Triple Play: The Outer Worlds 2

Kirk, Maddy, and Jason put on their capitalism hats and go to space for a trip to The Outer Worlds 2, the latest roleplaying game from Obsidian. They talk about how it improves upon the first game, all the fun dialogue options, and the hilarious Dumb trait.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Finally, there's a video game with representation of my identity, someone who has no clue what's going on. Welcome to TripleClick, where we bring the games to you. This week, we all played Outer Worlds 2, a sci-fi RPG that let us make characters with very entertaining flaws, like being stupid or selfish, while collecting a lot of guns. What could go wrong?

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:32Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Jason Shire. And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Hello, it's us again.

• 0:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Welcome back.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  We're back.

• 0:37Kirk Hamilton?

  We are. Here we are.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  We're back on Planet TripleClick.

• 0:41Jason Schreier?

  Guys, I spoke to the developer of Ball X-Pit yesterday, Kenny Sun, and he told me that it is pronounced "ball-pit."

• 0:51Speaker 00

  Okay, finally.

• 0:53Kirk Hamilton?

  I saw a couple of people saying that.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Glad we had that clear enough.

• 0:55Kirk Hamilton?

  That this is more of an anime styling, that you don't say the X. You just say the two words.

• 0:59Jason Schreier?

  As it often is.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, and like a ball pit kind of thematically fits with how it feels to play that game. You're jumping into the ball pit, the balls are bopping around.

• 1:10Kirk Hamilton?

  So there's this place in Portland called Hopscotch. It's like this art gallery kind of thing. You go there with your kids. I think it's more of a thing to take your family to, but you go from room to room, and there are these really cool art installations. Some of them are really amazing. There's one, it was like hanging balls from the ceiling that light up in these incredible patterns while music plays. It's just a kind of a neat place. One of the rooms is a ball pit, and it's, you know, more for the kids to play around in. And it did not smell great in there, I'm gonna say. I had not smelled a ball pit in a long time, and it was this mix of sort of plastic and sweat and feet, because you have to take your shoes off to go in the ball pit. It did not make me want to go in the ball pit, as fun as it was to see a ball pit for the first time in many years.

• 1:54Jason Schreier?

  Gotta watch out for those smelly balls.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I feel like a ball pit.

• 1:58Kirk Hamilton?

  God, here we go again.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  It's more about what you imagine it could be than what it really is. And here on Triple Click, we talk about what it really is. We talk about the realities of balls and ball pits. And we're not really going to get more into ball pit today. But if you liked last week's app and you're already listening to this one, then hey, kind of sounds like you like Triple Click. And if you like Triple Click-

• 2:23Jason Schreier?

  By the way, the X in Triple Click is silent.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  That's right. And it's also invisible.

• 2:27Kirk Hamilton?

  It's not triple X click.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Because we've never mentioned it before now. And we'll never mention it again after this because we're going to forget we said that. But it is silent and it is invisible. And some more fun facts about Triple Click. One of them is you can support us. You can become a member of Maximum Fun, our wonderful just cavalry of supporters by going to maximumfun.org/join. And if you were to do that, you would get our monthly bonus episodes, one a month. We recently did one about Hollow Knight: Silk Song. We spilled the beans or the beads on that game. We are going to do a bonus episode about Indie Game: The Movie.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  We're going to re-watch that old movie that I remember watching many years ago and haven't since. I'm excited to give that a re-watch and talk about it with you, too. That's the kind of stuff that's in the bonus feed.

• 3:21Kirk Hamilton?

  It is a trip. It is a real journey.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  A true nostalgia trip.

• 3:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  And we have some other ways you can support Triple Click. Like, let's say that just being a member isn't enough for you and you want to just rep Triple Click in your day-to-day life, which why wouldn't you want to do that? We have a lot of really cool merch. We have shirts. We got a Triple Click hoodie that I get to see Jason wearing on these calls from time to time, looks real cozy. We got a Triple Click mug that I drink out of every day. It's my go-to mug. We got all kinds of stuff. You can find a link to that in the show notes. So check that out if you haven't in a while. We've given the merch store a refresher. So if you haven't been there in a while, go check it out. Maybe there's something you might like.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Okay, let's, let's get to the, the video games though. I mean, I know we were talking about Ball Pit, but that's not the main event today. Today, we're going to talk about a different video game. We're going to talk about an RPG called Outer Worlds 2, the second one. It's a video game. We've all been playing it. This is an Xbox Studios game, but it's also probably more notably an Obsidian game. If you remember, we talked about Avowed previously on the show. So Outer Worlds 2, a sequel to Outer Worlds, and it is a big choice-based RPG. You are in outer space, going to different planets, but you're also crafting a character and their personality.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  You got flaws, you got all kinds of skill trees you can select, and you can sneak your way through these planets, or you can shoot your way through these planets. And you can just make a lot of different decisions. And I, I want to hear from you two about what you've been thinking of Outer Worlds 2 so far, and what kinds of characters you've developed. Because I have a feeling that all three of us are playing this game in very different ways, because it definitely allows for that.

• 5:25Jason Schreier?

  Let's give a little bit more context here. So this is a sequel to Outer Worlds, which was designed by the co-creators of Fallout, Tim Kaine and Leonard Byarsky, who, who had originally created Fallout back at Interplay, which is kind of, there's a lineage between Interplay and Obsidian. A lot of the same people wound up going from like this company called Black Isle, that was responsible for a lot of the classic RPGs back in the day, and creating Obsidian. And so this was always seen as like the Fallout successor, especially because back then, when it came out in 2019, Obsidian, and was not part of the same company as Bethesda. That wouldn't happen for another year or so after that. And Outer Worlds, it was interesting because it was kind of seen as a quote-unquote double A game. It was made in just about three and a half years.

• 6:09Jason Schreier?

  It was a much smaller budget than your average triple A game. It was published by a company called Private Division, that was set up to publish these kind of smaller scale, triple, double A games, maybe games that are made at a budget of like $20 million. Instead of $200 million. And so it was an interesting experience. We talked about it on split screen back in the day when it came out. We kind of, we were kind of lukewarm on it for various reasons that we can get into. And what Obsidian decided to do after that was make a sequel and make it much, much bigger. Actually, I just ran an interview that we'll link in the show notes with the director, Brandon Adler, who said that they had always planned on doing a sequel. But at first, it was going to be kind of a 1.5 version, like sort of a smaller scale

• 6:50Jason Schreier?

  iterative sequel. And then when Outer Worlds 1 became this huge commercial success, they were like, okay, now we're gonna go even bigger, make a proper Outer Worlds 2 that's twice as big and has all these new systems and stuff. And it took six years and this is the result, Outer Worlds 2. So yeah, definitely a bigger, and I would say better version than the first game. I played a bunch of it. I'm really into it. I think that a couple of things for me are vastly improved over the first game. One is the combat. The combat feels much better. It feels like they've put a lot of extra oomph into it over the first game. The first game was, it was a little flat. And the other, and this is the most important thing, is the writing. The first

• 7:32Jason Schreier?

  game, the writing was very interface, it was very over the top, it was very capitalism bad, we're gonna make all this satire about it. This is a little bit more subtle. Still got all the same notes of kind of satirizing capitalism and autocracy and all that good stuff, but there's a little more nuance. The three kind of core factions each have their, I would say, pros and cons, and certainly have characters that I think are both lovable and hateable within all three of them.

• 8:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Can you say what those factions are?

• 8:03Jason Schreier?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Kirk Hamilton?

  For listeners who haven't played the game?

• 8:05Jason Schreier?

  Sure, there's, so the three factions are, there's the Order, which is this kind of like cult-like faction that believes in like being able to predict the universe. There's-

• 8:16Speaker 00

  They believe in science.

• 8:17Kirk Hamilton?

  They believe in math, mathematical prediction.

• 8:20Jason Schreier?

  They can use math to predict what's going to happen in the future.

• 8:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Kind of like Foundation a little bit, Psycho History.

• 8:25Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, a little bit. There's the Protectorate, which is the authoritarian faction-

• 8:32Jason Schreier?

  Group that has a lot of military armor and big posters of their chancellor. And then there is Ante's Choice, which is the funniest one because this is, it might sound kind of familiar if you played the first game. It's a conglomerate of Spaces Choice and Ante Cleo, which are two corporations from the first game that since the events of the first game have merged.

• 8:52Jason Schreier?

  Art imitating life. Yeah, perfect for a game that's under, under Microsoft. And they are the freedom lovers who are also extremely capitalistic and everything is a product and consumerism, ho. And those are the three factions. There's a lot more depth to them this time. And I think that what's, what's most striking for me that's different from the first game is that it feels like there's a lot more branching narrative. It feels like each of the quests and really each of the dialogue trees you get just has so many more different possibilities. In part because of this one thing that they do that's really interesting that I'm curious to hear what you two think of, which is that they not only give you kind of prompts that you,

• 9:34Jason Schreier?

  that you would need a certain number of skill points to be able to access, like they do in Fallout games and a lot of other RPGs where it'll be like, if you have strength of 10, then you can unlock this prompt. But in Outer Worlds 2, they also give you giant question marks and then like little prompts like information not found yet. Kind of hinting that you could go and find something, some piece of data somewhere else that can unlock new dialogue options for you. And that I think is really interesting, but it also, it helps show the depth of a lot of these choices and the different branches they can take. And I found that a lot of the quests can be solved in several ways. And then each of those several ways has their own branches to it. So you can go down one direction, then you'll find yourself splitting even more.

• 10:19Jason Schreier?

  I think it's really cool. But yeah, I'm really into it so far.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I also really like the way that you can solve everything in a multitude of ways. And some of that is reliant on what kind of person you're playing as. And so Jason, while you're still on talking about Outer Worlds 2, are you a sneaky character? Are you a shooty character? Are you, what was your flaw that you picked at the beginning?

• 10:44Jason Schreier?

  Well, there are a lot of flaws that you'll pick up like over the course of the game. Yeah, my guy, I tried to do a little sneaking. I found it's a pretty weak sneaking system like in, so I'm up to the second main planet. I guess there's another kind of interval planet that you could go to, the market planet, but I'm on Golden Ridge, which is the second main planet. In the first planet, at the end of that, you're invading this kind of big spaceship. And I tried to sneak around and I found that the options are pretty inadequate for actually being able to sneak. You wind up in combat more often than not. I usually try to do so, but I'm focusing on like speech, just so I can unlock more dialogue options. But I find that in this game, unlike some other RPGs,

• 11:25Jason Schreier?

  there are a lot of dialogue options and interactive options with traits that you wouldn't think to pick, like engineering and medicine and stuff like that, that a lot of kind of role-playing focused characters or role-playing focused players might not think to pick in this game. They open up some options. So make you tempted to play around with even, even the less popular stats.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. Kirk, what are you playing as and what do you think about it?

• 11:53Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm enjoying the game as well. I'm playing, yeah, I guess a sneaky, shooty, speechy character. So already your prediction that our characters would be very different is maybe not holding water. It's, you know, the kind of approach I tend to take to games like this. And something interesting about The Outer Worlds 2 is that you are not allowed to respec and it warns you when you pick every single upgrade point or perk in particular, the perks which like in Fallout are more transformative and kind of funny and interesting. Each time you pick one, you cannot undo it. There is no potion you can go buy later to let you just totally revamp your character. It's a deliberate choice by the game's developers. They've spoken about how they really want to make this game feel like

• 12:37Kirk Hamilton?

  One playthrough and they're going to show you all these other possibilities, which they certainly do every time I see a sparking door that's not quite openable. And I don't have the brawny trait and I don't have, um, I think it's engineering score high enough to crack it open. I am reminded of the fact that I will never be able to open that door because I can't level up those two, those two skills. So I think that is an interesting thing about this game. Probably my favorite thing about it is the character crafting of it all, like how that all works. And, um, especially the more I play and the more I watch my character take shape, the more I'm aware of how many roads have been left untraveled. So yeah, I think that's really cool.

• 13:18Kirk Hamilton?

  So I'm playing as a character who sneaks and, you know, have a high speech skill, which as you said, Jason, yeah, this is true to something like New Vegas, Fallout New Vegas, which also had dialogue options tied to non-speech skills, which I think is just a great call. That's something that not every game does, but it isn't just, your, your persuasiveness in the conversation is not just how high is my one speech stat. It's, you know, how much do I know about in, you know, in, I'm talking to a doctor and I need to convince them to quit their post and come help at this refugee camp. Do I have a high enough medicine score to talk to them about what they're doing and explain a way that they can do it so they can leave what they're currently doing and go help at the refugee camp?

• 14:03Kirk Hamilton?

  That kind of thing, which is just cool. It like flushes out the interactions that you're having, you know? Do you have a high enough science skill to convince this person that you know what you're talking about and so on? So I really like that a lot. So while I'm, you know, I'm, I do have a high speech skill that only comes in handy when I need to like talk a lot, you know, I need to do something that requires a very specific kind of talking, which is just sort of fun and, and very specific. I like that a lot about this game.

• 14:30Jason Schreier?

  Well, you just described, I think, is a really good example of the, the multiple branches I was talking about. So that's an area called Westport that if you pick, if you, when you're, when you get to the first town of the game and the main planet or the main first planet, um, you are kind of given the option. Fairfield, yeah. You are, you're given the option to side with these two characters. One is wearing this funny hat. The other is this kind of brawny soldier type. I went with the funny hat dude who sent me to Westport, um, which is the city that Kirk was just referencing. And in there you have to convince them all to leave. And you can go in so many different directions. Like, you can convince the main guy. You can either not convince him to leave and just convince him to stay. Or you can convince him to leave through, like, by talking him into it or through force.

• 15:14Jason Schreier?

  Or you can get his disciples to all agree to leave, which will force him to leave. And one of his disciples is the doctor that Kirk you were just talking about. And then when you meet the doctor, you can either convince her to leave by talking her into it using medicine or science skills. Or you can go and do a quest for her and, like, go collect some samples from near the town and then use that to collect her to leave. So already, it's just kind of like you're going into all these different types of choices and ways in which you can go about it. And I think it's pretty cool.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  It is cool.

• 15:42Kirk Hamilton?

  I also like how it's kind of opaque about what you need to do. It doesn't hold your hand. Sometimes to a fault, or at least it can feel a little overwhelming. I mean, I can, you can just think, I have no idea what my other options are here. And I'll find myself abandoning things that I could maybe have spent more time figuring out how to do, just because I'm not really sure where the item that I, you know, the memo that I needed to read to get the information to argue, you know, the person out of their current stance. Like, I don't know where to find that. And so I just kind of don't. But generally, I really like how it doesn't tell you what to do. It just says, "Missing information," which tells you, oh, okay. So somewhere I could learn what I need to know in order to convince this person. And I don't need to pass a skill check for that, because I'm definitely not going to

• 16:25Kirk Hamilton?

  pass, you know, this other optional skill check that would accomplish the same thing. And I think that is a really bold and interesting choice.

• 16:31Jason Schreier?

  Specifically, it doesn't tell you what to do in the dialogue options. But for the quests, it's always telling you what to do, like, for the quests.

• 16:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, I mean, I guess. But I mean, like, there's like a big story beat a little bit later on where you can have huge variance in your outcomes and you can straight up just walk right past the computer that you need to interact with in order to change the outcome. And if you aren't paying attention to the dialogue where they're saying, "Oh, no, what do we do?" You know, you could totally just miss it. I did and reloaded and then went back and realized, like, oh, I can affect the outcome of this in this really dramatic way. Like, there are definitely big things that it just doesn't tell you to do on purpose, because it wants you to pay attention and find them for yourself.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you can also just decide not to continue a quest, which I did a few times. Like, I was also working with the funny hat guy. And then at a certain point, I was like, I just don't want to ever talk to this guy again. And I just want to see what happens if I talk to a whole bunch of other people and see if I can progress the storyline without talking to him anymore, which you can absolutely do. You can just keep walking around that first planet and find other people who will help you get to where you want to go. And part of that is because I actually am playing a pretty different character than you two, because I chose the dumb trait at the outset of this game. Right. And so I've just been shooting everyone and never sneaking and kind of doing like

• 17:49Speaker 00

  a Fry from Futurama playthrough, where I'm just constantly tripping over myself into doing not always the right thing, I would say even. And that's been really hilarious. And it makes me a little sad when sometimes quests don't quite account for it. Like, there have been moments when I've had to kind of make my character smart enough to get out of something. It doesn't, I would say that if I have a complaint about this game, it's that, is that it's not, doesn't allow for a perfect stupid playthrough, if you will. But largely, it allows for that, which is kind of impressive, I think. It's also pretty funny, because I have a fairly high medical score, which I mostly

• 18:32Speaker 00

  did so that I could play as a tank, so that I could survive most situations and get through them and like also heal. And that means that I'm like a really stupid doctor, which, sorry for the continued Futurama references, but that's kind of like a Zoidberg situation. This game actually reminds me a lot of Futurama, which is part of why I have it on the brain in terms of how broad the comedy is. It's in the future, there's different planets, there's futuristic technology, but the people and the problems that they have are very 2025 recognizable, and that's kind of how they talk about them and the slang they use. So you can kind of map on to them in that way, but it's very cartoonish. Like, we were saying, like, the anti-Strays characters being like just this absurd representation

• 19:16Speaker 00

  of people who are obsessed with capitalism. It's not like, this is- Isn't like the subtlety of a Disco Elysium, for example, it's more really broad. But anyway, I, I do really appreciate how much the game has allowed me to just sandbox my way through while playing a character who's stupid. I don't think I've ever played a game where I was capable of doing something like that before and had it succeed at all, which is cool.

• 19:41Kirk Hamilton?

  The flaws are great. I mean, it introduces it very early on with that flaw you're talking about, Manny. There are these really major flaws that you can accept at the beginning in exchange for one additional really major perk. You kind of choose one from a list of maybe six or seven really significant perks. One of them is brawny, which I mentioned early, earlier, and that like, it gives you a lot of new options, you know, for opening doors and stuff. What I think is really funny, one of those perks is lucky, which I've now, I now wish I had taken now that I've played the game, because there are times, for example, that, that story beat I was talking about earlier, where you go to a computer and you need to have a high enough science skill in order to really change the outcome. One of the things that you can do, if you have lucky, you can just like press buttons randomly.

• 20:26Speaker 00

  Press buttons and see what happens. Yeah.

• 20:28Kirk Hamilton?

  And that happens a few times. So you could theoretically take lucky and one other trait and in exchange for that, you'd have to make your character stupid. So your character could then be really lucky and really dumb, which is just a fun character to have to play. And all of the flaws are fantastic. The way this works is if you do something enough, you know, it will trigger a flaw pop up. Like, you know, you'll, I don't know, get to a new, a new place in the map and you'll have killed a certain number of people and a flaw will pop up saying, because you killed so many people, here's a flaw you might have. And to be clear, the flaws are optional. You can turn them down and you, you have to make the decision. You can't take it back. But if you don't want a flaw, you can just say no. Here's a specific example. I kept buying things because I just always

• 21:10Kirk Hamilton?

  abused the economies in games like this. I bought so many things. I was constantly spending and, you know, selling junk and buying more junk. And then I get a pop up that says, okay, here's your flaw. Something like profligate spender is the name of the flaw. And the way that it works is 20, I only get 25% of any of the money that I collect and the other 75% is taken by Valerie, my robot companion, and put into a savings account for me because I can't be trusted with it. And then it's basically a trust fund. So when I hit level 30, I get it all back and it collects interest every level.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 21:45Kirk Hamilton?

  I don't know, and there's more to it than that. And I might have some of the particulars wrong. But that is like a very, very clever and funny flaw. There are so many more. There's another one, I play stealth, so I'm crouching in stealth a lot. And it says, "Your knees have really suffered because you keep crouching." So you're really comfortable when you're crouching and you now move faster in stealth. But every time you crouch, your knees pop in an audible way that every enemy within 30 feet will hear you and be alerted and come and investigate. So they're not just flaws of, you know, like 5% less armor, 10% more crit or something. They're really funny and clever. And it's a major part of the character building in this game. And it's easily for me, one of my favorite things in the game.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 22:28Jason Schreier?

  Another flaw that I chose not to pick is foot and mouth syndrome, which is, which gives you a plus 15% to your experience. Plus 15% to all experiences above. But you're, you only have a few seconds to pick a dialogue option and then it's randomly selected for you if you don't pick it.

• 22:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Fantastic. And of course, there is one flaw you can pick that it tells you not to pick on a first playthrough. That makes you just accept every single flaw that comes your way.

• 22:57Jason Schreier?

  Yep, it's incredible.

• 22:59Kirk Hamilton?

  Speaking of second playthroughs, I think that would be a very fun way to play the game. Is just take every single flaw that comes your way.

• 23:05Jason Schreier?

  It would be very funny. Matty, the dumb flaw is very funny. I didn't pick it, but I saw a great option, which is at one point in the first planet, you can go to this farm and you'll see a woman who is like holding her animal and her animal has a purple mouth because her animal ate some of the Annie's Choice cereal, the purple berry crunch. And her, and the animal is sick. And this woman is like, "Can you help me? Can you help save my animal?" And if you have medicine, you can like potentially cure it. Like there are other ways you can potentially save it. And if you have dumb, you have the option to feed it more purple berry crunch.

• 23:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:44Kirk Hamilton?

  Which is incredible.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  I do have the option to ruin situations, which is good, although more often than not, I just enjoy how many funny dialogue options there are that I don't choose, which is another experience that I don't think I have often enough in games and that I just want to commend here. Like, I'll just enjoy reading through all the dialogue options in this game and being like, "These are very clever." And now I actually have to sit here and think about which one I'm gonna choose. But choosing the dumb ones is great, because usually people react to me by just being like, "Oh, you are not who I thought you were, and I now need to mediate how I'm talking to you to account for the fact that you have no idea what's going on," which is iconic. Especially given how often video games have you play

• 24:30Speaker 00

  as like the super competent, amazing hero. I'm appreciating that I get to do something very different here.

• 24:37Kirk Hamilton?

  I will say that, you know, I'm, so I'm around where you are, Jason, as well. I'm on the second planet on Golden Ridge. Yeah, I played, played maybe a dozen hours. I really did a lot of stuff in the first Planet and have just sort of been taking my time.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  I had fun.

• 24:51Kirk Hamilton?

  I, I did, I am finding that the writing, the character creation, of course, and the writing, the role-playing, you know, and by writing, I mean dialogue, that stuff is all great. The characters and the world-building are not so strong for me. This was an issue with the first game. It is less of an issue here. I just find, because the writing, I think, is so peppy and because the choices are so funny and there are so many options for my character, I just feel engaged by it and I'm laughing and think it's clever. But I am struggling a little with just the characters in general. Like, there just aren't any characters really so far that have grabbed me. And that is something that I think is different from a game like Fallout: New Vegas, which I think looms large over this game

• 25:33Kirk Hamilton?

  in a lot of ways. You know, Fallout: New Vegas does a good job of starting you off, you know, the first guy who shoots you, this kind of chubby checker-looking dude, and then, you know, you're... Benny. Benny, and then this cowboy robot shows up really soon. And like, the characters that you're meeting are very memorable and kind of capture your imagination. And Outer Worlds 2... I don't know, like your sidekick guy is pretty run of the mill. I'm forgetting his name now.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Niles.

• 25:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Thanks, Niles. The robot Valerie is also kind of not doing that much for me. And then really, the main antagonist who's introduced early on does nothing for me. Like, she is just kind of this angry lady and I really, at first, she's, you know, appears to be your ally. And I was like, dude, what is this lady's problem? She's so just unpleasant. And then now she's the villain. Okay, but she just continues to sort of be unpleasant. I know there are big twists and turns and there are many more characters that I will meet. I'm hopeful that I'll be attracted to them a little bit more. But I do kind of find with the characters, the sort of motivation for my character, and then the broader world, which is still so cartoonish and not quite giving me anything to hold on to,

• 26:39Kirk Hamilton?

  either in the comedic or the dramatic realm, that those parts of the game are not quite doing it for me as much as the role playing, the character crafting and all of that.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm with you there. I just, to echo it and go into a little more detail about the larger plot of the game, that a character you're chasing after the whole time, the angry lady, her name's Devries. And when you meet her, she's really rude to you, you're right, and then betrays you very quickly. And then you spend, at least up to where all of us are, trying to figure out why and what the nature of her betrayal is. You kind of stalk her across the galaxy and find her equivalent of diaries and audio logs and so on to parse out what her motivations are, which, just as far as larger overall video game plots go, is tough and not as entertaining to me as the moment to moment decisions I'm making inside quests

• 27:34Speaker 00

  and just goofy little guys that I'm running into and messing with or laughing at. Because it's a character who I inherently don't understand. Like, the game is about me not understanding someone and trying to, which I guess goes really well with the character I'm role playing as, but is an unusual choice for an overarching story. Because a lot of times I'll forget that's even what I'm supposed to be doing, because I'll just be... Like, I'm just bopping around the galaxy doing side quests. And then I remember like, oh, right, I guess I'm supposed to be tacking, tracking down De Vries and figuring out why she betrayed us at the beginning.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Niles really hates her like way more than I do. So that's supposed to propel me, I suppose. But yeah, it's tough.

• 28:21Kirk Hamilton?

  That's a really interesting observation that it's structured in a way that you don't really know her and you're getting to know her. Which I can, I'm sure I've encountered that before. The thing is, if you're doing that with an antagonist, who for all I know may well become like a teammate or something later. And they get like, she may convince me or something. I don't know. But like, when you're doing that with a character, they need to make a really strong first impression and also kind of entice you, you know, to have some philosophy that seems like you want to know more about it. You want to understand why they're doing what they're doing. And then just to have character design and sort of writing and acting that draws you in. And I think De Vries just doesn't really have that. I think this game kind of has a character design problem in general.

• 29:03Kirk Hamilton?

  It is lovely looking a lot of the time, but the characters just really look like little plastic action figures. And there really aren't characters like in a Mass Effect or something where you see someone for the first time and you're like, oh, man, I want to know what that person's story is.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:18Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I can see those complaints. Those aren't things that I've thought about too much while playing the game. Cause I've been raptured by the other stuff. My complaints, if I have any, are a little more, little more granular. Stuff like the inventory system and the modding system and all of that just being kind of a, a little bit like messy and hard to keep track of. It's a chore to keep track of your inventory. I hate that you can use junk either to sell or to like dismantle for materials, which is very annoying because I never know what to do with it.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Same.

• 29:50Jason Schreier?

  Although that stuff kind of is, is what's detracting for me. Yeah, I mean, there, there are hints that Val has some sort of interesting story that she went off the deep end at some point. You find, you can find her, um, her old house in Fairfield in that first town. And you can get a little bit of hints. You can talk to people who knew her, um, who have things to share about like. What she was like and how suddenly she went off the deep end. And obviously she's talking a lot about this order. Like there's hints that she belongs to this kind of like some sort of cultish organization. I don't know. I mean, I suspect we'll learn more. We're just not far enough to really see the full picture. But yes, but it's good.

• 30:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's more this, the thing of like, I want to be grabbed by it and I'm not.

• 30:37Jason Schreier?

  Yes, you should be, you should be grabbed.

• 30:38Kirk Hamilton?

  By 10 hours in or something, I should be like excited.

• 30:41Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I agree. I mean, the, the thing that resonates more with me from what you guys just said is the companions really not having, doing, doing much. Inez probably does the most for me out of those first three. I just met another dude who I think is going to be a companion, maybe who seems like he'll be a lot funnier and more interesting.

• 31:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's always funny when you meet a character who's super character designed and you're like, hmm. I wonder if you're just a random NPC or.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  Like a really elaborate outfit or whatever.

• 31:10Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 31:11Kirk Hamilton?

  I think as this voice actor, hmm.

• 31:14Jason Schreier?

  Yes, your face is different than all of the other faces here. Interesting.

• 31:17Kirk Hamilton?

  All these other action figures.

• 31:18Jason Schreier?

  Who have more polygons than your model than all the others. Yeah. Um, so that one seemed a little more appealing. But yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm with you guys. Val I think is, is funny, but, uh, but yes, I can, I can understand them. It's, it's no, they're no like, uh, Estarian and, and Gale and crew.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, but who is? I, I have four companions at this point and the most recent two are my favorites of the four. And I, I think there's five total and I'm assuming, but I'll continue to feel that way based on what I've heard about the fifth one. So that's also tough to me just as a player. Cause I'm like, you guys should have gotten some of these, these companions in there earlier. Cause I've just been hanging with Niles this whole time and being like, wow, dude, you really don't have that much going on. Although I did appreciate, he has like one side quest about his friend who he had lost touch with, who you meet up with again and like despises Niles. And I thought that was a really interesting quest and like weirdly emotional for a game that's largely so.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Sarcastic and flippant about everything in the world. And I I liked it, but then was also like, oh, that's sort of an interesting tone shift situation here where I'm I'm never sure how serious this game wants to be like, are is everything in this goofy? And the characters are intended to be caricatures. Or are they real people that I'm gonna gonna get these lasting bonds and friendships with like in a Mass Effect style? Or in a Baldur's Gate three style? And it's it kind of wants to have it both ways at times. And I get why.

• 32:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's I mean, it's more the former for me, which is in line with a Fallout. It's in line with New Vegas. I mean, I don't really think of New Vegas as a game where I had lasting bonds with the characters, really. I don't think, oh, you know, I really love that robot cowboy. It's more that the characters were so funny and they fit so well in the world that it was all of a piece. And this game does have like a consistent tone for the most part there. It's true that there are those moments like you described, Matty, where it goes a little further in one direction, which is kind of fine, you know, to add a little more gravity to the world building. It really helps, especially compared to the first game where a big problem that I had with that game was that it all just kind of felt like a big LOL, you know? I I just was like, OK, I get what the joke is. I don't need to hear it for another 20 hours or however long that game was.

• 33:41Kirk Hamilton?

  In this case, I'm, you know, I'm much more interested in just seeing what little story I'm gonna get to play a part in next.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. Do you feel Kirk, as somebody who's playing sneakily, that you're kind of being rewarded by that too? Either from a story perspective or in some other way, especially since the sneakiness is maybe not the way the game's designed?

• 34:04Kirk Hamilton?

  No, I I wish it were a better stealth game. It doesn't need to be incredibly complex, but I wish there was a little bit more going on. Right now, the way that I succeed as a stealth character is to kind of abuse the AI. Because you could really just go into an enemy camp. You know, you sneak around and shoot guys for a while and then blow something up and then just run away and crouch and then go back and they forget you really quickly if you have the right perks and then just keep going. I fought a few bosses where it's sort of it's it's almost up to where. You can do it as a stealth, you know, stealth boss fight, but you just can't. I mean, Jason, I had the same experience as you in that first kind of set piece. Story mission, you get to this compound that you have to fight your way through. And then there's a big boss fight at the end.

• 34:46Kirk Hamilton?

  And I mean, I was just, I beat it purely by just spam. Like, I almost felt like I was cheesing the boss by just standing behind cover. Both of my teammates were down and there was no way for me to revive them because they had like electrical fields around them. And I was just like chipping away the boss's health forever while kind of standing behind cover and waiting for him to reload. It just sort of sucked. Like, I was like, this is not like a cool fight. And it's because it just wasn't really designed to be taken on with stealth. Maybe I missed something, but that was my experience.

• 35:14Jason Schreier?

  Did that bring you back to the Destiny days of standing, standing on a chandelier with Icebreaker?

• 35:20Kirk Hamilton?

  If I had truly been cheesing it, you know, like standing out of bounds or something and he can't get me and I'm just shooting him in the foot, then it really would have been, yeah, that one Destiny strike, but it, but it kind of felt like that.

• 35:30Jason Schreier?

  Get, get your Icebreaker out, stand on this roof and just hang out for the next hour.

• 35:35Kirk Hamilton?

  And it was that feeling of like, man, I'm gonna run out of ammo because I'm doing so little damage. So anyways, yeah, in the world when I'm just sneaking around, especially on Golden Ridge, stealth is finally viable. Plus on Golden Ridge, that's where I can get a silenced sniper rifle. It like finally does enough damage that I'm able to one-shot guys from stealth, which I just wasn't able to do for a while because you have to kind of level up your stealth abilities. So that's part of it. But, um, yeah, I mean, on the first planet, I really was like playing stealth, but it was a little uncertain. Like, I was like, what am I getting for this? Why shouldn't I just start leveling up a combat character?

• 36:06Jason Schreier?

  One thing I'll also say is where we are, um, correct me if I'm wrong, if you guys have gotten further than I have, but I have not gotten the device that lets you interact with the rifts of either of you two. So, okay, so, so I played a demo of this game at Summer Games Fest and it was actually in this complex that, in which you got the device that let you, um, kind of create things out of the rift.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, we both played this.

• 36:28Jason Schreier?

  Yes, you played it too. Yeah. So in the first, the, the first two planets so far, you are seeing these rifts in different places, but you still haven't gotten what seems to be a core mechanic or will be a core mechanic of the game yet, which I think is interesting.

• 36:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Did you try walking into the rift and get the achievement for it?

• 36:44Jason Schreier?

  I have not, no.

• 36:45Kirk Hamilton?

  It's an achievement for just dying.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  It seemed in character. I, there's also kind of that. I just, I, I feel like it's probably set up so you come across it where you see someone walk into a rift and explode. Maybe that, that was just me that ran into that little scene where it almost, the game kind of like warns you, like if you walk into the rift, you're going to explode into a fine blood mist. And so I like got to watch a guy do that while his friend was yelling at him not to do it.

• 37:14Kirk Hamilton?

  That's funny. Yeah, there are definitely mechanics that we, we haven't unlocked.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  We haven't yet gone.

• 37:18Jason Schreier?

  Well, it's also interesting. I don't know if you guys did all the quests on the first planet, but like the double jump is hidden behind some kind of random side quest, which is kind of surprising.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  I kind of liked that though, because I just was doing that quest anyway. Cause I was like, why not? I'm doing all the quests.

• 37:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Only downside of the double jump is the terrible sound that it makes. God, it's like the, maybe that's just me.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  No, I'm with you. I hate it.

• 37:40Kirk Hamilton?

  But every time you double jump, it makes this awful like explosion sound and I think that I'm getting shot.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Same. It's too loud.

• 37:45Jason Schreier?

  One thing I'll say also is that Obsidian, it does itself a little bit of a disservice by releasing both this and Avowed in the same year, in part because the parkour I enjoy so much in Avowed that I, it feels lacking in Outer Worlds 2 and I can't explore like up every tower and like every passage and jump and, and swing and, and climb and stuff because I love that so much. God, Avowed was so good. I love that game so much. But, and Outer Worlds 2, I keep trying to like jump up rooftops and like, it's not quite the same. Doesn't have, have any sort of parkour in this, unfortunately.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. And some of even the like colorful flower like trees and stuff reminds me a little bit of Avowed and that's fine. It's okay that they have very similar colorful worlds, but I feel like that has also tricked me into thinking there's a lot more possible parkour opportunities than Outer Worlds 2 actually has. And once I got those double jump boots, I was like, oh great, now it's going to be a different game. No, there's still not quite that many parkour abilities. It's really just super specific places where you use the ju- double jump and it's precisely the correct length to get you across a gap or Fallen Bridge.

• 38:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I do find that I use the double jump and just the general mobility that you have, which is pretty fun. I mean, just jumping around, it's definitely not on a balanced level in terms of level design, but the mobility is cool. And that does play a role in the combat, which is actually fun. When I just start shooting guys and playing it like a shooter.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, like the way I'm playing the entire game. Yeah.

• 39:14Kirk Hamilton?

  So far, I haven't found a lot of variety in the enemies. It's kind of just like dudes, or there's a few different kinds of monsters, and the monsters kind of just run at you. So there isn't a ton of variety, but the shooting feels good. The guns seem cool, and I can tell they're gonna get more and more interesting, especially as I start finding unique ones. I think playing melee, I wonder how it feels, since I think we're all playing with guns, but.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  I've done a little melee, and it's very, very fun. They have a lot of really good melee weapons in this game that are different, and I think it's harder to do a melee run when you're fighting against a bunch of guys with guns, but it can be really useful in animal encounters to just switch to a melee weapon entirely. They have like a bunch of futuristic kind of telescoping staffs where you just bonk in guys on the head with something, and then a variety of like really long pole swords and stuff like that that are fun as well.

• 40:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that's kind of the sense I had gotten, or where I was going with that is yeah, that I've gotten some melee weapons that I'm not using, but they're unique weapons that seem to have cool abilities. And I'm sure there are plenty of projectile weapons that are the same. So they put a lot of care into just making combat kind of fun, letting you feel really fast and agile, and that's cool. And there's even some tactical stuff. I mean, I'm playing stealth. One thing I've started doing is laying mines, because you can craft mines. And actually, mines are really powerful. So when there's a boss that I can't stealth kill, I'll like set a mine right behind them and then shoot them, and then they turn around and attack me and walk onto the mine, and it blows up and they lose a bunch of their health. You know, like setting up little traps and ambushes, that's pretty fun, and you know, not always possible in games like this. So I appreciate that

• 40:51Kirk Hamilton?

  there are options for combat that are pretty cool.

• 40:54Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, there's a lot of weird shit in this game. Most of it I haven't found yet, but there's one sword. I haven't found this yet, but I saw people talking about it online. There's a sword that like. Starts a rhythm game and then you have to hit the button every time.

• 41:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Really?

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Oh, that's amazing.

• 41:08Kirk Hamilton?

  It's kind of Borderlands-y. I mean, the tone is not Borderlands, but there's something to the feel, the Unreal Engine, you know, bobbliness, maybe.

• 41:16Jason Schreier?

  The combat has a little Borderlands to it, for sure.

• 41:19Kirk Hamilton?

  And then these weird guns and it's kind of a little bit of a slapstick situation in fights. And yeah, I mean, that gun, a rhythm, or a sword that does a rhythm game, I mean, that's very Borderlands, right?

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:29Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, there's other weird. I think there's like a gun that shoots advertisements. It's stuff like that.

• 41:34Kirk Hamilton?

  Of course there is.

• 41:36Jason Schreier?

  I mean, one of the advantages that Outer Worlds has over Fallout, for as much as I love the Fallout setting and tone, Outer Worlds goes way wackier and way weirder and way more magical or more sci-fi-y than Fallout ever can, which I think is cool.

• 41:56Kirk Hamilton?

  More of the fiction of the science fiction, maybe.

• 41:58Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, exactly. More plays around with more of that. Not that Fallout isn't funny, but its comedy comes from different places. You probably wouldn't see wacky weapons in a Fallout game in quite the same way. Maybe like you have acid, like you can disintegrate enemies in Fallout, but you're not going to be like shooting advertisements at them. So yeah, I mean, this game plays around with that in some fun ways, I think.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wish I could have more guns on my person at one time, though. It has taken me seemingly forever into this game to unlock more slots of guns I can carry. And because I have so many cool ones at this point in my collection, and I'm using melee weapons, and I only have two slots, I'm often in a position where I'm like running off during combat and being like, okay, let me just quickly change to a couple of different guns that I want to try on these guys. And now I'm going to run back in, and now I've got these two as my setup, which there's got to be a better way. I almost feel like I must be doing it wrong for doing it that way.

• 43:01Kirk Hamilton?

  There's a perk. I unlocked a perk pretty early that gave me one additional slot. And actually, I have an upgrade.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  You gotta find that.

• 43:07Kirk Hamilton?

  It's like a mod for a hat for a helmet that holds a gun, which I just think is kind of funny, that I've gotten the perk for a third gun and then my fourth gun is like in a holster on my helmet.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  All right, I'll look into it because I'm like, there must be some way for me to carry more than two guns at one time and switch between them quickly in combat. I just haven't figured it out yet.

• 43:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Given that there are mods that do that, there are multiple ways to do it.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I will say if you play it the way I am, the and I just started blasting format of playing, I think it really rewards you for that. It feels really good. There's only been a couple of times where I felt truly outmatched by like a situation and like maybe being a little stealthy at first would have benefited me in some way. But of course, I've refused to have done so and will never change. So it's fine. You can always just kind of back out and be like, all right, let me try to take this slow. But it feels great. Like the shooting just feels really good in this game. It's it's one of the things about it that I think really, really works. Any other cool shout outs we want to say about Outer

• 44:14Speaker 00

  Worlds 2 before we break? I think we're all digging it. I'm gonna finish it. I guess I'm gonna find out what De Vries is really up to.

• 44:23Jason Schreier?

  Have either of you tried it on the Steam Deck? Because I want to.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have. I've been streaming to the deck and it's it's all right.

• 44:30Jason Schreier?

  Streaming, I'm not talking about streaming. I'm talking about like actually playing it.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  That I have not tried. I've only been streaming it from my computer to my.

• 44:37Kirk Hamilton?

  No, is it deck certified? Does it technically play on the deck?

• 44:41Jason Schreier?

  Not clear, although the headlines I'm saying seeing say that it's playable.

• 44:47Kirk Hamilton?

  That's interesting. Yeah, I'm finding on PC that it's surprisingly demanding considering how it looks. It's sort of frustrating thing about that game. I just installed this mod that weirdly makes it play a lot better. It's just like one mod file. It's on Nexus Mods. Maybe we'll link it in show notes. As far as I can tell, it's not having any downsides and it actually makes the game run a lot better for me. And that's the kind of thing they could improve over time. But it's weird for me on PC, just on I have like a pretty good gaming PC. It already doesn't run that well. So I'd be surprised if it if it played natively on on the deck.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it does look pretty darned good on my, my PC, but streaming to the deck, you know, sometimes you just want to shoot some guys on a smaller screen.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  I didn't even try to run it natively because it's chugging along enough as it is that I was like, I'm not going to risk it. But yeah, so that's Outer Worlds 2. I'm having a great time being very stupid and we'll, we'll let you all know what we think of it as, as time goes on and as we explore more. All right, let's take a break and we'll be back with one more thing.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Travis McElroy. I'm here with Maria and we're excited because as a member of the month, Maria, thank you so much for being a listener and a supporter of the show.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  How did you find out about the shows?

• 46:04Speaker 04

  When my daughter was in high school, we kind of connected over Taz. She introduced me to Schmanner's and Sawbones.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  What made you decide to become a Max Fun member?

• 46:16Speaker 04

  I kind of decided that with the economy being so difficult, it was worth me giving up my Starbucks to join in with you guys.

• 46:25Speaker 03

  Well, Maria, I owe you a cup of coffee then. At some point, I'll get a cup of coffee into your hands to pay you back.

• 46:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  Maria, again, thank you so much for your support.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Thank you very, very much for your time and getting a chance to be the member of the month. My daughter was shocked when she found out about it, so I can't wait for her to actually maybe catch a little bit of this. I can rub it in her face a little bit.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  That's what we do it for. Thank you and thanks to everybody for your support. Maria, have a great month.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  You have an amazing month as well.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  Become a Max Fun member now at maximumfun.org/join.

• 47:07Speaker 05

  Hey. Hey there. Do you love reading smut? Erotica? Romance? Romancy? Is your e-reader full of horny fairies and sexy shifters? Are your shelves bursting with enemies to lovers? We're reading smut, your new faded mate. Every other Friday, we dive into sexy books and talk to the people who love them. Consider this our me cute. Reading smut, every other Friday on Maximum Fun.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  We are back. It's time for one more thing. Jason, why don't you go first?

• 47:49Jason Schreier?

  My One More Thing is a video game called The Seance of Blake Manor.

• 47:53Speaker 06

  Ooh.

• 47:56Jason Schreier?

  I'm gonna try to keep this. Oh, God. I'm gonna try to keep this.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Spooky sounds of the game, like legit, though.

• 48:03Jason Schreier?

  This is what your soundboard is for, so you don't have to do that.

• 48:06Speaker 06

  Who needs a soundboard? I'm a ghost all by myself.

• 48:10Jason Schreier?

  I hope you cut this out. I hope you cut this out.

• 48:13Speaker 06

  I'm never gonna, I'm gonna put it in and double it. Woo.

• 48:18Jason Schreier?

  Guys, can I go? Can I talk? Or what?

• 48:22Speaker 06

  You could have talked this whole time. Woo.

• 48:27Jason Schreier?

  Completely lost my train of thought. All right. That's my one more thing. The Seance of Blake Manor.

• 48:32Speaker 06

  That sounds like an interesting game. Woo.

• 48:34Jason Schreier?

  It's like, our fit's like nails on a chalkboard.

• 48:39Jason Schreier?

  Um, okay, so The Seance of Blake Manor is a really cool video game. How does kind of come out of nowhere to become one of my favorites of the year? I'm gonna keep this short because we're gonna talk more about this next week, I think, since we're all playing it. But, um, short version is, this is another to add to the pile of deductive narrative games à la Obra Dinn and Golden Idol and, um, Blue Prince to some extent. Um, this is a game, uh, the setting is Blake Manor. It all takes place in this big manor in, um, late 1800s Ireland. And this manor is haunted and there is going to be a seance there. And you are an investigator who is sent in because one of the guests has disappeared.

• 49:23Jason Schreier?

  And you are being called to this manor, given a great sum of money and told, hey, come find this guest, Evelyn Dean, and figure out what happened to her. And so when you get there, uh, you find that there are 20-something, uh, people in the manor, each with their own secrets and potential magical abilities. You find that there are a whole bunch of ghosts in the manor and other spirits and haunted things. This is a perfect Halloween game. And like literally, the first thing you see is this ghost and you're like, yep, this is real. There are a lot of games out there, Gone Home being the most notable one, where you, it's kind of like, oh, there's spooky stuff here, but there's no, this is like

• 50:03Jason Schreier?

  straight up supernatural, the video game. And the kind of the core mechanic is to figure out what's going on. And you do that by poking around in this manner, picking things up, investigating notebooks and safes, and then also interrogating all of these people and learning their own kind of reasons for coming, why they want to participate in the seance and communicate with the dead, and what their deal is, what kind of real, their mystery is, what secrets they are hiding from you. And the way it works is that there is this time system. So there are three days, the first day is very short, the two days are, the next two, day two and three are kind of your main ones. And everything you do

• 50:47Jason Schreier?

  takes a minute or so of time. So you pick up a piece of paper and you read it, that takes a minute. You talk to someone about something that takes a minute. And so as you are doing this stuff, time passes. And what's really cool about it is that every character in the manor has their own schedule and like follows a path where you might find some of them in the dining room for breakfast. You might find some of them in the library reading a book at a certain time. You might find some of them participating in a seminar in the drawing room at a certain time. And depending what you choose to do, you can unravel this whole thing in any number of ways. So you could decide, okay, you know what, I'm gonna just walk and explore this room and see what I find there. And that's how I'll pursue the mystery. Or you could say, I'm gonna follow this one person around

• 51:32Jason Schreier?

  and see what they're doing and go from there. It's, it's almost like, it's reminiscent of Sleep No More, the interactive play that I believe has inspired many game developers over the years. Or maybe a video game comparison would be like those Inkle games, like Overboard and Expelled that we've talked about before, where you're kind of, you're pursuing, like, you're, you're in this world where everybody's on a set schedule. And depending where you are at a given time, that person may or may not be there, right? But the time limit, I will say, it's Not too intense in terms of like forcing you to have to watch every move because it might waste time. As long as you're a little bit judicious about like what you're doing, you're not going to run out of time. It gives you plenty of time to try to solve the mystery.

• 52:13Jason Schreier?

  And also, there's kind of the core mystery, figuring out what happened to Evelyn Dean. And then there are each individual's characters' mysteries. And you can solve the core mystery without solving all of the individual characters' mysteries. It's kind of, it's gravy. It's a bonus to do all of the characters' mysteries in addition to the main mystery, which you can do. I did it on my first playthrough. I finished the game yesterday, and it's quite a treat. But you have to be really careful and clever about how you're going about it if you're going to do that. I really love it. Again, we'll talk about this more next week. I'm really excited to hear what you guys think about it as you play a bunch more. But I highly recommend it. It's not getting

• 52:56Jason Schreier?

  a lot of attention. I don't think any of the gaming sites reviewed it. I don't, I haven't seen a ton of people talking about it. So hopefully, we can give it the old triple-click bump because this game is really cool. The one caveat that I'll offer here is that I ran into some pretty nasty bugs when I was playing. I've been told by the game's makers that some of those bugs or all those bugs have been fixed or will be fixed in the coming days. There was a day one patch that fixed at least one of them that was softlocking me. That was really annoying. I had to be in touch with the game developers and be like, hey, what's the deal here? There's also a handful of smaller bugs, like kind of wrong terminology used here and there, or like a map glitch, or other random

• 53:38Jason Schreier?

  little glitches that I ran into. So not the most polished game, which is particularly annoying for a mystery deduction game like this, where you really need to trust that the game is performing as it should. So that's a little bit of a drawback, but I don't know, doesn't, didn't, didn't make me like, I mean, I played this for so many hours. I was like in that hole, the way I was with Blueprints, the way I am with like Golden Idol games, where it's like, I cannot do anything else but play this game for as long as possible. I was just sucked in. And yeah, it's one of those. It's, it's really, really cool. I think you guys will really like it. I think anyone out there who's into these kind of deductive mystery games, the way that I am, will really like it.

• 54:17Jason Schreier?

  One last thing I'll say is that it's actually, it holds your hand much, much more than Blueprints, or Oberdan, or Call of Duty, or any of these other games. It's actually, I would say, much easier than those in terms of straightforward mysteries, investigations. You, you don't have to spend a ton of time just like, like taking out a notebook and thinking about what to do next, or staring at the screen, or anything like that. It is very clear about what you have to do. The, there's an in-game note system that keeps track of all of the mysteries for you, everything you've learned, how it's all connected. So it's definitely on the easier scale of this, which might disappoint people who are like, man, I wanted the blueprint style, like, just really staring at the screen until I figure it out. But no, this is a game you can very easily beat without any guides or anything like that.

• 55:02Jason Schreier?

  So this is kind of a good entry level to the deduction genre, I would say. It's called Sands of Blake Manor. Check it out.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, excited to talk about that next week. I'll go next. So I watched Peacemaker, season two. I think about, I think I talked about season one as one more thing way back when. This is maybe my favorite James Gunn thing, James Gunn now of DC Properties, formerly of Marvel Properties. And it's a spinoff TV series that he made about the character Peacemaker, who people maybe remember from his Suicide Squad iteration. It's, John Cena plays the character, and he's kind of like the embodiment of toxic masculinity and America.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Like, what if Captain America were the worst person ever? Like, just kind of like all, all the way on the other end of the spectrum, just that as a character? And Peacemaker as a show is sort of interrogating, like, can that character change? And what would that look like? And in season one, he's kind of surrounded by this comedic ensemble cast, some of whom have way better moral centers than he does. And they kind of drag him in different directions, and some of them have no moral centers, like this character Vigilante, who's like the hilarious, like, kind of incel character who lives in his mom's basement, literally.

• 56:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Just like a genuine psychopath.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  Just like an actual psychopath.

• 56:27Kirk Hamilton?

  A really cheerful one.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  Who's like the devil on his shoulder, as it were, and is like, no, you should murder people without remorse. I think Vigilante's an amazing character, actually. So season two. Much slower, still funny, still dark, but way, way more of a meditation on Peacemaker as a person trying to change in a world where people don't want him to. I still really liked it, but I know it's way slower and stranger. And I don't know, I just think John Cena's like a good actor, which is just not a sentence I ever would have expected to say about

• 57:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, he's fantastic.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  A wrestler turned actor. I know that many of them have tried to varying degrees of success. And I think he's really good. I think he's really good in this role. And I also think James Gunn is doing something pretty interesting with interrogating the question of toxic masculinity and just kind of writing stories about it. So I, I dig it. But Kirk, you watched it too. I'm curious what you think about it, if you liked it.

• 57:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I love this show overall. I mean, and I agree. I think it is also my favorite James Gunn thing. We should mention the opening credits.

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 57:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Season one opening credits are so good. And then season two took a minute to grow on me. What they do is they play a song in season two. It's this Foxy Shazam song and they do this kind of community theater-esque dance number where the whole cast gets together and does this choreographed dance routine that really looks like you're watching people on stage just do something that they learned a week ago or that they've practiced in their free time, even though there's like a huge CGI eagle that is apparently James Gunn was the body double for Eagle Lee during the dance numbers.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  Eagle Lee is also a great character on the show, just saying.

• 58:11Kirk Hamilton?

  The greatest character. There's, there's a really great Eagle Lee storyline in season two.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is.

• 58:16Kirk Hamilton?

  And yeah, and Eagle Lee is a lot of fun. Well, and Tim Meadows whole thing. I mean, Tim Meadows and the bird blindness, so funny. Tim Meadows rules on this season.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Tim Meadows, new to season two, really good.

• 58:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Just there are these scenes after the end of the credits, they'll play these scenes where they're just all improvising together, all the actors and Tim Meadows is just going off and giving everyone nicknames and stuff. So it's, it was a really funny season and had some great moments. I was kind of frustrated by it in some ways, partly because it sounds like they're not going to make a third season. I don't know. Yeah, that's like in the news. I think Gunna said they're not gonna make one or some cast members. It just sounds like, which is weird because it ends on a huge cliffhanger. And also, I thought the pacing in the season was just a little off. Like, it took too long

• 58:57Speaker 00

  It was weird.

• 58:57Kirk Hamilton?

  to really commit to this parallel, you know, this parallel dimension storyline they're doing. They don't really get there until there's almost no time left. And then there are two 30-minute episodes that go by really fast where a ton is happening.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 59:08Kirk Hamilton?

  And then there's a long finale. So like, some of that, the pacing felt a little off. And I don't know, given that what makes Peacemaker so fun is that it's its own little self-contained world within the DCU. They're introducing stuff, in particular, this, I'm forgetting what it's called, the, the parallel world that they discover toward the end, that I think is a thing in the DCU that's gonna play a role in the next Superman movie.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, which multiverses, please, no.

• 59:33Kirk Hamilton?

  And it's that same Marvel stuff where they're using the shows to introduce these concepts that are then gonna get fleshed out in the movie. And maybe Peacemaker will be back in some, you know, Superman or Batman movie. And I'm like, oh, I like that Peacemaker was its own little weird, profane thing. And this season felt way more like, okay, now Gun is running the DCU, so he is, you know, or DCEU, I guess.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there's like tie-ins with Superman, like Lex Luthor's a character in Peacemaker, which I didn't expect at all. And was like, I would have been fine with it if that weren't there.

• 1:00:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, and it was like, that was, and that was okay. But the fact that it just, it was all tying in so much. I'm like, I would rather have more time with these characters and to have moved them through the plot a little bit more. So those are my criticisms.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 1:00:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Even while, like, I still love the show.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  I still think it's great. I still recommend it.

• 1:00:17Kirk Hamilton?

  It's so funny. It's so well-made. And like, just the banter and the whole, like, James Gunn has really hit his stride right now. And I, I really recommend the show, for sure.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, same. I think it probably helps that we waited until the season was over and watched it all in one go. But I agree, like, that I could still observe those pacing issues even doing it that way. But anyone listening to it now who hasn't tried it, I think that would be the only way you could watch it. So I recommend doing that.

• 1:00:44Kirk Hamilton?

  And season one is incredible, top, like, start to finish, too.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, season one is great.

• 1:00:47Kirk Hamilton?

  If you haven't watched season one, just watch it. It's so good.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Just go ahead and watch two seasons of a really wonderful television show.

• 1:00:52Kirk Hamilton?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  All right, Kirk, what's your one more thing?

• 1:00:55Kirk Hamilton?

  My one more thing is a documentary that I watched this week after having it recommended to me by several people called Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery. This is a new documentary on Hulu. It's obviously a music documentary about the Lilith Fair. The tour, which was not actually like a festival that took place in one place. This was a touring show organized by...

• 1:01:17Kirk Hamilton?

  Are you the ghost of Sarah McLachlan's former ambitions?

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  Oh my god. Wow.

• 1:01:22Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm the ghost of 90s feminism.

• 1:01:26Kirk Hamilton?

  Lilith Fair was a concert series, like hosting a ton of female artists who all got together in the late 1990s for, I believe, three summers, from 97 through 99, and toured the country. They played a ton of shows. It was a huge deal, especially a big deal for women of our general generation. It was definitely a big deal for Emily. She went to several Lilith Fair shows. I did not because I was a boy. And I didn't, I don't know. I just, no one told me about it. I didn't even really know it was a thing.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  I didn't because I was 11, but you know.

• 1:02:00Kirk Hamilton?

  You guys were a little bit too young.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  It's not. I'm just bragging about how young I was. It's really good.

• 1:02:05Kirk Hamilton?

  I was in high school at this time and it was definitely a big deal. I was aware of it and should have gone because, holy crap, especially watching this documentary. I mean, the number of amazing, like legendary artists that performed at this thing is just off the charts. I mean, it was just a really incredible three years. Tracy Chapman, Fiona Apple, Sarah McLachlan, obviously, Indigo Girls, Missy Elliott, Sheryl Crow, Erykah Badu, Emmylou Harris, Michelle and Daggie Cello, Pat Benatar, so many more people than just that, like so many people. This documentary is so good. I loved it. I watch a lot of music documentaries. They're all pretty great. I mean, you can just have music and talk about musicians and it'll

• 1:02:47Kirk Hamilton?

  probably be pretty good. I really think that this one is special. I really do recommend it, especially to anyone who was around during this time period or is aware of Lilith Fair and went there. Though also, I guess, to people who are not aware of Lilith Fair, or maybe if you're one of our younger listeners and you've never really heard about it, the documentary actually opens with young girls on TikTok talking about it, saying, "Today I just found out, there was this thing called Lilith Fair, and it was all of these women, and it was an all-female festival that toured the country, and you could just go and hear them all sing in this safe space, and I don't even know how to feel." It's like those kinds of TikToks, young people find out about old thing. But it's really heartwarming in that way. And then it just goes back to who these artists all were then.

• 1:03:32Kirk Hamilton?

  I mean, it's just a murderer's row of incredible female singer-songwriters. And then, especially talking to Sarah McLachlan, who was the organizer, she was the brains behind the operation. And then she brought on a few core musicians to expand things, and then it just grew from there. And just as it goes, it gives this really neat view into this period of time, and in particular, what it was like to be a teenage girl at this time period, which was not the best time period to be a teenage girl. I would actually recommend this documentary as a chaser to the Netflix documentary about Woodstock 99. Woodstock 99 comes up a little bit because the last year of Lilith Fair was also the year that Woodstock 99 happened.

• 1:04:16Kirk Hamilton?

  This was a famous debacle. I mean, just an unchecked explosion of male rage that led to a riot, and there were sexual assaults and all kinds of alleged and confirmed horrible behavior. It fell apart into flames and destruction at the end. It was so bad. And this is Limp Bizkit onstage, this is Korn, this is Kid Rock.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  Peak 99, machismo.

• 1:04:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes. And at the same time, Lilith Fair was happening, and you watched these women coming together to support one another, to realize that that kind of a thing was even possible, that they could build their own community. And then all these fans finding it too. And it was this incredibly magical thing. So you get the two sides of 90s culture in America, and I think that's just really interesting. So I loved it. I thought it was just so good. I learned a lot. I had no I guess that Sarah McLachlan was like responsible. But I didn't really, you know, I didn't know the whole story and hadn't seen, of course, all this behind the scenes stuff and heard interviews with all these people who were on it. So I really recommend it. I thought it was very illuminating and heartwarming and just kind of lovely. Plus, it's gotten me listening to a lot of those artists from the 90s again.

• 1:05:25Kirk Hamilton?

  And there's just so much good music, which is a kind of fun bonus. So that is my recommendation for Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, which is streaming on Hulu. It's a new documentary. It's really good.

• 1:05:35Speaker 00

  Awesome. Sounds really good. Off to check it out.

• 1:05:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  All right. This has been another episode of Triple Click.

• 1:05:43Kirk Hamilton?

  It sure has been.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Did it again. Did it again. I was kind of expecting the ghost to show up again, but it didn't.

• 1:05:50Kirk Hamilton?

  The ghost is off haunting somebody else.

• 1:05:51Speaker 00

  Not until next week.

• 1:05:52Jason Schreier?

  The ghost of Triple Click passed.

• 1:05:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Wait, I think I hear it.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  And we'll see you all next week.

• 1:05:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, see you all next week.

• 1:05:59Jason Schreier?

  See ya next week.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:06:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Email us at [email protected] and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:07:02Jason Schreier?

  Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.