Blue Prince Really Is That Good

Blue Prince is the best-reviewed game of 2025 so far... but does it live up to the hype? Yes, yes it does. Jason, Maddy, and Kirk talk about the game's unique genre-blending design, the appeal of the puzzles, the story hidden underneath it all, and much, much more. Plus: a very special announcement!

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

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Any heir worthy of the Sinclair Legacy should have no trouble uncovering the 46th room at Mount Holly within a timely manner. But we're gonna stick around a while. Welcome to TripleClick, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about Blueprints. That's Blue, P-R-I-N-C-E, the puzzle rogue light game set in a mansion where each room is never in the same place twice. We live in this mansion now.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:32Jason Schreier?

  I'm Jason Schreier.

• 0:33Kirk Hamilton?

  And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and I don't know about you, but I can't wait to find Room 46.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  I think there might be more to it than that.

• 0:41Jason Schreier?

  I think you're a liar. You've found it already.

• 0:44Kirk Hamilton?

  You're right, you're right. I was kind of pretending to be a version of myself from a couple of weeks ago.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't even care about Room 46 anymore. There's just so much else I want to know at this point.

• 0:54Kirk Hamilton?

  You've elevated your consciousness beyond the quest for 46.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  I've evolved. I care about chess pieces now. That's my new thing that I'm into.

• 1:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Well, what are we, what are we even talking about? I mean, our listeners know that it's Blueprints at this point, but before we really get the chance to dive into Blueprints, which clearly we've wanted to do for weeks now, I gotta say, I gotta just say, Max and Fun, it's our network. It's our podcast network that we're on, and we love it. And if you want to support our show and get a monthly bonus episode in so doing, then you could go to maxfun.org/join. And for five bucks a month, you could get that monthly app from us. This month, we are going to record a Beans Cast, spoiler-filled Beans Cast, where we talk about Severance, Season 2, Season 1 and 2, because I don't think we've ever spilled the beans on Severance, Season 1.

• 1:49Speaker 00

  So we're gonna spill the beans across the board on a really cool, cerebral show about the workplace, just the corporate workplace and what it's like in, in the modern day. But there's a ton of other episodes in there. If you become a member, you'll find monthly ones going all the way back to the inception of TripleClick at Max Fun. So highly recommended. We really make it worth your while, and we appreciate all of you who support the show. It's why we don't have ads, and we're grateful for all of you. And you know what else is cool? Kirk, why don't you tell us something else cool that is gonna happen?

• 2:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay. I have a very exciting announcement, something we've been setting up for a little while that we can finally tell everyone about. TripleClick is going to be performing live onstage in Portland, Oregon this summer.

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Yay. Yay.

• 2:41Kirk Hamilton?

  It's very exciting. I am psyched. We've been talking about doing a show in my hometown of Portland for quite a while now. We're finally gonna do it. The show will be on Friday, July 11th, at the Alberta Rose Theater. It's super exciting. I love this venue. It's a place that I've been to many great shows. You know, it's a really killer Portland venue, a lovely space. It's where they do the next waltz. I just saw Vijay Iyer play there. There's all kinds of cool shows, and now we're gonna be one of them.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Aww.

• 3:11Kirk Hamilton?

  So, the show is Friday, July 11th. Like I said, the doors are at 7. The show is at 8. It's gonna be super cool. It'll be kind of a supersized live show. We've got a bunch of exciting ideas. There's gonna be some musical surprises.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. Songs will be played.

• 3:26Kirk Hamilton?

  So, yeah, we have access to a lot of things we don't always have access to when we do live shows. So, it's gonna be a ton of fun. We're still planning some stuff out, but we're very, very excited, and we hope that some of you can come. So, yeah, there are tickets for sale now. If you preorder tickets, that's great, just because that kind of tells us how many people are coming. It makes it just a lot easier for us to plan stuff for the show, and of course, it guarantees that you'll get in. So, preorder a ticket if you are at all interested, if you want to come see us live. I think you're gonna have a really good time. I am incredibly excited to finally play Portland. Link for tickets is down in the show notes. Come see us live.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  I'm very excited about this. Our first PNW show. We're really just going across the United States slowly but surely. Where will we go next?

• 4:15Kirk Hamilton?

  Popular demand. It has been widely requested by a lot of people.

• 4:18Jason Schreier?

  I feel like if you live in Seattle, you just have to come and come to this one, because you never know when we'll be back. So, anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, you should just come to this one.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  Please, please. Drive on over, fly over, bus over. This is our PNW show for the moment.

• 4:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I would love us to do a lot of shows in my backyard, because it's very fun for me to do shows right here. So, please, come to the show and...

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Buy a ticket. Show us how popular we are there, and then that would tell us some data that we could interpret.

• 4:47Kirk Hamilton?

  For sure.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Jason, what game are we talking about today?

• 4:51Jason Schreier?

  Well, I channeled my inner Kirk and I wrote a little intro, so I'm gonna read this.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Whoa, okay.

• 5:02Jason Schreier?

  Today, we are talking about the video game Blue Prince, as in a son of a king who is colored blue, not as in the plans you use to build a house. And if that homonym impressed you, this game is going to knock your skull out. Blue Prince is the debut game from director Tonda Ross, formerly an ad maker and his small team at Dog U Bomb. But you play as Simon P. Jones, a 14-year-old boy who is summoned to a mysterious mansion and told that he will inherit it on one condition: if he can reach room 46. The catch is that there are only 45 rooms, and they're never in the same place. Every day, you must map out the mansion, carefully placing kitchens and parlors and lavatories as you try to

• 5:47Jason Schreier?

  reach room 46 without getting stuck. As you go, you'll learn more about Simon's family and their secrets by checking out books from the library, scrutinizing photos with a magnifying glass, and learning that blue memos are always true, but red memos are always false. Or are they? You'll solve logic puzzles, open garage doors, pump water, do some math, and learn that the world of Blue Prince isn't quite what it seems. For the last month, I've done very little but play, think about, and talk about Blue Prince. It has become one of my favorite games of all time. Let's get into it by starting with some impressions, and let's try to keep them brief, because we have a lot to discuss. Kirk, why don't you start us off?

• 6:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Sure, I will keep them brief. So I've played about 60 hours of this game. I am on day 70. I am obsessed with it. I think it is brilliant. I agree with you. It's one of the best games I've ever played. I've just been totally enraptured by it for the past month. My god, it's so good. It's so good. I wrote about it. I wrote a freaking long video game essay about it for My newsletter this week. That's how good this game.

• 6:58Jason Schreier?

  It made your fingers start working again. That's how good it is.

• 7:01Kirk Hamilton?

  It is rare. So I have a newsletter. Listeners might not know this. I have a newsletter. You should go check it out. Maybe we'll link it in show notes, but it is, I mostly write about music. It's like music links and stuff. But I wanted to write about this game. I was like, this game deserves some real, like some, some real considerations. So I wrote about it. I'm sure I'll talk about some of those ideas here, but man, I mean, yeah, we'll get into it. It's an unbelievable accomplishment.

• 7:23Jason Schreier?

  Maddie, what are your thoughts? Quick impressions.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm about 30 hours in day 55. I had my first dream about Blueprints last night. I am now dreaming about the game in the sense that I was exploring the mansion in the dream and making discoveries in the dream. And when I woke up, I was annoyed that none of that progress was real or mattered. So I also have entered whatever vortex we've all decided to exist in now, where this is all that I think about. I just want to talk about Blueprints all the time and it's great. And here we are. I don't know. We're all in it now. We're all having a great time.

• 8:05Kirk Hamilton?

  The manor. We all live in Mount Holly Manor. Here we are.

• 8:08Jason Schreier?

  All right. So before we go any further, I want to explain a little bit about this, what this game actually is. Because I've seen a lot of confusion out there. I think a lot of reviewers and podcasts have kind of struggled to articulate it. Because it's a tough game to describe. It kind of, it blends genres. I described it on Blue Sky a little bit as kind of Outer Wilds meets Slay the Spire. But I don't really think that's a good way of encapsulating it.

• 8:32Kirk Hamilton?

  Gone Home.

• 8:33Jason Schreier?

  A little Gone Home. So let me, let me kind of give a brief description for people who, who aren't really sure what to make of this thing. So the way Blueprints works is it unfolds on multiple layers. On one layer, it's kind of a rogue-like strategy game where you enter this mansion and you see doors. And every door allows you to draft a new room that will then position it on the grid of this mansion's map. And those doors, those rooms that you get to choose from, you get to choose from three every time you reach a new door. And those are kind of randomly generated. Hence the rogue like nature of it and hence where a lot of the addiction comes in. And those rooms can be anything from there. A lot of them are just kind of generic manor rooms.

• 9:17Jason Schreier?

  You might have a bedroom. You might have a billiard room. You might have a parlor. You might have a kitchen. You might have a lavatory. And once you draft that room, you can go into it. And inside of that room is where the second layer of the game unfolds because inside of that room is where the gone home of it all plays into it. And that's where you poke around. You look for things you can examine. Maybe you'll find a clue on a bulletin board. Maybe you'll find a book nestled away on a corner table. And in those clues, you'll find some sort of either a piece of lore or a hint at something else or a clue. And you'd move this, you move through this world very quickly. So by, by the first half hour, you'll have drafted maybe a dozen, maybe 20 rooms or something like that.

• 10:00Jason Schreier?

  And that's when you'll start to see the pieces kind of connect because you might find that in, let's say you draft a billiard room and then on the wall of the billiard room, there's this dart game. And you see a bunch of colors on it and you try to interact with it and you're just like, what is this? I have no idea what's going on. And then maybe a few rooms later, you'll draft something else that gives you a little bit of a clue as to what that means. And then you think, oh, okay, I should go back there and check that out. And then things start to get more and more complicated as you kind of unpeel the layers of the onion that is this game. And you start to think, you start to really, you start to keep a running list of goals in the back of your mind or on a notebook, which is highly recommended while playing this game.

• 10:43Jason Schreier?

  And you might think, oh, if I combine this room with that room, what will that lead to? Or, oh, I just learned this key piece of information. I should apply it to that room, but I haven't drafted it on this run. Okay, I'll do it all tomorrow. Because every subsequent day, the manor resets and you get a chance to do it all over again and draft new rooms and make new connections and solve new puzzles. Some of the puzzles are small and simple. Some of them are very big and complicated. And the game is really brilliant and the reason it's so addictive is because it's brilliant. At making you, giving you so many different tantalizing breadcrumbs of like,

• 11:23Jason Schreier?

  things to experiment with and try out and check out and solutions to discover and puzzles to solve on a grander scale. A lot of them are escape room style puzzles, which I think is is an important part of this all. So it's like, it's like Gone Home with like actual gameplay is how you might describe the rooms themselves. And yeah, I mean, hopefully that helps capture what the game actually is. But there's still even more layers because it's also hiding a massive story and lore and all sorts of cool mysteries that you really, you start to get into the more and more you play.

• 12:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I think that's a good summary.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's cool how like tabletop like it is, I would say. It almost feels like a board game where you're like laying down each of the rooms of a mansion on a board. And that's a huge piece of it, but then that is interlinked with the fact that you are 3D walking around in first person in the mansion as well. You're interacting with this map with essentially tiles that represent each room just as often as you're interacting Gone Home style in first person with the mansion picking up letters and, you know, opening drawers and finding safes with codes that you need to figure out in order to open them and all that good video game stuff.

• 12:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Specifically, it's Betrayal at House on the Hill is the board game where you're laying out the rooms. And it really looks and kind of feels like that.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  It does. Yeah. Yeah. If anybody listening has heard of that game or played that game, it's very similar to that. It has a very satisfying feel. So like that kind of combined with an escape room vibe, plus the rogue like elements, I would say the main thing I was super into and relieved about puzzle game wise is that something like a code or a password is the same across every run. And so that's where the rogue like part of the game comes in, where you accrue a piece of knowledge, say, like you're like, okay, that's like the key to this lock. I'm going to use that next run or next time because maybe I don't have enough steps to get back there right now,

• 13:29Speaker 00

  but I know where that is and that piece of knowledge is going to remain true for every. A successive run and that just is awesome like because the entire mansion resets each day, but there are certain parts of the mansion that you're like, well, this is always true. So you always kind of feel like you're advancing and actually learning more about it each day.

• 13:48Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, that's an important point is that like knowledge is what you're gaining. So in a lot of rogue likes, you're kind of like gaining skill or like gaining do new like unlocking progression in this, a lot of it, there's some permanent unlocks. I would call it a rogue light because so much of it is permanent and so much of it is kind of like fixed. But yes, the rogue like part of it all, the reason to do it is to learn more things. And in fact, I think the best tip that people should have when they're starting to play this game is that almost always you should draft a room that you've never seen before because you will learn something new from it.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, just keep drafting. I mean, I feel like that was the key piece of information that I needed from friends and coworkers when I was starting was because I was like, I don't understand the point of this in the first few days. Like I'm just drafting rooms and I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere, but eventually you're like, oh, I have so many rooms that I actually do understand the strategy of it. And I'm starting to put together what's going on.

• 14:48Kirk Hamilton?

  One thing I think this game is remarkably good at is teaching you how to play it. The tutorialization in this game is exceptional. I've never seen anything like it. The tip you just gave Jason is a fantastic tip. I think we were talking and you mentioned it to me and I was like, okay, that's a good thing to keep in mind. And then was glad several times that I, you know, decided to draft a room that wouldn't have been the best for my current run just because it was new. And then pretty shortly after that, I found a book in the game about drafting. And the first thing it said was always draft new rooms. And then it had quotes from people about their approach to gems and currencies and what they try to prioritize. And then the more you play, the more you find there are several volumes of these books that are just outright tutorials. They're telling

• 15:31Kirk Hamilton?

  you how to play and even revealing secrets. And then there are a variety of mechanics like that that I'll let players discover, but they're really cool and they're explicitly giving you guidance within the game. And I think that's an important thing to say about this game. This is not like Animal Well, which I've seen a lot of people say, especially I think Jason hearing that you played, you know, up to the credits in 16 hours and then played another 100 hours.

• 15:55Jason Schreier?

  140 hours is my current playtime.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's be clear.

• 16:01Kirk Hamilton?

  So I got credits in 20 hours and I'm at 60 and I'm still going strong. There's a ton I'm discovering. People hear that and they think, oh, is this an Animal Well thing where reviewers had this experience that no one else will have because they played it early and they were all in a Discord together, crowdsourcing these crazy puzzles. And I would say no, and it's important to anyone worried about that. This game very much is not that. I have gotten essentially no tips at all in the 60 hours that I've played, and I've made a ton of progress. I got to room 46. I'm way beyond that. I'm doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I've actually stumbled into some, some really amazing things that I think, I know, Jason, it took you a long time to actually figure out where I lucked into them. You can just play this game and it will reveal itself to you. And I think that's a very important thing to say about it.

• 16:45Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm not like some puzzle game genius. I don't actually go that hard on games like this. But I have 600 and something screenshots that I'm in the process of organizing into a series of folders so that I can know which ones are books and which ones are, you know, things I'm trying to keep track of and which ones are puzzles. I've got notes. I write my notes on my computer. I just have like thousands of words of notes that I've been keeping track of because I've been so drawn in and I've been so empowered to solve everything for myself.

• 17:11Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, so it's a puzzle game, but it's not really, the puzzles themselves are not really where the challenge lies. Although there is a little bit of math, and if you struggle with kind of basic math, then you might have a hard time with that. But I would say that it's really more of an observational game and you're rewarded for paying close attention. And the game teaches you that. You're right about the tutorialization because the game teaches you that pretty quickly. One of the key items you can get, you can get all these different items as you move through the house that you can use to interact with the world in different ways, like a hammer or a shovel. One of the key ones is a magnifying glass, and that is one of the most useful, especially in the early game, because it allows you to zoom in on these books and photos and pieces of text that you're finding throughout the manor

• 17:55Jason Schreier?

  and learn more information from them. For example, you might see a photo and see like a little bit of text that is like really smudged and hard to read. And then you take a magnifying glass to it and oh, now you can read it. Oh, hey. So something interesting here. Or you notice like some faint marks on a map or in the corner of a piece of paper. And you're like, oh, I should take the magnifying glass to this and you discover something interesting. And by the way, one of the things that makes it so addictive and just kind of makes you, gives you that one more turn feeling of like, the best rogues or the best kind of strategy games is that kind of feeling of, oh, I haven't checked that yet.

• 18:39Jason Schreier?

  Oh, I want to do one more run so I can see if I can grab the magnifying glass and then go to the darkroom because I want to check out that photo, but wait, I haven't gotten the utility closet that'll, that'll let me light up the darkroom. So I have to do it next run. And that's one of the reasons that it can get so just brain wormed into you is because you, you just have that one more, one more turn feeling over and over again. But um, yeah, it really, even, even when you get to the deeper, deeper levels. I mean, there's some word puzzles in there that I think can get really, really difficult, not until end, end, end game. So don't worry about that stuff. But like, for the most part, careful observation and just kind of like trying to unravel homonyms and logic puzzles and stuff like that.

• 19:20Jason Schreier?

  A lot of that is, it's not super difficult. Like I think most people will be able to get pretty far in this game on their own. And maybe they can get a little bit of guidance or a little bit of kind of nudges from friends, but like there's no ARG required. There's no super brain, like binary that you need to pull off. So in that sense, it's not like Animal Well, which I think the third layer, the kind of deepest layer of that game required people to work together to solve it. This is a lot more self-contained.

• 19:52Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that's, that's what I'm saying.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would agree, but I also will say that solving the puzzles with a friend or two is extraordinarily fun as well. It's not mandatory in the Animal Well way where the game is designed for that in the end, end game. And you have to do it. This is just classic puzzle game style, like the math puzzle. There's sort of like one specific math puzzle that we're all talking around and the other puzzles aren't. Is math centric and I just could well for now.

• 20:22Kirk Hamilton?

  Don't make assumptions.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Fine. There's one specific one in the early game and I couldn't figure it out. And so I asked my wife, who's better at that kind of puzzle than I am. And she had so much fun solving it with me. And it keeps getting more complex as the game goes on. And so anytime it would do that, I would like pull her in and be like, hey, like, let's keep trying to solve this puzzle together. And that was super, super fun. And I think if you had just have somebody around in your life who's also playing this game, like, it's been really fun at work to just talk with coworkers about what stage each of us are on. And then one of us might discover an item that you need to unlock a place. And one of us has only found the place, but not the item. And like, watching those two people like

• 21:06Speaker 00

  interact with each other is really fun, because they're both like, okay, like, I know that I need this other thing. Can you give me a really oblique hint so that I'm in the right direction? Which I think is one of the more fun experiences of a puzzle game is like figuring out the right kinds of oblique hints that you can give with your friends, or just outright co-op playing the game together, the way Deena and I have been for that puzzle, just to have a good time. Like, I think that's a really great way to play this game. And I recommend that, too. Especially if you're somebody who's just like, I don't know if I could figure it out all on my own. I don't, I will speak for myself. I'm not sure I could.

• 21:43Kirk Hamilton?

  No, right. I think that's an important thing to point out. And that, you know, the puzzle that we're talking about, this math puzzle, to be clear, it's one of the small types of puzzles. There are puzzles that just take place within a room. And you can solve it. And if you solve it, you get like a key, or a gem, or something. And you want to solve it because it gets harder each time. And it's satisfying to solve it and it helps you out.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  And it's also like useful to have keys and gems. It will always benefit you.

• 22:05Kirk Hamilton?

  But we're not, it's not like one of the bigger puzzles. It's a small thing. And yeah, those are very fun to solve with people. The, there are some that are sort of image based associative puzzles. And I was staying with Emily's folks this past week, and I just was playing on Steam Deck. And I would just show them the picture. And I'd be like, okay, what, what do you think this is? Like, when you just look at this, just unfocus your mind, kind of tell me what you think. Because I was just trying. I had to like work my way through what the solution could be. And there, you know, that was another puzzle that was just one room. Yeah. And I didn't solve them all at once. And, you know, I kind of kept redrafting that room multiple times. And then I found eventually that I solved it. And that, I think, while this is a game of observation and that the observations are things that you can kind of just make.

• 22:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Like it's, each one is not that complex. It is a game of vast complexity. And I think that is worth pointing out that, you know, the actual scope of the game is massive. And there are so many connections you can make. I would say it's a game of observation and association. You observe and then you make associations between different things. And you start to realize how they're connected with one another. And that's very rewarding. There are even puzzles that are structured, that are built on that. This clearly seems to be a way that Tondoros and whoever else, if anybody else helped design these puzzles. The way that he thinks is in terms of one thing and another thing and connecting between them.

• 23:30Kirk Hamilton?

  And what's so fabulous about this game is that it is this vast constellation of things as you play more and more and uncover them. And the thrill of the game is drawing these connections. That's why you have to take notes. And I do think, I mean, the notes are such an essential part of this game. I just read through my notes. I just flipped through my screenshots just on my phone. I, when we were traveling, I was just looking through them, rereading books, rereading old letters. A big part of this game is that repetition. This is actually what I wrote about. I think the repetition is so central to this game in a way that even goes beyond Outer Wild. It's another puzzle type game with a lot of repetition or inscription. Another game with rogue-like elements, like with random elements and repetition.

• 24:12Kirk Hamilton?

  This game, the repetition is so crucial for the pacing and for how pleasant and ultimately relaxing it is to play. Let me, let me tell a funny story. So when you start this game, there's an anti-chamber at the top of the map, right? You've got this nine by five grid and there's the anti-chamber. And you can tell after your first run, okay, I gotta get to the anti-chamber. And that's really when you're kind of in strategy mode, as you said, Jason. It's kind of the strategy of how can I make my steps last until? I get to the anti-chamber. And for a while, I was really in that mode and I would start getting kind of close, like on my fifth or sixth run. I'd have a kind of good one and then I'd run out of gas or hit a locked door and I was so frustrated. And then finally, I stayed up really late on this run and it was going so well and I'm like, oh, man, I think I'm maybe finally gonna

• 24:56Kirk Hamilton?

  gonna get there and I'm gonna get the anti-chamber open and I'm gonna be able to get in. And I'm counting my steps. I'm looking at the map thinking like I have to, I have to backtrack and go here and open this door and then make it up. And I'm like, I don't know, it's gonna be really close. And I go and I go and I find myself standing outside of the hallway, the room before the anti-chamber with one step left. And I walk into the hallway, my step goes to zero. I keep moving as the screen begins to fade and enter the anti-chamber and get a reset screen. I have to start over. So at the time, I was super bummed and then thrilled. I found it actually kind of delightful. Oh, this is such an ultimate gamer moment. I fell one step short of this goal that I had.

• 25:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Now that I've played so much more, I understand how each of those goals actually fits into the broader context of the game. And I've come to find it so relaxing. I think as I talk to people when they're early on, they're a little more anxious. They make more assumptions about being stuck. They feel a little more set on solving one thing or achieving one goal. And the more you play through that repetition, the rhythm of the game kind of, you, you start to see the broader rhythms of it and just relax into this vast unfolding story that's so pleasurable and fascinating.

• 26:13Jason Schreier?

  You see the matrix. Yeah, Kirk, I think you would have been even more frustrated if.

• 26:19Kirk Hamilton?

  I think I would have been equally delighted, right? In the end, I would have been like, oh, okay.

• 26:22Jason Schreier?

  You would have been like, oh, God, oh, no. Um, yeah, the, I wanna, I wanna, um, jump on what you said about observations and making connections, because I think that's a very big part of this game, not just in terms of solving the puzzles, but also in terms of piecing the story together, because the story, um, itself requires a lot of archaeology. And there is a, like I mentioned before, a hefty story in this game that for me has made it all worthwhile and is really the kind of the hidden. The secret sauce that that makes this game work. And especially especially compared to a lot of other kind of mist like games or metroid brains that are trying to do this sort of thing. I don't think any of them have a story quite like this. Outer Wilds has an awesome story, but it's not quite like this.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  And Mist had a cool story too, and that always helped it.

• 27:09Jason Schreier?

  Again, not quite like this. This feels.

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I'm just saying, having a story in a game like this is such a benefit to me. Where I'm like, this is motivating me.

• 27:17Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, and so with this, I mean, it just feels it's literary in a way that I a lot of those games are not. It feels like Tonda Ross, the director, writer, designer, has kind of hidden a fantasy novel in here. And it's just such a treat to uncover it and find all of the threads and and kind of generations that it spans. It's really sprawling and amazing. The connections thing, yeah, I think is a really good way of putting it because making those connections is such a delight and gets your synapses going. And a lot of times, I think it's it's a type of game where you're rewarded by just not like trying to slam your head against the wall and solve a puzzle right away.

• 27:59Jason Schreier?

  There are a lot of times where you might get to a door and be like, how the hell do I open this thing? Like, this is not like any door I've seen before in the game. And it would behoove you to just forget about it for a little while and just keep going elsewhere because it'll be clear when you can actually open that door and maybe you'll unlock it by following some other path. So there's a lot of moments like that and a lot of moments where you'll make a connection later. God, there was one whenever we if we if we wind up doing a spoiler cast about this game, there is one moment towards the very, very end, like very deep in the game, that I just wish I could scream about with the world because it is one of the coolest like connections that I've ever made in a video game ever. But I'll sit on that for now.

• 28:41Jason Schreier?

  But one thing I will say is that as you go, you'll you'll you'll get less and less like the the earliest hours of this game are probably the most frustrating, that period that Kirk described. And then as you start to make those connections, it really is quite rewarding. One other thing I'll say is that even though my hour count can seem intimidating and Kirk, you were also intimidating when I told you I'd spent 140 hours on this game.

• 29:08Jason Schreier?

  A lot of that was me just experimenting and slamming my head against the wall to try things because nobody else in the world, other than like three or four of us who were like, had gotten further than anybody else and we're just talking about it in a Discord, nobody else in the world had gotten that far. I think for most people, when you play this game, you won't have that experience. And if you need guidance, as we kind of did at different points, you will be able to ask a friend, or ask the internet, or ask Reddit for like a little nudge to help you through certain moments. Because there are some moments later in the game where I like definitely needed guidance to, to figure out what to do next. That was usually the part, like usually when you know, you have an idea of what to do, you can kind of piece it together, but trying to figure that out can, can sometimes

• 29:52Jason Schreier?

  be a challenge.

• 29:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Can I just shout out the writing a little bit more, or like a little bit more in detail? Because I am incredibly impressed by the writing in this game. The narrative is one thing, and the narrative is exceptional, this broader narrative you're talking about. But the moment to moment writing, you're reading so many newspaper articles, letters from so many different characters. There are children's books in this game that are convincing children's books. They could basically be children's books from the 1980s. There is so much wonderful art. I think that the, the aesthetics of this game are exceptional. And the way that the art and the writing mix together, the handwriting, the way that each person's handwriting tells a story, it's just incredibly, incredibly impressive.

• 30:37Kirk Hamilton?

  They could have gotten away with having pretty good story, like pretty good writing in any of these, you know, written examples, and instead they're exceptional. And that really goes across the board. The art in this game, I think, is wonderful. There's so many great examples of art. The soundtrack is fantastic. It's by this Dutch jazz duo called, what are they called? Trigg and Gusset, who I am now listening to. It's a bass clarinetist and a keyboard player. It's really bass clarinet heavy. Bass clarinet is basically the instrument of this whole game. It doesn't sound like any game I've ever played before. And it's beautiful, especially at these key moments when the soundtrack kind of deploys, and this bass clarinet just carries you forward. And it's so cool.

• 31:31Kirk Hamilton?

  The game doesn't set a foot wrong, and it is incredibly impressive to me.

• 31:35Jason Schreier?

  It's so funny. I saw a review. I was reading some of the reviews. It's the highest reviewed game of the year so far, by the way.

• 31:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Not impressed.

• 31:42Jason Schreier?

  I was reading one review and thought of you, Kirk, because it was like, one of the negatives, like, the minus column was like, "The music isn't good," or like, "The music is repetitive."

• 31:51Kirk Hamilton?

  Get out of here. What?

• 31:52Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I was so shocked. I was so shocked.

• 31:55Kirk Hamilton?

  There's no accounting for taste.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  That's bizarre.

• 31:59Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, the writing is incredible. Tandoros is really good at writing all these different characters and making them sound distinct. He also does this brilliant technique of having a lot of the letters and correspondence in the game be written in people's handwriting and doing different handwritings for different people. And sometimes you might notice kind of matching handwritings here and there. And do your, put on your Hercule Poirot hat and realize that like, oh, this character is actually this character. Whatever, man. Hey, hey. This is America, Kirk. Come on.

• 32:32Kirk Hamilton?

  That's true. Freedom prize, baby.

• 32:36Jason Schreier?

  It is, it is really the kind of quintessential detective game, archaeologist game, whatever you want to call it, where you're just making leaps of deduction and finding things and digging into things. And yes, the writing being stellar, I think, kind of is what, what really ties in. That combined with the story is really what just kind of makes the whole thing hum. It's the engine that just drives the whole experience and makes it feel special. One other thing I'll also say is that, like, I think that it can be easy for a game like this, a puzzle game like this, a metroid brainia, so to speak, to feel frustrating when you've hit a dead end and you don't feel like there's anywhere you can go from there. This game is really, really good about creating multiple hints to each possible problem and just doling

• 33:19Jason Schreier?

  them throughout the game. Like, sprawling throughout the game are kind of, sprinkled throughout the game are these hints for everything. So, every single puzzle in the game, chances are like, or let's say 95% of the puzzles in the game. There are solutions or at least clues for it in multiple places. So you aren't just required to have the one pixel hunting, like find the one letter that will lead you down this one thing. No, there are multiple places to the point where like later in the game, past the point where it will be useful, but like, there's this funny moment where like, an entire puzzle might get just kind of spelled out for you later in the game. I'll be a little vague here, but like, and you'll be like, oh, okay. Like, I knew this already. Like, why, why is this here?

• 34:03Jason Schreier?

  This is very silly. But it's just like, just in case, in case you didn't figure out that one. Like, the game very much wants you. It's a game that doesn't want you to be, it's kind of, man, I enjoyed The Witness, but The Witness felt like a game that really wanted you to not solve it in some ways, or wanted you to be like, F you.

• 34:20Kirk Hamilton?

  Philosophically, it wanted you to be stuck.

• 34:22Jason Schreier?

  It wanted you to be stuck. This is a game that does, wants you to have an amazing time. Like, it wants you to be, it wants to guide you, it wants to help you out, it wants to help you answer all of these, all of these questions and solve all of these mysteries. Although I will say, the place where I'm at right now, I'm still trying to figure out if there is more to find in the game. And that's kind of a surreal experience where you, you don't even know if there's more to uncover. You feel like there, there must be, but you don't even know where to start, which is kind of an interesting experience.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Maybe there are no worlds left to conquer for you. That would, that would be sad for you. I will say, I think maybe the one downside, and it's something that I think might already be changing about the game, is that there are random elements to the game. And that's part of any rogue light or rogue like game. And sometimes I had runs where I'm like, I have an amazing set of items, and I'm just drafting the stupidest possible rooms. And I just have like, this couple of specific rooms that I could go in any particular direction puzzle wise, if I happen to draft them, or they're not in the right spot. Like, some rooms need to connect to other rooms, or it's beneficial to you if they're close to certain things.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  And I, I don't know if this is something that's being updated, but I wouldn't be surprised if, like, some of the RNG of the game is getting a little bit massaged, because there were also moments when I I was playing where I felt like I just so happened to get lucky in a good way. Where I was like, oh, like I'm just finding all the right items for this moment that I need them. But like, who knows? I could also just be describing luck.

• 36:00Jason Schreier?

  I just had deja vu. Was there a game that we talked about a couple of years ago where you're like, I think the RNG is getting massaged?

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Probably, yeah. I mean, we talk about puzzle games a lot on this show.

• 36:10Jason Schreier?

  It is true. I don't think RNG has got massaged. I think what you'll find, Maddie, as you play a little bit more is that there are more ways to manipulate the RNG than you might have realized in the past.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Oh, well, of course. Yeah. And the more I play, the more I find either items or circumstances that allow me to have some type of leg up. And I think when you're in like days 20 to 35 or so, that's like when you're probably going to really feel it. Or at least when I did, where you're like, I'm far enough in the game that I really like it and I understand it well enough to be frustrated by what I can't quite draft or discover yet. And I know what I want, but I can't get there. And then eventually you reach like cerebral monk mode, like Kirk is describing, where you're like, all things are possible. I'm seeing the matrix and I'm cool.

• 37:00Jason Schreier?

  Well, my tip for you, my tip for you, Maddie, would be, well, there are a few tips. Get one of the drafting guides because that'll help you like kind of conceptualize the best way to lay out the map. But also there's a room that's pretty easily available from the get go called the Boudoir, which is, am I mispronouncing that? Boudoir, whatever, man.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  A lot of French words in here that we're teaching Jason about.

• 37:20Jason Schreier?

  It's the Baudoiere.

• 37:23Kirk Hamilton?

  The true final puzzle of Lucrent's is pronouncing the French words correctly.

• 37:27Jason Schreier?

  And if you get the Boudoir.

• 37:29Kirk Hamilton?

  The bidet.

• 37:31Jason Schreier?

  That's a different room. There are two dice in it that you can use to reroll your three rooms.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Those are like secretly the most powerful items in the game.

• 37:41Jason Schreier?

  Well, yeah. So you want the, one of the kind of ways to avoid frustration is to get those and just save them for when you're at a point where like, well, we're like, you only have dead ends and you can't go any further unless you get a new set. Of potential rooms to draft. But yeah, you'll find that to be kind of less relevant the more you play. But yeah, I can definitely see how you would hit a sticking point. My actually, my, my vote for the, the one real flaw of this game is that there's no way to suspend it. Mid run.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Yes, that's true.

• 38:12Jason Schreier?

  So if you have to suddenly stop playing because your kids need you or something, you have to give up mid run, which that to me has been.

• 38:18Kirk Hamilton?

  This is a big benefit of the Steam Deck version.

• 38:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:21Jason Schreier?

  The Steam Deck version. Runs really well on Steam Deck, right, guys? Like it's been running well.

• 38:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does. It does get a warning that the text is small and it is, but usually, I mean, you can highlight items in game, even without the magnifying glass and see them pretty well. But when you're looking at the map screen, it's pretty tiny at various points.

• 38:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, I played a ton of this on Steam Deck and I also played a bunch on PC. And I do have to say the text size thing is real. It's not the biggest deal in the world, but there are times where I really wish the thing I'm magnifying, this very complex, whatever formulation written in a tiny little place. I just wish it was a little bigger and a little clearer. And my screenshots from Steam Deck are just lower resolution and I wish they were higher res. So it is a thing, but yes, generally fantastic on Steam Deck. And it's wonderful that you can just suspend the Steam Deck and then come back to it.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a big perk.

• 39:09Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, but it looks so nice on the PC, on the big, on the big screen and my 2K resolution.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there is something about the game that kind of feels handheld friendly too, because it's so board gamey. Like it's not to say that it isn't amazing on a big screen, but I have really liked being able to play it on the, on the deck and, and just take it with me everywhere and think about it all the time.

• 39:33Jason Schreier?

  My way of playing, and I don't know if this will be fitting for everybody, but my way of playing has been to, so I'm playing on PC with a controller and I am taking photos of everything, every document, every photo, every, every important piece of information with my phone. And the reason that it's useful on my phone is because then I can very easily just reference it while I'm playing by just pulling up my phone and going through the screens.

• 39:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh yeah, I have it synced via Google Drive to my phone. So I do the same thing, but it takes a couple of extra steps.

• 40:00Jason Schreier?

  Also, one of the cool things that you can do in this game is you can kind of make connections about things or like really play the game when you're not actually playing it. So sometimes while I was like in the thick of it a few weeks ago, I would just be like, okay, I'm done after a 10 hour marathon session. Now I'm gonna go to the bathroom and just sit on the toilet and just like look through the photos I took and I would make connections in my head that way. And sometimes I would have to be like, oh, gotta go pull up another run. Sorry, time is past midnight.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Grindset mindset. You're never not playing blueprints. You're always playing it.

• 40:33Jason Schreier?

  Exactly.

• 40:34Kirk Hamilton?

  No, a really wonderful thing about this game is its relationship to time. The way that you repeat over and over again is so central to how you play. But unlike Outer Wilds, which is on a timer, there's no timer. You can just stand in a room forever, just staring at whatever you're looking at. And as a result, you also can't just rush around it and access everything all at once, which means that my screenshots frequently have information that I can't access in game while I'm playing the game. There may be a book that I can't get from the library that I want to reference and I don't want to wait for the library to get it in, but fortunately I Xeroxed the book when I was in the library last time and have been carrying around the Xeroxes with me. And then I go look at them and then sometimes I realize, oh, man, this is kind of a bad Xerox.

• 41:19Kirk Hamilton?

  I need to go get it again because I magnified the wrong part or whatever. But that feeling of sort of multiple vectors of information that I'm accessing simultaneously across different timeframes is so special and unusual. It's a big part of this game for me.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. So what do we think? Could a 14 year old really solve all these puzzles? Is Simon a genius? Like, what is going on there?

• 41:42Kirk Hamilton?

  He might be. He's got some pretty smart ancestors.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  He sure does. He sure does.

• 41:47Jason Schreier?

  He's actually, he's almost 16 in my game, so.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah, because so much time has gone by.

• 41:54Jason Schreier?

  I'm on day 300 and it's actually the funniest part of this game is that Simon's dad has allowed him just to be by himself in this manner for 300 days.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  I know. It's like he's Ash Ketchum or something.

• 42:08Jason Schreier?

  Eating nothing but oranges and bananas for 300 days.

• 42:12Kirk Hamilton?

  He's eating like a delicious pot pie for dinner every dinner.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's getting a porterhouse steak from time to time. It's not like he's never eating.

• 42:20Kirk Hamilton?

  The food in this game is actually very specific and delicious looking.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  I know.

• 42:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Not like Monster Hunter food. It's not super over the top. It's very restrained, but I want to eat every piece of food in this game.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  It is good.

• 42:30Kirk Hamilton?

  The salted banana, number one thing in the game. Every time I salt a banana, I'm like, I bet that's pretty good.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  It's probably kind of good. Yeah. Salting an apple? Why not? I don't know. It'll probably taste stronger.

• 42:43Jason Schreier?

  It is good stuff. I feel like we need to talk more about this game. Maybe I'll do, well, maybe I'll just do another episode next week where we talk more about it.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Maybe, I don't know.

• 42:50Kirk Hamilton?

  I could talk about it forever. There's so, so much to say.

• 42:52Jason Schreier?

  Cause especially once people have started playing it and we can get a little more specific about like the early puzzles and what you do and whatnot. One more thing I'll say, when, when you roll credits, you will find yourself with like a whole lot of leads and background information. And I think a lot of people will be intimidated at the sound of like, oh my God, there's so many hours. You do so much after you roll credits. I think it's possible to like roll credits and be like, okay, that's it. I'm done. But chances are by the time you roll credits, you'll be so hooked by this game and its mysteries that you'll want to keep discovering things and finding more. And that is a very cool feeling that very few games evoke.

• 43:32Kirk Hamilton?

  And it's important, it's important to underline that the game becomes more and more relaxing the more you play it. It doesn't actually feel stressful and overwhelming. I find it to be a very calming experience now. And I think that is actually, that's part of what you're talking about, Jason, is that you roll credits, you make some big discoveries, you make some big, you know, you get your adrenaline going, you're really excited to have achieved some things. And then it just becomes more and more fun discoveries. And it's kind of just relaxing where any given day, who cares? I'm on day 70. I've seen everything. Like I, you know, I, I mean, I haven't seen everything. There's some very exciting stuff I'm sure that I haven't seen, but I've seen so much. I feel so in control. I have a lot of permanent upgrades. Like you were saying earlier, I have the ability to manipulate the floor plan. It's just so fun and chill. I just love playing it now. So I don't want to stop.

• 44:18Jason Schreier?

  And you don't have to for quite a while. This is a, this is a

• 44:21Speaker 00

  This is all we're playing for the rest of the year? I hope everyone's cool with that.

• 44:24Kirk Hamilton?

  At least for the next little while.

• 44:27Jason Schreier?

  140 hours. It's like I said, it's dethron Bellatro. On my Steam play, I think it's, it might be number two. Number one is still Final Fantasy 14, which I have like 200 plus hours.

• 44:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Beat Elden Ring. That's impressive.

• 44:40Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah, it's about to beat Elden Ring, I believe. I have to double check.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  It would be pretty hard for it to beat Elden Ring for me. I think I had like 300 hours of that, but we'll see. I don't know. I'll check back in later.

• 44:52Jason Schreier?

  All right, we're gonna take a break and then we'll be back with one more thing.

• 45:00Speaker 03

  Dr. Game Show is a podcast where we play games submitted by listeners with callers from all around the world. And this is a game to get you to listen. Name three reasons to listen to Dr. Game Show. Kyla and Lunar from Freedom, Maine.

• 45:14Speaker 04

  Dishes, folding the laundry, doing cat grooming.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  Okay, thank you. Great.

• 45:21Speaker 05

  Oh, things you could do while listening. Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  I love that the re, I'm like, why do you listen to this show? And Lunar's like, dishes. Fantastic. Manolo.

• 45:31Speaker 05

  Number one is that it'll inspire you. You're gonna be like, oh, I could do that.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  That's all we have time for, but you'll just have to find Dr. Game Show a maximum fund to find out for yourself.

• 45:45Jason Schreier?

  And we are back. I'm gonna go first because this is less of me one more thing and more just something we should quickly follow up on, which is that since we recorded last week's episode in which I said, I cannot see Nintendo changing the price of the Switch 2. Nintendo has announced that they are suspending pre-orders of the Switch 2 or indefinitely delaying them because of the tariff situation that is happening in the United States right now. Nintendo didn't say this, but some context here is that in, during the first Trump administration, in part because of Trump's trade war against China, Nintendo moved Switch production to Vietnam. And Trump unexpectedly issued a 46%

• 46:27Jason Schreier?

  Tariff on Vietnam, uh, which will of course affect the switch to. And so we don't know what's going to happen. We don't know if Nintendo is going to hike the price. We don't know. I mean, anything can happen in the Trump administration day to day. So like even we're recording this on Tuesday, by the time this goes live, things could be totally different. But as of right now, we, we are in this kind of, um, uh, I don't know, like a purgatory period where there are no pre-orders available for switch to, and we don't know if Nintendo is going to like suddenly come out and be like, hey, we can't sell this for $450 anymore. We have to hike up the price because of the Trump tariffs. So there's a follow up on what's been going on with the new, the newest gaming console.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is pretty wild. I, I'm kind of glad I didn't manage to make a prediction about this because I don't think I could have predicted how stupid this was going to be. I, I think my original version of my prediction was the tariffs won't impact the switch to because I just kind of

• 47:28Jason Schreier?

  was like, no, no one would be so stupid as to do something like that. But that wasn't, that was a prediction that you just like killed, right? And we didn't even air that part.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not in there because I did get a couple of posts from people being like, oh, Maddie, what happened with your prediction? Because I think people just forgot that we asked that one and they just remembered that I had one related to this. But God, I never could have predicted how stupid this reality is going to turn out to be. I know, I know. It just keeps happening. Here we are.

• 48:00Jason Schreier?

  Here we are. Yeah. Anyway, that's the latest update. Um, I guess we'll discuss more when there is something to discuss.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  When we know more.

• 48:08Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. Um, Maddie, what's your one more thing?

• 48:10Speaker 00

  So I found out that my beautiful wife hasn't seen a whole lot of really good Pixar movies. So we've just been watching a lot of Pixar movies and it's her first time. And that's been so fun because a lot of them are extremely good. Um, I put Inside Out one and two down here, but I just wanted to note that we also just watched Toy Story one and two. These are all good films. If anyone listening has somehow managed to avoid watching. Any of these, you should watch them. But out of all of them, I just want to recommend Inside Out. The first, I really liked it, the, the new time around, the most recent time around. I thought it was pretty great. And the second one's fine. I just think the first one is actually like a pretty

• 48:54Speaker 00

  cogent commentary on the way people's brains work and the fact that you need to have some sadness in your life in order to move through grief and process it. And it's just interesting to me when the writers at Pixar come up with some shockingly adult existential commentary to make in kids movies. So I don't know, I recommend it if you're an adult out there and you're just like, I've never really seen any of these. That one's pretty good. Inside Out, the first one.

• 49:21Kirk Hamilton?

  I never watched this. So the second one's pretty good. I never watched the second.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  It's all right. I, I wouldn't, I think it's hard to beat the first one. They like add more little characters inside of the head of, of the main girl and Inside Out two, and they're fun. And they kind of tried to do the same thing again, but I think it's hard to recapture that central premise in a way that still makes sense.

• 49:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Has that spark. Man, Inside Out one also has the most brutal cry I think I've ever had.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 49:48Kirk Hamilton?

  That was rough, man. That whole bing bong.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I cried again watching it this time. Yeah.

• 49:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Get out of here. I would just pass forward to that if I rewatched that movie.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  But it's good. It's good though.

• 49:59Kirk Hamilton?

  It's pretty manipulative, but it is.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  It does also have that Pixar thing where you're like, are you guys just manipulating me? Like the first 10 minutes of Up or whatever, where you're just like, I can't even, I can't deal with this. What are you, what's going on over there? Are you trying to kill me? Please stop. But yeah, it's pretty good.

• 50:19Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, Up was, uh, every Pixar movie has something like that. I mean.

• 50:23Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm more mixed on Up these days. I don't, I don't think, I don't love.

• 50:26Jason Schreier?

  I, I, I just recently saw some, something referencing the Ratatouille, like critic Egon moment. That is like so.

• 50:35Kirk Hamilton?

  You mean Brad Bird's just giving a monologue in the middle of his own movie about movie critics?

• 50:39Jason Schreier?

  It is, yeah. It's a little bit. I appreciate the sentiment of, of what they're trying to say, but also like, it's pretty, pretty. Lockish and

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't I see. That's part of why I'm like, I don't recommend all of them like some of them. I think are cloying and are like

• 50:55Jason Schreier?

  Ratatouille is great. It's a great movie.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  Kind of you see the the strings being pulled by a rat behind your head, as it were. I agree. Ratatouille is great, but like I do think some of them are better than others. And it's been kind of fun to like, go back and revisit them as an adult and be like, which of these actually hold up and are fun to watch and which of them are just kind of silly.

• 51:16Jason Schreier?

  You know, a movie holds up because I've now seen it four dozen times.

• 51:19Kirk Hamilton?

  But I can guess.

• 51:21Speaker 00

  In Kanto? Yeah.

• 51:22Jason Schreier?

  Still holds up in this house.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's pretty good.

• 51:25Jason Schreier?

  I say that unironically. I mean, every moment of that movie.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  I think it's a good film.

• 51:28Jason Schreier?

  There's no bad moments of that movie. It's just a fantastic, nice and short. Music is amazing. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And my kids are truly obsessed in a way they've never like this is that's the only movie they want to watch. They don't want to watch anything else.

• 51:41Kirk Hamilton?

  In Kanto is like they're frozen. I think for a lot of kids, it was frozen, you know,

• 51:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:45Kirk Hamilton?

  A few years back.

• 51:45Jason Schreier?

  But the music is so much better in In Kanto than Frozen.

• 51:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, I'm just saying that like there for a whole generation of kids or sub generation, Frozen was the movie that they just watched over and over and over and over and over.

• 51:55Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it's true. I think the advantage In Kanto has for my kids is that there's no like violence or action or like they really like it because it's just a story about people.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  And it's all character drama and that's like as stressful as it ever really gets. Yeah.

• 52:10Jason Schreier?

  Exactly. Exactly. The thing they used to like ask to fast forward when like the grandma is yelling at the main character and stuff like that.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  Cute.

• 52:19Jason Schreier?

  Kirk, what's your one more thing?

• 52:20Kirk Hamilton?

  So my one more thing are some books I've been reading that I've mentioned a few times recently, actually, but I wanted to just make them a one more thing, and that is the Slow House books by McHaren, which I am still reading. I made these my one more thing a few months ago or maybe longer, where I was reading the books along with the TV show Slow Horses, which airs on Apple TV plus. And I had started watching the show and really, really liked it. It's a fantastic show. Gary Oldman is sort of the Performance to write home about, but really everyone on it is fantastic. It's this great British spy show, very dryly funny, but also just good spy stuff. Started watching that and then found the first book, which is called Slow Horses by

• 53:01Kirk Hamilton?

  McCarran, in my dad's bookshelf when we were cleaning out my parents' house. And I was like, a little like, oh, well, my dad read this and I didn't even know he'd read this and was sort of sad that I never got to talk to him about it. So I took the book with me and then read it and really liked that. So this is, I'm recapping a story I've already given on one more thing, where I basically then read the first four books in this series, which correspond to the first four seasons of the TV show. And then the question at the time was, am I going to keep reading these books now that I've run out of TV seasons? Am I going to get ahead of the TV show? And the answer has been yes, I have kept reading them. I have read, let's see, I have read London Rules, Joe Country, Slough House, which was a good one, and I'm currently reading Bad Actors.

• 53:44Kirk Hamilton?

  And the more you read these books, the more you get kind of embroiled in Heron's own lingo. He has all this jargon for, you know, people who are working for the service and Joe Country is one of them and London Rules versus Moscow Rules. I have no idea if any of this stuff is real. If, if anyone who's ever worked for the security services reads these books and is like, what is he talking about? Joe Country? Because like a Joe is a spy. They'll be like, oh, you can't leave a Joe out in the cold and they always talk about your Joes. That's kind of a thing. I don't know if that's a real term, but in the universe of this book, it is very convincing. This book presents a very convincing spy imaginary. And I've really enjoyed reading the next four books. They're, I think now that I don't know what's going to happen, I'm more struck by the structure.

• 54:29Kirk Hamilton?

  And I think that is something that McCarran does very interestingly and is probably the big banner item on these books. He writes in a crosscutting style where each of these books takes place over the course of probably a day or two, maybe three, but they're almost all real time stories that just begin in the action, usually with some mysterious event that then gets explained later. And then they just begin cutting and there are all these main characters, the, the members of Slough House of the- The sort of slow horses are all the main characters. To explain this to anyone who hasn't watched the show, the premise is that in MI5, there's kind of a house for fuckups. It's like an assignment that you get if you make some mistake. You leave a classified document on the train,

• 55:13Kirk Hamilton?

  or you have a drug problem that could be used against you, or you're a gambling addict, whatever. Each of the characters has some kind of a major disaster or problem hanging over them. And if that happens, you get assigned to Slough House, which is known among the services as just, this is the shit posting. You will never leave. You cannot get back to Regent's Park. You will never return to the service. You will just sit in this house and like, write down like a huge list of everyone who's ever checked out a weird book and not returned it. And you'll just do pointless, busy crap for the rest of your life until you quit. The whole point is to try to get you to quit. And this guy, Jackson Lamb, who is this-

• 55:51Jason Schreier?

  It's like Lumen, except-

• 55:53Kirk Hamilton?

  It has a little bit of that like workplace. It's definitely a bit of a workplace comedy. Everyone there is, well, there's a variety of characters there and I've become very fond of all of them. And actually greatly miss some of them because this series is uncommonly willing to kill off main characters. People get killed right and left. And it's actually a very effective way to do that. But anyways, so we're cutting between all these different characters, you know, that we've gotten to know over the years and some that are new. You know, there's Diana Taverner, who's like the now head of MI5, and she's this kind of cutthroat spy lady. And then there's Jackson Lamb, who's the head of Slough House, who's this disheveled monster of a human being and a horrible dude, who's also maybe, just maybe secretly fond of the spies that work for him at Slough House, or at least not willing to let them be killed all the time.

• 56:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Anyways, so you get to know all these characters and you're just slamming back and forth between them. And Heron is relentless about cliffhangers and making you know someone died, but you don't know who died, and kind of pulling you along. So the books become incredibly propulsive to the point-

• 56:52Jason Schreier?

  Stephen King style.

• 56:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Even more so, to the point where recently there was a major character death? Or maybe not a death? There was this kind of cliffhanger at the end of a book that just left me kind of gasping for air. I was really shocked by it and didn't know what to do. And then- Started reading the next book and of course, this fucking dude, this writer is like not gonna tell me forever whether that character lived or died. And I finally just looked it up because I was like, okay, I hate this. I just want to know just if this character is dead or not. I looked it up and then continued reading and was glad that I looked it up. So anyways, these books are super fun. They're really, really funny. He's actually a really a tremendous writer. He has a real command of sort of imagery. He loves to use

• 57:36Kirk Hamilton?

  the imagery of London to sort of channel a certain energy or another one. He's a very evocative scene setter. He writes hilarious dialogue. His characters are all very funny and acerbic. So I am still loving these books. And yeah, I'm having a great time reading post show, even though I will never not picture Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. He's so perfect that I just picture him, but that's fine because it's perfect casting.

• 57:59Jason Schreier?

  Sounds good.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, these sound really good.

• 58:01Kirk Hamilton?

  They're great.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  I want to check them out. Why don't I have infinite time to just read?

• 58:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, you could just watch the show too. The show's very good. I mean, anyone could just watch the show and it's fantastic.

• 58:09Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 58:10Jason Schreier?

  Or you could just play Blueprint.

• 58:11Speaker 00

  I know. That's the main thing I'm doing right now.

• 58:13Kirk Hamilton?

  It's hard now that there's Blueprints. It's true.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  I'm reading books in a library. It's just inside of.

• 58:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I just sat down the other night and read a whole book in Blueprints and it was long. And I was like, this is a good book. I'm just gonna read it.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  There's some books in there.

• 58:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  Good times.

• 58:27Jason Schreier?

  Oh, boy.

• 58:28Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, God.

• 58:29Jason Schreier?

  All right. That is it for this week's episode. Go and book your travel to Portland right now.

• 58:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 58:38Jason Schreier?

  And come see us in a few months.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:40Jason Schreier?

  July 11th. It's gonna be super fun. Tickets are in the show notes and otherwise we'll see y'all next week.

• 58:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Yep. See you both next week.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 58:52Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Find us on Twitter at TripleClickPod. Send email to tripleclickatmaximumfun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 59:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.