09: Denied Your Clocks Again

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It is July 22nd, 2025, and this is not a dangerous expanse of wilderness filled with strange monsters.

It's Side Story, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by Friends at the table and supported by our patrons at friends at the table.cash.

I'm joined again today by the people who are here for the first episode.

And welcome back.

It's been a number of episodes since we've had this group.

Jack and Janine.

Yeah.

Hi.

Hi, Austin.

Hello.

How's it going?

It's the Outward Crew.

It is the Outward Crew.

That's the thing.

It's like, it feels like we haven't done the podcast together in a bit, but we have been putting out

Outcast.

Jesus.

Outcast.

We put our Outcast album listening podcast separately.

We've already got our our outward LPs, and I think that that's, you know, we're still doing that every week or every few weeks, every couple of weeks, except for this month where they've been, it was the first Tuesday, and it'll be the last Tuesday.

It'll be next Tuesday for the second one this month.

But how are y'all doing?

Good.

It's exciting to be back.

I feel like...

We started pushing the car down the hill when we started up a side story.

And then I went on both a work trip to Japan and then a vacation to Germany.

And then you broke your foot.

And then I broke my foot.

I'm here today to talk about Death Stranding 2, which we'll get to later, a game that I will, as a little teaser.

It's interesting to play when your foot doesn't work.

Oh, I bet.

You got to walk around a bunch in that game and like stumble.

Yeah.

Do you ever worry that Sam's going to break his foot?

Yes.

That would be dope.

I would.

That seems like a thing he should have put in that game, actually.

Yeah, I think he abstracts it.

And again, we can kind of talk about that

as we talk about that later.

How are you, Janine?

I'm good.

I've had some big accomplishments in life also.

Really?

What's your biggest life accomplishment lately?

My biggest recent life accomplishment is killing Dracula, Lord of Amperson.

He had it coming.

Finally.

He had it coming in a big way.

Someone's needed to kill that guy for a long time.

Technically they did, and I had to go back in time to do it again, but it's complicated.

Somebody's needed to put him to spicy sleep for a long time now.

Oh, God.

Someone's needed to unsubscribe to him on YouTube for a long time now.

I don't think Jack knows the spicy sleep.

I don't know about spicy sleep.

I know about

the new things with

the sleep.

Spicy sleep means the new unalive.

That's right.

I also just disagree with the premise.

Death is famously not at all spicy.

It's closely enough.

Spicy already has a use in censored internet speech.

It sure does.

and it's

not that's yeah different thing like if you say spicy handshake yeah you know that does not mean totally in the no coming back it kind of means the opposite thing it doesn't kind of mean like you lost your hand no it does not mean you lost your hand no no you're really blurring the the lines there in a bad way in fact uh anyway you killed dracula

The historic Dracula.

Yeah.

Historic Dracula.

Canonical Dracula.

There's no Dracula.

In In Transylvania, you do this in a video game.

Or somewhere else in the world.

I don't know where Dracula is these days.

I'm not keeping up.

I also went to Japan, and that's where Dracula is right now.

Dracula was in Japan?

Shit.

Dracula was in Japan in like the early 2000s, maybe, but I don't know if that's a good idea.

He was, I suppose, that makes sense.

Yeah.

I feel like now he's maybe in like South America somewhere.

That's the vibe I get.

That's the dragon from isn't he in like fake Germany from Nurseratu?

No, that's Nosratsu.

Nusratsu is not Dracula.

Different cut.

No.

Yeah, I unfollowed Dracula after everyone told me that he had done some stuff that wasn't above board.

So I haven't really been following the posts.

Yeah, he's kind of like a little bit problematic with women.

A little bit, yeah.

But just women.

And everything else is chill.

So.

A little bit of a stalker situation going on.

Sometimes he turns into rats, and I don't care for that.

Sorry, please continue, Janice.

And that reminds me, there's an achievement I need to get that I...

I was playing V Rising.

You just reminded me there's two achievements I wanted to get before I stopped playing it.

And one of of them is to be a rat and go in a little hole.

And I didn't know you could do that, and I need to find a little hole to go in.

There's some forms in that game where I just don't, I kind of don't understand the use case.

Right.

Rat is kind of good because it makes you small so you can hide in bushes from the sun a little easier.

That makes sense.

But there's like a toad form that you're supposed to be able to jump up on stuff, but like

none of the stuff I want to jump up onto, I've been able to jump up onto while being a toad.

So I don't fucking know.

V-Rising is for the person who has no idea about anything except you you can become a rat and a toad the form that of course dracula took famously which maybe that's true maybe i just don't remember that one uh game by stunlock studios uh it came out in

early access a couple of years ago more than a couple was it more than a couple yeah i guess so 2023 three

that's a couple right

now

steam to show me when i bought the thing great question i'm not sure but it came out it came out of early access

earlier this year?

No, it had to be earlier last year.

Last year, last year.

May 8th, 2024.

So about a year ago.

About a year ago.

And

that game is a sort of top-down crafting survival game, but with heavy action RPG elements, a lot of emphasis on, as you might imagine from our discussing, being a rat hiding from the sun, very flavorful systems, kind of really skillful combat challenges.

The studio previously made a game called Battle Right and Battle Right Royale, which were sort of

arena fighters with MOBA-style combat, which is to say, like lining up your shots and dodging incoming attacks and timing-based and reach, and like not recharge.

What's the

boy, timer, like a downtime timer in an MMO.

What is the thing I'm thinking of?

Cooldown timers.

And then like bosses in V Rising have like very,

you know, bullet hell adjacent stuff at the beginning to, for what I've seen, bullet hell style patterns by the very end of this game.

I mean, like mechanics and gimmick-focused bosses that are really flavorful.

And

you're meanwhile building up your life as a,

I was going to say as a Dracula, but I guess not as a Dracula, just as a vampire, as a Dracula rival.

Is that fair to say?

Kind of, yeah.

2022 was the year I was looking for.

God, that's so long ago.

Oh my God.

It is tough.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So basically, the premise of that game is you wake up, you're a fucking vampire, y'all.

And a long time ago, Dracula was around,

and it was bad.

And then he got fucked up and died.

Oh.

And there was like a, I believe,

this is long before you.

No, no, no, but you're post him being.

Did he die?

Was he bad news and died when he was like a warlord?

He was a vampire, but he was already.

Okay, that's I'm not 100% sure on this.

I'm getting this like truly like fourth hand almost.

Okay, because the game doesn't really spell this out for you directly.

Um,

there's a big war, uh, Dracula's got a bunch of demons and stuff on his side, but he gets fucked up.

There's like a weird blood reign after that.

A lot of the land gets like poisoned and screwy.

Um, over time, a bunch of like different religions and cults form, different areas have different livability.

And

you kind of show up as an

inheritor to Dracula's throne, a vampire returned, and you have to like,

you make a little fort,

a little castle, and you feed your castle with blood and you build it up and you make a sort of, you know, gathering, crafting, factory situation where you go around killing all of these, all of these uh bosses who are i believe the descendants of people who got powers from the dracula blood reign back in the day or something like that

okay they're v they're v-bloods is that what they're called yes yeah

uh and there's a pretty wide variety of them um there's dozens of them because yeah yeah we played the early access version of this game forever ago and a little of the full release and we didn't even get like we just got out of act one and i think we might have had a dozen bosses or something so and there's three acts of this game.

So, presumably.

I want to say there's like two dozen bosses or something like that.

I've eaten every single one of them, but I don't remember the exact number.

Wow.

That's kind of rude.

You don't remember everybody you've eaten?

Well, okay, but there's like a lot of, there's a lot of them that they're just like, some of them have like special areas, but some of them are just like walking around.

Yeah.

Also, Simon Belmont is there.

So, if you have the DLC.

Right.

And he sucks because he doesn't have a set level.

He's always just five levels ahead of you.

And he always just kind of hangs out or mirrors where

it's piece, he's a piece of shit.

Uh, he sucked to beat, but we did we did beat and kill him and eat him.

There are so many more than two dozen,

there are so many more.

There's, I don't have a total, I'm, I haven't counted, but I'm gonna send you the list here, and uh, we can we can give me a just a gut check guess.

Oh, okay, I see, Jack, how many do you think that is?

Oh, I think that is a 151.

Okay, let's slow down.

Well, some of these are kind of different than well.

What do you think?

Can we read some of these names, Janine?

Because the names are so

much of what appealed to me about the idea of this game was seeing this list in-game when it launched in a home.

Which is one of the coolest things.

There's a page in your game.

It's like a tree.

Yeah, yes.

That you can do that.

And it shows you, like, because they all give you different, like, they you know will teach you how to build different things or whatever they'll drop special

skills and stuff like that.

I will say that Talzer the winged horse Solaris the Immaculate Adam the Firstborn and Megara the Serpent Queen They're kind of they're not really like they're kind of V-bloods, but they're more like Dracula adjacent minions who

Yeah, but they drop like these amulets that decay really rapidly that give you like a special alt.

It's kind of like a it's like a real it's endgame stuff, you know

Jack,

I need you to validate me for a second.

Who do you think Adam the Firstborn is?

If you're playing a gothic fantasy game and

you are a gothic horror fantasy game and one of the bosses is named Adam the Firstborn.

Yeah, right.

That's our dear friend, the first man.

That's right.

The first man whose rib was taken.

Whose rib was taken was to make Eve.

Yeah.

In a way, he's the, you know, he's a man in the, in the,

he's the first man in the Mary Shelley sense.

Right.

He's that first man.

He's a different.

He's, quote, the culmination of Dr.

Henry Blackbrew's brilliance.

The monster.

Who you also kill?

Yo, you killed Dr.

Henry Blackbrew.

Oh, yeah, way before.

He's like way way before.

Potions and like alchemy stuff to see if

a mad scientist laboratory.

The potion lady is,

I think, Lucille, the Venom Alchemist.

She's really cool.

That's a cool fight.

You turn her into a sheep and stuff to stop her from casting things.

In a weird way, it's funny

you mentioned Simon Belmont being here because even though this is such a different game than the Castlevania games, I do think something that's common between both of them is like, yo, check out this cool boss.

Look at this cool weirdo.

Yeah.

Which is a huge part of those games, in my opinion.

So yeah, there's 57 bosses is what I'm seeing listed here.

That's why I said.

That's like four dozen.

Yeah.

You're kind of right in between your two guesses.

And they're a big part of the game, and we should talk more about them.

And I'm sure you have like faves that you want to shout out.

But I would just love to hear what the loop is for people so that they can kind of imagine they're sitting down to play a session of this game.

What's that look like?

Because I do think that it's interesting.

Obviously, I think there's some comparisons to make to like Valheim, which I think was super popular in a way that maybe that's a good touchstone for people.

But what is a V Rising session like?

It is a lot like Valheim, but like a little bit more top-down isometric.

Not like fully top-down isometric, but you are sort of zoomed out.

It's not really fully

third-person-y.

You have kind of a wider view of things.

It's got a little bit of like the Diablo-style

combat in terms of like aiming and a little bit of like twin stick work sometimes.

Um,

it

it's so tough.

I want to say, so the thing that I spent most of the time, like most of the time when I wasn't at near the end

working on bosses the thing that I spent my time doing was farming for resources and in the beginning of the game that looks like running out and hitting trees and rocks because it's crafting at the end of the game

that looks like

well, I built a sort of mini mini palace near the largest human settlement so that I could turn into a bat and fly down to the human city.

And then I would just kind kind of go through and kill everyone

in the city, sort of every few days.

So I could take their jewelry because I melt their jewelry down.

And that the gold that I get from melting their jewelry down lets me do shit with radium

and also

lets me then turn my old silver money, which is for garbage, is for the smaller town.

Who cares?

I can combine my silver money with the gold gold to get coins so that when I go back into town the next the big town the next time instead of killing everyone I go shopping and then I kill everyone

so do you think that this kind of growth from like I'm out here sucking the blood from rats I'm chopping down trees to like I am the monster that the town fears is is

like a deliberate design choice.

It feels like that is such a clear part of the like vampire fantasy is like one day the town town will fear me and so to hear you describe it so explicitly in those terms you know makes me think it must have been deliberate um the sort of the map is structured in such a way that like it feels like it really is sort of engineering that arc for you even though it doesn't really have an explicit story in that way that would sort of really shove it in your face um you start out in an area that is there's some village stuff uh there's like farmlands eventually that you that you get into it's a big open world right yes um but you start out you start out just kind of in like a shitty forest full of bandits like it's it's full of like bandits and skeletons and like wolves and you know wildlife and stuff like that um

and it's it's very much like a sort of unclaimed type

messy uh

everything's kind of gone to shit down here land um

between the the graveyards and the the farmland that you eventually get to.

And then you sort of advance to fighting like guards who are guarding towns and

like,

you know, members of holy orders, like paladins and priests and things like that.

As you sort of go further up.

And you get into these lands where like

some of the lands,

the sunlight,

I can't like describe it really.

It feels like the sun hurts you more.

Or like maybe you have less coverage.

Right, we should.

Like there are places that are.

Yes, you cannot be in the sun.

Right, there's a day night cycle, you will die super quick in the sun.

Uh, you can you can mitigate it a little bit with potions and equipment and stuff, but it's still even when you have the best shit and potions, it still does hurt you.

Yeah, when I think about the loop of this game, I think about the day-night cycle because it's something that most games that have day-night cycles don't actually build around.

It's just like aesthetic, which is cool, and I like that part too.

But in this game, it's very much like when we were playing this, you know the thing that we would do is say okay it's daytime we're gonna be inside we're gonna be like crafting we're gonna be you know moving stuff around in the castle we're gonna be trying to figure out like what our next step is we're gonna be preparing and then it turns to night and we go out and we go oh let's go chase down this v blood Let's try to go get this super bear that's kind of far away.

And we get there and we do the boss fight and then it's like, oh my god, we're so far away.

We have to get back before the sun comes up.

Let's go into a wolf form because the wolf form runs faster.

And then the sun starts coming up and you have to like stick to the shadows of the trees, which always introduced a lot of fun stuff around like especially if you've been over mining the resources around your place.

Just get rid of your tree cover for a few days.

And the trees are gone.

You don't have shadows to hide in anymore.

And then you're fucked.

This is where the rat form is actually pretty good because the rat can kind of can be sheltered by bushes and stuff because he's smaller.

That makes sense.

But you also get a spider form where you can dig a hole underground and just stay there, but you can't like travel in that hole.

You just have to hide.

That's classic first time you play Minecraft.

It's nighttime and the monsters are in the moment type thing.

It's in my dirt hole.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

There are also areas in the map where like the daylight doesn't reach on the ground level.

Oh, interesting.

Area that's sort of full of demons and stuff.

You can be out there all day with no trouble whatsoever.

However,

if you

have bat form, which is one of the last forms you get, and it's really sick, it completely changes the game.

It's good that it's the last thing you get, but it's also neat.

Um,

you can fly very fast.

You, you know, when you take bat form, you go up in the air, and

uh, you are not protected from the sun when you do that in the vampire area because you are above whatever miasma is filtering out the sunlight.

So, if you are out in that area in the middle of the day and then you do bat form to try and get somewhere really fast, there, you will be affected by the sun because you're up in the fucking sky

and it will truly blast you so fast

uh

if you use it in the earlier areas can you still stay to the shadows there or is it or is it similar as a bat no no okay so you're just like above the tree line and so you're gonna get you are you are like

in with the bad form you are up so high

that you can like fly over mountains and shit like the game does not make you walk it does not make you fly around any invisible barriers um you're flying over buildings where it's kind of clear, like, oh, I don't know if this was meant to be seen initially.

I don't know if they built this top of this building

with the intention of someone being able to fly alongside it because it feels a little bit rough.

It's not like, I'd assumed that it was going to be like abstracted and so I hadn't looked at any of the bat for you.

No, you're a little bad and you fly.

And you just lift the camera up above everything.

I see it now.

This is very funny.

This reminds me of, this reminds me of Phantasy Life Eye and like the

putting the mod in that lets you move the camera.

I guess they've added that now officially.

And being like, okay, this works, but sometimes you can see parts of the dungeon.

It's not like this.

Yeah, I see why it's not like this by default.

Yeah, that's very funny.

Yeah.

So yeah,

it's an interesting game because it can be a very action-y boss rush, or, you know, there are times where you can just spend like

hours and hours and hours just,

you know, stealing necklaces to melt down, to turn into this other thing, to then turn into this thing to make like a couch.

Right.

For your...

What's the couch for?

For looking at?

For hanging out.

Okay, I see.

You're making it.

I mean, you're making a Dracula palace.

So it's got to look opulent.

And

there's context here, which is that, like, you've played this game primarily co-op all the way through.

You've not played the other way that it's intended to be played, which is with a group of friends, which is like Rust, right?

Where like PvP server, yeah.

because there's a lot of, there's like

a bunch of plots of land that have nothing on them except for like, you can claim this and you can build here.

So the idea would be that like you'd be playing multiplayer with a bunch of people, everyone picks a spot to set up shop,

and then you're sort of running around.

You can raid other people's castles, you can do all kinds of stuff,

especially like once they start having endgame loot, which like shows up on the map where it is.

So you can be like, ah, that person has that necklace.

I'm going to go fucking kill him.

Did not engage with that stuff.

Was not generally in a buildy game, I'm not interested in engaging with someone breaking my sand castle.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Well, and I think, unlike a lot of those other games, this game does seem built so that you don't need to do that to have a really long, interesting play experience.

You know, like,

I,

you know, even in something like

some of the kind of classics of the survival multiplayer genre of like Day-Z,

I think has a lot of really cool shit going on, but the reason that game blew up is because of the wild multiplayer encounters that

really propelled.

Obviously, you can still probably have a couple of really great, you know, experiences just solo, exploring that space and avoiding the zombies and trying to survive.

But like, this feels like that part of the game is so full-featured, the

core, you know, exploration, crafting,

you know, combat stuff that it actually feels like it's a little bit more flexible than I think a lot of these kind of games that are built for PvP server type things.

But anyway, that's why you have a couch, Jack, is because you're supposed to have your friends over and

your enemies show up and be like, fuck, they have such good couches here.

We gotta figure out how to raid this place and take their couches.

Even if you don't do PvP, there are bosses that are kind of out doing their thing in the world.

Like, there's vampire hunters, there are just like weirdos who just like will fucking jump out of literally nowhere at you.

There's all kinds of fucking stuff going on where it still kind of feels like the world can surprise you in the way that a PvP game world can surprise you.

Right.

But without the added element of someone stealing your house.

Yeah, I think of these games that I've played, this has the best first 20 hours of any of them because of how often we went, like,

holy shit, it has this?

Wait, it has this?

What do you mean?

There's and so, like, that stuff like that is like finding merchants that you could talk to for the first time after feeling like there's no such, why would there ever be a merchant?

I'm a vampire.

Why would a merchant ever talk to me?

Um, buy a cool couch, but turn well, I think it was like to buy gems or something we needed.

I don't remember, it's been so long.

Uh, yeah, the shady merchants will talk to vampires, yeah.

Like the merchants in towns will not.

You have to disguise yourself as a human.

Well, Well, and so that was another moment of that was like we spent, you know, 15 hours out in the wilderness fighting bears and wolves and vampire hunters.

I mean, even the first vampire hunter jumping us was like, holy shit.

But then we, I remember getting the, getting to a town and just seeing like regular people walking around or like a weird guy in like a cloak walking around and be like, is he okay?

I think we got up to, there's one boss that we fought that was just like a lady who was like running around the town yelling and screaming and it's like, oh my God, get back here.

I'm trying to kill you and drink your blood.

But even

Beatrice the Taylor.

Yeah, Beatrice the Taylor.

Please.

And like her whole boss fight was just her running in circles while other people.

But the guards are trying to protect her.

Yeah.

Shout out to Beatrice.

Well, this is part of why this,

like, here are 140 bosses or whatever is so appealing to me.

And you're told about this really early in the game.

You know, I've played so little of this game compared to the two of you and definitely compared to Janine.

But right off the bat, right off the bat,

right off the bat,

they're telling you about stuff that makes no sense and is sort of being presented to you like walking into a buffet and looking at something on a distant table and going, oh my god, they have this here?

What's that?

Well,

that boss list is so good because that's not how these games work.

Like, imagine if you could play Elden Ring and you had the thing that said, here are the next like 15 bosses you might run into.

You know?

Like, ooh, who the hell is that?

There have been experiments with this in other games and also in the AAA sort of scene that I think have been mixed success.

I think recent Far Cry games do really good work in terms of saying, like,

your enemy, a sort of explicitly racialized, strange gang,

comprises this organization.

Yeah.

The Assassin's Creed games are all of that now, too, right?

Yeah, definitely.

The Order in Assassin's Assassin's Creed Odyssey and then kind of going forward.

That sense of like, oh yeah,

that sense of like, I can take out one of them and they will give me a clue as to where another one is.

They're just kind of out there in the world.

This, in part, I have to wonder, comes from that great story about the early development of Far Cry 2

way back in, what, 2008 or something like that?

Where an early version of that, that game is about hunting a killer called the Jackal.

And an early version of that game had the jackal in the world just from the beginning.

And and you could go and find him but the problem was that he would just die

someone else there in the world would just kill him the end but the the uh the implementation that the rising remotes be the most of actually is crackdown the original crackdown um which structured the gang that you're fighting again a sort of explicitly racialized it's weird how that keeps happening um

uh group in this city across three gangs and their leaders and each one sort of had their own oh the higher tier members had their own interesting characteristics and the lower tier ones sort of boiled down to mini bosses but by taking out the gang members you would be able to at least in theory at least in the sort of like broad brush work of systems design during the xbox 360 era you could you know affect how the city worked but i remember playing it and having that same sensation that i got with v rising of opening up this menu and going like oh there are like these characterful entities like bebopping around in the world right now

well i mean that crackdown version of it is something i wish I would love to play a game that does that particular thing again.

Thing it reminds me of is MGS5, actually.

For people who don't know this, Crackdown was the third-person open-world kind of like super cop game where you developed super speed and the super jumping ability and you collected a bunch of

stuff.

It is.

By the end of that game, you turn into a kid in a bounce house.

Yeah.

Like non-stop.

That's a game.

Yeah, it is so arcadey jumpy around nonsense while also being like you're you are the police's superman, you know, like it's deeply fucked.

And that knows it's deeply fucked, but it doesn't stop it from being a game in which you are killing racialized people for 40 hours or whatever.

But the specific mechanic that you're gesturing at that I think maybe people don't know about is that the different like leaders, the generals of each of these major gangs each had gameplay implications for the for the district and especially for the bot, like the late the end of area boss, where for instance, if you took care of the demolitions guy, or rather, if you didn't fight the demolitions guy and went to the final boss, which you could do immediately, he would have rocket launchers, right?

And so, if you, but if you got rid of the demolitions expert, then the final like area wouldn't, in that zone, wouldn't have rocket launchers anymore.

Um, and I think MGS5 does something very, very similar to this, right?

But kind of in the other way, which is like the famous example of this is if you get a lot of headshots and enough missions in a row, the soldiers start showing up with helmets on because they know that you've been killing them with helmets or with

real headshots.

Can you imagine

smashing us with helmets?

We got to get helmets to block the helmet gun he's shooting at us.

Is there a sense in V Rising that the order that you're taking bosses out is affecting the world, or are they kind of like self-contained little entities?

They are self-contained in that like, I mean, they have to, they respawn respawn is the thing.

Right.

Um, because there is a multiplayer game.

MMO bosses.

Yeah, because it's a multiplayer game.

So it wouldn't exactly work if, like, one person killed Beatrice the Taylor and then no one else learned how to make clothing.

That would be sick, but I understand why I changed that.

Because I know there's all that modularity in terms of, like, what are you allowed to teleport with?

How much blood do you need?

I'm guessing.

I don't remember any of the other ones.

I don't know if that would work for the blood specifically, which is the bosses.

I know that

there are some things that you can only have one of in the world in certain modes, and you can kind of alter that, but I'm not sure if that's true of the V-Bloods.

I think based on...

There's a lot of settings, so I don't know them all 100%, but I don't recall seeing one that would just be like, this boss will spawn once and then stop.

Right.

Specifically, I think because some of those bosses do kind of play a role in areas, Um,

there's

they're like, there's some that are just like, you know, obviously like leading little troops, and it's like, well, do you get rid of that whole troop?

Right, I see.

Yeah, you know, who are in charge of an area, and then it's like, well, I guess you could just take them out, but would that be weird?

Like, yeah, that sounds, that sounds maybe more, more of a Pandora's box to open than you would want.

Yeah,

yeah.

In any case, like, so that stuff is more stable in this game, and it's a lot more of like, what order do you tackle them in?

What do you,

and then, and then the micro, right?

Of, you know, on the most recent, I think the most recent outward

Let's Play, you told us about a mine boss who was a literally like, who basically had slaves and servants.

And when you were fighting him, they would help you fight him.

Unless you hit them, in which case they would start fighting you too.

And it feels like there's a lot of bosses that have those sorts of neat interactions with the environment and not just cool moves, but like, wow, like there's something in the world that reacts to this in a way that's kind of clever.

Um, yeah, that boss was Sir Magnus the Overseer, who is like a sort of paladin with these little wings on his armor, uh, who is a fanatical servant of the Church of Luminance.

His blind faith in the light makes him the perfect candidate for overseer of the sacred silver mines

where everyone is enslaved.

Um,

he,

yeah, he, so that, the, I, that fight was interesting because

at that point, we had already found, we'd already like tackled some fights where, um, there were summons, obviously, like, that's that's that's a normal thing.

Uh, boss summons people, and then either they fight you, or like, maybe the guy eats them for health or whatever.

Like, this video game stuff,

yeah.

Um, so the first time we fought, uh, we fought this guy, um,

I

think me and the person I was playing with both thought that, you know, well, we have to clear out the

spawns here.

We have to clear out the ads.

Sometimes that's not worth the time because they just want to burn the guy down, but you know, whatever, we'll try it.

So we tried fighting everyone and we got our asses kicked.

And then I sort of realized the second time, like, wait a minute, I'm over here.

All the ads are still going over to that guy.

And then they're attacking him.

Because when that boss is being attacked, the thing that's happening is people come out of the mine

to

fucking kill him.

And like, you can still hurt them.

They're not your friends.

They're, they're humans.

Like, you can eat them.

You can, uh, if you, if you hit them with your sword, they will be hurt.

They will try and defend themselves if they have to.

Um,

but also as you're going through that mine, and you have to go through the mine to get there because there's a locked front gate that you can only open from the inside.

so you have to basically sneak in the back through it's like a harpy's nest or some shit um

you sneak into the back of the mine go through the mine where you see all these enslaved uh miners and they're guards and like when you fight the guards the miners will sometimes help or they'll like run out once they know that they're not being watched um they'll escape so there are these little like hints right of just like these people don't want to be here maybe they'll help you i don't know um so yeah you get to that boss, and then they will kick his ass.

And it ended up being quite integral to beating him.

That was, I think, why we failed the first time was because we were clearing them out before they could

do their

very helpful shit.

There's also,

yeah, there's a lot of really interesting bosses.

There's one who, like I mentioned before, makes potions.

And you fight her in this area that's full of these potion shelves and you can run up to those potion shelves knock a potion off and use it but so can she so it becomes a game of

yeah of like knocking potions off and using them before she can or using specific ones at certain times like I mentioned there's there's a potion of beauty or whatever like that, elixir of beauty, that when you use it, it turns someone into a sheep.

So the key to beating her turned out to be whenever she was doing her big scary casting shit, turning her into a sheep.

This is a classic.

And it's like really short-lived.

It's like one second.

Is what it is.

Right?

Yeah.

All of these effects are like absolutely minuscule moments in time.

Like a lot of the abilities and stuff in this game really famously, extremely short-lived.

A long-lasting ability is like 1.8 seconds.

So

it's a big deal to have like, because otherwise that feels like it doesn't have a use.

Well, this is the thing that, this is the other thing that I love about this is like, though, that, what you've just described is like an incredibly important moment in a MOBA, right?

Where like, oh, the other enemy is about to, about to ult and I stun them and now they can't hit me.

Or like, again, a big end-game MMO raid, like Polymorph and WoW, or any of the stun moves in, any of the MMOs that are, that are big.

Like, oh, I've stunned them right before they're about to do the big thing.

And like, that is not approachable if I have to play a whole MMO ahead of time or learn how a MOBA works to get that incredible great moment where you turn someone into a sheep to stop them from owning you.

But this is a game that I think was way more approachable, but still gets to those moments of high-intensity, quick, again, things like skill shots, lining up that perfect hit.

So many of the fights, even in the first third of this game or quarter of this game, have those moments where you're like edge of your seat, they have us on the ropes, but if we can just like, we're hit, we're doing damage.

If we could just dodge for the next 45 seconds, we'll win, you know, which is great.

Um, and it's, it's also kind of there is an MMO element to it of like,

you know,

I think sometimes I played Final Fantasy XIV for a bit, and I think I ultimately came to the conclusion that if that was a single-player game, I would like it a lot because the parts that I liked the most were the most single-player-y.

But, like, things like when you go into a big raid that has cool mechanics, um, you don't get to just figure it out anymore.

Everyone else knows what they're doing.

And you just have to kind of stay alive or keep others alive or whatever.

Just stay in your lane.

It'll be fine.

You don't get to have those moments of like figuring it out.

They took out the best thing that that produced, which was the rare instance where there was a really easy one

fight, and then a bunch of veterans would be like,

okay, now everybody remembers phase three, right?

Phase three switched to Alpha Stance or whatever.

And you're like, what the fuck are you talking about?

And the fight is seven seconds long.

They made that one fight like an instance instead, which is probably right.

That's probably the right thing to do.

Oh, but that was so funny.

So funny.

But unfortunately, the point you're making is like, how many times did you sign up to do a raid to sign up?

You join a big raid in

Final Fantasy 14 or any of those MMOs and not get to unfold what it is you're supposed to be doing.

I will say one of the things that I really loved about The Old Republic when it launched, which Gene, Yumi, and Art played a ton of at the time, was

they had these flash points, which are like instances, but not full-on raids.

Actually, maybe there were more than there's maybe I'm confusing two things, but there were bosses in those where we did have to kind of crack what the what the rotation was that we needed to be using, when the big stun moments had to come, how did we have to make sure we were buffing, how are we, did we need to do debuffing, where in the arena did we need to be?

And when that stuff hits, you know, destiny raids are very similar to this watching people figure those out for the first time is really cool and what's really hard is making them that that anybody

or a wide number of players can actually figure out uh and not have to go to a guide to figure out and sometimes you could do that in the macro or rather in the micro in a little fight like what you're describing and it feels just as good as it seems it must for the day one destiny raiders to figure it out you know i mean even having it available as a guide is fine.

Like, you know, obviously this game's been out for a while.

The information was out there.

We did use the information from time to time.

But the difference is like, you know, when you are in that Final Fantasy XIV raid or whatever,

you can't not look at the guide

is like 10 people who are all around you doing the thing.

You don't get to opt out of that and just be like, okay, I want to learn this.

I want to learn what this guy's deal is.

Or I want to learn like, okay, if I throw this potion, she'll turn into a sheep.

How can I use that?

God, or even dungeons, right?

Like in an MMO, like, God forbid you want to slowly walk through a or go the wrong way because you're curious what's in a different place.

It's just not what they're built for.

You know, that's not what people, how and people are engaging with them at this point.

So, like, it often,

often, like, when we were doing these fights, um,

you know, the person I was playing with is like very combat skilled as a, as a game, game, gamer, as a gamester.

And

I am a little bit less so, I would say, but it was really interesting to sort of have someone who could do the brute force work while I'm there kind of like, okay, well, wait a minute, what are these interactions?

Or like, what's happening here?

Why didn't this do the thing that we thought it would do?

And then like after we had failed one or two times, come together and be like, okay, I noticed this and this.

You noticed that.

What does this mean?

That's an experience that like, I i feel like i don't get in a lot of stuff anymore um a really good example of this uh is uh wilfred the village elder who

there's get him get his ass there's a village in the game it is it is sort of set apart i believe it's called gracefall village um when you go there in the day uh There's a lot of people walking around who have suspiciously good blood quality.

Okay, wait.

You explain what that is.

There's blood quality in this game.

It's like a percentage.

And there's like categories.

And if you get someone that's a high percentage in a category, you get more benefits from that category.

So, in other words,

like, for instance,

what's a category of blood?

Like, like, warrior might be a cat.

Rogue,

or animal.

Beast?

I think it's beast.

Rogue, warrior, brute.

And those

do things like, yeah, so workers are really great.

Worker was one where it's like, hey, you uh collect resources more quickly you do more damage to resource like nodes yeah uh stuff like because i have more worker blood because you have more worker blood in you yeah now yeah this is fuck and also you can you can come you later get a thing called a blood homogenizer that lets you you also fuck

so you can one you get okay

so you can have prisoners is i'll start with prisoners um okay let's fuck in the context of a variety of servants you can have servants okay but they're

like thralls, right?

Yes, they're thralls.

They live in a coffin.

You can make them a nice bedroom.

I made some very luxurious accommodations.

Oh my god, the prisoner stuff.

I just remembered where we're going.

Okay, just keep talking.

They live in a coffin.

Are they dead?

They're like a thrall.

You, like, feed them your blood to, like, get them under your thrall, you know?

They just hang out.

They just hang out.

No further questions.

You sleep in a coffin.

You're a vampire.

Yeah.

You use a thing called, like, I think it's dominance or something, dominate,

to,

or is it subdue?

There's some confusion because one of them is just for, there's two skills and one of them is just for horses.

One of them just lets you dominate a horse and then turn it into your magic horse that you can summon and bring back from the dead and stuff.

But the other one is for people

and it lets you sort of mind control them and then you can bring them back to either an empty coffin if you want to make them a servant or an empty prison cell if you want to make make them a prisoner.

And if you put them in the prison cell,

you can then bleed them or eventually

get blood, like mix blood with grapes to make like a blood wine, which is slightly less harmful for them when you do it.

And they have two stats, health and misery.

And you want to kind of keep the misery down and the health up because the more miserable they are, the more damage they'll take.

I see.

When you bleed them, you mean?

Yeah.

Yeah, I see.

The way that you do that is by feeding them different kinds of fish.

Some of the fish heal them more.

It's a lot of different kinds of fish.

You can also feed them rats, but the rats only help their health.

The fish help health and misery usually.

You can also feed them a radiated gruel later on.

Which has a chance of increasing their blood quality by like one to two percent, but there's also like a 30% chance it will turn them into a big mutant that will then burst free and you have to fight it.

Well, I wouldn't do that then.

I wouldn't.

That would just be, that seems inconvenient you know if you have someone whose blood is like 98 and you want there's some bonuses you can only get it 100 this is what was not clear right so it's not just what's the interest

one benefit the higher the more pure the blood is the better the benefit i don't know if it's purity necessarily the more stronger the blood is yeah okay right

So, and there's also, you get the blood homogenizer that lets you take either the just normal blood or the blood Merlot and combine it with another another one.

And it lets you basically take, okay, I want this, I have this, I have this bottle of vintage 100% warrior blood.

And I want to give it a little bit of a boost for my spell shit.

So I'm going to take this like 58% scholar blood that I have, and I'm going to combine it so that this one is 100% warrior blood, but it's got this one benefit that I've chosen out of the scholar blood attached in addition to the warrior blood shit.

Is that a note of scholar blood I taste?

So I have a question here.

So you're saying that like

if I eat a rat or something, I get like 2%

beast blood or something.

Animal blood.

No, if you eat a rat, you're frail.

Okay, so if I eat like a cat, like a low animal.

If you eat like a deer, I get like...

You can't interact with cats at all.

But if I were to eat, for example, the noble lion, I would get like 50% beast blood.

This is the thing.

It's not like that.

A given.

It's not judgmental like that.

It's just some people are, yeah.

Some people have 88% blood.

I really said 88 just by default, but maybe talking all this blood purity bullshit made me think

in some bad ways.

But you know, like there, there is, yeah, random minor will have worker.

Minor M-I-N-E-R will have worker blood, and some of them will have 70%, some of them will have 17%.

And when you see that, some of them will be blowing red, and they'll have 98 to 100%.

Right.

And when you see that, you're like, holy shit, I got to drink your blood.

You do also get, one of the powers you get is blood vision, where you can sort of toggle that mode on and you can see what percentage everyone's blood is when they come on screen.

So you can just do a quick scan around the room to see who's got the best blood.

He sucker ranking people.

Okay, yeah.

So I can see how you get there, and this is kind of fantastic because it's like how vampires clearly, as everyone knows, as every fool knows, care a lot about blood.

Yes.

That's maybe the number one thing about that.

You need to drink blood.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

How do you make players care about blood?

And one of the quickest ways into that is you like systematize blood so intensely that players are thinking hard about blood all the time.

This is some really lovely like

what is Dracula actually thinking?

Dracula's actually thinking, oh, 41% blood in

the accountancy tree.

I shall eat Nicholas Holt.

Oh, that's Nosferati.

That's Nosferatzo.

Yeah, you gotta go.

What is it?

Mina, Mina Harker?

Mina Harker and Jonathan Harker and,

you know,

Tom Waits or whatever.

That's right.

Tom Waits has like 51% freak blood.

So I kind of love that they've gotten their way there.

The other part of Dracula that I think is critically important is sexiness.

Is this game sexy?

It has moments.

You can like, when you're playing multiplayer with someone,

you know, you do, you will have those conversations of like, oh, fuck, I'm out of blood because I've been trying, I've been using my blood to heal too much.

I'm out of blood.

Do I want to settle for this like 15% brute?

Or like, can I get something else before I'm running out?

And then you can, as, you know, your other, the other player can, like,

be like, oh, I just drank a 98% scholar here.

You expose your neck.

They can drink.

They can drink from you, and you basically split your blood in half.

However much blood you have, you split it in half between you.

Yes,

they get that whatever percent scholar, and then you can both go on your merry way.

I don't remember how we got to prisoners specifically.

You talked about it.

I thought about how you're like harvesting prisoners.

Okay, yeah.

So you harvest the prisoners.

The way that I got there was you find this village.

The village people have suspiciously good blood, which in this game you learn in the farmlands tends to mean if you find a villager who is like 68% or whatever, you're like, hang on a second.

Of any type.

Suspicious.

Worker.

Villagers usually workers.

Oh, they're right, of course.

But

if you find a villager like that, it's suspicious.

And sometimes if you start shit around them, they'll come fight you.

And if a villager fights you instead of running away, you know one thing about them, and it's that they're a werewolf.

And if you come up there at night, they will be a werewolf.

That rules.

Now, Gracefall Village is a town of such people.

And there is a boss there, the village elder, Wilfred.

And you have to,

however, Wilfred.

Right, he reads.

That's right.

So you have to kill him.

And you might think, well,

ha ha ha.

I'm a clever, I'm a clever little vampire.

Taps head three times.

I've got his number.

It's, you know, two hours till sunset.

What if we start fighting him right now?

Oh, no.

And then at the last minute, he's going to turn into a person, and that'll be great because he'll be really easy to kill.

He'd be so easy to kill.

It's just like, it's a free, it's a gimme.

So you go do that, and you kill him, and it doesn't count.

Because you just killed Wilfred the village elder.

You just killed Wilfred the Village Elder.

So you do not get the tier three blood spell point.

You do not get the long case locks.

Clocks.

Sorry, he gives you clocks.

You can make clocks after you kill him.

You do not learn how to make silver resistance potion or pristine leather bag or elixir of the werewolf.

You get nothing.

So you come back the next day and you think, okay, well, we had a bit of a detour, but we've still got five hours of night left.

It'll be fine.

We'll finish him off.

He's hard.

You struggle.

Time is passing.

Right.

Oh, no, this motherfucker, you're going to be denied your clocks once again.

Land the killing blow, I swear to God,

right as the sun comes up,

you and the person you're playing with cheer.

No, you say, we did it.

It was such a long fight.

Yeah, we got him.

Wait a minute.

Why isn't the thing popping up to let us drink his blood?

Why did he just die?

Why is he a human crumpled on the ground now?

It's because you fucked up again.

No.

Take three.

I need those clocks.

I believe it was on the third, but it might have been the fourth time.

I think it was the third time when we got there with plenty of time in the night to spare

to kill him as a werewolf, to drink his werewolf blood, to get his clocks.

Like, it did happen, but.

Can you start fighting him?

No, you can't because you'll be hurt in the day.

Duh.

He'll die immediately.

Okay.

He's like, it's a one-hit kill in the daytime.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's really easy to kill a villager.

He is no exception.

I see.

It says here that when he's at 50% health, he'll howl and release seven prisoners.

When he shouts, let me have a taste, he'll try to eat one of them to restore his health.

Yeah, he will eat the villa.

He has like prisoner villages, he'll eat them.

Prisoner villagers, he'll eat.

He's one of the ones who, you know, he summons it and it sort of teaches you like, oh, they're helping him.

So that means the summon, you know, and then you get to the mining guy and you're like, well, fuck.

I see.

Right, of course.

I think it's tremendous when a boss eats some of his own guys.

I think it's one of the classic things a boss can do.

And I always love to see that.

I was saying, Janine, that this and then the potion, especially the potion one, reminded me of the final boss fight in Knights of the Old Republic, where the evil Sith guy just has a bunch of Jedi in like cryo tubes all around the boss arena.

And whenever you kill him,

you get him down to no health, he'll go like sap the life out of one of them to heal up.

And the thing you do, if you're dark-sided, is you just do that first.

You just go and kill them all and sap all their strength.

You do drain life on them so that he can't.

And that to me is a very...

That's actually, you know, yeah, vampire boss fight.

I said this time, you get to be the vampire because theoretically, you could you could also

because you don't heal from eating, you just get your blood filled, right?

Yeah, yeah, you just fill the blood, you have to use the blood to auto-heal.

There's like a heal, like, yeah, right, right, right.

And then sometimes, I guess, during a boss fight, they'll drop healing, right?

They'll drop like big.

Yeah, once you get them to about halfway, uh, they will drop some health orbs.

Also, there are some like weapon codings and abilities and things where you can get health orbs to drop from different causes.

Yeah, I would say that's the other thing that that reminds me of.

It's just like if you are hearing crafting game, crafting game, crafting game, which it is, I don't want to diminish that it is that.

There is a lot of depth on the skills and itemization and armor progression and build stuff.

Especially once you start getting into

once you've sort of gotten the bulk of the V-Blood skills and you start getting into passive unlocking vampire power, vampire awakenings, I think is what they're called, and elemental abilities, which you have to buy with sort of a more difficult currency that you get from the Dracula vampire hell area.

You can really,

really hone in on some specific builds that you want.

Like if you want to build purely around the status effect weaken, around like weakening your your enemies and taking advantage of that state.

If you want to, or if you're more interested in, you know, if you want to focus on building shit around spells, or if you want to focus on building shit around your guns,

you can have a gun and

you can sort of build shit so that your gun is going to be more useful because, you know, you can...

You get like relic weapons and eventually unlock the ability to swap like different

traits into them uh and like different strengths of traits this is also true of like these jewels that you use to enhance your spells you can you know have a jewel that's like this is plus 12 attack speed or whatever um and if you like that if you like that but everything else in that jewel sucks you put it into another jewel that you like more um

same with the weapons like that you can really

You can really fucking fine-tune shit to

sometimes an intimidating degree.

Sure, sure.

Well, that's the thing is like, it's kind of choose your intimidation here, right?

In a, in a way, which in some ways I like because

I, you know, I didn't really click with Valheim.

There's parts of Valheim I really liked, um, uh, but

this is just taste.

Like, I'm not a Vikings guy.

It's just not a thing that hits for me.

Um, uh, and so that was always going to be something that, that I couldn't get over.

But the thing that I liked about that, and the thing I like about this is, um,

the

there's more pathways on in a weird way, even though they each have high ceilings.

Because if what you want to do is like try to find the

build your little castle and like put out the cool couches, that path eventually gets to be really complex too, because it's like, oh, I'm trying to like maximize, I'm trying to put the stuff that goes on

the library or study floor type in that room.

I'm building a study that has, I don't know if that's a specific one, but it has like all of my,

you know, book binding and spell crafting stuff.

And then this is my forgery room, which has a different floor tile set.

And I'm going to maximize out stuff that way.

And it's going to be about building the base.

And someone else who was like, I'm going to like master the quick click, you know, combat stuff.

I'm going to push higher than my level is and just like win fights I shouldn't.

Because what draws me in is the combat and the, you know, getting attacks off and figuring out just like movement patterns and stuff.

And then another person who still maybe is combat interested but is interested in, I'm going to find a build that lets me break through fights I couldn't fight normally.

Like, that's also available there.

All of that, all of those different pathways in are all adjacent to the other sets of systems that then you get lured into learning about, even if they're not your, your thing normally, you know, and I think that we have talked a lot about other types of

kind of action RPG slash crafting games on here.

We've talked about Rune Factor.

We've talked about Fantasy Life Eye.

The Fantasy Life Eye is a joy it has it it had its hooks in me for a long fucking time this year uh in terms of like moment to moment interesting gameplay i think v rising has it beat in a big way it's just a different mood you know uh fantasy life is a game that you could just like lose yourself in the the very cushy soft vibe of um but in terms of like oh is there something to chew on and think about in terms of decision making both in terms of what i'm building how i'm building it what i'm prioritizing and in terms of combat design and even in in terms of exploration, I think V Rising is just like really, really, really good.

And I didn't even try any of the DLC.

Yeah, there's so much of this game that seems just fantastic.

The DLC, I will say, is mostly cosmetic.

Okay.

There's not a lot of big new update that added a second haunted farm.

That's what I was thinking of.

Was that not pay DLC or was that just...

Invaders of Oak Vale, I think.

Oak Vale was the big

added thing.

Was that free?

I believe so, yeah.

Okay, so that's I was confusing that with big.

Yeah, I was confusing that with

the poison place.

No, because that feels like it's integral.

Well,

sometimes it's a little bit more.

Sometimes a live action game or a live service game gets updates that feel integral.

There's like multiple

haunted forest situations.

So I mean, I guess it could be the one that's like haunted, haunted.

But like, there's one that's like it's slowly, you get a status effect that makes you less and less able to find any direction.

unless you have a special cloak that you get from a little weird guy who runs away from you and snares you up in vines and shit.

Um, it's like a poison forest by the looks of what I'm reading.

Is it corruption?

The corruption poison is like a oh, yeah, okay.

Yeah, we were playing with all that stuff.

Claws, twin blades, throwing daggers.

I ended up being like mostly a claws main because claws let you close distance really fast.

I'm not normally a melee person, I really thought I was gonna stick with bow, crossbow for the whole thing, but claws ended up being the Dracula killer of of choice

in a big way.

I got some fancy ones made of bones.

Yeah, love to have some boneclaws.

Medium infused, yeah.

Good era of Wolverine when he had bone claws.

It looks like also

Megara the Serpent Queen is the Oak Veil wizard.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Along with Stavros the Carver, who, you know,

I had not registered that that was like special new shit because it feels so

like part of it.

Yeah, it feels, it feels very, it doesn't, like, stick out in a weird way, which is great, honestly, which is a good...

It has a lot of mechanics that are...

It has a whole like corrupted blood thing where like

you

sometimes want to have corrupted blood

because it like lets you take less damage from other corruption, which is important when you're fighting the corrupted bosses.

Sure.

This actually also makes the boss in this area, not Megara, the other guy, Stavros,

I think other than Dracula gave us the most trouble.

Interesting.

Yeah, that's something DLC.

Yeah, yeah, but he's not like top level.

Well, he's kind of top level, but he's not like top, top level.

Yeah, I see him in the list.

He's towards the middle top, I would say, of this list of

V-blood carriers.

All right.

I think any final, final V-Rising thoughts before we take a break?

Good game.

You can have a witch in a cage, like a little, like a goblin, like a Baba Yaga witch.

Oh, that's cool.

She usually puts people in cages.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

You can really want to it.

You can have a little rat farm.

I built a tower to store our rat and corpse farm in.

And then also it ended up having a bunch of like succubi in the basement.

that's where they hang out normal yeah it's a it's a it's an interesting video game if you can put a lot of things to the side mentally uh-huh

it's a good you know i kind of jack your early question was like do you think they're doing this because of the vampire fantasy i forget what particular sub

you know

it was becoming a terror becoming a terror of a town i think everything about it is

the flavor lead systems in this game so strong uh down to, yeah, of course you're gonna have prisoners.

You're a weird vampire who is keeping yeah, there's a lot of vampire stories about keeping prisoners with good blood around.

That's not yeah, it'd be very disappointing if you couldn't honestly.

Right, and in fact, go ahead.

You can turn into a magic bear, and that's the only way to bust.

It's either you can, there's a fortress, and to bust in, you either have to be a magic bear and bear the door in with your bare hands, or you have to learn how to make bombs.

Fun.

So love it.

The two kinds of dracula.

dracula.

Which kind of vampire do you want to be?

Yeah, which one use the bear Dracula, which one to use the bomb Dracula.

All right.

On that note, we'll take a quick break and we'll come back and talk about some Death Stranding 2 and some other stuff.

Jack, I meant to play Death Stranding 2.

I really did.

Yeah.

Because you're a Death Stranding Enjoyer.

Oh, I am.

And in fact, I'm such a Death Death Stranding Enjoyer that I've restarted it three times

this is our stranders

yeah we're stranders we're yeah we're the stranded um

and uh i started it when it first came out on ps4 i started it again uh on ps5 and i started it a third time on uh on pc with the director's cut um

and i spent days being like I really want to play Destiny 2, but I never finished that stranding one.

I only got about halfway through, but I kind of get it.

I got far enough in that I know I really like it.

I only didn't finish it because it came out at the end of 2019, like November of 2019, which is when I stepped back from Waypoint.

I was doing just the podcast at that point.

I hadn't joined Possibility Space, but I was like, you know, trying to write some other stuff and I couldn't keep up with the sort of like...

keep playing the game, especially as Rob was reviewing it.

So it's not like I was going to review it.

So I played enough of it to have the podcast conversation, knew I loved it, and said, I can't wait to have the time to play this game.

And then just didn't ever find the time to play that game all the way through.

Yeah.

Let's have these things.

So I downloaded Death Strunning 2 the other day.

I go, I get what happened in Destroying 1 enough that I could just jump right into Death Straining 2.

I understand that there's like connections, but there's not like...

I don't know that there's heavy connection.

And so on the front page of, or the front, like the screen, the main menu of Death Straining 2, it says like, start a new game.

And it says, you know, re-experience the past events of Death Straining 1 or whatever.

You know, summary.

And then what happens?

Well, you get Guillermo del Toro telling you, of course, about what happened in Death Stranding 1.

And

it is 17 screens of one paragraph each.

It's a PowerPoint.

I thought you were going to say 17 minutes, but actually.

I mean, but actually, I would have,

I gotta tell you, if it had been 17 minutes, I might have just played Death Stranding 2.

But instead,

you go through the whole thing, and it's like,

here's the setup, and then it's like one screen per major character.

Which, if you know about the Shrining One, that's kind of how the chapter setup is: where it's like, ah, this is the chapter where you learn about Fragile, this is the chapter where you learn about Mama, this is the chapter where you learn about Deadman or whatever, right?

These are the characters in Death Stranding, a game by Kojima Productions, directed by Hideo Kojima,

a game about moving stuff around, moving packages across the wilderness.

In any case, we get to a thing towards the very end of that, it's like, and then finally, you know, Sam met back up with Amelie and she revealed the secret of the death stranding or whatever.

What's the secret, Kojima?

Well, it doesn't fucking say in the summary.

Doesn't fucking say in the summary.

It literally ends.

Right.

Yes, Janine.

Yes.

It literally ends.

Okay, that feels like they're shaming you to a degree.

I was shamed.

It feels kind of like when, like, you know, a pet makes a mess and you like pick them up and set them in front of it and you're like, don't do this again.

He's saying, finish this fucking game because next time i'm not even gonna be this kind i and also i skipped apart which is like the night before i was ready to play the astronomy too and i was like i'll just download it really quick i'm on i'm on fios i can't be talking about it for a while you've been like warmering

yeah and then i so of course i couldn't do it because it's a huge it's a 98 gig game and psn is the slowest network on the earth somehow.

And it would not download even the little bit that it needed to like let me start the game or whatever.

So I was like, fuck it, I'll play in the morning.

And then felt shamed, felt badly shamed, exactly what you said, and went, fine, I guess I'll go back and play through the rest of Death Streeting 1.

And I booted it up and I was at.

And what I did is I went and I loaded my PS4 save into PS5

director's cut mode.

Because when I first got the director's cut on both...

console and PC, each time I was like, I just want to start from the beginning.

I'm deep in, but I'm not that deep in.

I really like this game.

I kind of want to sit with it and just like have that whole experience.

This time I was like, no, I'm just going to load my save.

I know where I am.

I think it's time to like,

I think I'm actually near the end.

I think there's only three maps in this game, and I think I'm at the end of the second map, basically.

So I may just push forward and do it.

And it turns out that I'm at the halfway point of the second map, I think.

Did you beat that first game, Jack?

No, I didn't.

How far in did you get?

I think I got

about at the same place that you did you start putting zip lines down?

No, I did not.

Okay, so i'm like i am now a little further ahead than you because what i did is finished out did you do you know why fragile is like the way she is i do know why fragile is like the way she is you stopped literally seconds you stopped right after

where i stopped the first last time and i've now passed you like like the slowest

tortoise versus the tortoise here i have slowly passed you in the first game um because i finished up fragile story uh uh and and have started in the section of the game where it's about like climbing the mountains

like Janine your V-rising bat.

I'm gonna fly over the mountains in dangerous ways by setting up a bunch of stupid sci-fi ziplines and traveling across the world with all these packages on my back.

So unfortunately Jack, I am nowhere near catching up to you and playing Death Stranding 2, which means I'm just going to have questions for you.

Because I also haven't really watched any footage of this game.

I thought I was going to, I just thought I was gonna be there.

I thought I was gonna have finished the replay of Death Stranding 1 before the day it came out.

And instead, here I am playing that one.

I don't even really want to be playing it, but I do feel like I need to.

It's a mess.

My brain is a nightmare.

Don't have my brain.

It's not useful.

High level.

Can you tell people who don't really know anything about this game, which is going to be some people, what Death Stranding is as a series?

And then, like, give me a little of like what is two in comparison to one yeah okay death stranding is the big new post metal gear project from hideo kojima uh following his move to kojima productions out of konami it's its own kind of story although kojima being kojima it is constantly in this sort of like reflection with his previous work etc

it is a

very simple idea wrapped in a series of really

opaque and Byzantine

sort of like supplementary ideas, which produce this really odd effect.

So on the very top level, it is about an apocalyptic world where humans have isolated themselves from each other in individual bunkers or in big bunker cities.

You never see any of those cities and you only see the bunkers a little bit because you are a porter, someone who carries goods from one of these places to the other across a apocalyptic ruined world.

The first game's apocalyptic ruined world was set in the US.

You were kind of crossing, you're crossing the US from east to west, but what you were actually doing was sort of crossing like Icelandic.

Yeah, it's America by way of Iceland.

Yeah.

So

it's like a package.

The original

crew.

Yeah.

And along the way, you are doing stealth against people who sort of want to stop you from delivering those packages.

I'll get into...

This is a really good example of...

I can say something as simple as you're doing stealth to stop you from being found by people who don't want you to deliver the packages, but what you're actually doing is even stranger.

And you're also playing this sort of complex

terrain navigation game where you know the packages that you're carrying on your back are physics enabled and they're very heavy and their weight distribution on your body is meaningful.

So you are picking a path that's going to cause you not to like lose your footing or stumble or something like that.

One level below that, it is, or maybe above that, depending on how you want to look at it, it is like a delivery and logistics game in the vein of Euro Truck Simulator and Elite Dangerous and Star Trucker and things like that.

These like very meditative, very gradual games that are about

developing an understanding of

a route and of your cargo.

Kind of like at its best, Death Stranding is a very slow game where you are thinking, all right, so I'm going to pick those things up and head over there.

And then in that classic way that you do in these sort of logistics games, you're thinking, all right, so if I just swing by that bunker, I can drop off the pills that I found elsewhere.

And I can,

you know, I can then pick up some goods to take to that place.

This place is on the way.

One level above or below that, it is a survival horror game because something I haven't mentioned is the circumstances of the apocalypse.

What has happened in Death Stranding is

on the face of it kind of transparent and again like occluded from you in really big ways.

Something has gone wrong between life and death and the dead have become stranded in our world as these sort of ghostly indistinct things called BTs which stands for beached things a whale has been beached

big thing about BTs is that no one can see them and if a BT touches a dead person, so BTs will kill you, and then they will make contact with a dead person, this causes an explosion, like several orders of magnitude greater than a nuclear bomb going off.

And this is what caused the apocalypse.

Just like

the game calls these void outs, just this sort of like...

Basically, a ghost touched you and you died.

Fucking game.

It's so good.

All this stuff is

opened.

Laser chamber for my brain, Jack.

It's unbelievable.

Anyway, I'm sorry.

It happened everywhere everywhere around the world simultaneously, and this is kind of what has caused the apocalypse, and it's also what's caused everybody to isolate from one another.

And let me tell you, the BTs in the first game are fucking scary.

You can see them for weird reasons that we probably don't have time to get into, but it involves a baby that's strapped to your chest.

And you can kind of fight them, but they're really quite frightening at first.

And then eventually the fear of the BTs disappears.

And in this game,

they make them scary again, kind of in like two really interesting ways.

The first thing that they do is they make them invisible to you, and suddenly you're like, oh, fucking hell.

Right.

This is actually really bad when you can't see BTs.

And the second thing is, BTs are usually blind.

They can kind of, they can hear you, they can hear you moving around.

There's a new type of BT in Death Stranding 2 called a watcher.

The name, I think, explains what it does.

And that is awful.

Collects time pieces.

It does collect, it collects the clocks from William the Elder.

Right?

It gets the data.

When you said you just get you drop off pills, I was thinking about the elder in Death Stranding 1, who's a guy who lives up in the mountains and you have to deliver pills and other supplies to.

And thinking, what if he turned into a werewolf one time?

I went up there.

You got up there.

That would be fucked up.

The glue that kind of holds this whole thing together is this.

Kojima Productions calls this a strand game, and they use strand game as a sort of shorthand for a

overarching mechanic they are using where your game is constantly in networked conversation with other people's games.

So

it's a single-player game, but in the same way that Dark Souls and the Souls games sort of have asynchronous like ghost multiplayer happening, you know, you'll see summon signs, you'll see people's messages, you'll see ghosts moving past you.

In Death Stranding, the paths that you and that all the other players are walking onto the world are kind kind of collectively affecting it and for example if you put down a ladder to help you climb a a um a little mountain outcropping more easily that ladder will appear in somebody else's game and vice versa um

this is really cool what else is this like tomorrow children

I was in this yesterday walks.

I was like literally thinking,

how much does this remind me?

And specifically,

there's on the second big map,

uh, which again,

sorry, the first game in the first

death running one, there's a the main kind of map that you play most of the game on has this mountain range in the middle, and the eastern side is like flatlands and a river, and it goes south into some other stuff.

But there's a part where you've laid down, um, you've laid down tons of uh road work, or you know, a highway basically, and it leads close to, but not quite completely to, um, a engineer or a craftsman or something.

Um, and one, the game not only maps those, but it maps desire paths, the sort of like

footsteps on the ground

where people just naturally walk.

People should look this up if you've never heard this term before.

It's like a really interesting concept.

And the experience I had of like, okay, I'm going from the place where I always go down the highway, like just off to this place to pick up doing the loop that you were just talking about, Jack.

I hadn't felt like playing, I was playing the Tomorrow Children since I played the Tomorrow Children six years ago, seven years ago now at this point.

that exact feeling of like,

I have a little goal.

I'm executing the little goal.

I have to go a little out of the way to do it.

But it's just like that whole thing feels like, and the collaborative side of it: oh, someone else put down the, like, without knowing it, they put down the desire path for me that made it easier for me to drive my little truck to go put the boxes in the truck and spin it around.

And that, and I think the important thing about this is there, that little bit of like

frisan that comes from do doing a job well happens whether you are struggling up the mountain or in your nice big truck filled with boxes and that i think is shocking because you would think that the the obliteration of difficulty by way of highway should

and it changes it it absolutely changes it it changes it from struggling walk to long drive but those both have their own character in such a way that i think yeah actually does change it even in comparison to, you know, Elite Dangerous.

I guess there's you can get out of

the spaceships now in Elite Dangerous and go on ground.

I haven't done that.

But when I played Elite Dangerous, you're just in the spaceship the whole time.

You know, American Truck Simulator, you're a driver.

There is something different about I walked this place once and now I'm driving through it or I'm riding a tram or I'm riding the zipline or whatever, you know?

Yeah, it's really odd because I

two of the kind of like most magical moments for me in the original Death Stranding were...

One was very near the beginning of the game, where kind of the first job you have to go on is you cross this plane.

And at the end of the plane is a very low range of hills, like a craggy range of hills.

It's maybe like 15 or 20 feet tall.

It's not very big.

And...

The job asks you to cross that craggy range of hills onto like a lower stretch of land behind it.

And this was a fucking trial this was like finding my footing finding where the ladder goes making sure that i could go up there this sensation of like successfully crossing a 15 foot hill and also like setting up the infrastructure to make sure that i could do it a second time felt really remarkable um

and then later in the game when desire paths started appearing when i started going oh my god there are like these paths have been walked not just by me but by other porters which is what the game calls these, like,

by hand, you know, couriers.

Death Stranding 2,

I am trying to figure out whether or not it simply feels easier to move around, and whether or not that is as a result of design choices in the game, or whether it is as a result of, like, an accretion of knowledge from playing Death Stranding 1.

When you say easier to move around, do you mean easier to control the character Sam Porter Bridges?

His middle name is Porter.

His last name is Bridges, by the way.

Or do you mean

pathing from place to place, the obstructions, the amount of times you trip and fall, etc.?

Both.

Both tying into one another.

There are some ways that this is so obviously mechanical.

You know, you get a car in this game so much faster than you got a car in the original game.

In Death Stranding...

One, I got given a truck after a period of time, and I was so delighted that I crashed it into the river.

I was absolutely thrilled into the river, truck road.

In this, you get this kind of like

cute little bike called a tri-cruiser.

A weird note about the try-cruiser is that because the physics are being simulated everywhere, and because of certain criteria, because of like the certain terrain around a certain base in this game, my try-cruiser, every time I reverse it, will do wheelies out of this base.

It will do backwards wheelies.

And this is just the terrain.

The Tricruiser is not built to do that.

It's just, they put a base here.

This base has terrain around it.

I want to reverse out of the base.

The Tri-Cruiser does wheelies.

But you get this Tri-Cruiser really early, and you're zipping around.

But some of it is just...

I wonder how much intuition I have carried through in terms of like, how does Sam like to move?

What terrain is readable?

And maybe that there's another thing going on here, which is that I might be less coy.

When I'm playing the original Death Stranding, this is all so new to me that I'm like, I have to take a really careful deck now, Jack.

You have to walk real carefully.

And now in Death Stranding 2, I'm like, oh, gosh, just go fucking over there.

I bet I can climb that.

And you probably can.

Yeah, and while I am exactly the kind of sicko who, if they were to say to me,

we've managed to make a new from software game and the bosses are even harder this time, I would be like, I don't much care for the combat.

This doesn't appeal to me terribly that you made the bosses harder this time.

But the idea of like doing weird walking puzzles across America America disguised as Iceland, them in the sequel saying, we've made it even harder and more complicated.

I would be like, I would love to see that.

So I am definitely feeling a bit of a pang.

Well, and I thought that it would be, because he had that quote weeks ago, months ago now.

I don't, yeah, this is not...

So Kojima had this quote where he was like, if people think my game is too smooth and is too easy, I have failed.

And in fact, I asked my designers to make bits of the game more inhospitable.

And it might be, I've played about 12 hours of this game.

This is a a big game, but also I like,

this will not surprise Austin Augenine, I take these games so slowly and I

look around all the little corners as I go.

But I've played a chunk of this game and nothing in it has struck me as particularly high friction.

I mean, it might be particularly high friction if you're unfamiliar with Death Stranding.

There's a bit of it where it's like the game is like, all right, now take those palettes back to the place.

And you're like, oh, oh, okay.

All right, back the way I go.

But there's a bit of me that wanted.

Let's talk about some of what they've added in the sequel.

I have a question about this before you say this, which is, have you played the director's cut of the first game?

The quote-unquote director's cut?

An absurd thing to call it because he directed the first game in a company he owns.

And there was no...

And I think he even maybe came out and said, I wouldn't have called it the director's cut.

And maybe it was a publishing thing.

You would think the original was the director's cut.

It is, right?

Presumably.

But in any case, did you play any of that?

No, I played the original.

Okay.

Did I play Unpatched Radan, maybe?

You have no idea how much the Director's Cut makes that first game easy.

Did you ever have a gun in your Death Stranding playthrough?

I think I had a shit gun.

You maybe had, yeah, okay.

So in Death Stranding Director's Cut, you get a bolo gun basically right away that can shoot and tie up the mules, which are the cult cult of amazon drivers who have lost their minds in the post-apocalypse because they're addicted to delivering packages and have become bandits uh it's fucking brilliant it's

you know it's when it when it hits it hits um

and uh yeah like um vehicles are all over the place um i i you i mean you get a bike in the first game pretty early on already but you have the ability to like print them pretty quickly um by the halfway point you have auto bots that will just deliver stuff for you uh Like they kind of, I don't know if they're procedural, but like the big list of.

They have those legs.

They have those legs.

They look great.

Oh, you have those legs.

You get exoskeletal.

You get exoskeleton legs.

It's huge.

It's like, it's life-changing.

And you get them all.

You get a bunch of different types.

You get ones that make you run faster.

You get ones that make you more sturdy.

You get ones that let you carry more.

Like all of those different things are super useful.

And so I suspect to some degree that stuff that has worked its way into.

There's like a stylistic impetus or mechanical impetus that's being carried forward from the director's cut.

I wonder, like, so I first thought when you were mentioning that the second game sort of has a faster on-ramp for all your mobility enhancement type stuff,

my first thought was like, oh, is this a situation where

you know it is kind of like the, you know, the term abilities was coming to mind, even though that's not accurate here.

But like, you know, the thing of it does suck in a second game when you've spent the first game building up all this stuff and then you get into the second game and then you're back at the beginning of like I guess I just have to haul stuff again like I'm wondering I was wondering is there a sort of thing there where he was like well we need to just like jump to that part so it feels like a more fluid transition but the thing about the director's cut makes that weird because the director's cut being that much easier I wonder, like, is it, is it a thing of, like, them fully expecting people who are buying the director's cut to have already played it and to be playing it a second time?

And it's sort of like a new game plus kind of

fast track but like that's a weird thing to presume but also I wouldn't put it past Kojima to just be like well yeah people play it again like for example and

you know

desire paths appear almost instantaneously now like within one journey and I don't like that I liked the feeling of I've trekked backwards and forwards here a few times right and now it's starting to appear but but they're showing up kind of almost almost immediately.

Um, and it's hard to see, yeah.

I think the fact that I hadn't played the director's cut and hearing that the director's cut has so much of this in place makes me feel a little less like a little less hard done by on some level, right?

Where I'm like, well, these

maneuvers were being made earlier, um,

earlier in the thing.

It also kind of

makes me think again of Final Fantasy XIV, the like boss we were talking about that got cut out.

Of like, there's a, there's part of it that feels kind of like when

a

old, big, long game is streamlined.

You know?

Yeah.

Yes.

Yes, totally.

I'm really curious to play more and see how this starts, specifically how the difficulty starts to develop.

But every so often, the game has done, pulled these maneuvers that in the original game were so wonderful and are still a lot of fun.

I'm having a great time with this game.

Where, you know, you will do what seems to be a pretty standard job through terrain that you think is, you know, those mountains in the distance are like background detail or whatever.

And then they'll be like, carry the goats to the top of the mountain and you're like oh shit oh i'm going up there okay you can have a mountain one of those moments

you can see the mountain go even at a s

you can just climb right up it but you this is the problem you can at this point in the game just climb right up it I haven't had a moment yet where I have been really truly stuck.

Well, actually, there was that time that there was a huge rainstorm and a river's banks burst.

So this is a new thing in the game.

Like weather patterns can start to like sweep through the terrain.

There's already something called timefall.

Oh god.

We can't get into like

there?

No, no, no.

Timefall is absolutely

timefall ages everything kind of immediately

and is signal.

It causes things to grow and then age.

So it's signaled by like plants growing and dying around you at all times.

Timefall is wonderful.

It also like rapidly corrodes the packages that you're carrying.

Yeah.

Also, I have to correct myself real quick.

Bolo gun was in the regular version of of Death Stranding.

The new gun is the Maser gun, which is like a little stun laser gun, but you get that very early.

And so it carries you until you get the Bolo gun in the second map.

Anyway, you continue.

I'll talk about combat in a second, actually, I think.

But like...

So now Timefall, you'll get a notification where it's like, Timefall has caused the rivers to swell and their banks have burst.

And you'll check the map and you'll see like a really cool overlay showing where a river usually flows and how it's flowing now or whatever.

And I got caught in a situation where I was kind of trekking through empty terrain.

It was like a series of stone ridges that were like almost like a bark on a tree.

And there were BTs hanging around them.

So I was taking a really circuitous path.

You know, I was taking like a ladder up one.

Rather than going through the narrow gaps between the ridges of bark, I was like laddering over one of them and then using a ladder as a bridge to hop onto the next one or whatever, avoid the BT, etc.

And I got to the river, and it was big and it was bad.

And I had thought to myself, I'll put a ladder over it, I'll just, I'll ford it, I'll ford it that way.

But my clever scheme with the BTs had removed all kinds of ladders, so I thought, don't worry, there's mechanics for this.

This is a strand game.

I will put down a little sign on the ground that says,

ladders, buddies.

And I will wait for another real-world porter to give me a ladder.

This happens.

I have done this several times.

I'll come back from a mission and a little sign will appear in front of me saying, weapons, please.

And I'll say, you can have my gun.

Absolutely.

I can just print another one.

Except I was outside of the chiral network.

And the chiral network is the sort of the mechanical and narrative heart of this game.

This idea that you are sort of spreading a peer-to-peer network connection that hooks people up to a

interfaced internet internet through the land of the dead.

Yeah, yeah, Twilight Rush.

Yeah, yeah, I know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And,

but because I wasn't hooked up to the chiral network, I didn't even have access to beg for ladders.

I couldn't even build

sort of the timeful shelter that would allow me to like really get my bearings, have a safe place to store my goods while I found the river.

The rain was coming down,

the river was, you know, going.

So I said, all right, fine.

I am going to walk across the river.

And as I approached approached the river, Doleman, who's Sam's companion, who is a man who got his soul trapped in a ventriloquist's doll, and he moves at 15 frames a second.

I'm pissing.

Sorry, what?

Well, he got his soul.

Sorry, he got his ha.

That is the soul as opposed to the car.

Your body.

The car, yeah.

He got his ha trapped inside a ventriloquist's dummy.

He has introduced with about as much.

explanation as I just gave you.

Someone says, this is Doleman.

He got his soul trapped in a ventriloquist body.

And sometimes you talk to Doleman and he says things like, I wish I could eat.

And you're like, sure.

Doleman is like clipped to Sam's waist.

And sometimes you can throw him way up into the sky.

That's nice.

Does he like it?

He likes it.

He says it takes great force of will.

To throw him or to be thrown.

Or to like it.

To be thrown.

Interesting.

Or maybe to like it.

And when he's thrown, he can

see through his eyes.

Jack, earlier today, I was thinking, wait, is there, is there, I remembered ha and ka being a big deal in this game.

But I was like, wait, is there a

Fort Da thing also, the sort of Freudian here and then gone games that children play?

Freud writes about this as like one of the early fundamental ways that children make sense of the world.

The kind of like you throw the stick and then you have to bring the stick back.

And now I'm wondering, are we going to get a big Fort Da

ha

overlap in reveal?

Yeah, reveal and death straining too.

Anyway, so here I am squaring up to cross this

water.

And if you haven't seen an image of Sam carrying packages, you should.

The packages are these big metal briefcases that he like stacks up on his back

in like a big tower.

Still do pizza boxes.

And sometimes pizza boxes and sometimes corpses.

They still have to be in the cases, don't they?

Or they're just regular pizza boxes, though.

No, I believe even in the original, the pizza boxes are pizza boxes.

I wish I could source this, but I remember seeing a great post on Blue Sky where someone was like, you need to understand that Death Stranding is a game fundamentally about delivering all sorts of different packages, and they've developed about four models that the packages could be.

You very rarely get unique-looking packages, but I do seem to remember in DS1 getting pizza boxes.

Dollman says, Very dangerous to cross the river, Sam.

And I think to myself, I know you little robot.

Or doll, I suppose.

I did not want to do this.

I take three or four steps into the river, and a wave hits me so hard, and every package that I am carrying

starts to become...

The sticks going down the river after you've thrown them off the bridge.

And I am in the river on my back.

New controls have appeared on the screen.

They say paddle left and right.

I'm fighting the current.

I'm watching these things go.

I swim to the side and then I start sprinting downriver as my goods are like bobbing down the river next to me.

And I like wade in three feet, managed to grab one package, get knocked over again, and you know, eventually I sort of corral all my horrible, now wildly damaged packages.

And I'm like, this is untenable.

The presence of the BTs here means that it is going to keep raining because BT, you know, there's a relationship between those two.

I don't have anything that can defeat the BTs.

I need to complete this mission.

I cannot walk all the the way back to the station where the Australian government is trying to set itself up again.

That is not possible.

So I look very hard at my map and I realize that the only thing I can do is walk to the west to the point where the river comes out of the fucking mountain

and then take a slow climb over the source of this river and then walk back down the other side towards my destination.

And that's...

I want Death Stranding to be making me do that.

All All the time.

Well, and the thing is

every journey.

In the first game, it felt like getting on the chiral network gave you some big bonuses pretty quickly in terms of, oh, there are more ladders here.

There's more ropes here.

I can make the climb more easily.

But it did not seem as if the big benefits, things like highways and

bridges

and other sorts of like intensely useful structures, those seem like they came on blind much slower, even after being on the chiral network.

And so you have this middle ground of I have no support to then you first get on the chiral network and you have some support to ladders, like ladder, which are huge, 100%.

Ladders,

I love to see a ladder.

You cross things, big important.

And then by the end of the game or the end of a section, you're like, oh, we got bridges.

We got highways.

We got ziplines.

We got in the director's cut.

There are now things that let you launch cargo, like over a hill or over so fucking high.

Something that parachutes down.

I will say, I'm so excited.

You know, bridges come into the game really early.

Highways are not quite in yet, but I think they're approaching.

I cannot wait because the end game of Death Stranding, I do think you should feel like the package's wizard.

You should, you know, I do think that there is a point at which this like spectacular power fantasy of I can get any object anywhere becomes something extraordinary at the end of the game.

I will say, right now, it feels like the end game of Death Stranding, both from hitting the first of these

and understanding where the third map goes, is a kind of mediocre.

This is the first game, third-person shooter.

I had my first Mads Mickelson

fight encounter.

Was it Sweaty Mads?

Was it Bloody Mads?

Was it Sweaty Bloody Mads?

It's World War I Sweaty Blades.

Isn't there also oily?

He's oily.

I mean,

no game has wanted tar and oil on a body more than like ooze, than goo.

It's a goo game, you know?

I

love

how

sexy this game is.

Have you met the guy who might be the sexiest man I've ever seen yet?

It's a tricky question, Austin.

I don't know who is the sexiest man you've ever seen.

He's like the guy who's instead of Mads in this game.

No,

I have not yet met him.

Lukey Marinelli is the actor.

I don't know what the name of, I think that's the actor.

I don't remember what the name of the character is.

Neil.

Neil, have you met Neil?

The guy who in the trailer looks like he's doing like

Solid Snake?

Yeah.

Yes.

I will say that

often to his wild detriment, Kojima has understood that sexy things and gross things are walking hand in hand through this world.

Yeah.

So sometimes he fucks this up so monumentally.

Oh, yeah.

But at several moments in Death Stranding, he clearly has this real understanding of like what it is when a body carries packages through the world, is put under strain, people are constantly like breathing and grunting and sweating and having to take showers and coughing.

And then there's just this weird interplay between like

classically conventionally sexy things.

Yeah.

Here's a hot lady.

Yeah.

And classically non-conventionally sexy things, sweaty mads, sweaty bloody mads.

Mads is tough.

i think this is like complete bullshit off the cuff but i kind of feel like kidyo kojima loves men's bodies and loves women's bodies but only loves men

i think that that might be true i think that that might be true he's interested in women conceptually and i'm sure he loves the women in his life i guess i'm not sure but i i would you know i don't want to say he's like

a you know a raving misogynist who who hurts people or something like that but when i think about the stories he tells they come with a sort sort of

women are written about like timefall, you know, and not like

if that makes sense.

They're written about like concepts in these stories

in big categorical schematic ways, you know?

Yeah, women are kind of sort of also like, what if you could have a machine that fired cargo over a film?

Exactly.

Yes.

And some of that stuff is still kind of interesting.

I'm not, you know, that first game is about parenthood.

Motherhood is a type of parenthood.

There should be stories about motherhood in that game.

And there are, you know?

Her name is Mama.

She has a ghost baby.

And he, it's despair to him to let you know that she still lactates, even though she has a weird ghost baby.

Yes, but then, and I mean, then we're also re-entering that, like, bodies are weird

and are being put under stress, etc.

He's a master of his own eroticism.

I really think he is.

I will say that the kind of the lead woman, at least at this point in the game, is Fragile, played by Leia Sidou.

She's so good.

And she has...

Leia Sidou is a fantastic actress, generally.

She has figured out this cadence for like how to exist in this world, like top to bottom.

There is like nobody better right now, except maybe the actor who is playing the person whose body is Guillermo del Toro.

Because that's a big weird thing that Kojima has also done in these games.

He like scans his favorite directors and celebrities, but then regularly doesn't cast them so you get this bizarre effect happening where Guillermo del Toro is here on the screen but he's not talking to me right I'm sorry I forgot about that it's not him who's doing the the summary it's whoever voices dead man that character right

yes but Fragile is Seydou and she is crushing it.

She has this like weird, dreamy

affect that at the same time is like very odd and firm.

Fragile has this very distinctive costume where she has like a pair of hands, like disembodied hands around her neck that are like making gestures and it's not clear whether they are controlled by her or they're probably not controlled by her, but she seems to treat them as like her partner in a conversation.

So they will be making gestures or she'll be interacting with them and Seydou's delivery of this is

Fantastic.

It's it's really great.

Yeah, so the fragile stuff in the first game is some of the most like, if you read it on a page,

you would roll your eyes at this guy and say, like, this guy's an asshole.

Like, this guy being Kajima, who, you know, the lead director on these games.

I guess I don't actually know if they're fully written by him or if he has a writing team.

I have not looked at the credits yet.

He does.

Okay.

I can credit them.

At least Death Stranding 2 is written by Hideo Kajima, Kenji Yano, Shuyu Murata, and Koto Watanabe.

Okay.

So, you know, I think if you looked at this character in bullet points on the page, and maybe even read the script, you'd be like, Fragile is one of his most, you know,

simplistic, boring versions of what it means to be a woman, right?

Which is like, ah, to be a woman is to have a body and to have that body be, you know, perceived.

And, oh no, what happens if someone makes your body something that you don't want perceived?

And what's her beautiful face fit in with that?

And what responsibility does she have to different communities?

And da da-da-da-da-da.

da All of this stuff is like, it does not live on the page well.

But her delivery of that stuff, I think she might be.

I don't really love Norman Ritus's delivery in any of these games.

I think that he's maybe being directed to be kind of affectless and flat because he's just a guy.

He's kind of just giving a guy.

But Lisa Dew's performance is fragile is kind of it holds so much of it together in that first game.

So I'm glad to see that she's being given more to work with here.

She has, she is the captain of the kind of the ship in this game, which is a big weird spaceship called the Magellan that travels through Tar.

And her new costume for Captain of the Magellan.

Yeah, I think she might actually be the captain.

She's definitely not the pilot.

She's wearing this sort of like, it's one part classic Kojima military fantasy and one part like French resistance

soldier.

It's a really good costume that she has.

But yeah,

there is a lot more emphasis on combat.

And the combat is fine.

It is better than the originals.

And you're given a lot more sort of like combat verbs.

I was given a sniper rifle, and the sniper rifle was really cool because the bullets on the sniper rifle move very slowly.

So I fired and went.

They don't move like astonishingly slowly, but they move way slower than you'd think.

So I fired and went, went, I missed, and I put the scope down, and then he keeled over in the distance.

And that was a really, really good feeling.

And then the mazer weapons, which are weapons that can kind of target humans and BTs now, are back.

It is

secondary

to my enjoyment.

To your enjoyment, but to the...

Is it secondary to the game?

They will regularly ask you to do things like clear out the bandit camp now, which is not really what they spent a lot of of time doing in the in the past.

Combat was such a it was such a secondary thing in that first game.

Um, you know, I only just now got gun guns in that, in that first game, right?

Uh, I, you, you get your first Mads playable scene, uh, which I thought was different than it was different than what I thought those would be.

I thought I'd get to play as Mads in those scenes for some reason.

No, no, you just hunt him around some World War I trenches in a weird way, uh, which is funny because I watched a little, I watched one of the trailers trailers or something of Destrony 2 and was like, this, there's a fight in this that is just the best scene in, what was it, 1914?

What's the 19, what was the recent World War I movie?

From like 40,

1914 with the illumination in the graveyard.

And I was like, you just lifted that whole scene?

Like, that scene rules.

That's Kojima, though.

That's Kajima, though.

In any case,

after that fight, you end up leaving it with like assault rifles and shotguns and stuff.

And you're like, wait a second.

Whereas I have assault rifles from the beginning.

well yeah because you had them from the beginning of because you it's death stranding 2 jack you know you come in with the assault rifle from death stranding 1 yeah sort of i will say that the the how do you make the plot a sequel to death stranding 2 his answer to that is really wild he he

he will regularly be introducing like big new facts about the world for example you can teleport to australia that is a fact about the world there are these things called plate gates we just discovered one of them and it in fact it appeared when Sam had connected all of North America to the chiral network.

The plate gate appeared and if you go through the plate gate

Australia you also cause a massive earthquake

and

as you are playing I think this is great you'll just be told like

plate gate transport incoming and then an earthquake will happen as someone moves through the plate gate.

I don't know if that's a real player or if, I mean, in fiction people are moving through the plate gate quite a lot.

So he'll be doing stuff like that.

He'll also be doing really incredible tonal stuff like

really early on, some figures come out of the tar that look like they are from Book of the New Sun.

I saw them.

They are like Realis ass

monks who are like leading a parade through

the sand towards a plate gate.

And that's fantastic.

And then at the same time, characters will say, Sam will say, like, what's my mission?

And characters will say, almost explicitly, it's what you did in Death Stranding 1.

You need to link up Mexico to the chiral network, and then you need to link up Australia to the chiral network.

And there's something so

kind of like formally pleasing about that to me to an extent.

Like,

this is a game in which you could essentially break down what you're doing as carry the metals to old Oz, and then you need to carry the plastics to the lone adventurer that's what you need to do and so it's so pleasing for the sequel to come up and be like yeah well look buddy there's another country and it needs to be connected to the chiral network have you another thing he said a lot before release was like

after covet i'm starting to wonder if we should be connected

So the tagline of this game is, should we have connected?

And I will say that

there is some plot maneuvering, there is some sort of act one, act two plot maneuvering that is happening that is so obviously suspicious that not one single character is mentioning that it almost feels deliberate.

It feels like this great weird genre move of like no way it's like in a pantomime when they make the children say he's behind you when the monster creeps out behind the hero and the audience knows but the hero doesn't know.

For example,

America kind of doesn't really exist anymore, and it's this

organization called I think the USC is having a lot of people.

It's the greatest cities of America, right?

UCA, USC.

Yeah, yes, perfect.

And they are kind of like setting up the curl network throughout America.

And as they do this, this sort of private company called APAC starts

to emerge.

Spell that for me?

APAC.

Different APAC.

Different APAC, presumably, than A-P-A-C.

Okay, no I for...

Okay, sure.

No, no, no.

APAC is a private organization that is an automated package delivering company.

I see.

And so right off the bat,

any savvy viewers hackles a race because I deliver packages.

You do.

And what are they doing, putting me out of a job?

And the answer is they've sort of put me out of a job completely at the beginning of the game.

APAC is now delivering packages through its automated systems and through a very powerful computer called APAS,

it has essentially replaced Porters completely.

I gotta play this.

And then

some weird stuff kind of starts happening immediately, right?

Which is that you start learning that the United Cities of America, the UCA, and APAS are separate entities, but the UCA has taken out a lot of contracts with APAS.

And so all of Sam's equipment is fitted with APAS as well.

I see.

And Kara just keeps saying things as we start moving the chiral network into Mexico and Australia.

Characters keep saying things like, well, we understand that people might think that what we're doing is colonization on the part of the USC, but it's not because it's a private company.

It's not the USC at all.

It's the Hudson Bay Company.

It's different.

That's right.

It's different.

British is a very good thing.

And what's really funny is that,

I mean, APAS and

American people are saying this to me, but also Mexican and Australian people are saying this to me as well.

They're saying like, well, it's good that it's not the UCA because we're not terribly sure about those guys, but it's APAS.

Now,

it is very clear to me where we're going here, right?

In terms of like the shape of this thing, in terms of like, we have met a character, a shady backer, is revealed to be the president of APAC.

And his name is the president.

And we have a whole cutscene about how America has done away with presidents and doesn't have them anymore.

Because instead they now use a sort of systems-driven automatic voting.

We gotta get this guy on

the table.

He has to listen to us, at least, if he's gonna keep stealing our shit.

So this guy is now essentially the president of America, but the text of the game is saying to me, it's okay.

He's the president of APAC.

And also he's suspicious, but it shouldn't be clear to you why yet.

So all of that is kind of rumbling along.

And it's clear to me that

this is part of what Kojima is talking about with the should we have connected thing.

I have to imagine there is also some other stuff going on.

For example, Australia has been saying to me.

Australia has been saying to me,

stuff has gotten wild.

There are new kinds of BTs that have appeared.

There are earthquakes everywhere.

There are forest fires.

There are sandstorms.

And all of this has coincided with the appearance of the Plategate.

And if you remember, as I said earlier, the Plategate appeared when Sam connected America.

So there is this real sense of like we are meddling with

forces beyond our control, especially because as far as APAS is concerned, sorry, APAC,

any following?

As far as APAC is concerned,

one of the key goals to getting Australia onto the chiral network is that they think that if they can get Australia onto the chiral network, another plate gate will appear that will take them somewhere else.

I see.

And they're like, well, we can just fix the world.

Right.

Right.

If we find another plate gate, not only can we then travel to, you know, Brazil or whatever, but we can also start triangulating.

Because now we have three of them.

We have a plate gate in America, we have a plate gate in Australia, and we have a plate gate wherever this goes.

So we can figure out where they go next.

And once we've done that, then we can have the world.

What the game isn't saying to me, but is very clear to me because I've seen a story, is APAS has an ulterior motive here about like control via the chiral network?

This also sounds like a very classic Kojima thing of,

I don't know,

I think Keith on a run-button Metal Gear Let's Play maybe said that Kojima was the smartest dumb guy ever.

And like explicitly, the sort of the thing around like, this is someone who seems to understand that nations

have used their power in ways that shape the world, in ways that are inegalitarian and bad for people, but often doesn't have the

can't take whatever the next step from that is

and kind of like pulls up pulls up short from any sort of diagnosis or cause outside of there are bad people there.

Sometimes has causes, sometimes confuses causes or confuses methods for causes in ways.

Middle Air Solid V is all about language eventually and talking about the, I don't know how deep either of you have seen that, but like big talks about how English's dominance as a language has a sort of cultural imperialist

kind of element to it.

And then kind of just kind of like...

it falls away into the science fictionality of the way he he builds his stories sometimes.

And

I would believe, Jack, that it's going to somewhere big, but I would also believe that it just kind of swerves off the road at a certain point.

I have no idea.

And not only swerves off the road and like hits you with something surprising and different, but just like drops a big part of whatever the big metaphor was that he was producing, you know?

Well, this is a little bit like the way we talked about the way Kojima writes women and also the way he writes like sex and sexuality, is that he does sort of like glance towards an interesting idea and then will regularly like go ricocheting off into some you know either outright fetishization or just some like really troubling uh like assumptions that he has made right about uh about how the world works about how women work about how sex works um i wrote down in my list here i was writing down kojima hallmarks and it's like to keith's point the first thing i wrote down was wheels within wheels of corporations and organizations you know uh kojima loves this idea that like within organization a there is actually a proxy for organization B that is actually talking through Organization C.

But then, by the time I had finished writing that list of Kojima hallmarks, I was down to metal buildings.

Yeah, well, he does like a metal building.

It's true.

He does love that sort of like World War II American military infrastructure of, like, I think about like mother base.

And the inside of the Magellan here is just a sort of an aircraft carrier.

But yeah, there is so much I want to say about this game, and I'm sure that we can come back to it.

I will try to get there because

I will say, you know, cards on the table for friends of the table listeners, you're saying things that are making me go, when we get back to the divine cycle, there is stuff here for us to work through.

Definitely.

Especially given, I think I've recently kind of cracked what the next of those seasons is, and it's not what I thought it would be.

And there is

stuff around this.

Yeah.

And there's stuff here that I think is fascinating for to bounce ideas around.

In terms of, you know, what I will say broadly is one of the things that was interesting about Death Stranding 1,

that's a game that comes out at the end of a decade dominated by the zombie.

You know, maybe 15 years dominated by the zombie, you know, from Sharon the Dead through Walking Dead and everything in between.

And core to that version of the post-apocalyptic story is the sort of like, we will eat each other, right?

All community is community only so long as it doesn't fall apart and then you have to move on to the new community.

Lots of post-apocalyptic stories have this sort of nihilism about the perth, the human, and about human community in them.

And I wouldn't say that Death Straining One was

like

necessarily.

It's a game about if you touch

a dead person, you will explain it.

It will explode 100%, right?

And it's not a game about, like, I'm, ah, wow, but we could all figure out how to build a garden together in

the remains.

But it is a game that is interested in the small, the large and small ways in which it's it's like, fuck,

I still, I still want you to deliver a pizza to me.

I still want to make food for somebody.

Oh, someone really wants this book that someone else has.

And that small desire could cash out into a third person bringing the book from person A to person B and not always, I'm going to break your head open so I can take the book from you.

Right.

Thinking here, I'm thinking here of the book of Eli, a whole movie about smashing smashing someone's head open to take a book from them.

But it's got a twist, doesn't it?

It does have a twist.

We talked about this recently on one of the shelf by genre episodes or the bonus episodes.

It came up because we're doing a post-apocalyptic unit right now.

Bet you wouldn't think it has a twist.

You know, Gary, Gary got me on that one.

I gotta tell you, I wasn't, I

couldn't, could have never seen it coming.

In any case, like, that was part of the thing that I think was so appealing about that first game.

And it's part of why I'm like, huh, I wonder where that stuff is going because I recognize where

the skepticism might come from.

I think, especially a lot of people talked about that first game when COVID happened in this sort of like, wow, he was such a sage, you know, it was so he saw where we were all going.

I don't know, man.

Sometimes this just happens.

Well, and also, some I've always said this is like for me, this sort of science fiction work is often about where we are and not about where we're going.

He was already, the world was already a weird, fractured space where it felt like we were distant from one another.

You know what I mean?

Swine flu had already happened.

Swine flu had already happened.

100%.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, he made Metal Earth Solid 2 20 plus years ago now about, you know,

the ways in which the digital world was fracturing information and separating us and, you know, fragmenting communities.

Like, these are ideas he's had for a long fucking time.

But it is interesting to see him explicitly say, the last five years have made me wonder about this.

And I'm curious to see where, how, if that ends up being an actual major thematic that can be universalized, or if what he's telling, not universalized for real, but that he's saying something about connection, or if he's giving us a little parable about how it might go wrong if it's not done right or something.

You know, those are different things.

You know, you can play the game that is nihilistic.

You can tell the story that is like human connection fundamentally is flawed.

I don't think he's going there.

I doubt it.

But, you know,

it would surprise me, but it wouldn't shock me, if that makes makes sense.

Yeah.

To leave our Death Stranding segment, I would like to read two things.

This is a tweet from Kojima on May 29th, 2019.

This is maybe my all-time favorite Kojima tweet, a man who is both a great poster and a terrible poster.

Dear Mads fans, there are many scenes in Death Stranding, which I think you'll love in this trailer.

There's Mads covered in blood, Mads tied, smoking Mads, variations with Mads' eyes, Mads with glasses, dot, dot, dot.

Singing Mads and Mads in battle dress were new challenges.

I love it.

I wish I felt this way about anything in this world.

About anything.

There's nothing in the world where I would ever communicate or feel like that.

And that makes me sadder.

You know,

life is long.

Hopefully, I find it.

What if it's like dress up?

That'd be great.

Are you kidding me?

If I like something.

That completely creeps up on you.

I would love to be someone.

Free diving.

I recently joked with Austin that he should become a greeting card making guy.

Yeah.

I feel like that's, I'm still, I'm still kind of in the camp of like, I don't know, that might do it.

Give it a few.

I would love it too.

What about consulting other people's model railroads?

That would be great.

You don't build it.

I would do any of these things.

I'd be happy to become that person.

I'm kind of a nothing guy is the thing.

And

with, with, which has its benefits.

It allows a sort of like um like fickley, ficklety fickleness has its

ficklety do

Batman, like oh, it's piccolo.

Oh, you're right, it is piccolo,

uh, but like there is a benefit to being a fickle person, which is like you get to experience a lot of different things, you get to have these great swells of interest for a limited amount of time, and if you make peace with that, it can be really pleasurable.

Jack, this is how you play video games, for instance.

Oh, yeah, um, yeah, uh, it's how I often play video games, you know, for to be sure.

You know, I think I'm on the scale.

I did not like

Be Rising.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

And so, and so I, I, but I do think if I could become a dressage person, and that was like the thing I loved, and it's all I thought about and could make the Mads post, but about different horse trots, different horse

prances.

What's gates gates?

Thank you.

I couldn't remember the general term.

I'm preempting this.

People are going to come out of the gate and say, well, Austin, you're like this about Mex.

Thank you, Jack.

Not even close to this.

I'm not even close to like this about mechs.

Every time someone sends me a picture of a thing, they're building mechs for real.

I mean, they should stop doing that.

Yeah, that's not good.

It's not good across any spectrum.

It won't work.

And also, I don't want them to exist.

And I don't have that.

I don't have that in me in that way.

I just like them.

I just, I like telling stories with them, but I don't, but I don't, and I don't even like them in that sort of like,

you know, I have a

closet filled with unbuilt gunpla, and they're not unbuilt just because I didn't have time.

It's because the interest wanes, you know?

Yeah, I don't have it like that.

And

Kajima, you are, if nothing else, seem to be someone who is honest.

No, I said Kojima.

No, Kajima is honest about.

Oh, 100%.

It was honest about the things.

It's driven by the preoccupations in a way that I think is fascinating.

You know?

The last thing I would like to read is a clip from the game's Codex.

Codis.

Sorry, Codex.

Very different.

Codex, different now, different thing.

Codus, like the

database of fingerprints and shit.

I suppose that's what they call, to be clear, the codex.

Right.

This is a really good example of the way the game's narrative tone dovetails with the game's mechanical tone in really funny ways.

I mean, I feel like the classic example of this in any game is when a character with their own mouth says to you to crouch, press the B button.

It's always a delight when that happens, when video games games have to tell you what they are.

I think this is a really good example.

This is a CODIS entry for a character called Norberto Puente.

Norberto was a guard on the Mexican border, just like his father before him.

After the death stranding, he continued to maintain the security of the border region, even when the societies on either side had collapsed.

A shortage of materials and equipment left the border security system on its knees, however, and the threat from extremists only grew until the situation became dire.

It was around this time that the first Bridges expedition arrived, promising to bring the chiral network in the near future.

Norberto therefore left the border where he'd been born and raised and moved to Ciodad Nudo del Norte, C1.

His hope is that the chiral network will bring about the peace and security that he and his colleagues were unable to maintain.

And then there's a little line breaking part of the UI off, and underneath it says, Continue to develop your

connection level with him and his facility, and you might receive a silent handgun.

Oh,

isn't that good?

Yeah, great.

Fantastic.

Thanks, Norbert.

Norberto.

I'm not being ironic.

I love that very much.

I do love it when tone just goes cascade.

Oh, also, we do have to move on.

I realize I've said chiral network over this section one trillion times.

Let me define that really quickly.

That is the internet through the land of the dead.

You said that.

We did.

Yeah, because I said, yeah, I just want to make sure that we have a lot of people.

Yeah, which is, I mean, we didn't have the land of the dead part, but we did have the you get people on the network that is the physical internet part, you know, because I spent a lot of the time playing the first uh the second game after having had a break, being like, What the fuck is what do we mean when we say chiral?

Yeah, what is that?

Well, chirality is like when something goes the other way in its reflection, right?

Yes, uh, uh, chiral, like organization of your organs, places your heart on the right-hand side, right?

Sure, yes,

anyway.

I actually think, Jack, we should save our next segment for the next episode.

We've been going for two hours already, and my mouth hurts.

And so I think that's a good enough reason to stop talking.

Yeah.

Great reason to stop talking.

They finally invented a way to make me shut up.

Pain.

Jaw pain.

Mouth pain.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

So that's going to do it.

Janine, you get to talk about that next thing in a future episode.

Yeah, because I think we should finish it back.

We should beat it.

Yeah, I think that's probably true.

Sort of, maybe.

I'm so excited.

Austin and Janine want to talk about a game that I have never heard of, never seen a a single screenshot of, and based on their description in the show docs, don't understand what it is.

I would love to continue that level of knowledge.

Yeah.

All right.

We won't even, I'm not even going to tease it beyond that.

People have to come back next time and listen to us talk about it.

As always, you can support the show by going to friendsatthetable.cash.

You can go check out merchandise for our main friends at the table show at friendsatable.shop, which if you're like, if you listen to the beginning of Perpetua, but haven't gotten deep into it yet, even if you listen to the first main Perpetua episode, there is relevant merchandise there.

There is flag merchandise there for you.

Friendsofthetable.cash.

If you don't know what a flag is, you should go to friendsofthetable.cash and be charmed by a wonderful creature.

What did I say?

Cash?

Shop.

Yes, cash is the patreon.

Shop is the

store.

Friends at the table.shop.

What else?

What else should we, I guess, Jack?

By the time this comes out,

Media club plus will be oh actually i think we're gonna end up in a situation where they both drop on the same day oh

because because media club plus was delayed by a week last week right we finished um yeah we finished uh they might i don't know if keith will get it out early we finished watching hunter hunter and we finished talking we finished season one of media club plus i have seen the works

as it goes

That is a great fucking question.

That's a great question.

Where did they get married?

Hunter won.

They did not get married.

okay they did not get married we're gonna be doing a q a episode that is probably gonna be coming out a week after today so that will probably be on the 29th um austin's gonna be there uh it's very exciting um and we've already read a little bit of the i've read i've read one chapter of the manga and my socks were knocked clean off my butt

um

At the same time, I'm doing a really cool stream series at the moment.

I'm doing a subscription drive over where I stream with my partner at Kat Bam Kapow on Twitch.

We are playing Blue Prince.

Kat has never seen Blue Prince before and is, I would say, fated by the gods.

I'm losing my mind, Jack.

It's, it's, I mean, it's now gotten beyond.

It's now spectacular in ways that even I don't understand.

It was initially spectacular in ways that I was like, how the hell is she doing this?

And it's now, it has exceeded that.

I'm like, I can tell this is critically important.

How have they found it on day seven?

It's remarkable.

There's a thing I want to tell y'all that I'm going to wait until you're done streaming that game.

So tell those years of Nancy Drew training.

Genuinely, it's part of it.

We are playing on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays at twitch.tv forward slash cat bam capacity.

That's not only Blueprints.

You're also doing a bunch of other stuff.

Yeah, that's Cat with a K.

And we are, oh, if you've seen our Outlast LP, you will have seen Cat and I playing Let's Play the Hammer Ka Schlemmer catalog for sure.

Sorry, our Outward LP, not our Outlast LP.

That one's awesome.

Oh, my God.

We are not doing that.

I constantly almost say Outlast instead of Outward.

Different game.

Very different.

It is really hard to make an LP about a game you dislike, and it's a very thin line to try and make that a good project.

It would take so much mental energy, but I truly believe we could make a good Outlast LP.

I'll leave it to you and Kat because y'all do a horror thing already.

And if you want to do that one day, go for it.

Yeah, anything else?

I think that might be it.

Media Club Plus.

Oh, Media Club Plus did announce its next

mini-season, which neither you nor I are going to be on the main cast, but we'll both be guessing.

And Janine, you'll be guessing on that at least a little bit.

A little bit.

Covering the works of M.

Night Shyamalan in

not completion, but in a great number, I would say.

The majority of the movies, right?

It's fascinating to me because I'm an M-Night Shyamalan enjoyer.

I think he's a really interesting, capable filmmaker who has kind of like ebbed and flowed, but I think everybody does.

Listening to Keith has barely seen any M-Night Shyamalan movies, and at the moment, all Keith keeps saying is, wow, M-Night Shyamalan is really good.

I am fascinated to see how this develops.

Keith believes that M-Night, he thought M-Night was bad, and he is discovering that he is good, and you're about to watch a man go on a journey.

Maybe.

I will make a bet.

I think Keith is going to double down and say the bad ones are actually good and no one else understands.

I actually think the bad ones are good and no one else understands.

I am maybe with Keith here.

Do you think the good ones are bad?

No.

I think the good one.

I think M-Knight is a skilled filmmaker.

I think he is

regularly...

He's hitting the ball when he comes up to the plate.

He's not always hitting hummers.

He is sometimes missing that ball, Jack.

I got to tell you.

Split is trash.

I haven't seen split.

I haven't seen split.

We're not going to be covering.

Mr.

Glass is bad.

Listen to find out what happens, dear audience.

Yeah.

I'm, of course, a hater in some ways.

I think.

It's just called Glass, but it's about the character, Mr.

Glass.

So, you know,

signs is

mildly overrated.

Anyway.

All right.

I think that that is actually it.

I think that's going to do it for us.

Please leave us some reviews.

I actually, I actually, wait, one second.

I did promise I would find and read a review, and I forgot to get one.

I forgot to get one.

Let me find one.

I'm going to find one right now.

Ojex69 says the I stands for, I love this show.

Aww.

Thank you, OJX 69.

That's just very sweet.

Oh, here we go.

This one more, one more from LZ Naught who says, Tale Time, T-A-I-L-T-I-M-E.

I don't know why it's called that, why they've named the review that.

I'll read the review now.

Hey, love the pod, and can't wait to hear y'all go deep on Gex trilogy when it hits next week.

Until then, stay Gexy.

I don't know.

I know one fact about Gex.

He's a damn lizard.

You know one thing.

He's not a lizard.

I couldn't tell you what you're doing.

He's a gecko, isn't he?

Which is an amphibian, isn't it?

Oh, oh, okay, right.

So I got the beast wrong.

He's more of a lizard than, for example, it's like if you picked up Virginia and said, this is a lion.

Well, it's not.

It's like if you picked up Virginia and said, this is a.

Geckos or lizards.

What?

I thought they were amphibious.

Geckos are lizards.

Geckos are lizards and fractures upbreaks.

Wow.

Foisted.

There you go.

Gecko's a lizard.

Damn.

To be continued.