02: Tim Rabbit, The British Bugs Bunny

What's good, internet?

It is April 15th, 2025, and this is not an intriguing mystery left to you by your grandfather.

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

Maybe that's you.

It could be you.

Importantly, if you go there and you give us $10, you get access to a Let's Play that is coming out every other week, offset weeks with this, which means the first and second episode are now live.

We're playing Outward.

I'm playing that game together with the same people who are here again this week, Jack Takeette and Janine Hawkins.

Hi.

Hi, I'm Jack.

You can find me on Blue Sky at NotQuite Real, and you can get the side story theme at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

When we recorded our first episode, we did not have the theme yet.

I was betting that I would still remember to make music.

Once again, it turned out that I did.

You can get it now.

It's like, oh, well, you just heard it.

You know what it sounds like.

It's great.

Yeah.

There are two versions of it here on the show.

Actually, there's three versions of it, kind of.

There are three versions on the show, and there is a fourth version that was the first one that I wrote that is so loose and dreamy and weird that it is for the version of podcasts in the world where gravity is just very slightly less.

Unfortunately, we live in this world, so we get this theme.

Have you considered making one in the world where gravity is very slightly more?

Because I feel like we're headed towards that world somehow.

Yes, if you would like to hear that sound, I recommend listening to Friends at the Table's Partisan

series.

Yeah.

With a harsh industrial score.

Yeah.

Yeah.

People should go to notquitereal.bandcamp.com and listen to all of Jack's music, both the songs featured here on Side Story and the stuff from Friends of the Table and elsewhere.

Speaking of a world where things are a little looser and a little dream-like.

Hold on.

What's up?

Who else is here?

Well, I said both of your names and only you said anything, Jack.

Oh, but I thought we were, I thought Janine was then going to introduce herself.

No, because we don't really do intros on this show the way we do on Friends of the Table.

Ah, fuck.

It's fine.

We can do it now.

Now that you've set it up, Janine, you're also here today.

Which I did say.

I'm bringing Clark back.

Oh,

finally.

A good social media.

So

the horizontal timeline might save us.

People don't know Clark.

I think the only people in the world who know Clark are the two of us and Jeff Gerstman.

Yes.

So.

And the Second Life community.

And I think, like, oh my god

it had like a good like Filipino or like Malaysian community is it gone?

It doesn't exist anymore.

I just clicked on the you know I had from years and years ago before I went to Plerk I went to Plerk I went to your thing on Plerk and it is gone.

Oh, well, that's yeah, I closed my Plerk still exists.

You closed your yeah, I meant your

Plerk.

Okay, I see I don't maybe I didn't.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Did I?

What did I even use on Plerk?

I'm checking.

that's out of the riddle of all the shopping there used to be a bunch of shopping there was shopping on plerk jack do you know what plerk is i do know what plerk is uh although not as i'm discovering with the same intensity uh as the two of you my my main experience of plerk was a social network that appeared and then just sort of fizzled in in my understanding but as i understand there was shopping as well and both of you were there That's right.

This is like at the same time I was on Twitter.

I was on Plerk.

I was mostly posting on Twitter.

This website now looks like

the Hoyoverse social media thing that we try to do,

which is very a mistake.

Yeah.

You know, what if you could capture your audience entirely?

You know, that's kind of the Hoyoverse strategy, it seems.

Anyway, I was going to talk about a thing that's kind of the opposite of a Hoyoverse game

in many ways.

You know, the way like we've talked before that opposites aren't really opposite, and you can kind of make them be whatever you want.

Because, like, call it.

The opposite of a Hoyoverse game is a physical library, yeah, it's like a boat, yeah, or something.

Um,

I really just want at the beginning of this episode, I'm not going to go too deep into it because I think to go too deep into it is to take away some of the magic.

But the day we are recording, the Blue Prince comes out,

it is so good.

It was one of my favorite games I got to play during the IGF jewelry process last year.

I think everyone should try the Blue Prince.

It is a first-person puzzle game in the vein of...

I don't even say what it's in the vein of because I don't want to say Mist and then everyone's like, oh, well, it's not, I'm bad at Mist.

It's not really like Mist in direct ways.

Or the ways it will eventually be like Mist come so deep in that you will have already found a fondness for and an on-ramp into thinking about the game in ways that the Mist style puzzles might might start making sense.

Another way to think about it is a game where you primarily play something that feels like a board game in first person for like five hours, and then eventually you realize you're solving a mystery on top of that.

It is a game where you play the heir to a familial fortune in the, that is, that is kind of comprised by a strange mansion in the mountains.

And it turns out every time you go in the front door of of this mansion, that's actually true.

Every day that passes, the mansion changes what it looks like inside.

The rooms get reallocated or the rooms get shuffled up.

And in fact, you are the one placing the rooms.

If you've played a board game like Betrayal and House of the Hill, which the three of us played the legacy version, Betrayal Legacy of a couple of years ago, all the way through, I still have that version right up there.

I'm curious if I'd flip through all of the tiles, if I would see any blueprints style, if I would see any like relationships between the two sets of tiles.

It's sort of like that, where you're, or like Arkham Horror does this too.

I think the Arkham Horror TCG or LCG.

Jack, you've played some Arkham Horror card game, right?

Am I wrong about this?

Yeah, I have.

Does that also have room placement or is that just regular Arkham Horror that does that?

It does have room placement, but what it considers to be a room could be something like carriages on a train, or it could be stations up a mountain.

But yes, it has that mechanic in the blueprints which i have to tell you i've been playing this game on and off now for six months or something today was the day i got the pun

today

today

oh awesome

it's in the logo

well i was playing an early build i didn't see a logo i wasn't paying attention to logos i was paying attention to the deep lore in which colors matter a lot uh you should remember i'm the person who named a character osteo dropped down on like a blueprint yeah it's a blueprint it says blueprint but I was thinking about the blueprints because you're the inheritor of this family that's deeply connected to the color blue because red has a deep political meaning in the world.

You know, I just wasn't thinking on that register.

I was taking it at face value.

It's not a very punny game.

It's not a game filled with other puns, you know?

It is a game that is funny in parts.

Yes.

There's a lot of really good stuff

early on where

other characters seem to be frustrated as well that the mansion is changing shape all the time.

There's a bit of you going into it that you're like, well, the mansion's changing shape for me.

You know, something weird is going on.

But the more stuff you uncover, you'll get letters from people being like, oh, mansion changed shape again.

Or like, oh, I'm really glad that I saw this room.

And I feel like I never got to see that room last time I visited.

Yeah, what have you for your patio?

And it's like, well, why didn't you go to the patio before?

The answer is it wasn't there before.

Every new session, it's kind of a run-based game, and every new run is a new day.

Every day you have 50 steps.

I believe it starts at 50.

I don't remember now because it's been so long since I started a new game.

And you go into a sort of foyer and then from there Every time you open a door, you get three cards to draw from.

And those three cards

are options for what the rooms are.

The rooms may or may not have doors on each of the four sides of, or each of their four walls, for instance.

They all have, there would be a different type of door, you know, or type of room where there's like some garden rooms connected to the outside, like the patio.

There are some that are like bedrooms.

And when you go into a bedroom, you get steps.

That is, you know, kind of more card draw.

It's not even just card draws.

Steps is anytime you enter a new room.

So if you go between two rooms four times, you're going to end up spending eight steps or thereabout, depending on what the rooms are and if you're gaining them back or if you, for instance, find an apple to eat, which will recover your steps, etc.

And the rooms rooms also tend to have uh things in them so a very early room you might get is the parlor room um which is a sort of l-shaped room you come to know that that parlor room is going to be this kind of l-shaped room you can see it when you draw it also it's not like hidden information where the doors will be um uh and in the parlor room there is like a basic logic puzzle a sort of like there's three boxes and you know two of them might be lying and one there's always one that's telling the truth and the others may or may not be telling the truth and inside one of them are some gems and you can then spend those gems to get slightly better rooms on a particular draw.

There might be, you know, three rooms comes up and there's a really good one, but it costs you a gem.

And so

you have a grid that's like a five by nine grid.

And you're slowly building the layout of the manor every new run.

And you will be struggling against how many steps you have left.

How many, you know, do you have exits that you can actually open?

Because there's a chance that you'll hit a door that's literally locked unless unless you have a key to open it.

Are you going to run out of gems such that you pull three cards and they all have a gem cost, or you pull three cards and one of them is a dead end, like a utility closet that might give you an item, but is a dead end, and that was your last

door that you could place because of the way you built your layout.

And so there's already a lot happening at that level.

And then I just, I don't know, Jack, you played this back in

the demo or during IGF also.

Janine, you've seen seen me play some of this.

But for me, the thing that really captured me was the way that

what I've just laid out eventually is something that you can zoom down into to a bunch of smaller puzzles, and then from there, zoom back out into much, much larger ones, if that makes sense.

And I don't want to give particular puzzle things away, but there's like, you know, you could imagine, and this is, I think, not a room or it wasn't in the build I played, but you could imagine a room that was like the game room, and there's a chessboard in the middle, and there's a series of chess puzzles right um and you would come to learn the rules of the chess puzzle so that each time you go through it you could maybe solve the chess puzzle and get some keys but it might be the case that the chess puzzle is also actually referencing something larger in the entire manner either on a run-based thing or in a you know a uh sort of overall

your goal is to not just kind of get to the final rooms, this antechamber at the very north end,

but to also kind of piece together a larger drama of the family and of the political history of the place that the manor is in.

Whatever happened to your mother,

whatever happened to your grandfather, what's really going on on the grounds of this place.

And for me, the thing that was so magical were those moments where you realized, oh,

I don't just want to throw the breaker so that I can turn on the lights in the dark room, another very early type of room you get, because the dark room without its lights on prevents you from seeing what cards you've drawn, which means you're placing inside of that room, you're placing new rooms blind.

But also when you turn on the light in the dark room, the red light comes on and you can see the photos that have been developed, which gives you more access to larger mysteries and questions about the story.

And that for me was like, oh, this is a great, this is a great video game.

Yeah, I am.

I'm so glad that I loaded up the show notes today and saw that we were going to be talking about blueprints because I am at a point where it is about to be a big blueprints week for me.

I can't talk much about the game now.

I played it like Austin during IGF Judging and I reckon I played about, you know, I poked at the first level of the of the mystery in that game, you know,

as Austin talks about it, you know, that kind of like that first bite of the apple that suddenly turns into realizing that you're eating a fruit salad or something.

But I am so excited now that it is out to be able to take the time and sit down and

really go for it.

When I was a kid, I was always so compelled by and so wildly disappointed with the board game Clue Doh called Clue in the US.

Yes.

Because you have this beautiful dioramic mansion that you can look down into and you can see the kitchen with its like brass pots and pans.

You can see the secret passage behind

the bookcase in the the parlor or whatever.

And what you really do in that game is you roll dice and move around and check things off on a little piece of paper.

And you know, it's wildly unsatisfying.

And whenever I was playing Clue, the thing that I was always thinking is like, firstly, these rooms are gorgeous and I want to be in them.

And secondly, like, what is going on in this house other than the...

Why is this guy being killed?

You know, like, what is happening here?

And I feel like...

Blueprints is the game that puts you in those spaces and lets you kind of like marvel not just at the secret secret passage behind the bookcase but also the that great sensation of like there is something going on here and i'm going to be the one to figure it out and the the way you end up figuring it out is this great marriage of story and mechanics where you come to learn the structure of a run but also the sort of broader structure of what runs can be and so you start making decisions about the future in some limited ways there's a bunch of rooms that let you change something going out of one run and into another one.

Again, I'll just say a very basic, very early one.

There's a coat check room that lets you leave an item from one run to another run, right?

You have to like draw the coat check room the second run to then get your third run or the fifth one, you know, whenever you finally get it again, it will have whatever item you put away.

So maybe you find a special key and you put that key, you're like, I'm not going to be able to use that key in this run.

So let me put it in the coat check room.

And eventually there are broader mysteries that start to,

and puzzles that start to reward you if you plan like that.

And

there are rules around,

you know, I don't even want to say too much, but like there are ways to game the game is, I guess, the way to say it, right?

There are lots of ways for you to make sense of the space and to interact with it in some really widely different ways.

And I think that it's, it's, It's telling that it's getting the response it's getting, including from people who I don't think of as, for people who don't know, it's reviewing really well.

But it is reviewing really well from people who I don't think of traditionally as like puzzle game people.

And I think it's because it does such a great job of on-ramping you through something really legible, which is, ooh, I want to try to maximize how many steps I can take in this place by, or I don't want to hit a dead end.

I don't want to hit a dead end.

That's like the first clearest thing.

If I, if I have three pathways, I want to make sure at least one of them stays generally open for me.

And giving the player those little digestible bits means that it's a little easier to then like commit to the bigger bits long enough for you to start asking the big narrative questions, which in turn drives you to start paying different sorts of attention to the world around you.

And you start going, wait a second, who was that in that photo?

Or are there any clues in this picture that I didn't put together?

There's stuff, you know, this is one of those games where you watch it or you play it for 20 hours, and then you go watch someone else playing it, and you're like antsy in your seat because they are walking past big things that there is, you know, information to be gained, or is

you're in on the secret, you know what I mean?

It feels a little bit like Jack talking to you about Hunter Hunter, Media Club.plus,

about some stuff that's that's like, you know, over the last year, I guess, of like approaching new big things and my goo-hoo-hoo.

But does Jack notice that XYZ?

So, if you enjoy that feeling at all, let me tell you, go play Blueprints.

Which now I can only hear it as the other word.

I think the thing, so I have, I've watched, you know, as you said, I've watched you play it.

I haven't played it myself.

There's so many, like, you know, I'm glad you resisted the urge to draw too many comparisons because you could kind of draw infinite comparisons

and none of them would really...

amount to that much.

Like there's, it's the degree of things that I see in this game that I recognize that I could mention that would be absolutely useless to someone who's trying to use them as like a, like a, like a guiding thing of, like, should I play this or not?

Yeah.

Like, I, I, I see, like, nuggets of like, you know, what remains of Edith Finch,

but also, like, Hades, but also, like,

you know, Betrayal in the House and the Hill,

but also, like, just all this stuff where it's just like, you can see these little glimmers of it, but it's not enough.

It's not like a thing to hang your hat on because the thing it's doing is so

clever and cool.

Yeah.

And I want to say, Jack, you mentioned a thing, which is, and I think, Janine, from watching this, you can confirm, it just looks good.

You mentioned the Cluedo, Clue, like tiles that look great.

Each of these rooms is so intricate.

It's stylized.

It's not going for like photorealism or something.

But

it is just a joy to walk around the space.

It can be really majestic in certain places and it can be really haunting in other places.

It is, it is like a, it hits its atmosphere extremely well.

You feel like you are, you feel at once like you are alone in this manner and also like when you turn your back, someone might have walked right past you.

You know, you're finding notes from,

not notes to you necessarily, but you're finding notes between the staff that takes care of this manner or between other people who've been here over the years.

And there is a sense that, like,

you know, you'll find a security room.

It's like, well, if there's a security room, someone sits in the security room and watches the camera feeds, you know.

You know, someone is watering the flowers in the garden, the, in the, you know, greenhouse, right?

And those people tend to actually be characters who come alive in the notes and stuff like that.

So, really high on this game.

It's

27 bucks on Steam right now.

I don't know if it has any console plans, but extremely worth your time.

I'll check before I say anything.

Yeah, so that's the that is blue.

The the blueprints, the blue prints.

Just blueprints, no the blueprints.

It's like the available on

consoles.

It is.

Is it on switch?

Nope.

It might take time.

Sometimes it takes time.

Yeah, I know.

I just don't want to bring my Steam Deck on a trip, but I want to have blueprints with me.

That's how it goes.

Give it a few months.

Yep, absolutely.

Speaking of building houses that are kind of confusing.

Actually, I don't know.

Does Insurre have house building?

It does.

I didn't fuck with that.

I just moved into an apartment.

Okay.

Did you

change the layout at all?

You bought furniture, presumably.

Kind of.

It comes pre-furnished.

Weird, but okay, I guess some of the game is.

The game starts you out with enough money to buy a gorgeous, a gorgeous two-bedroom apartment that is completely furnished,

and you have to make no compromises or sacrifices at all.

That's Inzoy.

Inzoy is a Sims-style.

It's like a life simulation game, a life simulation game, sure.

Quite NZOI.

Yeah.

It's, you know, I think it's.

I wanted, you know, okay, I'll say right out of the gate, it's an early access.

I want to be

cognizant of that, sensitive to that.

But also,

I'm going to say this anyways, it's more of a life sim than the Sims, but like in a bad way.

Wow.

Where like the thing you do in Inzoy is

you go to work, you eat, you poop, you sleep, you post on Instagram.

Ah, the full gamut of human experience.

That's it.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Maybe you read.

Maybe you play a game.

Okay.

I have a question that is maybe not for me, but maybe for a listener.

How is that different from The Sims?

Isn't that what The Sims is?

Things happen in The Sims.

There's like things to do.

There's reasons to grow.

There's stuff to unlock.

And again, early access.

A lot of that stuff could come along and absolutely probably will come come along um but i can only talk about the thing as i've played it right now and the thing i've played right now is a is a is an idle game um right

can you give me a material example from the sims of like what is a thing that happens in the sims yeah in the sims sort of thing that doesn't happen in enzoy in the sims you can be a veterinarian who uh you see you see animals at your practice and they come in and maybe they're blue or they're like making a weird honking sound and you diagnose them and you treat them and then you get money and then you take that money and you go home to your tiny your one bedroom rectangle um and then you maybe build a second story and then you you know go out to the club and you meet a girl who's a kleptomaniac because they still have that trait in there for for reasons

but you know sparks fly and the next thing you know you've you know you're upsizing to a to a nicer house and et cetera etc cetera.

But your new partner is stealing from you or is

stealing from other people.

It's a personality quirk.

Let her live.

There's also like

there is.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff you can do in the Sims.

The Sims also has rabbit hole careers where you just like have the job, you go to the job, maybe an event happens.

It's called that because you go into like an instanced rabbit hole that you don't get to actually.

You go into a building that's a fake building, so it's referred to as a rabbit hole

because you just disappear into there.

But then they, you know, they added events and stuff to like make those a little more dynamic.

Like stuff can still happen.

And Inzoy is just that style of job?

Because presumably there are jobs.

There are events that can happen.

I chose the criminal career, and an event that happened for my character in the criminal career was that someone was refusing to pay back a loan, and she had to go shake them down.

And when she did, let me find the exact wording that they gave me here.

I have to say, it's very funny that

your criminal, I guess, shaking down people who have loans is a classic, like

a loanshark thing to do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it is also just a, it is just a capitalism thing to do, too.

You know, that's true.

Yeah, that is.

It's just a job.

Yeah.

A small show of force was enough to scare the debtor, and they ended up paying off all their debts, which won me a commendation from my team lead.

At the loan,

crime, crime HQ?

I forget her exact term, the exact title, but it was like it was like hoodlum or gangster or some shit.

Like, it was, it was like, you know, thug.

She's like an entry level,

and she's getting a commendation from her team lead.

Very funny.

They have like made notes about like they're going to improve the quality of their localization.

And like, I will say, I didn't find a lot of stuff that was like,

I didn't find a lot of stuff that I would identify as localization mistakes, although I guess they could be.

But there is a lot of stuff that is just weird.

And again, Sims is weird.

Sims is weird in a way that like, you know, it pulls the strings and stuff.

This is weird in a way that like doesn't go anywhere.

It's just weird.

Like,

You can have conversations with people and all the same options will be available to you all the time.

There's no like real contextual variation.

Sometimes things will have like a bit of emphasis on them based on your mood.

But

you can walk up to someone, introduce yourself, and then tell them, for example, quote, life's best teacher is death.

You can tell them to humbly accept the fate one is given.

You can...

That I don't agree with, but I get where a person could believe it.

Life's best teacher is death is unless you're talking about does life itself somehow learn

that feels like translation a localization problem to me yes

maybe

um

i i'm you know when i when i see something where i'm like is this a localization error like what's it supposed to say

like life's like the uh you know suffering teaches you a lot is kind of where it feel what it feels like to me but death explicitly kills you.

So you can't learn if you're dead.

You know, unless you're dead.

Death is also,

yeah, maybe that, maybe it's like failure.

Right, failure, exactly.

But yes.

But that feels like, I don't know.

There's a lot of stuff I'm a little bit like, hmm, about, but that line came up to me when a lady came over to my apartment.

I forget what she was.

She was like going to, she was like, I think complaining about like a noisy neighbor or something.

And she came over and sat on the couch

and they were just talking.

And then, unprompted, my Zoy, that's what they're called, they're called Zoys, said that life's best teacher is death and then the girl immediately left.

So whatever it is supposed to be is still probably pretty dark.

Yeah, yeah.

I have a lot of, there are a lot of bits of this game that I am

fascinated and repulsed by, and I don't quite know the order to begin with them.

But the first that I want to talk about is this game is pushing for a kind of photorealism in a way that The Sims absolutely isn't.

Could you talk a bit about that and how that sits with this bizarre simulacra of life?

Yeah, so they are trying to, they're definitely trying to make it like

pretty photorealistic, but like photorealistic in that sort of polished Daz 3D kind of kind of way,

where you get like those visual novels and stuff on Steam, where like it all kind of looks a little bit like that.

You know, and it they want you to have a pretty beefy computer for that and also for other reasons that we'll get into shortly.

So it's, I think it's fine in that regard, but

there is also all this weird stuff that is like attached to this desire for fidelity.

But it's like, I don't know why, I don't know who, I don't know why you have this right now, but don't have all these other things.

Like, I don't know why I can open my trunk, turn on my hazard lights on my car, or turn on my turn signals, roll each window down individually, individual window roll down controls.

Yes.

I don't know why I need that.

I can drive my car around like myself.

I can control it, but there's nowhere to really go or anything to do.

You're just doing it.

You can do it, but why would you want to?

I don't know.

This reminds me so much of a thing in tabletop game design, um where if you're making a tabletop game that is like in the line of of something like d and d or blades in the dark or whatever right kind of traditional but even if you if it's something like um

uh uh dream askew or um uh primetime adventures you know games that are not about killing things let's say right necessarily um uh one of the questions you have to answer uh as a designer early on when you're coming up with your kind of like core dice mechanic um and anytime you're thinking about like how do the players and their characters interact with the world, is are you trying to do kind of like task resolution or are you trying to do kind of conflict or goal resolution?

A good example for this is like when, you know, if you're telling a story about

there being secret, you know, bomb plans hidden inside of a spy base or whatever, when you roll dice to pick the lock, or when you roll, when you're like, I want want to open a safe because I'm trying to find these plans, are you trying to roll the dice and you get a success?

If you roll the dice and get a success,

are you getting your goal, which is I'm going to find the plans, or are you succeeding at a physical task?

Uh, like, I'm picking the lock to the safe, right?

Um, safes don't tend to have locks that you can pick, but you know what I'm saying.

Um, uh, you're cracking the safe, I guess.

In the task resolution version, the world is kind of set already and you're kind of playing a simulation of the world, world, right?

You're like, oh, I can crack the safe.

I can roll to search for clues.

If there are any clues, I can find it.

I'm rolling to like punch someone.

And if I succeed, what I'm succeeding at is my fist hitting their face.

But in a sort of more kind of goal resolution focused thing,

you're kind of outcome focused, you're not rolling to see if you crack the safe.

You're rolling to see if you get the information you want, which means a mixed success or a failure might mean you crack the safe, but the clues you're looking for aren't there.

Someone already got them, or someone heard you opening the safe, and so now they're coming to bother you, or yes, you punched the person in the face successfully.

Your hand hit their face, but all it did was make them angry or something, right?

And

Sims kind of feels goal-oriented in that sort of rubric where you're really zoomed out and thinking about things like, I want to woo this person, not I want to deliver this particular line.

Now, The Sims does have some, I'm going to be clear, it's not, this doesn't map perfectly.

The Sims does have lots of little funny interactions you can do, but I think partly because of the sort of desires that will pop up for Sims in Sims 4, where you have like the longer-term ambitions, but also short-term things, you're kind of always aimed at these big picture things.

And the kind of slightly more cartoonish aesthetic and slightly more cartoonish set of

actions feels less simulation-y.

Watching you play Inzoy was like,

I'm watching someone play a mill sim, but the but instead of mill, it's life sim.

And like, really in that mill sim arma style degree of, you know.

Are you just saying that because I made my town filthy and ruined?

I mean, there's a slider to how filthy and ruined you want your town to look.

No, I really meant the one, the windows.

Like, the last time I wanted to roll up a particular window in a particular car was playing some hell let loose.

You know what I mean?

Or it's like, okay, we have to aim the turret this way exactly, you know?

But yes, tell me about your ruined town.

Right.

So there are things that this is again in the category.

Actually, I'm going to pause and say this also does have desires.

Your Zoy can desire to do something to fulfill their whatever.

That is still there.

But there's also another system that I want to talk about in a second.

But I will say that there are some, again, in the vein of

verisimilitude, but why,

there's a lot lot of like ways you can edit your town.

There's three towns.

There's one that's based on Korea, one that's based on Indonesia, and one that's based on

pretty specifically a part of California.

It's like the Santa Monica

area.

Yeah, exactly.

And you can,

there's like a, there's literally a slider.

that you can slide that will take your town from like green and lush to all the trees are dead and everything's covered in a layer of filth.

And even on the even when you zoom out and look at the mini map, which is a tablet on a desk, the tablet is all filthy, the books around it are all filthy.

That's probably a bug, but I do think it's funny.

So I made my town filthy just

because I could.

There's also,

you can change what bushes are around.

You can

put stuff on billboards.

The things that they suggest are a couple royalty-free

ambient landscape videos off of YouTube that are just from random YouTube accounts.

I put Collins Bear animation up because it's funny.

So you can do all of these little things, but again, it's sort of to the thing of like, but it doesn't do anything.

Like, you don't.

Your character doesn't notice the city is covered in mud.

Right.

They don't notice the Collins Bear animation billboard.

Well, it feels almost like

it's giving you more options for selfie backdrops.

Yes.

If that makes sense.

Yeah, it's a whole, yeah, that's, and that's a whole thing.

There's like a photo studio that you can turn into things like a subway set and things like that.

There's a lot of that stuff.

Like, it feels like content both narratively in the world, but also

like a style of...

There is a, you know, there's a ton of Sims content in the world.

There's a ton of it.

People, when I say content here, I'm using a terrible word to mean the sorts of videos.

Material.

Yeah, like, you know, the stuff that a YouTube, someone on YouTube might make, a YouTuber might make that is like, hey, I'm going to be playing The Sims and today I'm playing with this challenge or I'm checking out this new pack or I'm telling a soap opera style story about my people.

And then also I'm going to do like photos.

I'm going to take in-game screenshots as if they were real photos and I'll put those on my social media.

There are ways in which those decisions in the game around things like the backdrops and the city condition stuff feel almost built for that, but in the way that's not actually

built well for that sort of content creation, but like built with that stuff in mind mechanically or like materially, but not like in terms of how people actually do it.

I would say like there is a vision of that maybe long-term happening because there is, you know, every Zoy, no matter what career career you set them on, no matter what their goals are, no matter what their personality is, they're doing social media like all the time.

But currently, unlike The Sims, where in The Sims, you can like take a selfie and you see the selfie, you can do stuff with it depending on the expansion packs you've purchased, etc.

Currently, it's just like an action you do, and nothing really comes of it.

It's just, and I, I could, that's one of the things that I can imagine most likely to change because it seems like it's so

focused on this idea of social media being part of their lives that, like, maybe something will happen there.

Um, and in that sense, it makes sense to have this world that is kind of like a big photo studio, but that stuff's not there yet.

So, it is just a lot of like, okay, well, I can do this, but it doesn't matter.

I can, you know, I tell people I eat trendy desserts, but I can't go like get a cronut or whatever.

I can't actually decide I don't like it or what, like, none of that stuff has any

bearing on anything yet.

Maybe that'll change.

But right now it is kind of strange.

It feels very like empty and alien.

This sense of like an

empty gesture at interaction or

narrative, even just interpersonal narrative

reminds me of the way large language models construct stories and dialogue, where you have something that sort of ostensibly sounds like a story or ostensibly sounds like character work,

but kind of isn't really.

Is that,

could that be for any particular reason, Sean?

So, you know, there's this is a complicated thing, right?

Because I don't actually know that it's using

it's used.

Okay, so this game has quote-unquote AI.

That can mean a lot of things.

And it's doing a lot of things where

some of it I can confidently say it is doing based on some sort of local something.

Because it will tell you, if you don't have the newest Nvidia graphics card, this is going to take you a long time or it won't work at all.

So there's...

or they'll tell you, like, don't do anything with your GPU while we're doing this because it might crash.

So it's clearly doing something at home.

But there are also things where it's like, I could imagine it's doing this.

You know, it does, it has image generation if you want to generate a poster on for your wall or something.

And it works kind of like that Dolly Mini that that like that was going that was sort of viral and all over the place a few years ago.

Like the output looks a lot like that, which is to say it's bad

and really like clashes with the photorealistic stuff.

Like, it doesn't make sense.

I tried to use it.

I wanted to know, you know, I wanted to be informed.

And everything it made just like looked bad and out of place, especially when I could also just upload a picture that would look good.

As you know, that's not new technology.

Just let me upload a thing.

I'll, you know, let me pull an image of a banana off of Google, whatever.

That's people have been doing that since time immemorial.

there's also a thing that will let you turn a photo into a 3d object and this also works terribly but it takes a very long time yeah um

and it will kind of guess at what that shape is

uh and it'll kind of guess at what the back might look like um and you have to tell it very explicitly what part of it should be touching the ground uh and then it's huge and you can't actually you can't make it particularly small i I think the smallest you can make it is kind of like breadloaf sized.

I tried making carrots and it just made a pile of orange.

So

good.

Yeah.

Are there any 3D modeling tools in there that aren't just you put a photo in and it tries to make a 3D object?

No.

You you it has I mean it has the the pre-made stuff.

It also has like a thing where you can combine certain th elements of stuff to make things.

So you can like pick out out the seat part of a gamer chair and then put like dining chair legs on it.

And that's pretty limited right now, but you can kind of see the vision there at least.

And that stuff's kind of neat, but the making a 3D object thing, you also can't even like

do anything with it.

It's just like there.

I made a few, and it's just like, you can't even like view it.

There isn't even an option to have your Zoy like

look at it

appreciatively like a like a Abjadar, you know?

It's it's like functionally, it doesn't exist.

Functionally, it's just for you as the player to view,

which is, again,

sort of more in that vein of like, okay, this is to make, this is a platform for making content or like, what's

why?

I can do this, but why?

There's also something going on here with, you know, you see

like, the C-suite of big game studios getting excited about the possibility of generative AI in games.

And one of the things they always say, you know, this is the person at the top of the board, at the top of the board, at the top of the board, saying, you know, imagine if you could play an RPG and you could talk to a character like they were a real person.

You just have a real conversation.

Setting aside, even temporarily, the plagiarism and the environmental cost of AI, something that game designers immediately bring up when they talk about that is it's like, and then what?

Are they going to procedurally generate a quest, a location?

You know, they're like, you could just talk to someone, and it's like, okay, but what does that actually mean for how we play?

So I have a great idea

of that exact stuff, too, where this game also has a function called SmartZoy.

Right, this is what I was going to ask about.

Yeah.

That you need to have a pretty good computer for.

Thankfully, I just updated my graphics card, so I was able to run it for a while before it turned, before it started going bad.

Oh, it just gave up?

It started really struggling.

So there's this thing called SmartZoy.

I don't really understand what the

underpinning of it is, but the circuit that.

It's a language model.

It's an SLM instead of an LLM.

I mean, they make it sound like it's going to affect decisions or something in some way.

But the thing that I've seen it do is it will let you see your Zoys and other Zoys' inner thoughts.

And like, there's something appealing to that.

You know, The Sims has gestured at this, but it's like, be a like, via like a picture.

Your sim will be like thinking about the toilet.

It's like, which is pretty useful.

Or like, pretty, pretty foot.

Like, it is pretty, it works.

It's pretty effective in the sense that you're like, oh, funny, they're thinking about the toilet.

That might be all I need.

So I made a normal character, and then I did a thing that I never, ever do in these games, which I think is a sign of how dull my time with this game was.

I made a little weirdo.

I made a little weirdo freak

named Hobart Goblin.

Oh.

You never do this.

No.

I never do this.

I'll watch other people do it, but

I take things seriously.

Even if I make a person who is like normal, but like kind of a disaster socially or whatever, I don't make a little goblin person.

Like literally, you make them into like a visual little creature versus you wouldn't do that.

You might be able to do that.

When I tried to pick all the worst traits, I made him an authoritarian,

which is a thing you can do in this.

That's where I think the localization might be.

There's the like traits and stuff.

Some of them, I'm not sure that it's exactly what they're supposed to be.

Anyway, I made him an authoritarian in contrast to my first character, who was, I forget the exact word, but basically, like kind of anxious, nervous.

Their

style of thought

is not really different.

When I'm, and I'm looking at, I'm looking, I have, I have examples up because I took some screenshots.

I'm looking at them back like side to side right now.

And

the only difference I can tell is that I told Hobart that, because there's a little thing that lets you basically add something to the AI memory for this so that their thoughts can kind of reference that and be a little more personal.

The only difference between these thoughts is that I told Hobart there was a wasp following him.

And so sometimes he mentions the wasp.

I told the other character that she was hiding a gunshot wound.

And she mostly didn't think about it.

It came up once or twice.

And that's the first step of really hiding something.

Leave it out of your mind.

Yeah.

So she, you know, here's, I'll read her, I'll read a couple examples from her.

Cleaning helped me feel a bit more in control.

Still, that lingering unease about the gun's presence lingers.

And then she said she thought, I hope the mirror doesn't notice how empty my stomach feels.

Maybe I should take a quick break.

That's nothing.

This is maddening.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah.

So

onto Hobart and the Wasp.

He thinks

looking sharp is key.

Can't let the wasp see weakness.

Okay, I kind of get it, right?

See, this is why people like this stuff to begin with.

This is how one does

this slope.

That babimbab hit the spot.

Now, got to focus on standing out somehow.

Can't let the wasp think I'm just a slacker.

But that's

a different feeling.

But then, like, does that generate the action of like, go make principles?

Maybe alludes to what they have just done or what they might do next.

I see.

This table's clean, it feels good to see things in order.

Can't let the wasps see my shortcomings, though.

And my favorite one, sitting here, I can't help but think, this wasp's gotta be a good guy.

Um, firstly.

Uh, uh.

This is part of the thing that you see all the time with LLMs, right?

Which is that they are sold with the capacity to be exciting and different and say new things, and yet every LLM essentially sounds the same, you know, the same hallmarks, the same choice of words.

And in games, it has very little, if any, bearing on

what's happening.

Actually, what can be done, how you can interact.

The other thing is that, like, the.

I can see that there is an appeal on some level, like a conceptual appeal, with

watch a computer try and figure out

a person's life, you know, that kind of like that depiction of a Zoi.

But I think that there is

two things going on.

First, the game wants to have its cake and eat it.

You know, on the one hand, it's saying we've got these bizarre photorealistic Zoys, we've got the car where you can wind all the windows down, and

but the inner thought stuff is just producing either very bland,

you know, non-characterful, classic LLM sort of depictions of personhood, or just like outright broken.

I saw you tell Azoi that they were a dog trapped inside a human, and the first thing they did was just go out and do three squats, and it's like, you know,

yeah, and then they leveled up, they leveled up their life goal or whatever, because her goal was to lead a simple life, which apparently means do yoga, do not cook food for yourself.

That makes you sad.

Right.

And that joy of watching an algorithm try and puzzle out a life, like a sort of a simulacra of a life, is present already in The Sims and has been handmade by Maxis's AI designers, right?

AI in the way we used to refer to it for so long, right?

Where it's like

moving through a series of algorithms, moving through a series of different AI packets.

And that is...

There is an argument that you often hear delivered in bad faith of like, well, that is no different than an LLM making these decisions.

I absolutely reject that.

It is categorically different, right?

To say, you know, the Maxis designers have sat down and have created essentially like a flowchart that we, you know, that we move through.

And the joy in playing The Sims is watching The Sims go rolling down into the gutter of that flowchart and getting lost.

Like

they know what their verbs are, you know, versus

just being like, well, the world exists and I'm in it and these are all the things.

And none of them really come to bear.

And I'm going to gesture at a conversation about that wasp or whatever.

Whereas if you compare that, for example, to to like a Crusader Kings character who has a very specific handcrafted trait attached to them that changes their entire life, it's, you know, it's, it's such a different thing.

Well, I think that's also something really important to me about thinking about,

you know, kind of generative AI in

those sorts of roles is thinking about the CK3 character.

They have really particular goals that are in a really particular context that give the player a very specific set of verbs, which is to say that they are carefully designed towards historical, thematic, and player experience goals.

An LLM will never quite get there.

You can pre, you know,

you can kind of pre-prompt it.

You can, you can say, hey, make goals appropriate for a 13th century Duke.

You can say, you know, consider the fact, you know, remember, gunpowder hasn't been invented or widespread yet in Western Europe or something.

But you can't get to the precision that a set of designers will get to by having a particular outcome, you know, in terms of the player experience, in terms of the kind of affect of sitting down with a Crusader Kings character.

And instead, there's a sort of just, and I think that reflects an attitude in the way that I've seen people who are really excited about LLMs in this particular use case, that they get to thinking that it's a universal tool, but like all attempts towards universality instead of towards precision or towards particularity and kind of grounding a material,

you're betraying the fact that your supposed universal perspective or your universal tool actually also has biases built into it, right?

And so, like,

if you set the InZoy

SLM smart Zoy stuff, you know,

if you really look at it, it's just going to be the stuff that is like it's not adding up to a broader picture of anything.

You know what I mean?

It's not, it's not in line with the stuff that

the whole game seems to be in line with around influencer culture and stuff.

Chris Livingston had a write-up.

It's just everyone's insecure.

100%.

PC Gamer has an article on the smart stuff, the smart Zoy stuff.

Christopher Livingston, who rules and who has been writing great stuff for PC Gamer for a long time now.

New person to go to when a sim comes out.

Yeah, truly.

Yeah, 100%.

Wrote about the two, David and Grace's SmartZoy systems.

And Grace, instead of using the computer, Grace decided she wanted to, quote, clean mouse.

I'm going to make an assumption here.

Grace's AI-fueled brain contains a typo, and she really wanted to clean house to feel more productive.

Either that or all of her investigations at the computer left her mouse filthy.

Third possibility, she has a pet mouse that needed a bath.

With his smart zoid powers activated, meanwhile, David decided that rather than watching TV, he wanted to, quote, splash water playfully.

His internal monologue, which can be seen by clicking on him, said that it would feel cool, quote unquote, and make for a nice start of to the day.

That says less to me than the person who is watching TV and their thought bubbles keep thinking about the earthquake.

Water, rubber duck.

Or water, rubber duck.

Yes, the person who's watching TV and the TV is going, money, you know, microphone.

And then they're thinking, earthquake rubber duck, you know?

Yeah, I abstraction is functional.

It's not just abstraction is really useful in art and especially in games where you can fill in the gaps, you know.

So I want to say also, like, I think AI gets presented as a tool, and I think Inzoy is a really good example of how it is often the opposite.

As I was playing, there's a lot of stuff for like, oh,

use our thing to turn a video or a photo into an animation um and then your inzoi can do that animate your zoi can do that animation um

for re for

some purpose again maybe at some point you'll be able to do like zoy tick tocks or whatever i i don't know um

but so they give you these these tools quote unquote to do that but then if you get an undesirable result the only thing you can do is redo

you can only like regenerate and hope that it does it cleaner next time.

There's no way to clean things up.

Like, even if you're not, you know, even if you're doing something relatively simple, like just a single pose for your character for a photo, and you've, you've uploaded this picture and you say, I want that pose, and it does it most of the way okay, but the ways in which it's wrong are really clear.

Like, the head is turned the wrong way because it read the image the certain, you know, you can't fix that.

You can't,

as other games, or as other things, platforms will let you do when you're taking photos of a character that you're directly manipulating in some way, you can't like grab the joint and turn it and fix it.

You're not learning any of those skills.

You don't have access to any of those tools that are old tools.

Old tools that...

Getting familiar with them can translate into skills and other things and other programs.

No, you don't get any of that.

And that stuff is so available.

Like free VTuber software will give you that so you can take pictures of your 3D models and stuff.

Like these things are everywhere.

You don't have to license some AI system and build it in and whatever, whatever.

It is the absence of a tool in so many cases.

And that's the part that like...

I think that's the part that in Inzoy's case, even if you can be like, well, it's doing it locally.

And like, I don't know what they've trained it on.

I'm sure it's trained on the same shit everything's trained on.

But like, even if you put all of that stuff to the side, to me, there's a big thing of like there are older tools you could have put here that would do this better,

produce better results, and also get people familiar with things that they could then translate that skill elsewhere.

Into 3D modeling software or something, right?

Like or animating or, or, you know,

so many people, so many game artists got their start doing mods where you're looking like

you're at the sort of topographic map thing of the character and like adding textures because you want like the lipstick to be a certain color or whatever.

Totally.

Interestingly, there's a, there's like

there are mods for games like Skyrim and Cyberpunk that literally let you just move the skeletal model around so that you can take different photos.

Like it is, this is

well-worn ground in such a way that like...

If that's what they wanted to do, they could have done that, you know?

And for the kind of game that they kind of seem like they want to do, I think it would be way better.

Yes, totally.

It would like a Sims game that gives you that level of granularity and lets you focus and like pitch it about, you know, different kinds of people being different kinds of influencers or whatever.

There's merit, there's legs there.

Yeah, if you were like, oh, there's a music, you know, if the different job paths were all tied to different parts of being in the influencer culture and media culture or in, you know, oh, you could start as someone who does karaoke streams and then you could end up being a K-pop star.

That sounds great.

And there could be all sorts of ways to interact with that.

You know, the thing that I would say is the single overriding feeling from watching other people play this game at this point is I kept seeing people, streamers, saying stuff like, okay, but like, now

what should I be doing?

And I've never seen anyone have that feeling with The Sims.

I'm sure some people have had that feeling with The Sims, but The Sims has been so good at getting people to go, oh, I can do this.

Oh, I'm going to start this career path.

And in my downtime, I'm going to work on this other thing.

And there is something about the on-ramp for The Sims that's just stronger than whatever is happening here.

That's kind of why I say like to me this game as it is right now feels like an idle game.

But there's sort of an inherent conflict there with like, okay, if it's an idle game, but also all of this stuff is geared towards you like taking photos and things like that.

Those are two very opposite things.

One of them is like you leave the game alone and wait for something interesting to happen.

The other is nothing interesting will happen until you move the camera and make it happen.

And when you put those two things together, there's a really strong sense of like, well, now what?

Now what do I do?

And that doesn't get fixed by having a,

you know, having AI text generation at the end of the day have your Zoy think about a summary of their day that is

useless.

I noticed this happening and I copied one of them.

And

well, I copied two of them.

One of them, it spelled the name of my other character wrong, which is wild.

Her name is Abby ABBY, and it spelled it A-B-I-Y.

So I don't know what's going on there.

But at the end of the day, they'll just sum up their day really quickly, sometimes too quickly for you to read.

But it has a little button so you can copy the text and paste it for some reason.

Again, I I know.

Um

So the first one of these I saw was today started with a simple meal at the wooden top dining table, which set a calm tone for the rest of my day.

I did some yoga warm up stretches, and then tidied up my bedding, and even took a moment to check my appearance in the mirror.

I found myself repeatedly unable to act, and it reminded me of my constant struggle with inertia.

I did push-ups and spray some fabric deodorizer on the bedding, trying to maintain a sense of order.

Although I I had hoped for a more engaging day, the repetitive nature of my actions made me feel both reflective and a bit disappointed.

God, I hate the way that shit sounds like a bad thing.

Like, and

they're always that.

They're always just like, I ate, and then I did this, and then I cleaned my bed, and then I talked to this person, and then I ate, and then I felt bad about myself.

Well, I did A, I B, you know.

I don't understand it at all.

I'm curious to see where it'll go.

It's a shame because there's like, every now and then, there's something in here where I'm like, oh, is this going to be something kind of interesting?

Like, there's this whole weird meta layer that's happening.

Oh, I'm fascinated by what is happening

with Janine.

Yeah, the

Abstergo situation, but it's cats.

Seems like that is what it feels like, 100%.

And you have to, like, yeah, you have to manage the karma of the people in the town, or else the cat manager will call you into their office and be mad or something.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Now, this is great.

Tell me more about that.

There's something going on here.

The karma for my town was awful, and the only way to fix it was to hit buttons, and I never got called in the cat manager's office, so I can't tell you.

You know, Janine would share a video of, like, a town that looked like a town in Fallout in Vegas, you know, at this point, where no one is reacting to it at any point.

And then she opened up a menu of karma and just scrolled scrolled through a list of like 60 people, all of whose karma was bad.

Everyone for some reason.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it.

My supposition

control them?

Am I supposed to go find them and like have good interactions?

Like, why is this my job?

You have all these sliders for what the town is, right?

Like the Obstergo, people don't know Assassin's Creed.

Obsturgo is like a corporation that's making like player-facing simulations from the Assassin's Creed technology or whatever.

And in what couple of the games you played as someone working at their game studio.

And so it's the same thing happening in Inzoy, where you're playing someone at a computer desk being

observed by a cat, watching you run your little town simulation.

You're kind of doing a good place is kind of what you're doing, right?

Yeah.

But like you...

You have all these sliders and decisions to make about like, how often does crime happen in your town?

How often do people throw parties in your town or whatever?

But like, again, to what end, as far as I can tell, you don't have any, again, it's early access, but you don't have any like meta, you're not being made, given meta goals like reduce crime in the town.

That's just a slider you can do.

Yeah.

And you have a character that you're facing.

I mean, there isn't even, I should say, there aren't even sliders for like how much crime is there.

It's like, how dirty is it?

Is it?

I thought there was a crime one.

I thought I saw that one.

I don't remember a crime one.

Maybe I'm wrong, but

I thought when Tom Tom Walker was playing, that was one of them, but maybe I'm wrong.

I don't know.

I think it's just filth.

Well, filth takes many, many, in certain cultures, filth actually means the police.

So

there's a crime like career

that you can get to on your phone, on your Samsung phone.

Yeah, commentation.

Oh, or on your LG TV or on your...

There's a little bit of a

various Samsung computers or your, you've got your, your, uh, Hyundai car.

All the all the big tables are there because it is a South Korean game.

So

yeah.

I'm just I'm I'm so curious

about

where this game is going to go because

there you're right.

There is the it is an early access thing.

This game is going to be worked on.

It's going to be developed.

But at the same time, given their heavy use of small language model and generative AI stuff, so much of the promise of that stuff from people who want to put it in games is kind of like, well, it can finish the game.

You know, it can make the game for you.

You just have to have the idea.

So there's a kind of lack of faith that I'm already feeling.

And they are going to

the other side of that, which is that, and this is the thing that I think is a really interesting question for now and for the future.

When a game integrates AI stuff in this sense, again, AI and quotes, you know, large language models or, you know, local ones, any whatever.

You know, when you're playing an early access game, there's a degree of like, a human could come in here and fix this tomorrow.

You don't really have that with AI.

Models can evolve and change and stuff, but when things are running locally, I don't know how much

I don't know how much of their AI stuff is like, well, this is mostly how it's going to be, right?

So I can't say like, well,

the image generation right now just generates garbage that doesn't look at all like it belongs in the world, but maybe in a month it'll be better.

I can't say that.

Like, because that could just be what that system is going to be.

That could just be

how that is.

So it's like, it's a, it's an interesting, fucked up kind of thing where it's like,

I don't, I don't, I'm not seeing a case here for anyone but investors to be excited about how these things are implemented, you know.

Yeah.

I found the list for control city status.

That list is positive/slash/negative emotion control.

Oh, right.

Yes.

Civic consciousness,

friendships, romantic relationships, business relationships, family relationships, conversation karma positivity, conversation karma negativity, city sanitation, fire prevention rate, appliance durability, which is a good one, city safety, which I think is the one that is crime related.

Health level, dream occurrence rate, and maximum population

and maximum vehicle count.

I should love this game.

I want to play with those sliders and have them mean something, you know?

I think my worry with that is...

My worry is that what it's going to be is that the game is going to be about controlling one household and then like finding the other people in town and having conversations with them and stuff to make their karma better, which sounds mega-boring to me.

That sounds really, really boring.

And it actually reminds me of,

oh my gosh, what is the name of this game?

It was actually just up for, and I'll find it this way: IGF.

I was just about to bring this up.

Oh my God, what is it called?

Is it Place for the Audience?

No,

it's like Closer the Distance.

Closer the distance.

Closer the distance, which also has a lot in common with The Sims, except it's kind of

doing all of this in the inverse instead of trying to use something like an LLM or an SLM to fill in the gaps on

particular zoomed-in ideas or questions or thoughts that

a simulated person is having.

Closer the distance is a game about a very small particular set of characters.

It's like 13 people who live in a small village by the sea and there's a tragedy that hits that village, and you are playing at the beginning of the game, one person, and your starter goal is literally, I want to make people in the town happier, or like make them feel at ease after this terrible thing has happened.

You're being guided by a sort of ghost who can see the entire town and can read the kind of sim-style impressions and feelings that people are having.

And as the game continues, you end up getting more of the characters, and they have very particular tasks, like, I want to go find the right flowers to pick for the funeral that's coming up.

And so you might send them to go talk to people to learn about which flowers might be appropriate.

And then go send them out into the hills to go find the flowers.

And the whole thing is a sim-style, you know, top-down view of the town.

And you can zoom in on people.

You can play with the time control in a similar way.

It's brilliant.

And it comes from being handcrafted, having people work through.

I mean, obviously, they might be using other sorts of AI tools in terms of things like animation, right?

We already mentioned this, that like those tools are all over

development tools

and have been for a long time.

And they're certainly using old, what we talk about as design AI in terms of setting up scripting and kind of procedural

desires and wants and all of that stuff that's been in games like The Sims for a long, long, long time and a ton of different games.

But like, it's a great example of taking a swing at some of these ideas.

Like, well, how, what if we, instead of having emoji show up above their heads, we actually had them say, like, I am thinking about Laura, right?

And, like, in this case, it's because someone

hope he doesn't notice I'm just a guy here,

right?

Sure.

I'm saying, like, in Close to the Distance, you can actually do that because someone's actually written ones that are appropriate for the situation.

You know, that could just be, I really want a cigarette right now, but like, it reflects the fact that the person has like a high stress meter and they just got into a fight with their wife.

And you could make them go take a cigarette, which will lower their stress, but maybe weaken their health score or whatever.

Really, really recommend Close to the Distance.

It was a real big surprise for me last year, and I think it is

terribly underrepresented and underappreciated.

It's about the studio that made Allwell.

I didn't know that.

But you can kind of see a through line there, right?

Like, you can't get it.

I see how you get from A to B there.

This intricate, sort of, like, system

manipulation.

100%.

Yeah.

I should go back and replay Orwell.

Yeah, maybe it's actually way more interesting than

anyway.

That's Inzoy, it sounds like.

Are there any final big thoughts you have on Inzoy?

Um

man, I

I

you know, it's wild to me that the Sims hasn't spawned more stuff considering how significant it has been for so long,

for like a quarter of a century.

It's been its own thing in its own lane and people have had so many problems with it and yet there's nothing else that we keep going back to it.

Like,

I all you have to do is make a, is make that, but not be EA

in a sense.

Yeah, like if you

don't need the AI stuff, you don't need there's, yeah, there's a whole, there's a bunch that are supposed to be coming out that, like, there's one that was like, got canceled, and another one that the paradox is one got canceled.

Yeah, yeah.

So there's

the one right people have been trying.

Um, God,

but that,

yeah.

And it seems like Maxis are about to shit the bed in a major way with Project Rene.

Oh, I haven't seen any selling.

So they're talking about a new kind of Sims experience, and they've been talking about it for a long time.

And the first,

I don't remember whether or not it leaked or whether or not it was released as a little TV.

Did you say there was like a leak or something?

Because it came from like, there's not going to be a Sims 5.

Yeah,

it just seems like

a really mobile-focused, like small-scale.

Um,

I would also put absolute money that it's that it's not going to be long before we start seeing Maxis introduce generative AI to their um sims stuff.

I think that I think that that is the way the wind is blowing.

And if you're listening to this thinking, man, I really want to make my own version of the Sims, go, now is your time.

I, you know, I, I always want to be like, your thing's in early access.

You know, good luck.

Godspeed.

You know,

do your best.

I'm rooting for you.

But there is like a really strong conflict under the surface of Inzoy in terms of like

just what it is doing and what it wants to be that

needs to get resolved or else I don't know if it'll it'll be something.

I don't know.

Well, Oof.

Sorry, are you going to say something, Jack?

No, I was just going to say oof.

Yeah, oof.

Big oof.

On that note, let's take a break and get all the oofs out of our system.

And then we'll come right back to talk about some more.

Oh, you're right.

There will always be more oofs.

That's what we can promise.

There will always be more oofs.

We will be right back.

I always wish for luck before the podcast.

But no for friends at the table, dice roll.

Yeah, I was going to say it's only for this one.

It's not for the one where luck would actually mean anything or matters.

No, it matters deeply.

Yeah, I get you.

What people don't realize, because

it's brand new.

We haven't explained the mechanics of this podcast yet, is that before any of us makes a point, we have to roll dice.

And if we get less than a 10,

then we say it badly.

Yeah, you stumble over it.

And then we have to go and break one piece of crockery in our house.

That's right.

Yeah.

It's a very punishing podcast.

I'm sort of like Pavlov's dog myself into feeling bad about sitting down and talking about video games.

And I have to do more crockery.

Pavlov's dog you into feeling good about it.

This is actually Pavlov's dog

in.

Why do they call it Pavlov's dog in when you

dog in?

Why do they call it Pavlov's dog when you Pavlin the dog?

Pavloff the bell food.

Yum.

Wow.

All right.

We are back and we are headed across the pond to Great Britain.

I'm not going to do a funny, fake British voice because I'm really bad at them.

Like, I'm not even good enough to do a fake, funny one, you know?

Yeah.

I've heard heard you do it several times.

Such a nightmare.

And some years, I

lose some years from my life.

Sometimes you're in a situation where you have to do one, like,

and so I'll do it.

But otherwise, absolutely.

I try to avoid it.

When you go to the airport and the TSA flags you down and says, that's right.

Do a British accent right now.

Or else.

And you go, okay.

You say, all right.

I was like, all right, governor.

All right, governor.

see and then you do

uh-huh yeah uh the windscale fire of of 1957

a real fire

real nuclear disaster that we never talk about i didn't know in america

over here yeah they don't that's not the one we talk about over here you know yeah we get three mile island and we get Chernobyl and that is it

And

we get the dropping of the atomic bombs.

But let me tell you, in American schools, that is not taught as a disaster.

That is taught as, at best, a necessary evil.

Normally, the best strategic choice we could have made at the time, said in solemn voice,

as if it was true at all.

Fucked up.

Right.

Anyway, Windscale.

We're here to talk about Atomfall, a game that...

on the the the easiest way to talk about it is to describe it as a cross between stalker and fallout a lot a lot easier to get here than with the blueprints, where I think every, like Janine said, every comparison might actually detract.

I think there's a pretty good description of Adam Fall.

Not detract, but confuse.

Confuse, you're right.

Confuse.

You're right.

Yes.

Which I think that that gives you a pretty straightforward.

And also, I would say it's worth remembering it's made by Rebellion, which is a fairly, it's not tiny.

You know, I think it's hundreds of people at this point, but it is not a giant AAA studio with giant AAA budgets.

It is the folks behind the Sniper Elite series.

You know, in the past, they've done like the Alien vs.

Predator games.

They've done a lot of stuff that has the...

I've always felt the Britishness, Britishness in their games,

in the sense that, like, I mean, I guess they did famously did Rogue Trooper, which is like a 2000 AD comic, right?

And so it's there.

This is the first game that I've played of there that is explicitly set in the UK.

I think.

Yeah.

Maybe there's some sniper elite training levels in the UK or something, but I don't know.

The sniper elite games have always been, I think, broadly underrated, especially latterly.

Rebellion are doing some really interesting things in those games in terms of

in a similar, but not quite the same way,

approach that like I.O.

takes with the modern Hitman stuff of building these big clockwork, massive clockwork levels that they send you through.

The later Sniper Elite games have sort of developed a really interesting lane that they have been moving through pretty consistently in terms of like big, expressive clockwork levels.

Except rather than switching disguises, you're like finding vantage points, you're trying to manipulate

enemies through the use of the sniper rifle.

I think Rebellion has at their heart some really interesting mechanical design.

And you can kind of see some of this coming through in Atomfall.

With that context, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, it's worth saying off the top

that Atomfall is accessible on Xbox Game Pass,

but Microsoft has recently become a priority target for the BDS movement.

So they and us are encouraging you to boycott Microsoft services, things like Xbox Game Pass, things like Microsoft Office, as well as their big broad games companies, Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, games like Candy Crush, Minecraft, World of Warcraft, things like that.

And also, because it's BDS and not just B,

it's worth saying, too, that, you know, there is also a larger push for, hey, if you are someone who makes decisions at a university or at a company around what tools to use or what servers to use or, you know, what cloud computing sources to use.

Microsoft Teams, for instance.

Teams, they are cloud computing.

Azure, like all that stuff.

There was a larger campaign there.

I'll put in the show notes, I'll put a link to the Great Paced article by Grace Benfell, which kind of digs into all of that stuff.

I'll also say, I think that the BDS

kind of

write-up or their own internal communications around this have been really consistent and really like grounded in the sense that like they understand we all live in the world.

I think I read an interview with one rep from them that was like, listen, you're going to be on Teams.

You didn't decide to be on Teams.

You know, you don't have to quit your job because y'all use Teams.

Hey, you already bought something from Microsoft.

You already bought Halo Combat Evolved for your original Xbox.

We are not asking you to burn the disc.

We are saying, hey, please boycott

Game Pass.

Hey, don't go buy a new game from Microsoft right now, which you don't have to do with Adam Fall.

Atomfall is published by Rebellion.

It's on Game Pass, but it's not a Game Pass exclusive or something like that.

I bought it on Steam.

Worth noting about Game Pass, it's one of the few services where if you cancel your subscription part way, they will refund you the remaining amount.

So you can choose to either cancel next billing cycle or you can cancel immediately and then get some portion of whatever you just paid back.

Yeah, absolutely.

So yeah, so Atomfall, which you can get on Steam, or I believe on, is it on, is it on like PS5 and stuff like that?

It's on the consoles.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah.

But not Xbox.

I mean, it is on Xbox, but don't buy it on Xbox.

We just

had this conversation.

Yeah, I mean, to your point, Austin, of like, you don't talk about Windscale very much.

The first thing that I thought about when I saw Atomfall was announced, when I saw that, you know, it is a story about a quarantine zone being established around a disaster in a nuclear power plant in the north of England.

The first thing I thought to myself was, oh, that looks like the Windscale Fire.

And it was with a real kind of like.

sinking feeling in my stomach and also the the sort of like anticipatory rush of realizing that they're actually doing this that the the game opens and says, this is the wind scale plant.

A lot of the stuff that I am most interested about with this game is its specificity in its setting.

I feel like, especially, you know, Britain makes this kind of media as well, but a lot of the ways Americans will characterize Britain in fiction is through a very narrow narrative lens.

The, like, what ho, old chap, England, the how you doing, governor, England, And that is all over this game.

But there is.

I was going to say, unfortunately, Jack, the thing you're talking about is all over this game, just to be clear.

Yeah,

this is why I was like, Jack, you need to play some of this before we talk about it, because I need to hear your thoughts.

But you're also right, I think, in what you're about to say.

There is a kind of hyper-specificity in a lot of what is going on here that goes beyond this is just a game set in Britain.

Specifically, you'd be kind of like hyper-appealing both to the internal and external markets.

This is a game set in Britain of the 50s.

But it goes further.

Its tone establishes itself really quickly as part of a long tradition of the British techno-thriller, which I kind of think as coming out of the British sci-fi fantasy space in the 50s and developing into its own very distinct sub-genre.

I think of the work of John Wyndham, who was a British sci-fi and primarily sci-fi author who wrote books like The Day of the Triffids, which is about a plant invasion of the UK, or The Midwitch Cuckoos, which is about a town

that

suddenly cuts off all contact from the outside world, planes that fly over it crash.

And then he made a story called The Kraken Wakes, which is about an invasion of Britain by creatures from the sea.

And Wyndham's work, among other things, is

really defined by its

quiet, parochial spirit that nevertheless gets increasingly desperate and increasingly sinister as the

small C conservative world of Britain is torn apart by something terrible.

You could talk about this in a history of conservative sci-fi, and I think that

Atomfall is absolutely within that.

But I want to call out specifically Atomfall's place as like a British techno-thriller of the 50s.

This is perhaps most legible to Americans through Michael Crichton, an American author who kind of imported this style into the US in the late 60s, with novels like The Andromeda Strain, which is also about like science going wrong.

And you know, Stephen King picks up a lot of Michael Crichton.

If you think about the way Stephen King's novel The Stand begins with a sort of an outbreak of a virus inside a facility and the

very

prosaic, straightforward way that the workers in this facility are now faced with this kind of a disaster.

And in contrast with the sort of global techno-thrillers of Clancy, right?

Absolutely.

And also the

large-scale state-of-the-world

post-apocalypse stories that the Red Scare in America produces.

The post-apocalypses of Britain are much more concerned about with like what is going on in this village.

It's still coming from a kind of

anti-communist and red scare paranoia, but it is being filtered out through a particular kind of British cultural production.

Right.

You know, the thing that I think is interesting here is like the American

imaginary produces stories about communist, not just infiltration, but eventual total invasion, where the where you have to be, you were rendered freedom fighter against a newly established red, you know, infiltrated or red occupying army in contrast to, or that is the threat and the threat is still outside.

And then when it hits, it's going to hit big, right?

We're going to have nuclear war and then we're going to have occupation.

Get ready.

Whereas this is a game where the British army or an element of the British Army is holding the secure center of the village and is in control.

And the anxiety is often not just about, oh, is there something bad happening just beyond the village wall, but it's about the relationship between the sort of bureaucratic national army, which is ostensibly on your side,

but isn't.

And then the other forces inside of the village, like the vicar or the baker, or the, you know, the townsgoers in general.

And I think that that is not something that pops up so often in American post-apocalyptic or kind of zone fiction.

Right.

The game is structured across these sort of...

We'll talk a bit more about the mechanical structure of the game in a second, because I think it both really tries to set itself apart using that, and at the same time sort of reproduces a lot of fairly standard mechanical things within that.

The game is set across four-ish, maybe five.

Depending on how you're counting, I think.

Yeah.

The interchange has its own region.

It's big by the end of that game.

Open worlds around the ruined power plant.

And each one of these little open world hubs explores a particular kind of British techno-thriller, British

thriller horror imagery.

You begin with the sort of like ruined minds.

Oh, this is another thing that's all over all British cultural production.

This is a game about class

in a major way.

Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it fumbles, but in the grand tradition of British cultural production, it is talking about class with a kind of register and intensity that you don't see in quite the same way in American media.

The opening level is a series of slate mines that have first been

closed down and then sort of like subsumed into the scientific project of the Windscale farm.

the Windscale power plant.

I was going to call it like a wind farm because I'm a windscale.

Then you you have the sort of like folk horror of the Wicker Man, of Witchfinder General, of

the blood on Satan's claw, right?

You know, these like 70s British folk horror as you encounter druids in Castafelle Woods.

Then you have the classic,

there is something gone wrong in the village.

This is something that you don't see a ton of in games.

I think Chinese Rooms.

Chinese Room made a game called Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, which is about a similar, but not quite exactly the same disaster that is happening in Shropshire, a different region of England, but it's all over other media.

The There Is Something Wrong in the Village is a classic.

And then finally, the

horror of the soldiers on the Moors, this idea that there is like a military base out there on the Moors, that something is sinister, the sinister experimentation, or the soldiers are taking liberties.

You can see this sort of being reproduced in, among other things, stuff like 28 Days Later, this idea that there are soldiers out there who are acting on their own, either their own sort of like base impulses, or the sort of horror of someone has given orders to these soldiers that is against what we are aiming for.

And this is what I talk about when I talk about the game's

British specificity beyond all the other stuff that we have in here.

We have soldiers wearing cricket pads and police helmets.

We have people saying bloody hell constantly.

We have people saying things like, let's not have a bun as they approach you.

We have a vicar, importantly, a word that doesn't get

there.

There are some

Britishisms used in this game that I haven't thought about since I was doing a degree, you know?

Like, there's...

Well, I really appreciate that as well, because sometimes they really go for it with regionalisms of Cumbria, of the Lake District, which is the real region where the game is set.

And I was really impressed when the game began, and we had

accurate accents, not just the accents of the north,

you know, accents of Cumbria.

And then very quickly, the game sort of began to, and I, you know, you encounter Cumbrian accents throughout the game, but very quickly the game began to enter a really interesting regional grab bag between, you know, we have Yorkshire accents as opposed to Cumbrian accents.

We have Dales accents starting to show up.

Then we have a bunch of Welsh accents starting to show up, Scottish accents.

Of course, when we get into the protocol, which is what the army calls themselves, we have those cut glass British accents.

But I mean, that is part of the class play that's coming up here, so that makes sense to me.

We have enemies, outlaw enemies, wearing Border Morris rags, the like the ragged jackets of Morris dancers, except Borda Morris is not danced in Cumbria, and it's it's very interesting seeing this sort of like stuff that you wouldn't see in a straightforward we're just gonna do a pastiche of Britain, but also kind of misapplied, kind of like ladled into the soup.

I wonder.

I'm going to be honest,

I find this deeply charming.

There's, there's, um,

so there's, there's like a really

deep, sad history of mining disasters in the UK, too.

Um, the couple that come to mind right now are ones that were in Wales.

Um,

and also there is the

whole thing about like how

Wales used to be like like legally separate.

So people who were guilty of crimes or whatever would sometimes flee back to Wales to like kind of get away, get, you know, get out from under the thumb of the authorities or like people would elope, things like that.

There's some weirdness and stuff there.

So you mentioning that makes me think like, is there, like, I want to see, I often say this, I want to see their whiteboard.

I want to see, like, did they pick this and put, make this person like this because because this person has this connection to this thing, you know?

It feels like a game that's like full of that stuff.

And also, just in the fact that it is so much more colorful than the average apocalypse game.

Oh, it's extraordinary.

That's another thing is so great.

I want to see what they were.

I want to see their notes.

Yeah.

What you end up doing is after a delightfully brief tutorial, the tutorial takes takes maybe 41 seconds to

say, there's a bat out there.

Help me.

Okay, bye.

England's fucked.

Bye.

And then you exit and you're just like, Welsh.

It's great.

He says, and this is like right out of the techno-thriller as well.

He has a note on him that says, like, get to the interchange.

The secret is in the interchange.

And then you're booted out of the tutorial with no idea where the interchange is, really what it is, how you find it.

And of course, the moment you start exploring, you start finding clues.

And clues start falling upon your head like beautiful autumn movies.

Yeah, this was one of the things that was like pitched to me as one of the big difference makers between this and something else.

I think that sets it apart is the quest system in this game is not a simple

mark, we will mark a point on your map, go to it.

Though there are some occasions where your map will get updated with a name of a place or something like that, there's a lot of hand drawing of a crashed convoy.

But there's a lot of,

yeah, I heard that there was a cave at the north of Scethermore

where some of the, what's the occupying or what's the army called again?

The protocol.

The protocol sent some people.

We haven't heard back yet.

Right.

And you're like, oh, okay, well, like, I can go to Skethermore.

I can walk to Scethermore and I can just head north and see what I find.

And there's that sort of thing happening at every scale of play, both the kind of wide, I have to go to a different map, but also like you're in the village and you find the note that says such and such, you know, was spotted going into the basement on the west side of

some ruined building on the west side of town.

And so you go and do that.

And then, and it's not marked.

You go find it, right?

There's a lot of you go find it happening in the clues.

Just find the hollow.

We totally have to do that.

And then eventually.

Right.

And then there's like the wider version of it, which is the interchange mystery.

What happened in the facility?

How is that tied to Windscale, if it was at all?

All of that.

Yeah, because it becomes.

And we've skipped one other thing, which is there is one other major clue giver in this game.

Are we talking about our dear friend on the telephone?

We're talking about our dear friend on the telephone.

Oh my god,

I was playing

Mr.

Telephone.

Don't you trust anyone but me?

Oberon must die.

I said I was playing this with a friend, and as we exited the first bunker,

which compared to Fallouts like

mid-century, you know,

sci-fi vaults, these bunkers are just like brutalist concrete.

The Fallout vault opening is in this game in a very funny way with the interchange entrances.

It's behind this little World War II bomb shelter.

That makes sense.

Yes, that makes perfect sense.

We exited and we found an incongruous red telephone box.

I don't know why that box was there.

The box in the village looks lovely.

That's where you put them, rather than in just outside, in the middle of the middle of the quarry.

The phone started ringing.

And I looked at my friends and I said, we're going to pick this phone up.

And it's either going to be something delivered menacingly down the line, or it's going to be a fellow saying, I do seem to have gotten stuck in the north.

Bring me a bandage.

And we picked it up, and it said, Oberon must die.

And we both punched the air.

You know,

it was a really good hearing.

Basically, every time you complete a major quest or meet another major character,

yep.

It's lovely.

He's increasingly

sinister.

It becomes clear very quickly as soon as you see because he'll be like

you're gonna need more batteries get more batteries

Okay, I'm off

my god Janine you say that but let me tell you the internal battery

Economy of the interchange which is the sort of the bunker set up to

it's not terribly clear to me yet.

I haven't finished this game.

I've got some clues as to what is happening in the interchange, but I cannot say with full confidence.

What I can say with confidence is that it has an internal battery economy that would make God proud.

The batteries both

sold me on the game, and then I think...

because of overcoming the battery economy have made me go okay i've gotten what i need from this unfortunately but but yeah they're they are important they open doors for you they they power generators which sometimes do things like open open doors, I guess.

And they're very rare.

They turn the power on, but the thing that has had the power turned on is broken.

This is a particularly funny poke in the eye that the game will do occasionally, where you're like, yes, I powered it up, and you'll look over it and it's, you know, sparking or whatever.

Yeah,

and this kind of like...

This strange clue or lead system

is enjoyable.

It's not

revolutionary.

It's world shattering.

Oh, I can't wait to see other games learn from this or incorporate something like this necessarily, but it's a nice way to incorporate it.

It's a freaking enjoyable mechanic.

When it works best, it produces situations like this where you hear that a convoy has blown up and you go and the convoy might have a clue as to where the interchange is.

Because in the opening 30 minutes of the game, they need to get you to the fucking interchange.

So they are just handing out

five or six hours.

I did so much stuff before the interchange.

Yeah.

I did stuff before the interchange, but

I was getting clues as to the location of the interchange everywhere I went.

The problem is I was getting one of those like, you know,

I don't remember the actual name of this character, but it was like Kalishnikov is in the eastern part of Scethermore

in a single, you know, townhouse or whatever.

And I'm like, well, I got to go there.

That's what I'm interested in.

I got to go find out who these other fuckers are.

There's a lot of that.

And I will say that I think structurally the clue system stretches the available map um in not in the sense that it applies to the whole map because obviously it should do that but in the sense that this is a game without fast travel um this is a game so it's tough right i guess the interchange itself is sort of the sewers yeah

yeah they don't take they don't save you that much time i don't know i and you have to buy the keys of them from the lady do you

I don't think I did that.

I use the Swords a lot.

I don't know.

We've had different experiences with this game, Jack.

I can't believe this is broke.

I think the clue system is good.

It is broken into the sewers, yeah.

Uh, though, there is not, this is not a game with um, traditional, like you don't have a set of stats or a set of skills that you're putting points into.

There are there are skills that you can learn, um, or like like uh, I guess more like abilities that you can learn via books.

And you read the book that unlocks a new set, and then eventually, yeah, you get you get your um plasmid point or whatever.

To they're not actually plasmids, but like that style of performance enhancing performance-enhancing vials that you that you can consume to give you uh extra ability points uh but the because the clues lead you because it's not you open up a map and you can see that you have the same you have six quests all on the northern side of the village map um you're not like okay i'll just go do all of those in a row i'll go boop boop boop boop boop and then i'm done them instead you're like oh and then i guess i'll check in over here and then you check in over there and that says oh well you want to go back to slattin uh slattinmire or whatever the the slate farm place the slate farm place the slate quarry place, Slattendale.

And you're spending a lot of time traveling in this game.

This is a game about walking from place to place a lot and encountering troops on the way.

And maybe you're in good graces with them, so they're not going to fight you this time.

But

if you perhaps, for instance, portray them in the big prison, suddenly they'll fight you on sight, for instance.

Why would you do that?

And the combat...

is bad.

I really like the first five hours of the combat in this game.

the first seven hours of combat in this game.

Because it's like sweaty and panicked and odd.

That's exactly right.

The first fight that you have when you come out where you could have, I guess I came out, I come out of the quarry or out of the bunker towards the quarry.

I listen to the Oberon must die guy on the phone.

And then I go, well, what's going on over here?

And then I walk into a trap that blew me up or stabbed me with spikes or something.

And I went, okay, load my game, go back in and see what's going on over here.

And you get the kind of bandit camp.

They've taken over part of the mining area.

They've kind of blocked the entrance with two double-decker buses.

And you begin doing the thing.

I haven't seen this.

This is crazy.

You begin doing the thing that you do in many of these games, which is like slowly, you know, crouch walking your way through an enemy base, looting everything they have, trying to get yourself ready for just in case something goes wrong.

Something goes wrong, and you end up killing 12 people.

And in that first fight, it was so sweaty.

Sweaty is exactly the right word.

You know, you're very vulnerable at the beginning of this game.

This is not a game with an explicit armor system or something.

So you're not like, well, now I have the flak jacket.

I believe that there are some abilities that make you a little hardier.

There must be, because I've gotten to the point in that game where I'm just, I feel like I'm invincible.

And I apologize because it's been like two or three weeks since I put my, most of the time that I put into it into it.

But that first fight is like, okay, every shot has to count.

I have maybe a rifle that's a single shot rifle, or I have a revolver.

I think I said to Janine the other day while playing was like, this is a game that makes the revolver feel like a historical invention.

Oh, it's like, oh, I can shoot six times in a row without reloading.

This is the most important thing in the entire game.

And eventually, of course, you have an assault rifle and you have to go.

Today it's the Snapdragon CPU.

Back then,

it was a six-rift rule.

Exactly.

So that first fight was like that.

And I had a bunch of other fights that were like that.

And I think through as you begin to explore the interchange and start to fight different types of creatures and people, some of that stuff remains kind of sweaty and weird.

But there came a point where between the

there's a very simple crafting system in this game and repair and like upgrade system.

I don't know if you got to this stuff, but you can find a book that teaches you how to upgrade your guns.

And once you do that, you're just doing so much damage with so little ammo.

Yeah.

And I don't know, I i did not do much of the melee stuff maybe melee remains kind of sweaty and fun uh but by the point i got to where i am in the game i have not had a fight that has meant anything since the one time where and this is the battery thing for me i went into a military base in scethermore uh or ske skethermore skethmore i don't skethymore okay um and there's like a military base that's like on the map that i was able to get into because I was on good terms with the the captain of the village the commander of the village because I maybe sold out the vicar to him instead of selling out the person who was maybe actually doing some shit that I should have told him about.

But fuck that guy.

He's basically a cop.

And fuck the vicar.

The vicar is also basically a self-appointed cop.

Anyway, so I'm walking around Scanmore.

I find this.

Austin's discovering Britain.

God's cop, discovering God's cops.

God's cop, yeah.

Self-appointed God's cop.

And so I go into the base, and there are, you know, 25 of

Britain's best boys in there

who proceeded to die as they ran into the kitchen I was hiding in.

And I shot them one by one as they opened and closed the door.

Like a hitman run to get away from that.

You do that in Britain.

Yeah.

And then I, you know, but they got their hits in.

And I was down to basically a third of my health, maybe a quarter of my health.

And then I left the bunker, you know, with my battery in tow.

I had had, you know, big, big rewards from down there.

I think I even got enough of their various good rifles to build the best version of the rifle and i opened the you know i climbed the ladder i went through the load screen to go back up to scethermore and there was a big robot who went halt intruder and instantly killed me and my save was from right at the bottom of the ladder and so i had to learn how to kill those robots with no health and then i did and it took me 20 minutes and it was a really fun little challenge and from that point forward i have been invincible because if the big robot can't fucking kill me or can't like frustrate me enough to make me try a different pack, I it's just not, you know, these little zombies aren't going to do it, and the occupation soldiers and the druids aren't going to do it either.

I've killed so many druids, Jack.

I feel so bad, but I've killed so many druids.

They just keep coming.

So, yes, I do agree with you.

The combination of the people who are not.

They're like nature's cops, though.

So, it's they certainly believe they are.

They are not.

Have you talked to these ones?

I have not met them.

They think that they're nature's cops.

Okay, all right, all right.

But yeah, so I'm just taking issue with druids.

Generally, yeah.

I really wish they did more with the druids, is what I will say.

Um, I had a whole quest line that was like, go to the druid camp and get a thing.

Um, and then if you get the thing, you end up getting to be in their good graces after that.

Or you get like a token that's like, oh, you can carry this and they won't attack you anymore.

It's like, I just killed 700 of them.

What do you mean they won't attack me anymore?

I think that there's like a limit to the structure of the game in moments like that, which is fine.

Like, I'm not, it is not a big triple-A game, and I've had a really good time with it.

So, at that point, I was not like, well, fuck this game then.

I was mostly like, okay, fine, okay, this is what we're doing.

We're doing one of these.

We're doing the, I now have the special don't kill me, even though I've killed 700, even though I've basically destroyed your entire cult.

We're cool still.

But, yes, I think at that point, the combat fell apart for me.

But I really did like the bits of the game that were difficult, where I was making hard choices about carrying capacity, about spending ammo or not, about trying to maintain good ranges.

And I think that the guns feel fine.

Like, I think that they feel pretty good.

I think it's a game where a headshot also, oh my god, the sound design in this game.

Oh my god.

Austin, when you said they do the fallout vault door opening,

I like prickled a bit and I couldn't figure out why.

The reason I prickled is that the interchange doors opening make a sound that is more frightening than anything has ever made it.

There's a more scary sound in the interchange that's not meant to be.

I think.

Well, maybe it is.

I think maybe it is.

I jump every time I walk down one of the hallways that has the like cleansing spray, the like decontamination sprayer, and it goes brrrr and I go

every time.

Every time.

The sound design on the weapons is great.

They are the sniper elite people.

When the bullet hits in your head, you hear it.

It's gross.

Yeah, I think I really, this is not a a game without its problems, and we have been enumerating them as well as we've been enumerating its successes.

I can overlook the majority of them because of the delight I feel to be playing an apocalyptic game set somewhere other than America or a racist caricature of the Middle East.

You know, walking through slate mines that have been constructed like slate mines or like dry stone walls or like a bizarre simulacra of a Cumbrian village,

This stuff is entertaining to me in a way that it doesn't often get to be.

And sometimes that entertainment is feeling, you know, my teeth grating as I hear just another awful, like,

bloody hell, what's all this then from somebody?

But at other times, it's me going, oh my god, I didn't, I have not seen a game that does this before.

I will say the places where it misses for me narratively are where it feels like it is doing the thing that the Fallout games will do in terms of one little enclosed story.

And not even all of them.

Like, I think there's a pretty good one about the baker and her husband.

I think it's the baker and her husband in the village.

But, like, I came to a manner where there's like, um, you know, some

member of the aristocracy who, you know, was living life to the fullest before the accident and before everything was shut down.

And now she is, she believes that like her family is still alive and her butler is still alive, but she is, you know, clearly she's lost doing a sort of miss havisham type thing 100 during a miss havisham time like i mean way worse than a miss i would love a miss havisham thing compared to this right where it's grey gardens kind of thing it's literally like she thinks you can convince her that you are her butler so she'll give you the key to go loot the place outside you know this is full and that's

that's what i'm saying that and that is the moment where it's weakest is where it is aping that style of of play instead of doing the much more interesting stuff it's doing with its clue system and it's kind of like all the different stuff that you can get up to with

the little inter-politicking of the village and stuff like that which feels a little more distinct or just like um the nuts and bolts of the mystery less the what is going on here on the macro scale but the like um all the scientists have names and they are uh talking about what has been happening to various different scientists much like you know not quite with the intensity of the um arcane prey but there is a bit of this where you can track the passage of the scientists on their flight or their course of actions.

Some scientists will talk about others being kidnapped, and you can find them or find their bodies later on.

Or their weird obsessions with different projects happening, and like, hey, you know,

I warned her against this, she did it anyway.

And then you go back and you find the log that is like, I can't believe she warned me about this.

You know, I know what I'm doing.

That style of stuff actually does work pretty well well here yeah because it's not because it isn't laid out super cleanly and you're piecing it together yourself you're saying was that the person from i did the whole bit with the convoy and uh you know solved the what i believed to be the initial mystery of the convoy and then picked up a note elsewhere that clued me into the fact that somebody had survived the convoy and that was great that was this really good moment of like oh i thought i had essentially closed off the quest i'd put it down but now there's a survivor and i can go and talk to them Or, you know, that stuff's really interesting to me.

There are other ways in which it is, it is extremely not like fallout.

Like the fact that there are, you know,

15 talky NPCs in the entire world, right?

Generally speaking, there are like non-named villagers and soldiers and druids.

And then sometimes you'll meet like

the witch of the woods or whatever, right?

And like that is, and Carl will have a quest for you and the witch of the woods will have a quest for you, and you'll do that quest, and that is kind of it.

And that, I think, is a, is a really solid way of scaling to what the budget for this game was.

And it doesn't not work.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, this is part of what reminds me of Stalker, where there are a handful of named important characters inside of

various towns and stuff, right?

Yes.

But there are also just like the folks with the kind of proc gen names, the other many stalkers and the bandits and stuff like that.

Who don't necessarily have anything for you, but you could talk to theoretically and just get some loose intel from or something.

But here it's just like, there's also villagers in the village, but then there's the captain, the vicar, the various shopkeeps, you know, stuff like that.

And that works pretty well for me.

Where I think this game works the best is

where its kind of exploration and survival systems can interact.

to put you in tricky places like you come out of the bunker and there's a robot that wants to kill you or i went deep into an interchange place once.

I won't give away too many specific details, but like it looked different than the rest of the interchange in a big, dramatic way.

It had a different set of enemy types than the rest of the interchange, including the stuff that I've already said, like zombies, right?

There's like different stuff happening in this part of the interchange.

There are parts of the interchange that very much have the sort of bioshocky,

like, oh, and then this wing is the blank wing, you know,

medical, exactly, energy, or what, you know, whatever, power plant, whatever it is.

Uh, and the, uh, I went into this place, and on the way in, I had to pass through a place that did a burst of like negative, like a debuff and a damage over time.

Or actually, it was like a, it wasn't a damage over time, it was like while I was moving through the space, I just took damage and I made it through and I explored the whole place, and I kind of got what I needed from there.

There's a particular quest item I needed from in there, um, and I, you know, killed the enemies that were that I could kill that were in there, and I got ready to leave, And I went through the little space that got me into the zone.

And I fucking died.

And I went, shit, did I soft-lock myself here?

And I did another pass of the whole place and realized I could build, I could make, I could craft like a damage

resistance potion or whatever.

Was able to use that to get through with just the tiniest hair of health

back into the rest.

And that's really great.

Now, is there a world where I couldn't have found that and I would have literally soft-locked my game?

Maybe.

I haven't gone to look, but I think that's probably possible.

But instead, I had this great moment of being like, oh, hell yeah.

I mean, I could have loaded an older save is what I could have done, right?

It worse come to worse.

But instead, I was like, holy shit, like, I just got out of that place, you know, through the skin of my teeth.

And now I know all this extra stuff about this place that recasts some of the other stuff I've known.

And like, who am I trusting?

And all of that, what Oberon is.

And so, you know, all of that, I think when it works, it works really well.

Um, can I talk about the weird little animals briefly?

Please talk about the weird little animals.

Uh you know when you go into a cave in a video game and bats fly out of the cave and they're basically like a particle effect?

Yeah, uh-huh.

Yeah, I saw the bats come out of the cave.

I went, they're a little particle effect, and then the bats kick the shit out of me.

You go on top of the church?

No, no, oh, is there something up there that will get me?

Yeah, it's it's the bats.

They just keep coming.

I killed so many bats on the roof of the church or they're like the the tower of the church, and they wouldn't stop coming.

After my first encounter with what I thought was a particle effect

getting to me, I then had, in short order, an encounter with some leeches and an encounter with some rats, and they were both awful.

Those little fuckers.

I don't like them.

There is a dedicated stomp button and it does jack shit.

You might as well just...

You know, it's going to stomp them.

I like the gnomes in repo.

Earlier you said before.

um you know you're uh

the protocol are walking through the door and you're shooting them one by one i have i'm a single-person bat killing army they fly at me i knock them out of the sky with a single punch

um yeah i was trying to put together why the kind of like the

absolute bright light British pastiche of so much stuff bothers me.

Sets my teeth on edge.

And here, while, you know, while while a wing of it that we have talked about continues to bother me, other stuff here doesn't.

And I think it's just because they keep

in times when it is deployed badly, they just keep doing the same fucking thing over and over again.

It is a particular kind of Britain that is being deployed.

And that Britain is here in this game, but there is also the 50s techno-thriller.

There is also the government out on the Moors.

There is also the Unholy Trinity of folk horror horror in there, as well as the morty vicar, you know, I'm a fading Aristo or whatever.

And

just that 10 degree increase in breadth makes me have so much more fun with it as like a as like a setting than I would elsewhere.

It's so funny.

I misunderstood what you were saying at first.

You were saying you don't like it when,

or one of the things that sets you on edge with other sorts of pastiches is like they keep repeating the same type of Britishism over and over again, like the same.

And what I thought you were saying was like,

you

were talking about when you were talking about like someone in power in Britain making the same mistake over and over again.

And we do want to say that.

Oh, no, that's in here.

That's big time in here.

That's the protocol.

You know, that's like, oh, yeah, what if we kept digging?

What if we kept trying to use the power plant?

What if we kept, you know, maybe this time the

Chaos Vortex will work the right way for us?

Yeah.

You know, I don't mean it.

I don't mind it when

you, as a storyteller, either as an American or as a British person, have a guy run towards you and say, oh, bloody hell.

What I mind is when that is the

you know, you look at your next cue card and it says, oh, bloody hell, and you're like, well, yeah, it's, it's like that, you know, it's that thing of like when someone tells a joke that gets a laugh, and then instead of telling more jokes, they keep telling the same joke.

There is like a sort of sometimes in

media about British people, there is this like

toe twisting in the dirt.

Aren't I a little stinker mate kind of thing that like is

that was British Bugs Bunny

right there?

But it's it's like this sort of

Tim Rabbit.

It's it's this sort of like initially I think it was a thing of like

I think it I think it started back in the day as like sort of a cultural colonialism kind of like, ha ha, we're the heroes.

And then as empire fell, collapsed, et cetera, it feels like it became more of a like, oh, but you really like us, though, don't you?

Like, everyone knows us.

We're that guy.

Yeah, we're.

We're Tim Rabbit.

We're Tim Rabbit, and we say like Spiffing, and you know.

Yes.

And we do chap-hop.

And we do chap hop and we do chap hop.

We're going to get the chap-hop people.

And we're going to get John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, you know,

all of them lot.

The British people, that's them.

Yeah.

Alas.

Anyway, I had a really good time with Atom Fool.

I'm excited to play more of it.

This is a game that

is not without its limitations, but

you can have a good time with it.

Do you remember when they used to make these?

You know, I think that, yeah, I left this being like, ooh, something of this scale is really fun.

I think if I was not struck by the podcaster's curse, I would finish this game.

But now we've talked about it, so it is dead to me, unfortunately.

I know that I will need to spend that time on other stuff that we want to talk about.

That is the podcaster's curse.

But it's supposed to be different.

This will be different.

I know it's supposed to be different, but there is so much.

Okay, the blueprints just came out.

I know I have to put time into that.

There's just a lot.

We already talked about it.

Now you have to stop.

I will also simply say that I got deep enough into this game where I was like, oh, okay, so there's this many endings.

I'm choosing between these people.

I know what the rest of this game looks like.

And then I watched someone finish the game five times.

Okay.

So I am effectively done with this game.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I'm really, what I'm really excited for is whatever they make next because this feels like a game that they learned a lot from.

Sounds really well done.

I'm so happy to hear that because I think it will definitely lead to more games I'm excited to play from them.

There's a lot.

I just enjoyed my time with it until the final hour of playing where

all all of the enjoyment disappeared all at once uh which maybe that won't happen for you the listener and like it didn't all fall apart because like they did a stupid thing or they did something that i thought was offensive or bad or like not because of like a core problem with the design i just i just ringed all the water out in such a way that it stopped being

entertaining

sometimes you kill 700 druids in a row to get a little icon and then you're like all right i'm fucking done you know yeah so

the metaphor I use for this a lot is like, sometimes you eat a really big, good meal and you don't finish it.

It doesn't mean it wasn't

big and good.

It's just, you know, your stomach's already.

I should have ordered the smaller, the smaller steak.

I got the biggest steak.

14 at 20?

I don't know, steak ounces.

Those are both acceptable ounces.

They're 30 ounce.

Don't out of.

30 ounce is a huge steak.

You need to get that.

That is more than.

I've never ordered a 30-ounce steak by myself, certainly.

30 ounces.

Also, I'm literally realizing right now that the village is called Wyndham.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Like the writer.

Like the writer.

There it is.

Well, how about that?

How about

the wind?

No, it's with a Y.

That's how they spell it a little bit.

But it's the sound, is there?

Wind.

Wind.

Wind.

And like the place and the thing that happened.

It's all there.

It's right because the wind scale fire is W-I-N-D.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Much to consider.

Much to think about.

But you'll have to think about it in our absence.

That's right, because I think we are done for the day.

Or maybe not the day.

I don't know what y'all are doing after this, but I'm going to make salmon.

We're done.

You're going to make salmon

from first principles.

Yes.

Invent the salmon.

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And at the $10 level, you'll get access to our Outward LP, the second episode of which is available now.

LP means let's play, by the way.

I realize I'm aging myself by saying LP, a sort of a term that has become provincial, the province's

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Content.

Content.

Streams.

Play-a-thons.

I don't know that they call it.

I call them play-a-thons.

What are they called?

Please-a-thons.

No one.

I just was thinking of words.

You don't just think of words sometimes?

Guess not.

Shoebox.

You can go watch us play that game.

We have two episodes of that out now.

Very excited to keep recording more of it.

There is

a great, there's a great, there's some great segments in that second episode.

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If you haven't seen any of it, you can go to youtube.com/slash friends at the table to see the first episode for free, along with some recent streams that we've done.

Jack's tour of the Dreamcast in concert with our release of Perpetua, a kind of Dreamcast JRPG-inspired season, has continued.

Jack, you most recently played Jet Set Radio, or I guess Grind Radio, which is so, so good.

But even before that, you played Evolution,

the JRPG, and you played Shenmue.

That's it.

Oh, Shenmue.

Shen Mu's or Shenmu.

Shen Mu will be up soon

on the Friends of the Table account along with a bunch of other stuff.

I mean, it's on Twitch, but it'll be on YouTube.

Yeah, well, I can't.

I cannot wait for Shen Mu.

If you're dying.

Yes.

If you're dying right now.

If you're dying for Shen Mu.

If now is the time to die.

If a man has shown up

with a song.

If Lon D has arrived and asked you where, asked your father where he's keeping the thing,

then you're like, all right, I better watch the Shen Mu video now and see what I should do.

Well, I didn't want to spoil it.

I don't remember if Lonte said it.

It's not a mirror, anyway.

Okay.

Well, not by contemporary standards, certainly.

Anyway,

you can go to twitch.tv/slash friends of the table, youtube.com/slash friends of the table.

You should go to media club.plus to listen to Media Club Plus, where Jack, Keith, Sylvie, and Dre are working through the Chimera ant arc of Hunter Hunter.

I was just guesting on an episode, Jack,

for an incredible episode of anime.

Maybe one of my favorite.

I was very happy to be there for it.

It was a great time.

I can't tell you anything about what is happening right now in the Chimera Antarct.

Have you finished the season yet?

Are you waiting?

No, no, it's not.

I'm waiting.

Okay.

Okay.

Good luck.

Have fun with the rest of it.

And you're almost done, which means we're nearing the next season of Hunter of Not Hunter.

Oh, first of Hunter-Hunter and then of Media Club Plus.

I think we have a good idea of what we're doing next at this point.

Very excited for it.

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Nintendo just made a whole

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It's so hard.

They just made their own thing.

They were like, you know what?

F all this.

We're just coming to Nintendo today or whatever.

We don't need to figure this out.

They'll come to us.

They'll come to us.

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We can't make an app and no one would join it.

It would be a lot like the Jeremy Renner app, but worse somehow.

A lot of people joined us.

Oh, no, you don't want that app.

That was part of the problem.

What?

Did a lot of people join that?

Yeah.

I didn't realize.

Well,

I'm sorry what happened to him.

physically.

The nightmare thing he went through was really sad.

I'm less sorry about the app not really developing anywhere.

That

was was not a great idea.

We don't have an app.

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I think that's going to do it for us this time.

Do you have a sign-off yet?

Yeah, we all decided.

We've been using it.

What?

To be continued.