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Episode 39 - Case and Rise of the Golden Idol
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Happy American Thanksgiving, everyone! This is absolutely our yuckiest, most disturbing intro ever. And in the last episode, we talked about piss-proof toilet decals! And we are thankful you let us into your lives with this filth.
This week Matt and Roses talk about two of the best Storiented™ mystery-puzzle games ever made, Case of the Golden Idol and Rise of the Golden Idol, by Color Gray Games. We use our ancient, magical artifacts (microphones) to find all the words and put them in the exact right order and make this podcast for your ears to listen to.
Then we continue ranking every adventure game ever and try very hard to forget that we ever came up with a movie called Yucky Princess Swap.
Email us! [email protected]
Games Mentioned (*BRIEFLY):
- Case of the Golden Idol
- Rise of the Golden Idol
- Crypt Custodian*
- Tactical Breach Wizard*
- Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus*
- Chicken Police: Into the Hive*
- Crow Country*
- Arco*
- Nine Sols*
- Loco Motive*
- The Journey Down
- Grim Fandango
- The Sexy Brutale
- Myst
- Return of the Obra Dinn
- Duck Detective: The Secret Salami
- The Slaughter: Act One
- SSTR
- Dallas Quest
- The Book of Unwritten Tales: The Critter Chronicles
- Long Count
- Missing Since January
- Chants of Sennaar
Recommended
Transcript
Princess Swap Comedy
00:00:00
Speaker
Do it again. Before you hit record, we were you were trying to describe to me princess swap movies. Yeah, princess switch movies. Princess switch movies. And I guess I totally misunderstood. Like immediately in my head, I was like, oh, it's two princess. Like, oh, the princess of Luxembourg and the princess of Bahrain. They just switched for a day. It's no such thing.
00:00:33
Speaker
No, that's not the standard story. The standard story is like Prince of the Popper, right? It's it's ah a princess and a non-princess, not two princesses.
00:00:45
Speaker
Switching. Bad about two princesses switching is like everyone would know.
00:00:54
Speaker
Well, you but you know, though, that see, that's what makes this movie work is they look exactly alike. The princess ah princess, they look exact. They're not twins. Don't ask how it works. I don't know. But they look exactly alike. But right. If if two princesses are what people notice.
00:01:12
Speaker
but Like Keira Knightley and ah Natalie Portman. Yeah, Natalie Portman. Except, like, exact. Like, Vanessa Hudgens plays both the non-princess and the princess. Okay, this is the sort of movie that could be made in the shitty 90s when a lot of comedies were just based around, like, racism.
00:01:33
Speaker
And so you do like, oh, the Princess of Eswatini. And then you just make up a completely fictional fictionalized version of what Eswatini is. And you're like, oh, it's this primitive backwater nation. And oh, she switched with the Princess of ah Norway. And now Norway, all of a sudden, everyone's wearing loincloths. Oh my god. It would be that, right? like That's literally what like that's how that movie would go in the 90s.
00:02:03
Speaker
I don't even think it should be a comedy. This is serious biz. You can't just switch up the princesses. You can't just switch princesses. You can't do it. You can't make the princess of Sweden and the princess of Bhutan just switch. The economies will go down. I actually don't know if that's true. I don't know what would happen. I guess i don't know what happen would happen. Probably nothing good would happen. I'd say probably nothing at all, honestly. They just switch and it's like, all right. But like the point is, though, this is a rom-com. So the princesses, they have to both find love now.
00:02:40
Speaker
Oh my god, they yeah, they both fall in love with each other's brothers. Yes. Who also look alike. We just wrote a movie. We just wrote a movie. Wait, hold on. No. Because then the brothers fall in love with somebody who looks exactly like their sister and the sisters are falling in love with the princesses are falling in love with somebody who looks exactly like their brother. That's really disgusting.
00:03:08
Speaker
Oh, you're the you're the girl of my dreams. You dream about your sister. Listen, this is my movie and I'm writing it. All right, so it's okay there's brother there's print two princes. yeah So let's say the Prince of Belgium and the Prince of Kuwait. okay okay ah they They look exactly alike. And the Princess of Belgium and the Princess of Kuwait they look exactly like.
00:03:39
Speaker
And so Princess Belgium goes to Kuwait, and Princess Kuwait goes to Belgium, and Princess Kuwait falls in love with Prince Belgium, and prince spells Princess Belgium falls in love with Princess Kuwait. And then everyone's like, to everyone else, it's just like, oh, you you just started dating your, sick like, you're,
00:04:02
Speaker
because of No one if no one knows no one's supposed to know that they switched it's like we're getting married and it's the prince so but so be calling movie um The yucky royalty yucky royalty
00:04:20
Speaker
Just yucky royalty. Yucky royalty. It's yucky. Yucky royalty. Yucky royalty. No, that wasn't a good... I don't know. Do you have a suggestion? I like your original. We should just really steal ideas and just say the princess swap instead of the princess switch. The princess swap. This is the princess swap. It's different. The yucky princess swap.
00:05:05
Speaker
like a bad movie. But then you fall in love with both princes. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Number one movie of the year, I guess. Well, OK, wait, what if we deepen the plot, right? So the princess Belgium goes to Kuwait, and she falls in love with Prince Kuwait. And then ah Prince Belgium hu doesn't know that the princesses have swapped.
00:05:33
Speaker
I'll be right, nobody's supposed to know, it is supposed to be a secret. Wait, so then the prince is literally in your version, thinks they're falling in love with their own sister. ah
00:05:46
Speaker
but I thought I was gonna say the disturbing thing because I was gonna say, okay, then Prince Belgium goes into Princess Kuwait's room and he's like, hey, it's time for our normal ah incestuous sex. And then you find out that Princess Belgium and Prince Belgium have been sleeping together even though they're siblings. And now Princess Belgium is in Kuwait.
00:06:09
Speaker
And so obviously she's in love with Prince Kuwait looks because he looks exactly like her brother who she's already incestuously sleeping with. And I thought this wasn't gonna be my way to make it gross, grosser and darker. But then you go ahead and say, the brothers don't even know it's not their sister the whole time.
00:06:32
Speaker
I'm good at, I'm good at writing movies. This is my movie. Oh my god. The Yucky Princess Swap. The Yucky Princess Swap. The world's every, it's banned in every country.
00:06:52
Speaker
Also if we have any, uh, ah Belgian or Kuwaiti listeners. I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry. I don't even know if you guys have current princes and princesses. like I know you have royalty, but I don't know. Yeah, I don't need actually don't either. Also, I love how, because like in the UK, sometimes the princes and princesses are like in their 70s. So I also have an idea of this movie's happening, but all the actors are 72.
00:07:24
Speaker
Well, yeah, of course. That's my audience. We talk about Murder, She Wrote. We talk about Golden Girls. This is for you. This is for all the the oldies. Yeah, this is some septuagenarians in incestuous royal relationships.
00:07:41
Speaker
And also, happy holidays, everyone. Happy holidays, everybody. I hope you're all enjoying. This is our this is our Thanksgiving episode. Sure is. I'm excited.
00:07:52
Speaker
Oh, fuck. For what? I love the holidays. Oh, OK. All of them. Yeah, I like the holidays. I like I like the whole like Halloween right into New Year's. I love that little that little slide. I don't know what to call it. That's slide of of holidays. I yeah, I don't have many feelings about early November, but from like the week of Thanksgiving on to Christmas, I'm I'm I'm pretty into that.
00:08:20
Speaker
Yeah, I'm super, I'm super into it.
Holiday Traditions and Christmas Trees
00:08:22
Speaker
um yeah I'm very excited and been watching all my Christmas movies. I have a black Christmas tree. I'll put that up pretty soon. i it's It's a black Christmas tree with like red and white flowers on it. It's really pretty. It's really nice. We'll put a picture of the show notes, maybe the show being that we haven't even ah introduced yet.
00:08:45
Speaker
Hey, everyone, this is Save Your Game. I'm Matt Aucamp with me is pushing up roses. How's it going, roses? Good. Yeah, I usually I do the I do a live Christmas tree every year. A lot of living, a living Christmas tree. Yeah. That that sounds like a lot of work and a lot of pine needles.
00:09:07
Speaker
It is, it is both, it is both. And some might say, some might ask, is it even worth it? And to them I say, well, no, course not. But I'm gonna do it every year for the rest of my life. I mean, I'm only... I'm only a Christmas-loving human boy. Christmas-loving maniac. ah Yeah, I've never had a i've never had a ah Christmas tree like that. I've never had a live Christmas tree. I've always had synthetic. i Yeah, I always i always had a real Christmas. My mom was even allergic to Christmas trees, so every year we with like we would try different ones.
00:09:47
Speaker
like we So eventually we we found that for a long for many years she wasn't allergic to blue spruces. I don't know if you've ever had a blue spruce. I haven't. They are the sharpest. Oh. They are the sharpest trees on earth. So when we had to switch to blue spruces, it was just absolute pain. Oh God. But they're kind of pretty. they They do look a little bit blue.
00:10:13
Speaker
They look very Christmas tree-like, I'll give it that. Like I have it upon- Did you just Google? I did. And they look, yeah, they look like a Christmas tree. They look like a Christmas tree, yeah. And in the right light, they are kind of blue. Yeah. You can even see from pictures online, you see how stiff those branches are? Yeah. Like those will go straight through your skin into a vein. Yeah! You will bleed so much while decorating the blue spruce.
00:10:41
Speaker
I like hurt myself just on the synthetic trees. That sounds worse. That sounds worse to me. It probably is. Yeah. Just like a sh a shard of plastic going deep into my skin. um But anyway, yes, we love the holidays. um So, Rosas, we're talking about two games today, but I wonder Besides those two games, have you been playing anything?
Gaming Challenges and Trends
00:11:09
Speaker
Fuck no. Are you kidding? These games were so difficult for me yeah that I really tried. I really tried so hard. Well, I beat one. I did finish one. yeah ah The other one I got very far in. And then I did end up leaving it where it was because I thought it would make a good talking point okay about where I left off and like why I left off where I did.
00:11:35
Speaker
And yeah, ah but I yeah, those are the two games I've been playing. They're not. They're not like technically long games, I guess, but they take a long time to complete. Does that make sense? ah Yes. Like if you know the answers, not a long game. You're right. If you know the answer, if I mean, there's so many answers, though, it would be really hard to just know all of the answers. Like I yeah in preparation for this, I went back to a case and like I know the whole story and it was still kind of slow going, right? Because you have to find every word and then you have to you have to really think through the sentences. It's not like you memorize the sentences, you know? Yeah.
00:12:21
Speaker
It's just, it's just a very interesting these, I don't know why I'm doing that thing where I'm like keeping it a secret again. ah We're taking, we're talking about the golden idol games today. yeah And, uh, it's just really interesting to me. It reminds me of playing those initial Kings quest games where if you know exactly what to do, they are not long, right? Like in essence, they're not long games as opposed to something like disco Elysium, where you sift through dialogue for 500 years. It doesn't matter if you know the answers, it's going to take that long to get through it. But yeah, it reminded me of those early adventure games where
00:12:58
Speaker
You know, the gameplay is what should be giving you time is is what should be taking time to play. Um, and yeah, I had a lot of fun with it. Have you played so that that those are what I've been playing. I've been playing and going back and forth from case to rise the golden idol. Have you been, I know you've been playing those. Did you play anything else? I finished rise. Actually I've been playing a lot, uh, weirdly really because yeah, I've been thinking about how the end of the year is coming up and it just, I want to be.
00:13:29
Speaker
it's It's weird, ah neither this ah nor ah my you know ah role as review, no no one demands this of me, but for some reason I feel like I have to keep up with like games of the year, at least in my own wheelhouse. I'm not gonna go play Baldur's Gate 3, or maybe one day it will, right but I'm not gonna go play ah Metaphor Rifantazio, or any of the shit people are talking about. right but ah I went and I downloaded, here, i'll just I'll just run down a list of the games that I grabbed because I wanna play them before the end of the year. Yeah, yeah, go for it. um So we got Crypt Custodian, Tactical Breach Wizards, Bow Path of the Teal Lotus, Chicken Police Into the Hive, ah Crow Country, Arco, Nine Souls. Okay. So I grabbed all those ah because
00:14:28
Speaker
And i did I should have gotten locomotive. I didn't. ah I already spent too much money on games. Wait, is that out? Is locomotive out? It just came out like yesterday. Oh, yes. Oh, my god. I keep i can't wait to play it. um But so before I decided to do that, though, so I'll talk about those as ah the as December rolls on, I guess. Yeah. um And probably we'll, I guess we'll probably do our favorite Games of the Year episode in January at some point, right?
00:14:58
Speaker
our favorite oh our favorite game Our favorite games are 2024, right? That's a great idea. Yes, we should do that. Absolutely. Yeah. um But so I'll talk about these more as as time goes on. But so I'll talk about the games that I was adventure games that I played and beat.
00:15:14
Speaker
um Before I started this new quest, yeah um I finished the Journey Down Chapter Two. I remember in an old recommendations episode, I played Journey Down Chapter One. Yep, I remember.
00:15:31
Speaker
And you had compared it as I was describing it, you compared it to Grim Fandango. And the further in I get, the more I feel like this is just a very Grim Fandango inspired and yeah almost Grim Fandango level quality too.
00:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's I mean, I didn't even play it. All I did was kind of I listened to you and I looked it up. I'm like, oh, yeah, this it definitely gives me vibes. Maybe slightly less clever dialogue wise than Grim Fandango. um But the the story is really epic and the characters are really lovable and the puzzles are good. Like it's it feels like Grim Fandango um in a lot of different ways. And like Again, rather than just like a Dia de los Muertos setting, it is a Caribbean island setting and where also everybody wears African masks instead of has heads.
00:16:22
Speaker
yeah um So they I don't know. Yeah, so it was it was really good. I mean, I still have to play chapter three, but it's really good. I once again want to recommend it. And the other thing, I finally beat the sexy Brutale.
00:16:38
Speaker
I can't believe you finally finished sexy brutality. I know. Why did it I played it in fucking when I was in louis Louisiana. so So that was when I first started it. And that's what nine months ago. I ah don't know why I've so like I've gotten more than halfway through twice and stopped twice. And I finally was like, I'm going to get this fucking thing off my steam deck. I'm gonna sit here and play the sex sexy, sexy brutality and I'm gonna finish the sexy brutality and I did and it's, it's good. Uh, the ending is unexpected and a little weird.
00:17:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's I have beaten it, it's been many years. It must have not left did a big impression on me if I'm not able to recall it, you know? Right, I i can see that the ah it's solving the individual murders was pretty fun. And I kind of liked the Metroidvania aspect of where you get a power and now you can go back and find secret collectibles in different rooms, like an adventure game version of a Metroidvania. I kind of liked that, but the the ending, I don't know, was odd. It was touching. There were parts of it that I felt moved by, but um sure but it's an ah it's an odd ending. If you ever play the sexy Brutale, ah get ready for an odd, odd ending.
00:18:06
Speaker
Hey everyone, it's Matt editing. ah For some reason, the most interesting part of our discussion about the sexy brutality happened the moment we went to break. So I'm actually cutting and pasting it in here. I actually chopped a little bit into the conversation earlier. I don't know if you could tell.
00:18:23
Speaker
If you don't want to hear massive sexy Brutale spoilers, jump to Swanky Max Amino in like, I think it's like two minutes. All right, bye. I think if I don't remember something that well, because I have a great memory, then it's lost on me. i did I'll remind you of the ending as to and you'll probably remember what you didn't like about it then. Oh, maybe.
00:18:47
Speaker
um the main villain and your character and the host of the party who's been missing the entire time are all the same guy from different times. oh yeah And then all the henchmen turn out to also be you.
00:19:04
Speaker
right And he accidentally he accidentally killed ah he accidentally lit his mansion on fire at the wrong time. He was trying to destroy it for the insurance and he ended up killing his wife and unborn child and all his party guests. And he spent like a hundred years or something torturing himself.
00:19:22
Speaker
right over it and so like the game is essentially about him like one side of himself trying to move on by saving all these people and relieving himself of this torture and the other side of himself trying to fight that and being like no I deserve to be miserable for all eternity because of what I did to my friends.
00:19:46
Speaker
What a fucking weird thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like that's a really heavy topic and an interesting and intelligent one, but I just don't know that they had enough space to explore how deep of a topic that is. I know. um And the rest of the game did not feel that deep.
00:20:12
Speaker
right that by the ending you're just kind of like whoa uh it doesn't feel deep it feels like kind of it feels almost like cartoony in a way almost ah yeah yeah yeah um i mean i thought it was going to do the thing where you were going to go back in time and just like save them all right right yeah and yeah and it was like Okay, yeah, sometimes you do like a dark thing, but then you reverse it and then it's not that dark. But no, like the game was about, you can't save them. You have to figure out how to live the next several years of your life without being constantly burdened by the guilt that you murdered. Oh God. Fucking well people, including your wife and unborn daughter by accident. And unborn child, yeah.
00:21:00
Speaker
Great. Yeah. It's a wild wild, wild, wild game. Yeah. I mean, I think just stories in general are, endings are difficult, man. Look at Stephen King. He still can't end his shit and he's been writing forever. That's what I've heard. Yeah. No, so endings are hard. There are sometimes I can't even end a review and I'm like, well, okay, bye. It's just so, it's so difficult.
00:21:24
Speaker
to put a button on stuff sometimes. And games are not really different, you know, they're a different medium. But in terms of storytelling, yeah, there's some real clunker. endings out there. In fact, I don't think the games we're talking about today have clunker endings, but I do feel a certain type of way about- I know you do, about at least one. At least one of them, yeah. There's one other adventure game that I played a little bit of, and I'll talk about it later in the show, but- Oh, okay. Do you want to just hop forward, play some Casey Golden Idolino, and then talk about Casey the Golden Idol? Yes, I do.
Introduction to Podcast Hosts
00:22:30
Speaker
Hey, everyone, welcome back to Save Your Game. I'm pushing up roses. This is my co-host, Matt Aucamp. How you doing, Matt? Hey, I'm doing all right. How was your break? Good, I am so ready to talk about the idols. i Idols squared as, idol squared as it were.
00:22:48
Speaker
Is it squared? Yeah, ah well. Yeah, sort of. Nope, nope, nope.
00:22:55
Speaker
Don't ruin my metaphor. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Well, if one squared is two, right? Yes. So yeah, I guess you could say idle squared. Yeah. Or is one squared, no, one squared, sorry, one squared is one.
00:23:11
Speaker
and um So, uh. But two squared is four. Four. Yeah, so you can't get to two by squaring. Fuck. Anyway. Let's try. Let's try. Here, I'll spend some time on the Google calculator and you go ahead and keep introducing.
00:23:29
Speaker
Anyway, welcome back to save your game. Uh, I am very excited to talk about the idol games because I had not played them before.
Case of the Golden Idol Game Discussion
00:23:36
Speaker
And you know what? I, you know what I think happened? I think somewhere along the line, I confused the case of the golden idol with another game I had played and thus thought I had played it this whole time.
00:23:50
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's wild until we talked about Rise. And then I realized I hadn't because it was not a format that I recognized. So then I had to go back and look at Case of the Golden Idol. I'm like, I didn't play this game. What what game am I even confusing this with? I don't know. To this day, I don't know how it got into my head or where I got it confused.
00:24:15
Speaker
um hu Yeah, but that being said, I loved Rise so much ah that I went back and and played Case, got a key for that. And yeah I really like both of them. I think they are some of the best deductive games, ah mystery style games. Mystery games, I think, are very difficult to write and design. um But man, they are...
00:24:42
Speaker
they're both rewarding and punishing at the same time. right this is one of These are these games that you're either gonna feel like a genius or an idiot or both in the same play through because I don't think all quote cases are made alike, right? you know Some cases are easier for for people than others. brand And i you know I did some tweeting about it and ah yeah, a lot of people a lot of people are like, man, those games are tough, but they're great. They're great games.
00:25:12
Speaker
um And I can see why I can definitely see why people who are puzzle oriented would love this this game. If you are the type of person, if you are like Matt, right? And you like the mists of the world and like the witness, you like puzzle games. These are what I would call logic puzzles. Even though they're mystery and you're kind of playing detective, they they make sense, right? they're You're not, once again, you're not putting the cheese in the machine. It's not like that. ah Everything should make sense. That's true.
00:25:43
Speaker
I mean, hopefully. I guessed a couple times, okay? I'm not going to lie. but so The first thing I'll say is 1.4142222 repeating is about the closest. like When you square that, that's about as close as you can get to two. ah Okay, good. then That then. Idle one point something whatever. yeah I don't remember. I just closed it and I already forgot. No. Yeah, I mean,
00:26:12
Speaker
there The thing about these games, right, is there's one answer because there's a sentence you must fill. And that sentence already has some words in it and they're only, you know, each space can only hold the sentence is only true, right? If certain words are in certain spaces. And um I think there is a there's a very strong possibility that if you're making this sort of game, you structure it in a way that there are several ways that you could be answering that question and there and and that could be confusing because somebody's trying to pick the exact right way. But in, I think these games, I think there's only,
00:26:54
Speaker
At least in 90% of these cases, there's only one way to oh yeah fill in the words that it makes sense. I would say even higher than that, with the exception of maybe if you're naming people, you can name them out of order sometimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's it. This game does not have any room for error. You have to pick the right deductions. You have to pick the right words. um It's like Mad Libs, but like you it has to be,
00:27:22
Speaker
Correct. And if you don't, you wouldn't you wouldn't have gotten the scenario correct is the other thing. Like I think it is really well structured in that way where um if you really truly understand what happens and most of the time, I'll be honest, you don't. Even me who is, like you said, fairly good at this type of game and um and fairly good at this type of logic. um A lot of times I go into the sentence building And I know somewhere between 40 and 90% of what happened, right? Depending on the yeah scenario. There's very, very rarely I go in 100% knowing what, everything that happened. um Because these are these are hard. it's These are hard games. um And just in case nobody, in just in case you're somebody who hasn't played them,
00:28:19
Speaker
ah Before you get to these Mad Libs, the the way you sort of play the game is in case, because we're talking about case right now. um You are basically like this omniscient god, detective. Imagine you're a god who's also a detective.
00:28:36
Speaker
Omniscient isn't true because you don't know everything yet. You're just like a- And also, it is not your job to prevent anything. Your job is just to solve the story. Yeah, you're just a ghost detective. Yeah. And you show up at the moment that somebody dies.
00:28:59
Speaker
I think in every case, in case of the Golden Idol, the moment that a person has died and you click around the scenes, ah there's hotspots, you can choose to have them highlighted or not. I usually do choose to have them highlighted. Yeah, I do too. um Because where sometimes hotspot highlighting in like a point and click game can feel cheap, yeah right? Like it can stop you from really exploring a scene. ah But in this case,
00:29:29
Speaker
I think it's in this case. Yeah, it's almost necessary. The game's already hard. like you know i right I don't want to also miss words while also trying to deduce what happened in in this scene. And unlike a point and click where you cannot pay attention to what's going on and just try everything with everything, just click on everything and you'll eventually fucking get it, right? Yeah, yeah. um That's not the case here, right? ah Even if you let it show you where the hotspots are, you are going to need to really absorb every inch of the scene.
00:30:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So Dan, how to answer the questions. Yeah. So you and I, we had streamed the demo when, when before rise came out, we saw rise yeah yeah and I'm clicking around and I'm kind of getting used to it. And I'm like, okay.
00:30:28
Speaker
And then you had said something that made me realize but like the the nature of the whole game, because it's not just hotspots. You have to look at the entire scene, whether you can click on stuff or not, which is brilliant. That makes it a mystery. you know That makes it a murder mystery.
00:30:46
Speaker
Even though we're talking about Case right now, I think this moment is spoilable. And it like I think we can spoil it easily without ruining anything for anybody. um And it also gives you a really good example of what's going on. One thing that is not a hotspot in the very first scenario of Rise of the Golden Idol, a man has ah man is lying down on the ground. ah You can very easily tell that he slipped on the stairs.
00:31:12
Speaker
yeah ah because there's like a ah path leading from but an icy set of stairs to where he's at. It's just been snowing outside. yeah um And what Roses had missed, because she had looked at all of the evidence and all of the hotspots, um but hadn't quite realized that you have to take in the whole scene. And what um taught you, Roses, that you had to do this was that a scrap of fabric from his sleeve was hanging off of
00:31:44
Speaker
a wire on the bridge of above the stairs changes the whole thing and there a chunk of snow missing from the railing. and right of the bridge above the stairs. And so it goes from, oh, he slipped down the stairs to, oh, he fell off the bridge. Fell off the bridge, yeah. And I was so focused on the words. I thought the words was all the evidence that you would need, but it's not. You have to look at, which of course you do. I don't know why that didn't hit me, but just looking at it in strictly a gamer perspective,
00:32:23
Speaker
ah Yeah, I thought you just had to look at the, you get the words and then you deduce from there, but yeah, and there are hints within the scene that are not necessarily hotspots. What's just very different than like any other type of game, except for again, maybe um the, as we've, I say again, because we've talked about it on the show so many times, Return of the Obra Dinn, or these other sort of deduction games, outside of them,
00:32:51
Speaker
it's hard to find examples of this in video games. But you know in the first scenario of case of the Golden Idol, right um there's a point where you have to figure out where on the island the certain death has taken place. And the way to figure that out is you look at some islands off in the distance and you compare them to the islands on them on a map that you have.
00:33:18
Speaker
so i mean both games set that up in pretty much the first scenario is like, not only are you looking at the words and the hotspots, in fact, you have to look at hotspots like what's in each of their, this is in case, um what's in each of their bags to determine who the two men are, yeah yeah. And what's in their pockets. So again, ah back to,
00:33:43
Speaker
the premise, so you're clicking around these scenes, you're like this omniscient, you're not omniscient, you're this this detective ghost. And my i you're clicking around on these scenes and you get to see what every person in the scene is carrying on them. You basically get them to turn out their pockets. You just click on them and it shows like a list of inventory.
00:34:04
Speaker
yeah um And sometimes they're holding letters and you get to read those. And sometimes they're just holding, I don't know, like a ring and some pocket change or something. yeah um You also get to, if you click on any person, you get to hear their last the last words they said before the person died. um And so for the person dying, it might just be, ah! But for somebody else, it might be something really important. Like, yeah you know um you know, like,
00:34:34
Speaker
yeah Mom always did like you best, right? Now you know they're both brothers, right? yeah um And then you get to click around the scene, any other like random evidence that's laying around, footprints, a bag, and you click on the bag and you see everything that's in the bag. um so um but Not really,
00:34:57
Speaker
blood spatters are more things that you don't click on, but are just in the background. What's another example? of evidence. Yeah, stuff that's... Yeah, so weapons. There's usually weapons around. What else? What else is there? I'm trying to think of case because we're still... Yeah, if we're sticking to case right now. I mean, we're talking about both of them, but case was just a really interesting one.
00:35:26
Speaker
signs on a door, something, things like that. um yeah ah Somebody's jacket, sitting on a chair. Yeah, what they're wearing, try to pair what who's wearing what is very important. Yeah. um And so in case, things move really fast.
00:35:50
Speaker
Yeah, they do. So, oh, all right. just to Just to put a cap on what we were just talking about. So after you click on all these things, everything you click on will usually give you a word or multiple words. And then you have a bank, like an inventory of words, and i you that you you pull it out of, like you pull a name off of a letter, or um you'll click on a gun and then you get the word gun. Right. Or, you know,
00:36:18
Speaker
things things like that, you click on a sign that says, you know, castle big guy, and then you get the words castle big guy. that There's no castle big guy in the game. But then you you slot those in to the mad lib, and it will, if you don't get it right, it'll just say you're wrong. And it won't tell you how close you are until you get, if you get um three or less wrong? i thought it was No, no, it's two. If it's two or less, two or fewer wrong. If you get two or fewer wrong, they'll tell you that. Which is helpful. I will say that that that is helpful because then you can really, if you're that close, you can kinda start deducing a little bit better. You can tell at least which things are right if you have two or fewer.
00:37:13
Speaker
there are also some ways to trick that, right? Like if you know something, if you're if you're trying to nail down which part of it is wrong, if you have two or fewer, you can just ah take out something that you know is right. right and then ah And then switch out some words, and if it goes from yellow to red,
00:37:38
Speaker
You know, like, you know, OK, ah that was the one. And then you put the right and then, you know, yeah, exactly. So there is some ways to game it. And I don't know that I would recommend that. But if you're really stuck, um it's I mean, I would say that's just another strategy, right? To get to the I mean, on it realistically, that's just another strategy. But no, I know what you mean, though, like the best way to go about this game to ensure that you get things right is to just work really hard. and Really know them, right, look at everything. yeah So, um okay, so case so things to the story and we...
00:38:20
Speaker
I don't wanna, I don't wanna spoil anything. So let's, I wanna talk about the story and I think I can do it, being a reviewer, do this for a living. I think I can talk about the story without giving away too many spoilers. Yeah, cause one of the problems is ah and understanding the story is the gameplay.
00:38:40
Speaker
Correct. Yeah. So if we give you the story, that's not- There's no game to play. You don't have anything to play. I mean, you can, because you have to specifically- Get the sentences, but you're you're not going to have fun anymore. Right. i want the i you know It's really interesting. i I personally think it's very difficult to come up with a good mystery mechanic and a good story that is being told at the same time. And it's interesting because the story is all being told via evidence. That's very cool and unique to me. And these stories are very detailed, you guys. um so it might be i knowt Let me go into case a little bit. ah Sure. first thing I want to say about case is I actually like the graphic style of case better.
00:39:27
Speaker
then rise. They kind of did a little switcheroo. If you guys are familiar with like a home movies, which is one of my favorite cartoons slash shows ever. They started with like squiggle vision and then they went to flash later on and it's like smoother and different. That reminds me of what happened here. Case of the golden idol looks almost grotesque to me. Yeah. It looks off. You know, I don't want, and I want to hear you. I want to, I don't want to,
00:39:55
Speaker
fully interrupt you i just want to I think we should pause here for a second to talk about this art because it was very controversial. really People hated this artwork. There were so many people that were like, I love the game, but I can't stand the art. And I think those people are just straight up wrong. I think this art, like you said, it's grotesque um and it's shocking.
00:40:17
Speaker
It's weird. it's It's hard to explain exactly what it is. It's like overly dithered. Everybody looks kind of off again. I liked, I did like it though. I don't know why I liked it. I'm having a hard time articulating why I felt that it made sense. People discuss this game, like ah discuss the artwork in this game, like it's Microsoft Paint art. And I think these are people who don't remember what Microsoft paint art looks like. Like Microsoft paint art was like Hugo's house forward. sure right I can understand it. I can understand seeing it as in a very, but it's, I mean, it's very up there. Microsoft paint art, if that's what you're saying, like it's a very high end. A lot of it's flat yeah and or dithered, right? Like there's a, and there, there's not a lot of,
00:41:07
Speaker
guess There is shading, there's not a ton of shading maybe is is what I should say. ah Shading is often done in either not at all or in two tones. And it is grotesque, but the thing that they manage to do in this game is be entirely clear at every moment.
00:41:28
Speaker
You can solve everything by just looking at the pictures. And that is difficult to do, right? To to have that sort of clarity and story to visual storytelling is tough. Ask any comic book artist. And they manage to ah make every person, and this is something that's also incredibly hard to do in any visual medium, every person looks distinct.
00:41:57
Speaker
yeah Yeah, they do. Every single person looks like that person and only that person. And you will see that person later and you will know who that person is, which is important. It's, you know, recurring characters is very, ah very much a thing in both of these games.
00:42:13
Speaker
Right, and I'll say at first it's not, right? like You can solve each case separately, yeah but as you get further in, like when you get to the end of the game, or in Rise it's a little different, we'll get to that, but and when you get to the end of case, you really need to know who everyone was and how they moved through from one scene to the next. Yeah, yeah, and absolutely.
00:42:37
Speaker
And a little hint, it's not always as easy as you think it's gonna be. I thought Case was very difficult. um Well, I just mean, so you still haven't gotten to the end of Case. I'm just saying there may be some characters who are not the characters you think they are. Sure. In very interesting ways. it's It is the most shocking and amazing part of Case is when you figure out
00:43:07
Speaker
who each character you've been following at the end of the entire time is. right Sorry, maybe that's too much of a spoiler, but. not No, it's not because I don't think it is. um I think it is safe to say that this particular storyline is about a cult.
00:43:23
Speaker
we can say that. That's fine. I don't think that's a spoiler. No. um And it's it's your very I mean, I've seen this storyline in adventure games before it it was kind of giving me some broken sword vibes a little bit. You kind of had different, different parts of each cult and what certain people are following. And I was having a really fun time with case.
00:43:46
Speaker
until I got to, it kind of went off the rails to me. Like you said, it moves very fast, right? And it does, it moves incredibly fast. So I'm solving these cases and about maybe a little more than halfway through, I am suddenly in a cave and I am witnessing some cult activity. And I have never been more confused and stuck in my, that I did finally get to a point where I was sort of figuring it out.
00:44:15
Speaker
But man, it took such a hard turn for me. I'm like, holy shit. ah don't I don't know any of their names. I don't know how I got to this name. ah so There was a chapter, by the way, Matt, there was a chapter prior to that where i don't I can't even, I don't even know how I would have gotten one of the names. I went back and played and I still don't know how I would have figured it out. So I was struggling. Which chapter is that?
00:44:41
Speaker
the ah The servant housekeeper one was a little pip and the servants and Edmond Cloudesley. So there there was, I mostly got it, but there was an answer. I'm like, I don't know. I don't know how.
00:45:00
Speaker
where where I found this, I don't know what it is. yeah I'm so confused. It's there, but sometimes it's not so removed from um A plus B equals C, right? yeah Sometimes it is so much like if A equals B and B equals C and C equal equals D and D ah is F minus G, then H equals A, right? like yeah ah it's so Sometimes it is so far removed, and it's interesting, because you played Ryze first. I did, yeah. um One thing your brain was programmed to do was to look at it as an ongoing story.
00:45:43
Speaker
Right. Because that is very clear in Rise, but in case it's not clear, um in case ah the first three scenarios don't appear to have anything to do with each other besides a single last name. Right.
00:45:59
Speaker
um And you might not even notice there being a seeing a specific object that happens to be in each scene. You probably will if you looked at the name of the game, but you might not because it's not important yet. So um when you're playing Case, ah it is about where you're talking about, the cult.
00:46:30
Speaker
yeah where in order to solve some of those things, you have to sort of, you don't have to, but it helps if you go backwards and start to try and understand what happened leading up to now. But until that moment, ah when I first, very first played, I had not connected each scenario as a unraveling story. To me, they were all entirely separate.
00:46:57
Speaker
um until the the the chapter that you're talking about. um Yeah, i I did connect them, but in terms of puzzle solving,
00:47:09
Speaker
I did not understand how you got, so in in this culture of different ranks, there's different ranks and different like categories. I was really not sure how to wear how to like identify them. So yeah you don't always have to identify people's names in this game. Sometimes you just have to identify their rank and their category, like where they are. I had no idea where to start. I did finally get it.
00:47:37
Speaker
I looked up like a really vague hint that kind of guided me in the right direction. I'm like, okay, I'll start here. If I start here, maybe I'll be able to. And I did i did some guesswork and eventually got there. Yeah, I mean, in that scenario, that is one of those ones where ah through some very um difficult logic you have to figure out, if you can just figure out one, then the rest sort of comes tumbling down and you start to figure out, you can figure out all the rest. But yeah, getting that first one, again, we're not gonna spoil anything here, but it is hard. It is very hard. It's very hard, yeah. I was shocked at the difficulty level and I would say now having played both games, Rise is the much easier game and it's not an easy game.
00:48:31
Speaker
but if I compare it to Case, I think Rise is the easier of the two games. I'll also say the cult scenario that you're talking about, I believe, is the very first time you see mention of a man named Lazarus Hearst. Yep, that's correct. You've never heard of this man before. Correct. But like somehow- He's introduced in this in this section. Somehow everybody,
00:49:00
Speaker
he seems to somehow be connected to all these characters that you already know. Right. so he's And he's in Rise too, right? His name is at least, I feel like it is thrown out there. It is. yeah And i thought my, here's my, this is the biggest spoiler I'll give of the whole game. Good. You've met Lazarus Hearst before.
00:49:28
Speaker
And that's all I'll say oh in case that is all I'll say. Anything more would be like that is already like a massive spoiler and something that a lot of people don't figure out until the very end of the game because it is no idea what you're talking about. That's great. It is. It is a shock.
00:49:46
Speaker
ok um When Lazarus Hearst appears, and then it is a shock later when you start to figure out why Lazarus Hearst appears. Anyway, so I mean, a lot of a big portion of this game is this idea that power corrupts absolute power, or corrupts absolutely, right?
00:50:03
Speaker
um All these characters have their own ah agendas. Yes. Pretty much everyone you meet has an agenda. And some have really clever, really smart agendas, like Lazarus Hearst, or Edmund Cloudsley, or ah ah Some have some baser agendas, but are just very sly and clever about how they go about achieving them like David Goran or ah Walter Keene. And then there's these other people who are just absolute idiot buffoons who happen to fail their way upwards throughout the entire game. And I want to give credit to Jason Schreier of the Triple Clip podcast.
00:50:48
Speaker
because he pointed out a theme that happens between both games which is just there's ah each both games have an absolute idiot and i'd say there's actually a couple but both games i felt like i i don't know it felt like everyone was such an idiot like to me And yeah, there's a couple in Rise, but there's one specific one. And in ah case there is an absolute idiot who just fails his way upwards throughout the whole game. I'll i'll just say is I don't mind saying his name. it's His name is Peter Batley. And that guy, though, he is unlikable. He's so unlikable. He is such a dork and such an idiot. And every scene he's in, he's doing and saying stupid things. His character design looks insane.
00:51:35
Speaker
He's got pinprick eyes and a big fat face. And he's behind everybody else. Every other character in the game is on a level that he has not quite reached. yeah And yet he always comes out on top of everything. And it's amazing. um And we'll talk about who it is in Rise. But so if we're going to enter I wanna enter like a semi-spoiler territory before we move on to Rise. And what I want to do here is since you are, ah how far into case? um I beat the, oh, how do I say this? The lighthouse where there was a tragic accident. Okay, so you're starting to understand the,
00:52:25
Speaker
ideas behind the cult. Correct. Yes, correct. And like how the idol plays into what people are trying to do with it. Yeah. So um here's what we're going to do. Listeners, I think you should skip ahead. um Say.
00:52:41
Speaker
three minutes, let's say five minutes, skip ahead ahead five minutes, or until, skip ahead until you hear Swanky Max Amino. And I'm going to have, Rose, you try to explain to me in your best lord best possible way. And it's okay if all of it is wrong. um I think that just, that doesn't say anything negative about you. It says something positive about- It says something positive about how good the game is at obscuring the story. ah Sure. So again, listener, skip forward to Swanky Max Amino. Roses, what do you think is happening?
00:53:21
Speaker
think that somebody okay I think that there are certain people who want to acquire this idol because the idol gives miraculous, like weird powers. I'm not quite sure what really the powers are. I do know that when I did the lighthouse one, that like, somebody flew, like there was a flying, ah like a flying type of a miracle type of a thing. um and i And I don't know, since I'm not any farther than that, I don't know if that's because of the idol or because there is trickery going on. You know what I mean?
00:54:00
Speaker
um So I'm not beyond that. I'm not sure. It just feels like it feels like a story that people want this idol because the idol can perform miracles. So, OK, so you so you're understanding the idol at this point is just it does miracles and you don't know what it does. Yeah. um but So you have not. and Oh, and I know there's like a I know. Oh, oh, oh. And I know that there's like a temperature thing. um And there's like a gold thing because Edmund clouds Lee was like in his book, he was talking about he was trying to do these different things. He also put air into, you know, he sealed air into a a vase and exploded and killed people. So I know it has like weird properties. You know what I mean? Yeah. All right. um What? Who is Lazarus Hearst?
00:54:52
Speaker
That's a good question. I don't know is an accept is an acceptable answer, but if you have like even a vague guess of just where he came from, I would love to hear it.
00:55:09
Speaker
I think because he came in randomly.
00:55:17
Speaker
that maybe he was one of the people in the manor or something like that, you you know like somebody outside of it. So maybe so maybe somebody from the family, from the from like the clouds Lee family. Yeah. Are all the clouds Lee's dead now? No. OK, Edmund is alive. Edmund is alive.
00:55:45
Speaker
OK, where is he? don't no Okay, all right, that's fun. That's a lot of fun. I'm really excited to hear you're gonna have so much fun hearing this stuff out. Where did he go? That's very interesting, Matt. We haven't seen him in a while. Yeah, I mean, his assistant, David Goran, seems to have abandoned him, right? Yeah. And he seemed to defeat um What was his name, Keene? Walter Keene, yeah. Walter Keene, and yet Walter Keene is now hanging out in the cult, right? Yeah, yeah. It's just an interesting thing. All right, why don't you play Swanky Maximino, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about Rise. Let's do it.
00:56:55
Speaker
All right, everybody. Welcome back to Save Your Game. I'm Matt Aukhip. With me is pushing up Rezzes. Hey, Rezzes. Hey. How was your break? What up? It was filled with wonder and whimsy. It was contemplative, huh? It was. I'm a contemplative person. um All right. so We talked about Case. ah We gotta talk about the fucking story of Rise. I don't even know what to think about that ending, man. Why don't we talk about, so I think we're gonna get into a spoiler ah section of Rise. um But first, I think we're just gonna talk about it again, high level, like differences yeah between this and Case. Yeah.
00:57:44
Speaker
So Ryze looks all smoothed out, doesn't it? I wonder if the devs and the artists took to heart how much people didn't like the artwork. I really, really think they did. I think they did. Because I think that that was like a that was like the biggest feedback they got. And then the first thing that we ever saw of Ryze was, oh, the artwork is different. so they the Let me say this though, the character design, like the structure is not different. The medium is different. So it no longer has that very crude, you know, dithering paint, you know, paint MS look, it's more smoothed out now.
00:58:29
Speaker
It's less, there's no pixels in this one. It is now ah ah like digitally painted. Yeah, is like it is like a digital painting, yeah. Which I still like because i just i I know all the characters look very bizarre. It's got a charm about it. And if you just look at screencaps, I don't think, it kind of like Hobbs Barrow, where if you just look at standalone screencaps, you might not be into it. But in motion, when you're playing the game and in the scene,
00:58:59
Speaker
I think it all looks great. I like how it looks. And to me, yeah there are. So even though these ah these characters are all sort of grotesque and um like very, very stylized.
00:59:14
Speaker
it's okay the It's like the Nathan Drake thing. It is hard to believe that there's no person that Nathan Drake doesn't exist. right like They have rendered him in the game ah the Uncharted games so well that you almost feel like there is an actor out there that looks and talks exactly like Nathan Drake. yeah Well, I guess there is one that talks like him as a voice actor.
00:59:39
Speaker
but there But there is no one who looks like Nathan Drake. He is he is an invention. and But to me, I feel the same exact way about Auriel Toussaint and about Tessa Navari. It's like hard for me to imagine that those are just those are just paintings. Those guys don aren't real. um they've They've burrowed their way into my brain to the extent where they feel real.
01:00:06
Speaker
Yeah, no, for yeah yeah, it's true. it's they're very Everything is so unique and memorable looking, ah which is good. You want that for a mystery game. You want to be able to remember the characters and not get anyone confused.
01:00:21
Speaker
right And I'm gonna say I liked Rise More, and it had some of my favorite scenes that I felt amazing doing. Yeah, well, so, all right, so again, gameplay-wise differences. um The biggest thing is that you've solved the puzzles and chunks now. Yeah. um Instead of just getting... Okay, first of all, instead of having to click on the individual words,
01:00:51
Speaker
when you click on, say, a letter, all the words, all the relevant for words from that letter, just enter your inventory. That, I think, is a an improvement. yeah um Also, you can move around and resize the windows. Major, major improvement. Yes, yes. um ah And then there's something that I think many people would think is an improvement, but I don't know how I feel about it, and it's that you solve everything in,
01:01:19
Speaker
ah they're like little module modules. So you'll be trying to figure out ah who escaped from a jail. And the first thing that you'll do is match all the pictures of the prisoners up with which cell they're in. Then you'll match up every name you found right with who is in the jail. Like who were all the characters you've met. Then you'll decode
01:01:50
Speaker
a message that one of the prisoners received, like a coded message, and then finally, you'll solve the MATLAB. And in case, you would have to do all of that solution. and There were some modular stuff, but yes most of this, most of that solution, you would have to figure out in your head in order to get the MATLAB right.
01:02:18
Speaker
right I do. I did like the structure of rise. I did like this modular way of doing it. And one of my very favorite parts of rise just in general yeah is identifying people and figuring out where they were. ah So there is a scene in rise.
01:02:38
Speaker
it it it It looks, it can, it can look very overwhelming. Uh, some of these scenes, but there's a scene in Rise that is, it takes place in a full apartment complex. This is the most characters you're ever going to have to identify. And I had the most fun with that one. That one felt like a real murder mystery. You go into eight different apartments and a lobby and a basement. Yeah.
01:03:03
Speaker
Normally, I would feel, ah somebody like me, I would feel very overwhelmed. I felt overwhelmed, for example, in the cult scene in Case. yeah But for some reason, the way they structure it in in the apartment scene with that many characters, you know you if you just go one by one, if you figure out who people are, I just had so much fun with the apartment scene. And when you figure out these scenarios, it feels good. You feel like a fucking genius but you when you figure these out. Yeah, absolutely. And so I guess I'm sure you can figure out what I didn't, what ah bothered me about the modular thing.
01:03:45
Speaker
It's just a little easier, right? like It's a little easier, yeah. It's meant to make to bring you along. um And it does. it litter a very well it It achieves that goal very, very well. Yeah. I think it does get harder as you go as well, like kind of the modular stuff. You stop you actually stop identifying people at some point, and it becomes more story-oriented near the end of ride. So I think it ramps up. You just did an amazing thing.
01:04:14
Speaker
but b ah Yeah, ah you were saying story-oriented, and you combined the two words into story-ented, which is an incredible...
01:04:27
Speaker
Incredible word. Oh my God. I am. Oh, this is story ended. It's very story ended. Okay. Trademarking along with the toilet decal. Toilet decal. You do a toilet decal that says this piss is story. Wow.
01:04:53
Speaker
Yeah, right there' very good. So the other thing that changes is that you have an on you have instead of ah a surprise scenario at the very end that um you have to go back through all the other scenarios and put together a yeah ah put together the entire narrative, you do that in every chapter. So you do like four cases and then you solve what just happened right in this segment of time. What are the important takeaways? I thought that was difficult. I'm like, oh, God, it's like I know what happened, but I don't know what they want to hear.
01:05:31
Speaker
you ah So it's like you imagine this game as a semester of college, right? And each case is like a class. And then eat ah each ah chapter is like a quiz for that segment. And then you take a final exam at the end. Right, yeah, yep.
01:05:54
Speaker
um and And there's, I mean, the final scenario in this game is really, really hard. And it also, it does the thing where you have to go back through every other scene and really understand and understand with new context, which is something that Case is really good at. there's ah There's some bit of context you get late in the game and that you have to go to apply to every scene that you've already been in. This happens in Rise too.
01:06:26
Speaker
yeah
01:06:29
Speaker
There are characters who are different than the characters you think they are for a very strange and specific reason. um And you don't know that until much later. And then you have to go back and say, okay, who is who at every given moment? yeah And that is hu that is interesting. i in fact went through, I have notes in front of me, I went to each scenario and I wrote down the major things that happened and what date they occurred on so I could put together a timeline. and um i feel like i should ah I feel like I should have taken some notes. um I feel like this kind of game will do well for you if you take notes.
01:07:13
Speaker
Same, yeah, and I didn't until I got to the final thing and I was so lost that I was like, I'm gonna go back to the very beginning. yeah And then um by the time I made it to that, I took down all these notes. By the time I made it to um the final chapter, I was like, oh, I get it all. And then I was able to just fill in the MATLAB almost entirely correct. There's one name that I got wrong.
01:07:39
Speaker
What did you think about this story versus case? Cause there's similarities. Um, it is, and it it is following a theme of power and, uh, playing God and and and tragic accidents.
01:07:53
Speaker
And there is a there is an idiot who fails his way up through the entire game. There's an idiot. There's a couple idiots. Yeah. And he does the idiot thing that he does. He does a couple idiot things. And every time he does, he comes across to the world as a hero. I know. And so he becomes famous for doing something wrong. And that is Eugene Marmot is his name, which is a hilarious name. Yeah, it's his name.
01:08:21
Speaker
And yeah like he is the Peter Batley of this game where he just keeps being a fucking idiot yeah and not understanding what's going on. And yeah, just failing upward. And there's also Tessa Navari, who's an idiot in a different way. ah She she she's just weird. She has weird intentions. but She does. I mean, she's just she's just a spiritual guru who ah thinks that the idol is doing something different than everyone else. And it's not, it's like not doing it at all. It's not doing anything. And she tries to use it on somebody at some point. She's like, take that. Nothing happens. Nothing. And I think that's why Rise is so interesting is even though Case had a very complicated
01:09:08
Speaker
ah branching out story, this even more so. There are a lot of characters in Rise of the Golden Idol. There are different companies that are working together. There are people who are connected that they might not even know each other, that but they are connected and some in in some way. I thought personally that it branched out too much. And because it did,
01:09:34
Speaker
I was a little confused at the end of the game. It almost felt like
01:09:42
Speaker
I don't know. It felt like an afterthought. The very, very ending felt like an afterthought. I think this game, like as you're playing, you know, kind of where it's going and what people's intentions are. Like you have people who want the idol, like Tessa, for example, she thinks, she thinks that the idol can like give empathy to people and like take away hatred. So that's why she wants to use the idol. Right. Right. And there are other people who want the idol because it can like,
01:10:12
Speaker
Well, this is, okay, were bleep that out real quick and we'll just say we're in the spoiler section now. yeah And so again, if you guys wanna jump forward to Swanky Max Amino, we're gonna talk about spoilers for a bit. But yeah, okay, so sorry, say that again and not, we won't beep it out.
01:10:31
Speaker
But yeah, ah so yeah, so some people want it because, and I think the idol can do this. I don't think it can do the hatred empathy thing, but what it can do is it can swap people's like memories, like consciousness. Not even memory. Yeah, memories, I guess. well Because it is memories, but what they find out by accident is that it also, if you swap a person's entire memories, if you take or give a person's entire, it basically takes the entire person and swaps them. And swaps them, yeah, yeah. And that that happens in the game, and there are characters who are different people. It's interesting, I'm gonna say,
01:11:20
Speaker
This, I have such, and because this branches out so much, it's hard for me to say if I liked the overall story or not, or if I liked the like little mini stories that the snippets that you're getting in the vignettes and the scenes. do you Do you know what I mean? Yes, all right, I loved the story. It took me a bit to really understand it, but once I, once i okay, there's a moment, right, later later on in the game,
01:11:49
Speaker
where you start to understand why all these characters have ah ah red eyes with black crosses on them. And you start, you continue moving forward through the game and then you're sort of inspired to remember the first time you saw that. right And you think, oh shit, that guy who the very first thing I found out was that he was dead.
01:12:19
Speaker
Right. Is not dead. That guy has had his memories removed and put into the idol. And once that occurs to you, and once that occurred to me, I was like this fucking rules because there's just this because again, it's this aha moment that you strive for in these types of games.
01:12:44
Speaker
where all of a sudden something that you assumed is turned completely on its head. and But that led me to this false conclusion, which is that that man was behind all this. right right He wasn't, but once I found out who was, and I did have to do a trial and error in the, it was actually weirdly This is not to brag. This is just to talk about how different the difficulty levels are between rise and case. The only time I had to do a trial and error in this entire game. The entire rest of the game, I knew what I was putting in each slot and why. Yeah. um
01:13:27
Speaker
there was only a couple times where I got a yellow and almost no time where I got a red. The only times I got a red was when I accidentally put the same person's first name as both their first name and last name. yeah do I would do like Navari Navari. And yeah then I'd be like, why is it red? Oh, I fucking misclicked. But I got a ah you know a solid red in the very last scenario, because I didn't figure out who the mastermind was.
01:13:54
Speaker
Yeah, but. That's why I stopped. And went back and looked through every scrap of information. And realized like they do see it throughout the.
01:14:11
Speaker
Plot that he pulls off is the plot that he suggests. To the CEO when he first finds out what the idol can do, right? Also,
01:14:23
Speaker
um his idolization of his grandfather is seated early in the game with the name Icarus, right? yes um And there are some other like weird hints as to who Hunter, what's his name? Hunter something, Hunter Wolf. Who Hunter Wolf actually is um that I didn't pick up on until I knew who Hunter Wolf was. So. Yeah, same. um I was getting confused just by the amount of um the amount of important characters, right? It seems like there are way too many characters that have um ah an amount of importance that you need to pay attention to.
01:15:06
Speaker
And that gets very complicated, you know, it gets complicated to know what every person's motivation does and who did what and whose memories are whose and who the fuck is hunter wolf and why am I on this weird compound like it just got it got ah to me, it got a little overly complicated.
01:15:25
Speaker
The first thing that, well I knew from the start that Hunter Wolf had to be somebody we've met already, I just didn't know who he was. right um And then I hadn't realized we had heard about Hunter Wolf in chapter in the first chapter.
01:15:39
Speaker
oh interesting He was a contact of Isaac Nowak, that was listed in like the police reports and stuff. Or a contact of Luke Brown, one of the two, maybe a contact of Luke Brown. but um so And also, one of the first things you find out about Isaac Nowak is that he was spending time at the steel yard. Right. um Okay, so the first thing that really, really threw me was who the fuck is bryce mice Bruce Meissen?
01:16:13
Speaker
Yeah, there's just so many names and just like, who? What? So I had to go all the way back and was like, oh, that's that security guard who got stabbed. It is, I guess we don't know how he got like turned. Yeah. Like at some point, I guess he became part of the conspiracy.
01:16:34
Speaker
you' right and then yeah and then he gets wrong And then his brain gets replaced with Luke Brown's. But yeah we don't really know how that occurred. We know he got stabbed by a crystal. Right, it it just maybe it just really happens off off screen, as it were. Yeah, and I'd say that was probably the only plot point in the entire game that bothered me, is how did Bruce Mason switch sides? I think my biggest issue was that there were too many motivations. So like I was having trouble with, like because there's the motivation of Eugene, isn't Eugene, right? Marmot? Yes.
01:17:12
Speaker
There is like a capitalistic motivation here where people just want people to buy orange soda. This is real. I thought this was actually the major plot point that was happening. It's like, oh, capitalism is bad, obviously, and the biggest thing that they're going to do is broadcast. They're going to use the idol to broadcast good memories of fucking orange coke into the minds of the people so they can sell more of it. And this is their big, their big thing. And so I thought that it was gonna be that that's the main story. It's gonna go wrong. Obviously, I wasn't realizing that there was gonna be another
01:17:58
Speaker
weird thing where people were swapping memories. And then at the end, like at the end, the scientist becomes like his uncle's memories. If that came out of nowhere, I was like, okay. Yeah, no, no, I i can understand that. yeah I understood that there was a second person who was trying to do something to the, I thought he was trying to like enslave the populace.
01:18:25
Speaker
but he was trying to make them all geniuses, like his grandfather, who he idolized, exactly like he pitched in his original. um letter to the CEO. um But ju Eugene Marmot's pitch was better, which is let's make them all like soda. Which I thought was hilarious, by the way. i I think that is such a funny thing to put in the game, especially where you think that everyone has like almost murderous intentions. No, this guy he wants to sell soda.
01:18:59
Speaker
and and it's a little silly And his villain, the person he is struggling against, is just a guy that wants him to fail. That's all. right All Tim Spender wants to do is get Eugene out of there, because he thinks he's an idiot. So yeah he an idiot yeah he is an idiot so Eugene or so ah tim is trying to get people to have bad memories of soda, which is as stupid as Eugene's goal. So like you have two idiots who are sparring and then one genius who ends up having a tragic flaw that fucks it all up. yeah and it And it turns out, you know, like the real battle was kind of fought between Eugene and Tim because Jack's plan
01:19:53
Speaker
was completely foiled, but by accident. right So like, it it didn't, if Jack had never, it's sort of like the Indiana Jones thing, right? Like if Jack was never there, all of the same things would have happened. Well, no one would have figured out the idol, I guess, but, because Jack was the brains behind that, but if Jack had disappeared as soon as he solved the puzzle of the idol, all of the same things would have happened, it just wouldn't have,
01:20:21
Speaker
It just literally would have been about soda. But Eugene still would have gotten locked on the roof. Eugene still would have pulled the AV cable. It still wouldn't have gone anywhere, right? like it's like There's something so weirdly, absurdly poetic ah about that. Yeah. Yeah. I did think all of that was very, very clever. It's actually so clever that I didn't think for ah ah for a while I didn't realize that that was Eugene's intention. Because yeah because what? You could do so many things with this golden idol, but the the really? This is what you want to do. Oh, okay. So it's it's very funny it's actually very funny. um
01:21:05
Speaker
But I would say like my favorite scenes don't have have anything to do with the overlying story, which I wonder if that's a flaw with me or a flaw with the game. You know? I think it could just be a um misalignment, right? I think the way that the game builds story is really smart and really um interesting.
01:21:27
Speaker
yeah I also want to bring attention to the fact that we're going to have 20 cases of DLC, supposedly. yeah And we still have some loose ends, right? We still have, and this is made, we've gotten into major, major spoilers. So I hope if you were playing the game, if you haven't played the game, you're not listening now. But we still have Orielle Toussaint, who is, um doesn't exist anymore, I guess. ah We have, so Echo Secunda is just running around rampant.
01:22:00
Speaker
right um We have, Uh, two ah homeless men in rich people's body who both went rogue. Right. And we have Mamoudi. Uh, what was her last name? I have it written down here somewhere. Oh gosh. I don't remember. There's so many names. Malmadi da Silva who knows that something is up.
01:22:29
Speaker
and wants to reclaim the artifact for Lemuria. Right, right, right. And so we have those three, I guess technically four loose ends. Right. Swirling around and I, you know, am fairly certain they're going to come up in the DLCs. Oh, yeah, I'm sure they will.
01:22:55
Speaker
um The DLCs, we didn't talk about this in the last segment, but the DLCs of ah Case of the Golden Idol were all prologue. It was all how um how the idol made it from Lemuria into the hands of Albert Cloudsley to begin with. Well, that's cool.
01:23:20
Speaker
And it's very, very, very cool. I love that. I love it when stories go back and do a prologue. I think it's smart and I like it. But we also have a 200 year gap here. Right. Between 1770s and the 1970s. So, you know, even though the idol was in pieces during that entire time, it'd be interesting to see how those pieces moved. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
01:23:45
Speaker
So I don't know, there's a lot that I'm really, I like, it feels, because we know that we are only halfway through, it feels... like there's half of a story left to go. And I'm really, really excited for where it goes. How about you? I wanna know what your favorite thing to solve was that you were like, that was so fun. This is exactly my type of puzzle solving. Do you have any scenes that felt like this was made for you and you were just in your element?
01:24:20
Speaker
um
01:24:23
Speaker
Okay. I have two. I think I have two also. um I the apartment scenario was really good. I love the apartment. Yeah, I love that. Like you're just you're you were right about that one. That one is really amazing.
01:24:38
Speaker
um That almost felt like its own, and it was, it's it is its own little private story that you're trying to figure out. But man, that one felt particularly special to me because it was like, this is an episode of like law and order, this is murder, she wrote, I got to figure this out. All set in one complex. Yeah, that was a very good whoever designed that really well done.
01:25:03
Speaker
And, uh, and then, I mean, I loved so many of them, but then the final clash, the final clash blew me away. Right. Because again, I had to go through and just at the, like at the end of case, I had to go through and understand every single step.
01:25:20
Speaker
to just truly get it. And that, again, it makes you feel like a genius. Yes, it does. I do i do want to highlight a certain kind of puzzle that they used a couple times in Rise, which is There is one puzzle where um like a like a piece of glass falls into a pool.
Intriguing Mystery Puzzles
01:25:42
Speaker
And you have to determine what path this this glass dome or but whatever it is, ah how it fell. And I really like I really liked that. I think
01:25:54
Speaker
You know, you, you would see like some flowers trampled on the ground or at the other end, you would see like a bike trail and you would need to figure out what path this thing took. And I like that. It wasn't my favorite scene, but I can appreciate a mystery puzzle like that. you know I just want to be clear. You're saying glass as an example or.
01:26:14
Speaker
Do you know what that object was? I do. I don't want to say it though. Okay. Perfect. All right. Great. Yeah. I wanted to make sure yeah if you didn't, I was like, Oh, I have something fun to teach you. but No, no, no. I know. I know what it all, what it all is. Yeah. Great. Great. Great. Great. Great. Um, and I also loved, there is a, a bird scene, an aviary's name.
01:26:38
Speaker
I know, I know. It is like the saddest scene. Like I was legit sad at that scene. But it is a scene where you have to identify which birds are which, what has irritated them, who was feeding them.
01:26:53
Speaker
ive I really liked it. I really liked the way the puzzles felt. I like these kind of mini stories within the bigger story. Because they are connected, whether they're mini stories happening or not. The apartment complex had its own story going on that you needed to solve. But it is still, there are characters within this complex that are connected to the bigger story. Yeah.
01:27:16
Speaker
um But yeah, I I I really like these games. I wasn't like blown away by the ending that like you were for Rise, but I am blown away by the game. I am blown away that it was told so well. And it's so rewarding and so challenging. It's really unlike anything I've ever played. To be honest, I've not played a mystery game like this before. Yeah, ah it's I mean, they are they are incredibly unique. They are incredibly interesting and they and the fact that they're able to do so such a complex story with like this leaving you so completely in the dark is just so yeah is so interesting to me. um
01:28:08
Speaker
I can't, with just like, there's very little dialogue and there's no, there's very few cut scenes. It's just, right you solve it. And like, that's so, I don't know, I'm i'm blown away. And another thing that Jason Schreier said on TripleClick was he had interviewed the creators of this game and they seem tired and they seem like they're ready to move on to another project and nothing could bum me out more than that.
01:28:35
Speaker
Oh, because I really, I wanted these to go on forever. ah I would love one in the vein of murder. She wrote. Hi devs. If you're listening to this podcast, I have a big murder.
Podcast Housekeeping and Listener Interaction
01:28:49
Speaker
She wrote fan and I love your little mini murder mystery scene. So if you could just do that for me, you know what? I just, I, here's what I'm hoping. I'm hoping the duck detective games get harder.
01:29:02
Speaker
I bet they will. I bet they will. Aw, I love Doctor. Aw, Doctor, Doctor. Love that game too. All right, do you have anything else to say about the game before we move into ranking every adventure game ever? No, I think we did it. I think we talked pretty well about the cases. Here's the mistake we made, though. Little idols. We made a mistake?
01:29:25
Speaker
Yeah, because we um because we ah sent people ahead to Swanky Max Amino, we're gonna have to do our housekeeping after Housey Keeparino.
01:29:59
Speaker
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Save Your Game. I'm pushing up roses. This is my co-host Matt Aucamp. Hey. And we need to do some wrapping up of this gift that is ah this episode.
01:30:13
Speaker
Yeah, but we kind of like, we didn't think when we sent you guys ahead into the future. Sorry. Oh, we usually do this. We usually do wrapping up before, but you know what? Here's the thing. I think everyone fucking loves the ranking segment. Oh yeah. We've got no complaints about it. So maybe we don't have to worry about people turning it off midway anyway. Yeah, maybe not.
01:30:38
Speaker
yeah But okay, all right, so. So yeah, we're going to wrap up here before we do our beautiful ranking every adventure game ever made. We just want to say that we are a part of the Adventure Game Hotspot Network. You guys should go check it out. For all of your adventure game loving needs, my co-host here, Matt, is a writer over there. You should go read his reviews. Nominally. Nominally. It's been a long time.
01:31:05
Speaker
But whatever, you should go read them anyway. We also have an email that you can yell at us at. Yeah, it's mattandrosesatgmail.com. ah Yeah, yell at us about anything we're wrong about, but be nice. ah But be nice and you're yelling. Thank you. Tell us how much you love us, because we actually prefer that, to be honest.
01:31:27
Speaker
Hey, I prefer love over hate. Oh, it's weird, but yeah. It's a weird thing about us. I know it's um both of our therapists say how weird that is, but. Yeah, my therapist is always like, you are way too dependent on love. You need to be more dependent on hatred. You need to be dependent on hate. You should let more people hate you is what they most most therapists say to most people is what I've heard.
01:31:52
Speaker
Yeah, i get the golden idol and put the hate in instead of the empathy you put in the hate. Yes.
01:32:01
Speaker
um but yeah yeah no or you know give us Send us questions. It'll be a little while until we do our next Q and&A segment, but ah if you've ever written us before, you know that we save them. and ah you know We get to most of them, I think. We do. We get to a lot of them. We really do. We can't get to all of them, but we I think we get to more the next like well more than half. Yeah, I agree. So yeah, email us is the point. And now, shall we dive in to our
01:32:33
Speaker
special ranking every adventure game ever made? By the way. Yeah, let's rank every adventure game ever, yeah. Related to this, somebody sent us an email, speaking of email, no, no, no, sorry, my bad, strike that reverse it, not an email, Instagram comment saying that we should actually take off land of the... I saw that. We're gonna leave it for now, but I see what you mean, commenter. I get it, I totally get it.
01:33:02
Speaker
you're not wrong You're not wrong. It's just that I think it's going to be so funny to watch it drop over the like over the months and years that we do this show. Just get lower and lower. like Nothing's ever going to go below it, right? We're going to have some of the worst games you've ever seen, and they're still going to go ah above this fucking game.
01:33:23
Speaker
Yeah. And we're going to make fun of it and you denounce it every chance that yeah that we get. Yeah. So stupid. So stupid. I can't, what I can't believe is that they stole a bunch of assets and still managed to make one of the worst games. Like ah you cheated and still did bad.
01:33:48
Speaker
ah Oh, so here's what I wanted
Game Reviews and Rankings
01:33:50
Speaker
to tell you. I played a game that we ranked. You did? um i played Well, and I didn't finish it, but I played the Slaughter Act one. um And I don't know if I wanna move it.
01:34:07
Speaker
it's I, here's the here's the reason why I don't think it deserves to be at number 10 anymore. ok It's so slow. There's a lot, there's long cut scenes, a lot of like very long cut scenes. Some of the longest cut scenes I've ever seen in the game. a Very long winded dialogue and the characters literally just move slow on the screen. It's very frustrating for these reasons, but
01:34:38
Speaker
It is fucking gorgeous. It is such, yeah such a beautiful game. it really yeah And even though ah the dialogue is long-winded, it's all written really well. Like this guy is a phenomenal pixel artist and a phenomenal writer. And so like, yeah, I don't want to bump him down, but we'll see. We'll see you when I get further into the game. and ah because it is a little grating. I mean, also, we have so many more ah games to rank that, you know, things are gonna just move around naturally. bump down eventually. Yeah, you're right. We're we're we're ranking them in terms of ah how they relate to the other games on the list, not where they deserve to end up. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, i you're right.
01:35:28
Speaker
I know. All right.
01:35:32
Speaker
Okay, so I want you to give me a number out of six. Five. Okay, ah so number five.
01:35:46
Speaker
This one's going to require some work because I didn't, five is the only one that has some blanks on it. Um, because I didn't repopulate after our, after we just cleared out the whole list. Okay. So this one is number 2,576. It's by Dabster entertainment. ah Okay. From, uh, 2020 it's called S S T R.
01:36:11
Speaker
S. S. T. R. It's called S. It's called S. S. T. R. OK, I see it. I see it on Steam. It's a game. game may not be appropriate for all ages. I got to put it. Yeah. Oh, fuck. Yeah. Wow. Let's see my birthday in 1998.
01:36:37
Speaker
and Oh God, this is not a game that I would like. Yeah. How is it? Wait a minute. Matt, how does it have no user reviews that's row zero user reviews SST yeah what if we just put it at the top does he ke it as are what it's it's only five dollars it's like okay it seems to be the gameplay is you have like maybe robot arms and a little remote control yeah And you jump between, I don't know what it looks like, a scary reality and a not scary reality. Yeah, it says it's an escape room ah ah type of game. We have another game that's kind of lower that is like that. That I would tend to put near the bottom.
01:37:27
Speaker
Okay, in 2021, we have a comment from Free Flow on Steam. Unplayable. Tried this demo, that's my conclusion, you won't be getting any money from me. And then Breakba Break says, yes, I have to agree, the stupid game menu alone is reason enough to avoid the game. Vodkin says, same here, I broke my brain, too genius for the idiot like me to understand even how to navigate and adjust menu options. What was all that anyway? Darwin Prize in Studio. And Abyss24 says, no way I'll be getting this. so uh i don't know um okay it's gotta go pretty low then is it gonna go low or are we just gonna fucking skip it we could skip it this feels like a skip it to me okay let's skip it right like what is going on here take kit on air yeah okay yeah right like i don't even know how to rank something
01:38:19
Speaker
That has yeah. but's Yeah. All right. let good So ah this next one is number twenty five. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. From nineteen eighty four. Mm hmm. The company Datasoft. OK. It's called Dallas Quest. Dallas Quest. Mm hmm.
01:38:43
Speaker
So what it is, is it is based on the TV soap opera, Dallas. Sure is, oh my god. Number one. Who shot JR or whatever, that's the thing, right? Yeah, it is it is like Atari level graphics. It's kind of cute. What Dallas is?
01:39:05
Speaker
Dallas Quest is kind of, thank you. You're attracted to Dallas. What you're telling our listeners is you're attracted to Dallas. That's exactly what I'm saying. The actor who plays Dallas.
01:39:17
Speaker
um Yeah, it looks a little cute. ah I mean, here's here's what I'll say about it though. Yeah. When something is from this classic era, and it has this classic look,
01:39:34
Speaker
and literally nobody talks about it ever. Like, what does that say about it? No, I agree, I agree. ah So, it's yeah, it's got like, um ah really early, like, info-grams. It kind of looks like Wizard and the Princess.
01:40:02
Speaker
Yeah, maybe a little more, a little more advanced than that. Yeah. um I mean, it's gonna be too old to find like reviews, and so we're just gonna have to base it on like our fucking guts here. What are you- I would put this pretty low, because it's not, listen, it's not memorable. In 1984, we had games like King's Quest, so right we shouldn't be here. It's franchised, that makes it even worse to me. this Yeah, it'd be soft, yeah. People were really trying to soak this stuff up at the time. yeah right and they're and And people in our like, not everyone in our, not all of our listeners are gonna be of this kind of community, but people in the really heavy adventure game community mind these things constantly, looking for all the like, you know, hidden gems. And honestly, nobody ever, ever talks about Dallas Quest at all. No, never. It did come out for the Commodore 64, which is interesting, but even these, if you look at these screenshots, this text is nearly impossible to read. No, it's not good. It is it is a cash grab. Let's just call it what it is. And I think cash grabs gotta to go near the bottom.
01:41:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think you're right. Okay, so ah how close to the bottom are you thinking? Obviously not the last, because there is some character to it. um I think it's gotta go above like James Paris and the Fountain of Eternal Drunkenness, right? Yeah, I agree. Because that's one of those games that's like mining this era for entertainment in a way that I don't necessarily love.
01:41:56
Speaker
yeah but this is something of that era that I also wouldn't love. um So above James Paris is the fan, and above that is Blue Force. Okay, let's put it but of below Blue Force. Okay, okay, above fan, the fan, which we refer to as the game where you just torture a woman. That's all we know about it. That's all we know. ah All right, so all right, next up is 1247. This is the Book of Unwritten Tales.
01:42:28
Speaker
The Critter Chronicles. I haven't played that. Have you played any of the book of unwritten tales? I have not. Okay, so I'm sure we have a lot of fans in the the people that like point and click adventures who love book of unwritten tales. They are these point and click, these 3D point and click games. They're kind of clever. They came out in, um you know, the early 2010s at a time where a lot of point and clicks weren't coming out, so people were starving for them. Yeah. um And they're kind of funny.
01:42:59
Speaker
Now, the problem is they're boring. um And ah like they're they're just a little dull and the puzzles are just very much like, oh, you gotta go find three things. um They're just like very, very standard point and click puzzles. Now Critter Chronicles is a little different in Critter Chronicles. I've never beaten because it's so hard.
01:43:23
Speaker
Oh, okay, interesting. You play a non-verbal, well, he he talks, but he talks in like a nonsense gibberish language. Yeah. Little muppity sidekick of one of the main characters. He does look like a muppet. And Critter's probably the best character of these games, but this this game is really, really hard.
01:43:47
Speaker
um
01:43:49
Speaker
and i've I've never beaten it. and So i'm I'm inclined to put it in like the top third, but yeah not very high in that top third. Yeah, I would agree based on what I'm reading and what I'm seeing.
01:44:08
Speaker
And people love these games. People really, really like the Book of Unwritten Tales games. I think they're a little, I hate to use this word, but I think they're a little overrated maybe. um But I don't know where, I would put it, okay, all right, just to give us a starting place. I would say it's below been there, damn that. Because that's a point and click game that I really enjoy.
01:44:35
Speaker
yeah Uh, to give us another point, I would put it up above like Lily looking, I'd put it above midnight girl. I would put it above mid midnight girl. Um, so then we, uh, between midnight girl and Ben there, Dan, that we have clay man, amnesia, rebirth and wave tail.
01:44:56
Speaker
I would actually put it above all those because people like it, because it is a very structured point and click. Yeah. It's well made. It's definitely well made. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and people have a lot of fondness for it. So, okay. I can see that. Yeah. All right. Our next game is from 2020 by Cunningham games. I don't fucking know. It's called long count. Long count.
01:45:25
Speaker
It looks like an indie game. You can find it on itch.io and on Steam. It's like three bucks. um Looks like it's a maybe a little Gabriel. It's got a very fan game look to it. And it looks a little Gabriel Knight or um ah Broken Sword inspired, not in its art, just in its like the themes that it seems to be going for. There are no user reviews for this.
01:45:55
Speaker
ah There are some on itch.io. Oh, okay, that's good, that's good. ah I think this person's maybe just like part of this indie games world. Yeah, it's certainly just like a fan made indie game. So i give I give it props simply for that. Yeah, yeah it looks a little amateurish. Well, they're doing an interesting thing here though, where They have, this is a very weird thing. Okay, so the backgrounds are, it's like photos. h And then the next layer, the foreground is 3D art. right The main characters that you play are hand-drawn art rendered in 3D.
01:46:55
Speaker
Yes, it's weird looking. And then some of the background characters are just like pen and ink drawings. Yeah, and it's very clearly, very clearly a Gabriel Knight parody. You think so? Yeah, I mean, I was thinking, I was thinking. Did you watch the trailer on Steam? I did not. Is it very Gabriel Knight? It is Gabriel Knight.
01:47:24
Speaker
It is Gabriel Knight, that's what this is, yeah. No, it is Gabriel Knight. But like if you watch the trailer on Steam, it's like day one in blood. a Guy wakes up from nightmares in a book shop with a newspaper. It takes place in Germany. Okay, here's another knock against it. The ah narration,
01:47:46
Speaker
but so I can't believe this, is done ah with an AI voice. It's like i got it that it is it is it is is like this I wish I you guys could these fucking nightmares are getting worse and worse darn not even coffee available what boy what kind of books I guess I should get myself an assistant this is getting out of hand Nope, I gotta knock it, it's gotta be bottom five then. I can't be bottom five, because okay, if it was being written with AI, it'd be bottom five. But that is, the voice talent is AI, puts it below, I put it in bottom third for sure. But it's it's grabbing from an already existing story and game. Okay, that's true. ah Okay, but I'm gonna put it, I'd say bottom third,
01:48:34
Speaker
All right, fine. But, because we don't know that the story's the same, we just know that it's going for the same vibes and some of the same like, it's it's taking heavy inspiration. It's pretty heavy. Here's what I'll say. I would say it goes ah below Violet, but ah above Minecraft's story mode.
01:48:55
Speaker
We can sort of develop Minecraft simply because this is more, it's still an adventure game. And it's done at a passion. Sure, yeah, sure. This person clearly loves this stuff, and I love how they are creative enough to think, oh, I can't draw background, so I use a photo. Oh, ah I...
01:49:12
Speaker
Like I ah can't do people that well in 3D, so I'll draw them and put them, I'll just like stick them in the back. Like the fact that they've done so much innovative shit to try and make their vision come true, like is interesting to me. Okay, bear. um Okay, all right, next up we have, this is from 2003 by Lexis Numerique. It's called Missing Since January.
01:49:39
Speaker
We are just getting weird games this time, man. Oh, this game. It's called In Memoriam, I guess, originally. And in the US, s it's called Missing Since January. I have this game. Whoa, really? I do. I have this game. I have it on CD in my collection somewhere. Have you played it?
01:49:59
Speaker
I have played a little bit of it when I first got it. um As you can see, my response is not very enthusiastic, so. It's not on Steam. um
01:50:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it was in the EU, it was published by Ubisoft, and in yeah the US, it was published by the Adventure Company, which we've already talked about. Yes, the Adventure Company. It's very hit or miss. Yes, it is. Man, they'll just publish anything.
01:50:29
Speaker
Um, yeah, I do remember this game. Hey, jerk. Listen, jerk wheat on Metacritic gave it a nine out of 10. So I don't know if you're going to go against the prestige of jerk wheat.
01:50:44
Speaker
It's kind of, yeah, I mean, who am I to to question jerkweed? It's honestly really cool. It's got like live acted parts. it got It has mystery part. It's certainly a game I would have gravitated towards as a young like computer gamer. I don't know how well it aged. Yeah, is it the sort of thing where it's like a cool idea, but it didn't sort of work.
01:51:15
Speaker
I don't know, and like right now it's it's very rare and hard to run. yeah But I do wanna give it some props. Looks like there's a lot of password finding. yeah you like You watch a video. it's It's almost like, it almost like, it feels like this could have inspired something like her story. You know what I mean? Interesting. Yeah, it looks like, yeah. like they They do a lot of very similitude, right? You watch a video and then you have to like enter a password that you discovered in the video or like like you get an email yeah that you have to... like that's There's something interesting about that, right? I think so too. i just I don't want to put it too low.
01:52:06
Speaker
Like clearly this, yeah, clearly this wasn't like anybody's favorite game, but like there's there's interesting ideas and they're like, as I'm clicking through, there's like, you have to read articles and you have to read emails and watch videos and you have, like that's fucking interesting. Like I love that sort of put you in the world of a detective kind of stuff. But I don't know, where do you think? Top half maybe, but. Top half-ish.
01:52:37
Speaker
There's gonna be other games better than this ah is my is my thing. Oh, right, like this might have inspired some shit that's better. Yeah. Okay, all right, here's some, here I'll put two markers out there. Where would you put this in ah in relation to either the seventh guest or murder, she wrote? I'd put it probably below both of those. Whoa, okay, all right, all right, then let's, I'll come up with two more markers. Where would you put it in terms of ah
01:53:09
Speaker
Long count.
01:53:13
Speaker
And Randalls Monday. Above both of them. OK, so we're looking around Krabat and the Secret of the Sorbian King. You're putting this in the ah maybe I don't know if you're doing this on purpose, but you're at this is landing in the mediocre block.
01:53:30
Speaker
That's fine. I'm fine with it for now, being in the mediocre block. As we go, the mediocre block is going to move around. and I think it's ahs slowly becoming not just the mediocre block, but the mediocre block and like medium quality block. yeah right like this looks This isn't mediocre. this is not This doesn't appear to be a mediocre game to me. right It appears to be a medium quality game.
01:53:55
Speaker
right i agree um all right all right all right here's our last one of today because we skipped one and i'm so excited this came up this is number 3006 okay this is from the uh year 2023 oh shit this is a game by run disk known as chance of zanar Oh, you love that game, don't you? This is fucking top 10. Chance of Sinar is so good. and ah So I don't know if we've talked about it on the show before. We probably have. We definitely have. And you've explained the gameplay to me. It sounds amazing.
01:54:38
Speaker
Yeah, you basically, you go around for people who maybe haven't heard those episodes, you go around and in these really brightly colored, really stylized 3D locations, you're like a little monk, and it's based on the myth of the Tower of Babel. And you basically go around and you're solving a language based on... um visual cues and things like that. And you're like feeling in pieces of language in a book. um And as you feel those pieces of language in, now things you read or things people say that are involving those words are
01:55:14
Speaker
in English so that you the, or whatever, you know, probably if you play it in French, it's in French, but whatever your language is. And it's it's really good. there's It's held back by a couple of things. Like there's some stealth segments that are really, really shitty. um And some of the solutions are guessable rather than deducible. And that can be,
01:55:41
Speaker
a little deflating, but I think it's one of the fucking best games of the past five years. Yeah, I think this is definitely top 10. I'm going to make a plea. Okay. For this to go above Fran Bow.
01:56:01
Speaker
You can argue it if you want, but I think- No, I won't argue it. This game has some really interesting gameplay where Fran Bow has kind of, you know, we liked the gameplay, but it is basically just point and click. Yeah, that's why I'm not going to fight it, I think, because I think that makes sense.
01:56:22
Speaker
And I think they both say something really interesting. I think Chance of Sinar is saying something really, really interesting with what it's doing. And it's got like a really a heavy point and it tells its story as much through the gameplay as it does through the narrative, which is always something that's impressive. Now the last door, I know we both loved that. So like, love that if this was my personal list, Chance of Sinar would be above it.
01:56:50
Speaker
above the last door. It would probably be above Portal 2. To me, it would be below the last door. Right, that's what I'm saying. Because this is our list, I would say, let's put it at number four, right below the last door. Okay, that's fine.
Episode Conclusion and Feedback
01:57:08
Speaker
Do you like that? Yeah, that's fine. All right, so we have 72 games on our list so far. We're getting there. We're gonna fucking- We're fucking there! We're gonna get to the end of this shit one day. Oh my god.
01:57:20
Speaker
Also, people seem to really, and email us about what you thought, because people, so far, all the feedback we've gotten on our full ranking episode has been very positive. Oh, good. I'm so glad. I'm so glad you're here. So if you're a person who hated it or skipped that episode because you were not interested, just let us know. Doesn't mean we won't do it, but I just want to know if it's as universally positive as we are hearing. ah What else do you have to say before we get out of here, Roses? Keep a lookout for my toilet decals and for my next movie, A Yucky Princess Swap. Swap, a movie about incest and romance.
01:58:15
Speaker
two words that should not be in the same sentence ever. um It's very story-oriented, It's a very story
01:58:29
Speaker
Do you have anything else to say? I think I've said what I need to say here. Do you have anything else to say? No. ah ah the only i The only thing I have left to say is that podcasts is kind of art.
01:58:43
Speaker
and art is definitely
01:59:07
Speaker
And art is definitely supper.