Transcript
Speaker: You just turn it off, you know?
Speaker: Easy peasy.
Speaker: Easy peasy.
Speaker: Lemon squeezy.
Speaker: Lemon squeezy.
Speaker: You know what else is lemon squeezy?
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixel It, and it's our Game of the Year edition.
Speaker: We're going to talk about our Games of the Year.
Speaker: This episode, Phil and I will go down our lists.
Speaker: We'll talk about the games that we loved, the games that we loved together, and, you know, we'll get...
Speaker: Get it done.
Speaker: We'll crown a game at the end and all the other games are deleted from our Steam accounts.
Speaker: Forever.
Speaker: Forever.
Speaker: And your Steam account.
Speaker: They won't exist anymore.
Speaker: Yeah, I hope you got in there while you could.
Speaker: It's over now.
Speaker: Nuclear warheads are on their way.
Speaker: On their way.
Speaker: Not only are they on their way to the Great Lakes, but they're on their way to your Steam accounts.
Speaker: And so you guys won't hear this for another week or so, but this will explain a lot.
Speaker: This explains so much.
Speaker: You're going to, yeah, you're going to, you're going to have spent about a week trying to figure out what the hell went on.
Speaker: And this is our answer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, so anyway, let's, let's get into it.
Speaker: Let's, let's go bottom up.
Speaker: I would imagine that that makes the most sense.
Speaker: That's the way I like to fuck.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: I'm glad.
Speaker: I'm glad we're there.
Speaker: Off to a good start.
Speaker: Off to a great start.
Speaker: So, Phil, why don't you go first with your number 10?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: My number 10, and I'm going to be pulling it up so I've got the information in front of me.
Speaker: Hold on.
Speaker: Hold on.
Speaker: Hold on.
Speaker: Hold on.
Speaker: Oh, oh, oh.
Speaker: ASMR.
Speaker: ASMR segment.
Speaker: It's time.
Speaker: It's time.
Speaker: What you drinking tonight?
Speaker: I hate Coca-Cola.
Speaker: Ah, classic.
Speaker: Classic.
Speaker: Beautiful.
Speaker: It's beautiful.
Speaker: It's a beautiful thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So go for it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: My number 10 game is Ravenous Devils.
Speaker: And this was one that I talked a little bit.
Speaker: In fact, I don't think there's a single game on this list that I didn't talk about during our What Are You Playing segment.
Speaker: I'm pretty sure we've talked about all these during What Are You Playing?
Speaker: Yeah, so there's no getting around that.
Speaker: It's the Game of the Year episode.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: what are we expecting here?
Speaker: Yeah, we weren't, we weren't holding anything back from you guys.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: Ravenous Devils is a, they, they describe it as a horror cooking simulator.
Speaker: And, and I, I gotta agree.
Speaker: It is basically Sweeney Todd, the game.
Speaker: You play a couple of, one is a cook.
Speaker: The other one is a tailor in this case, and you have to swap between the two of them as one, uh,
Speaker: basically invites people in, kills them, steals their clothes, uh, refines their clothes.
Speaker: So you can resell them and throws their body down into the basement where your wife can chop them up, turn them into pies or sausages or steaks and sell them in your store.
Speaker: And, uh, there is a storyline in the game that goes through it, but it's probably the least interesting part of it.
Speaker: Um, again, it is, it is, it,
Speaker: It is just Sweeney Todd is just that story.
Speaker: And I love Sweeney Todd, but the story doesn't matter as much as the gameplay.
Speaker: The gameplay is kind of frantic.
Speaker: It's fun.
Speaker: You're hop again.
Speaker: You're hopping back and forth between these perspectives.
Speaker: It's it can get difficult, but never so difficult that I wanted to just give up the ghost.
Speaker: It's five bucks.
Speaker: And I got about seven or eight hours out of it before I finally beat it.
Speaker: I really enjoyed it.
Speaker: You can customize it and customize your stores and upgrade all that fun stuff.
Speaker: You can even in a secret little mini game, grow a man eating plant in your attic.
Speaker: And who doesn't want to do that?
Speaker: Like Audrey too.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Like Audrey too.
Speaker: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker: It's by bad vices games.
Speaker: Let me see what else have they done?
Speaker: The bad vices games, the masterminds behind sexual void, which is a, which is a J O I game.
Speaker: And it's a J O I game.
Speaker: If you know, you know,
Speaker: If you know, you know, you know, you know, J.O.I.
Speaker: for those playing the home game stands for jerk off instructions.
Speaker: So these guys really know you all know.
Speaker: Now you all know.
Speaker: Now you're all the people who know.
Speaker: And
Speaker: So they've come a long way.
Speaker: Let's just say it that way.
Speaker: They've come a long way.
Speaker: It's a lot of fun and it's got kind of... It's got just enough indie jank to make it charming and not enough to make it obnoxious.
Speaker: And again, the price point's pretty good.
Speaker: So yeah, my number 10, Ravenous Devils.
Speaker: What about you, Kevin?
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: All right, my number 10 is... They've come a long way, Jesus Christ.
Speaker: Oh.
Speaker: My number 10 is Faith Chapter 3.
Speaker: A few months ago in October, the Unholy Trinity edition of Faith was released, which has Faith Chapters 1, 2, and 3.
Speaker: If you don't have it, I recommend you pick it up.
Speaker: Play it as a complete game.
Speaker: The entire thing takes six to seven hours, and if you're
Speaker: A little bit more completionist, I'd probably say eight or nine hours if you're going through one, two, and three.
Speaker: Faith Chapter 3 is a continuation of the Faith series created by Eredorf and published by New Blood.
Speaker: And if you...
Speaker: if you know anything about new blood, uh, this is the faith is right up your alley, uh, because new blood does, you know, they, they've done things like iron lung, um, which was pretty well received this year.
Speaker: That was this year, right?
Speaker: Iron lung.
Speaker: That was this year.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: dusk amid evil uh so there's there's a whole lot of good new blood stuff out there and faith is is oh and um what's uh the one that i've been looking forward to for ever and it's in early access right now and it's uh called uh
Speaker: I'm going to cut this out.
Speaker: Keep me on the edge of my seat.
Speaker: All right, fine.
Speaker: Store page, New Blood Interactive.
Speaker: What am I thinking of?
Speaker: Gloomoid.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: Oh, Gloomwood.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Gloomwood's in early access.
Speaker: And it'll probably be on my next year game of the year because it's definitely early.
Speaker: It doesn't even have the complete game out yet.
Speaker: It's missing a bunch of levels.
Speaker: So Faith, chapter three, continues the story of the priest cop from...
Speaker: The Exorcist from chapters one and two, and it's the ultimate showdown against Gary, the cult leader who is basically behind everything that started in Faith chapter one.
Speaker: So it's it's retro.
Speaker: pixel art, real retro pixel art.
Speaker: It looks like it would have been on the Atari in 1985 or something like that.
Speaker: The game takes place in 1987.
Speaker: It's very influenced by the Satanic Panic, which is a very interesting.
Speaker: We all know about the Satanic Panic.
Speaker: It's a very interesting topic.
Speaker: So Faith Chapter 3 is my number 10 for 2022.
Speaker: Number nine.
Speaker: Go for it.
Speaker: Number nine.
Speaker: Oh, that's right.
Speaker: We did that last year.
Speaker: I'm already back.
Speaker: My number nine is Strange Horticulture.
Speaker: This one was developed by Bad Viking, who I don't know if they did anything that I would know otherwise.
Speaker: They're kind of all over the place.
Speaker: They've got a game called King of Retail, which appears to be a retail simulator.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: These guys came out of freaking nowhere.
Speaker: Land of the Vikings, that kind of thing.
Speaker: But Strange Horticulture is a really...
Speaker: satisfying, calm, but challenging little puzzle game where you play the owner of this odd,
Speaker: A botanical shop.
Speaker: It's very witchy and you're meant to solve a mystery while traveling all over this little map and solving puzzles that will lead you to new samples of plants and mushrooms and all kinds of other things.
Speaker: again, botanicals that you can keep in your shop, that you can use to cure people's ills, that you can use to solve mysteries, that you can use to solve puzzles.
Speaker: And it's very clever.
Speaker: It's one of those games that got me to grab my notepad and scroll down notes and stuff like that for the puzzles, which, come on, Kev, you and I are old school.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Gamers.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: How am I supposed to resist that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's very interesting and very unique and charming and had a lot of love put into it, baked into it, which makes me very happy.
Speaker: And again, it's challenging and really interesting.
Speaker: And the puzzles are fantastic, but it also has this wonderful, calm kind of atmosphere, which just makes it wonderful for a fat hungover guy on a Saturday morning.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: to just kind of lazily go through.
Speaker: And by the time he's figured out exactly what mushroom goes into this tincture, the hangover is gone.
Speaker: And hypothetically speaking, I mean, of course.
Speaker: So yeah, I highly recommend it.
Speaker: It's a little expensive for how much gameplay you get out of it.
Speaker: I hate to couch in that kind of criticism.
Speaker: I do.
Speaker: but it is $15 and I think I got like six or seven hours of time out of it.
Speaker: If that matters to you, then wait for it to go on sale.
Speaker: But frankly, if I'm describing it to you and it sounds like,
Speaker: It might interest you.
Speaker: It probably is exactly what you think it is.
Speaker: Cause I know that's how I felt.
Speaker: I was like, if this is what I think it is, I'm going to be really excited.
Speaker: And it was, uh, and there aren't a lot of games like this out there, at least not in my experience.
Speaker: If I'm wrong and there are, please contact me and let me know about more games like this.
Speaker: Cause I really enjoyed strange, strange horticulture.
Speaker: That's my number nine.
Speaker: All right, number nine for me is Last Call BBS, which is the final Zaktronics game that will be released.
Speaker: Zaktronics as a developer slash publisher or what have you is deciding to
Speaker: to throw in the towel after this last release.
Speaker: And what they've made over the years are these really quirky kind of fun puzzle games.
Speaker: Last Call BBS is a game
Speaker: The conceit of it is you are booting up an old computer and it has all this pre-installed like software on it that you can kind of click around and look into as, as old emails and, and whatnot.
Speaker: And then you go into the games and it has, and then you go into a BBS that it connects to and you can download games onto the computer.
Speaker: And then it, and it's like all in real time.
Speaker: It's like, you click download the game and it's like, it'll download in two minutes.
Speaker: So you just like sit there and watch the bar of,
Speaker: And then you can play the game.
Speaker: That's freaking hilarious.
Speaker: It's so funny.
Speaker: And then there's like, I can't remember specifically how many games are on there.
Speaker: Most of my time was spent in a game called 20th century food court, which has basically it's a, it's a puzzle game where you have to effectively and efficiently get food orders from one end of this map to another using the,
Speaker: all sorts of different equipment.
Speaker: And it goes from very simple at the beginning to to mind breakingly complex by the end, because you have to have all these things that do like, all right, well, this this takes when this hits this point, it activates this thing and it sends a signal over to this arm to grab it and move it over to this thing.
Speaker: And it's
Speaker: The amount of wiring on your little screen is so intense that if anyone who came in and saw it, they would think that you lost your mind with how intense this game gets.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Well, that's that to me, that's that was like the standout.
Speaker: The other games I played a little bit.
Speaker: There's a solitaire game that I, you know, mucked around with.
Speaker: There's a game that is very similar to the game that you were talking about the other day where you you build models.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Model builder.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: There's a game in in Last Call BBS that does that.
Speaker: Oh, that's funny.
Speaker: So you're saying that the game that I was like, I had to give up on because it was just too close.
Speaker: It's just a piece of this game is a piece of last call.
Speaker: BBS.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Funny.
Speaker: That's so funny.
Speaker: So number nine, last call BBS, the final Zaktronics game.
Speaker: Very nice.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That makes this number eight.
Speaker: My number eight is tiny folks.
Speaker: by Pierre Vandermason.
Speaker: This is another one of these...
Speaker: old school, cheap.
Speaker: You know, you could, you could buy this game for less than you can a cup of coffee these days.
Speaker: And it's old school as hell.
Speaker: It has a wonderful blend of strategy and classic RPG elements.
Speaker: Basically you are playing a king who needs to build up a team of adventurers to cross this land and take your crown back from an evil wizard and
Speaker: And you do that by building up your little hamlet of people and training them in different ways.
Speaker: There are all kinds of combinations of skills that you can give to each of your little heroes.
Speaker: And in 45 days or less, you've got to go and defeat this wizard.
Speaker: And it's weird how...
Speaker: well, it blends both complexity with simplicity.
Speaker: It is a very simple game.
Speaker: It is not, you know, it is not, it is not a complicated game in the slightest, but at the same time, there is a level of depth and complexity to it that is very, very satisfying.
Speaker: You can beat it and beat it again with different challenges in mind.
Speaker: It's really very cool.
Speaker: I enjoyed the hell out of this one.
Speaker: This one, I kind of like, just, I was like, it was four bucks.
Speaker: What's the worst thing that could happen?
Speaker: I'm going to try it out and see how I enjoy it.
Speaker: And I ended up pumping some serious hours into this one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I highly recommend it.
Speaker: I played it a bit too.
Speaker: I need to play it a little bit more before I would consider moving it up the list.
Speaker: I just started getting very frustrated with the, I'd say, difficulty spikes between the towns that I would like, or the things that you would travel to.
Speaker: It would be like,
Speaker: It would be like easy to medium was like a huge jump.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: It is a jump.
Speaker: Yes, it is a jump.
Speaker: It is a jump.
Speaker: And so and then the most the recent thing that I realized was that the like, oh, sometimes it's better to just not upgrade a person at all.
Speaker: Yeah, because like a single train, like a like a person who is just single trained once in faith, for example, like and that makes them a priest or whatever can do is probably the best healer that you're going to get versus if you train them again, they don't actually lose access to a couple of the spells that made them good on the lower level.
Speaker: So, yeah, tiny folks, though, I put some hours into it, too, and it's it's a lot of fun.
Speaker: It's it's almost like a puzzle in and of itself, figuring out like, all right, this is what I got to do in order to be actually effective.
Speaker: Yeah, it requires a lot of trial and error, like a lot of these strategy games that I like.
Speaker: Yeah, it's but yeah, yeah, that's totally valid.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Number eight for me.
Speaker: Dying Light 2, Stay Human.
Speaker: Love the gameplay of Dying Light 2.
Speaker: It is so much fun.
Speaker: It's the first person.
Speaker: You can't really say shooter because there are really not you're not really using guns in the game using melee weapons.
Speaker: Dying Light 2 is made by Techland.
Speaker: They are the company that also made Dead Island years ago.
Speaker: And Dying Light 2 and Dying Light were kind of like the
Speaker: the appropriate continuation of that idea.
Speaker: Whereas, whereas Dead Island was, you know, met with mostly disappointment.
Speaker: Dying Light games with the introduction of all the parkour elements that they have in them are a lot of fun.
Speaker: Now, Dying Light 2, for as much fun as I had on it, is lower on the list because of how absolutely, you know,
Speaker: dumb and annoying the story is.
Speaker: It's the story and the cut scenes are so bad that you start skipping them on your first playthrough.
Speaker: You're not even letting them play out.
Speaker: You're like, I don't care.
Speaker: Because you're playing a guy who's looking for his sister, but the flashbacks to when they were kids are just so cloying and
Speaker: They drive.
Speaker: They drove me up a wall.
Speaker: So I really wasn't playing it for the story anymore.
Speaker: I would advance the story just to get access to new areas.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But I wasn't really playing it for the story.
Speaker: But yeah, Dying Light 2, a lot of fun.
Speaker: And I think it's it's cheaper now than it was at the beginning of the year.
Speaker: It was released in January, I think.
Speaker: I'm glad that you said that because I played some Dying Light 2, and that was when, for our listeners who might remember when my computer completely cracked itself in half, that was right before that happened.
Speaker: So I wasn't getting the best gameplay experience of it.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Although I could tell there was something there and I loathed the storyline.
Speaker: And yes, and I, and you know, I love story and I was skipping through it on my first playthrough, just like you said.
Speaker: And I was like this, shut up.
Speaker: I just let me go fight some, I don't care.
Speaker: And let me run across some rooftops.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: And then when I got my new rig all set up and everything, I never went back to it, but I'm glad you said this because now I'm going to go back to it.
Speaker: Yeah, it's fun.
Speaker: It's a lot of fun.
Speaker: So yeah, that's my number eight.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: For my number seven, I chose Stray.
Speaker: Go for it.
Speaker: Which, I mean, this one was one of those games that when it came out this summer was kind of like all anyone could talk about for a solid like two weeks.
Speaker: It was a meme, basically.
Speaker: It became a meme.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was all anyone gave a shit about for a good long time.
Speaker: The meow button, the whole damn thing.
Speaker: And I, like an idiot, waited on this particular one.
Speaker: I'd only played it in the past month or so.
Speaker: And I'm so glad I did.
Speaker: It appealed to me on so many different levels.
Speaker: I love the world.
Speaker: I loved the best kitty boy in the entire world.
Speaker: And he looked like your cat.
Speaker: And it looks like my cat, Jonesy, and it gave me a little choked up moment at the end.
Speaker: And it's got this wonderful cyberpunk feel to it.
Speaker: The world is interesting.
Speaker: I had a little trouble, as we've discussed before, coming and going from the game.
Speaker: I feel like this is one of those games that if you're going to play Stray, you could probably finish it in like two sittings.
Speaker: And that's probably your best way to go about it.
Speaker: I don't.
Speaker: Yeah, I don't.
Speaker: I don't think I realized how short the game was.
Speaker: It's not a short, short game.
Speaker: It took me like six hours to beat.
Speaker: But I think if I knew it was that long, there were several times I would have chosen not to quit.
Speaker: I would have been like, OK, let's let's do this powered through.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Let's just keep playing.
Speaker: And, uh, and that way it wouldn't have affected me quite as much.
Speaker: So if you know that you're going into more of a medium sized bite of storyline and that sort of thing, I think you'll, you'll enjoy it, uh, better.
Speaker: I think the experience will go better that way.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: But the gameplay feels good.
Speaker: It's just so stupidly beautiful.
Speaker: And the soundtrack is great.
Speaker: I'm amazed I haven't heard more about the soundtrack.
Speaker: It's so subtle and there are no great sweeping scores that you're going to be able to hum, but it's so appropriate for the world and it all comes together so beautifully.
Speaker: So Stray, without question, number seven.
Speaker: Yeah, Stray, I never got, I never finished it, so that's why it's absent from my list.
Speaker: But I enjoyed the time that I spent with the cute little kitty.
Speaker: And I meowed the crap out of that button.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: How can you not?
Speaker: Number seven for me, and I think this is a shared one, is if you want to chime in, Cult of the Lamb.
Speaker: Cult of the Lamb.
Speaker: So Cult of the Lamb, it is a roguelite farming sim dungeon crawl game.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And also Cult Simulator.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Is that a good summary of what it is?
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: It was the game that finally made me understand the Binding of Isaac and why people keep coming back to it.
Speaker: Yeah, stylistically, it's not that far off from Binding of Isaac.
Speaker: You play as a little lamb.
Speaker: who at the beginning of the game is going to be sacrificed to some eldritch god and you break free and the god, a different god, is like, you're going to be my vessel and you start up a cult and you gather your followers and there's basically four biomes that you fight your way through with a bishop at the end of each one.
Speaker: And it's it's adorable, too.
Speaker: And you got your little cult cult followers and they poop everywhere and you pick up the poop and you sometimes you sacrifice them.
Speaker: I couldn't.
Speaker: I sacrificed Kevin for the record.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Full disclosure, sacrificed my best friend.
Speaker: That's just how this works.
Speaker: That's just how it works.
Speaker: That's how it works.
Speaker: No, I also have Cult of the Lamb on my list.
Speaker: It is higher up.
Speaker: In a big way, because to back when all of the millennials were talking about what House of Hogwarts they were, I had I was trying to explain to my family why I identified as Slytherin and.
Speaker: And my sister-in-law put it best.
Speaker: I said, I don't like the Slytherin because they're wizard racist.
Speaker: I like them because they're, and she said, evil?
Speaker: And I went, yeah, probably.
Speaker: It's all the dark lore and all that stuff.
Speaker: So the aesthetic for this game just makes me so happy.
Speaker: And the gameplay was so addictive.
Speaker: I'll get into a little of my own personal thoughts when we get to it.
Speaker: But yeah, this is one for my list as well.
Speaker: Big time, big time.
Speaker: By the way, we can't let a mention of Harry Potter go by without saying fuck J.K.
Speaker: Rowling.
Speaker: Fuck J.K.
Speaker: Rowling, by the way.
Speaker: And don't buy Hogwarts Legacy or play it.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: You can do other things.
Speaker: There's lots of good media out there.
Speaker: You only have so much time.
Speaker: Get into Warhammer 40K.
Speaker: Original flavored Warhammer.
Speaker: Pick one.
Speaker: Kevin is.
Speaker: I'm getting, I'm, I started reading the horse heresy series.
Speaker: We finally broke them down.
Speaker: People are you finally made it.
Speaker: Phil broke me down and I have signed up to read a series that is 62 books long.
Speaker: One that I myself have not finished.
Speaker: They have released 62 books in the past 16 years.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: What the fuck?
Speaker: It is an absolute factory of sci-fi grim darkness.
Speaker: Yeah, so I'm in.
Speaker: I'm in like Flynn.
Speaker: So you already did your number seven, right?
Speaker: Yes, we are on number six.
Speaker: Number six.
Speaker: Go for your number six.
Speaker: Number six for me, Iron Lung.
Speaker: I mentioned Iron Lung earlier.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And Iron Lung is only kept...
Speaker: from the top five, basically, just because of how good the games I played in the top five were.
Speaker: I mentioned before not wanting to gauge a game based on how much money you got, you paid for it based on how much time you put into it.
Speaker: This is one of those reasons because it's about five or six dollars and it's a 90 minute game.
Speaker: It took me, you know, a lunch break.
Speaker: It's a feature film.
Speaker: It is a feature film.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And it is wonderful.
Speaker: Everything about it, the claustrophobia of it, the simple but fun and engaging gameplay.
Speaker: You are a criminal that has been sealed inside a submersible on a planet that is covered in an ocean of blood.
Speaker: And
Speaker: You can't see.
Speaker: You can't see outside.
Speaker: So you've just got to follow these coordinates and take pictures of submerged artifacts slash skeletons slash nightmare fuel and, and, and.
Speaker: Fuck, it's good.
Speaker: It's just so good.
Speaker: It's like, it is just scary and bleak and effectively lo-fi.
Speaker: And just, it's just like, I guess you, what, N64?
Speaker: era graphics like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, and, and just everything's very polygonal.
Speaker: Now, one of the things, uh, uh, that, that people have given, uh, the designer, David Szymanski, uh, shit for is the ending.
Speaker: And he himself has, has admitted, yes, you're right.
Speaker: The ending's a bit of a cop out.
Speaker: I still didn't care.
Speaker: Uh, uh, it is a bit of a cop out.
Speaker: The ending is a bit of a cop out.
Speaker: I'm not going to say what it is.
Speaker: You have to play the game to find out.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But even with a, you know, not a horrible cop out, but it's a cop out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But even with that, it's the most effective horror gaming I've played all year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In an hour and a half.
Speaker: I never played it, but I watched.
Speaker: I just enjoyed watching people play it.
Speaker: It was fun to see people kind of start sweating as they go through the game.
Speaker: One of the other things I'll point out is that
Speaker: David Zmanski created this game, short game, and then, but the lore he created for the game, the hints of wider world building are so tempting.
Speaker: Like, I want to know more about that.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Well, too bad.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I hope we get another one.
Speaker: I don't care.
Speaker: I don't care if we get Iron Lung 2 and it's basically exactly the same gameplay, just another, a different hour and a half.
Speaker: I'm in.
Speaker: I'll give you another six bucks.
Speaker: Make it happen.
Speaker: It's a great example of how indie horror can be crazy effective on a budget without resorting to the same budget.
Speaker: bullshit five nights at Freddy's style jump scare thing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Look, that has its place, but we're glutted with it.
Speaker: It's so much.
Speaker: It's so much.
Speaker: So this is wonderful.
Speaker: Again, it is.
Speaker: I'm a horror guy.
Speaker: And this to me is probably the best horror game I played all year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's all there is.
Speaker: I mean, Phil was in Phil was in at oceans of blood.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was the most metal thing I'd ever heard in my life.
Speaker: Such a metal thing.
Speaker: I'm in a submersible in an ocean of blood.
Speaker: I'm in.
Speaker: Crank the cradle of filth and let's go.
Speaker: Let's do it.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: So that's my number six.
Speaker: Kevin, Kevin, what do you got?
Speaker: Number six for me is Vampire Survivors.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: This game, I've, this game, I've dedicated the most hours to, of the games on my list, I've probably dedicated the most hours to it.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Now, that's interesting.
Speaker: Now, honestly, no, actually, that's a lie.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Okay, okay, okay.
Speaker: I am lying.
Speaker: I'm not going to cut it out because I believe we should learn from our mistakes and preserve them in amber, but
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: So, yes, numbers one and five on my list.
Speaker: I'm number one, definitely more.
Speaker: And five is getting pretty close.
Speaker: But yeah, number six, Vampire Survivors.
Speaker: It is this little game.
Speaker: There's not there's you're just a little dude on a screen and you're walking around killing monsters and the weapons auto attack.
Speaker: It's a twin stick shooter, except there's only one one stick.
Speaker: So that's the way I kind of describe it.
Speaker: Think of Smash TV, except you don't have to really worry about the second control.
Speaker: You just have the one and you just point your guy in a little direction and everything about it is jangly and it's fun and all that stuff.
Speaker: Vampire Survivor, it's become so well known.
Speaker: I think it's it just released a DLC a few weeks before this episode is going to come out.
Speaker: That bastard, because now he ruined my perfect achievement list.
Speaker: I know it is.
Speaker: I don't know if I'm going to go back and finish and then go.
Speaker: because come on, man, don't move the goalposts like that.
Speaker: It's unforgivable, but you got to do what you got to do.
Speaker: You got to do what you got to do.
Speaker: But yeah, Vampire Survivors, number six on my list.
Speaker: I think it's also on your list, right?
Speaker: It is absolutely on my list.
Speaker: Everything Kevin said.
Speaker: The music, the music, the music slaps it.
Speaker: The music is amazing and it invokes evokes the best of Castlevania stuff.
Speaker: All the artwork is Castlevania inspired.
Speaker: The whole thing evokes the best.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: And I'll get into it a little bit later.
Speaker: But without question, I don't think anyone would be surprised to see Vampire Survivors on everyone's Game of the Year list.
Speaker: It is not a big surprise.
Speaker: We are not stretching hard to suggest that this one belongs on both of our top tens.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I will just say here, it is absolutely the game that I devoted the most hours to in 2022.
Speaker: So, yeah, we'll get into that.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Okay, so we're on number five.
Speaker: Number five.
Speaker: Number five for me is Marvel Snap.
Speaker: Son of a bitch.
Speaker: Marvel Snap is also my number five.
Speaker: Yay!
Speaker: I knew one of them.
Speaker: I was like, one of them we are going to match up on.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Number five.
Speaker: Marvel snap.
Speaker: And I think that's where it belongs.
Speaker: It's up there for hours.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I play it at home.
Speaker: So just on my Steam version, I have like 20 hours in.
Speaker: And I've like, I barely played it on my computer.
Speaker: And I have 20 hours in.
Speaker: On Steam.
Speaker: So the iPhone isn't tracking it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Which for me, honestly, in my own self-esteem, I'm probably good with that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I play it at work.
Speaker: I play it at home.
Speaker: I play it while I'm cooking, while I'm making breakfast, when I'm watching movies with the wife.
Speaker: I'm constantly playing it.
Speaker: Pooping.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: When I'm pooping.
Speaker: And it is...
Speaker: We have talked many times before about how non-exploitative it is.
Speaker: Don't get me wrong.
Speaker: They got potential to do it.
Speaker: But at the time of this taping, they are holding back.
Speaker: I think Evelyn Error made a good point when we talked about it.
Speaker: She said maybe it's just that they're trying to
Speaker: keep Disney's holding back on that because really what they want is people to be thinking about Marvel all the time.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And I hope that's what it is because not only is that diabolically evil and genius on a Disney scale, it saves us all a little bit of money.
Speaker: And I appreciate that.
Speaker: The trading card nerd in me loves it.
Speaker: Oh, God.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Simplicity.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I am taken back to 1992.
Speaker: 100%.
Speaker: Going down to the corner store, grabbing a pack of marble cards.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: We had a...
Speaker: We had a card store.
Speaker: It was just they just sold baseball cards, like all sorts of cards and other sports memorabilia.
Speaker: But they sold, you know, comic book cards, all that stuff.
Speaker: I just remember, you know, going there, walking there, getting a pack, opening it up and like looking at the cards, looking at the power levels on the back.
Speaker: I think that's the thing that really...
Speaker: I love about it is the power level idea.
Speaker: And they would have like, oh, this person's a seven in intelligence and a five in strength and all that stuff.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yeah, that was honestly, that was I may have talked about this on the show before, but that was my first dipping of the toe into game design.
Speaker: Because my brother and I collected those cards, and I noticed that on the back they had six stats, and so we would play a card against each other and roll a D6, and whoever had the highest score on that won the match.
Speaker: Very simple stuff, but that was me...
Speaker: getting into that kind of thing very early on.
Speaker: And that's really cool.
Speaker: It's neat.
Speaker: And, and so, so this really appeals to me on that level.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Marvel snap.
Speaker: Love it.
Speaker: I'm not, I, I just got, um,
Speaker: It was funny earlier today is either earlier today or last night.
Speaker: There's a new card called Dark Hawk that literally just came out this week.
Speaker: And I opened up one of the collectors caches that I got from from leveling up my cards.
Speaker: And there he was Dark Hawk.
Speaker: I was like, see.
Speaker: That's awesome.
Speaker: That feels like, ooh, okay.
Speaker: And it's great because you cannot buy the cards.
Speaker: You have to collect them naturally.
Speaker: You have to get lucky.
Speaker: And it keeps you coming.
Speaker: I've got this, I call it Symbiote X. Okay.
Speaker: It's a combination of self-destructive Symbiote cards and Weapon X cards.
Speaker: you know, invincible cards.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: And A, I still don't have venom.
Speaker: So obviously, and I'd venom for this deck, but B, there are variants, purely aesthetic variants.
Speaker: And there are symbiote variants for a bunch of the different cards that I also have in this.
Speaker: And I went, well, that just thematically makes me so excited.
Speaker: I'm desperate to have an entire deck filled with this.
Speaker: So it, and because I can't just go out and shell out cash for it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm going to keep playing.
Speaker: It's kind of like a goal you set for yourself.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I want this symbiote deck, and I want all the non-symbiote cards to have their symbiote variants.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And that keeps you coming back for it.
Speaker: And so it's something I anticipate I'm going to be playing for a while.
Speaker: I know the two dogs have symbiote variants.
Speaker: I think Cosmo and Lockjaw, I think both have...
Speaker: Nova has a symbiote variant, which I definitely need because he's in my symbiote deck.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: If you're doing destruction, you got to have Nova in there.
Speaker: You got to have him.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't know about all.
Speaker: That's one of the only ones I've seen.
Speaker: So I know they exist.
Speaker: And that's the thing.
Speaker: I could probably go online and look this up and find out exactly which one's it.
Speaker: But I'm really enjoying not knowing that.
Speaker: You're just enjoying the discovery of it.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: It's fun.
Speaker: It makes me feel like I'm playing these games between the trading card aspect of it and that it makes me feel like, you know, it's a kid.
Speaker: It makes me feel like a kid again.
Speaker: Makes me feel like a kid again.
Speaker: I'm a kid again, all over again.
Speaker: So yeah, without question, number five.
Speaker: All right, number four.
Speaker: What do you got?
Speaker: I put down, hold on, make sure I got this right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: For number four, I put down Return to Monkey Island.
Speaker: Love that.
Speaker: Love it.
Speaker: I have it on my list too.
Speaker: It's in a different spot, but go ahead.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And that makes sense to me.
Speaker: This was just...
Speaker: This is another, I mean, so many of these games, now that I look at it, are reflective of me being just an old man, both for just in the style of games I like and the nostalgic value of it.
Speaker: And Return to Monkey Island, obviously, this is a franchise that has existed since God was a boy.
Speaker: And, you know, we all, you know, get misty-eyed about it.
Speaker: And the developer made us misty-eyed through it.
Speaker: it was, it really hit the spot.
Speaker: Let me put it that way.
Speaker: It felt, it just felt good to go back to the world.
Speaker: It didn't overstay its welcome.
Speaker: It didn't, um, uh,
Speaker: Dwell too hard on the old aspects of it.
Speaker: It moved for it.
Speaker: It has graduated to the modern world very gracefully and and in doing so gave us a brilliant and beautiful send off.
Speaker: To this franchise, I thought they did it justice.
Speaker: I was thrilled with how well it was designed.
Speaker: I liked the art style of it.
Speaker: I liked the voice acting.
Speaker: Which was very contentious.
Speaker: I know, yeah.
Speaker: But I would say to those people who hate the art style, go suck an egg.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: I remember, first and foremost, even if you, whether you, whether, I don't give a shit if the art style looked like a third grader drew it, you don't act like that.
Speaker: Have some class.
Speaker: Don't be a dildo.
Speaker: But I do remember- Unless you're a dildo.
Speaker: Well, if you're a dildo, you know, then, you know, you're a friend.
Speaker: You're a friend.
Speaker: Just don't be a bad dildo.
Speaker: Don't be a bad dildo, says Pixelit Boys.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: No, it's one of those things that when I saw it, I was like, well, yeah, I'm not thrilled about it in the stills.
Speaker: But in motion, it really warmed up on me.
Speaker: I was like, oh, no, this is great.
Speaker: In action, it all made a lot of sense and it felt really good.
Speaker: No, I loved it.
Speaker: It hit me in the nostalgia bone beautifully, but it also...
Speaker: It carried itself on its own without the nostalgia aspects to it.
Speaker: If this was any other puzzle game, I feel maybe not this high on the list if it had been, you know, a brand new puzzle game or something, but it absolutely would have been on my list.
Speaker: I just, the gameplay was great.
Speaker: I really enjoyed it.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: 100% agree.
Speaker: Number four on my list is Marvel Midnight Suns, which is a late, late, late comer to the to the to the gaming sphere.
Speaker: I think it was released, what, earlier this month?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's but it's so good.
Speaker: It's it's made by Firaxis, makers of XCOM, Civilization, all your favorites, time consuming games.
Speaker: You know, the games that you really just say, all right, I'm just going to do one more turn or one more mission.
Speaker: And you say that at three o'clock in the morning.
Speaker: And then you're like, all right, I think I'm done.
Speaker: And it's three o'clock in the morning the next day.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Midnight Suns has a lot of the strategy elements that XCOM does, except it is card-based as opposed to grid and ability-based, so to speak.
Speaker: You draw a set of cards.
Speaker: You have three heroes that you control, and they're Marvel heroes.
Speaker: One of them is the hero that you've made called the Hunter, and the other two come from a roster that include...
Speaker: Iron Man, Doctor Strange, Captain America, Nico Minoru, Magic, who crossover is she's she's actually pretty important in a lot of Marvel snap decks.
Speaker: She shows up here as well.
Speaker: She shows up here as well.
Speaker: And who else?
Speaker: Oh, Captain Marvel is in the game.
Speaker: And it's it's a lot of fun.
Speaker: The the hilarious thing about it is that it's not only a tactics tactics game.
Speaker: It has this social element that you find in games like Persona, where you're actually building the relationships with the people on your team.
Speaker: And becoming better friends with the people on your team actually gives you bonuses in combat and raising the overall team friendship level gives you bonuses in combat.
Speaker: So there's there's all these elements that are completely optional.
Speaker: The game actually has a pop up box that says,
Speaker: All right, you've progressed this as far as you need to for the sake of the game.
Speaker: You don't have to do this anymore.
Speaker: It's optional.
Speaker: Which, thank you for that.
Speaker: Like, that's great.
Speaker: The fact that it tells you it's optional is amazing, but I'm like, well, no, fuck you game.
Speaker: I'm going to play it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So there's all these like fun little side quests that you have in between missions that you can work on.
Speaker: And it is delightful.
Speaker: I think one of the problems my night sons might have is, is probably MCU burnout.
Speaker: But I think some of the writing in midnight sons shows that,
Speaker: Marvel is Marvel because it's a lot of fun, you know, and that and Midnight Suns is very much in that vein where it just has these characters and they're they're written and they're written in their archetypal forms.
Speaker: You know, this is.
Speaker: This is Tony Stark being wisecracking.
Speaker: This is Peter Parker being, you know, he has imposter syndrome when he's out.
Speaker: When he's out of the Spider-Man suit, he has imposter syndrome.
Speaker: And as soon as he puts the Spider-Man suit on, he's super confident and making these like quips and everything.
Speaker: So it's it's it's fun.
Speaker: I love Midnight Suns.
Speaker: I'm like, I don't know, like a good 30 hours into it.
Speaker: I I think I'm.
Speaker: I don't know if I'm about halfway through it.
Speaker: It's a beefy game.
Speaker: If you're really engaging it on all levels, it's a very beefy game.
Speaker: So even though I haven't finished it, it's still the 30 hours I've spent in it are enough to warrant it being number four on my list.
Speaker: Yeah, I have a feeling that if I had if I if it was working for me, I would.
Speaker: Yeah, once you get through the technical issues, I think you're probably going to it might be the same type of thing for you where it's like, yeah, God.
Speaker: which, which is what kind of happened.
Speaker: It always happens every year.
Speaker: You and I do this and you'll mention a game or two that, uh, I, I didn't get to, and I'll end up playing within the first two months of the new year and go, yeah, this would have been on my list.
Speaker: So, uh, like death store, for example, that would have been on my list.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Uh, stuff like that.
Speaker: Uh, loop hero.
Speaker: Um, but, uh,
Speaker: Yeah, I have a suspicion that this will be also something that would normally, but I haven't played enough of it in good faith that I could put it on my list.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And at this point, it doesn't beat Ravenous Devils, my friend.
Speaker: Oh, it's Ravenous Devils and then everything else.
Speaker: Everything else.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Number three, go for it.
Speaker: Number three for me is Cult of the Lamb.
Speaker: There we go.
Speaker: Which is just all the aesthetic kills me.
Speaker: It's so adorable.
Speaker: I think one of my favorite things to do is to look at the steam reviews of it where people are giving it like all positive thumbs up and saying totally innocuous things about how cute the lamb is and stuff.
Speaker: I think in hopes of tricking some unwary parent into buying this for their kid.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I fully support this.
Speaker: I think it should be done more frequently.
Speaker: Trick parents into buying totally inappropriate games for their kids.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Do it in my name.
Speaker: Do it.
Speaker: Play the records backwards, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Let's get a good satanic panic going, you know?
Speaker: Let's do it.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: Let's do it.
Speaker: I mean, where are we?
Speaker: Where are we?
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: Let's go under the – let's walk around underneath the city in the sewer drains.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Let's find what, go down there, find that.
Speaker: You never know.
Speaker: See what you find.
Speaker: See if you, can you find a cultist down there?
Speaker: If you don't look for the giant rats, are you ever going to find them?
Speaker: No, no, not.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, we've talked about that one, but without question, number three for me, I loved that game so much.
Speaker: It made me so happy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Number three for me is Immortality.
Speaker: Ah, immortality.
Speaker: An FMV game.
Speaker: So good.
Speaker: I went on about it at length, I think, on the What Are You Playing that I talked about it.
Speaker: The lead is played by a woman named Manon Gage.
Speaker: And she was.
Speaker: Good name.
Speaker: Good name.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Good name.
Speaker: She was tremendous.
Speaker: She was nominated for best performance in a game this year for the Game Awards.
Speaker: She lost out to Christopher Judge, who is the voice of Kratos in God of War for Ragnarok.
Speaker: But Man on Gage gave a hell of a performance.
Speaker: And also the woman who plays the one who is a certain element of the game that is best discovered on your own also gave a tremendous performance.
Speaker: Immortality, it's an FMV game.
Speaker: You are basically taking the role of an archivist, a digital archivist who is archiving three films that...
Speaker: this actress starred in that have just been kind of lost to time.
Speaker: So you start out on just like a single clip and then every time you click on something in that clip, like it could be a mug or something like that, it will take you to another clip.
Speaker: that has a mug in it.
Speaker: And then you click on a person's face and it takes you to another clip that with that person's face in it.
Speaker: And you keep diving and you keep going in and in and further and further and like peeling back the layers of the story.
Speaker: And it's tremendous.
Speaker: It's best known.
Speaker: it's best played without knowing anything about it.
Speaker: And then once you play it, go watch Jacob Geller's video on it.
Speaker: But otherwise, Immortality, go play it.
Speaker: It's tremendous.
Speaker: Hell yeah.
Speaker: All right, number two.
Speaker: Oh, we're going down them, aren't we?
Speaker: My number two, surprising basically no one, is Against the Storm.
Speaker: Oh, really?
Speaker: You haven't talked about Against the Storm at all.
Speaker: I barely mentioned how much Against the Storm has ruined my life.
Speaker: No, I can't get enough of this game.
Speaker: I like my city builders, but this has something different to it.
Speaker: The aesthetic...
Speaker: is unique enough.
Speaker: The rogue-like elements of it, the fact that it's not just enough to build your one little settlement you've got to build
Speaker: At this point for me, we're in the dozens range and everything gets wiped clean and started over after a certain amount of settlements, trying out new strategies, figuring out different synergies and unlocking new buildings, new people, new everything is super fun.
Speaker: It's got a interestingly bleak.
Speaker: a storyline to it.
Speaker: You can sit down and just play forever and make your fun little town and get really caught up in the aesthetic of it.
Speaker: Or you can go really hard on just the gameplay loop of it and trying to win quote unquote.
Speaker: I am slowly unlocking all of the achievements and
Speaker: I think the thing for me that put this one so high up on the list was just how engaged I was.
Speaker: And it's an early access game.
Speaker: It's not finished.
Speaker: And I don't tend to do that all that often.
Speaker: I, I, with early access games, I want to play the finished product.
Speaker: I'm not generally given to playing something, um,
Speaker: When it isn't finished, which has become a whole thing.
Speaker: I respect people who do like to do that kind of thing, but that's just not my way.
Speaker: I just want to play it.
Speaker: And very few games have brought out that side of me.
Speaker: Like this is this is on the level of darkest dungeon for me on the level of how engaged and interested I am, despite the fact that it's not finished, because when I first got in the darkest dungeon, it wasn't finished.
Speaker: It wasn't finished either.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So this one is something that I think I'm going to be playing for a very long time.
Speaker: Does it have Wayne June providing voiceover?
Speaker: Nobody's perfect, Kevin.
Speaker: And I think if it had Wayne June, we wouldn't be talking right now because I would be working on my Against the Storm podcast.
Speaker: You remember our venerable estate.
Speaker: Opulent, genuine, furious.
Speaker: There's nothing better.
Speaker: Nothing better than that man's voice.
Speaker: So, yeah, there's no... This is my second highest in terms of sheer gameplay hours in a game.
Speaker: It has become a comfort food game to me in a...
Speaker: quick amount of time.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: It has sucked me in and I am helpless to its powers.
Speaker: You're helpless to it.
Speaker: Yeah, that's where I'm at.
Speaker: It is a vampire and you are the what's it?
Speaker: What's the thrall?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There it is.
Speaker: I'm the Renfield.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The Renfield.
Speaker: There's no question about it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's so good.
Speaker: So, so good.
Speaker: I can't stop playing it.
Speaker: So that's, that's, that is absolutely my number two.
Speaker: I have no regrets on that one.
Speaker: So Kevin, what is your number two?
Speaker: My number two is Return to Monkey Island.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: Which is, I don't know what else to say about this game other than I loved every single inch of it.
Speaker: By the time it was wrapping up and the closing of the game, it destroyed me emotionally.
Speaker: There is a level of...
Speaker: There's just this level of touch and love to the game that could really only come from somebody who had to wait 30 years to make it.
Speaker: Ron Gilbert has had his third Monkey Island game sitting in the chamber for 30 years.
Speaker: And he spent a long part of his career burnt out on the like the corporate game world and it was making pretty much educational games only.
Speaker: And then slowly started to inch back on.
Speaker: He made the cave with with his protege.
Speaker: What's his name?
Speaker: The guy who did Psychonauts.
Speaker: Oh, Levine.
Speaker: Was that Levine?
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: The double fine guy.
Speaker: Tim Schaefer.
Speaker: Schaefer.
Speaker: I always get the two of those mixed up.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So Tim Schaefer, if you don't know, back in the Lucasfilm games, LucasArts days was kind of like a protege.
Speaker: He worked under Ron Gilbert and they worked together on writing a bunch of stuff back then.
Speaker: So Ron Gilbert had his return.
Speaker: He makes the cave in the early aughts or late aughts rather with Tim Schafer with Double Fine.
Speaker: Then a few years later, he makes Thimbleweed Park, which was...
Speaker: More or less the swan song for the nine verb point and click game in his in in like his mind, not in his mind.
Speaker: I want to speak for him, but in my mind, the way it was he treated it, the way that game ends, it feels almost like a swan song, like saying goodbye to an older format of game.
Speaker: That really is doesn't it's not necessary anymore.
Speaker: And then we have Return to Monkey Island, which is a tremendous send off.
Speaker: I don't know if they're going to ever make another one, and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't.
Speaker: It's a tremendous send off to the stories and the characters that we've grown to know and love.
Speaker: And the writing is amazing.
Speaker: is on point and the voice acting by Dominic Armato, um, who is the longtime voice of Guybrush Threepwood.
Speaker: He's been the voice of Guybrush Threepwood for 30, 30 years now.
Speaker: Has anyone ever done the voice?
Speaker: Anyone else?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: I think it's been Dominic Armato the entire time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's tremendous.
Speaker: It's poignant.
Speaker: And I love it.
Speaker: And I was bawling by the end.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The end of the game and then the end of the thing that happens after the game.
Speaker: Yes, which, yes, thank you for informing me of that, by the way.
Speaker: I myself had beaten the game and was telling Kevin, my God, that really what you were right, that really did send me, that was fantastic, what a beautiful send-off, and Kevin went, did you check the thing?
Speaker: And I was like, no, I didn't know there was, okay, hold on.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, great.
Speaker: Round two.
Speaker: Here we go.
Speaker: Emotions.
Speaker: We, you know, I just, yeah, I, my, uh, I, without, without pissing anybody off.
Speaker: Well, yeah, that, no, I've never done anything like that.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: I hope they don't make any more Monkey Island games.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: That's going to sound like a weird thing to say.
Speaker: It just, it feels like it's such an appropriate sendoff for this.
Speaker: It felt appropriate.
Speaker: It felt good.
Speaker: It felt worthy of the franchise.
Speaker: And sometimes it's okay to just let things end.
Speaker: Sometimes it's okay to say goodbye to something that we love.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Sometimes that's something that the game really communicates is that it's sometimes the journey...
Speaker: The journey is the thing that matters the most.
Speaker: And the ending, when you come to it, is not always necessarily going to be satisfying or make total sense or be the perfect button that you want.
Speaker: So it's important to have the enjoyment of the journey that you can while the journey is happening.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I think that is...
Speaker: That's basically what made Return to Monkey Island my second favorite game of the year.
Speaker: It made me, it put me in my feelings, as the kids say.
Speaker: Well said, sir.
Speaker: Well said.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: What's number one?
Speaker: What's your number one?
Speaker: Take a sip of that gin.
Speaker: That's gin, right?
Speaker: My delicious homemade gin.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's vampire survivors.
Speaker: Of course it is.
Speaker: Of course it is.
Speaker: Dopamine factory.
Speaker: The music, the style, the level of weirdness without taking itself too seriously.
Speaker: It is simultaneously casual as hell.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: while also very weird and strange and complicated in other ways that you don't expect.
Speaker: It's something you can play in bite-sized pieces, or you can play for hours on end and holy shit, what happened to my Wednesday afternoon.
Speaker: It is, it is fantastic.
Speaker: It brings me back every time I bought the DLC, I will be continuing to,
Speaker: to strive for my perfect score on achievements.
Speaker: Uh, I love it.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: It's just so very, very satisfying.
Speaker: Um, James, Stephanie Sterling wrote backstory for all the enemies, which was just freaking hilarious.
Speaker: Um, it's wonderful.
Speaker: And, and it's,
Speaker: It's fantastic.
Speaker: And it just and honestly, on a side note, it feels like the people who developed this game are stand up folks.
Speaker: That's just all there is to it.
Speaker: They seem like cool people.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I'm just I love it.
Speaker: I loved every second I spent with it.
Speaker: I loved the experience of playing it in early access.
Speaker: I am not the guy, as I just mentioned, to play these early access games and follow patches and updates.
Speaker: I don't do that.
Speaker: I just, I don't care.
Speaker: I'm not that technically minded of a person and I just want to play the game.
Speaker: But I found myself, yes, I found myself like waiting on updates, patch notes.
Speaker: I'm reading patch notes, Kevin.
Speaker: You're reading patch notes.
Speaker: You are not a patch note person.
Speaker: No, I am not.
Speaker: How did that happen?
Speaker: I'll tell you how it happened.
Speaker: Vampire survivors.
Speaker: Goddamn vampire survivors.
Speaker: Fucking, I...
Speaker: I loved it.
Speaker: I had a blast with it.
Speaker: I'm certain I'm going to be putting in hours for it in 2023.
Speaker: My game of the year.
Speaker: Hands down.
Speaker: Easy.
Speaker: It was an easy choice this year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So number one.
Speaker: Shock us, Kevin.
Speaker: Give us a big shock.
Speaker: My number one is Kirby and the Forgotten.
Speaker: No, it's.
Speaker: I knew it.
Speaker: No, it's Elden Ring.
Speaker: It's Elden Ring.
Speaker: Elden Ring.
Speaker: Elden Ring.
Speaker: I put more.
Speaker: I was about to say, oh, I put more hours in Vampire.
Speaker: No, fuck no.
Speaker: I put more hours into Elden Ring than anything else this year.
Speaker: That's why I was right when you said that about Vampire Survivors.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: No, I have like, I think two separate 100 hour plus playthroughs of the game on my save files.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: Tremendous Elden Ring.
Speaker: I can understand FromSoft's game design philosophies not for or not for everybody.
Speaker: That being said, Elden Ring is lowercase accessible.
Speaker: I'm not saying I'm not saying accessibility as in accessibility as it's like, you know, the accessibility options.
Speaker: I'm saying lowercase accessible to more people than any prior FromSoft game.
Speaker: People like me.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: In terms of like difficulty, it's probably the easiest of the FromSoft Souls-like games that have come out.
Speaker: I think Elden Ring was a tremendous.
Speaker: It's not a send off, but it's like a pause for now on this style of game as from soft is going back into the world of giant mechs punching each other to death.
Speaker: The new armored core game, they hadn't made one since 2013, I want to say, was an expansion.
Speaker: It was like a
Speaker: not an expansion, but it's like an additional part of Armored Core 5 in 2013 was released.
Speaker: And Armored Core was the bread and butter before the Souls-like games.
Speaker: These really are gorgeous games.
Speaker: Yeah, that was their jam.
Speaker: I mean, FromSoft has made a bajillion games in the past, you know, 30 years or so.
Speaker: But the releases of Armored Core games and the aughts were pretty much the thing, their thing.
Speaker: So it's interesting to see them return to form.
Speaker: That being said, Elden Ring.
Speaker: in terms of depth and breadth is an amazing game.
Speaker: It has so much to do and see.
Speaker: There is the amazing thing about it is that you,
Speaker: You don't need to play the entire thing in order to beat it.
Speaker: You don't have to beat all the bosses in order to beat it.
Speaker: It's not it's not one of those games where you have to kill everything you can skip.
Speaker: I want to say you can skip three of the biomes.
Speaker: in the game if you want to and just go straight to the end.
Speaker: That being said, you're not going to get the the to the final boss type stuff or the best endings or and there's so many quest lines throughout the game that you can play.
Speaker: There's there's a bunch of different endings.
Speaker: It's tremendous.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: It was it was just so much fun to play and explore.
Speaker: It was one of the best experiences I've had exploring in an open world game.
Speaker: Most open world games can be kind of tedious.
Speaker: You know, there will be a lot of stuff.
Speaker: It's a whole lot of nothing.
Speaker: And Elden Ring was a whole lot of something.
Speaker: That's the back of the box quote right there.
Speaker: Kevin from Pixel.
Speaker: It's a whole lot of something.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: So that's my number one game of the year.
Speaker: That is absolutely what I expected.
Speaker: And
Speaker: you know me with these games.
Speaker: I, I just, I don't feel like I'm built for them and I can't help but think that I know I'm going to end up playing this game.
Speaker: It's impossible to ignore the level of, I hesitate to use the word hype because hype suggests that it isn't worth the sound and fury that seems to be surrounding it.
Speaker: I believe that it is.
Speaker: Yeah, just the level of prestige that has gained in such a short amount of time where people are saying not only is this the best game of 2022, it might be one of the best games of the last 20 years.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Is absolute insanity and impossible to ignore.
Speaker: So I'm still deeply, deeply intrigued.
Speaker: So we're going to see how that goes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So those are our top 10 games of the year.
Speaker: Top 18.
Speaker: We had two overlaps, right?
Speaker: Two overlaps?
Speaker: Three overlaps.
Speaker: Three overlaps.
Speaker: Snap, Monkey Island, and Vampire Survivors.
Speaker: No, four.
Speaker: And Cult of the Lamb.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So top 16 games of the year.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's fine.
Speaker: It's fine.
Speaker: You know, I do.
Speaker: Maybe this won't make it into the final cut, but I do feel like we probably should real quick.
Speaker: just throw this out there, discuss what's your book of the year, of the books that we read on this show.
Speaker: Oh, oh, oh, yeah.
Speaker: So book of the year now.
Speaker: We're going to talk a little bit about our book of the year.
Speaker: What is our favorite book that we read this year?
Speaker: Phil, why don't you hit me with what you think was the best book we read this year?
Speaker: I'm going to go with Dark Souls Mask of Vindication.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: You know what?
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: No, I think of all of the books that we read for this show this year, and this was an interesting year as far as...
Speaker: not just what we've covered, but the fact that this was our first full year.
Speaker: So we started new franchises.
Speaker: We read books that came out this year, as opposed to classics that we had to find old PDFs for and that sort of thing.
Speaker: Uh, we talked to excellent writers and it's just been a really cool year.
Speaker: It's been a fun year.
Speaker: It's been really fun.
Speaker: Uh, uh, it's, it's been great.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: Of the books that we read this year that I think that just hit me the hardest and stuck with me, I'm going to have to go with Halo Rubicon Protocol.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I think that one was the perfect blend of...
Speaker: Good adaptation and just flat out good novel.
Speaker: Uh, it brought the video game, it brought the halo feel and it brought some serious depth to it, uh, that I did not expect.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Did not expect, uh, for it to go, uh,
Speaker: so deep into the horrors of war and honor killing and, uh, these regular Joes out there trying to survive and everything like that.
Speaker: It was, it was thrilling.
Speaker: It was depressing.
Speaker: I absolutely loved it.
Speaker: Uh, and I'm hoping we can still get, uh, we've, we've talked to, to Kelly Gay, um,
Speaker: at least briefly in terms of getting her on the show and just hasn't worked out timing wise.
Speaker: And I'm hoping that we can maybe make that happen in 2020.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sometimes in, sometime in the next year, I'd love to talk to her.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So I would say that that is my book of the year.
Speaker: Kevin, what do you think?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think I agree with you on Halo Rubicon protocol.
Speaker: It's, it's up there.
Speaker: It's, it's,
Speaker: I would say it's neck and neck between Eco, Castle in the Mist, and Halo Rubicon Protocol, which is funny.
Speaker: And it's not even necessarily recency bias because we did read those two...
Speaker: very recently, but I would say the first half of the year is not, we didn't have a lot going on in terms of favorite books.
Speaker: Like we, we read Halo, the flood, Halo flood is fine.
Speaker: And we, we talked to the author, William C. Dietz about Halo, the flood and some of the things that we, we thought were a little off about it.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Let's see.
Speaker: We read Diablo Legacy of Blood.
Speaker: Really good for the first, you know, 60% kind of falls off at the end.
Speaker: A little bit.
Speaker: A little bit.
Speaker: Mortal Kombat.
Speaker: I forgot that we read Mortal Kombat until literally just now.
Speaker: It is not good.
Speaker: Not good.
Speaker: There is no, there's very little combat and not enough mortals.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You failed on two levels.
Speaker: Two levels.
Speaker: For our one year anniversary, we read Resident Evil Caliban Cove, which is solid.
Speaker: That would have been, I think, in my top three.
Speaker: I really enjoyed reading that.
Speaker: S.D.
Speaker: Perry, she always turns out.
Speaker: Comes through.
Speaker: And then we also read, after that, we read Shadowkeep and talked to the author.
Speaker: The king of the movie to book adaptation himself, Alan Dean Foster, we interviewed him.
Speaker: And Shadowkeep was really solid.
Speaker: He went pretty hard for a game that really had not much going on.
Speaker: Yeah, he had fun with it.
Speaker: And when he was having fun, I was having fun.
Speaker: It dropped off at the end.
Speaker: Dropped off at the end.
Speaker: It had a lot of charm, let's say.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And he was actually surprised that we wanted to talk to him about it because, I mean, who else?
Speaker: I don't think anybody else in the world has probably asked him a question about Shadowkeep.
Speaker: Kevin, we may have cornered this market.
Speaker: I'm just saying.
Speaker: We may have cornered this market.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We read a terrible Assassin's Creed graphic novel.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Assassin's Creed Bloodstone.
Speaker: Terrible.
Speaker: Terrible.
Speaker: Golden Axe.
Speaker: The Worlds of Power equivalent.
Speaker: Terrible.
Speaker: Terrible.
Speaker: Infinity Blade Awakening.
Speaker: That would have been in my top three as well, I think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Brandon Sanderson, heck of an author.
Speaker: He does his stuff.
Speaker: FNAF, The Silver Eyes, the revenge tour against that book.
Speaker: We made it through.
Speaker: We're still recording.
Speaker: We made it through, though.
Speaker: We made it through.
Speaker: We made it through and we're still recording the podcast and it is a bad book.
Speaker: It's a bad book.
Speaker: Beginning and end.
Speaker: Not good.
Speaker: Let's see.
Speaker: Halo, the Rubicon Protocol.
Speaker: Tremendous.
Speaker: Tremendous.
Speaker: Yes, I agree.
Speaker: It could be considered our book of the year.
Speaker: I have no mouth and I must scream.
Speaker: Um, I mean, I don't feel right putting that on the list because it's a, it's a, it's a short story.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's, it's so it's, it's already has enough accolades and, and cultural awareness, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I don't think, I don't need, I don't think he needs our help, but I will say, I think I enjoyed the game more than I enjoyed the story.
Speaker: I would.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I would agree with that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Dark Souls Mask of Vindication, just a really poor showing.
Speaker: Eco Castle of Mist.
Speaker: This might be a silly question, Kevin, real quick.
Speaker: But would you say that Dark Souls Mask of Vindication was your least favorite book of the year?
Speaker: I think so.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I knew that.
Speaker: I think it's at the bottom of the barrel.
Speaker: I think, I think like taking the like worlds of power and those books like that out of the running, because you know, whatever, it's not really counting.
Speaker: It's like, that's an apple and oranges thing.
Speaker: I think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Mask of vindication is probably at the bottom.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was bad.
Speaker: It was my least favorite book of the year.
Speaker: And then Eco Castle in the Mist.
Speaker: And we ended the year with Eco Castle in the Mist and Bioshock Infinite Minor and Revolt.
Speaker: By the way, we didn't I don't even necessarily think we planned it like this or we might have.
Speaker: But we read the Bioshock books one year apart from each other.
Speaker: Almost exactly.
Speaker: Son of a bitch, we absolutely did.
Speaker: That's hilarious.
Speaker: I had no, oh, that's funny.
Speaker: Oh, that's funny.
Speaker: You know, when you put, when you got a spreadsheet that shows what books you're reading and when they're up and everything like that, a year and a half goes by real quick when you're scrolling past it.
Speaker: Oh, Zoom.
Speaker: That's wild.
Speaker: Oh, that's so funny.
Speaker: It is wild.
Speaker: But yeah, so I would say for me, it's either Ecocastle in the Mist or Rubicon Protocol.
Speaker: I might give the edge to Rubicon Protocol because I feel like Rubicon Protocol never had a moment where it dropped off.
Speaker: It was strong all the way through, whereas the second act of Castle in the Mist.
Speaker: I didn't it wasn't a problem so much for me, but I agree a little bit that like the flashbacks were just a little bit too much in the in the middle of the book.
Speaker: It had some hiccups.
Speaker: Yeah, a little hiccup, yeah.
Speaker: But ultimately, the difference between that and other books that we've read, for example, that might be coming up that deal with flashbacks, is that I think- That's a hint.
Speaker: That's a hint.
Speaker: That's what we call foreshadowing.
Speaker: That's what we call foreshadowing, ladies and gentlemen.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Ladies and gentle thems.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think the difference, though, is just that when it comes to eco, that's just a matter of taste.
Speaker: I don't think that it is a badly written section.
Speaker: I just didn't care for.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: the pacing of it personally, but, but you can still, but my God, hardly anyone has written characters as charming and as fleshed out as, uh, as, uh, as the author of eco castle in the mist, who, whose name escapes me at the moment.
Speaker: Uh, I think it's Mizuki Miyabe.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, I think, uh,
Speaker: Wonderful, wonderful author.
Speaker: And yeah, I'm right with you.
Speaker: It's pretty close with that one.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We read some pretty good books this year, dude.
Speaker: We read some pretty good books and I'm looking forward to next year.
Speaker: We're going to read some pretty dang good books too.
Speaker: We got two S.D.
Speaker: Perry books on the calendar.
Speaker: We got a whole year mapped out.
Speaker: We do have a whole year mapped out.
Speaker: It's obviously asterisk subject to change.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: I mean, we did that last year as well.
Speaker: We kind of went with the flow, made changes as they needed to be.
Speaker: But yeah, we planned things out like a year in advance.
Speaker: So we're on it.
Speaker: We're here.
Speaker: We're for it.
Speaker: And that'll do it for tonight's episode.
Speaker: So if you want to help us out,
Speaker: head over to our website, pixelitpod.com, and subscribe for our newsletter.
Speaker: It's free, it's convenient, and you also get the episodes just a bit earlier, a bit before everybody else.
Speaker: You can go and get a little secret clicky link that takes you to the website and lets you listen before the episode comes out.
Speaker: So that's neat.
Speaker: And we'll probably be posting some other things through the newsletter over the next year or so.
Speaker: So go ahead, go to pixelipod.com, sign up for the newsletter today.
Speaker: Otherwise, follow us on social media, pixelipod, at pixelipod on Twitter and Instagram.
Speaker: We have a TikTok now.
Speaker: It's got content that's going up on it.
Speaker: So we're cool.
Speaker: People are watching that.
Speaker: We're hip.
Speaker: We're hip people.
Speaker: We're cool people.
Speaker: We're throwing some stuff up on the YouTube channel.
Speaker: We got YouTube shorts going out.
Speaker: They're the same thing as the TikTok stuff overall.
Speaker: So, you know, pick your poison.
Speaker: Pick your favorite.
Speaker: We're doing them a little out of order.
Speaker: Follow one and just enjoy.
Speaker: And we also put video versions of every episode up on the YouTube channel.
Speaker: So go ahead and subscribe to that if you want to see us, our beautiful faces, talk about books based on video games.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that'll do it.
Speaker: Happy New Year, everybody.
Speaker: Happy New Year, guys.
Speaker: It was a heck of a year, and I can't wait to get further into it with you in 2023.
Speaker: Hell yeah.
Speaker: Have a happy, happy holidays.
Speaker: I hope you had a great Christmas and just a safe and happy New Year's.
Speaker: Good night.
Speaker: Good night.
