A Spoiler-Free Big Walk Bonanza

Big Walk is the game everyone wanted during the pandemic. Not-so-coincidentally, that’s when the project began development. The multiplayer open-world adventure is developer House House’s follow-up to Untitled Goose Game. But where Goose Game hinged on you pestering NPCs to solve puzzles, Big Walk tasks you with pestering and supporting your friends. Or to put it succinctly: Big Walk is a game about communication. Though, as we explain, it’s an experience that requires some careful scheduling.

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

• 0:00Griffin McElroy?

  Let me hit you guys with this. Let me know what you think about it. Okay? Okay. So now you're gonna take a big walk on to solving puzzles with your friends. It's like that struck, like you can do a lot with that structure.

• 0:14Russ Frushtick?

  Was that Billy? Did Billy join us?

• 0:16Griffin McElroy?

  You're gonna take a big walk right now where the fun will never end. You know, I dropped into sort of a minor key there, but it's just, it, it works so good.

• 0:27Russ Frushtick?

  And it's fitting. It, it is fitting because after all the DUIs, he did take a lot of big walks.

• 0:33Griffin McElroy?

  I can only take a big walk, can't I? Cause I crashed into a house.

• 0:41Chris Plante?

  Listen, if somebody's had a car crash into his house, I'm a little sensitive to this opening.

• 0:46Griffin McElroy?

  It must be tough for you to even hear this Billy Joel reference. I apologize.

• 0:51Russ Frushtick?

  Was it the pianoman that did it?

• 0:53Griffin McElroy?

  Was it? You never said you were.

• 0:55Chris Plante?

  Every time I'm in an Italian restaurant, I start having flashbacks.

• 0:59Griffin McElroy?

  Every time I ask you about this, you get so cagey. When that car smash a crash right through your house, like the Kool-Aid man, I was like, was it him? And you were like, I'll never know.

• 1:09Chris Plante?

  Listen, the NDAs keeping me afloat right now, baby.

• 1:13Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. Don't you go and call it friend slop. It's not. It's a fun that never ends. Rachel must be really confused what I'm doing over here.

• 1:23Russ Frushtick?

  She loves it. She loves it.

• 1:43Griffin McElroy?

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

• 1:46Chris Plante?

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

• 1:50Russ Frushtick?

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

• 1:54Griffin McElroy?

  Welcome to the besties where we talk about the latest and greatest in home interactive entertainment. It's a game of the year club. And just by listening, you've become a member of it. This week, we are going to be discussing a game called Big Walk. It's a, it's a tough one, I think, to sell, but I think if you're this, a certain type of gamer who likes to play games with a certain group of buddies, it's going to be a real special time. Chris, what is Big Walk?

• 2:20Chris Plante?

  Big Walk is the new game from the developer House House, who you probably know as the creators of Untitled Goose Game. You might be thinking, that was a long time ago. What have they been doing ever since then? Well, they've been making this game basically beginning during the pandemic and leading till now. I mentioned the pandemic, not because I want to, but because this might be the most pandemic video game ever made.

• 2:45Griffin McElroy?

  It's a pandemic wet dream. It's the dream we all had of communicating and hanging out with our friends during the pandemic. Let's take a break and then get into it, uh, cause it's, it's going to be interesting to discuss, I think.

• 2:58Russ Frushtick?

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• 3:40Russ Frushtick?

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• 3:50Chris Plante?

  Really quick, before we get into this discussion, I just want to let you know, we are not going to be talking about spoilers for any of the puzzles or any of that stuff in Big Walk. This is more of a top level conversation. There is still a ton that we're going to talk about.

• 4:02Russ Frushtick?

  Let's tackle the, the top of the line question, because I do think we sort of dipped a toe into it. It is not friend slop, even though at, at a glance, it does look like friend slop. So let's explain to people why Big Walk is not friend slop.

• 4:20Griffin McElroy?

  Well, first of all, I think the friend slop sort of, uh, title is like functionally pretty useless. Like I think it just literally, I think it means like usually somewhat lower budget, lower fidelity, like indie games that are multiplayer and silly.

• 4:39Russ Frushtick?

  Yes.

• 4:40Griffin McElroy?

  Like funny multiplayer games, usually about overcoming some sort of tremendous obstacle together against great odds. I feel like those are the sort of hallmark things.

• 4:50Russ Frushtick?

  They associate themselves with like some jankiness and also some like preposterously difficult platforming stuff. It's usually in that, but you're right. It is a little bit tricky to like narrow it down.

• 5:02Chris Plante?

  I will also say spiritually or philosophically, friend slop games are about communication. And that is where the overlap with this exists.

• 5:09Griffin McElroy?

  Sure.

• 5:09Chris Plante?

  Friend slop games are games that are taking a lot of the fun from your friends. Not necessarily from the design of the game, but from the fact that like they're giving you a space, a playground to hang out in with your friends and have a chat without a whole lot of pressure to do much else.

• 5:27Griffin McElroy?

  Why it is functional uses is it is technically an umbrella that covers, uh, repo and peak. And I think Metachamillion people have been calling it. And like, those games could not be more different, I think. Like they are really doing very different stuff. So I don't think it, it works. I also don't think this game fits into the title like that, that sort of, uh, uh, I don't know, that, that sort of milieu at all. Uh, as evidenced by the fact that this may be the way that I, the shorthand I use that is probably not useful for most people. But like, I think Big Walk would be a bad streaming game because it is not like, it is not funny sort of at face value.

• 6:10Griffin McElroy?

  And it requires a level of kind of like cerebral commitment, maybe that, uh, some of the other titles that we've discussed so far, uh, do not. That's not to say it's a bad game.

• 6:19Russ Frushtick?

  I disagree.

• 6:20Griffin McElroy?

  Just that it's, it's not silly, I think, on its face.

• 6:23Russ Frushtick?

  I think it, it has the potential to be very silly, but in subtle ways. But before we dive into that, here's, I'm going to just give like a quick rundown of like what you're actually doing in this game. You are like a bird person. It's a first person game and you are joined by other bird people. It requires at least two people to play online. Uh, you can't play it solo. I mean, you can, but you can't accomplish any of the tasks solo. And what you're doing with two or more people is you're running around a big, open world, solving puzzles. And these puzzles can be a variety of different things. Some of them are just as simple as throw this ball in a hoop a bunch of times until you get a prize.

• 7:03Russ Frushtick?

  Some of them are more complicated, like, like, for example, they have puzzles where you have to sort of hot potato a ticking clock time bomb thing from one place of the map to another place of the map. And the only way to do that is with like coordination and planning. So there's a wide range of those things, but the big key here, and the design really lies into this is that sound, specifically your voice chat is proximity based. And most of the puzzles require using that in some interesting way. Because for example, if you're standing behind a wall, people on the other side of the wall will not be able to hear you speaking in the game.

• 7:42Griffin McElroy?

  Right. It is a, it's a game about communication, not just voice communication. There is text chat based, uh, stuff in the game. There is also basically semaphore, like you can control your little bird guy's arms, making him go straight out to the side or kind of up in the air and using that, you could kind of gesture in a way that, you know, sometimes if you're solving a puzzle where you are half a mile away and a person is looking at you for prompts through a telescope, you have to get pretty creative about like how you are communicating information back to them to solve the puzzles in the game. Uh, and, and it's just, I mean, they really take that idea

• 8:22Griffin McElroy?

  and, and they explore it in like a billion different ways. It's really very, it's so clever. How much it uses this like somewhat limited set of, of kind of ideas and mechanics. It really explores them all the way.

• 8:38Chris Plante?

  You will find tools throughout the game and most, if not all of them are to make communication easier. So you will have walkie talkies, which can help if you're trying to chat between long distances. You'll have a laser pointer. So you can show people exactly what you're trying to look at. You can have a flare gun. So if you get lost, you can shoot it up into the air. And that, the, the getting lost to me, I think is my absolute favorite part of this game.

• 9:07Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Chris Plante?

  The fact that you can be playing a game with friends where you can fall off a mountain, or you can, without just looking, turn left when they turned right. And if you get a little bit away from people.

• 9:22Griffin McElroy?

  It's so easy to get separated. Yeah.

• 9:24Chris Plante?

  You can get very, very, very lost. And then suddenly you have to make a decision, which is, do I think I know where they, they went? Should I go that direction? Are they probably trying to do the same to me, which is gonna get us to get even more confused? Should I start hiking to the nearest kind of like camp where I can fire up a flare and give them an idea of where I am? And that silence that you have, where you're playing a multiplayer game, but you are suddenly alone, is such a unique feeling.

• 9:56Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Chris Plante?

  Married to the fact that you can find yourself yelling in your room, hoping that somebody will hear you.

• 10:02Griffin McElroy?

  I, and man, it, it's fucking funny. Every, that, I, I, I shouldn't make it sound like this game is not silly, because you, you are right. It is silly in subtler ways, because there is nothing funnier to me than playing this game online with someone, chatting it up. You get a little bit separated, and then you can't find them for 10 minutes. And then you see a flare go up on the other side of the island.

• 10:24Russ Frushtick?

  Moment that Griffin and I had, because Griffin and I played a little bit. And we were, we were doing this basketball challenge, which again, you, you stumble on relatively early. And the objective of the basketball challenge is to throw this bouncy ball into the hoop pretty straightforward, but you have to do it like 15 times. And so I started doing it, but we didn't have a second ball, and Griffin wanted to try as well. So he ran off to get a second ball, and while he was.

• 10:46Griffin McElroy?

  Notice that Russ didn't share the ball. I think that's important.

• 10:49Chris Plante?

  That is.

• 10:50Russ Frushtick?

  I, I have always been more of a Reggie Miller type, I will be honest. So I'm, so while he's gone, I start getting very good at scoring baskets and actually end up finishing the puzzle. And so I'm waiting there for about 30 seconds, and he's nowhere in sight, and I'm calling his name, calling his name, and I'm like, oh, well, this is boring. So I'm gonna go deposit the gourd. You, gourds are basically keys in this game. I'm gonna go deposit the gourd in the tower that's nearby where I need to drop it off. And he'll figure it out. And so I go and leave, and then I guess Griffin probably showed up sometime later, realized I was completely gone. And then I guess you heard me on the walkie talkie.

• 11:35Griffin McElroy?

  I heard you on the walkie talkie much later. Yeah. I mean, we got separated a few times. Here's the thing that's interesting about Big Walk, that I really didn't like at first, but I've come to kind of appreciate as part of like what it is doing. When night falls, as it does, I don't know how long the day cycle is, but it happens often. You can't see shit, man. So like, a bunch of the different items that you have, that you are finding, that are basically tools to, to aid in communication, like there's a flashlight, there's like night vision type goggles, there's these, uh, these sort of spherical lanterns you're finding all, all over the place that, you know, you can pick up and carry around with you.

• 12:15Griffin McElroy?

  But we were looking for some sort of, uh, thing to help with a puzzle on a beach, like a craggy beach. And it was night, and Russ was like, this sucks, I'm gonna go get a light. And I was like, no doubt, but he was already gone. And then it, we, we really went a long time without seeing each other until a flare went up. And then it was like, well shit, man, do I keep stumbling around in the dark trying to find the solution to this puzzle we were already working on, or do I backtrack all the way back there to find them? This is, this is why I think this game is a tough sell. I think, I think most people hear the things we're talking about. You get separated from your friends while playing an online multiplayer game with them, and you don't see them for a while, and you're alone. Or, oh yeah, you gotta backtrack because you got separated, and then you gotta, that sounds bad. Like, that sounds like not fun stuff.

• 12:59Griffin McElroy?

  But the game real, I don't know, man, like it really cultivates this feeling of like, when you're with your friends and you're with them, actually like, uh, you know, your characters are physically close enough to be communicating with each other. It makes you really treasure that, because you know, like, there's a version of this where we get split up, and now we have to spend some time doing this before we can, you know, go find the next puzzle or whatever.

• 13:23Chris Plante?

  I, I think this is also the COVID of it all. So, you know, during COVID, everybody's playing different online games that are supposed to give you that sense of being with other people and being outside of your house, right? And what a game gets when it allows you to have, make a mistake, to not be close to your friends? That's how it feels to be in the real world. It feels like a, a being out on an actual big hike versus all of the other games that are, again, whether you like friends swap as a term or not, are in that category. They are meant to feel like hanging out on Discord. They're not meant to feel like hanging out in an actual physical space.

• 14:08Chris Plante?

  And I think that this is chasing that. And in doing that, it also ends up revealing a lot of things about you and your friends that you wouldn't get from those games. I am not surprised that this reveals that Russ Frushtick is a little brother who maybe didn't have the right to the controller all the time as a child, and now is holding tightly onto the ball, and needs to score all the points. I'm also not surprised to take the shot at myself, that I am an only child who needs attention, and will run and grab the flare gun and intentionally get lost, and then be confused why people aren't following me. The, these are, it is a great personality test of a video game.

• 14:47Russ Frushtick?

  I also want, I want to call attention to, to maybe my favorite feature of the game, which is, unlike a lot of the games that we played during COVID, Animal Crossing being probably the most memorable. Uh, when you're playing multiplayer in Animal Crossing, it's like a real production to get anyone to your island, and then you see them fly in, and it's, but it's a huge hassle to get anyone to your island. In Big Walk, there is the option to just jump into any friends game. Now, you can lock them if you want to, but if anyone is playing, and the game is unlocked, and they're on your Steam friends list, you can just pop right into their game. And I tried it with our good friends over at the TripleClick Podcast, Matty, Kirk, and Jason.

• 15:29Russ Frushtick?

  And they knew that maybe I was coming by, but I did not offer specifics, and I did not message them on Discord. I just showed up in their game. And I entered, and I set off a flare sort of at the near entrance, and I didn't see anyone. And once again, I got kind of bored, so I climbed to the top of the tower that's nearby, which is a bit of a hike, climbed to the very top, picked up some binoculars, and looked down back at the entrance to where I set the flare off, and I could see all three of them talking and trying to figure out where the fuck I was. And then they looked up at me, because I set off a flare at the top of the tower, and then trudgingly, begrudgingly, they like slowly make their way back up to the tower, and then we all

• 16:12Russ Frushtick?

  meet up, and then we go on adventures together and solve puzzles and have a good old time. So like.

• 16:17Griffin McElroy?

  So you sabotaged a rival gaming podcast, is what you're saying.

• 16:20Russ Frushtick?

  I, I added to it. In fact, we were able to solve puzzles easier, because the game was designed, when they made the server, they designed it for three people, so then they had a four. And that was great.

• 16:31Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Chris Plante?

  Yeah. This reveals a lot about who we are as people, because, Russ, I did the very same thing to, uh, friends from Polygon, Ross Miller, Chelsea Stark, and a large group of people that they were playing with. I didn't tell them that I was coming into the game. I didn't know most of them. I got in, I immediately went to the top of the tower where I could get onto the walkie talkie speaker system, and just mumbled, I'm coming to kill you. I'm gonna find you, and I'm gonna hurt you.

• 17:02Griffin McElroy?

  The wide, the wideband ham radio is intoxicating. It's a level of power that should be, but it's OP balance. We need a balance patch for the wideband ham radio.

• 17:12Chris Plante?

  Also, most people don't know that you can get into other games, is what I discovered after this. So I proceeded to, in the night, you can see them actually easier, because they're using lights. So I hunted them across the map for about 10 to 15 minutes, found one who had been broken away with a gourd, stole their gourd, went to the edge of a cliff and told them if they stepped any closer, I would throw it.

• 17:36Griffin McElroy?

  That's sabotage. That's the shit I like right there.

• 17:39Chris Plante?

  And you know what I did? Jumped off the edge.

• 17:40Griffin McElroy?

  The besties aren't gonna, we're not gonna get ahead if we don't take out the rival.

• 17:44Russ Frushtick?

  That's right.

• 17:44Chris Plante?

  You're damn right. You are damn right. And, and, and you know what? I gave them content. I gave them a story to tell.

• 17:51Griffin McElroy?

  Sweet content. Yeah, that's good stuff. The greatest gift.

• 17:53Chris Plante?

  I agree with what Griffin said up top. I don't know if this game is a great streaming game, but it is a game that gives you funny stories to tell.

• 18:01Griffin McElroy?

  Absolutely, it is. I think the.

• 18:05Griffin McElroy?

  The best thing about this game is what I think limits it in the kind of grand scheme of things, right? You talk about, if I wanted to go play Repo or Metachamillion or Peak or whatever, I can do that and get in the game with like a pickup group in no time. This game, like whoever's hosting the island has the save file for the island. I feel weird about like starting over or bringing in someone other than the people I've already played with on my island where me and another group of people have already solved half the puzzles. It kind of, I think, works. This game has a really specific use case for where it works best. And when you get that use case right, like it's amazing.

• 18:48Griffin McElroy?

  Playing it with friends over, I would say, longer kind of sessions usually is a better fit. Playing with the same group of people, you know, throughout, almost like a D and D campaign or something like that where you're not tossing new people in there every night. You can do that, but you're gonna be starting over, you're gonna be hopping into someone else's island, maybe they've done a thing you've already done or, you know, whatever. It gets a little bit complicated. So like, if you can get that situation sort of locked in, if you have friends you play multiplayer games with and you have routine gaming nights or whatever that you can set up with those people, and you don't use Discord, you don't use Steam Chat, you don't use any form, you can't play it locally, right? Like, I mean, I guess you can, right?

• 19:31Griffin McElroy?

  There's, it's actually pretty easy to do like cross-play. If I wanted to get Henry to download Big Walk on his Switch 2 and I had it on my Steam Deck or whatever, we could play it locally. I just give him the code for the game that I'm in and he can hop in and like, that shit works so easy. But if we're sitting in the same room together, we can just talk. And so like, that kind of defeats a lot of the limitations that are sort of core to the design of the game. So it's really like playing online games with set groups of friends at sort of set times. If you can do it like that and split the uprights, I think it's one of the most fun kind of multiplayer puzzle games I've ever played. Outside of that, I don't know, man. I think it's, I-

• 20:10Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, outside of that, I think the avenue is doing what Planar Eye has done, which is, I'm fine like cameoing in someone else's game for a little bit and having a good time with people. And I like intentionally don't give solutions to puzzles I've done before and things like that. So like, I think there is that avenue, but you're right, it's not, there's a reason why this game is-

• 20:31Griffin McElroy?

  It's not as fun because you're not discovering, you're not discovering those puzzles and the mechanics and stuff at the same time if one of you has kind of like already done it. They're still hard if you haven't, if you know how to do them, they still require you to do, like the solutions are random, I think, sometimes. But like, I don't know, you're not having to figure out how to do it with the other people.

• 20:50Russ Frushtick?

  I guess as a platform for having fun with your friends, it's a pretty fucking good one, even though I agree with you, the core of the gameplay is finishing the puzzles and like figuring out the best way to complete them. I still think like what they've done with sound and like, just the idea that you have so much going on with the way sound projects for people, like there's a moment where you can go into like a giant cone and everyone's in the cone and you'll actually hear the reverb of your voices bouncing off the inside of the cone. Like shit like that is very cool. And there's even like jokes tied to the sound where, so Matty, Kirk and I were playing and we were at a very high height and we need to get down to a lower height and we

• 21:31Russ Frushtick?

  all agreed that we're gonna jump down, but Kirk, I guess, stayed up at the top. And we all jumped down, Jason was holding a walkie-talkie. The walkie-talkie, when he lands on the ground, goes fucking flying and slowly slides at my feet and out of the walkie-talkie, I hear Kirk's voice saying, "Where are you guys? Are you guys okay?" And that is fucking the funniest fucking thing I've seen in forever.

• 21:56Griffin McElroy?

  It's really funny. It's super duper funny. I think the main selling point, like this main strength of the game is that you and your friends have to invent entire forms of communication, entire like lexicons. There's no writing really that the game provides outside of tutorials. So like, when you find your first gourd, it's not like, this is a gourd. We call them gourds because that's what Russ told me that it was.

• 22:20Russ Frushtick?

  The shape of a gourd, too.

• 22:21Griffin McElroy?

  But like, it's kind of gourd shape. What do you call the big light balls? When you're far, far, far away from each other and one of you has relayed the answer to the other person, how does that person communicate? Okay, I got the answer, now you can go on to the next thing. Like for Russ and I, it was a three jump sort of, if you saw the character a million miles away going, "Bip, bip, bip," you're like, okay, I could go on to the next. Like you have to invent all of that stuff yourself in that, like, I have not gotten super far into the game, but I have to imagine if you can play the whole thing with the same group of people, you're gonna have a whole like language that you have invented using the game's sort of variety of communication tools. And that's like, I've never seen a game, you know, let alone a multiplayer game really do that before.

• 23:02Chris Plante?

  Yeah. One quick last thing, which is about the friend swap of it all. What's so strange about playing this game now is it feels like the game that should have come first. It feels like the game that discovers a lot of the things about friend swap and then we get a lot of games that are like the rougher around the edges-

• 23:22Russ Frushtick?

  Lower effort.

• 23:23Chris Plante?

  -that are emphasizing the freedom to play however you want, whenever you want. And it's, it's strange to get this after it. And I'm curious how much this game may have influenced that movement, just because it has been advertised publicly for a very long time and people were drawing comparisons between this game and things like Peak when Peak came out, but-

• 23:47Russ Frushtick?

  Don't you think it was this more simple approach would have come first? Doesn't that make sense?

• 23:53Griffin McElroy?

  I don't know what you would qualify as the more simple approach, right? Like, because this game doesn't have the mechanics of Peak. Like Peak is a very mechanical game, you're having to manage all these different things-

• 24:03Russ Frushtick?

  I wouldn't even consider Peak.

• 24:04Griffin McElroy?

  You know, run on a stick.

• 24:05Russ Frushtick?

  Friend swap per se. I'm more thinking about the games like, those games where like each of you has an oar and you're trying to hold the oar as you go up a fucking cliff. Like that's when I just, that's what I describe as friend swap.

• 24:17Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I don't know, but whether it's like chicken or an egg, here's what I'd say, is I really hope that this developer, House House, follows this up with something that is a bit more free-form and less interested in the puzzles. Because as much as I loved the puzzles, just hanging out in this space is pretty great. And having something that has the same communication mechanics, but maybe is proc gen, procedural generation of like spaces to explore.

• 24:51Russ Frushtick?

  Where you're given like mini quests and things like that.

• 24:53Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I just like this space and I like hanging out in it. I find it just very beautiful and calming and I hope that we do get something that, to Griffin's point, you have to nail the setup for it. And I'm not quite finished with it, but what I have heard from people who have finished it and tried to play it again, it's like, it's kind of a one and done experience.

• 25:14Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Chris Plante?

  And that's not bad, like that's the type of art that it's set out to be, but it is the experience that it is.

• 25:21Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. I almost wish there was like a no holds barred matchmaking, like rando, rando mode. Because like, I always loved in Destiny 2, doing like raids with pickup groups that I found online before they, you know, for the eight years or whatever before they added matchmaking for raids, where it was like, there's a very specific set of things you have to do here and you have to communicate in this, you know, certain, certain way in order to achieve those things. Like doing that with strangers was often bad, but sometimes like really remarkable, like remarkable moments of sort of human connection. And this game definitely, definitely prioritizes doing that with people you know and friends

• 26:04Griffin McElroy?

  that you know, but I, you know, I'd love to see what it looks like when applied to strangers.

• 26:09Russ Frushtick?

  I think it only works if you know that everyone that you're playing with, for the most part, is at a similar level of knowledge to you. Because what you don't want to have happen is someone to join your game randomly and be like, oh, you've solved this puzzle by throwing this ball, or whatever it is.

• 26:24Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 26:25Russ Frushtick?

  Like that is not the, oh, we need to execute this Destiny raid challenge. Like, and that's why it's a little bit of a one and done thing is because like, you're only gonna have or gain this information once. So-

• 26:36Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 26:37Russ Frushtick?

  I agree, like it's a narrower field of playing, like the number of people that could possibly play this is pretty narrow relatively, but that is why I think it's so special and why it's definitely for sure gonna stick in my head for a very long time. I have a scheduled appointment for the next foreseeable weeks with a group of people, including Chris Plant, and we're gonna, we're gonna see how we do over the course of, I think, a few weeks. So we'll keep checking back in occasionally, but this game is really-

• 27:05Griffin McElroy?

  Thank you for the invite to those, that is awesome.

• 27:07Russ Frushtick?

  I did invite you and you rejected it out of hand. I think you want to spend-

• 27:12Griffin McElroy?

  Just the first time, yeah.

• 27:13Russ Frushtick?

  More time with your family.

• 27:14Griffin McElroy?

  I was busy, but no follow-up.

• 27:15Chris Plante?

  I think you should join, you should, I would love for you to be there.

• 27:18Russ Frushtick?

  We'd love for you to join.

• 27:19Chris Plante?

  I would love for you to be there, Griffin.

• 27:21Griffin McElroy?

  I mean, send me a Google invite, I guess, it's, I didn't realize it was so reg- I'm not gonna play this card, I don't give a shit. No, I do give a shit. I wanna play more of this game because I think a lot of the sort of like games press are talking about it with like goatee heat. And I get like, I think I get why people are feeling that way, because like the couple of sessions I've been able to play with folks I know have been really remarkably fun.

• 27:49Russ Frushtick?

  Have you been able to play with more than like one other person?

• 27:51Griffin McElroy?

  No, I've only played two-player.

• 27:54Russ Frushtick?

  I think it really soars with three or more.

• 27:56Griffin McElroy?

  So like, this is what I'm saying, is I, I could see why people are talking about this game with this level of buzz, because it is doing something so novel and it's doing it so well. At where I'm at in my life and like the timetable with which I play games, and I know people get annoyed when I talk about not having a ton of gaming time on this podcast.

• 28:18Russ Frushtick?

  It's more coordination, like it's-

• 28:19Griffin McElroy?

  But it's coordination, making that work with, like for me, it's usually after everyone else in my house is asleep, like 10:30 at night and then like, I ain't staying up until, I stayed up for three hours to play, to play this. So it's like, it's tough to find- To find that specific window.

• 28:37Chris Plante?

  We'll create some windows with you so we can do a big group sesh.

• 28:42Griffin McElroy?

  I would love a big walk.

• 28:44Russ Frushtick?

  My last thing is, don't cheat. Don't use Discord chat. The entire game breaks if you do that. Like.

• 28:50Griffin McElroy?

  It's not even cheating. Like cheating's not the right. I don't think that's the right.

• 28:53Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, that's how House House refers to it in the FAQ. They call it cheating.

• 28:57Chris Plante?

  But it, but it, but, but yes, but it breaks the experience. It removes that, that loneliness that you feel is fun. Like, I know it's loneliness doesn't sound fun. Trust me, it's fun.

• 29:09Griffin McElroy?

  It's not just fun.

• 29:09Chris Plante?

  Figuring out how to get to each other.

• 29:11Griffin McElroy?

  It's the game. Like, if you can just find each other on Discord and meet up and then do puzzles, like, the puzzles aren't so great objectively that you're gonna be having a great time. Like, the puzzles only work because they are based on communication and, and if you take that away, like, you're just not, if you speedrun the game to the end, you're gonna have a terrible fucking time. Cause you've, you've whittled off all of the, you know, interesting stuff.

• 29:38Russ Frushtick?

  Great game.

• 29:38Griffin McElroy?

  All right.

• 29:39Russ Frushtick?

  Highly recommended.

• 29:39Griffin McElroy?

  That is Big Walk. I'm gonna, I'm gonna probably wanna talk more about it, you know, eventually, once I've, I've had a little bit more time with it. But I, I fully understand why people are so gaga for it, cause it's, it's really a great time. Let's take a brief break and then let's come back and commemorate one of our dear friends, our dear gaming platform friends, who is now old enough to run for president.

• 30:07Russ 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/gameYourWay.

• 30:55Griffin McElroy?

  Did I get that right? It's 35. You have to be 35 to be president, I think, right?

• 30:58Russ Frushtick?

  That sounds right. I think you're right on the year. Yes.

• 31:01Griffin McElroy?

  I think it's 35, and that's, that is how old the Super Nintendo Entertainment System is, as of recently.

• 31:08Chris Plante?

  As of, basically a week from whenever people are listening to this, yes, you will be able to finally celebrate the Super Nintendo. I wanted to bring this up because I wanted to hear both about y'all's favorite games, but also, well, how, when did you get an SNES in your life? Did you even own a Super Nintendo as a kid? Were you having to go to the neighbor's house and just kinda set up camp?

• 31:33Russ Frushtick?

  I, I got one. I did get one. And in my memory, I got one because I finally learned how to ride a two-wheeler.

• 31:43Griffin McElroy?

  Hell, yes, dude. I love that shit.

• 31:46Russ Frushtick?

  That's what did it. My parents were so frustrated. My dad's back was fucked up from having to bend over to hold me on the bike.

• 31:51Griffin McElroy?

  It sucks. I don't know if either of you guys have done that shit. It sucks, teaching a kid to ride a bike. Man, it hurts.

• 31:57Russ Frushtick?

  So I, I guess at a certain point, they just needed leverage, and indeed, that worked very effectively. And it was fucking life-changing. I, it bums me out that these days, and maybe for the rest of time, we will never have the leaps in technology that you saw from the NES to the SNES, or the SNES to the N64. Like, fucking hugely impactful. So obviously, Super Mario World was like the first I played. But I played like F-Zero, and that blew my mind. And like, that, I have very, very fond memories. Whenever I have to like decide on a colorway for one of these like new handhelds that's coming out, I almost always do the like gray SNES colorway, cause it's just so struck in my mind.

• 32:41Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, we got one fairly early on. We were not super duper early adopters of a lot of game hardware. I, I say that, but we also got the N64 like the year it came out, which was no, no easy feat. But I remember having the SNES. The SNES came out when I was four, so, but I, we got it, you know, before I was really old enough to have core memories of that time. But I do remember like being a toddler and playing NES and it not really being anything I really hung with very, very deeply, because NES games are hard, too hard, I would say, for a four-year-old to tackle.

• 33:23Griffin McElroy?

  All of my core sort of foundational gaming memories are all basically on SNES.

• 33:30Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Griffin McElroy?

  Or, you know, Game Boy or whatever, like obviously Pokemon coming out. But Pokemon came out eight years after the SNES, I think.

• 33:37Chris Plante?

  Do you have a game that you're like, oh, that was the first game that I, I knew. I was in love.

• 33:43Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the one I always kinda come back to is Final Fantasy II in the States. Final Fantasy IV came out the same year as the SNES. I wanna say a few months after, in 1991. And I played that game when I was, when I was like four or five years old. And, you know, I would play it with my brothers or my dad, so they could like read to me what, what was, you know, the dialogue or whatever that was on the screen. And eventually I got tired of waiting for them, so I, I really, really cut my teeth reading, like playing Final Fantasy II on the SNES. And I, I mean, that really probably ruined me for the rest of, of time, because I still love that shit so much.

• 34:29Griffin McElroy?

  But I was obsessed with everything Squaresoft put out, and some of the stuff that Enix put out. So like, for, for me, when I think about the SNES, obviously, there's, there's more classics than you can probably remember out of hand. But for me, it's, you know, Chrono Trigger, and Secret of Mana, and Secret of Evermore, and just, just the incredibly strong library of RPGs on, on there.

• 34:52Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I, I would also just call out, as you were talking, the memories that I have, that probably the strongest memories for the SNES is like the beginning of Link to the Past. Cause imagine playing that game and you have no context, and you start, like, maybe you played the original Zelda fine, but it starts in this giant fucking rainstorm, and shit is like bad.

• 35:12Griffin McElroy?

  Scary.

• 35:13Russ Frushtick?

  And it took me like a good half hour to like figure out, oh, I have to go to the castle and go underneath him. Wait a minute, my uncle, is he stabbed to death, or is he just taking a nap? I don't know.

• 35:24Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 35:24Russ Frushtick?

  It gets really fucking intense very early on. So environmentally speaking, like, man, that, that still hits really close to home for me.

• 35:34Griffin McElroy?

  We weren't bringing new video games into the house all willy-nilly. Like, none of us really had money to do that. For us, it was largely like birthdays and Christmas, and that was pretty much it. You would get an influx of, of some new games from Santa Claus or Birthday Santa. And that wasn't a thing in our house. I don't want people to think that Birthday Santa was a real.

• 35:56Russ Frushtick?

  No, that's true.

• 35:58Griffin McElroy?

  It is good.

• 35:58Chris Plante?

  Adding it to the wiki.

• 36:00Griffin McElroy?

  So like, if we wanted a new game in the middle of the year, and we didn't wanna wait, we would have to go to like Babbage's at the mall and trade a bunch of shit in. Usually for not great sort of ROI. But I remember Justin and Travis talking me into trading in a bunch of my like, like Game Boy games, mostly to buy Link to the Past. And they were like, you gotta, you know, it's Zelda. You're gonna love this, this thing. I had no sort of like religion on it. I was very much bullied into it, but it ended up being not the worst trade-off. Cause yeah, I mean, I remember coming home and playing that game and being like, you guys were right. This is, this is groundbreaking.

• 36:36Russ Frushtick?

  Plant, you were a Genesis kid, correct?

• 36:39Chris Plante?

  I was a man of taste, you know, a young, a young man. I had a real taste for the finer things. But I did eventually have a Super Nintendo in the house. It was just later on in its life cycle. My, one of my aunts bought a Super Nintendo at some point, had it for a while, got bored of it, and then it ended up showing up at our home, which was also, let me be clear, very generous of her to do. But we had two TVs in our house. We had like the family TV, which is where the Sega Genesis lived, you know? You had to put that thing on, I mean, at, at least 20 inches, you know? That was a huge TV. And then the, the Super Nintendo lived in the kitchen,

• 37:24Chris Plante?

  which is where I could hang out while my mom was making dinner, or my dad was making dinner, or my mom was a hairstylist. So she did a lot of work in the evenings, cutting people's hair. I just have this very sense memory of her being like, I don't want you running around. I don't want you making a mess. Hang out with me while I get some work done. Stay quiet and play usually NBA Jam on the Super Nintendo, because it is a game that's not going to offend people. And it really was like that Donkey Kong country. And then I, I feel like I didn't become a big RPG person because I didn't have the system early on. I didn't have the Final Fantasies.

• 38:10Chris Plante?

  And it was Earthbound that like kind of was the exception to the rule and really got me into that. I think Earthbound, like, of all the Super Nintendo games, had a Sega Genesis spirit. It was very strange and weird and like, kind of like the awkward kid in school of, of video games. And yeah, and it really stuck with me. But it, it's strange. It is like this.

• 38:39Chris Plante?

  I feel like I was like in a different world when I look back amongst friends our age with like the games that influenced you because to me, the Sega Genesis was the biggest thing in the world. And what I discovered later on in life was like, oh no, everybody's core memories are with Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country and Super Metroid and Link to the Past.

• 39:00Russ Frushtick?

  It's basically like you only went to-

• 39:02Chris Plante?

  Until later.

• 39:03Russ Frushtick?

  It's like you only went to Knott's Berry Farm and everyone else went to Disney.

• 39:07Chris Plante?

  Yes.

• 39:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's basically, yeah. The catalog on the SNES is also pretty much unparalleled. Like, I can think of maybe, maybe the PS1 can kind of hang with it.

• 39:19Russ Frushtick?

  PS2's, PS2's pretty fucking strong.

• 39:21Griffin McElroy?

  PS2's pretty strong. I've been doing this streaming series called Every Game Ever on our, on the McRoy family channel where I'm trying to like make a list of every game I've ever, I've ever played. And the SNES took so long to get through and I ended up, oh, hold on, let me pull it up. I ended up playing, I've played 236 Super Nintendo games.

• 39:39Russ Frushtick?

  Jesus.

• 39:40Griffin McElroy?

  Which is like a fucking lot. But man, we've only talked about two or three of them. Like, I could go to any sort of section of this list and pull up like, hey, Pilot Wings, that game was fucking sick. Mega Man X, like, hell, hell yes.

• 39:56Russ Frushtick?

  And there were 1,700 total Super Nintendo games.

• 40:00Griffin McElroy?

  There were so many of them. And yeah, I mean, maybe Biker Mice from Mars is it, maybe Bill Lamber's Combat Basketball is not the best game in the world.

• 40:11Chris Plante?

  I don't know then. That game was pretty fun.

• 40:13Griffin McElroy?

  What I, I think another reason I really love the SNES is like when we got newer shit, when we got the PlayStation in, what, 97 probably? I didn't, I didn't get to have that in my room. And there was always competition. I remember at one point, me and dad and Travis and Justin were all playing Final Fantasy VII at the same time, on different saves. And so it was like getting time with that was not really doable. But when it came into the house, no one really wanted to play the SNES anymore. So I put that in my room and I could play SNES games like as much as I wanted. I could go back and replay Secret of Mana if I wanted to. And so like, this kind of like retro gaming mindset

• 40:55Griffin McElroy?

  for like a console that was one generation old at that point. I don't know, I felt an ownership of it because I was able to like really hoard it and make it mine because there all of a sudden wasn't very much competition for it.

• 41:06Russ Frushtick?

  And I also think like those games have, because it is the more advanced of that 2D era, those games have aged much better in history.

• 41:15Griffin McElroy?

  Much better.

• 41:15Russ Frushtick?

  Such that like I can't really go back and play a lot of, like maybe three or four NES games I can like really enjoy. But the list of fucking Super Nintendo games is endless of Yoshi's Island and fucking Met, Super Metroid and you just go down the list. So, yeah, no, it's, it's spectacular. I feel so strong about it.

• 41:35Chris Plante?

  Looking back through like a top 50 Super Nintendo games list on, and it is funny, the games that influenced my taste that I wouldn't even think about if I was trying to make a list, which is The Legend of the Mystical Ninja.

• 41:50Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:51Chris Plante?

  Or Zombies Ate My Neighbors, right? These games that were, The Lost Vikings, which was made by Blizzard, right?

• 41:59Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 41:59Chris Plante?

  It like, games that you would maybe get as a rental on a lark, Sunset Riders, because they had great, uh, great box art. And like you were at Blockbuster or a local rental shop and I don't know, it seems like a good way to kill a weekend. And then you end up kind of chasing that, that, that flavor for the rest of your video game life.

• 42:24Griffin McElroy?

  Right, yeah. We don't play games the same, like we don't acquire games the same way. Renting games was another huge vector for us to like get stuff. And I remember renting, I remember renting the Kirby Superstar Collection a few times because I would play it and be like, I beat it. And they'd be like, actually, you just unlocked this campaign. And I'm like, oh, god damn it. Uh, this is not me kind of like waxing sort of poetic about a long lost, bygone era. Cause like, this is the generation that I feel like I come back to the most when I'm playing on a, on a, you know, a gaming console. And it's not like they, they haven't, they don't make them like they used to. But there's some, there's truly

• 43:08Griffin McElroy?

  some classics on here that have, I don't think really ever been surpassed. Like, and, and that may have less to do with the hardware or with Nintendo like as a company as much as it's just like, I don't know, when certain artistic creative minds were all, I'm thinking about like Chrono Trigger, right? Chrono Trigger is fucking crazy to me. It's really, really insane to me that like, let's get the, let's get the designer of, you know, Dragon Ball and let's get the creator of Dragon Quest and, you know, the, the composer of Final Fantasy. I forget exactly who all, but it's like this super group comes together to make this game

• 43:49Griffin McElroy?

  that has never been touched. Like Chrono Cross I love, but not even close. And, and there's so many examples of that happening on the SNES because I think it's just a time where people, people who were making games felt like anything was possible because of the escalation from the NES. Because like all of these ideas they'd had in the 80s were all of a sudden achievable on this hardware.

• 44:11Russ Frushtick?

  And teams were smaller. Like the, the single few like people that like really made an impact on Final Fantasy, for example, could go over and make a huge impact on another title because they were 10% of the entire fucking team. Whereas now you need fucking 600 people to make the game. So.

• 44:28Griffin McElroy?

  Earthbound had between 15 to 20 primary staff members making it. It's fucking crazy. That's really, really, really outrageous.

• 44:35Russ Frushtick?

  Super Metroid was 15 made over the course of two years, something like that. So, yeah, it's.

• 44:40Griffin McElroy?

  And it's like that, the, the industry is not even built for that no more.

• 44:44Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, it is on the indie side. You look at.

• 44:46Griffin McElroy?

  On the indie side, yeah, for sure. I'm talking about the triple, sort of, you know, the Nintendo side of things.

• 44:50Chris Plante?

  And, and, and there is a slight difference there because yes, indie studios can and do make games like this. What was so unusual though is you had games made like Earthbound or Chrono Trigger or Super Metroid by people who had tons of experience working together, who knew the actual hardware, like sole hardware that they were designing for, maybe even knew the creators of that hardware and like how to make it work to maximum effect. There are things that you could get if you were working internal at Nintendo that are just different than the experiences that indie developer is having today. And the, the sheer amount

• 45:35Chris Plante?

  of like sweat and resources that would go into these games is bonkers. So, yeah, I, I agree. It is, it reminds me in some ways, and again, it's also not a perfect comparison, but of 2D animation and Disney. And like the technology moves on and it focuses on something new and you can still go back and look at something from 30 years ago and there's nothing quite like it happening today. Even if animation is still happening today.

• 46:00Russ Frushtick?

  Cool World, I'm telling you.

• 46:02Chris Plante?

  Cool World. You're right. We, we really happen to be in turn this into a Cool World recap podcast and.

• 46:09Griffin McElroy?

  I, I went back because that was one of the games I played on Super Nintendo. It was the coolest that I've ever played. And it's one of the worst, it's one of the worst games I've ever played for sure. But I was watching like gameplay footage of it on, on every game ever. And I was like, let's, I wonder how it ends. And it jumps to the end and it's like you just walk through a door and then it shows a word real big on the screen that says, "Cool graduation."

• 46:33Griffin McElroy?

  And then it just like cuts back to the title screen.

• 46:35Russ Frushtick?

  I love it.

• 46:35Griffin McElroy?

  You know what? I take it back. They don't make them like they used to.

• 46:39Russ Frushtick?

  Fucking cool. Okay, let's jump into honorable mentions.

• 46:44Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, I've been playing a lot of Fields of Mysterio, which I believe we're going to be discussing as our main sort of topic next week. So I, I won't go.

• 46:52Russ Frushtick?

  I'm pretty excited. I, I haven't played it since early access and I fucking loved it in early access. And I was like, oh, I better, as I often do with early access stuff, I'm like, I'm enjoying this too much. I better hold off.

• 47:06Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah. So I, that's, I think was the wise, wise decision to, to do. It has been my experience that a lot of the stuff that has been added is not so apparent at the top. So I think, you know, if you did spend time with it before our discussion next week, you should try and put a little bit of, a little bit of progress into it. I think I'm almost done with summer of the, of the first year. And like I can see where some of the new stuff is, but I, I feel like most of it is like how they completed the story of the town or how they, you know, added.

• 47:37Russ Frushtick?

  You can marry the dog, that kind of thing.

• 47:39Griffin McElroy?

  You marry the dog, whatever. But yeah, I, I mean, it's fantastic. If you like Stardew, it's fucking fantastic. We'll get more granular than that, I imagine. Yeah, a little bit. Been playing a little bit more EQ Legends. I was, I was traveling recently and I didn't have a ton of time to spend playing stuff. I did play Mechachameleon.

• 48:03Russ Frushtick?

  Oh.

• 48:05Griffin McElroy?

  I streamed that the other day, just playing with like viewers. And Rachel joined me like just kind of like sitting next to me and helping me find people who were hiding and helping me like sort of find, you know, clever hiding spots. I get it, man. That game, that game does its thing really, really good. That game does its thing really, really well. If you're not familiar, have you, did you guys do like a rest?

• 48:31Russ Frushtick?

  No, we haven't.

• 48:32Griffin McElroy?

  It feels like we've talked about it.

• 48:33Russ Frushtick?

  No, we, we haven't. You can give a quick primer on like how it works.

• 48:36Griffin McElroy?

  All right. So you're a little blob guy and you're running around and it's hide and seek. And there's, you know, a team of people who are looking and they have little paint blasters where if they see someone, they can paint blast them. And then they're either eliminated or they join the sort of hunting team, if that's sort of the setting that you have enabled. Everyone else is hiding. You're a little blob guy or a little Minecraft blocky guy, but you're just kind of a blank, kind of gray canvas. And you run around different maps and you find a place to hide. You can pose your body in different positions. You can do like arms straight up in the air. You can curl up in a little ball. You can spread your body out in an X or whatever. And you can scale walls or other objects to like reach different points in the map. And then at a certain point, you lock yourself

• 49:20Griffin McElroy?

  sort of in place and you paint, you paint yourself using, you know, somewhat, if you've used a.

• 49:29Griffin McElroy?

  Photoshop or an MS Paint even sort of canvas like will be very, very familiar to you. And then it's up to you to kind of make yourself blend in with the environment. You can do some clever stuff like you can, once you've painted yourself, you can leave a stamp of yourself. So you can basically clone yourself. You can do that to build more kind of complex shapes using like multiple different versions of your body and different poses. But you know, you only have a certain amount of time to hide and paint. And then you go out and seek and it's, it's, it's just like, how much is, this game's like five bucks or something, right? Like it's, it is dirt cheap. And six bucks, sorry. It's a huge difference. It's, it's just, it delivers like this moment of like, uh, realizing someone was hiding in plain sight

• 50:14Griffin McElroy?

  or hiding in plain sight and having people look at you. The clever thing it does is when you are hiding, you only get points when you are in someone's field of view. So like, if you're hiding and you go and you tuck under like a coffee table and paint yourself pitch black, like no one's probably gonna find you. That's like a pretty good hiding spot, but you're not gonna get any points because you have to be in someone's field of view. And I don't know, seeing, I've seen so many clips of people with actual genuine artistic backgrounds. You know, perfectly recreating a like complicated tartan plaid pattern. And then just like laying down on a rug in the middle of the room and no one's seeing them.

• 50:54Griffin McElroy?

  Or like someone painting their arms and legs with like, um, luminescent sort of paint. Cause you can change the values to be somewhat luminous or, or metallic and shiny. And then like climbing up on the ceiling and turning into an X and just rotating. And people running around like, oh, that's a ceiling fan, keep on going. Like there's, it's, there's just a lot of ways that you can be super duper duper duper clever with the tools that you are, are given. I made myself into a cow because I was in like a farm level. So I had like one stamp of me on all fours and then another stamp of me kind of in front of that. And then one stamp of me going for, and I just painted it all sort of black and white spotted. And it looked fucking terrible, but no one clocked it because like, no one was really looking for, for that.

• 51:39Griffin McElroy?

  Like there's so many ways that you can kind of outsmart people. It's just a very, very clever game that is really easy to pick up and play. And, uh, I don't know, man, six bucks, that's, that's truly, truly wild.

• 51:52Russ Frushtick?

  I hope this person is doing well with their absurd influx of revenue. That's, that is a life-changing situation.

• 52:01Griffin McElroy?

  A life-changing amount of money, I imagine. It was also really fun playing it with like Rachel as, as co-pilot, cause she doesn't play like a ton of games and, uh, doesn't love sort of like controlling kind of, uh, first, first person games like this. Uh, and, but having just another set of eyes, it really gives you like a, an advantage, I would say.

• 52:20Chris Plante?

  Do you have a Halloween costume picked out yet? Or you think you're gonna go with this cow? Because I'm thinking that this cow look could be real fun.

• 52:28Griffin McElroy?

  The cow had six legs, the cow didn't look great, the cow looked fucked up. I showed my, I showed Henry the stream, cause, uh, I was like, you gotta see this cow. And he, he thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever seen. But again, like no one was looking for the cow, no, you, you just ran by this six-legged mutant cow thinking like, oh, that's, that's weird.

• 52:46Russ Frushtick?

  I've been playing Blueprints, it's a game about a house. You go through pictures.

• 52:52Griffin McElroy?

  I'm, I have.

• 52:53Chris Plante?

  Is there anything left?

• 52:54Russ Frushtick?

  Apparently at every turn, it just, I mean, it does feel like the, the tunnel is narrowing to the point where, and I've talked to Griffin and Jason. And I've gotten a couple of nudges here and there as, as the tunnel narrows. And I will admit, as the tunnel narrows, not as much fun stuff happens per run, although there are still fun moments here and there.

• 53:21Russ Frushtick?

  Mostly at this point, I'm just trying to get to the end of it. And for people that are familiar with it, I am dealing with some crates, shall we say? So, uh, that's, uh, not my favorite part of the game, but the overall package is so fucking stunning. And I think about it regularly and I take notes in the middle of the, I won't play without my wife. We play together, but I will take our notebook that we've been working in and like jot down notes and look at screenshots we've taken throughout the day as like things occur to me. And then waiting till the end of the day to like actually act on those theories and have it play out is like fucking awesome.

• 53:58Griffin McElroy?

  Sorry, who do you play with?

• 54:00Russ Frushtick?

  My wife.

• 54:01Chris Plante?

  Sorry, one more time?

• 54:02Griffin McElroy?

  He wants it, he wants you to do it the right way.

• 54:05Russ Frushtick?

  Mow off.

• 54:07Chris Plante?

  Okay, there we go, thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 54:09Griffin McElroy?

  You, you have reached a point in the game that I think became much more kind of collaborative for, for me pre-release, like with the other kind of game, game critic people, uh, who are playing it at the same time. Cause some of those late game puzzles are, are bomb.

• 54:24Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 54:24Griffin McElroy?

  Like I, I would not have found them without nudges and, and sort of.

• 54:28Russ Frushtick?

  And yeah, props to Jason because he knows how spoiler-averse I'd been and I'm really been, I was a stickler for a very long time. And once I started asking, props to him, because he is still only giving me nudges to be like, hey, maybe check out this room. And won't give me more than that, or maybe look through your notes on this topic. Uh, and that's enough to at least make me feel like I'm putting things together myself, which I think does really help. But I think you're right, the best way to probably experience it is probably in a group larger than just two people that are playing together. Uh, if you do decide to get to the end, I do think two people, plenty of people to get to what I think is a pretty good satisfying ending, which is like finishing the sanctum key thing.

• 55:11Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 55:12Russ Frushtick?

  But yeah, once you get beyond that, it gets much harder, I would say.

• 55:17Chris Plante?

  Uh, I, I've been just playing more Persona 3 Reload, talking about things that we're just working our way through very, very slowly, but damn, if it is not just the best excuse for my AYN Thor, that's the correct name, to exist, along with another game that I don't think we can talk about yet, that I really want to talk about very soon, and we will. But man, haven't.

• 55:46Griffin McElroy?

  What month are you at? Do you know, can you give me an idea of like where you're at?

• 55:48Chris Plante?

  Oh, very early, I'm still in July, so I'm about like, probably like 35, 40 hours into the game.

• 55:55Russ Frushtick?

  Are you even trying, Chris Plant? Are you, are you even like?

• 55:58Chris Plante?

  That it.

• 55:59Russ Frushtick?

  Do you even know who June S is?

• 56:02Chris Plante?

  Okay, that's a different Persona, okay? Let's, let's, let's be careful here. Uh, it, no, it's, it's a delight and it's a delight to be able to pick at it at a pace where I'm not burning myself out. I like went really, really hard at first and then.

• 56:19Russ Frushtick?

  You kind of have to, right? To get over the hump of like the beginning.

• 56:22Chris Plante?

  Yeah, you kind of do, and it's, I, I like.

• 56:25Griffin McElroy?

  There's not as big a hump for, for Persona 3 Reload, I, I will say they've, they've trimmed it down significantly from, uh, I don't know. Persona 3 Portable is the only other way that I've played the game, but.

• 56:35Chris Plante?

  Yeah, but now like the big, I think mysteries of the game are kicking in and I'm just really enjoying it. It's, it's, it's a nice end of day chill out game.

• 56:45Griffin McElroy?

  I will tell you this, Chris, just to, just to advise you on something, as a, as a seasoned Persona vet myself, um, we are six months out from Persona 4 Revival. So you do need to finish this thing, I would say relatively quickly, cause you're gonna want, I mean, at least, uh, four months to really recover, to really come down before you hop into the next sort of hundred hour.

• 57:10Chris Plante?

  See, no, I think I'm gonna just ready to just go right into it. The idea of just always having a Persona that I can pick at and chill out with. And I think that timing wise, that'll nail it. I have a feeling that I'll be done with this by like Christmas, when I have like a few more long breaks. But it is, it's like my.

• 57:28Griffin McElroy?

  I'll be about when Russ finishes Blueprints.

• 57:30Chris Plante?

  Yeah, yeah. Just in time for our Gotti conversation.

• 57:33Griffin McElroy?

  We should have an episode where you just talk about Persona 3 and Russ just talks about Blueprints and I just talk about EverQuest Legends. And it could be like, we just send it to like the nine perverts who that like Venn diagram would.

• 57:46Russ Frushtick?

  Someone asked for a spoiler Blueprints episode at one point in the comments on one of the newsletters. I don't know that I ever want to do that. Like, I feel so bad to steal the magic from people that, I don't know.

• 57:59Griffin McElroy?

  It's not worth it.

• 57:59Russ Frushtick?

  It's the whole magic of the game is what I've been talking about of these like weird mysteries that you're putting together.

• 58:05Griffin McElroy?

  Hey, real quick, you guys see that new Spider-Man movie?

• 58:07Russ Frushtick?

  No.

• 58:07Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 58:08Russ Frushtick?

  I saw it.

• 58:08Griffin McElroy?

  Okay. I don't know, man, I don't, I don't, I haven't seen one of these in a long time and I usually bring movie stuff, but I, I went to see this the other day just cause we had a window of time and Rachel and I wanted to go to the, to the films. Uh, and, uh, I, I think Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings is the last one that I, that I did see. Yeah, it was a cool one. I haven't seen any of them since then, and I don't think I've really watched any of the TV shows, except Wandavision, which is pretty good. And Hawkeye, that one kicks ass. And I thought it was a good time, I didn't like it nearly as much as really the other ones. I liked the last one a lot with all the Spider-Mans in it.

• 58:48Griffin McElroy?

  And I, I did feel, I enjoyed it kind of objectively as a, as a blockbuster kind of action movie, but it, it confirmed my fears. And I don't know how you felt, Chris, but.

• 58:58Russ Frushtick?

  Plant loved it.

• 59:00Griffin McElroy?

  My lack of investment in this world, in this cinematic universe, sort of post-end game, has made it a truly daunting, a truly daunting. I went to see it with Rachel, who like, at the end of the movie was like, so who was his friend Frank? Who was like so angry?

• 59:19Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I mean, they don't really say The Punisher at any point in the film. And so like, I guess if you didn't know.

• 59:25Russ Frushtick?

  You just have to assume, based on what he's doing in the film, you have to assume.

• 59:28Griffin McElroy?

  Punishing, yeah. He punishes, he does punish. So like, you do got, I, I, I don't know, I, it made me, uh, I felt a little bit. I still enjoyed the movie. I feel like I'm not going to be able to hang with Avengers.

• 59:40Russ Frushtick?

  You don't thi- oh, definitely not Avengers.

• 59:42Griffin McElroy?

  Avengers is entirely that. Avengers is like, the trailer looks cool, it looks fun. It's a bunch of characters that I don't like, I haven't, I didn't watch your TV show, I didn't see that sequel post Endgame. I didn't like, I don't know, man, it makes me worry that I'm not going to be able to, to party with that.

• 59:57Chris Plante?

  I, I really enjoyed the Spider-Man, the new Spider-Man, because one, it basically is like a Spider-Man video game. Two, the soundtrack is, uh, really going for post-college life, specifically a post-college life from 2007, 2008.

• 1:00:14Russ Frushtick?

  Seems like a Who wrote it.

• 1:00:15Chris Plante?

  For me, yeah, exactly. The soundtrack is, uh, killer, um, and old. And also, compared to everything else, yes, it doesn't explain who Punisher is, but like, it really does like ask so little compared to what, from what I can tell.

• 1:00:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Chris Plante?

  All the other Marvel movies are. Very much agree on the like, I saw that Avengers trailer. I, I, this is me recovering from having to, you know, oversee a, a, an entertainment publication. But like, I see that and like, I just like get nauseous. It's like, this is everything wrong with the culture of, there is no story. There is just faces that you're supposed to point at like the Spider-Man meme and be like, I get it. I recognize them. Um, deeply weird for a movie that big to be very unclear on what the hell it's actually about, other than seeing famous people. Um, so yeah, it's weird. I enjoyed the movie.

• 1:01:13Russ Frushtick?

  That being said, Wolverine Deadpool was.

• 1:01:14Chris Plante?

  Excited for more.

• 1:01:15Russ Frushtick?

  Wolverine Deadpool was a lot of that?

• 1:01:16Griffin McElroy?

  That, that, I take it back. That's one that I did see. That's one, that's one of the best times I've had watching one of these fucking.

• 1:01:22Russ Frushtick?

  And I've said this before about the MCU and superhero movies and like franchise movies in general. You can ha- if you can have a standalone movie that doesn't require any pre-existing knowledge, which I think Deadpool and Wolverine comes pretty close to doing, they kind of like bring you up to speed. It should just stand on its own. I do not give a fuck about the continuity and whether this makes sense and who died and who was friends in the previous six movies. I don't care. It should stand on its own. So that's really all I hope for. But yeah, I agree. I think Avengers has no fucking chance of being that, because it is once again, the, we're gonna bring in all these old people you remember, and we're gonna bring in new people that you need to know for the next six properties. And it's just gonna be movie to movie. And some movies are gonna be bad and some will be good.

• 1:02:06Russ Frushtick?

  And because I have to pay for a babysitter, I'm only gonna pick the really, really good ones.

• 1:02:10Griffin McElroy?

  The real good ones. The ones I have, yeah, that I've received a firm endorsement.

• 1:02:15Russ Frushtick?

  6% on Rotten Tomatoes is like my.

• 1:02:18Russ Frushtick?

  And I'm not even joking. It needs to be that consistent.

• 1:02:22Chris Plante?

  A last, um, oh, we are all old folks thing before we go. Griffin, were you a Lord of the Rings War in the North person? That feels like that would have been your shit.

• 1:02:33Griffin McElroy?

  No.

• 1:02:34Chris Plante?

  No? Okay. Well, for listeners, I'll just let you know, Lord of the Rings War in the North, one of the iconic PS2 games that is actually really good. Just beat the shit out of things in a Fantasyland game. Inexclusively is now on Steam and even Switch 2, and people could go check this game out. Is that a way to end the episode? No.

• 1:02:57Russ Frushtick?

  It's actually not, because we're gonna talk about Patreon over at patreon.com/thebesties.

• 1:03:01Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:01Russ Frushtick?

  Please go over there and subscribe. We have a new, uh, new content going up. We have a new bracket battles, uh, with Jacob Geller, who joined us this month. We also have new, uh, Resties that just came out just a couple of days ago. So we've got new fun stuff to talk about. Oh, we talked about that GoldenEye game, Agent 64, which is fucking cool.

• 1:03:19Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:20Russ Frushtick?

  Highly recommend checking that out. We have some new backers, Nick H, Ryan F, Rip M8, and Steve R. Thank you to you and also all the other new backers or old backers or everyone else who supports the show and makes it all happen. Uh, last bit of business, as a reminder, we are doing a live show in New York City. I know we've said it before, but I will reiterate it. Uh, it's on October 9th. You can get tickets at besties.fan. There's a big link. Click on that baby. It'll bring you over to the ticket page and, uh, get tickets, uh, cause we're pretty excited. We are planning some really fun stuff for that.

• 1:03:55Griffin McElroy?

  Yep. Next week, Fields of Mystria 1.0.

• 1:03:58Russ Frushtick?

  Love it.

• 1:03:58Griffin McElroy?

  Come and, come and play that, play that jam and join us as we talk about it, uh, next week here on The Besties. Because shouldn't the world's best friends play the world's best games?