Mina the Hollower Is GOTY Quality

Mina the Hollower is a delicious 7-layer dip of beloved video games. It looks and feels like a gothic Zelda, but its influences stretch far beyond Nintendo’s action-adventure series. The Besties are joined by Jason Schreier (from Bloomberg and Triple Click) to burrow through one layer after another to uncover its many secrets. In the back half, we talk about the big news of the week: Dragon Quest 12’s development reboot and the end of Destiny 2.

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

• 0:00Chris Plante?

  Fresh, you said you wanted a story you wanted to tell me because you're gonna try to shame me publicly on our podcast?

• 0:05Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, no, no, no, I'm gonna save it for later.

• 0:07Chris Plante?

  Oh, great, cool.

• 0:08Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, good.

• 0:08Chris Plante?

  Something for me to look forward to.

• 0:09Russ Frushtick?

  We're gonna save it for later. That's gonna be a nice little moment that we're gonna have. But thank you for the reminder. I appreciate it.

• 0:14Chris Plante?

  No, no, no, that's great. Is there any, any other ways you could maybe publicly shame and disown me on our podcast?

• 0:21Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, you have that thing.

• 0:23Chris Plante?

  That I'm not feeling well?

• 0:24Russ Frushtick?

  No, no, you know, the other thing. You know.

• 0:29Chris Plante?

  Which one says?

• 0:30Russ Frushtick?

  You know.

• 0:30Chris Plante?

  I have so many embarrassing things.

• 0:31Russ Frushtick?

  I don't wanna.

• 0:33Chris Plante?

  Is it my skin tags?

• 0:35Russ Frushtick?

  It seems, I mean, I'm just, I'm not gonna like fill in the blanks for people.

• 0:39Griffin McElroy?

  It's like this every week, Jason. It's like this every week. And it's like, this will they, won't they sort of energy? And the will and won, I just referenced to the shame kink that they had, like this weird symbiotic shame kink that they both have pitching and receiving it. And I have to be a part of it. And there is no HR person on the bestie.

• 1:03Chris Plante?

  Well, it was Justin, but now he's gone.

• 1:05Griffin McElroy?

  It was Justin. Justin was really the mediator for it. Justin was my ripcord where I could be like, come on, Juice, let's, let's rip it. And now I don't even have that anymore. And it's just like nonstop, like, tell them about your weird butt. Tell them about your silly balls. And it's like, guys, I'm fricking your coworker.

• 1:25Russ Frushtick?

  I wouldn't say silly.

• 1:30Chris Plante?

  I, yeah, I've, I've known these guys for, for many, many years. I've, I've seen.

• 1:34Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, so you're familiar. Fantastic.

• 1:37Chris Plante?

  Well, cause Plant used to be in New York and it was even more palpable when everyone

• 1:41Russ Frushtick?

  Well, now there's a distance between us.

• 1:44Griffin McElroy?

  New York is the fifth bestie. Well, the fourth now.

• 2:08Griffin McElroy?

  My name is Griffin McRae. I know the best game of the week.

• 2:10Chris Plante?

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

• 2:13Russ Frushtick?

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

• 2:17Speaker 03

  My name is Jason Shire, and I do not know the best game of the week because there are two pretty good ones.

• 2:22Chris Plante?

  You certainly do. You think this is like the greatest game that's come out since Sliced Game?

• 2:27Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 2:27Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, you'd love this. You want to marry this game and get married to it.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  It's true. I would like to marry a mouse. I will confess that.

• 2:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, who wouldn't?

• 2:35Speaker 03

  That.

• 2:36Griffin McElroy?

  Welcome to the Besties, where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It is a game of the year club. Just by listening, you have become a member of the game of the year club. The Besties this week, I'm very excited, we are going to be talking about Yacht Club Games, the developers of Shovel Knight's new title, Mina the Hollower, which has been very anticipated around these parts. I believe it was on both mine and Russ's sort of top games of 2026. And Chris, can you sort of set up what it is that Mina the Hollower is doing?

• 3:07Chris Plante?

  Mina the Hollower. It looks a bit like Link's Awakening. It plays a bit like Link Between Worlds and Bloodborne and Puzzle Platformers. You play as Mina, a mouse who is a brilliant inventor responsible for Sparks. What are Sparks? Well, that's the great mystery that you're going to have to uncover as a Hollower. A member of the Hollower Guild means you have the special gift of burrowing, and I guess also being just really, really smart. You don't talk much because, as I mentioned, this is similar-ish to Zelda. Will Jason correct me that this is not actually a Zelda game before the end of this episode? You can fucking count on it.

• 3:45Griffin McElroy?

  Sparks is the energy beer. Mina the Hollower invented energy beer, and we're going to learn more about that after this short break.

• 3:53Chris Plante?

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• 4:38Chris Plante?

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• 5:12Chris Plante?

  P-R-O-T-O-N-V-P-N dot com slash besties for 70% off your two-year plan. That's protonvpn.com/besties.

• 5:28Russ Frushtick?

  Before we dive into the game, I do want to formally introduce our special guest. This week, we have none other than Jason Schreier, famous for his work over at the TripleClick Podcast, his scoops for Bloomberg, his fantastic books that he writes. He's written quite a number of them. Most recently, the Blizzard book, whose name is escaping me. Help me, Jason.

• 5:50Chris Plante?

  The Illion.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Play Nice.

• 5:51Russ Frushtick?

  Play Nice, thank you.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  The Risefall and feature Blizzard Entertainment. Did you know that there is video footage of Griffin getting scooped by me?

• 5:59Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, that's true.

• 6:00Russ Frushtick?

  No.

• 6:00Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I think in the press reset, was it one of the press reset? Yeah, gosh, that was wild. Old, old heads remember when Polygon first launched, we did a video documentary series.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  A great video documentary series where Arthur gets a tattoo.

• 6:15Griffin McElroy?

  Arthur gets a tattoo during it. Yeah, and one of my things was like, uh, as the news, god, I was the news, the deputy news editor under Brian Crescenti at the time, and I forget what the story was, but I was like trying to crack it. There's just a clip of me going, ah, fuck Jason.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  And Chris Plant was extremely excited when I released a book called Press Reset and then like took over the Google results for Press Reset.

• 6:42Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it is a mercy. Snatch that SEO right up.

• 6:44Russ Frushtick?

  Greatly appreciated.

• 6:46Griffin McElroy?

  This game is fan fucking tastic, man.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  It's so good.

• 6:49Griffin McElroy?

  I really, I, I adored Shovel Knight, and I find that the way this game kind of resonated with me is very similar to the way that Shovel Knight did in where like Shovel Knight was, what if we took this formula for like NES platformers, specifically DuckTales, which was a market that no one had really cornered yet, but then like modernized it, polished off a lot of the rough edges, added in, you know, the decades of kind of game dev, game design sort of techniques that, that had come across since DuckTales came out and just made this one fucking really incredible game.

• 7:28Griffin McElroy?

  And they, they, they have done that again to a T with a, a game formula that has been iterated on by Nintendo a million times now, which is, which is Zelda, which is Link's Awakening. And I'm, I'm just so impressed with this studio and their ability to kind of like, I don't know, take something that's already amazing and, and really turn it into something special.

• 7:49Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, it has been 12 years, so they certainly took their time.

• 7:52Griffin McElroy?

  Well, well, okay, in that time they also.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Essentially, there was these Shovel Knight DLCs that were essentially full games that they released for free to Shovel Knight.

• 8:00Russ Frushtick?

  I know, I'm giving them a hard time.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Can I just say, you know what's funny about that Nintendo, I think one of the reasons they're the best, they're number one top tier video game company, is because of. Their chemistry and because they like have longevity and they keep people or they retain people and those people work together and just build up this trust and just kind of rapport with one another. And I think yacht club did the same thing here. And actually, um, one of the problems with Mina's development, I wrote this big story about it a few months ago for Bloomberg, was that they wound up splitting the team into two and one team, like the founders and a couple other people worked on this shovel night 3D game while the other team worked on Mina. That did not work out, cost them a couple of years. And then they merged everyone together and you can see the results because now they have that just kind of like core team working together.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Again, and this is a team of people who like all left way forward together, um, way back in like 2000, I think it was 2012 or 2013. And they've all been working together. One of the reasons they all left way forward back in the day to start yacht club is because they got sick of like being moved around from place to place and they wanted to all keep working together. And they worked together on all the shovel night games and now on this. And I think it really shows that these people just like know how to work well together and are all just like on top of their craft.

• 9:12Griffin McElroy?

  It's, it's awesome. There are so many cases of indie studios having like a, a hit that, that they were super duper passionate about and worked on for a long time. Their like big breakout first title and then their second game, for whatever reason, whether it's like bloat or over ambition.

• 9:27Russ Frushtick?

  Or just like odds, like the odds you're gonna get another hit is crazy low.

• 9:31Griffin McElroy?

  They just don't capture the, the lightning in a bottle. And it's interesting to hear that like yacht club almost kind of fell into that pitfall by, by splitting up the party a little bit.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, what happens is when you have a success, you just like instinctively, you want to grow from it. You want to be like, we can do multiple things. We can be ambitious. We can like, do, do we have all these crazy ideas? We want to pursue them all. And sometimes you just have to kind of stick together and do what's best. They also thought Mina was going to be a side project. Like they thought it was going to be a one year, small scale thing. And the game just kept blowing up and just growing as it, as it evolved over time, which I think also contributed to why it took so long.

• 10:06Chris Plante?

  I want to talk a little bit about the Zelda stuff really quick because I want to give people an idea of like what the game is and I think Zelda is a great way into the game, whether you think it is or isn't like it. The top level thing where I think we can all agree, this is very Zelda in nature and specifically Link Between Worlds, is you are dropped into this, this kind of central town and said, "You need to go out and fix these generators." And they are in four different directions, really more than that, directions. And by going out in northwest or southeast, you're going to discover dungeons, basically, Zelda-style dungeons. But, the big difference, and this is where I think Jason, you have a feeling of that

• 10:50Chris Plante?

  this is more like a puzzle platformer, is where a Zelda game, you'll go into a dungeon and get a new item, and it's all about using that item. The dungeon itself is the thing that changes. So, the way that the floors work, because you can burrow and dig, or the way that enemy dynamics work, or the way that the flow of movement across the spaces works, that is what you are learning and adapting to per dungeon.

• 11:15Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, notably, there's-

• 11:16Chris Plante?

  It's the space, not the weapons.

• 11:17Russ Frushtick?

  Right, there's no gear gating in this game. You can go to any dungeon in effectively any order technically, because you could theoretically grind the needed currency to access any dungeon at the very beginning of the game. There's no gear gating. What there is, is the like Metroid Brania-style, "Oh, I now see how I can use the things in my current equipment to manipulate the world in ways that are unexpected." Like, "Oh, I can actually get a long jump, even though they never gave me an item that allows me to long jump. Technically, if I combine this sub-weapon with this trinket or whatever, suddenly I can get across bigger gaps." So, the game is very creative in that sense, whereas if you look at most Zelda games, except

• 11:58Russ Frushtick?

  for Link Between Worlds, they are pretty relatively rigid, or I guess Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, like that's where Zelda is going. But earlier Zelda games, pretty rigid in terms of the order you had to play them in.

• 12:10Griffin McElroy?

  There are a ton of upgrade. There's like a ton of shit to find and there's a there's a whole sort of Souls-esque system of enemies drop bones and then when you hit certain, you know, amounts, you could upgrade these different stats. And you're also spending those bones on these trinkets, which are sort of like Hollow Knight style badges or-

• 12:29Russ Frushtick?

  Passive abilities, basically.

• 12:30Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, passive abilities that you can kind of like change your build and customize. And there's different weapons that you use. It's not like Link just has a sword. There's like five different weapons that you're kind of upgraded. So there's like a lot of different ways that are very kind of RPG-y where you are feeling this constant progression, but none of it is like, but you have to get this thing before you can go and do, you know, this, this one section of that.

• 12:53Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, Jason, is that where you see the distinction?

• 12:56Speaker 03

  I wouldn't even call it a puzzle platformer. I would call it just a platformer, like an action platformer, because there aren't really any puzzles. There are just kind of like new mechanics that you just learn how to deal with and get to know. And I think the Zelda comparisons, they make you think that like each dungeon is going to give you some elaborate, just kind of winding labyrinth with a bunch of keys and block puzzles you have to solve. And that's not what this game is. It's more, it's closer to Shovel in Night than anything, or like a traditional like Mario platformer in that, hey, now you're in the, I don't want to spoil future mechanics, but I'll talk about the first one that most people will do, which is the crypt. So you get to the crypt and it's this undead themed dungeon and biome and you, there's a whole area leading up to the dungeon and then you get to the dungeon and it's just gradually introducing new mechanics.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  So it'll be like, hey, here's a statue and then there's a head in another screen that you have to carry to fill out the statue. But as long as you're carrying the head, you'll be chased by a ghost, kind of Animal Well dog style. And that ghost will try to kill you unless you put down the head along the way. So you have to kind of find the balance between when you're going to carry it and when you're not. And so that to me feels more like a traditional platformer mechanic that is just mapped on this kind of Zelda links awakening slash link between world perspective and the action and the jumping feels like links awakening or links between world. But the the rhythm of the game does not, the structure of the game does not. In the second area, for example, I mean, it's just like a lot of water themed stuff. So you have to learn how to deal with water mechanics. But again, but again, it's not

• 14:21Speaker 03

  puzzles. It's just kind of platforming execution and learning mechanic and then mastering that mechanic.

• 14:28Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's more exploration based, I would say than

• 14:31Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Griffin McElroy?

  There's not, there's very few like moments where you're really, and I honestly, I was looking, I spent a lot of time early in Mina the Hollower, like, looking for stuff I assumed was going to be there. And I think that that was a thing that kind of carried on, uh, which is really an issue with my own sort of expectations for like what the game was going to be, when really it has, uh, you know, more in common with a, like a Banjo Kazooie style, like, here's a big checklist, there's 40 fucking things hidden in this part of the world. And if you really look really closely and you really take your time and explore and dig at every little hole that you see, like, you'll, you will find all that stuff, you will get stronger and you need to get stronger because the game

• 15:12Griffin McElroy?

  will also kick your ass up and down the street for a while until you start to get some of this stuff, which I, I also kind of appreciated.

• 15:20Russ Frushtick?

  That first dungeon to me, didn't feel like a puzzle platformer, it didn't feel like a platformer for that matter. It felt like Bloodborne, like when you first start playing and you have no kit whatsoever, and you're just trying to eke out a win, it really feels like Bloodborne. As the game progresses and you have more control over your build and things like that, it starts feeling like a Link Between Worlds or those sorts of games, like just more exploration, more, uh, character control. But early on, you, you are, it's really punishing. I do want to mention, this is a good opportunity, the game in the settings has like a crap load of settings that you can change, regarding game speed, regarding how much health you have, regarding how much bones the enemies drop, like if you're just-

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Regarding if you want the screen to spin the entire time while you play.

• 16:04Griffin McElroy?

  It's, it's fully, fully GoldenEye 64 level, like insane. You can make Mina be 16 times bigger than, than normal and move at, when I, after I beat the game, I like went through and tried turning on, like, everything and then tried to play it and it is unplayable. That is how bad they like-

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Well, there's a thing called barf mode that literally makes it unplayable because it's just like-

• 16:25Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's really, really funny.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  You can have Mina jump an infinite number of times until she's off the screen and you could just play the game with her just jumping off, like, above the screen.

• 16:34Griffin McElroy?

  So funny. Yeah. Uh, but the, the power curve is, I think, elegant enough that like- I don't know, you spend so much time getting your ass kicked. I found this like mini dungeon really early on where you can go in and rescue someone, but you have to like spend some of your healing vials to get into the dungeon in the first place. And I just kept getting killed over and over and over again. But I was like, I bet I can do, I bet I can do this. And after enough tries and finding like a trinket or two that like helped me stay alive a little bit longer, eking that out was like so satisfying, so, so, so rewarding.

• 17:06Russ Frushtick?

  I think it does the silk song thing that you have to remind yourself while you're playing. If you hit a wall like that where you're dying, dying, dying, it's really fine to come back. In fact, you will just have so much of a better time if you come back in an hour when you've gotten another healing thing or whatever it is. It's fine.

• 17:22Griffin McElroy?

  I will also say it is infinitely easier than silk song. Like if you hear that, don't let that scare you off. You, you mentioned the combat fresh and the bloodborne comparison. That's probably a good chance to talk about the weapons. What weapon did everybody here use? Because they're, they're quite different.

• 17:38Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 17:39Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. Yeah. So I used the whip for most of it. When you start the game, it lets you pick from like three of the five different weapons. Uh, and then you'll unlock the rest like as you, as you play. Uh, and the whip just felt so, uh, having the range was really great because you can only take a couple of hits. Uh, like bloodborne, you keep making the bloodborne comparison. I think the, the, the most apps sort of part of that is that you have these healing vials that you use in, in the vein of, you know, uh, Estes flask or whatever. But like bloodborne, you can only recover health after you attack enemies. When you attack enemies, you collect what's called plasma, which determines how much the vials will heal you for. So if you just like play

• 18:21Griffin McElroy?

  super conservatively and you don't get in there, then your healing vials aren't going to heal you for very much and you're going to die just via entropy. You, the game really asks you to be aggressive and, and get in there, which is really smart because otherwise I think this kind of like top down action platformer style combat wouldn't be that engaging. Like the combat in Link's Awakening is not. Exciting or like particularly challenging in any way, but this one mechanic is enough to make you think like, oh shit, I just got hit. I better get in there and hit them right back or else I'm not gonna be able to kill them.

• 18:56Russ Frushtick?

  Dodging as well. You can go underground in the middle of combat. It's certainly more, there's more going on in like.

• 19:01Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, sure.

• 19:03Chris Plante?

  Jason, what weapon did you use?

• 19:05Speaker 03

  The shield for most of it. Don't sleep on the shield. The shield, cause you can do this. Okay. So the shield is very short range. So you think of it as like, oh, this isn't nearly as cool as the whip. This isn't nearly as helpful. But if you use it, you can get this kind of parry. And if you attack at the right time, you'll parry an enemy's attack, which is extremely useful and more powerful than it seems. But I played around with all of them. I mean, I played the game twice. I'm like almost done with the second playthrough with an item shuffler on. So all the items are in different locations. Maybe I could talk about that a little bit later, but uh, so I played around with all of them and I find the shield actually to be the coolest one, although I'm also partial to the daggers.

• 19:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I used the daggers. That was, that was my preferred and I, well, so I would switch between daggers and whip, uh, depending on the situation. Uh, but the daggers were nice for just like run of, run of the mill, normal enemies. And then if I was against the boss and I needed that safety of range, I would switch the whip.

• 20:00Chris Plante?

  I used the weapon that I have never used in these games, which is the hammer. I started with the whip, found the hammer, immediately hated it.

• 20:07Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I hated it.

• 20:08Chris Plante?

  Ah, I can't, I don't want to deal with like having to go find a place to change it. And then I don't even know when I started to love having this hammer. The hammer, you want, you can charge it up, deal extremely damaging blow, but also you can dodge while loading that charge. So you do kind of a dodge roll.

• 20:27Griffin McElroy?

  Fully Monster Hunter style, like really, really, yeah.

• 20:30Chris Plante?

  But the other thing that you can do to really kind of like spice up your, your combat is the trinkets. You'll be able to collect more and more of them and they can have offensive and defensive capabilities. So I got, uh, trinkets where I could burrow longer. I could create poison paths wherever I burrowed. And when I came out of a burrow, it exploded wherever I blew up. So I would burrow around, create a poison path in front of me, pop up, knock people back. And then as they came to me, I would have the charge ready and I would deliver the hammer.

• 21:05Griffin McElroy?

  Mm hmm. Cool.

• 21:06Chris Plante?

  And like that you can come up with that and it wants you to come up with like your own style of combat is wild. There's, there is so much going on in terms of the depth of the combat in this little game.

• 21:17Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  The, there's a trinket with an air dash ability that is my favorite by far. There's also, man, there's like some hidden synergies with the trinket, including, I, I, I won't spoil anything here. But like, if you equip, end game, like if you get, if you get towards the end of the game and you have all of your trinket upgrades. So I think you can equip six of them max. And if you equip six specific trinkets, you unlock a whole new mode and it like changes.

• 21:44Griffin McElroy?

  It's crazy.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

• 21:46Griffin McElroy?

  It's really, it's a totally different that, yeah. I, I a hundred percent in it, mostly because like, one, it's amazing. And two, like, it's just really fun to go around and find all that stuff. And the game does a great job of kind of like communicating, okay, in this area, like you're missing, you know, these three things. And you kind of start to get an idea of what kind of stuff you have to look for. And, and yeah, finding, finding those synergies and putting together like the strategy really, uh, really is, is, is a super rewarding kind of gameplay loop that I am not used to this type of game really offering.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  You're not used to games being this good is the problem.

• 22:24Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I guess so. It, the game also, we haven't talked at all about like sort of the aesthetic, like the game looks fantastic.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Music, holy shit.

• 22:32Griffin McElroy?

  The music is spectacular.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Oh my God, knocking.

• 22:34Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, the, the design is, I, I, at first I thought like sort of Game Boy Color because the Game Boy Color had like that very limited, like each sprite only had like three colors and it's pixel art. And so they had to kind of work very minimalist, but you still get like a lot of detail with that stuff. What was it? You, what was the comparison?

• 22:51Chris Plante?

  Neo Geo Color, definitely.

• 22:53Griffin McElroy?

  Neo Geo.

• 22:53Russ Frushtick?

  Or like a Wonder Swan, maybe?

• 22:55Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 22:56Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's definitely more high def than a Game Boy Color game, but just really gorgeous to look at and the music's spectacular, too. And the vibe is also just like, kinda creepy? I thought for, maybe because the first level is like a big graveyard level, I was like, oh, it really is like a Bloodborne kind of horror style type thing, but the game goes other places. But the whole time, there's this whole air of like, something is terribly, terribly wrong here. And they do not shy away from that. The game's story goes some really fucking buck wild places. And it is very, very memorable, I think, for that.

• 23:33Russ Frushtick?

  Chris, I know you in particular had some pathing issues when exploring the map, the open nature of the map, and some backtracking issues as well. I wanted to dig into that a little bit, because I know you kind of struggled.

• 23:46Chris Plante?

  Yeah, this for me is the one downside of the game. And I told this to Fresh before we even hopped on. This is that thing where you like it so much that when you come across the sandpaper on your toes, you're like, why is this here? But by being totally open, you can go in any direction. And I think the structure that the game expects you to play is, and let me know if y'all agree with this, is each dungeon actually is two dungeons. There's a midway point where you will fight a boss. And it is allowing you to go back, spend some of your credits in the town, and then come back. That's what it's wanting you to do. I did not understand this until about halfway through the game.

• 24:31Chris Plante?

  So what would happen is like, I would get to the midway point. I would reach a dead end, and I would think, oh, well, I don't know which way I'm going. I will head back. And then a problem that happens if you do not... Kind of figure out your pathing while you're in the thick of it is you start having to look at every damn wall, trying to figure out what you missed. An example of this, and this is like not a spoiler, and also if anything, it'll help you, is you come across a puzzle in a bayou where you turn these kind of like screws to raise and lower water. And I did that, I went through it, I went and fought a boss, I found a mirror, mirrors are important for various reasons that we may not spoil.

• 25:15Chris Plante?

  And then I found a room that seemed to show that like, oh, I could keep moving on, but I couldn't figure out how do I get through it? It was almost like it was throwing me into a new biome. Well, surely I needed to figure that out to get to the generator that I needed to go solve. So I end up spending an hour, do I go back into the other biome to find a way there? Do I need to figure out a way to play with the electricity that's zapping across the screen? Do I need a different utility? There are these special powers, which we'll talk about. Any of this, will any of this work? The answer is no. What I needed to do was actually go back to the screw puzzle, five screens back, turn a different screw, go a different direction, and that kept me on the righteous path.

• 25:58Chris Plante?

  And there's a few times in the game where this happens, where it seems like it's trying to tell you, go this way, in reality, it's go back to a puzzle and discover that that puzzle has multiple ways for it to be solved that can keep you going forward.

• 26:13Russ Frushtick?

  Okay.

• 26:13Chris Plante?

  It's not often, but the problem is because the whole

• 26:16Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, stop, plant, stop right there, because this is perfect timing for my story.

• 26:20Chris Plante?

  Okay, okay, okay, okay.

• 26:21Russ Frushtick?

  We teased it in the cold open, and here it comes. I spent the weekend, this past weekend, upstate, upstate New York. And while we were up there, it was a very rainy weekend, the weather was terrible this weekend, and we were looking for indoor activities to do. And what we found was Howe Caverns, which from where we were staying is about a two-hour drive north of where we were staying, and in heavy, heavy rain. So we're like, well, I guess this is something to do. So we go to Howe Caverns.

• 26:53Chris Plante?

  You took your child on an impromptu, two-hour rainy road trip.

• 26:58Russ Frushtick?

  Followed by, followed by, wait.

• 27:01Chris Plante?

  Wild.

• 27:01Russ Frushtick?

  Followed by taking a giant elevator down about 20 stories into the earth to do a 90-minute cave tour. Which involves like water and a boat that you get on to like go through the cave. It's very well paved, it's safe, but he's four, so like keep that in mind. Okay, so that happens. So I'm in the cave.

• 27:27Russ Frushtick?

  I'm coming up in the elevator. As this cave is going on, the way we've been cajoling him to get through it is hey, there's a gift shop at the end. Of course, he's a four-year-old. He loves gift shops naturally. So he's incredibly amped about the gift shop. We're going up in the elevator. We go to the gift shop. He now had, the gift shop is like large and it's got tons of shit in it that four-year-olds would absolutely love. And now he's obsessing over what does he get from the gift shop? It's like a huge mental anguish situation. And I'm standing over him like, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? And while this is going on, Chris Plant sends me literally 16 text messages about getting through the open-ended nature of fucking Mina the Hollow.

• 28:11Russ Frushtick?

  And at some point during these text messages, I'm trying to like politely convey to him that maybe now is not the time. And it starts light. It starts with, hey, I think you go down here. And, and then I say, uh, yeah, it might be over there, but I'm actually out and about right now, so I don't have time. And then-

• 28:30Griffin McElroy?

  That's enough for me. That, hey Russ, that would have been enough for me.

• 28:33Russ Frushtick?

  Most people would see out and about and be like, I think maybe I'll, nope. Chris Plant plows through and at one point he sends a few more and he's talking about how frustrated he is about getting around. And I say, okay, have fun. You would think that would be the end.

• 28:51Griffin McElroy?

  No, certainly not.

• 28:53Russ Frushtick?

  Another screenshot of I'm stuck here.

• 28:59Chris Plante?

  I just care about, I, you know, when you love someone, it's like you can't fully experience things without their involvement. I need, I need to see this through your eyes.

• 29:09Griffin McElroy?

  In Chris's defense, I had definitely a lot of moments, specifically when I was playing cleanup. Like I had gotten to close to where the final boss was and I wanted 100% at, but some of this shit was just like, what Chris had is super true. You will find a solution to a puzzle and then you'll do it and then you will kind of forget about it. Not realizing that that solution is also the solution to like six other hidden little things. And there were many times where I was like, man, I wish this game was out. So I could like find a hint or something online. It is, uh, it is fairly opaque, but I also, I don't know. I also kind of like that. I am glad that I didn't, I didn't have the option to do that because it forced me to kind of try to.

• 29:52Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. I mean, as you guys know, I'm obsessed with that and I know it's not for everyone. And I would also add that like Chris's experience while valid, a hundred percent valid. It's also not an experience that really anyone else would have. Because short of the internet shutting down forever, anyone that gets that frustrated will probably just look something up. Which is fine. Um, I don't think that's necessarily like, I, you know, it's, I think my rubric for this is like, is it possible to figure the game out without help online? I think the answer is yes. I think most of us were able to do it. But I do agree for people that hit that friction and don't have the patience to like throw themselves at it. You have the option, just look it up. It's fine.

• 30:35Griffin McElroy?

  That area was also my least favorite area for.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  What are, what are areas are always the worst?

• 30:40Griffin McElroy?

  The bot, yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  When you, when you are trying to a hundred percent the game, I can't, I didn't have that experience, Chris. That sounds frustrating, but I can't speak to the main campaign part of it because I didn't find much frustration there. But when you are trying a hundred percent in it and get everything, you can actually get this ability, this skull that will glow different colors. It glows, it'll have on your UI, you'll see this little skull and it'll glow blue when you're in a room next to a room with a secret in it and it'll glow red when you're in a room with a secret in it, which is super helpful. And that helped me find everything in the game, except for with one exception. Where there was this one room to the west of Osex where like the skull glows red, but you actually need to activate something in a different screen in order to get the secret there. That was very.

• 31:20Russ Frushtick?

  That was not the only place you got stuck, Jason.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, there were two. Okay. Two places. That's true. You got stuck in, in one of the same places I did too.

• 31:26Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  But I complained about that to the developers. Yeah, the kite was, that was stupid. That was me.

• 31:31Griffin McElroy?

  I got a kite.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  Well, here, well, no. Okay. What happened was I messaged Russ and I was like, hey, with this kite, do you need like a special? Do you need a trinket to to open it? And he was or to to get it? And he was like, no, you don't need a trinket. And so for some reason in my head, I was like, oh, that means I don't need a sidearm either. But not I didn't realize that Russ was being.

• 31:51Griffin McElroy?

  I think there's a few different ways to do the kite.

• 31:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:53Chris Plante?

  I say this as someone who sent fresh 16 messages. Never send fresh a message asking for a tip because he's the fucking riddle of the speech. He's always like, um, if you know A plus three, then the riddle is me.

• 32:07Griffin McElroy?

  Kitty cat toy. Yeah.

• 32:09Russ Frushtick?

  It's because I want people to have that moment of discovery. I think that's the best part of these games. That's why.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  I mean, for the most part, I I found the game to be extremely fair and it felt like everything was justified. And like, the answer to most of the secrets is burrow. Like, if you burrow, you will find.

• 32:24Russ Frushtick?

  Or just like really look at the screen very carefully.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Or like, yeah, look for hidden cracks or look for symmetry. Like, if if one side of a room can be blown up, maybe the other side can too, etc., etc. It's all just common sense stuff for the most part. But yeah, that that sounds frustrating, Chris. I'm sorry you had that experience and had to text Russ 20 times to.

• 32:44Chris Plante?

  That that was the hard.

• 32:45Griffin McElroy?

  Russ, I'm sorry you had that.

• 32:47Russ Frushtick?

  No kidding. I was.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  I mean, going underground while playing Venus sounds pretty cool. Like, did you want to burrow with your kid like under those?

• 32:54Griffin McElroy?

  Four hours of rain, driving for 90 minutes of four year old cave diving. I do feel like you set yourself up for kind of a stressful.

• 33:03Russ Frushtick?

  Like, well, the alternative was an entire day at home and.

• 33:08Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, don't get me wrong. No, you were not facing anything.

• 33:10Chris Plante?

  But but before we wrap, I I do want to hear, Jason, you said early on, you're going to explain the the bonus weapon abilities. It it works in a really interesting way in this game, how it incentivizes you to use these secondary weapons.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Bonus. I I was going to explain the randomizer.

• 33:28Chris Plante?

  We I don't think we've actually talked about the teleport and the sidearms. Yeah, yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, some of them are, yeah, the sidearms, they're two kind of subsets of things you can get. The sidearms, which are basically like Castlevania weapons that you just equip in a separate screen and use a separate button to. To do use and there are a bunch of cool ones. There's the classic Castlevania axe and a dagger. And then there's crazy ones like a bike. And there's a fun little mini game that you can do in in Ossex with the bike too. Super cool. And like, yeah, the teleporting thing you mentioned where you like throw this disc and then you teleport to it by pressing another button and then explode everything around you. Super cool. And then the trinkets we talked about earlier and some of those also give you special abilities in addition to everything else, like the air dash and whatnot. What I was talking about earlier is the item shuffler, which is after you beat the game.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  You guys know, are you guys familiar with randomizers like in Zelda games, Metroid games? All too well. Yeah, I've streamed a few Zelda games.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Amazing. Yeah, those are so cool. And like watching the speedruns of them is incredibly fun. And this game has a built in one, so you don't even need a mod for it. After you beat the game, you can choose item shuffle on. And that just like completely shuffles up every location of every item and upgrade in the game to a hilarious degree. So like normally the game opens with this ship crash and then the captain of the ship gives you some vials and is like, here, these will help you heal. And so to get through the early game, you need those to be able to heal. But in the item shuffler, he'll give you anything depending on what the seed has you given. So like I got, I think it was a weapon upgrade or something, maybe like a key.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  I don't remember exactly what it was, but he just gave me that. And I was like, shit, I have to go through like the first two hours of the game without healing until I find a vial somewhere. And it took me a while, which is extremely fun. Like, cause once you've mastered the game, it's really cool to go through. There's also new game plus. And there's also like, you can play the whole game in mirror mode where it's all flipped. You can play, there's a set of mods. So in addition to having 200 something mods, there are also these kind of collections of them. So like you can choose, there's one called Ura Mina, which is a reference to like an old classic Ura Zelda type thing. And basically it just chooses like 40 mods or so that make the game tougher.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  And so that can be the tough mode and you don't even have to go through all 200 on a granular level and pick them all yourself. You can just choose this category. The other one is, there's another one called barf mode that I mentioned earlier. There's a shuffle mode that the level of Detail they put into these mods into everything of this game. I think if to the best way to sum up this game is just the word meticulous. Like everything in it is just so clever and well thought out and just so much attention to detail paid to even the tiniest little things. Including the mods, which is very satisfying.

• 36:12Russ Frushtick?

  I think the studios also, and we've seen this with shovel night and then the DLCs after very, very smart in the way they reuse the assets they've created in a clever ways that like. Enhance like turns this into, I mean, I don't think they're stretching it, but it's if you're getting a hundred percent, at least 30 hour game, right? At least.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:30Russ Frushtick?

  So that's pretty amazing. And then once you beat it, you have all this extra stuff where you're going through. It would not surprise me if they might have already announced this. I don't know where, hey, you can play through the game now as a new character or something like that. So I could see this game having a lot of life and in turn funding the development, easily funding the development of their next project, which obviously would be a big.

• 36:53Griffin McElroy?

  I think it's going to be huge. I think it's going to, I think it's a goatee contender up there for me. I was so, so, so deeply into this.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  I mean, it's number one on Metacritic right now.

• 37:04Russ Frushtick?

  And Jason, you were in your reporting, you said that the number they were trying to hit is 200K units sold.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't even think that's accurate anymore. I'll, I'll do a new story on Friday, but that was a number that they kind of threw out before pricing it at $20. I think they'll need to sell more than 200,000.

• 37:21Russ Frushtick?

  You think it was more than that at the point?

• 37:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I think for them to be so, Yocleb is entirely independent. So this game was made entirely by their funding the studio themselves, based on what they made from shovel night over the years and shovel night. And, and all the other games they've worked, like they've published other games and like work with codevs and stuff. None of them have really been hits other than shovel night. They definitely need this to be a hit. Otherwise they'll have to downsize or find outside funding or something like that. And they have a runway. I don't know when it ends and they need this to sell X number by then. I think they'll be fine. I mean, like I said, this is number one on Metacritic right now with the 93. Right? Over Forza, Pokemon, Resident Evil, Mugenix. So like they'll, they'll be fine. I think. Unless people really don't want a Game Boy style game. But to your question, I mean,

• 38:06Speaker 03

  since it's only 20 bucks, I think they have to sell a lot more. I was talking to Sean Velasco, the head of the studio last week for a story that'll be up on Bloomberg this Friday. And he was like, look, really, I want to sell a million copies and I want to sell a million copies like within the next like soon, like within a short timeframe. I think that's very doable. 20 bucks makes us such a no brainer for people. Like if it was even even 25, it would be like, oh, okay, I don't know. But $20 for like this quality of game.

• 38:35Russ Frushtick?

  It's gotta be they're looking at Silk Song, they're looking at Hollow Knight and realizing, oh.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  That's the crux. You'll see in this story that I did. But I'll just kind of I'll spoil it a little bit early for you guys. I'll give you guys the exclusive, which is basically the Odd Club team met last month and they were they had picked a release date and they were like, okay, we're all set to go. Finally, we got to talk about the price and

• 38:55Russ Frushtick?

  Fucking crazy that that's when they were talking about the price.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  That's great. That is that is insane compared to these sort of like, I mean, we'll talk about the Destiny stuff later on, but just like the AAA world of like, that's the first fucking thing. That's the first thing. Well, in AAA, you don't need to talk about the price. It's just

• 39:13Russ Frushtick?

  How can we make a game that we can charge $90? Like, that's the fucking

• 39:16Speaker 03

  So they're like, we got to talk about the price. And they had kind of assumed so on Kickstarter, you could get a copy for 20 bucks. And they assumed that would be the cheaper price. And then they would go for like, maybe 30, maybe 35. But they looked at Silk Song and they also all got together. So basically, what happened was they got together for this meeting. And a lot of them expected to be like, all right, we're gonna have to debate this like 30, 35. But every single one of them thought on their own, this should be 20 bucks. And they all got in the room and there was no debate and no argument because every single person in there was like, this needs to be $20. And they ultimately figured, which I think is true, that this will make more money at $20 than it would at $30.

• 39:53Russ Frushtick?

  It's gotta. The people that normally wait for the sale at 30 will not wait for the sale.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Exactly. And it also it like feels so good, I think, from a consumer perspective to be like, I am giving such a little amount of money to support this independent studio that is like so dedicated to their craft and like cares so much and like Is willing to just sell this for so cheap. It just feels like a good and like to get that much value for your price. It to me, it seems like it's a brilliant move, especially compared to like, and then you have Microsoft being like, hey, Outer Worlds 2 is gonna be $80. Actually about that, never mind. So it's like such a contrast and yeah, I think it's a brilliant move.

• 40:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, can't recommend this one enough. I really, I think it's for just about everyone.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  It's pretty special game.

• 40:40Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. Yeah. Uh, let's take a break. There's some, some big news to talk about. And so we're going to get into that with Jason, uh, just, just after this break.

• 40:49Russ Frushtick?

  This episode of the besties is sponsored by Alienware. You know, gaming today isn't one thing. It moves between cozy, chaotic and everything in between. One minute you're exploring something slow and immersive, the next you're in a fast paced match. And somewhere in there, you might be creating, streaming, or seeing where the session goes. That's why Alienware systems are built with the performance to handle it all. With Nvidia GeForce RTX, it delivers powerful graphics that bring every world to life while optimizing battery life. So whether you're playing, creating, or jumping between both, everything runs the way it should. No interruptions, no slowing down. You don't have to adjust the way you play. You just keep gaming your way, however that looks in the moment. Be more Alien at Alienware.com slash game your way.

• 41:38Russ Frushtick?

  This episode of the besties is sponsored by Lisa. You know, we are starting to get into the cooler months of the year. And you know what I love in the cool months of the year? An incredibly cozy mattress that you can just cozy up into. You got the blankets and everything and I will speak from experience, but maybe not my experience. Because Lisa sent me one of their mattresses. But it was timed as such where actually my son, who was becoming a toddler and needed like an actual bed, needed a mattress. So we had him use the Lisa mattress. And every time that I get into that bed to read him a story at night, I am incredibly jealous of his mattress because holy cow.

• 42:22Russ Frushtick?

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• 42:59Griffin McElroy?

  I didn't know that today was Dragon Quest.

• 43:02Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:03Speaker 03

  It's Dragon Quest day, baby.

• 43:04Griffin McElroy?

  Being unplugged is again, I talk about this a lot. It's just a wonderful surprise.

• 43:08Russ Frushtick?

  Your slime tattoo didn't tell you?

• 43:10Griffin McElroy?

  Giving shit about the games industry for one hour a week. When I record the besties, it's just like it's every day. It's like opening up a special little present because I don't know that they're announcing Dragon Quest shit. And I love Dragon.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  But the announcement today was that Dragon Quest 12 was rebooted and starting from scratch.

• 43:28Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. So, so what is the, what is the, obviously they announced Dragon Quest 12 with like the most bare bones. Here's what the logo of it looks like.

• 43:36Russ Frushtick?

  People running around.

• 43:38Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  I mean, the context is they had originally announced Dragon Quest 12 like five years ago.

• 43:44Griffin McElroy?

  A long time ago.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  It was like 2021 or something. And today they announced, hey, about that, we've rebooted it and restarted it from scratch. And now it has a new subtitle and here's a little bit of footage. This game is forever away, which I did not expect. I expected them to be like, hey, Dragon Quest 12, it's almost done. It's coming out next year. I was totally caught off guard by them saying it had been rebooted. That's crazy.

• 44:06Chris Plante?

  The fans, they just want more Dragon Quest. Keep it as Dragon Questy as possible. In the point, like when they announced the original version, this five years ago, people were like, oh no, it's dark outside and there's fire. I don't want grim dark Dragon Quest. This is going to be too moody. And then they're like, got it, got it, got it. We're going to reboot it. You're going to get all that colors right back. And then all I see on Twitter or what is it? Blue sky this morning is people being like, I don't know. The guy looks pretty tired. I don't think I'm really into it.

• 44:35Griffin McElroy?

  He does look tired. They used the Dragon Quest tired eyes preset. Uh, which it really took me by surprise when they sort of revealed this guy. It's called, it's Dragon Quest 12 Beyond Dreams.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Very important.

• 44:46Griffin McElroy?

  Which is, I mean, I don't know, man.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  Cause he's like beyond dreams until like, also he has the broccoli hair.

• 44:54Griffin McElroy?

  Oh. Does have the bro, the cool fade on the sides.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  He's like, this is like the Gen Z Dragon Quest.

• 44:59Griffin McElroy?

  The Gen Z Dragon Quest guy. I think it was Dragon Quest 6 was the one that was like, had like a dream world. I don't know. I've played all these fucking things and I can't keep them straight. Uh, so I, I, I'm wondering if it has something to do with that, but I don't think we have any kind of like plot details. They just showed off like, hey, there's a, a, a, a cool lady with a robot side chick and like a side chick, side chick.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  Side chick.

• 45:23Griffin McElroy?

  Robot side chick and a motorcycle.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  You can get married. So it makes sense that you would also be able to have a side chick. Also, again, he's Gen Z. So like they have all sorts of ideas about

• 45:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, sure.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  polyamorous relationships.

• 45:34Griffin McElroy?

  They also announced sort of with again, just kind of a logo reveal. There's a new Dragon Quest Monsters game quote, coming soon. And Dragon Quest 11 is coming to Switch 2?

• 45:45Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, the notable thing.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  It's already on Switch. So this is.

• 45:47Russ Frushtick?

  It's already on Switch. It's a definitive edition Dragon Quest 11.

• 45:50Griffin McElroy?

  I think that's where I played it the first time.

• 45:51Russ Frushtick?

  Notably, they did not announce an upgrade path for the Switch one version. So if you already own it on Switch one, there's a good shot that you're just gonna have to pony up another.

• 46:01Griffin McElroy?

  Love, love Dragon Quest 11. I do not know that I'm going to want to buy it, uh, at Switch 2 price, uh, to, to play it again.

• 46:09Russ Frushtick?

  It's a pretty bold move by Square. I think they, uh, just, uh, just did a sale on the original Switch one version like two days ago. Uh, and so if anyone bought it then they might be kicking themselves, but what are you gonna do?

• 46:22Chris Plante?

  I mean, somebody's gotta pay for this new Dragon Quest reboot, you know?

• 46:25Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I, that's the thing. It's not like it was, I played it all the way through on Switch. That was like the place I played it. It's fine. It works good.

• 46:32Speaker 03

  You can even, you can play it in the 2D mode and that is, runs great on Switch.

• 46:36Griffin McElroy?

  Right. Yeah. You don't need all the fidelity. You don't need the HDR shit if you just played in pixel art mode. I, I'm excited for more Dragon Quest, but I'm, I don't know, man. My JRPGs have been really letting me down lately in the like anticipation department. Cause it's like, when is Persona 4 revival coming out? When's Persona 6 gonna fucking rear its head?

• 46:55Russ Frushtick?

  Wait, there's another Persona game? Persona 4 coming out?

• 46:58Speaker 03

  There's a Persona 4 remake coming.

• 47:00Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, the remake.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then Six is...

• 47:03Griffin McElroy?

  That they announced with, again, like 15 seconds of gameplay footage. And, you know, I don't know what it is. I mean, I know that these games are enormous and take forever to make, but like, I don't know why the drip feed is quite as... You can't just show me 15 seconds of the guy running around the city and play, "Tell me, boy, all true." Like, that's good, but I want... Oh, I think I need a little bit more than that.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, my question, and I actually emailed Squared to ask them this. My question is, when did they reboot it? Like, are we talking two years ago they rebooted it? Or like, this week they rebooted it?

• 47:37Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it could be like a Metroid Prime 4 situation.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 47:40Griffin McElroy?

  I don't know why... This is... It's crazy to me that game companies are so hesitant to talk about that, that they are so hesitant to talk about the... I was always... I was really impressed when, like, ID Tech... ID Tech? IdTech? Came out and like, sort of said like, "Okay, Doom..." I was at the QuakeCon where they like, sort of revealed, "This is what Doom 4 is now." After years of it being kind of like in-development hell, "And here's all the shit that we didn't get right, and check it out, now you're gonna just chainsaw all these guys in half. We fucked up trying to make it some other thing, and now it's just..." And the response to that was insane. Like, people were crazy about that. And I think to this day, like, people hold that game and sort of Doom in very high regard

• 48:22Griffin McElroy?

  now, knowing like, the hell that it went through to get there. And it seems like there are so many developers and publishers out there who think of that as like, some great failing, or that they have wasted your time, or they have wasted the shareholders' sort of like, time and investment. When really, it just means like, "Hey, we are actually working much harder on this."

• 48:42Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, they did waste a lot of time and money working on Metroid Prime 4 before they rebooted it, and in turn, like...

• 48:48Griffin McElroy?

  And then they... Yeah, that's obviously a bad example, because then the one that came out was pretty rotten.

• 48:53Russ Frushtick?

  But even in good examples, like, it's them admitting fault on like, "Hey, we spent four years on this thing, and most of it's not gonna get used."

• 49:02Griffin McElroy?

  For a legacy thing, like Dragon Quest, like Doom, like Metroid, if that game had been good, like, I think it's more important to say like, "Hey, this thing is... We can't put something out that's not..." Like, that's not good enough. That's not up to what people are expecting.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  Sure, I agree.

• 49:17Griffin McElroy?

  And so we went back to the well. I mean, I don't know. And there are so many situations.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  They did say this, essentially. Like, that's what they said.

• 49:22Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, they said it.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  They said, "Hey, it wasn't working out. We rebooted it."

• 49:24Russ Frushtick?

  This is more candid, both in the Nintendo situation with Metroid, and this way more candid than you traditionally see from Japanese studios. So, things are changing.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Also, for what it's worth, I think that with Japanese studios, it comes as a surprise because there isn't the same kind of reporting there. Like, if this happened in the West, it would probably get out. It would probably leak in some way.

• 49:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, they'd have staff turnover, and people would be talking to Jason on the phone, so.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Get some text messages.

• 49:49Chris Plante?

  The other part of the news, how are y'all doing? How are y'all feeling about the Destiny news?

• 49:54Griffin McElroy?

  So, I think it was last week, like, right after we recorded, that Bungie came out with their, I guess, weekly update, and said, "Hey, so, the patch that comes out on June 6th for Destiny 2 is the last update that we are releasing for Destiny 2." And then, development, you know, ongoing development on Destiny 2 is done.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  Good night, sweet prince.

• 50:19Griffin McElroy?

  Literally, three paragraphs, right? In a, which is already kind of shocking. There's so many shocking things about this. One, like, the comms from Destiny has had to be pretty thorough, because the fanbase, like, expects a lot, and wants to know everything that's kind of going on. To announce in a fucking, like, PR blast that big, like, "So, we're done. Bye. Thanks for playing our game for 65,000 hours. Bye."

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Did you still play it, Griffin?

• 50:51Griffin McElroy?

  So, I don't know. I played Final Shape. And I played a couple of updates, like, after Final Shape.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  Oh, so you do still play. I mean, that's more recent. I haven't played since 2019.

• 50:59Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I stopped on Final Shape.

• 51:00Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, no, yeah. So, I played through all of Final Shape, which was fucking spectacular, which was really, really great. Really, like... I think there's a lot of people who think it should have stopped there.

• 51:11Speaker 03

  So.

• 51:11Griffin McElroy?

  Like if you're going to stop it, like stop it after this like extremely like exciting, cathartic, kind of polished way out of like this whole story. But because the, the, the structure of that game was based on seasons and, uh, you know, what, what's coming next, they, they kind of kept going along with it even as the player base continued to kind of like slough, slough off.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  I mean, that's the fatal flaw, right? Is they announced this thing called the final shape, made everyone think it was the end and then just kind of limped off with just like, hey, here's some more stuff, kind of.

• 51:46Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, it was the end, like effectively it was the end in terms of like significant updates.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I, I was talking about this with someone at Bungie, actually. I was like, like it makes no sense. Like, why would you guys not just tease Destiny three at the end of that? And they were like, yeah, I mean, this is a problem. The problem, I actually, I just made a YouTube video about this. I'm a YouTube vid, I'm a YouTuber now. So like, like and subscribe. Um, I just made a YouTube video about this.

• 52:08Russ Frushtick?

  What's your channel called?

• 52:09Speaker 03

  I had some thoughts. It's called Jason, Jason. Yeah. It's called Mr. Beast and check it out. Uh, I do all sorts of pranks and games.

• 52:15Russ Frushtick?

  It's the games, uh, branch.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  I'm gonna give hundreds of thousands of dollars to everyone at Bungie.

• 52:20Russ Frushtick?

  It's a fucking Bungie. Yeah.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  Uh, it's, it's Jason hyphen, Jason dash Schreier. Check it out. Like and subscribe. No. So, uh, uh, I think what happened, I mean, my understanding what happened is that like, uh, first of all, they had this project called Payback. That was like a Destiny thing. It was kind of a third person Destiny Genshin Impacty thing that Luke Smith was working on. That got canceled around the time Final Shape came out. Um, they really couldn't.

• 52:45Griffin McElroy?

  Was that because of the Destiny mobile game that Destiny?

• 52:49Speaker 03

  No, it was because of other big like upending at, at Bungie. Um, and I think that Destiny three, like Sony just didn't have the appetite to spend that kind of money on a Destiny three. Like that's, we're talking 300, 400, 500 million dollars before marketing for the next four or five years.

• 53:06Griffin McElroy?

  The Paul McCartney is gonna need like 10 million at the very least.

• 53:09Speaker 03

  But also you have to fund Marty O'Donnell's Congress campaign. So that's.

• 53:14Griffin McElroy?

  Is that real?

• 53:15Speaker 03

  That's really got endorsed by Trump.

• 53:16Griffin McElroy?

  Griffin.

• 53:18Russ Frushtick?

  No, no, no.

• 53:20Griffin McElroy?

  It's real bad.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  He is a nice character of him with you. You gotta check out his, his X feed.

• 53:25Griffin McElroy?

  Fuck dude. Oh man. This is, this is the opposite of a president. This is like.

• 53:32Griffin McElroy?

  No, guys, my detachment from the games industry is supposed to only be good. Finding out that fucking legendary game composer Marty O'Donnell is a fucking cheat.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Griffin, I don't know if you know this, but the games industry is mostly bad news these days.

• 53:47Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, man.

• 53:49Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I mean, I think Sony just didn't have the appetite for that kind of money in a market that is like increasingly harder, getting harder and harder every year. Nobody's making that like significant profits off of spending budgets like that. The budgets are going up and the timelines are going up and Sony has been burned a bunch of times with some of their investments and bad moves.

• 54:09Griffin McElroy?

  Specifically by Bungie, I think.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Well, you know what's really crazy? I talked about this in my video. So not only, so Bungie, put Bungie aside, the amount they spent $3.6 billion buying Bungie, plus all the burn rate that they've been going through. So Bungie, I don't know if you guys know this, in 2016, Destiny 2 was delayed a year. And as a result of that delay, the guy who was running Bungie at the time was kind of asked to leave, Harold Ryan. Harold Ryan would go on to found a company called Probably Monsters that would start a studio called Firewalk. And to run a game at Firewalk, they would bring on this guy, Ryan Ellis, who was the original director of Destiny 2 before the delay and kind of reboot happened on D2. And Ryan Ellis would direct at Firewalk a game called Concord.

• 54:51Griffin McElroy?

  Oh.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  So this is like full circle here. And again, just.

• 54:56Griffin McElroy?

  Getting them from all, getting Sony from all sides.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Sony has all these investments that have not quite panned out and it's, it's.

• 55:03Griffin McElroy?

  Where does it, what was the story? What was the story? This is obviously, I think, pretty germane, but again, I'm, I'm pretty detached. What was the Sony losses? They like put up like almost a billion dollars.

• 55:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, an impairment on Bungie. Yeah, I mean, that's, that could be a number of things. And when it comes to accounting, I think that the games press doesn't really know how to, how to handle that or what it actually means.

• 55:26Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, sure.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  When, when, when a company writes, writes off like investments into a game company, it could mean a lot of different things.

• 55:32Chris Plante?

  Here's, here's my question about the video games for you, Jason. What does this mean for Marathon? As somebody who loves going to Talcetti, does this mean, hey, we're actually going to focus what money we do have on this thing and try to make this work?

• 55:46Russ Frushtick?

  And I do want to drop in a stat on Marathon before Jason jumps in. The stat that I looked at, the second they announced the Destiny news that they'd not be doing any more updates. Destiny at the time had more daily active users than Marathon did.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Daily or concurrent on Steam?

• 56:02Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, concurrent, but I was looking at the averages per day. So it was overall.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  But on Steam specifically, you're talking.

• 56:07Russ Frushtick?

  Steam specifically. So granted, they are on multiple platforms, but I was kind of extrapolating it out.

• 56:11Griffin McElroy?

  It's not so surprising.

• 56:13Chris Plante?

  Yeah. A number going down versus a number going up is also more important.

• 56:16Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, they're both going down, but the difference is this game that came out three months ago is lower than the game that came out 12 years ago and hasn't had an update in a year.

• 56:25Speaker 03

  So Bungie is definitely investing in Marathon. They have a big team on Marathon that is continuing. They've moved people off of Destiny onto the Marathon team. I don't know if they can recover. Like, I don't know if they can get to the player base that that game needs to get to, to be a success. But it's not like they're shutting down the game and shutting down the studio. What they're gonna do is like.

• 56:47Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the question. It's like, when does Sony lose all patience in Bungie as a studio?

• 56:52Speaker 03

  I don't.

• 56:54Russ Frushtick?

  That's true.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, Destiny 2 is gonna keep going just without any updates. Yeah, what they're gonna do, so the current state of things is they have a big investment in Marathon. They're gonna keep that going for at least like the imminent future. They're gonna have that right now. People are pitching and prototyping new ideas there, including Destiny stuff and other, other stuff. But like, could pitch it and wind up getting greenlit a new Destiny thing, whatever that looks like. I cannot imagine it would be Destiny 3, but certainly possible.

• 57:20Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Destiny 3 is on active development, but like, it could very well happen.

• 57:24Russ Frushtick?

  Rogue like two years development.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  It's such a, it's such a cool world. They could do all sorts of stuff in it.

• 57:29Griffin McElroy?

  I understand why they would be hesitant to invest the amount of money required to pay Paul McCartney his nut to like make Destiny 3. But I have thought, I've, I've played thousands of hours of Destiny 2. It's one of my favorite games of all time. I think it's the tightest shooter ever made, like feeling like it's so good.

• 57:47Russ Frushtick?

  It's a great studio. Marathon's a great game too.

• 57:49Griffin McElroy?

  Great studio. There's so much talent and there's so many, so many stories of that talent being squandered, going on these wild goose chases after, oh, fuck, Overwatch is big. Quick, do Overwatch. Oh, shit, Fortnite's big. We better do Overwatch. Better do Fortnite like and and betraying that incredible amount of like talent and competence. Uh, and Sony not really sticking by or Activision or whoever was kind of like, uh, on top of things at the time. Like bailing at the first sign of like, uh oh, someone doesn't like this thing. I told you guys, you should have done a Fortnite like there's so much mismanagement and it's so, it's, it's heartbreaking to me as

• 58:30Griffin McElroy?

  both a fan of what Bungie does, like they're, they have made some of my favorite games of all time and also of just a fan of Destiny two and Destiny in general and the world and the lore. It has been truly devastating to see the videos coming out of the like YouTube community, the creators. My name is Bife and, uh, you know, all the folks who like, I would go to like, watch their raid guides and shit. Uh, the Bife one is in particular, pretty sad because like he would do these 10 hour explainer pieces on the lore of the world. And I can't wait to find out what Sivirath is actually up and like in three paragraphs. They were like, that's, and that's it. It's fucking, it's so, it's, it, there's nothing, it's purely sad.

• 59:15Griffin McElroy?

  It's truly, truly, truly sad. Uh, and I'm still kind of reeling from, from this news. Uh, and I think it speaks to so many problems that the games industry has been facing for a decade. And it's, it's just such a huge, uh, terrible loss, uh, I feel like, and it seems it. I have felt like Destiny three, if they had announced it and made it, it would have been fucking huge. It would have been big because there's still such an appetite, both for this type of game and for this world. And it's, I just don't understand.

• 59:47Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, it would have been 2032 before that game came out.

• 59:49Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. I mean, unless they started working on it, you know, seven years ago, right? Like,

• 59:54Speaker 03

  But then you need hundreds of people working on that game. It just seems so impractical in this day and age. I don't know. I mean, the modern games industry is just so fucked and like, I, I think that especially Western game development, where the salaries have to be high to deal with our cost of living here in the U S and, um, therefore the. Budgets are getting out of control. I mean, I just don't see how sustainable it is to have a team of 800 people, most of whom are in the suburbs of Seattle.

• 1:00:23Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Speaker 03

  Working on a video game. It's just.

• 1:00:25Griffin McElroy?

  Move to West Virginia, open up Bungie in Huntington, West Virginia.

• 1:00:28Speaker 03

  Well, it's funny you say that because they're like a remote first studio. So people can be anywhere. It's just that they have their offices in Seattle. And also like, who the fuck wants to work for a company where like you get less money if you're working somewhere else. So that's a whole nother can of worms too, right? Like if you're paying Seattle salaries to some people, you have to pay them at everyone. So yeah, it's tough, man. And on top of everything else, Sponge is going to be laying people off, which is something that we reported at Bloomberg. And I heard that last week, there was like an all hands meeting and basically they, people were asking, people have been asking for a long time about layoffs. People asked the, the head of the studio, are there going to be layoffs? And he essentially dodged a question. He was like, we're not announcing a riff right now. Like it's just, it's bleak over there. And sucks to work on that team.

• 1:01:14Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. Bummer. Huge, huge, huge, huge, huge bummer news. Um, do we, do we want to do some honorable mentions? Maybe we can find some, a point of light.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  Bring it out. Bring it up. Bring it up. Energy wise.

• 1:01:28Griffin McElroy?

  I, I can start.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Griffin McElroy?

  Cause I finally played that Diablo DLC, Diablo four. Just a brief backstory. I thought Diablo four was okay. Uh, didn't really like the first DLC, the vessel of hatred. Played it for like an hour and was like, eh, this is more Diablo. Uh, and I finished the Lord of Hatred, the, the, the newest DLC that came out. Uh, a month or two ago, maybe last month, uh, yesterday. And, um, hey, it's fucking great. It's really, really fun and really good. It is, it asks a lot. When you start playing Diablo four, after not playing it for a long time and you drop into like one of those hub towns and it's like, okay, man, do you want to do the pit or the tree of whispers or the artificer's tower?

• 1:02:13Griffin McElroy?

  Or do you want to do a nightmare dungeon? Or do you want to level your glyphs? Or do you want to go to room crafting? Or do you, it's like, oh, fuck, just stop, just stop, just chill, just stop. And, and there, there are so many different. Different ways that they have kind of worked to provide a pathway for stuff you can do that's gonna be fun. And will get you constant sort of drip feed like upgrades. I've been playing as the Paladin, which is one of the two new classes Paladin and Warlock. And it is a returning class and being able to kind of create this tornado of hammers and then just running through a place like I'm a fucking Beyblade. And then constantly finding these different ways to like make that feel better and make that feel faster and stronger.

• 1:02:58Griffin McElroy?

  And then going up to the next difficulty tier and finding new shit and taking on these different challenges.

• 1:03:03Russ Frushtick?

  I'll tell you the thing, and I'm curious if it addresses this, I'll tell you the thing that made me bounce off Diablo four. Was I felt like I did my build, I had my combo that was like a five to 10 second combo. Where I would do the same combo every time I ran into a room, clear the enemies out, pick the stuff up, go to the next room. Is there any sense that like that flow has changed at all in this expansion?

• 1:03:26Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, so there's a, there is just from the core kind of like gameplay side of things. They added a system now where gear has sockets, right? This is like classic Diablo shit and you're slotting in gems. Now you can also spend two of those sockets to have like an activator rune and a power rune. And the activator is like, it will generate energy if you drink a potion. Or if you use this type of skill, or if you do this and it'll generate this much energy. And it will, after a certain point, activate the other rune, which is a skill from any class.

• 1:03:57Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, that's fun.

• 1:03:58Griffin McElroy?

  So like I'm a Paladin and for a while I had a piece of gear that I slotted one of these runes in and it like used a necromancer skill.

• 1:04:05Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, that's sick.

• 1:04:05Griffin McElroy?

  That like was actually pretty synergistic with the shit that I was, that I was doing. But even like beyond all of that, I've, I've, I played through the campaign. It took me like five or six hours or so, and I've been like diving into some of the, the in-game stuff afterwards. And I've barely kind of like scratched the surface of like, you know, finding the piece of gear that changes the way that your build works like entirely. I haven't found any of that shit. I've just kind of been picking away at sort of what I have missed out on. And I don't know, man, there's a lot there. And then, and I don't know, it would take me a while to kind of like figure out exactly what has changed, but I feel

• 1:04:44Griffin McElroy?

  compelled to, to check that stuff out. I feel compelled to like, see what this thing is that people talk about. This gameplay loop that like people obsess over, or to, to see what I need to do to like, get to that next difficulty tier. Here's a checklist and here's a bunch of rewards. There's a really smart system called War Plans now, which is just like in the main city. After you finish the campaign, you get what's called War Plans, which is where you set a branching sort of path of activities. And you build sort of a route through them. And so right now I'm picking like three different activities, but it'll be like, do a nightmare dungeon, do a hell tide and do,

• 1:05:22Griffin McElroy?

  you know, some other thing. And then you lock that in. And then as you do that shit, you are getting so much gear and you're getting points that upgrade those individual activities. So now, you know, I've leveled up War, Hell Tides. And now like, now different shit happens during Hell Tide events. Yeah, that's cool. It doesn't happen for other people because I've leveled it up through this thing. Just doing stuff I would normally be doing anyways. There's just a lot of really, really, really smart kind of systems that are in play now. Also, the story is fucking killer. They take some big swings. They do some major shit with some characters that have been in the franchise since Diablo. And I don't give a shit about Diablo lore, but even I was like, I had several moments during this campaign where I was like, holy shit.

• 1:06:05Griffin McElroy?

  I can't believe they, they did that. It's, it's, it's the strongest Diablo has been for me since like, I don't know. I think Russ and I got into Diablo three on Switch for a while when it came out. And like, I enjoyed, you know, going through and trying to find the rare gear and trying to find the thing I need to like, make my barbarian build work. This is clicking for me on a, a, a level that is quite a bit deeper. I also, Henry had surgery yesterday. And so I was in the hospital for a while. And I've just kind of been like staying up with him as he kind of recovers from that. And it's been pretty choice for just kind of zonking out and turning into a Beyblade and tearing through a million zombies or whatever. Yeah. So yeah, I, I, I've had the code for this for a while and I didn't dip into it because it's like, yeah, it's Diablo four. Who gives a shit? But, uh, me. Yeah. As it turns out, is the answer to that.

• 1:06:50Russ Frushtick?

  Jason, anything that you've been playing, it doesn't have to be a game, it could be something, a book you're reading, for example.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  A one more thing, if you will.

• 1:06:56Russ Frushtick?

  A one more thing.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  Uh, can I talk about 007?

• 1:07:00Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, ooh, we are, we are planning on doing it next week.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  But I won't be here next week.

• 1:07:06Russ Frushtick?

  I know, just.

• 1:07:07Griffin McElroy?

  When's it come out?

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  Uh, comes out, oh, it'll be, it's out, it's out.

• 1:07:11Griffin McElroy?

  Tell me every, tell me all about, tell me what to expect from 007.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  Very quick version.

• 1:07:14Russ Frushtick?

  Very top line, please, Jason, we don't want to spoil, I literally haven't played it, so we don't want to spoil.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  No, I'm not going to spoil anything.

• 1:07:20Russ Frushtick?

  How's Lanny?

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  No, I mean, it's really cool. I really like it a lot. I'm way, I'm into it more than like most triple, like, I haven't been this into a AAA game in a minute, because I find AAA to be so tedious and repetitive, that it's like, it's been hard to stick.

• 1:07:35Russ Frushtick?

  And there's only six of them a year, so.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  That's true, yeah. Um, yeah, it's really cool. It's like a mashup of Uncharted-style cinematics and driving and shooting and Hitman-style kind of immersive sim stuff. It's not quite as sandboxy as Hitman, for good reason.

• 1:07:49Russ Frushtick?

  It felt a little closer to Splinter Cell, was my, like, a little bit.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  No, it feels very Hitman, like, it's like you'll overhear someone talking about how like, there's a, the password is over in that room, or like, you'll, you'll try to sneak into an event, and someone will mention that they left their press badge over there, and so you can go get it. It's very Hitman in that way.

• 1:08:09Russ Frushtick?

  But you're not like, cutting the Fugu fish?

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  Uh, no, you are not cutting the Fugu fish, at least from what I've seen.

• 1:08:15Griffin McElroy?

  It's not a Hitman game if you don't cut the Fugu fish.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  And you're not dressing up as a duck. It's, it's more serious than Hitman. But it's like, Hitman, I've always appreciated Hitman, but never really gotten sucked into it, and I think that's because it lacks a real story and real characters, and that's what this has. And the performance of Bond is so delightful in an unexpected way, and the writing is so good in a way that I really just was not anticipating that I've been really into it, and really just hooked by the story and wanting to see what's going to happen next. I'm also not a James Bond fan. I've never even seen one of the movies, so I, I don't know anything about James Bond.

• 1:08:49Griffin McElroy?

  You've never seen one of the movies?

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  I've seen every Austin Powers movie, if that helps.

• 1:08:52Griffin McElroy?

  That's incredibly weird, Jason. If you add all those up, it equals one James Bond movie.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  Exactly. No, I played GoldenEye and N64, but I- I've never, never seen the movies.

• 1:09:00Russ Frushtick?

  Well, you know what happens.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I have an idea. I know who Odd Job is.

• 1:09:03Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, he can slap.

• 1:09:04Griffin McElroy?

  Quick around the bend recommendation. I think Casino Royale, if you're gonna watch one Bond movie.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  Good to know. Maybe after I finish this, I'll, I'll check that out. Um, and yeah, it's good. One thing I'll say though, not a spoiler, but Lenny Kravitz has been kind of like been part of the marketing campaign of this game. His performance is truly, as the kids would say, mid. It is like, it is horrible.

• 1:09:26Russ Frushtick?

  You don't want to go his way.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  It, it's, yeah. No, you do not. You do not want to. I think Zoe got the talent in, in that family. Yeah, Lenny Kravitz should not be in this game. Uh, but it's very Gen X of them to be like, we gotta get Lenny Kravitz in, in our James Bond game. But, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's a cool game. I, I like it a lot more than I expected to like it.

• 1:09:47Russ Frushtick?

  I am excited. I, I really just played like the first intro part and I'm excited to play more and we will indeed be talking about it more next week. Uh, Plant, do you have any honorable mention stuff?

• 1:09:57Chris Plante?

  Yes, I saw, uh, Obsession, which is, it is taking over the movie theaters. Uh, the rare movie that does better on its second weekend than its first one. It is a new horror movie.

• 1:10:10Griffin McElroy?

  The word of mouth has been pretty crazy for this.

• 1:10:12Chris Plante?

  Yeah, it's a lot. The, the basic premise is, uh, a young man, uh, is yearning for the affection of one of his friends. He makes a wish that she will love him more than anyone else on the planet and he gets that wish. And, uh, where it goes from there is, is unbelievably gruesome and dark. It is a horror movie that earns its R. It is a horror movie that actually has scares that aren't just jump scares. It's just like really, really unsettling. Um, and it's a horror movie that you hear that premise and it is like kind of about social things.

• 1:10:53Chris Plante?

  It is definitely a movie about, um, the like quote, nice guy who, you know, just wants your love. But really it, it's, I didn't find it interesting.

• 1:11:06Chris Plante?

  At all, in terms of what it has to say, I found it interesting in that it set up a really, really mean and nasty premise, and it is determined to see that through, and where that could possibly go, which is many, many, many wrong directions.

• 1:11:21Griffin McElroy?

  I've heard a lot of good stuff about, I think, Inda Navarrette, the woman who plays the sort of object of affection, who turns in a truly dazzling, terrifying performance.

• 1:11:35Chris Plante?

  If there was a just world where horror, or comedy, or family movies could get Oscar nominations, one, Rachel McAdams would have like five Oscars, but two, yes, this is the sort of performance that like deserves that caliber of attention. Also, if you're gonna go see it, try to see it in a busy, crowded theater. There are so many moments in it that are going to get very big reactions, and you don't get many chances to enjoy that anymore, where you're in a theater with people who are genuinely shocked and aghast. And I would say most of that is like pretty fairly earned. So, yeah, you should check it out.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  No wonder you're sick. You went to the theater and just got all those gifts.

• 1:12:17Griffin McElroy?

  That is the risk.

• 1:12:19Chris Plante?

  I'm twisted.

• 1:12:22Griffin McElroy?

  Russ, what about you?

• 1:12:23Russ Frushtick?

  I reached room 46.

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  Oh, man, do we have another hour to talk about this game?

• 1:12:30Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, you finished the tutorial.

• 1:12:32Russ Frushtick?

  That's what fucking Jason said. He's like, "Congrats on the prequel," or whatever the fuck.

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  The prologue.

• 1:12:36Russ Frushtick?

  The prologue, the prologue, right.

• 1:12:38Griffin McElroy?

  We only, this is our last chance to be insufferable about Blue Prince. Russ, you're the last person to play it. Please let us just kind of celebrate this moment.

• 1:12:45Russ Frushtick?

  Live it up, guys. That's a good fucking game. It's great. Important to note, the Switch 2 update with the accessibility features is indeed live, finally.

• 1:12:55Griffin McElroy?

  Great.

• 1:12:56Russ Frushtick?

  It happened about halfway through my playthrough.

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  It's so funny that you waited this long and then you had to play the version.

• 1:13:01Griffin McElroy?

  I know. Have you been like galaxy braining? Have you been like?

• 1:13:05Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, yeah, we've got-

• 1:13:05Griffin McElroy?

  Do you feel like Goku taking off the ankle weights, where it's like, "Now I can see what all the different things are."

• 1:13:10Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, we've got a truly unhinged notebook that started kind of normal and then just goes- Wild from there. Um, I'm, we are sort of in this place of like definitely more threads to pull.

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Russ Frushtick?

  I am curious to know how long this game like keeps our attention. Um, because it's certainly there now, but at a certain point, if I feel like I hit a wall or we hit a wall and we feel like we have to start looking things up, that would kind of kill it for me. So, um, I don't know. How many, how many days did you guys do?

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  Well, okay. The question is how many, like, do you have a bunch of goals still in your head that you want?

• 1:13:48Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I wouldn't say, I would say probably four, four-ish goals.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  And are you curious about how the story and lore just kind of unravels?

• 1:13:55Russ Frushtick?

  To some extent, yeah. I, if only for the sake of opening, uh, safes specifically.

• 1:14:00Griffin McElroy?

  Have you found any fucking crazy keys?

• 1:14:03Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, yes, I've found some crazy keys.

• 1:14:07Griffin McElroy?

  Okay. I mean, that, that for me was the big kind of breadcrumb trail that, uh, I, if you've found one, the sanctum keys, I think is what.

• 1:14:16Russ Frushtick?

  Oh yeah. No, I haven't. I, we haven't found any of those.

• 1:14:18Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I get to that room. Yeah. When you're unlocking 46, you get to that room.

• 1:14:22Russ Frushtick?

  I've been to the room. So we were, I certainly figured that there were ways to access.

• 1:14:26Griffin McElroy?

  By tracking those down, you will, you will, that is the kind of, I think, closest you get to a critical path in the, in the game part. That it goes lots of other places for sure, but like by hunting those down, you will start to see the broader kind of, the broader vision. There's like three different ending. I know this is not being insufferable as a bit, but like, there's a few different kind of like benchmark ending points where you've like solved a bunch of different shit and like 46 is one of them. Uh, and, and then there's a few like really, really satisfying ones that you can, you can dig up if you.

• 1:15:03Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, we're, we're obviously, you know, we're aware of the giant vault door and black bridge and, and all sorts of other things. So there is definitely stuff to pull. Uh, I think the number one goal right now is try to make a, uh, power hammer. So to access all the, the brick.

• 1:15:21Griffin McElroy?

  Nice. Put that shit in your, in your.

• 1:15:23Russ Frushtick?

  That was our intention. We were going to store it once we.

• 1:15:26Speaker 03

  Well, now that you're done with with the basement key, you don't need to uh

• 1:15:30Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, so we we use that. We've used that twice. So I think we're more or less done, but who knows? We'll see.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  Griffin and I were in a discord pre-release, like solving everything with a with a bunch of other press people.

• 1:15:41Russ Frushtick?

  It's been so much fun playing with someone else.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  It is really cool.

• 1:15:45Russ Frushtick?

  Really.

• 1:15:46Griffin McElroy?

  If you want jokes to say, if you want little hints, I know, I know what a, well, I'm talking about little rust sized, tiny,

• 1:15:52Russ Frushtick?

  I don't.

• 1:15:53Griffin McElroy?

  micro fun size.

• 1:15:54Russ Frushtick?

  Jason sent me like a, the first three sentences were like, this would save you a bunch of time if, and I sent him like gifs to like, scroll the text up. That's how much I don't want.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Did you ever go back and look at that? Cause now you know it. All I said to you was, you're, all I said to you was that um, the the pump room just stays persistent. So you don't have to worry about going back and changing it. That's all I said to you.

• 1:16:17Griffin McElroy?

  God damn it, Jason. How could you?

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  I know. How dare I spoil that?

• 1:16:20Russ Frushtick?

  But I don't know the degree to which Jason is informing me.

• 1:16:23Griffin McElroy?

  If the alternative is you bail from the game, there are.

• 1:16:25Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I would look stuff up or ask for help.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  Well, no, don't look stuff up. Ask one of us.

• 1:16:30Griffin McElroy?

  Ask Jason and I because it's the last thing we have.

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  So I mean, I were, okay, so to give you kind of, Griffin and I both saw everything this game has to offer. Like, we got deep, deep, deep, deep, deep. Um, I think it's 100% worth it, but there's definitely some stuff that like I never would have been able to solve on my own. So you will get to a point where you probably need some hints.

• 1:16:50Russ Frushtick?

  Animal well was the same way. Like, once I knew we hit that wall.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  It's a little different than Animal Well, because Animal Well, it's very clear when you get to the bunnies that it's like, all right, this is the point of no return. I don't mind asking for hints anymore. The eggs you can do on your own. With this, it's a little less kind of distinct. The point, the layers are a little less distinct. And I think some of the hardest stuff or some of the stuff that is most obtuse is is throughout, is sprinkled a little bit throughout. But I will say, at least for me, it was well worth getting to that final layer because the stuff you find at the end is so cool. But from a story perspective, a design perspective, just like a holy shit, what is this game perspective? I I think it's worth it.

• 1:17:27Griffin McElroy?

  There's another sort of threshold, which is like, it would have been helpful for someone to have told us like, and that's it.

• 1:17:34Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Griffin McElroy?

  And now you've found the last thing. Because I, not a joke, Jason can attest to this, like, weeks spent, uh, certainly, I don't know how pre-release, uh, we got the code, but like, nights spent just like fucking banging our head against stuff. I remember one time I like hopped in the Discord like, guys, I found something, holy shit, I blew the whole thing wide open. And what it turned out is that I had found like a glitch where I could interact with something through a wall that I wasn't supposed to be able to do. And they're like, oh no, this is this other thing that you haven't even found yet. But like, there was a long, long, long extended period that ended with us going like, okay, so I guess that's it.

• 1:18:08Russ Frushtick?

  That happened with Mist. I remember playing Mist when it first came out and you just like, it ends with like you looking at the book where they're like trapped in the book. And I was like, where do I go now? And you can walk around the entire fucking island and they never tell you, they never show credit.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  This is inspired by, I asked Tanda Ross and he still won't tell me, although I think it's very clear that we've seen all there is to see. But like, he still will never acknowledge whether.

• 1:18:28Russ Frushtick?

  Was there not a layer of internet crazy people like going even deeper than what you guys did?

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  No, we actually, we found everything before the game came out.

• 1:18:37Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:18:38Griffin McElroy?

  Much like Animal Well, we're like, uh, we just, you did Animal Well like.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  No, Animal Well, we didn't find everything. Animal Well, people found that, that audio log, like after the, like.

• 1:18:48Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, there was stuff after the rabbits.

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  Well, the reviewers couldn't, we couldn't find it. There weren't enough, you needed 50 of those screens to fill up the whole thing.

• 1:18:56Griffin McElroy?

  That's right. Yeah, that's, that's a big bottleneck. But yeah, they found it in like 12 hours.

• 1:19:02Speaker 03

  With Blueprints, I'm actually proud to say the reviewers, we found everything, um, right before. We actually, I mean, we also were working with, uh, QA testers who like had seen everything. And so they kind of guided a little, like nudged us a little bit, but still we found everything. And then people in the real world found it like three days after it launched. And now it's clear that there's nothing else to find, but yeah, we, we, I don't know, I think it's kind of clear. But yeah, if you have questions about like, is this it?

• 1:19:29Russ Frushtick?

  Like, we'll keep picking at it, uh, and it's still really engaging. So, uh, yeah. And you know, it is up for best of the game of the year 2026. It is an, it's an option.

• 1:19:39Speaker 03

  Love it.

• 1:19:39Russ Frushtick?

  We punted it to this year, so we'll see.

• 1:19:41Griffin McElroy?

  Maybe I'll play it again in the fall after my brain has.

• 1:19:44Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  Do you think, I wish you could erase your brain, like forget everything about it selectively.

• 1:19:49Griffin McElroy?

  I would Eternal Sunshine, this and.

• 1:19:51Russ Frushtick?

  I think 20 years down the road, that's about 10 to 20 years, you start forgetting the numbers.

• 1:19:56Griffin McElroy?

  Way less than that, dude. Way, way, way, way.

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

  We're old.

• 1:20:00Griffin McElroy?

  Jason, where can people find your stuff? Obviously, there's the excellent Triple Click.

• 1:20:05Speaker 03

  Triple Click, people should come to Triple Click. I'm a YouTuber now, so people should come to my... I don't know if I'm actually gonna be a YouTuber.

• 1:20:11Russ Frushtick?

  Are you doing Counter-Strike box openings on YouTube?

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  I should. I should unbox Lego sets.

• 1:20:18Griffin McElroy?

  Jason hates sort of the AAA state of the AAA industry, but fucking loves loot boxes.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 1:20:24Griffin McElroy?

  You cannot get enough of these.

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  I can't get enough of them. I'm gonna unbox Lego sets, but it's only my daughter's Lego sets, so it's like Lego friends.

• 1:20:31Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, bars.

• 1:20:32Speaker 03

  Here, I'm checking out the Heart Lake Hospital today and...

• 1:20:36Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, man. Henry and I built that Ganon Final Battle Ocarina of Time Zelda Lego set this past weekend. That's fucking cool.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  Is it? I was not impressed by that. I like the Deku Tree.

• 1:20:46Griffin McElroy?

  The Deku Tree rules.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Which I see in your background, but I do not like... Actually, I'm very tempted by the Minas Tirith Lego set.

• 1:20:54Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. $650.

• 1:20:57Griffin McElroy?

  That's the... I would have to hide it.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Griffin McElroy?

  I don't think I could... I don't think Rachel could... I don't think I could tell her I spent $600 on a giant.

• 1:21:04Russ Frushtick?

  No, there's no coming back from that.

• 1:21:06Griffin McElroy?

  There is no. Jason, thank you so much for joining us. This is a great week to have you on, because there was a lot of stuff happening, a lot of...

• 1:21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, lots of fun stuff to talk about. Yeah, people can find me Triple Click is where you should find me, but also Bloomberg News. I mean, I'm sure you'd notify me there or just on my... If you haven't seen my articles, you've seen YouTubers reading them out loud, so...

• 1:21:27Griffin McElroy?

  Goddamn, that's like the coolest sort of fucking UFC pre-fight flex. You know me. They won't... They can't keep my name out of their mouths.

• 1:21:38Griffin McElroy?

  So, if you're a fan of The Besties, did you know that there's a lot more waiting for you on Patreon? If you go to patreon.com/thebesties. It sounds like I'm talking to you, Jason. I'm actually pivoted now to talking to the... If you wanted to join our Patreon, Jason, you're more than welcome to.

• 1:21:52Speaker 03

  I would love to. I'll sign up right now if I can afford it after buying Minas Tirith Lego set.

• 1:21:56Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, we have monthly Bracket Battle episodes. We have episodes of The Resties that Chris and Russ talk about even more games.

• 1:22:02Russ Frushtick?

  As a matter of fact, so we have a Resties up already, and next week, we have a very special Bracket Battles episode featuring the one and only Ron Funchess. So

• 1:22:12Griffin McElroy?

  Such a fun one, unhinged this episode.

• 1:22:14Russ Frushtick?

  It is a really fun one, so stay tuned for that. I do have a couple subscribers I wanted to shout out. We have Hank K., we have Thumpus, we have Nilo S., and we have Daniel R. Thank you for being members over at the Patreon, patreon.com/thebesties. We love you all.

• 1:22:30Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, next week, 007 First Light. If I'm not mistaken.

• 1:22:34Russ Frushtick?

  That is correct.

• 1:22:35Griffin McElroy?

  So join us again for the Besties next week as we dive into Bond's latest caper. And join us, you know what, while you're at it, every week here on the Besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games?