Saros is More Bullet Heaven Than Bullet Hell

Saros is the continuation of decades of bullet-dodging action games from Housemarque. But it has most in common with the team’s previous game, Returnal. Is this game welcoming enough to bring newcomers into the pseudo-series? We find out! Plus, a humongous collection of other stuff we’re playing and watching, including a Korean reality TV series that pits different types of spirit mediums against one another! Look, we’re just as surprised, confused, and delighted as you are.

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

• 0:00Chris Plante?

  The other day was May the 4th, you know, Star Wars Day?

• 0:03Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 0:03Chris Plante?

  So I, I thought I would go and celebrate, now I go to Disneyland, cuz the people are gonna be dressed up. It's the day that you can actually, as an adult, dress up in Disneyland. There's gonna be some, you know, Kylos there. There's gonna be some Darth Vaders, right?

• 0:15Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, you can actually dress up? You don't need the color block or anything like that? You could just dress up as the characters?

• 0:19Chris Plante?

  Fully dress up. I'm talking about helmets. You just look like cast characters.

• 0:26Griffin McElroy?

  I think you have to be a Star Wars guy, right? You can't just show up dressed as...

• 0:31Chris Plante?

  That, that was my problem, right? So I'm like, oh yeah, okay, like Kylo, I get it. Ren, who is Kylo?

• 0:39Russ Frushtick?

  Same character.

• 0:41Chris Plante?

  Yeah, same person, I get it. So I'm walking around, and out of nowhere, I see a full-on Predator.

• 0:51Griffin McElroy?

  Awesome.

• 0:51Chris Plante?

  The most elaborate Predator costume I have ever seen.

• 0:56Griffin McElroy?

  Fucking alright, man.

• 0:57Chris Plante?

  More elaborate than any of the Star Wars characters. I mean, this looks like it was gonna bite my face clean off.

• 1:03Russ Frushtick?

  I love it.

• 1:03Griffin McElroy?

  They have the face tentacles in it, the, ah, all that shit, man.

• 1:07Russ Frushtick?

  To be fair, he doesn't bite faces, he does steal skulls. So we need to be very clear.

• 1:11Griffin McElroy?

  He takes a whole spine out. He's, Predator's crazy, man.

• 1:14Chris Plante?

  But, wh- where do you draw the line? You know?

• 1:18Griffin McElroy?

  Sure.

• 1:19Chris Plante?

  Because like, is, is this the new world? Is this the world of corporate mergers that we've been asking for?

• 1:24Russ Frushtick?

  It does seem like a loophole that no one really considered when they were like, anyone could dress up as anything. Like, could I dress up at the Magic Castle?

• 1:34Chris Plante?

  It looked like the people who were working there were also questioning, is this a loophole? There was a lot of Disney people who looked very stressed out about what do we do?

• 1:46Russ Frushtick?

  They're in the back checking all the fine print.

• 1:48Chris Plante?

  Can you imagine if you went up to him and you're like, hey, you can't be here, you're not Star Wars? And he's like, well, actually, an issue 234.

• 1:56Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:57Chris Plante?

  Of Star Wars X Predator. And then you're screwed.

• 2:01Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, they would throw him in, they would throw him in the Disney jail. They're just, it's pretty easy. They'd just throw him in the Disney jail.

• 2:08Griffin McElroy?

  There's a special Disney jail for Predator. For specific, they have created a special kind of, it's like a tank, sort of, for suspending the Predator, cuz otherwise, he'll get out, man.

• 2:18Russ Frushtick?

  No, he's, he's a, he's a fucker.

• 2:21Griffin McElroy?

  I didn't realize Disney even owned Predator, but they definitely do own Predator.

• 2:25Russ Frushtick?

  Good for them.

• 2:26Griffin McElroy?

  Good for them. When are they gonna make their Super Smash Brothers?

• 2:34Griffin McElroy?

  I guess that's what kicked them hard. Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:54Griffin McElroy?

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

• 2:58Chris Plante?

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

• 3:01Russ Frushtick?

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

• 3:05Griffin 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 you, my friend, just by listening, have become a member. We, this week, are talking about, let me check my notes, the first first-party PlayStation 5 game in 17 years called Saros, or perhaps Saros. The critics aren't, they have not reached a consensus. I've been playing the game for a long time, and I don't know that I've heard anyone say it out loud yet.

• 3:36Russ Frushtick?

  It's one of those.

• 3:37Griffin McElroy?

  Okay. Chris, what is Saros?

• 3:40Chris Plante?

  It is the latest game from Housemarque, the studio that built its name on kind of arcady, classic, twin-stick shooters, but then at a certain point said, "We want to go big, or we will go to home or house." And they did Returnal, and then they did this, and they're all in this line of, I don't know. You and I'm realizing, hard to talk about this sort of game succinctly. So how about we just go right to the...

• 4:07Griffin McElroy?

  You know how smart games have red and blue balls in them? This one has those, too.

• 4:10Chris Plante?

  Yeah, that's a good way of doing it. Yeah.

• 4:11Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, buddy.

• 4:12Chris Plante?

  It's a game about those balls.

• 4:13Griffin McElroy?

  It's a game about avoiding, or sometimes collecting, red and blue balls very, very quickly. And we'll talk about...

• 4:19Russ Frushtick?

  Also trauma.

• 4:20Griffin McElroy?

  Also trauma, of course.

• 4:21Chris Plante?

  And Lovecraft, yeah, yeah.

• 4:22Griffin McElroy?

  So we're gonna talk about what all that, how that all comes together after this short break.

• 4:28Chris Plante?

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• 5:13Chris Plante?

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• 5:47Chris 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.

• 6:02Griffin McElroy?

  Can one of the two, I did not play a ton of Returnal.

• 6:05Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, I finished Returnal.

• 6:07Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 6:08Russ Frushtick?

  Like 10 minutes ago.

• 6:09Griffin McElroy?

  Oh, about 10 minutes ago?

• 6:11Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I was like, I'm close. I can do it. And I did it.

• 6:14Griffin McElroy?

  You finished Returnal?

• 6:16Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, sorry. I finished Saros and Returnal.

• 6:19Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, cool, cool. All right. So please understand, I'm trying to set up a completely different thing, which is that I did not play much of Returnal. So obviously, this is a spiritual successor, if not a like narrative one to any degree that I've found so far.

• 6:37Griffin McElroy?

  And I'm curious sort of what the, as a setup for what Saros is, how it kind of has evolved on the Returnal sort of premise.

• 6:45Russ Frushtick?

  Sure. Uh, okay. So if, for those that played Returnal, which wasn't a ton of people, so I will kind of backtrack a little bit. Returnal was basically a rogue-like in the style of like a Binding of Isaac or something like that, but the gameplay was bullet hell style, third person action. Pretty straightforward.

• 7:03Griffin McElroy?

  Sort of Risk of Rain 2-esque.

• 7:06Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, but with like actual levels and exploration and like build crafting. I mean, Risk of Rain has that, but build crafting was a big part of Returnal. Here's the thing about Returnal. It turned off a lot of people for two reasons. One, it was very hard, which I get. And the other one is they made a pretty boneheaded decision in the development cycle of not letting you save or quit a run in the middle of a run and runs could take like three or four hours.

• 7:33Griffin McElroy?

  It's just incompatible with my life, man. I could not fuck with Returnal for that very reason.

• 7:39Russ Frushtick?

  They have since fixed that. So if you go and play Returnal today, you can quit a run in the middle of it. And indeed, the first thing you see when you boot up Saros is, hey, by the way, if you need to stop a run, you can do that so long as you don't quit in the middle of a boss fight.

• 7:54Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 7:54Russ Frushtick?

  If you do that, you will lose everything, but otherwise you can stop whenever you want and it's all chill. So good decision, y'all. At a glance, they might seem like very, very, very similar games, but structurally they're actually very different.

• 8:08Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Russ Frushtick?

  Returnal was a game where you basically start from scratch every single time. There was very little in the way of like permanent progression. And you more or less just like had to have a really good run to make it through. This game is all about permanent progression. Every single run, you're earning currency, which you then spend on stats and upgrades and things that'll make subsequent runs faster. And also you're not doing runs from scratch. You're doing runs. You'll unlock like a checkpoint. You'll, you can start from that checkpoint.

• 8:36Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, there's a really interesting kind of like, this is, this is very much, or at least in my experience, like a game about sort of farming, because those upgrades are pretty important. There is a stat called, what is it called? Not mastery, but something that.

• 8:51Russ Frushtick?

  Proficiency.

• 8:52Griffin McElroy?

  Proficiency, yeah, that you are sort of leveling up. You can get these permanent sort of like starting upgrades to your proficiency, but as you kill enemies and you pick up a lucite, which is the lucinite?

• 9:04Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, boy.

• 9:05Griffin McElroy?

  Lucite is the fucking stuff that they make Pizza Hut cups out of.

• 9:08Russ Frushtick?

  I think that's what you're collecting.

• 9:10Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I think you're collecting Pizza Hut cups as you down enemies. You're building this proficiency bonus and then every weapon or like a special power that drops will drop at that that strength level. So there's, there's a reason to like, you could, if you just started the third sort of level, you can teleport to that and just like rocket from there. Or a sort of more consistent strategy is like, start a little bit earlier and, you know, farm up all this stuff. You're also picking up artifacts, which you have a set number that you can pick up that usually will give you some statistical benefit, some sort of more intangible benefit, like you're invincible for a second after you dash or whatever.

• 9:52Griffin McElroy?

  And then a lot of the times a negative detriment that is also associated with it. Like now you take fall damage or your gun jams whenever you take damage. And so it also becomes a question of like, well, do I want to pick this up? Cause I'm early in my run and I'll probably find something a little bit stronger, you know, a little bit later on. So you're doing a lot of sort of on the ground decisions as well.

• 10:12Chris Plante?

  If, if people are listening and they're like, that sounds like quite a bit of systems. The answer is you're right.

• 10:18Russ Frushtick?

  Yep.

• 10:18Chris Plante?

  And the challenge with this game, it has grown on me a lot after watching many videos and many conflicting videos, including one that we'll talk about that Fresh gave me that ruined, I would say about two to three hours of my experience with this game.

• 10:31Griffin McElroy?

  Uh oh.

• 10:31Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, no.

• 10:32Chris Plante?

  Oh, it was, it completely ruined it, but we'll talk about it. It's not, it's not your fault.

• 10:36Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, thank you.

• 10:38Chris Plante?

  The, the, the challenge with this game is in theory, you're going in and you're dodging the red and the blue balls and then you're using a shield that can like block some of them, but not all of them. And some of them need a parry. That's like very familiar gameplay mechanics. And then you're also going into a run and then you're collecting the, the, whatever the credits are, and then doing the upgrades. That all should be pretty straightforward. And yet. It's not entirely because of the things like you just talked about, the weapons that have, some have upgrades and some have detriments. Well, that's only true once you've entered basically the quote like red moon or red sun era.

• 11:19Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, you turn on hard mode in the middle of a run and suddenly everything drops more currency, but the things you pick up can have these negative effects.

• 11:26Chris Plante?

  Yeah, right. Or you could just spend the time dodging, but if you shield certain types of blue bullets, you can collect the blue bullets and then you can use that to charge a special weapon. Cool. But if you watch fresh's video that ruined my life.

• 11:42Russ Frushtick?

  I didn't make the video, to be fair, I just suggested it.

• 11:44Chris Plante?

  You can also punch the bullets.

• 11:46Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, yeah. Bad idea. Don't do that.

• 11:47Chris Plante?

  And it doesn't take any charge. I was like, oh, that's, that's how, that's how you're supposed to play this horrible decision.

• 11:52Griffin McElroy?

  No, you gotta use that shield, man. It's a good shield.

• 11:54Chris Plante?

  Much harder. Yeah. And then there are, there are yellow bullets that when you take them on, even if you shield them, they can like stick to you and they can lower your health, but you can recharge your health if you fire weapon. I could go on and on and on. And these systems ultimately are really interesting, but a thing that I think it struggles with compared to a Hades or similar rogue likes, and it struggles with this in the story department too, is it kind of hits you with it all at once.

• 12:23Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 12:23Chris Plante?

  And you, where, where I feel like traditionally in these games, it's like you do a short run and then you go back and you meet a new character who's waiting there for you and they're like, hey, have you ever heard of yellow orbs? And you're like, oh, interesting. And then you go and do that run. We're here like before you even go into the first run, it's like a whole camp there and they're like, do you want to go talk to 20 people?

• 12:44Russ Frushtick?

  I think you actually kill someone before you even do a run. I think you literally, literally like someone's gone crazy and you're like, well, I gotta kill them. And you kill them. And then you do a run. Um, the systems, plan is right. The systems are insane. There's systems in there that I watched this 10 minute video and many of them I didn't understand. Part of the problem is they decided to label everything in very funky ways.

• 13:06Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Russ Frushtick?

  Do you know what stat, just for argument's sake, what would you name a stat that increases your maximum shield time?

• 13:13Chris Plante?

  Shield.

• 13:14Griffin McElroy?

  Shield stat.

• 13:15Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, would you name it Command?

• 13:17Griffin McElroy?

  Probably not.

• 13:17Russ Frushtick?

  They call that.

• 13:18Griffin McElroy?

  Would you call the stat that determines how much Pizza Hut cups the enemies drop? Would you want to call that Drive?

• 13:25Russ Frushtick?

  No, I wouldn't.

• 13:26Griffin McElroy?

  I wouldn't. I don't think I would call it that.

• 13:28Chris Plante?

  It's a car game.

• 13:29Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's, yeah, that, that's shit. I genuinely, after about two or three runs, and I was just like picking up all these items, and it's like, oh, you've gotten more resilience. I, I eventually stopped and I was like, okay, I went through the menus, like, is there like a help section that tells me what the fuck these stats do? And there was like a data lore entry that like kind of, kind of explained sort of what they do.

• 13:52Russ Frushtick?

  It's not even just the stats. It's also like the weapons you pick up will have these sub abilities that are incredibly important to their capabilities as weapons. And there's just, it's like expand more information. Oh, you're just going to get the names of what those sub abilities are. You have no idea what they do.

• 14:06Griffin McElroy?

  I, I do want to say, because this, this paints like a pretty brutal picture of, of the game.

• 14:12Chris Plante?

  Before you say the nice thing, do you mind if I ask Purge one more bit of negativity?

• 14:15Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, of course.

• 14:16Chris Plante?

  And then, because I gotta, I gotta get all these yellow orbs off me, and then we can get into, there's so much good stuff.

• 14:20Griffin McElroy?

  Corruption will build up, by the way.

• 14:21Chris Plante?

  The, the last bit of negativity. The game's story is, well, it's Lovecraftian, but really it's like weird fiction, and it's supposed to be influenced by the, the King in Yellow, which if anybody watched True Detective Season One, you'll be familiar with this. Mostly it's like they took the names of locations and ideas, like Carcassus, the name of the planet. Anyway, the thing with weird fiction is you need to know what normal is before you get weird. You need to know who the people are before they start losing their minds. And the story from the drop is in Chaos Town. So you don't know, you have no footing for this story full of all these strange words and people.

• 15:06Chris Plante?

  You early on don't know if people are alive or not. I am nearly certain that there was a bug in my game and a character wasn't showing up. So it was just an empty space, but there was subtitle going on. And it took me like an hour after the game to be like, oh, I don't think that was supposed to happen.

• 15:26Griffin McElroy?

  That was part of the invisible guy. Yeah.

• 15:30Chris Plante?

  So yeah, this is all just to say, it's like, it is across the game where this like insistence on just dive into the deep end is a problem. But.

• 15:40Griffin McElroy?

  But.

• 15:40Chris Plante?

  Once you do get in.

• 15:42Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, the systems being sort of pretty opaque, honestly stopped being an issue for me once I got pretty good at the game. Um, because it's so fucking fun. This game feels so good to go into a room that you have been in a dozen times, like farming up these, these resources, or like trying to get through a run and dying to the boss, uh, and being like excited to fight the dudes in there, because it's just so fun to dash around and then shield to collect some, uh, blue projectiles, and then launching your power attack at an enemy, and then they turn into a little turret,

• 16:24Griffin McElroy?

  and then you dash through that, like, it feels so fucking great all the time.

• 16:29Russ Frushtick?

  They give you option, uh, the game is mostly linear, like it's not exploration heavy for the most part, because it's, uh, contrary to Eternal, but they do give you moments where it's like, oh, this is a side path. You can go here for more currency, or maybe another battle, whatever. I always, always, always took the side path because it's just not only more stuff, but also like, I want to do those fun platforming challenges or those fun like dodge, whatever they are.

• 16:50Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, the, the movement, um, it kept reminding me of like, uh, it kept reminding me of crackdown. Once you'd been playing for a while and collected like a ton of agility orbs and you were just running. There's very, very, very, very little aiming down sights that you do. Like there is a special function that most guns have that you have to like half pull the trigger, which is a little bit finicky in order to like access, but most of the time, most guns like auto lock on and the bullets will just hit if you are pointed in the general direction of an enemy. And so when that is true, you can spend more brain and hand energy like dodging or, or, uh, shielding into blue projectiles to get your, your, your power recharged. Like it, it, man, it feels so good.

• 17:34Chris Plante?

  I think the real trick to the way it does 3D platforming and does movement is it handles like a ship in a 2D schmup, which if you have played any 2D games, there's no momentum needed. There's no sense of like, you know, gaining or lowering speed. You move at this consistent speed so that you can perfectly nail wherever you need to be. You stop on a dime, you start at 100 miles per hour. And that, not chasing reality in that one aspect, while letting the game look like maybe the best looking game on the PS5 is such a big choice. I like, I think there are many studios that would say, well, it looks so real.

• 18:18Chris Plante?

  The character needs to look real when they move. And nothing about this character looks real when it moves. It looks, the game looks amazing. And then you start hopping around and you are just like, you might as well be a little like pol, like pylon that happens to have a human face on it.

• 18:32Griffin McElroy?

  It's really, well, that human face belongs to Rahul Kohli, who is, who was in fucking Midnight Mass and like a bunch of iZombie.

• 18:45Griffin McElroy?

  Haunting of Hill House, maybe? Like, an actor I recognized pretty much instantly. And then to watch him be like, I'm acting and I'm acting. Whee! Just like flinging yourself up 30 feet out of the air was like, oh, that's great. You're having a lot of fun, man. That's awesome.

• 19:01Russ Frushtick?

  Maybe wear a helmet, but otherwise.

• 19:03Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, probably be safer. Yeah, I bounced off Returnal and this is a thing I've heard a lot from people who have played Saros is like, I bounced off Returnal because I felt like, one, the like, not being able to stop in the middle of a run thing was pretty bad. Two, just like, it's locked on PS5, right? And I, my PS5 is in my office and it is tough for me to like, find time unless I stay up, you know, super late to like, sit down in my office and play this game for a long time. But three, like, I just never felt like I was making much progress. I never felt like I was, that my next run, I would have a better shot at it. Because the enemies, you could be on the run of your life and fuck up a little bit once

• 19:47Griffin McElroy?

  and the enemies could just like combo you right into the ground. Whereas here, like, if that happens, it's like, ah, fuck, but taking home all this currency. I'm gonna come back stronger. I'm gonna have all this stuff. I do wish that the upgrades. I do wish that the upgrades, the artifacts that you were picking up were a little bit more impactful.

• 20:05Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, that was sort of the, you know, in playing this and playing Returnal, like the big takeaway I have in Returnal, and I 100% get the criticism of like, you feel like you're not necessarily making progress in Returnal. But you are making meaningful like build crafting decisions in Returnal. Where, oh, I'm gonna make like a melee centric build, or I'm gonna make a whatever, one-shot kill build, things like that. Whereas this, you can kind of sort of do that. Some of the artifacts kind of have those things. But largely, like, you're mostly just picking up everything unless there's something that has like a very negative, like a slower dash or something.

• 20:41Griffin McElroy?

  Like, there's a reroll mechanic that you like get through the armor upgrade, permanent upgrade thing, which is like now, whenever you go into a run, if you find an artifact and you don't want it, you can roll it to try and get it to be something else. And like, that's an idea that exists in, you know, so many games in this genre. But it's like, do I want to reroll this artifact that like barely increases my shield capacity? And maybe it'll give me one that like makes me a little bit stronger whenever I'm like low health. Or like, it doesn't, it just doesn't, whereas in Hades, it's like every choice you're making is like, well, fuck, okay. Well, now I, I'm, this is going to be a very helios sort of centric run. I'm gonna be playing this way, this way, which matches with this weapon's style.

• 21:24Russ Frushtick?

  I did find, and maybe this is like a personal preference thing. I did find that some of the weapons, especially like as you get later into the game, just like I could not get going. I could not make them as effective as like some of the earlier weapons that I've found. The shotgun, for example, like required to get like right up in the face of the enemy. And the game does not encourage that at all.

• 21:44Griffin McElroy?

  Well, okay, it does, because there's also a stagger mechanic in the game. Where if you can, you know, hit an enemy with a certain heavy enough weapon and shotguns do it with one shot. If you get up close, it will stun them, which then you later unlock the ability to like melee someone in that state. And basically one, one hit.

• 22:00Russ Frushtick?

  Right, but then you're risking getting hit.

• 22:02Griffin McElroy?

  Right, you're not making a bunch of other choices that are like, okay, I've built this guy to be an up, up close. Like high health, like you could maybe try and get a lot of resilience through the

• 22:14Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I'm waiting to watch like, like late game builds or like, I don't know YouTube builds of this stuff because they emphasize melee so much.

• 22:24Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Chris Plante?

  In the game, like you can get this upgraded arm that I keep thinking there must be a way to play that is much more melee focused.

• 22:32Russ Frushtick?

  You do get to a point, uh, at some point, I guess spoilers on just functionality, uh, where if you stagger enemies, you can melee them basically from any distance and you'll dash right to them and melee, which is effective. It's good. But I just found like, I'm pretty risk averse in these sorts of games. So like, I was doing incredibly well, just hanging back. And anytime I like got up close, I would like get hit, lose a combo, lose a whatever it was.

• 22:57Griffin McElroy?

  The adrenaline. Yeah.

• 22:58Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, things like that.

• 22:59Chris Plante?

  I want, I want to add one quick thing on, on the stats and upgrades too. For people who are listening who are like me, who do not like rogue likes, where it feels like artificial growth. Where it's like, oh, I play and then I get good by just doing the grind and I get better and better and better. This game does that, like you're, you're going to need to grind to not just get like your stats increased, but to like unlock your basic abilities, like a grappling hook and things like that. But, and it's a big but, it moves, it moves very fast. Like you get a lot of upgrades very, very quickly each time you're coming back from the run.

• 23:40Chris Plante?

  And I found that to be a bit, it felt like a nice compromise for me, even if that's not my personal preference for how to play rogue likes. I felt like it was upgrading me at pace with about how good I was at the game. So versus what I was saying early on, like I was like, yeah, I mean, it would be nice to have the grappling hook, but like, I'm not going to get much further than this either way. In that, yeah, I don't know. The balance there works, works pretty well for me.

• 24:10Russ Frushtick?

  Did either of you guys get through the second boss?

• 24:12Griffin McElroy?

  Yes. Uh, yeah. The last thing I got is, I mean, I don't know if it's a spoiler because it's so obvious from the start of the game that there's a grappling hook thing. Uh, that you, that you will eventually get. So that I am now on that sort of level, the third and fourth actually sort of uh, chunks of the game. And that is crazy. There's a mechanic that unlocks there that lets you. Put modifiers on and there's positive ones and negative ones and you have to kind of balance them out. And that has made the game so much more enjoyable for me.

• 24:43Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Griffin McElroy?

  And it's not something that is available to you until you can beat that second boss, which is a tall.

• 24:48Russ Frushtick?

  It's a weird choice that it's like, it takes a good six or seven hours to like get to that point. And then what you're able to do is, let's say, for example, you don't do a lot of the sucking up the blue balls thing with the shield. You can turn it so that like, oh, instead of being able to do that as much as you want, you're getting more currency overall if that fits your play style. So you can really craft it in a way that fits your play style. And once I started doing that, I was flying through the game.

• 25:16Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, one of them is just a damage boost, just a flat damage boost. And you can like level it three times and then you do have to pick quite a few negative modifiers to weigh it out. But like, man, it's, the game's pretty fucking fun, but you can just mow, mow down guys. There's a lot of sort of quality of lifestyle stuff that you can, that you can grab in there. It's, it's a, it's a very smart system.

• 25:37Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I like that a lot.

• 25:38Chris Plante?

  A last thing before we wrap, we haven't even talked about the biomes and how this game looks.

• 25:44Griffin McElroy?

  It makes me so sad that they have not announced a Bloodborne like remaster in the style of Demon's Souls. It's really, there's so much, especially once you go into like spooky eclipse mode, like so much of that shit. Just like, man, I'd love to, I'd love to see Yarnham in this, in this light.

• 26:03Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, the, the boss fights especially, like, man, there are some boss fights in this game that are unquestionably the best looking visual things I've seen in a video game, bar none. Like stunning, jaw dropping, looked like they could easily be the final, final boss of the game. And in fact, it's just halfway through the game because there are so many of those. The art design of those in particular, I was just really floored by. I will admit that from an environmental standpoint, I didn't think the environments themselves quite lived up to that. Like there's some cool vistas, but largely it's like. You know, metal pipes and like craggy rock moon face things and like

• 26:47Chris Plante?

  Yeah, I mean, it's doing the proc gen thing, right? Where it's like not like, well, it's not full procedural generation. Like it's like lining up different pieces.

• 26:54Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, they're picking up different pieces, right?

• 26:56Chris Plante?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I liked, I liked the general themes. Like the first one that Griffin is referencing is kind of bloodborne, decrepit castles, stonework, you know, gnarly trees, wasted landscapes. The second one is underground, basically the, the real world in the Matrix.

• 27:18Russ Frushtick?

  Right, that was my thought, yeah.

• 27:20Chris Plante?

  Which is like, I, I enjoy this kind of tour of just cool sci-fi fantasy places. I'm, I'm down for it. It works for me. Um, again, not entirely sure how it connects to the weird fiction sci-fi stuff, but hey, sure, I'm like, I'm, I'm ready for vacation.

• 27:37Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I've really been enjoying this game. I'm going to, I'm probably going to keep playing it. It's been a fun, um, exercise bike game for me.

• 27:46Griffin McElroy?

  Which I think is saying something because I can't usually fuck with like twitchy, like super twitchy games. And this game is about as twitchy as they come. But it, I, I don't know, like House Market does such a good job at taking systems that are somewhat, like, there's a lot of systems. There's a lot of things you can do in this game, but like, it's not that hard to kind of get something going.

• 28:10Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Griffin McElroy?

  It's not that hard to, because you can always sort of dash away from a problem. And then there's like, a lot of things you can do if you dash towards that problem. If you want to like, take a slightly bigger risk. But it just, man, it's such a good feeling game. And I want to keep coming back to it just to like, get, see what the new power is, to see what the new, uh, weapon is.

• 28:34Russ Frushtick?

  I am kind of dying, now that I've finished this game, to go back to Returnal. Cause I think this game is like, almost a really good tutorial for getting very good at Returnal. Unfortunately, I think this game might never come to PC, uh, which is just a new strategy that Sony is doing, where they're not necessarily bringing their, uh, exclusives to PC. But Returnal is on PC, it's on Steam. Um, and so if you play through this game and you're like, wow, this is really good. I want more of it. Check out Returnal. I fucking love that game. Uh, and I think narratively, Returnal kind of sticks the landing a little better than this one. But overall, this game is fun as shit. I loved it.

• 29:11Griffin McElroy?

  Let's take a brief break and then when we come back, we can talk about more of Housemark's red and blue ball lineage.

• 29:19Russ 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.

• 30:08Russ 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, that thing is incredibly

• 30:53Russ Frushtick?

  comfortable. Lisa was awarded the Best Hybrid and Best Memory Foam Mattress by New York Times Wirecutter and is featured by West Elm as their go-to mattress partner. You can go to lisa.com for 25% off select mattresses, plus get an extra $50 off with promo code BESTIES, exclusive to our listeners. That's L-E-E-S-A.com, promo code BESTIES for 25% off select mattresses, plus an extra $50 off. Let them know we sent you in the survey after checkout. Lisa.com, promo code BESTIES.

• 31:30Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so it is a little bit crazy how long this studio in some fashion has existed.

• 31:37Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Chris Plante?

  One of the most senior active studios, I would say, making games today?

• 31:44Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Russ Frushtick?

  They've gone through a few name iterations, at least early on in their period. They were originally called Blood House, which is a great name.

• 31:53Griffin McElroy?

  That's a good fucking name, man.

• 31:54Russ Frushtick?

  That's when they released the first Stardust, which will come back later. And then they became Terra Mark.

• 32:00Chris Plante?

  I think they're two separate studios that came together to work with each other.

• 32:04Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, yeah. Right. Hence the name. So I guess, I don't know, Housemark was what they ended up as, as the fusion of the two studios. And that's where you start seeing more games that you've probably played before. The first game that I remember playing of theirs was Super Stardust HD, which came out in 2007.

• 32:22Griffin McElroy?

  Was that a PS3 title?

• 32:24Russ Frushtick?

  That was a PS3 title, but apparently Super Stardust came out on MS-DOS in 1996. Who fucking knew?

• 32:30Griffin McElroy?

  That's crazy.

• 32:31Chris Plante?

  And was a sequel to Stardust by Blood House in 1993. It was one of the Amiga classics of back in the day.

• 32:40Russ Frushtick?

  I think they're most known for that Stardust arcade-style arcade game, which is like, just score a lot of points, dodge bullets, things like that, like Sektory in that style. Sektory was obviously inspired by Housemarque's early stuff.

• 32:55Griffin McElroy?

  Okay, I was trying to, I had played Super Stardust HD and I remembered something weird about that. And so I was looking it up and found on the Games Wikipedia page that Super Stardust HD was one of the games given for free by Sony as part of their Welcome Back package due to the PlayStation Network outage in 2011.

• 33:14Russ Frushtick?

  Wow.

• 33:14Griffin McElroy?

  You guys remember that? You guys remember the PSN hack?

• 33:17Russ Frushtick?

  vaguely remember it. That's amazing.

• 33:19Griffin McElroy?

  PSN was down for 24 goddamn days. And then when they came back, they were like, here's, here's a great Housemarque game for free. Please.

• 33:28Chris Plante?

  I completely forgot about that. That's wild.

• 33:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Chris Plante?

  Yeah. What's strange about Housemarque is they were so small for so long. And how they got to making a game like this is kind of mind blowing because they're mostly making Arcade games, I guess, would be a way of putting it. Like, they're keeping the arcade stuff alive, like you said, uh, fresh, like the twin-stick shooter. Where they start to break away, or I guess find some traction, is with Rezogun. I think that's like the, the, "Oh, there might be something more here."

• 34:04Russ Frushtick?

  Well, I do wanna, before we get to Rezogun, I wanna call out one other game, which is in 2010, Dead Nation.

• 34:09Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Russ Frushtick?

  I thought was an interesting, this was a zombie game, but in a lot of ways, it was also an arcade game. You're like, you're combo scoring and all sorts of stuff like that, and giant hordes of enemies. Um, and that felt like kind of a progenitor to where they are now, just in a very small, much smaller scale on the project. Like, that was, wasn't like a straight arcade game. It felt more like a survival, survive the hordes kind of game. Um, and so, they would experiment with other formats as well. Outland is another game that I love. Uh, this was a Metroidvania search-action game from that team, uh, that used red and blue balls, but it was still a search-action game.

• 34:48Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, that game notably, "I can't find a place I can play it."

• 34:52Chris Plante?

  Oh, wow.

• 34:53Russ Frushtick?

  They removed it from the Steam Store for some reason. Uh, it might be on-

• 34:56Chris Plante?

  But it was probably on the Ubisoft, uh-

• 34:59Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Chris Plante?

  Uplay online thing, right?

• 35:02Russ Frushtick?

  But it would have been, oh, yeah, maybe that's it.

• 35:04Chris Plante?

  It was a Ubisoft game, and it came out in 2011. It was definitely on their, their dipshit launcher.

• 35:08Russ Frushtick?

  Christ. Um, yeah, but that game ruled. Uh, and then Plant, you can sort of dive into-

• 35:14Chris Plante?

  Yeah, well, I guess if we're gonna do that, they also, they worked on Angry Birds at, at a certain point, right before Rezogun, which is all just to say, this is a studio that seems to be just trying to stay alive.

• 35:25Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, everybody's gotta pay the bills, even if it's-

• 35:27Chris Plante?

  You got to, yeah.

• 35:28Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 35:29Chris Plante?

  Contract work, they were doing a mobile game, and then Rezogun comes along, and it's, it's a similar to what they've always done. It's like an arcade shooter, but what they said was, "You like particle effects? What if he gave you all of the particle effects? What if we took the PlayStation 3, and the 4, and the Vita, whenever it was on, and we pushed it to its absolute limit of what it can throw at you with these, like, spectacular- I don't know if it was actually voxel, but it has like a voxel-y look of just particles filling the screen as you blow up the world.

• 36:05Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 36:05Chris Plante?

  And suddenly they had this brilliant idea of what if we do a simple game, but make it a graphic showpiece? And because people want to have a graphic showpiece on their system, you can buy it for cheaper than all the other, you know, $60 games that were out at the time.

• 36:23Griffin McElroy?

  Well, actually, this was a PS4 launch game, right? So that takes that idea like to the max of people like, I want something that looks fucking great. Well, guess what? If you're subscribed to PlayStation Plus, it's free. So like, yeah, there's a reason why I think a lot of people have a lot of affection for this game. And it's because like, if you go into PlayStation 4 and you had a PlayStation Plus membership, you got it for free.

• 36:48Russ Frushtick?

  And there weren't a ton of like, I mean, we mentioned it.

• 36:50Griffin McElroy?

  No, this was the law. This was the killer app on PS4 at launch. There was really not much else going on.

• 36:56Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 36:57Chris Plante?

  I reviewed it for Polygon. I have to check that. But, but basically the studio then seems to split into two directions in terms of the opportunities they're getting. They're still making these arcade games. This is where their, you know, their bread is buttered. But then they're like, oh, you know, we should do some other bigger swings. And they do Alienation, which I don't know if any of you remember playing, which is, it was like an isomet- it was also a twin stick shooter, but you could have like four players doing it. And it was a bit more of a not arcadey game.

• 37:30Russ Frushtick?

  Like an earlier Helldivers.

• 37:32Chris Plante?

  They keep layering on and they're basically layering on, I guess, like planes. Cause they do Matterfall, which is a side scroller. And then they do Returnal.

• 37:41Russ Frushtick?

  And it's notable that when Returnal happened, that was the year that Sony bought them. They became officially part of the Sony family. It's a PlayStation studio now. And so all their stuff is basically exclusive to Sony. And this was like Sony being like, what do you want to do?

• 37:59Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Russ Frushtick?

  And, and they came back with a pretty fucking big swing.

• 38:02Griffin McElroy?

  I don't usually get super stuck into this, the genre of games that Housemarque kind of like specializes in. I don't know that I've ever like really score chased or like tried to complete any of the games on this list. But like, I'm always so fascinated by long-running developers who have a weird kind of intangible connecting tissue between all of their games. Whether it's like, oh, the, you know, all these quintet games use the same sort of sound font library throughout, whether you're playing Actraiser or Illusion of Gaia, right?

• 38:41Griffin McElroy?

  I feel like Housemarque's fascination with red and blue projectiles and having different ways of kind of like interacting with those. It truly is a defining feature, I think, of their games. And I, I don't know, I find that so, so cool, right? From a historical perspective, but also from a design perspective, because you don't, maybe you don't have to teach your players as hard, like how this stuff in your game functions if they've played another Housemarque game before and they already have that like deep reptilian kind of red, bad, blue, git association.

• 39:14Chris Plante?

  Yeah. I, I was bummed when, when they decided to like leave behind the arcade stuff. I think the last one that they made was Nex Machina. Did y'all remember that one? It is fantastic. If you want a taste of like what this studio could do at the top of its powers, they partnered with Eugene Jarvis, uh, who is the designer of Defender and Robotron and Nark and Smash TV. And like, let's just make one more great, classic arcade-style twin-stick shooter. It's fantastic. It did not do nearly as well as the games we're talking about today. And they're like, okay, we're gonna move on. And I was bummed, but now we get to have both because

• 39:55Chris Plante?

  one of the former designers of Housemarque went on to be the designer of Sectori. So basically you get to have it both ways. You can have their like fancy, awesome games like Soros, Soros, whatever. And then Sectori is. I mean, a perfect heir to what they were doing in the past.

• 40:17Russ Frushtick?

  And obviously, like, Sarah's has like a lot of that DNA as well, even though it's not structured like a score chase game like. It wouldn't surprise me if DLC came out in a few months that was like, oh, and now you can play it in this way. And it's just high scores and shit like that. Yeah, it's a pretty remarkable studio. I'm a big fan of what they've been doing. And narratively speaking, like, they take swings in ways that like you don't often see in AAA development anymore, which I love to see. It doesn't always land, but largely like, yeah, pretty risky, especially for one of the few PlayStation exclusives. There are not many that come out, maybe two or three a year, if that.

• 40:58Russ Frushtick?

  So the fact that one of them is like this weird, trippy, like dealing with trauma and also on a fucking space planet.

• 41:07Russ Frushtick?

  Thing is, is pretty sick. Yeah. I'm very impressed with what they're doing, very excited with for the future. It does slightly bum me out because maybe there's no better studio to make a third person Metroid game than Housemarque.

• 41:19Chris Plante?

  Oh, man.

• 41:20Russ Frushtick?

  That would fucking rule, but I'll let it slide. It's okay.

• 41:26Russ Frushtick?

  Before we dive into the one reader mail that we have, we got a ton of other reader mail. I can't read them all because there's so much of just like people shouting out Justin and Justin being great. And we completely agree, Justin is great.

• 41:38Chris Plante?

  I'll pass that along.

• 41:39Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, let him know.

• 41:40Chris Plante?

  Next time I see him.

• 41:40Russ Frushtick?

  Let the boy know. And obviously, we appreciate you guys sticking with us, evolving the show into whatever it's going to become. Obviously, Besties goes through a lot of changes over the years. This was not the most fun one because we all love Justin, but we're doing the best we can. And we thank you all and certainly we'll pass along all the messages to Justin in case he didn't see them in the comments.

• 42:07Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, this letter comes from Zach. "Hey besties, just wanted to drop a rec in the comments because I know many of you are Taskmaster fans, but I'm not sure you've mentioned checking out the New Zealand version yet. Season one is good, but season two features honorary McElroy brother Guy Montgomery and is considered to be one of the best all-time seasons of Taskmaster from any country. Best of all, it's on YouTube for free, so there's really no reason to check it out." Thank you Zach, that is a great recommendation. Yeah, have you guys experienced-

• 42:37Griffin McElroy?

  Oh yeah, I watched that for sure. Partially because like, I dunno, we'd been watching Taskmaster a lot at that point and then we found out Guy Montgomery was on it, who we're pals with. And I was like, "Yeah, I'll give this a shot." And it's great, man. It's really great. They have a different Taskmaster. I mean, it's not Greg and-

• 43:00Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, I wouldn't imagine, it's a long flight.

• 43:02Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I guess so. But it's still, I dunno, it has its own kind of flavor and it's just really, really strong TV.

• 43:09Russ Frushtick?

  Seems like something Reese Darby would do, but I guess it's not him either. Maybe he would guest at some point.

• 43:15Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, it's great. It's a really, really, really good season of Taskmaster. Really solid.

• 43:20Russ Frushtick?

  Cool. Should we dive into our honorable mentions?

• 43:24Griffin McElroy?

  Let's do it, dude.

• 43:26Russ Frushtick?

  I started playing Blueprints.

• 43:28Griffin McElroy?

  So, how's it going?

• 43:31Russ Frushtick?

  Okay, so funny story. So the patch came out, but the patch as of right now is still only on PC. And I do not have a great way to play PC games in my living room right now. I theoretically can move it in, but I don't want to deal with that.

• 43:46Griffin McElroy?

  You want to make a Steam Deck or something?

• 43:47Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, I do, but like, is a Steam Deck? I dunno. Anyway, I've been playing it on Switch 2. It is on Switch 2. The patch is not out on Switch 2, which is okay because I've been playing it exclusively with my wife. It is like, the one game that we're playing together.

• 44:05Griffin McElroy?

  But it should be out this week, right?

• 44:06Russ Frushtick?

  That's what they've been saying. It should be out this week, yeah. So any minute. And obviously, if you're playing with someone who can see colors, you don't necessarily need it. I will say though- That there have been puzzles where she'll be like making leaps and making decisions and I'll be like, "Stop everything you're doing. Why did you pick seven?"

• 44:24Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, right.

• 44:25Russ Frushtick?

  Cause I cannot, for the, I mean, there's a, I will, this is not really a spoiler, but there's a, a dartboard puzzle.

• 44:32Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Russ Frushtick?

  And like genuinely could not see that some of the numbers were highlighted in certain ways.

• 44:36Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 44:37Russ Frushtick?

  That will be fixed once the patch drops, which should be any day now. Uh, it might be actually out by the time you listen to this. But, um, guys, that game's pretty good. I gotta say.

• 44:47Griffin McElroy?

  Have you had like a, uh, I, I don't know what the statute of limitations on blueprint spoilies is. Obviously I don't want us to get into anything too crazy, but like.

• 44:58Chris Plante?

  I don't think Fresh has seen any major, major spoilies.

• 45:02Griffin McElroy?

  Have you had like any kind of oh shit moment of like, something comes together or you realize something?

• 45:08Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 45:08Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 45:09Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, how do I even convey this in a way?

• 45:14Chris Plante?

  Don't worry about spoiling. You're not going to spoil anything big.

• 45:17Griffin McElroy?

  Any of the like permanent upgrade style, like discovery?

• 45:20Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know anything. I mean, we, we upgraded a room to give you an idea. Like one of the rooms is upgraded. Um, the last big, uh, discovery that we made was the code to get into the garden in the back of the house.

• 45:34Griffin McElroy?

  Yes. Okay. Got you, got you, got you.

• 45:36Russ Frushtick?

  Which we used the mag, mag, so on and so forth. So, uh, that was like the big, uh, reveal that we made most recently. But I love, the experience of like trying to min-max your resources in the house has just been, we had this moment where we were going and like, we, we were down to like two steps. And we open a door and it's the fucking dining room and the fucking turkey dinner shows up in the dining room and we're like, yes, life. So cool. Uh, the systems in it are, yeah, once you start, I think I'm very good at like the like meta game, like min-maxing the like resources.

• 46:12Russ Frushtick?

  And she's very good at the like raw puzzle stuff. And so doing that back and forth has been so much fun. Uh, and, uh, it's a good game. I'm, I'm glad I'm the first to discover it.

• 46:23Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 46:24Russ Frushtick?

  So you guys should probably check it out. I would recommend it.

• 46:26Griffin McElroy?

  I, I, uh, anticipate the day where I will have forgotten a lot of shit about blueprints, so I can go back and play it again. I had that moment with Oberdin a couple of years ago, where I've finally had kind of purged it from the old memory banks. Uh, I think blueprints will take me a little while longer to, to, to get out of there, but yeah.

• 46:48Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, it's tough with things like blueprints and like, um, Outer Wilds.

• 46:54Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Griffin McElroy?

  Outer Wilds, I may never be able, like, there's some, there's some discoveries you make in Outer Wilds that are so, oh, it's been staring me in the face the whole time, that I don't know that I'll ever.

• 47:04Russ Frushtick?

  Really hard to ignore, but, um, yeah, it's, it's fucking good, man. I'm, I'm really excited to play more of it. It's, it's the perfect, like, we'll just do a day or two, structure that makes it really easy to put down. You don't need to, like, binge it necessarily.

• 47:19Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 47:19Russ Frushtick?

  Um, so it's, it's just been a good night-ender.

• 47:22Chris Plante?

  I am really looking forward to you in like two or three weeks.

• 47:26Griffin McElroy?

  Please, every, every cool moment you have, please text us. I've seen everything that that game has to offer. You will not spoil anything for me.

• 47:34Russ Frushtick?

  Sounds good.

• 47:35Griffin McElroy?

  Um, I have a few things, if I can run through them real quick.

• 47:38Chris Plante?

  Do it, please.

• 47:39Griffin McElroy?

  Uh, there's a lot of iOS stuff that's, uh, come out recently, some ports, and I, I've been playing an incremental game called Idle Obelisk Miner that a lot of people recommended to me after talking about incremental games a couple of episodes ago. It's a really good, very, very traditional kind of like, you're mining stuff to get stronger, but there's, they keep layering systems and systems and systems and systems on, uh, for a really slow burn kind of incremental experience that I've been enjoying. But the two big ones are Nubby's Number Factory is on iOS now, and that is a good one for iOS play. I finally, like, finished a run for the first time. Uh, and that game's so cool because it's, uh, if you're not familiar, kind of like Peggle,

• 48:21Griffin McElroy?

  where you're like shooting a ball down into a board of pegs that are increasing in sort of number size and combining every round to form larger and larger numbers, but you're also drafting these sort of upgrades that will trigger certain things, like now Nubby shoots out a- A big wall of radioactive energy on his first hit. Or like the lowest score peg on the board doubles every second and a half. Like you're trying to combine all that stuff into something that can really break the game wide open. And yeah, it's really, really good on iOS. Gambananza is out. This is one that Russ recommended to me a while ago before it had launched. This is Chess Bellatro.

• 49:00Griffin McElroy?

  You start out by spinning a roulette or a slot machine reel to draft three pieces, chess pieces on a five by five board. And then the game is split up into very, very short sort of chess battle sequences where all the pieces move in the traditional sort of chess like way. You have to take out all the enemy pieces without losing all of your pieces. And then between each round, you are buying new pieces or you are buying tiles that have special properties on the chessboard. Or you are buying upgrades that have like different modifiers. Like whenever you capture a piece with a pawn, you get an extra turn or stuff along those lines.

• 49:40Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, we're going to be doing a deeper dive into this game specifically during Resties. For an upcoming episode, it's, I guess, the episode that comes out in a little bit. So keep an eye on it, but I do agree. Yeah, it's been a steady mainstay on my phone as well.

• 49:57Griffin McElroy?

  It's really solid.

• 49:58Russ Frushtick?

  Really, really good. Yeah.

• 49:59Griffin McElroy?

  The last thing is a show, a Korean reality competition show. Stop me if you've heard this one before. It's on the Disney Network. Disney Plus is how we are watching it. It may be other places as well. It is called Battle of Fates and it is a Korean survival show in that sort of survival 100 sort of milieu, very, very over the top production values. But It is a show about fortune telling. So they have 49 fate readers of different disciplines. So there's tarot card readers, there's people.

• 50:42Russ Frushtick?

  I guess it didn't occur to me that people, someone would be good at tarot and not good at like crystal ball reading.

• 50:48Griffin McElroy?

  So the way that they handle that is very, very good. And I will get into that, but they have saju, which is a, I believe, traditional Korean sort of birthday fortune telling. Where they take a look at all of these different charts. There's shamanism, there's a lot of shamans representing different sort of like spirits. There is, there are face readers, name readers. There's like people who are sort of of this discipline, but like across these various different techniques, right? And the game, the show starts with like a disclaimer saying like, this is entertainment purposes. We didn't give anybody sort of advance notice about whatever.

• 51:29Griffin McElroy?

  And the game starts and what they have to do is just do a reading based on a certain thing. So maybe they will show you a picture of a kid and it'll be like, here's his birthday. What did he grow up to be? Or a person, they'll bring out five people and they say, one of these people won the lottery and one of these people was struck by lightning. Identify who it is. And so like they, one of them is just pictures of feet. Like, and you have to do a reading based on that. It is a somewhat gnarly hang from time to time, because the first one of these readings is they show a picture of a woman and her name and her birthday who has died, who has

• 52:14Griffin McElroy?

  actually passed away and they have to divine the nature of her death. And it's like, apparently they did a bunch of those and people, there was a lot of backlash from people who were like, that's fucking gross. So they only left one in the show and it is indeed like, it's the first one they show you and it is so fucking wild.

• 52:35Russ Frushtick?

  Okay. And just, just for my edification as a man of science.

• 52:39Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Russ Frushtick?

  Aren't people just constantly, like they're all getting it wrong?

• 52:43Griffin McElroy?

  So here's, here's what's great, right? There's 49 people and every like round you get to buzz in if you think you got something good. You like feel like you got a good thing. And then they let seven people give their readings and from that they let one person advance.

• 52:56Russ Frushtick?

  Okay.

• 52:57Griffin McElroy?

  So like, what's, what's wild about the show is they don't really show the bad readings. Sometimes they'll like do a round and it'll be like, which of these five people are students at this university? And they'll only show like one person who gets it like dead on right. And they do not show the other. So like by, by what they are editing in and what they are showing, it really paints a picture of these sort of like fortunatally disciplines that are like, wow, this shit's really good. What's interesting, like it's an interesting concept for a show, right?

• 53:29Russ Frushtick?

  Sure.

• 53:30Griffin McElroy?

  It is, I'm learning so much about like shit I did not know about, like, like Korean shamanism and saju and like all of these different things. It's really interesting watching people coming at this sort of concept from way different angles sort of talk, right? And so like tarot card readers feel a certain way about something or they'll get like a fortune thing where they're like, I don't know how to even do this because our thing is like people draw cards and then it's important that they interact. Whereas shamans would be like, I have this granny spirit and she is mad at me, but she told me that his, uh, he has ulcers in his, you know, whatever. Uh, it's, it is, I don't know.

• 54:12Griffin McElroy?

  It's a fascinating subject that is obviously fraught as fuck and the show doesn't do a ton to kind of like get you over that hump.

• 54:21Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Griffin McElroy?

  But it's also like, again, super high touch, super high production value Korean reality competition.

• 54:28Russ Frushtick?

  What was it called again?

• 54:29Griffin McElroy?

  I need, I need. Battle of Fates.

• 54:31Russ Frushtick?

  Battle of Fates, okay. And, and we, we trust the Korean live, uh, reality show organization to like, I don't know what, I know they, in the U S, there are laws about like not putting a thumb on the scale.

• 54:44Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 54:44Russ Frushtick?

  Do we know if those laws exist?

• 54:47Griffin McElroy?

  I don't know, man. I mean, couching all of this is like, I watch a lot of Korean reality competition survival programs, and I'm not at all knowledgeable about kind of like, not, not in a way that like, I feel pretty comfortable. I know Survivor or Bachelor kind of back or back and forth. I, there's, there are, you know, cultural barriers there. There's a lot of things that like, I don't really understand. They have the disclaimer, but like, I don't know.

• 55:14Chris Plante?

  Yeah. Griffin, did you watch Don't Don't at all?

• 55:17Griffin McElroy?

  Did I watch Don't Don't? A little bit, yeah.

• 55:19Chris Plante?

  Yeah, this is giving me Don't Don't vibes in a weird way, which is the premise at the beginning, is that there is a high school boy who believes in space aliens and is obsessed with them, and a young woman who believes in ghosts. And what I love about that show, even though it disappears very quickly, is that they both think the other one is totally full of shit.

• 55:40Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Chris Plante?

  That like, their thing is clearly real, but how could there possibly be space aliens?

• 55:44Griffin McElroy?

  Everybody walks out. The stage is like this huge, winding garden path with these like circular stone plinths that all of the fortune tellers have a little table and a little seat, and then they have their bag of ritual tools, for the most part.

• 55:59Chris Plante?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Griffin McElroy?

  And for the shamans, that's like, they have these five colored flags that they spin around, and then whichever one they draw, like, there's divining sticks that they shake and whichever, like, there's so many different things that they're doing. But the Saju guys roll up and they pull out a fucking laptop, and they have an app that looks like fucking TurboTax that they punch people's shit into, and then they read it like that. The tarot readers have all their different shuffles and different styles that, like, it's interesting. If, if, if this kind of stuff-

• 56:25Russ Frushtick?

  I mean, if the Saju guys had wifi, that seems-

• 56:29Griffin McElroy?

  If this stuff doesn't piss you off, and I understand there's lots of people who fully, fully, fully it does, like, you know, your mileage will obviously vary, but like, I don't know, it's, it's deeply, deeply fascinating to me.

• 56:42Russ Frushtick?

  I would definitely check for a cell dongle on those laptops, quite honestly.

• 56:46Griffin McElroy?

  A cell dongle?

• 56:46Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, someone's connecting to wifi and getting an edge. That's all.

• 56:50Griffin McElroy?

  I think you can connect to wifi. Well, yeah, I guess-

• 56:53Russ Frushtick?

  MySpace seems like an advantage.

• 56:55Griffin McElroy?

  Yeah, I guess that's true.

• 56:56Russ Frushtick?

  Uh, okay.

• 56:57Chris Plante?

  The divining power of Google.

• 56:58Russ Frushtick?

  Versus a card.

• 56:59Griffin McElroy?

  Right.

• 57:00Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah. The tower. Uh, okay, that's cool. Plant, you have anything?

• 57:04Chris Plante?

  Yeah, just very quick, it's another thing that we'll go in way deeper on, on the upcoming resties, but I gotta get y'all on chain staff.

• 57:11Griffin McElroy?

  Okay.

• 57:13Chris Plante?

  It's it's so it's so good y'all it's so good. Chain Staff is the latest game from Nathan Fouts, uh, who did Mommy's or runs a studio Mommy's Best Games. Nathan was at, uh, Sony for Resistance Fall of Man a long, long time ago. And if you've ever been like, man, I miss I miss when they had these absolutely bonkers, uh, weapons in my action games. He basically has just continued that on now inside scrolling 2D shooters. And these games are, if you converted the drawings in the back of your high school, um, like workbooks at school into a video game,

• 57:55Chris Plante?

  it would look like this. They are just hand like hand, hand drawn in a way that is almost disturbing, but also quite beautiful and more so with each passing game. I think this is really his finest work visually. But the attitude is high schooler gone, truly cut loose. You in this game are a super soldier shredded muscles who has a like basically a space alien slug that is bitten onto your head and now is just, you don't have a head, you just have this space alien slug. And if you were to remove it, you will die. So you need to go through alien worlds, uh, saving your fellow soldiers

• 58:39Chris Plante?

  to get powers to both increase your space slugness and also your various weapons.

• 58:45Chris Plante?

  But what matters most is in the title, the chain staff, which is one of the coolest mechanics in forever. It is a single weapon. It is this like alien chain made of different lengths. And you will shoot it out and you can use it to grappling hook like in Bionic Commando, but with like more like physics than Bionic Commando of the past. Cool. Very neat. You can also use it as a ultracharged weapon that is almost a guaranteed one-hit kill missile that you can shoot. But again, if you do that, you can't swing or you'll drop from your swing. Also use it as a shield. So you could plant it in the ground and have it go vertical.

• 59:27Chris Plante?

  And suddenly you have this, I mean, fully impenetrable barrier between you and your enemies. Or you could use it as a bridge. It can be used for all of these things. Basically, everything you want to do in the game can be done with this object. But again, it can only be doing one thing at a time. So you're constantly having to think about how you're manipulating this incredible tool and prioritizing its various uses while also blasting aliens with increasingly ridiculous weapons. That sounds really, really, really sick. It's absolutely sick. There's like so much more I have to say about this game. So like I said, we'll, we'll get into it in Rusties. But in the meantime, I really can't recommend it enough.

• 1:00:12Chris Plante?

  And I think Nathan, what Mommy's Best Games has done is like Housemarque, a beacon of survival.

• 1:00:22Chris Plante?

  His earliest game Weapon of Choice came out a long, long time ago. And he's just been, you know, plucking away at this ever since.

• 1:00:29Russ Frushtick?

  Cool. Cool. That's all awesome. I wanted to call out over at the Patreon. We have a new Bracket Battles episode that is live right now. It's actually Justin's, not, I won't say final, but we're going to be having special guests join for a lot of the Bracket Battles episodes. Justin will probably join for a few of them each year. He won't be every single month, but this was his final as part of our Besties regular crew. This is very fitting because it was about franchises that should be turned into theme parks.

• 1:01:01Chris Plante?

  Oh, what a good one.

• 1:01:02Russ Frushtick?

  What a good one, right here.

• 1:01:03Chris Plante?

  It's good.

• 1:01:07Chris Plante?

  Silent Hill would be too big of a bummer. I'm realizing there is a Silent Hill ride, which is Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, except for, for going to jail for, you know, like driving too fast. You killed your wife. But either way, you're getting arrested and going to hell.

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're right. And I would do want to eat the green, if they made like green licorice herbs, that you could just walk around gnawing on green plants and red plants, like red licorice plants.

• 1:01:32Chris Plante?

  Golden eggs.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  Licorice plants. I'd love that.

• 1:01:35Russ Frushtick?

  Fucking briefcase. You stuff all your merch into it. I love it.

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Griffin had that great idea where everybody has a gun.

• 1:01:44Griffin McElroy?

  It would be so obvious it was fake, guys.

• 1:01:49Griffin McElroy?

  It would be like the Weemote rifle kind of shell.

• 1:01:56Russ Frushtick?

  Lots of fun to record that episode. We had a good time. So go over, listen to that. Show Justin some love by supporting the Patreon. It's only five bucks a month if you want to join, or you can get ad-free episodes of the main show, 10 bucks a month, plus all the bonus stuff. And we love all of you guys, especially some new members. We have Karen, we have Abigail, we have Ned, and we have the high-tech redneck. Thank you for joining and supporting us over at patreon.com/thebesties. Thank you to everyone else who continues to support us. We really appreciate you. Obviously, this is a transition time for the show, but we hope to continue entertaining you guys with dope-ass games for a long, long time.

• 1:02:38Griffin McElroy?

  That's exactly right. What are we doing next week, though?

• 1:02:42Russ Frushtick?

  Oh, boy. Speaking of dope-ass games, we have a game called Mixtape. This is a narrative-first game. I don't even want to preamble it too much, but it's really interesting. So stay tuned for that next week.

• 1:02:57Chris Plante?

  I am so excited to talk about this game. I don't know an embargo list, but I can say this. Fresh Chick messaged me right away and was like, are you playing this? And like, looking into a mirror of my soul.

• 1:03:10Russ Frushtick?

  Yeah, just because Plant loves it, don't let that scare you, because I also feel strongly about it. So keep an eye out for that. That's coming next week.

• 1:03:21Griffin McElroy?

  Awesome. So join us again next week for The Besties, and thank you so much for listening to The Besties, because shouldn't the world's best friends pick the world's best games?

• 1:03:53Griffin McElroy?

  The Besties is executive produced by Justin McElroy. You're welcome. Besties!