17: A Buffer Arm and a More Traditional Hammer

Speaker 1 What's good, Internet? It is November 25th, 2025, and this is not your 1990s one-bedroom apartment lit by the warm glow of your computer in the early World Wide Web.

Speaker 1 It's SideStory, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by friends at the table and supported by our patrons at friendsatthetable.cash, where you can get all sorts of bonus material, including our ongoing Outward Let's Play.

Speaker 1 We have been to two or three of the two of the second cities, like the follow-up cities from the first one. We have two more to go, I think, in our in our pilgrimage around the world of Outward.

Speaker 1 Janine has joined us. Janine is playing as a

Speaker 1 sort of mushroom person. It's going very well.
We are going to talk about some of that today. We're going to give it like a me and Jack and Genie.

Speaker 1 We're going to do a big update on how Outward is going and talk about it in depth. However, towards the end of the first segment that we recorded, my internet fell apart.

Speaker 1 Shout outs to Spectrum in New York, where they often have a monopoly on internet in your neighbor, in any given neighborhood.

Speaker 1 Not shout outs, in inverse shout-outs. Shout down,

Speaker 1 shout in, shout at. Don't shout at them.
Please don't shout at them. The people who man those

Speaker 1 social media accounts cannot do anything.

Speaker 1 In any case, instead of that, the first half is going to be as is.

Speaker 1 It's going to be me, Janine, and Keith talking about the root trees are dead and getting sidetracked into conversations about games that at some point in their development used AI.

Speaker 1 And then the second half, which I have not heard yet, Jack and Keith pick up the ball and talk about Clock Tower, the Clock Tower series of games, which Jack has been playing with their partner, KB, over on Cat Bam Kapow, KB's stream on Twitch.

Speaker 1 And I'm excited to hear that. I haven't edited it yet, so maybe I'm gonna hit play on that and

Speaker 1 Jack and Keith talk about something else entirely. And I'll have to redo this intro, but if you're hearing it, it means you can look forward to them talking about Clock Tower.

Speaker 1 All right, I'm gonna shut up and let the first part of this episode go.

Speaker 1 The root trees. They've died.
The root trees. Uh-oh.
The

Speaker 2 Can I tell you, like, leading into this, I was like, oh, I want to have like a, you know how sometimes you do your intro thing and then I do like a, that's what you think, Miss Austin.

Speaker 1 I see. But

Speaker 1 joke.

Speaker 2 And I was like, what can I do for this one?

Speaker 2 And I was like muddling around. I was like, I could ask, like, what's the most embarrassing thing a person in your

Speaker 2 like lineage has done.

Speaker 2 And then I was like, well, that's kind of mean because they might be, so I was like, okay, a person who's who's dead in your lineage, maybe something embarrassing they've done.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, that's the same answer for me, and I can't talk about it.

Speaker 2 I was going to say, I kept getting further away from the heart of it, but also no further away from the

Speaker 1 I don't want to talk about that on

Speaker 1 a podcast

Speaker 1 type thing.

Speaker 2 And then, and

Speaker 2 just now, I thought for a second that I had it, and I was going to blurt it. I was so close to blurting out:

Speaker 2 What's a relative you have who has died?

Speaker 1 That's a lot of them for most people.

Speaker 1 That's the same answer for me, and I don't want to talk about it.

Speaker 1 Fuckdads.com.

Speaker 1 Hi, the root trees. They've died.

Speaker 1 And you are here to pick up the pieces. Not really.
You're here to figure out who the fuck they were. The root trees in this phrase are a group of people.
They're a family.

Speaker 1 They are a very wealthy american family built on the back of maple candies uh and in this video game which is kind of this like database driven adventure game like her story or hypnospace outlaw or a lost phone or any of these other kind of like interface games um you know video games that have interfaces you know what i mean the games that like they're trying to

Speaker 1 model that are trying to based on you interfacing with another type of uh interface that we're already used to um you are playing a freelance.

Speaker 1 You're a guy using a computer, playing a guy using a computer. That's correct, right? You are, in fact, using a computer in 1998.
It's a 1998 computer.

Speaker 1 You're a freelance genealogist, or maybe an amateur genealogist, but with like a big reputation.

Speaker 1 And a plane crash has killed the most famous members of the stunningly wealthy Root Tree family.

Speaker 1 And you have been hired by a mysterious employer. She stands in your doorway and is silhouetted in order to hire.

Speaker 1 She hires you to like rebuild the root tree family tree via a list of names that she gives you,

Speaker 1 a library

Speaker 1 and a periodical database, and the late 1990s internet, which you can do a web crawler search for, and it gives you sort of summaries of web pages.

Speaker 1 This is not hypnospace outlaw where you're getting actually distinct web pages, but you'll like fun jingles. There's no fun jingles.

Speaker 1 There are songs songs that you download a couple of times. Yeah,

Speaker 1 but that's not

Speaker 2 Granny Cream's hot butter ice cream or whatever it was.

Speaker 1 You're right. That is an important distinction

Speaker 1 because that can't be right.

Speaker 1 I bet it's not. You look that up for me, or for you, really.

Speaker 1 But you're not, you know, yes, there is, for instance, the key to this is that the Root Tree family has the Root Tree Candy Company. And,

Speaker 1 you know, one of the first pieces of clues that you get is an old advertisement from the 1920s about their five-pieces candy pack.

Speaker 1 We take the hot butter, mix it with the ice cream, freeze it up, cool, you can see it on your screen. Put it in your microwave, make it real hot, like a soup or a dip.
We call it heat and sip.

Speaker 1 Very tasty and healthy, too. Granny cream's hot butter ice cream.

Speaker 2 Sorry.

Speaker 1 It is Granny Cream C-R-E-A-M.

Speaker 2 Yeah, hot dad. Granny Cream's hot butter ice cream.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Okay, double cream.
Okay, interesting.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 in that game, you could go to the website or the outer space site or whatever.

Speaker 1 What's it? Hypnospace site.

Speaker 1 And get like...

Speaker 1 explore the kind of minutiae and the mundanity of an internet filled with stuff as you try to like piece together stuff, piece together what a user is doing or posting about or whatever.

Speaker 1 But here, you just kind of get a it's a text-based game, right?

Speaker 1 You get, oh, you're on the website and you see an advertisement, you download an old advertisement that they have up in their archive, or, oh, you're getting a layer of abstraction.

Speaker 2 Like it almost feels summarizes it for you.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 2 It kind of feels like, because this is the thing that has, that bothered me about it, was like, that's not what internet searching looked like in 97 or whatever.

Speaker 2 But the way that I've sort of,

Speaker 2 because

Speaker 2 I should say, I haven't played through a whole bunch of this. I watched Awesome play some and then I've been thinking, which is, you know, a dangerous thing.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 But the thing that it reminds me, that it makes me think of is like, okay, maybe you are doing, you are actually doing the old-fashioned, like, searching a list of hotlinks kind of thing. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And the summary. That's described sometimes.
Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 2 And the summary is what your character is gleaning from that, but you are being spared the full effort of going through a long list to find, you know, five relevant words.

Speaker 1 Yes, that is exactly what I mean.

Speaker 2 And it's just being, it's presenting that information within the browser as if it is what the search, you know,

Speaker 2 it's a metaphor, isn't it?

Speaker 1 It is. Exactly.
Well, like, you know, a good example of this is like early on you start with this

Speaker 1 list of notable root trees with the note that's like, these are people you will definitely find information about if you just do a search for them online.

Speaker 1 And, you know, one of the early ones is like

Speaker 1 Red Root Tree. And it's this, I'm using this one specifically because it is a red herring.

Speaker 1 And it's just like, oh, yeah, you looked up this guy and you found some stuff on some websites about him. And he's from Europe and he did this stuff and he doesn't seem relevant.

Speaker 1 And like, it's three paragraphs or whatever, but it's three short paragraphs.

Speaker 1 But it's not like you're clicking through across a whole history page, which means that the writing gets to just kind of like. zip past this thing

Speaker 1 instead of being like, oh, we need to make a convincing whole fake history website about stuff that isn't relevant so that we can have you have a red herring early on or whatever.

Speaker 1 And it does that all the time, basically. So,

Speaker 2 even on occasions when you might actually want the full thing because you hit on something that's like, whoa, tell me more.

Speaker 1 Tell me more. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've written down here that you have these following tools. Tell me if I've forgotten something.

Speaker 1 You have a notepad, like an in-game notepad, where you can make notes and you can, you can tab them out.

Speaker 1 You have tabs that you can put the different pages into, basically. I guess really what it is, you have different pages, but they're kind of presented like tabs.

Speaker 1 Um, you have a highlighter where you can highlight anything in a periodical, a book, or a web page, or any of your kind of writing, your write-ups of images, like the summaries of images and stuff, I think, too.

Speaker 1 And you can hit the highlight button and they'll just drop it into whatever page is open in your notebook.

Speaker 1 Um, you have the search system where again, you can search the web, but you can also just kind of like highlight any text and then click on periodical search or web search or whatever, and that'll like drop whatever you've highlighted in.

Speaker 1 So for instance, if you want to like highlight the name Carl, you can highlight the name Carl and then do a spider search to check the web for people named Carl.

Speaker 1 And that's going to get you back like, yeah, dude, there's a lot of people named Carl. You got to be more specific.

Speaker 1 And then there's just like intuition and like context. And,

Speaker 1 you know, I think a really important thing for this is like, eventually you start getting pictures of a bunch of people across different generations of this family.

Speaker 1 And one of the big things I started to do was be like, oh, these two people are wearing glasses, or these two people have the same color hair, or like these two people look related.

Speaker 1 Like, obviously, they're all related. It's a family tree, but you start doing this sort of like visual context clues.
Or,

Speaker 1 hey, what's this person's job? Well, someone says at one point that, like, she's proud that her sister got a cool job.

Speaker 1 And that might mean that the woman writing this is probably a housewife, you know, or that sort of contextual. Uh, and also just historically, right?

Speaker 1 There's a real shift over time about how many housewives there are versus people, women having other jobs in this family. You find a note at some point.
Oh, it actually it's in

Speaker 1 Lauren Routries book. She calls out Gwen specifically as being the first Rutri that wasn't a housewife.
Exactly. So then you just go like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.
Housewife. Exactly.

Speaker 1 I should just say really quick, we're we're not going to like spoil anything big here, but we're going to have to talk a little bit about some things like that in order to just communicate what this game is.

Speaker 1 And it is kind of what we've just set up. You're trying to, when you, you have a family tree.
Each entry in the family tree has an image that you have to put in.

Speaker 1 It has their name, which comes from the list of names. So you, again, you have a couple dozen names, which is a huge advantage.
I don't think most genealogists get that.

Speaker 1 I don't think most times you come to them and say, no, here are 40 names. Put these in the tree for me.
You have to.

Speaker 1 Go ahead. This is like a

Speaker 1 weird contrivance for the game, which is like the person who gives you the family tree. Yes.

Speaker 1 Gives you the family tree and then says, like, can you really, what she's asking of you is like, can you get this right? Yes. Which is strange.
And it is addressed that it's strange in the thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, eventually there is a narrative reason for this that is given. That's kind of one of the big, I guess I'd call it a twist.
I guess reveal.

Speaker 1 I don't know that it's really a twist, but it's a reveal.

Speaker 1 And then, and then, you know, you have to also put their occupation down. So

Speaker 1 the game opens with these three sisters who died on this plane crash, and you learn very quickly that they were all like, this is what they are. This isn't like a reveal at all.
They're models.

Speaker 1 There are three models who are like very famous. They're kind of like young, teen heartthrob-ish, you know,

Speaker 1 kids who are all

Speaker 1 the Olsen sisters. They're what if the Olson sisters were part of the Hershey family is basically what this game is.

Speaker 1 And also, what if the Hershey family was like,

Speaker 1 I actually don't, we don't know anything about the Hershey family. I, you were, I don't know that you or I or

Speaker 1 anyone listening knows a fucking thing about the Hersheys. What if you did? What if the Hershey family was like, Yeah, what if it was also Disney?

Speaker 1 What if the guy who started Hershey was Walt Disney? Yeah, like in your imagination.

Speaker 2 This is like a thing that I realized, sort of Austin when you started playing it was like I would I would give some like examples of like oh, they're like so-and-so and then I realized like a lot of these examples that we are beyond the generation where they are living that in public.

Speaker 2 Um, you know, like it was really that was a huge thing like

Speaker 2 turn of this of the century of the 20th century like you go from like 1900s to like mid-century you have a lot of the heiress of the Rockefellers fortune yeah, the Rockefellers,

Speaker 2 but like, but, but even, even

Speaker 2 not like huge, huge families, but like ones where it's like they've put their name on a company, and like, you know, like, this is so-and-so of so-and-so.

Speaker 2 But, like, you know, this is, it's not, it's wild the degree to which people don't think about that stuff now.

Speaker 2 And the, the, like, big example would be that, like, I don't think most people knew that Army Hammer was related to the Arm and Hammer stuff.

Speaker 1 That's right. Yes, you brought this up and it went, wait, what?

Speaker 1 Until his whole shit blew up.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's his, his family is the Armin Hammer, and they named him Army Hammer, and no one fucking knew.

Speaker 2 Like, it's just, it's.

Speaker 1 To be fair, because that one reads like a joke.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's like you go like, Renee, Rule of the Arm and Hammer. He's like, yes, I am.

Speaker 2 Seagram's whiskey girls were until they got wrapped up in Nutnexium stuff.

Speaker 1 I haven't heard about that. Well, don't worry about it.
Sounds bad.

Speaker 1 It was bad.

Speaker 1 But, you know,

Speaker 2 it's like that fucking bullshit, TikTok, quiet luxury shit where it's like just

Speaker 2 enough generations have happened since the boom in the family business.

Speaker 1 Sorry. I've just learned something absurd.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 All right. Do you know what Army Hammer's grandfather's name is?

Speaker 1 Armin. Armand.

Speaker 1 Okay. That was close.

Speaker 2 I think it is Armand, but.

Speaker 1 Well, sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I've only ever heard it.

Speaker 1 Sudden to D. I didn't think that's the same.
Yeah, there was no D. Yeah, there's no C.
Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry. Sorry.

Speaker 1 He didn't found that company. That company was named Arm and Hammer 30 years before he was born.

Speaker 1 But he did own considerable stock in it.

Speaker 1 Huh. What?

Speaker 1 Wait, so he just coincidentally was named Armand Hammer. Or Armand Hammer.

Speaker 1 And then that's like the weirdest case of nominative determinism I ever heard. Ever heard?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's like if instead of his name being Milton Snavely Hershey, the guy who's Hershey was named Hershey, and it already existed. Yes, his real middle name is Snavely.

Speaker 1 Snavely. Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 That's really funny.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 He is also a communist.

Speaker 1 He also Snavely Hershey. No, no, Armand Hammer.
Oh.

Speaker 1 The symbol of

Speaker 1 the symbol of the Socialist Labor Party of America.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Do you know this already?

Speaker 1 Kiko, I do, but Kiko. I watched that whole.

Speaker 2 There was a whole documentary about his family. It was like the

Speaker 1 family. I've never heard of this.

Speaker 1 The House of Hammer or some shit.

Speaker 1 The House of Hammer. The House of Hammer.

Speaker 1 It's an arm holding a hammer, but it's not the Arm and a Hammer.

Speaker 1 Arm and hammer. That's slightly different.
It's a little bit of a buffer arm and a little bit of a more traditional hammer. This is very funny to me.
Anyway,

Speaker 1 Church and Dwight founded Arm and Hammer. Dr.
Austin Church, obviously, which sounds like a name from the Root Trees Are Dead. Anyway, I have to close this.
I'm doing a Root Trees right now.

Speaker 1 It's happening. I have to close this

Speaker 1 forever.

Speaker 2 Let me get us back on track with one quick thing.

Speaker 1 Please.

Speaker 2 Of all of the games, you didn't actually list the game that this, that Root Trees are dead makes me think of the most, which is Digital a Love Story.

Speaker 2 Because that is a primarily text-based, you know,

Speaker 2 takes place about 20-ish years before in the past from when it is released.

Speaker 1 Yeah, totally. There is that,

Speaker 1 yeah, that remove.

Speaker 2 And there is that, there is, you know, that one's a little, that one isn't summarizing. That one is just like, here is the text.

Speaker 2 Here is all of the text Christine loves

Speaker 2 analog also

Speaker 2 analog I hate story also you know did that where it's just like we're just gonna do all of this text and you're gonna put it together yep

Speaker 2 but in both cases you're dealing with

Speaker 2 a super simple interface you are you know piecing together a mystery

Speaker 2 and you're doing so in this sort of like

Speaker 2 system that is familiar but also quite different from what you're likely used to.

Speaker 1 Yeah. That makes a lot of sense, actually.
Yeah. Great touchstone.

Speaker 1 And so, yes, you're using those tools to then go around the internet, go into the library, skim some books

Speaker 1 to start putting together this mystery,

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 1 I, you know, I found this game like pretty

Speaker 1 fascinating in the doing. And now that I'm done it, I'm kind of like, oh, okay, I'm done.
Did you finish it, Keith? I know you, you were playing it.

Speaker 1 I finished it, and I even started a little bit of the

Speaker 1 the added content, Rootry Mania. Yeah.

Speaker 1 How is that in comparison? Are there any mechanical differences that we should know about between? No, there's zero mechanical differences.

Speaker 1 I know that the version that we played was a re-release.

Speaker 1 I don't know what was changed, but it seems like what might have been changed is bringing the original version more in line with like what you can do in Rutry Mania.

Speaker 1 So I can tell you what some of the things are, but there's a couple of small things.

Speaker 1 There's things that are either large or small, depending on what you're counting as large or small, I guess, right? So like new music, the music has been remastered.

Speaker 1 They voice the character who comes to knock at the door, right? That wasn't voiced originally.

Speaker 1 The big 3D living room that you can look at is new.

Speaker 1 Apparently there's lots of quality of life improvements on the interface, which makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they give you a note about how you can highlight text to search. I think that that's new.
Yes. And here's the

Speaker 1 what? Why? Wait. Why is it like that? Why isn't that in the normal one? No, sorry.

Speaker 1 Key to saying that is now in the normal one. It wasn't in the original release of the original.

Speaker 2 I thought you were saying that that was in the thing you unlock at the end.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. No, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think that there's they've like created a parody between they like updated the original game when they released Routry Mania. Yes.

Speaker 1 The big thing is that the original release of this game had AI art, and they got rid of it all and hired an artist

Speaker 1 whose name is here, Henning

Speaker 1 Ludvigsen, Ludvigsin, who's a board game artist, to do all the art instead.

Speaker 1 And I think this is like one of the big questions of the game

Speaker 1 position in our current game culture. As, for instance, you may have noticed we haven't talked about Ark Raiders on this on this podcast.
We haven't talked about the new level 5 soccer RPG,

Speaker 1 whose name I'm forgetting right now, even though

Speaker 1 Sylvia and Trey have been posting about it. Yeah, and Azuma 11, of course, which both heavily rely on AI in ways that have been all over the discourse.

Speaker 1 So bummed about level 5. Still bummed about level 5.
So bummed that they would do that.

Speaker 1 Now, uh the root trees are dead was originally a game a jam game and it was released for free on itch and then when they made it on steam they included new original illustrations and voice acting and other stuff and so i think that this is like one of our first big tech like edge cases for like okay if a game comes out and it's using ai and they get rid of the ai in it How do we treat that project?

Speaker 1 Because I think it's pretty clear that we have been on the site. And when I say AI, I guess I should be clear.
I'm talking about like, you know,

Speaker 1 generative

Speaker 1 technologies, not

Speaker 1 capital A, capital I, which is a marketing term, but we're talking about like

Speaker 1 LLM-based text or machine learning being used for generative assets like the art in a game like this, where presumably they must have written something like,

Speaker 1 What if there was a third Olson twin and they did a got milk ad? I need one of those.

Speaker 1 Let me put that in the game and instead they hired an artist and said hey uh we want something that's like what if they were the olson triplets and they were they did a got milk ad uh

Speaker 1 yes i don't want to nitpick here but there is a there is a third olson sister they're not the sisters in the root trees are denar triplets and the most famous one right now right and i guess they're not she's the famous one right now you're right and they're not twins in this game they're sisters they're just sisters there's no twins

Speaker 1 as far as i know among them but yeah this is how among them as far as as far as we know. Among us.

Speaker 1 I haven't played Root Tree Mania. Maybe there's a fourth sister.
Whoa. Whoa.
Who could say?

Speaker 1 So yeah, I think this is an interesting game for that reason, which is like,

Speaker 1 I feel like I'm willing to talk about this game, partly because I think that they did the right thing in when they went commercial. They spent money on an artist and got rid of their AI art.

Speaker 1 But I also understand a case that's like,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 a hard, there's a strategic reason for being hardlined about something like this and being like, no, I don't want to give my money to anyone who's used it at all.

Speaker 1 Um, because I'm, I'm taking this kind of strategic hard line, not necessarily a moral hard line. I don't think that they're going to hell, but I'm not going to do it.

Speaker 1 And I understand that that's definitely like a different perspective that's available.

Speaker 2 There's also like, it's only going to get worse because if you are looking right now, if you're trying to do it the right way, which is, you know, we have no money, we are not artists, we have this idea we want to explore, we need placeholder art.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, let's like try and find a pack of assets or like, you know, free assets and stuff. That used to be

Speaker 2 all stuff that like a person made and put up for sale. And maybe if you were in the Dodger areas, you were getting something that someone like ripped out of something and resold.

Speaker 2 That happened a few times.

Speaker 2 But you would still, you're still, you know, getting things that a person made, especially if you were buying it off of a reputable site or using, I don't know, Adobe,

Speaker 2 all kinds of things.

Speaker 2 Now, it is

Speaker 2 getting increasingly hard to, like, you have to know what AI looks like. And even then,

Speaker 2 even then, there's going to be some stuff where it's like, oh, this is perfect, but it might be, I can't tell 100%. Maybe I should just stay away from it.
And, like, it's only going to get worse.

Speaker 2 And it sucks because, like,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 those assets were really helpful.

Speaker 1 And it's really bad

Speaker 1 for the value proposition also to ask people to spend money to buy a pack of AI art instead of just getting their own free AI art and stuff's like mixed in, like, stuff's not.

Speaker 2 If you find a platform where it's labeled reliably, that's amazing.

Speaker 1 Good for you.

Speaker 2 But in a lot of them, it is just in the mix with other stock stuff.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 you know, that's obviously different than when someone makes the conscious decision of, like, we want assets that are

Speaker 2 not just from a big pack and whatever. So, we're going to use, you know, this tool to whatever.

Speaker 2 That's a conscious decision to use the evil tool, to use the bad machine

Speaker 2 for that. But, you know, it's, we're going to keep having these conversations.

Speaker 2 It's only going to get grayer and grayer.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 You know, I think a good thing for this is, and I don't know that we have an answer for this, but like, if the Arc Raiders developer came out tomorrow and said, listen, we're getting rid of all the AI stuff.

Speaker 1 We are,

Speaker 1 we, we've decided we're not doing it from now on.

Speaker 1 What I suspect that if you, if you polled us internally, there would be differences in how we should react to that as a podcast or as a stream group or whatever. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 I'm such a bit shocked that they didn't change the voice in the finals.

Speaker 1 Same. And it all sounds like

Speaker 1 that. It was in early access.

Speaker 2 And I was like, I can kind of understand, I guess, like, I don't agree, you know, the classic, like, I don't agree, but I can understand from a developing perspective why if you're doing this, like,

Speaker 2 I would still encourage you to not do that. Um, but I can understand why someone at a high level would make that choice.

Speaker 2 Um, this is what drives the fact that they didn't change it really was like, oh,

Speaker 1 this is bad.

Speaker 1 This is what drives me crazy about that is that, like, they're making the same pitch in the finals and in Arc Raiders about the AI voices, which that it allows them to do like dynamic on-the-fly, contextual voiceover.

Speaker 1 That's not in those games.

Speaker 1 There is no meaningful dynamic dialogue or voiceover that happens. So it's just like a shitty fake voice going like,

Speaker 1 Let's go over there. Yeah, well, it's not even that stuff that's even the worst in that game.
The thing that's the worst in that game is the like vendor dialogue that's all that's all AI voice acted.

Speaker 1 And like, that's the stuff that they're saying. Oh, we can change that more quickly based on player feedback.

Speaker 1 And like, we could roll out new quests and stuff quicker than we, than we could if we had voice actors that we have to go into the booth with. And it's like, okay, but it all sounds like shit.

Speaker 1 Like, it sounds like shit. Even if you're bracketing all of the moral and ethical and economic and everything else, it sounds really bad.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So the technology is not there to do the dynamic stuff yet without a significant delay that they don't want, that no one wants.

Speaker 2 There's a game that came out fairly recently that I forget the name of because it doesn't matter and it's not good anyway, where you are having voice conversations with a character who's sort of giving you answers that are run through an LLM kind of thing.

Speaker 2 And it takes her like

Speaker 2 a minute to answer any fucking thing you say. It's not cool.
It's not fun, even if you were ignoring everything else. It's not functional right now.

Speaker 1 The the other thing is like this isn't the kind of game arc raiders i'm talking about it's not the kind of game where like you're gonna go like oh my god the story of that quest was amazing like they really fucking set up an awesome narrative for me to play through the so this the bones aren't there to have anything be interesting anyway the interesting thing from the game comes from playing it where there's no

Speaker 1 dialogue happening at all, but except between you and your friends or you and a guy that you met in a shed. Uh, this is the excellent case that the Euro Gamer Review made, basically, right?

Speaker 1 Which is like, this is a game about human connection, both fictionally, it's about a group of humans surviving a robotic apocalypse, and materially, when you are playing the game, it is the fact that you could be like, Hey, are you cool?

Speaker 1 and someone would go, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, come over here, I found some cool stuff that makes that game interesting.

Speaker 1 And so, like, what an absolute abandonment of the machine that makes your game work, you know? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And finally, and I don't develop games. I could be wrong here.
Voice acting's the cheapest thing.

Speaker 1 In a product that costs millions and millions and millions of dollars to make, voice acting is the cheapest part of that. That is such a weird.

Speaker 1 And the value for money is so high. You get so much return on good voice acting versus how little it costs to get.
good voice acting in your game.

Speaker 1 We're talking less than a percent of your budget, probably, on voice acting. I have no idea.

Speaker 1 I think it probably depends on the game and the budget, right? It depends on the game, but but Arc Raiders specifically.

Speaker 2 Yes, it doesn't cost. I mean, I don't even want to say because I have I have more insight into how much the voice acting costs than any other part of a game relatively.

Speaker 1 Um, but like it,

Speaker 2 you know, I

Speaker 2 when I'm in a meeting and someone's like, well, it doesn't, it doesn't, we'll just just re it's just it's just fine we'll just record re-record that makes me nervous because it is sort of like a

Speaker 2 I don't know what the what the equivalent is in and I was gonna say like like a fast food equivalent but like the basically you can

Speaker 2 completely just waste a lot of money if you're not smart when you're recording

Speaker 2 oh sure because like it depends on the studios you're working with a lot of the time

Speaker 2 in my experience, again, limited experience. I don't know how it works if you're doing stuff in-house or if you're working with different studios or whatever.

Speaker 2 Normally, you're recording with a company, like a third-party kind of studio who's handling a lot of the technical aspects.

Speaker 2 And they

Speaker 2 will have contracts with the actors. And often there's a situation where like you can't get an actor to come in and record for less than an hour.
So you need something that can fill up that hour.

Speaker 2 And that's

Speaker 2 in situations that I've been in where an hour is like you can get them in for a minimum of an hour, that's like, whoa, wow, cool.

Speaker 1 That's amazing.

Speaker 2 Normally it's like two.

Speaker 2 And also, you're dealing with actors, so they are traveling a lot sometimes.

Speaker 2 And like, there are actors who will, like, their careers will blow up in a big way over the course of a live service game, for instance, and it becomes very hard to get them in the booth to do anything

Speaker 2 with with their characters because they just don't have the time and availability. So, like, you know, I understand a case for it.
I genuinely understand the case for it, but

Speaker 1 it's a production problem. The technique you're talking about is something that gets used just to be very clear to people, for people who do not have your development background.

Speaker 1 Placeholder text-to-speech voices are extremely common inside of game development

Speaker 1 and are increasingly this style of

Speaker 1 AI voice in a way that they're always the tech to text to speech but this sort of like

Speaker 2 classically been like the shitty text to speech that's right Microsoft Sam

Speaker 1 Sam yeah not Microsoft

Speaker 2 Amazon I forget what Amazon's one is called

Speaker 1 but it is like classic text to speech like what's it's slightly better than the built-in Microsoft one but it is like that oh it's it Poly Poly is the Amazon one is that right

Speaker 2 yeah there isn't really any emotion or or things like that it struggles a lot with words that you would think it wouldn't struggle with uh to the point that sometimes you have to spell it out phonetically if you really need that line to make sense while you're testing um it's that's not perfect i still vastly vastly vastly prefer it right well and the it's part of uh it mostly reflects the thing that you're talking about which is like Developers use text, have used text and speech for a long time because the material reality is you need a bunch of stuff to bring in an actor to record down the line, or you record a developer, or you right, or you record a developer.

Speaker 1 That's also possible, right? Absolutely.

Speaker 1 That's that's when we were doing when I was on uh possibility space when we were working on our, I almost said the name of the project, which I don't think I'm allowed to say still.

Speaker 1 Um, I almost said that, yeah, we used our own voices for stuff like that when it was necessary.

Speaker 1 Um, uh, and so totally also a viable thing, which is which is the other argument against something like a game needs AI art in order to be concepted, right?

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, Root Trees are dead probably couldn't have made a hit on itch as a in-web

Speaker 1 game with developer art because neither of the developers are artists at all.

Speaker 1 And so maybe you can make the case that they needed, et cetera, et cetera. I suspect they still probably could have spent a little bit of money and gotten,

Speaker 1 you know, some

Speaker 1 stock photos and used stock photos or used other types of resources, right? Free art, et cetera. But

Speaker 1 that is part of the

Speaker 1 difference here is that it was a public game at that point, even if it wasn't a commercial game. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then the big, and then like truly on the far other end of it are things like in Azume 11, where they were using AI art all through the concepting phase.

Speaker 1 So it's like truly built into all of the art in that way. And that's like, they did a whole presentation about this.
You can go read about it. Or

Speaker 1 something that is a live commercial game like Arc Raiders and the Finals are.

Speaker 1 And so I think that this is like such an interesting use case or such an interesting

Speaker 1 you know kind of case to talk through what we're looking at going forward assuming that the AI bubble continues for the next few years I certainly hope it pops sooner than that

Speaker 1 because all this stuff only functions via big subsidy from huge companies that are willing to you know offer it for cheaper than it actually costs uh in terms of money in terms of environmental damage it's very expensive and no one can subsidize that.

Speaker 1 And so, you know, I think that that stuff is like, we're going to keep having this conversation about stuff. So I thought maybe worth stepping into it a little bit here on the Rutries Are Dead,

Speaker 1 which wasn't really in my notes for it, but, you know, I don't think we can like touch it and then move past it quickly. I think it's probably worth digging into it.

Speaker 2 If it hadn't been public, if that had been purely internal,

Speaker 2 like, you know, there are so many games where the final product isn't going to have AI in it, but

Speaker 2 it's just like

Speaker 2 I don't know. It's you know games are a tech-driven industry and the tech industry right now, some like real messy people have their claws all the way in

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 there are

Speaker 1 in ways that are sometimes are sometimes

Speaker 1 I know this from talking to other developers sometimes you are told to use a tool Regardless of whether you want to or not. This is not the case with this game that was made by two people originally.

Speaker 1 I'm not saying that that's true for Rootrees.

Speaker 2 I've also had cases of people being told, like, you here, here's a tool. Can you report us a list of ways you could use it?

Speaker 1 100%. Yep.
100%.

Speaker 1 When I was at Possibility Space, our publisher was desperate for us to use an AI tool that they had invested in quite a bit.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 they were like, well, could you use it to do this? Could you use it to do this? Can you put together a little team of people who are going to be able to do that?

Speaker 1 Bring our guy and we'll talk to you and

Speaker 1 see what you need it to do. 100%.

Speaker 1 This is like

Speaker 1 when I was a waiter and like Red Bull would show up with people and be like, do you guys want to carry Red Bull? Like, we have all this Red Bull. Do you want to be selling Red Bull here

Speaker 1 at California Pizza Kitchen? No, imagine that Red Bull owned California Pizza Kitchen or was like paying your salary. And you got to be like,

Speaker 1 no.

Speaker 2 No, the Red Bull was there, but they were saying, well, you could marinate chicken in it.

Speaker 1 That's right. Yeah, you were already.

Speaker 1 Would it make you more efficient to be drinking this Red Bull?

Speaker 2 What about a Red Bull glaze on that pizza crust?

Speaker 1 Oh, this is a good thing.

Speaker 1 Oh,

Speaker 1 I don't like this.

Speaker 1 But again, there are going to be games like this.

Speaker 1 There was another narrative game that I think has some really interesting stuff going on called Asbury Pines that is also a, it has the note on Steam that is like AI assisted with early art concepting.

Speaker 1 Every piece of final in-game art is handmade by the developers.

Speaker 1 And it's one of those things where it's like, I'm so torn on this because it's like, I don't think that game needed AI art in the development process.

Speaker 1 Like, I've played that game, I don't think that they needed to do AI to concept a bunch of like character portraits, especially if they were going to eventually pay an artist to begin with.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't think I want to reward that style of like, let's outsource the character ideation during development. It's not, it wasn't worth doing that.

Speaker 1 Uh, it wasn't worth the environmental cost, it isn't worth the labor cost, all of that stuff. Um, uh, and at the same time,

Speaker 1 i like i want to make a uh

Speaker 1 it's it's difficult with ai because there's so many reasons why someone might not like it or not want to use it or not want to do stuff uh and that gets sort of filtered into the way that people talk about ai and i think that for a long time people have talked about ai in ways that like

Speaker 1 you know the arguments that people make against why

Speaker 1 AI is bad are kind of replaceable by better AI technology, which is not a cycle that you want to get into where what you're actually doing instead of arguing against AI is advocating for better AI by saying, like, well, the problem with AI is that it doesn't produce good work.

Speaker 1 The fingers are all messed up, and then they make an

Speaker 1 extra fingers aren't messed up, yeah, right. And then it's like, oh, fuck, well, now I have to figure out why I still don't like it.

Speaker 1 Something that has remained true about AI is that it's not good at making interesting looking characters

Speaker 1 because it doesn't know about interesting.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it knows about averages.

Speaker 1 Right, yeah, sure, sure. And so, and I and I don't know.
You don't think that's going to fall into the same thing of, well, now it makes interesting-looking characters.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, that's the thing because

Speaker 1 it's the human effort

Speaker 1 that goes into AI.

Speaker 1 I guess all of its human effort that goes into AI, but I mean the end user effort of describing and regenerating and redescribing and regenerating what the interest that you can get out of an AI character is

Speaker 1 determined by the person, the end user's willingness to go through that process.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that is that can be a time suck because it's because AI is not really that good at

Speaker 1 coming up with what you think is interesting or accomplishing the thing that you have in your head. And a lot of people that use AI seem to

Speaker 1 have a like, that's good enough kind of attitude about what they're generating because that's sort of the argument for the whole thing to begin with.

Speaker 1 But every time I see a game where it's like, yeah, we generated concepts using AI and it's like,

Speaker 1 I can tell. I can tell you did.

Speaker 1 Even when a human artist came in and did the art at the end,

Speaker 1 that artist would have been better at coming up with ideas for character design because that's

Speaker 1 because they have a human soul.

Speaker 1 Right. I will say something else too, though, which is like there are ways in which quote unquote these, you know, AI machine learning improves

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 but that improvement is

Speaker 1 not real when it comes to like environmental efficiency or energy efficiency, environmental impact.

Speaker 1 Because what happens is, let's say you have a machine that can generate an image for X watts of energy and you get it down to half that. You just get a second machine running at that point.

Speaker 1 This is like a classic

Speaker 1 contradiction inside of capitalism, right? Which is that like efficiency is just opportunity for further

Speaker 1 profit.

Speaker 1 It never cashes out to a four-day work week across the board, right? It

Speaker 1 You could give your company twice as much output. They will not give you twice as much money or half as much work time per month.

Speaker 2 It's not about making the muffins faster at the bakery. It's about sending the frozen muffins to the bakery.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 And so, and so similarly, as you know, one of the critiques of AI is this terrible environmental cost, which, as we all know, is largely off-put into marginalized communities because of where data centers are being built, the poor, black folks, et cetera, across the country.

Speaker 1 And that is going to end up being replicated if it isn't already globally.

Speaker 1 That stuff,

Speaker 1 it is not like, oh, well, one day your phone will be able to simply run

Speaker 1 efficiently and onboard LLM.

Speaker 1 That stuff is going to continue scaling to reach capacity because that's the way the system works and has always worked for fucking everything.

Speaker 1 And I think that that is something that is like universally true, or at least it's been, that's the pattern for all technological spread. It's why server farms are so big now.

Speaker 1 You know, we didn't say like, oh, servers, we can, we can all have our own server and that's all we need. You know, that is not how it worked.

Speaker 2 Cloud, uh, cloud data, cloud server, cloud computing is cloud computing some is starting to feel like the uh it's toasted

Speaker 1 you know just yes

Speaker 1 it's not It's not a server farm polluting the

Speaker 1 black rural communities of the South.

Speaker 2 It's in the cloud.

Speaker 1 It's in the cloud. Exactly.

Speaker 2 And the cloud is beautiful. It's quite fluffy.

Speaker 2 It doesn't take up any space. It's overhead.

Speaker 1 It's cute.

Speaker 1 Ah, perfect. Anyway,

Speaker 1 we should go back briefly at least to talk more about Root Trees or Dana. We got way off the subject here.
Otherwise, I think we're probably necessary. I want to say, like, please.

Speaker 2 Developers who, for whatever reason, there is AI involved in the conceptualization, whatever early stages of a product. Maybe it is just

Speaker 2 someone's boss walked into the room and handed them a thing and said, I generated some things for you right here. Use them.

Speaker 2 Which that hasn't happened to me, but I would bet any amount of money that it has happened to someone today.

Speaker 2 But anyway,

Speaker 2 for you know,

Speaker 2 you never get the context, you never know how it came about, you never know if it was a whole team being in on it or just like one guy who was in the right position to push it.

Speaker 2 Either way,

Speaker 2 taking that step to be like, you know what? No, we we're we want the art, we want like real art from real people,

Speaker 2 um, we are we want real voices, like whatever our intentions were at the beginning, whether our intentions always were to replace it or whether we were flirting with the idea of not replacing it.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 2 want to believe that being angry or disappointed and

Speaker 2 people changing their mind is like a pattern that we can replicate and continue, I guess. Like, I want

Speaker 2 I want people to not feel it, not like attack, obviously. God, no.

Speaker 2 That's, I, but I want it to be a conversation. Like, I want it to be, hey, I really like the creative vision of your company, and this is the opposite of that.
Like, it's super disappointing.

Speaker 2 This is how I feel about level five. It's like, it's really fucking disappointing that you did this, and you, you, the end result is a thing that, like,

Speaker 2 I, I couldn't tell that that there's no, there's no level five and that it's just, it's just, like, Brazilia or whatever. Like, it's just, it's nothing.
Um,

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 2 I, I want.

Speaker 2 I want developers to be like, oh, okay, you're right. And then to change.
And then to, like, I want there to be room for that.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I also don't want that to be the end of the conversation.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I, the, um, we have been such a level five focused podcast this year, you know.
Um, we spent a lot of time talking about fantasy life.

Speaker 1 We have, we have, you know, level five has been one of those

Speaker 1 studios that has done so much stuff that hits for us

Speaker 1 historically. Do you think we do not want to be talking about in Azuma 11 the uh, soccer RPG that's like has a bunch of weird systems and seemingly a bunch of uh a bunch of uh boyfriends in it?

Speaker 1 Uh, I it's it's really side story core. Unfortunately, it is something that they have proudly used as an example of how they're using AI going forward.
Um, and it's like,

Speaker 1 like you said, Janine, exactly.

Speaker 1 So, you're level five, you have great artists, you do not need to rely on this machine to show you what a city looks like um i'll link the thing about the inazuma 11 um uh like uh concepting the art stuff nothing about it says like soccer city or anything like i don't

Speaker 1 yeah

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 1 anyway the five pieces the five pieces there they are the five pieces everybody loves the what are the what are your five favorite uh candy flavors elderberry for me like i like miracle berry that's my favorite i thought that it was fucked up that they threw Elderberry under the bus on the modern ad.

Speaker 1 Yeah, where they're like, what's an elderberry anyway? What's an elderberry anyway? It's like, wow, I bet you sounds like you hate your grandfather.

Speaker 1 I mean, yeah. Kind of.
That is kind of. Yeah, they do.
Yeah, they do.

Speaker 1 Other things about this game that I think are probably worth talking about is like, do the, does this feel like the 90s to you? Does this internet feel like 90s internet to you?

Speaker 1 Does it work? I

Speaker 1 I was barely on the internet in the 90s. 90s was a child baby.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I was on the internet in the 90s because I was using it to download emulators and ROMs to play Super Nintendo and Game Boy games. They should have put that in here.

Speaker 1 They should have put that in here. There is a Game Boy.
There's a Game Boy on the shelf. There's a Game Boy on the shelf.
You're right. Wait, can you play anything on it?

Speaker 1 No, you click on it, it makes noises and stuff. Okay, well, that's something.
I missed that somehow. Yeah.

Speaker 2 In 1997, I believe I was probably

Speaker 2 looking up Sailor Moon fan sites because someone in the schoolyard told me there was a Sailor Pluto and I called her a liar.

Speaker 1 Wow. Irotic.

Speaker 1 Listen, I know.

Speaker 2 Yeah, to me, it to me feels so much more like 2001, 2002

Speaker 2 than the 90s, but like also I can understand. This is part of why

Speaker 2 I started thinking about digital in comparison to it because digital takes place in 1988

Speaker 2 and I don't know how old Christine Love is, but I imagine if she was alive at that time, she was probably a baby.

Speaker 2 So someone who

Speaker 2 maybe lived that might look at that and be like, well, this is not...

Speaker 2 I mean, digital in that case might actually be a bad example because when I was playing digital forever ago, my dad walked in and got really mad because he thought there were going to be long-distance BBS charges on the cell phone, on the phone bill.

Speaker 2 He's like, I better not be paying for it. I was like, what year do you think it is?

Speaker 1 Sir, it is 2012.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but you know, there's a degree of like, is it close enough to count? Is it, you know,

Speaker 2 we can nitpick it all day, but like,

Speaker 2 the vibes, you know,

Speaker 2 it's not totally wrong.

Speaker 1 Yeah. There's like just enough going on that feels.

Speaker 1 I think the thing that ends up being interesting are the ways in which it needs to be

Speaker 1 it needs to be both older and newer than it can be.

Speaker 1 In the sense that, for instance, here's one.

Speaker 1 I think that in 1998, if the root trees existed, you could probably search for root tree family tree and get a lot more information than is available just in the world.

Speaker 1 You know, you could in 1998 look up all of the Kennedys, you know, you could do that on the internet because they're that famous.

Speaker 1 And so there's like this structural thing, which is like they need the internet to not be there yet. It needs to not yet be

Speaker 1 a big enough of an archive or resource that you can go just like find other people who have already obsessed over this thing.

Speaker 1 Or the degree that

Speaker 2 they need more, like more local celebrity than

Speaker 2 national celebrity.

Speaker 1 Than national celebrity. And it's funny because there are bits of it where they do zoom in on that.

Speaker 1 Sometimes, yeah, it feels like that in a Pittsburgh-based family, which also makes them feel like the Carnegies.

Speaker 1 And, you know, you're looking at the local newspaper. And that stuff feels like

Speaker 1 that stuff feels really zoomed in in the right way, I think, comparatively. Yeah, I think that one of the things is that

Speaker 1 the family feels so big

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 main guy and his wife and three daughters died in a plane crash, and they were the most famous ones.

Speaker 1 And I think that a lot of the game is like you're encountering kind of propaganda about how awesome the root tree family is, based like from root tree family sources.

Speaker 1 And maybe it contributes to them feeling bigger than they are

Speaker 1 because you start with the most famous ones, they're all dead, and then you have to sort of tendril outwards. And you very quickly run into like

Speaker 1 they they call someone like a distant root tree cousin and this is like what are you talking about this is the main guy's grand son or whatever right who's like runs an advertising company yeah and it's like like that's not that's not nothing

Speaker 1 but but it tells you where the focus is where the or where they're like yeah the locus actually of the family is yeah yeah and i i think that that i was feeling the same thing about like like how come there's not more information on this extremely famous family?

Speaker 1 And by the end of it, I was kind of feeling like, oh, they're not that famous. There's like the company is famous, and the grandfather is, you know, we didn't know

Speaker 1 that Hershey's name was Milton Snively. Hershey, right? Snavely.
You're right. We didn't.
Sorry. Snively would be funnier, but it's Snavely.
But it's Snavely.

Speaker 1 Or is it? If you go to the family tree, you'll find they were originally the snavely.

Speaker 2 It was all those

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 And somewhere in my head, I knew that his name was Milton, but I couldn't have recalled that. Like, I've definitely heard of Milton Hershey before.

Speaker 1 And I think maybe that's like the thing is, like, it's early-ish internet. It's a bad

Speaker 1 search engine. It's a pre, right?

Speaker 1 So this is a pre-Ask Jeeves internet. Yeah.
Yeah. Is it a pre-Ask Jeeves internet? It's the, it's that era, right? It's that era.
It is that era.

Speaker 2 I wanted to ask Ask Jeeves coming out.

Speaker 1 I think actually Ask Jeeves is older than I'm thinking that it is. 96.
Oh, 96. Okay, so it's right after Ask Jeeves.
But this is like an early search engine.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 the family runs out of Steam really quick once you leave the critical path.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, yeah, except they're they're all I think this is part of the thing that I think narratively is kind of fascinating about the game is you fill in the family tree, right?

Speaker 1 And so you're like over here, like, oh, this guy was a musician and this family became, this part of the family became caught up in

Speaker 1 like television, like televangelism, you know, and like, oh, this lady was an actress and like she had kids and they lived in Paris or whatever. And

Speaker 1 you get all that stuff. And what's interesting is partly like, and none of that matters.
Because the big picture, the goal is to fill in the family tree.

Speaker 1 It's not, and there is some like big revelation at the end. There is, which I, which I kind of think I figured out very early.

Speaker 1 And like, I at least had some big suppositions about both of the big things.

Speaker 1 I figured out the

Speaker 1 thing early, but not the who. Sure.
Okay. I had no clue about the who for a long time.

Speaker 1 There was, there was some stuff very early on, I think, in one of the books you can read, in one of Lauren's books,

Speaker 1 where it's like, the way a name gets used gave me like, oh, okay, interesting.

Speaker 1 Yeah. yeah along with like i know you're talking about and i like didn't pick up on i was like what's that about and i moved on but

Speaker 1 maybe more importantly here is like what it isn't is

Speaker 1 you're not ever it you're never gonna reveal okay i'm gonna make up a root tree family member from the last 50 years, let's say, right?

Speaker 1 So we already have the televangelist, we already have an actor, we have a writer and stuff. Let's say that there was a, there's like a minor politician in the family.

Speaker 1 Let's say that there was in the 1950s a senator and you get all this stuff about the senator in the Cold War, and you learn that the senator was caught up in the House on American Activities Committee, and you learn that their kid turned into a famous radical,

Speaker 1 and then that they had a baby, and they like emigrated out of the country. And that's just the story for them.
That's their little story. You like learn their little part of the family tree.

Speaker 1 That does not reflect back upwards into the main mystery of the game, the core like one-two punch of like who is hiring you? Why are they hiring you?

Speaker 1 What's their relationship to all of this and etc, right?

Speaker 1 I think that is kind of fascinating because I think in contrast, something like her story, right? Kind of the one that made this genre so big in the last

Speaker 1 few years.

Speaker 1 Maybe it did make it big, but like that hypnospace, I think there was like a real, there's a real boom in these right now.

Speaker 1 And those are like, maybe not Hypnospace so much, but Hypnospace gives you the thing of like each little journey into Zane's stupid web game form or whatever is its own little reward.

Speaker 1 And I don't know that I feel that way about learning about the

Speaker 1 kid who had to do a college project where he did his own little mini genealogy and had to get photos of his third cousins or whatever. Like, okay, that's fine.

Speaker 1 It's important to fill in the little mini puzzle, but it doesn't, um, I don't, it's tough. I'm really, I'm really pulled in two different directions here.
Of course, the family tree should be mundane.

Speaker 1 Of course, the fifth cousins related to the Olsen sisters shouldn't fucking matter. Like, none of it's this kid was a swimmer.
Who cares, right? Like, it should be who cares, but there isn't enough.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that part of the story, like, this whole chunk that you're talking about, that's about a five-minute operation in the

Speaker 1 game.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I think some of that stuff is actually harder to me than the kind of core early who are the five pieces, who are, what are the kind of founding member stuff.
That stuff was

Speaker 1 hard to get to. This is, I guess, maybe this is the problem of the construction is that it's really hard to get to the point where you learn about the

Speaker 1 cousin and then his cousin stuff.

Speaker 1 And then you get those final few names. It's really hard to get there.
And then the story is like the least interesting story because these are kids, basically. They have nothing.

Speaker 1 They have nothing to offer in their story.

Speaker 1 But for me, the actual doing of it was very quick. Interesting.
Okay. Well, I guess that's the thing for me is like, by the end, it was like, okay, it's getting harder to get.

Speaker 1 One of the things that changes is you have to get, when you get three people right, you get their picture, their name, and their job right.

Speaker 1 It locks them in and it says, ah, you've gotten three people right. So sometimes we'll be like, I thought I had three right, but I guess I don't.
Let me do another one and see if I've gotten it.

Speaker 1 And then it'll lock three of the four. So I go back and fix something on this fourth one.

Speaker 1 Eventually, they make it so that you need four instead of three before they'll confirm that you've gotten it right, which is which I think maybe is part of why that section was harder for me because I must have like been like, oh, I have, I think, I have three right, but I guess maybe I've misunderstood the ages of some of these characters or something that's made me do something.

Speaker 1 They're in the wrong place, or they're the wrong type of student, or whatever. Anyway, we're kind of in the weeds here.

Speaker 1 It is the kind of game, I think that what you're getting at is it's the kind of game where if you miss a piece of information that you don't realize is relevant, it can get buried in time.

Speaker 1 And so, so if you're at a point where like you need a piece of information that you missed,

Speaker 1 it's very difficult. Like this happened to me two different times with like, I just totally glossed over that they mentioned a publication.

Speaker 1 And so every time they mention a publication, what you have to do is search the internet, the web browser for the publication, and then it adds that publication to your list list of publications.

Speaker 1 I really wish this wasn't how it worked. I really wish that the second you see the name of a publication, it gets added to your publication.

Speaker 1 I also tried to write in the name of a publication once because I'd read it and it didn't get added. Was it

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 newspaper? The television one? No, I think, oh, maybe it was the television one. Was that

Speaker 1 because that one,

Speaker 1 you have to do it as one word. It can't be two words.
I see. It might have been.

Speaker 1 Yes, I typed in MMM and what they needed was Modern Music Monthly. I think maybe that's the one.

Speaker 1 Okay,

Speaker 1 I was thinking of Silver Screen. I see.
Because Silver,

Speaker 1 when you, the first time, or I think the only time you encounter that magazine,

Speaker 1 it's in a comment where it's spelled incorrectly and it uses two words for silver and screen. So you have to fix the spelling and also make it one word.
Yeah, it's not just that.

Speaker 1 I think it's also like spelled S-C-R-E-A-N or something like that. Yeah, it's bad.

Speaker 1 And it's like, did you mean silver screen magazine?

Speaker 1 Well, you can't click that. You have to retype it.
You do have to retype it. You do.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I think that that to me is part of the thing that's interesting about the game is like, you are just doing the genealogy.

Speaker 1 You're going to hit dead ends to the big mystery because it's just people's lives. But also,

Speaker 1 I think so, this is actually maybe what it is. So much of the big mystery is so early on in the family tree that it feels like that's the only part that is quote unquote important.

Speaker 1 Then, and the rest of it feels extraneous.

Speaker 1 I may have gotten lucky in that like I

Speaker 1 it took me a really long time to finalize the five pieces

Speaker 1 and I had gotten

Speaker 1 focused on the next generation.

Speaker 1 Here's the other anachronism thing. Yeah, I really hate this.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 You pointed this out while you were watching me play.

Speaker 1 There are a bunch of generations and they refer to themselves by names.

Speaker 1 And so the original five kids of of the founders of the candy company are the five pieces, because that's also the name of the big maple candy that's made them famous. And then it's the next gen.

Speaker 1 They call themselves the next gen. Yeah, the next gen.
And usually people born in like the 1930s or something, you know? And then the free spirits. This term was coined by Lauren Rutry in the 50s.

Speaker 1 That's right. Or in 65, in 64.
That's right. They called themselves the fourth console generation.

Speaker 1 And then after that is the free spirits. And it's like, it's like being in the world where in World War I and being like, this really is the First World War.

Speaker 2 It's like being in the First World War and being like, we really are the silent generation.

Speaker 1 That's right.

Speaker 1 I spent a really long time thinking about in 1965, would it be normal to call your cohort the next generation and then shorten that to next gen, which to me is a very modern modern-sounding

Speaker 1 abbreviation of next generation.

Speaker 1 And I had to just put it out of my mind because it was bothering me so much.

Speaker 2 Boomer was contemporary.

Speaker 2 Like, they were called the baby Boom at the time,

Speaker 2 but that was like a whole, that was like millennials. That was like a whole.
That wasn't like.

Speaker 2 Within a family, it ends up feeling like,

Speaker 2 I don't know. It feels like a thing you would do if you were like prep school kids, but the names themselves are not very prep schooly.

Speaker 1 I'll say this.

Speaker 1 I can

Speaker 1 see

Speaker 1 how

Speaker 1 stratified? Stratified? How stratified a family can be when you have a really big family like that and you have like a

Speaker 1 patriarch and a matriarch who are like,

Speaker 1 this is our family. And, you know, lots of kids and then tons of cousins, and big family parties, and

Speaker 1 you know, I, there's, there are ways where I look at my grandfather, and I'm like, he's kind of an Elias Rutri. Sure.

Speaker 1 And I can see the, like, my father's generation as a cohort that has their own goals and desires, and a way that they interact with their parents, and

Speaker 1 the way that the in-laws are treated and like sort of subsumed into the family in a way that is kind of bizarre. And how

Speaker 1 you have this new

Speaker 1 set of kids, their kids, and all of a sudden it explodes outwards. And, you know, all these different priorities are all things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Priorities are different. Times are different.

Speaker 1 Like, I saw a lot of my family in this game and the way that it goes, the way that there's a the there's a critical path and then it's sort of like things sort of

Speaker 1 taper off towards the ends of that critical path like I recognize something in that and the way that like

Speaker 1 oh having you know

Speaker 1 having access to someone like that can give you a a freedom to be like there's a lot of fucking music a lot of artists and artists suddenly in the second generation of you know what what I mean?

Speaker 1 And like,

Speaker 1 and then, and then the older generation is kind of complaining about that. And it's like,

Speaker 1 you know, how come they're not being lawyers and doctors or whatever?

Speaker 1 Totally. So

Speaker 1 I think that I had two things going for me when I was playing this game. The first thing is that

Speaker 1 I got a lot of

Speaker 1 Lauren's generation before I got a lot of the finalized things from the five pieces. The five piece of the pieces.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that's true for for me, too, but I think I had it conceptually pretty down, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. I had like, I was like, I didn't know a lot of jobs and I didn't know

Speaker 1 the firstborn's name

Speaker 1 for a while. I just had missed it.

Speaker 1 And then the second thing was like, I spent a lot of time being like, I recognize this. I recognize this from life.

Speaker 1 I have some evidence and some evidence. I have some, the OED.
Miriam-Webster says Next Generation was first used in 65. OED says 55.
Laura uses it in 54.

Speaker 1 And Next Gen, which she calls her generation in 1954, the Next Gens,

Speaker 1 first known used 1995.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Is that book not from 65?

Speaker 1 I mean, that's. It's a diary.

Speaker 1 It's a diary. And so the entries are from the years.
Got it. And so

Speaker 1 the other one is from 10 years after that. That's right.
That's correct. Yes, exactly.
And so in 53, she calls them the next generation. And in 50, I guess in 58, she says, we next gen.

Speaker 1 So. Yeah.
Yeah. I felt, it felt very anachronistic to me.
That's one of the things that I'm going to do. Which is fine.
I'm not mad about it.

Speaker 1 It's fine. No, I'm not mad at that.
It was just distracting. It's about delving into,

Speaker 1 it ends up producing more friction than I

Speaker 1 normally do.

Speaker 2 It's about people looking for clues and small things. So you're going to attract an audience that's looking for clues and small things.

Speaker 1 Which shout out to two other little things, which is one, when you look at a photo, they'll be like, there's no clues here, or there's seven, there's seven points of clues in this image that you can extract, which is a little arbitrary and weird, but I actually came to appreciate it because I'd be like, oh, there's weird words in this in the background of this image.

Speaker 1 Is this anything? And like, no, no, it's not. It doesn't have the clue number on it.
Or also, sometimes you'll be reading the lyrics of one of the songs from the 70s or whatever.

Speaker 1 And it will straight up say in the text, the lyrics of this song contain no clues.

Speaker 1 which

Speaker 1 I appreciate that because

Speaker 1 I would be like, hmm. He says, so take my hand beneath the tree.
Wow, is there a photo of a tree somewhere that I've missed?

Speaker 1 You know?

Speaker 2 This is why you got to

Speaker 2 play test stuff.

Speaker 1 You got to. You got to log into the forum or whatever, the Discord one day, and see a bunch of people going on.

Speaker 2 What do you think the song lyrics? And it's just spent hours and hours decoding these song lyrics. And it's just like, oh, I just wrote these for fun, they don't mean anything

Speaker 1 at the end of the day. It really is a game about, like, isn't it fun to find little bits of information and then fill them out on the tree?

Speaker 1 And I have to say that it is fun to do.

Speaker 1 I was surprised at the mundanity of the

Speaker 1 of the what the story ends up being really about when it starts with something

Speaker 1 with a lot of potential, which is a big plane crash and the death of five people,

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 that is really set dressing to the game

Speaker 1 was a weird choice. Yeah, yeah, without getting too deep into it, I also thought that, Keith, I also thought the mystery would be more to do with the plane crash than it is.

Speaker 1 So, though maybe that's what Ruth Mania is about. Those are Richmondia.

Speaker 1 They're on the box.

Speaker 1 All right, I think we should take a break. Keith, thank you for joining us.
Is there anything you want to plug before we say goodbye and bring bring Jack on?

Speaker 1 We're good?

Speaker 1 Keith? I think

Speaker 1 you're all good.

Speaker 2 I don't know if Austin's good.

Speaker 1 Wait, can you not hear me? Uh-oh.

Speaker 1 Uh-oh.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. What a clashing of gears that must have been for the listener.
I have to imagine Austin has prepped them for this.

Speaker 1 Certainly, it didn't happen when I was listening because his internet was destroyed

Speaker 1 and he suddenly went silent.

Speaker 1 And then just said all his words. But he'll figure out whack.
Yeah, he'll absolutely figure out how to stitch him together.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and if he hasn't, if they've just played a music queue and now we're here,

Speaker 1 Austin's internet got destroyed. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And we're here to talk about Clock Tower, the Clock Tower games.

Speaker 1 And Janine, who was in the first half of this episode, said, I do not have a lot to say about Clock Tower games. So she ran into the dugout and passed me, and we high-fived, and I ran out.

Speaker 1 I also don't have a lot to say about the clock tower games, but that's never stopped me.

Speaker 1 I'll find what I have to say about them in the moment. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I have been playing the first three clock tower games.

Speaker 1 There are four clock tower games. I've been playing the first three, essentially back-to-back, over the course of October.

Speaker 1 Every year, my partner Kat and I do a horror game LP series on their Twitch channel, which is Kat Bam Kapow.

Speaker 1 And we've been doing this for nine years. Next year is going to be our tenth, which is

Speaker 1 unsettling to think about.

Speaker 1 And we tend to focus on games that one of us has played and the other one hasn't, and kind of choose games that we think will let us into interesting conversations about

Speaker 1 horror games. You know, we played Fatal Frame and talked about Japanese folk horror.
We played Until Dawn and talked about Trace and Consequence games, trace and consequence horror,

Speaker 1 and sort of the American Slasher movie. We have played Signalis and talked a lot about

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 weird fiction, Lovecraft and post-Lovecraftian fiction. But this year we decided to do something kind of fun, which is take a series, a whole series that neither of us had played,

Speaker 1 and sit down and try and play as many of them as possible.

Speaker 1 This means that we played the first three Clock Tower games.

Speaker 1 And going into it, we sort of knew almost nothing. We knew that they were very influential.
They cast a very long shadow over survival horror games for reasons that we'll sort of get into in a second.

Speaker 1 We knew that they took as a lot of their cues

Speaker 1 the films of Dario Argento and the Italian Giallo movement, which is like a particular kind of stylized Italian horror in the 60s and 70s. Jack's

Speaker 1 fallen out of fashion. Giallo is

Speaker 1 given for yellow. Yes.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 there was

Speaker 1 an Italian book publisher, a major Italian book publisher, had just finished a very successful run of romance novels, which they bound as part of the marketing in blue spines.

Speaker 1 And then they finished up that run, and they were like, all right, we'll do mystery novels next, and we will kind of semi-arbitrarily choose a color. We will bind them in yellow spines.

Speaker 1 And that became so popular, and the Italian Cultural Association of mystery novels of all kinds, really. So, you know,

Speaker 1 not just what we in the West would consider to be, or in English-speaking countries, would consider to be like jallow movies with this sort of like stylized, eroticized violence, but all kinds of mysteries.

Speaker 1 You know, Agatha Christie's, your Sherlock Holmes's, were bound in yellow spines and so became known as jallos.

Speaker 1 And the film genre kind of like picked up from there, which I think is great. I love the idea that someone's marketing project

Speaker 1 accidentally names an entire film genre.

Speaker 1 That's so odd.

Speaker 1 Isn't it? Yeah. It makes me wonder.
I wonder if they did another series after Jallow, where they were like, we're going to do sci-fi now, and we're going to bind that in taupe or something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they all call everything sci-fi is called taupe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, all the sci-fi's, and then many years later, someone's going to invent a really cool sort of eroticized sci-fi and they're all gonna be called taupe films um

Speaker 1 anyway we sat down we played these and it turns out that they are kind of extraordinary in terms of uh shifting focuses uh

Speaker 1 of the kinds of horror that they are interested in the levels of success that the that the game uh

Speaker 1 had,

Speaker 1 where it was released.

Speaker 1 The first Clock Tower game was not released in the West for a long time, for a very long time. You could only play it with fan translations.

Speaker 1 And so Clock Tower 2 was the first game that got released in the West, and they called it Clock Tower, which meant that the numbering, the naming convention, was completely fucked up for the entire series.

Speaker 1 You've got Clock Tower, Clock Tower,

Speaker 1 Clock Tower 3?

Speaker 1 It is Clock Tower.

Speaker 1 Clock Tower 2, which is released in the West as Clock Tower. Right.
And then Clock Tower

Speaker 1 Ghost Head, which is released in the West as Clock Tower 2, The Struggle Within.

Speaker 1 And then Clock Tower 3, which is released as

Speaker 1 Clock Tower 3 in both places. Yes.
Okay. Got it.

Speaker 1 It's very, very confusing. How much of the streams did you see, Keith? Have you seen a bit of each game? I have only seen

Speaker 1 the bad one with the zombies in the hospital.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I am familiar with Clock Tower

Speaker 1 broadly, and

Speaker 1 I have them on my handheld thing, and I've seen

Speaker 1 generally what the first two are doing, which is why they're on my handheld thing, and

Speaker 1 the third one isn't.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 in short, the first game is a 2D side-scrolling survival horror game that was released in 1995 for the SNES.

Speaker 1 The second game follows the story of the first game and is now a 3D sort of X-Files slash Twin Peaks mystery

Speaker 1 as the protagonist of the first game tries to uncover what exactly went down

Speaker 1 way back then. And then the third game goes completely off-piste,

Speaker 1 kind of

Speaker 1 catastrophically

Speaker 1 for reasons that we will talk about kind of when we we get to that game.

Speaker 1 But I think the first game is a really good place to start because when people talk about Clock Tower, the thing that they talk about a lot is its innovation with the pursuer enemy that has gone on to become like a

Speaker 1 standout part of survival horror. You've got your Mr.
X and Nemesis in Resident Evil. You've got the various enemies in Amnesia.

Speaker 1 The pursuer enemy is one that will kind of steadfastly chase you over the course of the game and that you cannot defeat.

Speaker 1 Terrifying concept.

Speaker 1 Do you like that in a horror game?

Speaker 1 Just because you don't really play horror games. No, I don't.

Speaker 1 Well, I say that I don't really play horror games, but then on Run Button, it's like one of the main things we do is play Silent Hill games. So it's kind of hard to say

Speaker 1 that I don't play them full stop.

Speaker 1 But I don't like them broadly. And

Speaker 1 because I'm a scaredy cat.

Speaker 1 But The Pursuer,

Speaker 1 that is like the stuff of nightmares in kind of a literal sense. Like,

Speaker 1 I think that people have this and have nightmares of like being chased, and that's yeah, like a real thing that happens all over the world, and it's just an inherently terrifying concept.

Speaker 1 I remember as a kid playing the Sonic games, and there's there's parts of Sonic games where you're chased not by a monster, but by like

Speaker 1 uh, uh, you know, a

Speaker 1 like lava or a rise, like rising tides, and you have to run away from it. That's terrifying as a kid.
Yeah. And things that are terrifying as a kid are like the true terrors, I think.

Speaker 1 Yes, when I was a child, I dreamt that I was being chased round and round my bed by a cobra, and I've never forgotten that dream. No, and you're scared of snakes to this day.

Speaker 1 That might be, you know, deep in the origin points of that fear or whatever.

Speaker 1 But when you look at this first Clock Tower game, which features a sort of stunningly simple plotline,

Speaker 1 played out in these very stark

Speaker 1 cutscenes on the SNES, sort of like adventure game style cutscenes with hand-drawn portraits of people's faces and text underneath.

Speaker 1 You play as this young woman called Jennifer, who is like a one-for-one rip of Jennifer Connolly's character.

Speaker 1 Connolly? That is her name, right? Jennifer Connolly, yeah. Yes.
Jennifer Connolly's character from the Dario Argento film Phenomena.

Speaker 1 She has been

Speaker 1 bulk adopted, along with another few adoptees, to the mysterious Barrows Mansion.

Speaker 1 And as soon as you arrive in the Barrows Mansion, the other adoptees go missing and turn up dead in a variety of scary ways, and it's up to Jennifer to escape the mansion.

Speaker 1 If you have played Night Trap on UFO 50,

Speaker 1 the recent collection of

Speaker 1 sort of like SNES style games, Night Trap is very similar to Clock Tech. Sorry, Night Trap is a real game.
No, not Night Trap. What the fuck is it called?

Speaker 1 I don't think it's like. Jack is in another world where Night Trap isn't real.
I'm sorry. Night Trap is real.

Speaker 1 It's called Night Manor. It's called Night Manor.

Speaker 1 Oh, I haven't played Night Manor.

Speaker 1 The podcast listener was just like sitting bolt upright in their chair being like, Keith, you have to tell them.

Speaker 1 And so what you do is, you know, you move from left to right and solve these sort of adventure game style object interaction puzzles. And these, for the most part, are very...

Speaker 1 They make a lot of sense. You know, there's clearly a key in a big whirling mass of flies that are infesting a freezer.
So you go and get the pesticide and you spray it and then you can get the key.

Speaker 1 Or, for example, there is a barricaded door and you need to get scissors to like pry out the, or you need to get something to pry out the nails of the barricaded door so you can move through.

Speaker 1 It's not too baroque in its puzzle design,

Speaker 1 but you are just sort of moving from room to room.

Speaker 1 That'll come. Trying to solve the puzzle.
And all the while, you are being pursued by this figure called the Scissorman, who is a small, foppish child. He is kind of

Speaker 1 deliberately silly in his look, in his affection. He's ghoulish.

Speaker 1 He's a little ghoulish, but if you are familiar with the Scissorman from later in the series, you might be thinking of him as this sort of like hulking figure in a black raincoat, which is how he appears in the second Clock Tower game.

Speaker 1 In the first, he's the little Lord Fauntleroy fucker,

Speaker 1 who, you know, walks around, walks after you with these big scissors, and if he catches you, um... he kills you.
And you can hide from him. You can also, like, trick him in certain rooms.

Speaker 1 You know, you could throw throw a pillow over his head, throw a pillowcase over his head and stall him. You could cause him to fall through the floor or whatever.

Speaker 1 At which point he goes on cooldown and you get some more puzzle solving to do before he shows up again.

Speaker 1 Which I think speaks to the kind of strange structure of this game, where it is linear. You are trying to complete a linear series of events.

Speaker 1 But they're often mechanized in certain ways, right? Where it's like you need to be...

Speaker 1 You need to have performed these events in the right order and not been killed by the Scissorman during that time.

Speaker 1 And, you know, you might think you're safe, and then he'll suddenly come bursting out of a door, and you'll be like, oh, right, I was just about to go and break down that barricade and find the letter that I needed, or whatever.

Speaker 1 But now I need to not chase over the Scissorman. Yeah, exactly.
And we have to go on this weird sort of like chase all the way through the mansion.

Speaker 1 The control scheme is wild in that when you push left, Jennifer sets off left and doesn't stop until you tell her to go right. Pac-Man rules hilariously sit down on the floor and rest.

Speaker 1 Yes, it's Pac-Man rules.

Speaker 1 And this produces, you know, people talk about the way that tank controls

Speaker 1 induce a kind of panic or a kind of fear. This does that in a 2D environment where...
Well, you say 2D, but the rooms are 3D, aren't they? When you're in... Not in the first game.

Speaker 1 In the

Speaker 1 Super Nintendo version, I thought when you go into a room from the hallway, you're kind of walking around a X and Y axis plane. Oh, you are, I suppose.
It's a 2D game.

Speaker 1 You are moving deeper into the scene. Okay, I suppose.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Side-scrolling, which a lot of it is, like when you're in the hallways, it's really a left-to-right kind of deal. But once you're in the rooms, yeah, there is a Y-axis to it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think, you know, on a very basic level,

Speaker 1 what they are doing with the pursuer is really cool. This idea that

Speaker 1 you never feel fully safe. You know almost exactly what what the enemy that is going to be targeting you is.

Speaker 1 You know the parameters of his moveset, but you don't know where he's going to come from or when.

Speaker 1 So this means that as you're exploring, you are constantly looking around for ways you might be able to thwart him.

Speaker 1 Or when a chase begins, you're trying to keep your head and be like, all right, I have to go out of this door, head three rooms down, climb the stairs, and then up there, I can hit him with the fireplace poker or something.

Speaker 1 And it means that when he freaks you out, it feels really, really impressive.

Speaker 1 Early in in the game, Kat and I found that we could hide in a hayloft, and he would just stand at the bottom of the stairs to the hayloft and snip his scissors kind of like menacingly and frustratedly at us, and then turn and leave.

Speaker 1 And we were like, well, that's great. The haloft strat.

Speaker 1 Until once we went up to the hayloft, he pursued us. He stopped at the bottom.
He snipped his scissors.

Speaker 1 He walked off to the right, and then suddenly with a scream, plunged through the roof of the hayloft and killed us.

Speaker 1 That's pretty much great. That was really good.
It was like like, he's figured it out. He figured it out.

Speaker 1 And you know, you can draw a line straight from that to like the alien in alien isolation learning from you hiding in

Speaker 1 lockers too often and attacking you in the locker or something.

Speaker 1 That's the game I tried to play that was too scary. That game is fucking scary.

Speaker 1 It's really scary. It's also too long,

Speaker 1 which is just such a cardinal sin for a horror game, right? Because if you're like, well, okay.

Speaker 1 What's the scariest game you've ever played? Devotion. Devotion.
What is that?

Speaker 1 It is a game by the Taiwanese studio Red Candle Games.

Speaker 1 It is a sort of PT-like in that it is an emotional first-person horror game where you explore a house that sort of reconfigures itself and loops around.

Speaker 1 But it is just, like, gut-wrenchingly frightening

Speaker 1 and sad.

Speaker 1 It's very, very good. It's the spiritual sequel to their game Detention, which is also very good, but not quite as scary.
What is the scariest game you have ever played?

Speaker 1 For Run Button, we did

Speaker 1 Resident Evil 6, including playing a big chunk of it in VR.

Speaker 1 Seven. Seven? Oh, what's the one with the scary is the scary family? Seven.
Seven. Okay, yeah, seven.

Speaker 1 That game's fucking scary. That game was really scary, especially in in VR.
I really was scared by it.

Speaker 1 It's a good game, though. I like that game a lot.
Yeah, it's too long. It's way too long.
It is too long.

Speaker 1 It is too long. It's a game with an amazing and terrifying act one, and then like an okay act two.

Speaker 1 And then it's like,

Speaker 1 okay, we're still going.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 they are sort of just doing the Texas Chainsaw Massacre for the first act of that game, and it works because

Speaker 1 TCM is great. But with a whole family,

Speaker 1 Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a whole family. With a whole family in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

Speaker 1 What do you think happens in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre?

Speaker 1 I thought that there's a guy with a chainsaw and a hockey mask, and he goes to your car at night and scares you out of your car, and you have to run away from him in the woods.

Speaker 1 Okay, the movie begins.

Speaker 1 It's people in a car at night in the woods, and then a guy in a hockey mask with a a chainsaw comes and scares them out of their car. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Not really what happens, man. No, okay.
I've never seen it. I barely even know about it.

Speaker 1 It's got a scary family in it, a scary family of murderers. I had no idea there was a scary family of murderers in that.

Speaker 1 The chainsaw man is the son of the family of murderers.

Speaker 1 He doesn't scare them out of the car?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Does he scare them into a car?

Speaker 1 They are famously in a

Speaker 1 camper van for a lot of that movie. Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 They're on a road trip, I think. That's kind of car.

Speaker 1 It is a kind of car. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 I feel like aside from the pursuer, the other big innovation in Clock Tower 1 is its structure is very peculiar.

Speaker 1 The whole game is sort of structured like hunting for secret endings in another game, in that the layout of the mansion and also the kinds of endings that you will get, the kinds of items that you need, are dependent on choices that you make that sometimes feel arbitrary.

Speaker 1 So depending on what body you find first, depending on

Speaker 1 which item you pick up out of a choice of two items.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you will, sometimes rooms in the mansion will switch places. And what I love about this is it's not like the mansion is procedural.

Speaker 1 It's essentially the same every time, but sometimes rooms will swap. Sometimes bodies won't appear where you think they do.

Speaker 1 And so as you go through the game looking for

Speaker 1 the best ending, you're moving through this web of

Speaker 1 different scares, different rooms, different mechanics. It's really interesting.
What's the experience of that as a player who might expect a room to be somewhere and then it's not?

Speaker 1 Or you have to go to a body that you know is one place and then it isn't there.

Speaker 1 It turns into feeling like a really interesting dance because you're like, well, okay, I think for this ending, I want to make sure that I find Julia's body first, or whatever.

Speaker 1 So you go to the bathroom where you think Julia's body is going to be, and it's not there.

Speaker 1 So you're like, okay, right, I guess I'm on the track where I'm going to find Julia's body in the pond, which means I'm now going to have to go to the armory and get the, you know, the whatever key.

Speaker 1 And in this track, I know that the armory is quite likely to be here or whatever you know you think about watching people play um

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 like really high skill Minecraft or Terraria and they're constantly making these decisions about where they're going to find items and how in this sort of semi-procedural world that's a bit like what it feels like and it's also especially cool because you're you're being chased at the same time so you're having to keep the keep this um together in your head it's also very pleasant to play with a walkthrough as well because even though you have what you need to do written down, you're trying to like wrangle the game into the position where you can do that.

Speaker 1 That reminds me, this is a totally different game, but that reminds me of the experience of playing Digimon World for the PlayStation 1.

Speaker 1 Does it have that similar sort of like pseudo-branching? Yeah,

Speaker 1 the way that it determines what Digimon you get and when is based on a set of criteria that feels very squishy, and you can follow along with a guide and even an official, I would say even especially the official guide, and be totally lost

Speaker 1 at like how exactly to make your Agumon become a Greymon.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 This is also Phantasy Star Online, right? With the section IDs. Yes, yeah.

Speaker 1 Like there's there's kind of a like

Speaker 1 here's 15 different criteria and you need to get these four.

Speaker 1 But because it branches out, every possible branch has a set of four or five things.

Speaker 1 And so you might think that you're going towards one thing, but the game actually sees you going towards something else first, and you pivot, and it's like, oh, all of a sudden, I'm a slime guy by mistake.

Speaker 1 Fuck. I didn't want the slime guy.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And taking that into a horror setting and, you know, playing off that uncertainty or playing off that feeling of the ground shifting underneath your feet, you know, feels really appropriate.

Speaker 1 Now that I think about it, there's a horror game called Visage that came out maybe five or six years ago that does something very similar.

Speaker 1 You know, it's a first-person horror game in the vein of PT, and it sets out seeming to be about one thing, but sort of various hidden choices that you make put you onto certain tracks within the game, and you get different kinds of stories within it.

Speaker 1 Oh, this babyface thing is scary.

Speaker 1 Which babyface thing? The visage babyface thing. I don't know what it actually is called.
Oh, you looked up visage game. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And there's a babyface thing.

Speaker 1 Oh, that babyface thing is scary. Yeah, damn.
I had to stop playing Visage because it was frightening.

Speaker 1 But this is one of those games where it is like, you know, if you want to see this plot line, you have to pick up the ringing phone after it rings a certain amount of times or whatever.

Speaker 1 Or, you know, you need to get the camera first, and that's going to cause this or that to trigger. I like thinking about this in the context of the era of development that they're in.

Speaker 1 It's a space where

Speaker 1 there's just so much less possibility, obviously, in what you can do.

Speaker 1 And it feels really natural to me to have a cascading series of, you know, if-then statements that kind of combine into this weird stew where

Speaker 1 it feels like there's a lot of possibility inside this relatively inert chain of,

Speaker 1 you know, corridors,

Speaker 1 metaphorical corridors, not the actual corridors of the game.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think it's it, it's um

Speaker 1 it's really interesting. It is kind of like putative, and it's it's a shame that we never really got to see them like fully develop on this idea.

Speaker 1 Um, and instead it was the pursuer that kind of got picked up and carried forward into the like survival horror milieu.

Speaker 1 Um, but I think in Clock Tower one, it is really clock Tower 1 holds up really well.

Speaker 1 And there is

Speaker 1 a re-release of it that came out, I think, this year, 2025, called Clock Tower Rewind,

Speaker 1 which is really good. I recommend that game a lot.
It has some really interesting quality of life features that make playing this game, as we've described it,

Speaker 1 maybe more manageable

Speaker 1 or take less of a time commitment. You can rewind if you've...
been attacked in the haloft. In a really limited way, you can see that this like

Speaker 1 the thing that you're talking about shows up in other games. Like, Silent Hill games are famous for having a bunch of endings that are determined by essentially invisible metrics

Speaker 1 throughout the game. And even things like

Speaker 1 the Metal Year Solid games have this, where you'll be graded at the end based on, like, how many people, or, you know, a level will be different based on how many people you've killed to that point.

Speaker 1 Did you, have you knocked everyone out or

Speaker 1 killed everyone? Dishonored, the dishonored chaos

Speaker 1 stats.

Speaker 1 But you know, Clock Tower is out here doing it with the meat and potatoes of the game itself,

Speaker 1 which is really interesting. It is interesting.
So then we moved on to Clock Tower

Speaker 1 2, otherwise known as Clock Tower.

Speaker 1 And this one I know famously as a Sega Saturn game.

Speaker 1 This is a PS1 game. Is it not a PS1? We also have released it.
Let's see. Clock Tower

Speaker 1 2?

Speaker 1 Nope, not that one.

Speaker 1 Just PS1. Just PS1? Ah, I could have sworn I had it on the Saturn.

Speaker 1 And after having moved out of the Jallow-inspired feel of the first game, they've really moved into an X-Files or Twin Peaks thing.

Speaker 1 Jennifer is no longer in a mansion, but is instead in various university libraries and hotels and hospitals and is being accompanied by journalists and police officers.

Speaker 1 You know, there is now like full-scale dialogue in these games. There are other named characters.

Speaker 1 And you start to feel the wheels starting to come off the bus a little.

Speaker 1 But it is still very enjoyable. And they kind of push the branching

Speaker 1 a little further where

Speaker 1 you can unlock hints in the game. You know,

Speaker 1 you will open a drawer and find a hint that will give you

Speaker 1 a non-diegetic tip for how to play the game. And the first one of these that we found just said outright,

Speaker 1 the game's secondary protagonist will be determined by how many times you talk to the scientist in the corridor. If you talk to him

Speaker 1 more than once, the protagonist will be Helen. If you talk to me,

Speaker 1 only once, the protagonist will be, I think, Nolan or something. And it's just like, shit, okay.

Speaker 1 What a wild thing for a game to say to you before you've even known that there was a second protagonist.

Speaker 1 Do you think that they had this idea of sticking you with a protagonist without telling you how to get them and people complained in guessing? And they're like, wait, what?

Speaker 1 Or they just wanted to make the marionette's strings visible to you. I don't know.

Speaker 1 There was something so, like, blunt about it that I found so charming. You know, you know nothing about this game.
You're playing it from the start. You're playing as a character you're familiar with.

Speaker 1 You pick up a hint and you read it and you're like, what? Well, because you already talked to the guy.

Speaker 1 They're essentially saying, choose your character. No, they're not, because they're telling you that after you have had the conversation.
Oh,

Speaker 1 oh,

Speaker 1 I misunderstood. I thought it was...

Speaker 1 right before you have the conversation and they're just no they're saying you chose you also here is how, in future playthroughs, you will know how to make that choice.

Speaker 1 And so you can't go back and talk to the guy another time because you were already one or the other person.

Speaker 1 Yep. It's really good.
That's funny. Never mind.
I take it back. I take everything I said back for my whole life.

Speaker 1 For your whole life. For my whole life.
100%.

Speaker 1 I don't think he means that.

Speaker 1 And then the game kind of devolves into like a lot of bad X-Files episodes. Some.

Speaker 1 There aren't a lot of bad X-Files episodes.

Speaker 1 There's only like three or five.

Speaker 1 Low-concept schlock as we head to a castle in England to uncover the various mysteries.

Speaker 1 Scissorman is back, but he's more scary this time. Why is he more scary?

Speaker 1 I think

Speaker 1 it's big.

Speaker 1 I think the easiest answer is that they were shifting the kind of horror that they wanted to do. In the first game, they were doing this very stylized.

Speaker 1 He wasn't necessarily a frightening character in the first game. It was what he did that was frightening.

Speaker 1 And as we move into the second game with like police officers and rogue hypnotists and strange castles out in England, it makes more sense to make him more explicitly frightening.

Speaker 1 He's sort of like, like I said, he's a hulking figure in a raincoat. His scissors are much more like shears.

Speaker 1 This is the first game where you can get a gun and

Speaker 1 you can shoot at him.

Speaker 1 by the end uh you're in this absolute web of like you know the first game is set in one house the second game is set in

Speaker 1 most of Oslo and a castle in England

Speaker 1 and the

Speaker 1 wild change in scale and then the next one's set in a hospital

Speaker 1 See, this is what you would think, because after releasing Clock Tower 2,

Speaker 1 the studio human head came to the game's director and said, Can you make a third one? And he said, No, I don't have any more ideas for Clock Tower games. I'm not going to do it.

Speaker 1 And another staff member at the studio said, I reckon I could do it.

Speaker 1 Listener, he couldn't.

Speaker 1 No, but it's good on him, though. That's, I think, bet on yourself.

Speaker 1 I think that someone should, so someone should...

Speaker 1 Always say that. Someone should always say, I bet I could do it.

Speaker 1 Especially if it produces something like Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within, which is unquestionably one of the worst games I have ever played. And I really don't say that lightly.

Speaker 1 It is a game that is botched on almost every level.

Speaker 1 As we are playing it, I think I said it's difficult to make a game this bad, and I stand by it.

Speaker 1 Any fool can make a bad game, but to make a game this bad, this ruinously bad, takes some some real, real talent. To start with, this game has no connections to the previous two games whatsoever.

Speaker 1 Sure.

Speaker 1 Scissorman is not in it.

Speaker 1 It follows the story of a woman called Alyssa, who... Okay, alright, hang on.

Speaker 1 I can't really explain this story because

Speaker 1 your brain is going to try and draw connections and make it make sense, and it sort of doesn't really.

Speaker 1 You play as a girl called Alyssa who goes to visit her uncle and also she is possessed by a ghost called Bates

Speaker 1 who

Speaker 1 possesses her when she's not wearing an amulet and

Speaker 1 Alyssa regains control of herself when you put the amulet back on and so a large portion of the game is about finding places to stash the amulet so you can strategically become Bates, fight zombies, and then go back to where you put the amulet, put it on and become Alyssa again.

Speaker 1 And what's the deal with Bates?

Speaker 1 Oh, I don't know. The game doesn't have

Speaker 1 the game, doesn't say?

Speaker 1 Not really, no.

Speaker 1 He's a curse. You're cursed.
Right, you're cursed to be Bates.

Speaker 1 Yes, the game reveals. I'm going to spoil Clock Tower 2

Speaker 1 for you now. The game reveals in the last 30 seconds that you were buried alive as a child because you were cursed, and a man brought you back to life

Speaker 1 as a way to do revenge on another man.

Speaker 1 Damn.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they don't tell you this really sort of at any point.

Speaker 1 Do you already know the two men?

Speaker 1 You

Speaker 1 sort of. So you sort of know the man who brought you back, and you sort of know the man who you're trying to get revenge on? Yes.
Did it feel like you were trying to get revenge during the game?

Speaker 1 No, not remotely. In fact, it didn't feel like I was doing anything at all, Keith.

Speaker 1 You know, usually it's nice in a game when you have a goal and you can sort of point yourself in a direction. For the first game, it's you know, get out of the mansion and escape the bulk adoption.

Speaker 1 In the second game, it's figure out what was going on with Scissorman and lay the curse to rest completely.

Speaker 1 In the third game, you walk around a house and fight a little girl who has been possessed and a possessed suit of samurai armor.

Speaker 1 At one point,

Speaker 1 Act 1 soft-locked us so bad because it required us to take a key from our inventory and lock someone in a room, an action that the game had never told us about prior to that point, and we didn't use at all after that point.

Speaker 1 Failing to lock that door soft-locked us, and we had to start the game again.

Speaker 1 Do you think that after seeing Clock Tower 2,

Speaker 1 Hifumi Kono, the creator of the Clock Tower series and the director of the first two games, do you think he went.

Speaker 1 I guess I probably did have an idea for Clock Tower 2. I wonder.

Speaker 1 It is so.

Speaker 1 It commits sins of game design that are fairly prosaic. You know, things like making all of the rooms essentially indistinguishable from each other.

Speaker 1 Gating

Speaker 1 items behind other difficult-to-get items.

Speaker 1 Not explaining what is going on or have characters, you know, clearly guiding you from one place to another worst case scenario adventure game style um very confusing solutions to uh puzzles yes that stuff is is i think part and parcel with a bad game and the game is is doing that kind of in spades but it's also failing in really um

Speaker 1 peculiar and and sort of like down in its bones ways. It is breaking the line of action with wild abandon.

Speaker 1 Not just when characters are talking, that is to say, it's like moving, it's crossing the camera across the 180-degree line. It is also,

Speaker 1 there is very little relation between doors that you exit and rooms that you enter.

Speaker 1 So you will go through a door in the right-hand side of the wall and come out of a door on the left-hand side of the wall, making it seem like the room has been flipped.

Speaker 1 You're being pursued almost all of the time by enemies that will kill you in just a

Speaker 1 woefully small number of hits. And you can regularly get yourself into these like procedural issues where because you don't have the item needed to shoot the zombie and because you need to be bait

Speaker 1 in order to shoot the zombie because only baits can shoot, you have to go and find a place to stash the amulet, come back,

Speaker 1 get the item, get back into the room. The zombie has to be in the place where you thought it was going to be.

Speaker 1 You will regularly find yourself stuck inside a room for like 40 minutes while you're playing this game because the chain of events necessary to let you exit the room just do not transpire.

Speaker 1 Now, you said that this is the worst game you ever played, or something close to it anyway. Yeah, definitely.
Is it also your least favorite game to play?

Speaker 1 No, not at all. It felt like I was being put through a grinder,

Speaker 1 which was a very unpleasant experience, but it was novel. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I've played much, much worse games, you know. Like experientially.

Speaker 1 Like Ghost of Tsushima or something, you know?

Speaker 1 Sure. I would much rather play Clock Tower 2 with the struggle within, even though it is objectively worse.

Speaker 1 For me, this is the difference between this is this comes up on Run Button

Speaker 1 where

Speaker 1 I compare things to Sonic 06 a lot, uh, because Sonic 06 is like a really poorly made game, but the experience of playing it is so funny and novel that it kind of overcomes uh the

Speaker 1 brokenness to become like a kind of good experience versus another Sonic game like Sonic Unleashed, which is like a much more competently made game that is so much less fun to play to me.

Speaker 1 Uh, or recently I had a very long time. It was months and months where I couldn't shut up about how much I hated Metaphor Refantasio.
A game that isn't poorly made at all.

Speaker 1 It's totally competently made and I hated every second of it.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 I feel very grateful that I could play something so monumentally bad.

Speaker 1 Arctic Alive

Speaker 1 is one of these. Oh, yes, yes, absolutely.
Like, Arctic Alive is a

Speaker 1 Could you tell the listener what Arctic Alive is? Okay, yeah, Arctic Alive, talking about pursuers. Arctic Alive is a horror game

Speaker 1 made in Blender back when Blender supported game development inside of the 3D modeling program.

Speaker 1 It's a survival horror game

Speaker 1 where you are stuck in the Arctic. You wake up in a cell in an Arctic

Speaker 1 base of some kind,

Speaker 1 and you have to sort of figure out the mystery of why you are here and why

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 facility is full of these sort of like

Speaker 1 flickering monsters,

Speaker 1 these red-eyed monsters who are trying to get you,

Speaker 1 all while making sure your clothes are warm, your hands are are dry, your bladder is empty, your belly's full, etc.

Speaker 1 It is very clocktower now that I think about it, because the way you play Arctic Alive is you blunder through a series of

Speaker 1 fiddly mechanical interactions.

Speaker 1 And in the same way that while playing Clock Tower 2, The Struggle Within, we would regularly essentially lock ourselves in a room thanks to the weird set of mechanics that were being deployed against us, lots of Arctic Alive is spent on like

Speaker 1 frustrating odd little trips out to the generator room to get the thing that you need to cook the whatever

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 power up your... Don't you need to have clean hands all the time? You need to have clean hands.
You have to perform your ablutions, yeah.

Speaker 1 You do have to perform your ablutions. Yeah, Arctic Alive has a sort of Sims-style menu.

Speaker 1 You might be thinking that what we're describing is sort of like a survival game, but it's more like you are piloting a sim around.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I highly recommend me Ali and Jack. I think, Jack, you joined in in the second or third episode for the rest of the Let's Play.

Speaker 1 We played through this game years and years ago on the Run Button channel, and you can go and watch that for the full list of

Speaker 1 all of the things you need to be in order to survive Arctic Alive.

Speaker 1 I wish I could remember how I said that.

Speaker 1 Yes, you read it like a list. Yeah, it is presented like a list.
So, I mean, I think that it is worth worth going to see the Clock Tower games,

Speaker 1 whether that is just playing the first game or watching an LP. Cat and My LPs for Hallowstream are time-locked.
They sort of disappear slowly over time.

Speaker 1 So I don't know that ours will be up.

Speaker 1 They should be up now. Yeah, they'll be up for like another three weeks by the time this.
But they are going to start sort of disappearing.

Speaker 1 But if you are curious about specifically the ways that Clock Tower 3 falls apart,

Speaker 1 I am sure that a quick glance at a Clock Tower 3 Let's Play will start to give you some sense of what it looks like when a game manages to contort itself into such a ruinous shape. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 Especially a game that maybe you don't want to physically control.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, because it's a mouse. You play with the mouse, and the mouse is exclusively controlled by the D-pad.
There is no analog stick control in the game, in any of the games. Right.

Speaker 1 Because they're for the Super Nintendo and then the PS1 and PS2.

Speaker 1 Well, the PS1 and PS2 had analog sticks. That's true.
Oh, let me tell you. They could have used them.
They could have used them, yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, the PS1 may not have had analog sticks when

Speaker 1 Clock Tower came out. Oh, was there did did the first PS1 controller not uh just have a d-pad? Correct.
For about half of the PS1

Speaker 1 be well, I guess between half of the PS1 up to the release of the PS2, the original PlayStation controller was D-pad and

Speaker 1 face buttons. The analog stick is a fantastic invention.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they really nailed it. They really nailed it.
It's very funny if you look at the original PlayStation controller. It has no analog sticks at all.
The defining feature.

Speaker 1 The defining feature of them, yeah. Is there anything else that you want to say about horror games or pursuer enemies or clock tower? Or shall we throw back to Austin to say goodnight?

Speaker 1 Let me scan through my mind. My mind.
Let's see. Have I played anything interesting that has a pursuer enemy in it? I'm sure that I have.

Speaker 1 I'm sure that I have, but I just can't think of it. Did you play Dark Souls 2?

Speaker 1 No. No.
Dark Souls? I bounced off of the first Dark Souls, and then I didn't play another

Speaker 1 Fromsoft game until

Speaker 1 Sekiro, which became one of my favorite games of all time. And then I tried Elden Ring, and I was like, nope, still no.
Still won't like.

Speaker 1 And you haven't played Brown. I love Fromsoft game.
I was not from way back, though. I was a big Chromehound's head.
Did you ever play any of their early sort of like

Speaker 1 Echo Knights? Is that what it's called? Echo?

Speaker 1 I think so.

Speaker 1 But no, I didn't play them. Yeah, I really want to go back and play the Echo Knight games.
They are

Speaker 1 scary games set on a ship.

Speaker 1 The first Echo Knight game says the story revolves around Richard Osmond, the game's protagonist, and his journey to find out what happened to the ship Orpheus, which mysteriously disappeared from the sea.

Speaker 1 They used to make so many games. This is how game development has changed.
Yes.

Speaker 1 In pretty much all of the 2000s,

Speaker 1 Fromsoft was releasing like five games a year. Yeah, absolutely.
Of like really mixed quote-unquote quality.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 quality in both ways. Like

Speaker 1 quality in that they were very different from each other and quality in that some were really good and some were really bad. Yeah, it would be really interesting to kind of do a

Speaker 1 go through those games

Speaker 1 in the same way that we went through the first three Clock Tower games, try and get a sense of the shifting sort of like moods and design impetuses within that studio. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Hey, maybe you want to play Kuon.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a horror game, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
It's a survival horror game. From Software Survival Horror Game? Mm-hmm.
Mid-middling reviews, middling, but who knows? You know,

Speaker 1 my opinion about older games has always been like time kind of sands the edges off both extremes. Like, it kind of makes...

Speaker 1 Games at the time, you're like, oh my god, this is like, this feels like a game from five years ago.

Speaker 1 Well, 20 years in the future, a game from five years ago is still an old fucking game, so it's not that big of a deal.

Speaker 1 Or when things are like on the absolute bleeding edge, edge, it feels like maybe a game from one or two years in the future. And it's like, these are all the same to me.
There's no

Speaker 1 the idea of something like being outdated or ahead of its time stops making sense of the context of a retro game. So, you get to experience it with

Speaker 1 for maybe more for the ideas that are in there and maybe less for how much they live up to the expectations of buying a new game.

Speaker 1 Let me tell you, Clock Tower 2 does not feel like a game with its edges sanded off.

Speaker 1 Hey, there's always

Speaker 1 exceptions.

Speaker 1 Hello and goodbye, I guess. This is Austin from after that segment was concluded.

Speaker 1 Obviously, my internet fell apart, and so thank you to Jack and Keith for picking up the ball and running with it and talking about horror games and pursuers and Sonic 06 and everything else.

Speaker 1 Arctic Alive, please go watch the Arctic Alive. Let's play.
It's one of my favorite things to watch straight up. I re-watch it every few years, maybe once a year, actually.

Speaker 1 Arctic Alive, I'll put a link in the description.

Speaker 1 And hey, if you want to support us, you can go to friendsofthetable.cash. There will also be a link to that in the description.
For $10 a month, you can watch me and Jack and Janine play Outward, a

Speaker 1 really great game. If you just finished watching the AMCA Coach Tour 2 Let's Play and you're like, I want to watch Austin Playmore games.
Hey, that's a good place to go.

Speaker 1 And if you actually have just finished watching maybe the most recent episode of Outward and you're like, I want to watch Austin Playmore games, you should go watch the Knights of the Old Republic 2 Let's Play that I did for AMCA, which also just ended.

Speaker 1 If you're someone like me and

Speaker 1 who has a hard time

Speaker 1 watching a thing or reading a thing until it's like done, I'm really bad at ongoing series.

Speaker 1 Hey, that's done. You can go watch me play through all of Code Tour 2.
You can listen to all of us over at AMCA, which is me and Allie from here, plus Natalie and Rob from waypoint/slash remap

Speaker 1 talking through that whole game, which was great. That episode just went up today.
So you can go listen to that if you're interested in hearing us talk about more video games.

Speaker 1 All right, we'll be back in a couple of weeks. Until then, to be continued.