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Episode 2 - 10 Essential Adventure Games
3.6k Plays1 year ago
Roses is playing Stardew and put the shorts in the soup! Also, Excavation of Hob's Barrow rules. Matt played Blood Nova and too many Next Fext demos (see next week). We list our Top 10 Most Essential Adventure games!
Email us: MattandRoses@gmail.com
Games Discussed:
- Stardew Valley
- The Excavation of Hob's Barrow
- Blood Nova
- Kings Quest 1
- Secret of Monkey Island
- Curse of Monkey Island
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Firewatch
- Unavowed
- The Walking Dead
- Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon
- Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure
- Colonel's Bequest
- The Sexy Brutale
- Botany Manor
- Cabernet
- Sky of Tides
- Disco Elysium
- Islands of Insight
Recommended
Transcript
Episode Recap and Lost Joke Context
00:00:00
Speaker
Okay, so last time we recorded, we went like insanely over time, right? We did. Like insanely. Like we rambled for two hours. So I understand that you had to cut it down.
00:00:14
Speaker
The problem is you cut out the very first things, like the origin of the joke where you called me a special boy, but you never cut out any of the other instances where I refer to myself as a special boy.
00:00:33
Speaker
So every listener thinks that just halfway through the episode, I decided I was a special boy and referred to myself as such. Just because I cut it out doesn't mean that I didn't think it. I don't go around naming myself special boy is just the thing I want people to know here.
00:00:56
Speaker
Okay, just to reiterate, Matt doesn't think himself as a special boy. I think of him as a special, precious, cute little blonde-headed goblin. Is that better? I'm like Dennis the Menace, but 37 years old.
00:01:34
Speaker
Hey, everyone. Pushing up roses here. Welcome back to Save Your Game, where we, as in me and special boy Matt Aucamp, discuss adventure games.
Podcast Success and Stardew Valley Antics
00:01:44
Speaker
Hi, Matt. Hey, how's it going? How have you been?
00:01:47
Speaker
I'm good. I mean, I'm a little thrown because this started with a call out to me and my editing prowess. Well, yeah, I just I think I feel like I had to set the record straight because otherwise I come off like the biggest fucking weirdo that the world has ever known. So that I think that was just your collateral damage in that.
00:02:10
Speaker
Well, now I'm going to make up for it every single episode by calling you synonyms of, you know, special and precious and all those things precious little boy. What have I gotten myself into?
00:02:26
Speaker
the best podcast in the world, naturally.
00:02:45
Speaker
And within 24 hours, we had well over a thousand downloads. That's amazing. You guys are cool. I hope you're enjoying the show. We're incredibly glad to have you. I think our trailer was amazing. You know what? I bet it was so amazing that people watched it several times. Watched it. I'm so used to doing YouTube videos. Listen to it. Listen to it several times over.
00:03:12
Speaker
They played it in Winamp and watched the weird visualizers doing the psychedelic lava lamp show. That sounds fun. What have you been playing lately, Roses? Listen, I need you to hear me out.
00:03:25
Speaker
Oh, no. So as you know, because I think I told you personally, Matt, I never played the update to Stardew Valley. And now I am. And I'm upset because I used my new update to throw the shorts into the luau pot. It started out funny, but then it got really not funny.
00:03:52
Speaker
And when you're talking, when you say the update, you mean 1.5. You're talking about the one with the... With Ginger Island. It's got Ginger Island and it's got the new boy. What's the new boy's name? Leo. Leo, Leo the new boy. He's a precious boy. He's like you. The wild boy. The wild boy. He just runs around in shorts with crazy hair.
00:04:15
Speaker
I need you all to know that even though I am a spooky darkling, I was very upset at putting the shorts in the pot because at first it was kind of funny, but then Mayor Lewis was like, you have degraded all of us in this community. I am so disappointed. And I'm like, I am feeling negative about this.
00:04:42
Speaker
supposedly if you put the shorts in the grange display if you save them and put them in your grange display he will also be like
00:04:54
Speaker
Okay, fine, you win. Does this make you happy? He'll give you money for it, yeah. Whatever you do with the shorts besides just give it to him, he'll make you feel incredibly bad for it. The Lua was the worst, though. I played good stuff. I told you you could do it. I didn't tell you to do it. Oh, and then I'm not supposed to do it?
00:05:19
Speaker
You can't tell me something I could do and then expect me to not give in to the temptations. I'm into Penny, who's your... Uh, Elliot's my boy. I believe you referred to him as a slut. He acts like kind of a slut.
00:05:39
Speaker
Uh-huh. It's actually me who is the slut, because in my previous game, definitely made use of some of those obelisks, the magic things. So I would romance everybody and then marry them and then divorce them and then wipe their memory and then do it again.
00:05:59
Speaker
What I do is I date everybody and get them all to the proposal stage. And then I just choose Penny at the end.
00:06:13
Speaker
Okay, we gotta stop talking about Stardew Valley. What else did you play? I'm just saying, I love Elliott and I'm excited for the updates.
Game Reviews: Hobbs Barrow and Blood Nova
00:06:20
Speaker
So beyond that, beyond shipping away at that, upon many recommendations, I played Hobbs Barrow, or AKA the excavation of Hobbs Barrow. Hell yeah.
00:06:32
Speaker
Yeah. Published by Wajidai, my good friends over at Wajidai. And now I forgot the developer. Matt, help me out here. Cloak and Dagger games. Of course. Yeah, Cloak and Dagger games. That's right. So I don't think I had ever played a game by Cloak and Dagger.
00:06:49
Speaker
And I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I'm just going to be completely honest and transparent. When I saw screen caps of this game, I was feeling not good about it. It made me feel negative and I didn't like the screenshots. But upon playing it, all of the art makes sense in movement. Do you agree? Screenshots don't... I don't think they do it justice.
00:07:17
Speaker
I don't think I was as affected. So for the listeners, it's pixel art. The characters and the scenes are like what I would consider gorgeous pixel art in a palette that you just, a color palette you just don't normally see. Everything's kind of muted and- Earthy, I guess. Earthy. Yeah. Misty. But the close-ups
00:07:43
Speaker
are horrific looking. They are. All the characters look, you know, kind of hideous, maybe even slightly deformed. But and I don't know if that is a person who had an idea in their head and it didn't fully come out on the screen or if it's done intentionally
00:08:09
Speaker
Either way, it has the effect of making the game just slightly more eerie the entire time, and I think it's very effective.
00:08:18
Speaker
I think I really think it's purposeful. I really do. Um, now that I have played through it and I've seen all the scenes, uh, should I give a brief, uh, little description of what it's about? Great. So if you like folk horror, you will like the excavate. I don't know why I'm sounding like I'm selling it. You will like the excavation of Hobbs Barrow. It's very much inspired by movies like The Wicker Man, Midsummer, and the dev also mentioned a little bit, a little bit of Twin Peaks in there as well. HP Lovecraft as well.
00:08:47
Speaker
I wasn't getting the Twin Peaks vibe, but I was heavily getting the HP Lovecraft Wicker Band vibes. So you are playing an excavator named Thomasina Bateman. She's awesome. Great voice acting, by the way. Thomasina is such a funny name to me. I love it. I'm sure that there are real people in the real world with the name Thomasina, but it feels like a sketch comedian.
00:09:13
Speaker
who's just like adding a feminine ending to a male name. It's like I'm Thomas Cena. I'm Joseph Ella. It's like you're in a sitcom type of a setting and you need to come up with a fake name real quick. Right, my name is Thomas, oh wait, I'm supposed to be a girl, Thomasina.
00:09:38
Speaker
Well, it is set in Victorian times. I did not look this up, but I wonder, I kind of wondered if Thomasina was a more prominent name in the Victorian era. I'm not really sure. It's strangely fit, even though I had kind of a good chuckle over her name at first. But yeah, you were playing as her. She is an excavator. You are called to this small English town named Bewley, where somebody wants you to excavate a barrow named Hobbs Barrow.
00:10:05
Speaker
Buele Buele Everyone's yeah, Miss Bateman. Everyone is great in these roles. By the way, everyone is British which is great. I always can't just Spectacular. Yeah, phenomenal phenomenal. I was blown away. So you get to this small town and That's when it kind of gets very
00:10:29
Speaker
kind of very Wicker Man, very HP Lovecraft. This town seems to have a secret. Some people seem to know something kind of horrific about Hobbs Barrow and why maybe you shouldn't excavate this site because as we find out in the game, her father tried to excavate this site 25 years prior with somebody else and bad things happened when they excavated this. And I just love
00:10:56
Speaker
I love a town with a secret. I love like a culty, weird town where some people are good, right? Because you got that sense. You didn't think everyone was in on this, right? You would say that there are good characters.
00:11:13
Speaker
It's hard to say because there are characters who at the beginning, they tell you they don't know what Hobbs Barrow is and then later they're like, oh, I was feeling guilty. I do know what Hobbs Barrow is and I'm sorry, but yeah, that was the innkeeper. And I think he is just one of the untrustworthy ones. I think you find an ally in like some of the characters.
00:11:34
Speaker
What I'm saying about that innkeeper though is he seems like a guy who was trying to keep a secret and then ended up being good. And then you find out a little later, he's got more secrets that he's also been keeping. So it left me at the end of the game wondering if even the characters that I thought I could trust maybe were a little shadier than I thought.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah, there came a point where I no longer trusted the innkeep and I really only trusted, there's a character named Arthur Tillet. He becomes your ally and maybe the witchy lady, I'm not sure what to call, her name is Mother Mildred. She's not quite a witch, but she dabbles in holistic medicine. So just overall, how did you feel about this game?
00:12:28
Speaker
I loved it. Truly, truly love this game. I've never played a game that was so slow paced, but also enjoyable. And that's kind of why I compare it to the Wicker Man a little bit. It's very slow paced, but on purpose.
00:12:42
Speaker
It's very narrative heavy. It does have many puzzles, but I would still say that it's quite narrative heavy, quite dialogue heavy. But I listened to every dialogue tree because I thought it was interesting. The puzzles, I think, personally, I know there's people who disagree, I think are perfect. And we'll get more into that maybe in a different segment.
00:13:05
Speaker
I think this is proving that we both have a lot to say about it. There's like a lot I'm holding back and I'm sure there is for you too. I bet. I think maybe we should do an entire episode dedicated to this.
00:13:17
Speaker
Yeah, we shall. And that'll give people, that'll give listeners a chance to like play it. And then they'll, maybe you guys can get in on the conversation. The ending seems to be polarizing to people. It is for me. But I will say this for the game, it's very faithful to folk horror, you know? I don't think it has the worst ending. It is not, but it is not a happy ending. Let's just put it that way. And you kind of know that, I mean,
00:13:45
Speaker
The story is told through Thomasina and she keeps foreshadowing that bad things have happened here and there's no going back. So it's not like you don't know that, but throughout you still kind of root for a happy ending. I was, I was rooting for her. So that's what I've been playing. I've been playing Stardew Valley and Hobbs Barrow, which it sounds like we have a lot to say and we'll cover later on. What have you been playing this week, Matt?
00:14:10
Speaker
I've been playing a game called Blood Nova. It was released in I think 2022 and it's by Cosmic Void. It's a Cosmic Void and Ross Joseph Gardner, who's like a comic book writer.
00:14:27
Speaker
It's a pixel art game. It's this futuristic space magic, this very fantastical sci-fi world. It's a point and click adventure game, your first person, kind of like the old Manhunter games. Oh yeah, I remember that.
00:14:48
Speaker
Yeah, where the scene in front of you is kind of static and you're kind of clicking around. Yeah, that was a definite genre at one point. Just like a slightly less graphically intense version of point and clicks where you have a guy walking around the screen.
00:15:09
Speaker
So it is fully static. This is first person fully static, right? Yeah, there's very few animations that happen sort of in front of you. Oftentimes, if something changes, the screen sort of fades out for a second and then it fades back up and the thing has been changed.
00:15:28
Speaker
It's not 100% like that. There are some animations, but just very few. The story is you are Princess, Princess Love is your name. Yeah, it's got a very like Gem in the Holograms kind of vibe.
00:15:47
Speaker
mother, the queen, just abdicated the throne in a very controversial way. And your nations, like the nations of the universe, like a star-faring civilization, are at war. There's like a rebellion happening, and the empire is trying to quash the rebellion, and you find out
00:16:15
Speaker
Very early on, this isn't spoiling anything. You find out that your empire has been supplying weapons to the warlords who have been oppressing certain planets. There's a whole political, horrific thing going on.
00:16:30
Speaker
but you just found yourself suddenly in control of this entire world, this entire universe. This is like a stop on your way to take the throne. You are at a, what they call a lighthouse, which is like a space station post outside of this kind of like wormhole-y stargate thing. They call it a star tunnel, I think, or star port. You're hanging out outside the star port
00:17:00
Speaker
with your friend, you go back in and you find that everybody in this lighthouse is dead. Oh, so is this a scary game? Is this horror? Um, there's some horrific elements to it. I wouldn't call it a horror game. Um, there's some scary things to it and it's definitely a thriller, but I don't know. Sounds like a thriller for sure. I don't know if I'd call it a horror because it seems like there's been an assassination attempt and
00:17:28
Speaker
because you were outside at the time they missed you. So you're trying to figure out, first of all, who tried to kill you. You're trying to save who you can that's still alive on the space station. You're trying to uncover whatever conspiracy your mother was a part of. It's very, again, it's very...
00:17:51
Speaker
magical and very sci-fi. Some things about it, the first puzzle is hilarious actually. It's like sort of making fun of the idea of point and click puzzles. Like you find a gem and you find like a rod and you and your, it's hard to tell, she's your bodyguard but she also might be your romantic interest, are locked outside of
00:18:20
Speaker
the space station at first, and you're trying to break your way in, and she's like, okay, well, I know how to get in, but if you wanna be the one to do it, go ahead. And so again, you find this gem, you find this rod, you connect them, and you decide it's a magic wand, and then you use it on the console, and you're like, oh, it didn't do anything, and she's like, it's okay, I already hacked the console, we can go in whenever you want. And so it's just like, can you just- Combine everything with everything.
00:18:48
Speaker
Exactly. It teaches you how to play the game at the same time. It's sort of just like mocking the idea of point and click puzzles. There's also another funny thing in it where the first time you come across a dead body, you have to loot it and it's kind of horrific and your character's like, I don't want to do this.
00:19:05
Speaker
But I have to and then subsequently every other dead body you come across You have to loot and so she's every single time like oh my god. I said I wasn't gonna do this Every single person
00:19:20
Speaker
I love looting bodies though. I love that. I'm so desperate, in adventure games especially, I'm desperate to find cool stuff when I loot a corpse, you know? So it's a game that is, it's small, you know, it's small. I think it only takes like three hours or four hours to complete. It is only like 30 or probably 30 or 40 rooms in total. But it feels,
00:19:50
Speaker
humongous, it feels huge. The consequences of these small things you're doing and things you're learning ripple out across this entire universe and maybe even into like a cosmic magical. A cosmic void? I said the thing.
Adventure Game Classics
00:20:09
Speaker
So it's a game about, uh, it's a game about, you know, realizing your place in the world. It's a game about, um, confronting tradition and it's really cool. Check it out. It's called cosmic void. Sorry. That's the name of the company. It's called blood. Oh, I put it, I put it in your head now. Yeah. You poisoned me. You poisoned me like I'm on an interstellar lighthouse. So that's what I've been playing. Uh, roses. Yes.
00:20:39
Speaker
Do we want to move on to our next segment where we talk about... How's Baro? Started Valley for an hour. I can. We're going to be trying to give our essential adventure games. If you don't know anything about the genre, here's where you start. Look, I don't know about my list. I am second-guessing the list that I put together.
00:21:06
Speaker
but I'm gonna say it anyway. So I just wanted to let you know that this already comes with a warning. Like, you know what? I'm not sure. I might amend it or I might keep it the way it is. Okay, we'll talk about it right after this break.
00:21:49
Speaker
Hey everyone, we're back! Did you have a good break? Yeah, did you enjoy yourself? I mean, I had a drink. I fidgeted with a paintbrush. Oh yeah, oh, I was talking to the listener.
00:22:06
Speaker
asking you how your break was. So what we're gonna do here in this segment is we want to talk about we want to try to compile a list of like 10 essential adventure games that if you don't know the genre or if you do and you're not sure if you've played all everybody's you know standard reference points maybe
00:22:28
Speaker
Here's 10 games that will catch you up to speed. Maybe we'll debate a little bit. Maybe we will. I think we are gonna debate, cause I'm looking at these notes and I'm not sure I agree. Although in my notes. Yeah, yeah, yours are pretty interesting. Okay, who's gonna start here?
00:22:54
Speaker
I will start. Okay. I will start. Okay, listen. Oh no. Here's the thing, right? I know we all kind of rib on the King's Quest games because they are very, very difficult. But I think if you want to have a good idea of how graphic adventure started, especially graphic with the text parser with animation. Probably play something other than King's Quest.
00:23:19
Speaker
That's not where I was going with that. Oh, okay. Look, my first entry is King's Quest 1, the OG.
00:23:31
Speaker
because I really think that even though it is a very difficult game, it is also just a great introduction of how things started out. You know, King's Quest 1 did so many innovative things. When you first start playing, it's like you've never seen a world like this before. And yeah, I know we're all kind of spoiled on modern games, but this is really how it started. It started out, for me,
00:23:59
Speaker
like this. For some people it started just text only, but I think we really expanded when the world was shown through graphics. I think you're right. I think the idea of like the idea of seeing the world really changed the game in literally in some pretty intense ways. And I think King's Quest 1 is an incredibly important game as far as if this
00:24:25
Speaker
Is this a game you need to play to understand the genre? That's where I'm a little more hesitant because it is definitely, again, it's a good history lesson. Sure. But is it a fun play, do you think? I don't know. I don't know. We didn't say top 10 fun games. We said top 10 essential games. Right.
00:24:46
Speaker
I just think it's important to know where it came from. And you may like it. You may actually, I was one of those people who did like the Sierra games that I did spend a lot of time on. So I do think that people should give that genre of an adventure game a chance, see where it came from, and see if they like it. You know, I would almost actually suggest something like Black Cauldron.
00:25:14
Speaker
Oh, I hated that game. Well, the thing about that game is it's very similar to King's Quest in that it's 2D, it's very blocky pixel art, and it's got a text parser. But it's different than King's Quest in that it's a lot harder to die, and there aren't dead ends in it.
00:25:30
Speaker
I want people to die. Context. Again, we've talked about this before. You can play for hours and then find out that something you did at the very beginning was wrong and that you just can't win the game. You have to start all over. You know what? So be it. Look, just use a walkthrough, people. Like trying to climb the beanstalk? Yeah.
00:25:55
Speaker
are just, they're just a little bit beyond, uh, unconscionable in 2024. What about, what about the remake, the point and click remake of King's quest one, then you can kind of, you get a sense for who King Graham is, what, what Daventry is. These are important. So if you're interested,
00:26:15
Speaker
in the history of King's Quest I, yeah, check out the AGD remake. If you are a masochist, check out the original King's Quest I. Yeah, if you hate yourself, as I do, go ahead and play King's Quest I, the original.
00:26:32
Speaker
Okay, so speaking of old games, right, that set up the history of adventure games, I'm gonna start with, my first one is Secret of Monkey Island. It's still funny, it's still beautiful, it's pixel art, it's point and click, it's got the verb,
00:26:51
Speaker
menu at the bottom where you select between, you select pickup and then click on the thing you want to pick up. You select, I think it even has things that barely had any use, like open, close, turn on, turn off. Yeah. You were not going to use all those verbs ever.
00:27:11
Speaker
The word use works in all those scenarios. And it does in the game. You can do use light switch. I don't know if there's a light switch in. There's probably a light switch. But maybe I'm thinking of like Maniac Mansion where there's. Oh, there's definitely switches in Maniac Mansion.
00:27:29
Speaker
And there's the word turn on and turn off. You can do use light switch and it still works. I don't necessarily know that that was an efficient use of space, but it's interesting to see the verbs. It's still a funny game.
00:27:45
Speaker
breezes by, I think it gets a little slow when you get to Monkey Island. But before and after actually being on Monkey Island is still just like some of the best times I've ever had in a video game and I still play it.
00:28:03
Speaker
I do think it is a little difficult, so I would not be offended if anybody really needed to use a guide. You cannot die in this game, and when I say die, what I really mean is you can't get yourself in an unwinnable situation, unlike the Sierra games where you can very much mess up, but that doesn't mean that it's an easy game, if that makes sense. There is one scenario in Monkey Island where you can die, and it is one of the funniest things that I've also ever seen in a video game. And you don't actually
00:28:32
Speaker
die. Well, yeah, I guess you do. You do. Yeah, you have to if you don't if you have not saved the game, you're right in the 10 minute span where you're slowly dying. Yes, that's true. You will have to reload an older save.
00:28:45
Speaker
That is true. I think the great thing about Secret of Monkey Island for beginners is the world building. It's just so gorgeous. It just really looks beautiful and mysterious. Right. And the character feels so cool and so good.
00:29:06
Speaker
Guybrush three-foot is sort of in every man in a sense, but on another level, he's sort of like a, I think of him like a Don Quixote type, right? I think of Guybrush three-foot as a guy who read about pirates and fell in love with pirates without ever understanding what it was like to be a pirate or why a person would or would not be a pirate. And so he's just, he just shows up at this Island. He's like, I want to be a pirate. And then I'm like,
00:29:35
Speaker
Okay. Okay. What are your qualifications? He's like, I can hold my breath for 10 minutes. 10 minutes. It's just like childish view. This is like immature view of the concept of piracy and the reality of his own situation.
00:29:55
Speaker
He's just such a darling, lovable, perfect, sweet boy. And I love that. Very lovable. He's just a precious little boy. No, I love Guybrush. Guybrush was great. Let's move on to your second game.
00:30:10
Speaker
Mine is actually, this is a good segue, mine is actually the Curse of Monkey Island. It was one, I think it was the first Monkey Island game I played. And I found it at a Babbages, and this was, this might actually be the first LucasArts game I played, which is wild to me. Because I think I played it before Grim Fandango. So I picked up Curse of Monkey Island at a Babbages, the art style intrigued me.
00:30:36
Speaker
And it was one of the funniest games I think I've ever played. It's up there with Grim Fandango, humor style. And what I really like about it is I really do think that the puzzles are more balanced and leveled. They are more logical than Secret and like the second Monkey Island as well. And it's just so funny that the voice acting is amazing. Guybrush has taken to a new level of his character development.
00:31:05
Speaker
I love and I know that Ron Gilbert who is the original dev on secret of Monkey Island He is not involved in this game. So there are differences but it doesn't make it any less of a game and that's why I feel confident of putting it as a standalone because I think you don't have to play the other games to play this one it's such a wildly different game than secret of Monkey Island it changes the
00:31:34
Speaker
It changes the whole tone. It goes from this pixel art style to this Saturday morning cartoon kind of style. Dominic Armato's voice acting is incredible. It's hard now to go back to the first two games where there was no voice acting and read that dialogue without hearing Dominic's voice in your head.
00:31:57
Speaker
That was like my first character crush was Guybrush Threepwood in, specifically in Curse with Dominic's amazing voice acting. And this might, that might have been, I don't know, full throttle might have predated this, but it might be the first use of the verb coin where you click on an object or you click on something in the background. A little coin shows up that asks you what you want to do. Like you can click on the hand or the eye. Yeah.
00:32:27
Speaker
I remember I had played Secret of Monkey Island a lot as a kid and then I remember reading some sort of video game magazine and seeing advertisements for Curse of Monkey Island and I was so excited to buy this game. I remember making my parents take me to where whatever the
00:32:49
Speaker
software store was at the mall and buying Curse of Monkey Island and being so excited. Like when I went to school the next day, I brought the manual because I just wanted to keep looking at it. Like I just wanted to engage. Oh my God. Oh my God. I did that too. I brought game manuals to school with me. We were not very cool, huh? No. No one liked me. No. I cannot agree more with. Oh, thank you.
00:33:19
Speaker
with Curse of Monkey Island, and it might be weird to have two Monkey Island games on the same, but they are so, so different. Both of them are essential to learn very different things about what the appeal of venture games is. Okay, my next game is, and I, it's sort of, I've become sort of a cliche on the internet for evangelizing for this game. Because I cannot stop talking about how great this game is.
Unique Adventure Games: Obra Dinn and Unavowed
00:33:49
Speaker
Return of the Obra Dinn. I don't agree, but do go on. Return of the Obra Dinn is, it was the start, it's by Lucas Pope and it was released in 2018. It's the start of a sort of new, whole new genre of adventure game. I guess you could kind of say there were similar
00:34:15
Speaker
beforehand with like the Sherlock Holmes consulting detective games. But what Return of the Obra Tinn does is it gives you a scene, it gives you a world, and it doesn't give you puzzles, right? Like you're not walking through and picking up inventory objects and using them to get past a certain obstacle.
00:34:39
Speaker
What it does is it gives you an entire book to fill out based on pure deduction. All of the game, or half of the game, rather, happens in your brain. So you are an insurance adjuster, I guess, who is called out to, there's a,
00:35:00
Speaker
shipping boat called the Obra Dinn that is just drifted into port and it's a ghost ship. Everybody's gone. Everybody's either gone or dead. Okay. I was going to say, are people dead or are they missing? I don't remember. Okay. And so the shipping company puts out an insurance claim for the lives of their sailors and their cargo and their ship.
00:35:23
Speaker
and like for the loss of revenue. And so you're an insurance adjuster that has to board this ghost ship and try and figure out what happened. So you have a manifest, a blank manifest where you have to figure out the names of every person on board. You have to figure out their position on the ship and you have to figure out how they died.
00:35:46
Speaker
It's very clue, isn't it? It's very, very mystery clue deduction kind of mechanic. Right. Yeah. Like clue the board game, right? Yeah. Where you, you have to look at all the evidence presented to you and you have to really think about it. And so it's this sort of vector, this pixely vector art. It's clearly made with modern technology, but then sort of dialed back into this like early Macintosh graphics.
00:36:15
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's where the game lost me. First of all, I got so stuck that I was deflated. I don't quite remember where I got stuck, but I was so deflated when I did get stuck. And the graphics, even though they're very artistic and cool, and I would normally be very attracted to graphics like that, it kind of hurt my eyes during the game. Interesting.
00:36:40
Speaker
Well, so the game does allow you to change. You can have the game be black and white. You can have the game be like a green and a darker green or like an amber, or you can change it to different colors, but it is monochromatic. I mean, there's only two colors. There is the light color and the dark color, and that is it.
00:36:59
Speaker
And it's first person and it's fully 3D and you're walking around this ship and there's, again, there's dead bodies around. And you get this magical compass that you hold up if you find a dead body.
00:37:14
Speaker
You can hold the magical compass up to it. It will take you back to the exact moment of that person's death. And you hear the sounds that that person heard in the last few moments of their life. And beyond that, everything else is just still. So you'll see a person midway through falling off the crow's nest. Or you'll see a cannonball that is impacting with the side of the ship. And you'll see the debris is floating in midair.
00:37:43
Speaker
And if you find somebody dead in that scene, so you're...
00:37:47
Speaker
in a scene in like Inception, like if you find somebody dead in that scene, you can use the compass on them and go back a step further. And you find that while the first few deaths are like, oh, okay, there was clearly a mutiny, there was clearly some people tried to overthrow the command of the ship and killed the captain, you start going back steps and you're like, wait, something really strange is happening here. This person was not killed by human means.
00:38:16
Speaker
Right, because it's got a bit of an HP Lovecraftian influence, right?
00:38:20
Speaker
Yes, it really takes you to some wild places. The amount of deduction you have to do in this game, it makes you feel like a genius when you solve something. It will only tell you, if you have, it will only tell you that you have something correct if you get three full entries complete. So you have to figure out three names, positions, and the way they died. So you can't guess, right, at that point. Correct, you cannot, these are not guesses.
00:38:47
Speaker
unless you have most of that already fully known, you can't just guess after that. You can guess after that, but you can't just guess and fill random things in. It will not work. It forces you to really solve the puzzles. It takes the dream of adventure games and pushes it
00:39:12
Speaker
to its logical conclusion, right? Like, you don't just play a detective in the middle of a thriller, you are a detective. Yeah, in that way, it's a very good murder mystery adventure game, which I think are very difficult games to design. You know, there's a lot of games that came out after Overden that really followed its inspiration. Case of the Golden Idol is one I would argue Paradise Killer is another.
00:39:42
Speaker
chance of Cenar that just came out this past year. So this game has been highly influential. And I think especially if you're one to, if you want to look at the future of adventure games, I think we're Dern of the Obra Dinn is where that future starts. Oh, I like that. I like that. I like that entry. I don't like the game for my own personal reasons, but I do like your argument for it. Okay, Rose, what's your next game?
00:40:09
Speaker
Yeah, speaking of newer games, because that was definitely a more modern game, I actually put Unavowed on my list by Wajidai. And I put it on there because when I played it, let's see how old is Unavowed now. It's also 2018.
00:40:24
Speaker
It's also, I was going to say it's around the same time as Obra Dinn. That must have been a pretty good year for adventure games. I put that on there because I was blown away by how engaged I was with it and also how satisfying the puzzles were. This is a like fully
00:40:42
Speaker
written drama, thriller, adventure game, great narrative with also really, really good puzzles. And you cannot mess up. You will not get, I mean, you can get stuck, but you will not mess up. There is no way to do this wrong. There is multiple choices you can make. You can replayability is amazing. You can go in as different characters and get different dialogues. I actually have a small voice cameo in that game. Pay over.
00:41:11
Speaker
Game or gate. Oh my God. No. But yeah, if you've, if you heard me in that game, let me know because you do have to look for it. But I just, I was just blown away by how classic and modern it felt at the same time. And I'm not saying these puzzles hold your hand or anything, but they're very satisfying when you do figure them out.
00:41:36
Speaker
Why Jedi Games is good at this, taking the traditional point and click genre and sort of updating it into modern times. I mean, starting with the Blackwell games and, you know, they published Excavation of Hobbs Barrow. Unavowed is very good.
00:41:53
Speaker
also published Techno Babylon and Shardlight, which I have not played, but people speak very highly of. It's just interesting. They have their own identity, I think, Wajidai does. It's kind of how I wanted Sierra games to play, you know, not, you know, more palatable, more, less frustrating, but still keep, you know, a certain quality. I think we've maybe had this conversation before, but there have been adventure games where I just want to skip the dialogue. It's just like going on.
00:42:24
Speaker
Discworld is one of them and I love that game. Discworld the Adventure game is one of my favorites. It's also the hardest game I've ever played.
00:42:31
Speaker
But that dialogue, that will go on forever. You'll be clicking through tree after tree and it gets exhausting. So I much prefer kind of these newer games that have more terse dialogue that is still very well acted. Cinematic dialogue as opposed to literary kind of dialogue. So did you put Discworld on your list? Yeah, my next word, my next game is Discworld. No, my next game is actually Firewatch.
00:42:59
Speaker
I feel like we definitely needed what are, now there's a lot of debate about whether we should even use the term walking simulator because the term was made to signify this idea of like, you know, people who can't fathom a game that doesn't have punching or shooting in it. Those people,
00:43:26
Speaker
trying to make fun of this genre of games. I think the term walking simulator is very funny. As a person who loves these sorts of games, I've heard them also described as first person narrative adventure games, which is fine. Okay, that makes sense. Walking simulator is now a genre that you can search games on, on Steam. So I think even though it started as like, we're mocking this genre, I think it was at this point you surfed.
00:43:54
Speaker
And now it's just a category of its own. That's how I feel about it. And so I'm going to call this a walking simulator with absolute love. Firewatch is a game where you are a guy who gets.
00:44:11
Speaker
who's going through some rough times, personal times. And so you take a job in the wilds of, I can't remember where it is. Oh, it's Shoshone National Forest. It's part of Yellowstone. It's in Wyoming. So you take a job out there to live
00:44:32
Speaker
in just some basically advanced tree house. Yeah, the entire summer. And you're just watching for fires and you're watching for anything that might cause a threat to the forest. Although I reported everything I saw. I found a turtle. I reported that. I found a raccoon. I reported that. So I am on top of this. So so that's like the premise. But what the actual game is is
00:45:02
Speaker
you are developing a relationship with this, your boss, this woman who is also in this forest for the summer.
00:45:10
Speaker
Yeah, another dispatch, I guess a dispatcher, watchtower person. And she's also here for her own personal reasons. And she has a history with this area. And so you're sort of uncovering the history and there is a horror element to the game. There's a spooky mystery. And so there's like, yeah, there's this sort of really sad but really human love story. There's this really interesting mystery. I think if you want to understand
00:45:40
Speaker
these walking simulator games and what people like about them. Firewatch is probably the most accessible of them. There's always something to do. It moves very, it moves at a very nice pace. There's a lot going on and it's just incredibly written and it's beautiful. The whole game is beautiful.
00:46:01
Speaker
My next game is, you're probably gonna argue this, is the Colonel's Bequest, which is an older Sierra game. And the reason I am putting it on here is because I played that game when I was quite young. It did scare the hell out of me. I was scared of everything as a kid, you guys. I don't know how this happened. I'm pointing to myself. I don't know. I don't know where this came from. I don't know how it happened. But once upon a time, I was scared of everything. And the Colonel's Bequest had that
00:46:32
Speaker
ambience that was just very frightening to me. So it is based off a whodunit type of a format and Agatha Christie story, if you will, very closed circle, people are getting murdered in this mansion. And you are basically playing detective, you're trying to figure out
00:46:49
Speaker
why people are dying and how they're dying and how to protect yourself essentially. There are different endings for this game based on how you play it. So if you're very observant, if you talk to everybody, if you examine everything, if you figure out the story, you'll get a better score. You can actually do nothing in this game.
00:47:09
Speaker
You can just talk to people and not figure out anything and get all the way to the end and get a low score. And instead of being deflated by that, I think I was encouraged by that. I think I was like, oh, there is more. What did I miss? What did I do?
00:47:25
Speaker
Like I got to figure this out. I think it's a good murder mystery mechanic. I think if you like Agatha Christie, it comes across as a cozy. And like I said, it is more difficult to get yourself in a bad situation. You're going to beat this game. Right. Whether you like it or not. If you keep playing, you're going to come to an end. That's the thing. You're going to get an end.
00:47:48
Speaker
you don't get yourself into an unwinnable situation. You can die, and you can die in some really absurd, stupid ways. You can't walk down the middle of the room. I know that pisses you off so much. Why would you do that? I know they warn you. So there's a chandelier in the foyer of this game, and when you walk under it the first time, the character mentions something about how it's,
00:48:11
Speaker
doesn't look stable and then the second time you walk under it crashes and you die but that's for the rest of the game so anytime i mean it's it's also like it's also making noises and like walk through the foyer
00:48:25
Speaker
you have to walk along the edges of the room and you walk through the foyer like 50 times and you have to walk through the along the edges of the room because you know that if you stray too close to the middle the chandelier falls and kills you in its game over stupidest thing in the world but
00:48:45
Speaker
There's a lot of cool things about this game. And yeah, so like I'm saying, you can die, but you can't get yourself into an unwinnable situation. You can get to the end of the game and have absolutely no idea what happened.
00:48:59
Speaker
Correct. Unless you go back and you learn, and you learn from it. And now, especially as a murder mystery person that I am, I just really appreciate the mechanic. Yes, it is an older game, so there are frustrating elements to it. It's not talky, you know. But there's just something about that game, man, when you first play it. Even if you don't win and you get through it, you're like, oh, I did it. I got through this somehow. I'm gonna try that again, you know.
00:49:27
Speaker
But yeah, I really love the Colonel's Bequest. I will say, if this sort of retro style of the Colonel's Bequest bugs you, but you were interested in this style of like type of gameplay, 2017's The Sexy Brutale has a very similar sort of...
00:49:52
Speaker
gameplay loop to it where uh but it's designed around you playing it multiple times it's designed around you losing or not figuring things out and playing again and getting another clue do you want to hear something hilarious what's that so the the first time i played this game is in middle school i'm a very best friend and only friend kim kim if you're out there
00:50:16
Speaker
Thank you for the memories of the Colonel's Bequest. Hi, Kim. She came over. We played Colonel's Bequest the whole evening. We did not find the arm wars that you move for eavesdropping. So we knew
00:50:34
Speaker
Nothing about the end, nothing. We got there having no clue what the heck just happened because we never figured out how to eavesdrop. And that's actually a very important mechanic. This game utilizes like an eavesdropping mechanic and it is very important. So you never learned one thing. Not a single thing. Not a single thing. We went into the rooms and everyone's like, oh, hush, hush, she's here again. I'm like, oh no, they stopped talking and then I would leave.
00:51:04
Speaker
Did you even find any of the dead bodies? Or were you just like, okay. Oh yeah, people were dying. That would be extra funny if you've never found the dead bodies either. You just got to the end and they were like, oh, thank God I survived. What? Where's everybody? No, and that's what made it like,
00:51:27
Speaker
also feel like we were doing something. Even though we weren't doing the correct thing, we weren't exploring maybe enough. And we didn't know the eavesdrop mechanic was so important. We still got through it and we saw all these dead bodies. And man, it was scary at the time. I just, walking onto a screen is like, oh, there's a dead body. Okay. So my next game, this was a tough one, but I'm going to go with Telltale's The Walking Dead.
Telltale's Impactful Narratives
00:51:55
Speaker
Okay.
00:51:56
Speaker
because I feel like what this list needed was the choice-based adventure game. The adventure game where, sure there's some puzzles, they're not great. There's a really strong story. I think Walking Dead, at least Walking Dead 1 has an incredibly strong story. And the graphics are fun. They're like sort of comic books turned 3D.
00:52:25
Speaker
everything's got a sketchy edge to it. What it shows that none of these other games show is this idea of different paths, right? There's a moment, I think this isn't the first Walking Dead game, right? There's a moment early on where you are holed up with a bunch of survivors and you have this, and zombies attack, right, obviously, and you have
00:52:51
Speaker
this option to save one person or another person. And whichever person you don't save, I think, if I'm remembering correctly, and sorry if this is spoilers, but I think they both survived, but whichever person you don't save, that person now knows you just didn't save them and you intentionally didn't save them. And that becomes a huge thing for the rest of the game. And there are other parts where there is like,
00:53:17
Speaker
You can save this person or this person and if you save this person They're with you the rest of the game if you say the other person they're with you the rest of the game like your choices Legitimately changed the way the rest of the game develops now. Yeah, that's true. It's true This is a game where your choices really really matter as much as they can right like there's a lot of people that point out how similar the stories are
00:53:43
Speaker
no matter what path you take in these Telltale games. And that's a fair criticism, but your experience is gonna be a lot different in some very significant ways. And you as a person will feel like you just let another person die, right? You are going to feel the emotions of that moment exactly the way that Telltale wants you to. And I think that is an important addition to this whole genre
00:54:10
Speaker
And I would say it's accessible too. I think that it is a very accessible way to play adventure games.
00:54:16
Speaker
Right, I agree. And I mean, Walking Dead 1 has some kind of bullshit point and click puzzles. Well, every adventure game does, to be honest, you know? I think it was the Walking Dead games a little better when they got away, actually, from inventory puzzles and got more into just linear story that branches off in multiple directions. Yeah, I like that. And you're just making choices and you're interacting with people and you're deciding what parts of the story you want to engage with the most.
00:54:45
Speaker
Okay, what's your next game? So this is technically my last one. Now I did put an extra one in case we had conflicting, not conflicting, that's exactly the opposite of what I was... I put an extra one in case we had the same one. We did not, surprisingly, so that's great. So, you know what? I'm actually gonna go with Hobbs Barrow. I'm actually putting that on my essential list. I know it's a newer game, but...
00:55:13
Speaker
I think the puzzles in that game are so great that it's one of the more accessible games. It's a great story. It's easy to control. I mean, I guess you would call us seasoned adventure. We are seasoned adventure gamers over here. We grew up on really bad logic, so we're very good. We're very good at adventure games. Put me in a room with a piece of string and some rocks.
00:55:43
Speaker
And you have no idea the amazing things I can do. You put me near a machine that needs a crank, and then you hide that crank. We will find that crank. Like three miles away. I'm going to get that machine running. I'm going to find that crank, stick it in the machine, and I'm going to crank that crank.
00:56:02
Speaker
We know how to use cranks over here in a venture game world. That being said, even though we've played some of the more challenging games, I still think that this game is very fair. And on top of that, it's got that retro aesthetic. It's a pixel art game. It's very retro looking. It's got brilliant voice acting. And it's very traditional point and click. That is how it plays. It has fetch quests. It has dialogue.
00:56:33
Speaker
And it's great. I really, I can't believe how much I enjoyed that game. And now I kind of recommend it to people who haven't played one or any, or very few, I would say. I started playing Hobbs Bureau with somebody else and they absolutely got into it. Having never played an adventure game. Now I'm gonna raise some challenges on this one. You're so argumentative. Number one, that's what we're here for is to really dig these things out and discuss them.
00:57:04
Speaker
Are you worried about recency bias here? Are you worried that this is not what you would choose if this was a month from now? No. Okay. Next question. Do you feel like this treads some of the same ground as unavowed? Yes. Okay. I'll just keep going with questions then if we're not gonna elaborate. Next question, please. Next question.
00:57:33
Speaker
I think it's interesting. We have very few games on this list. We don't have any modern point and clicks that show a modern graphical style, right? Like we have...
00:57:45
Speaker
Yeah. Two retro pixel art games and then two, like, what? Three legitimate retro pixel art games, like, that were made at the time when that was modern. I mean, I guess Firewatch. Firewatch has newer graphics. It looks good. Yeah. I guess what I mean is, like, there were games like Roki, right? Or I'm trying to think of, like, modern point and clicks that do not rely on
00:58:14
Speaker
pixel art graphics. And so I think Hobbs Bear is a great game. I would also recommend it to anybody. It's not that I think this is a bad choice.
00:58:23
Speaker
I think maybe we should just state for people, if for some reason you're listening to this podcast and you don't know adventure games, there are adventure games with modern graphics, right? Like there are adventure games with three, with like. I don't think so. With like well rendered 3D graphics or modern cartoon style graphics. Or live acted. Live acted FMV has come back. Or very stylized artistic graphics.
00:58:54
Speaker
There's just something about when you played these games back in the 90s, you just love to see more pixels. I just enjoy looking at what people can do with pixels, even on modern computers.
00:59:12
Speaker
It's just interesting that we look at pixel art as like retro art, when really, I don't think it ever should have died. To me, it's as modern an art as anything else. You know what I mean? I think creation of pixel art doing, it's just a style to me. It's not a thing of the past that is a style that changes and evolves, you know?
00:59:34
Speaker
I think they would have called it a style because there was a point in time where that was all you could do. There were people making pixel art that didn't want to be making pixel art. That was just the best they could do. I think that's a thing that we run into when people are frustrated.
00:59:56
Speaker
about old Sierra or LucasArts developers coming back and making games that aren't pixel art. They're like, hey, you sold out. Why aren't you using pixel art? It's like, pixel art wasn't a style choice in 1991. It was the only thing you could do. But it does, but I think you're right that at this point now it is sort of, it has become a style and people have sort of owned it to its own artistic form.
01:00:25
Speaker
Would you consider return to Monkey Island modern graphics? Yes. Okay. But we can't put another Monkey Island game. No, we're leaving it Hobbs Barrow. I just wanted to raise some questions and then move on to my final game, which is Tex Murphy Under a Killing Moon. Very interesting choice.
01:00:49
Speaker
This is also a classic game. It is. There was Sierra, and there was LucasArts. This is back in the early days of adventure games. And then there was this studio, Access Software, who is doing these series of detective, silly detective games called Tex Murphy. And the first two were pixelartian. I love them, but they're not very good. Yeah, I agree. And then the third one, they changed it up. And Under Killing Moon is
01:01:18
Speaker
SMV, it is, there are live actors that are filmed in front of a green screen and then placed in the game. And you're seeing actual actors have actual performances. Which I love, by the way, I just want to put that out there. Yeah, I love live acted games. I think they are the best. And they're walking around. It's still
01:01:43
Speaker
you're looking at static images sort of like mist, right? It's 3D environments or it's 3D appearing environments, but it's not actually 3D. It's a still image rendered in 3D, and then you're looking for hotspots and clicking them, or you're clicking an arrow and then moving on to the next scene. It's a funny game. Yes, it is a humorous game. It has really good inventory point and click puzzles. It has...
01:02:11
Speaker
really, yeah, the acting is interesting. And I think we needed an FMV game on here. We needed a full motion video game in here. I was thinking that too. I almost put contradiction on here, which is a modern, a more modern FMV game. But I think Tex Murphy is a good choice. It's got a vibe, you know, it's got a vibe. Now, there is a thing about Tex Murphy games where they all this is this is, I think,
01:02:35
Speaker
across the board is they start very good. The beginning of any text Murphy game is great. The middle of any text Murphy game is great. The end of every text Murphy game is like, it's like they went too long and got bored with the game. And we're just like, okay, let's just put something here. Every single text Murphy game, the last hour or two hours is like, it's like they gave up.
01:03:02
Speaker
Stephen King ending Have you noticed that Stephen King cannot write an ending they're all fairly questionable and and to be fair Endings are difficult to write like so have you seen some of my videos sometimes I end it with like and that's it Roll credits I guess it's hard to conclude things, you know, yeah, I agree I think one of the things about the text Murphy games though is there are logic puzzles
01:03:32
Speaker
in most of the Tex Murphy games, and logic puzzles just basically means rather than diegetic puzzles, rather than something that comes out of the environment, it's like
01:03:41
Speaker
it takes you to a different screen where it gives you some sort of like a puzzle that employs logic, right? Like a slider puzzle. There's a logical explanation. There's a way to get through this puzzle, math puzzles, stuff like that. Yeah. Like you could have that puzzle outside of that game. You could take that puzzle, come up with 90 variations of it, and it could be its own game.
01:04:03
Speaker
So Tex Murphy has those and they rely on them so much more heavily towards the end of all their games. This is an incredible problem with their final three games, Pandora Directive, Overseer, and Tesla Effect, where again, it feels like they stopped making the game. It feels like they were just like, I don't know, just throw something in there.
01:04:32
Speaker
I think Under a Killing Moon is maybe the best one in terms of how the community feels. Do you think so as well? I think that one's pretty much championed as the best one in its series. I agree. Yes, I think Pandora Directive is a close second, but Tesla Effect, again, the first
01:04:54
Speaker
five, four, five hours of that game are definitely, without a doubt, hands down, 100% the best Tex Murphy game that they've ever made. Because that's a newer one, Tesla Effect. Tesla Effect, yes. Yeah. The last three
01:05:12
Speaker
hours of that game? I guess it's like, I'm looking at it on Steam now. I played it for 10 hours. So I guess maybe the first six hours, six, seven hours of that game are amazing. The last three or four hours of that game are, it's the worst. It is worse than anything they've ever made. That's unfortunate. Yeah. Oh, I don't like to hear that. That's really unfortunate. Because if you're saying the final three hours,
01:05:39
Speaker
That's a lot, that's a lot of time. And it is really frustrating and they've remade a lot of the, and this is another thing, they remake the text Murphy games, right? The first game was called Mean Streets and it was not good, right? Again, I liked it because there was a real deductive detective element to it because there was a text parser, you had to input the words you wanted to ask about.
01:06:06
Speaker
So if you hadn't figured something out, you wouldn't be able to ask about it. It wouldn't be just a text choice you could click on. That's true. You would have to know it and you'd have to type it in. I thought that was incredible. And it made me write things down on pieces of paper and really figure stuff out. But Mean Streets has these like side scrolling shooting segments that are ridiculous. And half of the game is an open world flight simulator, like a 3D flight simulator. What? I didn't even know that.
01:06:36
Speaker
Yeah, that is that is unbelievably bad. So they remade Mean Streets in 1998 as a game called Overseer. Oh, right. And I did not know that. And it was done in the style of Under Killing Moon and Pandora directive. And then they've been working on this game called Poisoned Pawn.
01:07:01
Speaker
since 2015, we don't know if it's ever going to come out. I think it's been canceled by this point. But years and years into making this game, the Poison Pawn, they decided it was going to be a remake of Overseer, which was a remake of Mean Streets. It's like, stop remaking the game. It's like, you remade the same game twice. It's just a tragedy. There was so much potential that was never fully lived up to.
01:07:30
Speaker
I think that just kind of is what happens with the, uh, the games that have a seat in the series games. There's always going to be not a perfect series, you know, you can kind of, you can compare that to King's quest or space class. There's going to be like. Bummers in there. Um, so I just think that's the nature of it. I just, I think they were.
01:07:54
Speaker
they never made their perfect game. They always were trying to make the perfect version of Tex Murphy and something got in the way every single time and they never fully made that game and it's just a bummer. It's just a bummer that the perfect Tex Murphy game was never created.
01:08:14
Speaker
Except for Under a Killing Moon, which is your... Again, I don't think Under a Killing Moon is a perfect game by any stretch. I think it's a good example of FMV. It's a good example of another take on the point and click adventure genre that's very different than LucasArts and Sierra.
01:08:35
Speaker
from the time. Okay, so let's read down our list real quick. Do you wanna do it? Because I've been talking about Tex Murphy for a long time. Do you wanna go one by one? Like I'll do it and then you'll do it? Yeah, you do mine, I'll do yours. Wait, what? Yeah, you read mine, I'll read yours. Okay, fine. Okay. Secret of Monkey Island. King's Quest I. Return of the Obra Dinn. Curse of Monkey Island. Firewatch. Unavowed. The Walking Dead.
01:09:05
Speaker
Colonel's Bequest. Tex Murphy, Under a Killing Moon. And Hobbs Barrow. Nice. There you go, that's- And Halo. That's save your game's list of the 10 essential Avenger games. You play those, you'll know what we're talking about. You'll know everything. Yeah. Yeah, you're just gonna know everything. You could start a podcast now. Hey, Roses. Yes, Matt. Do you wanna take a quick break and then come back and
01:09:33
Speaker
hear me tell you all about some of the next fest demos I've been playing? Yes, I do. I'm going to go feed my cat and we'll be right back.
01:10:10
Speaker
We're back. So what we thought is that we're still trying to figure out like the format of this podcast, but we thought we would end most of them with sort of like, what else have we
Personal Projects and Gaming Demos
01:10:25
Speaker
been doing? What else have we been, what non-adventure game stuff have we been doing?
01:10:29
Speaker
Yeah, because we're people. We have lives. We do stuff too. Sorry. I don't know why I got defensive. We want to recommend like, oh, I've been playing this non-adventure game or, oh, I've been reading this book or I've been watching this TV show or movie. So unfortunately for this episode, the only thing I want to talk about is more adventure games. And I'll explain why in a second. First, uh, roses, what have you been, what non-adventure game things
01:10:58
Speaker
Oh, well, I've been, I have a life. I've been doing things. I, oh, I started a video on the company of wolves, which is a horror film starring Angela Lansbury. So I watched that and got that together. And I have been doing diamond art. And I, look, I sneezed the other day and there are little tiny resin pieces all over my home.
01:11:28
Speaker
that I'm never gonna find and I'm at peace with it. I was talking to a friend about this the other day because everybody's doing diamond art these days and I have this feeling that, do you remember in the 90s, people would do those things where you had like a sheet of cloth with a bunch of like a picture and a bunch of colors on it and you would pull little bits of yarn
01:11:58
Speaker
through the cloth and you would end up with this like shag carpet picture. Oh that's coming back now. Well so thrift stores in the late 90s early 2000s were full of these things because everybody was doing them in the late 80s and early 90s and then nobody wanted them.
01:12:19
Speaker
I have a feeling in the 2030s, every thrift store is just going to be full of diamond art. Oh, like finished diamond art, like diamond art pieces that are in a frame. Yeah, exactly. Because I framed mine. Yeah, I think there's going to be framed diamond art all over the place. So, I mean, does that mean you don't want the diamond art picture that I made for you, Matt? What is it? Is it Guybrush three-put?
01:12:49
Speaker
No, it's a computer. No. It's a computer that's saying hi. Yeah. I made it best for you. Just don't go to any thrift stores in Pennsylvania over the next couple of years. What now? Roses, I'm really excited to tell you about these Next Fest games. So do you know what Steam Next Fest is?
01:13:16
Speaker
I actually did not, I did not know what this was until you mentioned it. Okay, so yeah, so Steam Next Fest is every year they do what they call a celebration of upcoming days and they, upcoming days, upcoming games, and they do seven days, like they do a full week of demos and developer live streams and trailers. So I went to the adventure game section
01:13:44
Speaker
As you do next fest and I downloaded basically everything that was there it's like I'm good as many of these as possible and Let's see I put them all in a folder
01:14:01
Speaker
so I could have them grouped together, so let me see. Wait, we just talked about this, and you've already downloaded everything and have played a bunch of them? I've played a couple of them. What I think we should do, I think me and you should do a full episode about these next Fest demos, and I think maybe next episode we should talk in depth about some of these.
01:14:23
Speaker
because there's some really interesting ones. I've downloaded 51 demos, roses. Matt. I had such a reaction to that that I actually hit my mic. 51? Yeah. So I've played about seven of them. Okay, that's pretty impressive already. There's a couple that I want to talk about right off the bat. And again, we can talk about them more in depth next week.
01:14:50
Speaker
And the unfortunate thing is by the time this goes up, these next festival be over. And so some of these demos might not be available, but these are games that you can look forward to. And some people leave their demos up. So you might not be able to get some of these demos that we're talking about.
01:15:07
Speaker
but these are games that you can look forward to, because some of these are really wild and really cool. The first one I wanna talk about is Botany Manor. It is a, it looks like an escape room game, right? You find yourself in this house, you find yourself in the green room of this house, it's 1890, and
01:15:29
Speaker
there's clearly puzzles around, right? Like there's like a cork board with numbers and figures and charts up on it. There's like a letter on the table that you can pick up and read. What you find out is the way to solve the puzzle, like the first thing you come across is there's a lot of smog, so you can't really see. So the way you solve that puzzle is by growing a flower that processes smog.
01:15:58
Speaker
All these kind of like escape room puzzles are built around figuring out how to make the flower grow. That's cool. I'm looking at the screen. The screen captures here the images and it looks lovely. It actually looks very pretty. It's very peaceful. It's very calm and
01:16:15
Speaker
It's, yeah, like an escape room game mixed with like a flower growing simulator. And so like you have to find out, you have to identify what the flower is, where it was native to, what type of environment it grows in so that you can figure out what temperature to set the heat to.
01:16:33
Speaker
So you can plant the flower, put it in front of the heat, and then watch it grow, and then it'll filter out the smog. There's other puzzles that are kind of like that as you're walking around this manor. My one complaint with it is that the manor's a little too big. I was going to say, this is starting to sound a little complex.
01:16:50
Speaker
It's really fun, but yeah, you're going to have to do a lot of running back and forth. Like run back to the seeds and then run up to the, uh, you know, you're searching the manner and you're finding these letters and then you got to run back to the seeds and plant the flower, put it in the pot.
01:17:08
Speaker
And then you have to take it to the next spot that it needs something that will help it grow. It's but I'm really excited for it. It's called Botany Manor. It is by who's the developer Balloon Studios and the publishers White Thorn Games. Awesome. What else? I like flowers. I like growing stuff.
01:17:30
Speaker
Next game I wanna talk about is called Cabernet. It's technically an RPG, but it's an RPG in the way that like Pentiment was an RPG. Where it's, I don't know if there's going to be combat, it doesn't seem like there is, but it's more about building, like your stats, your RPG stats are science.
01:17:53
Speaker
art, logic, and history, and they just help you have different dialogue options and different ways you can interact with things. Kind of like a- Yeah, I mean, you were so excited by this when you messaged me about it. You're like, yeah, play this one. It is spooky. I thought this would be one that you would love, because it is spooky, and it's the developer and publisher's party for introverts, which I've never heard of. Okay, yeah. Not familiar with that one.
01:18:21
Speaker
It doesn't look like this is their first game but it's the first one I've heard of from them and I played about an hour of this game and it was it was it seems like something really special. Right now it's the demo is very buggy and I lost a lot of progress. Yeah but it gave me a real good feel for the game so if the demo is available I still suggest checking it out and
01:18:48
Speaker
Yeah, that's called Cabernet. Similarly, there's a game called Sky of Tides that is way more graphically intense. It's a little bit more like, it's also an RPG, but again, like an RPG that does not seem combat focused. It seems more like, you know what it seems like? Like Quest for Glory? No, what was that game that...
01:19:16
Speaker
Everybody was really into, it was an adventure game, it was also an RPG. Oh, oh, oh, Disco Elysium? Yes, okay, all right. It seems very inspired by Disco Elysium. It's got that sort of isometric feel to it. But you're this woman, it seems like,
01:19:39
Speaker
your grandfather is part of the system and the rest of your family is part of the rebellion and you have to choose which side to take. I didn't get very far in it and it seemed like most of the scenes were based around dialogue choices.
01:19:58
Speaker
And each of the dialogue choices gives you a boost in your stats, like they level up your stats. And the game tells you your goal is to keep your stats as even as possible. And if one of your stats gets overleveled or underleveled, it might cause consequences, right? Your stats being intelligence, courage, compassion, humor, luck, and I think that's it.
01:20:27
Speaker
So they're all personality-based stuff. The weird thing about it is it mostly seemed like you were walking around environments trying to find objects. Okay, as you do in adventure games, right? Right, but it's not like they go to your inventory. It's just like, you found this item, plus two to intelligence. And each item has a little bit of lore attached to it, so it's fun to find the objects.
01:20:54
Speaker
I don't know. It doesn't excite me as much as the other ones, but it was still, I thought, notable. But there's only... I like this isometric thing. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I really don't like that style in Adventure Game, but part of that reminds me of Sanitarium. So I have like a little soft spot, a little fondness, and that's kind of the vibe that I'm getting. Absolutely.
01:21:18
Speaker
There's a lot more I wanna talk about, but there's one more that I just need to talk about before we do an episode on all of these. And it is this game. I don't know how people are gonna feel about this game. I cannot predict. It feels like it could be an absolute phenomenon.
01:21:38
Speaker
Or this could be a game that everybody makes absolute fun of because it's a sincere game that the sincerity borders on silly. But it is a puzzle adventure, massively multiplayer online game.
01:22:00
Speaker
Okay. So you're like... I want that. I very much want that. You create this like, this angelic magic fantasy character and the character creation, Roses, is so wild because you pick a skin color and then you pick skin luminescence and then you pick skin sheen and then you pick skin. So like, you're just adding
01:22:25
Speaker
layer and layer and layer and there's like six of these of color upon your skin and it's so, so strange. And then you get tossed into this world, there's a very like light but very heady narrative, like kind of like psychedelic kind of spiritual almost. And then you're thrown into this world where it feels like, it seems like you guys are solving puzzles to unlock some sort of ancient wisdom that the world needs to exist.
01:22:55
Speaker
I love that. Something like that. But you're running around this environment and there's all sorts of other, like you see all the other players running around just like in a massively multiplayer online game, but you're each just running up to puzzles and then standing there and solving puzzles. A lot of them are perspective based puzzles. Okay. So, so perspective and meaning like there were perspective based in the witness where you're like moving the camera.
01:23:21
Speaker
sort of like that. Yeah. There's a there's a lot of witness vibes in here like there's because there is definitely some there's like these grid based puzzles where it's like connect all you have a whole grid that you have to fill with either black or white tiles and they'll some of them are already filled in and it's like connect all the black tiles. But I see there can be you can you're not allowed another rule like you're not allowed to have three black tiles in a row.
01:23:50
Speaker
or connect all the black tiles, but also connect all the white tiles. Or I'm trying to think, oh, or there's a number and it's like, there's like a white tile that has like the number three. So that means there can be three white tiles attached to it. And so you'll have to figure out how to fill all these numbers while also doing something, again, like connecting all the black tiles in between them.
01:24:18
Speaker
real logic-based, but then there's these perspective-based puzzles where it's like find an angle to look at the series of rings where you're looking through all the gold rings, but none of the purple rings.
01:24:32
Speaker
I am so bad at those kind of puzzles. I am so bad at them, because there were a few of those, like I said, in The Witness, and I'm like, what? I didn't grow up on them, you know? Yeah. I mean, these puzzles are, and they're wild. There's one where there's a bunch of orbs floating in the air, and you have to find the right angle to look at the orbs so they form a circle. And then you click in the middle of the circle, and you solve the puzzle. I played this game.
01:25:02
Speaker
Oh God. For four and a half hours. Is that why you weren't answering my texts? Stop it. Cause you were doing logic puzzles for four hours. So I, I got to levels. I leveled my character up to level six. So you get these, yeah, you solve these puzzles, you get like points and you use them to level up your character. Like I got the double jump.
01:25:26
Speaker
I got wings, so now I can glide in the air. I got like a turbo jump, so I can fire myself up in the air and then fly on the wings.
Game Demo Privacy Concerns and Listener Engagement
01:25:37
Speaker
I am so into this game. And again, I can't tell if it's good or if it's just speaking to a broken part in my brain.
01:25:48
Speaker
And I don't know if when this game comes out, people are gonna be like, this game is a revelation, or if people are gonna be like, this is the stupidest game ever, can you believe these nerds are playing it? And I'm gonna be one of those nerds, yeah. Well, maybe it'll find its niche audience and you're one of them, you know?
01:26:06
Speaker
Yeah, perhaps. So the demo is pretty open-ended. You can play it as long as you want, but there's just areas that are blocked off. Another warning, it uses your Steam name.
01:26:22
Speaker
as your character name. So if you have a Steam name that you didn't mean to be public, you might wanna think about that before you start the game. Time to get my secret second account out. I found somebody in the game that, there was somebody running around that made me, their name made me laugh so hard. Their name was, and this might just be like a publishing studio and say maybe I'm, the way I'm pronouncing it,
01:26:49
Speaker
is not the way they intended to but it it was so funny their name was call me games that's a lot to unpack it it can either be like call me games like my name is game yeah yeah call me games i'm here i'm playing games call me games or it could be call me comma games
01:27:12
Speaker
but right I I figured I thought it might be like a developer called that in their game studios called call me games I was laughing so hard at the idea that somebody is just named hey call me game I'm your friend who plays games call me games yeah they call me games games
01:27:31
Speaker
Like, oh, I ride a motorcycle, so they call me Wheel. So I play games, they call me Games. So anyway, I don't think they even said the name of this game. This game's called Islands of Insight, and I, again, I don't know if it's a good game or a bad game. Also, the last thing I'll say about it, the load times on this game are really crazy.
01:27:51
Speaker
That might improve, though, over time. Because this is currently a demo. Agreed. Agreed. The game's not even out until... Actually, the game comes out in a week. It comes out on February 13th, which is like... I think the day this episode might be published. Yes, it is. Right? Or we're definitely... Wait, no. We're recording. We're recording on the... We're putting an episode out on... Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, back it up. We're putting an episode out on Valentine's Day? Yes.
01:28:21
Speaker
and we haven't done anything for Valentine's Day. Oh, missed opportunities. Everyone's favorite holiday, Valentine's Day. People are going to be so upset that we're not talking about everyone's favorite holiday, the one that has no problematic aspects to it and that nobody has trouble with at all. Valentine's Day.
01:28:45
Speaker
I mean, we could have talked about Leisure Suit Larry looking for love in all the wrong places. So interestingly, yeah, this game will have come out the day before this episode releases. If you guys want to find me online, run around Islands of Insight, I will be running around solving some logic puzzles.
01:29:10
Speaker
I will, I will try to be there as well. Uh, just fumbling because I'm not good at logic puzzles. So I'll just be yelling and probably rage quitting within like 10 minutes. I'm going to make sure to be on the day this game comes out. So when you listen to this podcast, go, if you listen to the day it comes out, go look for me and islands of insight. I don't know if there's servers, like I don't know. I no idea how this game works, but, uh, yeah, go look for me.
01:29:37
Speaker
Do it. If you want to play a game with Precious Boy Matt Aucamp, this is your opportunity. I think next week we should break down some more of these demos, because there's so many really cool adventure games that are part of Next Fest, and they're all games that will be coming out over the next year or two. You guys can probably look forward to that in the next episode. Roses, do you also want to tell them what else is coming up in the next episode?
01:30:02
Speaker
Well, yes, I do. We have an interview with Julia Minamata, who is the developer of the Crimson Diamond, which is a Colonel's Bequest slash Laura Bowe homage. Let's say I actually did a video on it on there. There was a demo that she had put out. I did a video on that so you can play what she has out. You can watch my video. We're going to talk game dev and probably Laura Bowe. We're probably going to bore Matt to death.
01:30:28
Speaker
Just talking about Laura Bowe. Laura Bowe. Best female character ever, am I right? Sure. Yeah.
01:30:40
Speaker
She didn't seem to have much, I haven't played Daggervom in Raw, but she didn't seem to have much of a personality in Colonel's Bequest. You know what, you shut your gob. I'm not joking, I did a whole video about Laura Bowe being a great female protagonist, so check that out if you want to hear me babble about that. Based on Colonel's Bequest or based on both games?
01:31:04
Speaker
Both games. Okay, yeah. Maybe upon playing Dagger of An-Mun-Ra, I would get it a little more. This has gone so long. I think it's time we wrap up. Everybody, you can email us at mattandroses at gmail.com. Send us your questions or your compliments or your anger. That still makes me laugh. Our email makes me laugh.
01:31:32
Speaker
It's just the most prosaic sounding thing. Mattandroses.gmail.com. What was our outro from last episode? Mattandroses signing off. Oh, podcasts is art, art is suffer.