13: The Validity of the Scorpion

What's good, Internet?

It is September 23rd, 2025, and this is not a ruined world of red skies and incomprehensible monsters.

Or is it?

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

Joining me today, Jack and Sylvie.

Hello.

Happy, happy fall.

I guess technically today is the first day of autumn, right?

It becomes autumn today.

It is.

It was yesterday.

We did it.

We made it to where it's like cold enough outside that I get to wear long-sleeved shirts.

I am not wearing a long-sleeved shirt today, although there was a big storm this morning, and it was not the kind of like rumbling summer storm storm that we had.

You know, even just three weeks ago, it was an autumn storm for the first time.

There are leaves and

dirt everywhere now.

Fall has come.

I'm currently enjoying it.

However,

dot dot dot.

To be continued.

To be continued.

When winter hits, we're going to be a lot.

We're going to miss this.

Oh, boy, we're going to miss this.

To be continued is the unfortunate uh but also blessed uh uh you know true quality of life is that you know it keeps on coming don't it you know until it don't don't uh you know what i've always said

don't die till you're dead don't die till you're dead as a wise man once told us as a wise wise man once told us

uh we uh before we get into the show proper today uh a couple things one we are holding a sale over on our Patreon.

I think it's the first time we've gotten to say it over here on Side Story.

We are in our 11th anniversary month, which is really wild.

Our 11th anniversary was just about,

I guess, 12 days ago as the time that you'll hear this if you're listening to this on the day that it comes out.

And we did a big live stream.

You can go find all of the archives of what we played during the live stream, which is all video games this time,

over on youtube.com/slash friends at the table.

We played some change together.

we played some wiki arena we played some wildermyth we picked up our wieldermyth uh you know series so we're almost done it um sylvie you and keith pushed further into uh vlr virtual last award um some big revelations we were just talking about off mic or off off call or off not neither of those things both on mic and on call off recording um

it's funny how off mic to me means before we hit the record button off the record that's right off the record um what we played something else too didn't we or is that it uh

repo right we played repo we played a really fun repo session so please go check that stuff out um and yeah uh

very excited great for me very excited to see that get edited together by keith um uh and uh we announced a couple of promo codes for new patrons so if you're someone who only listens to side story and has never really dug into our patreon catalog because you're like well i don't really do tabletop stuff or whatever like one, I think there's a lot of stuff on there at this point, especially that's for you, even if you're not like a tabletop person, especially if you are.

We have a huge collection of things called clap casts, which is just us kind of bullshitting,

talking about, I don't know why my head always goes to this one, but like super yachts.

There's that one time we all got, we all like were doing downtime between like we were on a break or whatever for a first of the table episode, and we started talking about like stupidly expensive, ugly ass yachts.

I don't know why that's the clap cast that lives in my brain forever.

But all sorts of things, including video games sometimes, but often just like a thing we read on the internet or a book, you know, a book we're reading or a video, a stupid meme we saw, or,

you know, we just started talking about, Jack, one that you, me, and Art did once was

we quizzed you on every, we quizzed you, someone who had not studied for the test, on every possible power that you could have in DC Universe Online, or every category of power, which is very fun.

And those are available at the $1 level.

And so, in fact, you should get that just whatever, because neither are coupons about that.

But at the $5 level, you get access to everything else, which includes a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff.

And it includes our bonus tabletop campaign, Realis, which is the game that I made.

If you've

not listened to stuff over here, but you've listened to Nextlander, you'd have heard me run it for them.

You can use the code Burn Thrones to get $2 off the $5 tier.

That's one word, all caps, burn thrones.

Or you could use the code build tables to get 20% off any higher tier than $5, including our wonderful $10 tier, which gives you access to our Outward Let's Play, which had a huge dramatic moment and change forever in the most recent episode.

That game is going great.

Jack, I said to you and Janine the other day, like, oh, we need to like do an episode where we talk about Outward as soon.

On side story, yes.

Yeah, on side story, because like we've been playing this game together that is fantastic and really neat and cool.

And we've hit some really fun, strange things.

You know, we're off the first map now.

We're like into the second big zone.

And we haven't like talked about that.

in a critical context anywhere.

We're just kind of playing it.

And I think that like part of the side story project should be us like getting right together to say some stuff about it at some point.

Maybe once per map change, we check in.

We do like a check-in segment, you know?

Yeah.

So yeah, burn thrones, $2 off the $5 tier.

Build tables, 20% off any tier higher than $5.

We have some other tiers.

If you're friends with the table listener for a long time, you know that eventually you get access to things like postcards

or even, you know, the highest tiers, you're getting stuff like, you know, super special behind the scenes stuff.

Or

we will do like, we'll send you a copy of a tabletop game that we've all assigned a book plate that we've attached to it.

You you know, a game that we've played, not just any tabletop game, just anyone that we've played.

But that list is very big, and we provide the book.

You know, we're not, yeah, you're not sending us the book, and then we're signing with the book plate, like we'll put it together for you and send it out.

Um, and yeah, so that's that is the uh, that is what we have on offer there.

Please go check it out if you like the show.

Uh, definitely help support us.

You know, we don't, I don't think we do like the big pitch ideologically very often, um, but for many reasons, I have been very grateful lately to be an extremely independent

group.

You know, we are not, we are not part of,

we don't have to hew it all to advertisers.

No one can fire any of us for saying, I guess we could fire each other,

but

for saying something

about,

for instance, the rise of fascism in America.

None of us could be called into a room by someone you've never seen before who tells you that you're fucking up the bag for them.

That just isn't on the table.

And I'm very grateful for that.

And the only way that that's possible is through the support that y'all have given us over the years.

And it also, frankly, means we get to tell the types of stories we want to.

We get to cover the types of games that we want to.

You know, we're about to talk about two new releases that I don't know were top of the board for any other,

you know, podcast over the last couple of weeks.

Maybe that's not true.

Any other is really broad, but it is not the ones that I think, these are not the games that hit big necessarily, but they were ones that hit us big.

And we'll check in on some other kind of big releases too.

And when we want to do that, we can do that.

And it doesn't feel like there's not that weight of necessity on our backs where it's like.

We have to talk about Assassin's Creed shadows.

Right, 100%.

Though, Jackie,

you and I are people who'd like to play the Assassin's Creed games when they come out.

So maybe we would.

We have to play the Assassin's Creed games.

We don't need to talk about them.

As we get further into our stride, we can do this even more and more.

We're going to do an, I am, putting my foot down.

We're going to do an episode about the game The Saboteur at some point.

Oh, I would love to talk about The Saboteur.

Let's do that saboteur.

Yeah, we probably could.

If you gave me seven minutes, I could find enough notes to put that together.

I reviewed The Saboteur, I think.

Did you like it when you reviewed it?

Yeah, I liked it quite a bit.

It kind of perfectly fit

my

desire for a certain style of open-world game that

isn't super ambitious in the ways that they often are and is steadily ambitious stylistically, you know?

Yeah, the tone of that game is very silly, but it is also, they have absolute command over that tone.

Yep.

Totally.

I think that's exactly right.

It just feels incredible.

A weird, weird, fun game.

I think whatever review I wrote for that game is long gone because that's how the internet activates.

It's kind of nice, though, actually.

Yeah, it is.

It is.

It was probably a trash review.

Oh, well, you know.

That's what we're doing.

Now we can celebrate it it properly.

That's right, right here, right now.

Welcome to the Salvatore cast.

What was his name?

Was his name?

Sean?

Sean?

It had to be Sean.

He's Irish.

Something like that.

Yeah, he's super Irish.

He was

offensively Irish.

And my favorite thing about my favorite thing is that I wait

as someone who loves the Irish or is it

an Irish person?

Like, I need to know

Sean Devlin.

That it was a full Irish stereotype.

My favorite thing about Sean is that he had

a voice line that played when he was falling from a long distance, which was a long, elongated scream of fear as he fell.

Except this sometimes would accidentally trigger when he was falling a short distance, which meant you would drop from one roof onto a lower roof, and he would deliver a four-second long, full-throated screen, scream, three seconds of which were as you were walking along the rest of the roof.

The rest of that scream was just screaming about Nazis.

Just like, like,

I can't do it anymore.

I missed everywhere.

They're on stage with wrestling intros.

You guys are going to have to do that.

It's unbelievable.

You know, the burlesque club was great in that game.

They're on stage with the wrestling intro.

Are we talking about Brock Lesnar's return?

That's our Brock Lesnar's return.

That's right.

Hey, oh,

don't support the Fed.

You got to get off the WWE train at this point, folks.

I get it.

I get it.

It's done.

It's done.

There's so much wrestling out there.

You can do it.

I believe in you.

Come watch the old man Yaoi and AEW.

Go across the sea to Japan.

I know New Japan is maybe not at the best state it is right now, anyway, but it's fine.

Go watch Tokyo Joshi Pro.

There's a girl whose whole thing is that she's very sleepy.

Her pillow won a title recently.

Fucking A.

Now we're.

Congratulations.

That's great.

That's good.

Speaking of

things happening in Japan, Sylvie, you and I are fans of a Japanese video game.

Oh, yes.

Called Demon X Machina or Damon X Machina, depending on how you want to pronounce demon slash Daemon

in the thing.

I'm really of two minds about the pronunciation.

One, historically, you pronounced this word demon.

Two, they didn't spell a demon though, did they?

They spotted it with the A.

Yeah.

And I want to recognize that with my pronunciation.

I get it, but I think Demon X Machina personally sounds cooler.

Then let's call it Demon X Machina.

The sequel of Demon X Machina.

Demon X Machina itself came out in 2019.

It was a mecha action game similar in many ways to Armored Core.

If you liked Armored Core 6 and you hadn't played Demon X Machina 1, I think you should go play that game.

Probably like it, yeah.

It's a mission-based game.

You are fixing up your mech in between missions.

You're changing parts out.

You're unlocking new parts.

Like the Armored Core games, there are some secrets hidden in the levels.

I don't remember if there's branching paths the way the Armored Core series does narratives.

I think it was pretty straightforward.

And stylistically, I think

pretty different.

Really bright, saturated levels, really anime-focused characters and character arcs.

It had Char and Omaro doing voice acting in it, right?

Didn't it?

It did have Char and Omaro.

Yeah, really.

Yep, it truly did, which was great.

Yeah.

And that game, I think, was unfortunately launched on the Switch in a state that was detrimental to the way people could enjoy it.

Lots of slowdown.

It really pushed the Switch hard or wasn't optimized or some combination, probably a combination of the both.

But it's going to play that game now.

That's right.

You can just play it on PC, and I think it plays great, or I think you can play it on a bunch of different consoles at this point.

I think it got a wider release eventually.

The sequel, Demon X Mocking, and Titanic Scion,

it is just out everywhere immediately

and is the sequel to that game.

And there are some big changes, I think.

There's a lot of changes.

Changes where sometimes I'm like,

was this supposed to be the sequel to this game?

Is how I feel occasionally.

And then sometimes I'm like, oh, no, wait, I totally understand how they got here.

There is a really good video with the.

I want to say it's the creative director uh but it might be the studio it might actually be the studio director okay of of marvelous um uh

who like digs into it's a very funny it's a very funny uh like behind the scenes making of video that is like

like slow paced and a little like emotion emotional it's like it's him riding his motorcycle around japan and talking about the like inspiration for the game and like why did they move from having giant mechs to like smaller exosuits and why is there so much weird body stuff in this game?

Like it's it's it's it makes me think that this was a labor of

there might be a there might be a market decision behind some of those some of those changes.

But I don't think that it's a heartless decision or a decision that like after they made those moves, they didn't say, all right, well, how do we make that work for the type of thing we want to make anyway?

So, do you want to set up what this game is, Sylvia?

Since you, I think you've played even more of it than me at this point, based on some conversations we've had.

I think I would say, like, it's kind of hard to gauge progress.

I think I'm about halfway through the story, is kind of how it feels.

How many maps have you unlocked?

I've unlocked two.

Okay, so I'm at the beginning of that second map.

Okay.

And I've done a lot of stuff, but it's all side stuff.

I haven't,

I've done two or three of the big things that happen when you first get that second zone.

So, like, big bosses

against the Noin.

The Noin, who I do love.

They gave me a bunch of freaks with a number motif, and the Kingdom Hearts fan in me just lets out.

And I get to be the estranged member.

Oh, my goodness.

That moment, the moment that you realize that your character has a backstory that you're not aware of is really good.

Yeah, we'll get there a little bit.

I dig the story, even though it does hit you with an incredibly dense opening crawl.

I'll give like a heads up of what the game itself is, and then if you want, I do have a screenshot of that.

I would love it.

I would love it.

So

the big difference, I would say, between there's two major differences between Titanic Zion and the original Demon X Machina.

One of them is that this is now an open world game.

There's like loot.

It's very loot-heavy.

There's a lot of...

I have been grinding bosses for materials to make parts of my mech.

Yeah, it's like a little, it's a little monster hunter.

It is very, it's, it's, um, I was thinking of it because I believe Marvelous, I believe it's the same studio.

I don't know if it's the same team in any way, but Marvelous First Studio, their main development studio, to my knowledge, um,

it did some of the God Eater games.

It is a monster hunter, like, right?

Like, it makes a lot of the stuff click into place.

God Eater, for anyone who doesn't know,

similar monster hunter thing takes place on a future ruined Earth.

This game takes place on a sort of ruined planet.

100% does.

Where you're fighting these giant chitinous monsters called immortals.

It's very funny because

there is something true about the planet you're on that I think the game does not say.

Yeah.

But if you played all the way through Demon X Machina and got the ending that has a huge twist on it, you would maybe know.

And that's, I won't say it here, but I'm just saying it's very funny.

If you're like curious and are never in the chat, I want to just read this one sentence.

Yeah, I will type it out here.

I'll put it in spoilers just in case anyone else in our internal friends on the table discord is looking.

I'm typing it out now.

At the end of Demon X Machina 1, it is revealed that

he's doing the Keith Reads his credit card number.

Wow, yeah.

All right, I've sent it in.

You go ahead and take a look at that.

Yeah, this also makes the intro crawl really funny.

It makes it so funny.

It makes it really funny.

It makes some of the terminology really funny, but also I kind of love it in a really up-it-ass sci-fi way.

Yep, me too.

That's great.

But yeah, I mean, also briefly,

is Marvelous one of the secret most side story

developers there is?

I mean, I'd put it up there.

Because we've now talked a lot about Story of Seasons.

We've talked a lot about Rune Factory.

We didn't do a Monster Hunter or Wilds episode.

I know that's not them, but they do do the Monster Hunter Stories games also explicitly, which is the new one of that looks pretty good too.

And they do Demon X Machina.

I think

they may have our number in terms of weird, systems-driven,

you know, player goal-oriented games.

Send us some codes.

I'm sure we can reach out.

I'm just going to figure out who does.

I'm not.

Shit.

Sorry.

Continue.

So you're grinding out parts from giant monsters to build

my dragon hunter armor, you know?

Oh, I see.

It's got good burn resist, Austin.

I can't tell if you're joking about it.

I'm literally not joking.

Okay, great.

So,

where was I?

Yeah, the big

major changes are that it is, you...

It's the open world stuff, like I mentioned.

There's more material focus.

There's some more exploration.

Honestly, the open world, I think, is a little bit of a miss for me.

Me too.

But

the game is a lot of people.

But I also wouldn't want to necessarily.

It's tough because it's like they built the game.

They built how to get rid of it.

They built the content for the open world.

They just had to have made a different game, right?

Yeah.

Because like the thing you're talking about is like going out and grinding for parts.

It's partly available in.

What you would have to do is do the Monster Hunter or God Eater version of this, which is like, I'm going on a hunt.

I'm going out to this set of maps.

That's maybe that would have actually worked better.

I'm replaying this mission.

But I, I, there's a personally there's a limit for for me for the replaying the mission mode it's part of why i've liked worlds and wilds in monster hunter is because they've moved to a model of like go out into the environment and hunt down the creature you want and you can

it will wilds will like generate the mission for you when you start the fight you know like okay take down the whatever you know the anginath that's not is that one of them is anginath is that the fire i haven't played a monster hunter in a minute so i think i got it right it's a a T-Rex.

I think it's a fire-breathing T-Rex.

Okay.

Anyway.

So, yeah, so it's like, I think that the structure is tough for that reason.

Yeah, it gets especially weird when you realize that I would say most of the main missions are literally just boss fights.

Right.

Yep.

A lot of the open.

You should just

load into, ideally.

I don't need to move to a fast travel point and then fly for 30 seconds.

Even if I do like how the movement in this game feels, I agree.

The other big change is that you're not in a mech anymore.

You're in like an exo suit.

And I think part of that was really smart because it's allowed them to really like amp up the speed of a lot of things, in my opinion.

It's a very fast game.

The combat in this feels great.

I really like fighting in this.

I've already ran through the Coliseum.

Like, I'm.

As soon as they open it up, it's like, well, I'm going to climb every rank they're going to let me climb right now.

I haven't been able to beat the top guy because him, we have such similar loadouts and he doesn't have to button mash like I do

when we get locked up in like a sword clash.

This is the opposite of that thing I sent you yesterday, Jack, about Puzzle Quest, where you were talking about how strong the orcs are.

And I was like, well, yeah, they have to be strong.

This is the classic thing of they have to win forever.

You only have to win once.

Video enemies don't have skulls in that.

You don't really need them anymore.

Sorry, I've put over a thousand hours into Puzzle Quest.

Have I mentioned that before?

I've played a lot of Puzzle Quest.

I own Puzzle Quest on seven different platforms.

This is no longer an episode about the Sabutsu.

This is an episode about Puzzle Quest.

Yeah, Puzzle Quest is great.

Puzzle Quest is really good.

Don't talk to me about Puzzle Quest 2, please.

Is Puzzle Quest 2 the one, the sci-fi one with like the weirdly rotating no?

That's Puzzle Quest Galactrix.

Galactrix is the one I reviewed.

Yeah,

20 years ago or whatever.

Puzzle Quest Galactics is also not great, but also weirdly, weirdly fun.

Puzzle Question Puzzle Quest 2.

It just, it is more like

you're a, the map is way smaller scale.

You're like dungeon crawling, it's uglier.

Um,

I just, it lost a lot of the charm.

Um, back to Demon X Machi, though.

Yeah, sorry, yes, Demon X Machi.

Um, we're focused, we're so focused right now.

Yeah, so I'm, I, I've been really enjoying the combat.

I find that, so I haven't played Armored Core 6.

I'll put that out there, but the last time I've played Sylvie, I know.

You want Sylvie?

I know.

Okay, i will you would love armored cores i know i would i know i would

i just haven't i got it you know it happens but like i usually don't play melee in those types of games um

because it is really slow it's really you're just trying to get it's like using a great sword in a monster hunter game where you're just trying to get your one big hit and i'm not usually built like that in this i'm fighting like i'm general grievous like i i'm dual wielding i've got one laser sword.

I've got one physical sword.

They both got different special abilities.

Because in this game, things have different laser and physical

resistances, defenses.

Yeah, which is really funny.

Which comes into play with bosses because they'll have armor on some spots and no armor in different spots.

So, like, if they're armored, I believe you want to use lasers.

And if it's exposed, you want to use physical damage.

It's very fun.

But the way that it moves now is like, it's almost more like a third-person action game.

It's almost like you're playing

a Team Ninja or Capcom character action game, but someone who has jet boots on, who with the tap of a button can do an Armored Core style side dash.

It really feels like...

It reminded me a lot of Vanquish, if you ever played Vanquish.

100%.

I think there's some of that here, I think.

And there's a lock-on, which I think is pretty important for the way that melee feels in this, you know?

Yeah, especially once you're starting to try to do some Dark Souls-style parries and stuff, which you can do with shields, which I find really fun.

I haven't tried any of the shields yet.

I need to try some shields.

You gotta get a shield for a boss fight later because it has a move that will either you will it will drain your repair sprays if you don't have a shield.

Okay,

it'll drain them with a shield even, but it'll drain them way more if you don't have one.

Okay,

I will keep this in mind.

But yeah, so like you, you have now built a character that is melee-focused.

What are are your you four weapons?

You have

six weapons total, potentially, because you can have a shoulder weapon and then like an auxiliary.

Yeah.

What are those?

What are those in your current exosuit build?

So yeah, I've got

also this game, by the way, is another of the gray, blue, purple, etc.

Yellow.

Oh, it is.

It is a loot game.

And in fact, even inside of those color schemes, weapons will have different versions and different versions.

different different it is a random role-ass game.

It is a game of like, oh, I really like this swords move set, but I wish it did a little bit more whatever damage, and you might find one that does it, or you might find the like blueprint to make one that has an A ranking in, you know, basic damage value or an attribute, attribute damage rate.

Better fire rate is like the better fires on the lookout.

Exactly, yes.

I really like, um, I really like something that has like high flinch value because it means you can kind of stun lock a tough enemy, you know?

There isn't.

I don't know if you've gotten this move yet, cuz we'll get into how you unlock these abilities in a second, but there's one called harvester scythe for the the laser blade where you basically supercharge your um it uses some of your your femto particle meter um

uh yeah it supercharges like like it's like the limiter's taken off your your laser sword basically and you do this big wide aoe swing and that every time i hit with that it feels great wiping out a wave of enemies in one hit is like the coolest shit ever I was gonna tell you the move of that type that I use the most and then remember it is literally a monster hunter move which is helm splitter helm splitter is great helm splitter I have on my sword helm splitter is a long sword that is to say katana move from monster hunter really explicitly explicitly is the thing that you build to in a long sword build you're like building up heat on your sword and then you cache it in with helm splitter um and it's and it's the move in this game it is a sort of uh jumping uppercut spin

like crash down with the weight of the blade behind like it's exactly helm splitter so more points in the this is uh exosuit monster hunter uh case you know just posting a thing of the hanger in our chat because you can kind of see the like base stats in there and kind of figure out where i'm building yes i see i see b variability a brawling which is your melee stuff yeah b shooting d mobility.

I'm surprised that's not higher.

I think I might have changed my armor a bit

recently for some stuff to some heavier gear.

This looks sick as hell.

Yeah.

I love all posting this in the show notes.

You can change your appearance.

This isn't accurate to what I've got equipped necessarily, but it is.

Yeah, because this has the thing of you can equip.

Once you get a type of item, you can kind of put it as a skin on anything else you equip it with.

Which is very funny in contrast to something else which we'll get to in a second yes

um i so in addition to the two swords um i've got uh so i've got like a blue laser sword and then the rest of my weapons my shield my physical damage sword and the assault rifle i have because you do need to have a ranged thing just in your back pocket um

They're all purple.

I just picked up this cannon that I have on my shoulder.

It's not a laser cannon.

It's like a pink cannon.

It's just a shoulder cannon.

The shoulder cannon is so fun.

great uh especially when you're holding down dodge and doing the sort of like like slippy movement i don't know how else to describe it it's not quite like you're dashing it's like you're

sliding around on the ground like a bottoms mech or like a um

yeah you're kind of just like you said slipping slightly it's like it's like skating almost yeah

There's a lot of mech stuff that has that type of movement in anime.

And some of it even in heavy gear mechs do that sort of slipping around.

It's really, again, it feels almost like ice skating around your enemy.

It's nice.

And yeah, so I, and I've been running midweight

on my, on my mech, mostly.

My, my, my, sorry, my arsenal.

I'll use the proper terminology.

It's your arsenal.

Because it's not a mech.

No.

It is a slightly bigger than a person-sized exosuit.

Yeah, and you can also make it so you're not wearing any of your suit except for your shoes.

Like, you don't, like, like in appearance, not necessarily in equipment.

And it's really funny.

You could, like, have just your head poking out as if you don't have a helmet on.

Or you could just have the boots that lift you off off the ground by an extra couple feet.

And there's like a boss that has that look going on, and it's really funny.

Is it a member of this group, this fucked up goth evil group that shows up?

Yeah.

Who the second I found out I was part of, I was like, okay, I need to make my character look more like a member of the goth evil group.

If I used to be part of them, like

I was going to be edgier.

Oh, no.

You could have been formerly edgy, and now you're done being super edgy.

The problem is, they gave me glowing eyes as my first mutation, and I was like, well,

oh, it was your first mutation.

Mutation.

Because I think this is the other big thing with this game, besides the move to a smaller exosuit,

which I have kind of, you know,

I love a mech, and I do think that this feels distinct.

I don't think this feels like mechs anymore.

And so I'm trying to take it at its own.

You know, I think partly a nice thing about it is Armored Core exists, and they are not chasing that directly anymore.

Um, and so I'm happy that they're doing that, but I know that in my heart of hearts, part of me would be having more fun if there was a mech, but I do think that they have taken extremely seriously the fact that mech stories are almost inevitably about bodies, um, because of the second thing that they've added, which is this mutation system you're talking about.

You said that your first mutation was that your eyes changed color.

How do you get mutations in this game?

So, what you are who doesn't doesn't love a little gene splicing?

This was in the first game too.

You could upgrade your...

So your character is called an outer,

which is sort of like the

new types.

It's kind of they're like a different type of new type.

You know what I mean?

It's like, oh yeah, they're people who are born with like

with like a reaction to the the femto particles, which are this like little thing.

But because of that, you're able to extract these factors, these gene factors from...

I'm getting another screenshot of this.

From the immortals that you fight, as well as from when you fight the Noin.

They'll have special ones for the bosses.

And so you'll go onto this menu here, and depending on what you have, you'll be able to activate your

whatever amount of genes you have.

You can collect a...

I have a my lab upgraded so I can hold up to seven slots right now but like you think you start with four and that limits how many you can get at a time

and what that does yeah what you've pasted for us here is like a list of yeah it says genetic combinations and there's like yellow green and red little boxes that are all tied to different it's like sk1 factor or sk2 sk2 compound factor which are these are drops you can get from the monster enemies spread across the world basically basically.

Yeah, and then what that lets you do is that will give you things like the harvester sites, that move I mentioned earlier, as well as I'm gonna post just like the full

equip screen too for you guys.

Um, so you can see how mutated I am.

I mean, this to me is the thing.

It's cool.

The mutations, you don't happen to have a picture of what you look like to begin with, right?

Yeah, I do.

I posted that many screenshots and games and character creators.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so Sylvie looks like a vampire.

Yeah.

Like a Talonous

vampire with

like a rock vampire, like a chitinous

spiky cyber vampire.

Also a cyber vampire because you have like, you have like,

I would like like cybernetic or like technological.

That's what you looked like at first?

Yes, that was me right after I got my glowy eyes.

And then this is me after I got a few more mutations.

And then eventually, when I got these big shoulders, I couldn't wear my big fun cloak anymore.

So I had to change,

and my hair and the glasses didn't work, so I had to change that up.

And this is the thing:

if you want to get access to harvester scythe or increased mobility in your body, in your physical body, illusion resistance, things like that.

Right, things like that.

What it says to you is, all right, if you're going to ingest these jeans, is it going to change your body, okay?

It will overwrite.

it, it will overwrite whatever you're doing.

You won't be able to wear the clothes you're wearing anymore because you're going to have these bony spikes on your shoulders, okay?

Yeah, and you go, oh, but this is all it says is like, we're going to change your back and uh, maybe your face, okay?

And you go, okay,

I really want harvester scythe, so I guess okay, yeah, and then the screen fades to black and you hear some science sounds, uh, and then you come back and you have giant bony shoulders or uh huge, you know, red scars all over your your body.

My scars, Sylvia, are like twirly and like swirly a little bit.

I'll take a screenshot and

they're fine because they look like a circlet.

They do.

That's really good.

Those go all the way around and they glow a little.

To me, I think it's really clever how this is something you cannot control.

Whereas with your exosuit, with your arsenal, you could just go into the customize menu and be like, no, let's put on the, we're going to literally put on the dragon hunter face on top of the goliath stats because this is just a tool that i put on on top of myself um which is like an interesting

there that that juxtaposition is doing something with the relationship between humanity and tools the relationship between technology and flesh it's like playing in that space and is uh you know giving you really powerful things that are immutable and that are changing who you are visually um uh and and taking that control away from the player is a very pointed thing to do in a game that, I don't know for you, but for me, opened with me spending an hour in a character customer.

I would say at least

half of my time in this game has been spent doing character and arsenal customization.

I had to like, because usually, you know, you design a mech.

I design my mechs like a sports car.

I try to decorate them that way.

You have to change it up when you're doing an exo suit.

Now you got to decorate it like you're a race car driver.

It's very different.

It takes a lot of time.

A lot of effort.

Yeah, 100%.

But the character creation stuff is really interesting because they also do say, like, you can revert this.

It costs a lot of money and you will lose all of your bonuses.

Yep.

But you can do it if you want to go back to looking the way you did.

Right now it would cost me 220,000 credits.

Any guesses on how many credits?

I have 114,000 credits.

I thought it was going to be a way lower number.

I guess I've been stacking up credits.

If you've done Coliseum stuff, you can get busy.

That eventually is like 30 grand a fight.

I have 4,000 credits right now because I've bought a lot of things.

Something expensive.

280,000 to get my body reset, which is,

you know,

as a trans woman without health insurance, I can relate to the exorbitant prices of these cosmetic surgeries.

Well, I think that's part of the thing that's so fun about this is part of what's being pulled at here is

you're making choices to desire.

You are making, there are two different things happening when you're fusing your body with the monster genomes,

which is you desire a certain sort of outcome visually, or either, I guess you could do it visually.

You could be like, I want the outcome that produces the sick bone armor, or you could say, I want the outcome that produces my ability to do a level three helm splitter.

And those things are held in tension with each other.

And the beauty of the machine is you choose whatever you want.

That's like the world-building vision that they are doing.

I'm not saying the beauty of the machine.

I'm saying that that's like the reality of living in the world of Demon X Machina, and that produces interesting tensions.

And

all the people in your fucking base are just

humans who have not done that.

And so you were like walking around your base, at least the part of the game I'm in, where you're like, you're just like a person who has like,

you know, spikes coming out of your shoulders, and everyone else is just.

Jim.

Just Jim is here, you know?

Kyle.

Kyle is right.

You mentioned Kyle before, and I'm like, who the fuck is Kyle?

I can't send you the Kyle thing.

I might send Jack the screenshot.

Jack, do you plan on playing this?

No.

Okay, I'll send you this screenshot I took today, which is really funny to me.

This game goes in more directions, like textually doing stuff about bodies.

I don't know if it sticks the landing or not.

Yeah, I mean,

who could say?

They definitely get in the game.

It could say.

Yeah, they get more into

what's going on with the outers, what's going on with

the process of becoming an immortal things like that.

Yo, here's you can see me from early in the last two shots and then now where I'm at, which is again weird red swirly

like

I have the shadow of the box art logo.

I have the shadow of the hedgehog box art logo all over my body.

I'm jealous.

You can see I started like, oh, I'm going to be this like very crisp, clean, you know, all white, white and lavender, white and purple, you know uh and it turns out no no you're not not for long buddy i think you can change the color for commutations i don't think i'm gonna do that but but yeah exactly that is about it so um so yeah i think that that's really interesting and i think that there is some

i think that there is some some um

I like the letting go.

I like being unable to.

So much of

the monster hunter style thing is like, oh, I want to grind out a new look for myself.

And I think having a part of the game where that is a less touchable produces a really interesting friction, I guess is the thing that I would say.

I'm just like really happy to find out that it isn't just like a single track of the mutation's like appearance.

Like you getting a different like sort of like glowy skin mutation than I have is more than I like expected, honestly.

Tied to so there's the three different colors of genes.

Yes.

And I think those stack and eventually

change which mutations you end up getting.

That's my assumption, too.

Now, I just like, it makes me want to wipe my stuff and try to get some stuff.

And try some other stuff.

Yeah, totally.

They're generous with the save slots, you know?

They are.

Yeah, you can absolutely just load a save and see what you get, you know?

Yeah.

I

don't want to get too into it because I don't want to spoil too much, but I would love to talk a little about the story of this game and the like super like

hardware.

What is going on?

It is.

Okay, you know what?

Jack, I'm going to post this opening crawl, and you can read along with me.

And

the viewer or the listener can enjoy a dramatic reading of the first thing you like see in this game, basically.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Oh, this is so funny.

I don't think you should do this, but I also think you should do this with every game you make.

I feel both those feelings simultaneously.

I kind of love it.

You want to read it for us, Jack?

Oh, sure.

I can read it.

Humankind on the red planet sought to expand their reach, colonizing the blue planet and modifying its environment for human habitation.

283 years passed.

The blue planet sought independence from Earth Prime.

Thus, with two sentences in, we've hit semicolon and thus.

Thus began a war that lasted 76 years.

At its conclusion, the two planets forged a non-intervention treaty.

All interstellar travel between them was halted.

A defense system was put into place, including orbital elevators and monitoring satellites made to repel any invaders.

Voices for a new world echoed across the blue planet, Semicolon, voices that would shape their government.

But an anomaly appeared in the world.

People born with innate special abilities caused by the femto energy used during colonization and the war.

These beings were designated non-human and called outers.

Femto energy would change countless other creatures, turning them into aggressive organisms that would come to be known as immortals.

Outers were rejected by society, comma, their cruel treatment widening the rift between them and humanity.

And so came the Great War, 369 years after colonization, bringing with it revolution for the outers, who enacted a strict military regime through the sovereign axiom.

The three supreme leaders of the Axiom, dubbed the Trinitas, separated the ground, the home of humans, from the garden, the aerial paradise the Outers called home.

The humans who resisted the rule of the axiom would take the title of Reclaimers.

It's worth mentioning that after that's on screen, some of these words that are red are left on screen while the white ones fade out, so it just says red planet, outers, immortals, military regime through the sovereign axiom, the Trinitas, the ground, the garden, reclaimers.

Reclaimers.

Wow.

This game sometimes feels like I'm playing a Cohit and Cambria album, and I really like it.

Yeah, yeah.

It does have that energy.

There's like...

They're not at all

trying to be restrained.

The planet you're on, they'll also call hell with one L.

I think they've referred to the garden as heaven.

I've seen the Trinitas now.

Those are some real prog metal motherfuckers.

They are the three supreme leaders of the Axiom.

I do have a screenshot of those guys, but Austin, if you would prefer, I don't share it.

No, put them in.

I want to see.

I want to see.

I want to see.

I only

have a couple of them.

Jack, can you guess who they are in my mind?

The Trinitas?

Yeah.

If I had to summon a trio of characters who are like the super powerful leaders that no one likes, but like kind of hold everything together.

Well, it's the damn Holy Trinity.

Right.

Vivek.

Saw the sil, and Almexia.

Yeah.

The tribunal.

I've got the tribunal.

Oh, look at these motherfuckers.

Yeah, I didn't guess

the girl on the left.

It's worth noting that when they speak, their faces don't move.

It's very, if anyone's seen the anime ergo proxy with the the sort of city council of statues it's very reminiscent of that

we also have a sort of cyberpunk cenobite thing going on

that is the vibe a little bit yeah yeah um

when i read a thing like that um like this opening crawl it feels a little bit like um

ink bleeding through a tissue or something where like I'm sort of getting the story but I'm getting it like by capillary action.

This game feels, honestly, like, like Austin said, you don't know your character's backstory until you've put some time in.

And even then, I'm getting flashbacks that, and I'm like, oh, okay.

And to be clear, it's not because your character has amnesia, it's because the game has made the developers have made a very specific, determined choice to detach you from your character.

You know, they could have, you open this game by escaping a facility from the sovereign axiom.

And it's clear that you're betraying them in some way.

But my read on that situation was that you are like a new recruit who doesn't want, who's been like birthed in the tank that produces outers or something.

And you are like, no, I'm getting out of here with my buddy.

And that's how it kind of plays out.

And then, you know, a couple of hours in the game, this is not the stuff that Sylvia and I are talking about about like you having a backstory and you're being tied to the noin in some way is not a deep game spoiler by any means.

means it's it's kind of a setup thing but like you can do hours and hours of side content knowing nothing about that you know and then you get like five missions in or whatever and your character starts talking about their relationships with these npcs and it's like where the npcs start talking about their relationship with you yeah is really what happens it starts with stem doing it and it's really cool yeah it's really cool and i think that that is also um you know in a in a it's another way that i think it separates itself from armored core which is would be a really clear comparison is like oh it's actually really interested in the particular identity of your character and the previous relationships that they have.

Armored Core 6 is very much about a body that gets thrown into a body and a mind, I guess.

They get thrown into a new context

and that has very little, you know,

is basically a living corpse from the moment the game begins in some ways.

And it's by a great deal of effort that new connections are built.

And here it feels, as the game progresses, very much like you are someone trying to escape some old connections and they're catching up with you.

The thing that's happening to you at the beginning of the game is going to turn you into what you described the Armored Corpus 6 protagonist as.

Right, right.

Yeah.

And I think that's like a really conscious choice.

Your character has a personality in this.

Your character is kind of an asshole.

There's not that like you can agree to help people, but you're never really that nice about it.

To be fair, some of those people are fucking assholes themselves.

Oh, don't get me started.

Ash is a mess.

Ash is a piece of shit.

Yeah.

He eventually warms up to you, because of course he does, but he's a prick.

Yeah.

So yeah, Jack, to your kind of question of like, what is the story actually?

There is a big, bad, super-powered military that is like being resisted by a group called the Reclaimers, most of whom do not have the powers that the Outers have,

and who live on the ruined blue planet, which is mostly red now.

I believe this takes place on the blue planet, right?

I think so.

I'm pretty sure because because the blue planet seeks independence from Earth Prime, the red planet.

And now that this is where the

garden hangs above the ground, I think that we're on the second planet, not the first planet.

That would make sense.

They're still throwing new proper nouns at me, so I'm still kind of like,

there was something called like the endless trigger that they talked about in a cutscene, and I was like, okay, guys, can we

just 2025?

Sorry, divine trigger.

Divine trigger.

Oh, the divine trigger.

I see.

I see.

Yeah, extremely funny.

And I mean, I think this game has all of the qualities of like,

it's rare that I play something and I go, oh, this is making a whole new coterie of freaks who are going to be furious that no one respected this game.

Yeah.

For a decade from now.

And then people are going to come back to it and be like, oh, this actually had some really cool ideas.

And, you know, it's a shame that it got overshadowed by X, Y, and Z.

By Silk Song.

I mean, that is, it came out on the same day as Silk Song.

Literally, yeah.

It's a real tough one for this.

I had been very

stop moving your games out of the way of Silk Song.

I didn't say this anywhere, but I've been thinking about it in my brain: like, come on, are we really like,

I get it, especially if you're making something that's comparable.

And then I

saw the day one Steam

concurrence for that game and went, yeah, okay, well, okay.

I kind of get the fear at least.

I don't know.

You have a note here in our run-of-show about side quests, and I want to ask about side quests.

Yes, please.

You sort of, you gently said that you don't know that the open world super works for you, and when we kind of moved on to talking about like that as a production

thing, I'm curious about

when I think about games with lots of side quests,

of a particular kind of side quests, the thing that keeps coming up for me is like Xenobate Blade Chronicles, where when you play Xenoblade Blade Chronicles, you go and you're given like 45 side quests

that are all just like, get the fox's tail 26 times.

And it's not even quite a fetch quest.

It's more like it resembles something a little closer to what you might think of as like Destiny Bounties back in the olden days, where it's like you go out into the open world and you just play the game and side quests are kind of like completing as you are playing and then you get to a town and you pick up another bunch of side quests.

Is that the kind of model that they're going for?

Because it feels like that could dovetail pretty well.

That'd be great.

Monster Hunter feel.

Yeah, that is not what they're going for, Jack.

Really?

Um, the structure of this game is very:

you have a single

the point of the game I'm at, you have a single base of operations that is like your hangar, and it's also where you do the genetic stuff,

where you upgrade your arsenal, where you get your ice cream, all the normal stuff.

Um, and then the rest, you go to like the counter that's there, like the center hollow table thing, and you

select side quests there.

And

they do all get activated in the way that you're talking about, but they are all more in the

like Yakuza style, go to a place and then the mission starts when you talk to an NPC there.

Yeah.

Or like that style of thing.

And most of them are...

God, you know, they remind me of...

What do they remind me?

They remind me of,

you know, an era kind of long gone

inside of the, I guess they remind me of other action RPG type things where it's like you go, you talk to an NPC who says, I really want to see you fight with these custom, you know, knuckle punchers.

Can you kill enemies for two minutes while wearing these knuckle punchers, these knuckle dusters?

And then you do that, and then you turn it in, and then, you know, there's a little gag, you know, oh, this character is like trying to become a famous photographer, or, oh, this character loves playing this card game, which you can play and teaches you how to play the card game.

Prototype side quests, like for the game.

This is a fucking Xbox 360 game.

I was thinking about this the whole time I've been playing this.

It's like, if this hit on the PS3, it would be my favorite game of the world.

100%.

This is that era of game in that way.

You know, it's a game that's carried by a structure of fair, not repeatable quests.

There are some like go-kill 13

dogs or whatever um or like you know another another ongoing series of quests is like hey come back wearing heavy armor so you can lift these canisters and move them um and that's not fun

it's not have you gotten any of the race side quests because those might be the worst no i have not got like superman 64 in an exosuit oh i don't i do like flying around though and that's i love flying that's a problem with this is like the movement's really good i like being able to fly i like it when they give me a weird motorcycle.

I like that you can be on an exosuit riding a horse around in this game.

Yeah, there are horses you can ride.

That's cool.

Horses or light exosuits?

Mutant horses.

Mutant horses.

Very strong, then, yeah.

Very strong.

Very, very strong.

Yeah.

You don't kill them and get their genes.

You just ride them.

No.

So far, at least.

They're your friends.

They are your friends.

So, like, that's the sort of it's the world because of this largely feels empty.

Um, you're outside of, oh, look, there's a super boss that you can fight for parts.

I can go there to the fast travel point and do that.

There's some like very light, very light strand-like stuff happening where other players, you or other players can build like restock bases, like resupply bases around the world.

Um, and sometimes you'll come to one and be like, oh, thank god this is here.

It can repair me and I can, you know, buy more healing packs and stuff.

Uh, and it'll be like, you know, James built this.

And you go, oh, thanks, James.

That's, thank you very much.

But that's it.

You know, it's not like the whole game is not built around that concept.

Right.

But I haven't seen anything else that you can.

I can't, you don't build bridges or tunnels or anything, right?

Sylvie, it's just the supply bases.

No, as far as I can tell, it's just the supply bases.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's funny because it's like...

Because that's the sort of structure.

Jack, you were describing like, oh, then you go out there and you play the game.

It isn't that, it can't be that sort of game because partly because you can fly.

So, like, you know, if you think about a game like Xenoblade, Xenoblade Chronicles series, even Xenoblade Chronicles X, in which you eventually get a mech and can fly with the mech, though that's very late game, the game's level design is structuring your play experience, right?

So, let's say in something like Xenoblade Chronicles X, you get a mission that's like, go kill 12, you know, uh, duck birds, ducks.

How do you do that stuff all the time?

All the time.

Right.

Or go get the, you know, 15 of this one flower type.

Okay, well, where's this flower type?

Yeah, uh, grow.

Okay, it only grows in this one plateau, and between you and that plateau is an area that's like a little higher leveled than you.

So you have to kind of like sneak your way through that zone, or you have to grind until you're strong enough to get through that zone, or you have to find maybe there's another way that you can go above it and drop down onto the plateau, and that's a further distance thing.

And also, maybe you have a mission to go kill seven of the triceratops dogs that are up there or whatever i like these creatures you should use them in perpetua uh they're in uh xenoblade chronicles x already so i can't really do that uh triceratops dogs that's a real one basically i mean they're all they're all just like chitinous dinosaurs that also

you know i like that game a lot but come on um uh in any case there's like that's the sort of and and because the level design is structured such you're going to walk through the place place.

You're going to have to engage with the enemies in that way.

This is like the Breath of the Wild design.

This is like that style of open world design.

It's also part of, it's one of the ways you can make an MMO mechanically introduce tension to an MMO.

You can hit, in this game, you hit A twice, you hit X twice, and you're flying.

And then you can zip around at hyper-fast speeds.

This game feels sometimes a jack like Anthem

in terms of flight, the flight model a little bit.

That's the type of exosuit maneuvering you're doing.

I think it actually feels better than Anthem, especially in melee combat, because it's built for it more.

But that is the sort of maneuvering you're doing.

And if you played Anthem, you also know it does not really support that style of play because you are not constrained to the various hallways and tunnels, dressed up though they may be of a well-designed open world that you are like, oh, I'm visually stunned by the vistas and stuff.

Here, you're you're hitting double you're hitting x twice to jump or to fly and then you're flying from point a to point b and ideally you're like oh i have a fast travel point that's only 30 seconds away from where i'm going and invariably this is what happens when an mmo gives you mounts or gives you a sparrow in destiny and i mean even the sparrow in destiny feels more i don't know maybe i'm wrong about that sylvie do you feel you know what did you ever have you played destiny i played destiny yeah okay i think even the sparrow in destiny because it's on the ground, means that you end up encountering enemy resistance or whatever on the way, such that you have to

even bumping into an enemy feels like it is contacting an enemy.

Even if you're just charging through them with the sparrow, there is a sort of alienation that happens.

Yeah, a little bit.

I think what's happening is it feels like you can fly above the world and you can.

And then you kind of dive bombing down into the world.

They're like, okay, well, now I'm over here.

And in some ways, it's like, outside of of the fact that you're burning femto energy while you're doing the fast flight, and it's fine, just hit some crystals on the way, just hit some crystals on the way.

Um, it doesn't necessarily feel like you aren't just loading into a level, you know.

It doesn't feel like you're traveling.

Maybe, maybe this will change as I get more into the second map, but like I've seen so much of the first map, it's like I'm not,

I don't feel like I'm discovering anything by flying from point A to point B.

There's some mining spots because you can do some mining.

Sometimes they'll, I think, I do like is that they will put like like destroyed

like arsenals from from some many of them are just like pre-baked into the game, but sometimes, especially around the boss arenas or the boss areas, you'll see other player bodies that you can loot for like a grenade or like usable consumables, which I think is really cool.

That part I think is really cool.

But none of that I feel like is necessarily

couldn't be done with tighter monster hunter style like zones or something like that.

yeah i think the only thing time i've really uh thought the open world was doing something that wasn't just like me

like a little bit of ooh fun to fly now and avoiding enemies is when uh you can restore these beacons that give you like a little like glimpse of a map the map and then you're you're search for something there and you can get some like really good gear off those and that that is kind of like the most i've felt like that stuff is cool this is working for a purpose outside of just the treasure map style stuff that you might find in other open world games.

And that stuff's fun.

I'm always a sucker for that sort of thing.

That stuff is fun.

But otherwise, yeah, I do just kind of feel like I am boosting from mini-dungeon to mini-dungeon.

And it's a shame because there are things I do like.

You know, a thing I like partly about the thing you were just saying, but that reminded me is you can do like the scan pulse to see if there's any chests nearby to loot or any, again, any like destroyed arsenals to loot.

And sometimes you'll be flying past like a destroyed skyscraper that's you know like just laying down on an angle it's still super tall up uh super high up and so you you scan you you know you get a ping up on the 40th floor or whatever and you kind of have to like fly up and look for the way in to whatever the open door is you know the open uh like like side of the wall that's been blasted apart in whatever war happened here a hundred years ago um and that like feels pretty good like that scratches the itch a little bit you know

I will say part of part of the thing that I think I'm missing from the first game in terms of the arsenals previously being mechs instead of these exosuits is the scale of this.

I do think that part of what I part of in that first game, you could leave your mech and just be the outer, just be the person running around in a small, like a version of this exosuit that's less complex.

It's kind of like they combined those two things in this game.

And I really liked in that first game sometimes being knocked out of your mech for a little bit and being like, ah, shit, like, look how big the world is compared to me.

And there are still giant monsters here that I think actually emphasize that scale a lot.

But the not having both scales to look at that world in, I think, I wish I had to get on a motorcycle as just a person without my suit sometimes.

That would be really fun to me.

It's weird too, because they have like an HP stat for your outer, but that is mostly just like your armor has run out, and if you take three more hits, you're done.

Totally.

And as opposed to being like a thing where you can get out of your suit.

I have not seen this myself yet, but in promo materials, they have shown that there are times you get into an old-style mech.

Yeah, I've been biting my tongue because I just unlocked that.

But I don't think it's a, correct me if I'm wrong.

You don't get to customize that mech in the same way.

You get to give it a paint job.

Okay, so you don't get to build the mech in the same way with the part systems and stuff like that.

The way the super move is.

yeah, it literally is.

You're filling a meter.

The way that they talk about it makes me think that there are other ones you might be able to unlock eventually, but I also could be wrong.

That's interesting.

Yeah, I'd like to see that, but it's it feels like a distinct, I don't know.

Yeah, I think part of the open world might feel better for me if I was engaging with it in two different scales at once, if that makes sense.

But yeah,

I'm gonna keep playing it.

I have waited a long time for this game.

In many ways, it is stylistically

the game I wanted from to make Armored Core as before they made Elden Ring, and I decided, like, oh, no, it's okay.

They've already made their big open world game.

I don't need them to make Armored Core like that, you know?

I'm happy to have them actually make a level-based traditional Armored Core game.

That's what I want to see in the world, you know?

So it is a little, it is a little like Armored Souls.

It's what people have been posting about for a while.

Nintendo hired this man.

Nintendo did hire this man.

Exactly.

So yeah,

I'm going to try to stick with it.

I'd love to see some of this later stuff that you're talking about.

It's cool.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to see it through.

All right.

Let's take a break.

When we come back, we'll talk about strange antiquities.

Jack, what's going on in Undermere?

Oh, it ain't good.

It ain't good.

It wasn't good in 2022 when Bad Viking released Strange Horticulture, which was a game about running a horticulturalist shop, like a plant shop.

Smaller than a nursery, bigger than a farm stand.

You were a shop that sold and cultivated a variety of plants to people in the English town of Undermere who needed them as a variety of sinister goings on.

And you won't believe what's happened in 2025.

It turns out that the shop Strange Antiquities, a antiques shop, although it is perhaps better described.

No, it's not an antiques shop.

It is a Thaumaturge shop.

And Thaumaturge is magic about objects.

This is an important distinction kind of in the game.

You are not an antiques dealer so much as a magical objects.

Explicitly that.

So this is not someone wanders in and says, oh, I'm looking for a gift for someone and you happen to give them a cursed ring.

This is someone says,

I need like a cursed ring for

my evil, for the cousin I hate.

For my evil, and yes, and you say, I've just got, I've got just the thing.

Except, of course, you are not the proprietor of the shop.

The proprietor of the shop, Eli White, begins the game by saying, I gotta go out of town for a couple of days.

Unnamed, unbackstory, ungendered protagonist.

Essentially me.

Good luck, have fun.

And departs.

And of course, as is the way of all of of these things, it's when Eli White is away from the shop that things in Undermere, a small seaside town.

It's not tremendously clear where Undermere is, but I'm getting sort of like East Anglia vibes.

And so, what this game ends up being is it is a

like a person puzzle game.

You've almost heard

this game.

Yes, a person puzzle game like Papers Please, or or like Little Guardsman or That's Not My Neighbor or Mars After Midnight.

These are games in which you play as a person who usually has a job, be that a border guard or a

weirdly often it's people in positions of institutional power.

And a person comes to greet you and gives you a puzzle that is sort of discreet and bounded to their appearance.

They will show up and they will give you a puzzle that is something like, you need to check my ID, or they will be like, figure out if I'm an evil monster masquerading as your neighbor, or sell me a cool piece of horticulture or an antiquity.

And you have to complete this little discrete puzzle around sort of them as a person, and then they leave and a new person arrives with a new puzzle for you.

Can you walk us through a puzzle, an early puzzle, so that we understand what you mean here?

Because I think looking in from the outside at strange antiquities or even strange horticulture, I think that the instinct might be: oh, this is like

a game about buying and selling stuff.

This is a game about

finding

the right cursed ring or the right, you know, evil rabbit foot, evil, unlucky rabbit foot to give to somebody or whatever.

It's a little bit like that.

But in my mind, I think there are definitely people who've talked, I've seen people talk about this game casually as if, or not this game, but horticulture specifically, as if it were closer to something like uh story of seasons grand bazaar or um or moonlighter or any of these other shop running no type simulations or even something like uh mortician's tale or something like that uh yes it is it is a great grave keeper grave gravekeeper digger grave grave yeah

or or on the other end of the horror spectrum mortuary system like a giant right mortuary system graveyard really water is what i was is what i was looking for graveyard keeper anyway So what happens is you are a first-person static camera, the game is 2D, looking from behind a shop desk at a customer.

On your side of the desk, there are sort of like shelves built around the desk, are a very large number of unlabeled strange objects.

These might be things like a pendant that clearly has a living eye inside it, that when you move your mouse around, the eyeball follows your mouse.

It might be

a weird little sucklet with four gems inside.

It might be a twisted tree with a kind of chalk symbol carved onto it.

The game gets so much mileage out of like what weird objects look like.

Also on the desk is a scale, like a set of scales,

and a book.

Let's say two books.

A person arrives and they say,

Oh my god, I have got to deliver a talk at the university tomorrow.

And I am so nervous.

Please, I need an Adenum's tongue to help me deliver my talk better.

And you're like, shit, okay.

Well, let me see.

There's no timer.

They just stand there, sort of looking at you.

And you go and look in your book under the desk and you go, you search down and you see Adnum's tongue.

And you get a little

paragraph that says like Adnum's tongue

Adnum's tongue is created by an alchemist to encourage people to be able to speak better it fills people with a sense of confidence the Adnum's tongue is associated with the moon and also makes a strange whispering sound if you listen closely to it sometimes it is depicted in the style of an animal that is famous for speaking like a fox or a magpie or a crow and you're like hmm okay have I got anything that looks like a okay i have to look around your the nook my own shop of the right there's like facing theoretically i guess so you know the person who's at the front desk can't see what you're looking at you're looking around the sort of like um the alcoves and the what's the phrase what's the word i'm looking for cubbies your little cubbies your little cubbies filled with a little deer statue that's been carved and a little tree and you're like is this the thing that this guy just described to me or the book i guess described to you?

Yeah.

Because none of them are labeled.

The guy who runs the shop doesn't label any of the important magical stuff.

He's been doing this for,

you know, his whole life, and you've been doing it since Tuesday.

And so then you go, okay, well, let me pick up the object.

And when you pick up the object, you get a little series of sort of filters, which let you tell you what material it's made of, or what the sensation of touching it feels like, or what it sounds like, or smells like, or my favorite, what sort of a vibe it gives you and sometimes you pick them up and click on the give me a vibe and the character says I have nothing to remark and sometimes you pick it up and the character's like oh my god I can hear voices

or like I've got an awful feeling about this and you give it to the person and they say great thanks and they leave now of course as the game which takes place over several days continues, these get more and more complicated.

Sometimes people will show up and they'll say, I have to go talk at the university tomorrow and I'm scared.

Give me something.

Give me something.

I don't know the name of the confidence booster drink.

Yeah, and so the and so the

you're now looking through the index of the book for like Z for confidence.

Okay, no, there's nothing for confidence.

Let's do S for speech.

That's right.

Ah, blast.

Sometimes people will show up and ask for something that you know is wildly inadvisable.

Someone might just show up and be like, I gotta go kill that guy.

And you're like, I don't want you to go and kill that man.

Your sister has explicitly told me to not give you something that you could use to kill that man.

Is that because the sister has come in the shop and been like, listen, my sibling's going to come in later?

Sister shows up and is like, Jemima's going to arrive later.

Do not give her.

Yeah.

And then you're given some options.

You know, you could give her the thing that she will use to kill the man, or you could give her something that, you know, will...

will not work.

And there's like a choice and consequence system that is playing through.

This game is a scripted story that you play over 16 days.

Each day is more than one visitor.

Yeah, there's sort of like five or six.

Okay, cool.

And it is no spoiler to say that very early on,

something very sinister starts happening in town, and that sort of becomes the focus of these 16 days in the same way as, you know, Papers Please gradually develops into a story about the Revolution or the Rebellion.

And in addition, you start meeting recurring characters.

You know, someone will arrive who's lost their sight and will say, Can you give me something that could help me learn to paint?

And

you give her something, and then three days later, she comes back and she's like, This is great.

It's all going very well.

And then two days after that, she comes back and says, Something odd is happening.

And it kind of starts to unfold mechanically that way.

Where the game gets really interesting and enjoyable is that there is another layer on top of this beyond sort of helping the customers and figuring out the meta story.

Is this tied to the thing that reminds me the most of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective?

Yes, sort of.

So underneath your desk, you have a series of, well, first you have a map.

And this is a map of Undermere.

And if you move your mouse over it, you can see that almost every block of Undermere is highlighted.

And at the end of every day, your character will be given a hint, hint, sort of

from the universe.

These hints do not come through diegetically,

nor are they sort of explained away as a dream.

After the end of every day, you are given a card, they're called clue cards, that might have something on like,

I'm making one up, that might be something like, um,

I sleep soundly beneath the moon.

And you're like, shit, okay, I'm gonna open up the map.

I'm gonna go to the park for that one, Jack.

And you open up the map, and you go to the park, and your character says,

There's birds, but there's nothing here.

And you take a little bit of damage.

And then you look at the map and you're like...

Damage.

Wait a second.

Why am I taking damage?

I'll get to this.

Because it's like.

I'll get to this.

I'll get to this.

You're like, oh, there's the observatory that's got a big statue of a moon on it.

And you click it, and your character is like...

I went to the observatory and climbed to the top and I noticed that there was something on the ground there.

And you pick it up and it's like a weird little pendant in the shape of a moon.

and you take it back and you put that in your shop.

Oh no,

wait, do you how many do you

so?

You get the clue card.

Do you then get the whole can you keep making you're gonna take damage if you go to the wrong place?

Is that what's happening?

Yeah, so what happens is your character, this is like a very gentle mechanic.

It is clearly not something they want you to worry too much about.

But wait, if I need the moon pendant for somebody on day two and I don't have the moon pendant yet, what happens?

I believe

that

i have not found an instance where someone has asked me for something i can't give them okay interesting

so i think there is gating at work uh in terms of who the customer who shows up to be what you have in your inventory it's less a puzzle about get the things in time and more a puzzle about like find the right

stuff which opens up the possibility that you can get on the branch that brings you to the person who needs the moon pendant.

And if that's the case, if you can get them, then that maybe leads you to a different ending scenario or something.

Yes, possibly.

Hard to say.

Because the other thing that is happening is that you notice really quickly that your shop has a bunch of weird shit in it.

The thing that this most reminds me of are the like fireproof games, The Room,

which are about interacting with objects.

There's also a lot of blueprints here.

I don't know that this game was released.

This game was released recently enough that I don't think it is directly inspired by Blueprints in this way.

But in the same way that Blueprints and The Room both have a real deep fascination with like uncovering secrets in an environment that you have grown familiar with,

you'll be playing Strange Horticulture, and you will notice that there's like a button on your desk.

And when you push the button, a little...

cubby hole pops open and inside that cubby hole is space for a key and you'll go hmm what okay hmm now what uh and the game is still progressing.

You know, you're like, okay, now I have more customers to serve.

And then someone else is coming in and going, I'm itchy.

Do you have anything for itchy?

Yeah, and I say this not because it's timed.

This game does not have a timer other than the sort of the structure of the day, but more that there is never a moment where the game says to you, now solve the puzzles in your shop.

You are a shopkeeper who is also at the same time like working through a layer of environmental puzzles around you.

And this is exceptionally rewarding, especially because you sort of start to get little hints of them early on.

You know, your beloved reference book will start talking about a particular way to do thaumaturgy, and you'll be like, I don't, I can't do that.

And then four days later in the game, you will uncover a thing that lets you do that, and you'll be like, oh, I was there all along.

And of course, Eli knew how to do this.

You know, this is his shop.

But I didn't.

And so the parameters by which you are being asked to interact with these objects are kind of constantly shifting and the weird surprises, the weird sort of like treasure hunt surprises that you are looking through are constantly being expanded in ways that are really, really enjoyable.

That rules.

That sounds great.

I need to try this.

Well, I think that this is part of what making a game about objects lets you do.

The previous game was about plants.

And I think that

while you can go real far with fun fantasy plants, and that game really does in terms of like fun ways to interact with plants and tend plants and think about plants.

I feel like games as a medium are kind of really tuned into objects.

It is an objects medium.

Most often those objects are weapons and equipment.

But I feel like...

When you are playing something, you're almost always in conversation with like, what does it mean to interact with interesting objects that I have collected?

I think that it lends itself really well to the media.

Sylvia and I were, you know, an hour ago talking about the Dragon Slayer armor that you're crafting by getting parts from the whatever.

You know, we're playing Perpetua.

We're playing Fabula Ultima right now on the mainline front of the table

show.

And that game is a sort of

emulation in design of JRPGs from the 90s and 2000s.

And a lot of that is about itemization and objects.

And like, thinking a lot about how do you tell a story about the world?

How do you develop characterization through object?

All of that stuff, I think you're right, Jack, is a key part of what games, I mean,

you can take another step further, right?

Which is like inside of the coding.

Object, the object is an important thing about what makes a video game go, you know,

in key ways.

You could also maybe tell a story about processes or a story about configuration.

You could talk about games as configurations,

as as some academics do.

But I do think that you're right, that the object is potent inside of the video game

because of all of this, the possibility that you're talking about here, that like objects have qualities, objects can move, objects can be a place and then be in a different place.

You can examine an object.

It can be a different thing than you think it is.

That's right.

You can grow familiar with it.

It can have a like a

its image can hold a kind of power in and of itself.

One of the first things you see when you load the game is a locked cabinet that contains a sort of hooded bird skull before you even pick up that object.

It is conveying something to you.

And I think about how well players tend to respond, and I am players, me pointing at myself, I am players.

I think about how well players tend to respond when

the breadth of what an item or an object in a game can do is wildly expanded.

Think about whenever you open a shop in an RPG and you see that, in addition to selling swords, they're also selling you maps.

Or think about when you open up your inventory and look at an object, and the flavor text of the object says four numbers are scrolled on the back of it.

That transforms it into a very different thing.

And perhaps, in the most prosaic sense, think about the way that Fallout 4 and Skyrim make their loading screens about turning over and rotating objects simply for the pleasure of it.

And this game goes wild with that.

You know, almost every way you could play with

strange items in a game gets explored.

Well, because it's a game that's just about the items.

It gets to not be about raising your strength score.

Not that Skyrim has a strength score, because they got rid of that in all of their wisdom to make it more approachable.

They got rid of stats.

But, you know, you still have to make it about increasing your sword stat and then unlocking a perk and then doing a quest for the Thieves Guild or the company.

Oh, you have to kick kick the shit out of a spider you gotta kick the shit out of a spider in this game you just have a little statue of a spider and all of the mysteries contained therein and you can devote the the developers are able to devote time to like this the spider statue and and what's everything we could do with the spider statue and at first it plays very similarly to strange horticulture where someone shows up and says i need to go talk at the university this kind of thing would happen in strange horticulture and you would find them a berry that gives you confidence you'd give them baja blast you give them baja blast right Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You'd make them the Baja Blast potion with the Baja Blast berry.

And for the first three or four days of the game, I was a little disappointed because I was like, well, plants and objects are very different things.

And

but what you seem to have made is strange horticulture, except you've just swapped out all the plants for objects.

Well, and there's almost something retroactively happening there, Jack, that's like, oh no, the plants were only being treated like objects to begin with, is what it sounds like.

Right, yes.

Except what ends up happening is that after day four, once they are sure that you understand the rhythm of working the shop, they get straight into why objects are interesting.

I mean, plants are interesting for similar reasons, but I think you can get right into like, what does this thing feel like?

Right.

What does this thing remind me of?

How is this thing deployed historically?

Right.

You can say all these things about plants, but you can map them so much more clearly to stories about objects.

This makes sense.

It's a great time.

It's also

scary.

It is not a horror game, but it begins with a kind of

twee

horror that you think is going to be whimsical.

And I don't mean that pejoratively.

You think this is going to be,

you know, like dark mysteries, cozy mysteries.

And then people start fishing bodies out of the water

with like black eyes or

people

start having very strange visions.

People start using things called diverging hooks to claw away parts of their mind.

Oh.

Can I

you got one

for me?

I do have a divergent.

Well, actually because I need one.

I'm here.

I'm at the counter.

I'd really love to claw away parts of my mind.

The diverging hook looks like.

Well, it's probably a hook.

Or maybe not.

Or maybe it's not.

I don't think it is because I think I have it, but I don't think it's a hook.

And the way the game, you know, gradually commits more and more to a like MR James or HP Lovecraft, like

really starting to dig into something is very seriously wrong here.

Interesting.

It's really enjoyable.

Sounds great.

I'm looking at some gameplay and being like, I want to solve these mysteries.

I want to click on these objects.

I want to smell.

This sounds great.

This eye pendant.

I want to put

the statue on the scale and see how much it weighs.

Oh, yeah.

Strange horticulture is really good.

I really liked Strange Horticulture.

So if you're here, these games are

I want to play this one.

They're very explicit in the description on the thing where they're like,

it says, Strange Antiquities is not a sequel, not a direct one, at least.

And I know, I know they're saying that so that people buy their new game for $19.99 instead of buying their old game when it's on sale for seven bucks.

However, I'm going to take them at their word.

I suppose what I'm saying is

there is more of this good

studio doing good work.

Right, I see.

I see.

Yes.

And I don't want to undersell Strange Horticulture by saying the better version has come up.

I see what you're saying.

This is a game by Bad Viking.

And for the record, Strange Horticulture is $15.99 right now.

And this one is $16.19 because it's on the 10% off early sale.

That's on Steam.

I think on Switch, it's probably the full price.

I think it's on Switch also.

I think.

I think I saw it.

I think so.

Yeah.

So it is on Switch.

Yeah.

There you go.

KB's playing it on Switch right now.

Here we go.

Any other final thoughts on strange artifact or strange antiquities?

We gotta get back to San Fiel at some point.

We have got to get back to Sangfiel at some point.

I don't know.

I think there is more to say about like

this game is drawing very clearly from like British colonial

thinking, not so much in the sense that the game kind of like

consciously sidesteps, we got these artifacts from strange foreign lands or whatever.

But at the same time, when we still have, you know, the artifacts are from England for the most part.

But when you have characters say, I have to go research something at the Bodleian Library,

which is the library of Oxford University, you know, this is like situated right within a kind of

English like collecting impulse.

And I think there's a lot to say about the way the game plays with that and kind of fumbles aspects of it.

Or perhaps more specifically, kind of avoids talking about it.

Which is sort of a fumble

in a way that, for instance, I think we've complained about steampunk as a genre for ages, right?

Which is like...

It's one thing, it's really bad to like be, to be, to valorize the empire, right?

Um, and and to make make it feel grandiose, but it's still not much better to simply like have Victoriana

ascendant, uh, you know, aesthetically, and pretend like uh hundreds of years of England's history were not built on the back of colonial uh expansion and and

uh you know looting

right so um

yeah

and i'm curious to see how that plays out as i as i

play more of the ways.

You know, a very clear, close comparison here is, of course, all the Fall in London stuff, which has always to me felt very engaged with, not maybe not always, but has often felt engaged with Britain as empire,

insides and outsides,

conquests and,

you know,

collections in that way.

Yes.

I think on some level, it is a more complicated piece of writing to do for a wide audience, which I don't say to be like, so they shouldn't do it.

But I think that on some level,

a player base is more equipped to think about

criticisms of the British Empire sort of broadly than they are to think about like the imperial history of objects, which is, of course, central to the imperial history.

But when you're making a game specifically about objects, the post-colonial critique would have to be about, or would be best served, by being about the physicality of

the collection of empire,

which is a more specific brush that you need to paint with than, saying, for example,

doing the sort of the greedfall thing, right?

Of like

empire as explicit colonial expansion.

Yeah, yeah.

The second game's out, that's that greed fall game's out.

Uh

they have done they've they've they've they've they've they've made you would you believe it this time around you are not part of the empire.

Oh, okay,

which was which was which was yeah, we don't have to get into greedfall.

I talked about greedfall on a podcast once already in my life.

I don't need to do it again.

Yeah, you've put in your time.

I put in my time.

I played a lot of that game, actually.

So, anyway, I haven't played,

I couldn't get past the premise.

I did my best to.

They sent me code and I said, I'll do my best.

You're telling me you're taking it seriously.

So,

I want to touch a couple other things quickly, just to flag them as potential future topics.

One, I'm going to do these in backwards order.

I played some that No Man's Sky's Voyagers,

which is the most recent update to that game.

That game is good again, actually.

I know that that had been the wide belief about that game for the last three or four or five years that they'd fixed it.

And I've always been someone who's like, I think that they've made some really great changes and they found a great audience.

I'm not that audience because I miss the simplicity of what the game once was.

I, I, to this day, to my grave, will be a no-man's sky at launch.

Not a defender, because I know why people don't like it, but I liked it at launch.

I had a great time with it at launch.

I knew what it was at launch, etc.

Um, I didn't have my expectations were very

close to what it was.

Um, and as it's gotten more complicated, and I don't mean here bug fixes and the addition of new creatures and better world generation, all that I would have loved no matter what, but especially the move towards multiplayer uh base building, etc.

Um, I have been like, this game isn't for me anymore.

They've gotten to a place where I feel pretty comfortable with all of the loops that are there.

That I have had a really good time going back to it over the last couple of weeks.

The new thing in Voyagers is building Corvettes.

I maybe they call them something else, but it's like No, I think they do call them that.

Yeah, it's like Millennium Falcon scale ships.

It's like ships the scale of the Starfield ships.

Bigger than your default freighter, shutter, fighter, shuttle,

et cetera, explorer-type vessels, but way smaller than the giant freighters that you can get.

And I really like the shipbuilding, and I really love the loop of going out to find new parts for the shipbuilding.

And I love having a little home that is your moving home in your little Corvette.

It reminds me a little bit of playing another space exploration game, sort of Starbound, which I was a I played a ton of that in early access and then fell off for the launch as always.

But really loved the ship customization in that.

I really took a lot of joy in that and I'm really enjoying it here.

Sylvia, have you put some No Man's Sky time in?

Is that right?

I put some, yeah, no.

I hadn't played No Man's Sky for a very long time when I got back into it.

So I have bare, I like, have barely scratched the surface of the new stuff.

I have to, because I played it on PS4 originally and I got it on PC this time, I kind of have been going through early game stuff again.

Yeah.

But I am really enjoying it.

My favorite thing in that game, I play that game like

a dad with a beat-up car in the garage.

I'll like find a ship and then keep it on my freighter.

And my goal is just, I just want to repair this thing.

Hell yeah.

It feels good.

I named them after Steely Dan song.

Literally, my main ship right now is the Deacon Blues.

It's great.

Oh, it's a great name for a ship.

That's a great name for a ship.

Do you drink Scotch whiskey all night long and die behind the wheel?

Yeah, you know, you should see me pie.

I drift in that motherfucker.

This is like, we've talked about maybe streaming that, and if we do, like, I can't be a prospective person for it because I fly first person and do stupid dogfighting maneuvers for fun.

I love this, actually.

This sounds great.

I i want to like no man's sky so much

um i think that the premise is great i think that their art direction is really fun i

i have a lot of respect for the work that they have done on that game i find it so

i have a strange feeling when i see these incredible updates and i load the game yeah and I have to mine carbon.

Yeah.

And

the sort of the immediate gut response to that, which is the response I have had and tried, is like, well, turn on creative mode.

No, that I don't think you've created that anymore.

I really don't think you do.

I think that they've made some quality of life improvements.

A phrase I don't really love that much.

I think that they've made some streamlining improvements, changes.

For things like, for instance, you just carry so much more shit now than you used to be able to carry.

And so,

and there are ways to like mine from the ship

that are

now well documented inside of the fandom.

And so, what you it's less likely that you have to go mine carbon, and more maybe that you have to like go watch a seven-minute video about like getting into no man's sky or read a you know, a little guide on the Steam Guides page.

Uh, because a lot of the stuff that I think was you're still getting carbon at the beginning of that game, but I think that part of the thing that I didn't understand the last time I tried to come back was how much has been done to prevent that from being the primary

verb that you're doing, for

you know, you can get away from that way quicker than you used to in a way that I feel like.

That is something I noticed coming back to it as someone who like skipped a bunch of these expansions and then had to start fresh is like, I am further along than I really ever got, is how it feels.

Yeah.

Like, I've got the freight system like humming in a way that I never really did.

I've got like

you got ships coming back with stuff for you.

Yeah.

You know, Jack, you know that they have the Assassin's Creed Brotherhood assassin missions in this game now, right?

Where I send out my game, I send out Rodrigo

and Carlotta

and Ignacio.

Uh-huh.

And they go and take out a Templar squad and they come back and they say, I brought you, he had so much copper.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

Except that it's like...

Except it's uranium.

Yeah, it's like the SVG,

you know, silver lining and it's returned with all the uranium you'll ever need.

Or for Sylvie, it's the fucking bad

cow.

Right, exactly.

Yes.

Exactly that.

I think that that stuff is, Jack, to your point, it is still a crafting game and it's still a game about that.

There's another thing that we can do that isn't craft, that isn't

creative mode.

And it's me and Sylvie can come give you a bunch of carbs.

We can build a little, we could take a little portal to you and

just give it to you.

The other day, I took off in my Corvette and I could hear a weird noise.

And do you know what the noise was?

It was a guy who got on my ship with me.

A human player?

A human player.

Oh my God.

And I went home.

And then I landed and let him off and he ran off and he waved and left.

You didn't have to figure out what weird language he was speaking and then take him to Dantoine?

I did not have to do that.

No.

Thankfully, no.

No, I did not need to do that.

So you boot up no man's sky yeah what do you what do you spend one hour doing you you said you like getting ship pots i don't know the news the new thing is like this corvette system that has like uh again you're kind of doing uh like a top-down lego brick style like these two pieces can click together uh like build mode for for for this stuff um you find those pieces in the wild on planets that have certain types of salvage available and so you're like hunting around for those those on the planets.

And you're also, I mean, do you know what has the Xenoblade style missions, Jack?

Is this game now?

Because you go to a space station and they say, hey, can you go get us seven pictures of deer?

Or can you go kill four sentinels?

Or could you go recover some old writing from a relic on this planet for us?

And you go off to do that.

And along the way, you're doing all the other stuff.

I think that structure has changed quite a bit in a way that I think is really good.

I think we should do a a stream.

We should do a stream that's like, are you going to have fun with this?

You know?

Yeah.

I think that'd be a good idea.

I think the thing that happens is when I push my right trigger and they say, you don't have fuel in your launch thruster.

I know.

And I say, well, go fuck yourself.

I'm going to bring you a piece of technology where you never have to worry about that again.

My launch thrusters are always recharging now.

Wow.

You know, I got a ship.

I got to ship.

Well, my car.

Yeah, the fuel crisis has been solved.

The fuel crisis, but I don't build the car.

Let me tell you.

I don't build the car.

I don't build the mech.

I don't, and that's the part that's changed.

Is when those other updates were coming, I was like, well, the new thing to do is to touch the car.

I got to build the car.

I got to build the supercar.

I got to build the mech or the other mechanism to build a submarine.

I got to build an underwater base.

Something about having the spaceship that is the base has fixed this for me because it feels like I'm not ignoring the base building, which has been such a big part of it.

Sylvie, did you see the one that was like the Verdant Island?

The base that was someone that was

posted that in our in our chat somewhere, right?

It's got to be in the season.

It's not ringing a bell, but I'm sure it's somewhere.

Yeah, I thought, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I put it in Realis is where I put it, our Realis channel.

I'll put it in.

Oh, God, it's so good.

It's really cool.

I've not built something like this yet.

Mine is a piece of shit, but I like it, and it's mine, you know?

This is someone who has basically built like an ambulatory island.

Oh, I do remember this.

You know what this thing reminds me of?

Outer wilds.

It's outer wilds.

Exactly right, Jeff.

Yeah.

This is also a little Xenoblade 2 to me.

It is.

Yeah.

Just replaced the thruster with an old dragon.

Yeah.

And that's your grandpa.

That's your grandpa.

That's your grandpa.

What a game.

Yeah.

So yeah, I think this game is in a pretty good place.

I think it's really fun.

I'm downloading it.

Thank you.

I'm glad.

And then very, very briefly, because we talked a little more about No Man's Sky.

One,

Trails in the Sky first chapter.

I'll have more to say about that later at some point.

What is Trails of the Sky?

Can you just tell me what it is in one sentence?

Is it RPG?

Trails in the Sky is Trails in the Sky is part of the Kiseki JRPG series from developer Falcom.

Yeah.

That is super long running.

That has a bunch of branches and alternate

sub-franchises inside of the same setting and world.

Each one is a long,

character-full and character-filled JRPG.

I would say that they are my understanding now from playing some of this and also from talking to people, and even historically, these are games that

live and die on character relationships

and often a certain tone of deep sincerity.

These are games with blue skies and characters who are rivals coming to become friends and

the importance of family and the importance of freedom and

doing

side quest after side quest and gaining a reputation as an adventurer

and running across the hills with your with your friends and sometimes making a boy put on a dress.

They do that in this too.

Oh, they do that in this too.

Like famously.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

Joshua gets that dress on.

And

importantly,

and I think that, you know, I was trying to explain this to Janine the other day.

I sent a screenshot of just the

like the mini map.

And I will send you the same, the same screenshot here.

And I, and I said, I think this is what this game is about, actually.

And I'm sending you the screenshot.

I'll put it into our side story channel.

Here it is.

It says, enter the bracer go at the bottom.

And then it's a little mini map.

It has like the compass, the north on the top.

And then there are a number of little dots spread across it.

Some of them are yellow.

Some of them are gray.

Do you see them?

I do.

Yes.

Guess what the yellow dot, what the yellow means, and what the gray means.

So my first thought is an NPC you can speak to.

That is very close.

You can speak to all of them.

The yellow ones are ones who have new dialogue since the last time I spoke to them.

Yeah.

And that's the game.

Does this game also have the like notebook?

So I've played the

Trails of Cold Steel games.

I haven't played Trails in the Sky, which is what this is a remake of.

But that has a notebook that will fill out with little descriptions of these minor NPC games.

I don't know.

I just have that.

It might, or I might not have even unlocked it yet.

Trails of Cold Steel has a, like, you're at a school, which makes it, I think, make a bit more sense that there's characters that are recurring.

You're like meeting your classmates.

So it might not be in this, but they really love doing the like this NPC will have something like

a new line of dialogue that moves along their very inconsequential storyline that I've seen.

We've systematized it so you'll know.

So you will know and you will not have to run

everywhere in this game.

In this game, that is.

Yeah.

The little yellow dots mean they got something new for you.

I love that.

And I think that's the game.

And when I say updates, like I want to be clear, in the tutorial, everyone in town had something new to say at every phase of the tutorial.

Walking into the city for the first time before you go and like get your tutorial mission, after you get your mission, after you're back from your mission, after you turn in your mission.

And like, if that sounds bad to you,

I don't think that that's the, I think that's the juice.

I really, I mean,

you can probably disregard that and focus in on the MP, the major characters, the party members, and their relationships to each other.

I don't want to say it's the whole thing, but I do think that that's part of what makes it distinct is that it is not the JRPG style game where you're running around the town and you get everyone saying one thing once and it's the same thing the whole game through.

It's it's that everyone is you know you go into the little house and there's a kid who's like all right dad I hope you have a good time at the mine today and then you go back you know after you've taken your mission and the kid says

I hate how often dad has to go to work.

I hope he'll be home early today.

And then you come back the third time after you've completed your mission and it's like dad is back and he's like, and it's like, oh, he brought a gift for me home from the mine.

I'm so glad.

you know?

That's the type of gift.

It's a diverging hook.

It's a diverging hook.

This will help you clear out the part of your mind where you miss me when I'm at the mine.

There's also like, I feel like both of these are really pleasing to me in like large scale, both of these two approaches, right?

Because on the one hand, it is really lovely when you talk to the kid and she's like, you know, mom's going to come back from the bakery with a cake.

And then later she's like, I got the cake and do you want some?

And that's great.

But it is also so good during an 85-hour game where the guy says, I love the blacksmith shop every single time you go.

You go to the blacksmith's shop.

And it's not equally pleasing.

They're both very fun.

And, well, I guess it's just like, I think part of what's happened here is this is this is a series that has

it is, I'm a writer, and so I don't want to diminish what we do as writers.

However, we are fairly affordable in the grand scheme of games creation.

It costs more hours.

If I say,

I got you this gift, it's a beautiful candlestick.

I can write a thousand of those in the time it takes someone to model a beautiful candlestick.

I can give a lot of people work very easily if it's the type of game that requires you to actually produce the beautiful candlestick.

And so I think one of the things it's leveraging is it's fairly affordable for a small RPG company to make dialogue and to make that feel like the game is full of life in contrast to let's compare it to something like the Ubisoft open world model which requires a huge amount of motion capture and character animation for

space right like guy playing hacky sack in the in the park I'm like let me tell you what if you want a woman playing hacky sack in the park No, sorry, you can't.

They are going to say you can't because it costs too much, you know?

You should have told me that two and a half years ago.

That's right.

If you want a woman in the game.

Also, I'd have said no then.

For other reasons.

So yes, like that's the...

Whereas the writer can simply have a character standing in the park going, I sure do love playing hackiesack in the park.

And you go, oh yeah, my brain is filling it in, you know?

And so I think that that's part of how the series got here.

Trails in the Sky first chapter is a remake of that first game.

And that's the other thing that I'm very curious about as we go forward is, as I go forward with it, is like, we live in the era of Final Fantasy VII Remake,

which, for better and worse, is interrogating its own lineage and history and like playing with what the idea of putting the word remake is on a game and the line between a remake and a reimagining and other things, right?

And I don't get the vibe that that's where this is going.

Yeah, I would not expect it.

And I think that that's interesting and good.

I'm happy to just get to play to meet these characters and spend time with these characters.

I've bounced off of Trails in the Sky before, I've bounced off of Trails of Cold Steel before.

But I think I'm in the place where I'm going to try to put some time into it and see how I feel about these.

The vibe for this very much felt like it's time for us to try having another coming out party for our big series.

Fully does feel that way.

Because

the original came out in 04.

It's like 20 years old.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The also, like, famously, the Falcone game was mostly just available like, on PC and then later, like, PSP.

So, I wouldn't be shocked if they're just playing it straight and up-rezing it.

I think that makes a lot of sense.

You know, am I going to become someone who plays through all the Trails games?

Probably not, I'm sorry to say.

There's just so many.

The Legends of Heroes series is

so big.

There are five Trails of Cold Steel games alone.

Yeah.

I think there's like characters from those games who are still resolving their plot lines in

new games.

That's wild.

Or in Trails...

What's it called?

Trails of...

Trails Beyond the Horizon is the most recent in the continuity, as far as I'm aware.

How close are we to the end of Legend of Heroes?

Oh, I got no idea, man.

Like, it feels like Legend of Heroes to me occupies the same space.

Like, saying that is like saying, when does like

what's a long-running soap opera?

Like, when, like, when does that end?

Like, when does Days of Our Lives have this big series finale?

Yeah, I've also just realized Legend of Heroes is even bigger than just the Trails games because Legend of Heroes has two other previous sub-games that ended in the 90s: the Dragon Slayer series and then the Gagarve Gagarve series, Gagarve, Gagarve, and then Trails started with this and then has been running since 2004, like you said.

So,

yeah well there you go and then finally I put a little time to silk song I think that probably needs way more time

sorry what's I never heard of it is a you know what a Metroidvania is

oh yeah yeah yeah Castle Troy Castletroid a okay so picture the

adventure game

And then picture the regular animals like cats and dogs and maybe even the smaller animals like mice and squirrels.

Make them much, much, much smaller and kind of harder.

Yeah, okay, so it's like Cave Story.

Well, sort of.

They're very, very tiny, and it's like their skeletons on the outside.

It's good.

The music's incredible.

The music is incredible.

I like the dive kick that you start with.

I know that you, and I'm at the point now where I have a number of different styles, like combat styles, but I really like how different Hornet feels.

I really love tools.

You get these kind of like Bloodborne style.

I was literally gonna say Grug love

tools.

I love tools.

Have you heard about these tools that you do things?

You know, you get like you start with like a shuriken style like knife that you throw, but like eventually you're getting things like

I really love this thing that you kind of like throw out and it hovers in the air and becomes like a spike ball that if an enemy hits it, does like repeated damage against it.

It makes Hornet feel like Batman, you know, like, oh, I have this set of gadgets I'm bringing out for the different, you know, oh, for this fight, I really want to bring out the triple dagger, or I really want to bring out the spear that gives me like this really good arc against it or whatever.

Um,

really interesting build stuff happening in that game, uh, in a way that I, I know that Hollow Knight had with

some of its stuff, but I feel like I'm getting to it way quicker here.

I'm, it's, it's, I'm at the point now where I'm like, ooh, this, this fight is kind of a pain in my ass, but what if I took the combat style that let me heal when I did damage when I'm in my like super mode?

That could get me through this thing because this one phase is so hard, it hurts me so bad.

I don't have time to do the traditional heal.

So, if I can do like the combat heal, that'll heal me more.

And that's just like that's good, that feels distinct.

Good job.

Yeah, Hornet speaks.

She's a really funny character.

Hornet's very funny.

That's a huge note.

Yeah.

She's like an actual character.

She is a princess who is very, very confident and also kind of like wistful.

and likes regular people quite a bit

and like is like cares, you know, is sarcastic sometimes, but very much cares for the poor pilgrim, you know, stuck on the on the journey up towards the citadel or the cathedral, you know.

The bugs sing,

and I, it is so good.

There's Sharma, who I'm sure you've seen.

You've seen Sherma.

He's like a little, he's like a little friend of mine.

Shama 985, yeah.

Sharma 985.

There's a map maker who who sings.

She's great.

I love how the map maker moves.

The way she brings her body down.

You know what I mean?

And like, kind of like...

It's not clear what kind of bug she is, but she's a sort of...

I mean, she's clearly not because

this means something in Hollow Knight.

She's sort of like a mantis.

Right, she's animation in those games is so impressive, by the way.

Everything I've seen is

so fluidly done.

Just before you move on too much for how things move.

It moves great.

It really does.

The boss fights are shocked.

It's something like that because she also does have shock rooms that she throws.

Oh, yeah.

She is like an extremely cool warrior lady who is

her senior warrior lady.

Yes.

Yes.

I got to play this.

She's really good.

I think you would like it a lot, Sylvie.

Did y'all see the Metroidvanias

are all Catholic or Protestant?

Yes.

No, I didn't.

So Blasphemous is Catholic.

I'll read the.

This is from

gave me powers.bluesky.social.

Good name.

Weird name.

Uh uh miss misanemi in 1997.

Uh here.

Great, great.

It says Metroidvanias are either Protestant or Catholic.

Castlevania, Catholic, of course.

Metroid, Protestant.

Blasphemous is Catholic.

Dead Cells, Protestant.

Hollow Knight is Protestant, but Hollow Knight's Silk Song is Catholic.

That's why people are complaining the game is hard, because it's Catholic now.

And that's also why sh why Hornet moves like Alucar.

That's right.

100%.

I do think, though, that Hollow Knight is Anglican.

It's definitely Protestant, but it's interesting.

I don't think it ain't Baptist.

You know what I mean?

This is interesting.

Shadow Complex is like a Protestant.

Oh, extremely Protestant.

Evangelical, I think, perhaps.

Yeah, I think so.

What about

the Lost Crown?

That is probably Protestant, even though it might seem to be Catholic.

Oh, maybe.

I don't know yet.

What's the lost crown?

The really good Prince of Persian.

Oh, the Prince of Primary Shape.

I also did play.

Really, really, really good.

I think maybe once we move to Persia, we have to maybe blow up the Catholic Protestant

binary.

I think we have seen the limits of the Eurocentric model.

Cave Story normal ending, Protestant.

Cave Story true ending, Catholic.

Oh, interesting.

Interesting.

I think that's how I divide that.

That makes sense to me.

What's that new one

where it's Dark Pac-Man?

That's called Dark Pac-Man.

What is that fucking game?

That's a Dark Enlightenment.

That's Shadow Labyrinth.

No.

No, I haven't.

I know someone who has and who loved it.

I'd suppose it's very interesting.

It is legitimately Dark Pac-Man.

I love it.

Listen, as someone who played that Bionic Commando remake, like, give me more.

Give me more dark old classic games.

What is silly enough?

It's in the canonicity, you know, that, right?

Oh, Pac-Man, yes.

All of the

yeah, it's like in the same way.

The canonicity of Pac-Man?

Yeah, it's in the canonicity of like Galaga and

all of those games.

Those games are all in.

I need to find the timeline for you.

One second, let me get it.

The Namcohai universe.

Yeah.

Yeah, here's the game.

I'm sending you a screenshot, but I'm putting it under a spoiler so that you can hit the spoiler and react when you want to.

Okay.

Oops.

All right.

I'm gonna

yeah.

Here's the timeline

coming through here.

As you see here, it starts with Ace Combat 3 and then goes to Cyber Sled, Cyber Command, Burning Force, and eventually you get to Galaxian and Galaga and all the other Galaga games and all that.

And then eventually,

yeah, you get the Dig Dug games are in the middle there.

They're 2382, obviously, which is a little bit before Mr.

Driller and Star Juster

and Star Blade.

And then this comes in.

I'm gonna doing a media club plus season about this timeline.

Shadow Labyrinth is in the year 3333.

It is the year 3333 of the perfect millennium.

That's right.

And Akhmer.

Actually, it is evil now.

Oh, it's good.

I'll play it.

There's too much to play.

There's too much to play.

I got to play Final Fantasy Tactics.

I got to play.

Yeah, it's a lot.

I'm playing.

I want to play Silent Hill F when it comes out.

I'm so excited for that.

I called a local game store today to see if they had it.

I called a local game store today to see if they had it.

I want to play...

But the other thing I really want to play, actually, is I want to play House in Fatimorgana.

I need to...

Interesting.

Is this why?

This is the result of you asking people about what the good visual novels are?

No, I mean, this is the thing of, like, I've been having so much fun watching Sylvia and Keith play

VLR.

and i've always wanted to play fatimogana and people talk about it with such i've heard it's very good like interest and

they're like oh this is something that you should probably play but it's such a time commitment which is you know fine um

i just need to i just need to do it you don't think you're going to play silent hill f and become a a uh when they crossio seven i also really want to play those but those are

way too

i i say way too long That's not what I mean.

I mean,

my life right now is very difficult when I'm like, I have to read a visual novel for 100 hours.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But I'm so curious about Ryuki Shio7 and seeing how his work

plays in a very different gameplay context.

It's fun.

And I'm also playing Dying Light the Beast, which is okay.

Oh, just okay.

I have to tell you, when you said Dying Light the Beast quickly, my brain heard prototype

the game that we referenced earlier.

Prototype 2, every three months.

Yeah.

You ever play that game?

You get to throw helicopters at people eventually in that game.

You do?

Uh-huh.

She gotta let you do that more.

I'm saying it every day.

Let me throw helicopters at people.

Let me just throw one helicopter at a person.

I get to pick the person, you get to pick the helicopter.

I'll figure it out from there.

Yeah.

I saw a helicopter for sale on Facebook Marketplace the other day.

And I'm sending you a picture of it.

I will not be buying this helicopter.

I'm excited to see it.

Shit.

Oh, I'll just send you the Facebook Marketplace link.

Is it still available?

Did the price come down?

I don't know if the price came down, but

I'll also embed a link here.

This is a 1972 Rotaway Scorpion.

This looks like

it doesn't look very good.

This it's all red on the front, and it's shiny in a way that to me.

Did y'all ever I'm a little older than both of you?

Are you familiar with the video game Virtua Racing?

No,

I know of it from

the car being in Virtua Fighter.

Sure, of course.

Virtua Racing was from this era of like early polygonal 3D games that Sega was putting out, along with Virtual Cop, the light gun game,

and Virtual Fighter, of course.

And everything is this kind of smooth,

untextured, you know, just color block style visuals.

And they're beautiful.

And that's what this helicopter is.

This was like a bird from Virtua Helicopter to me.

It looks like if a Fisher-Price car was a helicopter.

I will say,

I just searched 1972 Rotaway Scorpion, and this is its original 70s advertising.

It has the best slogan, which is take off straight up.

This looks like it's

coming out of Inspector Gadget's hat.

Go Go Gadget Copter.

Have you heard about

sport flying?

Did you know that you can participate in your own personal helicopter?

The Scorpion 2, T-O-O, is Rotaway's answer to Backyard Flight.

Oh, I just noticed that it's T-O-O.

Holy shit.

This is so dangerous.

Yeah.

You also have to build it yourself, and the build-it-yourself guide comes with a 25-minute 33-and-a-half vinyl

containing something.

I don't know.

I'm getting the IKEA aircraft.

Wow.

Jack Pellett is a professional helicopter pilot.

He built the Scorpion because he wanted to fly his own ship, quote, just for fun.

Jack says the Scorpion fully meets my expectations.

I

how is this not crashing immediately?

When Bill Rice completed his construction, he had his ship checked out by rotorway representatives.

Bill said, I took my time building my craft because I wanted it to be right when it was finished.

And it was.

Yeah, you better want it to be.

It's a helicopter.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

It needs to be right, my man.

Look at this one.

You don't get out of it if it.

Oh.

The great dream.

Oh, the great American dream machine.

I misread it as the great dream.

American.

The great machine.

Oh, that's way better.

It's way better.

The photo here is like an extraordinary piece of American visual like ideology.

You have like a middle-aged couple standing in the light of a bonfire.

The sun is going down.

Behind them is like a Joshua tree or some sort of small scrubby desert tree.

Next to them is their tent and an enormous

saguaro cactus.

And then right next to the campfire, its rotor blade, essentially over the flames, is the great American dream machine, the rotaway scorpion 2.

Oh my god, it's an everyman's house.

Is that what this can carry?

No, wait, what can I do?

I have all the assault blocks that I need to move.

This is actually great news.

Yeah, those are those missions from Demon X Machina that you have to do.

You're gonna carry the salt blocks and then do a weird game of death and like block Tetris in the hangar as you lay them out.

You gotta equip heavy armor or your great American dream machine.

That's right.

Now we know what's on the vinyl as well.

Here it says you will receive.

So, if you get the package, which hilariously is under the tagline, you've always wondered what makes a helicopter tick.

Have I?

You will receive essential information on how to judge the validity of the scorpion and gain valuable insight into rotorcraft operation and usage.

In addition to becoming an armchair helicopter expert, you will really enjoy the 33 and a third soundtrack recording of a Scorpion 2 as its pilot explores old ghost towns and gold mines on a flight through the Mojave Desert.

I love armchair helicopter expert.

Like, armchair coach is a positive thing people are called.

Yes, of course.

I really like the validity of the scorpion.

This is my new album.

The validity of the scorpion.

God, that was one of those like really great early period Sophion Stevens albums.

Oh, yeah, 100%.

The validity of the scorpion.

Yeah.

All right.

I think we've done a podcast.

I think we're allowed out now.

Yeah, we're free.

We're free.

I have to go talk about Knights of the Old Republic 2 over on a more civilized age in 30 minutes.

So I'm going to take a little break and then I'm going to get back to podcasting.

As always, you can support us by going to friendsofthetable.cash.

Reminder that you have two different Patreon codes you can use.

You can use Burn Thrones, all caps, all one word for $2 off the $5 tiers.

I should have said this clear the first time.

It's for the first month.

It is not an indefinite tier, you're not getting a $3 tier indefinitely.

I should have said that before.

$2 off the $5 tier.

Build tables 20% off your first month of the tiers higher than $5.

That's friends of the table.cash.

You can also go to friends of the table.shop to give us money for t-shirts and glassware.

And glassware we sell like we're selling bonks.

We're really just

drinking glass.

Stickers and other things.

Both will do you sell paraphernalia.

Oh my god, I need the Exeter leap pipe.

If only it's shaped like his head.

Just his head.

You're stroking out of his head.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're kissing him every time you do it.

Oh.

Please go listen to Media Club Plus.

The season on Edmund Shamalan's films are off and running.

And this is a safe place.

Next week, Lady in the Water.

I can't wait for y'all to get to that.

I am the person who is like, I think they're being too kind to signs.

So

I can't wait to hear how Lady in the Water goes.

I, yeah.

I didn't like saying I know.

You were being very polite and good.

I understand.

I understand.

And that's the right thing to do.

I'm glad I was not on that podcast because it's not fun to have one person on a podcast of three people who mostly like a thing just being like, actually, all the things you're saying sound stupid.

You're all, what are you talking about?

This movie is trash.

That's not a fun podcast to listen to.

And you have to restrain yourself and have good diplomatic critique, which is what you did.

And I don't think I could have looked forward to Lady in the Water.

I see.

I see.

Okay, Media Club Plus, go listen to that.

What else should we promo?

You can hear all the music from all of the shows at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Most of the anniversary streams, we mentioned this at the top of the show, but most of the stuff we streamed on our anniversary, including Wiki Arena, Chain Together, there's a VLR stream in there, those are up on our YouTube channel, Friends of the Table on YouTube, And

um,

Keith will eventually have the repo multi-cam edit, but that's a lot of work for him.

So please be patient.

It is, just look forward, watch the old one and look forward to it.

Um,

ah, I think, I think that's it.

I can't think of anything else.

Yeah, nothing else to announce right now.

Stick around, we'll be back in the future to be continued.

To be continued.