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Episode 9 - Audience Recommendations!
1.7k Plays7 months ago
Matt and Roses review some of the games YOU, THE PEOPLE recommended to us! Also, Matt can't stop playing Marvel: Midnight Suns, and the new Stardew Valley update is out!
Email us! [email protected]
Every Folk Song episode on The Two Sisters: http://everyfolksong.libsyn.com/8-the-twa-sisters
Games Discussed:
- Stardew Valley (Update)
- The Space Bar
- Marvel Midnight Suns
- The Last Door
- Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
- Her Story
- Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
- Telling Lies
- Immortality
- Below the Root
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Bear Pose Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
You could also do the bear pose. Well, it's not, I don't know. I don't think it's called the bear pose, but it's a little uncomfortable. Uh, you, you stand up really tall and you put your arms up over your head and you growl and you just, you make yourself as big and powerful as possible. And that's supposed to help. Okay. Here I go. All right. Are you doing it?
00:00:30
Speaker
I love how much you trust me. I could have made that up entirely, but I'm not. I didn't make that up. That's actually a thing. How did that feel? Was that a good growl? I feel energized by your growl. Okay. Well, then I'll, you know, I'm glad I energized you. I'll have to find mine somehow. Do you want to hear a joke? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, please.
00:00:55
Speaker
I don't know why I did that. I don't have a joke ready. Why would you do that to me?
00:01:04
Speaker
Oh my God! That's like going, yeah, going up to somebody and being like, hey, do you want $10? Oh yeah, me too. I don't, I don't have it. I thought I could. I thought I could do it. I can't. I'm a failure as a public figure, intermediate. Sorry, I deserve this. All right, well, this is the energy we're going into the episode then with. Big failure energy. BFE.
Playful Introductions and Cheap Glasses Story
00:01:49
Speaker
Hey, everyone. PushingUpRoses here with my special boy, special guest, extraordinary jumper, super strong man, Matt Aucamp. Hi, Matt. Rawr! Yeah, that's it. That's it. Hey. I'm glad you're coming in with good energy. I failed a joke and you're a bear, so that's good, I guess. Yeah, I'm a bear now. He does. You know, I could have talked about this during the cold open because I'm thinking about it now. Okay.
00:02:19
Speaker
I buy my glasses from a really cheap online glasses store. It's like, I won't promote them here, but the glasses that I buy are like $12. What the hell? They're prescription, but I spend like $12 on them, so they break really easily.
00:02:42
Speaker
So I was just like, I was just idly opening my desk drawer. And it was like, I broke a pair the other day, but now I'm just gas. And so what I'll do is I'll cannibalize old broken pairs. I'll be like, okay, I broke the arm, the left arm on this one.
00:03:00
Speaker
So I'm going to unscrew the left arm from this other one. That's great. That I broke the right arm on, and I'm going to screw it onto my new one. That's fantastic. You have Frankenstein glasses. Exactly. Yeah. So I just realized I was looking in my desk drawer.
00:03:21
Speaker
And I just have a pile that I don't know. I have not consciously realized this, but I just have a pile of like the glasses without any arms on them. Well, wait, can I have them? Yeah, it's sure. You mean the frames, right?
00:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, just frames without any arms on them and then my lenses are in them. Oh my God, I can make art with that. Please, can I have them? Okay, I did not expect that to go here. I'm so excited. Okay, yeah, I'll send you some broken glasses.
00:04:06
Speaker
Thanks, man. Yeah, of course. I'll send you some weird art that I make with it. And then we all recycled. Okay. There was, there was one point where this shop, so I buy just like the most basic like black frame.
00:04:24
Speaker
basically like emo glasses, right? Like just the almost rectangular, like slightly rounded, almost rectangular black frame glasses, right? And there was one point where they changed that model just slightly. And I didn't realize it till I broke the arm of one of my pairs of glasses. And I tried to attach it and it just didn't fit anymore. That was the worst.
00:04:53
Speaker
I love having fancy, interesting glasses. I got my cat eye glasses on today, which I think suit
Artistic Glasses Styles Discussion
00:05:00
Speaker
me. But I also like my octagon glasses. You should rock some stop sign glasses. That'd be cool. Oh, octagon. You'd probably break them. Octagonal glasses. Yeah, I'd find a new way to break those. Like, how did you break these? These are like, they're just like wire, not even plastic. I bit through them. I'm sorry. Oh my God.
00:05:22
Speaker
What do you think about asymmetrical glasses? Oh, I love them, but they look really bad on me. I've tried. I know myself, as we all do, we know what we look what we look good in. So I'm always very jealous of people who do the like one's a square and one's a circle like so artistic. Now.
00:05:42
Speaker
Do they look good on anybody though? Like they're cool as an idea. But have you ever seen somebody wear them and you're like, that looks, that makes them look good. Listen, there is this artist at this Galleria that has them and she looks amazing in them. I don't know how. It would have to be. You would have to be a weird artist. Like that's the only possible way you could make these work.
00:06:07
Speaker
That's why I look good in octagons and in my bright reds, because I have the aesthetic, I think that goes with it. But my favorite glasses, the Elton John music note glasses. He has glasses that looks like a running note, and that's, I want that so bad. Where would I wear it? I don't know, just around the house. To an Elton John concert. Oh, but that would maybe be like wearing the band t-shirt.
00:06:31
Speaker
to see the band. It's not though. No, it's not. I saw Elton John in concert and everyone was dressed in sequins and boas and I went as a dot. I felt a little out of place. It's just a celebration of being ridiculous. It was all, it was all in like feathers. Oh, it was so cool. It was awesome.
Replay Intentions for Stardew Valley
00:06:49
Speaker
Roses. Yes. What have you been playing? I have been playing a few games. Um,
00:06:58
Speaker
Have you been playing any games that we're not discussing on this episode? Sort of. I am actually prepping to... I hate that I started Stardew again a couple months ago. I want to play the update. That's my goal, is to play the Stardew update. Because I've been reading a lot about it. I play it on my desktop, so that means I have to be in my studio, which...
00:07:20
Speaker
well sometimes I just don't want to be surrounded by paint when I'm playing a game but that's what this is how it is so I'm kind of gearing up to play that I've been watching somebody else play uh like the console version which as you know has not been there's not an update on that yet yes um I haven't like giving myself little notes yeah consternation
Game Review Suggestions from Listeners
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah. So I've been taking notes and I'm just kind of curious as how I'm going to do this. Cause I really did. I really did just play this a few months ago and concerned ape says that you should really redo it. You should just play the whole thing again to get, to, to get all the new updates and experiences. I'm like, how am I going to do that? Like I just played it. There's a lot. There's a lot. Yeah. I, uh,
00:08:11
Speaker
I've been watching somebody, like here and there, I don't wanna get it too spoiled, but I've been watching somebody play it too. And I just, I'm itching for it to come out on Switch. I think it will, it's just there's not a set date yet, right? Right, yes, correct.
00:08:30
Speaker
And then, of course, I have been playing, and we'll talk about these. This is gonna be our subject, but I played The Last Door, which I have a story about, which you already know what happened. And Indiana Jones, Fate of Atlantis, because they were recommended to us in our email. We decided to give it a go. I decided to give it a go. I think you've already played Indiana Jones. I've already played Indiana Jones, yeah.
00:08:57
Speaker
at the sort of end of our Q and A episode, we sort of rapid fired a bunch of emails where people were just like, have you played this game? Do you like this game? Will you talk about this game, right? And so we picked four of those that we hadn't played and played them.
00:09:21
Speaker
and this episode, we're gonna be reviewing them. And I think we're still looking for more like questions, right? Like not quite yes or no. Because obviously we can just wrap it. If it's a no, that's rough. I don't have anything to say about it. If you ask me, did you play this? And I'm like, nope. That's it.
00:09:42
Speaker
we expect to keep getting those kinds of emails, right? We expect people, we expect all you guys to write in and say, oh, have you played this, my favorite game? Like that's just going to happen. So what we figure is every time we do a Q and A episode, what we'll do is we'll follow it up where we try some of your suggestions. We try some of these games, but again, we're not necessarily soliciting that, we're just expecting it.
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. That's a solid idea. I feel like we came to that conclusion pretty mutually and we're like, this is a solid idea. Yeah,
Impressions on 'The Last Door'
00:10:14
Speaker
exactly. We are such good podcasters. Because it's never going to stop because, you know, again, even if we say, hey, don't send us an email that's just have you played this game.
00:10:24
Speaker
It's not going to stop because these are like, that's the people we're talking to, right? The people who just want somebody to say the names of the games they like. Like as fans of some niche genre, that's all any of us want, right? We just want somebody to say Monkey Island to us. So I get it. I have those moments too, where I'm talking to like a peer or colleague. I'm like, you play this, you play this, you play this.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, I have friendships that some I have some friendships that that is all it is. Hey, have you played this one? Oh, cool. Have you played this one? Matt, that's how our friendship started. That's true. You asked me if I played that spacebar game. What was it called?
00:11:08
Speaker
It was called the spacebar. Oh, shit. Smart. Yeah, you asked me if I played that and I I was like, that's an interesting question and I didn't. So I looked it up. But then we talked about how it was like broken and I'm like, I'm not going to play this because it's broken. I don't want to play it. It is a little broken. The spacebar was a.
00:11:31
Speaker
It was like a first person 3D like detective game. With like Alan Rickman. I think Alan Rickman's in it. It's from the mid 90s and it's got, it's like FMV but like 3D animated FMV. Yeah.
00:11:52
Speaker
Yeah, so ugly. It's by it's by Steve Meretsky, the guy who used to do he used to do games with Douglas Adams. Yeah, that makes that makes so much sense, though. It's very Douglas Adams the humor.
00:12:10
Speaker
And it's also kind of like, you're walking around basically with the Mos Eisley cantina from Star Wars. And you're trying to solve, I can't remember what it is, I think it's a murder?
00:12:27
Speaker
I never got very far on it as a kid I was always so confused by it and then when I went to play it as an adult or when I when I remembered it as an adult for the longest time I couldn't find any info about it on the internet like I yeah it was just
00:12:43
Speaker
a big black hole that like in the history of adventure games, I was like, no one seems to
Strategy for Replaying Older Games
00:12:51
Speaker
know what this goddamn game is. I know, like, I know I had this game. Like, I know I had it. I know I played it. And then a couple of years ago, they released like a they re-released it.
00:13:07
Speaker
Yeah, Steam, right? Was it Steam or GOG? But they... Somewhere. It got re-released somehow in... You can play it on modern computers.
00:13:19
Speaker
It's still kind of broken. Yeah, it happens. I mean, they obviously they re-released like Quest for Glory 5 and that's still kind of broken, too. So yeah, some games are a little beyond help, but I do want to play it. I do. So I yeah, I've never.
00:13:38
Speaker
I've never beaten it. So maybe on this on this on this podcast at some point, we should we should both try and get through the spacebar and talk about the spacebar. I don't really it'll really feel a loose wrap up a loose end for my childhood.
00:13:58
Speaker
And it's special to us, because that's how we met, is through this weird game. Well, that's not how we met, but that's the question that got me to talk, which is weird, right? That's a weird icebreaker. Have you played this space far? Have you played this? Well, I was in a Zoom call full of adventure game nerds, and I just asked it to the room. And you were just kind of like, what is that? I was like, OK.
00:14:24
Speaker
I don't know why I gripped onto that like clamped as this is my new saying now I clamped onto it. I don't know why I clamped it down. Yeah. Yeah. It is like, oh, now the conversation is just me and roses. Yeah. Sorry about that, guys. Everybody else is like, yeah, there's some input here or there, but now we have to talk about this weird game.
00:14:49
Speaker
whatever, we're very charming. They got like a live podcast. Oh man, yeah, that's what you should say to anybody. Anytime that you're in a social situation and you're completely like trampling over everybody, you're like, yeah, you're welcome. You got a live podcast. So again, we've been playing these games that we're going to talk about this episode.
Marvel's Midnight Suns Enthusiasm
00:15:14
Speaker
I played her story and I played The Last Door and
00:15:19
Speaker
This'll be incredibly exciting to two people. I played below the root. Oh my god, he played it. But these were my homework games. Do you wanna know what my, just the game that I've just been,
00:15:36
Speaker
glued to for the past few weeks. I haven't talked about it on the show because it's not an adventure game, but it's getting to the point where I can't not talk about this. I play this game so much. Yeah, I do tell. It is Marvel Midnight Suns. Okay, I'm not familiar.
00:15:53
Speaker
So it was a game that was released at the end of 2022, I think. Look it up. It was in a lot of people's game discussions of last year. And it is a Marvel game. You don't say. It's like a turn-based tactics kind of game. Oh, I see. OK. Yeah, so you get to make your own
00:16:21
Speaker
little hero and you team up with like a bunch of kind of random Marvel characters. So it's got like Wolverine and Doctor Strange and Spider-Man and Iron Man. But it's because the Avengers eventually like.
00:16:39
Speaker
You meet some people from the Avengers that kind of join the Midnight Suns, but the original Midnight Suns in this game are Blade, Ghost Rider, the new Ghost Rider, Nico from Runaways, Magic from the X-Men,
00:17:02
Speaker
And then some other kind of like Agatha Harkness's ghost is there or something. So you do these little tactics, like turn-based tactics things that are really fun. You get like three heroes and each have powers on cards that come up randomly.
00:17:23
Speaker
and you know you get like three actions per turn plus you can have like a move like a free move and you get like you can do environmental attacks for free if you have hero points and those will be like rather than using Iron Man's you know blasters or something you just pick up a rock nearby and smash it on a villain's head
00:17:46
Speaker
It seems like a combination. You can correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm only looking at screen caps. Sure, sure, sure. It looks like modern Civ with turn base mixed with like Hearthstone with cards. OK. I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. I could see those. I haven't played a Civ game since Civ II. Oh, shit. We should play Civ sometime. We were missing out. I got obsessed with that game.
00:18:14
Speaker
But yeah, there is a deck building element to it, right? Because you can alter and arrange and collect new powers and stuff of each hero's individual deck. So you do have to think in terms of that. So in between this, you have this life sim friend making game.
00:18:38
Speaker
where you are hanging and end this exploration-based adventure game. So you're hanging around what they call the Abbey, which is the secret hideout of the Midnight Suns.
00:18:52
Speaker
Uh-huh. So you can walk around the Abbey grounds and you can find little mysteries to solve. Some of them involve doing battles, but most of them involve and like collecting powers and Metroidvania, like you collect the open power and then you can
00:19:10
Speaker
open any doorway like thing you come across and then you come across the purify power and then you can cleanse away evil vines that have grown over your path. And like so there's this exploration like Metroidvania kind of thing to it, but
00:19:28
Speaker
Also, some of these are puzzles that you have to solve. That's cool. I like the sound of that. So that's very cool. And then, they're not hard puzzles, but little tiny puzzles. But then, usually almost every day you get to hang out.
00:19:46
Speaker
with a member of the Midnight Suns. You get to choose somebody to hang out with. So you can invite Iron Man to go pick mushrooms with you. Or you can invite Wolverine to go painting with you in the woods. That's exactly what I'm imagining. Like, hey, Wolverine, do you want to like?
00:20:07
Speaker
Go to picnic or something. You like lounge by the pool with Captain Marvel. Like it's so funny. And then like you get friendship points and then you have like special friendship scenes. You give them gifts to get better friendship with them. It's so funny. It's so good. It's so quickly. It's just like something else entirely.
00:20:30
Speaker
What kind of gift can I give like Wolverine? Do they have favorite gifts? Is this like Starry? Yes, they have favorite gifts. Yeah, you find books, you find comics, you find artifacts, you find ancient root beer. Oh, shit. I want that. You sound stale, but I want that. You can play video games with Ghost Rider. And there's other things like Blade has a crush on Captain Marvel, so he starts a book club to try and get close to her. But then
00:20:59
Speaker
Captain America overhears and joins the book club too. So then Blaine inputs you to the book club so that you can distract Captain America so he can hear Captain Marvel. And then Wolverine, whenever you find him, he joins the book club and he never reads the books. It's so good. It's so fun. That's so funny. If all this stuff sounds funny and fun to you,
00:21:28
Speaker
you're not going to like this game if you don't like tactics based combat because the game is centered around the battles and you are maneuvering where you're at on the battlefield, which enemies you can take out each turn and what hits you can survive until the next turn. So you have to be very strategic about it. But
00:21:53
Speaker
in between is just the most goddamn charming like little life sim adventure game. It sounds like The Sims. It's incredible. I cannot stop playing and I've put so many hours into this game. It's like any free moment I get when I need to like come down from homework or
00:22:15
Speaker
That's right. I'm a 37-year-old college student. What of it? What are you talking about? We're in our early 20s. Matt, you're so humble. Yeah, you're right. You got it. I'm actually 24. That's what I thought.
00:22:33
Speaker
Uh, I just, I say, I say sometimes I say thirties because I'm, uh, yeah, I'm trying, you're, you're right. I'm trying to be humble. I'm trying to be humble about how young I am. I don't want other people to feel bad.
00:22:51
Speaker
How crazy was that? Anyway, but yeah, when I have a rest, when I'm trying to take a rest from homework or work or adventure games, I spend my time playing Marvel Midnight Suns and I goddamn love it.
In-Depth on 'The Last Door'
00:23:12
Speaker
Okay, so do you wanna start, do you wanna get to discussing the recommended games from our listeners?
00:23:19
Speaker
I sure do. Hell yeah. Let's do it. Should I put on your favorite game of all time? Sworky, Borkett's Dino? Yeah. Yeah, let's do that.
00:23:42
Speaker
Hey everyone, we're back. Pushing up roses here with Matt Aucamp. Matt, how was your break? It was, uh, you know, good. I doodled on a piece of paper. Oh, I do that all the time. I'm an artist. I don't know if anyone knew this, but, uh, I'm an artist. You know, you never mention it as the thing. I know. I'm very humble. Very humble over here.
00:24:07
Speaker
But yeah, speaking of art, this is going to be my segue. I'm very clever. Nice. You know what art I liked? The art in the last door. Oh, good. Yes.
00:24:22
Speaker
I said it. It wasn't really a joke, but it kind of sounded a little bit, so I added that. You're welcome. Yeah, you've earned it. You've earned it. Yeah, the last door, the art is, so it's very chunky pixel art. It's chunky. It's chunky, which is, it sets a mood really well. Should I tell them what happened? Should I tell them the boo-boo I made? It's, yeah, I mean, if you can stand the embarrassment,
00:24:52
Speaker
I can stand it. I've done worse, honestly. Here's what happened, guys. Upon your recommendation, we both decided to play The Last Door. I bought the complete edition. I wanted to play the whole thing, I guess. So I bought the complete edition on PS4.
00:25:09
Speaker
I went to season one. I played chapter one. I loved it. I thought it was great. And then my brain just took a massive shit. Like I don't know what happened. I completed that chapter. And then for some reason, my brain's like, Oh, you're done with that. Go into season two now without completing any of the other chapters from season one. So I played this game completely out of order. Yeah. Two comes after one. Yeah. Obviously I'll click two.
00:25:39
Speaker
It's so easy. I was a little shocked that it allowed me to do that. Or even without a warning, like, hey, you're actually not finished with the first season. What are you doing? So I did play it out of order strangely, very strangely. I was very much into the second season, even though the order made no sense. And I think it's because it's a Lovecraftian kind of weird
00:26:07
Speaker
game so you expect to be lost you accept that these things don't are maybe more abstract in nature or weird or just yeah off uh i i did i guys i did go back in places so the artwork's great it is yeah like well like we said it's very chunky pixel art but it's very uh
00:26:31
Speaker
It's very moody. And it's got modern lighting effects too, which is a thing that a lot of retro pixel art does these days. And I kind of like it. It makes pixel art look really, really good. It's beautiful. Yeah. The biggest problem I have with it is it's a little abstract at times. You know, you will.
00:26:58
Speaker
you'll find a note on a table and that note will be four brown pixels. Yeah. Right. You can't distinguish what some things are. That's true. It's the funniest to me when there's, so there's a lot of, you're the first chapter you're kind of walking through an abandoned, well, semi abandoned mansion. Semi abandoned, yeah, yeah.
00:27:26
Speaker
you can look at any of the art on the walls. And so it'll just look like, it'll just be a square of like blue and green and brown. And he'll look at it as a big, it's a beautiful painting. It's a beautiful meadow, it is. That's like seven brown pixels, man.
00:27:51
Speaker
Uh, so I don't know if you played it this way, but on the PS4 there is a toggle that'll show you if you missed a hotspot. I only used it when I felt that I was really missing something. So yes, there is a toggle. I don't know what it is on the computer. I assume you played this on PC. I played it on PC.
00:28:11
Speaker
Okay, I played this on ps4, you hit triangle, and it will show you where the hotspots are. So to the game's credit, even though some of the art is not discernible, you really have to use your imagination, which is great for I think the narrative, you can toggle that if you are just so stuck, you know, right? I didn't feel like I was pixel hunting so much. Because again,
00:28:34
Speaker
four pixels is pretty big, it's pretty chunky. And I will say they do work with color very well. So if there is something that they want you to see, like an object on the ground, it'll generally be a much different color than the objects around it. Without being completely unnatural, it's not just like everything's hot pink.
00:29:02
Speaker
And I want to do I want to say this, I want to do a deeper dive onto this game when we're both feeling up to it. So I would like to talk more vague about the last door. But I do want to make this super clear. This is one of the best written games I've ever played in terms of dialogue.
00:29:20
Speaker
and description boxes. It's just something I don't know how you feel about it. But there's something about the way it was written very writerly, very poetic. That really captured me. And obviously, you know, we've played enough of it to where it's like the dialogue doesn't go on forever. It's not one of those things where it's like, oh my god, it's all dialogue all the time. It's just enough to where I was really enamored.
00:29:48
Speaker
with the story. I sometimes like Lovecraftian things, I sometimes don't. I like Dredge a lot, but I didn't like Shadow of the Comet, you know what I mean? It's kind of hit and miss with me. I like to call Cthulhu Dark Corners of the Earth and stuff like that, but I don't like a lot of Lovecraft, but this had pieces of Edgar Allan Poe, I would say it had pieces of Stephen King,
00:30:14
Speaker
and it was just a very tense play for me. Even though the pixels are chonky, I felt tense playing it. I felt frightened of what I might find. I think it's really well written. There are some poetic sections and some more abstract sections, which sometimes to me can be a little frustrating, right? Like I think sometimes as,
00:30:44
Speaker
writers, we can like to kind of go off on our bullshit, right? When it comes to like writing about metaphysical, like,
00:30:58
Speaker
otherworldly stuff where it's like through the eye of the goddess, you see the wind blow against your childhood. And you're like, what the hell? This means, I know this means nothing. I know actually this means nothing, man. It just sounds kind of good, but the,
00:31:26
Speaker
The dialogue, like you said, is very, there never came a point in the game where I was like, okay, like just clicking through. Every line of dialogue I was so captivated by, like I wanted to look at everything in every room. It was really great, the jump scares got me real hard.
00:31:51
Speaker
Damn, they didn't get me as hard and I think it's because I checked with you first. I asked if there were jump scares. Some of the jump scares, it's trying to tell you that there might be a jump scare happening. It foreshadows that.
00:32:09
Speaker
I would I'm not sure if I was jump scared, but I was startled. I felt startled by a lot of the things that were happening on screen. And that made for a very tense place because there are fake outs to there. There aren't just, you know, yes, startles. There are fake outs that are just keeping you on edge. And that's great. That's a brilliant idea. You don't want to like bombard people with all of these jump scares and, you know, like catching people off guard. You want to keep them
00:32:37
Speaker
in this state I guess and not let it fall. I'm glad you also brought up the other literary influences here because I think it's so easy to call
00:32:48
Speaker
horror Lovecraftian. Yeah, I think we do it. And I was I was trying to resist it as I was playing this game. I was like, I want to like, OK, there seems to be something about touching the unknown. And we seem to be going about this as a as a logical sort of disaffected person.
00:33:11
Speaker
And it's like a Gothic setting. Like I was trying to say like, I was trying to go through it and be like, okay, it has those, but is this Lovecraftian? And yeah, it's Lovecraftian. Getting so far into it, like I beat the first game and there is, you know, you're not dealing with
00:33:32
Speaker
subhuman monsters that formed in an isolated evolutionary pocket and you're not dealing with massive ocean or space gods.
00:33:49
Speaker
you are dealing with this idea of touching the veil between the known and the unknown. And like maybe opening up something that you really weren't supposed to. Yeah, some like final entryway or something. Some like last, some like final, some like not like the first, not like the first door, but like the last door.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah, like the last door. He said the thing. Yeah, which comes straight from Lovecraft. Again, we overuse, I think, the term Lovecraftian in all culture critique, but this is, yeah, it's definitely Lovecraftian.
00:34:37
Speaker
I think Lovecraftian in, let's see, I don't want to say this, maybe Lovecraftian in format slash style, but to me in like emotionally, I was getting very Edgar Allan Poe. I was getting very, a lot of depression, a lot of sadness. There's even a point where I got like, because there is such an emphasis on like the occult.
00:34:59
Speaker
And I was even getting a little bit of dead poet society. And if you play this game, you'll understand kind of what I'm talking about with the characters. And I definitely got some Stephen King. There's an emphasis on birds, about specifically blackbirds, like ravens and crows. And I was kind of getting, I don't know if you've read much Stephen King map, but I was getting kind of like the dark half that has an emphasis on ravens and crows and blackbirds in general.
00:35:27
Speaker
So for me, I think the reason I liked it, this is brilliant, right? Because you can be a Lovecraft fan and probably like this game. You can be an Edgar Allan Poe fan, you know, more of a gothy fiction type fan, and you will like this game. I think if you like Stephen King, you will like this game. I think it is such a good combination of feelings and styles. I do want to talk about the puzzles real quick before we move on.
00:35:52
Speaker
Did you like them? Yeah, that's what I was gonna, yeah. I liked them, but sort of. Like some of them I really liked, but there's a lot of, I wouldn't call it moon logic, but you do have to make a lot of logical leaps. There's a lot of puzzles. And it also is funny that they call it the last door when there is a
00:36:15
Speaker
There are so many door-based puzzles. There's so many doors. Why are there so many doors and why are all of them locked? Stop it. Yeah. I mean, that always feels to me like the easiest way to do an adventure game. Just put somebody in a house full of locked doors and hide the keys various places. What keys do you think we collected during that game? It was so many. It was so many.
00:36:38
Speaker
And like crowbars to get into barred doors and like, Oh, this is locked from the other side. So you have to go out the window and come in the window and like, just all that standard adventure game stuff. Like it's very much like, Oh, all the doors in this house are locked. Which again, there's not a door knob. Yeah. Any excuse to make a door not open.
00:37:01
Speaker
which can feel a little lazy in terms of puzzle design. And then there's some other puzzles. The more creative puzzles are not very well clued. So you just end up doing stuff for no reason. You're like, okay, well, they clearly want me to interact with this thing. And I have two things in my inventory.
00:37:20
Speaker
I guess I'll use this with this. Oh, OK, I see. But it's not like you're not like, oh, I understand what they wanted me to do. And I understand how this is why this is how you do it. It's only in retrospect where you're like, oh, I guess.
00:37:36
Speaker
Yeah, like I would say credit in retrospect, I wasn't saying I wasn't like, Oh, that sucked. That was like a King's Quest five deal that what the heck is that? I do understand like what their process I understand what they were trying to do with some of these
00:37:55
Speaker
I think we would have felt that way if the experience wasn't so tight, right? If there were twice as many rooms or twice as many inventory objects. I think we would feel like these were like King's Quest puzzles. I would say they're not moon logic just in the sense that
00:38:10
Speaker
In retrospect, you're like, I see how that would work. But you don't know what your goal is ahead of time. So there's absolutely no way you would guess that. I'll spoil one puzzle. For example, you're trying to lure a cat inside because the cat can lead you to a secret room in the basement. Yeah.
00:38:33
Speaker
You don't know that's what you're doing. You do know there's a cat on the grounds that has been shooed out of the house many times. You also have a thing in your inventory that a cat might want. There's so little to suggest
00:38:54
Speaker
the series of things that you have to do to lower the cat in. And again, you have no idea that why you would want the cat inside. Like, why would you want to learn? Why are you trying to lure the cat inside? You don't know that until after it's come inside, and it's led you to the secret room. So it's like, there's, I would have no reason to start thinking about how do I lure a cat inside.
00:39:18
Speaker
That's fair. So there are notes in this game that try to guide you that you can find around. I found a note or a diary entry by the former maid or servant that said, there's a cat. And when I opened the window, the cat comes in. And I took that to heart. I'm like, well, I want to see this cat. So I did understand that I wanted to get the cat in. But you're right. I didn't know why. I had no reason to believe that it would find a room.
00:39:46
Speaker
didn't feel like it was gonna accomplish anything, right? Like- I just wanted to do it. That's all. I just wanted to see if that's what I needed to do. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they would just bank about that. We all like to see a cat. To the game's credit, I do think season one, because I played a lot of both, I do think season one is more difficult than season two. Okay. Season two, the first part of season two,
00:40:11
Speaker
explode so well for me in terms of in terms of puzzles. I did maybe a little bit of backtracking, but I think you'll see that, too. I think you'll notice that that it is it is it flows better. Well, I'm excited to play season two. And then we, I think, can talk a lot more about the specifics of these games and, you know, well, on that episode, throw up a spoiler warning and talk about
00:40:37
Speaker
the story a little bit more, but okay.
Exploring 'Indiana Jones, Fate of Atlantis'
00:40:40
Speaker
But if you guys wanna play it, I think we both highly recommend it. Should we move on to our next game? Yes, I'm kind of excited to talk about it. Okay. Which game do you wanna talk about now? Okay, on the count of three, we're gonna say the game we're gonna talk about. Okay, ready?
00:40:58
Speaker
Okay, I think I know which one you're excited about. Okay, three, two, one, Hershey. Indiana Jones. Were you waiting for me to say it so that you could say a different game? No, I'm actually, no, this is, I'm being honest, but then I realized that you weren't going to say the same thing and I'm like, uh oh. Okay, yeah, let's talk about Indiana Jones then.
00:41:23
Speaker
I was kind of stubborn about this game for a long time. It's not a game I grew up on. It's not a game I was interested in. I tried replaying it in my adulthood and I didn't like it.
00:41:33
Speaker
OK. And so I kind of begrudgingly played this game to find that it's very charming. And right. I didn't realize that. So this is a LucasArts game, obviously. I didn't realize that so much of the puzzles are so dialogue driven, like real like honestly, you have to do so much talking to get people to do what you want them to do or to get to even get an item like it's so integral.
00:42:02
Speaker
to make sure you're like going through all of these dialogue trees. You know, do you know the big innovation of that game? I do not. And I say big innovation. They kind of used it in the the other Indiana Jones game. They did Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade game, too. They call it a team wits or fists.
00:42:33
Speaker
So there are generally three solutions to not every puzzle, but many different puzzles and they can take you down slightly different paths. Those paths will have things happen. There are certain things that will happen in one path that won't happen in another path. And there are certain things that happen in a slightly different order. But.
00:42:56
Speaker
one of the things that you can, so you can solve many of these puzzles on your own. They're like very difficult, difficult, the puzzles are in their most difficult form when you try to solve them by yourself. Or you can fight a lot of people in the game.
00:43:20
Speaker
OK, there's a lot of there's a lot of times in the game you can just fist fight somebody. OK, I did not do that. OK. Same way I don't do that in Quest for Glory, I literally sneak around and like, yeah, I guess I pursued because I'm so interested in narrative that I got on this whole dialogue like tree thing, which is probably the team path. Right. So you probably were
00:43:49
Speaker
working very closely with the, so, you know, Indiana Jones in every movie has like a woman who is a little clever than he is, except for in Temple of Doom, who is a sidekick, oftentimes needs rescuing, but again, usually is smarter than him. In this game, it's Sophia Hapgood, who is an archeologist like him.
00:44:18
Speaker
And, but not just an archaeologist, a psychic. She's a clairvoyant. Through dialogue, yeah, you can be you can get really close to Sophia and then, you know, you can solve puzzles together. And if you can navigate the dialogue trees in a clever enough way.
00:44:41
Speaker
then I think you get slightly easier versions of the puzzles. Oh, that's so good. That's so good. I honestly didn't even realize that's what I was doing. It was just very intuitive for me, the kind of gameplay I play to exhaust. And then once I found that it was working, then I just kept doing it. I'm like, oh, there's a pattern here. I can sway these characters with dialogue.
00:45:07
Speaker
Yeah, the first time you come across this is in the alleyway when you're trying to get in to see Sofia's talk. It's really early on in the game. Yeah, that's like in the New York, you find yourself in New York. Yes, there are three solutions there. You can talk your way past the bouncer. I think maybe you have to bribe him a little bit. Is that true?
00:45:31
Speaker
It's not, it's not quite bribery. You're just, what I've noticed about this game is like, you have to be on their level. You kind of have to guess what the character might want to hear. So basically this guy likes the bouncer likes Sophia. So I'm kind of trying to, you know, charm him a little bit and be like, yeah, Sophia is really smart. And they're like, there'd be three options. You can be like, pretty smart, talented. And based on what he said, you have to kind of make a guess.
00:45:57
Speaker
You know what I mean? So right. So when he says, yeah, she's so smart, you know, she really and then you'll get dialogue trees. And obviously the correct one is going to be, oh, she makes it easy for you to talk to her because that aligns with, you know, how smart she is. So I kind of sweet talked my way in with this shared admiration for Sophia. I thought that was so funny. So that's interesting. Yeah. So the other ways into that building, you can beat the guy up.
00:46:26
Speaker
It's just not intuitive to me at all. He is a difficult fight, but you can beat him up. The other way is there is a puzzle that involves navigating all those crates in the alleyway. Oh, ew. No. And you kind of sneak into the building. Yeah.
00:46:48
Speaker
So that's very cool. Right. There's there are many, many branches in the game where you can do three. Yeah, that you have three different ways to solve the puzzle. Yeah. And it's also very like another thing I loved about it. Do you remember we talked about Home of the Underdogs and I told you that there was a category called Grand Adventure.
00:47:13
Speaker
That's where I would put this game. Grand adventure. I mean, I think that's the nature of Indiana Jones anyway. But I really felt like I was doing so much and just being on this world adventure, because it's kind of like Sam and Max, only Sam and Max is confined.
00:47:32
Speaker
to the US, but you're traveling a lot with the magic of adventure games, you know, you can be in New York, and then you can be in Egypt, like in two seconds. But it really felt just the whole story. The story felt very Indiana Jones with the inclusion of the Third Reich again.
00:47:52
Speaker
And the whole paranormal thing that Indiana Jones is kind of skeptical about, but I don't know why he is because he's always wrong. I think Fate of Atlantis is, to me, it is like the fourth Indiana Jones story. It is so right on the same level of the Indiana Jones movies.
00:48:20
Speaker
is a yeah, down to its core. It's just a perfect little Indiana Jones story. Yeah, absolutely is. It's maybe one of the closest like franchised games I've seen, like the closest adaptation. And I would put I would put Discworld high up there. I talk about that in one of my reviews and how accurate the representation is. I would put this game up there, too. It's very, very accurate to its source material.
00:48:49
Speaker
You know, they even, it even has that Indiana Jones thing where throughout the entire adventure, you kind of don't know if the thing you're chasing is magical or not. Right. You know, it could be a lost technology. It could be, you know, it could all be hype and lies. And then this isn't much of a spoiler because everybody knows
00:49:19
Speaker
what happens at the end of an Indiana Jones story. It's magical. At the very last moment. Yeah, at the very last moment. Indiana Jones is like, it's not magic, but it is. It always is. It's always magic. So you enjoyed it. Did you make it all the way through? I did not. And I think the reason is,
00:49:42
Speaker
I you know, adventure games of the past, they're not meant to be beaten right away. They're not meant to be done in one sitting. And I wanted to break this up a little bit so that I could revisit it and not get tired of it. So I got pretty far, I think I got beyond Where was I? Oh, no, I'm gonna look like a geography like idiot at the moment. Um,
00:50:07
Speaker
Well, I think the two hardest parts of that game, there is a surveying puzzle where you are on a dig site. And this might be a limitation of older computers because, you know, I remember being a kid and being like, I absolutely know where this spot is. Yeah. And still not like like not hitting it quite exactly. But are you talking about when Sophia falls into the ditch?
00:50:38
Speaker
Is that the, that's the dig site, right? After the balloon, after you're in the balloon. You know, it, here's another thing. It may be different in. Oh shit, right. It may be different in the team path than the wits path. I think I generally went wits path, like either wits or a combination of wits and, uh, Braun. Yeah. Or fists. Sorry. Uh, but yeah, no, there is a dig site you were looking at from, uh,
00:51:04
Speaker
a high angle, you're looking at some old set of ruins, and you end up having a tripod and you're sort of trying to pinpoint the exact right location. It was, it was, it drove me crazy as a kid. And then later you end up in a sort of a maze. And that is
00:51:29
Speaker
incredibly difficult oh i hate mazes in adventure games i just hate it there is and this was by accident but there is an unwinnable situation when you get to the maze oh it's by accident though oh no um i yeah
00:51:50
Speaker
there is an object that you can leave some place. And this is the most obnoxious part, I think, of the entire game. There is, when you're in this maze, there are objects that you need to use multiple times in multiple places, and you have to remember to pick them up. And there is one scenario, I think it's on the team path, where you can be stuck on the other side of a chasm without the object.
00:52:19
Speaker
Oh God, okay. And then you can't progress. Oh no, Ron Gilbert would be like throwing a tantrum because he doesn't, yeah, LucasArts was known for not locking the player up like that. Yeah, again, I think I remember reading a long time ago that this was a mistake. Oh God. That sucks. That really sucks, aw. But yeah, I got towards, so were you ever in the balloon with Sofia?
00:52:48
Speaker
It's been so long since I played it. But I think so, it sounds familiar. Yes. I found that part a little grating, just navigating the balloon. And then whenever I landed it, I made sure to tell Sophia, like, oh, it's hard to land a balloon. It's hard to drive a balloon. See, this is why I probably got into this path, is because I don't like playing two characters at the same time.
00:53:14
Speaker
But I like having a sidekick. I like just like in Sam and Max, right? I always liked talking to Max to see if I could use him for the puzzle. So I think I got into that groove with talking to Sophia as as solving some of these puzzles or getting through some of the dialogue. You know, adventure games are lonely. I like having a sidekick with me. Yeah.
00:53:41
Speaker
That's definitely, yeah, that is something, another really strong thing in favor of this game.
00:53:49
Speaker
And it's got that LucasArts charm. It's funny. It looks great. The character animations are thorough. He just looks like Indiana Jones all the time. And he doesn't necessarily look like Harrison Ford because he's made out of pixel art, but he looks like the platonic ideal of what Indiana Jones is. He is the essence of Indiana Jones. It's so perfect.
00:54:15
Speaker
Voice is pretty on pretty good. It is not Harrison Ford, but it's a pretty good voice and I'm okay with that. This is not an Indiana Jones film. This is a game. Yeah. So I'll say this too. I never played it with the voice acting. So I'll have to go back. Yeah, I played it, you know, as a kid with. Yeah. Yeah. It didn't have the voice acting so.
00:54:36
Speaker
I'm gonna say it's pretty good. It suffers with what a lot of old adventure games suffer from is like, is this somebody's friend? Is this a programmer? Because they're kind of sounding a little stilted. You know what I mean? So it kind of suffers a little bit from that. But overall, it was an Indiana Jones game. It's not just a game that could be any plot and we're calling it Indiana Jones is definitely
00:55:00
Speaker
That is what it is, like unmistakably. But now I want to ask you about, I'm so excited to get your thoughts on this. I want to ask you about her story because I think that's one of the most just innovative, brilliant games I had played in the last 10 years.
Analysis of 'Her Story'
00:55:19
Speaker
So yeah, so I played her story. It is a live acted, a full motion video game. You play a person. Explaining who you are is a bit of a spoiler. It might even be a spoiler to know that you're a character.
00:55:46
Speaker
I don't think so. I think we can talk about that. Throughout the game, I guess I thought I was just anonymous guy, but turned out I was somebody very important. Anyway, so you're combing through the video footage of a series of interviews with a woman whose husband was murdered, or went missing, and then turned up murdered in her basement. And she discovered the body.
00:56:14
Speaker
There are so many more levels to this than initially appear. Yes, it seems very cut and dry, but it goes off. There are no ways to talk about this, I don't think. Okay. Without getting into spoilers.
00:56:36
Speaker
I want to describe it as this. I want to get people's interest because it appears that the whole thing takes place. We are on a computer. Yes. It's very clear that we are. It almost looks like a Windows 95 situation. It's very nostalgic. You can even go in the recycling bin and pull out a pirated game and play those little games. And you know, it's a pirated game because in the recycle bin is a read me file.
00:57:06
Speaker
from the Pirator. Yeah. So obviously in adventure games and fantasy fiction games, you can't use real search engines. It's never going to look like that. It's never going to look like File Manager. It's going to look like something else. So they have constructed this database search engine on this computer.
00:57:29
Speaker
and that is how you are looking for clues. You are basically using key words that bring up certain videos. So let's say I, I think, I don't know what you started with, but I think the inclination is to start with murder, right? Yeah, the first one, it starts you out with murder. So any time, so you have five videos there, and you can only see five videos at a time.
00:57:57
Speaker
until you beat the game and then it opens up like a mode where you can see, I think, 15.
00:58:04
Speaker
it gives you a maximum of five search results and then it'll say there are, you know, 25 search results, only the first five are available. So you can't just type in the word is and then click through all the videos. Just type in the and see what you've got. But it's anytime she has mentioned that word in an interview. So like if she mentions a name, you're gonna search for that name.
00:58:34
Speaker
I think another interesting thing, I don't know if you clocked it, is the visual component. Trying to make sure you're looking for visual discrepancies in the, even though it's appear, you know, the same woman, you're kind of looking at what she might look like in that particular video on that date. You start to get a handle of, okay,
00:59:00
Speaker
her first interview, she was wearing this jacket. And then her second interview, she's wearing this shirt. And then her third interview, she's wearing this bright red jacket or whatever. And then you start to link that to the dates.
00:59:15
Speaker
and say, okay, and when you figure out when she discovered the body, then it's like, okay, these outfits, you start to just know in your head when you see her in these outfits, these are before the body was found, and when he was just missing, these were after the body was found. And then as you learn even more information, you start to put even more, you sort of find even more significance in some of these differences. Yes.
00:59:43
Speaker
Sometimes her hair's up, sometimes it's down, sometimes she's wearing a ring, sometimes she's not. You start to realize there's something odd and off about this lady. And if there's anything else you wanna say before we get into spoilers, you should say it now. We're gonna go into spoilers? We gotta go into spoilers. I can't talk anymore about this game without spoiling. Okay, all right. This is your, how long do you wanna go talking about spoilers? Cause I'll try to give a timestamp.
01:00:12
Speaker
Okay, let's say five minutes. All right, we're gonna go five minutes into spoiler starting now. Okay, give him a little space. All right, so you find out that this person, they're, okay, I'm just gonna ask you. Okay. Were there two different women or was there a woman with two different personalities? I think there are two different women.
01:00:40
Speaker
I think there are two different women too. So you, at some point she starts asking for, you see her ask for a coffee. And I forget what, it's an early term. It's one of the terms that you'll find kind of early. And at the beginning of one video, she asks for a, you know, a coffee with sugar. And the next video she asks for a coffee black and you're like, huh,
01:01:09
Speaker
That's interesting. And then there's there's other things. At one point, she starts talking about this person, Eve. But then in the next thing, she starts talking about her tattoo, which is a snake and an apple meant to represent her name. And you're like, wait, her name's not Eve. And then, like, it took me a while to find out the other girl's name. Like, I don't know if you're supposed it's supposed to take a while to hear Hannah.
01:01:37
Speaker
but at some point she talks about her name being a palindrome, so you write down Eve on your piece of paper or whatever, and then later she says her name is Hannah, and you're like, what the hell? So you find out that not only are these two different women who are twins, also sometimes Hannah sends her twin Eve in to pretend to be her. So you don't know if you're looking at Hannah,
01:02:05
Speaker
if you're looking at Eve pretending to be Hannah, or if you're looking at Eve being Eve, which there's only one interview where Eve is Eve, and that is the final interview of the thing.
01:02:16
Speaker
Yeah. Do you think that if you wanted to, do you think there's credence to the multiple personnel or what we would call dissociative identity disorder these days, DID? Do you think there's credence to that? Because I think the game is meant to be ambiguous. I think you are supposed to reflect on both. For me, the tattoo stuff, that solidified it for me. There might be explanations and theories for other people, but do you think there's credence to both?
01:02:46
Speaker
the tattoo stuff solidified it for you. So she could have, because there is one video where you can see her arm and there's no tattoo. And then there is one video, I think, where you can see her arm and there is a tattoo. The thing that solidified it for me was
01:03:13
Speaker
Okay, so all right, I'm just gonna totally spoil it because we're in the spoiler section. So they were twins. The midwife stole the one baby and told the mother that she was lost. And then like, yeah, and then took the corpse away.
01:03:35
Speaker
quote, unquote, and then ended up just like keeping the baby and raising her kind of across the street from the raising Eve across the street from Hannah and raising her in an attic. Now. My and that woman, the midwife's name is Florence. My thing is. Florence doesn't make any sense. Yeah.
01:03:58
Speaker
you wouldn't just make up, that's just not a thing that you would just invent out of whole cloth is I was raised in an attic with a woman named Florence and she died when she fell down the stairs and everyone thought it was an accident. You're talking to a police officer, he would know if in that exact same town there was a woman named Florence who died falling down the stairs. They would have included something where she's having to explain why they wouldn't know about this woman.
01:04:27
Speaker
You got one minute, by the way. Okay. Now, but I have seen. So I think logistically, it only makes sense if it's two different women. But I read a very compelling theory about how artistically a lot of the choices don't make sense if it's two women. Like why include this? And I think maybe the only thing you could say is what you said, which is that you
01:04:59
Speaker
that you are just meant to ponder it.
01:05:04
Speaker
Yeah, let's okay, let's get out of spoiler territory and just say that it's kind of comparable to American Psycho, where this is this is a thing where you're meant to ponder it. I if you're looking for a game where you're going to get a solid answer, this might not be the game for you. The game is meant to make you think and really, really stretch your brain meats.
01:05:31
Speaker
And Sam Barlow, the creator of this game, he also, he did the game telling lies. Is that true? That is true. And previously he did a couple of Silent Hill games or in the shattered memories. And he did the game. His big follow up to his big critically acclaimed follow up to her story was immortality.
01:06:00
Speaker
I did not play that. It's very similar to her story in a lot of ways, but he has said online before that writing is more interesting when you leave gaps, but he basically says you're a hack if you don't know the answers. Oh, okay, Sam. So he has, in his head, definitive answers to the questions we have at the end of the game. I see, okay.
01:06:31
Speaker
you know, he's not going to reveal them because it's more interesting to just ponder about. Yeah. All right. Stanley Kubrick. We see you. But anyway, yeah, it's an incredible game. It's very well structured and well built. And I was I was incredibly impressed. I played it all in one sitting. I could not pull myself away.
01:06:52
Speaker
I knew you would like it. I was so excited to hear that you hadn't played it. I'm like, oh, I think you're gonna like this game. It's very compelling. Should we talk about our last game?
Experience with 'Below the Root'
01:07:03
Speaker
I think because we're not gonna have a lot to say about the last game. I say we put up our interstitial music and just hit a couple beats about the last game and we'll just kinda rap. All right, all right, sounds good. Why don't you throw up Simpy Dandenino.
01:07:34
Speaker
Hey everyone, we're back and Matt has a special announcement. Matt? My special announcement is, oh, is it just the game I played? I played below the root. I played below the root.
01:07:50
Speaker
Somebody played Below the Root. Somebody played Below the Root and it was me. It wasn't me. You know what? I do have to. I have to jump back. I have to say one more thing about her story. There's a moment where she picks up a guitar and starts singing a song that I have done in every folk song episode about. That's awesome. It is a traditional folk song that
01:08:13
Speaker
I'll just say it's called The Two Sisters. And so she starts singing the lyrics and instantly I understood what she was about to sing, why she was singing it, what it meant about the game, like why it was included. Like I knew that I know that song so deeply that I was like, I cannot believe I cannot believe this is happening right now. What?
01:08:41
Speaker
you should link that, because people, that's a pretty important part of the game. So definitely link your episodes so we can all listen. I'll throw that in the show notes for sure. Yeah. Okay, so I played below the root, it sucks. No, it's... Look, it's just old, okay? And we all know that old things are terrible.
01:09:02
Speaker
I played it with my son, we were very confused, because we've never played, we've never read any Below the Root, like apparently it's part of a franchise. We've never read a Below the Root book before. So when there's all sorts of like weird language that they do not explain at all. So like all of a sudden you have like an object. So all of a sudden you have this thing called a Shuba.
01:09:31
Speaker
And you're like, what the hell is a shooba? It's just like a glider. You get a thing called a horn trencher, which is just like, I don't know, like a knife or something that's made out of a horn. You use it to cut down vines. Oh, it's called the trencher beak. You have to cut down vines.
01:09:56
Speaker
look all this stuff up and it is a little satisfying when you start to solve things, right? Like there's. Sure. OK, I'm going to go all the way back to the beginning. This game was made for like the Commodore 64 and like the Amiga and it's like four colors and it's really old when we say blocky pixel art, I mean like Atari level blocky pixel art.
01:10:21
Speaker
And you, there's like, okay, so you're just, you create quote unquote a character. It's just, you pick through from like four different races or something. And then it just kind of drops you in the game in a house and you can access a verb menu and you don't know anything else. Yeah.
01:10:45
Speaker
And you go talk to people and they're kind of like Final Fantasy NPCs from the first Final Fantasy game where they'll give you a tiny little bit. They'll be like, good luck on your quest. Or they'll be like, find the wise child. And you're like, what the hell is that? I have no idea what I knew I was talking about.
01:11:06
Speaker
So I think you could slowly, over hours and hours and days and weeks and months, if this was the game that you were focused on, I could see how this could have been really fun to just like very,
01:11:23
Speaker
inch by inch progress through this game and be like, okay, now I've been everywhere and still haven't figured anything out. So I'm gonna go back through some of those places and try weird things. But there's other stuff that the game doesn't tell you, like you can get hungry and then die. Well, you don't die, you just, this is another interesting thing about this game, you can't die, you just reappear back in your house and it's the next day.
01:11:45
Speaker
Okay. But you can get exhausted if you don't rest enough. And if you rest at the wrong person's house, they will rob you and throw you in like a trap. And I didn't realize you could get out of the trap, but you used the Trencher beak to get out of the trap. How would I know that?
01:12:02
Speaker
What the hell's a trencher beak I mean it might it might help to know that the author of the book did write this game So it would be super helpful for anybody who wants to play it to maybe know the source material Yeah, but why would the author not have couldn't like could they not have written an intro? Goddamn game. No, this is 1984. We don't we don't get intros here So there's platforming sections
01:12:31
Speaker
that are incredibly tough. It really is just jump over the small gap. But the controls are so finicky. And I was playing it on a keyboard in like a browser emulator. So granted, not the best way to play. Maybe it would be easier if I had maybe it would be easier if I had like an actual.
01:12:53
Speaker
It's something that would have actually been used in the game. But just jumping from platform to platform was so hard, and I kept falling out of the tree. And you don't die when you fall out of the tree, but sometimes it breaks your stuff. I think the one way you can lose the game is I think the inventory is limited. So you'll go to a store, and there will be a ton of shoebas, because they expect you to break them.
01:13:21
Speaker
When you revive the next day, they haven't replenished their stock. So I imagine if you fail enough, you can run out of food. And then without food, you're not going to get anywhere you need to go because you'll starve before you get there. And I imagine you can run out of shoebuds, and then you can't get to certain places because you can't collide to them.
01:13:44
Speaker
I do. I mean, what you're saying, though, it does it does sound like it has some mercy, though. It's not maybe as insane as like a King's Quest game. It has a lot of mercy, but the map is so hard to navigate. And again, the platforming is so difficult when you end up back at your house. It's very dispiriting. Sure. I'm going to say something that's going to be shocking. OK. I'm going to play this game again. OK.
01:14:11
Speaker
I was playing this and I was like, this sucks. And my son Toby, he was like, this sucks. But somehow it got a hook in me and I'm like, but I think I can get through it.
01:14:20
Speaker
I can see why. I mean, I can see why it would be intriguing to some people, especially if you're a fan of the author. But I can also see it does feel very adventurey. It does feel it has that it has that adventure game feel going on. So I could see also if you're anything like me, it's like, well, now I now I'm committed. Now I got to finish it now because I need to get all the I want to get all the powers. And I only got one power, which was Pence. So it's going around pensing people.
01:14:50
Speaker
I had no idea what pence mean. Apparently it just means like you magically detect their emotions. So it's like walking around, like you go up to people and you click pence. It's like, oh, I penced him. Like I have no idea what I'm doing. There's so much in this game that it's just so hard to understand. But- The description for the novel says that pensing is just basically telepathy. Okay. And then, oh man. Yeah, there's other powers.
01:15:19
Speaker
It's very like nature, almost like nature and spa, I mean, obviously below the roof, but the Kinney porting, which is telekinesis. Yes, Kinney porting. Grundspreaking. Yeah, I don't know what Grundspreaking is. It's in the, these are all in the verb menu from the very beginning and you click on them and it's like, you don't have enough spirit points. And you're like, what the fuck? It's so- Did this come with a manual? Did you see if there was like some documentation? I don't know. Maybe.
01:15:49
Speaker
Below the root, let's Google, below the root manual. Let's even type in PDF to see if we can find it. Yeah, that'd be so helpful. Below the root game manual, Apple II C64 IBM, there is a manual. That'd be helpful. OK, here's how to install it. Here's what the controls are. Here's where it tells you all the different races.
01:16:19
Speaker
Oh yeah, it describes each of the verbs. There you go. And all these items. So yeah, so I guess you would, yeah, in the old days you would read this manual and you would know what any of this stuff was about, but I didn't have that and I was just so baffled. And like Toby was like googling this stuff on his phone and being like, uh, apparently that's just like, uh, apparently that's just like a glider.
01:16:48
Speaker
I mean, it's it's understand. I mean, I think that just shows how far and different adventure games have evolved because there are games where you absolutely 100 percent need the manual. And that's part of the game. Part of the game is having this documentation. Whereas today, I think you could you could jump in to a game. I'll give you maybe it may be a tutorial, maybe something to guide you.
01:17:14
Speaker
But yeah, it wasn't always like that. You had to have your manual with you. Yeah. This game is bizarre. For some reason, I want to beat it. So maybe I will give you guys an update on it in a future episode. But yeah, that's below the root. Well, thank you for your service, Matt. Yeah, of course. Such a strange little game. I think we both knew that I was not going to play that game.
Encouraging Listener Game Suggestions
01:17:44
Speaker
So everybody, please, we would love to do another Q&A episode. And again, we expect to get recommendations from you guys. So don't be shy. Don't be coy now. Email us at Matt and roses at gmail.com. Were you about to say Matt at gmail.com? Excuse me. I was going to say Matt at roses.
01:18:07
Speaker
Mad at roses.com. Mad at roses. Yeah, mad at roses.com. Do you own roses.com? I do not. Roses.com is just a flower delivery service. You could become a flower delivery person. Yeah, sounds terrible. Fun games.com. Fun games.com.
01:18:33
Speaker
Yeah, we can, oh, douchebag workout too. Oh God, what is this? secret girlfriend when booty calls. Okay guys, don't go to fungames.com. Girl makeup, girl makeup salon. Let's go to amazingpeople.com.
01:18:52
Speaker
I'm just making up websites. It's a picture of me. What do you know? Oh, it's not loading, so I'm going to quickly close my browser because it's not loading, and it makes me think that there's a virus there. You guys don't have to go there. I went there to amazingpeople.com, and it was a photo of me and my cat. Don't go there. Don't check. Trust me, right?
01:19:16
Speaker
Sure, yeah, absolutely. If you visit amazingpeople.com, email us at mattandroses at gmail.com. We love to hear from our ag heads every single episode if you have thoughts. We love to read them. Well, somebody did have a pretty decent thought.
01:19:36
Speaker
They want to be called the loose crank society. You know, it's not on it's not on the eggheads to determine who is egghead and who is not. Maybe they can have like sub like they can split off into different crank society. These are the eggheads. This is the leisure suit crew. There's the leisure suit crew, the loose crank society. And they're all under the umbrella of the eggheads. There could be the guybrush gang.
01:20:04
Speaker
Yeah, which one are you a part of, guys? Let us know. Which one are you a part of, Matt? Oh, my God. Out of Loose Crank Society, Leisure Suit Crew, and Guybrush Gang, I'm definitely Guybrush Gang. How about you? I am definitely Loose Crank Society. We need a third co-host who could be part of the Leisure Suit Crew, and we could be really creeped out by him the whole time. Yeah, of course.
01:20:30
Speaker
I think that brings us to the end of the episode, Rosas. I think so. I liked this episode because we got to talk about so many cool things we liked. Yeah, that's yes, absolutely. We are also part of the adventure game hotspot network. Check them out at adventure game hotspot dot com. Do we have anything else we want to tell the people before we go? Oh, I'm ordering a pizza tonight.
01:20:59
Speaker
No, no responses to the crowd. Podcast is art. And art is suffer.