Silksong is an Exceptional Metroidvania (If You Endure its Challenges)

Justin, do you feel bad?

Yes,

just in general.

How did you know?

That's a good guess, honestly.

I'm going to talk a little bit about my Silk Song day,

the day that Silk Song came out.

This is how the day went.

I woke up in the morning.

I was like, I'm going to download Silk Song at 10 a.m.

Eastern.

Steam totally shit the bed and wouldn't let me buy it.

And then I had to record with Chris Plant an episode of Resties.

And then I got off of that and couldn't download it.

And then my aftercare for my child fell through, so I had to babysit my child.

It wasn't until

we got to take a big stop right there, my man, because you actually can't babysit your child.

You can only parent them.

I think Russell's having some Andrew Dice Clay style fun there, guys.

I don't want to emulate on it too much, okay?

He's the bad boy at the time.

Okay,

okay, Dice, man.

Keep going, keep going, keep going.

I just wanted to make it explicitly clear for the listener that you're going to be able to do.

It might help if

people don't get to hear it very often, but if you actually use your natural accent, you use a nasty voice.

If you're going to say nasty stuff, do a nasty accent.

Hickory, dickory dock.

I had to babysit my child.

Great.

Now it makes sense.

You know, in 2025, maybe that is edgy, you know?

I don't know.

Are we allowed to even say that anymore?

So we go through the whole process, and 8.30 rolls around and my child is sleeping in his bed.

It's time.

I've got, finally, I've been able to download Silk Song.

It downloads to the Steam Deck.

I'm ready to start playing.

I literally turn the lights off, put headphones on, and I'm going to like be in it.

And I suddenly hear a click, a, click, click, click, click coming from my bathroom.

And I go in there and water is pouring out of my outlet.

What?

Which is not a good thing.

No.

that's crazy because for me, for me, electricity comes out.

Yeah.

This is literally, I'm not joking, 30 seconds into playing the game.

I haven't even gotten to this intro case.

Apparently, there was a pipe that broke several floors above me in my apartment building.

Okay.

And water was flowing down.

Is it all the drilling?

It's all the drilling that's happening.

Part of the drilling.

Yes.

Part of the drilling.

We've heard the drilling before.

Okay, so that happens.

I call the downstairs.

I talk to the super.

We're figuring out.

You do let them know that it's so song day right yes

yeah okay i let them know i mean i sent them an email two weeks ago making sure they were aware and yet this still happened takes about an hour for things to calm down water is no longer pouring from my outlet hooray

and i i'm able to play about probably 30 minutes of that nice of so i imagine i imagine him starting to play in like a rocking chair and he's like time to game

well actually

his little sleeping cap falls over.

So here's a little bubble comes out of his nose.

And then suddenly I get a notification on my phone, and someone has sent a slack message to the besties.

Now, I know if it's a slack message, it must be important, work-related information.

Oh, no.

I just remembered.

Okay.

Now, as we all know, I'm not a big fan of spoilers.

At 11:09 p.m.

uh on that night what does justin send justin you want to do it i'd rather not okay so justin sent pro tip the yo-yo is op once you get the chain

listener this is not a real

this is not first of all listener you probably don't care about this as much as rest would so

now that you've told me contextualize it that's actually one of the best jokes i ever did oh man

Russ, that story tells so much about you.

I think the ending is the most demonstrative because it is so not a spoiler, and yet it is enough to really cap off you.

I mean, it's literally not a spoiler because it was bullshit.

Right.

But how would I know that?

Right.

Sure,

you were kind of like fading in and out of this gentle slumber.

Yes.

So I sent a very snippy slack message to Justin

morning.

Really good.

Well, not to Justin.

I sent it to

Yeah, sure, the group.

Don't talk about Silk Song in here.

And Justin admitted that he was baiting me.

Yeah.

So that was my Silk Song day.

How was your guys' day?

Fun?

Yeah, pretty good, but we should probably talk about the game too.

Okay, fair enough.

My name is Justin McRoy and I know the best game of the week.

My name is Griffin McCoy.

I know the best game of the week.

My name is Christopher Thomas Plant and I know the best song of the week.

My name is Russ Fruschik.

I know the best game of the week.

Hello and welcome to the besties, a besties episode long, long awaited, long anticipated.

We are talking about Hollow Knight Silk Song.

Chris Plant, I don't know if it even needs explanation.

I'm fucking kidding.

I'm not telling you jack shit.

We've been talking about this game for years.

It's a sequel to Hollow Knight, and it finally came out, but it's faster and harder.

Unless it's not harder, and it's easier, and it's better.

Unless it's not better, and the discourse is hot and fast, and we're going to get right to it after this.

Wait, not after this break.

Russ Rushdick, please.

Thank you.

We have some news actually before the

ad rolls here, and this will be relevant because we are launching a new tier to our patreon.

What we've yeah, we what's that even mean Russ?

I'm scared and pissed off, but excited.

We've been doing this Patreon for about a year and a half now.

We love you guys.

We really appreciate the support.

It's awesome.

At this point, there's probably the vibes are great.

55-ish episodes.

Way more than that.

Way more than that.

I think we're five.

I think we're like over like 60 approaches.

Okay, maybe 60.

Anyway, a shitload of bonus content that is only available to Patreon subscribers is all there.

So that's all great.

We got the rest.

There's a bunch of the resties.

There's our monthly besties bracket episodes.

There's the resties.

There's the rusties, which is Russ's annual adult video award.

He does.

He does this quarterly, folks.

You would think annual would make sense, but he says there's just too much.

Bracket needs some green no we're trying to encourage people we want people to do this thing uh ever since we launched there's been a request and that request has been can we get the main episodes like the episode you're listening to right now ad-free

uh and now you can because we are launching we've launched In theory, assuming everything goes well, we've launched a $10 tier that includes all of the bonus content you're currently be getting, as well as all of the main feed episodes completely ad-free.

So that will be up now.

Uh, hopefully, that is something you guys are interested in.

I know a bunch of people have asked about it.

Uh, it should be noted that we are once again just straight copying what Blank Check did on their Patreon because they seem to be good folks that know what they're doing.

Uh, so that's what we've done here, and uh, yeah, so if that's of interest, uh, I know for people that haven't subscribed yet or don't have an active subscription, there's a bit of a discount for signing up, things like that.

So, hop on over to patreon.com/slash the besties

for all that

cool stuff with the tier.

And that's it.

And we should make it clear, if you don't want to do that, you still can listen to the regular episodes with not going anywhere.

You'll still have the ad-supported main feed episodes.

Those are there.

Or if you just want to stay at $5, you'll just get the bonus content and the ad-supported episodes of the main feed.

This is really just for people that either want to support us more or just want ad-free main feed.

And they'll all be in, you can actually choose.

They'll all be in one giant feed with all the bonus bonus and the regular episodes or you can separate them out if you want according to patreon people that know more than me that's it let's let's take an ad break let's do yeah or not or not if you're a part of the new team wow hey welcome

here's your chance to try it out

so hollow night silk song is here the way is over

and uh it's uh what do you guys think?

How's it living up to your expectations?

How do we even tackle this?

It's such a tough.

Yeah, it's tough.

We should lay this out first.

We are only talking up to a certain point in the game.

Obviously, with Russ on the line, we're extremely cognizant about spoilers.

And so we are not going to go too far past

an area that's maybe like halfway through Act One, maybe a good like eight.

I think we should give town names.

I don't think a town name is a spoiler.

Well, I don't know, man.

With you, it's always a moving target.

It would be a spoiler for me, but I think for most normal people, it wouldn't.

Yeah, you set the boundaries, Fresh.

Sure, yeah.

So there's a town called Bellheart, which is like a critical path town.

It takes, I mean, depending on skill, probably seven or eight hours to reach.

If you played a ton since launch, you've probably reached it already.

So we were thinking everything before that, we'll cover here.

We won't be touching any late game stuff in this conversation, but obviously, you know, anything before reaching Bellheart is a fair game.

So if you want to wait to listen to this until you've gotten to that point, feel free.

If you don't care, like most people, I'm sure,

rock and roll.

Okay,

can I kick things off with this?

And it's the thing that I keep kind of coming back to as I've

played, I think I've put about 20 hours into Silk Song at this point.

Is

I

had forgotten the thing that made Hollow Knight so special and so memorable, which is this

sense of place and atmosphere and vibe that Team Cherry was able to sort of accomplish of being a little bug in a big sprawling bigger bug now.

Yeah, bigger bug, slightly bigger bug now

in a threatening, sprawling world

that constantly scares and surprises and

overwhelms you.

That vibe, like the fact that they have been able to do that again, and I think much more even effectively than in Hollow Knight is really above everything else.

There's a lot about this game that is working for me so well.

I have not felt so sort of like transported by a game

in a very, very, very long time, if ever.

Difficulty is like the big conversation about this game, and it's always one that is so fraught and turns people into,

I don't know, buttholes sort of on either side of the conversation.

But the way that this game makes you pay attention to everything and care about every hit you take and every jump you make because of that kind of like atmosphere that it surrounds you with is

it is a feat.

It is an accomplishment that I think cannot be overstated.

The way it looks, especially now that you've mentioned the bigger bug and like the animation, I kept trying to think of like, what is the vibe that is I'm connecting connecting with here It reminds me of like a lot of the non-Disney animation of the 80s like Don Bluth stuff Don Bluth exactly like that that that it's a very generous like lush kind of animation, you know what I mean?

Like there's almost more frames than you need to like really bring across like the fluidity of it like it you feel that like sort of

Almost an almost sort of like painterly

aspect to it like as you're as you're going through and so crazy varied too like beyond the point we're going to talk about today like you will reach areas that don't look anything like places you have been before and all of a sudden it's like oh fuck like the rules are different here uh thing this is a this is i need to be on my fucking toes and that sense of like constant alertness that the game requires it it dovetails it feeds back into

uh

i just the appreciation for the for the vibe in the environment um i mentioned earlier when i was playing i plugged in headphones Did anyone else try playing with headphones?

No, I don't think so.

I don't think I've ever played a game with better audio design than this fucking game.

The audio design in this game is fucking through the roof insane.

There's a moment very, very early on

when you are going through a cavern or whatever, and you hear in the distance, somehow, it's a 2D fucking game, and yet you hear it in the distance,

just the echoing of a song from someone that is singing.

beautiful chris and your footsteps are echoing on like the cave floor and you can hear just like the whispers of air sneaking through the cave and you get closer and closer to this singing voice and you meet the person who turns out to be like your main map fender effectively and that vibe is just like so precision tuned in ways that I really can't think of a single like oral experience that I've ever had that is better than this game.

And it's holistic.

Yes, I agree.

It's incredible how well they do that.

And they do that in a lot of other ways.

There are lots of subtle audio cues.

And then there are subtle

visual cues.

So, like, when you're meeting this character Chakra, there are little items that serve no real purpose other than to cue you in to you are getting closer and closer to this person.

There are large objects in the environment that also cue you in, that you are getting closer and closer to this person.

It's so incredibly clever.

I'm curious, Plant,

as someone who we've talked a lot about, the fact that this genre does not click with you,

how you found this one in particular?

Because in my experience in playing it, it does feel

more directed, although not extremely directed at all, but more directed than Hollow Knight was.

Yes, I'm so glad you asked because I bounced off Hollow Knight and there are a few things that have changed.

One,

didn't just have a kid.

And let me tell you, bad time to play a game where you need to remember an entire giant world is when you don't remember anything, including your own name.

So that was a huge game changer.

Two, you're right.

More directed from the drop.

This game does a pretty clear job of

confining you just enough that you feel like you know what you're doing before before you get lost in its world.

And most importantly, with that confinement, I feel like you have the opportunity to get the core parts of the mapping system

before you get thrown out into the murkiness, which I did not feel personally with

Hollow Knight.

Maybe that is, maybe I'm wrong.

No, this game gives you the mapping stuff earlier.

Way quicker.

Yeah, way easier.

Yes.

I also just found the combat very quickly to be much more exciting.

And I,

again, I don't remember much of Hollow Knight or why I bounced off.

I remember it being a little bit slower or not muddier because it's not bad in that way.

But this reminds me of something closer to a platinum game, honestly.

It feels like...

pretty intense action combat.

The amount of aerial work that I'm doing when I'm playing the game feels like the sort of thing I like doing in action games.

And what's really,

really blown me away about this game, as somebody who is less interested in the Metroidvania stuff, is your moveset is so small, but it wants you to use every piece of it.

So like, I pictured this game as, oh, I'm going to do the normal, like, poke, poke, dodge.

Like, that's the system here.

That is not how the combat works.

Like, it is, at least for me, I have been zipping through it and have maybe had to like retry a boss once or twice, as long as I continue to play really aggressive and I'm like jumping and I'm doing the dive poke and I'm doing stab stab and then diving downward actually once you get the dash.

Like, it's it's wild how much you benefit from just using every little thing that it gives you.

It does so well at catering to different play styles.

And I think there's a lot to talk about there, but I am curious to hear Juice's thoughts about it because I don't remember.

Were you a big Hollow Knight?

Yeah, I finished it.

I played all of it.

How is Silksong treating you?

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't think I'm going to be able

to hang with this one.

I really,

I just found it pretty frustrating.

The boss, whatever, that I ran into were like...

difficult but like once you learn the patterns you like it was a little bit more manageable uh but i would like i just kept getting

i would need to pace myself a little bit too much.

There was like too much distance between the safe point and the boss that I was fighting, and I would like takes a little bit too long to get back to the guy, and I would like die and get hurt on the way back to him.

And just found it frustrating.

It felt, I think that it feels more like a Dark Souls or like that level of like find the perfect route, master the perfect way through,

and like there's things like the uh

the little platforms that you have to jump at diagonally to like

bounce to to move off of yeah yeah so just that just for just a question because this you're right this is before the cutoff so is the is the thing that like destroyed you a little bit mentally was the this chapel of the beast fight

i don't know if no big bug in a cave that's no i beat him

big bug in a cave

oh a big bug in a cave hold on

you described them all um it wasn't and it wasn't even like, I mean, the first boss fight that I did, the Bell Beast was the first one that I like.

And the Belle Beast is like,

once you learn it,

it feels a little slow, but once you learn it, it's not that hard.

Like, once you learn that there's a pattern, and once you get the pattern, and once you realize, like, oh, this is much more, this is really the kind of experience where,

you know, if you look at other Metroidvanias or search action, thank you,

those battles, the big fights in there are a lot more about like utilizing tools a lot of times than they are about like pattern memorization.

And

there are some that are like on the harder end, like Prince of Persia was a little bit, not to this level, I don't think at all.

But for me,

I kind of wanted to do more of the exploration and I felt like so sort of hampered by how careful I had to be all the time that it made it, that sucks some of the fun out.

Yeah, for what it's worth, I found the it's it's by no means an easy game.

It is a hard game.

I did find the early parts of the game to be some of the hardest.

The hardest.

Because you really don't have much of a kit at all.

And not just hardest, but like most unpleasant, like not most, least enjoyable.

Because before

you will, you can reach a point where it's like, okay, I've got some traversal upgrades.

I know I can go back and maybe find this mask shard.

And if I go into that fight and I have an extra mask,

that's going to help me do that a lot.

but when you start the game you don't you only have this one

uh this one

secaro at the beginning of the game where you're like locked into a playstyle i also have like 400 of the i don't know chits bucks rosary beads no not rosary shards

shards i got 400 shards and i can't get any more of those there's a limit i can't get more i haven't found any place to use them but i there is a limit and then the rosary beads you lose those if you die you know and you don't get back to your

thing.

But I was confused about that because it seems like there's a finite number of them, right?

Yeah, so

my interpretation, Justin, is you might feel like you're being more critical pathed than you actually are.

Because really, at this point where you're at, there is a ton specifically involving like your, a ton of aspects involving your actual like hit.

that you haven't found yet

that you might think you have to take on these boss fights with what you have, but yeah i don't know why i would say

probably from the getting to them there's there's a uh an item that you get that completely changes how your jump dive works that makes it usable yeah um and like those are the things that i think or like you you don't have any tools and we haven't actually talked about tools but it's a big like mechanic

let's come back to that i do want to hear uh griffin frush i feel like you two are the ones who've been waiting a long time for this Where are you at on it?

I'm through the roof in love with it.

I've played about as much as Griffin has.

And

the things that I love about Metroid Vanya's Serx Action game, sorry,

are all here.

It's just done at such a high level of quality and just variety.

I'll talk about a couple things that really stand out to me.

I had just played Hollow Knight.

I mentioned it on the episode last week.

I had had just played through Hollow Knight before this, and I was a little bit worried that like I might be burnt out or something like that.

But this game actually takes a lot of turns that Hollow Knight never even approaches.

One of which is, and we'll talk about it because it's before that cutoff.

There's something called crests.

So crests

are

basically

subclasses or even classes that you can find in the world.

They're items that allow you, that, that allow you to change your primary attack, attack the gear that you have equipped how you interact with the world what your down stab is like all sorts of aspects of the like way you actually fight

that um

felt like a total like shift from how they were approaching hollow knight where hollow knight's combat plant you kind of mentioned it was attack attack dash or sometimes cast a spell like that was really there wasn't a lot to it right and here you are given so many tools at your disposal to really transform the way you interact with this game that I was not expecting at all, in addition to all the other stuff that I love about Hollow Knight, which is exploration and world design and audio design, etc.

Yeah, it really didn't click for me until I found one of those because I fucking hated the diagonal down dash.

Like that pogo mechanic is so integral to

Hollow Knight and this game.

And I was like, well, this does, I've done it a million times and it still doesn't feel good.

But finding one of those crests completely changes your moveset.

And also, they they are built for different play styles, which I think is the most brilliant thing.

I found a few at this point, and the one that I keep coming back to is the Crest of the Reaper.

And what that does is after you heal,

which you, you know, use some of your silk to heal, it puts you in this state where if you can hit enemies without getting hit, it will spawn extra little silk orbs in the environment.

So it creates this play style where it's like, I'm going to heal.

I'm going to use my moves.

As long as I don't get hit and I keep hitting the enemy, I can just keep this chain going of healing and powers and all this stuff.

There's one where after you heal, it puts you into this rage state where you deal extra damage, but the move set is like really weird because your attacks are like really, really small.

Also, there's like different tools that are kind of like the,

what were they called in Hollow Knight?

uh bat not badges but something oh yeah the perks basically yeah where like there's different slots different types of perks and each crest can equip a certain amount of those.

And so like, I don't know, looking at other people talking about the game, it's interesting to see like how people are gravitating towards different play styles.

As you find more move-in abilities, specifically the dash, like that is where the game really took off for me.

But I really did not have a good time with this game until I found that stuff.

And I think that that is

evidence of like...

seven years of overtuning perhaps the game as evidenced by the fact that they are patching it to give you more rosaries and reduce the cost of unlocking checkpoints and making a few of their early game bosses a little bit easier.

Because

that stuff is a pretty, pretty solid wall.

I am well past that stuff now, and I am really, really, really liking the game a lot.

I do think that there are a couple elements still, though, that are just like, too

punishing, not

hard.

Like, there's boss.

I have yet to face a boss that you know i felt like i can't beat this but i have faced a boss where i'm like this is a five minute fucking run back to this there's a five minute run back to this boss and then i have to fight five waves of enemies and then i get a chance at the bottom like that sucks man like that's not i'll just i will leave and maybe i'll come back and do that later but i it really sucks to like put a bunch of work into clearing out an area, hit this point, and then feel like, well, okay, this is not, this is, this is a little bit too much for me.

I have found that for what it's worth.

And again, having played Hollow Knight just recently, it actually helped this.

I think I have a good sense now of like what a normal fight or a normal, quote, run back

should be for them based on their design language.

And oftentimes, if I feel like a fight is going on so long, even though I know the pattern or whatever it is, it usually means like it tells me at least, I don't have the right kit for this.

I should just come back later when I have more gear or a damage increase or whatever it is.

And that has actually helped me rather than like throwing myself again and again and again.

I get that thing.

I get that.

And I

should be clear, like,

I like hard games.

I like that this game is, I like that this game is really challenging.

There's an area

pretty well past the point that we're supposed to talk about that episode.

I won't get too deep into it, but it's like, it's just a really, really, really, really hard challenge that you get a cool thing if you can do it.

And I banged my head against it for two hours and I did it and it was fucking great.

That's cool.

What's not cool is like

I have to, all of this work I have to do to go through this area and then hit this boss and get my ass kicked.

And then like, instead of getting another shot at it,

I have to do a lot of busy work to to get there.

It doesn't feel, it feels like punishing in in a bad way.

And there's not a lot of that in the game, but I have hit a couple points of it.

And it really, it is a, a pretty big kind of like, I don't know, momentum killer.

Threading together what you and Frush are saying, for me, what I don't like about Metroidvanias in general, and especially bad ones, which I don't think this is, is I don't like the feeling of wasting my time.

I don't like when a game feels like it's larger because it is having me backtrack.

And it's the thing that I don't like about some Souls games too, for a different reason, is the wasting my time of having to replay and regrind to make up for the time that I lost.

And I think what you are talking about feels like a bit of both those things.

That said,

because I am so skeptical of the genre, Fresh, I've had almost an identical experience to you despite not knowing the language of this game, which is the second I go somewhere and I'm like, right away, I'm like, well, this is a harder.

This is more challenging than it was before.

I turn around and I go a different direction because I'm like, I just want to fucking deal with it right now.

And what is cool about the game is there are a lot of different directions to go.

So

did you guys end up in Hunter's March?

Did you guys make it to that little game?

It sounded like Justin did if he's bouncing off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hunter's March is an area that you no one has any right to go to early in the game, but you can get there pretty easily.

Yeah.

And it is a point where it's so fucking brutal.

It's so hard.

The enemies are I think that's where I am probably, I guess.

I don't know.

It is an area that you can get to fairly early in the game where it just the difficulty spike is insane.

And there's not really a lot of signposts saying, like, turn back, man.

Like, you're, you ain't ready for this shit.

Uh, where it's an area that is just nasty full of traps and crazy fights.

Uh, and I don't know.

I, I,

I, I am of two minds about it because it was so annoying, but I felt like, well, this is the way I'm supposed to go because it's a straight shot from the last boss that I fought.

Uh, and I did end up sort of like making it pretty far into it before I realized, like, wait a second, there's a lot of like platforming shit here that i'm not able to do so maybe i should turn back uh almost always there's it's so rare that you maybe at the very very beginning of the game but otherwise it's so rare that there is just one path you have to go to yeah you don't have anything else to explore when i hit that i hit that cap i was going to address what you mentioned earlier justin i hit that cap that resource cap of the shards, whatever they're called.

And I'm like, I'm fighting a boss, but I'm at this cap.

This is weird to me.

There's no reason I'd be running around with this much currency that I've been collecting and nowhere to use it.

Right.

So instead of fighting that boss, I was like, I'm just going to like walk around and look in rooms and see what's there until I found a way to actually spend that stuff, which in turn gave me tools that made me more effective in combat, that made me better at exploring.

And that's kind of, I mean, I don't know.

It's a design language that oftentimes is a little opaque.

You really have to be into this kind of game and you kind of have to meet it at its own kind of level.

And if it's not clicking for you, I probably won't.

For me, this, I've talked for a long while about like what kind of games I'm into and what like checks my boxes from a game.

This is doing it all for me.

Like it's, I think it's better than Hollow Knight.

Hollow Knight was easily one of my top five games of all time.

And I think it does

everything in here apart from which i agree the intro is a little bit punishing yeah i want to i want to put a bone up because i know that we will probably be talking about it more at the end of the year and i also uh honestly just want to play more of it i am surprised how much i've enjoyed it despite it not being the game that was um

At the top of my to wait list, I'm still waiting for mother three.

It's gonna come out.

I've been talking with my buddy Doug Bowser and Shigeru Miyamoto with our usual like weekend lunches and they keep saying, Chris, you just keep waiting, but I guess that this will hold me over for now.

Do you want to talk about, speaking of, some other games that

I will never play?

And by that I mean Silicon 3?

I would love to, after a quick break or not, depending again on

the new tier thing.

This week's episode of the besties is brought to you in part by Rocket Money.

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Well, I have great news for you.

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We are back

and

with Silk Song now available, now taken off of our fantasy dreams of the future, we have to move our hearts to something new, something fresh.

So I thought we could talk about the games that we're really excited about coming up between now now and the end of the year.

And you might be thinking, Chris, this seems like just an excuse for you to talk about Sonic Racing Crossworlds.

To which I want to say, yes, it is.

And I don't need an excuse for you.

I don't have to give you an excuse to talk about Sonic Racing Crossworlds.

So you're saying like 30 minutes is maybe too much.

If you want to take 30 minutes to talk about Sonic Racing Crossworlds, that's actually great.

It's a crossword game, right?

What if I told you Sonic Racing is back?

And you might be a little worried because it's not being made by Sumo Digital, the team that made the really good ones.

But you know who is making it?

Team fucking Sonic.

Sonic Team is making the racing game now.

And you're thinking, yeah, but just more Sonic?

Don't worry.

What if I told you SpongeBob was there?

What if I told you Avatar and the Ninja Turtles are going to pop up and have Sonic?

Wait, did you get Nickelodeon in with the Sonic?

Of course they got Nickelodeon in it.

Who else would you put in these games?

Did you say multi-curses?

But

if you want to talk about some other games, I want to make sure that I give you all time to talk about those two, but we can come back to the Outer Worlds.

The Outer Worlds 2 is the true Starfield.

I'm going to say it.

Because Outer Worlds 2, the benefits are, one, no one is going to be confused and think you're talking about Outer Wilds.

That's because there's no Outer Wilds to very powerful.

Second, I feel like Outer Worlds one was so close, so close to really great.

Like the wheels fell off, like for me, halfway through.

It was halfway to being like

truly great.

And I feel like Obsidian is on a really solid run where they're figuring out ways to iterate things that Bethesda is still struggling to sort of figure out how to do with any sort of like soul or character.

And I feel like Outer Worlds 2 is going to be very good.

That's where I'm at.

It's crazy that they're releasing two large RP action RPGs in the same fucking year.

And they released

the Honey, I Trunk the Kids.

Oh, yeah, and fucking Grounded is really wild.

What's the other?

Oh, sorry.

What's the other?

My brain is what's the other biggest obsidian?

In Shrap.

In Slate?

What?

About.

About Ashen.

Ashen.

Man, that was a real

spate of those A games all at once that didn't come out.

I am nervously excited.

I am tentatively excited for Pokemon Legends Z to A.

Mostly because

Henry and I still play Scarlet and Violet.

And so just the idea that I'll be able to play a different Pokemon game is

an exciting notion to me.

I can only square off against him in six-on-six battles with the same fucking team

and pretend like it is

a thrilling melee so many times.

So I'm looking forward to seeing what they do.

I'm looking forward to seeing what they do on new hardware sort of natively because

the last Pokemon game really was pushing at the seams of what the Switch could kind of do and suffered dreadfully.

I think it's on both.

It is on both, yeah, I guess.

But it's going to roll out.

Legends also felt like closer to what I I want from a modern Pokemon game.

When we played that last one, that was the first time I felt like in a long time.

Oh, I'm yeah, it was cool.

This feels made for me.

It was cool.

It's also returning to like my favorite generation of Pokemon games, that Pokemon X and Y, you know, early Nintendo 3DS era, I thought was really, really good.

So that's I want to call out Mina the Hollower, which is the yacht club game

makers of Shovel Knight.

I just a few weeks ago finished

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yo-Yo,

which like awakened something in me for this era of game.

And I just kind of want more of it.

And that game was so fucking good.

Did that keep evolving that Pipistrello?

I liked it all right at the beginning, but I don't know

where it was going.

Yeah, I mean, they kept adding like new movement and puzzle mechanics that like kept it very interesting throughout.

I think it was 10-ish hours.

I was miserable this year.

I feel like worse than any other year at finishing stuff.

I feel like my ability to actually see things through has been so bad this year.

I feel like I keep jumping from thing to thing.

Maybe that's a

testament to the speed of releases.

I don't feel like there have been a lot of dry spells, but yeah, there really haven't.

Even, you know, I think our driest spell has been this, you know, past month or so before

Silk Song.

And even then, it was like, there's still stuff to play.

Yeah.

The backlog for this year for me, too, is really quite brutal.

It's been a really strong year.

It's going to get even stronger when Kirby Air Riders comes out because that shit looks good as hell.

It doesn't have SpongeBob in it, unfortunately.

We should also mention there's going to be a Nintendo Direct happening when this episode goes live.

Obviously, we won't have seen it, so who fucking knows what's going to be in there?

It does feel like they're missing.

I mean, I guess Metroid theoretically is coming out this year.

It does feel like they're missing another holiday title at the moment yeah so we might see something have y'all heard about cairn

see a ringside bar

yeah so it's a mountain climbing game and look I just dropped two images in the besties slack and I feel like these images are designed to get the juices tingling in a certain type of brain I see a lot of tick tocks about cairns

Oh, that's a different, sorry, that's a different thing.

My kids are always talking about Karens.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a

screenshot.

The screenshot you sent me is insane.

It's a backpack full of

pasta noodles.

Yeah, it's kind of like a Resident Evil style inventory thing, but it looks like it's like physics space where you're kind of just making space for all of your items.

And then it is, it's a climbing game.

It's all about just climbing mountainsides, but taking

try and try again to like find your path.

It looks to me like a return of the strand game.

And if we could get two strand games in the same year, I'm just saying that's big.

That's big news for the strand genre.

That is a sharp, that is a hundred percent increase in strand games.

Yeah.

Um, who put ball x pit on here?

I put it on there.

I think it's pronounced ball pit in the way that anime often adds like spy family for no reason, like spy family.

Uh, but it's just a um breakout roguelike.

Yeah, I've seen some streamers playing it, and it looks

really, really.

I guess the demo is out,

and it looks really, really good.

Yeah, I'm pretty excited about that one.

Any other last ones?

Did you see that?

I mean, yeah, Prime 4, assuming it comes out this year.

Did they say officially that it is coming out, and they just haven't given a release date?

I don't remember hearing a release date, but I'm also pretty dog shit at keeping track of that.

I think it might come.

We might hear the release.

I would guess we're going to hear the release date on this new Nintendo game.

That seems right.

Yeah, that is a cursory Google search does suggest that that is the

that is what's going to happen.

The point.

I'm also very excited about Baby Steps, which got delayed because they wanted to get out of the way of Silk Song, but that comes out end of September.

That's the Did you see our friend Geo took a nice long walk with her friend Simone for that game?

No, I didn't see it.

It's very charming.

I got you.

Yeah,

Gio and Simone at Polygon went on a long walk with Bennett Foddy, the co-creator of this game, and it's just a great conversation about game design and walking

that I really recommend.

Lots of good stuff.

Lots of good stuff.

Lots of good stuff.

Do we have any questions from the mailbag?

I think we do.

Let me pull this up really quick.

This one is from

Thrill Ho.

Hey, besties.

This question is partially inspired by Chris's excellent interview with the creative multi-hyphen at Claire Evans on Postgams.

But I think this is a better place to ask.

Any place to get a promo.

Mini gamers.

Anything to get a promo.

Hey, hey, I just, it was the first time.

You remember I was enjoying a Lipton iced tea

on my Casper mattress.

And the question continues, for a mere $5 a month, you can subscribe to

Patreon.

That's wild.

I can subscribe to Save the Rizzler?

What?

I, like many gamers, harbor dreams of making a video game despite knowing nothing about programming or what game development actually entails.

It would be an utterly boneheaded thing for me to attempt, both because of my lack of knowledge and how very rare it is for a game to pay off.

At the same time, I've somehow managed to be a mildly successful writer, another career where the odds of success are dismal at best.

It got me wondering, which is the more quixotic pursuit?

Making a

financially successful video game?

I would say just sort of like with

the recent spade of censorship on Steam making a sexful game is

not going to be financially the most sort of sound decision.

Making a financially successful video game or writing a financially successful book?

They seem comparable, but I would say I think writing the book is easier.

Yeah, I've written books.

It's hard.

It takes a while, but like, you know,

I don't

know.

Yeah, you just be the one person.

Just write a whole dang book.

And that's, that's cool, but you have, there's so many other things you have to do to make it to make a game.

I don't know how to make a financially successful either one of them.

I don't know.

Yeah.

But

I mean, the game does seem harder in general than the book.

So yeah,

I will say the books make money, but then does anything make money is the big question.

So you know what?

I'm going to flip this question and say,

make things

because they're great art.

And if you can't, not worry about the money.

Anyone has a hard time.

The hard part of it, I would just say make things if it brings joy to your life.

Oh, there you go.

Do you feel like you want to put it into the world?

It doesn't need to be art.

It could be far.

That's a great effort.

That's a great point.

Hey, I want to get into honorable mentions.

And there's a request we've had from a listener about AR glasses and what we think of them and hoops.

I know that you've actually tried these things.

So I was hoping that you could tell us a little bit about it.

Yeah, I use a pair of

X real.

I gotta make sure I'm saying the right things because there's a lot of X Real

glasses, the X Real ones.

They,

I believe, I don't know if I have this model I'm looking at here, but they're by X Real.

There's several different kinds.

These have, there's the X-Row One Pros are

the new latest and greatest, I think.

Those are 650.

And I don't know what you're getting that's different with those.

Let me tell you what these do.

All right.

And you will know if this use case will work for you or not.

But you got a pair of sunglasses that look like big, thick.

Black sunglasses.

They don't look like normal sunglasses, but they don't look like a visor.

They look like

there's a depth to these thickness and they look kind of like stupid.

They look kind of stupid, but not stupid in the way that like a visor would.

They look like stupid sunglasses.

And they connect via a USB-C

to whatever, anything with a USB-C outlet or a USB-C video out, I guess I should say.

And they will play the video signal from that device and the sound from that device through like bone conduction speakers in the this part, right?

In the in the

ear part,

and then the uh the glasses will project a large image in front of you that's tantamount to like a seven foot tall screen.

You can adjust the size in terms of inches, you can make it big enough that you have to like look around to see all of it.

Um, you can also do if you're watching something that's in side-by-side 3D, you can activate that as like a as a mode if you like.

But mainly the use case is like

if you are,

here's why I have found them to be useful for me and why I end up using them a lot.

Because if you travel a lot and you don't want, like if you're trying to like watch something on a flight or you want to do something like that, it is

like...

Just a fantastic experience.

I mean, you plug it in and you're, and you could do it with a Steam Deck.

You plug it into a Steam Deck and you're playing the the latest and greatest video games on a gigantic is it two screens one for each eye?

What do you mean like what are you seeing when you're you're looking at a you're looking at a stereoscopic

you're looking at a 2d image is what you you're looking at the it is two dependent independent things, but you're like looking at a regular it looks like you're looking at a big floating

TV screen in front of you.

And if you move your hand if you were to pull the glasses away from your face, you would see two screens on the inside.

Yeah, sort of like how an octopus, you know, quest

does it.

Yeah.

I imagine.

Yeah, same concept.

It's boiled down to the very smallest.

You can push a button and like it'll turn into like pretty dark sunglasses so you can see

in front of you, but they're pretty good at shutting the light out.

You know, you don't have to use them in like a super dark environment.

But like for, you know, if you end up watching a lot of like TV movies, video games in like hotel rooms or planes or taxis or whatever, like we do,

it's pretty cool.

I don't know if you would want to necessarily use them in a place where people you know might see you, but like, you know, when you're on a plane or whatever, you don't give a crap.

It's pretty, pretty cool for that.

And gaming is a lot of fun.

I will say it feels like you are not, you know, there's that old David Lynch video where he talks about like, if you watch a movie on your phone you'll think you will have seen the film but you won't have actually seen the film this does feel like in this one specific case when i plug these glasses in i do feel like i can watch a capital f film

and also uh cheaper than the apple vision pro right like i mean every yeah but like you are it is a such a more i mean i will say this that's probably what i would use the apple vision pro the most for anyway i mean if my history with vr is any example I have, I'll say, say this: I have used these more than I have ever used any, like cumulative hour spent.

I have used these more than I've ever used any VR helmet I've ever owned.

So,

I mean, this is the, this is the way this needs to go, right?

This is much closer to the way things need to be, but yeah, they're, they're cool.

Uh, I have not tried the like best of the best higher end ones, but the ones, I mean, the X-Reel ones I used are good.

I enjoyed them.

Um, I've been watching Kaso, K-A-S-S-O.

Y'all heard about this shit?

It's a Japanese competition show.

It's on YouTube.

That's where I've been watching it.

And it's basically

skateboarding Ninja Warrior.

It's a long skateboard obstacle courses.

that incredibly talented skateboarders go through.

Like one is just a crazy long winding rail that goes around and around and people take runs at it just to see how far they can go before they fall off and it beats ass because it's a lot of like really really really good skateboarders like busting up as people try to do these like ridiculous uh challenges it's it's taken way less seriously than a you know a sasuke or ninja warrior or or or whatever it's just like

skaters cutting up and doing crazy stunts and it is a good ass time it's k-a-s-s-o on youtube i love this look it up I wanted to call out a video, speaking of YouTube, done by our friends over at Secret Base.

It is about scorigami.

Oh, yeah.

If you're not familiar with scoreigami, it is a concept that John Boyce

invented.

It's basically the idea that in football, when there's a score that has never happened before in the history of the NFL, that's a scoreigami.

So if no one's ever scored 21 to 6, I'm sure that's happened a lot, for argument's sake, that counts as a scorigami.

And so they're doing a video series about the concept of scorigami, the history of it, why people are so into it, the weird esoteric moments throughout history.

You don't need to care about football.

God bless, John Boys,

for making me give a shit about sports that I otherwise would not give a shit about by focusing only on the weird, weird errata that I'm.

That whole channel has dynamite stuff in here that will really draw you into the weird esoteric sports stories and this this video just went up so it's definitely worth a watch it's great

there's so much good stuff

what games do we talk about this week Chris do you have anything before we oh yeah I mean,

it's basically Halloween season, so I'll just throw out like a random recommendation.

I think that everybody should watch Halloween 3 season of the witch.

Heck yeah, man.

Jesus Christ, man.

It's basically Halloween 2 because Halloween 2 is a direct sequel to Halloween 1, and Halloween 3 is basically the exact opposite.

They said, you know what, Halloween?

It's just going to be this random series where we tell different stories, and not all of them are about Michael Myers.

And after this one, people got so mad that they didn't do it again, which is a shame because this movie is a blast and is a great way to both start or stop your Halloween season.

And you should check it out.

It's also a great way to stop the Halloween franchise for four decades.

That's true.

Release another one of those then.

That might be a good idea.

Okay, what did we talk about this week?

We talked about so much stuff.

We talked about Hollow Knight Silk Song.

We talked about Metroid Prime 4, Baby Steps, Pokemon Legends Z through A, Sonic Racing, Crossworlds, Ball, Pit, or Ball X Pit, Cairn, Mean of the Hollow, Kirby Air Riders, The Outer Worlds 2, plus we talked about the X Real One AR Glasses, Casso, the YouTube TV show about skateboarding challenges, Halloween 3, Season of the Witch, and the Skoragami video, which will be linked along with everything else at besties.fan, a newsletter that you can subscribe to for free.

There's also the Patreon over at patreon.com slash the besties.

I wanted to thank a few members.

We have Alden, we have Tanner, we have Sarah, and we have Triosaurus.

Thank you for being members of the Patreon.

Once again, we have that new tier.

If you're interested in getting the main episodes ad-free in addition to all the bonus episodes, the new tier is up,

but if you want to just stay at $5, that's also fine, but you do you, whatever is going to float your boat.

We've got a new bracket episode up about bathroom games, if that's enticing to you.

We've also got a new besties episode up where we played some fun stuff.

And yeah, what are we doing next week?

Oh, we're doing a grab bag next week.

We're doing so much stuff.

We're going to be getting back to some things that people have been asking us to check out, like Abiotic Factor and a bunch of other games.

Have we talked about the new hotshots?

We talked a little bit about it on Rusties.

Have you played it yet, Griffin?

Yeah, hell yeah.

Okay, okay.

Let's talk more about it.

Let's talk more about it.

I had a more successful technical experience.

Yeah, I want to talk about Lone Track.

I need to give that a try.

There's so much much stuff.

So many games.

That is going to do it for us for this week's episode of the Besties.

Be sure to join us again next time for the Besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends make the world's best games?

Besties.