01: It’s All About the Bird

What's good, internet?

It is April 1st, 2025, but this is not an April Fool's joke.

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

I am joined today by Jack DeKeat and Janine Hawkins as we kick off this brand new show.

How's it going?

It's exciting.

It is.

Yeah.

I think we've all been very excited about this.

We've been planning this now for

a, we've been, it's been a loose plan for six months, let's say, maybe a little longer than that.

I think I said to both of you in the middle of our Palisade finale era that I was like, I really want to start talking about video games again, I think.

But what if we need a video game podcast?

And then

well timed for today is as the IGF awards just were announced last night.

I was an IGF drawer last year and I was like, damn.

I miss playing and thinking hard about video games.

And so here we are, a new video game podcast.

For people who've never listened to us at all, ever, welcome.

For people who've listened to us on Friends at the Table, check it out.

We're talking about video games like right away, right in the front of us now, instead of as a weird diversion.

We will not stop doing weird diversions.

It's a reason why this podcast is called Side Story.

It's because we are fans of the diversion.

And if you happen to be someone who like listened to me at Giant Bomb or on the Beastcast or at Waypoint or guesting on Remap or if you come from a more civilized or shelf by genre, welcome.

Did you know I used to be, I mean, some of you obviously would, but I used to be a full-time video game critic and podcaster.

And so

I wanted to do it again.

And I wanted to do it with some of my favorite people, the people I make friends at the table with.

Again, friends of the table.cash.

This is not going to have its own special Patreon.

We're not starting sidestory.patreon.net or whatever.

That's not how those URLs work.

We're just doing the Friends of the Table one.

You know, I will say outright that like, Friends of the Table has been the side project for my entire professional career going back to when I was in grad school.

It's never gotten to be the thing I'm putting most of my attention onto.

And it felt like if I was going to go back to talking about video games on the internet professionally, that I should give it a shot here, which is like my hometown, so to speak, with people who I think are brilliant and are smart and funny and talk and make video games well.

And so I wanted to bring people from Friends of the Table here.

And I think it'll be a rotating cast to some degree.

I want to make sure everybody on Friends of the Table can come talk about the stuff that we've been playing and thinking about and talking about.

But today, we're kicking it off with Janine and Jack.

For people who don't know y'all, who've not heard your wonderful play in our actual play podcast, Friends of the Table,

or who haven't happened to stumble onto something else that you've been on, like Jack, you just did that Fall in London actual play.

What should people know about you?

I'm Jack.

I am a writer and a composer.

I work for Friends of the Table.

I write all the music for the show as well as the music that you will have heard, opening side story.

It's available at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

You can find me on Blue Sky at NotQuite Real.

I have done sort of like games criticism in the past, as well as some games writing.

I've worked with Fail Better Games on Fallen London, and I did some work back with Crows Crows Crows years and years ago.

And then I had to immigrate to the United States, and they said to me, you cannot do do anything other than what you write in this document at the beginning of the year.

And I said, Oh, that makes freelancing very difficult.

And they said, Yes, it does.

So I've recently been freed, freed from those awful restrictions.

And I'm getting back, much like Austin, to thinking and talking about video games professionally, which is really exciting.

Yeah.

How about you, Janine?

So I'm Janine Hawkins.

I'm not really on a lot of social media anymore, but like, you know, in a social pinch.

Yeah.

In a social pinch, I'm still bleating heart on X and also on Blue Sky.

I

also, you know, did my time in press.

I

was a critic for a bit, wrote reviews for some assorted sites, always freelance, because that was...

That was very much the period when the salaried positions were all becoming just freelance contract

stuff, sadly, tragically.

But also before guides had fully taken over, so I never had to do that, thank God.

Or before you were writing for, for instance,

Screen Rant or one of the other places that recently, I think yesterday,

there was a news article about how bad that freelance pay is, which is kind of listen.

It was pretty bad.

It was pretty good.

I mean, it was not.

It was never good, but it has gotten, it has bottomed out.

It has gotten so brutal as like part of a campaign of

particular destruction, like on purpose.

So,

you know, not great.

Cool.

Anyway, then I escaped.

I patched together a hot air balloon out of

slipcovers.

And then crashed it directly into.

And yeah, and then I started working.

I started writing

for games instead of about games.

So I worked on Hitman 2 and 3.

I worked on some unannounced stuff and some stuff that's still coming out.

I started by unannounced stuff, I mean thing that's,

I don't want to say it's dead because it's not like dead, dead,

but

I don't, it seems like it's not for the first season.

It hasn't been laid off phase, but theoretically, for people still

have stuff around, maybe.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Ain't that the way?

yeah some

working on other stuff that'll come out eventually yes yeah i think that that's that is uh part of the cycle that we live in uh i i guess at this point uh shout outs also i guess The day that we are recording this is a couple of days after CWA announced a industry-wide union,

which

is

a pretty big swing at trying to take this on in a different direction.

There's been a lot of folks trying to build build unions inside of their studios for the last decade or so, like a really concerted effort, I would say.

And now there is a, you know, on top of those efforts, there are, there is now this industry-wide union via CWA.

I'll put a note in the episode notes.

I'll put a link in the episode notes to find out more about that.

It's not one of our big topics today.

Otherwise, I would have prepped for it.

And instead, I'm just going to say, hey, go read about this.

I think probably worth saying up top, I don't want to get too deep in the weeds, but like, I do think it's fun to say that we tried out about a thousand different names for this podcast.

Oh, yeah.

And I want to give a special shout out to Janine.

There was a period when the two of you were in my house, and we had this conversation that was, we should, we need to figure out what this thing is called.

And over a few days, we sort of started batting the ball between us.

And then we all went on to get away from the middle.

You and I had a doomed drive to two different grocery stores in search of the proper groceries for a board game night.

And the whole time was us just being like, is it this?

Is it this?

Is this the vibe?

And then we came back fully in that conversational mode

that we were, and that was it.

We were just in that mode then for the rest of that trip, basically.

And then Janine in the Discord was taken by a fey mood.

And by taken by a fey mood, I mean persevered with a degree of effort and like grit to do maybe 500 name suggestions.

There was a point at the end when they just started getting really like loose and weird.

You know, like when you zoom really far into like the quantum molecular structure of a thing and things start behaving differently.

Once you sort of reached your deep limit, Janine, there were some really odd names in there.

And then eventually you just said, I can't do this.

Do you remember the Janine, the thing that almost broke you?

That's, yeah, that's good evidence of how much it almost broke you.

There was a point at which

we rapped back around to something we dismissed like four weeks earlier.

And we were like, well, what about this?

And you were like, if we pick this after weeks of it was like, you know, it was like a thing I really liked at the time, too.

And

it hadn't been like, you know, it's,

it's not, it's not like a devastating takedown of things.

It's just like, no, that's not the right fit.

And then you move on to the next one.

But you did use the word fisticuffs

to describe what your reaction would be if we went with it.

Because

it was to begin with, we were talking about one of our early thoughts was like, oh, well, we have Media Club Plus, which people don't know, the excellent Media Club Plus, also part of the Friends of the Table expanded universe.

No, I don't like universe.

Is network better than universe?

No, network is also bad.

Universe is also bad.

We should do Oeuvre, but we should say it like Alex Trebek, where he says Ouevre every time for some reason.

The Friends of the Table Ouevra

has a podcast called Media Club Plus.

Jack, you are on the current season of that.

You're talking about Hunter Hunter right now, the incredible Shonen anime.

You're in fact at the height of that show right now.

So people should go listen to Media Club Plus.

And so we were like, well, is there like Game Club Plus, Game Show Plus?

Well, we're not doing a Game Club.

We're not like playing a game on LinkedIn or something.

And we're not doing a game show.

It's a show about games, but it is not a game show.

So we can't really.

Every episode of a podcast, one of us asks a family feud question.

I mean, you know, sometimes you got to find the thing that makes it work.

Walkins, come on down.

It's our price is right podcast.

And then what animal might you find in your garbage can?

Rats!

Raccoon.

See, this is the best.

This is now...

Well, this is now a little preview for Perpetua because the game we just did is actually a very well established thing over in perpetua people should go listen to that uh which i is out as as this hits for sure we're in perpetua prelude people don't know we also do an actual play podcast where you play tabletop games uh we are currently playing uh i guess when this comes out we'll probably be in the middle of wrapping up our prelude series to the upcoming fabulous ultimate series we're going to do um fabulous ultimate is kind of a j rpg inspired uh tabletop rpg so if that sounds interesting you should go listen to that at friendsofthetable.net

In any case, we were like, what about Game Podcast Plus?

And you were like, if we pick Plus after a month ago, me being like, it would be cool if we had Plus in the title again.

That might not be clear.

It's that Media Club Plus has truly astonishing SEO.

Right.

And it's not like we were saying, well,

we have to go for good SEO, but we wouldn't like bad SEO.

That's right.

So like Plus was interesting for a bit, and then we moved past it, and then it was very nearly first to cuffs time.

But instead,

we chose Side Story.

Yeah, and I'm really happy with this name.

Me too.

That's often the case of these things.

The moment you decide on a name, it doesn't feel right.

And then the longer you say it, the more and more right it feels.

Yeah, and now we've been saying it for a couple of weeks.

We then got into a whole second big thing, which we'll talk about, I guess.

Let's talk about it right now, or we basically redid the whole thing except

me at my worst.

And it's me at my worst is not, that's not the right name.

Me at my worst is, that's not the game I want to play right now, actually.

That's not the right fit for what I want to stream.

That's not, I'll just get into these.

It's like the opposite of a

Austin Walker Faye mood, which is just like, I have a hundred things in front of me, and they're all a little bit wrong.

They're all a little bit wrong.

Yeah, and I don't need to find the perfect one, but I do need to find the right one.

I, I, and really, the perfect one is either something I already played, or watched, or read, and I don't want to actually replay it or re-watch it or or or whatever, or it simply doesn't exist.

I'm imagining a thing that should exist that doesn't exist.

Oh, well.

And the thing in

this

circumstance is a video game Let's Play, a game that's perfect for a Let's Play because for $10 subscribers to our Patreon, friendsofthetable.cash, you will get access to an exclusive Let's Play of a video game.

And we spent about a month.

figuring out what game that was.

Maybe not a month.

Maybe it was like three weeks.

No, it felt like a couple weeks.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, it's one of those years these weeks just keep getting longer.

So, uh, for people who don't know, our Patreon has a bunch of stuff on it, including stuff that has nothing to do with tabletop actual play.

So, if that's not your thing, but you're like, I like these people, I like it when they talk about video games, I like it when they talk about anime.

You can go to friendofthetable.cash and, for instance, go listen to the Media Club Plus crew, uh, listen and talk about uh, or talk about anime.

Uh, you've what have you covered at this point?

Dragon Ball Z, some Jojo's bizarre adventure.

Uh, yeah, we're going to do a bizarre non-canon hunter-hunter movie.

I'm going to eventually make Keith J.

Carberry watch Sailor Moon.

Thank God.

He needs it.

I'm so excited.

Yeah, we also have a thing called the Clapcast, which is a monthly kind of

cutting room floor material podcast where we get distracted looking at yachts on the internet and...

talking about them or I don't know what was a recent Clapcast

conversation.

I'm trying to remember what the most recent big one was.

You made us do a Winnie the Pooh quiz.

That's true.

Children's Reading Comprehension, Winnie the Pooh.

I did make you do that.

That was different than the time I made you, Art and I made you try to guess every power set in DC Universe online without having ever played that game or really knowing too much about the DC Comics universe.

We do do other things than quizzes.

Prove it.

It was the time that Keith and Ali and I found that there are a bunch of places in the continental U.S.

called Peru and planned a road trip on maps between each of the various Perus.

That sounds great.

It's a good time.

Yeah.

And there's also a newsletter that gives you the update on everything we have done in the last week that Janine puts together.

That's very funny and good.

And there is a bunch of other stuff there too.

We, in fact, do, if you are a tabletop person, you know, we have a second campaign.

We're currently running Realis, which if you've heard me on Nextlander or if you've heard us on the main show,

you know,

it's a game I made.

I made a game over the last year or two or four.

It was four.

It was four years of slow development on it.

A tabletop game, and we have a currently running a campaign of that on our Patreon.

And then we also have, you know, we link, you know, when we've done a stream, here's a VOD, or we announce that there's a stream coming up.

And now, for our $10 tier, the new added bonus is

a Let's Play.

We are going to Let's let's play the game outward, which for people who don't know is

Jack, how would you

compare it to comparisons are tough because it's immediately going to put something in someone's brain, right?

And they're going to be like, oh, that's it.

That's the one thing it is.

It is

a very

odd, particularly

tactile

fantasy RPG

that is borrowing from things like

it predates some of these games, not all the rest of the game.

It's not necessarily borrowing, but it's in line with it.

It's in conversation with Morrowind.

It's in conversation with Death Stranding.

It's in conversation with Kenshi.

On the face of it, it is going to look a lot like an open-world fantasy exploration game.

It's going to look like Elden Ring, but with Oblivion aesthetics.

Yeah, we are going to be flapping gigantic backpacks around.

There's a a bit of pathologic in there as well.

Pathologics, like obscure architecture.

And we're going to be

dealing with weird factions, weird cities, disease.

It is going to be very odd.

Here's the thing that I'll say about that game.

I almost don't want to spoil it.

So it's a fairly modern game.

I think the definitive edition only came out a couple of years ago, which has all the DLC in it.

And I think it originally was 2018 or something like that.

So it's a fairly recent game.

We're not talking about, you know, make the Morrow in comparison in terms of style and vibes.

And, you know, you're in a strange place and you're learning all the factions and stuff.

But, but, you know,

there are things about it mechanically that I do not want to spoil that I know about or that I've

happened to me.

But I will simply say that the first time that I died in this game, which I died to like, you know, a giant mantis shrimp or something, I was like, all right, time to load my game.

And I did not load my game.

Instead, my character woke up in a prison mine being run by a bunch of bandits.

And, all right, just keep playing the game from here.

I thought you were going to say it was run by a bunch of shrimp.

It was run by a bunch of mantis shrimps.

I mean, listen, I've only been to one of the areas in the game.

That'd be really cool.

Which is the other thing.

We're actually going to start this Let's Play with a particular goal in mind because what if we hate it?

There's always the chance that we're playing it.

And it's just like, I've watched a lot of Let's Plays in my time.

And one of the worst things that can happen is people are playing a thing and they hate it and they feel obliged to keep doing it.

And like, it's just not fun.

It's not even funny bad.

It's just like not, it's just not fun to watch, no one has the energy for it anymore.

I don't expect that's gonna happen with us, but just in case it does, I'm giving us a very particular goal, which is I want us to visit every major city in the game or do a little road trip through the game.

Uh, and I don't think it's possible to like for two amateurs playing it because it's a co-op game, it won't be we can't just speed run that.

I think we have to like play the game to make that happen, you know?

Um, so I'm excited to see to to see how that treats us janine you'll be there uh as our backseat guide um i think so um very excited to start that up that the first episode that should be available now i think probably the first episode will be free and then every couple weeks we'll put out a new one for uh for patrons only

Yeah, I'm so excited.

And yeah, that's available right now.

You can go and we haven't recorded it yet.

God.

No, I'm so excited.

You want to make a prediction about something that's going to happen?

Yeah.

Death by Wolf.

Death by Wolf is a good idea.

Death by Wolf is a really good prediction.

That's the kind of prediction when you want to just win some money, but you don't get to win a lot of money because the odds are

going to be pretty low.

The odds are too good.

Yeah.

I'm going to go in the opposite direction and go for a low odds thing

and hope for a big payout.

Mace that does weird magical damage.

Interesting.

I'm going to go for one that I have strong suspicions about.

I bet one of our characters will get indigestion.

Cool.

Deal with that.

You know?

Speaking of video games where you're like, what do I even do here?

Where am I going?

I love how it feels, but where am I going?

What am I doing?

And then later you're like, ah, well, of course, you simply do XYZ.

I believe the three of us have all been playing Soul Frame.

Yeah.

The latest game.

Oh, boy,

do I always get there?

I always get the developer name.

It's Digital Eclipse or is it the other one?

Fuck.

It's Digital Extreme.

I believe it is.

Digital Eclipse does the ports, does the really great remaster reports, etc.

Is that correct?

Digital Extremes plural.

Plural, plural.

Apologies to Digital Extremes.

Shadows to Digital Extremes for making Soul Frame,

which I believe is currently in...

What are they calling their

guests?

Oh, my God.

We stole prelude for perpetuation?

No, no, I think it's a word that exists.

Oh, okay, okay, okay.

Phew.

Um, but oh, yeah, all three of us have been playing it.

There is no NDA on the prelude, which is sort of like an open

alpha of the game.

I don't, I don't think it's in beta yet.

Uh, no, and they're kind of avoiding those terms, so maybe I should avoid those terms to some degree.

It's so loosey-goosey what those things mean as soon as it's out of you know, like we've all worked in games enough to know that, like, what you call an alpha internally and what you call an alpha externally is often pretty different.

Um, in that, like, oh, there's textures.

Oh, there's, there's

lighting everywhere.

You know, that's, that's.

Yeah.

So what it is, is for people who have no idea what Soulframe is, digital streams are the Warframe people, so you might know them from Warframe.

Maybe, like our very own Sylvie Bullet, you know them from Dark Sector.

But

it is

an online

third-person action game set in a fantasy world with some sci-fi elements.

We're going to talk about Soul Frame, not Warframe, which is, of course, a third-person sci-fi action game with some fantasy elements in it,

in which you are playing in a sort of mystical, ethereal

that, you know, this game has a map, but it sometimes feels like even in the overworld, things just seem to like go.

You know, you're just like always over another hill, always seeing another little village.

um and then there are on there on top of the kind of open area there are procedurally generated dungeons instance dungeons that you go into um the combat is similar in many ways to the sort of souls style um combat which is which is to say that it's uh very

um precise it's very uh animation um uh priority focused.

It's very much like it has things have weight and and precision and

you are you know fighting fighting people one on three one on two you're not really fighting you're not dynasty warriors out there or warframing right or warframing i guess right no that's the thing i'm excited to talk about because i i got into warframe after soul frame and i have thoughts i bet yeah um let's stay on soul frame now because like people probably played some warframe what what do you what do you both think of of soul frame i guess i guess janine you and i first started playing it on the same night and then i got busy or was traveling or something and then i came back and you would figure it out, which was interesting because we played like 30 hours or something.

I had gone all in.

Yeah, because when we first started playing, the way that game unfolds itself to you is very weird.

You get a very basic.

I mean, you get the wildest intro in the world.

Yeah, it's a thing of like, I almost don't want to spoil it.

You know, you're picking some things very tangentially related to how your character is going to look.

It's like if you were playing The Sims and instead of shopping for wallpaper for your house, you were just walking through a Home Depot and someone was like, well, what do you like?

What type of painting do you like?

Do you like furniture?

What type of furniture do you like here at Ikea?

What kind of wallpaper did your mother have?

Right, exactly.

Yeah, what type of wallpaper did you grow up around?

Then you get a character.

I think you can, I think they added a, you can change it now after the fact.

But, uh, that's gonna be because I don't like my hair.

I want to change my hair.

I wonder if that, I wonder if there even are other hairs.

Um,

yeah, so it gives you very little in the way of instruction of like how to do anything.

I want to say it, like, tells you how to run and like light and heavy attack.

And then, like, yeah, but you kind of wake up on a beach, and there are some, some guys with silly helmets, big knights with silly helmets, big helmets, um, and it's kind of like, here's how you attack.

Okay, here's how you summon a bird.

Those helmets, now that I've started playing Warframe, there's there's people in Warframe that have helmets that are very similar to that.

And I'm sitting here like, hmm, I hmm.

I am gonna do a video about this, and I'm gonna watch the hell out of it.

Yeah, someone is gonna make the connections that I don't know enough about Warframe to make, you know.

Um, so it's interesting, it's it's a heavier game, um, in terms of like how it feels to control and play.

Uh,

it's very deliberate.

I am not a person who likes, I like the idea of souls likes, and I've dabbled in souls likes, but I have a hard time sticking with them.

Even the, you know, the core stuff.

Just for so, it's, I can't really pin down why.

I've tried so many of them at this point.

Even things like Lies of P and stuff like that, where it's just like, this just doesn't quite work for me.

Something about Soul Frame does work for me.

I think it is probably just that it is a bit less punishing when you die, but you are still really squishy at first.

You do still have the arc of you level your shit up and then you're super, super powerful, and then you have to swap something out for level one.

And then, you know, that's

right, which is similar to the Warframe arc.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Which is not like Elden Ring or Dark Souls.

Those are games that

if you want to change your...

First of all, it's hard to get really powerful in those games if you've never played one before.

And the second that you've played enough of one to fully understand what the loop is, you're like, oh yeah, I'm just going to do blah, blah, blah.

And then that's like, it's completely

obscure if you're not, if you don't have resources to learn that stuff.

Here.

I would say Soul Frame's kind of...

close to I've compared it to Cube World in terms of its progression where

you know for better or for worse there's there's a

when you when you start out it is really alienating, and the world feels very strong, and you feel very clumsy.

And also, like, nothing places don't have legible names, everything has these runes that you can't read, and there's a system for slowly unlocking the runes for each location until you can know the name of them.

And then when you get them all, you get a little stat bonus item that you can equip, for instance.

Um, uh, yeah, the entire and it's a deeply brave maneuver, I think, to be as

secure as it is, very confident, And also, all of the writing is very stylized in this kind of early modern English

style,

prose-wise.

And the delivery is very much in that space.

And sometimes people are rhyming, you know.

It's very much like working in the language of like legend and fable kind of feeling things.

Yeah, speaking of Fae moods, this is a Fae mood-ass game.

People are in the Fae, you know,

pretty closely at least.

But it's also a game that sometimes a spaceship shows up and you're like, what is happening?

Yeah, I was going to say there's a bit of a distinction.

I could understand people listening to us and thinking, well, so I mean, something like Elden Ring is a game that is also very vague about

its world and its story and kind of like lets you loose, gives you just a little bit of instruction.

What's happening here in Soul Frame is

much more like...

You know, when you're playing like a

rogue or a dungeon crawler or something, and you are like deep in procedural territory for most of your time.

I think about this with case of CUD as well.

And then you suddenly start feeling like you're right on the edge of something authored.

That is the sensation that you get in Soul Frame.

You know, you head out into the world and you're just like, well, I guess I'm just kind of going to go over here.

You're hitting the up button, which summons a little bird and you follow the bird to a thing.

But they tell you right at the beginning, like, and I wonder, a lot of this, I wonder, like, how much of it is just prelude, how much of it will actually carry through the volume.

Yeah, this is something I'm curious about.

But

when you first hop in, they're kind of just like, okay,

go.

Yep.

Go on.

It's very much like a parent has put you on a bicycle for the first time.

Right.

And they have pushed you a little bit, but then they immediately let go.

And it's like, you're riding it now.

Do it.

A really good example of this for me, of Jack, the thing you're talking about about brushing up against authored content is there's a quest sort of early on where you end up in a a new type of zone that you've never been in before.

All of the kind of enemy types start to shift and

the sort of tiles, so to speak, that the game is made up of are fresh and new.

It's a different type of weird forest.

And then you go through some caves and you end up then, and all of that stuff is proc gen, right?

They're pulling from a pool of potential rooms and enemy encounters and stuff like that.

And you fight your way through that.

Maybe even do some puzzles.

There's some fun stuff in this game where you like throw your sword with a rope attached to it to like attach to something and pull yourself across a cliff or drop some barrels of water to like put out the fire so you can walk places.

They're really quick and fun.

Anyway, you end up emerging into like this new field you've never been in before, and a voice starts echoing in the clouds above.

And it turns out that it is a sort of lightning knight who is going to come wreck your shit.

And that whole little encounter is authored and is kind of the climax of this series of

kind of procedural uh you know pathways that you're going down um and and the way that they drop that stuff in is so unexpected and then like the solution to that yeah is really fun and really like um

they swing big when they do the the authored stuff you know you you end up changing the weather so that you can beat this lightning night um in a way that's like dramatic and bigger than everything you've been doing for the last like 90 minutes of play you know and that's no structure they have there's no, like, well, I'm just going to focus on the main quest tonight.

I'm going to advance the main story.

Yeah, that's not, you don't, you don't get to make that call.

Oh, it's all about the bird.

You're either, you're either playing it or you're not playing it.

And, like, it will, it will give you

missions and stuff, but often it's just like, man, go here and kill the guys.

Or, like, you know, and then eventually it'll be like, oh, go get the thing.

And then the thing will be this magical nonsense thing that you bring back.

And it's like a, it's like a, involves some sort of, of like a, like a rat lady who wants to dye your clothes and all kinds of shit.

Um, she does do that, it's true.

She does.

I love her.

You know, I have a, I have a, I have a task for you, and I need you to go to the shop and pick up some bread.

And, you know, and the green knight is there.

Oh, the green knight is the vibe, also, by the way.

Yes.

It's kind of the green knight.

It's really interesting.

The, the, the tone is very much

like every piece of

sort of like European folklore firing at once.

Whereas I think that the Green Knight is sort of like a bunch of very specific pieces.

The Green Knight is a lot...

I don't like this one.

The Green Knight is a lot earthier and a lot darker.

People are constantly nearly...

nearly drowning.

Yeah.

Lomi.

Men briefly turn into skeletons and stuff.

And it's not that there's not really that in Soul Frame.

It's odd.

The tone sometimes works really well for me.

Especially when it starts blending the weird sci-fi.

Very early on, you encounter a sort of like a huntswoman who has been sent from the Evil Faction, who it turns out, you know, had spent time in this sort of like magical world beforehand, but her whole character design is this very odd blend of the sci-fi and the fantasy.

And then, you know, you will have these just these great

old folkloric feelings of like sleeping kingdoms, things under the ground.

And then sometimes they'll just be like, here is a weird little turtle man with a non-specifically regional accent.

Yeah, that guy's weirdo.

You know, sometimes they put their thumb on the scale and it starts feeling more like Fable 2 than it does, you know, like

the green knight.

Have you gotten to the whatever flagon yet?

The

oh my god, what is the name of the?

That sounds like it's a place from Fable 2, doesn't it?

It is the dripping flagon, which is the tavern you can get.

It's strange, but it's for social zone, you know.

Yeah, usually fantasy games that have characters speak in rhyme are just like deeply annoying.

Just sort of like different sort of rhyme in here, though, isn't it?

Very often, the rhyme is working pretty well here.

And part of that is that the meter is consistent, which is something that people just fall down on all the time for no goddamn reason at all.

That's 100% like a lot of people fully, a lot of people, even writers, don't realize meter is even a thing they need to worry about.

They're doing it like based on vibes.

And so much of it is like, if you read it in your head one way, you can't guarantee the actor is going to read it in their head the same way.

And also, the actor is aware that they're rhyming.

Whereas, like, often the character who's rhyming,

ideally, they're not supposed to be aware of their rhyming.

It's just the way they are.

It's just what they're doing.

And, like, I think where they succeed is that the performances are,

you know,

the little guy is a funny goof because he's a funny goof, but like, when people rhyme, they're often rhyming, they're often rhyming, like,

kind of tragically or, like, almost incidentally.

Like, it's, I don't know, it, it feels good in that way to me.

There's a bit of that early modern stuff in there where, like, um, the early modern playwrights understood that a shift in meter indicated something about a country.

Something was happening.

Yeah.

When you are speaking in blank verse, you are sort sort of saying something different about the world than when you are not.

You're counting your I ams.

Exactly.

There's a bit of that going on here

that I like quite a lot.

I also like that

very often you have no goddamn idea what anybody is saying.

There's like an inventive vocabulary going on at points that sometimes you're like, oh, well, clearly, clearly I understand what they're talking about.

And then occasionally they'll throw in a line or two and you're like, I don't know what that means.

This is the same thing.

This smell like the clay that skinned my lovers, for instance.

Yeah, you're like, damn.

Wow.

They do this in CUD, and you just sort of have to.

The writers on Caves of CUD talked about how they wanted it to feel like you were discovering an ancient text.

You know, like finding something

in a temple from 2,000 years ago or whatever.

And there's a little bit of that going on here where

the narrative joy comes from

the sounds of the syllables, less a sort of a meaning that you can grasp.

But when it's the sounds of the syllables along with like a spaceship shaped like a trumpet descending through the clouds, you're like, God damn,

now we're into it.

Well, and then you also, there's two things here.

One is like, I think in line with that is...

Just push through that.

If you end up coming into the preludes or if this drops somewhere playable for you this year, and you're like, I don't understand what they're saying to me, my advice for you is the same as people who are reading Book of the New Sun, which is like, don't slow down and open the wiki and go read what a cleg is um it's okay that you don't know what a cleg is

know that they skin and that this person doesn't like you because you remind them of a cleg a particular cleg and like that's all you kind of need to know The experience of, you know, I said before that when you come to new places, you don't know the names of them originally.

Over time, you unlock.

It's like in a script.

Yeah, it's in a weird, it's in a weird runic script, which maybe you could learn theoretically.

You know, maybe you could, you could, you know, over time actually internalize that.

I I have not done that.

What you end up doing is finding these collectibles, maybe it's like once a day you can go to the same place, and they also don't like fully spell that out, they do not.

Yeah, so I'm spelling out something the game doesn't extremely spell out, I guess.

But over time, you do learn the names of the places, and that's sort of the experience of learning what's up with the world and your ancestors and what the conflict that you know that's being focused on is about.

And I would love for them to retain some of that stuff, yeah, because my big fear is that it will get tutorial heavy and it will get less obscure in favor of

a really strong on-ramp, which I get why that would happen.

But I think that it's really special in keeping where it's at now.

The second thing I was going to say is when the UFO descends from the heavens through the clouds and it's this beautiful thing and the lightning is striking and it feels really cool to shoot an arrow of light at someone and have them explode into a sort of chromatic firework.

It's yet the particle effects in this game, oh, they're so good.

Like just in general, the magic shit that happens is so,

it's so like deliciously rule of cool.

Like, it's so, they don't care about the fact that, like, okay, this is your, this is your second arm or whatever.

Like, maybe it shouldn't be super powerful.

Arms are your warframes in this, basically.

And,

you know, maybe it should just be kind of basic or whatever.

No, it's like you have this ability and it's going to look sick as hell and you just have it.

And it's like, basically, sort of the game.

we just we realized that we one that that second arm that we had was the equivalent of a second character a second warframe in warframe parlance was already great and then we realized that the default like special attack with it the first one is this kind of bow that fires these light arrows the second one is just like an orb that hovers in front of your hand like you're the coolest wizard who's ever lived but it's like a techno orb and it summons like electricity blasts that do chain lightning, but in these like rapid um you know they're like Tesla towers or something from Command and Conquer or like,

like if you ever see like, if you ever go to a Spencer gifts and see one of those things, it's like doing the lightning, the plasma balls, or a Tesla thing,

Tesla, not the bad one.

Well, even the old one was kind of the bad one in some ways, but you know what I mean.

He got that fucking elephant.

Yeah, he did.

Yeah, he did.

Yeah.

Well, wait, wait, wait.

Wasn't that Edison?

Wasn't Edison the elephant or was Tesla the elephant?

Who got the fucking elephant?

I think Edison said, because Edison was just evil, like a cartoon guy.

Yeah, Tesla was mostly a misogynist.

And like, well, women's brains don't work.

You know, he's one of those guys.

Unfortunately, anyway,

anyway, the electricity was like, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

And it was like, oh, this game does that too.

And I say all that because I think the three of us as game writers probably spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a good game and why does the writing work for us and all that.

I think all of that's super important.

But also, like, if it hits right when you pull the bowstring back, you're going to buy yourself a little patience for me when you're doing something creative.

Um, when you get the ability to shoot an arrow that summons a flock of birds to just harry your opponent repeatedly, you're like, oh, okay, this game rules.

They're taking swings, they're not just, it's not just a fire arrow, you know?

I was playing with Janine the first time, and I loaded into the game, and I didn't know how to do shit.

And Janine said, I will, I will teach you.

And Janine arrived and looked a lot cooler than me straight away.

And then we got into a fight.

And I was just like hitting guys around the head with a sword sort of enjoyably, but fairly ineffectively.

And then like 70

blue deer came out of nowhere and like trampled this guy to death.

And I said, was that you?

And Janine was just standing over there with, you know, like the Cheshire Cat smile being like, got him.

That was like my second time using that arm, too.

Like, it's Janine's ass.

They just let you do the thing.

It's really good.

Janine simply said, twas the torment stag.

And you went, I guess it was the torment stag.

Okay.

I guess it was the torment stag.

There's like his name is Darren.

Oh.

His name is Darren.

It's Darren Rude.

Right, Darren Roode.

Yeah.

R-O-O-G.

It's kind of scary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a little bit in here as well of like early MMOs.

I think about

early Warcraft.

I mean Warcraft wasn't the only one that was doing it, but I think it's kind of fixed in a lot of people's minds, is that early Warcraft, you just went out and saw what happened.

There wasn't really like a main story that you could go through.

You'd just leave Ogrimar and head out into the wastes and you know run into little bits and pieces or whatever.

And there's a bit of that sensation in there, as much as I think there is the sort of like from software, out you go into the world, my son,

which is really enjoyable.

And like, you know, if you did want Elden Ring to to be more like this, you could do it.

You would have to get rid of the grace that leads you from bonfire to bonfire.

You would have to, you know, maybe, maybe you could have your finger maiden

Melina.

Melena?

Melena.

Melana.

Melana.

Melana.

God, I always get them all confused.

Melana.

But like, she would be even more

abstract with her guidance than she already is.

And

you would need to also say, guess what?

It's going to take you a lot of, you're going to, you want to make some crafting?

You want to craft some armor?

All right, put in the order.

Come back in eight hours to pick it up because that's the other thing that shapes this.

Go ahead.

What were you going to say, Janine?

I was going to say, you do kind of have

finger maidens.

This is true.

You do.

And they are very.

But they're all very specialized.

Yes.

And the main one is another man.

Yeah, Da Vinci's here from Leonardo.

Leonardo da Vinci with a baby on his shoulder.

Assassin's Creed 2 total recall Leonardo da Vinci.

You know, that's the vibe I get from him.

He is not going to tell you where to go.

He might tell you where you went.

And listener, you might be thinking, didn't you say that the bird leads you to things?

I need to reiterate.

Sometimes the bird just leads you towards just like, you know, four guys who you need to get.

Yeah, four guys in a campsite.

Sometimes it leads you to four guys in a campsite and next to them is a giant mechanical head vomiting oil directly into the lake

you know and i think there's a uh uh you know we want to spend some time talking about warframe as well and i think that a way into that is that something that a lot of people say about warframe and i'm i'm one of them i haven't spent a ton of time with that game is that you know when you start playing warframe nothing makes any sense and you just sort of have to you sort of have to go with it and it will start to become clearer and there's a bit of that going on but i think that the the difference between Soulframe and Warframe at this stage is that when people say you just sort of have to go with it, what they are talking about is the like accretion of 15 years, 10 years of various interlocking game systems, some of which have been deprecated, some of which have been partially deprecated, a story that you are playing through only vaguely in the order in which it was released.

like an interlocking web of systems that are so phenomenally complicated that you just sort of have to to, the only way you can enter them is like, take a nice, small, manageable bite, and then see where it goes.

Soulframe is so much simpler at this stage, and it really does feel like

they like the sensation that players describe of, I feel overwhelmed and I want to start to explore this thing, you know, like at my own pace and on my own terms.

But they have paired it back from 500 interlocking systems.

If something that has always interested you about Warframe is the sense of a game whose outer limits you don't quite understand or a tool that you sort of want to grow and learn with, but Warframe is proving too much, I think Soulframe might be a really interesting way into that sensation for you.

Yeah, I'm curious, Janine, you know, so I have played Warframe on and off, mostly off,

since it came out, basically.

I've been trying to become a Warframe guy.

And every time I put about 12 hours into it or 10 hours into it, and I go, I just don't think I can crack it.

I don't think I'm not having, we'll talk about why I bounce off of it, maybe a little bit more, but part of it is what Jack just described, which is there's so much of it.

I can't get my head around it.

As you know, I am someone who likes to get my head around a game in the way that I feel like I'm making good decisions.

Famously, one of the things that makes me bounce off of things like Stardew Valley is when I feel like I've wasted a day in a season and it's like, I'm not going to, I can't, I have to wait a whole year of gameplay to play Spring again and i fucked this up and which is a stupid way to think this is not i don't advise anyone have my brain you know please take it replace it with something slightly different i would appreciate it but uh warframe because of that complexity it really got me the last time the last time i played i played with um uh joel fowler a little bit uh formerly of waypoint our publisher at the time uh and and there was probably about a week or two of playing before he was like oh yeah we have a dojo set up which will help you do da da da da da da da da da and i was of two minds minds one was like i don't want i want to just play the game without needing to have been in a dojo and the second thing was like well fuck i wasted all this time without even being in the dojo well i gotta i should probably just restart which is not true that's not how it works at all um but you seem like you've pushed through that because you've now been playing warframe like for real for real for dozens of hours I have 62 hours in here.

There we go.

See?

Damn.

And this is after, like, I, for years, was saying, oh, I I should try Warframe because I, like, aesthetically thought it looked really neat.

Right.

For people who don't know Warframe, a third-person action game, not run-based, but mission-based,

sci-fi with lots of shiny chrome, but not bad.

Lots of unique butterfly shapes.

Yeah, exactly.

If you are a Friends of the Table listener, I think it's a very Signet-coded game, personally.

Yeah.

So

Signet's Divine Belgard was definitely sort of influenced by some things I had sort of passively absorbed from seeing Warframe floating around for a while.

It was definitely not

definitely like the idea of like, oh, a robot can be pretty in a certain way, but also kind of gross.

That was very important for that season.

So...

Yeah, for a really long time,

I had downloaded Warframe so many times and uninstalled it and downloaded it again and it uninstalled it.

Without trying it?

Yes, because, like, every time they would show it at like the game awards or whatever, I'd be like, oh, that looks really cool.

And then I just wouldn't commit to it.

So, playing Soul Frame finally pushed me over the edge because I played what feels like

most of what's available in Soul Frame right now.

And I was like, I really just, I want more.

What if I try Warframe?

And at first, it was a really jarring adjustment because the controls have a lot of overlap, but are different in a way that is very disorienting if you're trying to just kind of do the same things you do in one game and the other um the logic of the controls is is consistent but

but it is a little bit is a little bit weird um

but warframe's really interesting

So I booted up Soulframe today for the first time in a few weeks, just to like see how the feel is now that I've been playing a lot of Warframe.

And it feels so slow and heavy.

And Warframe is

Warframe is so much and I can't speak to how it was at launch, but right now with all of the 12 years of content, it's just having their 12th anniversary right now.

With 12 years of content and shit, like they want you to fire yourself like a bullet through each level, basically.

I would not be surprised if there was a whiteboard with that on the top of the whiteboard drawn in so long ago that it has solidified atomically with the board beneath, you know?

It can't be fully erased.

Whereas Soul Frame feels like a sword being swung, which is still fast,

but it is precise, and it is the word that you said 30 minutes ago, one of you said 30 minutes ago, that I always forget when I'm trying to describe souls-like

combat.

It starts with a D.

I always forget what it is.

It's driving me crazy.

Deliberate?

Deliberate.

Deliberate.

I always lose the word deliberate when I'm talking about souls-like, even though that's like no way.

Oh, that'll do it for me.

I'll just remember Delibird, the Pokemon.

Yeah.

Anyway, it's so deliberate, but it's deliberate in a way that still feels heavy and weighty, but not

like Monster Hunter Soul Frame, but it does feel like a sword.

But compared to Warframe, I get it.

Warframe is so frenetic to me.

Warframe really wants you to...

It's so interesting because

I feel like, again, I don't know how much of this is because,

you know, they want to get new players up to speed, obviously.

Like,

you get some of this in older MMOs in general, where they sort of compress the early parts of the game and they can all kind of feel like a blur.

Like, if you're starting Final Fantasy XIV now, you're going to have a very different experience than someone who started with Final Fantasy XIV six years ago.

And so there is this sense sometimes of like, I can't tell how compressed this is deliberately and how compressed this is just as an experience of being a latecomer to it.

But it's so

there's so much, and it happens so fast, and you really kind of don't have time to take everything in.

And I can imagine if you were playing it from the beginning, there's a lot of environments where like you're happy to shoot through them because you've seen it a million times.

Sure, but it's so strange to play a game where they really don't care if you stop and look

at this stage of it anyway.

And I would say that Soul Frame isn't that.

They want you to be curious about the world in a way that in Warframe I don't feel the same way.

I mean Soulframe has a few mechanics that are really built around that.

Not only the throw your sword with the rope puzzles, but like sometimes you'll hear a sound and it turns out if you go into your soul vision mode, there's a ghost of an ancient king who you can let possess you briefly for extra you know damage or whatever or there's an enemy type arena

yeah there are little locarina puzzles there's that one enemy type that when you beat them you have to go into that mode in order to like truly beat them um and so there's they're simply being a mode where you have to slow down and look around even if that just means for a second means that the moment-to-moment play always has these little pauses in it in a different way

than the bullet through the air warframe and i you know i've watched high-end warframe You're still,

you are not moving slow through those spaces.

If anything, I think high-end play is like even faster from what I've seen.

You know, it's a racing game.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's

sort of,

yeah, it's sort of like Track Mania with swords.

You know, you're just going.

Yeah.

It makes me feel nauseous.

Me too.

And this is why I've bounced off of it.

Is this, have you, how much time have you put into it?

I believe you.

I just can't play that rhythm.

Yeah, I think I don't know that I mean it makes me feel nauseous negatively.

Okay, you mean like a roller coaster?

Yeah, sometimes it actually makes me feel like I'm playing music very quickly.

And

as is often the case when I'm playing music very quickly, I just lose it completely.

And, you know, the rhythm falls apart and I get out of the flow.

And at that point, it's just, it's the worst sensation.

You know, and in Warframe, this is me doing this sort of like bizarre bullet jump that they let you do all the time straight into

an overhang and smacking my head on it and then losing my momentum completely.

But when it's working, it just it feels it feels tremendous.

Do you have a do you want to talk about your warframe, Janine?

I sort of wonder.

I would love to know how you move through the game.

So my gateway warframe.

So I did the thing of like when you when you join up now, they offer you a discount on currency.

And like whenever I start playing a free game.

Sorry,

I hate to interrupt you.

Could you briefly explain what a Warframe is for people who are unfamiliar with this?

I'm not at the point in the story where I think I fully know.

So to me, it's a robot body.

It is a robot body that comes with a set of abilities.

It is...

Yeah, like in Soul Frame, you get arms that are bonded to gods, essentially, that give you abilities.

And in Warframe, it is a robot body that

has certain abilities in it.

Do they also have stats separate from those abilities?

Is Is that true?

Like speed and all that stuff?

They have stats, yes.

And then you equip mods, which are like cards, into them to

add other effects and boost stats and things like that.

Nice.

Yeah.

So, you know,

when I start to play a free-to-play game, I'll play a little bit.

And if I am having a good time, I will do the thing of like, how much would I pay for this game?

And then I'll put that into the currency.

And then I'll, you know, give myself some walking around money.

Right.

You put 62 hours on this thing.

That's enough.

That's a full game.

Yeah.

So Warframe gives you a 50% off or whatever when you first join.

So I got some currency.

I grabbed a bunch of Warframes.

I didn't look them up.

I didn't, I like looked at them in the display thing.

And I was like, this one seems cool.

So I got a few of them.

And the one that I ended up spending the most time with initially was Yurali,

who is

she's a character that you sort of are exposed to early on as like she's in this comic that these orphans on the working, the like worker, what planet is that?

Is that Mars?

Where there's like indentured servitude?

Venus.

Venus.

Yeah, sorry, it's Venus.

She's like in a comic in Venus that the kids who

space skateboard really like.

And I had a, she really like is the one that kind of hooked me because she has a built-in space skateboard

before I had unlocked it in anywhere, in any other way.

So it was really fun.

She also just has an aura thing, like a power where she can just

like a ring of water.

Yeah, I showed Austin the other night.

I'm just like, it's just this ring of water that goes around her and just immediately bisects any enemy that comes within it.

So you don't, like, I didn't even have to fight.

I just put the ring on,

put it on her skateboard, and then it would just run through a level, and then I'm done.

Yeah, the first time you fought, it was like I was watching, it was like I was watching someone play Soul Frame and as if there had been way too many enemies attacking.

Like, you just can't move that quick.

Like, how do you even deal with this with the character you have, the weapons that you have?

And the second time, it was like, oh, I'm watching Vampire Survivors now.

Like, you were just really watching it.

Yeah, I think the first time I was using NYX or something, and NYX is not as

massively destructive

or wasn't at that time.

Right, I'm sure now if you've leveled up your Nicks, maybe it's it's a different situation.

It's better, it's just you know, it's a different, it's a different thing.

Um, but this was a mastery test, so it was like a here's demonstrate your skill, and then you get a little plaque and another little banner thing.

Um,

so that was sort of the gateway for me, and I've sort of been working my way through a bunch of different frames.

Um, generally, the ones that have like at least some kind of damage aura are my favorites, or something that I can kind of plant in one spot that will do damage.

But also, now I've got like pets and stuff, so

I have options where like I can kind of have fun with any of them.

Even like weapons, I was using fist weapons for a bit, and I was like, I think they, I think I hate this.

And then I put a bit more time into it.

I was like, this is fine.

This is totally fine.

This is okay.

So I've hit a point where I can kind of

enjoy any frame that I'm playing around with, which is surprising to me.

I did not think that would happen.

I'm curious about a thing, which is because I think one of the things I'm so curious to see is how much this shakes out into Soul Frame.

And I already kind of gestured at it.

I mentioned waiting around for a blacksmith to finish making your armor in that game.

My experience of Warframe is not just that you have to put time into it playing in order to get through to the stuff that's really exciting, though that's changed since the last time I played.

I think that you've gotten to stuff that I could not have gotten to quickly when i first played i was stuck in running missions on kind of cookie cutter ships for like 10 hours when i first played or not first played when i most recently played so i think that's changed maybe quite a bit or you just did did it maybe you just pushed through i mean 62 hours you know i yeah but i mean you were on venus pretty quick right you were like in an open world maybe you just put in the time i i truly don't know um but the the thing of it the other thing that was like tough for me was like oh

i if i want to make this sword good, or if I want to build a thing, I have to like get all these resources together, and then I have to put them together and then wait it out.

Um, and that's like one of the big structural things that makes that that Warframe is, is, uh, makes warframe distinct, let's say, from Genshin Impact or other sorts of hero-based free-to-play games where like Genshin Impact is all about, I mean, there is some crafting in Genshin Impact, but I think you, if you, I played some Genshin Impact in my day, uh, and mostly I was crafting five gems a day or whatever in order to like get my daily you crafted five things

thing not to like make a new weapon that I actually used yeah exactly upgrade materials exactly whereas whereas with warframe and and with soul frame if you want to make the cool new arm in soul frame you have to like grind rep with the blacksmith and then get all the materials you get three pieces of the blueprint or whatever for the new sword then uh which are random drops in certain locations grind out the the materials you need, and then take them to the blacksmith.

And the blacksmith will be like, You don't have high enough rep with me yet.

Go make some other stuff to get your rep up.

And by the way, Austin, don't go sell that stuff for money because if you do, you lose reputation with me, which I didn't know.

And makes me feel so sad.

It makes me feel so sad because the blacksmith has such low self-esteem, and it's like she's getting sad because you sold, you sold the sword she made you.

Anyway,

then you give it to her, and she's like, All right, cool.

Come back in 12 hours or 24 hours or something for those arms.

And at the time when I was playing Warframe very much like on a schedule, where it was like, I'm trying to play enough of this to talk about it on the podcast in a week or in three days.

This waypoint was twice a week.

I was like, okay, well, I'm not going to advance at any sort of real rate here is what it felt like because I can't make it my everything game.

I can't only play this.

And I'm curious if that stuff is, where's that at in Warframe today?

How often are you like, I really want to use this sword, but the only way I can actually use it now is if I pay them five bucks to speed build it over the next, you know, instead of waiting three days, I'm waiting three hours, or instead of waiting 30 hours, I'm waiting 30 minutes or whatever.

So, most of the stuff that

I have access to right now is stuff that like takes a day to make.

And that's

I haven't really found it pressing because I have so much other stuff to play with.

Right.

The thing that's more pressing is like

because there's so much in the game and so much of it is like kind of

recursive and tangly, I have a lot of blueprints for materials that I don't even have access to the planet where the materials are from.

Sure.

And they're just going to sit there forever.

Or I have blueprints for things where it's like, okay, well, this requires mastery level 10 and I'm at like mastery level 5 or whatever.

Right.

And that's like my personal mastery.

That's not like

the crafting station's mastery or whatever.

That's like, I need to level up more weapons and level up more frames and like that stuff individually I can do pretty quickly.

But

I think the thing that I keep encountering that's sort of the most

running up against a wall is

leveling up mods because it costs so much money and so much endo.

And

that's the thing where it's like, well, that's where most of your power is actually coming from.

The mods that you have slotted into stuff.

Right, I see.

And you have a lot of slots, and there's a lot of mods.

Every single thing you equip, every frame, every pet, even the pets' claws have slots.

So are they the pets' claws, like C-L-A-U-S-E?

Like, you've just signed the pet's clause to get a pet.

No, no, no.

Like, the pets have claw weapons, and the pets have slots where you slot in cards, and then their claws are also you slot cards into their claws.

Some warframes also have like specific

weapons to them, like

I forget the name, but there's one that's like glass and has like a glass whip.

Gara?

Or is Gara the stabby one?

I don't know.

All of this is also a thing that I struggled with, which lines up with my bad brain around maximization, which is like

which again, I don't advise anybody else to do.

This is not me saying that's the right way to do it, but I would feel so overwhelmed by the amount of things I could be focusing on that it felt like, oh, well, I played for six hours today.

And then I read on the form that I was not actually getting the thing I needed to get in order to advance the thing I thought I was trying to advance.

Or like, I'm trying to get this drop.

And then I don't realize, like, oh, yeah, it'll drop at 2% on these maps.

But actually, it'll drop at 20% once you get a little bit later on.

And I just didn't know.

I was so overwhelmed, which I think is a me thing, to be clear.

I'm not saying that it's a failing, but it's part of why I'm so excited about Soul Frame is it's a clean slate that I will not feel that overwhelmed by, you know?

I'm, you know, I'll also say, like, there is an auto-equip mods thing, and I'm a person who I have no problem using that.

I don't even look at what it's equipping.

I don't even think about, oh, I like it when I have ice on this gun, but it put fire here.

I don't care.

I'm going to be in the game.

It's going to be for one minute.

You might as well be saying you're not even playing the game.

Because for me, that is part of what I like.

That is part of the play is being like, well, today I was playing Xenoblade Chronicles X today, and my highlight of the day was realizing that the character who doesn't use, who I didn't think had any beam type weaponry, could buy a beam type, you know,

sword that allowed her to get the boost from when I used the aura that increases beam type damage.

And I went, ooh, a little synergy I have found in this video game that I've played before.

I do find that fun, but like,

it's

I haven't noticed in my particular case.

Well, I mean, there's there are synergy things, but it's like when you're polarizing a slot, and like I'll do that stuff deliberately.

That's when I do that.

When I use form, the forma, you know, it's jargon.

When I put the thing in the other thing and then the thing changes.

That stuff I will still do deliberately and be like, you know, which is the

thing I'm most excited about having here.

Okay, what polarity is that?

I'll put that slot there.

And then that makes it half price to use, essentially, or like half resource point cost

whatever

I'll still do that stuff but like just in terms of especially because you level stuff up so fast like I did I did one mission where I like stuck around for a few rounds instead of just bouncing after the first one and like all my shit went from like rank 10 to rank 28

and when things are happening that fast yeah yeah why are you do I want to spend time between every single mission picking the perfect No, I'm just, I'm just going to go in.

I'm going to hit right stick.

I'm going to auto mod whatever.

And then, like, you know, when I get something maxed out and I'm like really into it and really committed to just sticking with that, sure.

Then I'll hand pick.

I'll be careful.

I'll be deliberate.

But like, when I'm just leveling stuff up to get my mastery up and I'm not encountering, that's the other thing.

And I'm not encountering any resistance because Warframe is to me like a Muso game

at this point where it's just there is just a wave of of guys and they are all turning into mush

there's no point in waste in like spending time maximum like i'm not at the point of the game where it has is has been hard i guess i'm sure that will come at some point um maybe they've done a really nice rework of the on-ramp you know i don't know i i've done like because there's that 12-year event going on right now

i've mostly yeah i mostly stick to things that are sort of at my level-ish those are the things that it surfaces for me fine.

But for some of the event stuff, it is higher level.

And some of it

doesn't gate you out, even if you're a lower level.

So I did something that was like level 110 or something around when I was doing things that were level 10.

Right.

And it was fine.

Like, it was a little bit tougher.

I was a little bit squishier.

I definitely had to stay close to the group.

I couldn't just wander off on my own.

But it was still doable.

You know, it was still like,

you know i didn't feel like i couldn't hang i did feel a little bit like kid sister syndrome

but it was still fun and i got the reward i wanted and like and then i went back to the stuff that i that i do normally or that i that was at my level um

it feels very i don't want to say seamless because there is still a lot of stuff that's just like

this is locked until you get your Robo hanger six and it's like I don't know what that is I don't know when I get that I could look it up I'm not going to.

I'm just going to keep doing my thing.

So it's still a little bit like obscure and weird, but it is so much a game of just like

the numbers go up.

You hit the buttons and the numbers go up and you get the rhythm.

It's like alt, you know, the rhythm of the rocket jumping, or whatever,

where it's like Alto's Odyssey or whatever those iPhone games are.

You just tap and release, tap and release, tap and release.

It's very soothing.

It's a great bedtime game somehow.

That makes sense to me.

And I think that's part of the appeal, right?

Is you know, one of the things I know you

compared it to in terms of setting certain sorts of goals for yourself was Infinite Nikki, where you're like, okay, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna.

Infinity Nikki.

Thank you.

What did I say?

Infinite?

I wrote down Infinite.

Infinity Nikki.

So the actual, the real thing with Infinity Nikki,

because mostly because I have run out of stuff to do in that game, I've like run out of of stuff to make and stuff to missions to do and whatever.

I think the interesting parallel between Infinity Nikki and Warframe and Soul Frame is the

there's outfits that give you abilities in Nikki, but Nikki is a gotcha game.

And you have to roll for the for those outfit pieces.

Right, Warframe is not, I guess.

There's someone listening right now who does not understand that Warframe and Soulframe are not gotchas.

They are, they are not.

You put in real money if you want to buy a a new warframe, but you can also grind for those for things like warframes.

Yeah, pretty.

It feels like pretty much everything you can acquire through other means.

Right, right.

But not an infinite

Nikki, though, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The only kind thing I can say about Nikki, because I kind of, from the start, thought it was a little bit gross to have ability outfits, and then some of the outfits would only be in the gotcha.

That's kind of the third rail of gachas, isn't it?

So none of the,

they're not like, you don't need those abilities to succeed.

It's a little bit less mercenary than Genshin in that way, where some where originally in Genshin there were some characters where you needed that character to do this world thing or whatever.

It's not quite like that.

Usually it is like a superficial ability or just like kind of a fun, gimmicky thing, or a twist on an existing ability.

Yeah,

there's an ability you get, an ability outfit you get in the story story, where you have a, you summon a flower and you glide with the flower.

Um, and there is a gacha outfit from a few rounds ago where it's that power, but instead of being in that dress and summoning that flower, you're in a different dress and you summon a bunch of balloons and you float on the balloons.

Oh, right.

So, and those are different, and I don't want to like downplay the difference there, especially in a game about like

different outfits, but it's not, for example, like

you're unlocking an ability to like open locked doors that you just can't get elsewhere, right?

Yeah, it's definitely the balloons are an alternative, like a similar gameplay alternative.

And there are some,

you know, an example of something that you can't do without paying the money or winning it in the gotcha,

but also it's not like a big thing.

It's not game-breaking.

They had a bicycle that they were selling for like a dollar of real money.

So then you could summon the bicycle wherever you wanted instead of having to go to a bicycle stand and rent the bicycle from them.

And now the current events.

Bicycles are fun.

The current gotcha banner has an outfit where the power associated with that outfit is you summon a motorcycle and then you can ride the motorcycle.

Holy shit.

That seems useful.

I wish I had that outfit.

That's so funny because the opening to that game is like cozy pastoralia.

And the idea being like four months later and Nikki has a motorcycle is very in keeping with the tone of the

isn't the previous Nikki game filled with like war crimes

all of the previous, yeah, then the one before that has been.

I thought there was only one I didn't know that there were, I thought this was the second, there's three.

I didn't know there were three.

I think it's actually the fourth or fifth.

Okay, the first one's really bad, though.

It was barely a game.

Um, the thing I was gonna say, though, is like the kind thing that I can say about Nikki is that when you are pulling items from the gacha, you don't get duplicates until you have the full set

of that outfit.

You'll get duplicates from

garbage, but if you're pulling for a motorcycle outfit, you're not going to like pull the hat and then pull the hat again and pull the hat again.

You're going to pull each piece in sequence until you have the whole thing.

Right.

And then

start pulling the second set so that you can upgrade the first set after that, and then etc.

Well, and the upgrades are cosmetic, it's a color palette upgrade.

Okay, that's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's like

there is some kindness to it, but and like to the point where I can't decide

when I look at that versus Warframe, I can't decide which mode I prefer

because I think something about Warframe's model is definitely I'm more susceptible to spend money in it

than I am a gacha.

And maybe that's just because I've built up gacha self-preservation muscles after years of being a Mihoyo player.

Yeah.

It reminds me of being the person who swore off

CCGs, collectible card games, and then being like, oh, but I can play Netrunner because Netrunner comes out as a specific set of cards once every three months, then another one every six months.

And it's the whole set is in there, and I know exactly what I'm getting.

And like, I can preview all the cards ahead of time, and now I can play this again because what I can't do is fall into the trap of wanting to just keep buying single booster packs so I can chase something.

That is like not a fun way for me to engage with the CCGs I'd been playing at that point.

And whatever dopamine hit I originally had was quickly replaced by frustration and then like, you know, you end up at a certain point if you get into CCGs, you do end up going, okay, well, is there a secondary market where I can just go fucking spend the $7 on the card I actually want instead of spending $17 buying individual packs hoping I get it.

And so much around in that experience, and this is so true for gacha games, is also about FOMO and also about the build of the moment, the like,

not the gameplay build, but the build, the PR build of, ooh, a new character is about to drop, a new banner is about to happen.

You're going to get excited about this character who you might not ever really play.

You're hoping that they're fun and good.

And I think that that probably also happens when Warframe is getting ready to drop a new Warframe.

I know while we were playing Soulframe and we realized, oh, there's two new arms we could grind for, we got very excited because it's like, oh, new core abilities are about to drop.

That's like a whole new way of engaging with this game we already like.

But I do think that there's something really different between I'm going to give you 15 bucks for this thing and I'm going to start at 15 bucks or I'm going to start at 99 cents or $3.

And then from there, maybe I'll spend $100 before I get this thing.

Or maybe I'll spend, you know, four weeks trying to get it, not get it through earning the in-game currency.

And then as it's about to cycle out, which is something that happens in gacha games, right?

Like the window will close on the thing that you want.

The windows don't seem to close on warframes, right?

Like you could just go get NYX if that's, if you've heard us, or

who's the one with the water ring?

Yurelli.

Urelly.

Yorelli is in the shop probably forever.

Yep.

Right?

They're not Disney vaulting the warframes.

They do like sales with the like marked stuff down, but it seems like...

I mean, there is some stuff, I think, that's limited, but it's usually very, very cosmetic.

It's like the shiny, weird version of this guy.

Sure.

They're not like...

I want to push back a little about...

There are dark patterns at work in Warframe.

Oh, for sure.

Sorry, I was not saying there were not dark patterns.

I was saying this particular one that I can't fucking deal with anymore.

Right, right, right.

But when we're talking about like FOMO and stuff like that, something Warframe will do is like when you log in, you will get like a random login bonus.

And some of those login bonuses are things like you've got a 20% off coupon.

Oh, that's a classic if it is going to expire.

Oh, that's a classic dark pattern.

Yeah.

The first thing you see is, do you want to spend something, but it'll be a little bit cheaper.

But this is also why I say, like, I'm not sure which model I prefer as someone who's engaging with both of them, like, willingly.

And like, I, you know, am fortunate in that, like, I have a good sense of, like, how much I'm willing to spend on entertainment in a free-to-play game.

And like it's it's, you know, I'm on top of that and comfortable with it.

And if someone isn't and is not comfortable with it, do not engage with them.

But for Warframe, like I find I am a little more prone to

impulse of just like the idea that I can have the whole thing.

Right now for this money is more alluring to me than the idea of well I can put some money in and then pull for this and I'll probably get most of it, but maybe not.

And like that stuff, I can, I can wait for that.

Like I can, I know I will get X amount of premium currency a day just by doing my dailies and I'll plug away.

And then maybe at the end, I will have, you know, the night before I'll have a moment of like, do I really want this yes or no?

And then maybe I'll put some currency in and get those last few pieces.

you know, versus the warframe thing of like, I could have this whole thing right now.

I could have this warframe, I could have this gun, I could have this hat, I could have this weird dog if I just give them $30 right now.

Yeah, yeah, that's dangerous.

That would, that might get me too if I was in.

Yeah, that's tricky.

Right, again, imagine, imagine

at the moment where playing Soul Frame, I realized I'd lost enough reputation with the blacksmith that I now can't craft the thing I thought I was going to be able to craft.

If at that moment they were like, five bucks, buy yourself a little reputation, put a little money, put a little money in Tolkivain's

pocket, and she'll make you this cool new wolf arm that you want so bad.

They might have fucking gotten me, you know?

So, and of course, none of that stuff is in there yet, right?

I'm always going to prefer like sticker price.

Just

I just want to pay you for the game and be on my way.

Yeah.

I understand that's not always the model.

I understand that like if that had been the case with Warframe, it probably wouldn't have stuck around for 12 years.

It probably would have had a shorter shelf life and they would have moved on to do other stuff.

And, you know, to some extent,

it's food in the trough

for the animals to.

Who's the animal?

I've lost this.

Where am I going?

I don't know where that metaphor is going.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think I mean like fuel for the engine or something, not

food for the animals.

Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.

Yeah,

it's tough, right?

It is.

It's a balancing act.

I will say I'm like more or less happy with

Warframe.

I'm not

unhappy with Nikki.

I just wish there was more content.

Yeah, sure.

It's early, though, right?

Warframe, or Nikki has not had the 12 years of

what Warframe has had to make a bunch of stuff.

I've started a lot of gotcha games.

I've played a lot of fashion games.

I've played a lot of Nikki games.

I have never run out of steam with run out of something to do as fast as I have with that game.

Fair enough.

Really, if you play it a little bit every day, you really do just, it's all done.

It's all, you have done everything

and there is nothing for you to do except for you to go to the machine and spend your energy points and level up stuff.

Love to spend my energy points at the machine,

which I'm going to go do right now.

We're going to take a break while I spend my energy points at the machine, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about some more stuff.

All right, we are back, and we actually took a kind of a long break, long enough that there's been a soul frame update.

I don't know if any of you saw this.

I haven't watched it.

I didn't know how much was going to actually bear fruit in the middle.

Prelude 9 is out.

It's just going to make me straight up.

I went and played it.

I went and played the game more today.

They released

in the middle of our recording.

Is it more different?

Yeah,

there's big differences.

They got rid of a thing that I think was previously pretty

key because they've, you know, the idols, the super weapons, like the bow or the lightning blast, those have been removed because they're going to be like full weapons instead.

And instead,

they did roll out a regular bow as a weapon and a new lightning like spell punch thing that is a whole new weapon type

And you I'll put the that's very consistent with what I've seen from Warframe how the weapons are in warframe that makes they um they also uh rolled out a new thing where you pick your starting kind of uh your class your your frame your in this case your packed

um outright at the very beginning between what was the magic bow one and the lightning the like kind of lightning fist or lightning ball one um and now a third starting one also which is like a stealth stealth focused one and that one starts with a regular bow as a weapon the um the one that previously was i mean it still is the one that like does like the knockback attack and the um

uh

what's the other thing it does um

gosh i'm i'm blanking actually you know what i think i didn't end up getting this one there's one here now that's new the pact of courage tethran is a like a tank focused pact where you're you're getting one of your abilities is just like do more damage on consecutive attacks one of them is like a taunt that gives you increased damage and defense um and so that's like there was no taunting before and in that stream today they were talking about um they were talking about uh the idea of there being like more role-based uh multiplayer stuff um there's factions now you're getting faction rep now between three different factions um

again very consistent warframe if you look at the patch notes you can see if you scroll down enough you can see what the new kind of like casting lightning attack basic weapon is.

It's so

zodiac, yes.

This reminds me a lot of, I've been playing with a weapon in Warframe that's a combination whip and taser.

Sure, right.

It's kind of a similar vibe.

And all the map is covered with mist, and you have to go find these trees to recover your map, which is very fun.

Otherwise, you don't have map access anymore.

And then there was one other thing that I think was, you know, there's a bunch of little changes for balance.

New totem gear.

Which is tied to your faction and like your faction rep and stuff like that.

But like a thing they didn't add was like a bunch of tutorial or something, you know.

I will say I immediately had to solve a puzzle.

I found the entrance to my faction area.

There had previously been a sort of tavern that was like a social hub.

That has now become one of three similar social hubs.

And

each one is tied to a different faction.

I picked the faction unknowingly of the little avocado guy

that little that little yeah avocado and there was a little totem like shrine thing out front and it said

beloved when lost but loathed at home I crave a jewel born not from stone so a little riddle I had to do a little riddle it asked me which of the like gem drops that I had did I want to place in the altar kidney stone pearl

close right in some ways right because yeah loathed at home Pearl is a kidney stone for a, yeah, exactly, for an oyster.

So, so yeah, put that in there, opened up, new little social space, which was cool.

I didn't put a ton of time in.

I tried out these new, these new, like, lightning bolt,

the odiac, as you said, the crackle of lightning bolt bottled up one's sleeve.

Even just reading these notes.

I see, there's also a new fucked up dog.

There is a new fucked up dog.

I misread this.

We didn't mention when we talked about this

before, we didn't talk about how

there were dogs and the dogs dogs have helmets, and instead of killing the dogs, you knock the helmet off and they run away.

I bet you kill this dog.

This dog's killed.

Look at what it says is it says it says

to free them from the Odin Reign.

Seek to free them from the Odin Reign.

Yeah,

I thought this said corrupt old dog.

Not corrupt ode dog.

Corrupt old dog.

You know, even just looking at these faction notes, or these patch notes rather, are a great description of like, hey, what do they mean when they say the writing is weird in some way?

The writing is

extremely built towards its own voice.

And it's like, okay, let's take a look at something as simple as, what are the three classes?

And one of them says,

chief of the soulless warriors was she, wreathed in flame and fury.

Claim the pact of the Fae champion Tetherin.

Raise your sword to sun.

Howl the Felling song.

Have courage, envoy, for a warrior's heart is both a weapon and armor, and a human heart can crack.

And it's like, yeah, okay, they're like, they're doing it.

It's great.

And then at the same time, you read stuff like Kith of Kings Enclave, heralded by his towering throne, haunted by his subject stone, the crumbling crypt of the fire king Fen Yota, hidden away in an untouched pocket of his Undercity, does his body rest, dot, dot, dot, and his restless soul wander.

That's just good fantasy writing.

It's just good fantasy writing.

Yeah, 100%.

When there's an undercity and like a tomb of stone,

I love to to see that stuff.

New pact, Mora's hand.

Her ever flame will she impart to braving souls with burning hearts.

Not life nor death will do you part.

Take Mora's hand, envoy.

Make a pact with the red sun.

An honor once held only by the mighty kings and queens of mid-wrath is yours.

Do not sully her flame.

The first abilities is Ignis Roth.

You'll see why I'm reading on.

Wake the old flame, set the earth ablaze.

Enemies in area of effect take fire damage.

It's so funny.

You know, it's, you know, sometimes enemies in the area take fire damage.

It's just still the thing.

Yeah, these will return as mythic tier earnable weapons, etc., etc.

Premium currency testing, you know.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, well, there we go.

We'll be back to that, I am sure.

So we'll have to see how that shakes out, I guess.

This is a precedent that we will not be continuing, which is midway through every episode of Side Story, they release a new patch that we

don't know.

What if this does continue?

Who could say?

You know, maybe this is our weird special version of the shining.

You know, anything we talk about, if we happen to take a break in the middle of the episode,

something will shift the world such, you know, that I mean, we're set to record the next one of these shortly after Switch 2.

This is true, yeah.

So, so who knows, right?

Anything could happen.

We'll take a break and then the Switch 3 is happening.

Exactly.

We also played something else in between sessions,

which was Repo by Semiwork, a developer who I think previously put out a game called Avoidigo or something like that, which is like an action roguelite.

And this is not that.

This is another game.

Do we have a name for this?

It's like horror extraction

comedy.

I don't like that people.

They're getting called lethal company likes, which I don't think is fair because I don't think lethal company started.

I don't recall feeling like, wow, lethal company is doing something new.

I remember thinking, oh, people are refining the Phasmophobia.

Which itself is in a line with a Phasma.

Which is, yeah, itself is, yeah.

So I don't like that they're being called Lethal Company likes, but also when you say that, people

know what you mean, you know?

So Jack, have you heard any other term?

I don't think so.

They're horror comedy games, which is really, and Phasmophobia is more explicitly a.

Muppets in Peril.

Muppets and Reparo for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and you're right.

Phasmophobia obviously had comedic moments, but it's, it's one, unlike Lethal Company and unlike Repo and unlike

what's the content warning?

Is that the other one?

Yeah.

People played a lot last year

and headliners and headliners well so like I think headliners is different also in one way which is repo

and the other two I just mentioned lethal company and content warning are do have the extraction element of like go in and get a particular get literal objects I guess

the one you just said what was the one what's the one the one

headliners you are trying to survive and escape with photos but you're not like go in to get stuff and leave the way that repo and co are doing that almost as if it's Tarkov or something, except you're trying to find, in the case of Repo, a big vase instead of like an AK-47 or whatever.

Yeah, it's because it's got that like moving out.

It's moving out plus totally.

Yeah, so Repo, like you said, first person, multiplayer, I think it's up to six players by default.

Game about going into creepy places with your friends, trying to extract a bunch of valuable things.

Each new level is set up where you arrive in a big truck and at the truck there is an extraction point and to start with all you have to do is come back with a bunch of valuables which you load in via a weird physics carrying system, also a hover cart.

But as you play deeper into a run, you unlock levels that need, you know, consecutive levels end up having multiple extraction points that are placed deeper and deeper into the level design.

And importantly, this word's already come up.

You're playing a bunch of Muppets.

You're playing a bunch of kind of

cylindrical people.

Trash can puppets.

Yeah, there you go.

It's a stroke of genius.

These little guys are.

Okay, so Austin briefly mentioned that there's some sort of physics going on here.

And physics is the backbone of this game.

You know, if in Lethal Company, you're kind of just picking things up and putting them down.

In this game, you are trying to wrestle like a grand piano through a door that you can't quite manage.

And every time you bonk it against the floor, it loses, you know, $50

of its value.

Right, because you're trying to extract a certain percentage of, or a certain dollar amount of stuff from these places.

You know, it's like you're ripping out the copper pipes from the walls, except the copper pipes are a big statue or someone's, you know,

a vat of or a canister of liquid flame.

And if you drop it wrong, it'll blow up in front of you, you know?

Or like a glass, a statue of a glass rhinoceros in a glass case.

In the glass case.

so funny.

There's some real understanding.

In the same way that

will kill you.

The doll that attacks you.

Yeah, like in the same way that

the understanding of the Victorian bedroom farce is like predicated on how it's extremely funny to run in and out of doors and slam doors open and closed.

The understanding of repo is predicated on the fact that it's extremely funny to like pick up a cup and then your friend turns around and bonks the cup with the thing that they are holding and it just shatters immediately.

I found a vase.

I was climbing this unbelievably tall set of spiral stairs and halfway up the spiral stairs there was like a ledge looking out over the gap with a huge, very valuable vase on it and I picked the vase up and misclicked and immediately dropped it down five flights of stairs where it shattered.

You know, it's it's the physics in here is amazing and it is built into these like trash can Muppets who are moving with sort of like inverse kinematic stuff going on.

They are affected by physics in the world as well.

And they are looking,

their eyes are not controlled by the player, their head motions are controlled by the player, but their eyes are looking at whatever is making the most noise or what they consider to be high-value objects.

And the physical comedy involved in watching your friends embody these guys is exquisite.

There was this great moment where I guess, you know, you can crouch down, importantly, you can take this little trash can, and it will like person, the design that they are, they're almost like cylindrical trash cans, and they can telescope down into a tiny little, like a flat button almost, like not quite flat, but like just the cap of where their head is, and then a little bit of leg underneath that, and that's about it.

And there was a moment where we had taken a little break or I'd stepped away or something, and I came back.

And I remember who the two people we streamed this,

youtube.com/slash friends of the table.

The archive will go up at some point.

you can probably go see the archive still on twitch.tv slash friends of the table um and it was you jack i want to say and maybe sylvie were both in the cart in your little tiny hiding mode in your your crouched mode and you were both making perfect eye contact with me and i was like wait is sylvie playing and just listening and like looking at me and you told me that the eyes like naturally follow sound and so that's just it's so expressive because of that it's so filled with character whenever anyone yells or runs or gets thrown across the room or gets shot by Elmer Fudd, the guy with the gun who will talk about Elmer Fudd.

We have to.

I mean, this is, I was saying, Janine, the other day to you, that I think the thing that makes it stand out for me is there are enemy types in those other games, right?

Like, there really truly are enemy types in Lethal Company and in Content Warning.

And I know in my heart of hearts that repeated play would have led us to develop strategies with dealing with them, you know, outside of like, I I know how to deal with the blob and lethal company pretty easily, or I did at the time, anyway, right?

Um, these are so legible.

The enemies in this space or in this game, uh, you very quickly go, like, okay, I understand how it's patrolling this route.

I understand the type of uh, not very quickly, not so quickly that it's nothing, but the first or second time it kills you, you know, I see what just happened there.

Someone made noise and it caused this old guy to raise up a shotgun and shoot at us.

And next time, we got to be more careful with the noise, but you don't know how how careful you need to be necessarily.

And be yeah, I was going to say, explain the frog chef to me then, smart pan.

Well, the frog chef just chasing you around.

The frog chef just wants to just wants to get you, you know?

I didn't get, I never, the frog chef only killed me in the back because someone led the frog chef to me once.

So I didn't get a like a look at the frog chef.

Whereas, for instance, I know I should probably not mess with the big box, the cart, or the wooden box that if you drop it, begins to break open, revealing a creature inside.

You know,

it's that I've learned my lesson.

The creatures are tremendous, um, and they are subject to the same weird physics shit that you are.

Um, I've seen Elmer Fudd, who is a like a huntsman who is blind, but has really, really uh advanced hearing.

I've seen him fall down the stairs on several occasions and then get up and shoot someone in the face who laughed as he fell.

Um, there is uh an alien who floats around menacingly and summons you into like a...

Oh, there's gnomes?

There's a...

Yeah, oh my god.

That's a great example for me, right?

Is we were playing in one of our early

like missions or one of our early runs.

There were these little gnomes that were like hopping around and killing the whole party.

And on a whim, I was like, I went to, maybe I went to pick up something else, but I grabbed one of the gnomes and then like had it and held it and whipped it against the wall and it like broke, like a ceramic, like a little ceramic gnome would break.

And then the next 30 seconds was me like destroying a half dozen little ceramic games.

Yes.

And so, that for me is one of those things where it's not just their cool monster designs, but they are interactable in really particular ways.

Um, the doll was similar, where like, there's a little doll that you can cash in as loot, basically.

But the second you, you pick it up, it will start, she will start like trying to stab you to death with a little knife or like reach out with her arms she's like flailing it's a nightmare it's a tornado of violence um but i realized if i keep doing the thing where i'm holding her in this game when you pick stuff up you have kind of like a little gravity beam is how you're picking stuff up in the interface um and that you can you can pull stuff closer to you with that or push it further away and so i was just like push her further away push her further away and she's going

like trying to kill me and like i'm running to the drop off point because i'm like oh as long as she's not near me then it it you know i can keep her out of reach and then we can still cash her in and get the money we need so that we can leave this level.

And that is just not the way I've interacted with any of these other games before.

Again, I'm willing to say that if I'd put 20 hours into

Lethal Company, maybe I would have that depth of interaction.

But the core set of verbs in this game just are so much more expressive than what I've seen in those other ones.

There's a really good

sense of like there's sort of two like branches here that converge that I want to talk about where it's like they've they've, one, picked the most expressive kind of puppet to base their main character, their main models on, which is the sort of Muppet where the mouth is made out of like a margarine lid you cut in half kind of thing.

Um, I don't know if anyone else is like a puppet kid, but

you were just a puppet kid, you're now a puppet, a grown adult.

I still appreciate puppets.

It's just, you know, not as much.

I watched a lot of puppet content as a kid, including shows about involving like making puppets.

And

so there's a kind of puppet that you see a lot in

Sesame Street and Muppets and stuff.

Like if you look at Elmo, Elmo's mouth is basically a big circle cut in half and folded.

And basically anything where you're getting like this big wide circle shape where it is so obvious when it's open

and then so minimal when it's closed is very expressive and people I think tend to respond very strongly to it.

You get this a little bit with Kermit too, but Kermit's more of a soft mouth.

Like he can twist his mouth around more.

He's sold up like a little pizza, but upside down.

Another thing you'll see a lot with

really, really funny puppets is the eye, you'll often see like the eyeball will be like a little plastic black disc, or the pupil will be a plastic black disc that's like attached to a pivot point.

And the pivot point is not at the center.

It'll usually be like near the top or something so that the the pupil can like waggle yes um and and sort of move around uh so again you get this sense of animation that like even you know if you're using it correctly will feel directed and will feel like really expressive um so they've learned and i think you can say a lot of the same stuff about the enemies too right where they they've clearly got some opinions and done some looking at, you know, what is evocative?

What like what do people really respond to on like a like

a primal brain level of like what gets us

feeling things?

But also, I think a thing that they've done that's really smart is they have kind of

figured out some of the kinks in the format that they're looking at

in a way that reminds me of like when shooters figured out like, what if you could just get back in a match real quick?

Like what if, what if once you're out, you can just like keep, you know,

and it, you know, you, so you have health.

You have, you can, you can share health.

Um, healing isn't like a rare, strange thing.

You're totally right.

Um,

you can give health to other people.

You can survive taking a few hits, um, depending on the context.

Usually, like, there is room for you to make mistakes, and that's good because mistakes are funny, but what's less funny is when you're immediately out of the action and you can't, you can't, there's no room to recover, there's no room to to

steal victory from the jaws of defeat.

There's even, yeah, I got to tell you, I don't know that I've ever been more clutch than in some of those rounds that we played people to go watch because I think the final version of this is very MLG.

Yeah,

I was esportsing for sure.

Esports gnome killing.

Esports gnome killing, esports evading the guy with the gun.

Lots of various esports learning how, okay, well, I evaded.

Esports getting other people killed

because you were saying shit about the guy with the gun sometimes being clutch is being the guy who's faster than the slowest person with the bear and sometimes guy behind the human shield exactly sometimes you cover someone else with peanut butter and then you you know can outrun them anyway that's esports

you know esports isn't isn't fair esports is like love and war you know uh the yeah

uh the uh sorry i was reminded i have our footage on and i was reminded of the duck which is a little duck that you cannot interact with or else but it just like hangs out and quacks at you and jumps up and down.

It's like a little brother or something, like a little sibling who's like, Oh, what are you doing?

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

And like a little sibling, I don't have any.

My plan would be,

I'm just gonna ignore you.

I'm just gonna not give you any attention.

And that seemed to work fine for me and the little one.

What happened if you put the feather drone on it?

Well, that's what I was going to say: is my favorite clutch moment was spending an entire round being stupidly obsessed with a feather drone, which is a thing that can make any object light enough to float or light enough for one person to lift is really what it is.

Because you have to go to hell with the feather drone.

I really did.

I was like, oh, I got this feather drone.

Okay, how do I make it work?

And I made it work pretty quickly where it was lifting not me, but an object.

And then for the rest of that map, I kept making myself lighter, which lets you jump really high.

Instead, at one point, I jumped out of what was like the primary area of the map and up to like some balconies looking down and i was like i don't know how to get back down without hurting myself no feather drone helped with that it turned out um yeah that's not that's not a game where jumping is a is a

real strategy i don't jump i was jumping a lot of verticality in that game i think the number one place for jumping is when gnomes are trying to bite your knees and you gotta be like ah get away from it you know so uh but that feather drone ended up helping me lift a big heavy case with like a uh a witch was it the it was either the the um i said grandpiano it was a broom it was the was it the case with the broom in it or was it just the raw broom i don't remember but

yeah and that big big was the last

and that was the last thing we needed to like get out of the the area and to your point janine things like the feather drone other games have had uh things that you can buy between rounds 100

um sometimes those things are really funny or like uh multipliers content warning is big on like bring this new thing with you into the world so you can take better pictures or get better video that will give you more points.

But they don't lean as much into the way that this has both stat increases

in terms of stamina, strength, being able to lift things more, and then like outright verbs like the feather drone.

Obviously there's like grenades and weapons and stuff too, but there's a lot of things that are just like, ooh, what if we used this thing?

What if we brought the shock mine?

What if we brought, you know, this, this, there's a, there's a recharge drone, which will charge your other drones.

And there's those things, I think.

There is a gun.

There is a gun, but those things speak to the thing you're talking about, Janine, which is like there has been a

focus on how do we change what the

loops are in this game to go from you do a run, most of your team might die, or maybe you won't, and you'll get out with the stuff and then you do it again.

There's like both short-term loops of, okay, I'm going to go in, I'm going to get hurt, my friends can heal me, I'm going to die.

A number of times, people would die together and or near each other, and then, or, or not even near each other.

They'd both be dead and in the voice comms for dead players.

When you find someone's body or their head, just their head, you can bring it to an extraction point that you haven't used yet.

And when you use that extraction point for the first time, you can only use each one once, it'll res that person.

And then the player will come back and be like, I know where Sylvie's body is.

I know where we can go save Sylvie.

Jack said that they have no idea where they died, where their head is.

We can't save them.

We have to go.

And those little loops, combined with the kind of larger progression schema, really do the thing that you're talking about, Janine, which is like, oh, this is maybe what will a standardized version of what this might look like.

It feels like we're arriving at that a little bit more.

You know, there's a more fully functional, fully featured look at these sorts of comedy extraction horror things that you could imagine breaking bigger because of that structure, you know?

And all of this stuff compounds

to produce something that is just so funny.

I can

the the horror comedy of this genre, you know, tends to balance the two fairly evenly.

Phasmophobia is a funny game, although it's much more frightening.

Lethal Company is about equally frightening and funny.

This is just so deeply

all of these mechanics have been tuned to producing moments that are and not just moments that are exciting, but moments that are funny.

And, you know, I feel like a lot of Colluminch's have been spent talking about how and why games struggle to be funny or succeed in being funny.

And, you know, very often there is conversations about how, you know, successful funny games are funny because of what you do rather than because of what the game says.

You know,

it's quite difficult to write a comedy game, although it can be done.

And it's much easier to, you know, it's extremely funny in a match of Warzone where something goes very, very badly wrong because of one player's inaction or something.

And in repo, you are just seeing mechanic after mechanic after mechanic like turned towards how can we make people laugh um

to to you know you describing earlier people coming back and saying i think i know where sylvie's head is there was a version of this where we were talking in the voice comms and austin and someone were trying to evade elma fudd and we came back and you just said shut the fuck up everybody stop talking

because they can't hear you in the voice comms but as soon as we were in the world and we were still just maintaining our conversations it might be because I had one HP, which is not a thing.

You know, you have health of those other games, but it's not a big one on the screen on the top left, which you'll carry for nine minutes as you're like, I just need to get to the end of this level because if I do, I'll get 25 more HP and I'll be at 26 for the beginning of next level and that'll be way better, you know?

Yeah.

But what you were going to say about the character we call Elmer Fudd, who I think is actually called like the Huntsman.

The Huntsman or something like that.

The Huntsman.

I think that's right.

To Janine's point about how you're given opportunities to make mistakes, I think central to the way the game is

really aware of kind of the mechanics of comedy,

there are exceptions to that.

And they are the exception rather than something that happens regularly.

But you don't get an opportunity to make a mistake with Elma Fudd.

Or you do if you're very, very lucky.

And the idea that, you know.

Or if you're already in motion.

Or if you're already in motion.

Or if you're hiding in a table and Jack is actually closer or in the line of sight.

Because I didn't get shot, certainly.

No, no, that's true.

But there being a monster out there that will just get you makes the narrow escapes all the funnier.

And it makes the moments when you encounter that fellow walking quietly down the hallway genuinely terrifying and intense because you're like, all right, well, this is it.

Now the rules are very clear to me in this moment.

I have to be silent.

We've learned that.

Oh, we need to talk about the text-to-speech.

The game is mostly played over voice comms, and it has that really good

not just proximity stuff but also like processing done on the voice to mimic the spaces that you're in phasmophobia was wonderful at this you know as you step into some gigantic uh school or asylum in phasmophobia and hear the the reverb in your voice but it's slightly crunchy it's slightly reverb-y things get muffled through the walls uh yeah things i think get super muffled when you're one room away like i think that they made a very key important choice which was even if you're fairly close on the map, being in a different

room on the grid automatically makes someone more quiet than they might be in real life as a way of creating kind of information asymmetry.

There are so much, so many times when playing where I, you know, a good example of this is like there's the laughing child enemy.

I never saw that thing in person.

I always heard it laugh and then heard someone scream and then someone would try to explain to me, but from a room away, and I never quite, I still couldn't tell you what it actually looks like.

I have no idea.

So, you know, I'd be screwed if it showed up near me outside of I'm gonna get small and hide in a corner, you know.

But that asymmetry, I think, really is important for

selling that distance between you, you know?

Yeah,

but for players who don't have a microphone plugged in or who don't want to play with voice chat, there is text-to-speech.

This is hilarious because the voice that they have chosen for the text-to-speech is the most garbled

like tone-shifted robot.

And it fits so well with these stupid little trash can Muppets.

And it is it differs in tone and pitch based on whether or not you're crouching.

If you're crouched, it appears as this awful hissed robot whisper.

Sometimes they'll speak in a very deep, low voice for seemingly no reason.

It's because you're looking down, Jack.

If you look down, it gets deeper.

If you look up, it gets higher.

Which again feels Muppety to me.

Yeah, they mispronounce things like a computer does.

They have no real sense of where stress falls in a word.

Just standing around making these things talk to each other is great because it is the ultimate transformation into a Muppet-like character.

I think about the

Sesame Street aliens who don't know what a telephone is and are trying to talk.

talk with each other about what they think a telephone does.

The various little gangs of weirdies that the Muppets will just send into a scene to cause havoc or whatever, just using the text-to-speech transforms you perfectly into one of those.

It's great.

And we learned to our cost that

the enemies can hear text-to-speech as though they are

being spoken to through a microphone.

We learned this because in warning friends about Elma Fudd, I typed reacts to sound and was shot in the head so quickly that the word sound still appeared in text above my head.

I mean, and the timing of that, you know, you got shot and killed by this guy.

You didn't get shot and then immediately blow up.

There is a, you know, a half-second beat where your whole body turns red as if you've been supercharged and then you're, and then you explode into pieces, which again is.

Yeah, if anyone watched, reads the newsletter, that Sylvie took a screen cap of that moment and I put that at the top of the funny score.

This currently, and that's the, and that's the, like, there is, in the same way that, like, doing, uh, playing Monster Hunter or playing a fighting game means that there's like a little bit of hit-stop on certain attacks, like that, that kind of handcrafted animation timing for maximum effect can sometimes be in video games.

Yo, check out this dragon punch you just hit.

In this case, it's like it is the funniest thing in the world when someone gets shot and explodes into little pieces.

We have to emphasize that moment, we have to punctuate it, you know, with something that makes it stand out from just any specific split second.

And that's, you know, it's good.

It's simply good.

One thing that I think is genuinely not good about this game is its logo.

Oh my God.

It's bizarre.

Okay, so the logo is clearly pushing for some sort of virality, which I say not so much as a value judgment.

My value judgment here is that I think that the logo is bad, not that they went for virality.

It shows a grinning, smiling,

Yellow smiley face with like rotten teeth.

This does not represent the production design of the rest of the game in any way.

There are emojis in the game.

Your email communication thing in the truck only ever has emoji on the as or your respond button, and I have to imagine that that's where it grew out of.

But it's not...

It's not these sorts of like rotten, gross, you know, it's just regular ass emoji, you know?

And

the Muppets are such a beautiful piece of art direction that it is clear that there is really skilled, thoughtful production design going on here, but not in the logo.

It's fucked.

It's a shame.

It's the one thing that I would like...

I would love for them to just change it and be like, we got a new logo.

You know?

It's the Muppets.

It's the Muppets.

Yeah, they just put these little guys

bouncing around.

I would die for

the little guys.

Oh, it's also worth saying that they're.

Yeah, make it the duck.

The Muppets are small.

They are.

I don't know if you've noticed this.

They're about three feet tall.

All the levels that you go into, the architecture is like

slightly bigger than you.

And this is presumably to allow for hiding under chairs, tables, couches, etc.

But

it further characterizes the repo crew as this

like these

bizarre, like rowdy gang of small mascot characters that rock up into uh into a house to strip it for parts.

Um

it's worth saying that they are adding some stuff to the game that I'm really excited about in terms of new maps, new monsters.

They're adding a bucket that you can put over the duck to stop it

coming for you.

And they're also adding stuff that I am less interested in.

They are adding like expressions for the characters.

And one of the big things that they're adding with the expressions is eyelids and that sounds like not a major addition but so much of the humor of the little trash can robots is their blank-faced big-eyed stares they they have no expression in their face and they communicate entirely through like their the posture of their head the way they're moving whether or not they're the tiny trash can sometimes they roll their eyes purely procedurally like completely by accident um

and i think the idea of like making them narrow their eyes or something is a really weird moment of something that seems like it would add more expression to the characters, but might end up robbing them of a particular kind of expressivity that is really funny.

Now, I wasn't on board until you said seeing them narrow their eyes, because I am cure.

I want to see it.

I got to see it.

I got to see.

I think I can send you a picture

and then we can get a reaction.

I mean, you know when Animal from the Muppets like lowers his eyebrows?

Yeah.

That's funny.

But you kind of of get that.

Or Gonzo.

Like, Gonzo,

it's going to be a question of like restraint, right?

Like, if they do it all the time, it's going to suck.

But like, Gonzo has big, huge eyes.

And then every now and then, those big eyelids do something funny.

And it's funny.

That's true.

The other thing that they are interested in adding is lore.

There was a question where they were like, does the game have lore?

They're like, yeah, the game has a lot of lore, and we're really excited to tell you about it.

And that's making a video game for this audience in 2025 right this is this is you got a yeah scp backrooms it you got a skippity toilet scp you got a skibity toilet it these guys are funny to me the going into the houses is funny to me because they are just these like there's like a magic school there's a weird old mansion there's the base from the thing yeah these are inherently weird funny spaces and they will not be made better to me by someone saying you actually work for the glaxaback corporation and the huntsman is actually a guy who has been as long as that stuff is, you know, when I think about the way that that stuff gets delivered in these games, it's like

so tangential to what playing it is like.

You know,

a lethal company has data disks you can find and load in to read the lore docs.

I think that's fine.

If we were finding every once in a while some sort of, you know, not even an audio log, but that sort of text log that you could then like in your side, you know, time, or, you know, it goes back to like the Halo 3.

You can find lore dumps in that.

Like, that's fine.

It's okay.

I'm not gonna, what I wouldn't like is that.

I'm not that player, right?

What I right, what I wouldn't love is if there was like a big briefing about each location that before we went in that explained why there was a magic school and what the history of the magic school was, you know, I don't need that.

Yeah, but and I don't know, the other thing is I like it when writers get paid, and so I'm happy that there is someone being paid to write lore for the Muppet, you know, horror extraction comedy game.

Yes.

Even if it's not going to be to my particular taste, you know.

I got to tell you, Jack, I kind of like this angry Muppet expression.

No, I do not.

I don't like these angry Muppets.

Well, they're not going to always be.

It's going to be a moment.

The thing is, for me, it's like, I'm going to trust them to continue to understand what makes.

They got here.

They got here.

Yeah, exactly.

Maybe you're right, though.

It's not like I haven't played games before where I've been like, I really liked it early on.

And then as stuff, as they added to it they kind of diluted what was great you know that does happen they're adding a museum that's going to be extremely funny

because uh

there's a lot to steal

there's a lot of repo

well and there's a lot to break

you know yeah that is a hundred percent the funniest thing in this game is you pick up something that's worth twenty thousand dollars you only need seventeen thousand to clear this extraction you know and you immediately drop it and you know take $6,000 off of the top of it, you know.

It is simply innately funny.

What is your favorite object to find in a repo level?

Oh, great question.

Ooh.

I do really like the rhino.

I really liked.

I like the big dinosaur bones.

The like giant

dinosaur bones on a

stand is really great.

I like opening an armoire or something and just finding a little pocket watch or a diamond or just like just something small out of the way, just a quick 2K right in the bucket, you know?

Froggy purse, which is a frog purse that croaks when you pick it up.

Sorry, it's the doll I described before.

That's the because the line being blurred between monster and thing I want to trade in for $9,000, you know?

Yes.

The experience I had of lifting that thing, getting mauled by it as its arms went,

and then learning to keep it at a distance was just like, I like the reactive things.

The gramophone that can make noise is very fun.

Yeah.

A flamethrower that if you pick it up by its handle, turns on a flamethrower from the thing and just sets you on fire.

Okay, I've picked that up before.

I never picked it up by the handle.

That's very funny.

Can you use it against the

you can, but it's really, really hard to use.

It's great.

I like that big painting.

I like when you grab like a giant painting with somebody.

That's the other thing.

We haven't been super explicit about this, but things have weight.

And you often need a second person to pick it up.

And so there's a lot of comedy of like, all right, now let's quick, we've got to rotate this thing this way.

And then you hear the sound of like the state, the stay-puffed marshmallow man walking down the hallway.

Like, ah, shit.

Okay, everybody, hide.

Put the painting down.

Put it down soft.

Put it down soft.

We don't want to break in.

Great game.

Really, really thrilled with it.

Great game.

If you want to play it before

they add the eyelids,

you should go play it now.

Look back on that, like the beautiful day before they added the eyelids.

I think the eyelids will be fine.

Yeah, but I get what you're saying.

I mean, again, like...

If the eyelids suck, there'll be a no-eyelids model.

There will be a no-eyelids model.

And that'll fix it.

You're right.

You're right.

You know, I get this, Jack, because I am the person who really misses launch No Man's Sky.

I'm that person.

I was just talking to a friend about this the other day oh uh uh side story update report they added bones to no man's sky all right yeah they did they did do that um they did you could build the you could build one of the dinosaur stands the dinosaur displays that are in uh repo in and you then have to carry away yeah um

yeah i you know and i'm always

because of stuff like uh and you know what they've done to no man's sky is really cool what do i think both austin and i are talking about primarily from a preference sense rather than from like a value sense.

Yeah.

But like

whenever a game hits massive success and their designers

like carrying forward that massive success are like, here is all the stuff that we are adding.

I feel like a tingle of fear creep down my spine, you know?

But also.

I mean, because there's a sense of like, because this is a game that

is following a sort of sequence of games that have sort of come and gone, When this game was originally conceived of, what was the list that they had on their whiteboard?

Right.

And how much of that was cut for

scope reasons?

Because they didn't know, am I going to make any money?

Are we going to have any time?

Are we going to have time to do this?

How much of that was cut and like it ended up being a lucky and good thing that it was cut?

But then when they do have the time, the budget, et cetera, to return to it, they maybe are still of the impression, like, well, this is a thing we should include.

This is is a thing that

these kinds of games have, whatever.

And there's, you know,

you have to trust.

You definitely have to trust that, like,

it's their game.

They have a vision for it.

Their vision so far has been represented in a way that has resonated.

Yeah.

Cool.

Hopefully, that remains true.

Hopefully, they change their logo, though, actually.

It was never originally intended to be a lethal company type thing.

It sort of became that.

The developers say that it was originally originally a single-player cleaning game where you tried to clean a mansion while remaining hidden from Headman.

That's funny.

Which is one of the monsters in the final game.

That's very funny.

And it's called Goblin Maid game.

What's that game?

I don't remember.

I know the one you're talking about.

Goblin made game?

Yeah, you know, the game where you're a goblin made.

It's the game where you're a goblin made and you're cleaning out the dungeon, but the traps are still active and stuff.

Goblin Madeup?

That's really funny.

What's this called?

It's a good pitch.

Maybe.

I think this is it.

This looks like it was it.

It's the one where you have a picture.

There's actually like multiple games where you're a goblin who's cleaning things or repairing things.

I can think of three off the top of my head.

Yeah, there's a dragon in this now, so yeah, this is

not out yet.

It's one of the seven basic plots.

That's right.

That's right.

You're a goblin cleaner.

You're a goblin.

The dragon is here now.

Yeah.

Yes.

And also man against God.

Goblin, what's it called?

Goblin.

It's just called Goblin Clean.

Goblin.

Clean up.

Clean up.

Oh, this is great.

And of course, this is, you know,

there's a lineage here with Power Wash Simulator, but way before that, there's Viscera, a cleanup detail,

like way back when.

A kind of

expression in games that has been like percolating for a decade.

I would say even longer than that, because like if I look back at when I first played

Harvest Moon, Super Nintendo, like the very first Harvest Moon, the best part of that game and all subsequent games to me was cleaning the field when you first get the farm.

Oh, it's so good.

Chopping the wood, hammering all the stones, getting a nice clean field, and then, you know, when the summer storms come or whatever, like repairing your fences and picking up the

crap that the windstorm leaves.

So

I feel like there's been a thread of it around for a while, but it did take a while for people to just be like, this could be a thing on its own.

Yeah.

Why not?

uh sorry i've just been notified by steam that there is actually uh a uh another

repo change that has arrived or is arriving oh yes

explosions yeah it's explosions do you see what this is do you see like oh what is that

i didn't understand what i was looking at jack get then since you haven't seen it jack guess what what the the title of this video is introducing an explosive new mechanic uh the i'll see what i can read without it this week we're showing off a new new mechanic and some progress on matchmaking.

The image is everyone blowing up around the huntman, the huntsman.

What do you think the explosive new mechanic is?

I'll even say it is.

They've added explosions.

They've added explosions in a particular way.

Is it farting?

No, I see where you...

See, this would be the bad version of this, I think.

You know, I think that if the first thing they added was farting.

If the first thing they added.

Maybe that's

someone else's.

30th or 40th?

Is it the players willingly exploding?

Not willingly, but that's not a bad

guess.

Like a weird...

Like, you can have a timer put on you.

If you don't do something, you'll explode.

That's actually the other way.

It's if you keep doing something.

So when you are lifting an enemy, let's say you had enough strength upgrades that you can lift one of the enemies up, it creates

a new meter in the top left next to your health and your, um,

next to your health and your, your stamina.

There's stamina in this game.

It's a roguelike, or it's a, it's a souls like now.

Uh, here, I've time-stamped this for you.

If you're holding, say, the huntsman up in the air and bashing him against the walls, which you can do with a high enough strength upgrade, or even just holding something in place so that your friend with low health can get away, it will start ticking up this meter.

And if it hits 100, you blow up and die.

really interesting and if more of you are holding it it beats it it uh it speeds up or it it uh it goes up slower so it you know if multiple people are trying to hold back the creature so that the weak person can get away that is acceptable you know or it's always acceptable it's about gaming this uh i don't think this is for items or anything like that it's just for monsters it's like overheat yeah i mean that's exactly what it is it is like overheating yeah uh-huh yeah Great.

Yeah, low charge affects enemies.

Yeah, that's like

of the museum, which they're gray boxing towards the end of this video as well.

And you can just see like weird statues of the robots.

Oh my god.

There's a load of bowling pins like balanced on top of each other to make a pyramid with a bowling ball on the top.

Hell yeah.

Excellent.

We didn't even get to do the thing in our run because our run was so successful of what happens when you lose.

Jack, did you get to do this in a different game?

Yeah, I've done it a few times through failure.

We don't lose, so you know, we're just never going to see it in our group game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You play an extremely small, extremely stupid, last man-standing King of the Hill game with a combination of weapons and also just stuff where the last remaining sort of surviving player gets to claim a crown that they wear in the next level.

This mechanic is exactly as, like,

um...

This joke would not be funny at all if it was three minutes long.

It is 90 seconds long, and it is just an immediate free-for-all.

That

results in a winner.

It's longer than most of those rounds go.

Yeah, you fall and you pick up like a massive hammer and you just hit your friend with it completely off the platform that they're on, or then you stumble backwards and fall into the thing.

It's great.

It's just such a fun little

case.

I mean, I think the way to think of it is like, it's like you are suddenly dropped into a Mario Party minigame.

Oh, usually.

That is the vibe.

Shout out to Repo.

I think that's...

Shout out to Repo.

That's probably the last thing we'll talk about today.

We've already gone at this point for a reasonable time, and

I know I'm well known for five-star run times, but I'm trying not to make this default to a three-hour monster podcast every week so that when that does happen, it's special.

Is there anyone we want to shout out that we didn't, I guess, important one before we wrap up?

We did not talk about our cover art at all.

And the artist credit, Jack, you really took the lead on that.

Do you want to talk a little bit about our incredible cover art and kind of what makes it so special visually?

Our cover art is by Eiliang Chan or Four Myths.

That's F-O-R-M-Y-T-H-S.

This is a

piece of cover art that is so beautiful.

I am in love with this art.

It is Risoprinted, which is a style of printing that produces these really great tactile images.

And something I knew that I wanted in getting art for this podcast was something that felt really warm and felt really tactile.

and i am so excited that we were able to work with eiliang chan on getting this uh art that has such a cool feel to it i'm i love it so much i will say a really fun thing uh in it is without giving it away one of the things on the on the the cover art was an alternate name for this podcast was a name i really really multiple things i guess so yes oh sorry at least one of them was one we explicitly did not ask for and and they just kind of put it in there and and I that felt that felt good that felt like a little a little bit of kismet, you know

like a sign.

Um, so yeah, shout outs to to age hand, shout outs to four myths.

Um, really incredible, uh, really beautiful.

Um, uh, I think we'll probably end up having some cool digital assets around it for our for like if we ever do special streams.

Maybe I'll use some of those in our outward uh, let's play.

Oh, yeah, you know, put some frames up

available now, available now

slash friends at the table, friends of the table.cash.

You can watch our repo stream.

Again, twitch.tv slash friends at the table.

We're on YouTube, youtube.com slash friends at the table.

I don't think the repo stream is up quite yet because Keith got a

huge amount of

different perspectives and is doing his best to actually put them all together, which is going to be incredible.

It's going to be the best way to watch that.

Maybe a good way to watch it the second time, you know?

I believe all of us were recording, even though only one or two of us were streaming.

I think that that's right.

Um, yeah, so so yeah,

that'll be a good one.

Um, we have a lot going on right now.

We are very close to Perpetua starting in uh proper uh mode very soon.

We are deeper into our Dreamcast stream series, uh, Jack.

Uh, you have now played two of the eight dream or yes, seven Dreamcast games that have been prepared for you on a uh a beautiful slideshow introducing you to the world of the Dreamcast.

You've now done two.

You've done

what was the first one?

Evolution,

the RPG.

And now you've been, I was going to say indoctrinated.

Maybe that's too strong.

But

inducted

is better.

Yeah.

Introduced is too light, though.

I think it is more than just an introduction into the world of Shen Mu.

Shen Mu is astonishing.

I think everyone who has played it either says this thing is garbage or I love it deeply so much.

Yes.

I got to experience it for the first time.

I love it deeply so much.

It feels not just like a game that was made for me, but also like a weird jewel.

I don't know how or, frankly, why it got made, but it's excellent.

There's some stuff in Shenmue that is...

It is gorgeous today.

Like, you know, the way that game looks and the way that it moves, and it's also its bizarre, sort of, like, singular spirit.

Really, really special.

I had a great time playing it with Keith.

We're definitely going to go back to it.

I accidentally left my Dreamcast running while I went and to do something else midway through a cutscene.

I was in a cutscene, and the cutscene reached a point where I could talk to this guy and offer a response.

And I was like, okay, I'm going to go and make lunch and then come back because I'll still be in the middle of the cutscene.

Save the game.

Instead, of course, 11 p.m.

happy that I was immediately teleported back to my house.

I don't know what the status of that cutscene is anymore, whether or not I can go back and learn a move from that weird old man.

I bet you can.

That's very good.

That's good news.

We know some people who've

a lot of people

have done some things with this game.

Run Button has an entire let's play of it.

I think the first few episodes are very easy to find at the very least.

And

there is a Patreon for Run Button you can go support, our good friends Keith and Kyle, and go watch them play through the whole thing if that's what you want to do.

Or, like Jack, you could go down this route and become inducted into the Shen Mu fandom.

It is a valuable journey.

I think you learn a lot about yourself and video games by doing it.

Jack, have you decided what the third of the Dreamcast games is you're going to play yet?

No, we haven't decided yet.

I'm really excited.

Twitch.tv/slash friends at the table.

And I guess that's going to do it for us this first week.

Thank you so much for giving us a shot.

If you enjoyed this, feel free to let us know.

We are over on Blue Sky at Friends-Table.

I think that's our primary social space at this point.

I would love to hear your feedback.

We'd love to hear what you think.

Obviously, the best thing you could do for us right now is to share this, to let other people know about it.

We don't have any advertisements for the show outside of us shouting about it on our own shows and our friends' shows and stuff like that.

So please let people know.

We have already decided a little bit of what we're going to talk about next time, which is exciting.

So look forward to us coming back in two weeks.

We're going to do an every other week structure right now.

Obviously,

we can revisit that if this is some sort of giant Smash success and everyone is like, no, you have to do it every week for a million dollars.

Like, okay, maybe we'll do it then.

But let's

do lots of stuff every day.

Let's see this is a thing.

So we'll see.

If you all could get a million dollars together every week, I promise you we will do this show weekly.

And maybe even for less than that, but you know, we got to like start somewhere.

Start with a strong first offer.

You know what I mean?

A million dollars a week.

I'll do face cam.

Wow.

I'll do video.

Okay.

Look at that.

That's the only way to see.

This is, yeah, we're taking a Germa stance to face cam.

It's a little reward, you know.

You gotta, you gotta earn it, you know.

All right, that's gonna do it for us.

Thank you so much for hanging out with us.

Any final thoughts from either of you?

No, I'm having a great time.

I'm really excited to do more of this.

I'm having a great time.

It's gonna haunt me until we have a good sign out.

These are our two test sign outs right now.

I'm having a good time, and I'm haunted right now.

Stay haunted.

Is it too corny if we're like to be continued?

Oh,

because it's stories.

It feels corny.

It's pretty corny, but maybe we should bring corny back a little bit.

You know, we're like trying to be a little less irony poison.

You know, the thing is, the world is bad, and so it's kind of hard to be genuine and sincere because if you open that door, it's like just

burning in there, and you just have to like let that out.

The corn subsidies are getting scrapped.

We got to pick up the slice.

I see.

I see what you're saying.

Right.

It's a fake it till you make it type thing.

All right.

We'll just try it.

We'll say, I'll say it here.

To be continued.

Is that the to be continued or is it to be continued?

I don't know.

You have to say it the way that you like it.

It has to be.

Because if I tell, if I dictate, if I dictate how you say it, you're going to try and follow that.

And it's going to defy whatever feels natural to you.

I do the voice up thing.

I do to be con.

What do I do?

What do I do with this?

I'm feeling a little haunted right now.

To be continued.

I could also imagine you going like, to be continued.

To be.

To be continued.

No, it's too long.

I take it back.

It was not.

It was bad.

To be continued.