Transcript
Speaker: Luigi's laundry.
Speaker: Luigi's laundry.
Speaker: You know what else is laundry?
Speaker: What's that?
Speaker: Hey there, everybody.
Speaker: Welcome back to Pixel.
Speaker: My name is Kevin.
Speaker: With me as always is Phil on today's show.
Speaker: We're talking Returnal Fallen Asteria.
Speaker: Well, we got a little graphic novel here.
Speaker: This might be the first time that you bought the physical copy of it.
Speaker: And then I got the ebook.
Speaker: It's a good looking, it's a nice looking cover.
Speaker: We got Celine from Returnal right there on the cover.
Speaker: Kind of doing an action pose.
Speaker: Doing the spacewalk kind of thing.
Speaker: Spacewalk, kind of Jack Kirby-ing somewhere.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: She's... You know what?
Speaker: My first criticism of this story is not enough Jack Kirby, like, cosmic... It needs more, yeah.
Speaker: Like, you know, kind of like the bullshit that he would just kind of, like, throw in to the lines.
Speaker: Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Just...
Speaker: Just, yeah, it's flair.
Speaker: It's flair.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Jack.
Speaker: Jesus.
Speaker: God damn it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, but before we talk about that, I want to talk about the best website in the world.
Speaker: Oh,
Speaker: What's the name of it?
Speaker: Oh, my God.
Speaker: I'm searching my brain, but all I keep thinking of is when I go into my mind palace and I search, I type, go to the computer in my mind palace, and I type, what is the best website in the world?
Speaker: I get...
Speaker: Patreon.com slash pixel of pod.
Speaker: Is that the answer?
Speaker: I think that's it.
Speaker: Oh, that's weird.
Speaker: I like when that happens.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: That's nutty.
Speaker: Very twin peaks.
Speaker: That's what I like that.
Speaker: It's very twin peaks.
Speaker: So, yeah, if if you if you want to see a wonderful website, go to Patreon dot com slash Pixel at Pod.
Speaker: We have many ways of being supported.
Speaker: You could support us for free that we consider that supporting us.
Speaker: If you just absolutely sign up and and follow us for free.
Speaker: Otherwise, you get one dollar that gets you access to Phil's blogs.
Speaker: Five dollars gets you access to ad free versions of the episode, as well as the pre show.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: bonus episode and $10 gets your name shouted out in the episode.
Speaker: And to that end, I want to shout out Jesus loves you.
Speaker: Kyle Seaman, Ruthless Mudder, Middle of Things, Sigma Sal, Chet Beaks, Dumb and Thick, and Friendly Friend.
Speaker: Thank you for being a friend.
Speaker: We love you.
Speaker: We love you.
Speaker: So, Returnal Fallen Asteria.
Speaker: Returnal is, let me talk a little bit about Returnal first.
Speaker: Yeah, you've got the knack on this one.
Speaker: Yeah, so Returnal is a game by Housemarque.
Speaker: It came out as a quasi-launch title for the PS5.
Speaker: It was actually one of the first games for the PS5 to use the haptic stuff on the controller.
Speaker: So the PS5 controller itself is...
Speaker: The PlayStation five had it really been it.
Speaker: It's never really been worthwhile to me as a console.
Speaker: Had it had more exclusives that I was interested in.
Speaker: Yes, it would be.
Speaker: Returnal, though, was.
Speaker: is one of those early games that was an exclusive for a while, then it's out on PC now, but it actually made use of the haptics on the controller.
Speaker: And when I say that, it uses the triggers on the shoulders.
Speaker: It'll like, say your gun is out of ammo, the trigger will be jammed, so you can't fire anymore.
Speaker: It actually puts out upward pressure on the trigger, so you can't pull it down.
Speaker: It's really cool.
Speaker: It has a lot of neat mechanics,
Speaker: But the game is a roguelike.
Speaker: You play as this character, a woman named Selene, who is an astronaut, and she crash lands on this planet.
Speaker: And basically, she is chasing this signal called white shadow, the elusive white shadow signal.
Speaker: And she has to figure out what it is.
Speaker: Her plane, her spaceship is wrecked.
Speaker: Her spaceship is called Helios.
Speaker: It is destroyed.
Speaker: And she wanders off into the wilds.
Speaker: The first level is this jungle.
Speaker: She wanders off into the jungle.
Speaker: And then she's in this area after that with red sands.
Speaker: And then it's
Speaker: It's an amazing game.
Speaker: It is – it quickly became one of my favorite games of all time.
Speaker: And there are a lot of neat things to it.
Speaker: There is a lay it motif using a very famous song by Blue Oyster Cult that plays in very nicely to kind of the twists and turns of the plot as you finish the game.
Speaker: So, yeah, Returnal, my full recommendation, 100%.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Phil, do you know anything about the people who put this darn book together?
Speaker: A little bit, a little bit.
Speaker: What we've got ultimately is we've got like four writers, Greg Loudon, Evie Corhone, Khalil Osaimi, I want to say, and Igor Lamov.
Speaker: And most of them, from what I can tell, are actually work writers.
Speaker: worked on the video game.
Speaker: One of them's a narrative director.
Speaker: Um, yeah, they all, they work at a house mark.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Uh, one of them's even, uh, it goes beyond that.
Speaker: It's like, um,
Speaker: like we're talking like president and all that shit.
Speaker: Like we've got, it's everyone's kind of, and I think that means that most of them probably didn't actually sit down and write this thing.
Speaker: It's just their baby.
Speaker: But we do have Igor Lomov who actually does have some comic experience from what I can tell, just some, some, some like really indie stuff that you can see.
Speaker: And Khalil Osama,
Speaker: I'm sorry if you're listening, Khalil, your last name is failing me.
Speaker: I'm failing your last name.
Speaker: Or sign me.
Speaker: He's like a brand manager at Housemarque, which is always, always interesting when you got your brand manager coming in to help make it.
Speaker: But I mean, that does make sense at the same time if we're talking about, you know, this came out.
Speaker: long after the game came out.
Speaker: So making sure that we're sticking to our guns on the brand of what it is and that sort of thing, especially several years later, is going to be important, I think.
Speaker: But yeah, not a ton about these guys beyond their involvement in the development of the game itself, which should mean that what we've got is a very
Speaker: true to form true to the source material kind of book here.
Speaker: And you would know that better than I would.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I read it as well, but I wouldn't know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Let's put the let's put the body in the marsh.
Speaker: Hell yeah.
Speaker: When I tell you to dump a body in the marsh.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So this is not a very long graphic novel.
Speaker: And when I say there's not a lot to summarize, I mean it.
Speaker: There's not a whole lot to summarize that is in visuals.
Speaker: There's maybe 10 lines of dialogue in the entire book.
Speaker: In like just under 100 pages from my just under 100 pages.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Basically, it's it's separated into three parts and we follow what the graphic novel shows is it follows Selene through a course of kind of like through a loop on hysteria and.
Speaker: From crash landing there to going and countering hostile enemies, especially in this first part, she sees hostile enemies.
Speaker: In one moment, she finds a house.
Speaker: Now, the house is...
Speaker: It's interesting because, and here's the thing is it's, you can't discuss this without getting into spoilers for the game, right?
Speaker: Fair enough.
Speaker: That's, that's kind of the thing with this is that it is such a tie in.
Speaker: It is such an adaptation that,
Speaker: even though if you were just reading this and you haven't played the game, if you're reading this and you haven't played the game, you're not being spoiled on anything because you don't know the context necessarily.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay, good.
Speaker: I feel better then.
Speaker: But if you've played the game and you're reading it, then you know the context of the images that the book is showing you.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: We'll just kind of like go through a few of the imagery so that the enemies are all kind of like,
Speaker: They're pretty terrifying.
Speaker: A lot of them are very tentacly.
Speaker: Great design.
Speaker: They have great design.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Love the enemies.
Speaker: And there's a variety of enemies in the game.
Speaker: The jungle enemies are like, they have a lot of these like tentacles and ropes.
Speaker: And there's one where it's kind of like, looks like a humanoid tree monster.
Speaker: In other areas, you fight off enemies that are almost like sentient enemies.
Speaker: cubes that like rise up out of the sky.
Speaker: They're almost like drones, like an automated drone force that is fighting you.
Speaker: So some of the big moments in the game include Selene finding a house.
Speaker: And this is in the first area of the game.
Speaker: The house that she finds is her childhood home.
Speaker: This is where she grew up.
Speaker: Or ostensibly where she was raising her child, which is why it kind of gets into weird spoilery area.
Speaker: You assume that it's Celine's house from when she was a kid.
Speaker: Yeah, I totally assumed that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's also Celine's house from when she was an adult.
Speaker: Ah.
Speaker: As you explore the house in the game, you find a whole bunch of information about how Selene was kicked out of the astronaut program and how she's not actually an astronaut.
Speaker: Stuff of that nature.
Speaker: How her mother was an astronaut, but she wasn't.
Speaker: So the house is...
Speaker: One of the first images that shows you in the book.
Speaker: And she says, I never wanted to go back there, but it's like someone wants me to not forget.
Speaker: And she spends some time like looking through the house and runs into this, this figure of an astronaut.
Speaker: And the astronaut is a recurring figure in the game.
Speaker: This character that you just, it's off in the distance and never quite,
Speaker: within your grasp to interact with.
Speaker: And it's kind of like an unknowable character.
Speaker: There's nothing to actually...
Speaker: There's nothing that Selene sees behind this mask.
Speaker: It's just this dark dome, right?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: After this, in the book, she's wandering around and she sees that Helios off in the distance is crashing again, right?
Speaker: Helios is the ship that she came in on, but she sees it.
Speaker: It's coming down again.
Speaker: the game is in a time loop that's not only the mechanic of like the the gamey mechanic of like returning back from death and things like and things like that it's like you're you're actually in a repeating loop and these loops are not um
Speaker: They're not in sync.
Speaker: They don't end when you die.
Speaker: They start over kind of whenever.
Speaker: So the fact of the matter is you are still in an active loop, but you see Helios crashing from another time loop.
Speaker: Like the it's everything is kind of out of sync, which is one of the things that I thought is kind of interesting about this book is that the way it plays with frames like they will shoot the the illustrator create would create like a splash page.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But then there would be frames within the frame of Selene doing different actions on the splash page.
Speaker: And one of the – there's two things that it says.
Speaker: It's like, OK, this is a sequence of her doing the following things.
Speaker: Or she did these things at different times on different experiences.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Is like another way to look at it.
Speaker: And it's all overlapping in different ways.
Speaker: It's all overlapping in different ways.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: So, yeah, she basically continues and she is fighting and decides to just go into a hole.
Speaker: She's going deeper.
Speaker: I think...
Speaker: This is not one for one for what you do in the game, but it's a hint of, oh, yeah, this is what you did at the end of the jungle level as you jump down into a hole.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Kind of an expansion on the end of one of the levels, basically.
Speaker: Then there's these little interludes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: At the end of every issue, so to speak, there's like three issues in this book.
Speaker: At the end of every issue, there's a little mini comic just called Sisyphus.
Speaker: I love this, by the way.
Speaker: Yeah, this is a great touch.
Speaker: Real quick, before you go into it, is anything like this in the game, this Sisyphus thing?
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Sisyphus is thematically connected to the game.
Speaker: Oh, sure.
Speaker: There's a eternal mode, like an endless mode called the Tower of Sisyphus.
Speaker: Ah, okay, cool.
Speaker: Where you just keep going and it never ends.
Speaker: Like the base game has an ending, like you can beat it, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But there is a true eternal roguelike mode that you can go into in this little Sisyphus cartoon.
Speaker: It shows Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill and he just like, he's like, oh, I'm done for the day.
Speaker: And he sticks a branch underneath the boulder thinking that would like hold it.
Speaker: And then the next morning he awakens to the boulder having rolled that back down the hill regardless.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: So, um, yeah, that's, that's a little sisyphus cartoon.
Speaker: It's a very cartoony kind of, uh, so stylistically different.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Like wildly stylistically different.
Speaker: It's striking.
Speaker: It's very, very striking.
Speaker: So yeah, that's, that's pretty cool.
Speaker: So, uh, as Celine continues down these paths, part of the thing is like, it seems like she might be seeing herself, uh,
Speaker: Like she looks at down this one tunnel and she sees a figure and she's like, okay, I'm, I'm on my way.
Speaker: And she gets there.
Speaker: She doesn't find anybody.
Speaker: But I think that the idea is like what she's looking at is just another Selene that she can never reach though, because the time, the time is too out of, out of sync.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: And yeah, so she's back in like the ranch.
Speaker: She sees the house again and is attacked by a tentacle monster before she kind of ends up in this like boss arena where the water is able to be stood upon and fighting this gigantic beastly demon thing.
Speaker: This is like a mini boss from the game.
Speaker: You see like, you know, you'll see a couple of these
Speaker: in the jungle level, so to speak.
Speaker: So she fights off this thing and then she finds a, it's this alien looking device.
Speaker: Now it's in the game.
Speaker: There is this device and it's like, clearly not for humans.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's like, it's an alien ass.
Speaker: Like, uh,
Speaker: silhouette in there.
Speaker: Nothing human about it.
Speaker: Nothing human about it.
Speaker: And Celine can use that.
Speaker: You as a player can use that to create a copy of Celine so that if she dies in the run, she wakes up again on this device.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I think what they're hinting at is like using the device is also what creates, um, uh,
Speaker: some unique mutations in monsters that you see later.
Speaker: So part of the neat thing of the game is that you can...
Speaker: As you go through, you can find dead bodies of Selene and you can read her logs.
Speaker: That's really neat.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Sometimes though, when you touch the dead body, it's not actually dead and it's like turning out, it's like mutating into a tentacle monster and it attacks you.
Speaker: And these are actually really hard enemies to kill.
Speaker: And those will be like where certain players died or something like that.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: Isn't there something similar to that in in Bloodborne or in one of the Dark Souls or something like that where you can find where other people died?
Speaker: You get shadows of it or something.
Speaker: You can touch that.
Speaker: You'll see the bloodstains and if you touch the bloodstain, it'll like show the last moments of.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Another player before they died.
Speaker: That's pretty cool.
Speaker: Yeah, I wish I was better at these games.
Speaker: So she uses the device and it kind of like cryptically cuts to like a version of her all wrapped up in tentacles.
Speaker: And we get another Sisyphus cartoon.
Speaker: This time, a different looking Sisyphus is rolling a tiny boulder up a hill, but it's a snowy hill and it turns into a giant boulder.
Speaker: And it rolls back down and he gets, he gets crunched.
Speaker: And as he's down on the grassy part of, uh, at the bottom of the mountain, looking at the tiny boulder again, he says, Zeus.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a nice touch.
Speaker: um, Selene, uh, continues on through and sees a lot of her dead bodies.
Speaker: Um, and, uh, she is, uh, she finds a rifle, can't use it for what it's supposed to be right for, for right now and continues on, uh, traveling through a wasteland and finds the tree monsters that I kind of talked about earlier.
Speaker: They're like, they're like skeletal mossy tree things.
Speaker: And they, they have this like slam into the ground and vines come up somewhere else attack, um,
Speaker: If I recall correctly.
Speaker: Yeah, she kills the shit out of them, murders the shit out of those.
Speaker: A lot of really good art.
Speaker: The artwork is outstanding.
Speaker: It really, really is.
Speaker: Eventually she comes upon a corrupted Selene corpse and kills it using the blade.
Speaker: So you get kind of a lightsaber in the game.
Speaker: It's your melee weapon and you use it to like...
Speaker: If you are like, if an enemy is like, I think if I recall correctly, if an enemy is like stunned, you can like melee it to like instant kill it.
Speaker: Um, but you also use the weapon to like cut open doors and things like that.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So she kills like a corrupted version of herself, which has gotten authentically and ends up falling deep into a pit.
Speaker: And we get some and starts corrupting, getting corrupted herself and thinking about the, the house.
Speaker: And she got a, she gets a phone call.
Speaker: There's a voicemail saying, hi mom.
Speaker: I took care of it when the car was filling up with,
Speaker: And then it kind of cuts to static and she wakes up in the cloning device as if she died.
Speaker: And then she comes back to the rifle that she had found earlier and continues on.
Speaker: And she kind of like finds a almost like a temple looking building.
Speaker: continues, finds the signal and sees, I think, a bunch of different futures and outcomes.
Speaker: And then when she is sitting on the ground, she looks up and she sees the silhouette of a child holding what appears to be a stuffed rabbit walking off into the light.
Speaker: And she apologizes to the child.
Speaker: And then she has a vision of a car.
Speaker: And then we get back to the Helios crashing from the sky again.
Speaker: And her saying, I can't give up.
Speaker: And that's the end of the main story.
Speaker: We get another Sisyphus with Sisyphus learning how to build a truck for a little trolley for his boulder.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then he gets to the top of the mountain.
Speaker: And Zeus says to him, so you still haven't understood anything.
Speaker: And Sisyphus hops on the boulder and rides it down having fun.
Speaker: And he says, maybe just the first couple thousand times.
Speaker: And there's a bunch of pictures of him and the rock being happy together.
Speaker: Which...
Speaker: Is the who was it that said we one must imagine Sisyphus to be happy?
Speaker: I don't remember.
Speaker: But as far as I'm concerned, the Internet, I that's that's one I've only ever seen on the Internet.
Speaker: Sisyphus to be happy.
Speaker: Who is that?
Speaker: Camus.
Speaker: There we go.
Speaker: So that's that's returnal fawn hysteria.
Speaker: There's like.
Speaker: There's not a lot there in terms of, I mean, you can parse a lot from the imagery, but in terms of what happens, it's very brief for a 100-page graphic novel.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: I would, no, go on.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: I just want to hear, I want to hear what you, your thoughts are before I spoil things.
Speaker: Yeah, it's funny because on one hand, first and foremost, the art is outstanding.
Speaker: We have we have we have covered graphic novels on this show that have had some lazy slash sloppy art.
Speaker: And this is absolutely not one of them.
Speaker: The artwork is really dynamic.
Speaker: It's very kinetic, which is great because you're having all of these action moments and you can see the speed and the intensity of it.
Speaker: I loved the artwork in this.
Speaker: Honestly, probably maybe the best artwork of any of things, any of the graphic novels we've read so far.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's just that solid.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've never played Returnal.
Speaker: So I go into that completely blind and come out the other side, not at all sure what just happened.
Speaker: And on one hand, on one hand, that kind of makes me go, well, why are they?
Speaker: Why would they do that?
Speaker: If you're trying to, it's an old game at this point.
Speaker: Why wouldn't you try to like,
Speaker: explain it a little better so that people like me could go, Oh shit, I want to play that game or something like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But on the other hand, there is an aspect of the mystery of what has happened combined with some really intriguing moments
Speaker: artwork and and just snippets of a story here and there that honestly could probably be just as effective in that sense.
Speaker: So I'm of two minds about it.
Speaker: I think if I had a system that that could handle a game like Returnal, I would be I would be looking into grabbing a copy at this point.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Uh, but yeah, I think it's, I I'm, I'm intrigued to hear from you more about the story itself.
Speaker: Uh, but I think that, you know, I was, I was looking through these, these authors and stuff.
Speaker: And one of them, I think it's, uh, Igor Lomov on, uh, on, on one of his social media pages.
Speaker: He was talking about how, like, he was talking about projects he's working on.
Speaker: And this is before this came out.
Speaker: And he was talking about how excited he is that he is getting to expand on the storyline that already exists in, um,
Speaker: in the game of Returnal, which is really cool because it tells me a lot about, you know, it tells me that this is clearly part of the game, but it's also there's more to it there, which I love.
Speaker: So, yeah, I thought it was definitely worth reading.
Speaker: But I would say without a shadow of a doubt, you're going to get way more out of it if you've played the game.
Speaker: No question.
Speaker: 100% and this is one of the few books that I would say falls less into the adaptation category and more into the tie-in.
Speaker: It is a companion piece to the game.
Speaker: It is not meant to be read necessarily on its own outside of the context of the game.
Speaker: There's too much in this.
Speaker: that is referenced that you can kind of start to grasp a little bit of what it's referring to.
Speaker: But I don't think if you're not, if you're not familiar with the game itself and you want to play it, probably stop listening.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because the story of Returnal, and it's still, I think it's up for a little bit of debate, but the story of Returnal is a woman named Selene who is trying to process a level of grief that is untenable.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Here's kind of how the game plays out.
Speaker: There's four acts in the game.
Speaker: The first two acts you go through and at the end of the second act, you find the signal, the white shadow signal, and you return home.
Speaker: You're able to like, the white shadow is preventing you from contacting for help, right?
Speaker: From reaching outside the planet.
Speaker: You contact help.
Speaker: And you return home.
Speaker: And then in a cut scene, you live out your entire life.
Speaker: Selene lives a full life.
Speaker: She dies, you know, in her 80s.
Speaker: So like another 50 years of life, she's put in the ground, buried, dies and wakes up again on the planet.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: It's like that arcade game in Rick and Morty where you're in the life and you're like, oh, I don't know, man.
Speaker: You died in your garage.
Speaker: That's weird.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Oh, he's burning his social security card.
Speaker: He's off the grid.
Speaker: He's off the grid.
Speaker: Let me destroy your Roy score.
Speaker: I want to play that game.
Speaker: I want to play that game.
Speaker: You know what, though?
Speaker: Maybe I'm playing it now.
Speaker: Maybe I'm playing it right now.
Speaker: Shit.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: This is what they say, what they mean when you're living in a simulation.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Then you die and you take the helmet off.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You're in an alien arcade.
Speaker: You started a podcast with your friend, Kevin.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: There's a choice.
Speaker: You want to play again?
Speaker: We still got a half hour.
Speaker: Where am I?
Speaker: Where are my kids?
Speaker: Oh, man.
Speaker: That is wild.
Speaker: That's some wild shit.
Speaker: So then you go through the next parts of the game, and you fight this one boss who is playing a song, and it's this magnificent boss that is at a gigantic organ, and it's playing this amazing song, but the leitmotif of the song is Don't Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult.
Speaker: That's hilarious.
Speaker: When you're fighting the boss, you're like, that sounds really familiar.
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: As you continue, kind of things start to get a little bit weirder and weirder.
Speaker: And at a certain point, you see, when you're on the ice level, you just see...
Speaker: like a Volvo station wagon just sitting in underneath the ice.
Speaker: And when you get to the end of the game,
Speaker: the visions and things are starting to like come closer and closer together.
Speaker: And you realize, and this is just one reading of Returnal.
Speaker: And I think it's kind of the, it's the more obvious one.
Speaker: And I know there's ways you can go deeper into Returnal is that the entire game is the last moments of Celine's life that
Speaker: on earth.
Speaker: She was never an astronaut, but her mother was.
Speaker: She has these images of her mother being an astronaut.
Speaker: She was driving her kid and something distracted her while she was driving and she drove off the road and the water, the car is filling with water.
Speaker: The radio is playing.
Speaker: Don't fear the Reaper by blue oyster cult.
Speaker: As during the last few moments of her, it's like the last synapses of her brain is firing off, creating as she's drowning, creating, creating,
Speaker: That's pretty cool.
Speaker: And that is why you see in the book, in this graphic novel, you see a child, the silhouette of a child holding a teddy bear and the headlights of a car.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because that is the last thing that happens.
Speaker: But it's never spelled out.
Speaker: It's never actually spelled out.
Speaker: We see this.
Speaker: We see this, but is it?
Speaker: Is this actually what happened?
Speaker: It leaves, and this, in the graphic novel, also does not necessarily answer it.
Speaker: In fact, what's interesting is that at one point in Returnal, you shoot down yourself.
Speaker: You shoot the Helios down.
Speaker: Like you're responsible for the Helios crashing.
Speaker: And there is so, there is so much in Returnal above it being a mechanically pretty fucking awesome roguelike shooter.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's got these really cool themes.
Speaker: And if you're you or anyone listening are interested in a more thorough analysis is I would go to Jacob Geller's channel.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And watch Returnal is a hell of our own creation.
Speaker: which talks a lot about, it talks about Returnal, but it also talks about I have no mouth and I must scream.
Speaker: And Groundhog Day is referenced in there because they're all part of it.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: That video is a 30 minute video on the plot of Returnal and it's good.
Speaker: You had me at go to Jacob Geller's YouTube page.
Speaker: Go forth to Jacob Geller's YouTube page and watch the video on Returnal because it's good and it's
Speaker: But if you're not interested in any of that or you are and you're still listening for some reason after I've spoiled chunks of the story, go play Returnal before.
Speaker: Go do it.
Speaker: What are you doing?
Speaker: What are you doing?
Speaker: What are you doing?
Speaker: It's not an easy game, by the way.
Speaker: It is, in fact, a very hard game.
Speaker: So it's got some souls like kind of shit to it, doesn't it?
Speaker: Or no, it is.
Speaker: I wouldn't say souls like.
Speaker: I would say it is a roguelike bullet hell.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: OK, great.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: So there's a lot of projectiles flying at any given time.
Speaker: So it's more about it's more about bullet hell dodging and stuff like that.
Speaker: I gotcha.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That does make sense.
Speaker: Jesus Christ.
Speaker: And with that, that's so funny because with that style of game, you know, is it a third person game?
Speaker: Third person action bullet hell roguelike.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's not, that's not a bullet.
Speaker: Hell is not something I often associate with.
Speaker: A third person action game that's really interesting.
Speaker: Third person action or like it's like really dark sci-fi.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Mixed with all this, like a really unsettling, deep personal story of sadness and it's a fantastic game.
Speaker: I wish it had gotten more of more laurels when it came out.
Speaker: But I think, I think it's, you know, just enough to like that people are, I know Sony, I think acquired house Mark like later that year.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: Anyway, I love when big bombastic games like that are allowed to have those kind of dark personal stories.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And it is a bombastic game.
Speaker: You can just play it and not pay attention to any of the story at all.
Speaker: And I know I'm pretty sure people have, but.
Speaker: Oh, sure.
Speaker: It's worth digging a little bit deeper into it if you want to learn, if you want some more of that weird stuff.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So shorter episode tonight, shorter book coverage tonight, because I mean, yeah, yeah, it's shorter thing.
Speaker: So that leaves me one question.
Speaker: What are you playing?
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Well, I'm still on my UFO 50 bullshit, but I'm not going to get into that.
Speaker: Actually, the main thing that I have been playing, because we've reached the point in the year where I'm trying very hard to get back to some games that maybe I started and never finished.
Speaker: And, you know, while we're making the game of the year list and everything like that.
Speaker: So I have been playing a lot of Conscript, actually.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: which I have just been having such a good time with it.
Speaker: I stopped playing it in the end because I had originally started playing it on a work trip on my Switch.
Speaker: And so when you go back home after that, everything's
Speaker: different and you know you just put everything away and and i kind of forgotten about it um and i got back into it i was surprised because we were discussing this before about how some games getting back into them uh can be a lot of work yeah um
Speaker: I was surprised at how, because I finished the first chapter of the game before I came home.
Speaker: And so getting back into it, I was surprised at how easily I was able to pick back up from where I left off.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's just a wonderful, it's still a wonderful, like, Resident Evil-like kind of thing where, and we've talked about this before, but for anyone who isn't aware, this is a indie World War I game.
Speaker: That touts itself as a survival horror, which it absolutely is.
Speaker: And it has the kind of grim atmosphere.
Speaker: And especially after playing Amnesia the Bunker last year, I think because you played this one, too.
Speaker: We were both ready for like a monster to show up at some point, but it never does.
Speaker: The monster is humanity.
Speaker: And you are this French conscript running back and forth through the trenches.
Speaker: I think if there's any and just, yeah, you've got to collect the keys to open this place, to get over here, to get these weapons to do this.
Speaker: and it's it's your very very standard kind of resident evil style sort of thing i think if there was one thing to say against it it would be that the level of backtracking uh borders on uh uh uh you know uh uh metroidvania yeah it's it's insane
Speaker: Yeah, that's actually why I stopped playing it the second time is that I was just like, all right.
Speaker: Okay, I'm all the way over here.
Speaker: I'm like, I gotta go all the way back over there.
Speaker: And it's not like a Metroidvania where you have fun traversal mechanics that make you move faster.
Speaker: No, you're just running.
Speaker: You're just a dude.
Speaker: You're just a dude running.
Speaker: Who gets out of breath.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And I totally get that.
Speaker: And how much it has worn on me really depends on the mood I'm in.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But I have resolved myself to play this through the end, and it's no –
Speaker: I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker: Let me put it that way.
Speaker: It's not I'm not going, oh, I have to beat this thing because I paid money for it and I better beat the thing.
Speaker: No, I'm enjoying it.
Speaker: It's a nice game to play on the Switch, which if you're like me, you only ever use as a portable mobile device.
Speaker: Um, this kind of game really does.
Speaker: It's suited for, for that sort of thing.
Speaker: Um, so I'm enjoying it.
Speaker: Uh, still really, really getting a kick out of it.
Speaker: And I'm glad I came back to it, uh, before the year ended to be completely honest.
Speaker: So, um, I haven't gotten to any, many demos.
Speaker: Uh, that's been, that's basically been my main thing lately.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Uh, what about you?
Speaker: What are you playing?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Pretty exclusively.
Speaker: I've been playing Indiana Jones and the great circle.
Speaker: Is that still treating you good or you liked that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's treating me pretty well.
Speaker: I got to say, love it.
Speaker: Hey, I, I, I,
Speaker: I talked about it last week, right?
Speaker: I think I'm pretty sure I did.
Speaker: Yeah, you had just started at that point.
Speaker: I think it is a wonderful game.
Speaker: I'm in the second area of the game.
Speaker: So now I'm punching Nazis in the first area.
Speaker: I was punching fascists.
Speaker: So I've gone from fascists to Nazis.
Speaker: What's the difference?
Speaker: You might ask.
Speaker: Well, in this case, we are the fascists.
Speaker: A fascist is only a fascist if it comes from the fascist region of Italy.
Speaker: Otherwise, it's just a sparkling Nazi.
Speaker: Mostly it's the uniform.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, it's because the fascists were – it was like the fascists refer to the Italians and the Nazis refer to the Germans.
Speaker: But now fascist is kind of expanded into be talking about the form of government.
Speaker: So yes –
Speaker: You go from the black shirts, the fascist black shirts to the Nazis in, in, in world two, where you are in Egypt and, uh, going underneath the pyramids and going underneath the Sphinx and solving puzzles.
Speaker: Uh, the Egypt level has a lot of fun, like classic indie type stuff where it's like, okay, now I gotta, I gotta find the mirror and rotate it.
Speaker: So the mirror, the light hits the thing and then the door opens.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And a really cool recurring like trap enemy of scorpions that are so basically if you don't have a torch on you in some areas, scorpions will start like crawling up out of the ground.
Speaker: Oh, that's good.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: And you have to like take the torch and like start swinging it at the scorpions to scare them off.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: Or else they only take a little bit of health, but when there's like hundreds of them, you know,
Speaker: It adds up.
Speaker: I imagine psychologically it could fuck psychologically.
Speaker: It's not good either.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, you, you it's, it's, it's a lot of fun.
Speaker: I think I'm, I think there's one more area after Egypt or Giza to be specific.
Speaker: And then, yeah, it's, it's up there on my game of the year list.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: 100% because, and it's a late, you know, late comer, uh,
Speaker: He's a comer.
Speaker: I don't know if anybody else knows, remembers this video of Donald Trump talking about Rick Perry back in like 2012.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: Donald Trump is he's like going through all the Republican candidates who would run against like Barack Obama.
Speaker: And he's like, oh, you got to you got to watch out for Rick Perry.
Speaker: And he meant to say up and comer.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Rick Perry.
Speaker: He's a comer.
Speaker: I mean, if anyone would know, to be fair.
Speaker: Oh God.
Speaker: Um, I think I have that video saved somewhere.
Speaker: I know, uh, uh, Cody Johnson, Johnson, uh, uh, saved all of, cause it was Donald Trump used to have a YouTube channel where he would post these weird fucking videos talking about things.
Speaker: Holy shit.
Speaker: Years ago.
Speaker: And it's, it's gone.
Speaker: It's all gone now.
Speaker: He like took it all down.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cause it's fucking ridiculous stuff.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: That's never stopped him before, but I get it.
Speaker: Never stopped him before.
Speaker: But yeah, Cody Johnson saved all of it.
Speaker: He's a comer.
Speaker: Rick Perry, he's a comer.
Speaker: He's a comer.
Speaker: And so is this game.
Speaker: It's definitely a comer on my game of the year list.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: So it's getting up there.
Speaker: And by the time this episode comes out tomorrow, I think there should be another episode.
Speaker: Should be another episode that out with Vidya Game Apocalypse.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Where we guested on for their game of the year episode to talk about Ballotro.
Speaker: So check that out over on their channel.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But other than that, this is our last regular episode of the year.
Speaker: Next year, we'll have next week, we'll have a we'll just have a compilation of all the bonus episodes that we push out for the non-patron Patreon folks.
Speaker: You get them.
Speaker: eventually you just gotta wait to the to the like end of the year uh to get them so it'll be a nice chunky episode of stuff that you haven't heard before but not stuff that phil and i have to record because guess what it's christmas next wednesday and if you're listening to us during christmas uh i just want to say thank you because it you should be you should be you should be um
