Wanderstop, Split Fiction, and More New Games

Video games: they're cool! There are a lot of new games out, so let's talk about them. Games discussed this week: Wanderstop, Expelled, Split Fiction, Rise of the Golden Idol DLC, Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist, Lost Records: Bloom and Rage

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

• 0:03Kirk Hamilton?

  The thing about video games is, there are so many of them, and a lot of them are good, and they keep coming out. And how are we gonna talk about them all? Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring all the games to you. Today, we are doing our best to round up a bunch of interesting new games from the last few weeks with thoughts on Wanderstop, Split Fiction, Expelled, Ender Magnolia, and, if you can believe it, more.

• 0:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:33Jason Schreier?

  And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Hello. Hello, hello.

• 0:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Hello, friends.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  It's us.

• 0:39Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. Welcome back to another episode of Triple Click. Guys, next time, at this time next week, we will all be hanging out in real life in San Francisco.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I know. Possibly with some listeners, so I hear.

• 0:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna see some listeners.

• 0:55Jason Schreier?

  Well, more than possibly, most definitely with some listeners.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  What if no one shows up?

• 0:59Jason Schreier?

  If nobody shows up, I would be very impressed. Also, very sad, but very impressed.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I'd be really sad.

• 1:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, to be a little bit more specific, we are planning a meetup with listeners at the Game Developers Conference next week. We are all three gonna be there. We're very excited. And I'm sure some people listening are gonna be there as well. So on March 20th, that's Thursday, at 2:00 PM Pacific, we're gonna be in Yerba Buena Gardens, the three of us, just hanging out for a little while. So if you are in town for the show, or if you just live in San Francisco, I guess, and wanna come say hi.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, even if you're not at GDC, you can still come.

• 1:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Come by Yerba Buena Gardens and...

• 1:37Jason Schreier?

  Kirk, you don't have to say "Pacific" when we're in a single city. Just say "well."

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Well, what if they thought it was East Coast time?

• 1:47Jason Schreier?

  If people wanna zoom in from Chicago, they should know that it's a 2:00 PM Pacific time.

• 1:51Kirk Hamilton?

  Look, we schedule everything else on East Coast time. It wouldn't surprise me if we scheduled a San Francisco meetup on East Coast time. So I'm just being careful. There's nothing wrong with being extra short to give people all the information that they need.

• 2:03Jason Schreier?

  Redundant.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. It's gonna feel like 5:00 PM.

• 2:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Anyhow, Yerba Buena Gardens, 2:00 PM, next Thursday. Day, March 20th, we're gonna be there. Come say hi, it's gonna be great. Speaking of TripleClick listeners, we are a listener-supported show. We are members of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network. As you heard during the network teasers last week, we've got the Maximum Fun Drive coming up. Max Fun Drive 2025 begins next week, which is super exciting. We'll have more on that then. But at any rate, you can become a member to support us. I mean, maybe wait until next week because there's special there's special rewards for people who sign up during Max Fun Drive. But we do really appreciate all of the members who support the creation of this show. It is very cool that we get to make it the way that we do.

• 2:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Speaking of our listeners, one last thing that I just have to mention on the air. Okay, so last week, I mentioned the fact that on one episode during the intro, when we each say our names, at one point, Jason's, "I'm Jason Schreier," which he said after saying the intro, it was a little bit off. It was so kind of out of step with the intro that he later recorded, that I went back, I cut it out and I went back and grabbed his, "I'm Jason Schreier" from an earlier episode and pasted it in and left no one the wiser. But then, of course, I mentioned it last week with a little bit of a dare to listeners to see if maybe somebody could figure it out.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Assuming no one would. I think we all assumed no one would, right?

• 3:32Kirk Hamilton?

  I didn't want to assume anything.

• 3:33Jason Schreier?

  No, I assumed someone would.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Really?

• 3:36Jason Schreier?

  There's always someone who's gonna figure this out.

• 3:37Kirk Hamilton?

  As it turns out, one of our listeners, who at least on this paper, goes by Nio Von Rattenberg, and I believe Nio is the correct pronunciation, went ahead and performed a study and then published that study as a white paper that they dropped into the Discord. It is absolutely spectacular. It is titled "Analysis of duplicated host introductions using spectral analysis." And it was published in the Journal of TripleClick Citizen Science, Volume 69, Number 420, in 2025. You can find this in the TripleClick Discord, but we'll maybe find a way to link it in the show notes because everybody must read this. Can't read the whole thing here.

• 4:21Kirk Hamilton?

  It is one of the best things I've ever seen in my life. In part because through an incredibly thorough process involving spectral analysis, Nio was able to determine, in fact, the time, the two episodes in which I duplicated Jason's, I Am Jason Schreier. It was our favorite games of 2024 episode and then switched to Switch Harder at the start of this year. So in, as a reward for this, because in the conflicts of interest statement on this white paper, they write, "The author is performing this study solely for the prize promised by Kirk Hamilton." I would like to say that a triple-click mug is en route to Nio. Congratulations and thank you for doing this. It made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

• 5:04Kirk Hamilton?

  It's the best thing I've seen in a long time. So yeah, I hope, I hope some listeners check it out. And man, we really have cool listeners.

• 5:11Jason Schreier?

  Is it spectral analysis when you analyze all the spectral cards in Bellatro? And try to figure out what to do with them?

• 5:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, that's a form of spectral analysis, I think.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 5:22Kirk Hamilton?

  Anyhow, that's enough preamble, a lot of fun stuff, but we have even more fun stuff to talk about on this episode. So yeah, Jason, what are we doing this week?

• 5:31Jason Schreier?

  All right. So this week, we realized there are a lot of games that have just come out or come out recently that we haven't talked about. So we figured we'd put them all in one place and just do a video game roundup, a spring, spring video game roundup. Spring is in the air and so are video games. Before we get to this list, though, I just want to do a quick shout out because I've spent this, the last six or seven days immersed in a game that might wind up being like this year's Outer Wilds for us. It's called Blueprints and people should look up what it is, maybe look up the trailer, wishlist it. It doesn't come out until April 10th, so we'll be talking about it a lot more closer to then.

• 6:12Jason Schreier?

  But as someone who has just been like all the way into the rabbit hole, I just gotta shout it out because it's all I can think about and all I can play. And I just cannot stop like praising it and thinking about it and talking about it. So put a pin in that one. Blueprints, it's called. We'll talk about it later.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Also, I just realized blueprints is a homonym as you were saying it out loud. So we should spell it out for the listeners and that actually makes the name pretty cool. So it's, it's blue, B L U E, of course, but then space, P R I N C E, not blueprints, like architectural blueprints, for example. So I don't know, I haven't played the game yet, but I'm guessing that's maybe part of it.

• 6:53Jason Schreier?

  Homonyms are a very big part of this game.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Cool, cool, cool, cool. Okay.

• 6:56Jason Schreier?

  It is, uh, best described as like a cross between like a rogue-like, a slave-aspire and a brain, a metroid brain, yeah, like.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 7:05Jason Schreier?

  And outer wilds.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  An animal well, yeah.

• 7:07Jason Schreier?

  Animal well, it's insane. Anyway, we'll talk about that later, but let's talk about some games that are out and that we've all been playing, because there's a lot to get through, a bunch of cool stuff that, um, that I think the three of us have dove into recently. So let's start with a game called Wanderstop. Wanderstop is a new game from Davey Redden and his studio Ivy Road, best known for their last two games, The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide, which are both critically acclaimed and commercially successful games. This is his latest. It is a game about making tea at a tea shop to try to heal yourself from burnout and anxiety. Have all of us played this game? Have you guys played this game? So I finished it. Um, I have some thoughts on it, but I want to throw it to you two first to talk about it.

• 7:52Jason Schreier?

  Maddie, you want to give some, some thoughts on Wanderstop?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Sure, I've played some of it. I, I haven't beaten it. I, hmm, I was really expecting to love it and instead I think it's all right. And so this is, this is a game that's very on its face about what it's about. It opens with the main character who's a fighter. She defines herself as being a fighter. She carries a sword with her everywhere. She's, that's her whole life. It all revolves around that and she collapses from exhaustion after devoting her entire life to fighting and she's kind of forced physically. Like it's not just a mental burnout for her, although I think that's also part of the story for her. It's a physical one, like she can't physically continue to even carry the sword that she's had her, her whole career as a fighter.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  And she gets kind of taken in by this tea shop owner who has these very on the nose pieces of advice for her about how she needs to slow down. And making tea is extremely methodical and slow. It never really gets any faster, but that's sort of the point of it all. It's meditative. Um, I, I, I like the themes, but I, I haven't, I haven't completed it, but I, I think I was hoping for something a little bit more than what I'm getting so far. But again, I'm only, um, like a couple hours into it. So that's my, that's my take so far is that I'm intrigued, but not sure.

• 9:15Jason Schreier?

  Have you, have you gotten past the first kind of phase?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Where like customers start coming, you mean?

• 9:21Jason Schreier?

  Or, okay, then no. The first, have you meditated under the tree yet? Oh, okay. So you're, you've just scratched the surface. There's more that, that.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Okay, good to know.

• 9:31Jason Schreier?

  Comes, there's other phases. Not that it, the game's nature changes, like this isn't like a meta type of like everything completely changes and it's genre bending or it's not like Stanley Parable, that sort of thing. But it is, uh, uh, it does get a little bit different as you go, or the kind of, you haven't really seen the full structure of it yet. I'll say it that way.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Okay, that's cool.

• 9:54Jason Schreier?

  Kirk, what about you? You, you played, how much have you played and what do you think of Wanderstop?

• 9:58Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm probably like halfway done or something like that. I've met a bunch of the people. Yeah, I've, I've had some tea and sat and thought about my life and I'm learning more and more about the main character. I really like this game. It's, it is, uh, as light as the wind and I like that about it. It floats along like a breeze. Um, despite, you know, being, I wouldn't call it heavy handed, but it is very upfront, as you said, Maddie, about what it is trying to say and, and what it's about. But, uh, yeah, I'm finding it to be pretty lovely. Carla Zimonja, who worked on Gone Home, also was the narrative lead on this game, which I didn't realize. So, we describe it as a Davey Redden game. He's the writer, but Carla designed the narrative.

• 10:41Kirk Hamilton?

  And I think that the narrative structuring of the game is very clever and very cool. I like the writing. I think Davey is a very funny writer of dialogue. I appreciate how often it leans into the sort of joke that you can allow to be as long as you want it to be, where you'll ask someone something and they'll give you an example, and then you just sort of say nothing and they give you another example, and then you say nothing and they give you another example, and it just keeps going and going and going. This, of course, goes all the way back to Monkey Island games and Ron Gilbert games. It's a long tradition in these kinds of games. And I found that kind of stuff charming. I think the music is phenomenal. The music is by C418, AKA Daniel Rosenfeld, the composer of all the music from Minecraft,

• 11:23Kirk Hamilton?

  who is a really special composer, I think. I think this music captures the Nintendo energy, the energy of an Animal Crossing or a Zelda game, better than almost any non-Nintendo composer I can think of. So, yeah, I really like the game.

• 11:50Jason Schreier?

  I want to get to the writing, because that's what I really love and appreciate about this game. The kind of, the process of tea-making is tedious and, in a not unpleasant way, I would say, in a pleasant tedious... Well, of course, intentionally, yeah, in that cozy game sort of way where you're just kind of filling things off of a checklist, but it's not, I find it pleasant to do. But really, it's like meeting each of these new characters, and they really get bonkers and quite funny. Especially, there's this one kind of phase of the game where you meet a lot of businessmen, and these businessmen are quite funny and quite enjoyable. There are also books that you'll get in the mail if you kind of, if you keep checking

• 12:34Jason Schreier?

  your mailbox and keep returning lost packages and stuff. You get these books-

• 12:38Kirk Hamilton?

  The books are really funny. They're worth reading.

• 12:40Jason Schreier?

  The books are so funny. And oh, yeah, definitely read them. If you are playing this game, definitely read them. And I think most importantly, the game doesn't outstay its welcome. It's it took me about 10 hours to finish it in its entirety. You can extend that a little bit if you really take your time with like, sitting on the bench and drinking tea and just thinking thoughts and trying to be a piece of the world. But nice breezy 10 hours to see the entire story and meet all the characters. And I appreciated that for sure. Yeah, the writing, man, it's really good. He really, Davy Redden, I assume he wrote all of it. I mean, maybe there are other writers involved, I'm not sure, but it certainly feels.

• 13:19Kirk Hamilton?

  I think he wrote all the dialogue.

• 13:21Jason Schreier?

  It certainly feels like the same writer as Stanley Parable and Beginner's Guide. I didn't actually play Beginner's Guide, but based on what I've read about it. And it has a certain tone, a certain kind of blend of like that. It's very good at capturing like yours, it's set in this kind of fantasy world where it feels like there are knights and medieval kind of tropes and team making, but it also blends in some anachronisms. And it's all just extremely well done, very punchy, very funny, very satirical. And yeah, I just really enjoy the game, I would say.

• 14:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Do either of you remember this article, The Guilt of the Video Game Millionaires? This is by Simon Parkin in The New Yorker in 2014.

• 14:07Jason Schreier?

  Yes.

• 14:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes. And it was about, you know, the kind of newly minted indie successes of that era, Davy Redden being one of them. And I think it's interesting to keep that in mind when you play this game. Because this is definitely a game about someone who is very successful reckoning with what that success means for their life long term. And I think that that is actually a really interesting and kind of specific thing for a game to be about. It's not just about burnout, even though I know it sort of is, you know, it's very clearly a kind of a millennial burnout type game. But at the same time, I don't know, it's also about, it's about success.

• 14:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Because, you know, it's about a very successful fighter who never lost and her whole thing was that she was undefeated. And then inevitably she lost and has to reckon with the fact that she's no longer the best. And what does that actually mean? And I think that is a very cool thing for this type of game to be about. I don't know, it differentiates it from Stardew Valley for me, where Stardew Valley is also sort of about leaving the rat race behind. But the irony of Stardew Valley has always been that you then create your own rat race by creating an endlessly optimized factory of production out on your farm and Wanderstop deliberately avoids that. And I think that is a cool thing about this game.

• 15:27Jason Schreier?

  Right, it doesn't change. You might have to make increasingly elaborate types of tea, but the process is always exactly the same. You're always drying leaves, you're always planting seeds and you're always watering them and picking the fruits off the trees.

• 15:42Kirk Hamilton?

  You're never converting the tea shop into a tea factory that can produce that volume and make the line go up.

• 15:48Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, there are no upgrades, there are no gam- there's no gamification in this, that's for sure.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  I did think it was interesting, though, that you still technically have a job. Like, I'm following everything you're saying and I agree, that's absolutely the message of the game. But it is true that technically what you're doing is still labor at the end of the day. And I'm not saying that's like an inherent contradiction in the game. It was just something I thought was interesting and is maybe just the quality of it being a game is that you do need to continue to do something.

• 16:19Jason Schreier?

  But it's not labor, so nobody's buying the tea.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  True.

• 16:22Jason Schreier?

  There are different points when Boru, your kind of your amicable proprietor, says to you like, hey, there's nothing to do, chill out.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  I know, I like that.

• 16:31Jason Schreier?

  You don't have to be working all the time. There are times when like, people will come and be like, I don't want anything. And your main character will be like, but, but I have to do things, like you have to want something. And the game is kind of telling you very specifically, this is not labor, this is not a job. This is something you're, you're doing to try to relax and whether it works or not is another question. But I think it's very specifically like anti-label, it's, it's helping people out.

• 16:59Jason Schreier?

  It's not labor. It's like community building.

• 17:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 17:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Useful in that, and I think important that I noticed in my own life, that when I am feeling burned out or depressed, if I just don't do anything at all, it doesn't really get better. I do find that work, just being, meaning something that I'm doing, you know, some creative undertaking, something, even if it's just cleaning up or gardening or going on a walk with the dog, some kind of project actually really helps focus my mind. So I guess the opposite of overwork and burnout isn't, you know, absolute stillness and just sitting there, even though that is also part of the game, since such an important part of the story is taking these, you know, taking your mug of tea over and sitting down on a bench and then just sort

• 17:47Kirk Hamilton?

  of looking at nature and thinking about your life.

• 17:51Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it's labor in the sense that doing gardening work in your backyard and like giving the vegetables to your friends is labor. Like, I guess it is technically labor, but it doesn't, I don't think it's quite the same as like capital L.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:04Jason Schreier?

  I suppose.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  And also, even being a swordfighter is also not labor, as we would see it. Like, it's a pretty, like, distinct metaphor in both ways. And I guess that's part of what surprised me about the game was how specific it was. Not in a bad way, but in the sense that playing it, I was like, oh, this is really a game about game developers having a series of successful games and then feeling pressured to continue to deliver. Like, I, again, I think that's good. I don't know that it's a bad thing for me to play it and feel like the voice of the people who made it is very present in the metaphor that's central in the project. But I was kind of struck by that. I expected it to be more broad

• 18:49Speaker 01

  or like universally applicable or inviting me in or something. And instead, it's like, no, this is really about this, this specific feeling that these people have.

• 19:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, and I like that about it.

• 19:01Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I feel like it's relatable, this idea of like trying to be your best at something and then just to the point where you burn yourself out so hard that you're no longer able to do it anymore. I think it's kind of, it can be applicable to a lot of different people.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:15Jason Schreier?

  The feeling of anxiety and that feeling of trying to take, trying to heal from that. And yeah, I mean, I'll leave it to you guys to find the ending. I won't spoil what happens at the end of it. But it's, it kind of, uh, uh, the question of like whether you can be healed, I think is a really interesting one in the first place. And in fact, there's an introductory video that Davey Redden made a few months ago. I think it was at a PlayStation event or some, some event where he talked about it and it was like a camera on him. And he's like, um, I started this because I wanted to make this cozy game after suffering from burnout after my first two games. And so I thought making a cozy game would heal me, but it did not. And it's an interesting video. It's worth watching. Um, let's move on because we have a lot of other games to get to.

• 20:00Jason Schreier?

  Um, next up is a game called Expelled. Have you guys played this or is it just me?

• 20:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Nope.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  I've played it. We've all played it.

• 20:07Jason Schreier?

  Okay, cool. Um, I'm curious to hear both of your thoughts before I set the scene. Expelled is the sequel to Overboard, which is a game I really enjoyed a few years ago from Inkle, uh, which is a, a kind of a literary game studio, best known perhaps for 80 Days. Which was this great, great game, uh, on, I think it was on iOS where it started about, uh, traveling the world and super fun game. But anyway, so Expelled is a very much a sequel to Overboard. And the concept is that you, um, you play as a student at this, uh, girls academy in, uh, the early 20th century.

• 20:48Jason Schreier?

  And you, uh, kind of find yourself in different opening scenarios as the game goes on. But the basic of it is that like, uh, another student has fallen from a window and you have to kind of exonerate yourself. There's kind of a question as to whether you push her out of the window or not, but I'll leave that to, to the, the player to discover. But you have to find a way to. Exonerate yourself and then you could kind of you each of your actions takes up a certain amount of time and you play out the day until a certain time. So the day starts at seven o'clock or six thirty, whatever it is, you can go to different places within the school, you can

• 21:28Jason Schreier?

  talk to people, each line of dialogue, each relocation takes up time and then each person will be in a specific place at specific times and you kind of can figure out their schedules as you go and you do a loop of this over and over again. So you'll just keep repeating the same the same twelve hour section of a day over and over again until you've kind of figured out different outcomes and different solutions. And I found this game interesting. I think it there's a lot I like about it, but there's a lot that I find very frustrating about it. And the first game in the series, Overboard, had some of the same frustrations, those frustrations

• 22:07Jason Schreier?

  being a lot of repetition, a lot of kind of trial and error, a lot of getting things and not knowing like the optimal way to use them. And so having to try them over and over again, but because of the nature of the game, you can't just like, like if you were in a point and click adventure, you might just kind of go from door to door, from room to room, and just try different things. And it would be kind of a short experience. But because of the nature of this, there's so many variables that you have to kind of like try things over and over again. And a tiny little permutation here and there might change them. With the first game, there were fewer variables because there were fewer characters, fewer rooms, it was a simpler game. And so it was much easier to try things. And this game is much harder to try things. And as a result,

• 22:51Jason Schreier?

  it can be really frustrating. I found it actually kind of quite frustrating at times, even as I was enjoying the writing and the kind of moment to moment interactions and the kind of puzzling of it all. I actually left feeling super frustrated with the game and really not wanting to like kind of crack all of its secrets, even after seeing the final, the getting the end ending, rolling credits. But what about you two? What did you guys think? Kirk, do you want to start?

• 23:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I haven't played as much as you, so I really kind of just defer to your take on this. I played a bit of it. We started talking about it. It, you know, and articulating some of those things about the game that were frustrating. And then there are just all these other games that we're about to talk about that sort of pulled me away. So I played enough to get to where, you know, I had a few different passes through the story. I was getting to know how the different routes worked, starting to get a sense of what really happened. You know, whether this, this girl was pushed out of the window or jumped or what happened. And, um, and really kind of enjoying the, the overall vibe of the game. They actually use a lot of licensed jazz, which is funny.

• 23:57Kirk Hamilton?

  The very first track that plays, it's this tune called Festival Time by the Army Blues Band. And I had the CD for it and listened to it a lot, just randomly in 2008. So this song comes on the soundtrack and I'm like, what? What is this? Why am I hearing this? And then it turns out that they've made the whole soundtrack out of licensed old jazz recordings, which is actually very smart. So it's got a really nice vibe. But yeah, I don't know. I ran into the same kinds of problems where I was unlocking things. You know, going to the nurse's office, opening up the medicine cabinet, getting out.

• 24:30Jason Schreier?

  That's the example I was gonna bring up. Because, yeah, because you get, you can find this bottle of chloroform in the nurse's office. And then like there, you have to, there's no way of knowing what you can do with it. And so you instinctively are like, okay, I'm gonna go to where each person is and try to figure it out. If I can use it and then you can't. It's very frustrating.

• 24:52Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. So I, right. I wanted maybe a better sense of the structure of the story and an ability to move around and zoom around a little bit within it. Instead of having to start each day over again. I also found the framing device to just be a little bit confusing narratively. That, you know, the character that you're playing, she's talking to her dad at the end of the day when she's been expelled and then telling the story differently each time. And I just sort of found that structure a little confusing because, I don't know, just sort of abstractly from the start anyways, it didn't feel clear to me what was really happening and what wasn't, or, or why I'm playing through the story a bunch of different ways, which is. Maybe that's a weird point to like to get stuck on, but it did kind of leave me feeling a little bit at sea, which is kind of how I felt with the game in general.

• 25:37Jason Schreier?

  It's funny. In addition to that, there's also, so you can learn different pieces of information and then you can use that to unlock new dialogue options or actions as the day goes on. But of course, there's no way to, it's not like you're literally stuck in a time loop. So it's not like you can remember information from one game to another. So instead, what they do is they put it all in this little book you find that's called your like, your filth book, your gossip book. And you can get that in the library at the beginning of the game. And if you get it, then suddenly dozens of prompts will appear on your screen that are just like, this, this, this, this piece of information, this piece of information, this piece of information. And they cycle through in this annoying way. And there's no way to like, see them all in one place, just like there's no way to see

• 26:19Jason Schreier?

  like, other bits of information in one place. And it's, it's very frustrating from a usability point of view. Again, it's just like this game, I wish it was, I wish I loved it because narratively, it's really interesting. Structurally, it's really interesting. It's just like usability wise and just kind of mechanically, it's just got so many frustrations, little ones that added up for me quite a bit. Matty, what do you think of Expelled?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  I'm with you on the usability aspect. I just also think the game is really funny. And for what it's worth, the thing that you identified was actually something I liked about the game, even though I will also completely agree with you that it's very strange. So Overboard is kind of distinctive from this, at least in my view, because no matter what the game starts with you murdering someone, and then the rest of it is you trying to get away with it. And you always know that's what you're trying to do. And there's different ways it can play out. Whereas in this game, you don't know if you pushed the girl out of the window or not. But also, you don't know a series of other things. And you're like, maybe playing as a compulsive liar type of a character. And I sort of liked

• 27:27Speaker 01

  that as a framework. And that was kind of how I accepted the Rashomon style storytelling that she does, where it's like, every person she talks to, she's just like, well, actually, that's not what really happened. And like even I, the player have no idea if she's screwing with me. And I think that's a cool framework because it's like, oh, I'm playing as an unreliable narrator. That makes this game really interesting. And I don't think that's what's difficult about the game. It's really just the user friendliness or unfriendliness that's a problem. Like, I think you could have an unreliable narrator and have that be like a point of tension throughout. That's fun and funny, but then the game itself is like, it's hard to keep track of everything. And that makes it extra frustrating.

• 28:11Kirk Hamilton?

  I think the two things kind of, they kind of bounce off of one another.

• 28:15Jason Schreier?

  Well, let me just clear something up. The pro, because I've finished the game.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:19Jason Schreier?

  The problem is what you're describing, Maddie, only happens at the beginning. Eventually it gets to the point where

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Oh, it becomes clear.

• 28:25Jason Schreier?

  The beginning is always the same. Yeah. Like, it's not, it's like, for some reason, she just keeps lying to her dad, but then eventually tells the real story. Like, it's not really, or maybe it's not, like, eventually it just doesn't change is the point. So it's not really like telling an unreliable narrator story.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  That's too bad.

• 28:42Jason Schreier?

  It's more just like, and then also you can like, you have this little devil meter that is like, it fills up with bad behavior. And that kind of can go up through the day and then change what actions you can take based on how evil you are. So one of the goals is to get as evil as possible.

• 29:01Jason Schreier?

  And yeah, and that also seems to have an impact on the beginning. Although again, at a certain point, it just kind of flattens out. Anyway, it's called Expelled. We have a few more games to get through and we're running low on time. So let's knock through a few more. Next up is Split Fiction. I have not played this game, but you two have. Do you want to give some quick thoughts? This is the next game from Haze Light Studios, makers of It Takes Two and A Way Out.

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, Kirk, why don't, I think you've played more of it than I have. Why don't you go?

• 29:33Kirk Hamilton?

  So yeah, I've been playing this game the last couple of nights with a buddy of mine. We just have been getting online and playing. Though interestingly, when you play this game with someone online, it still goes split screen, which makes sense once you're playing it, because you do kind of want to see what the other person is doing, like you were sitting at a TV playing split screen. And because the game actually does a lot of very clever things, combining the split screen into a single screen, and then having some sections that play out when you're both on the same screen. Anyway, so explain what this is. This is a co-op game. It is designed through and through to be a two-player game, just like their previous games. And it is written notably by Joseph Faris, who is well-known among gamers, probably

• 30:13Kirk Hamilton?

  less so among other people, but his voice is totally inescapable in this game. And I actually love this game. My friend and I are having a great time with it. As dumb as it is, as unbelievably cringe as so much of the writing is, it doesn't even matter, just because, first off, it's just nice to play with my friend. You know, it's been a great excuse for us to get together for an hour. And also because this game, from a design standpoint, is unbelievable. The amount of unique mechanics and constantly shifting gameplay ideas is just overwhelming. The momentum, the speed at which it moves, is just unstoppable. We're just laughing and laughing and laughing. Honestly, I don't want to describe too many things that we've seen, because some of them

• 30:58Kirk Hamilton?

  were such hilarious surprises. One in particular, the sequence that played out on a motorcycle, anyone who has played the game will know what I'm talking about, was so funny, we were really, I mean, I was just dying laughing. And so for every Wilhelm scream and every stupid reference to Assassin's Creed, or whatever, or just hackneyed bit of dialogue, because these characters are so thin, at least at this point, I have a feeling they may be developed as we go. But for all of that, and actually... Taking all of that into account, because even the annoying stuff is still funny. We roll our eyes and laugh together. I have been having a great time. Maddie, I'm curious what you've thought of it from what you've played.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a little trouble getting past how hackneyed it is, but I agree. It is like a marvel in terms of what it's trying to do and like the idea.

• 31:46Kirk Hamilton?

  I would say doing, like mechanically anyways.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, doing, doing, achieving. It is achieving what it sets out to do, which is be a two-player cooperative experience that is like puzzle-based, platforming-based, incorporates like activities you do together and apart. It does all of those things. I do think it's a little hard. I feel like we should warn people about that, especially like the people who are like, oh, I want to play with my partner. I think the skill ceiling is a little bit high for this one as compared to some of the other Haze Light games, which I haven't actually personally played. This is the only one I've played and I think it's kind of hard.

• 32:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Let me weigh in on that then, since I've played It Takes Two. So my wife Emily and I played It Takes Two and she is not a super skillful gamer. She doesn't really play that many video games and it was a real issue. It Takes Two actually gets pretty difficult pretty quickly. And I would definitely underline what you're saying, that split fiction is even more so. This is a game, both because of the subject matter, it is constantly making video game references and a lot of the jokes are funny if you're very indoctrinated into games. But also, yeah, it's hard. I mean, we did a boss fight that just felt like, it was really tough, you know, bullet hell, dodging, shooting, you know, trying to stay alive, really frantic and fast-moving. So yeah, it requires a lot of twitch reflex skill.

• 33:05Jason Schreier?

  Can one person carry the other or both have to really twitch?

• 33:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Definitely not.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Because it really, the boss fights will have some mechanic where one player needs to be doing something the entire time and the other player needs to be doing something else and you both have to be doing your part to win, which can be really cool and rewarding if you're playing with somebody who's up for it. So I would just like warn listeners who are like, oh, this sounds like a great co-op experience. It can be if you're playing with someone who's really up for it and it needs to be somebody who can handle like both the. Precision platforming and it's like a 3D platformer, which is not always my forte. And then also puzzles, which I think are more fun and like shooting stuff, which that's fine.

• 33:47Kirk Hamilton?

  This is a perfect game for you and your spouse who doesn't play games because you can be like, look, this is what video games are terrible writing.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  I honestly, though, I do feel like that is real and like the writing, I don't think it can be understated. I really find it unbearable and I wish there was no dialogue in the game at all. Like I, I think they should cut it out.

• 34:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Should we describe the narrative setup?

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Sure. Uh, well, the narrative setup is there's two characters who are both book writers, but they're completely unpublished. One is into fantasy and the other isn't to sci-fi, and this is depicted as a false dichotomy whereby they would hate each other's genres, which I don't think is a thing.

• 34:27Kirk Hamilton?

  They're also very different people.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yes. And they're also depicted as like comically different people, like pick any attribute you may have and the other one has the opposite. Like they're like, you say tomato, I say tomato, the song, except like in a video game. But I think they both get trapped in like some sort of evil corporate AI machine that is going to steal all of their ideas and they have to escape. That's the premise of the game. Uh, but really it's just that you have to hear these two women talking to each other. And you know, I headed into this and I was like, a lot of times people say a character's annoying and it turns out they're just a female character and I end up really liking them. That's not the case here. It's really just that these characters don't seem like people at all.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  They seem like just caricatures of an idea and not a person. So that, that's tough.

• 35:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. So I'll say, having played maybe a little more of it, they begin to be fleshed out and it becomes clear that what, what they're exploring in this game is the idea of the stories that we tell and the stories that we hold inside of ourselves. And especially as storytellers, you know, they're both writers, that you're always drawing on something and that your stories reflect something about your life. So I'm not, we're not finished with the game, though I plan to finish because we're having so much fun just playing it. But it is clear that we're going to see. Oh, okay, Mio, who's really into sci-fi. Her story is actually, there is some backstory there with her dad, and he was a mechanic, and what happened with his shop, and the reason that she writes these dystopias. And Zoe, who writes fantasy, I'm sure that we're gonna learn about her as well.

• 36:01Kirk Hamilton?

  We've already gone into one of her stories that she wrote when she was a kid. And you can imagine, because this game gear shifts so hard, so fast. I mean, you're going from cyberpunk, cyber ninjas flying around through like flying cars, incredible car chases, into totally, but you know, Prince of Persia style skating through the desert, into you're both pigs and you're flopping around in the mud in a farm, and one of you like farts to fly, and the other one has a spring head, and you have to make your way through this weird pig world, because this is a story Zoe wrote when she was a kid, back to cyber ninjas. And the game is so relentlessly paced. It's so fast. It's fast compared to It Takes Two, like it's twice as fast.

• 36:42Kirk Hamilton?

  And as a result, I can tell we're gonna probably get into some, maybe interesting and probably cool stuff. And at the very least, for all that that is true, and everything you said is true about the characters, they are very thin, they don't seem like real people, and a lot of the humor is just so groan-worthy and ridiculous, it just moves so fast.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  That helps, yeah.

• 37:03Kirk Hamilton?

  And the design is so ingenious. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm not doing it justice because I don't want to spoil things, but there is a whole sequence in the cyber ninja area, part of the game, where you're playing, so Mio has the ability to gravity shift up onto a wall. So the two characters are running through a level where Mio's gravity is taking her up onto the wall, Zoe is moving according to regular gravity, they each have different special powers and have to complementarily use them to move through the level. At one point, you are platforming where, because of the way the camera is placed, it's no longer in split screen, Zoe is doing a 2D platformer, jumping from platform to platform, Mio is on the wall, which means she's doing a top-down platformer at the

• 37:47Kirk Hamilton?

  exact same time on the same screen. This moves through this unbelievable sequence of rotations and camera turns to where they're running sideways. There's this cyberpunk city like rotating behind them. Eventually, they're both running in the same direction on opposite sides of this crane. And the camera, I, it's totally like, it is showstopping stuff. I'm really, really amazed at how talented the people who made this game are. So I don't want to undersell that. It's absolutely the reason that I'm going to keep playing it.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I agree. That stuff is great.

• 38:20Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 38:21Jason Schreier?

  Okay, um, let's do lightning round with a couple more games. Um, one is that The Rise of the Golden Idol has a new DLC out. Uh, I have played it. It's awesome. It's got some cool stuff in it.

• 38:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Surprise, surprise.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  What is good?

• 38:35Jason Schreier?

  Right. It's got, there's some, there's some, some great cases in there, including a couple where you have to like, decipher visions that are out of order and it's very, very fun. I highly recommend it. Rise of the Golden Idol, awesome game. Uh, next we have Ender Magnolias. I think this is a Kirk Hamilton joint.

• 38:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I've been playing this because it's actually called Ender Magnolia Bloom in the Mist. This is a sequel to Ender Lilies and, uh, has been very highly recommended by our friends at The Besties. Russ Frushtick is wild about this game. Uh, this is a, an atmospheric, moody, metroidvania in the vein of, I would say Hollow Knight, especially in terms of vibes. Um, I kind of bounced off the first one of these and have played this one and liked it more. This is a game where you control a young girl who has the power to channel different homunculi, who are the kind of automatons that used to run this city, but now the city has fallen into disrepair. So there's quite a bit of Lies of P in this as well. It feels a lot like Lies of P.

• 39:35Kirk Hamilton?

  And as a result, so as a result of her powers, she doesn't actually ever attack, but she meets a homunculi who's this super cool, you know, kind of lady's sword homunculi very early on. So then when you press the attack button, that homunculi like appears. It's, it's basically like a big kind of faceless robot woman with a sword, just appears and does a sword attack. So functionally, you're doing a big sword attack, but it visually appears to be someone else, you know, just magicking into the air next to you and doing it. And then every ability Works that way. So as you work through the game, you meet new homunculi. They're all malfunctioning because they used to serve the city, but there's been this malaise that's caused them to go crazy. You kind of beat them in a boss fight and then they give you their ability or join you.

• 40:19Kirk Hamilton?

  So then the game is kind of collecting all of these different creatures who then give you all kinds of different powers. And eventually, you know, you're kind of summoning an army alongside you. And it's very cool. I mean, the combat's really great. The vibes are super nice. I find that, um, you know, I loved Prince of Persia, uh, the, the Lost Crown from, from last year. I think that was a wonderful game, but the vibes were never quite Hollow Knight vibes. It was its own thing. So it was a really well-made game, but it didn't have that kind of dark, calming, sort of misty energy that Hollow Knight has that I really like. And this game does have that, which I really enjoy. So I like it, you know, I'll keep playing it. It's, um, it's pretty straightforward.

• 41:02Kirk Hamilton?

  I gather it's not a million hours long as well, which I, I like about it. I think it's like a 20 hour kind of a thing. And I like what I've played. So yeah, that's, uh, if you're looking for one of those, if you're looking for a good moody metroidvania, uh, you could certainly do worse. So yeah, I'm, I'm enjoying it.

• 41:18Jason Schreier?

  Uh, too many metroidvanias. Next half. Next and last, we have a game called Lost Records.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Which I think is also you, Kirk.

• 41:27Jason Schreier?

  Also you, Kirk.

• 41:28Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, this one's also me. I'll just check in really quick. Full name of this game is Lost Records Bloom and Rage.

• 41:33Jason Schreier?

  Oh my God, these names, man. I feel like they, they're trying to just give us all.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  They're goading us.

• 41:39Kirk Hamilton?

  They didn't hire us. They didn't, they didn't hire Spider Mansion or whatever we're calling our consultants.

• 41:45Jason Schreier?

  In a few weeks, we're gonna have to do a triple play on Claire Obscure Expedition 33.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 41:51Kirk Hamilton?

  We've already talked about that one. So this is from the makers of Life is Strange, the first Life is Strange. And it has that kind of an energy. It's, I, and I don't really know what I think of it. I just want to kind of clock that I'm playing it. The structure of it is very Yellowjackets adjacent. So you're playing as a group of women in the modern day who are meeting up to talk about something that happened to them when they were all teens in the nineties. So most of the game is told in flashback, but there's also, you know, modern day sequences where you're at a bar and you're meeting grown up versions of the characters. It has a lot of nineties music. It has that same odd feeling that Life is Strange had, where everybody leaves massive.

• 42:31Kirk Hamilton?

  pauses where they say anything and you're like, I don't think young people talk like this. I think this is just an invention of the weird universe imagined in these games. It doesn't, it doesn't not work, but it like, doesn't totally work for me. Anyways, I'm not sure what I think of it. I played a little bit and then realized this was the first part. This is Bloom and then Tape Two Rage comes out, I think in April and I'm just gonna hold off.

• 42:53Jason Schreier?

  So it's not Lost Records Bloom and Rage.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:56Jason Schreier?

  It's Lost Records Bloom.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Bloom.

• 42:57Jason Schreier?

  Followed by Lost Records Rage. Is that the correct nominatory?

• 43:01Kirk Hamilton?

  I guess so. I don't know. Call it, think of it however you want to. Anyways, I'm gonna wait until people have finished it and can then say, hey, the story's really cool. It's going somewhere. It's worth playing through the whole thing before I spend all the time with it. And I also think it'd just be nice to play the whole story through. So really just wanted to mention that I've played some of it. It seems like it could be neat or it could be very disappointing and I'm not really sure.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Great. Great review so far.

• 43:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that's all I got.

• 43:26Jason Schreier?

  All right. Those are the games we discussed. Just to go over it in case people are forgetting some of the names. Wanderstop is a game about tea. Expelled is a game about being a student in the academy. Split Fiction is the co-op game from Hazelight. Golden Idol DLC, I forget the name of that, but you can just, just go to Rise of the Golden Idol, get the DLC. Ender Magnolias, what was the col- what was after the colon?

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like Ender Magnolia, da, da, da, da.

• 43:56Kirk Hamilton?

  Bloom in the Mist or something like that.

• 43:58Jason Schreier?

  And Lost Records Bloom and Rage. All right, let's take a break and we'll be back for one more thing.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Alexis.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  And I'm Ella.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  And we're the hosts of Comfort Creatures.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  We could spend the next 28 seconds telling you why you should listen, but instead, here's what our listeners have said about our show because really, they do know best. The show is filled with stories and poems and science and friendship and laughter and tears sometimes, but tears are from your heart being so filled up with laugh.

• 44:52Speaker 03

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• 45:01Speaker 04

  So come for the comfort and stay for Alexis's wild story about waking up to her cats giving birth on top of her. So if that sounds like your cup of tea.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Or coffee, Ella. We're not all Brits.

• 45:11Speaker 04

  Then join us.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Every Thursday at MaximumFun.org.

• 45:16Jason Schreier?

  All right, kiddos, it is time for one more thing. Maddie, take us away.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  All right. So I watched a television show that I thought was amazing and great fun. So it's called Paradise. It's eight episodes in the first season. We watched all of them in a week because this is a thriller where you start watching it and you're like, I just gotta know what happens.

• 45:40Jason Schreier?

  Hold on, hold on, hold on. Maddie, are you saying watching eight episodes of a show in a week is like fast? I thought you were gonna say watch all of them in a day. Like a week, a week for eight episodes.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Well, I do have a job.

• 45:52Jason Schreier?

  That's like leisurely viewing. I just wanted to point out.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Apparently the Shrier household is really just you and you're significant other.

• 46:00Kirk Hamilton?

  We watched two episodes and haven't had time to watch more, even though we liked it as well. So, you know, not everybody burns through eight in a week.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, for us, it's, we really dropped everything and we watched it in a week. I'll leave it to you, listeners, as to whether that's fast or not. Maybe it's agonizingly slow, but anyway, it's a thriller and I don't want to spoil the first episode because I really enjoy it and I think it's really hooky. I think that's your word, Kirk, to describe the show, and I thought it was true. But I'm gonna describe part of it that I don't think really spoils it. So Sterling K. Brown is the star of this show and it's, it's really a two-hander with James Marston, I would say, the whole show is. And the two of them have incredible chemistry. Together and the show just kind of rides on their relationship.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  And the premise is that Sterling K. Brown is playing a Secret Service agent for the president, who is James Marsden. And there's lots of like shifting back and forwards in time, because this is also a murder mystery. And so Sterling discovers a body at the outset of episode one, and he has to figure out who did it. But it ends up being kind of a closed room murder mystery in a way that I don't fully want to explain, but that I found really fun. And I just think the two of them are excellent on this show, and that really like helps it truck along. But also, Julia Nicholson is is on the show playing like kind of in weird villain

• 47:31Speaker 01

  slash, I don't know how to describe her character. And there's a Nintendo Wii appearance on this show that is incredible. Oh, my God, you're not at the Wii yet.

• 47:42Jason Schreier?

  Matty is the main is the main mystery and resolved in the first season?

• 47:47Speaker 01

  It is. And that is part of why I'm like, I'm not sure this needs a season two, because I got to the end of season one, and I was very satisfied. And I think I could see this show hitting a sophomore slump. I'll just say that because I felt so satisfied at the end. Yeah. But but unlike Yellow Jackets, where I was like, oh, there's so many great ideas here. I kind of got to the end of Paradise season one, and I was like, that was a delicious plate of food. So I really recommend season one. I don't know if they're going to be able to keep doing the show, just like narratively. But I loved it. Thought it was a great mystery, thrilling, fun, wonderful use of a week or a day if you're Jason. Paradise, Paradise is the name of the show. Oh, also, they do like 80s covers every episode, where there's like a

• 48:32Speaker 01

  slow version of an 80s cover in every song.

• 48:36Jason Schreier?

  Think twice, it's just another day for you.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  That one is the first one. But there's a million, there's like an Eye of the Tiger one that I just like burst out laughing at because I was like, you can't do that. You can't do a sad, slow Eye of the Tiger. They do. Anyway, Paradise is the name of the show. It's good.

• 48:51Jason Schreier?

  Nice. Go on, Kirk.

• 48:54Jason Schreier?

  You're next.

• 48:55Kirk Hamilton?

  My One More Thing is also a show that Evla and I have been watching for three seasons now.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  I've been meaning to watch this.

• 49:01Kirk Hamilton?

  I think I've ever directly shouted out on the show. So we've been watching Reacher, which is a show on Prime Video that is incredibly entertaining and pretty dumb, but also really smart. And just a show that I enjoy and figured I would finally make my one more thing because the third season is pretty good. So this is a show based on a series of novels by Lee Child that are very, very popular, the Jack Reacher novels. They were adapted into, I think, two movies starring Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, which is very funny if you know anything at all about Jack Reacher, which I didn't at the time. I think I watched that first Jack Reacher movie not knowing anything

• 49:43Kirk Hamilton?

  about the character from the books. But the thing about Jack Reacher, who is an ex-military intelligence drifter who kind of shows up in your town and then solves a crime and helps the people who need helping, the thing about Jack Reacher is that he is huge. He's the hugest dude. He is a massive monster of a man, who is always described this way in the books. And thus, it was very funny that they cast Tom Cruise, a notably small and agile man, to play him. He just is in no way the physical type of Jack Reacher. And I remember that movie's OK. But when the TV show came out, they cast Alan Richson as Jack Reacher. Alan Richson is a gigantic, completely insane-looking human being and

• 50:27Kirk Hamilton?

  is much closer to Jack Reacher, the character. So I think that made Reacher fans happy. I am not a Reacher fan. I liked the movie OK, but didn't really have any reason to watch this. And then saw initial reviews of the show saying, "This is a lot of fun. It's a lot smarter than you might think," based on what it looks like, which is, big guy comes to town and messes up bad guys. And so we gave it a shot, and it really won us over from the start. The first season is an incredibly strong season. It's just a whole lot of fun. And we're not alone. The show is very successful. I think a lot of people in the kind of smart TV critic set love- Of Reacher as well. It has that kind of crossover appeal. It's a little bit of a show for everyone. Definitely some stuff in it is, you know, kind of like right wing coded.

• 51:13Kirk Hamilton?

  A lot of military storylines, a lot of cops doing their best. Might makes right. A whole lot of bad guys get killed. And it's, it's view of good and evil tends to be pretty black and white for the most part. But at the same time, it's so smart and it's such, it's such a generous show and so constantly surprising that it just, everyone can find something to like in it.

• 51:32Jason Schreier?

  How does it compare to 24, which is one of my favorite shows of all time?

• 51:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, 24 is, I would say explicitly right wing coded and actually genuinely creepy. If you watch it now, that's a show about just how, how torture is awesome. How everything is justified when lives are on the line. And how you sometimes just need one man to operate completely outside of the law.

• 51:51Jason Schreier?

  Well, it's also a show about Kiefer Sittle and just going, damn it, Chloe. And

• 51:56Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, yeah. And it's a very Bush era show. And I would say that it is in many, many ways, a very George W. Bush era show. This is not, I would say that Reacher feels much more modern. There are elements of those same themes. Reacher kills like so many people every season. And it's possible, I guess, that this show will look like 24 looks now, you know, in 20 years. But it's just kind of, they're very different, you know? Reacher is more of a Western, like stranger comes to town kind of thing. It's also just funnier. It's more explicitly funny. There's a great line in season two where he and his friends are, are planning. You know, they're trying to take down some evil group of bad guys. And he says, well, I don't know. If we're going to get to the bottom of this, we're going to have to kill a lot more guys.

• 52:41Kirk Hamilton?

  People say things like that in the show constantly. The writers are just incredibly funny people and there are these constant great one liners. And yeah, it's, it's, it's just, it's really enjoyable. I've seen it called, people talk about the Sherlock Holmes element of it because there is a lot of mystery solving. And I think Sherlock Swolms is the one that I've heard most. Because a lot of the show also is just playing with Alan Richson's insane physique. When this guy takes his shirt off and is on camera, you can't help but just start laughing. He's so unbelievably yoked and

• 53:14Kirk Hamilton?

  And he plays it so, I don't know, he, he has a very specific take on the character that I find very charming. Something they're doing this season a lot is they've given him this tiny little cellphone that he uses because he's undercover. And so in the first episode, he like opens up his boot and he takes out this secret phone and it's like Zoolander's phone. It's this tiny phone and he's this huge guy and he picks it up and he starts talking into it. And then you just get to watch Ellen Ritson talk into a tiny phone. Also, they've cast a bad guy in this season who is even bigger than him. He's maybe the largest man alive. He must be nine feet tall. Every time he's in a scene with Reacher, he dwarfs him, which never, ever happens. And it's just very fun to know that at some point, these two guys are going to fight. It's going to be great.

• 53:56Kirk Hamilton?

  The last thing I will say about this show, and this is actually related to my pick or my one more thing last week, Murderbot. The Reacher show actually has a lot in common with Murderbot in a lot of different ways. And as we watched the show, the more we watched it, we started feeling as though this was explicitly a depiction of someone who is on the autism spectrum. And I think that Jack Reacher, in this incarnation, is, is being portrayed that way. And so I went and looked online and I could find like on Asperger's forums and on Reddit, a lot of people saying the same thing. Hey, you know, like I have Asperger's and I really see myself in this character. And it's really, really cool because like Jack Reacher is amazing. He's this unstoppable badass and he is very different

• 54:39Kirk Hamilton?

  from other people, but that combined with his hyper competence and the really, you know, cool people that he surrounds himself with, it makes him this incredibly formidable force. And it does feel a little bit like The Murderbot Diaries. There's a similar feeling where this character who is incredibly competent and thinks in this particular way that isn't the same as a lot of the people around him thinks, shows up in a new situation and then has to kind of navigate this situation. And you know, whenever it's time for them to spring into action, that they're totally going to take care of business and kick ass. It's more just interesting watching them bounce off a new set of characters with each book in Murderbot's case, or each season in Reacher's case. So I think that was just kind of, that's an interesting element of the show as well.

• 55:24Kirk Hamilton?

  So I really recommend it. It's very funny. It's very charming. It is very violent. It's not really for kids, so I'll throw that out there. But yeah, we've, we've really been enjoying season three. We liked season two a little less, but season three has been very fun so far. So that's Reacher. It is on Prime Video.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Right on.

• 55:38Jason Schreier?

  24 may be problematic, but at one point, Jack Bauer escapes from a prison guard by biting him in the neck and you watch it just, you see just blood all over his mouth. So how can you call that problematic?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's just right. That's too just right.

• 55:55Jason Schreier?

  My one more thing, my one more thing is about Jack Bauer. No, my one more thing is a book called The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, which I read recently for the first time. I think it came out in like 2001. But actually, I was reading through that big New York Times list of the book, the best books of the decade, and that was number in the top five. I think it was number five. And I realized that it was in here in my office because my wife had gotten it at some point. And I was like, hey, I should read this.

• 56:25Kirk Hamilton?

  I think everyone owns a copy of The Corrections. Fifty percent of those copies have been read.

• 56:30Jason Schreier?

  It's really, really good. I really enjoyed reading it. It's a very, it's like 600 pages long, but it's very entertaining. 600 pages. Two immediate thoughts. One is that it's a really kind of masterful interweaving of different characters. The main plot of it is that it's, there's this family and everybody in the family, the, the mom, the dad, and then the three kids are all kind of dysfunctional in their own ways. And the book really zips between each of their stories and each of them get these very long-winded, very entertaining kind of subplots and histories and their own little skits or, or kind of

• 57:12Jason Schreier?

  scenes that they go through. It goes everywhere from like Lithuania to drugs to a talking poop at one point, which that's a particularly memorable scene. And the main story is that the father, the patriarch of the family, is dying of Parkinson's and the matriarch is trying to get everybody together. In their midwestern town for one last Christmas, or presumably one last Christmas, before he deteriorates completely. And it's all about the traumas that have been passed on to these kids from their parents. And it's really, really fascinating. I really enjoyed reading it. That was my, my one takeaway. My second takeaway is that it is striking how much,

• 57:54Jason Schreier?

  another book I really enjoyed recently, Long Island Compromise, kind of mimics The Corrections in pretty much every way. So Long Island Compromise by Taffy Bertus or Akner came out last year, and I really enjoyed it. I recommended it pretty highly on this, on this show. And it's really fascinating to read The Corrections after reading that, because you can see the archetypes. Each character in Long Island Compromise is very clearly inspired by a character in The Corrections. Even the way that like it goes on these tangents and kind of moves between past and present, all of that is like taken straight out of The Corrections. And it's really fascinating to kind of, I want, I want to reread Long Island Compromise to see the ways in which it just kind of takes from The Corrections. It's really fascinating reading them,

• 58:37Jason Schreier?

  too. And, and I'm not saying, to be clear, I'm not saying that Bertus or Akner did anything wrong. It's not like plagiarism. It's just kind of a very clear homage, a very clear inspiration in the way that Jack Reacher is, takes from Jack Bauer, Long Island Compromise, takes from The Corrections.

• 58:54Kirk Hamilton?

  For what it's worth, the, the first Reacher book was written in 1997.

• 58:59Jason Schreier?

  Fair enough, fair enough. So before Jack Bauer really stole, stole America's hearts.

• 59:04Kirk Hamilton?

  So maybe, maybe, yeah, Jack Bauer kind of ripped off Jack Reacher.

• 59:07Jason Schreier?

  That's true. Yeah, it's, it's true. I think Jack Bauer really ripped off John McClane, but that's a whole nother story.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Probably, yeah.

• 59:16Jason Schreier?

  And, and yeah, it's, it's a great book. I really enjoyed reading it.

• 59:22Jason Schreier?

  A couple of parts here and there are slow. I mean, it's 600 pages, but for the most part, it's just a very entertaining read. Got a lot of very unlikable fucked up characters who eventually grow on you because they have their, you kind of, kind of see the traumas that they've inherited and the problems that they are dealing with over time. And yeah, I just really enjoyed it. Just a very fun book to read.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  A classic fucked up characters book from Jason. Like, he loves this genre.

• 59:51Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, man. Well, I always appreciate it when a book is like, literally acclaimed, but it's also very fun to read because there are a lot of books out there that are just kind of quote unquote, capital L, literary that aren't fun to read. And this one is very fun to read. I'm a big fan of books that are fun to read.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 1:00:09Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm with you on that one.

• 1:00:10Jason Schreier?

  All right. And that is it for this week's episode. Uh, next time we see each other, we will be in San Francisco together. And, uh, I hope everyone, I hope to see many of you fine listeners out there at the Yerba Buena Gardens on March 20th at 2:00 PM Pacific.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:00:28Kirk Hamilton?

  Time. Very important.

• 1:00:29Jason Schreier?

  And we'll also have a regular episode ahead of that. So Kirk, Maddie, see you both next week.

• 1:00:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. See you both next week.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:00:40Kirk 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. Find us on Twitter at Triple Click Pod, send email to [email protected], and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:01:38Speaker 05

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