Transcript
Speaker: How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake, and I'm joined by my co -host is always Dave. How you feeling tonight, Dave? Currently feeling razzed. Razzed? Like you got the razzmatazz in me, you know? Does that convey? What is that stronger weak against? Razzed. Strong against blueberries, obviously. But mixed berries of flavor, so I might have shot myself in the foot there.
Speaker: Yeah, I would have also accepted. I don't know if like the protagonist, the Psychonauts has any weaknesses. I know he's a psychic type. I mean, water. Water. Oh, canonically water. I can't remember what psychic's weak to. Is it like metal or fighting or something? I want to say it's grass. Hmm.
Speaker: It's grass or bug. It's something like weird. Like, okay. Cause like it's so much of like, uh, ethereal, it's a concept more than anything else. Um, it's made up as like, uh, bugs, bugs, fuck them up. Okay. I like that. Um, you mentioned grass at first. I was like, ah, yes, psychic is weak to psychedelics. It makes sense.
Speaker: I was able to read minds. Now I can read the universe. Oh, geez. That's a lot to read. You beat them by giving them sensory overload. Ah. I've been there. I have been there. Have you been assaulted by the paparazzi, is that what you're saying? No. I'm not famous enough yet, but we're working on it. If this podcast thing ever takes off, then it just flies. I'll be fine. This is the short of it.
Speaker: Um, yeah. Well, that's good. Glad you're doing well. And you're razzed. Are you also razzmatized? I am, uh, tired. I don't think that's a feeling though. Let's see. It's a state of being. That is true. Uh, I think I'm, I think I would be happy. Probably happy. Your mood is happy. Hmm.
Speaker: Well, let's change that. Step one, talk about the game.
Speaker: I mean, we can jump in. We can answer. It's up to you. I've got nothing but time. Time and emotions. And a underdeveloped critique of a video game I played very recently. Do you want to tell everybody when you completed this game for this recording? Sure. So we're recording this in the evening. And I completed this game at 4 AM the previous night.
Speaker: Then I woke up for a meeting at 8am the following morning and I'm here. So the tired thing checks out. The alibi now has a justified backstory makes sense. It tracks. Yeah. I'm glad I've proven myself, you know, I mean, I have a little dedication. I haven't proved my razzness at all. Yeah. Mm hmm.
Speaker: Well, we'll give you opportunity through the course of this. If you get like increasingly excited as we delve into like a darker subject matter, that's like you can prove it. But I don't want to confirm any sociopathic bias that I have against myself. This would be a great episode for it though. If you did, this would be a perfect time.
Speaker: Maybe we'll save that. That'll be the question for the episode. Do we reveal ourselves as sociopaths through the course of this game? I'm saving that for Dave, episode two. OK. Gosh, yeah. The second Dave. The real Dave. Would the real Dave please stand up? If I had worked that better, that would have been a good transition. I didn't even think of it.
Speaker: So we're talking about Omori tonight. This is a game that I had heard some good things about, saw some brief things about the art style, heard some good things about the music. And I said, one day, I'll check it out. And I got it on sale on Steam. And then I played through it, just doing a single player game. So I did it over a weekend, a couple of days. You beat this in a weekend? Yep. That's a lot of time. Yeah.
Speaker: I don't fuck around, son.
Speaker: I was just kind of hooked. So it starts out like super cutesy and fun RPG. I really like the, it's kind of like a crayon or pen art style. Yeah. Like drawing. Yeah, very drawn. But it shifts between like a couple of pictures that are very similar, but it gives it like a little animated effect.
Speaker: Yeah. But it's really cool. And they'll do that for like your character portraits and then like enemies you fight and stuff. And I just love it. Yeah. They have a lot of detail in the battles and whatnot. And then a couple like video clips, short video clips, not like a lot of frames, but.
Speaker: really reminiscent of like older style manual hand -drawn stuff. Basically, I think like Cuphead, but if they had like $30 ,000 less to spend on animation, it's still really good. Like the art style is amazing, but Cuphead animated every frame of everything. And this is like, let's do five frames. No, I was... Instead of making comparisons to Cuphead, I was going to say, do you guys remember Take On Me? Do you remember that song? Oh, it is that. It is literally that.
Speaker: I mean, Take On Me was much, much more limited in budget. I saw, this is a complete diversion, but I saw a recent YouTube video that was like Take On Me, but they replaced the drawn guy with like the sidekick from the new Transformers movies. I don't know who that is. He's just there. I'll have to find it and send it later.
Speaker: Um, doesn't really relate, but you could just fill in, you know, a side kick type character. Um, but yeah, Amore is a RPG game. It is literally made in RPG maker. So, you know, it was meant to be. Yeah. Apparently at some point they updated the version, but it's been in creation for a long time created by Omo cat is the name of the.
Speaker: the studio and the person. But she's been working on it for seven years. They did a Kickstarter, which was funded in a day, and then they ran out of money and like sold merch to finish the game. Oh, damn. Yeah. Well, I mean, for what it's worth, the game is pretty fucking polished. Yes, absolutely. There are definitely some things I've played that have like the feel of like. You definitely know it's budgeted.
Speaker: Like, oh, we'll focus more on just like the story elements and then like other things might drop as far as priority. And I think that's important in game design too. Like in game development, you need to be able to be like, hey, this feature, we're going to be working on this for four months and like we'll have some checkups and depending on where we end up with this, like we will or we're not include.
Speaker: The idea is to prototype really rapidly and then scope based off your prototypes, what you can actually finish. I get the impression that was not the design for this game. It was very much like a labor of love anywhere that detail felt like it should be like added. Oh, my cat like absolutely did. And a lot of it I didn't see.
Speaker: But it's still, you know, games like this are created because people create games for themselves and their own ambition. Selfish bastards. I got you. Yeah. Like when they pour themselves into the game and they're like, this is my vision and I'm going to see it through then. Yeah. It can put you in situations like that.
Speaker: I'm glad it got made. Um, cause a lot of times those games do not get made. If you're like, it has to be perfect. Looking at you star citizen, but moving targets are a real, real pain in the pain in the Dick.
Speaker: You know, like I said, definitely a labor of love. Do you want to quick kind of go over like the game description so people can kind of get a feel? Sure. So I have two descriptions and then I've got some Steam tags for us. So this is the game description is provided on Steam.
Speaker: Explore a strange world full of color. Colorful. That's a hard word for me to say, apparently. Friends and foes navigate through the vibrant and the mundane in order to uncover forgotten past. When the time comes, the path you've chosen will determine your fate and perhaps the fate of others as well. That's it. Okay, so I got you. Yeah, not a whole lot there. Now for the mature content description.
Speaker: The developers describe the content like this. Hmm.
Speaker: That feels like a bit of a juxtaposition. Yeah. And that second part is longer than the first part. It's worth noting. Um, I think this is literally the first game I've seen where the content description is longer than the game description. I don't check game descriptions, but I'm going to just back you on that. Um, a lot of them don't have content descriptions or it's just, just the epilepsy one. Um, yeah, like I was saying, like the game starts out like,
Speaker: I mean, there's a brief initial thing that kind of has you going, what's the game? Or it starts out with some text and some loose lore. But it's very much something that you immediately kind of store away because the game just drops you in like, hey, here's a cute, fun RPG world. It's you and your friends. And you're in a play room. Not that young, but youths. And then you're going out to explore. Yeah, that's a good youth age.
Speaker: And they're like going out and exploring, like having adventures in the playground and the forest and stuff. So like right out the gate, they're like, Hey, ignore that other thing that we just, we just said, it's not important right now. Right. It's like the cute fun stuff. Uh -huh. And it's, it's really fun and upbeat and bright and engaging. Um, and it really gets you in the jam for like, Oh, it's fun. RPG stuff. Right. Yeah. It's very clear. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Well, I don't want to like ramble the whole thing, but, um,
Speaker: No, you can ramble. I'll make it up. Don't you worry. See Jake for the second half of the episode. As I flip the hourglass. That's what we need. We need like the sands of time.
Speaker: But basically, the first two hours of the game are kind of tutorial. You're going through the RPG stuff. It's all fun and upbeat. And you're meeting colorful characters. And you're kind of getting invested. And you're learning about the combat, which we'll come back to because it's more in -depth.
Speaker: and you're going through with your friend Basil, who likes to take photos, and he also likes plants and flowers, and he's saying, oh, you remind me of this plant because of this reason, et cetera. Yeah. And it's very wholesome, right? It's incredibly wholesome. These are the nicest people. Even the jerk of the group is nice compared to anyone in real life. Yeah. It's just all really sweet. It's like, I appreciate you because of these qualities, which
Speaker: I don't think people say enough to each other for your rugged good looks. Then after you're looking at some of the photos that Basil took of your friends, of going through down memory lane,
Speaker: there's a photo that falls out of the photo album. And then Basil looks at it and then becomes kind of terrified. And his profile picture or his icon becomes very dark. His eyes become kind of red. He sees something haunting and immediately takes a turn from like the bright, colorful crayon drawings to like, oh shit, what the fuck? And then there's like a very quick snap to
Speaker: it actually does give you a flash of something. If you actually freeze frame it, I only got this from a YouTube video. If you freeze frame it, it actually does show you one of the other pictures briefly. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. And then you kind of immediately get flashed out of that world to like you awake in your bed.
Speaker: Yeah, and this is very much, I'll reiterate, this is like the minor spoiler territory. We're going to do a deep dive on some of the nonsense this game has later. But we're just talking about some of the opening stuff. I think that that's around the same line. I was going to go through Steam tags real quick here. That covers Story Rich. We started developing a story by dropping you straight into it. Indie, we already mentioned it's made an RPG maker. There you go. Good enough. RPG, again, RPG maker.
Speaker: And then psychological horror. And this is the reason I think that we're still in minor spoiler territory is like it's the first tag. That's not I did these in a different order than they were listed on the page. The first tag for this game is psychological horror. You'll see it. It's it's going to be there. So.
Speaker: Yeah, but they they do a good job of either much of us ready to say masking it or just shifting your focus away from it. So it's not constantly there. Yes. But in a meta narrative point, it kind of does that intentionally as well.
Speaker: Would you agree? I think we're going to elaborate on all these points later, too. Yeah, I mean, the game is a seesaw, essentially, of balance everything out. Here are the highs, here are the lows, hanging out with your friends, and then the heavy stuff. And then things are falling apart. And there's some other games in this space I think you could kind of compare it to for that. And I think we'll circle back with comparisons.
Speaker: For the most part like this opening section of the game is a lot more focused on Having fun with your friends. Everybody's nice even like the first bad guy is The boss is who he's called. He's like kidnapped Basil And you have to fight him and It's not a particularly hard fight. The game starts out like pretty pretty easy in combat I think it's fair to say
Speaker: Oh yeah. Um, but like literally after the fight, Basil's just like, like trying to like reconcile the group with the boss and be like, he was actually protecting me during the fight and making sure I didn't get hit and all this other stuff. Like it's Saturday morning cartoon care bear style, like affection between a lot of these people, even the bad guys. Um,
Speaker: That doesn't last. No. Because basically, as I said, you wake up after that, quote, unquote, tutorial section. So pretty much everything that you've been experiencing up until this point is a fiction made up of reality. We don't really know the details of it too much, but we can tell that it's separate from reality.
Speaker: It has a welcome screen. We actually know it's called white space. It says welcome to white space. It's like one of the first things in the game. And white space, at least when you initially get there before you go through the door, is just like this void where you have like staging. Yeah. Load up for your job. Assets unloaded. Everybody's in T -pose on like slightly outside of the view screen. Uh -huh.
Speaker: Yeah, it's the game hits you with foreshadowing early on things, though. It's like, OK, well, before you go through the door, how do you how do you do this? How do you trigger going through the door? And like I've seen a play through of this, too, and it takes most people a little bit of time to figure out how to go through the door. You have to like run off screen.
Speaker: out of the standard area and like find a knife, pick it up. Okay, now you have a weapon, now you can go through the door. You've equipped your loadout for the mission. That's the thing though, like you grab this knife and then you go through and then like you're hanging out and playing with your friends. So like in combat, your friends have like, I think Kel has like a basketball or like a baseball or something. Yeah, he has a throw. I think it's basketball. It's either basketball or baseball.
Speaker: Uh, no, it may, it has to be a baseball because of a follow -up move. He has with Aubrey. Okay. So baseball Aubrey has like a big stuffed animal and then Kel has like a frying pan or some cooking implement. Yeah.
Speaker: It's all like these kind of like, not I guess zany, or just kind of like off the beaten path as far as combat. And then you have a knife. A knife. No. Who gave you a knife?
Speaker: But also your character Omori is drawn in like this black and white style. You don't actually have any color, but every other character does. Yeah, it's a very, very high contrast situation.
Speaker: Everybody treats you really nice. You say almost nothing, but your friends are all very protective of you. There's an early sequence where you're playing hide and seek, and everyone's like, okay, well, they're like, okay, you're it. Amore, you'll do the seeking. And then Kel, you close your eyes next to like, what's the, you hit a ball. Tetherball, I think. Tetherball, thank you.
Speaker: uh, tetherball pole and Kel stands on the opposite side of the pole, perfectly visible. Um, and you can talk to him and be like, Oh, he's like, Oh dang, guess I'll help you find everybody else. But if you like walk away from him without talking to him first, he's like, Amore, I'm over here. Like, come talk to me. And it's because he doesn't like, he doesn't explain this to you, but it's because Amore hates being alone.
Speaker: Yeah, it's super fucking wholesome. Yeah. Let's go through the kids. Omori is the protagonist character, the black and white individual we just mentioned. There is Kel, who is kind of like the
Speaker: You know the kid who has one tooth missing when they grin? That's that character. They're very upbeat and outgoing and sometimes a little bit irrational. A sporty, lovable scamp. Yes.
Speaker: There's Aubrey who is the young girl of the group. She has a stuffed animal but she's like really sweet and loves her friends. And then there's Hiro who's a little bit older and he kind of like looks after the group and he's also Kel's older brother.
Speaker: And he's a little more smart, sensible one. Yeah, he's the balancing. He keeps like Kel and Aubrey from like fighting each other a bunch. Then you've got Basil, who's like he's the most pacifist out of like everybody in the group. He's got literally a flower crown and art. And like it's actually the game's ambiguous about like.
Speaker: Uh, his gender, like at the beginning, it's just like, who is this person until they actually, you know, like. Gender him later. Um, but a lot of people apparently think, uh, it's a girl when you start. I mean, it's a fair assumption. The hair is a little bit longer, consistently wears a flower crown. So it looks like it's more effeminate qualities typically. Yeah. Um, and then, uh, Mari who's there at the picnic.
Speaker: Um, they're in the, um, the playground and she provides like a picnic basket, which is your save point throughout the game and some food stuff that you can eat to replenish your parties reserves. Yeah. So like in that starting area, I think it is just like picnic stuff, like fresh fruit and whatnot. Yeah. There's candy. Candy is what you get. Yeah. It's like, it says like delicious, nutritious candy or something like that.
Speaker: But like, throughout the game, she keeps showing up with like, as like a save point, you know? But she'll have like region specific food. So I think at one point, there's just like a jar of pickles. And depending on which character you're controlling as far as like the party leader, they won't eat the pickles. But Omori's like, okay.
Speaker: So it's pickles. Yeah, but like eating a food gives your party a full heel So you eat the food you stop at the picnic basket to save and then you take a break because It's not all upbeat. Mm -hmm
Speaker: Yeah. There's, there's often an interactable there too, where like people will say on the picnic blanket and like have a conversation. Um, but it's, uh, yeah, like you said, it's not always upbeat. We'll get to some of that stuff later. We should talk about the emotions. We should write some of those things that we say that we're going to circle back to. We're in a constant circle. We're just, we're spiraling down.
Speaker: So, I think I briefly mentioned this on a previous episode with Gennaro because I was forced to extract some details about a game I was playing instead of just saying it was good. But the three emotions are happy where I think you have a higher chance to do crits and you're more evasive or no, you have a lower chance to hit people in combat.
Speaker: There's angry, which is definitely three syllables, and that is you will deal more damage, but also take more damage.
Speaker: And then there is sadness where you deal less damage, but also a portion of damage that you take will go into your juice, which is your banana for special abilities. And what's really cool about the emotion system in combat is besides having those effects, it will also update your character's profile picture.
Speaker: as it's animated so if you're happy like they have like a cheery yellow background and you see like a sparkle in their eye and there's also different stages of each emotion so you can be happy or you can be ecstatic yeah you can be angry you can be furious and just seeing those change throughout the fight is kind of i don't know i like it yeah no it is it is really cool
Speaker: Did you use the mechanics a lot through this? I did starting at the mid game because the game starts to ramp up in difficulty. It hits you with like a couple harder boss fights. And after like my first one, I was like, OK, rather than just like relying on consumables to manipulate emotional state for advantage, I'm going to put a little optimization into it. So. Pro tip skip ahead five seconds if you don't want pro tip. Happy.
Speaker: is the emotional state, uh, is incredibly powerful because a lot of characters get abilities in the mid game that play around happy synergies. Um, and it's really easy to make one enemy angry, which is the other part of it. It's a rock paper scissors for advantage. So which beats which, so, oh yeah. So happy beats, angry, angry beats, sad and sad beats happy.
Speaker: And the mechanic for that is like, if you hit somebody, if you are happy and you hit someone that's angry, you basically auto crit. Um, and the opposite is true. If you're hit by angry, it will be weak. It'll say like, it's a dull attack. Okay.
Speaker: Then you take less damage. And then for those amplified states, those are just exaggerated, right? So you'll do even more damage against angry. You'll take even less damage against angry if you're manic.
Speaker: I did not use the system as much as I probably should have because after like four hours in, I just forgot where I was getting by enough. I'm just hitting stuff with a stick pretty much. You can kind of just auto attack your way through it, then heal up after taking a lot of damage.
Speaker: But the one thing I really like about the combat outside of the emotions is the follow -up system. So after there's a separate meter at the bottom, which is just a numeric counter of 1 to 10, or I guess 0 to 10. So every time a member of your party takes damage, it goes up by 1.
Speaker: Right. And so if you have at least three, you can do a follow -up attack from somebody. So let's say Amori attacks, right? He has a chance for a follow -up attack or follow -up ability. Another one is just like attack again. You just stab him or you can trip to, I think, lower their speed. Yeah, lower their speed and hit him with another attack. It's not as strong as the double attack, I think. Yeah.
Speaker: And then each character has their own follow -up thing, but also it can depend on the other characters. So let's say Kel has – you want to do a follow -up attack after Kel has attacked. Basically, he throws something at another party member and then they'll each have a unique interaction with that.
Speaker: So you can throw a ball off of Omori, it'll hit the enemy, it'll also make Omori sad because you fucking chuck something at him. Right. But Omori can possibly for some of his abilities have advantages while in the sad state. Yes. So it's this really unique way of having those interactions. So it doesn't just feel like mashing the attack button.
Speaker: Yeah. And they're all unique. Like, I think several of them are just like, you know, get a bonus attack, have this person do a bonus attack. Um, but, um, others like often heroes, uh, follow ups for characters is to like give them health and juice. Um, so it could be good to like sustain making hero attack, but these are only available if you attack and you have some of that meter to spend. Um, so it's kind of like, uh,
Speaker: Sometimes abilities, you know, might be what you want to use instead of an attack. So you're forgoing that option. And that's where some of the tactics come in. I don't think it's crazy. Like you said, like there's not multiple difficulties to the game. Some fights are harder than others, but you can kind of autopilot through most of it. Um, but yeah, for the harder fights, it is actually really useful to engage with it. I think in my opinion, yeah, I think it was like four or five fights where I had to like,
Speaker: reassess my tactic of like okay we actually have to plan around this a little bit who's going to focus on like party healing or using items and then using those that extra meter at the bottom for either a follow -up attack or saving up for a big group attack.
Speaker: where basically you consume the full meter of 10, and everybody does an attack against the enemy, and it does a lot of damage. Also, it's a really cute animation too. Yeah, we kind of like turn towards the camera in their drawn state and then attack. Yeah, and Morrie has to kick that one off. It has to come back to him. It's been the full 10 maximum bar.
Speaker: But it's a lot and sometimes it's not always worth it. Sometimes you want to use somebody else's follow up to get a certain advantage. Oh, just some extra damage or a heal or maybe a status shift, something like that. Yeah.
Speaker: There's also a cute little development for the follow -ups throughout the game as they just get better at working together. And by the end of it, you already have a relationship with these characters. You think that they're probably really cool if you're like us.
Speaker: Or at least really engaging and so note like seeing their follow -up moves become better as they work better together Is like it's the it's the darn tootinist cute thing in existence Did that sell you guys So the one you described is like Kel will like throw a ball at Amore and then it bounces off it makes him sad bounces off and hits the enemy but like by the end of the game and
Speaker: He like throws the ball to Amore and Amore catches it and is like ecstatic because he caught the ball and like just runs up and like stabs somebody. So it completely changes it.
Speaker: The one I probably watch the progression of the most is between Omori and Aubrey, where after Aubrey attacks, she can do a follow up where if you pick Omori, she kind of just like smiles at him and just like a dot, dot, dot of like,
Speaker: She's kind of like, hey, what's up? And then he just kind of replies with his dots. And then I think he doesn't notice. Yeah. And the other one. Yeah. It kind of distracts the enemy. So then she just like hits the enemy quick as they're like distracted. But as it goes, like you see like he responds to her and it's like a kind of like a smile and it's just like this wholesome loving thing. But she still will hit the enemy because they're distracted. She hit them harder.
Speaker: eventually it reaches the point where she's motivated because Amore actually notices her. Yeah. Like the animation they use for it is like there's like a heart next to her when she like like a speech bubble. Yeah. I think on the speech bubble. Yeah. And then there's the dot dot dot for Amore.
Speaker: Um, but then later, um, there's the heart and then Amore notices her and it like turns into a thumbs up. And then the heart like kind of like, uh, has energy lines kind of coming off of it and she runs up and hits, hits the enemy even harder. And it's just, it sounds dumb, but you can tell like, by how excited we are describing it, that it's incredibly cute within the context of the game. Yeah, it's, it's super cute. Mm -hmm.
Speaker: And that's white space. There's a lot of the game that takes place in white space. A bunch of different areas, diverse map. How do we transition to the real world? Well, we'll circle back. We'll circle back to when you woke up. Because you start out in white space, but you wake up in your house. And I believe you wake up at nighttime the first time. I'm pretty sure that's correct.
Speaker: Yes. Um, and from here, the game kind of like begins a cycle of going back and forth and we can go into some of the events, but the, uh, the waking world is, um, far away town is what it's called. And you have the option to interact with some of your friends and do day jobs, which I think are pretty funny. Like do you remember delivering pizza? Did you do that one at all? Trying to think, trying to think.
Speaker: I want to say yes. If you remember like ill -eligible handwriting describing the houses that you have to deliver to, that's the job. I did not do this twice. Okay, gotcha. I'm going to describe it real quick then. You get three pizzas. They don't have addresses for you to deliver to. Instead, you get this note.
Speaker: that describes the house in like doctors would be like a port by how terrible this handwriting is. It's so hard that the puzzle for this part of the game is figuring out what the house is based off this description. It'll be like cans in the yard, green roof, whatever. And it's like actual work.
Speaker: But you get paid, and you can use that money to buy Band -Aids, donate it to a guitarist, or there's some other things you need to use money for, buy CDs. Yeah. The real world is very much the scaled down version of your imagination. Yes, absolutely. And I feel like it's safe to call white space your imagination. Yeah.
Speaker: So you're running the characters. You're like, oh, I've seen the dream equivalent of them. So you realize the mental projection is just kind of exaggerating certain features of that character. Right. Yeah, you can still have little skirmishes with kids in the playground. And combat is very scaled down as far as you hit. I think there's a few items, like Band -Aid dimension for healing.
Speaker: There's not as much, I would say, in the overworld. It's it's much more pared down. Yeah, because narrative things happen there more. Yeah, much more because your character, Sonny, which is their real life name or whatever player you choose to accept it, whatever player name he did of McPeanis pants, 59. Mine was Magnum. Give me six characters.
Speaker: Yeah, the six characters is why. Big wink. And not the gun. No, you don't. A gun! Neutral being.
Speaker: Yeah. It's pretty much just narrative stuff. You find out that your character and your mom are moving away in three days. Your mom's currently out of town on business, so you're very much in like an empty house alone, a bunch of packed up boxes. You're kind of fending for yourself pretty much. I think pretty soon we can make the jump to spoilers and just open the floodgates when you're comfortable.
Speaker: No. No. OK. All right. Disclaimer. We're now going to talk full spoilers. If you don't want to hear that, then just know I believe I can speak for Dave when we recommend the game. Unless with caveats, you want to throw caveats on there. I mean, the tags are there for a reason. The description is there for a reason. If you are somebody who's triggered by this type of content, be wary of it for your own mental health. Yep.
Speaker: I personally like feeling emotion from time to time very seldomly, but it's a reminder that I'm actually in fact not a sociopath. So it definitely is a fuel strip, but I enjoyed it a lot and I appreciate it for that.
Speaker: Yeah, I would second all of that. Um, no joke. The disclaimer is there because those things are present in the game. Um, so that all ahead. And the only caveat I would also have is the game's rather long if you don't want to play like an RPG maker type experience for a long time.
Speaker: That could potentially also be a turnoff. But if you're willing to put in the time, it is exemplary within its space. So recommend. And this is the off boarding pass for anybody who doesn't want to hear all of the spoilers as we lose our minds. Goodbye. And also thank you for listening to the Midpoint.
Speaker: Resume. Full spoilers. All right. All right. Just the cool kids here. Anyway. So basically, you're leaving town in three days. And you're kind of fighting for yourself. But basically, an old friend stops by who finds out that you're leaving town and sees the for sale sign in the house. And he's like, hey, we haven't hung out a long time. I'd love to hang out and catch up. The friend is Kel. Right? He's much taller now.
Speaker: apparently you haven't really seen any of your friends in I think at least three years. Yeah, it's several years. So everybody in the real life is much different from they are in the dream world. But basically Kelby and Kel and very like, yeah, let's go and do stuff. He's just so excited to like hang out and catch up. So he's like bringing you around to like
Speaker: His parents house, like you're helping him run errands and stuff. It's all very much just like. Like a hobby store, there's like a gaming store and you can play some games there, make some money if you want to get some of those activities we're talking about, but it's just hanging out. Right. Yeah. And your character doesn't really ever speak through pretty much the entire game. More or less the entire game. Yeah. Or at least.
Speaker: in dialogue in game. I don't think your character says anything. Yeah. There's a few times you get like decisions. There's not that many, but like, Hey, do you want to do this? Or in some cases, what do you say in response to this? Like, yes, no, but it's like a confirmation dialogue. It's not anywhere near like, ah, yes, I will use the philosophy approach to this problem or anything like that. It's much more toned down closer to a silent protagonist than Sonic the Hedgehog.
Speaker: And a good deal of your choices, I would say, are also kind of the less important ones are very much, oh, don't be a kidder. Oh, come on, let's do this anyway. So your choice doesn't matter because it's kids being kids type stuff.
Speaker: Yeah. But I want to say the key thing at this point is you find out pretty soon in the real world that Mari, who's actually Omori's sister, older sister, is dead and she has been for three years. Coincidentally, this winds up.
Speaker: So basically I feel like everything that's happening in the real world over those three days is very much like
Speaker: you kind of being dragged out of your house by Kel pretty much because he's so gung ho of wanting to not necessarily get the gang back together, but he misses his friends who he spent a whole lot of time with and cares about. But the gang kind of fell apart after Mari's death. And everybody's struggling with their own shit and just kind of dispersed versus staying together as a support system.
Speaker: Yeah, like Aubrey's with a group of delinquents and hasn't talked to Kel in basically the same amount of time. Hero was off in college. That's not how I coped personally too. People haven't talked to Basil in a long time.
Speaker: And Kel is honestly surprised if you do leave the house. He's like, oh, geez, you actually stepped outside because, you know, the protagonist, Sunny, in this case has.
Speaker: Not Magnum. We'll use Sonny. It really just hasn't left his house in like forever. And his parents aren't there, his dad's left. His mom like leaves him notes telling him what to do and otherwise... Do we know if his dad is like left, left or like... You find out later that he left. I'm just flipping that in. That is potentially a later, later game spoiler. It doesn't impact much, but it explains why he's not around. I feel like that kind of guy was like fuzzy info but didn't follow up on it.
Speaker: Yeah, because of events that happened several years in the past. Dad has left. So it is a lot to deal with. But yeah, Kel's like, all right, well, if you're out here, we got three days. Let's freak and go. My brother's showing up tomorrow. Let's hang out. Yeah, it's looking to be like a reconnection of a whole bunch of things. But this part of the story is told in pieces.
Speaker: because it's like, how many days do you have left before you move? And then after that day cycle ends, you go to sleep, you kind of reenter this dream world. And the whole narrative of the dream world at this point is,
Speaker: after that event that happened at the end of the tutorial where Basil saw like this horrible picture, which we don't really know anything about at this point, you kind of just go back in, your friends are in the room again like, hey, let's hang out and do stuff. And then you go to the park and you're like, hey, where's Basil? And you can't find Basil anywhere. So the quest becomes find Basil.
Speaker: Yeah. And this goes on for the game. And so that's what kind of gets you to go through like these different fantastical areas and do these other main quest side quests. The overall goal is to find Basil.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. You can talk to Mari. She has like her picnic set up all over the place. And you can ask her about like hints for quests. They're never terribly useful, but just a reminder of what quests are on is basically what it's fire for. And at the top one, there's always that one basil. Like this is, this is your main story. Find the boy.
Speaker: Save the world. Save the world. Yeah. Wasn't it something about hero in the original? Oh, no, that was the name of the show. Cheerleader. That's what it was. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. And there's, there's a lot of jumping back and forth. I think, I think it's safe to say you spend a lot more time in white space for sure. In the stream world, then hanging out with, uh, Cal above, but you catch up, you know, it starts to reconcile.
Speaker: Like day two hero shows up, um, in the evening and you can kind of like hang out and they have a, uh, sleepover, um, at Sonny's, Sonny's house. And later you can kind of, um, reconcile with Aubrey after some drama about like how her and her friends have been treating Basil. Um, they're jerks in short is, is what it appears to be. I mean, do we want to touch on why?
Speaker: Uh, sure. Yeah. I mean, we're, we're in spoiler territory. Let's go. Okay. So in the real world, um, everybody, obviously besides Mari is alive. Um, Basil has also kind of very much kept to himself. Um, cause they were traumatized by Mari's death.
Speaker: And at a point, Aubrey, who was also kind of dealing with stuff on her own, kind of reaches out to him and wants to hang out and study or just something. It's kind of awkward, intense. Yeah, she's trying to help him. And help herself, I'd say, in a way. She's looking for some of that reconnection with an old friend. And she finds his photo album, I believe. This comes up a lot in the game. There's many times you can interact with a photo album.
Speaker: I'll rant about that in a sec. But basically as she's looking through the photo album, she sees a bunch of old photos of them, specifically ones with Mari in it, that are all like marked up and kind of like scratched out. And she gets really upset by this. And she kind of flips out on them and calls them like a creep and a weirdo.
Speaker: and then kind of like gets in with this crowd and they all kind of like collectively pick on him because they don't understand why.
Speaker: That's the core part of the story too is that she takes the album from him. Yeah. That's one of the reason that like Kel and, uh, Sunny think that she's like particularly picking on him is because she's stolen the album. Yeah. But from her perspective, he's defacing these memories of this person that she really doesn't want to forget.
Speaker: And the photo album that is in the dream world is the same one that is in the real world. So all of those memories that you get to look through for like, Oh, we were having a picnic and eating watermelon falling asleep in the, in the sun. Like you still have all of those photos there. Um, but as you, as you're collecting some of the photos, you see like, there's a bunch of ones missing of Mari. Mm -hmm.
Speaker: And so you can eventually get those from Aubrey. A lot of this game is remembering, figuring out things that have happened in Sunny's past and facing some of that trauma.
Speaker: And, you know, at a point it's revealed like when most of them have met up, I think it's when you have all four that you can like enter the backyard and they have a moment where they kind of, they talk about what happened and, um, the sheep killed herself. Like that's the, uh, the revelation at this point in the game. And like, nobody knows why.
Speaker: Um, it was like the night of a recital she was going to have with, um, with Sonny where he was going to play violin. She's going to play piano and like her parents came back and like found her hung in the backyard. And that's, that's, you know, a big part of where the suicide disclaimer comes from. I say laughing and it's nervous laughter, not funny laughter. Yeah. It's.
Speaker: Cause basically you just know at some point that she died for a bit. Uh, you don't really know the details about it. And then when you find out that it was suicide, like part of the thing is like the group, they didn't really, there wasn't a reason of, um, so it's like really hard for them to reconcile that. Um, and again, just
Speaker: I don't know, loss and trauma and sadness in general. Everybody copes with it in their own way. There's not a, oh, have you tried this? This cheered me right up. And it doesn't work like that. So very much like the group, as we said, kind of like
Speaker: splits up in a way to kind of deal with their things individually. But as they're in the backyard together, they go up to the treehouse as well, and they're kind of reliving some fond memories that they have of when they were all together. Which is, I'd say at that point, it's bittersweet. A lot of the game feels bittersweet.
Speaker: she by far she's the topic that they talk about the most like when they're together and it's because they really haven't had that catharsis the ability to share their feelings as a group as the friend group that lost her um there's a couple like you mentioned the tree house which is an important one there's a sleepover at basil's later in the game which we'll get to and then there's the actual cemetery behind the church
Speaker: um where like people will talk about it and like hero actually has never been to her grave because so each of the in the emotions chart they actually have some foreshadowing uh so they show a picture of the emotions chart and kell is happy because kell is happy and he's coped by trying to cheer people up
Speaker: And Aubrey is angry because she felt betrayed when her friends pulled away from her, you know, after Mari's suicide. And Hiro is sad because he loved, like, romantically, was...
Speaker: Very much in love with with Mari and like it's very obvious in the scenes. They're holding hands They're gazing at each other affection. It's like the most yeah, like Plastered affection. They're very much like the the parents of the friend group. They're a little bit older They look out for everybody and like they're very sweet. Mm -hmm
Speaker: So he took it like particularly hard because he has no explanation of this person that he cared so deeply about would do this. And she cared real deeply about him too. Yeah.
Speaker: So it's naturally like after the context for this in the game is like you've spent time talking to them in all these lighthearted situations. Most of white space is like fighting enemies, looking for basil, but kind of getting distracted with fun things in the meantime.
Speaker: And all of it is helping you grow together as a team. And you get a feeling for how much they care for each other, or at least in Sunny's mind in this white space world.
Speaker: he perceived. Back three years ago, pretty much. Exactly. There's a little tidbit because Mari is in white space. She is there with the picnic table and at some point you learn the reason that she's there in the picnic table and she doesn't go out adventuring is because in his subconscious
Speaker: Um, Sunny is actually so worried about losing her again that he can't like risk her going out on adventures with the rest of everybody. It's just too much trauma for him to deal with. Oh, I actually never picked up on that. That's a good point. Yeah. Also with the emotions thing that I kind of missed that too. Yeah. It wasn't until I was literally staring at it and I was like, wait a minute.
Speaker: Or I saw it on Reddit, who's to say? I'll take credit for it. Also for your rugged intellect, wink. Yeah, I got them. So as you're going through white space, we kind of mentioned at the end of the tutorial, Basil kind of saw something haunting and it goes real dark, real quick. Dark from like an overall dark sense, not like screen goes to black. And that kind of just takes you out of it real quick.
Speaker: There's lots of instances as you're going to find Basil where you kind of have glimpses of something darker going on, something that's kind of haunting Basil and haunting Omori. It kind of is like an apparition to a degree.
Speaker: And in the real world, there's also kind of an equivalent of that, and that is called something. Yes, capital S something. I didn't forget the name of it. It's called something. So when you first wake up in the middle of the night in your house and you're hungry, you'd like to go downstairs for food, you're initially, you don't want to go down the stairs.
Speaker: Your character, your sprite just shakes his head like, not doing that shit. Stairs? Nope. So you know he has a fear of going upstairs with the dark, whatever, right? So he tries to go back to sleep, but his hunger wakes him up. So he goes back to the stairs, and he has to go down it, and the stairs just become infinitely long. You see these dark hands come from the shadows, and then you fight something.
Speaker: And this kind of happens like multiple times throughout the real world side of the game of basically you have this mental projection of something very dark that's haunting you and it kind of attacks you and you can't really attack it. The only thing you can kind of do in response is to calm yourself or persist or I'm forgetting one of the other abilities.
Speaker: Cherish is the focus is the first one. We'll get to cherish. That's the last one. Yeah. Calm down, focus, persist. I almost said perish. That's a different ability inside. Yeah. A voice tells you to, teaches you basically. Calm yourself.
Speaker: So the parallel there, I feel is back in white space in the imaginary world. There are some gates in the game world as far as, and these are like things like, oh, there's an obstacle. You need a key to go to the place. But in this game, it's, oh, you need to climb this ladder. I'm afraid of heights.
Speaker: Yes. Oh, you need to get through this forest, but there's a giant cobbler. I'm afraid of spiders. You need to swim across this thing. I'm afraid of drowning. Yeah. So you have these phobias, but the way you overcome each of these is by Mari saying, basically, she's giving you the motivation. Yeah. You can do it.
Speaker: Which just kind of reinforces how sweet and wholesome of a character she is. Which you appreciate more in white space and then when you get back to the real world you're like, kind of sucks that she's dead.
Speaker: Yeah, it's very much the case. And those are your traditional kind of like boss door gates into new areas. And it prevents you from losing yourself too much in the overworld. It opens up as you progress. But the other thing I want to touch on real quick is you're also playing hangman. All this is going on and that there's keyboard keys you're picking up.
Speaker: And if you pick up keys that fit into the phrase at the bottom, excellent, you're making progress. If not, then it starts to draw the hangman figure on the side, which is creepy because many things are creepy in this game.
Speaker: I didn't reach this failure state, but I looked it up afterwards. It's not like a game over or anything, but the figure that it's drawing hanging on the side is Mari. And I didn't realize that. I could have guessed that's where it was going. I didn't get that far into the failure state. But again, as we said, like Mari hung herself. So that's a pretty safe correlation there.
Speaker: And the keys are spread out, so you'll reach a certain part in the story when you are able to solve the final phrase. It's actually after Humphrey, this giant psychopathic whale that is a fun, it's an interesting, it's a very interesting area.
Speaker: Oh, yeah. All the areas are really interesting. The hump race is like, bro, what's going on? Yeah, it's very creepy. But do you remember the phrase? Yes. I did figure it out before I finished it, but it took me a bit. I think I need to get like 8 % of the way there. Yeah, I was down for four or five letters when I was like, oh, I think I know where this is going.
Speaker: One of the clues that they give you early is at the very beginning of the game, they say, welcome to white space. We've been here, or I've been here for as long as I can remember. The phrase that you spell out is, welcome to black space. So this game is about racial injustice. Yes. They should have tagged it.
Speaker: But basically, white space is your happy place. It's where you have your fun adventures with your friends from what you remember from three years ago before this traumatic event has happened. And black space is pretty much where all the dark, repressed, sad memories have gone. Yeah, it's basically that that's split. So at this point in the game, you can actually now go to black space, which you have been
Speaker: frequently avoiding. When you get the last character you see like a cut scene and it shows you Basil's house and there's actually some foreshadowing for this as you're assembling the phrase like the area in the center of the house grows darker and like a more you will remark like the floor is sinking and like the area around it becomes decayed.
Speaker: But yeah, once it's all done, then it actually opens up and becomes the passage to black space. You can jump solo down. Nobody else is following you there. Oh, it's also worth noting the shadowy figure is leading you in this direction by this point in the game. Yeah.
Speaker: Also, I think this is a pretty black space or in black space, but the apparition that's following you says, oh, Maury, I love you. I don't know if you remember that.
Speaker: But yeah, in the reason that nobody follows you into black space is because everybody in white space is in your imagination in the happy place. So they can't really exist in black space. Um, and they have no incentive to like, they're happy there at this point in the game that actually started to forget basil entirely. Um, and,
Speaker: Yeah, if you've reached this part in the game, then you're approaching the point where it's like, hey, you're invested in finding out the truth instead of sticking with the happy, naive, forgotten memory state. Well, it's only sort of happy. You still don't go outside that much and can't interact with humans, but true.
Speaker: How do we want to transition or build this up? Yeah, I don't know. It's really tough. Black Space is, I'm just going to describe the mechanics of it. It's a series of weird, trippy areas. You open doors and you find a key, and then that allows you to open a separate door. And the goal is to just open enough doors that you start to remember what the repressed memories are. I'm not going to go into detail on many of them. They're pretty short segments.
Speaker: but a recurring theme is you'll find Basil in a lot of them and Basil's always happy to see you and he's like hey let's just go back and hang out with everybody else now and sometimes he dies horribly like pretty bad and then you go to the next store and it's like Basil and he's like great happy to see you like let's go meet everybody else up and
Speaker: It's really clear that, uh, Sonny has a lot of conflicting emotions about what he's finding in black space. Um, but you gotta, you gotta find the truth. Okay. I can take it from here. Um, yeah, that's, that's the segue. So
Speaker: I'm going to take a step back throughout parts of the game, you kind of get little snippets of something outside of the happy white space. One of which is on the back of the photo that you see, you see a key on the back and written on it is like, don't forget it's in the toy chest, which you also find this photo in the real world up in the tree house, right?
Speaker: But basically, as you're in black space and you're going through these gates, which are metaphorical for unlocking these memories,
Speaker: you're finding photos for a different photo album, kind of similar to how you'd find photos for like the happy memories. These are all just kind of very dark grayed out black and white photos. And they're kind of vague for what they're depicting. They're very much snippets. Um, but after the first photo, I knew where it was going and I started to have, um,
Speaker: I don't know why it was that it just something clicked my brain is like, Oh, fuck. Um, there's too many spots here in this photo album. But basically, uh, at a point in the game, you have to, after you have all the photos, you have to kind of put them in the book in order. So the story goes as this.
Speaker: Amari is your older sister. You guys are practicing for a recital. Amari, you said Amari, which they're very similar. Amari, your older sister, and Amari are discussing something about the recital. And this is upstairs. And Basil is taking pictures of all of this so we have memories for whatever reason. But you and Amari get an argument, you get angry at her, and you push her down the stairs.
Speaker: like minor addendum here, like the, the violence thrown down first because, um, uh, Sonny basically snaps. He's over pressured that he doesn't think he's good enough for this concept, this recital. Um, and he's a kid, right? Yeah. I did a whole bunch of stupid stuff as a kid where you just, you get the instinct to like just break things. Um, this is my out, right? I'm just removing myself from the situation. Well, I'm actually going to say instead, I think it's more so like,
Speaker: it's having the power to choose something. So if I destroyed my Legos, I built the whole thing, but I'm destroying it because I can, like I can have impact on something, even if it's destructive, even if it's destructive to me. It's just kind of like, I'm going to channel this outlet this way. You can exert influence over your situation. Yes.
Speaker: So he smashes the violin and then he pushes her down the stairs. I think he probably just meant to push her. Um, but she falls down the stairs and dies. Yep. And then the other pictures are of, I think they carry her body upstairs to their room. Yeah. They try to call out to her and make sure that try anything basically to remove themselves from the situation, make sure she's okay.
Speaker: So Amore and Basil are obviously freaking out and crying and depressed. But then the photos proceed to basically Basil has the idea to say, hey, let's take her body outside. And you see photos of them carrying it to the tree and then they hang it up with a jump rope. So they actually stage her suicide.
Speaker: So basically the whole thing of your character and Basil repressing these memories is of obviously was an accident. It was not meant to be him killing his sister, but it's the whole, how do I say this?
Speaker: Basically, he can't cope with the reality of it. It's horrible, scary, terrifying, and he's just trying to distance himself from it so entirely that he creates this white space and impresses all of these memories.
Speaker: Meanwhile, Basil, who also was a part of it, feels awful because everybody loved Mari, every single character in the game. And he feels awful for suggesting that they kind of stage for suicide and they didn't take responsibility
Speaker: for what happened or they didn't tell anybody. Yeah, there's a few other factors too. He never accepts that it was Sonny that did this. He thinks there's something behind you that did this. He refuses to psychologically. Sonny is his best friend and Basil's been abandoned. His parents have left.
Speaker: He has a grandma in the early years and a caretaker in the later years after she falls comatose. And he's having a hard time of things. And Sonny's his best friend. And he just cannot reconcile that this is something that Sonny would do. So that's why he suggests this full cover up, because he doesn't want Sonny to get in trouble for something he didn't do. That literally comes up in the game. And that's depressingly sad.
Speaker: It's real rough. But also, Sonny's leaving. He's moving away in three days. And Basil's faced with this potential reality where he's kept this secret from people and had to live with it for so many years. And the payoff is that he's being abandoned anyways.
Speaker: Yeah. And it's also not like Sunny and Basil have been spending time together. Sunny very much kind of closed himself off from the world and everything. Didn't really go outside, didn't really talk to anybody. Which one of them hits the character because he doesn't talk throughout the entire game.
Speaker: One of the few things we know that he actually did is yet another sadness and that Sonny is the one that drew through all of the photographs. Oh, it wasn't Basil. It was actually Sonny because Basil actually mentions this in one of the later conversations where he's like, he says someone
Speaker: like, uh, drew through all of my photographs and like cross everyone's faces out. Um, referring like right in a previous line that someone killed Mari and it's like,
Speaker: Yeah, so it's very much his mental justification of that someone or something behind Sunny that has caused this. It can't actually be Sunny himself.
Speaker: So, I think on the last night that you're all together, like the day before or the night before you move away, like you're on good terms with Aubrey, Cal and Hero. You're all kind of like sleeping out in the living room of Basil's house. Yeah. They're over because his caretaker can't get him out of his room. Yeah. She's like, well, go hang out there as friends and just be there to support him, right? Mm -hmm.
Speaker: But then in the middle of the night, you as Sonny kind of get up and go to the bathroom and Basil's there. And he's kind of like mentally snapped at this point. And he's like, basically talking like, can you see, like, I still see it behind you. And he feels the need to like, destroy it or be destroyed because there'll also be something behind him.
Speaker: Basically what's been haunting both of you for all of these years, it's kind of come to a precipice and he's like, I have to resolve it or get rid of it in some way. So you guys kind of start fighting. Yeah. He's holding hedge clippers too. And this is like, this is crazy for Basil. Cause he, again, he's the pacifist. Like this is the only time in the game he's fought anything and he's fighting his best friend, but he thinks he's fighting something to free his best friend.
Speaker: Yeah. He actually says, I'll save you. It's the saddest exchange. I'm going to keep this in the word sad, but it's rough. It's really fucking feels -y. So just in general, recently I've been rewatching Attack on Titan. And I've had a lot of like, I'm not crying, you're crying moments, where I'd well up at things, whether it's like a positive emotion or obviously a lot of times it's just sad in that show. No spoilers for Attack on Titan.
Speaker: I don't want anyone to stop listening literally right now out of fear of Attack on Titan spoilers. But like the only time that I've really been emotional besides that in recent history is this game around this part. So basically, Basil takes your eye.
Speaker: And while you're - There's a showdown, yeah. There's a showdown with Omori. Yeah, this is after you go unconscious from fighting Basil, you kind of fight Omori, which is kind of like your
Speaker: avatar of repressed memories. So you basically - He's the god of light space. Yeah. You have to kind of defeat Omori to be sunny and move on and deal with those things. How does that work out for you?
Speaker: It's a rough fight because essentially it's the character you've built up throughout the whole RPG phase and he fucks you up and you are Sunny who again has very limited abilities. He's like controlled breathing. That's my specialty. Controlled breathing beats knife.
Speaker: And like the whole thing is it's drawn out and slow and like you have like five or six phases, I think of the Omori fight. Um, but you can attack. You can, I believe play violin that comes in later. That's after the, um, is that later?
Speaker: No, you're right. It's, it's available now, but yeah, they lock out a lot of ability or no, no, your standard abilities are available. Calm down, focus, persist, but later in the fight, like they just go away. Like they stop functioning. Um, I mean, I could be confusing these fights. There's two fights that are back to back. Don't hold it. Don't hold it to us in either case. Doesn't work out that well. Yeah. Um.
Speaker: As you're going through this, Omori is talking to you and it's basically the whole inner dialogue of at this point in the game, you kind of have to make a choice of do you want to tell your friends now that you've remembered what happened? Do you want to keep holding it in indefinitely as it eats away at you? So as you're fighting Omori, he's saying things like,
Speaker: like Aubrey loves Mari and you killed her. Kel loved Mari and you killed her. You loved Mari and you killed her. And a bunch of other things that like makes you feel like a piece of shit. It's basically the darkest thoughts you can think of in this type of situation.
Speaker: Yeah, you don't deserve to live. Your friends will never forgive you. Right. All the possible worst case scenario thoughts. But after that fight, you get a game over. But basically, like your character
Speaker: does persist on at that point. And you kind of wake up in the hospital because this is after you've had an actual literal fight with Basil. Yeah. And I think you have a choice at this point, if I'm correct. Yeah. So there's a group of friends go to the north and they're clearly white world or white space, white space friends. I was like, white world sounds wrong. West world. That's what I'm thinking of.
Speaker: White Space Friends. And then you see the shadow go to the south. And by this point, you know that the shadow is Basil. Also, there's a lot of scenes we didn't talk about that involve Mari incoming like to acceptance and her encouraging you and things, but that's fine. There's a lot in this game. It's over 20 hours. What are you going to do?
Speaker: But the choice is actually immediately prior to this. After you're defeated and you get the game over, you can either continue or give up, essentially, and either way you wake up. But if you give up, then
Speaker: Uh, then you've lost control of yourself in the waking world and it's a Maury. Um, and he'll follow the illusory friends to the north in this hospital room, which leads to a balcony and then jump off.
Speaker: And this is while, um, essentially, uh, sunny is in white space. Like they've switched places, um, and suicide, not a great end. In fact, the bad end. If you don't do that, if you choose not to give up, then even if you went to the north, um, sunny will shake his head. He won't jump off the ledge and you have to follow the shadow down to the south and into Basil's room.
Speaker: And if you enter Basil's room as you really, it's the only thing you can do at this point. Um, then they, uh, they look at each other for a second and, um, then it flashes to like a black vignette sort of screen. And there's the text which represents Sonny's dialogue. And he says, I have to tell you something to all of his friends that are standing around the hospital bed.
Speaker: And that's where the game ends. Unless you watered Basil's plants for the entirety of the game, then there's a bonus scene where they smile at each other and their individual somethings vanish. And then the game ends. It's a little extra happiness.
Speaker: which I feel like you need at that point. Um, you really do. Which is like, why wouldn't Jake said he finished the game at 4am and you had the message to be on discord and like, dude, what the fuck? Because I played that during the waking hours and I didn't feel great. Let alone like the middle of the night where you're alone with your thoughts and it's a dark, um, that would, that would talk to the end.
Speaker: But yeah, what did you think of the game? Did you have any impressions going in? So the gameplay is good. The music is excellent. You'll have heard two of the tracks by the end of this episode if you're still with us. Thank you, by the way. The graphics are great. The combat is good.
Speaker: not amazing, but I don't even care because I'm in it for the emotional investment. If they stripped the combat out of the game and just had mini games or something like that to maintain pacing, I would have the same overall impression, I think, because it's such a deep dive in an emotional field strip. How can I not
Speaker: I mean, I'm in agreement. It's like, we're the people that repped Undertale. What did you expect when we started talking about Amore? Well, I'm going to have to be my tagline. I rep Undertale, motherfucker. What'd you expect? I do think to place it in that space, I mean, like Undertale is the better game for me because it's more self -contained. It doesn't like.
Speaker: I'm going to say waste your time as much. That sounds kind of hurtful, but there's a lot of optional things that really don't matter in this game and you can do them, but it will just make everything take much longer than if you did the main quest. And I was in it for the main quest. Um, but I don't think it makes the game worse.
Speaker: I think Jake's a cheater and a coward. I enjoyed the side content. But yeah, there's very much a lot of stuff in there for what you'd expect an RPG RPG maker game to be for sure. It's still very much opt in. You don't have to do it. But to the game's credit.
Speaker: A lot of it's good. It's not shitty filler content. A lot of the optional content is very fun and engaging. It has really good writing for making all of the characters lovable or funny. I love all of the Pluto interactions. There's so many. We don't even have time. We're so far over time. It's 1 .78. I know.
Speaker: But like we're not even counting intro time. That's. But basically like it's still good side content. Yeah. So I would generally agree.
Speaker: Some disagreement. Jake doesn't like recycling. Recycling was fine because I was using cheat engine, and I was just like spamming my way through that in a million miles per hour. But also only cheat engine for speed. I didn't actually adjust anything other than the game run speed. But it's RPG Maker, and that's what they're asking for when they make an RPG Maker game.
Speaker: I specifically had a quest where I had to deliver a package to somebody on the other side of the world. And I ran it over there at cheat engine speeds. And then I got a consumable as the reward. And I was like, I'm done with side quests. Let's get back to main quests. Yeah, they're not always necessarily rewarding. It's more so the experience of it. You get a funny dialogue or something. Yeah. Very much optional. Most of them are good.
Speaker: Yeah, I it's still such a good game. Like you play it for the story. At this point, we've spoiled it. So I mean, like you probably didn't have any intent to play anyways. Buy it nonetheless.
Speaker: Yeah, it's to give them more money. It's just really solid. And I'm glad I didn't I somehow dodged all spoilers for it, which is ideal for something like this, because it's I'd say story is definitely the main focus. You did way better than our listening audience. This is the double edged sword of covering things. Right. The spoiler is also the experience. But if you already played it prior to this, maybe you can empathize with this. So good news. Yeah.
Speaker: It's good, though. It's it's a really good game. And if you like emotional games, there is a lot of that. We've already said the disclaimer several times, but I will say I've only experienced the good end. And with how emotionally invested I was in this game, I would be concerned to end it on like one of the bad ends or the one of the ends where you stay in white space.
Speaker: kind of just succumb to the dream world. I would not be as happy if I, you know, ended the game on that note. But it's not the responsibility of the developer to say this game must always have a good ending. So. I don't know, mixed feelings on it. Will not take points off for having bad endings.
Speaker: I give the game a 10 out of 10. Loved it. I'd give it 9 .9 out of 10. Yeah, gonna have a margin for air. Too many side quests. Yeah, it's...
Speaker: I don't know, it was just an all around good time for me and anything that can kind of subvert my expectations and make me feel something, always get strong points because I feel inundated by the media I ingest. I very much, for the most part, don't like re -experiencing something. Thankfully, it's been years so I can rewatch Attack on Titan.
Speaker: But it definitely a lot of things will feel samey. Like every time we should on AAA games, I'm like, oh, it's because they reuse this or it's the same thing with like an asset swap. So this was like a nice little treat for me. Just a really good time all around. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah. But above all, above the positive praise, above the negative praise, um, Omukat made the game that she wanted to make. And like, you, you can't doubt it while playing the game. Um, so shout out to Omukat. Friend of the show. Yeah. Friend of the show, Omukat. Uh, feel free to reach out if you want to join us for a future episode.
Speaker: But if you do want to reach out and join us for a future episode, I'm a cat. You can do so at soapstonepodcast .gmail .com. It might not be as long as this one. I don't, I don't think we're resuming like incredibly long form episodes. This is just, we couldn't stop talking about it. It's like anything that has a deeper lore or story slash a Dark Souls. Like that's what gets you past like the hour 10.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. Or farming simulator. Also a good one. Also a good one. Or you can join the discussion on Facebook at facebook .com slash soapstone podcast. And as always, we'll see you in the next one. Have a good night.
