12: The Succulent Strawberry, or: Make Turnip Grow and Pet Cow

What's good, internet?

It is September 2nd, 2025, and this is not a windy pastoral paradise.

It's ScytheStory, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by Friends at the Table, supported by our patrons at friendsatthetable.cash.

friendsatthetable.cash.

Today we are splitting the show in two, and in the first half, we are joined by Dre, Allie, and Janine

here to talk to us about farming.

Is that fair?

Farming and selling, farming and marketing, farming and hawking.

This podcast, unlike

your

new livestock

barn, is not because the barn isn't two.

Normally it's two, but in this one, it's one.

No, you're right.

It isn't two.

You're right.

It's just not two.

What's happening?

That's two?

No, no, because normally you put your animals in two buildings in farm game.

In farm game.

But in this farm game, you put animals in one.

Which is the opposite of this episode.

Sure.

Why do you call it

one barn when you two animal in, out, etc one sheep out the barn one sheep out the barn two

what are you talking about

i'm talking about grand bazaar story of seasons grand bazaar in fact not to be confused with harvest moon grand bazaar which is

um

not the same game it's not a remake they've said it's not a remake but it does have a lot of the same designs and gameplay elements and features, but then also like a bunch of new stuff.

Would it be fair to call it like a redo?

Yes.

I mean, I would call it fair specifically because like Harvest Moon, going back to the beginning, Story of Seasons, we don't need to get into that.

You can find that on YouTube.

You can explain that on YouTube.

Maybe we've explained to him.

Here's essays.

You can watch them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's,

The people who make the good pharma games don't own that name anymore because it's the localizer's name and the localizer makes their own games now with that name, which is why the Harvest Moon games aren't...

Sorry, aren't good

anymore.

But the very first Harvest Moon game for Super Nintendo

was

good,

but then they came out, they put one, they put out Harvest Moon 64, and the story of that is that Harvest Moon 64 is kind of what the original game was supposed to be.

So it's not just a port, it's not just a sequel, it's kind of a sort of weird thing.

And there have been a few games like that.

Friends of Mineral Town, I would say, was more of a

remake.

The recent Friends of Mineral Township Star of Seasons.

Yeah.

The terms are so weird, right?

Because like it's a remake in the Final Fantasy VII remake sense.

Yeah, I was going to ask, where does it rate on Final Fantasy Silent Hill remake sense?

Well, I only know what one of those means.

So,

Silent Hill, well, this is the thing, is like, it's so weird to remake or a thing.

Um, because you, you know, in some ways, you can think about something like there was that Shadow of the Colossus remaster, um, remake, not just a remaster.

I think we, we talk about ports, which is just you can play the old thing on the new thing, and it's it's as close to the original as possible.

Maybe the textures are higher, Rez.

Right.

And people, you know, sometimes that looks like shit, like those original Final Fantasy ports that came in the middle of the day.

Oh, yeah, when they do the like when they do the weird smoothing shit on it.

Exactly.

So sometimes it looks really bad.

Then you can think of something like a remaster, which mostly happens around things from like one generation immediately into the next generation, but sometimes does come across a wider span of time.

So obviously

one of the most prominent one of these in the last decade has been the last of us which has been remastered five times or whatever where it was on the ps3 and then it got remastered for the ps4 and then both of those get remastered for the ps5

i believe and the pc and the pc um and sometimes those will sometimes they're called remasters but and they do include like some updated assets but generally speaking the bones of the game are still exactly the same

They're taking the master files and then

putting them out for higher end, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

For side story people, I would say, like, the Lunar thing was a pretty clear remaster, and that was like a couple decades between, and not just like

here's the PlayStation 5 version of this thing, even though you had it for PlayStation 4, you know.

And then the thing that you could, that gets into a weird situation is you end up with certain things that get a,

what's called a remaster, like the, um, uh, I guess actually the Shadow of the Colossus thing was called a remake, the blue Blue Point, Shadow of the Colossus, or the, the Demon, or yeah, Demon Souls remake, or the, the, like you said, Allie, the Silent Hill 2 one, right?

Where it's like, we are being loyal to the gameplay design of this game.

The level design is the same.

The characters are saying the same words, et cetera.

But we're doing like an updated aesthetics pass where...

We've changed the lighting in this game dramatically.

We've re-recorded voice acting in the case of the Silent Hill 2-1 in a way that like changes the character of the game.

But even that is less of a remake than Final Fantasy VII remake, where it went from a turn-based, you know, isometric or top-down-ish, you know, fixed-camera angles JRPG in the traditional turn-based sense to an action RPG with tons of new writing that includes weird intersections with the other, with, you know, side games in that, in that

series.

And so, like, that's even a different thing.

And then, this is like

it's the same game, but with all new systems and stuff included, right?

Grand Bazaar?

This feels like it's in the in between the it's definitely a remake, it's definitely a remake in the sense that it's a remake that changes things, but it's not just a remake in the sense that they are not simply taking the old exact bones and keeping them as they are.

And it's a a little bit extra weird to talk about in this,

with this Game of Context, because Grand Bazaar was always sort of an outlier in Harvest Moon.

It was always kind of the weird one.

I saw someone literally,

I was looking at like performance reviews and stuff to figure out which platform I wanted to buy it on.

And I saw someone literally call it

like a

forgotten spin-off of Harvest Moon.

And I was like, what the hell are you talking about?

And you know, that's YouTube, whatever.

But the more I think about it, the more I'm like, well, it was, it was kind of weird.

It was one of the earliest ones for the DS.

I think it was, well, yeah.

And

it had a lot of mechanics that

did not exist in Harvest Moon before or had sort of been there in bits and pieces.

And they sort of assembled it into something that was kind of strange.

So So this was happening not too long after things like Innocent Life and

the first Rune Factory games.

So in that sense, I can kind of understand calling it a spin-off.

I mean, it's not because it's called Harvest Moon, literally in the name.

But I can kind of see where someone's coming from there because it is such a thing.

Wasn't the first Rune Factory called

like Rune Factory.

Oh, that was Rune Factory

Harvest Moon.

That's a pretty big distinction, though.

You're right.

This isn't called Grand Bazaar, a merchant's harvest moon, or something like that.

You know, so that's fair.

That's fair.

But we should say what this thing is, which is it is a

harvest moon, story of seasons farming game.

But instead of the,

you know, daily routine of get your stuff, put it in the shipping bin, get paid, you save all your shit up

and you bring it to market on Saturday.

And you set up your stall, you can decorate your stall, you have a little bell, you get the crowd hyped up, you bring them over, they say, oh,

that's nice, but do you have perfume?

And then you go, yeah, I do have perfume.

You pop the perfume out and they're like, I'll take four.

And then you make $27,000.

Mm-hmm.

Oh.

That's the thing.

And sometimes the spirits of the forest also come and force people to buy things as quickly as possible.

Yeah, they do some cheer squad routines to magically make people spend money.

Those are the little gnomes I saw briefly while watching some gameplay.

Yes.

Harvest Sprites.

Sorry, Harvest Sprites.

I was surprised by how tickled I was seeing certain

long-time harvest moon things that I kind of haven't thought about for a while, like the Harvest Sprites, which are usually around but have taken roles of of varying prominence and and unprominence um and also like a power i saw power berry they sell a power berry and it's like oh man powerberry have they been not in recent games i think powerberries like the harvest sprites but it's just it it's not the same

it used to be in the very first harvest moon and i this is a system i i do think they should bring back because it's really cute um powerberries were like a thing you would get really infrequently or win.

You could get them just by like hoeing your field and stuff.

And there was a little fenced-off garden behind your house.

And as you got them, a little sprout would go

there just to show you how many you'd gotten.

And that was always really cute and really exciting to get a power berry, get the stamina increase, and then you could go there and be like, I got another one.

I only got six more or whatever.

That was cool.

So just there's there was definitely like a

nerd hit for me of just like seeing the power bearing being like, oh yeah, good times.

Now you buy it from their market stall.

Yes, you buy it with happy story.

Happy points.

They monetize your happiness and then you can exchange your happiness for berries and seeds and

things like that.

Yeah, I

for me, the story of this game for me, the story, but the thing that I keep thinking about is how its structure differentiates it from what is like a really

filled category now.

Like, there are a lot of farming games.

We've talked about a number of farming games on this, you know, on this podcast.

Very young podcast.

Very young podcast.

There was a time when you would have to have gone years between

talking about a different game.

There's a time when Harvest Moon was the only game in town.

Right.

And you waited for that.

You waited.

You got like two or three of them per per platform, and you had to wait in between, and

you had to live with it.

That was your life.

And that's not even counting the

huge explosion of sort of life sim, work sim type stuff.

You know, like, I wasn't even thinking about fantasy life when I said we talked about multiple farming games this year already.

Which added farming.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So there's like lots of stuff here.

And on top of just like, we live in a world where, you know, whether it is something that's like a dwarf fortress-like, or like a Sims-like, or like a

drug kingpin-like Schedule 1, or like

sim games are everywhere now in this way.

And I think the thing that is so fascinating to me structurally with

Grand Bazaar is the thing you just mentioned, which is like the routine shift.

Um,

so many of these games are about, like, okay, I have, I've hit the bit where the turnips come up.

I put the turnips in the cell cart.

You know, even, even

Rune Factory this year, which had such a different structure, which Dre, I know you played this, still had the like,

when the fucking turnips come up, your people put them in the cell cart immediately, you know?

And that game has other structural stuff going on that's different, but like that is still there.

And that's sort of like...

In so many of these, you start the day with a few tasks.

You make sure before you go to bed that like if you have stuff to sell, you've sold it.

Everything changes when it's like, no, you get all your money basically on Saturday because you went to the market, you sold stuff.

Maybe you didn't even get to sell everything you have because you couldn't bring everything you had.

You only brought or you like passed out the night before and you slept in or missed the morning shift because it's divided into a morning shift and an afternoon shift.

Totally.

Oh, yeah.

Or you

didn't know what the trendy item was or you didn't have the someone or just someone shows up and says, hey, can I get one of these things?

And like, you're like well i got one of those things back in my damn you know storage but i don't have it here right now um uh or you fucking clean up you clean up and you end up with so much money and then it's sunday and then it's monday and guess what you don't get more money on those days because you're not just dropping stuff off magically in the bin that gives you money in the market a thing that i that i have done multiple times is like flush with cash i'm like oh yeah i'm gonna go to the mayor i'm gonna get i'm gonna buy double jump from the mayor i'm gonna expand my storage i'm gonna expand my pockets no wait a sec um I'm going to buy it.

This is going to be my first bazaar.

This is exactly what I'm going to do.

Yeah.

And then I end up with like 50 bucks.

And

I harvest all my seeds like the next day.

And it's like, oh, fuck, my field is empty.

Nothing.

And then you don't have anybody for honey.

You can sell some stuff, but like, it's not, you know, it's kind of.

Well, I think the big differentiator is it is limited and anything that you don't sell at the bazaar doesn't go towards your bazaar sale total, which is the big thing that you need to level up the bazaar.

Yes.

Interesting.

Also, there's like metals and stuff and there is like, there is stuff around town that you can sell to the guys.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you're, but you're, that's what I mean by like the heart of the thing is what you're not able to sell during the week basically like you're not making your money to get your upgrades I might be wrong.

I think you can still sell some stuff, but I think part of it is that the prices are going to be because they give you a sell price.

And I think the sell price is usually not what it's actually selling for in the stall.

So I think that might be you might just get more money selling it at the store.

You also lose out on if you like sell items to the town people they like.

I think that you get like a heart up from them.

Or maybe that's just during the cheer event.

But

so you'd also miss out on that.

The rest of that stuff is there.

Cheer events,

fishing events or whatever.

Honey day.

Tons of festivals.

festivals.

Oh my God.

So many festivals.

You're still

back.

But

cheer events are different from like honey day.

A cheer event is a like limit break that happens during the Grand Bazaar where the sprites cheer for you.

Yeah.

Whereas Honey Day is a town holiday where you give honey to your honey.

No, to people your own age.

To people.

Uh-huh.

You give honey to your honey.

You try to give it to an adult.

Maybe you should give this to someone else.

there's like multiple characters that i did not realize were quote-unquote adult and not my age i was like well excuse me i thought you would like cake but i guess i should go fuck myself

i did not want the cake i don't care that she has two kids i should be able to give her some honey

so true

I mean, that's the thing.

That's the other half of this, though, right?

So there's two new characters.

And one of the things that I thought was very funny about them is they both read a little older than the rest of the cast, and it really feels a little bit like they were like, all right, we hear all the time that people want to date the parents in these games.

We cannot go through and make the parents datable.

Or even some of the characters who I don't think are parents, they're just like

three years older than the main characters.

Older siblings.

Yeah, older siblings.

Yeah, exactly.

Though again, I who are the new characters?

I just looked this up.

It is

Arada, the martial arts boy.

Oh, the mountain boy?

The mountain boy.

And the siblings who come.

Diana.

Yeah, Diana and Mutton Shops.

Her brother.

But Mutton Shops isn't datable.

No, he's not.

Harold.

Diana from Harold, yeah.

From the Bizarre Review,

with her fancy ass hair and her golden glasses.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah.

For sure.

But like, when I look at the list of characters and it's like, Sophie looks like she's 12, you know?

Maple maybe is younger.

There is, which is not the case, right?

Like, these are they're all workers, they're all people who have jobs in the town and who like are part of it.

That we've always talked about this, we don't need to go too deep into it.

Let us date the parents, please.

The moms are always the hottest in these games.

Now, I will say in this one, the moms aren't as hot as normal, but they're still really cute.

I did try to get it.

Janine really said the moms are a grand bizarre 10.

Wow.

Wow.

What were you saying, Allie?

Who did you try to give honey to?

No,

I tried to give honey to Nadine and Mina.

One has two kids, so I should have known about that.

But Mina just like works at the cafe.

Yeah, Mina does just

a regular character.

I'm also learning live on this podcast that Eric, who is obviously older, but I thought was older and the like charming, like Atome, like guy in a mansion with a bow tie, kind of like obvious guy you would want to date, sort of way.

But no, he's just some dude with his hair.

Oh, is he?

I don't think he has a wife.

She just like chooses not to live with them, quote unquote.

Fuck, she is Rayoname.

I've been thinking of her as like a sort of strange vampire girl.

I mean, she is that, too.

Yeah.

But you're right.

When did this game come out?

Did they really just like the original?

She's in the original, right?

She is in the original.

She's pretty faithfully that.

Yeah.

Okay.

So she's just goth lolita Rey.

That's right.

Yeah.

I love it.

Well, nothing's wrong with that.

So

what else I think separates this

game from the previous ones for me watching this was the thing you just said earlier, Janine, which is you spent some of your money on a double jump.

Why are you jumping all around?

You got a fucking hang glider in this game.

Yeah, and the hang glider is affected by the wind because you're in Zephyr town, Zephyr Town.

It's all wind stuff.

There's windmills and stuff that it processes stuff faster on windy days.

And on windy days, it's easier to jump across the river to get the good minerals instead of dying in the river.

Because the wind will carry you on

the thing.

But sometimes it'll blow against you and then you're fucked.

And

you can't.

You fall in the water.

I know this.

You fall in the water and you lose a little stamina.

And if you already have a lot of stamina gone, that's it.

That's the end of your day.

How does all that platforming stuff feel?

Like the double jumping and the

and more importantly, like the exploration and stuff.

That, I think, is a thing.

These games have gotten kind of good at the sense of like these games meaning farming sims in the lineage of Harvest Moon and Story of Seasons.

Like

exploration has become an increasing part of them, especially the ones that end up with dungeon type stuff

or with complex adventure-y,

you know, oh, I have to go find this thing to give to this person.

And I'm curious if that's a, it feels a little bit like the double jumping and stuff is, I'm guessing that that stuff is new, is also meant to be like, we're trying to add another layer to this game, but I'm not sure, I'm curious if it lands.

So there have been, I want to say there have been some

story of seasons

that have kind of experimented a little bit with slightly more platformy not platformy but you know what i mean um slightly more action-y exploration of like forest areas and things like that um you never fight stuff in story of seasons that is what rune factory is for so it's it's never that but um

i don't believe there's ever been a glider before i do believe that's a new thing that's very it feels

The music also often sometimes feels very breath of the wild touched, I would say.

For sure.

But it doesn't feel

good in that way.

I don't think it's bad, but I do think you can kind of tell that they're trying a newer thing, that they're not...

Because there's like a slipperiness to it sometimes that is a little bit like...

It's not really floaty.

Yeah,

it's sometimes a little hard to.

There are certain jumps that are a little hard to gauge.

It's a little hard to gauge if you're going to be able to catch an edge or not.

The camera angle in the 3D space kind of sometimes feel reminds me a little bit of like

platformers on like,

you know, the platformers in like 1998, where it was like 3D, but they hadn't really figured out how to communicate to you where your feet were going to be.

Again, I don't think it's bad,

but it is a thing where it's like, yeah, no, this is, it's still not a platform.

It's still not a, it's still not a game that is about jumping in that way.

It is kind of just a puzzle-solving tool, I guess, is the way to look at it.

It's like, there are some areas that you want to get to, and you got to figure out where to jump and the wind to glide on and stuff.

And that's your reason to jump.

I think the biggest reason for the double jump upgrade is that it makes your farm tools more effective, right?

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That is, instead of you can, you can

interact with multiple tiles of whatever, of harvestables or farmland or etc.,

from the jump without any upgrades

by jumping.

You jump and then you can do three tiles instead of one.

And then you upgrade your watering can and you can do six tiles instead of three tiles when you jump.

And then also they introduced the double jump where you can do a full three by three square.

And presumably it's going to keep going up because I'm only in the fucking copper

tools, which you also upgrade in a windmill, which is a little weird.

But there's no blacksmith in town.

It is just you put your watering can in the windmill with a couple rocks, and in the morning it's better.

Yeah, they figure it out.

It's a real special wind out there in Zephyrtown.

Yeah, yeah, it's sprites.

The sprites are doing it.

The sprites are doing it.

The nerd one is in there.

Yeah, that makes sense.

He does machines.

The wind stuff is also like bad sometimes.

There's like windstorms in this game.

Yeah, you have to get fences or something for your crops.

I haven't run into that yet, but I am

worried about material costs.

I set one up because I thought it was coming, but it wasn't actually coming.

It wasn't a storm.

It was just raining and also very windy.

And I set up screens, and it didn't actually fuck up the screens.

But the screens will stay up until some wind actually does come and fuck them up.

You need to make three for your initial batch of field

out of like rock and wood that you refine in the windmill, also.

And it's it's basically just to protect your crops from storms and stuff, which is like another

Harvest Moon is one of those games that, much like Animal Crossing, started out kind of fucking mean to you.

Your chickens could get eaten by coyotes at night.

Like, you could

yeah,

there would be storms where you couldn't go outside.

It would just be storming too much, and the TV would be all static, and you'd go to open the door, and it'd be like no um you just don't get this day so you'd have to go

and you'd have to go to bed because you didn't have like

you know this is back in the day where like maybe you had a kitchen but like you didn't have pockets you didn't have pockets you you had a some sort of storage but like you couldn't you probably didn't have anything in your kitchen to cook with so you couldn't even really like use the time that way also that was back when time didn't exist when you were indoors so it was just always going to be morning while you were in the house.

So you fully just had to go to bed.

Existentialist play.

It was just a little bit more extraordinary.

Yeah, and then storm day, man.

And then you would wake up

and you would go outside and your fields would be super fucked up and your fences would be super fucked up from the wind.

And also all your animals would be mad at you because you couldn't feed them because you couldn't get out of your house.

Sounds great.

Yeah, like blue game used to be pretty, pretty harsh.

They should do this again.

Yeah, blue games did that.

The one I'm describing was like the first, the very, very first one for SNES.

But like the

earlier you go, the meaner they are, basically.

The Game Boy ones also have some really weird ones, like one where you start out going to like your cousin's farm and they're there to help you.

Like you're living with them.

It's their farm.

And they help you and you can tell them what to do.

They just suck at it really bad.

They're just really, really, they just don't know what the fuck they're doing.

So you can tell them, like, yeah, take care of the animals.

And you'll go there, and it's like they fed one of them.

It's like, okay, well,

yeah.

So there's,

there have been, and there have been some that like do like this does where it's like, okay, well, there's,

you know, your shit can rot.

Your shit can go bad.

So what do you do with it before that?

It's discouraging you from hoarding, which is a thing that I enjoy doing in farming games.

So fuck me again.

But in this case, I think it works really well because it encourages you to have your things, to turn them into other things, and then

if you're holding off them for holding onto them for too long, you can give them to the sprites to get a little bit of bonus from them.

And then the stuff

you level them up, and then the stuff will be worth, like your quality will go up as the sprites get happier with the stuff that you're doing.

Okay.

I didn't understand why to give them stuff.

Yes.

It's like if you hit level like four friendship with them or something, then your things will go up like half a star or a star or something like that in that category that is their specialty.

This is also one where you can water your crops twice in a day.

And where they want you to fertilize every single day.

I don't think you, I don't know, I'm sure you, I'm not sure if you have to.

Do you get a benefit from it, though?

I think it probably affects the quality.

Yeah, it might

sound like the quality of the speed, but probably the quality, because also fertilizing every single day will also affect the quality.

But like it's not, you know, in Stardew Valley, you have to, if you're going to fertilize, you fertilize the ground before you plant the seed, and then it stays fertilized for as long as that square is around.

But in this, you have to spread fertilizer every day.

You make fertilizer by putting grass clippings in the windmill or garbage, I guess, if you want to make rotten food.

You can put rotten food in the windmill.

And then that'll also make fertilizer that you can spread around.

That's composting.

I know.

I don't want to put it in the windmill where you also have to put your fucking hammer to operate it.

Don't worry about it.

You can do the garbage windmill.

But, like, fundamentally, I think it's, they've taken a lot of

the things that have made that made certain Harvest Moon games in the, in that, like, really experimental era made them kind of sometimes a little intimidating sometimes a little unapproachable and they've combined them with a lot of stuff that like really simplifies it like you have a combo axe and hammer so you don't have to worry about having the axe and the hammer and the you know like it's really streamlined

you know you have to buy fodder but you can also just put your cow outside and let them hang out,

which is also true in like, you know, it's true in Stardew.

People kind of expect it.

It's True in life.

You know, the other side is you have to, like, push them out or use the bell.

They won't just go in and out on their own.

Which is also a that's a harvest moon classic thing.

But from the beginning, is you had to, if you wanted your cow to eat the free grass, you had to shoulder them one by one out of the fucking thing or buy the bell and then use the bell to, you know.

So they've added these complications, but they've balanced them out with a lot of quality of life stuff that I think is really good in terms of distinguishing this from all of the explosion of farming games that have come post-Stardew.

When Stardew came out, it was like a real,

I don't want to say love letter because everyone says love letter, but I can't honestly think of a better example of a love letter to a series than Stardew Valley is to Harvest, Moon, and Story of Seasons.

When I reviewed it at the time, I called this out.

Like, it was things where like I could really tell that the person who made this game really loved and had thought a lot about farm games.

And a lot of the farming games that have come after have kind of lost the plot a bit on that front of just like, oh, the thing people want is to make turnip grow and pet cow.

And this is another like, this is a thing where it's like, okay, we're going to give you some of those basic things you expect, but also we're going to give you some

interesting mechanics to engage with by sort of plucking this, you know, Grand Bazaar was obviously pre-stardew and all of that, by plucking the sort of

weird old, like, people in the know love this game.

It was always my favorite Harvest Moon game.

Um,

but it was kind of pushed to one side.

It was kind of like a lot of the mechanics in Grand Bazaar did not come back after that.

Um, right.

And, you know, we're going to bring that back.

We're going to, you know, it's something we have that's different.

It's got some weird new mechanics.

It's also coming in the midst of a real boom in early access

farm to shop type games.

Teddy's Haven, Discounty.

God, there's like a bunch of them.

Explain that.

Yeah, Moonlighter 2.

There's a boom in also like Supermarket Together.

There's a big boom right now in games where you are functionally running a little store.

You either gather stuff and sell it, or you order stuff from someone who delivers it and you sell that, or maybe you're crafting stuff and selling it, or maybe you are, you know, all of these different things.

And this is a genre that's been around to shop.

Oh, so that's what you mean by farm to shop.

You're like gathering these things to sell them to people, but not in the structure of the game.

You know, tavern keeping games where it's like you're gathering stuff and then you're selling it in your tavern.

These games have been around for a really long time, but there's like a particular glut of them right now.

I think because people are experiencing farm game fatigue and they're looking for that extra layer of

something.

Um, and then so it's it was cool.

I was really surprised when they announced they were going to do this to Grand Bazaar, but in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense.

It was it's really cool for them to come and be like, We've been doing this, here you go.

It's fully, it's not an early access, it's just done, it's a full game, go nuts.

Yeah, the not an early access thing is so, I think, important.

There are so many farming games that have come out in the last four or five years, which one, clearly take big inspiration mostly from Stardew.

They don't feel like they have that, like, oh, we've played everything in the genre vibe, you know, and we're doing our,

you know, injection of new personality or perspective.

It's a lot of like, oh, people like Cozy.

I like cozy.

What's cozy?

Cozy is you grow the thing and then it's nice.

Right.

And then the other half of it is just like so many of them just come out in early access where it's just like, all right, like, is this going to get finished?

Is this, is this finished enough for me to have a good time with it?

Is this under, is this at the point now where if I play it for 30 hours, I'll be done with it.

But actually, if I had waited until it was done, I would have gotten 60 or 70 hours out of it.

But now I'm not going to want to go back.

It is, it is.

Really nice to have a game available that is just out, you know, and is complete and works in that way.

way you know not to dissuade people from putting out early access things but like every time I see an early access game especially in this sort of

farming or

you know life sim thing there was a there was another one that was like a very

a very rune factory inspired one that came out earlier this year I forget the name of it right now

that I was like oh this looks cool I'm not gonna buy it in early access because like I know that what's gonna happen is I'm gonna get just enough of the taste that when they're done it won't feel novel anymore i have felt like i've already had that taste and i won't go back to it um and so i i always feel like really um trepidatious about going into this particular style of early access thing because it's the sort of thing where like as a genre These types of games want you to feel like you're you're like at home in them.

And I need that experience to be like unified in a way, you know?

Obviously, Mystria is doing this very successfully right now allie i'm curious how you feel coming to this after doing doing so much uh mystria but but yeah

yeah i mean they're they're much different games which i really appreciate like the

the the difficulty changes in mystria

are through the dungeon and so much of the like mechanic focus is on enemy type and things like that where like right that's sort of those mechanics aren't in

Grand Bazaar at all.

So, to have this other focus on, like, you're spending more time on your farm because you have to be fertilizing every day, or you have this bigger, um,

like, your animals have more asks of you, um,

is, is interesting.

And I, I, you know, I feel equally satisfied by both of them, and I don't feel like one is taking the place of the other so much because

of the difference in like

focus on day-to-day sort of thing, even though they are fundamentally like farm games.

I found the thing that I found earlier this year that I'm talking about as an early access.

It's called Tales of Seikyu, which I think looks really cool, but I'm like, I'm not gonna, I don't know if I'm gonna, if I know if I play this, I am not gonna stick it out, and I want to wait until it's done so I can try it then.

But there's also

Tales of Seikyu, but there's also Pathless Woods, or how about Seeds of Calamity, or how how about

you know, there's there's so many, yeah, there's so many right now, yeah,

and a lot of them are really good, or are gonna be really good, but I think the numbers are like that 50% of sorry, 15% of early access games have ever fully released.

Um, geez, yeah,

it's

yeah, and then you've you've got the mix, like the messy part too, where it's like a game will come out in 1.0 technically, but like oh, right, yeah,

yeah.

And then people are like, well, they didn't actually finish it, they just said it was finished, and it's, but you still, you still like can't touch turnips anymore.

Like,

they got rid of the turnip touching, they say they're gonna patch it back in.

I was gonna say, I don't know why I'm hung up on turnips, but that's like that's that's harvest moon.

Harvest moon is you always start with turnips, you start with turnip, potato, and grass, and like, and then you go, you know

corn

it's been a big radish season for me they were trendy yeah oh yeah i've done a lot of radishes and a lot of props you'll have the the round round vegetable trend no no oh

no one of my trends is just round crops it was just like stuff that's round

bro people i just gotta i really hope we find some round some round vegetables at the market this weekend i'm just really fiending for something round right now

I just, I just picture, that's exactly, I just picture someone being like, oh, round vegetables are the cutest.

Like

an influencer being like, oh, round, I love round vegetables.

Here's my round vegetable haul.

And then we're just being like, yeah, round vegetables, they're really cute.

I need some turnips and radishes and potatoes.

No, Janine, a true influencer would say that the round vegetable helps absorb the

devil germs that are in your stomach.

And by eating round vegetables,

you don't have to get vaccinations.

You can't turnifies your gut biome.

That's what has to happen.

Speaking of influencers, I think another thing probably worth saying about this game is like it is not set in,

you know, modern day, but there's a dragon, or modern day, but everyone is hot.

It is like set in like a very particular place in a very particular,

like, it has a sense of

placeness that I think is really charming.

It feels like a mountain town in Germany.

Aesthetically, it's very Bavarian.

There's a lot of like

things that are like embroidered and embellished and painted with sort of folk patterns.

It really leads to that.

Who's that big man?

The Mayor Man.

No,

Felix, the big man in his

big ass vest with his trees all over it and his big hat.

Yeah, the Mayor Man.

Very, very, you know, Bavarian.

Very.

And I think that that's like part of the charm is to come into one of these that

in the same way that actually part of the charm with Stardew was, oh, it's modern day.

It's not set in like vague European pastoralism.

It's set in like Iowa, you know.

There's something fun now, a decade on or whatever, to come back to, oh, yeah, everyone has like really cute knit, you know, jackets on.

I'm going to say everyone, I think that's the other thing that I think is really charming about this is like the towns are dense with people,

including lots of people who don't, who are just passers-by.

Yeah, just passing through for the market.

Yeah, and even on non-market days, you'll just see people walking through who are just you know, NPC one.

And I think that actually adds a lot to the sense that you're like a mountain pass town that people come to or move through.

You know, a lot of farming games, it's like

you and the town of 20 people, and those are all the people who exist, except for the ones ones who, like, you hear about in a news update, or

someone says that they have a husband who's at war.

I know that

we talked about that guy.

We talked about that guy, we know.

We don't care.

Wow.

On the feeling of like population, there, another thing that I like about this game in the like town sense is how they've split the sort of like

mayor and

person who is raiding you role

with the arrival of Diana, because I think that it's interesting to have one of these games where you're not the only newbie.

She arrives like a week or two after you and is sort of putting the like, well, you have to keep your score up pressure, whereas Felix is the one who's like

really engaged with you, is sending you mail all the time to help you with the town, like is the guy running the town events.

And and i think like the separation of that like makes those characters really unique and your like placement in the town sort of unique in a way that like at least with mystria feels really distinct right because in mystria it's like the nobles who run the town are your

your check-in people whereas here you kind of get get that role split that's cool

there's also like uh there are a few characters who mention that they that like they have

they'll say like you know oh i have have a i have family in town or in the city or like oh i work in the city i don't work here like there's there's kind of there's a sense of like

being

a smaller place you're not like the place in the area you are a place in the area and like you have your selling points um there are people who choose to live there but don't work there like that it's like really small stuff but it does kind of add to that sense of of austin like you're saying placeness like it feels feels

yeah it feels situated in the world in a different way

yeah

um I think before we finish I have to know who everyone is dating I want to know who everyone is and also like tell me who they are because I think if you're listening to this you're like who what type of characters are here is probably a thing worth filling in it's like who are you trying to who are you trying to who are you trying to have a baby with because that's in this game

that's true yeah yeah yeah there's babies i think that's hard yeah there's babies in this game i'd say in most of the story of seasons harvest moon games, you can have a baby.

It's just how far does that baby go?

Oh, sure.

Well, that made everyone really quiet.

I just mean to say,

I was trying to hold the thought I was going to say next in my head, and then I had to remember that, like, yeah, they grow up.

Are there any generational harvest moon games where you like take over as

no,

but there is one where you die at the end?

Whoa,

your kid grows up and you die.

Yeah, they did.

They remade it like last year.

And then you

came out on Steam.

Wonderful life.

You still die at the end?

Yeah.

That makes sense.

It's a wonderful life.

Yeah.

The whole point is to live a life cycle.

It's a little bit, it's a little bit, it's the one with like, I want to say like the most time pressure because like

you got to get married.

You're one.

You got to get married.

Damn.

Because you are going to die either way.

And I think everyone else in town will get married.

So you kind of gotta, you gotta, you gotta seize the moment.

You gotta carpe DM.

Interesting.

I think it Rune Factory 2 might let you get to play as your kid.

One of these games does this.

I can't remember if this is true or not.

Anyway, this doesn't matter.

I want to know who is everyone's favorite character.

I guess who's every trying to date?

And then who is your favorite character who you are not trying to date?

Even if they're datable, but you're just trying to like be buds.

And what's their deal?

Allie, put you on the spot.

Let's get on there.

Okay, well, so I'm, I'm still, I don't have one person that I'm going after.

I'm still in spring.

I'm still in the first season.

I'm not making any commitments.

But I am going to share the story of my honey day because

I was gifted five honeys.

I couldn't buy any more because I had run out of my bazaar money.

The shop guy was closed on Thursdays because

that's what he does.

So I gave my first one to Freya.

Obvious.

She's really cute.

She hangs out at the cafe.

She has a different schedule than me.

She has like a job outside of town.

I don't understand her outfit, but I never did.

So, that's true.

That's consistent.

It's yeah, she's got like an apron and then like capri pants, and then like, but it's like sexy, it's like a sexy apron.

I don't know, yeah, because it's like missing the midriff, but she also wears like a midriff covering shirt underneath.

Yeah, she has a whole house outfit under the apron, yeah, yeah it it doesn't make any sense it's so funny yeah yeah and then um june who we spoke about who's ray ianami and then there was sophie she was kind of just there she's a redhead she's the mayor's daughter i like her outfit i think she's cute uh maple i i seeked out um she's like a cute

uh they're all cute

she's the cute girl who works at the hotel and then i only had one honey left i was really stressing at this point because i was like do i give it to diana do i give it to the mountain guy maybe i give it to one of the the the brothers who live together um and i was like oh my god i don't know what to do and then i accidentally ate it

love yourself

love yourself you deserve a little treat

i just had to you know take a moment i had to calm down

Who are the brothers?

Is that Jules and Derek?

Okay, they're brothers.

One's a fancy gentleman rider, and the other one is a skateboarder.

No, wait a second.

Wait, no, the little children's.

The child's a skateboarder.

Yeah, and the other one wears.

Oh, that's right.

They have a little.

They have like a little.

They have like a rowdy little.

They have a rowdy little.

I was going to call him a Dusseldorfer.

Kev.

He's like a little boy who wears a little hat, and he's like very...

Oh, I see.

He's very like bugs on ladies.

I got to take it back.

That kid's going to grow up to become an influencer.

That kid's very Keith-coded.

What?

I did have a Keith question about this.

I got a catty little boy.

A Keith question about this game?

Well,

what's the number one Keith question about these games?

How's the fishing?

How's the fishing?

Oh, it's great.

I really like that.

I think Keith would like the fishing.

I think so.

I think that the difficulty change with the types of fish is really interesting.

I like that it's straightforward, but it's like really timing specific too.

I do like the way they show it.

Like the way that it illustrates like difficulty and stuff I think is really easy to immediately grasp

compared to some other fishing minigames where it's like it's basically a rhythm game, really.

It's like a rhythm game quick time event where it's, you know, it's it's popping up what direction to push the controller in.

Yeah, it's a boss.

I see it.

Gotcha.

It's a bust.

But you have to do it fast enough, and the rarer the thing is, it seems like the faster your little meter goes down.

i see yeah and if you fuck up it goes down even farther and there's like a little yeah yeah gene you were like catching some sort of glowy thing last night when i was watching you for a little bit i fucked it up yeah

well it's tough uh speaking of things that you could fuck up make sure to check your mail uh in your menu oh my god also wait oh yeah

oh yeah sorry who else are you gonna drag me

to drag me for just i was not gonna drag you i was not gonna i was saying it's possible to miss that you have a mail that you've the mail in your inventory menu.

There was a whole menu I didn't know was there.

Yeah, that's all.

And I just assumed it was going to unlock later.

And then I opened it up and I had like 60 letters in it.

You had 60 letters.

Could you hold everything in those letters in your pockets?

No.

No.

Yeah, my biggest detriment to checking my mail is that I can't fit things into my pockets.

Ever.

It's too much.

It's too much.

Characters.

We can go back.

We can go back to characters.

I'm going for Arada.

yeah maple and diana and a rad are my top three i think a rad is the mountain guy he's like the mountain guy who does karate

well i don't know

he does fishing and training and stuff like that when he shows up in town he's training his karate

he's training his karate

he's training i don't did he say karate or just martial arts well no

yeah come on i don't i don't know what his school of training is it's martial arts i'm not it's not necessarily it may be some sort of special story of seasons karate he has a little little kitten in his belt.

I'm really excited to find out what the story, what that is.

It's like a toy kitten.

He

seems to be an adult, which is cool.

He offers to pick you up and carry you sometimes.

He doesn't actually do it, but he's like,

if you pass out and talk to him afterwards, he's like, I could have carried you or whatever.

It's like, okay.

Yeah, he's, I don't know.

I don't usually go for like himbo type he's giving himbo but he seems nice so you know big fan

drey who are you saying uh i really like erada for those reasons um i like diana also because she looks like an adult um and her her fashion is just impeccable like her hairstyle her outfit her hairstyle

so good yeah

she looks great and i really like maple maple is just kind of your classic like uh

means well and is running around so fast to mean well that she that she accidentally trips over her own two feet or makes a mistake every once in a while.

You backed up into a couch and fell over like the first time you talked to her.

I don't even know how you do that.

Like

I didn't really understand what happened, but then she was on the floor.

Have you all seen the little cutscene with Maple where she's giving the two girls advice on like how to give a gift to someone that you like?

I don't think I've seen that one, no.

It's very cute.

And it really, like, I saw it early on and it really endeared me to her because she's basically giving them advice.

And then the girls are like, Wait, I can't, you said to make the present they like, but my person likes bugs, and I can't make bugs, and my person likes books, and I can't write a book.

I'm for.

And then they do like a little brainstorming of, like, well, what if you made a gift that like goes with the thing they like?

It was just really cute, it was really something

I do want to say, um, with that, I love the scene system in this game.

I'm um like surprised what it tells you, yeah.

So what you do is you have like a map menu and you're able to see where everybody is in the town, which is really helpful.

But there will be like an exclamation point on the like button for that menu, which will tell you where you can go in town to witness a scene with somebody.

And what this typically is, is like a little cutscene that you could unlock where you're seeing them interact with somebody else in town, like Dre just described, or you're like having a little meet-cute with them in the cafe or whatever.

And I really, I really, really like that.

It also gives you a little notification too when there's like a checkpoint mission where it's like, oh, this character has a quest for you and you've got to do this quest in order to keep leveling up your hearts with them.

It communicates that stuff really, really well.

Or if someone just has like a little errand they need you to run in order to get their stall to move into town or whatever.

To the bazaar and that's how you're going to have to.

But then you give the lady

16 dies and then you go to her stall and then you still have to make the clothes i know it's so expensive

but i i got what i need i'm wearing the cow costume the whole way through because this is uh this is my meta commentary on the farm syndrome oh i see wow yeah who's the real cow

exactly right isn't the farmer the real cow no

no

The cow is the sheep and the sheep is the chicken.

This is the chicken.

No, I'm looking up by the dog and the dog is the horse and the horse is the farmer, and the horse is going to get married.

Sure, and LeBron James is ponky.

That's right.

I actually didn't look this up, but in the comments of someone's

review of this game, I saw someone say that once you have pets, they will herd your animals in and out for you.

Yeah, they will.

I have two dogs and a cat, and they take care of all my animals' outside needs.

Love this.

See, this is what I mean: is like they've, I don't know if that's true in the original it's it was a long time ago um

but there's so many little things where it's like okay we're going to have this complication but then we're going to add these ways to mitigate the complication or to sort of offset it that like

feel good it feels like you earn you know it's gonna feel you don't get you can't get a pet right away it's gonna feel like you earned

you know and the but like the pets also the pets need special food the the pets have special treats that you make in the windmill where you do all this stuff

but like you know everything so everything's like gotta

got a kind of trade-off like there are a lot of these games where you don't have to feed the pet at all it just exists it's just a nice thing that you have but like no you gotta feed your shit um i don't know if they'll run away but they used to sometimes run away animals would run away from you in original grand bazaar you can get a dog and a cat and you have to train them and once you train them dogs can herd large animals like the cows, and cats will take care of the chickens.

Oh, I remember.

So, who knows if that's how it's going to be?

I remember doing some of that, but I just remember, like, I think it was playing fetch.

There was like a thing

to play fetch with the dog, and it was like the ball was like a tool you had to equip, and you would throw it, and then they would get it.

And it was, it was sort of

a little awkward.

I don't know.

So, I'm, you know,

as a Grand Bazaar fan, as I've, that's always the one I say, like, well, that's the one.

That was my one.

I'm feeling really good so far.

Yeah.

I would have never in a million years expected them to pick Grand Bazaar as like the remake-y one, but

yeah.

Cool.

All right.

I think that that's going to do it unless anyone has final thoughts on Grand Bazaar besides the ones they've just shared.

What's everyone's animal naming motif?

Oh, great question.

First thing that comes into mind flowers.

Yeah, first thing that comes to mind.

I couldn't stress myself out.

I'm the weirdo.

I have a cattle named Fork.

I have a sheep named Baby.

I'm not even.

Those are good names.

My cow's name Bob, and then my chicken is named Terry.

True.

That's just people names.

Yeah.

That's your theme.

Sure.

Animals are people names.

The animals of the farmers is what's happening.

The animals of the farmers.

It sounds like a morning, like drive time, like rude crew.

Cherry

in the morning.

Welcome to our animal farm moo.

Yeah,

exactly.

All right, let's take a break and come back.

Jack was going to join, and Jack and I are going to talk about the probabilities-based art freak,

roguelike Sol Sesto.

Get ready.

Oh, is that the one Northern Line was playing?

It is, yes.

It is.

This game is freaky.

Positive.

All right.

Be right back.

Happy Labor Day, Austin.

Happy Labor Day, Jack.

Welcome to Side Story.

We made it.

We got through the break, and now you're here.

Yeah, we had a corn muffin.

I had a

shower.

I took a shower in between sessions.

I

had

a

shrimp and garbanzo bean and

quinoa and sort of like lime marinaded sort of fish meal.

It was the sort that you find in Chiazo.

Oh, I see.

Yes, of course.

The Chierzo fish meal.

I actually recently said to Janine, like, oh, we should do an episode.

where we get to talk about Outward, the game we've been playing over on Side Story, Side Story LP, the Outward LP, the bonus LP.

Let's play that we've been recording for patrons, for $10 friends at the table.cash patrons.

That's been going extremely well.

We're on our second map now.

I've dipped into runic magic.

My character now draws letters in the sky, in the air, to like, not the sky, but in the air in front of him, to then combine them in magical ways to get cool effects.

So we have some big fun things coming that I don't want to tease without saying what they are.

So, yeah,

we need to do that episode at some point.

Maybe a little further into

a little further into this new map, and then we'll maybe.

Part of the fun of making Side Story is that when you started saying I was talking to Janine and thought we should do an episode on after we've been talking about making ceviche, I thought you were going to say we should do an episode about cooking because cooking is a kind of play.

We should do an episode about cooking.

That sounds great.

What do we like to cook?

What do we like to eat?

Yeah.

We could retroactively make all the Drink Girlies streams side story drink girlies.

We're all about our brand.

That's right.

That's us, Friends of the Table, Side Story, Media Club Plus.

You already know what it is.

Today, we are talking about...

I actually don't have great notes for this, Jack, because I've had COVID for the last week, and I've been playing this game

in COVID months.

You do sound better, though, which is nice.

I do.

Yeah,

this is, I think I'm on the final day of the

kind of hard part of it.

And then really yesterday was even the last of the hard days i built a bed in five hours yesterday um and that felt like a sort of ritual like wrestling you know you know like you wrestle wrestled the angel was jacob is that who that is

joshua is jacob and the angel i should know this yeah jacob i got it right the first time um really was jacob wrestling Was it an angel or was it God?

Anyway, it's hard to say.

He cannot have been wrestling God.

Are angels not simply

sort of emanations of God?

No, there's different.

So the Wikipedia article on this is Jacob Wrestling with the angel is what it's called, but it is the angel in question is referred to as man and God,

Ish and El in Genesis, while Hosea references an angel.

The account includes the renaming of Jacob as Israel,

etymologized as contends with God.

So there is the contends with God, but wrestles with an angel.

Anyway, we're going to leave the theology aside.

It's about angelology.

That's right.

That's right.

But it is,

I was, I was, I think building that bed was me wrestling with the COVID in my mind, you know, getting through it.

And you won.

And I fucking won.

I got a bed frame now.

I spent the last two and a half weeks sleeping on a bed on the ground, a mattress on the ground.

And it is good to be back above ground, baby.

So the snakes and the

worms and the

little bugs crawling all around.

I live in a very nice place now.

I have no bugs.

I'm bugless.

I'm free of the.

That's not true, actually.

I saw saw like a house centipede the first day I moved in here.

I went, all right, wow,

New York centipede has got to have

shit together.

They're out here.

I live two blocks from a park, from a very big park, and it's a house centipede.

It's not like a...

I was confusing centipedes and caterpillars.

Oh, very different.

There are caterpillars here, too, because there's butterflies here.

Oh, yeah.

And one leads to the other famously.

Oh, I've seen Hunter-Hunter.

That's right.

In any case, while I was in the midst of COVID mind, I was playing a game that you said you were playing, and that I also saw, as Allie pointed out in the last segment, Northern Lion playing a couple of weeks ago.

Soul Sesto.

I don't have a ton of notes because of the COVID.

Normally, I have a bunch of notes and stuff, so we're just going to kind of, you know, do it, you know,

free, free

form.

Okay.

Who made them?

You can't see them.

No, I can't.

I don't have that note.

I think it's a developer named Tambuille or Tam Tambuille.

T-A-M-B-O-I

Tambuille.

And it's published by Goblins with a Z.

With a Z.

And it is a

roguelike.

It is.

It is

one of the classic genres of games that I end up really enjoying, which is a game that takes a astonishingly simple mechanic and then starts doing really interesting things with it.

So it is a fantasy roguelike about descending into, I think the opening title card says something like, the sun has gone or something.

And you descend into a cave first as a sort of unfortunate peasant, and then as the game continues, a variety of different cool guys.

The way you play Celsesto is very simple.

You are looking at a four by four grid of squares, and each square has something on it.

That might be evil dog.

It might be

unfortunate looking slime.

Yeah.

Kind of sad-looking slime.

Well, it's only sad for a particular reason.

It is sad for a particular reason.

I'm so glad that you've also tuned into the weird ways.

This is the

together here.

Yeah.

These are little, these are the, we're saying the 4-4 grid is just like kind of a flat 2D.

You're looking like sideways, like

side on.

And so the creatures are kind of in profile or they're looking at you.

They're little 2D animations.

They almost do look like cards.

They're little 2D animations,

like sprites in animation, basically, in like almost an idle animation.

And they kind of maybe will do something in between.

They're snarling, or they're bobbing up and down, or they're banging on their drums.

That's right.

Or they're like looking menacingly over you at their shoulder or something.

I hope that they're banging on their drums.

They're not doing anything special.

I hope that they're just...

That's weird, wouldn't they?

That would be weird.

But also another thing that can be on one of these tiles, it's your friend and mine, the dear strawberry.

The dear strawberry, my beloved strawberry.

Never before this point has a game gotten me to feel such love for the beautiful single strawberry.

The succulent, juicy strawberry.

The succulent juicy strawberry, which when

it makes a beautiful pop sound.

It does.

And on every single one of these tiles, there is a percentage chance.

And the way you play solcesto is for the most part you click on a horizontal row of four tiles and you land on a tile um represented by the percentage chance that you might land on it so for example um there'd be like a 41 chance you'll land on

no no no that's right the way the game starts jack which is it's uh it's 25 25 25 25.

it's you've you've land on any one of them equal chance to land on any you know let's so imagine you have four tiles in a row and they are a treasure chest, a little slime who looks scared of you, a snarling dog,

an angry dog,

and the succulent strawberry.

And it'll say, as you mouse over them, 25, you mouse over the row, the whole row will have the percentages pop up for everything that's in that row.

And you say 25 at the beginning of the game, because there's a 25% chance that you can land on any of the four things.

There's a quarter, you know, you have a quarter percent chance or a quarter

chance to hit any of them.

I am a knight, which means my stats are very straightforward.

I have two

physical

represented by a red sword.

Yes.

And I have one magic represented by a blue curly-whirly stuff.

Now, the problem with the snarling dog is the snarling dog has three sword.

Which means that if I land on him with my 25% chance, my health drops by the difference.

So my health just goes down from, I think, five to five down to five.

I do not have a lot of health.

We are in classic roguelike territory here.

There are roguelikes in which you have 141 health, and there are roguelikes in which you have four.

And this is that ladder.

Now tell me about the

nice slime that looks like he's a little bit scared of me.

Well, the thing is, the nice slime only has one magic.

It's not a physical attacker or a physical being.

It's a magical being.

It only has one magic.

And you have one magic.

So it can sense, it can intuit that you are a threat.

It looks at you and goes, I'm fucked.

Exactly.

Now, what happens when you click on that row?

There's a dice roll.

1d4 gets rolled and you have a one in four chance of landing on any of these tiles.

Now, what you might immediately think is, well, wait a second.

That means I have a pretty good chance of landing on something that won't hurt me.

Awesome.

Now, what the game is, is one, you're going to still land on that dog sometimes and it's going to bite you.

And when that happens, you do win the fight.

You just, you just, and the dog gets removed from the tile.

And at that point, the row becomes 33%, 33%, 33%.

You've, you know, one in three chance for each of those tiles.

And suddenly, you've to remember that there's not one set, one row, there's four rows.

And so you're starting to make decisions.

Like, I have three health.

I would love to have more health, but I could take a bad hit.

So even though row one is mostly safe stuff and then something that could hurt me, Maybe I go with row two, that is two snarling dogs and two glimmering, glittering chests of gold.

Because maybe I'll just hit the gold.

It's a 50-50 chance I hit the gold.

Now, it's a 75% chance on the top row, I hit something that doesn't hurt me.

But there's also, you know, if I hit the slime, I don't get anything really from the slime necessarily.

So you're starting to make those sorts of decisions as you look at the board of four by four, you know, 16 different tiles.

You're thinking, okay, what's the safest thing I can do here?

What's the most profitable thing I can do here?

And that's just the first, the very first screen.

And after jumping around a few times, you'll see something light up in the top right of your screen.

A beautiful sun.

The sun is returning.

Well, sort of.

Well, go right.

No, the sun is gone, unfortunately, but you have a sun token or something that you can spend.

And the sun token that I spend does something different based on who I am.

If I am the humble peasant, it does nothing.

I do not have one.

The sun is gone for the the peasant.

The sun is.

Actually, I don't know if the peasant doesn't have a talent.

This is famously untrue of peasants, but I don't remember what the peasant's ability is.

The

knight can

move up and down.

You're choosing a column instead of a row.

And that's initially really powerful seeming, but then suddenly you realize you're just playing the game up and down now.

The probabilities are all still so useful.

Because it means you can, for instance, clear a row down until it's three, you know, until it's two snarling dogs and a treasure in the corner of the edge.

And if you clear the other things on the other edge columns, the other edge rows, you can use the vertical to just go sneakily get the treasure because it's the only thing left in the row.

And there is something so beautifully straightforward about this mechanic.

You are just selecting based on a series of probabilistic decisions that you then start spiraling into the Goldberg variations of like,

how can you play with interesting mechanics surrounding chance?

I'll give an example of this in a second, but in terms of the like overall structure of the game,

it's super straightforward as well.

The game simply says, at first, clear five tiles, and then you will go to the next floor of the road.

And you do that enough times, and then the game says, clear six tiles.

And sometimes you load

a map, and you have a row that's just perfect.

Useless egg, useless egg, useless egg, the succulent strawberry.

And you're like, oh, well, that's four.

That's four right there.

Nice.

It would be a terrible shame if the useless egg's bird mother got increasingly angry about me.

But the game very quickly starts playing like a fun probability game.

As you continue, you can affect your stats in a really cool, creepy way.

You can upgrade your strength or you can upgrade your magic.

Making those snarling dogs into whimpering.

Arched in fear,

scared wolf pups, you know?

Poor things.

They have like visible ribs there, like tiny ghosts.

Yeah, it's so funny.

But there are monsters that

I think a really good example of this is the red and the blue monsters.

I love the red and the blue monster.

Yeah, so there is a little

snarling imp.

It's like a little imp dog.

lizard yeah it's it has big haunched legs that are but are like taut and um uh like it's crouching down all the time.

You know, it looks like it's ready to leap or something.

It has fangs coming out of its mouth, and one side of it is a dark blue, and the other side of it is a bright red.

And every turn, it flips from the blue magic side to the red physical side.

And what that means is you can game it, because if you're the knight, chances are you've increased your physical power by one.

But if not, maybe you increase your magic by one.

And the magic, you know, I think it's two and two.

I think it's two on each side.

And so as long as you have two in either side, you can beat this thing.

If you time it right, if you time it so that if it's red side is facing you, you can beat it with the red, with your physical stat.

And if the blue side is facing you, you have to face the

its magic stat.

And that means that sometimes you'll be like, okay, I can't fight it on this turn, but I could click over here in the field that is slime, slime, strawberry, spike trap.

We'll come back to traps in a second.

As long as it's safe, I hate the traps.

It's so, so good.

So funny.

You know,

as long as I land on a safe one, regardless if I land on a safe one or not, the next turn, it will be red, and I can click down on its row and hopefully clear it.

And because it'll be the one I can beat right now.

And the thing is, sometimes it won't be.

And then you'll be like, shit, okay.

You end up concocting these plans, right?

So again, let me remind you that with the knight,

you can use your special ability to clear a column instead of a row.

And so that means that you might want a treasure chest.

It's in the very top left, right?

And then underneath it, you've cleared a spot.

And then underneath that is this weird imp that changes between magic and combat.

And in the bottom left is a strawberry.

And you're like, I could just risk it and use my vertical jump talent to get in that column and hope that you only have to do it once.

It's not like you get to stay doing column jumps, to be clear.

You're like, okay, I'm going to try it.

But you want it to be on the one where you where you either get the treasure or you've cleared the imp.

And if you haven't, you have to then wait for the next turn to come back around so that you can, like, okay, I'll try the horizontal one again and see if I can clear the imp that way.

That way, the next time I get to jump, I can do it on any turn and not just when the imp is looking the wrong way.

So you're doing these kind of like strategic three moves ahead style plan outs.

And that's on top of two other things.

And we'll come back to traps.

One, items.

So like the knight starts with an arrow that they can shoot to instantly kill one creature.

So maybe you're up against a mystical book that has three magical.

I hate the book.

I hate the book.

I hate the book.

So maybe you'll use your arrow on the book.

The knight starts with a potion, which can heal one HP.

So maybe you know you're going to take

one damage if you hit the imp facing the wrong way, and that could kill you because you're down to your last life.

Well, not if you use the potion, because then you go up to two, and then you only take one, even though the imp is facing the wrong way.

And then, maybe most importantly,

you don't, it's not always that you have a 25% chance to land in any tile.

Because

it is so much more, you know, there are items, like you said, and getting items, which you usually get via the shopkeeper.

We'll talk about him in a second.

Him and his guns are a lot of fun.

That's a lot of you can pull on.

But usually, in a roguelike, God, I have to talk about the nose in a second.

In a roguelike, you know, you'll be picking up cool equipment.

In Solsesto, you are not picking up equipment.

You are pulling teeth from a cursed statue.

You will, as you clear a floor, you will suddenly be faced with a sort of, they look like the,

you remember those little fuckers from Elden Ring?

Oh, yeah, you're totally right.

Yeah.

The

knife statues.

The troll, yeah, the

stone,

the little guys who run around and stab you.

Yeah.

Like hide on the walls.

Yeah.

You'll see one of those, and he will have, initially, two beautiful glowing teeth in his mouth.

And these teeth are really beautifully designed.

They are

a tooth that affects strength enemies will have like this weird sort of like shimmering red texture.

A tooth that affects treasure chests will look like a little tiny treasure chest.

And when I say effect, what I mean is they start letting you tinker with the probabilities.

Let's say I have a really good strength build.

I find a token that says plus 11% attraction to strength enemies, negative 4% attraction to strawberries.

Oh, 4% isn't that bad, I think.

And

I'm building a character that I I want to target the strength enemies.

Because again, if I can equal or exceed their value, they do no damage to me.

That's right.

And they clear one of my five, six, seven tiles that I need to get to the next level.

That's great.

Doesn't matter if I don't get a strawberry.

And these things start compounding.

So you'll get something that's like plus 26 attraction to strength enemies, minus 11 attraction to magic enemies.

Oh, amazing.

That one's really great.

Or every time you open two treasure chests, chests, weaken all enemies, but just for one turn.

Just for one turn.

Or all enemies in the column of the enemy you just, or the tile you just cleared.

Or, my beloved, the strawberry tooth

that is.

Which looks like a beautiful little strawberry tooth.

It does.

And it slots into an inventory slot that looks like a tooth in a mouth, you know, over in the left hand.

We have to talk about the art design of this game in a moment.

It's kind of beautiful hand-drawn.

The strawberry one is like, you know, plus some percentage, 20%, 30%, sometimes even to strawberries, which means, again, to be clear, let's say

if you have a row that's slime, slime, slime, strawberry, instead of it being 25, 25, 25, 25, it's 55% to go to the strawberry, and the remaining 45% gets split up among the other slimes.

And you can imagine how these things start to interact because you might end up with plus 15% strawberry, plus 10%

on on uh

you know physical enemies uh minus five percent on traps and all of the math just gets done behind the scenes on that and suddenly you're looking at a row that says like okay well there's like okay I have a 17% chance to land on the spike trap I have a 20% chance to land on the the treasure chest and I have you know a 30 and a 32 percent chance or whatever the math doesn't math but to land on the the enemy or the the strawberry and then you look at the row below that and you have to look at those those percentages.

And it's super intuitive.

I know that hearing people say numbers on a podcast sounds confusing and sounds like difficult, but this game is so simply intuitive in a way that

big numbers get to be.

Do you know what I mean when I say that?

Like, not large numbers, but like, actually, I guess it's like big percentages.

You know, I think we intuitively understand the difference between 50% and 20%.

We intuit, like playing XCOM, right?

The difference between a 95% shot and a 65% shot produces a different sort of like,

oh yeah, like I feel safe taking the 95% shot.

Ooh, the 60% shot, that sounds tough.

And because it's XCOM, the 95% chance shot is always a chance of missing.

Bunny fool.

But you feel it.

You know that if you, if you have a 95% chance and a 60% chance, you're going to take the 95% chance as long as the outcome is desirable, right?

And in this, it's similar where you look at a row and you're like, well, there's 70% of the stuff here is good.

That's probably going to be good, but not always, but it's going to be better than the one where I only have a 20% chance of the good thing happening, you know.

And

playing with those percentages and that sort of risk assessment, and that sort of like sometimes a safe, a safe bet isn't useful to you besides opening the door.

You want the money so you can go to the shop and buy another arrow,

the succulent strawberry, you need the succulent strawberry to do that.

And like you said, any fool who has played XCOM learns to fear the 95%

accuracy.

Because if you have played XCOM, you know what happens, which is that you see a 95% chance to take down that chrysalid that is targeting one of your most beloved guys, and you take the shot, and your sniper shoots, you know, directly over the chrysalids head, chrysalid comes forward and kills your guy, and you say to yourself, 95%, it was 95%.

And then you are reminded by fate that 95% does not mean 100%.

This is a whole game about playing that trick on you.

I think now's the time to talk about why we hate traps.

They don't go away.

They don't go away.

It's possible to think about

these

four by four tiles as particular rooms in a dungeon or something.

But you can also think of them as abstract representations of encounters you might have.

And unlike, say, walking through a hallway in Baldur's Gate where you disarm the trap and that's it.

Actually, I guess maybe that's not true.

Maybe they are distinct things because later you can unlock a thing that can disarm traps.

That's a wild delight.

Yes, 100%.

But to be to default with,

by the beginning, at the beginning, spike traps just stay there.

And spike traps are not the only type of traps, but a spike trap will just do one damage to you.

There's no calculation.

There's no,

is your combat strength strong enough to resist it?

You just get the damage done to you.

Too bad.

And because they don't go away, it's not like taking the one measly damage from the snarling dog, but in exchange, you clear the snarling dog from the row.

You might click on the same row again to be like, no, I gotta get the strawberry.

I gotta get the chest.

Too bad, buddy.

You land on the spike trap again.

You're stuck in the spike trap trap.

Especially funny when you have a low percentage chance of hitting traps.

And it's like a perfect farce set up on punchline because you're like, well, it's fine for me to choose this tile because there's only a 28% chance of me hitting that trap.

And you click it and you hit the trap and you're like, okay, well, fine.

I was always going to be bad luck.

But look, there's only a 28% chance of me hitting the trap again.

And you click it again and you land in the same trap again because 28%, you know, there's a 28% chance of that happening.

Totally.

This kind of like

just joy in playing out the themes and variations of a very simple mechanic reminds me a lot of games by Michael Brogue.

Of course.

Michael Brogue is a New Zealand game designer,

perhaps best known for the game 868Hack, which is a really interesting thing.

Is that true at this point that that's the most famous?

I think that might be my favorite, but I don't know if it's the most favorite.

What is it?

Is it Cinco Pausch or is it?

I think among designers, it's probably Cinco Palsch, but maybe it's Imbroglio.

Maybe it's

Imbroglio, rather.

Maybe it's...

Maybe you're right, though.

Maybe it's 868.

8688 hack is phenomenal.

Maybe 868 hack went widest.

Are you excited for the sequel?

I didn't know there was a sequel.

I had no idea.

I've not kept up.

Yeah, he was just kickstarting it.

It's the Kickstarter is over.

I'll link it to you.

Oh, no.

It's called.

You'll be able to get it when it comes out.

But I wanted to, you know, I want to be part of him Kickstarter.

The sequel is called.

8688.

86 Hack Hack.

Incredible.

Yeah, for people who don't know, Michael Bro makes Bro, Broke.

I believe it's Broke, but I'm not 100% sure.

Okay, B-R-O-U-G-H

is a developer of Roguelikes who I think completely mastered making phone games in my mind.

You know, along with,

you know, a handful of other folks who I think in the early 2010s or through the 2010s really like squeezed everything you could out of the phone as a as a

platform,

made a series of truly fantastic

remotes.

Utterly obscure.

I guess, and I should say not only phone games, right?

Corrypt is a PC game, right?

Yeah, it's a pack's a PC game as well, but like

the interaction with a phone is like such an important part of the way he thinks about

mechanics.

His games are,

I think, marked by

really

diy aesthetics um this sort of like again hand-drawn art or um 868 hack which is the sort of hacking cyberpunkish one has these very um

uh

hard to even explain like icon focused um but kind of abstract icons so you might have something that's like a tetrahedron that's pink or purple with strange eyes.

You might have a sort of sketchy, like red virus, as you might find in Dr.

Mario, you know

Almost abrasive in in aesthetics 868 hack like intentionally

Always kind of obscure or mysterious.

I think something like

Imbroglio and Cinco Paus have this sense of like

figuring out how the game works by looking at its art and by looking at what happens when you combine thing A and thing B.

I would say that this game,

Solcesto, is much clearer than something like

Cinco Paus.

Cincinnato Paus's initial mechanic is: you're in a dungeon.

Cinco Pausch means like five sticks or five wands.

Five wands.

In the dungeon with you are a bunch of wands.

The wands look fucking crazy.

What do they do?

Wouldn't you like to do that?

You would love to know what the wands do, wouldn't you, buddy?

And yeah, very like person drawing in their sketchbook in high school

visually on that one, which I don't mean as an insult.

Like, I think it's a, it's a,

it is a hallmark of the design and it is like an intentional thing.

And I think that this takes some of that aesthetic and like

slips it into like a slightly different tier of intentionality.

So you could make this game and you could say very...

So something I think about a lot is how the core card game in Inscription is just a really fun card game to play in and of itself.

He could have made a game that was looser

or less well thought through, but he built a full TCG in here.

The core mechanic of Solsesto is so

has the capacity to be so agnostic that you could theoretically make this game look like anything you want.

This game of probability is so simple and straightforward and kind of like sings mechanically outside of its theme.

So they could very easily have made just like a regular fantasy game, a regular fantasy sort of aesthetic.

You know, here are your dwarves, down you go, etc.

What they have ended up with is a sort of grotesque psychedelic

like

hypercolor gothic art style where everything is hand-drawn but it's hand-drawn really softly and oddly

And the, I mean,

the only health item being strawberries is like a way into thinking about this.

We should be clear, the potion is strawberry juice.

Just a little bit of a potion.

Yes, do you see that the stopper of the potion is a tiny little strawberry?

So good, yes, it's perfect.

And the

what exactly am I looking at?

is being played in really fun ways.

You know, Austin and I couldn't initially decide on what the red and blue monster was, but you've also got the knight who is dressed in this beautiful multicolored plate armor.

You've got the warrior who has got this incredible hairstyle.

Incredible.

And

has one arm and

the other half of their torso is like bandaged up.

Yeah, the poor peasant with like a jester's hat.

And then deep down in the dungeon, you know, you've got weird little eggs with eyes and legs.

You've got multicolored birds.

You've got

tomato guys with like

tongues and fangs.

The rock and roll drummer who buffs enemies that are near him.

Oh, my despised evil purple wizard.

Oh, who destroys the various boons across the map.

We'll simply obliterate my beloved strawberry.

My succulent strawberry?

Because you say to yourself, you see the wizard and you say, look, my health, my stats are really good.

I will simply kill the wizard first.

And the gamer says, no, you won't.

You will kill kill the dog in that row.

And then the wizard has his turn to take a turn.

You're like, I'll kill the wizard again.

And then you step into another dog.

There are a few moments where the aesthetics of this game just kind of like come screaming out of the screen so beautifully.

A good example of this was the first time I upgraded my stuff.

Like my stats and the upgrades.

It's pretty clear what is happening.

You have these sort of like two plinths where you can place your hand.

One is blue and one is red.

And, you know, looking at it immediately,

the design of the game is clear enough that I was like, well, I'm going to click one of these and upgrade my strength or my magic.

And you click it, and almost like a brand comes down.

And in the flash of light, as the brand comes down, you see in the darkness behind these two things, this massive, gleaming-eyed blacksmith grinning at you out of the dark.

And you see him for like two frames in this flash.

It's crazy.

And then he disappears again, which is fantastic.

The first boss is a

dinosaur?

Snake dinosaur?

What do you think that guy is?

I wasn't really thinking either snake or dinosaur because it has hands.

Oh, dinosaur has hands?

Yeah, I know, but it doesn't have a.

It has hands the way a person has hands, but like.

I think it's a like a Lizalthos type.

Yeah, I think that's probably right.

And it's huge, but it's huge.

It's like a dragon.

It's so big that it breaks

the frame of the game.

Yes.

It is like its body is covering up your UI art.

And at the end of the first phase of the boss fight, you click on the little door to go down to the next level.

And the boss's hand comes in and swipes you away.

So good.

It has like a weirdly, the thing is, it has a weirdly human nose and face.

It's like a contra boss.

It's like a huge screen-filling lizard-like person with big fangs and the tongue.

And what it, I'm going to just spoil what what this first boss does because i think it's interesting yeah is every round it has a sort of um area denial thing happening it marks two of the tiles right in front of its big mouth with purple and if you land on one of those tiles you die i don't care how much health you have you get you get eaten up you get gobbled up by the boss um and it changes it kind of chases you around so if you're going uh down to if you're like avoiding the top two because that's where the boss is it'll swing down to where you are now in the bottom one and so that can be annoying so you're like well that's that's the safe one for me generally.

And now you've taken my safety away, you know, in the next turn.

So I can't just stay in the safe zone, you know?

And, you know, you just got to clear the rooms and then

cut his big hand away so you can slip through to the next to the forests below.

But that's mysterious fungal forests.

It's one of those things where it's like, you know, the hand has this kind of, or like even the face, all of that, that part of the, the, the creature has this almost like dappled or like dotted like

shading gradient work happening with greens and blacks.

And its eyes are bulging, but they're also kind of gleaming in this very,

you know, it's a cartoonish game in places, especially in the idol animations and the characters.

But these additional materials all have this extra level of detail and clarity that's like...

striking and scary often that I think is just oh my god the guy who takes your the the the guy who takes your money and tells you a fact.

Oh, I've run into the guy who takes your money and tells you a fact.

Oh my god.

What type of fact does he tell you?

Oh, he'll tell you all sorts of things.

He'll give you, so this is the other thing.

There are sort of weird little oblique sub-details like

bubbling through the game in terms of like, what am I looking at and how does it work?

For example, a weird-looking little Hisuka motherfucker occasionally pops his head around the corner of the screen

and you quickly select it.

And he gives you gold.

Gives you gold.

Not the only little extra way to get gold.

You know, the the bugs, right?

The bugs in the shop.

Sometimes there are gold bugs.

There's a

bucket.

We'll talk about the bucket in a second.

And in a well, and you can pull a brick out of the well to get a bunch of gold.

Oh, I've gotten the brick out of the well.

I've gotten.

Wait, wait, there's a bucket in the well.

I know the fountain.

Is the bucket different?

No, the gold return bucket.

Oh,

now.

Oh, the gold return bucket.

Wait, wait, there's a brick that you can get out of there?

Oh, I need to get it.

Sometimes there's a loose brick.

The persistent mechanic in this game is really interesting.

You...

Every so often you will encounter a little bucket with a rope next to it, and you can put any gold you have encountered into the bucket and send it back up to the surface where it will be available to unlock the kind of metaprogression, whether that is something as like large-scale and exciting as unlocking a new character, or something kind of tantalizing, like a key will be added to the shop, or like two new teeth will be added to the pool of the stone statue.

There's a shopkeeper down there who you can give gold to, and you can rob the shopkeeper.

The shopkeeper has a big nose, and you can rob the shopkeeper like you would rob any cartoon shopkeeper, pulling his nose and then letting go of it so that it elastics back into his head.

And then you can like grab one item off of the grid, but next time you go to the shop,

he will have a little bandage on the nose, and he will be ready not to

get you that time.

You can do more than that, though, too, if you wanted to, to the shopkeeper, Jack.

Let's see.

So, one way to know that

else you can deal with the shopkeeper?

I know you can dice the shopkeeper, but even though I know you can dice the shopkeeper makes me think you might also be able to use some other items as well.

You certainly can, and that's all I'll say about that.

But there's also like,

this isn't necessarily one of those sorts of

like total mystery games in line with like Tunic or Outer Wilds or Blue Prince, where there's like a there's like a immense mystery in there.

But there are bits and pieces.

There's a flute down in the dungeons.

And the flute will not be clear to you even from the beginning of the game, but you will gradually learn ways that the flute works.

And I'm sure that this game is in early access.

And I'm sure that as it continues to grow, in addition to kind of like core mechanical interplay, they are going to be peppering it with all these weird little, what is that, and how does this interact with that?

The man who tells you secrets is

you will first just see a hand kind of come out of the darkness, offering or asking for a coin, and when you drop a coin into the hand, this awful, leering sort of specter emerges from the darkness and just tells you a thing.

Like, for example, a fairy swims in the pond.

And you're like,

finding it.

If you say so.

So true, by the way, you should get that pond fairy.

Very powerful.

You got to get the pond fairy mic.

What's your favorite thing to dig out of the pond?

It's probably the pond fairy.

You know, it's a piece of flute.

It's the flute pieces.

Because I got to finish the flute.

I got to finish the flute.

I've looked at some of the stuff the flute does.

It's really cool.

Interesting.

Interesting.

I like to get, this will not surprise you, listener, the succulent strawberry.

The succulent strawberry.

Yes.

the succulent strawberry from the pond restores all your health and gives you one more which in a game where you have five health is really big

yeah um i like to get the one little piece of the the tree fountain uh that you're that you're like interacting with a little pool of water is like in the the base of a of a tree trunk

open um and uh there's like a little nodule have you found a little nodule on the tree yeah break that thing open something happens.

All sorts of little secrets.

You know, how often, Jack, do you or I or someone else that we know reference the classic Arcane Kids Manifesto?

Gameplay is an excuse to hide secrets or whatever.

It's a function of gameplay.

It's a function of gameplay to hide secrets.

And that's this game in a big way.

I mean, even down to the character select screen, right?

Where

when it starts, it's just the peasant.

And then after you've unlocked

your first character, there's this kind of set of constellations above that you can spend your gold on in order to upgrade your characters and give them new talents.

Kind of one talent per character.

Or unlock new items for the shop or new things you can find from the little stone statues that kind of teeth upgrades that change your percentages around or let you clear or weaken enemies or whatever.

But there's also things that are just like question mark, question mark, question mark.

And it will say something like,

God, I wish I had screenshotted one of these, but like, you know, a melody in the night sky.

Well, let me load it up.

Because one of the nice things about Solcesto is that not only does the game boot in about one second, you can play one run of Solcesto while you are waiting for Austin to make coffee or something.

Easily.

Before recording.

Yeah, the title screen says, The Sun Has Disappeared.

That's a shame.

We got to get that back.

Maybe it's in this dungeon.

Okay,

this melody suffocates, trapped inside a box.

This melody is carved into the bark.

This melody is familiar to the blacksmith.

A musical instrument is hidden in the depths.

They're great.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And so those are little questions for you.

And it's like, okay, well, I mean, you run into the blacksmith and you get your upgrade, your core stat upgrade.

He's terrifying.

Is something happening there?

Is there something I can do when that's on that screen?

This is a real

clicky game.

It feels good to click on things.

It feels great.

You know, on the shop, the shop screen where it is just a table with the shopkeeper with his nose

up on the top of the table like that one drawing.

Kilroy was here.

Have you seen what happens if you try and buy a thing you don't have the money for?

Slaps your hand away.

And you get a little bruise on your hand.

Like a little red blush on your hand.

The level of detail throughout the game is so impressive and kind of playful.

Oh, I have seen this guy.

You sent me a picture of the guy who shows up to ask you a thing.

I have seen this guy.

I forgot about this run.

I did this run on Dennis.

Very creepy.

Very creepy.

Yeah,

it's really wonderful.

I'm very curious.

Have they talked at all about what their plans are for early access?

And

in the first segment, we talked a little bit about how hard it is to play an early access game and keep up with it.

And I'm curious what their hopes are.

So they say there's a fourth biome coming.

The initial art release is really cool.

It's sort of like dark red colored.

They say it will have a quote, let's say, warm atmosphere.

There will also be.

This is so soul sesto.

This is a really good example of what it feels like to play this game.

There will also be a few new items, like the fireball and the egg, as well as a new character hidden somewhere underground.

Great.

Okay.

Fantastic.

These are some of the ways in which it's not very

brogue-coded to me.

Michael Brogue-coded, that is, which is like, I think we didn't really get into, for some reason, zeroed in on aesthetics before for that comparison.

And I think much more important to say that the

design is part of what we were talking about.

The sort of clarity of one core mechanics, other mechanics that slowly brings you into a world of interesting decision-making.

Also, like single map, single screen roguelike, right?

This is not a roguelike of exploring a big, you know, it is not cud.

That's right, exactly.

Um, I think the other thing that, and this might kind of inform or provide some context to what I think you're about to say, but like something I think that Michael Brogue is really interested in is the reinterpretation of the like traditional space of the dungeon in a roguelike.

Um, something Something like Imbroglio, which is one of his that I really like, is a dungeon roguelike from top down where each kind of like square or position in the dungeon

behaves differently.

So like your stats and the stats of your enemies and your positioning are going to be different based on where you are.

It's like the properties are on the tile rather than on you.

So you could go to a tile that gives you a really strong physical attack, for instance.

And I think that that's such a, it is so characteristic of the way he thinks as a designer to be like,

I'm interpreting space and I'm interpreting the way you move through a dungeon.

And I mean, you know, from the very beginning, Rogue was always interested in that question, like the reinterpretation of a dungeon.

And its big initial thing was like, it's procedural.

You know, the space is different, which feels so prosaic to us now, but, you know,

was not then.

And I think Sol Cesto is doing something similar in its rendering out of a dungeon as a series of like 16

possibilities.

But you were going to talk about the way it's different.

Which is which is fundamentally, Grogue makes games that are

that are roguelikes in the traditional model, which is to say they are run-based.

There is no meta game outside of score

comparisons, which he's big into scores.

Well, so were the original roguelikes.

So were the earliest roguelikes.

Things like Rogue and NetHack and eventually Angband, like how good was your run became after you became the sort of player who could win a run of something like NetHack pretty commonly, you started to compete for overall score.

And so that's like really clearly in the heritage, in the lineage of it.

But I think what is novel is

really is this feeling of like

for the Rogue games, like, I'm going to do a run in 45 minutes

and go to the score screen, you know, and

eventually in

Michael Brogues games and things like 868 hack,

you do unlock certain types of secrets

that are things like new abilities can fluctuate in.

I don't want to say there's no secrets.

I think that would be a mistake.

But I think most of the secrets, especially things in Cinco Palsh or in Brolio, are about like secrets about how the core mechanics actually work.

What do the stave, what can all, what are all the things the staves and single palsh, what are all the things that they can do?

Um, what are the weird interactions I hadn't considered with this enemy type or with this tile type?

Um, this feels like it has this other layer of uh, obviously you're unlocking things all the time in terms of long-term progression in the more rogue light-ish way, the way we talk about those games.

Um, but also there's this sense of,

I don't see narrative mystery, but like, hey, what's up with the melody of the flute?

What's up with the melody of the stone or whatever?

Hey, how do I unlock this character with this little clue?

Hey, what are the next layer of upgrades I can get for the shop?

This is like it adds a new type of bomb to the shop.

Okay, what's going on with that?

And I don't think that Rogue really moves with those sorts of tactics.

The game is the game in a real way, you know, and which I know that I'm being, you know, diminishing metagame stuff here.

I don't mean that actually, but that though, you know, you know what I mean, right?

That like the focus is on the run.

The focus is on outfitting you for the run and then doing the run.

It's less on producing a desire to go forward and see new art assets and see new biomes and see a new character or unlock a character ability.

That is just like, those are very distinct.

And I actually think make this game, again, a lot more palatable than some of Brogue's stuff is.

In a way that reminds me a little bit of like when Hearthstone came out and Hearthstone in contrast to something like Magic the Gathering, which at the time was not as big as it is now.

It's worth saying.

You know, I think we've turned a corner in magic,

partly because of the ascension of a version of that game that is much more palatable than the one that I grew up playing in Commander.

I will never get over that in high school and college, I wanted to play four-player magic games where we all had really stupid, big,

goofy decks, and everyone was like, No, that's not serious, that's not the right way to play magic, and now that's the ascendant form of playing magic.

I mean, listen, younger listeners do have to know that when Austin and I were children, they only had 14 cards in magic.

That's right,

and we can name them all right now.

Yeah, the frog,

dog leg,

wizard kin,

fight of leaves,

The Pit

The Sun

The Sun

Awful Son of the Demon

Father Demon

Box Containing Egg

Crowbar

Four Cats Wishes

Fireball

Ludovico's ice shield,

strange device,

and the whisper in the night, and those are it.

You had to build a deck out of those, and that was and lands.

I guess they were lands, and we didn't say it, but there's the lands were there, obviously.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for me.

The normal number of those, the normal, yeah, those are all there.

Um, so god, it sucked so bad.

Yeah, we had to do it, it was really hard, and everyone was like mad if you played Ludovico's, you know?

Like, oh, another Ludovicos deck.

Great.

Oh, fucking Nicol Bolus.

He was just a character.

He obviously didn't have his own card.

No, yeah, he was just in...

He was in some of the flavor text.

The flavor text was massive.

It was huge.

He took the full back of the card.

Oh, this is sort of that

TTRPG that's the NASA manual, right?

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

That's the NASA manual.

I'm going to shut up or there's going to be some really good games.

Yeah, I know.

It's definitely not happened to us before that we've had a funny idea for a game.

I do briefly want to shout out going in the other direction, actually.

If we're talking about

Sol Cesto as being, and

I know you don't mean it this way, Austin, but I really want to

be as clear as possible into the microphone that when we're talking about palatable, we're not necessarily making a value judgment on either Sol Cesto.

That's why I'm saying palatable, not good.

Yeah.

Yes, or easy.

I know a lot of people who've bounced off of Michael Brogue's work.

I've bounced off some of his games.

Yeah, of course.

Sure.

Yeah.

So, yeah, when I say palatable, I don't mean that as an insult or as a...

I guess I sort of mean it as a...

I sort of mean it as praise, but I don't mean it as an insult then to Brogue's work either.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, definitely.

If you want to go in the other direction.

If you want to go journeying deep into the sort of aliatory realms of what is happening and why, I would like to shout out a game made by the designer Droken, D-R-O-Q-E-N, called Starseed Pilgrim.

Oh, sure.

A classic.

Starseed Pilgrim came out in, I want to say, 2012, maybe?

2013.

Yeah,

I can't really tell you what Starseed Pilgrim is about because I don't terribly know.

It is about growing a plant and how the plant works and how you move around it is kind of like the core question of the game.

It is

about figuring out how things interact with other things.

And it's kind of like journeying in the other direction.

Droken has a new project out at the moment called Kill Gameplay.

The end of gameplay.

Someone's hatching it.

I've not yet played it.

Finally.

Fucking finally.

But yeah, I had a huge amount of fun with Solsesto.

I am going to keep playing it.

I have it on my Steam Deck, and I play it when I have 36 seconds to spare.

Oh, this is a game where you can get taken out by a misclick in a big way.

Instant.

Near instant.

Well, again, I guess, yeah, a misclick especially, right?

What mostly I get taken out by is hubris, right?

Yeah, misunderstanding an 88% chance and then being like

88% chance that and only good things will happen.

Well, what happens on the 12%?

The worst thing.

The worst kills.

The 88%, right?

Right?

Wrong.

When you die in this game, the art style suddenly like breaks out into a new area of grotesquery, going straight into the Pendleton Ward

adventure time, like character straining image, where the character appears with this awful, contorted expression of pain on their face as they swing the sword at the enemy that takes them out.

And you know, as soon as you see that awful face appear, that you have landed on the fucking trap again.

Yep.

And you go back to the beginning.

It's a good time.

There's a great inversion of that, though, where you also get that

when you beat the boss and you deliver the blow that frees the way forward.

You get the same sort of close-up out of nowhere that feels so...

It's so good to have this thing that normally means death to mean progress suddenly.

It's great.

We've been talking about that since the Viking times.

That's what Beowulf's all about.

The thing that would usually mean death.

Oh, it means victory.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Beowulf would love Solcesto.

Beowulf?

No.

No.

No.

No.

Beowulf.

Well, I suppose Beowulf would also love Solcesto.

What's the name of the hero?

Beowulf.

What?

What are you talking about?

Beowulf is the...

No,

Grendel.

I thought Grendel was the mother.

Frankenstein.

No, the mother is the mother.

It's called Grendel's mother.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Both Beowulf and Grendel would love Solcesto.

Yes.

Grendel is.

They might both be in Solcesto, actually.

Now that I think about it.

Yeah.

I first unlocked Beowulf.

The creature kind of has

Grendel vibes.

Not that Grendel is like.

We don't really get much Grendel, right?

We don't really...

Sorry, we do get a lot of Grendel, but we don't really get like...

Can you summon Grendel in your mind visually?

Big evil

killing everybody

in the whole.

It's like a big guy, right?

Because he jumps around the halls up on the tables and shit.

I haven't read Bailwolf in a while.

Beowulf fucking goes.

Yeah.

He's a creature of darkness, exiled from happiness and accursed of God, the destroyer and devourer of our humankind.

He's described as a descendant of Cain.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Tolkien.

So in Tolkien's translation, he says, the other miscreated thing in man's form, so he's humanoid, trod the ways of exile, albeit he was greater than any other human thing.

Him in days of old, the dwellers on earth named Grendel.

And then Seamus Heaney says, every nail, claw, scale, and spur, every spike and welt on the hand of that heathen brute was like barbed steel.

Everybody said there was no honed iron hard enough to pierce him through, no time-proofed blade that could cut his brutal, blood-caked claw.

And Beowulf said, we'll see about that.

We'll see about that.

I'll see about that, won't we?

Let's go.

Watch this.

And I'll kill his mom.

I bet I could kill anything, even a dragon, said Beowulf.

People should read Beowulf.

Anyway.

Have you read that new translation?

I have.

What's the thing?

I haven't read it at all since I've been in 20 years, probably.

I read it in high school.

I read it in college.

I maybe read it once after college, and that was it.

I want to get her name right.

It's a new translation

by

English translations.

Lots of people have translated Beowulf.

Oh, yeah.

This is that.

Maria Davana Headley.

The Headly one.

This is the one that famously has the bro.

The Bro translation

as Vikings are calling to one another.

Or not Vikings, but, you know.

Danes?

Where are they from?

Yeah, they're Danes.

They're going to be Danish, right?

They're Geats.

They're the Geats.

The Jeats.

The Jates?

The Gate.

Yeah, the Geats is right.

North Germanic tribe that inhabited Gataland, land of the Geats,

and modern southern Sweden from antiquity.

It's September the 2nd, and this is not a podcast about video games.

It's a podcast about Beowulf.

Beowulf.

I think that's going to do it for us.

I should have convinced Cameron and Michael to let us read Beowulf over on Shelved by John.

Oh, wow.

Michael, famous fantasy hater, reading Beowulf.

Jack,

I'll message you after this about some future plans we've got coming.

So get ready.

Get ready.

All right.

That has been us here at Side Story.

As always, we love to have your support.

You can go to friendsofthetable.cash to give us that support.

We've been putting out the Outward Let's Play every other week now for six months or five months or something, maybe six months now.

It's been a while.

We were about to drop our 12th, which would make it six months.

That has been a joy to do.

We obviously are releasing a ton of stuff for Friends of the the table.

We have our weekly Perpetua series where we play a game called Fabula Ultima, which is a sort of JRPG-inspired tabletop game.

For $5 patrons, we also have been playing Realis, a game that I have been making for years now that's available on Ashcan over on thecalchiate.itch.io.

And that campaign has just kicked off into another level.

We are in kind of part two of that campaign.

Jack, you are now in the game,

not just performing the excellent music for it, but playing

the little happiest boy.

Yeah, uh-huh.

And that has been a joy, and those episodes that are coming out are some of my favorite stuff that we've done in a long, long time.

So go check that out, friends of the table.cash.

We've done some game streams.

You, in fact, you and Sylvie just finished up

anthology of the killer.

Yeah, yeah.

I would love to come on with Sylvie and talk about that.

I would love

to that.

That sounds great.

That sounds great.

We should do that soon, actually.

Anything else to shout out?

Yes.

If you enjoy listening to Side Story, I would love to encourage you to go to wherever you review podcasts, but possibly Apple podcasts, and write a five-star review letting us know either your favorite game that does interesting stuff with the roguelike form, be that Ancient Dunzer Magic or CUD or you know, something like that, or whether or not you think you could kill Grendel.

I have a review to read.

This one's from Dark Lord, nope, Dank Lord Gannon.

It says thoughtful games discussion.

Yes.

Thoughtful games discussion.

Finally, a Laboo Boo Games podcast in a feed full of Lefufu pretenders.

Thank you so much.

We're at 4.9 over there right now.

I would love to get that up to five, which we can do if enough people give us five stars.

Who's saying dog shit about us?

People who hate me.

Oh, no.

You know, the haters.

There's one three-star review here, which is probably from someone who takes their podcast very seriously.

And they they said,

and they said, this is not a five-star podcast.

Perhaps one day.

We want to turn your three-star into a five-star.

We're going to keep working on it.

Everybody else, please give us a five-star review.

It's free to do.

It takes you a little bit of time to give us a five-star review,

but it's free.

You can do it.

And it would support us quite a bit.

So thank you so much for your support.

I am, this is the first real thing I'm doing post-COVID.

It's a joy to get back in the saddle.

Apologies if it was a little rambly today as my brain fog continues to lift off.

Oh, I guess one other thing to shout out, the excellent ongoing Media Club Plus.

That's great.

Y'all have wrapped up, or your group wrapped up Hunter Hunter, and now a new group has picked up

the excellent

first with two excellent first episodes, the Emp Night Shyamalan filmography starting with Six Sense and Unbreakable.

I'm listening to the Unbreakable episode right now.

Not the second, but like today I've been listening to it.

It's great.

Keith has never seen a lot of M-Night movies before, and his guess as to what Unbreakable is about is the craziest thing I have ever heard.

It's so funny.

Also, Keith's intro bits are extremely funny because Keith did not know.

Isn't it playing the Crypt Keeper?

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Which

on Balance will turn out to be okay, but there's going to be some movies where it makes no sense, including Unbreakable.

Including Unbreakable.

So, yeah, go listen to Media Club Plus, one of my favorite podcasts.

That's a five-star podcast.

I'm looking at it right now.

You're going to get us up.

We got to get all of our podcasts up to five stars.

That would be my goal.

Friends of the Table, also not a five-star podcast, apparently.

So

we got to get these up to 4.9s.

I'm looking at all the podcasts I'm on.

None of my podcasts, not a single one of my podcasts has five stars.

That's not true.

Shelf by genre has five stars.

But Friends of the Table is a 4-9.

nine.

Side stories are four or nine.

More civilized age is a four or nine.

Any of that upsets you, you should go leave a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts or whatever you use to listen to podcasts.

Surely point one

is not important to our souls.

Yes, it is.

Yes, it is.

So says the scales.

The soul scales.

That big man with the head of a dog.

Everyone, it turns out there is an afterlife.

I know there'd been a lot of debate.

There is one.

And everyone is weighed to see if they get into the good part of the afterlife.

Their souls are weighed according to a metric that is mysterious and unknown.

It's secret.

Everyone has one, and you don't know what it is your whole life until you face the scales.

And then you find out it was how good were you to

animals with cloven feet?

Or how many bananas did you eat, right?

You just don't know.

It's almost, it's sort of arbitrary.

But I did sneak a peek.

And mine is how many five-star podcasts were you on?

And I got to tell you, it's not looking good for all Austin, you know?

So

please go give these podcasts some reviews.

It goes a long way.

Really appreciate it.

Find out next time.

Find out next time.

To be continued.

To be continued.