Blue Prince is the First Must-Play Game of 2025

We will try to convince you to play Blue Prince without spoiling Blue Prince. But first, we need to talk about the Switch 2: the games, the price, the canceled pre-order date, and everything else.

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

• 0:00Griffin McElroy?

  Hey guys, is this anything? If you want to build a man or just go ahead now.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Blueprints.

• 0:07Griffin McElroy?

  If you're an architecture planner, just go ahead now. And if you want to solve a puzzle, just go ahead now. And if you inherit.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Draft a hall, find that key. I'm the.

• 0:24Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so this is.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Let me try it. Draft a hall, find that key.

• 0:28Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Get that gem. Is that a spoiler, Russ?

• 0:30Russ Frushtick?

  No, it's not that it's a spoiler.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I gotta take, you gotta make the lyrics more generic.

• 0:34Russ Frushtick?

  I don't think you can make song parodies about games that haven't been culturally like, they haven't clicked yet, except for about 30 people on the internet.

• 0:42Chris Plante?

  You think that's a problem for our audience? You don't think it's that they're like, mm, Gin Blossoms, not familiar?

• 0:49Russ Frushtick?

  They're definitely familiar with the Gin Blossoms.

• 0:50Griffin McElroy?

  Was that, I'm pretty sure I was spin, spin doctor.

• 0:53Chris Plante?

  You're right. I'm sorry. I, you could say I was Little Miss Can't Be Wrong, but I was wrong.

• 0:58Griffin McElroy?

  Little Mr. Must Be Wrong.

• 1:00Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 1:03Chris Plante?

  Hey, you know what? Getting, getting Van Nams right, it's my pocket full of kryptonite.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  That even rhymed. We're not gonna do better than that.

• 1:10Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  My name is Justin McElroy and I know the best game of the week. My name is Christopher McElroy. I know the best game of the year. Deal with it.

• 1:34Chris Plante?

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

• 1:38Russ Frushtick?

  My name is Russ Roshnich. I know the best game of the week.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Welcome to the besties, where we're gonna talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a video game club and just by listening, you, my friend, have become a member of our illustrious ranks. This week, we got a double header for you. We're gonna be talking about the Nintendo Switch 2 and Blueprints. Russ, you know about the Nintendo Switch 2. We don't even clarify that. Plant, what's the deal with Blueprints?

• 2:05Chris Plante?

  Blueprints, is it a puzzle game? Is it an adventure game? Is it the greatest game of all time? I don't know. We'll talk about it.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  I don't know. We'll talk about it. Figure it out. I'll have an answer for you right after this.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, guys. Last week, we recorded our sort of like last minute Switch 2 things. And because of the timing, we didn't quite know what was going on with the Switch 2 yet. Hilariously, even if we had recorded our Switch 2 reactions after the Switch 2 announcement, but not the next day, we still would have been like out of date. Like, we still would have been out of the loop. It's a moment to moment fluid changing situation.

• 2:42Russ Frushtick?

  Things are moving quickly. We still can't preorder the Switch 2. We still don't know when it's actually coming out in the United States and Canada. Poor Canada.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Well, sorry, by the way, Canada, our president sucks so bad that you can't preorder the Switch 2.

• 2:57Griffin McElroy?

  I think they said it's still planned for the June 5th release date, but we don't know when it's coming out.

• 3:04Chris Plante?

  That assumes you believe anything is possible right now. You can't just change within a minute.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think that that is the, I mean, okay, let's not get in the weeds. Let's talk about the big picture.

• 3:15Griffin McElroy?

  We're coming in late enough on the Switch 2 conversation that I feel like we can maybe vault over some of the brass tacks stuff.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  I would like to know, I did not get to hear your guys' like first blush. I'd like to hear the fun. Before we get into the mechanics of, you know, political geopolitical currency manipulation, like, let's, uh, let's talk first about, would you, would you, you touched it, right?

• 3:37Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, just me. I'm the only one who touched it.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  I'm looking at you. You're the one whose box is above my, in my, it's very clear that I'm pointing at you in my box. I don't know.

• 3:45Chris Plante?

  On a scale of one to fun, how fun is Mario Kart?

• 3:49Russ Frushtick?

  Point nine fun?

• 3:52Chris Plante?

  And one being full fun?

• 3:54Griffin McElroy?

  One is it's a binary system. I don't know why you're being so difficult.

• 3:57Russ Frushtick?

  Look, I think, I think we should start with the basics is what is it like to pick this thing up? Cause guess what? Every single game requires that you at least pick this thing up.

• 4:08Chris Plante?

  Great.

• 4:08Russ Frushtick?

  And, uh,

• 4:10Chris Plante?

  Got it.

• 4:11Russ Frushtick?

  I kinda wish it was better to pick this thing up.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 4:16Russ Frushtick?

  It's better than the Switch 1. I will say that.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Can we stop? Well, let's stop right there. Real quick.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Do you want to talk about your first reactions to the Switch one? Because you were pretty notoriously epically wrong about the Switch one in a way that was like catastrophic.

• 4:30Russ Frushtick?

  Was I?

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Predicting, yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you were very down on the Switch one after your first time with it. You were like, I don't really get it. I don't know what they're doing here. And then became a massive success.

• 4:40Russ Frushtick?

  That doesn't sound right.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Tracker in here is like really bad.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Listeners, if you go back and clip out Russ being wrong.

• 4:47Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, please about the Switch one, please do. I just, it's been eight years and I just kind of wish that like someone was looking at the ergonomics and being like, we could do a little better.

• 5:00Griffin McElroy?

  You're talking about the lack of sort of like handholds.

• 5:03Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it's just not, it's just still not great to hold. It's better than the Switch one, mostly because of the size, like, because it's taller. So your hands can actually like grip the whole thing, but.

• 5:13Griffin McElroy?

  How is this, how is the screen? I've heard good things.

• 5:15Russ Frushtick?

  Screen seems fine. It's bigger. I don't know. It was nice. I, I'm not like a screen junkie, if you will. It was bigger, you know, the ergonomics was what jumped out at me initially. I don't think it's bad. I think if you have a Switch one and you're fine with it, this will be fine too. It just like, it bums me out that I will definitely need, if I want to play in handheld mode for any length of time, I will definitely need a grip for sure.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Is it, is it, okay. I'm wondering about that, right? Because I've been messing around with a lot of these like portable computer, like the, like, you know, the, your.

• 5:48Griffin McElroy?

  Your rogues.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Your rogues, your odens, whatever. A lot of those ergonomics are coming in aftermarket, right? Because people are getting like the solutions that they want for them, right? So if you're traveling a lot with it, or you're just going to use it docked in a lot of ways, like maybe that's, maybe you don't want the extra bulk of like good ergonomics. You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm wondering if like on a default, there's those really good joycons where it's like, you can put those on and it's like more of that. But you're, you're trading. Like the

• 6:19Russ Frushtick?

  The flexibility. I think that's Nintendo. I didn't get this quote, but I think that's Nintendo's rationale is they want, they needed to design something that could work not only in handheld mode, not only something that you could dock, but also something that you could take the Joy-Cons off and use them sideways and not have them be a total disaster for your hands.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 6:37Russ Frushtick?

  And if something had like a grip on the back of it, you're not going to hold it sideways. Now, the number of times I actually used the Joy-Con sideways for the Switch one is about three.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:46Russ Frushtick?

  They do feel better sideways now, I think, because of the larger size and they made the L and R buttons easier to press. But it's still like not great. Um, but it is

• 6:56Speaker 01

  I use that feature a shocking amount for Switch one when I'm traveling and Henry wants to play like a multiplayer game on Switch. And that is one of the big selling points of Switch two is actually being able to use those uh, as controllers and have it not be like almost, almost unusable.

• 7:13Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, you could like actually press the trigger buttons on the new Switch two, which is a real improvement. Um, I, yeah, I, I get the argument and it is tough to make something that is going to work for all people. I, it just, it's just a little bit of a, like, I don't know, man. Uh, they have a Pro Controller. I guess that's your solution. And then, and then these third-party companies that are hopefully not based in China, if you stick around, uh, will make grips and things like that. Uh, so, yeah.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Now, they weren't letting you sort of like, if there was a big new feature and I, I don't know that they would necessarily agree with this. It's probably the

• 7:48Russ Frushtick?

  The mouse.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  The game chat. Whoa. Okay. So I was thinking the, the new button, the game chat, like, did they have prioritized chat to a point where it is a button that you press to like access it? And you couldn't mess with that, right? That wasn't like on display.

• 8:03Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, no, I mean, you could, well, the button was there. It wouldn't really do anything.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  And how was it?

• 8:08Russ Frushtick?

  It was great. It was a great button.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Was it more of a nubbin?

• 8:10Russ Frushtick?

  It, it kills me because you, you do need a subscription service to use the button. If you

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 8:16Russ Frushtick?

  If you press the button and you're not subscribed to Nintendo Switch online, it just pulls up an ad for how great Nintendo Switch online is.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  That's great. I love that shit, man. I love it when my, when the, uh, the Pluto button on my remote does that too. I love. Yeah. It's like, hey, don't you want to subscribe to Pluto? We got all button. Um, no thanks.

• 8:36Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. So I, I don't know. I personally don't view game chat as like a major feature. Cause like it's kind of table stakes at this point. Uh, but.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Okay. Wait, see, this is what I want to talk about. I want to talk about this because I feel like if you are, to me, I kind of got what they're going for. And I don't, or at least I think I do. And I don't know if it will work, but I think that this is at least the idea. Since we have like, our kids have gotten old enough to play games, uh, like Griffin and his son, Henry and my daughter, Charlie, have played games like pretty sporadically, right? And Charlie will play, uh, with her friends. It's a communal thing, right? Like we've seen Minecraft do that, robot stuff. I think that it, if you, if I as a parent knew that like, we could put them in the Nintendo ecosystem.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  And I knew that the kids, and it's really easy to talk with your friends and it's recognizing that like, the game is something you're doing while you're doing something else, but it's like actually making that easy to a point where I could link up Henry and Charlie one time. And they could chat to each other without Griffin and I setting up, which right now what it is, is us like calling each other on Facebook Messenger or something. Whatever app, you know, is, is open at that time. Then we'll get connected that way. And then they're playing on, it's sometimes it's like three or four devices before you get this all like going. Um, so I think that if, if, I think that they're trying to get ahead of a market that is, is playing games and maybe like a different way than we did.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  When, when they tried game chat before.

• 10:14Chris Plante?

  I think that, I think that's true. I think it, uh, a few problems come up along the way. One is a big if of will a Nintendo internet thing just naturally work? Or will your kids be running to you screaming because it's not working and they don't know how to find.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Is this a zero or a capital O in my friend code?

• 10:33Chris Plante?

  Yeah. I think there's that. I think there's also the reality of kids are younger and younger in knowing how to use Discord.

• 10:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 10:40Chris Plante?

  And things that seem really complicated to us or to someone designing this system. Don't realize that if you actually just hand a kid an iPhone at like nine or 10, they're going to know how to do a fair amount of this stuff already without any help or support. And I think there's like the question of do you want your kid being able to do that, but like

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:01Chris Plante?

  There are a lot of kids.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  I mean, no.

• 11:03Chris Plante?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Is the, is the, I mean, like, yeah, no, not at all.

• 11:05Chris Plante?

  Yeah, right. But I, but I think when you, when you get like, when you narrow this down to like, okay, parents who are going to be protective in that way, who also are familiar with the Nintendo brand, who also have kids who are not just going to circumnavigate it, but are smart enough to use, like, it's a really small window of people versus people like adults who are just going to use Discord.

• 11:28Russ Frushtick?

  And let me, let me add this as well. Um, on PlayStation five, PlayStation four, PlayStation five and Xbox platforms, the idea of game chat already exists and doesn't require a subscription service. You can chat with your friends, play any game you want. You don't have to be in the same game together and just have a ga- a chat going, a party chat going, and it doesn't require subscription.

• 11:50Chris Plante?

  Is that true?

• 11:52Russ Frushtick?

  Yes.

• 11:52Chris Plante?

  You don't need PS and or Xbox Live?

• 11:53Russ Frushtick?

  Correct.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  I, guys, I feel like you're, you're kind of like, you, you've missed the metaphorical value of having it in the device. Like, if we're talking about what can be done, you have always been able to pick up your phone and call your friend while you're watching TV.

• 12:08Russ Frushtick?

  It's in the device of the PlayStation. It's in the device of the Xbox. Like, it's built in.

• 12:12Chris Plante?

  Yeah, Franch is saying like, game chat just not new.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  The surface level, the, where it is surfaced is different, right? Like, you're, you're right. Like, that is a, a thing that has been in there, right? It is very different from, I push a button, I'm talking to my friends.

• 12:25Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Right. That's what I'm saying is the, the, the way it has been prioritized metaphorically by attaching this like button and part of the press conference to it, like, I, I feel like if they're looking at how popular the Switch has been, right? And they're like, we, the one thing that we wish we could chat, we're gonna keep

• 12:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Almost everything the same. The one thing that we wish we could do better.

• 12:47Russ Frushtick?

  No, that's a fair point.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  I don't know. I still don't. I'm still not saying it's gonna work. I'm not so stupid.

• 12:52Chris Plante?

  I agree with you in that sense that it's just such a big if of the software. If this ends up being, the problem for me right now is it looks like just copy paste of Discord. And if it truly is something where you hit that button and there is a group of 15 friends that are your go to friends. And when you hit that button, you're thrown into a room where you will always be talking to them. It literally is as simple as hit the button and you're there and.

• 13:18Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, you'll need to add people. It's not gonna like automatically.

• 13:21Chris Plante?

  I don't know. I'm saying what is my best version of it, which is it should be as painless as possible.

• 13:26Russ Frushtick?

  You wanna be in a game chat with 15 friends? That's your best version?

• 13:31Chris Plante?

  You know what I mean? What I'm saying is I don't want it to be, if this truly is as natural as any other Nintendo thing, it shouldn't be like Discord. It should be like, hey, I can be exactly what Russ was describing. Like I hit that button and I am here with my family and we're having a nice time.

• 13:48Griffin McElroy?

  I would love to hear from what Russ thought was the big transformative feature of the mouse. Did you actually get to play anything in mouse mode?

• 13:56Russ Frushtick?

  I played two things in mouse mode. I played Metroid, which I know you don't really care about, and I played Welcome Park.

• 14:06Chris Plante?

  Nice.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I agree with Russ. Metroid's Metroid. Tell me about this Welcome Park.

• 14:13Griffin McElroy?

  I didn't know Metroid, maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention, was a, was a mouse equipped game. It is a. Metroid Prime 4.

• 14:20Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, yeah. Metroid Prime 4 is extremely mouse equipped such that at any given time, you could either use mouse mode or like hold two joycons like normally and like switch back and forth. So the second the game notices that you're using mouse mode, it'll just switch to mouse aiming. How does that feel? Which is pretty wild. From an accuracy standpoint, fucking fantastic. Like incredible, totally responsive, incredibly accurate.

• 14:49Russ Frushtick?

  From a pressing button standpoint, I'm a little concerned because if you think about a Joy-Con and you put a Joy-Con on its side, try pressing the face buttons in that scenario.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, yeah.

• 15:02Russ Frushtick?

  And it's a problem. They're like activating like the ball.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Does this, does this feel good? Are you, okay, let me ask you this. Okay. If you're playing something in mouse mode, right? If you're playing with a computer, like the, like the number one thing you would be doing is clicking like a left mouse button with an index finger, right?

• 15:20Russ Frushtick?

  Yes.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  What's the like main action? Like, what's the shoot?

• 15:24Russ Frushtick?

  The shoot is, is that bumper button. It's the-

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Does that feel good?

• 15:27Russ Frushtick?

  That feels good. It might be the-

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Sorry, I keep doing this.

• 15:31Russ Frushtick?

  I know, I see.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  The listener can't see it. It's just-

• 15:33Griffin McElroy?

  No, but you do look like the fucking Crypt Keeper every time.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna stop doing it.

• 15:37Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, maybe the one button that feels good to press while in mouse mode is that bumper. So at least they nailed that part of it. Uh, but I do have concerns, yeah, for the other buttons that might be required. Um, it just doesn't feel supernatural because it, just like the thinness of it and where your hand rests, it's just a little tricky to like hit any other button on there. That being said, like, you know, it didn't feel, I didn't feel like I was constantly needing to reach those buttons when I was playing Metroid Prime 4. And with Welcome Park, which is obviously the much more anticipated game, uh, for people that don't know, it's basically like a tech demo

• 16:14Russ Frushtick?

  for all the features in the Switch 2. Um, those games were like, move a UFO to dodge the asteroids. And so you're really, you weren't even pressing any buttons. You were just like-

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Tell me why. Tell me why they charging for it?

• 16:27Russ Frushtick?

  Why are they charging for it? I have no fucking idea.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  You are a bit, hey Russ, can I say something to you right now? You are on real ass, like television networks that are talking about business, about video games. They bring you on as the person who's like, explain this shit to us. So Russ, I'm asking you as a friend. I don't know if I have to pay your rent, your Bloomberg rate.

• 16:50Russ Frushtick?

  Do you want the honest answer?

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:52Russ Frushtick?

  The honest answer is I spent, I had an interview with Bill Trinnan, who's a VP at Nintendo, and I spent about seven minutes asking him very direct questions about the overall pricing of the Switch, the pricing of the games, so on and so forth. And I kept asking and he kept seeming a little uncomfortable about it until PR told me to stop. That's

• 17:13Griffin McElroy?

  Alright.

• 17:13Russ Frushtick?

  What happened?

• 17:14Griffin McElroy?

  Great, great, great.

• 17:15Russ Frushtick?

  So I probably would have gotten there, but

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Okay, did it feel like, we've been doing this a while, does this feel like maybe a decision that NOJ made that in a way is like, I don't know why it's

• 17:26Russ Frushtick?

  Quite honestly, I think practically every decision when it comes to like major decisions come from NOJ.

• 17:32Griffin McElroy?

  Oh yeah, baby. I don't think in a way he's calling any shots, dude.

• 17:36Russ Frushtick?

  Nintendo of America is making big marketing decisions for the region.

• 17:40Griffin McElroy?

  Sure.

• 17:40Russ Frushtick?

  But broadly speaking, if it's like a global, like, hey, are we charging for this or not? It's gonna come from the head office. And, uh, yeah. Look, I'll be honest, what I played of Nintendo Park, pretty fucking fun.

• 17:52Griffin McElroy?

  It looks great.

• 17:54Russ Frushtick?

  It was actually legit fun. And there's like, um, there's a mini game where you are moving the mouse across a line and you are trying to guess where the strongest vibration is. And so it's like this weird

• 18:07Griffin McElroy?

  That's got big one-two switch energy, man.

• 18:09Russ Frushtick?

  It does feel like one-two switch. I, I mean, if there's like a party game element right now, I only played it in single player, but if there's like a multiplayer element, a lot of these mini games would be like legit fun in multiplayer. So

• 18:20Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. I was hoping, I was holding out hope for a Nintendo Land 2.

• 18:24Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  So the answer is because they can. Is that?

• 18:28Russ Frushtick?

  I think, I guess so, but like, I don't know, it just feels like for something they easily could have not charged for and

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Or include with the Nintendo account, you know, it's like you're trying to incentivize that anyway.

• 18:39Russ Frushtick?

  In the way, the like, the goodwill that Sony got from Astro's Playroom being like

• 18:45Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 18:45Russ Frushtick?

  A thing. It just, it totally vexing that they needed that extra $10 for whatever they're gonna sell, like crazy.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Weird. It's so weird. Anyway.

• 18:54Griffin McElroy?

  Can we talk about, uh, other games you played? Did you get to play Donkey Kong Bonanza?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Can I touch, can we talk about the mouse for a second?

• 19:00Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, sure.

• 19:01Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Cause we didn't really, I, I, I wanted to float this thought because I've been thinking a lot about, I've been messing around with a lot of like the, the, that, this form factor, right? With the handheld gaming form factor. And, um, I

• 19:16Speaker 01

  I think that power wise and like the usability wise, it will be outpaced pretty quickly by a lot of these devices. They're coming out at a really rapid pace and they don't have the same standards it has to live up to. But the ability to play mouse based games in a portable form factor could be like really, really major.

• 19:38Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  In a way that we're like, it makes it the device. Cause like, there's, that's the one thing that's holding me back is if I'm thinking about like a game for travel or whatever. It's, it's just, it can't be something like, I'm not gonna put something on my Steam Deck that's like feels better as a mouse and keyboard.

• 19:53Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Or, or even like a mouse based.

• 19:55Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Thing, things like, even stuff like like Bellatro or things like that where it feel nicer to play.

• 20:01Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, Civ is kinda like the obvious.

• 20:03Russ Frushtick?

  If you like Civ, that would be the example.

• 20:06Griffin McElroy?

  My concern, I agree with you Juice. I think that that would be so rad.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  There's a base, there's a big chunk of mouse based PC games that I think that they could release on Switch. That would look great and haven't been done to death on consoles yet.

• 20:20Griffin McElroy?

  I agree with that. I also however, know Nintendo's track record with kind of like specialty hardware stuff. And their ability to court third party publishers into supporting that. And the fact is, is it is not a mousing keyboard based system. It is maybe a mouse based system. So they are going to require some sort of hybridization of like with the left Joy-Con plugged in, you can do some stuff. And then with the mouse, you do the mouse stuff and that's going to require like no short amount of.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  So I'm actually Griff, I, I'm actually thinking less mouse and key, I'm actually not talking about mouse and keyboard games. Cause like by and large, a mouse and keyboard game, I think is better served by dual thumbsticks, right? I'm, I'm.

• 21:04Russ Frushtick?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. Clarify what you just said, cause a mouse and keyboard game isn't necessarily better with dual thumbsticks.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:12Griffin McElroy?

  If it has to be portable in a portable handheld gaming console, then.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  What I'm saying is there's, I, I do not find myself wishing that I had a mouse and keyboard to control first person or third person as shooter, right? I don't want that, but I do wish I had like for deck building games, for example, is like, is the massive one, right? Like it would just feel better. I hate poking cards and dragging it with my finger. It feels shitty.

• 21:36Russ Frushtick?

  I think to address what Griffin just said about the third party support, my impression is.

• 21:43Russ Frushtick?

  It seems relative, who fucking, I'm not a game developer, quite honestly, but it seems relatively easy to just program a mouse, especially if your game is already designed for it, a mouse functionality such that, I agree that you might not see a ton of first, after a couple of years, a ton of first-party games coming out. I think you will see a ton of third-party games coming out that will support the mouse if you want to use it and if it makes sense.

• 22:09Griffin McElroy?

  Interesting.

• 22:10Russ Frushtick?

  I just don't think it's that hard to implement. Like, that's my read on it. I could be dead wrong, but I think you will see it.

• 22:19Griffin McElroy?

  I would love to hear about some of the other games you played, specifically the new Donkey Kong game, if it was hands-on at this event.

• 22:24Russ Frushtick?

  I thought you wanted to hear about Dragon Drive.

• 22:27Griffin McElroy?

  No, Donkey Kong Bonanza. Like, Dragon Drive, obviously, a wild one to include. Dragon Drive hit, like, at peak Nintendo ass-energy during that direct, when it was like, oh, they got a new, oh, they did a new arms. Like, oh, okay, Nintendo's did a, did a arms again. That's fun. That's cool.

• 22:47Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, yeah, no, I didn't actually play Dragon Drive. I watched someone play it. Dragon Drive looks, and according to Chelsea, well, yeah, it's not great. But that's okay.

• 22:57Griffin McElroy?

  But I have, I have, I have learned firsthand that trying to shoot a basketball using Joy-Con motion controls is a non-starter. It does not feel amazing.

• 23:08Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. Um, we'll talk about Donkey Kong, because I played that and quite enjoyed it. So, Donkey Kong Bonanza, and it's spelled like banana, but Bonanza. Um, when I first saw the trailer, and I'm curious if you guys got the same perspective, didn't you just think, like, oh, this is just like Mario Odyssey with Donkey Kong?

• 23:27Griffin McElroy?

  I, I thought it was Odyssey until I saw that ape.

• 23:30Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, but even when you saw the ape, didn't you think, like, okay, they just slotted in?

• 23:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Um, I figured it was doing destructibility as a big feature. It was what I, I thought it was, it seemed like kind of a red faction was the impression I got, but that might have been wishful thinking on my part.

• 23:44Russ Frushtick?

  No, no, you were spot on, Justin. You, you, you got it. Uh, it is. It feels like a Hulk game is what it feels like. You are like

• 23:53Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, fuck yeah.

• 23:54Russ Frushtick?

  Kind of let loose in these environments. And Donkey Kong's eyes are like that of a, like a true obsessive. He needs this, whatever the material is, it's like gold banana material.

• 24:07Griffin McElroy?

  Cocaine.

• 24:07Russ Frushtick?

  He needs it. He's obsessed. Yeah, it's his cocaine. He's obsessed with it. And you go around like fucking Hulk or like the Tasmanian devil, just fucking wrecking everything in reach. Every single button except for one, there's a jump button and then every button and every trigger triggers some sort of fuck shit up action.

• 24:29Russ Frushtick?

  He's slamming the ground or punching a wall or throwing a rock or ripping rocks out of the wall.

• 24:35Griffin McElroy?

  That's great.

• 24:35Russ Frushtick?

  Everything is destruct. They're like, everything is focused on destruction. I wouldn't say everything's destructible. It's not like you can, you know, level the entire level.

• 24:43Griffin McElroy?

  Take the thing to the studs.

• 24:44Russ Frushtick?

  But I was of what I played, kind of blown away by how much of the environment was destructible. And it was all happening very, very quickly, such that like, it was clear this was not something that could have happened on the Switch hardware, like much more involved than anything I would have seen.

• 25:00Griffin McElroy?

  I'm glad to hear that. Very excited. I think both my kids are gonna like this game a lot. Why the fuck is it coming out a month after the launch? Obviously, like games, there's no telling like how hard it is to get them across the finish line. But you would think like a month

• 25:15Russ Frushtick?

  I think it's done.

• 25:16Griffin McElroy?

  From being a launch title.

• 25:17Russ Frushtick?

  My interpretation is I think it's done. I think the reason they're doing that is because it's gonna be a pretty light year from a first party standpoint and they want to spread things around.

• 25:27Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 25:27Russ Frushtick?

  That's my interpretation. Cause people, they expect people, when they buy the console, they're gonna buy Mario Kart. That's the system seller for them. And Mario Kart's gonna take them a chunk of time. And then by the time Mario Kart is starting to wane or whatever, July hits, they buy.

• 25:41Griffin McElroy?

  You know what else? It's not, it's also different quarters.

• 25:44Russ Frushtick?

  Also different quarters.

• 25:45Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, yeah, sure. You know, you're ending.

• 25:47Russ Frushtick?

  Business boy over here, we need you on the BBC.

• 25:50Griffin McElroy?

  Get you up on there.

• 25:50Russ Frushtick?

  Yep.

• 25:51Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I can make, I can lie, lie. Did you play Mario Kart World?

• 25:55Russ Frushtick?

  I did play Mario Kart World. Fun as fuck. Super fun.

• 25:59Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, good.

• 26:00Chris Plante?

  It's nice.

• 26:00Russ Frushtick?

  I'm not a-

• 26:01Griffin McElroy?

  Did you get to fuck around with like the open world?

• 26:03Chris Plante?

  You said a point nine out of one. Go back and tell us about that.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's the point one? What more can Mario do for you?

• 26:09Russ Frushtick?

  So, uh, I'm not a huge Mario Kart fan. I like those games, but I'm not like, oh, I'm obsessed and I'm gonna play it all in my spare time. I think most people are like that. I think it's a great party game, but not necessarily a game you would spend a lot of time in outside of that. It does feel like they're trying to flesh out the like, for lack of a better term, single player experience with that open world. Like you can between matches, and if I had to guess, they didn't show this, but I have to guess, I think there's a dedicated like open world exploration mode. In so, at some, I think it'll be something like a Forza Horizon, if you will. Where you're in this environment and you're unlocking characters and costumes and doing like side fun, side challenges and things like that.

• 26:51Russ Frushtick?

  To add to the depth of like, why this is an $80 game. It feels like, apart from the fact that they can sell it at $80 and it'll sell, I think they will make it pretty meaty. What I played, there was like 34 playable characters. You could play as the fucking coin purse from Super Mario Land, like, there's some deep cut shit in there.

• 27:13Griffin McElroy?

  That's cool. Yeah, sure.

• 27:13Russ Frushtick?

  They're just showing in the demo, so it feels very robust. The actual driving, to me, being like a kind of a layman, felt very, very similar to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. The maps were much, much bigger, like the tracks felt like much more wide ranging. And because it's all open world, you can have a track that's like, you start in the snowy Alps and you go down into the valley. And then suddenly you're underground, because you're like mixing and matching biomes within the same track.

• 27:44Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 27:44Russ Frushtick?

  So that's pretty fucking cool.

• 27:46Speaker 01

  It's really interesting thinking about, um- This in terms of like the Mario Kart announcement seemed very surprising, right? But

• 27:54Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, was it? How was it surprising?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Well, no, no, no, not the Mario Kart announcement. To me, the open world.

• 27:59Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, yeah, that was.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  It's a big departure, right? Uh, it's interesting when you look at Bowser's Fury.

• 28:05Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Because I feel like Bowser's Fury in hindsight was really even more of a test case than we knew. I think it was really Nintendo saying like, how can we, let's like, practice this?

• 28:15Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Like, let's see, because if you look at it, it didn't make a bunch of sense in their strat, like overall strategy, but it really feels more like a test case now in hindsight where, and with, with Zelda 2, I would argue Zelda probably started it. It's like, hey, we made this an open world. How do we shift these other franchises to that? And like, this seems like the next, the next one.

• 28:32Russ Frushtick?

  And I think they see the playtimes of those games. They see like Zelda playtimes and they're like, oh, how do we port this over? And the more playtime someone's spending in it, like I could easily see them launching like fucking car passes and things like that in Mario Kart world where people are continuing to spend money in this thing a year or two in advance, uh, after this.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:52Russ Frushtick?

  You know, I think that's the incentive.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  It would be, I feel like it would, I don't know, they're, they're missing, I think, the value they could have captured by making it more of a social thing by lowering the price a lot. Like this is not going to be, if you want something where you're going to be like, it's more of like a social space hangout thing, I think it's going to be a lot cheaper than 80 bucks.

• 29:11Russ Frushtick?

  So they, so you're right, but they are working on it. We didn't see it and it wasn't even talked about, but they have been working on an MMO, a Nintendo made MMO for years. There was like a playtest of it a couple of years ago. I think that is their solution for solving that problem. Who knows, that might be like free to play. And then there's like in-app whatever currency stuff. Um, so I think that might be their solution for that.

• 29:38Chris Plante?

  How much credit do you think I should get for these cool new video games?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  A lot, I think.

• 29:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, probably a lot.

• 29:45Chris Plante?

  I thought, because like, I, I think we all remember five years ago, I wrote a letter to Miyamoto that said,

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:53Chris Plante?

  Gimme Forza Horizon Red Faction Guerrilla Nintendo now.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:58Chris Plante?

  And I was out of ink, so I did cut the letters.

• 30:01Russ Frushtick?

  And you wrote some pretty threatening shit.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wasn't, that part wasn't nice.

• 30:05Russ Frushtick?

  But it did move the needle.

• 30:05Chris Plante?

  Right, right. But it seems like it worked.

• 30:08Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  The only weird thing about the Switch, I would say that I could think of is that we have no idea how much it'll cost.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. That's actually the sort of big thing is it could cost anywhere. I'll tell you this, but it's not gonna cost less than $350.

• 30:29Russ Frushtick?

  450.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  I don't, well, it's certainly not gonna cost less than $450 either, Griffin. I don't think it's gonna cost less than that for sure.

• 30:37Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. I mean, as of right now, the tariffs on Vietnam where they produce Nintendo produces their consoles are 46%, which is a lot. Uh, I'd imagine.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  As a business reporter, would you say more than 40, less than 50, Russ, to give people sort of a baseline?

• 30:53Russ Frushtick?

  Generally considered more than 40, but, uh, less than 50, correct. Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  If people have done like 45%.

• 31:00Griffin McElroy?

  Pretty close. Crunching the numbers on that, I'm getting, I'm getting 657, uh, on my calculations, which is, which is rough. That's a lot.

• 31:08Chris Plante?

  What if I then have to travel back and forth across some different, it might get even more complicated pretty quickly.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I don't think that's possible. Plan. Honestly, the original chart was generated by AI. I don't see how this could be any less.

• 31:21Griffin McElroy?

  We're, we're in PlayStation 3 launch territory, gang, and this thing does not have cell-powered processing, so.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  You're gonna have to get a second job, but the joke is we don't have any other jobs either. It's just kind of bad.

• 31:32Griffin McElroy?

  Right, right.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Is the, is the gimmick.

• 31:33Chris Plante?

  I think, uh, the bad thing is, I think 450 was the ceiling and they knew that. And now they're like, well, shit.

• 31:41Russ Frushtick?

  Well, they were charging 500 for the bundle, but.

• 31:44Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 31:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Griffin McElroy?

  Right. Russ, was there anything else from the event that you wanted to touch on?

• 31:50Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, I mentioned this in Resties, but every room that we walked into, they would have people clapping at us, which is a very bizarre experience when they're just there to play video games. Uh, I want to play, I want to mention, I played Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom in 60 FPS. Uh, and that feels fucking gorgeous.

• 32:09Griffin McElroy?

  Is it the, so this is, is that, was that the Switch 2 Enhanced Edition? Or was that just the regular edition of those games running at a faster frame rate on the Switch 2?

• 32:20Russ Frushtick?

  I don't think, I think you need, in order to get the frame rate increase, I think you need to pay for it, or you need to be subscribed to Nintendo. Switch online. I don't think it'll automatically update. There are titles that will automatically update for free. Mario Odyssey being one of them will update some aspects of the game for free. But I think with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, if you want to play it at 60 FPS for whatever resolution it is.

• 32:43Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 32:44Russ Frushtick?

  You will need to pay for the upgrade, which I.

• 32:46Griffin McElroy?

  But some of, God, that's so fucking confusing, man, because like the thing that Henry took away from this most is that Kirby and the Forgotten Land is getting new content.

• 32:56Russ Frushtick?

  It is with $20 paid.

• 32:59Griffin McElroy?

  Right, right. So it is with that, which is like, fine. Like, I'm not, I'm accustomed to paying for DLC to a certain extent.

• 33:07Russ Frushtick?

  It's a little weird that they're doing it for just like resolution and performance.

• 33:10Griffin McElroy?

  Right, that feels bad.

• 33:12Russ Frushtick?

  Their justification, whether this is whatever, is that it now has Zelda notes in the app, which allows you to, I guess there's new voiceover stuff from Zelda within the app, only in the app, not in the game. But it does have a feature that I was pretty enticed by, and I think it'll allow you to actually find all of the Koroks without ruining your life. Because I think you can use the app to like, help you guide to the Koroks.

• 33:38Griffin McElroy?

  And it just talks to you, right?

• 33:39Russ Frushtick?

  And it talks to you in Zelda's voice.

• 33:40Griffin McElroy?

  It talks to you, but it recommends great books. That's how it gets you out of it.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  When you're talking to your colleagues, to what extent was the absence of a big new Mario felt? Because I feel like there was a sense, I think, I was kind of waiting for it the whole time, you know, to drop the big new Mario, and it wasn't there. How was that vibe?

• 34:02Russ Frushtick?

  I think Donkey Kong Bonanza was obviously their like, solution to that problem.

• 34:08Griffin McElroy?

  Sure.

• 34:09Russ Frushtick?

  Donkey Kong Bonanza, I think, gets you like 70% of the way to like, kind of scratching that itch, but obviously isn't the full on like, holy shit.

• 34:16Griffin McElroy?

  That's why the launch date thing is worse with Donkey Kong. It's like, you're Donkey Kong, dude. You need to be there day one.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  We would wait for Mario, but like your Donkey Kong, if that's the launch game, like you gotta be there.

• 34:29Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Griffin McElroy?

  Odyssey wasn't a launch game though, right?

• 34:32Russ Frushtick?

  Odyssey was not. It was a couple of months after. Yeah, Zelda was.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Breath of the Wild was. Very long time since Odyssey. Like it's been a very.

• 34:37Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, God, believe me, I know.

• 34:39Russ Frushtick?

  They're definitely do. I don't think this is gonna happen this year, but I definitely think there is more. There's probably one more first party game that's gonna come out from Nintendo that they haven't announced yet. Air Riders is scheduled for this year. Kirby Air Riders. I don't personally care about Kirby Air Riders. I know Plant's excited.

• 34:57Chris Plante?

  I am.

• 34:58Griffin McElroy?

  I'm in.

• 34:58Russ Frushtick?

  But I think that's the, right now, that's the only like Q4 holiday title that they've announced, like a 2025 title. They've announced. I think there must be one more. I don't think it's gonna be the 3D Mario. I think that's probably a next year thing, if I had to guess. But at this point, like Nintendo's been announcing and then releasing games in a fucking three month span. You look at Echoes of Wisdom. Was announced in like June and it was out in September. So.

• 35:23Griffin McElroy?

  I was speaking of shocked when they announced the release date for the Switch 2 being June 5th.

• 35:27Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, really?

• 35:28Griffin McElroy?

  Which is shocked. I thought for sure it was going to be a holiday.

• 35:31Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, yeah. No, a lot of the rumors were pointing to about that timing. Oh, like a June, but yeah.

• 35:39Russ Frushtick?

  What's up, Justin? You seem torn.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  Um.

• 35:43Chris Plante?

  Natalie and Brogley over here.

• 35:45Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Um, it's, uh, so we can't, we can't preorder it.

• 35:48Russ Frushtick?

  Correct.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Um, I don't think they're gonna have any problems selling them.

• 35:51Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, they'll be fine.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  That's gonna be fine. I think what will be.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  What I think is gonna be really probably will end up being the biggest story of the Switch 2 is this weird. Pricing situation, right? Where they have, they announced a price and now we don't really know. Like, obviously, these tariffs have not been formally like, we, we don't know if they're gonna be rolled back. They could change it any minute. But if, if Nintendo starts doing pre-orders, they're kind of locked into a price. Like, there's a couple of different realities where like Nintendo charges a lot more because they have to, right? They're saying like, look, you see this, we have to do it.

• 36:30Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Um, and then the situation changes and then it's like, well, we've already normalized this price. Like, do we cut it back to react?

• 36:38Russ Frushtick?

  I don't know.

• 36:38Griffin McElroy?

  I think they hold off just based on the fact that like this is, imagine it's, you know, uh, 10 years ago. Any other administration, the idea like when a, a game company announces the price and release date of their console, that shit is etched into tablets, taken down from the high heavens from God himself, right? And now it's a situation where it's like, well, if it is, if it stays this way, like we can't do it for 450, but nothing else about the tariff situation has stayed that way for longer than like 48 hours. So it's hard to like, it's hard to imagine them kind of like committing to that, knowing that the, the sort of volatility of this, this sort of insane economic decision.

• 37:20Russ Frushtick?

  I think they will frame it as some sort of, to account for the global trade, whatever, the price is $600, just for argument's sake, price is $600, but make it very clear that it's the reason the price is $600 is because of this thing. And if things change on that front, seemingly in a permanent way, the price will normalize to.

• 37:42Griffin McElroy?

  But they can't do pre-orders.

• 37:44Russ Frushtick?

  Correct.

• 37:44Griffin McElroy?

  Until that, right? Like if they start pre-orders at 600 and then their tariffs get rolled back, those people that paid $600 have paid $600. There's no rectify. Best Buy is not going to be like, yeah, let me get you back your 150, dog. No problem.

• 37:57Chris Plante?

  I, I, I think the thing is exactly what Griffin said, which is this is a month and a half away from when they're going after, almost two months from when the thing actually releases. This is changing on a 24 to 48 hour basis. There is no world in which the tariffs as they exist today are the same on May 1st. That's not to say that they couldn't be worse or better. I don't know, but they will be a hundred percent different. That's for sure. There's already signs of that being the case. I also think that Nintendo is smart enough to not have to say the thing that you said, Fresh of, hey, here's why we raise the price.

• 38:35Chris Plante?

  If they have to raise the price, it will be after car manufacturers are raising the cost of their cars by 10K, 20K, right? So I think that they would hold off on raising that price until. That subtext becomes text across the entire economy.

• 38:53Griffin McElroy?

  I would also like to remind listeners that we do record this show in advance of when it comes out. Not a joke, not a joke, like.

• 39:01Chris Plante?

  It's true.

• 39:01Griffin McElroy?

  So when this thing comes out, who the fuck knows where we're at?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  This has been a very long discussion and we could talk for longer, but I think we do need to wrap it up.

• 39:09Chris Plante?

  And we have a hell of a game to talk about.

• 39:11Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Speaking of, Russ, do you want to address the game after the break?

• 39:16Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, sure. So you guys are going to be talking about a game called Blueprints, which is a first-person kind of MIST style puzzle game with a lot of secrets in it. I was pretty excited about this game. It's been described to me as like the new Animal Well, if you will. And I actually started playing and found that I really couldn't play with a lot of confidence because the game is incredibly color sensitive. There are a lot of colors, even more colors as you go deeper is my understanding. And it was creating some problems because a lot of the puzzles in the game are very subtle. And if I don't know when colors are important for a puzzle, it really messes with me.

• 40:01Russ Frushtick?

  There was a moment where I like made the total wrong decision because I was like, I for sure have green rooms in my house. I did not have green rooms in my house. That's like a very basic level. So a couple of things I want to mention. One, if you go into settings, there's a settings option and in there is accessibility. And they do mention colorblind mode in there. And it's grayed out and they say, I have a note underneath it saying, hey, we know how important this is. We are working on it. But as of right now, it is not in the game. I don't know how long it's going to be until it is in the game. But I wanted to make that clear, A, for colorblind people like me, obviously. You, I think, will have a lot of difficulty playing this. And B,

• 40:41Russ Frushtick?

  Given the fact that it is such like a secret heavy game, I don't have a lot to contribute. And I also don't necessarily want to like totally blow up the experience for myself. Not that these guys are going to give spoilers, but without having really any context of like where the game goes, it didn't feel like it made a lot of sense for me to participate. So I actively said I didn't want to participate in the B segment of the show where they are talking about the game because I really have only like scratched the very, very surface.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Hey, Russ, to what extent does Steam and other digital platforms like surface that kind of information?

• 41:16Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, like whether it's supported?

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Like, is there a, I've never really looked for it. Is there like a warning on games or like anything like that?

• 41:22Russ Frushtick?

  I've never seen like a system wide warning. Obviously there is like a couple of things. One, Steam supports, you know, returns after if you only play a game for under two hours, you can just return it. But I've never seen like system wide games, obviously for people that it's like a real concern, certainly do your research before playing any game. But yeah, um, you know, we've talked a little bit about accessibility in the past. This is not the first time I've experienced it. It is one of the first times in a long time where it was like so integral to the game that I really couldn't participate. But again, I would reiterate that it's very clear to me that developers realize how integral it is and seem to be working on it.

• 42:05Russ Frushtick?

  And I don't know how long it'll be, but that's sort of like a long preface to say I will not be in the second half of this episode.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  While Russ is away, the us will play. We can say the next episodes about anything.

• 42:16Chris Plante?

  It's called Nowita and you gotta play it.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  All right, let's take a break and we'll be back right after this. Bye, Russ.

• 42:25Russ Frushtick?

  Bye.

• 42:27Griffin McElroy?

  I feel like this could get out of control very quickly. And I feel like, one, we make a promise upfront that we're not going to spoil anything.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  It's impossible. Go ahead.

• 42:37Griffin McElroy?

  It's impossible to spoil something?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  It's impossible to not spoil something. Just by talking about it, you're going to contextualize the game in a way, you're giving things away already. I already know five puzzles just from listening to you talk.

• 42:49Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, so Russ is still with us in spirit, which I can appreciate.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, he's out.

• 42:54Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, you've purged him out. Blueprints is one of the, one of the most exciting, best, like, most consuming games I've maybe ever played.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Goodness.

• 43:05Griffin McElroy?

  And I've been so stoked to talk about it, even though I think it's going to be kind of a challenge because there's not really a game that has existed like it before. It does have a lot of sort of familiar components, though. So maybe we start kind of there.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Okay, I want to try something because I think that, I think you could best understand Blueprints like a single-player board game, right?

• 43:31Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Imagine Blueprints like a single-player board game, and your board for the game is a nine-by-five grid. And you always start the game at the bottom center position of it, and then you draw three cards. And each one of the cards is a room. After you've drafted, you can choose which room to play. Some rooms have a cost of resources that you've accumulated, hopefully, in other rooms.

• 43:58Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  But the important thing is that the orientation of these rooms and the assemblage of these rooms is randomly generated every time by you as you explore through the house. You're building this house as you draft your way through it.

• 44:12Griffin McElroy?

  A touchstone that may be helpful for some folks is Betrayal at House on the Hill. If you have played that board game where you are placing the tiles down and building the house as you go, that is very much the system here.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Right, there are a truly dizzying array of interlocked puzzles, both mechanical and sort of like narrative in nature, that are, uh...

• 44:38Speaker 01

  All interlocked, but in order to like fully maximize their abilities, a lot of times you're having to synergize the rooms that you're pulling. So you may need one room because of the effect that it can have on another to progress your

• 44:57Griffin McElroy?

  Understanding.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Overall, understanding. And really, that's the, that's the currency, right? Like, that's the number one currency, I think, is, is understanding.

• 45:05Chris Plante?

  I'll layer one thing on top of that, which is, it is a series of more challenging games to actually reach your goal. So your goal is to find the 46th room in a 45-room estate, right?

• 45:21Chris Plante?

  In theory, at the beginning, you draft these rooms and you want to draw a line from the room that you start in to an ante-chamber on the other side of the house. So in theory, you could do that by just picking rooms that make that line from point A to point B. But added a layer, you have a limited number of steps that you can do, and you have some locked doors. So now you have to start using rooms that do not actually give you as clear a pass, may actually terminate pass, but those rooms have the jewels or they have keys. So in theory, now the game's good. But as you get further, you reach rooms where the keys don't actually work. Okay, well, now you need to find a computer terminal.

• 46:02Chris Plante?

  And the power of the computer terminal, and suddenly it just keeps cascading on top of this, where you are now, you know, those are the first two or three layers, you're 30 layers deep of, oh, but if I need to do that, I have to do this. And it's a bit of a give a mouse a cookie puzzle game.

• 46:18Griffin McElroy?

  Now, to, to add another thing.

• 46:21Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Griffin McElroy?

  And, and hopefully you're still hanging with this, right? This idea of every, every time you play the game, every in-game day, you are starting over and building a new house with this randomized draft every time, trying to solve the puzzles, you have to take fucking notes. You have to take screenshots nonstop. You will

• 46:39Speaker 01

  You have to take screenshots nonstop.

• 46:42Griffin McElroy?

  Right?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Or you'll be mad at yourself.

• 46:43Griffin McElroy?

  You'll be so pissed. So you don't know when the next time you'll see this puzzle again. Is and you kinda gotta have it like stored away somewhere.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  And don't take screenshots nonstop. We're kidding about that because a lot of the stuff that you're gonna encounter early on, you'll encounter a lot over and over again until you get it.

• 46:58Chris Plante?

  Take screenshots there and don't write it down because I, the first five days, I was on a plane for like four hours just writing down every little thing where I'm like, oh, well, there's a picture of a pawn and I wonder if I'm a pawn in the greater scheme of things.

• 47:11Griffin McElroy?

  So, so, so the game for the most part is how do I draft these rooms in a way where I can solve, start to figure out what these puzzles are and start to solve them, right? And it's hard. When you start the game out, it's almost impossible to actually guarantee that you can make progress in any given run, trying to make these two goals interlock. However, it is also a rogue light and there are a lot of ways where you become more powerful, where you have more options. And that power curve, I think, is more elegant and more satisfying than like any like RPG,

• 47:53Griffin McElroy?

  like I, my strength went up two points because you've been trying to get these two rooms to draft together for fucking 10 runs and it's killing you and now you, but you just found this upgrade that is permanent that is going to facilitate that. And now you're making progress, which then leads to more puzzles and more upgrades and more like.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  It is, it is in a sense, the dark souls of thinking.

• 48:18Chris Plante?

  That's very good.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Rather than, than learning the enemies that you need to fight and getting really good at fighting those enemies because you fight them over and over again, what it really is, is you're learning the vocabulary of this house and you're learning the way this house thinks and the way this house communicates with you. And that is what you are get, that is how you start to feel confident navigating this house because you know it so well because you've been in the rooms over and over again. So when you realize you've walked past the fucking thing that you've needed to look at 30 fucking times.

• 48:52Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Then you really can savor it.

• 48:55Griffin McElroy?

  That's.

• 48:56Chris Plante?

  Justin, that's very elegant because the learning is, is the hook. I have bounced off other games that have been the animal wells that fresh mentioned earlier, or even Lorelei and the laser eyes. And what I really appreciate about this game is it is a puzzle game, but the vast majority of the times it is actually telling you how to solve its own puzzles.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:22Chris Plante?

  If you look around for the answer, it, it is happy to just literally hand it to you. But you have to keep your eyes open and you have to be curious.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  That's the thing because it's not going to hand it to you in the right order guaranteed. You will find a hint that makes no fucking sense to you and won't until you find this room you've never seen before 30 hours into the game. And you're like, wait a second, that has to do with this. And hopefully you've taken a screenshot.

• 49:51Chris Plante?

  What's great about that, and if you know this, especially going in is yeah, you can try to solve some of the puzzles and there are some that you can solve without those hints. There are a lot you can't, but often in puzzle games, I get to a point where I'm stuck on a puzzle and I bash my head against it and I just don't feel smart enough to solve it. And then I just walk away from the game where here I get to a puzzle and I can trust that, hey, I don't know the answer to this. I should just keep moving, just keep going and doing other things because eventually I will find an answer for this.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  I really think that there is a, there is a,

• 50:28Speaker 01

  the learning curve of this game, I would say is steep, but short to get to like a point where you're enjoying it.

• 50:36Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  I think that right at the first, when you first start going, and this is not a knock against the game, but it's sort of like a heads up or a way that I wish I was more comfortable experiencing games. At first it's much more about just having your eyes open and looking around.

• 50:52Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And. That's it. I mean, it's really like, and waiting for stuff to come to you.

• 50:58Griffin McElroy?

  You're gonna build some shit, you're gonna build some shit houses, which is my favorite experience was when Juice and I were on tour and you would just, out of nowhere, just be like, great fucking house, great shitty, because each room has a different number of entrances. It's so easy to lock yourself into a situation where you have drafted five rubes and then there's no more exits. And you're like, well, that's my run for the day. Okay, goodbye. But even then you learn something about those five rooms.

• 51:23Chris Plante?

  Thing, right? Like, there were times where I built a house and I built a path that was maybe a room away from the antechamber on the other side. And got a dead end, but I had an entire path on the left side of the estate that I could go kind of rebuild. And I knew I wasn't gonna be able to make it far enough to get to the antechamber, but I went and just built, just to build, just to see what I could get. And I ended up discovering something that blew my mind. They completely reframed the game for me. And did that have anything to do with in that run, getting to the goal? No, but that was honestly, looking back, that was when the game really clicked for me.

• 52:04Chris Plante?

  Because then I started to realize it truly is not about just reaching the goal. It is about solving its greater mysteries.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  What I, what I feel like, if I had to, to put a knock on blueprints, if I had to like complain about something. It's that I feel, and this is more of a warning, because once I tell you, it won't be a problem for you, but I feel like blueprints makes it feel like that you are playing against the passage of time. Or that you have a time limit, or that like, time must not be wasted in a way that is not accurate. Like you are seeing signage for like, there's a sale on this certain day. And it feels like, I, I started thinking like, well, I gotta be ready for that. Like, I gotta be ready for that day. Like, I gotta be ready for that sale. I gotta have my stuff lined up. I gotta be ready, but like,

• 52:55Speaker 01

  it, that doesn't matter. Like, it doesn't matter. And it doesn't, and the passage of days was a lot more frustrating for me when I would have like dead end days like that. Because I, I thought the way that days are like counting very.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  Definitively makes you feel like there's a time pressure and it's not. And I wish I had realized that earlier.

• 53:14Griffin McElroy?

  There is, there is not a time pressure. I think that that is, I think the reason that that is there, and I agree with you. I've also had that same feeling of frustration of like, well, if I don't get ready for this sale that is on one side for some reason, uh, I'm, I'm going to be fucked. Um, I think the reason it does that is because this game's big trick is you think you understand the scale of it. And then something happens and you realize that you don't. And there is not, I'll say definitively, there is not a game that has ever been made and released that pulls that off as many times sequentially as Blueprints has done in the, oh, like 120 hours that I have spent with it so far.

• 53:59Griffin McElroy?

  It just, it just keeps going.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  You think, one of my favorite concepts in games that I love to think about is the, the, the create, the hand of the creator, right?

• 54:10Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  That brings us joy to feel the creator in the work because they have put themselves into it and you can feel them guiding you. Like when you are having a good time at a video game, a lot of times you can feel that creator present, they've thought about this. And a lot of times when you're not having fun, it's because you can feel like the creator of the game didn't really think about this experience, like what this would feel like, right? Cause they didn't put their, there's a sense in this game where when you find something, sometimes it's so hidden that you, you can almost feel a, like you can feel someone speaking to you. Like it's like that concrete, like yo, you found it. Okay. Good. Cause I've been waiting for you to find it.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  And also 30 other things that have just kind of been floating around in your head have just like simultaneously clicked. And the pleasure of it was such, and Griffin saw this a couple of times, I would set the video game down and just. Let the the pleasure of that like wash over me.

• 55:11Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  It is so perfectly orchestrated and satisfying and it keeps.

• 55:16Griffin McElroy?

  Happening over and over and over.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Over and over and over again. And every time it happens, you think, well, that's, that's the bottom.

• 55:21Griffin McElroy?

  And it's like, wait. It is on some Animal Well shit, which I do appreciate. I think that it is easier to solve the thing. Like Chris said, like it's easier to solve this stuff than it is in Animal Well, because you will constantly. It, it, it shows its hand a lot if you are paying attention and you're looking around. But it is also on some Animal Well shit where like, I know the three of us are on different strata of, of, of the game.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:45Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, and so like talking about the game is, is I think pretty difficult. I think you will have a hard time chatting about this game with your friends until you have guaranteed that you all have reached a certain like checkpoint together.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  I will say this, though, I, speaking of Animal Well and this, I bounced off Animal Well soon before I will bounce off this. This is a, this is a much more deliberate and orchestrated and like laid out. There's a lot here, but I think it's more fairly laid out and more obviously signposted than in Animal Well, which I, it clicks more for me. It's just a personal.

• 56:19Chris Plante?

  Oops, I wanted to share a detail from a call I had with the creator of this game. And because you were talking about how it really feels like they are whispering to you. And this will make a lot more sense as more people play the game, but everything in the game again can feel like a clue. So I'm on the call with him, right? And behind.

• 56:38Griffin McElroy?

  Is it Ton- Tonda Ross?

• 56:40Chris Plante?

  Yes.

• 56:40Griffin McElroy?

  The name pronunciation?

• 56:42Chris Plante?

  I believe so, or Tonda, but I, yes. So I'm on a call with him and he lives in LA. And he used to work in the film industry and behind him is a poster for Nightmare Alley, the original film from 1947, right? And I'm like, oh, I love that movie. And I think that's really interesting because Nightmare Alley is about a confidence man. Like somebody who's kind of like creating illusions and tricking people. And he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I hadn't thought about it, but you know, like everything feels like it's kind of part of the game. And then there were two other movie posters next to him. And I was like, oh, like what's up? What's up with those? Like, those are old movies, but I don't know if they have anything in common with Nightmare Alley. And he's like, yeah, no, I don't like those movies as much. I really like Nightmare Alley, but I don't really like those as much.

• 57:26Chris Plante?

  It's like, why, why do you have them on your wall? And he's like, oh, they were all released in 1947 and my address is 1947.

• 57:35Griffin McElroy?

  So like, that's what you're doing.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is my dude.

• 57:38Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, like I immediately just like vibrated of holy moly, you're incredible. Like that you are this game. It's it, there's like nine different brilliant things about this game. The puzzles themselves are brilliant, the microcosmic puzzles, the bigger puzzles. The writing is fantastic. The story, once you start to unpack it is is quite gripping, but it is the way that like you have this one half of your brain that is thinking about this board game drafting, deck building sort of mechanic. And that is keeping some plates spinning in your brain. And then you are also trying to figure out all these puzzles and how they all interact.

• 58:20Griffin McElroy?

  And the the way that your brain works as it is trying to do these two things at once keeps you from getting frustrated and locked in on either thing, right? Because in Animal Well, you're trying to solve puzzles and you aren't making any progress. You're stuck, right? But in Blueprints, you have like this other game that is also going on. And if you keep playing that one, it's gonna move you along the path on the other hand, right?

• 58:44Speaker 01

  There's a meta layer, there's a couple of different layers.

• 58:47Griffin McElroy?

  It's insane how it that it works.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  When I had started talking about the the comparing this to Animal Well.

• 58:55Griffin McElroy?

  Yes.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  The thing that I wanted to say, and I really, I'm never this cat, but like, you really, really, really shouldn't try to look up any help with this game. Because thinking about it, and I wonder if this is part of the idea, it would be almost impossible to extract information that you need without ruining

• 59:23Griffin McElroy?

  Spoiling other shit.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  many other things for yourself. And I swear to you, I am the first person to go to guides if I feel like something is is is unfair, or I mean, I have no qualms about it whatsoever. But I really, in this, in this one scenario, am telling you that you will ruin this experience for yourself. It is fair, it's there, it's not, it's very deliberate, it's there.

• 59:46Griffin McElroy?

  Small, small.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  But like, don't try to look.

• 59:48Griffin McElroy?

  I agree with you to the credits. And then maybe after that, chat with friends.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  That's what I would say.

• 59:55Griffin McElroy?

  It does get to a point where you're gonna wanna talk to other people.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  I'm saying a hundred, that's a hu- I very much agree. I'm putting that in a separate bucket. I think talking to people about stuff, it's a lot easier for a friend to be like, okay, Griffin has had some very like weird cautious like, what do you know that I like?

• 1:00:11Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Help me try to figure out where you're at. Um, so that's a lot easier, I think, than Googling.

• 1:00:17Griffin McElroy?

  Yes. Okay. It's, it is my, it's my game of the year so handily right now and I, uh, I, I don't know what's on the horizon that could unseat it. Uh, because it's, it is truly had, had some of the most memorable moments, most satisfying like solutions. Um, I can't stop thinking about it. Like I've been, I've been having the dreams where like I'm rotating floor plans in my, in my, uh, slumbers. Uh, it has really, really, really, uh, got its, its hooks in me and I think it is a truly once in a generation like game.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  Have you left the credits rolling?

• 1:00:59Griffin McElroy?

  What's that?

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Have you left the credits rolling?

• 1:01:03Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  I left the credits, I left it on when I left to go start, uh, I left it the menu and when I went back in, the credits were rolling. And I started watching the credits, the things that are being highlighted in the credits and watching like the different shapes in the credits. And none of it was anything but.

• 1:01:22Griffin McElroy?

  You've lost your mind.

• 1:01:26Griffin McElroy?

  It's, it's, you know, I think listening to this, if this is your shit, if it sounds like your shit, it's gonna fuck you up, man. It's really, really gonna get you pretty good and I am excited for, for more people to play it.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  And even if it's not your shit, try it. I believe there's a demo.

• 1:01:44Chris Plante?

  Give it, give it a shot.

• 1:01:45Griffin McElroy?

  I don't think the demo is available anymore. I think it was up in Next Fest.

• 1:01:48Chris Plante?

  I, I strongly encourage people to check it out no matter what. This is the game that feels like an exception to the, even if you're not into the genre, because this is so not my thing normally. This is so normally what I bounce off of. And the, give it a try. And the rule is if you're getting frustrated, if you feel like it's impossible, literally just play one more day. There were so many times where I was like, I, I need a guide. There's no way I could figure this.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  I may have audibly text said out loud, fuck this game. I'm never playing this again. This fucking sucks. And then I did play another day. I was like, okay, it's, it's much better.

• 1:02:24Chris Plante?

  It's, yeah.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's easier now. I understand. This house is, it was just a bad house. Just had a bad house last time. No big deal.

• 1:02:31Griffin McElroy?

  It is also, I think, fair warning, just based on the critical reception to the game. Like, this is gonna be the game that people are talking about a lot this year. And so there is a certain element of like, if being a part of those conversations is important to you. Which is why it is so disappointing and such a huge fucking bummer that our dear friend Russ Frushtick, who's, this is absolutely his shit, like, can't play the game right now.

• 1:02:56Chris Plante?

  I think we will do a spoiler episode at some point this year. I would, I would like to talk like a full, how does this game work? Let's crack it open.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Griffin McElroy?

  That would be cool. We would have to separate it into chapters based on what, what strata you are.

• 1:03:13Chris Plante?

  Sounds very good. I'm fine, obviously.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm going to make an executive decision to skip emails.

• 1:03:21Griffin McElroy?

  Yes, I think.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  And we're gonna go straight to honorable mentions. Have you guys played or watched anything else that you've enjoyed?

• 1:03:26Griffin McElroy?

  Well, friend, uh, this past weekend, I took my wife and kids to see the Minecraft movie.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Ooh, yeah.

• 1:03:35Griffin McElroy?

  I will say this upfront is that um the teenagers have discovered irony and that is a challenge.

• 1:03:46Griffin McElroy?

  I didn't realize what was happening packed, packed fucking house when we went to see it on a Saturday at 2pm.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  They're making a lot of money.

• 1:03:53Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, sure. Unsurprising, uh, and there were a lot of teens and pre-teens sitting directly in front of us, talking the entire film, cutting up, joking, and also then at certain points, uh, it seemed like everyone in the theater except for us would quote lines from the movie that had just come out two days ago.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  So they're, so it's, so it's trailer lines. That's what the gimmick is that they are, this is a TikTok thing.

• 1:04:20Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  People are getting thrown out of theaters.

• 1:04:21Griffin McElroy?

  I know this now, but I did not know this when we went to see the movie and the first time it happened, I looked at Rachel and was like, what the fuck is going, so it is very much that same thing that happened when um.

• 1:04:32Chris Plante?

  Minions.

• 1:04:32Griffin McElroy?

  Oh gosh, was it minion, yeah minions where kids would come dressed up in their Sunday best suits and tie. When the movie let out and the lights came on and all these kids stood up, sure enough, they were all dressed in suit and tie. So I'm assuming this was the third or fourth time that they had seen this film.

• 1:04:45Chris Plante?

  That night.

• 1:04:46Griffin McElroy?

  So like that gave it sort of a rocky horror energy that I was not expecting. I had a great fucking time at this flick though, man. It, it couldn't be anything else. Like it is so, like imagine how you would make a Minecraft movie and make it actually like extremely Minecraft and not like the 1993 Super Mario Brothers where it's like lightly inspired, like imagine how you would do that. And then think about how sort of like threadbare that would actually be and then how you would solve for that is just put Jack Black in it like.

• 1:05:15Chris Plante?

  And have Jared Hess direct it.

• 1:05:17Griffin McElroy?

  And have Jared Hess direct it and have Jack Black deliver lines in really, really, really silly ways.

• 1:05:22Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Griffin McElroy?

  And that is enough.

• 1:05:24Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Griffin McElroy?

  That's enough to hold the film together. Henry loved it. He's a big Minecraft player. Like there's a lot in there for, for kids like that and um, it's like I, it, it is not, the characters aren't the most fleshed out and the plot isn't anything at all. But if you just kind of like vibe with it, I, I had a pretty good time watching the Minecraft.

• 1:05:48Chris Plante?

  I'm happy that Jared Hess made Napoleon Dynamite a cultural phenomenon and then decades later made Minecraft in a weird way. Also a like. It's gonna be a midnight movie, I think, for years. The SpongeBob movie has become one. And what is it like blows my mind when we show it at our theater in California. Sellouts. Like, I mean, people get so hyped for it. And I weirdly think that we will see this in like a decade. Somehow be a cult movie, which is bizarre.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, it's also funny that like, if you want to make money for your project, you gotta get Jack Black. I feel like my, our generation of people is like, one of the few ones who are like, we found that one. He was good, right? We, we kept him around. He's good, right?

• 1:06:35Chris Plante?

  Nailed it.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  We did a good deal with Jack Black. Um, I, uh, finished the third season and I guess it's supposed to be the final season, I guess. I don't know. That could be hearsay. You never know with this stuff, but White Lotus, uh, the, um, it's just a really, really well-written and acted and performed TV show. And the third season, which was, like I said, essentially wraps up the show. I kind of hope it does. It's very much, uh, it makes it very clear what the show is about and what the show has been trying to do. And I think it sticks the landing in a really, really remarkable way. And this is, uh,

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  each season has been about something else. I think the first season was very much focused on income inequality and sort of like an upstairs downstairs thing. The second season, uh, was very much about sex and the power that has over people. And this is, uh, a, a season about death. Like, so like that we've been hitting the big ones, right? Money, sex and, and death. But the way that this is, it's, it's really about, uh, the way people bring meaning to their lives and the power of like spirituality and religion and the, the place that that has in a modern world. And it's a really thoughtful nuanced take on that. Um,

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Parker Posey is doing some incredible work. Jason Isaacs is doing some incredible work. They feel like people that I have known in, in my life of, in their, in the way they sound, not necessarily in their socioeconomic. Standing, but uh, it's wonderful. It's really wonderfully done. Um, Walton Goggins is sort of like TV's Jack Black at this point. Like if you want to make money on something, you gotta get Goggins. Uh, it's, it's great. It's, it's really well done. It's a fantastic show and, and it, it has a clear point of view. It's really well executed. And Mike White has been on Survivor. So, and he did really, really well. So what more do you need?

• 1:08:33Chris Plante?

  One quick thing, one long thing, quick thing. Uh, Anne Shirley is now on Crunchyroll. It is an adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. Everybody should watch it because it's beautiful and you can watch it with your family. Longer thing, Children of Time. Whoops.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:08:52Chris Plante?

  Have you read it? Do you know about this? It seems like so extremely your shit. Okay. So, uh, it's a, well, really it's the first in a trilogy by Adrian Chekhovski. And it is a set in the future. Their, uh, earth is, is absolute garbage. And scientists want to make sure that like humans can survive and that humanity thrives in its own way. And they create, I believe it's called the Exaltation, uh, Plan, where they are going out and seeding planets. And the idea is, hey, we have this like ark full of monkeys. We're going to shoot it into this planet that is somewhat earth-like.

• 1:09:31Chris Plante?

  And we're also going to fire a virus into that planet that makes, uh, creatures evolve ultra, ultra rapidly. So in the span of like 50 generations, monkeys will evolve into humans. And once they get to a point where they can like communicate with the solar system, it'll ping our satellite and we will know, hey, we've created effectively a new group of humans, a new earth. Goes terribly wrong. Monkeys get blown up. This all happens very early, but that virus still gets shot onto the seed planet. And instead spiders become the dominant life form.

• 1:10:09Chris Plante?

  And it is an entire sci-fi universe about what would happen if spiders evolved at the pace that humans had. And like, how would society work if it was spiders instead of people? Which sounds at first on its face silly, until you realize it is basically kind of a perfect metaphor for what if the internet was sentient? Because spiders can communicate via web. And it is like all about. Extrapolating that out to its like furthest extent. It is unbelievably thoughtful and creative and smart and like takes its premise seriously without being burdensome and I am blown away by it. There are two more of them that are about other animals.

• 1:10:54Chris Plante?

  I believe there's one about ravens or crows that came out recently that is kind of more of a metaphor for AI. But the series is so far awesome. It had been recommended to me forever. I put it off forever and I am so glad I have started it. And again, that's called Children of Time.

• 1:11:11Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, that sounds sick. I love alien spider shit, like spiders. That's like absolutely my stuff.

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Um, hey, what do we want to do next week?

• 1:11:21Griffin McElroy?

  That's a really great question.

• 1:11:22Chris Plante?

  Hey, that's just, that's me in Yoohoo's.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, the boys.

• 1:11:27Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, that's right. Yes, Russ and I will be absent next week, but Chris and Justin are talking about a game I desperately wish I could be a part of.

• 1:11:33Chris Plante?

  I am so excited. We are talking about Promise Mascot Agency, which is the new game from the studio that did, uh, Bestie's favorite Paradise Killer. And this game looks like Yakuza, but with like local mascots? I don't know.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 1:11:50Chris Plante?

  I don't describe it. It looks incredible.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  Who wants to talk about the Patreon? Russ isn't here. That's normally his thing.

• 1:11:55Griffin McElroy?

  I'll say thanks to the following members for joining the Besties Patreon and supporting this show. Stacy, Matt, Adam, Sue. That's some pretty straight over the plate names.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Thanks, Russ.

• 1:12:07Griffin McElroy?

  Thanks, Russ, for that. Uh, you can join at patreon.com slash the besties, listen to the, uh, the resties episodes, listen to our monthly bracket bonus episodes, uh, and support our show, uh, because you all are the reason that we are able to make it. And yeah, patreon.com slash the besties. Help us out.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  That is going to do it for us for this week on the besties. Be sure to join us again next time on the besties because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  Besties!