Spotify playlists.
00:22:10
Speaker
Um, it's, it's fun.
00:22:12
Speaker
It feels good to play.
00:22:13
Speaker
Even when you get to a point with some of these, uh, bad guys that you, you, you know, you have to learn how to fight them and you might be getting a little frustrated, but there's something about the rhythm that just lulls you into this.
00:22:27
Speaker
Like, no, we're good.
00:22:28
Speaker
I I've, I've got this.
00:22:29
Speaker
I've got this.
00:22:30
Speaker
It's also incredibly funny.
00:22:32
Speaker
It's a really, really funny game.
00:22:34
Speaker
And it came out at the beginning of the year for 30 bucks.
00:22:38
Speaker
And it is triple A. And it was completely unannounced.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:22:44
Speaker
There was just nothing.
00:22:44
Speaker
They just dropped it.
00:22:46
Speaker
And it was Shinji Mikami's last game.
00:22:52
Speaker
That's right.
00:22:53
Speaker
As an executive producer at Tango Gameworks.
00:22:57
Speaker
just, and, and what a wonderful way to head out because the game is triumphant and positive and, and fun.
00:23:07
Speaker
It's like, that's as far as creative endeavors are concerned, being remembered for something, uh, I would think, yeah, that, that kind of attitude, that's where you want to go and succeeded.
00:23:17
Speaker
And you know, what's wild is just like, as an aside, Shinji Mikami is, he's like,
00:23:24
Speaker
I don't know if we, if we have like a George Romero in the game industry, it's him, you know?
00:23:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:32
Speaker
Because it's, you know, you got resident evil is, is him, right?
00:23:37
Speaker
He directs the first resident evil.
00:23:39
Speaker
He's got dino crisis.
00:23:42
Speaker
He's got his later in his career.
00:23:44
Speaker
He tries to recapture resident evil with the evil within, you know, kind of goes back to the, well, sort of like Romero did.
00:23:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:54
Speaker
And he also doesn't, he doesn't take himself too seriously.
00:23:57
Speaker
He's very accessible.
00:23:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:58
Speaker
I think that's a great comparison.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:00
Speaker
And you know, he's there's also God hand is in there, which is an interesting game.
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:07
Speaker
That's right.
00:24:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:08
Speaker
That one's got, yeah.
00:24:10
Speaker
But yeah.
00:24:10
Speaker
So hi-fi rush, absolutely worth playing.
00:24:14
Speaker
It's, it's, it's too good not to.
00:24:16
Speaker
Fantastic stuff.
00:24:16
Speaker
That's my number eight.
00:24:17
Speaker
So Kevin, where does your number eight bring you?
00:24:21
Speaker
My number eight is the Dead Space remake.
00:24:25
Speaker
Ah, okay.
00:24:26
Speaker
Which I was really high on it when I first played it, and the longer I sat with it, like the lower, kind of it slid down my list a little bit.
00:24:34
Speaker
It's good.
00:24:35
Speaker
It is really good, and it does a lot of good things, a lot of good quality of life updates to the first Dead Space in terms of...
00:24:46
Speaker
Like the zero gravity stuff is based on like the Dead Space 2 zero gravity stuff versus the original Dead Space.
00:24:56
Speaker
Like zero gravity was a bit clunky in the original Dead Space.
00:25:03
Speaker
The remake does a lot of nice quality of life improvements and also does a neat job making the game feel a little bit less linear.
00:25:12
Speaker
But at the same time, it doesn't
00:25:16
Speaker
quite pull that off uh in a really compelling way because it was like oh there's side quests they added extra quests and then there's like there's only like fucking three in the entire game you blink and you miss your opportunity to go do them yeah um so yeah i i i'm not
00:25:38
Speaker
I wasn't too high on some of that stuff.
00:25:44
Speaker
But if you're looking for a really good way, a really good version of dead space, you know, you can play the remake or you can play the original.
00:25:52
Speaker
The original still holds up.
00:25:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker
The remake is still is fucking excellent.
00:25:56
Speaker
So.
00:25:57
Speaker
As someone who played the entire trilogy for the first time just last year, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that that's the only reason I didn't buy it, because I was just like, I just played this.
00:26:08
Speaker
I don't I don't know if I need.
00:26:10
Speaker
And I agree.
00:26:10
Speaker
If you had just played it, there's really no reason to to to play the remake.
00:26:16
Speaker
Yeah, and one and two are still incredible games.
00:26:19
Speaker
Two is high on the list for me, like one of the best horror games ever made.
00:26:24
Speaker
It's really, really good.
00:26:25
Speaker
Three, we don't need to talk about.
00:26:27
Speaker
We don't really need to talk about three.
00:26:28
Speaker
I like three more than most people.
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah, it wasn't the dumpster fire some people made it out to be.
00:26:35
Speaker
What's that line about Ted Cruz?
00:26:41
Speaker
I like Ted Cruz more than most people, and I hate Ted Cruz.
00:26:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:46
Speaker
Uh, Al Franken, Al Franken saying it about Ted Cruz.
00:26:49
Speaker
I like Ted Cruz more than most people.
00:26:51
Speaker
And I hate Ted Cruz.
00:26:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:26:58
Speaker
That's hilarious.
00:26:59
Speaker
Uh, Ted Cruz, uh, dead space three is the Ted Cruz of the series.
00:27:03
Speaker
Uh, actually, yeah, no, the dead space books are the Ted Cruz of the series.
00:27:07
Speaker
That's way more appropriate.
00:27:09
Speaker
Cause I still found some joy in dead space.
00:27:12
Speaker
Dead space three.
00:27:12
Speaker
I had some joy in there.
00:27:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:14
Speaker
Um,
00:27:15
Speaker
Yeah, so not much else to say on the Dead Space remake.
00:27:19
Speaker
Phil, we're moving on to number seven.
00:27:22
Speaker
What's your seventh best game of the year?
00:27:25
Speaker
My number seven is what I've been giving this a lot of thought, and I believe that it is the best example of a game to show you exactly how it feels to actually be a space marine, and that is Warhammer 40,000 Boltgun.
00:27:46
Speaker
It is a Doom clone version of the Warhammer universe, retro graphics, what are they called, boomer shooters?
00:27:55
Speaker
Boomer shooters, yeah.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yes, yes.
00:27:57
Speaker
And it does all of the best parts about that kind of genre incredibly well.
00:28:04
Speaker
It's just this kind of onslaught of baddies and rotating arsenal of weapons, and it's over the top.
00:28:13
Speaker
And there is a button exclusively used to scream things about the emperor at your enemies.
00:28:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:28:20
Speaker
Rahul Koji has like a thousand lines that he requests or something.
00:28:26
Speaker
He was just in there for five hours.
00:28:30
Speaker
I hit that button quite a bit and I had not.
00:28:32
Speaker
I don't recall hearing a repeat.
00:28:35
Speaker
And it's fantastic.
00:28:36
Speaker
And it's it is it's not flawless.
00:28:39
Speaker
There are there are aspects of it that get a little samey after a while, which I think any boomer shooter gets.
00:28:46
Speaker
But the fact of the matter is, is I stand by it.
00:28:49
Speaker
Even I haven't played Space Marine, too, which maybe they'll stick to their guns and have it actually come out in the remaining four weeks of the year.
00:29:00
Speaker
And I love I love the first thing.
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's still listed that.
00:29:05
Speaker
Okay.
00:29:07
Speaker
But I loved the first Space Marine, and that's the one a lot of people go for when it comes to the authenticity and the feel of being a Space Marine in that universe.
00:29:17
Speaker
And I have no real quarrel with that because I think it's an incredible game.
00:29:22
Speaker
I love that game.
00:29:23
Speaker
And it does a wonderful job of displaying that world.
00:29:27
Speaker
And I think, actually, if you're a first-time 40K person, you want to know
00:29:31
Speaker
what this world is all about.
00:29:32
Speaker
Pick up Space Marine.
00:29:34
Speaker
But I think there's also a very specific age group of gamer who lived through the 80s and 90s of old school, over the top,
00:29:48
Speaker
heavy metal games like Warhammer.
00:29:51
Speaker
And, uh, and this, this is kind of a love letter to them.
00:29:54
Speaker
This is, this feels like it was made very specifically for my age group.
00:29:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:29:58
Speaker
And, uh, for that reason, it, it stands head and shoulders above any of the other 40 K games in terms of feeling like that, uh, highly genetically, uh, fucked with, uh, a murder machine that is the space Marine.
00:30:13
Speaker
So that's my number seven, Warhammer 40,000, Bolt Gun.
00:30:17
Speaker
I hope very much that they do some expansions with it, some DLC that they do, throws in some orcs, some tyranids.
00:30:23
Speaker
I mean, there's plenty of good shit you can do with this.
00:30:25
Speaker
I would pick it back up if they did.
00:30:28
Speaker
Yeah, me too, I think.
00:30:30
Speaker
Even though if I was a little bit bored by the end of it, I think I would too.
00:30:38
Speaker
Especially if the DLC added a little variety to it.
00:30:42
Speaker
Oh, absolutely.
00:30:43
Speaker
Just a little more.
00:30:44
Speaker
They did a wonderful job of representing the demonic baddies of the world.
00:30:51
Speaker
But it was longer than I expected the game to be.
00:30:57
Speaker
And I think that was cool.
00:30:59
Speaker
It was really cool that it had more meat to its bones than I expected.
00:31:03
Speaker
But it also meant that certain things did get a little samey.
00:31:07
Speaker
Did it have a boss demon for each of the chaos gods?
00:31:12
Speaker
I remember there was the Lord of Change, which is just the Lord of Change and the and and the of the one for the Nurgle.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:23
Speaker
Demon thing.
00:31:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:26
Speaker
There was no slanish stuff.
00:31:27
Speaker
And I don't think that there was any corn stuff.
00:31:30
Speaker
If I'm recalling correctly.
00:31:33
Speaker
So there is hell, even if they just wanted to keep it to the demonic stuff, there's still plenty of stuff to expand into there.
00:31:40
Speaker
We're missing the blood God.
00:31:42
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:31:43
Speaker
No one misses the blood God like we miss the blood God.
00:31:49
Speaker
So that's my number seven.
00:31:50
Speaker
Kevin, hit me with your number seven.
00:31:53
Speaker
Dredge.
00:31:54
Speaker
Oh, okay, lovely.
00:31:56
Speaker
Dredge is just a lovely game about fishing, and there's nothing else at all under the water.
00:32:05
Speaker
There is nothing deeper in the water.
00:32:08
Speaker
Nothing.
00:32:08
Speaker
Dredge is a fun game where you play as a fisherman who is trying to figure out
00:32:18
Speaker
Well, he's not trying to figure out a mystery.
00:32:20
Speaker
He's just trying to fish, but there is a mystery happening upon him.
00:32:25
Speaker
And you as the player slash fishermen are starting to reel it in.
00:32:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:34
Speaker
That was good.
00:32:34
Speaker
That was pretty solid.
00:32:35
Speaker
It was good.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:36
Speaker
Okay.
00:32:36
Speaker
I feel good about that.
00:32:37
Speaker
I feel good about that.
00:32:39
Speaker
And so you just, you could play the game a number of ways.
00:32:43
Speaker
I mean, I know some people just kind of used it as their chill out game where they take their boat out and they just go fishing.
00:32:50
Speaker
And you go and you sell your fish to a...
00:32:55
Speaker
to the fishmonger and, you know, you get some money and you upgrade your boat and all that stuff.
00:33:00
Speaker
Or you can just, you kind of keep pulling on threads and you go to other islands and there's people to talk to at the other islands and they tell you things about, you know, Hey, there's this artifact.
00:33:11
Speaker
You should go check that out.
00:33:13
Speaker
And then there's a weird person in the, on another Island.
00:33:17
Speaker
And they're like, well, if you bring me all the artifacts, I can tell you the truth.
00:33:21
Speaker
And the truth is like capital T truth.
00:33:23
Speaker
And you're like, well, that sounds interesting.
00:33:26
Speaker
So you keep doing it.
00:33:28
Speaker
And then, you know, there's, um, there's, there's elder gods at some point.
00:33:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:38
Speaker
Um, so dredge is a friendly fishing game in which everything else happens.
00:33:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:50
Speaker
right um Phil what's number six for you number six for me uh I'm going with cocoon uh which uh I've talked about a few weeks ago at this point uh this was uh by the uh by I want to say his name is is uh
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeppe Carlson, because he's Scandinavian, and I think with the J it's Yeppe as opposed to Jepa.
00:34:17
Speaker
I apologize to Pim and any of our other friends who are listening to me butcher this, but whatever.
00:34:25
Speaker
He created Limbo and Inside, and both of those games are games I adore.
00:34:30
Speaker
I especially have a real, real fondness for Inside.
00:34:35
Speaker
It is probably the best game he's ever made.
00:34:38
Speaker
It is definitely the most complex.
00:34:39
Speaker
It's the most colorful and beautiful.
00:34:43
Speaker
It is almost too complex to return to.
00:34:47
Speaker
I will say that that is the only downside of this game.
00:34:50
Speaker
It was the puzzles are nuts.
00:34:54
Speaker
And you play a little kind of anthropomorphic beetle person who is...
00:35:02
Speaker
The storyline is very unclear, but very beautiful at the same time.
00:35:06
Speaker
You are going in between these different dimensions through these orbs, and the orbs and the dimensions themselves are actually things that you can hold in your hand.
00:35:15
Speaker
You can hold them as a crystal, and
00:35:17
Speaker
And you have to use each of these dimensions against each other.
00:35:24
Speaker
It sounds weird, but trust me, I'm doing a great job explaining this.
00:35:30
Speaker
And just trust me on this one.
00:35:32
Speaker
Anybody who's played knows exactly what I mean.
00:35:34
Speaker
And it's got this wonderful portal style in out.
00:35:40
Speaker
level of puzzles and it has boss fights, which is the first time I've seen that in any of his games.
00:35:45
Speaker
Um, and it's just charming and beautiful and, uh, absolutely savage in terms of its puzzle difficulty.
00:35:54
Speaker
And, uh, I, I, again, I, I think it's the best game he has ever made and I'm probably never going to play it again.
00:36:02
Speaker
Uh, because it's just, it's one of those things that you're, you know what it makes me think of?
00:36:06
Speaker
It makes me think of, um,
00:36:09
Speaker
Oh, what's the mystery boat game that came out last year?
00:36:13
Speaker
Oh, uh, Ober, Oberden, Oberden, Oberden.
00:36:16
Speaker
It was a couple of years ago.
00:36:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:17
Speaker
A couple of years.
00:36:18
Speaker
It makes me think of that in the sense that I'm like, this is an achievement.
00:36:21
Speaker
It is something that anyone who wants to design games should play and study and pay attention to.
00:36:28
Speaker
Um, and I never want to play it again.
00:36:31
Speaker
And, uh, and it's my number six.
00:36:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:36
Speaker
I don't play by other people's rules when it comes to my game of the year list, by the way.
00:36:40
Speaker
Never.
00:36:41
Speaker
Never.
00:36:42
Speaker
So what about you, Kevin?
00:36:43
Speaker
Where do you find yourself at number six?
00:36:45
Speaker
My number six is a game that started out probably higher on the list and drifted down the longer I sat with it afterwards.
00:36:53
Speaker
Alan Wake 2.
00:36:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:36:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:36:57
Speaker
I really loved it when I was playing it.
00:36:59
Speaker
It's a lot of fun.
00:37:02
Speaker
A lot of... And listen, I know it's...
00:37:05
Speaker
Like, Alan Wake inherently as a character and storyline is really fucking stupid.
00:37:12
Speaker
Sure, he's a terrible writer.
00:37:14
Speaker
He's not a good writer.
00:37:16
Speaker
I don't buy for a second that this guy is a best-selling author based on his narration.
00:37:22
Speaker
He's terrible.
00:37:23
Speaker
He is god-awful.
00:37:25
Speaker
And some of the...
00:37:27
Speaker
Some of the assertions that his character makes about the nature of horror stories is like he at one point he says in a horror story, you're either the monster or the victim.
00:37:39
Speaker
And I was like, OK, well, that's a little narrow bit of a narrow view of horror.
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:46
Speaker
Okay, fine.
00:37:47
Speaker
We're going to, well, I'll let you, you can have that one.
00:37:49
Speaker
Sure.
00:37:51
Speaker
There's so many cool mechanics that they added to this.
00:37:54
Speaker
Alan Wake 2 is basically what, when I told you I had played Alan Wake 1, and I was like, yeah, it's fine.
00:38:00
Speaker
There's, it's weird because it's a shooter.
00:38:04
Speaker
It's a, where you've got an author who is just shooting his way through, you know, the state of Washington.
00:38:11
Speaker
Right.
00:38:12
Speaker
Pretty much.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:14
Speaker
And I was like, it would have been really cool if it was more of like an investigative thing.
00:38:18
Speaker
And they did that for Alan Wake too.
00:38:20
Speaker
You have, you're playing two characters.
00:38:23
Speaker
You start out playing as an FBI agent and she is for like the first, I don't know, so two, three hours of the game, you're playing as her.
00:38:33
Speaker
And before you get the ability to switch back and forth between her and Alan Wake.
00:38:37
Speaker
And the, yeah,
00:38:41
Speaker
Her interesting, she has a mind place.
00:38:45
Speaker
Oh, the mind palace.
00:38:47
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:48
Speaker
It's called mind place, but it's a mind palace.
00:38:52
Speaker
Basically, she has a room in her head where she can see a board of all the clues that you've collected so far, kind of like piecing the storyline together.
00:39:02
Speaker
On the other side, when you're playing as Alan Wake, he has a storyboard.
00:39:07
Speaker
Where he can do with this is he can take a scene.
00:39:12
Speaker
He'll be like, I'm at this place, right?
00:39:15
Speaker
Because he's in like an alternate dimension.
00:39:17
Speaker
I'm at this place and he can take the scene and he can change who, what the characters are in that scene.
00:39:27
Speaker
to changes this.
00:39:29
Speaker
It changes the room that he's in.
00:39:32
Speaker
Like it might move furniture around.
00:39:34
Speaker
It might like fucking fill the room with gore and blood or whatever.
00:39:37
Speaker
Right.
00:39:38
Speaker
It's like, you know, stuff like that.
00:39:41
Speaker
So there's a lot of really cool stuff.
00:39:43
Speaker
There's an amazing sequence in the middle of the game that I don't want to spoil.
00:39:48
Speaker
But if you played the first one and you remember the stage sequence when you're fighting off the all the taken,
00:39:54
Speaker
It's kind of in that vein, but, you know, more metal than even that.
00:40:01
Speaker
But it's one of those games, the longer you sit with it, the it's like the gameplay is really cool.
00:40:07
Speaker
It's just the story begins to feel more and more.
00:40:13
Speaker
Sure.
00:40:15
Speaker
Not as deep as it wants you to think.
00:40:17
Speaker
And it's not as deep as it wants you to think.
00:40:19
Speaker
And a little too much as a little too Marvel in terms of, oh, this is just setting up something else.
00:40:29
Speaker
Okay, okay.
00:40:30
Speaker
Now, I've heard people say that this is, like, actually more related to Control than it is to the first Alan Wake game.
00:40:36
Speaker
Yeah, you could actually call this Control 2 in some regards.
00:40:42
Speaker
It is, like, it's very, very heavily related to Control.
00:40:47
Speaker
The Federal Bureau of Control features prominently in the game.
00:40:59
Speaker
It's just the continuation of Alan Wake's story, but set more in a control setting rather than just like strictly Alan Wake, which is fine.
00:41:10
Speaker
They had already started going that way with control when in the game Control, there's a lot of references to Alan Wake in it.
00:41:18
Speaker
Sure, yeah.
00:41:19
Speaker
But I think the problem I have with the ending ultimately is it just feels like it's setting you up for another...
00:41:29
Speaker
another entry rather than giving you any real satisfaction as to the thing, the story you just went through.
00:41:37
Speaker
Like they did everything, but bring out Samuel Jackson to try and recruit you to the Avengers.
00:41:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:43
Speaker
I wanted to talk to you about the control protocol.
00:41:45
Speaker
Right.
00:41:46
Speaker
Right.
00:41:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:49
Speaker
I feel that.
00:41:50
Speaker
So Alan Wake was probably when I played it, it slipped from like a top three down to where it is.
00:41:56
Speaker
Number six.
00:41:56
Speaker
That's how it is with a lot of games.
00:41:58
Speaker
You know, even after you're done playing them.
00:42:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:01
Speaker
You just kind of rumble them around in your head a little bit and you're like, uh.
00:42:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:06
Speaker
All right.
00:42:07
Speaker
But that's enough about Alan Wake 2.
00:42:09
Speaker
What did you got for number five?
00:42:11
Speaker
Number five.
00:42:12
Speaker
The halfway point.
00:42:13
Speaker
Okay.
00:42:14
Speaker
Well,
00:42:16
Speaker
This is basically part of, I'm just following the law here because I have a legal requirement that I've agreed to with Capcom since 2017 or so that anytime they release a new Resident Evil game, it will appear somewhere in or close to my game of the year list.
00:42:36
Speaker
And that means that number five is Resident Evil 4's remake.
00:42:41
Speaker
I stand by it.
00:42:43
Speaker
No, it's funny because we talked about Dead Space and just last year I had played those three games for the first time.
00:42:52
Speaker
I also played through the original Resident Evil 4 for the first time last year.
00:42:57
Speaker
So I honestly thought that I wasn't going to... No, we're going to... Hold on one second.
00:43:03
Speaker
We're going to nip that in the bud.
00:43:04
Speaker
No.
00:43:05
Speaker
Get over there.
00:43:09
Speaker
They've got a little...
00:43:10
Speaker
Scratch pad that has a rolly ball that goes around it.
00:43:14
Speaker
And I'm just not letting, I'm not even going to let that start.
00:43:18
Speaker
We're not even going to, anyway.
00:43:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's, it gets loud.
00:43:23
Speaker
So yeah, after, after I'm done, I'll turn it over again, sweetie.
00:43:29
Speaker
They speak English.
00:43:30
Speaker
Okay.
00:43:32
Speaker
But I think this one was important for me to actually get into because I really loved the first three Resident Evil games, that era, the twin stick era.
00:43:46
Speaker
And then I kind of dropped off for four or five and six and all the other stuff that happened around that time.
00:43:52
Speaker
And then I got back into it for its new kind of like, I don't know what you do, like this dark new direction that they've been going in since seven years.
00:44:02
Speaker
which is my favorite.
00:44:04
Speaker
I love the direction they're taking it in.
00:44:07
Speaker
I love how much fun they're having with it.
00:44:10
Speaker
They're broadening the world.
00:44:13
Speaker
Resident Evil Village is a masterpiece in my mind.
00:44:16
Speaker
Same for Resident Evil 7.
00:44:18
Speaker
And they basically took...
00:44:21
Speaker
All of my complaints when I played the original Resident Evil 4, which mostly had to do with controls, I just couldn't get used to the controls.
00:44:29
Speaker
And gave them this new coat of the new era of Resident Evil paint
00:44:38
Speaker
And it basically turned Resident Evil 4 because it was a game that everyone's like, this is the greatest Resident Evil game that was ever made.
00:44:46
Speaker
Sure.
00:44:46
Speaker
It's certainly the most influential, all that stuff.
00:44:49
Speaker
And I played it and I went, I guess.
00:44:50
Speaker
I don't get it, though.
00:44:52
Speaker
It's just not quite reaching me on the same level, possibly because I'm not...
00:44:57
Speaker
uh playing it when it first came out and you know it's not affecting me for that reason um and then i got this coat of paint on it and it not only made me appreciate it more it made me go oh i totally fucking get it i totally get it now um so it made it a little more accessible for me and it made me appreciate things that i learned about it when i played the original so it weirdly retroactively made me enjoy
00:45:23
Speaker
the original more if such a thing even exists.
00:45:27
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense.
00:45:29
Speaker
And I think that's pretty impressive for a remake because it's more than just a reskin.
00:45:33
Speaker
They really had fun playing with that sucker.
00:45:37
Speaker
And I finished the DLC for it and everything.
00:45:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:42
Speaker
Yeah, that's something.
00:45:42
Speaker
I still need to get back to the DLC.
00:45:45
Speaker
It's good.
00:45:45
Speaker
It's good.
00:45:46
Speaker
It's just another five hours.
00:45:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:50
Speaker
It's fucking excellent.
00:45:52
Speaker
Everybody's best girl, Ada.
00:45:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:55
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:45:56
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:45:56
Speaker
She calls Leon a good boy at some point, and I feel weird inside.
00:46:03
Speaker
It checks all the boxes is what I'm saying.
00:46:07
Speaker
So Kevin, what about you?
00:46:08
Speaker
What's your number five?
00:46:09
Speaker
My number five is My Friendly Neighborhood.
00:46:14
Speaker
Okay.
00:46:16
Speaker
My Friendly Neighborhood is a first-person shooter, and it's like a Resident Evil 7-like.
00:46:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:32
Speaker
It's a very specific type of Resident Evil-like game.
00:46:36
Speaker
It's first-person, very Resident Evil 7.
00:46:40
Speaker
Basically, you play as a guy, a repairman, who is dispatched to a...
00:46:46
Speaker
TV station, which has started.
00:46:49
Speaker
It's a closed down TV station, which has started broadcasting old episodes of a Sesame Street like show called My Friendly Neighborhood.
00:46:59
Speaker
And they're like, yeah, you got to go there and shut it down.
00:47:02
Speaker
Like, because it's annoying, you know, it's interrupting people's shows and stuff like that.
00:47:05
Speaker
So you get there and the entire station has been overrun in the absence of people and
00:47:15
Speaker
has been overrun with sentient versions of the puppets that...
00:47:22
Speaker
We're on the Sesame Street show.
00:47:26
Speaker
So when you start out, you basically just have a wrench and then you get a letter gun.
00:47:31
Speaker
It's basically, it is what it is.
00:47:34
Speaker
It's a game that, it's a gun that shoots out letters.
00:47:41
Speaker
And you have to knock, the wild thing is you cannot kill the puppets.
00:47:48
Speaker
They won't die.
00:47:50
Speaker
The only thing you can do if you want to keep them down is knock them down and then tie them up with duct tape.
00:48:00
Speaker
And that lets you move freely through an area.
00:48:05
Speaker
So they're out of commission permanently at that point.
00:48:07
Speaker
They're out of commission at that point.
00:48:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:09
Speaker
I hear a kitty.
00:48:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:11
Speaker
Give me one second.
00:48:12
Speaker
I'm going to move this thing.
00:48:13
Speaker
I'll be right back.
00:48:13
Speaker
Sure.
00:48:14
Speaker
Guys, I made it more appealing to them for some reason.
00:48:19
Speaker
I don't know how that works.
00:48:26
Speaker
I didn't know that turning it over would just make it a whole new toy for them and they would have to investigate it that much harder.
00:48:34
Speaker
Okay.
00:48:35
Speaker
Sorry.
00:48:35
Speaker
Clawing at the underside of it or.
00:48:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:48:37
Speaker
He was just like clawing it and trying to turn it over.
00:48:39
Speaker
I think it's he's, he's a real smart one.
00:48:45
Speaker
I love your little cats.
00:48:46
Speaker
They're, they're hysterical.
00:48:47
Speaker
They are strange animals.
00:48:49
Speaker
I love living with them.
00:48:51
Speaker
Okay, so sorry.
00:48:52
Speaker
Keep going.
00:48:53
Speaker
Yeah, My Friendly Neighborhood.
00:48:55
Speaker
I really recommend it.
00:48:56
Speaker
It's like five to six hours long, I think, if you're playing through it.
00:48:59
Speaker
And it's got a lot of puzzles in the Resident Evil vein.
00:49:04
Speaker
So you're backtracking, going back and forth.
00:49:08
Speaker
It's a blast.
00:49:10
Speaker
And it's probably...
00:49:12
Speaker
Oh, the other thing about it is it was made by the Szymanski brothers.
00:49:18
Speaker
Szymanski brothers.
00:49:20
Speaker
So not the one, not the brother who made Iron Lung.
00:49:24
Speaker
There's three brothers.
00:49:26
Speaker
There's three Szymanski brothers.
00:49:29
Speaker
One of them made Iron Lung and is working on Gloomwood.
00:49:32
Speaker
And the other two worked on My Friendly Neighborhood.
00:49:36
Speaker
And we look at the credits.
00:49:38
Speaker
It's a relatively small team that put out a product that was really, really polished.
00:49:44
Speaker
So, you know, a lot of... They do a lot of credit for this one.
00:49:48
Speaker
That family's got...
00:49:51
Speaker
some real kudos to them, to their names.
00:49:54
Speaker
They can make some fucking games.
00:49:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:57
Speaker
So that's, that's my number five, Phil.
00:49:59
Speaker
What's your number four?
00:50:01
Speaker
Okay.
00:50:01
Speaker
We've made it all the way to number four before we get our first overlap.
00:50:05
Speaker
My number four is dredge.
00:50:07
Speaker
There we go.
00:50:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:08
Speaker
I don't have a lot to add.
00:50:11
Speaker
I remember playing it for the first time and actually thinking maybe this was going to be my game of the year period, simply because, uh, it's,
00:50:24
Speaker
They're finding ways to be loud.
00:50:28
Speaker
They said, we don't want to be playing with that toy back there.
00:50:31
Speaker
We want to... If you'll excuse me one second.
00:50:41
Speaker
They found...
00:50:43
Speaker
candles that we placed out and they're round and they said well i want something to roll while i'm out here and these will have to do they are so they're like we're in the mood to roll that's exactly it that's such assholes okay uh oh
00:51:05
Speaker
Father, we must throw things.
00:51:08
Speaker
Yes.
00:51:08
Speaker
Oh my God.
00:51:10
Speaker
And then I'll turn off the camera here and I'll go, here, here, play with those now.
00:51:16
Speaker
And they won't have any interest.
00:51:17
Speaker
None whatsoever.
00:51:19
Speaker
So as I was saying, I remember playing Dredge for the first time and thinking it would probably, I remember honestly thinking this might be my number one game of the year simply because it had that perfect combination of fisherman's life with horror.
00:51:35
Speaker
And they do the cosmic stuff and the Lovecraftian stuff very, very well.
00:51:40
Speaker
But they also do just the fishing simulator aspect of it really well.
00:51:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:45
Speaker
Uh, it's, I I've come to find now that I'm in my forties that my favorite games are games that challenge me, but also let me sit as far back from the chair as possible.
00:51:57
Speaker
Uh, or you can just lean back and this is perfect game for that.
00:52:02
Speaker
Uh, I'm getting a lot out of it.
00:52:03
Speaker
I'm, I'm engaged.
00:52:05
Speaker
I'm,
00:52:05
Speaker
getting all kinds of cool little storylines and that sort of thing.
00:52:09
Speaker
But I'm also just like, well, let's just go out and see what kind of fish we can catch.
00:52:13
Speaker
Let's see if we can make a profit today.
00:52:15
Speaker
Um, and the new DLC came out and I, I picked that up.
00:52:19
Speaker
I have to, I have to try that out.
00:52:21
Speaker
It takes you to kind of an Arctic area.
00:52:23
Speaker
So that'll be cool.
00:52:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:25
Speaker
Uh, get some mountains of madness shit, but yeah, I mean, but that's, that's my number four dredge.
00:52:29
Speaker
I fucking loved it.
00:52:31
Speaker
I loved it.
00:52:31
Speaker
What about you, Kevin?
00:52:33
Speaker
All right.
00:52:33
Speaker
My number four is our second overlap, and that's going to be Resident Evil 4.
00:52:42
Speaker
Nice.
00:52:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:44
Speaker
I really can't say much else about Resident Evil 4 other than I...
00:52:51
Speaker
I just loved every minute of it.
00:52:52
Speaker
It's such a fun game.
00:52:53
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:52:55
Speaker
It really did a good job.
00:52:56
Speaker
Like, if you go back and you play Resident Evil 4, the original, I remembered going back to it, and it has a certain level of jank that came from it being the game that kind of spawned the third-person shooter.
00:53:11
Speaker
Right.
00:53:13
Speaker
In a way.
00:53:15
Speaker
So it has a certain level of, like,
00:53:18
Speaker
not really sure how to make this.
00:53:19
Speaker
It feels, it's like at the time it felt amazing, but after 20 years of playing third person shooters that have really refined the, the, the movement, it's, it's, it can be hard to go back to.
00:53:32
Speaker
And I know some people are saying, well, I go back to it every year.
00:53:35
Speaker
I'm like, well, good for you.
00:53:37
Speaker
I'm proud of you.
00:53:38
Speaker
Proud of you.
00:53:39
Speaker
Proud of you.
00:53:41
Speaker
Resident Evil 4, the remake does a really good job refining a lot of that stuff while also keeping, um,
00:53:47
Speaker
what made the original so special and did a number of things better.
00:53:55
Speaker
Like it took Ashley Graham and made her from kind of an annoying, just side character to someone who was, uh,
00:54:03
Speaker
uh, funny and interesting to, to be around.
00:54:07
Speaker
Their relationship is wonderful in the game.
00:54:10
Speaker
It's wonderful to watch it unfold.
00:54:12
Speaker
It's, it's just well done.
00:54:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:14
Speaker
And she acts like a, she acts like the, the young woman that she is when at like, there's, there's just this one point where, uh,
00:54:24
Speaker
Leon jumps down from somewhere.
00:54:26
Speaker
It's like a 15 foot drop.
00:54:27
Speaker
So like he, he jumps down and he, he does his landing and then he, he gets back up and he's going to catch her and she jumps down and he catches her and she says skills.
00:54:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:40
Speaker
That's right.
00:54:40
Speaker
That's right.
00:54:41
Speaker
She's charming.
00:54:42
Speaker
She's not.
00:54:43
Speaker
She's charming.
00:54:44
Speaker
Annoying little twerp of a kid, you know, she's.
00:54:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:49
Speaker
It's fun.
00:54:49
Speaker
And they did the same with Leon.
00:54:51
Speaker
They gave Leon so much more of the dad jokes and stuff like that.
00:54:54
Speaker
It's.
00:54:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:54
Speaker
Which I think was necessary to keep you from getting the impression that maybe they were going to like hook up or something like that.
00:55:03
Speaker
Like he.
00:55:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:03
Speaker
They really pulled that back.
00:55:06
Speaker
Yeah.
00:55:06
Speaker
They made it very clear.
00:55:07
Speaker
He's a dad, not a, not a boyfriend.
00:55:09
Speaker
Right.
00:55:11
Speaker
even though Leon is in his, what, late 20s, I guess.
00:55:14
Speaker
Oh, it wouldn't have been crazy inappropriate, but I don't know.
00:55:18
Speaker
It would have felt weird.
00:55:19
Speaker
Yeah, like, he's more Ada's speed than Ashley.
00:55:23
Speaker
Yes, yes.
00:55:24
Speaker
And, yeah, you don't get in the way... You don't mess with Ada's man.
00:55:27
Speaker
I don't want to see anything bad happen to this young lady.
00:55:31
Speaker
But also, there's, like...
00:55:34
Speaker
Lewis is really refined into a, like, he looks creepier.
00:55:43
Speaker
He looks more rundown than, than the original version of him.
00:55:47
Speaker
But as a character, he's like a lot more sympathetic, you know?
00:55:54
Speaker
And like, he, like, there's, there's a, there's a moment with him that I was like, oh man,
00:56:03
Speaker
He isn't just some random Lothario kind of character or whatever.
00:56:07
Speaker
It's just, yeah, there's something to it.
00:56:09
Speaker
It's nice.
00:56:11
Speaker
So, yeah, Resident Evil 4 is my number four game of the year.
00:56:17
Speaker
Nice.
00:56:19
Speaker
I feel like we're going to have some overlap in these next few, I think.
00:56:23
Speaker
I think so, too.
00:56:24
Speaker
And I think this next one.
00:56:26
Speaker
Yeah, it might be an exact overlap.
00:56:29
Speaker
It might be.
00:56:30
Speaker
Well, what's number three for you?
00:56:31
Speaker
Well, I believe that number three for the both of us is Amnesia the Bunker.
00:56:36
Speaker
That's correct.
00:56:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:56:38
Speaker
Yes.
00:56:39
Speaker
In my opinion, probably the best horror game that was released this year.
00:56:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:44
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:56:45
Speaker
And I, I know this, I think it might be Fractional's best entry in this particular series, even, even better than the original.
00:56:55
Speaker
I'm not one of these people who, who, you know, looks down their nose at the whole quote unquote, you know, walking simulator genre or anything like that.
00:57:03
Speaker
Um, but,
00:57:05
Speaker
But I do think that this is the game where they really struck the sweet spot of story, atmosphere, all that shit that made all the other entries so memorable.
00:57:15
Speaker
But they also give you genuinely exciting, scary, thrilling things to do.
00:57:20
Speaker
Hold on, I have to interrupt you.
00:57:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:57:22
Speaker
There's breaking news.
00:57:24
Speaker
Breaking news?
00:57:25
Speaker
Yeah, breaking news.
00:57:28
Speaker
Henry Kissinger is dead.
00:57:29
Speaker
Oh, thank fucking God.
00:57:31
Speaker
How?
00:57:32
Speaker
How did, how is...
00:57:34
Speaker
God, he lives so long.
00:57:37
Speaker
I'm just happy that Jimmy Carter outlived him.
00:57:40
Speaker
That is that.
00:57:41
Speaker
You know what?
00:57:42
Speaker
You know what?
00:57:43
Speaker
That's pretty good.
00:57:44
Speaker
That's pretty cool.
00:57:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
00:57:48
Speaker
God damn it.
00:57:49
Speaker
All right.
00:57:50
Speaker
I'll expect to hear from you.
00:57:51
Speaker
That's not breaking news for the people listening to this podcast.
00:57:53
Speaker
No, this is old news by now.
00:57:55
Speaker
It will have been like a month before you hear this episode.
00:57:59
Speaker
We were recording this when the news broke that Henry Kissinger had died.
00:58:04
Speaker
That is good news.
00:58:06
Speaker
That is good news.
00:58:08
Speaker
As Anthony Bourdain once... I want to look up his exact quote.
00:58:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I get the quote.
00:58:16
Speaker
Anthony Bourdain Kissinger...
00:58:21
Speaker
Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never want to stop beating Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.
00:58:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:34
Speaker
You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking.
00:58:48
Speaker
Witness what Henry did in Cambodia, the fruits of his genius for statesmanship, and you'll never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milosevic.
00:58:58
Speaker
Fuck Henry Kissinger, RIP Anthony Bourdain.
00:59:02
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:59:05
Speaker
All hail Saint Bourdain.
00:59:07
Speaker
Anyway.
00:59:08
Speaker
Anyway.
00:59:09
Speaker
The bunker.
00:59:11
Speaker
What can I say about the joy I experienced from playing Amnesia the Bunker that can't be summarized with the joy I experienced from finding out Henry Kissinger is dead?
00:59:20
Speaker
LAUGHTER
00:59:23
Speaker
It's a very parallel emotional rollercoaster of joy, fear, anger, you know, just that kind of thing.
00:59:32
Speaker
Hunger.
00:59:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
00:59:37
Speaker
I could go for a sandwich.
00:59:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:59:42
Speaker
I loved this.
00:59:43
Speaker
I thought that the...
00:59:47
Speaker
gameplay is so good and the storyline is so good and neither of them detract from the others.
00:59:54
Speaker
I felt that the, the, the main downside to a game like amnesia dark descent was that when you just, when you started going, you'd stop and have to read or listen to like 15 minutes worth of storyline or something.
01:00:08
Speaker
And, and it just, it could get a little dull at times.
01:00:12
Speaker
Um, but,
01:00:13
Speaker
Whereas the bunker, the bunker, I feel like it's them finally hitting that sweet spot.
01:00:18
Speaker
It's the best in the series as far as Soma still is their best game as far as I'm concerned, but I loved it.
01:00:25
Speaker
So what about you, Kevin?
01:00:26
Speaker
How did you feel about Amnesia?
01:00:27
Speaker
Oh, I loved Amnesia.
01:00:30
Speaker
It is terrifying in all the best ways.
01:00:34
Speaker
It doesn't, it's not reliant on jump scares at all.
01:00:37
Speaker
It's, it's all about the tension, right?
01:00:40
Speaker
You know, just the, ugh, the dread of knowing that this monster is out there just and around the corner and you don't really have any means of fighting it.
01:00:55
Speaker
This is a different, like the other Amnesia games, from what I understand, this is the first one where they actually, they're like, okay, you want a gun?
01:01:04
Speaker
Here's a fucking gun.
01:01:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's what people have been begging for since the first game.
01:01:08
Speaker
And it somehow makes you feel less powerful.
01:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, because you can shoot this thing.
01:01:14
Speaker
It's not going to... It might scare it off for a little bit.
01:01:19
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:19
Speaker
But that's about it.
01:01:20
Speaker
And if you fire and it...
01:01:23
Speaker
wasn't there, then, uh-oh, you've just attracted it to you.
01:01:28
Speaker
Good news.
01:01:28
Speaker
And you probably only had two bullets at most in the chamber.
01:01:32
Speaker
One for the monster, one for yourself.
01:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, good luck.
01:01:35
Speaker
Hope everything works out.
01:01:39
Speaker
So Amnesia, the bunker, amazing game.
01:01:43
Speaker
I know they did some, they're releasing some updates or they have released some updates, some randomization updates and things like that.
01:01:50
Speaker
Yeah, they released something around Halloween.
01:01:51
Speaker
I know that.
01:01:51
Speaker
Yeah, stuff for like replayability and like harder difficulties for the people who are like really into the challenge of...
01:02:01
Speaker
uh, dealing with, with this creature.
01:02:03
Speaker
It's not an easy game.
01:02:04
Speaker
It's not an easy game.
01:02:05
Speaker
And, um, I know that there's, uh, I, it's, I'm almost tempted to go back and get some of the achievements that I couldn't get.
01:02:14
Speaker
That day is coming for me.
01:02:15
Speaker
I know that there's like, there's like some achievements for like, you know, you, uh, save the prisoner without letting the monster eat him or something like that.
01:02:25
Speaker
Um, you know, stuff like that.
01:02:27
Speaker
Uh, but it,
01:02:29
Speaker
It's wild.
01:02:30
Speaker
You have this game where you're scrounging for your guns and ammo and stuff like that.
01:02:38
Speaker
And there's only two encounters, two antagonists in the entire game.
01:02:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:47
Speaker
They're all rats.
01:02:52
Speaker
So, yeah, I agree.
01:02:54
Speaker
Amnesia the Bunker, number three with a bullet for me as well.
01:03:02
Speaker
So, Phil, we're at number two.
01:03:06
Speaker
This one's going to frustrate some, maybe present company included.
01:03:12
Speaker
My number two is Baldur's Gate 3.
01:03:15
Speaker
How dare you?
01:03:16
Speaker
I know.
01:03:16
Speaker
LAUGHTER
01:03:21
Speaker
It's a masterpiece.
01:03:22
Speaker
It's an absolute masterpiece of a game.
01:03:24
Speaker
I'm not going to say anything about it that other people haven't already said.
01:03:28
Speaker
The branching storylines, the characters, the memorable characters they created.
01:03:34
Speaker
I think the greatest thing about this game was how effective of a fuck you it was to all the corporate bullshit people out there who have been saying no one wants to play a single player game.
01:03:45
Speaker
that there's nothing to be gained from making single-player games.
01:03:48
Speaker
This is not just a single-player game.
01:03:51
Speaker
It is a classic role-playing game style game.
01:03:55
Speaker
It is a niche genre at best, and it blew everyone's head off.
01:04:02
Speaker
It was fun, horny, and scary, sometimes all at the same time.
01:04:09
Speaker
the characters, I'm still thinking about them, and you spent an inordinate, inordinate?
01:04:15
Speaker
Inordinate?
01:04:16
Speaker
Inordinate.
01:04:17
Speaker
Inordinate.
01:04:19
Speaker
Thank you.
01:04:20
Speaker
Amount of time in this world.
01:04:23
Speaker
And it takes you all over the place.
01:04:25
Speaker
You get, it's every, it's basically as close to the experience of an actual D&D campaign with a decent character
01:04:37
Speaker
dungeon master as you can possibly get in a video game.
01:04:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:43
Speaker
It feels sometimes like they thought of everything and there are so many ways to play it.
01:04:48
Speaker
So many different builds and I'm not that guy.
01:04:54
Speaker
I went with my role playing games.
01:04:56
Speaker
I just want to play the game.
01:04:56
Speaker
I want to play.
01:04:57
Speaker
I want to play the character I want to play.
01:04:59
Speaker
Yep.
01:04:59
Speaker
I have been thrilled to look at all of these different builds people are coming up with and it makes me want to play the game again and I don't have that kind of time.
01:05:06
Speaker
time on my hands.
01:05:08
Speaker
Uh, and, uh, but I, I've seen all these different kinds of builds.
01:05:11
Speaker
People are talking about, I said, why don't I play that?
01:05:15
Speaker
Um, and I can't wait for any DLC and, uh, increase in level cap, uh, that might come with it.
01:05:22
Speaker
Uh, this is a game that I feel like all the other, all they'll need to do for the next five or six years is just add DLC to it.
01:05:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:30
Speaker
Um, this is like Witcher three level hugeness.
01:05:34
Speaker
Um,
01:05:34
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:35
Speaker
So yeah, that's my number two.
01:05:38
Speaker
Kevin, what's your number two?
01:05:40
Speaker
My number two is the System Shock remake.
01:05:45
Speaker
Okay.
01:05:46
Speaker
It is... So for those of you who don't know, System Shock is one of the first M-Sim style games.
01:05:58
Speaker
It's not like...
01:05:59
Speaker
You can see it's really fledgling in terms of that genre.
01:06:04
Speaker
System Shock 2 is the one that really took it further.
01:06:07
Speaker
But System Shock is a wonderful game.
01:06:11
Speaker
It's definitely another horror game.
01:06:13
Speaker
So many fucking horror games on this list.
01:06:15
Speaker
By the way... It's one of the most influential games of all time.
01:06:18
Speaker
Every game that I've listed on my list so far, save for Pizza Tower, and even Pizza Tower has an entire level dedicated to horror, is a horror game.
01:06:27
Speaker
Yeah.
01:06:29
Speaker
You out horrored me this year.
01:06:30
Speaker
I know.
01:06:31
Speaker
It's fucking wild.
01:06:34
Speaker
So System Shock, you play a hacker who's caught hacking into some database thing for a company.
01:06:42
Speaker
And then the CEO is like, hey, if you are able to hack into this AI that we own and take care, take down its safety features, we'll give you, we'll do a surgery on you that, you know,
01:06:56
Speaker
ups your hacking ability, you know, install a new deck or whatever into your brain or, you know, one of those, one of those shadow run bullshit things.
01:07:04
Speaker
And so you wake up six months later because that's the convalescence time for the surgery on a space station and,
01:07:13
Speaker
And, uh-oh, the AI that you helped unleash has taken over the space station and has unleashed hordes of robots and mutants and all that stuff onto the space station and is planning on destroying Earth.
01:07:33
Speaker
So it is up to you, as the hacker who started this whole thing, to put a stop to it.
01:07:41
Speaker
Uh...
01:07:42
Speaker
As it often is.
01:07:44
Speaker
As it often is.
01:07:47
Speaker
It's a lot of fun.
01:07:50
Speaker
There's a lot of puzzle solving.
01:07:53
Speaker
You're going back and forth between a bunch of levels.
01:07:55
Speaker
There's...
01:07:57
Speaker
You know, a lot of fun guns in it, things like that.
01:08:00
Speaker
A lot of fun enemies.
01:08:05
Speaker
I'm looking forward to the remaster of System Shock 2.
01:08:10
Speaker
And I know Night Dive, who made the remake, I believe is going to be doing a remake of System Shock 2 in the future.
01:08:19
Speaker
So I'm interested in seeing that as well.
01:08:21
Speaker
But that's my number two.
01:08:24
Speaker
And before we get to our number ones... Yes.
01:08:27
Speaker
We got some honorable mentions.
01:08:29
Speaker
Phil, why don't you tell me what your honorable mentions were for the year 2023?
01:08:34
Speaker
I've got a few.
01:08:36
Speaker
First one, Blasphemous 2.
01:08:39
Speaker
Not quite the experience that I got out of the first game, but still a time in that world, an extra bit of time in that world is still really great.
01:08:51
Speaker
Still very grim, still very gothic, a lot of fun.
01:08:54
Speaker
Underground Blossom, which is the new Rusty Lake game.
01:08:57
Speaker
Every single time those people come out with a new puzzle game, I'm in, I am in, I am in.
01:09:04
Speaker
I love their aesthetic.
01:09:06
Speaker
I love the way they come up with these puzzles.
01:09:09
Speaker
They're getting a little more challenging as time goes on.
01:09:12
Speaker
And I had a blast.
01:09:14
Speaker
I spent an afternoon playing that one, and I loved it.
01:09:18
Speaker
Bramble, which I think is a great example of how important it is to remember that you can, in fact, combine whimsy with abject stark fucking terror.
01:09:32
Speaker
Great stuff.
01:09:33
Speaker
Fairytale stuff.
01:09:35
Speaker
Very German.
01:09:36
Speaker
Very, very, very, very, very Nord.
01:09:38
Speaker
Just grim and lots of trolls and wizards and fairy kings, birds that talk and fish that sing.
01:09:46
Speaker
All that kind of good stuff.
01:09:48
Speaker
And finally, and this one just released the other day and it's looking good.
01:09:52
Speaker
I haven't, I've only played the demo.
01:09:55
Speaker
so I feel like this might have made it onto my list if I hadn't played, if I'd played more than the demo and that's a last train home, which is a fantastic game about a underserved kind of time period.
01:10:10
Speaker
You don't see a lot of people trying to escape the, the, the whites and the reds of the Bolshevik revolution.
01:10:17
Speaker
Sure.
01:10:18
Speaker
And it, it has a really intriguing combination of real time strategy and like,
01:10:26
Speaker
Civ builder in a way because you're building up your train.
01:10:29
Speaker
And it's very cool.
01:10:31
Speaker
And I know I'm going to come back to it.
01:10:32
Speaker
I just did not have time.
01:10:34
Speaker
Kevin, what about you?
01:10:35
Speaker
What are your honorable mentions?
01:10:36
Speaker
My honorable mentions are Void Stranger, which is kind of a it's a one bit color Sokoban game with weird
01:10:50
Speaker
There's like weird stuff happening.
01:10:52
Speaker
If you ever know anything, if you've ever heard anything about Frog Fractions, which was like a game that had a game hidden underneath it, Void Stranger has like a lot of stuff hidden underneath it.
01:11:05
Speaker
And I know I've beaten the game once, but in all honesty, I know you have to beat the game a bunch of times.
01:11:12
Speaker
You have to like...
01:11:13
Speaker
keep coming back to it.
01:11:15
Speaker
There are people who've been put 50 hours into this game and they still haven't found all of the weird stuff hidden in this game.
01:11:22
Speaker
So it's probably something I've, I've beaten it once.
01:11:25
Speaker
So it'll go in the honorable mentions.
01:11:26
Speaker
I'll see how many times I come back to it and kind of see where it goes.
01:11:31
Speaker
Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 slash rogue city or yeah, or not rogue city, phantom Liberty.
01:11:38
Speaker
I wrote, why didn't I put rogue city?
01:11:42
Speaker
Phantom Liberty is a
01:11:48
Speaker
I put that on there.
01:11:48
Speaker
It's a massive update and DLC to Cyberpunk 2077.
01:11:53
Speaker
I beat Cyberpunk 2077 not long after it came out and really enjoyed my time with it, but I knew it was jank as hell.
01:12:01
Speaker
The 2.0 update is kind of the culmination of a bunch of efforts that CD Projekt Red have done to clean up the game, and Phantom Liberty is this huge DLC.
01:12:13
Speaker
It's got Idris Elba in it, so...
01:12:16
Speaker
I thought it was worth a mention.
01:12:19
Speaker
Blasphemous 2 is also on my honorable mentions list.
01:12:22
Speaker
Same reasons.
01:12:23
Speaker
It was more time spent in the blasphemous world.
01:12:26
Speaker
Just didn't do enough for me.
01:12:29
Speaker
Killer Frequency is in my honorable mentions.
01:12:34
Speaker
A fun visual novel horror game where you are a radio DJ trying to keep people alive.
01:12:43
Speaker
The radio DJ doubling as a 911 operator and you're trying to keep people alive as a masked serial killer is running loose in the town.
01:12:50
Speaker
That's a really unique one.
01:12:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:54
Speaker
Warhammer 40K bolt gun.
01:12:55
Speaker
You've already talked about it and I agree with a lot of things you said.
01:12:58
Speaker
World of Horror has been out for like five years now in early access.
01:13:02
Speaker
It just got its full release.
01:13:05
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:08
Speaker
A couple of weeks ago, as of recording this episode, the 1.0 release, do yourself a favor, go out and check out World of Horror.
01:13:15
Speaker
If you are interested in two things, specifically Junji Ito and Carmen Sandiego, two tastes, tastes great, tastes great together.
01:13:28
Speaker
See, I've been meaning to go back to that one.
01:13:30
Speaker
And now that you put it that way, I have to.
01:13:34
Speaker
That's really, oh, okay.
01:13:36
Speaker
It's basically Carmen Sandiego with Junji.
01:13:39
Speaker
Like, you know, Carmen Sandiego is like, for those of you who don't know, before it was a game show, Carmen Sandiego was a video game released by Broderbund.
01:13:52
Speaker
Um, and they, you, you were just like figuring out clues.
01:13:57
Speaker
It was, it was like, it was an educational game, but it was probably one of the better games to hide the educational part of it.
01:14:05
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
01:14:07
Speaker
Absolutely.
01:14:07
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:08
Speaker
It made the pill easier to swallow.
01:14:10
Speaker
Yes.
01:14:11
Speaker
Without question.
01:14:12
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:14
Speaker
But yeah, you had to figure out where Carmen Sandiego was going.
01:14:17
Speaker
It was a point and click kind of mystery thing.
01:14:21
Speaker
That's kind of the vibe I get from World of Horror.
01:14:24
Speaker
I mean, there's more to it than there ever was in any of the Carmen Sandiego games.
01:14:28
Speaker
Don't get me wrong.
01:14:29
Speaker
But that's just the general vibe.
01:14:32
Speaker
Finally, RoboCop Rogue City.
01:14:36
Speaker
That's why I wrote Rogue City earlier.
01:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, that's why I was thinking of RoboCop.
01:14:40
Speaker
No, RoboCop Rogue City, my seven out of 10 game of the year.
01:14:51
Speaker
I think that should be a category.
01:14:53
Speaker
Yeah, my 7 out of 10 game of the year.
01:14:55
Speaker
Speaking of 7 out of 10 games of the year, why don't you tell us, Phil, what your number one game is?
01:14:59
Speaker
Yeah, I was about to say, that's kind of the perfect segue.
01:15:02
Speaker
Um,
01:15:05
Speaker
I mean to tell you people, when I told Kevin this, he reacted exactly the way I expected him to.
01:15:11
Speaker
My number one game of the year, 2023, is Aliens Dark Descent.
01:15:18
Speaker
It went from a game that infuriated and pissed me off all the way to the top of my list.
01:15:25
Speaker
I played through it three times.
01:15:27
Speaker
I've invested 115 hours into it.
01:15:30
Speaker
And I still haven't played the new game plus, which was just released about a month ago.
01:15:35
Speaker
So I know I'm going to go into it again.
01:15:37
Speaker
I've gotten 46 out of 50 of the achievements.
01:15:40
Speaker
It just, it's so, it is janky.
01:15:43
Speaker
It's a very janky game, but it gives me so much of what I wanted.
01:15:48
Speaker
It's got, it does the XCOM vibe, the strategy vibe, and it gets the universe, the Aliens universe really, really well.
01:16:01
Speaker
I think Alien Isolation is the best Alien game.
01:16:06
Speaker
And I, honest to God, think this is the best aliens game.
01:16:10
Speaker
I think it summarizes the squad, the Space Marines aspect, because it isn't like other strategy games where you're just stockpiling ammo and just absolutely taking out waves upon waves of foes.
01:16:24
Speaker
You have to choose your battles.
01:16:26
Speaker
You can't just...
01:16:28
Speaker
You have to sneak around sometimes, you can't just take everybody down, you have to hide, you have to decide when it's worth it to blow things up and when it's worth it to run and hide, and both of them are equally valid.
01:16:39
Speaker
I think it has a lot in common with games like Darkest Dungeon in the sense that you are going to lose people, and it's probably the first strategy game like this that I've ever played that was actually scary.
01:16:54
Speaker
It is a horror game without question.
01:16:56
Speaker
Not quite, but it is, and it's enough of one.
01:17:01
Speaker
It's just a really, really unique game.
01:17:05
Speaker
Well, you know what?
01:17:06
Speaker
I take that back.
01:17:06
Speaker
It's not unique in the slightest.
01:17:09
Speaker
It wears its inspirations on its face, very, very obviously.
01:17:15
Speaker
Anyone who goes into the marine customization section knows exactly what I'm talking about because this basically ripped whole cloth from XCOM.
01:17:24
Speaker
Um, and that's fine.
01:17:26
Speaker
It does all of those things well enough.
01:17:29
Speaker
It has some jank to it that you're going to see with these kinds of studios, but I, it's well worth it to me.
01:17:34
Speaker
Uh, and I just keep coming back to it.
01:17:38
Speaker
Uh, it is like, uh, that X who ruined my life.
01:17:42
Speaker
And I just keep coming back for one more squeezer in the back of my Chevy Malibu.
01:17:48
Speaker
Uh, it's, it's a motherfucker and aliens, dark descent, uh,
01:17:53
Speaker
Number one game of the year.
01:17:55
Speaker
Done.
01:17:56
Speaker
Just so you know, everybody, Phil actually has multiple exes that have ruined his life.
01:18:02
Speaker
Oh, God.
01:18:02
Speaker
Like so many.
01:18:03
Speaker
And I was there for a few of them.
01:18:05
Speaker
Yes, you were.
01:18:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:08
Speaker
You were there.
01:18:10
Speaker
So I'm immune to this kind of shit.
01:18:12
Speaker
I'm a nerd.
01:18:14
Speaker
You can't fuck me up, Alien Star descent.
01:18:16
Speaker
In fact, I love you.
01:18:17
Speaker
How about that?
01:18:19
Speaker
Oh, God.
01:18:20
Speaker
So, yeah, my number one is Baldur's Gate 3.
01:18:25
Speaker
Nice.
01:18:27
Speaker
The choice of most respectable human beings everywhere.
01:18:31
Speaker
No, I get it.
01:18:31
Speaker
I played, you know, 30 seconds of Alien's Dark Descent.
01:18:37
Speaker
So I understand where you're coming from.
01:18:39
Speaker
Sure.
01:18:40
Speaker
It crashed on me, I think.
01:18:41
Speaker
Yeah.
01:18:44
Speaker
And I'm not sure I even bothered playing it again.
01:18:50
Speaker
That sounds about right.
01:18:53
Speaker
Jesus.
01:18:55
Speaker
Uh, no Baldur's Gate three amazing achievement by all the folks at Larry.
01:18:59
Speaker
And I know it's, um, it Baldur's Gate three is such a heavy release that it is such a big gravitational body that it is generated a number of discourses just on its own.
01:19:11
Speaker
Um, but I think the thing that can easily get lost in all of this is that Baldur's Gate three is an amazing achievement and it took it a, um,
01:19:20
Speaker
It took a genre in CRPGs, which, you know what, and it doesn't do anything really special with that genre other than, hey, we're going to make it look good.
01:19:33
Speaker
We're going to make all the characters hot.
01:19:35
Speaker
We're going to give them all great voice acting.
01:19:38
Speaker
And we're going to plan out just about...
01:19:43
Speaker
every conceivable option that the... That's the big achievement, is that it was thoroughly...
01:19:52
Speaker
mapped so that it actually responds to almost every conceivable option that you could choose at any given point.
01:20:04
Speaker
I remember people posting something like where you could, there's this part where there's a halfling threatening to blow everybody up with this like powder or whatever.
01:20:15
Speaker
And there's a way where you can like have one of your people steal the powder while she's talking about it.
01:20:23
Speaker
And she'll be like, and now we all die.
01:20:27
Speaker
And then she'll look at her hand and be like, what?
01:20:32
Speaker
Just little things like that.
01:20:34
Speaker
I love that.
01:20:36
Speaker
And I think the other thing that's really been cool about it is that they have been very amenable to feedback in terms of great bug reporting.
01:20:45
Speaker
They're constantly working on patching up the game, making sure, because it's a...
01:20:51
Speaker
I mean, I just can't imagine.
01:20:53
Speaker
It's a monster.
01:20:54
Speaker
It's a monster of a game.
01:20:56
Speaker
And keeping that monster of a game bug-free has got to be a task in and of itself.
01:21:01
Speaker
I can't believe how clean it was.
01:21:04
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:04
Speaker
It's crazy.
01:21:05
Speaker
I mean, the third act probably had the most clunkiness out of all of them, of all the parts of the game.
01:21:11
Speaker
But in terms of, like, you know, a really solidly finished product from beginning to end, I mean,
01:21:20
Speaker
It was really good.
01:21:22
Speaker
And I think what I think, there was some discourse around like, you know, people shouldn't be too used to this type of game.
Immersive Sim Discussion
01:21:32
Speaker
I don't, like I didn't agree in terms of this type of game in terms of like a big, you know, fun CRPG.
01:21:40
Speaker
I do agree that it like, don't pin your hopes on a company sitting there and mapping out
01:21:46
Speaker
every potential choice that you can make in a game.
01:21:49
Speaker
I think that might be, that's kind of where some of that criticism comes from in terms of expectations, because it's like the game is basically an immersive sim in terms of the things that you can do.
01:22:01
Speaker
Like there's so many ways that you can get around obstacles.
01:22:06
Speaker
You can go and collect a bunch of barrels and you can just stack up the barrels and climb over them and get over a wall that way instead of like anything else.
01:22:16
Speaker
Instead of fighting your way in or whatever, you can, you know, build some, put some barrels up.
01:22:22
Speaker
It's a game that wants you to be clever.
01:22:24
Speaker
It wants you to be clever, which is the mark of any good DM.
01:22:28
Speaker
Big time.
Favorite Dungeon Masters
01:22:30
Speaker
Yes.
01:22:31
Speaker
And Amelia Tyler is my favorite DM, you know?
01:22:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:22:37
Speaker
Whenever she says, what does she say?
01:22:46
Speaker
When the thrall power activates and it's like one word.
01:22:55
Speaker
Oh, fuck.
01:22:59
Speaker
Is it domination or...
01:23:05
Speaker
She just has this one word that she says when you can just mind control somebody.
01:23:09
Speaker
And I'm just like, ooh.
01:23:12
Speaker
She's got a beautiful voice.
01:23:13
Speaker
She does a wonderful job.
01:23:14
Speaker
Yeah.
Character Humor and Affection
01:23:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:16
Speaker
Team Carlack forever.
01:23:19
Speaker
Team Carlack.
01:23:20
Speaker
Best girl Carlack.
01:23:21
Speaker
Best girl Carlack.
01:23:22
Speaker
Come on.
01:23:23
Speaker
Come on.
01:23:23
Speaker
Though I have dated everybody.
01:23:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:28
Speaker
Asterian, you little bitch.
01:23:31
Speaker
He's adorable, though.
01:23:33
Speaker
I didn't like him at first.
01:23:34
Speaker
I turned around on him.
01:23:35
Speaker
Oh, God, yeah.
01:23:36
Speaker
He's just a little half-elf.
01:23:40
Speaker
Full elf.
01:23:40
Speaker
He's not a half-elf.
01:23:42
Speaker
He's a full-elf vampire.
01:23:44
Speaker
And who could say no to that?
01:23:47
Speaker
He's just a slutty little guy.
01:23:49
Speaker
Just a slutty little guy.
01:23:50
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:52
Speaker
Just innocent men.
01:23:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:57
Speaker
Just normal vampires.
01:24:00
Speaker
Just normal vampires.
01:24:03
Speaker
Just innocent vampires.
01:24:08
Speaker
Oh, God.
01:24:09
Speaker
So that'll do it.
Community and Support Announcements
01:24:10
Speaker
That's it.
01:24:11
Speaker
That's a games of the year.
01:24:14
Speaker
And this is Phil's going away episode for a little bit.
01:24:19
Speaker
Yeah, not permanently, but not permanently.
01:24:21
Speaker
Briefly.
01:24:22
Speaker
When he's back, he'll have a fresh, fresh new baboo.
01:24:25
Speaker
Yeah, I got like a week or so on my hands before I have a son.
01:24:30
Speaker
So that's going to take up a little bit of my time, but Kevin's going to take very good care of you guys.
01:24:35
Speaker
We've got all kinds of cool guest spots coming up.
01:24:38
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:39
Speaker
A lot of people that have never been on the show before, so that's exciting.
01:24:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:24:43
Speaker
It'll be good times.
01:24:44
Speaker
So in the meantime, if you'd like to send us some money...
01:24:52
Speaker
to fund Phil's diaper funds.
01:24:55
Speaker
Yeah, there you go.
01:24:57
Speaker
You could do that on patreon.com slash pixelitpod.
01:25:00
Speaker
We have three tiers.
01:25:02
Speaker
$1, $5, and $10.
01:25:03
Speaker
And $10 gives you a shout out at the end of every episode.
01:25:07
Speaker
And it's that time.
01:25:10
Speaker
It's that time.
01:25:11
Speaker
Friendly friend.
01:25:12
Speaker
You know what time it is.
01:25:13
Speaker
Oh, friendly friend.
01:25:14
Speaker
Oh, friendly friend.
01:25:18
Speaker
Thank you for being a friendly friend.
01:25:20
Speaker
So yeah, go to our Patreon.
01:25:23
Speaker
Do that.
01:25:25
Speaker
Patreon.com slash PixelitPod is too many words, too many letters.
01:25:28
Speaker
Just go to PixelitPod.com and you'll be redirected to our Patreon page.
01:25:35
Speaker
Otherwise, at PixelitPod on all the social medias that you can think of.
01:25:41
Speaker
Uh, go follow us there.
01:25:43
Speaker
And we have a discord.
01:25:45
Speaker
Join our discord.
01:25:46
Speaker
Yes.
01:25:47
Speaker
Join the conversation.
01:25:48
Speaker
A lot of good stuff talking about, I mean, we got, that's how I found out that Henry Kissinger died.
01:25:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:53
Speaker
It's, it's, you get all kinds of important information through our discord.
01:25:56
Speaker
I've come to find is our friend, Tim just posted that Henry Kissinger died.
01:26:01
Speaker
And I was, you know what?
01:26:02
Speaker
I knew we could count on Tim.
01:26:03
Speaker
I'm glad I found out through him.
01:26:04
Speaker
That's that, that seems appropriate.
01:26:06
Speaker
I found out through Tim.
01:26:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:26:09
Speaker
Um,
01:26:10
Speaker
Yeah, so that'll do it for tonight's episode.
01:26:13
Speaker
Thank you guys for another wonderful year.
01:26:19
Speaker
And I really can't wait to see where 2024 takes us.
01:26:25
Speaker
Hell yeah.
01:26:26
Speaker
Hell yeah.
01:26:27
Speaker
Have a good night.
01:26:28
Speaker
Good night.