Triple Play: Mina The Hollower

It's finally here: after six years of development, Yacht Club's Mina the Hollower has arrived. And it's a winner. Kirk, Maddy, and Jason burrow into the crevasses of this new Game of the Year contender, which smashes Zelda, Castlevania and Bloodborne to great success.

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

• 0:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Meet Mina. She's a mouse, she's a hollower, she's an inventor, she's an adventurer and warrior, but to her friends, she's just memes. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're talking about Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club's fantastic new retro-style action game that our own Jason Schreier found to be so nice, he played it twice. Let's get into it.

• 0:30Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:32Jason Schreier?

  And I'm Jason Schreier, hello.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Hello, it's us, again.

• 0:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Here we are.

• 0:38Jason Schreier?

  Here we are, rained-out Memorial Day weekend, what a bummer.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 0:44Jason Schreier?

  Plans in place to do a barbecue.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  I know, had to spend all of it inside playing the game we're gonna talk about today. Terrible, terrible news for me.

• 0:54Jason Schreier?

  What a bummer.

• 0:55Kirk Hamilton?

  The weather in Portland was beautiful for most of the weekend, so I had a lot of lovely barbecues and hangs, and then it kinda rained on Monday, but that was okay, because we were all ready for it by then, so.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Rained almost the whole time for us.

• 1:06Kirk Hamilton?

  I can't quite relate, it was very nice here. We love to talk about the weather here on Triple Click, and if you would like to support our weather discussions, if you'd like to hear more about what the weather on the coasts is like, you can become a member and support the creation of Triple Click. Become a member at maximumfun.org/join. That is the network of which we are a part, a proud part, we love Maximum Fun, and yeah, we love all of our Maximum Fun members who support our show and make it possible for us to keep doing this thing. If you join, you get a lot of bonus episodes of Triple Click, like years' worth, so many bonus episodes. We hear from people pretty regularly, who will just go back and listen to old bonus

• 1:51Kirk Hamilton?

  episodes, because they joined recently, and those are a lot of fun. A lot of them are spoiler casts about games that we played or movies that we watched, though we cover a lot of other stuff in the bonus feed as well. We kinda do fewer games, "beans casts" as we call them, spoiler episodes now than we used to, and just talk about- All kinds of things. Lately, we've been covering The Sopranos, an amazing TV show that we just sort of kind of started watching and talking about. And we're up through season three of that show, recapping it sporadically in the bonus feed. And we've also been watching a lot of documentaries about video games, which have been really cool. Indie Game, the movie, The King of Kong. You can hear our thoughts on those in the bonus feed, too.

• 2:34Kirk Hamilton?

  And this month, we're going to be doing something kind of like that. We're going to be watching a documentary that is in fact a mockumentary called Players, which is a fictional documentary about a fictional esports team, focusing really on a couple of fictional esports players. And it is a lot of fun. It's very funny. It's made by the people who made... Oh, wait, what's the Netflix show called? American Vandal. Thank you. It's made by the team who made American Vandal, the two-season mockumentary for Netflix, which is pretty tremendous. And it's really just as good. It was a little underwatched when it came out, and it's kind of hard to find, but you don't have to have seen it to enjoy this bonus episode that we're about to record.

• 3:18Kirk Hamilton?

  I think it'll be cool for anyone who's interested in esports, League of Legends, just a lot of this stuff. It's a great story. It'll be really fun to talk about. Anyways, lots of good stuff in the feed. Become a member, maximumfun.org/join. Support our show, and thank you so much to everyone who already does so. Bing! One more thing that I wanted to add here that came in after we recorded. Last week, I talked about Mixtape and my complex reactions to it. I generally liked it, but there was this one creative decision I didn't really like, which is that there are songs presented in the game as real songs that are actually fictional songs, and it's not clear where those songs came from. So just this morning, on Wednesday, I finally heard back from the game's PR about those mystery songs that I'd been unable to identify.

• 4:03Kirk Hamilton?

  They clarified that they were all composed in-house by the game's composers at Beethoven and Dinosaur, the studio that made the game. I had allowed for that possibility, though my uncertainty about it, the fact that it's not clear when you're playing the game, was definitely a big part of my problem with how they approached the whole thing. So now we know where the music is all from, though I'm still unclear on why the songs aren't accounted for in the game's credits, given the way that they're presented in-game. I followed up to ask about that. We'll see what they say. But in the meantime, just wanted to provide an update, since I just talked about the game last week. All right, on with the episode. All right. Well, we're gonna talk about a really good video game today. But first, we're gonna talk about another really good and maybe sometimes not so good

• 4:46Kirk Hamilton?

  video game that I think we just kind of have to talk about. Jason, why don't you take us away on both topics?

• 4:52Jason Schreier?

  I saw you losing, losing yourself in the construction there, being like, oh, God.

• 4:57Kirk Hamilton?

  I was holding on to it for dear life.

• 4:59Jason Schreier?

  Shouldn't have done that. Well, it is a video game. So last week, last week, the folks at the game studio Bungie announced that Destiny 2 is coming to an end. And this marks the, the, uh, the stopping of new updates for Destiny, the Destiny franchise after 12 years. It's essentially been going strong, getting stuff every single year, if not more often, since 2014. And since Destiny is near and dear to this podcast's heart, all three of us have been obsessed with it at some point or another. And it used to be, back when we were Kotaku split screen, uh, we pretty much, we started off as like a Destiny podcast, essentially.

• 5:44Jason Schreier?

  Not really, but that's all Kirk and I would play.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  Not so jokingly.

• 5:48Jason Schreier?

  One of our first episodes, I believe, episode three was us having then director Luke Smith come on to talk about The Taken King, which was the first big, um, fall Destiny expansion, not the first Destiny expansion, but the big one, um, and the one that kind of improved the game and made it, made it go from

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Zero to hero?

• 6:09Jason Schreier?

  Polarizing to pretty good.

• 6:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 6:13Jason Schreier?

  So anyway, I thought we would commemorate a little bit, um, a little bit more context here is stuff that I reported at Bloomberg last week, which is that not only is Destiny 2 coming to an end, there is no Destiny 3 in development right now. A lot of people had assumed that there was. I can report that there was not. Marathon is, is the big bet that Bungie has at the moment. And then there's also teams that are incubating and prototyping new things, including Destiny things and including other, other things. And none of those have been greenlit yet, so expect them ways from now if they ever come to fruition. And also, there are going to be some big layoffs at Bungie, um, in, in the near future as a result of all these big changes.

• 6:58Jason Schreier?

  So yeah, let's pour one out for Destiny. It's the end of an era. Uh, and yeah, should we have a moment of silence?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  It is sad. I mean, I know we're kind of laughing about it, but I was surprisingly sad about this when I heard about it. For somebody who hasn't played Destiny 2 in a really long time, I was like, wow, I just kind of thought it'd be around forever, like World of Warcraft or something. I know that's not feasible and probably isn't even feasible for World of Warcraft while we're here, but it did feel like-

• 7:30Jason Schreier?

  It's extremely feasible for World of Warcraft. It makes a shitload of money.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  True, but I don't, I don't know, when we're 64, are we still going to be talking about World of Warcraft? That I can't promise.

• 7:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Forever is a long time.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, exactly. But it did feel that way psychologically to me, even though, of course, I was reading all the same news stories as everybody else about how things were going at Bungie and how people were feeling about Destiny 2 and the player count, etc. I just, I don't know, it just didn't occur to me. I, oh, and also, when I was playing Destiny 2 and talking about it a lot on this show, that was what became the inception of what is now my weekly Thursday Gamer Night. That began because of Destiny. So I was also kind of emotionally thinking to myself like, wow, like, the reason why I really make regular

• 8:19Speaker 01

  time for multiplayer gaming in my life as an adult, which is something that was so easy to do when I was a kid and a teenager, you just kind of fall into it. But as an adult, you really have to organize it. And Destiny 2 was the reason why that even happened. So I feel like I have an eternal soft spot for it because of that.

• 8:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I have a similar relationship. The group of guys that I play video games with still are, were initially sort of my Destiny friends and the people that, Jason, you and I played a lot of Destiny with. And we kind of bonded through our time with the game and, of course, at times complaining about the game, the many missteps that Bungie made along the way, but also the really high highs, especially of those first few years. And it was, you know, so it was a big deal for me as well socially. And yeah, I think the comparisons to WoW are interesting because when Destiny launched-

• 9:17Kirk Hamilton?

  It really wasn't trying to be World of Warcraft, or at least it was trying to set itself apart, even though Luke Smith, I remember talking to him about how much he loved World of Warcraft and how I almost got the sense that there was one faction within Bungie who wanted it to be more like an MMO and more like World of Warcraft. And then another faction, Bungie, of course, a famously factional studio, another faction who were more the Halo, you know, we want this to be a console first-person shooter. And in hybridizing the two things, they created something that was kind of neither fish nor foul for a few years. And then gradually, especially in Destiny 2, became much more like World of Warcraft and more just an MMO that got kind of MMO-style upgrades

• 10:01Kirk Hamilton?

  or updates and, you know, they handled loot a little more like an MMO. But it still wasn't really quite World of Warcraft. Like, it had that kind of awkward console shooter that gets sequels. You know, it was just like the fact that there was a Destiny and a Destiny 2. Yeah, there was a 2 in there. And then Destiny 2, what became the platform. It just wasn't quite like World of Warcraft in some fundamental way. And I don't know how much that relates to the fact that it couldn't ever just become the perpetual game that's just fun for everyone forever, that some people always kind of wanted it to be and that it felt like it just never could quite get to. But it does, I would have to imagine that some of that, you know, that kind of foundational,

• 10:46Kirk Hamilton?

  there's a bit of a fracture in its foundation. And that was always the sort of fatal flaw with the series that wouldn't allow it to kind of transcend its roots and just become an eternal thing.

• 10:56Jason Schreier?

  So when Destiny first came on the scene, it was published by Activision. Activision funded it to the tune of infamously $500 million. And it was $500 million for this kind of 10-year plan that wound up leaking in, of all things, a lawsuit over Call of Duty. So this plan leaked out and you could see in it that there was this content plan for Destiny 1, then an expansion that was codenamed Comet a year later, and then Destiny 2 a year after that, and then Comet 2 after that, and Destiny 3, and so on and so forth. Call of Duty style. Cadence of just kind of yearly updates. And it's really interesting because what happened was for a variety of reasons, including Bungie's engine and tools just being unwieldy and taking a lot of time to work with.

• 11:40Jason Schreier?

  They found that that kind of content schedule was just untenable. And in 2016, at the beginning of 2016, they had to delay Destiny 2. Their CEO was ousted as a result of that, although some heads rolled because they had to slip a whole year for that. And then Destiny 2 wound up coming in 2017. And then a couple of years after that, there was this kind of this, there was this expectation from Activision. Hey, you guys have to come out with Destiny 3. And the people at Bungie were like, no, like, this doesn't really work. We want a service game that is continually updating. And that doesn't really kind of fit with this plan for releasing continual sequels over and over again. Especially because from Destiny 1 to Destiny 2 came a player reset and you lost all your stuff and had to start from scratch. And that was something that players of this kind of World of Warcraft style service game were not amenable to.

• 12:25Jason Schreier?

  And so as a result of those conversations, Destiny and Activision wound up splitting up. Bungie, or sorry, Bungie and Activision wound up splitting up. Bungie kept Destiny and wound up turning Destiny 2 into a service game. A couple of years later, they got bought by Sony and Destiny 2 just became this ongoing, ongoing thing with the awkward title of Destiny 2, that it was just like, oh yeah, we want to have Destiny 2 as a service game. And they made a lot of mistakes.

• 12:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Somewhere in there, notably Destiny 2 also became free to play, I think, which is a worthwhile thing to.

• 12:54Jason Schreier?

  2019, yeah, later in 2019 with Beyond Light. And I think one of the mistakes they made, there were a lot of mistakes along the way. But one of them was that they could never really figure out how to make the game approachable to new players. If you're a new player and you're logging into Destiny 2, it is really not approachable in any possible way. And a lot of the content that has been released for the game has been taken offline because they've cycled out of old stuff. I believe they said because of storage issues and whatnot. And there were a lot of just mistakes made along the way. But the thought of a Destiny 3, I think for Sony's bean counters was a little, a little out of hand. The idea of spending like $500 million.

• 13:37Jason Schreier?

  On this game before marketing, I think was not something that Sony had the appetite for. And so that never got off the ground. There was a project that Luke Smith, who we mentioned before, was working on called Payback was the codename. And that was kind of this weird spin off thing. It was like third person and kind of like Genshin Impact-y. So I don't know how that would have gone over, but would have been interesting to see. But that was canceled a couple of years ago. And yeah, Bungie has had a lot of kind of difficulties over the last few years. But yeah, like you guys, I have a very special relationship with Destiny. In addition to making a lot of friends through the game, it also is responsible for me becoming an author. Because when I wrote a story about the behind the scenes of Destiny back in 2015,

• 14:22Jason Schreier?

  I got an email from my now agent being like, hey, we should do a book about game development. And that wound up springboarding into my first book was on pixels and then other books from there. So yeah, it means a lot to me and I'm sad that it ends. Like, like you, Maddy, I kind of felt like it was always just going to be this inevitable thing, that it was always just going to be, even though I haven't played it in years.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  I know.

• 14:42Jason Schreier?

  Six years at this point, seven years.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  And I'm sure we're not the only ones, so.

• 14:45Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it was just kind of, it's comforting to know that like, oh yeah, Destiny's there. If I ever one day have the urge to go back or like get my buddies together and are like, hey, I actually, I never really got into Destiny 2 even slightly as much as I got into Destiny 1. I think because a lot of the friction that I really enjoyed in Destiny 1, they smoothed off, which I think is a lot of the complaining about it was part of the fun. But that's a conversation for another day. But yeah, I'm sad, I'm sad that it's over. And obviously I'm very sad that there are going to be layoffs and that people are going to, going to lose their jobs as a result of all this. And it's just a very sad situation.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Jason Schreier?

  All right, well, let's pivot to something less sad, which is a new video game called Mina the Hollower that we're going to be talking about.

• 15:36Jason Schreier?

  Mina the Hollow is out this week. After lengthy delays, it was originally planned for last October, but really it was originally dated for 2023 in the original Kickstarter that came out a few years ago. This is a new game from Yacht Club Games, the makers of Shovel Knight and all of its expansions, which are essentially new games that just kind of are set in the Shovel Knight universe and released for free inexplicably to Shovel Knight users. This is a top-down 2D action game that looks a lot like Link's Awakening, like Zelda Link's

• 16:18Jason Schreier?

  Awakening, but really feels more like a Bloodborne or a Castlevania kind of crossed with the feel of Link's Awakening. And it is quite a video game. We'll do some overall impressions. I want to hear both of your takes, but I will say upfront that I have played through it 100% of it and then played through it again with the item shuffler on, which I think speaks to how much I love this game. It is tremendous. It's my favorite game of the year so far by a long shot. I love it, but I would like to hear your thoughts. Kirk, why don't you go first?

• 17:03Kirk Hamilton?

  I love it too. It's fantastic. I think it is just, it's clearly such a labor of love. There's a ton of thought and care put into every screen, every character, every bit of dialogue, every item, every combat encounter. It has some of the best music I've ever heard in a video game. No surprise, given the score is by the great Jake Kaufman, but I've really come to have a new appreciation for him. I'll maybe talk about him a little later, but he's just such a great composer.

• 17:30Jason Schreier?

  Strong songs?

• 17:31Kirk Hamilton?

  Hmm.

• 17:41Kirk Hamilton?

  That'd be fun. I can talk about him a little later.

• 17:43Jason Schreier?

  Chip Toon's Strong Songs.

• 17:44Kirk Hamilton?

  He'd be fun to interview. Chip Toons are not something I have a deep expertise in, but I really admire his writing. I guess I'll just say that like, I actually appreciate him as a jazz musician somewhat. He's kind of a jazz nerd in a way that I never really thought about before. And I recently made an episode of Strong Songs about Kind of Blue, the jazz album. He made a chip tune version of Freddie Freeloader off of that that I had caused. I just, I happened to be listening to it two weeks ago while playing this game. And his take on Freddie Freeloader was so good. He like recreates Witten Kelly's piano solo perfectly.

• 18:32Kirk Hamilton?

  It's amazing. So anyways, Jake Kaufman is sick.

• 18:35Jason Schreier?

  We gotta shout out the opera. His version of Final Fantasy VI's opera theme must have.

• 18:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Also, really, really good. That was a collaboration. I'm forgetting the artist that he was collaborating with, but yeah, it's like a Queen style thing.

• 18:57Jason Schreier?

  Tommy Pedrini.

• 18:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, there you go.

• 19:02Kirk Hamilton?

  But he's amazing and like, the music is such a big part of this game. There are so many great tracks.

• 19:26Kirk Hamilton?

  But man, I mean, it's just so fun. And my main thing that I want to talk about later is that one thing I really appreciate about this game is that Yacht Club included a ton of modifiers, including difficulty modifiers. And I've been using some of them and having a great time. And it's been super interesting and a great way for me to really just relax and enjoy this game.

• 19:45Jason Schreier?

  Man, there are more than 250 modifiers. You can access them. They're all optional. You can ignore them, or you can access them in the menu. Some of them only unlock after you finish the game, but they range from, hey, well, you could now do, like, you're invincible, or you can, you do, you take half the damage or whatever, like a slider of damage that you take, to Mina is now twice the size and the screen spins around when you move and you can jump past the screen, like above the screen. And so you're jumping in the air and you can't see me that anymore.

• 20:15Kirk Hamilton?

  That jump one is fun.

• 20:16Jason Schreier?

  It goes out of control. There's one that changes the language to Victorian, like authentic Victorian style, which I won't spoil, but you guys should try that one. Maddy, what do you think of Mina the Hollower?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  I also love this game. Clearly, it's getting a rave from all three of us. I really, really love it. I think we talked about this way back when the Link's Awakening remake came out, but I think we're all, I know Jason and I are really big fans of Link's Awakening and like that old

• 20:44Kirk Hamilton?

  I've never played it.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Zelda style. Ooh, maybe that should be a bet game someday. You're giving me a clue here, something, something I could pick one time.

• 20:52Kirk Hamilton?

  There's like a Switch version of that, right?

• 20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is. It's really good.

• 20:55Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I thought you played the Switch version. Didn't we talk about it?

• 20:58Kirk Hamilton?

  No, I never did.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Well, I wasn't trying to get sidetracked. My point is, I really love this style of game. And I think that, well, I mean, it's clear from Shovel Knight that the devs at Yacht Club are really kind of fascinated by taking this retro game style and modernizing it and adding kind of modern sensibilities to it. And that is something that many developers try to do, and they don't always succeed, but this is incredible. I am just blown away by how strong it is. It is truly like if Zelda were very difficult and complex in terms of exploration and combat, but also, I say it's difficult, except that as Kirk said, there's this massive suite of modifiers that make

• 21:43Speaker 01

  it so that you can transform the game into essentially whatever experience you want, which is incredible. I mean, I feel like I just don't have enough good things to say about it. I almost don't even know where to Begin with all the things I like about this game.

• 21:57Jason Schreier?

  Are you using the modifiers?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  I I have ended up using some of them, but we can Kirk and I can get into which ones we're using. I don't know, Jason, if you've gotten into them. Some of them make the game harder, which is fun, and some make it easier or just different. I they're incredible, honestly.

• 22:13Jason Schreier?

  Well, the thing I mentioned earlier is the item shuffler. So that's one of the options. There are so many options that we can't even cover them all.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  I know.

• 22:20Jason Schreier?

  It's like the number of modifiers, it's it's insane. It's like essentially you're getting a suite of PC mods along with this game that are built into this game. You can skip entire sections. I mean, there's so much cool stuff you can do. But when I'm talking about the item shuffler, so it randomizes the locations of every upgrade and trinket and special ability, everything that you can get in the game. It just like shuffles it up to a hilarious degree. So like it'll at the very beginning of the game, you get into this ship crash. And then the captain is like, here, like this will help save your life in a pinch. And he gives you these vials that you can use to heal yourself. But in the item shuffler, he might give you anything else. So instead, I don't remember exactly, I got a key or something. And I was like, oh, great, I got a key. And wait a minute, I can't actually heal myself.

• 23:05Jason Schreier?

  And like I had to spend the entire first hour of the game going without being able to heal myself, which was a very fun challenge. So that's just one of the the many, the many modifiers you can play around with. A couple of other things we should talk about on this game. So this is, I think, even though it looks like it's all done, we're making the links awakening comparison. I think it's actually really important to establish this is more of an action game than a Zelda game. The dungeons in this game feel more like Souls dungeons or even Castlevania dungeons, might be the closest comparison than they do Zelda dungeons. There are no block puzzles or buttons that you're going to be or like elaborate key labyrinth that you're going to be solving. I mentioned keys earlier, but those are entirely optional things. You don't need any keys to get through the main quest.

• 23:51Jason Schreier?

  And so it's a little bit like, don't come into this expecting big, grand puzzles. And you can also, you can do anything at any time without needing items. Like there are no, other than side stuff, there's nothing in the main campaign that you. Need specific items for for some of the side stuff you'll need like specific trinkets, which are these accessories you can equip that give you special abilities or enhance Sabina's powers in some way. But other than that, it's not like a Zelda game where you need the boomerang to unlock this part of the the map. It's not there's no Metroidvania to this. That said, there's a bunch of really clever kind of environmental secrets that you can find that do remind remind me of Zelda, but in a very different sort of way.

• 24:34Kirk Hamilton?

  I would add that there is also a sort of souls like experience system. You earn bones toward leveling up and you lose them if you die and the enemy that killed you kind of gets them and you have to get back to them and, you know, hit that enemy or kill them to get your XP back. And if you die again, you lose it for good. So it's very much got that souls XP system. However, there is a modifier to just completely turn that off. And you can kind of upgrade over time to make it more forgiving. Just the more you play the game, you kind of you can the systems that make it difficult become really softened over time, just through playing regularly without any mod.

• 25:12Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it reminds me of Elden Ring in that way in that the first couple of hours are the hardest that you're gonna go through.

• 25:18Kirk Hamilton?

  That's definitely true.

• 25:19Jason Schreier?

  And that's I'm actually curious to hear about both of your experiences with the mods and how you've used them, because I think some people might come into this game and hit a wall right away because it's really tough right away until you A get a feel for how the combat works and how you should be finding enemies and decide which weapon is is your best, like which one you're you're optimal for and get some more trinkets and get abilities, etc., etc. But B, because the the like, when you are low health, it is very difficult to like even know what's going on. And you're you're like still mastering the 2D like the space of it all and the verticality of it all and the platforming of it all. So yeah, tell me about the the difficulty modifiers you guys are using.

• 26:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, the the healing system in particular can be challenging because you have to hit enemies in order to build up the amount that you can heal, which I don't need to explain in granular detail, but can be very punishing if you're way, way on the ropes trying to score a hit on a on a boss or, you know, or a tough mob that you're fighting. Yeah, I I've used a number of or experimented with a number of different difficulty modifiers, and I'm still using plenty of them just because I find it really enjoyable. Honestly, you know, this is something that we talked about with Silksong, and I installed my own mods on that game to play around with that. What would this experience be like if it was just a little bit easier and I could tweak my experience? And I had made the argument at the time that I don't think Silksong would have lost anything by including difficulty mods like Mina.

• 26:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Mina just further underlines my belief that that is the case. Like, this game is fantastic, I love it, and I think it's so much more accessible than it would have been because of these mods. Like you said, it's hard, Jason. It is like freaking hard at first, especially was for me. I didn't have a Super Nintendo, I didn't have a Game Boy Advance, I did not play games like this. There are just certain things about it. The platforming is a little hard to gauge if you're not used to reading a kind of strange, isometric, but also sort of 3D world. You know, you have to land aerial attacks, but it's not always clear, you know, unless you learn how to read shadows where an aerial enemy is. The platforming can just be punishing in general.

• 27:28Kirk Hamilton?

  You get shot back pretty far into the room that you're in if you fall. You take a lot of damage. Like I said, the healing system is like very punishing at first, and as you've already said, Jason, you're at your weakest at the beginning. You don't have a lot of good items and a lot of healing. So it's really hard. Oh, also movement, like it's a four-way, four cardinal direction movement, and I find, for example, you can't redirect in midair. Like, there are just like things that I keep trying to do, or I kept trying for many hours, and just finding myself swinging in the wrong direction and constantly missing attacks, and then just dying over and over and over. And I was like, dude, I can't do this. So that was my early experience, was basically the after kind of clearing the town out and getting to the first level.

• 28:10Kirk Hamilton?

  Just thinking, man, this is so cool. The music is so cool. I love this. I cannot do this again. I can't spend 60 hours like making myself learn this whole new thing that's unfamiliar to me and is really hard. So I started playing with the mods and we can get into specifics. I've already been talking for a minute and Maddie, I'm curious what mods you use, but I will say the best thing they, the best decision they made about the mods is yeah, there are seven million of them. You look through the list, it's overwhelming, but there is an option that is just easier difficulty. And if you select that, it explains to you in the game, it just activates a suite of mods that together just make the game the same. It doesn't randomize items or do anything crazy. It's just easier in a number of different

• 28:54Kirk Hamilton?

  ways. And then you can just check all the active ones and look at what you've got and kind of fine tune your experience from there, which is what I've done.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, right on. So I had a somewhat different experience with the mods, which is to say, I think the fact that when I was younger, I was playing stuff like Link's Awakening and I had at least a little more experience with this type of movement. This is not to brag at all, but I, that didn't challenge me initially. And like, actually the combat I thought was really fun and cool. And I, I still think that that didn't change over time or anything. Um, and so I got through the beginning well enough and was like, okay, great. You know, I'm having a great time. But then I think around, um, I think it's called like shifting sands or something. There's like a

• 29:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Bone Beach?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bone Beach.

• 29:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, well, the, the sandfall area?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. There's like this whole kind of suite of the map with a lot of pits that you can fall into. And like Kirk said, the pits take damage and Mina can jump. She's, her jumping is fine, you know, like there's, there's some platforming elements in this game that I would describe as maybe the most challenging part for me personally.

• 30:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Can you describe the, the actual hollowing, like the tunneling and how that works to give you a longer jump and stuff? Cause we haven't actually described that and it's a central mechanic.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. So in addition to just kind of like the classic suite of weapons that you could imagine, like she has knives and a sword and like a mace and things Like that she's she you could imagine she's like a little link from Legend of Zelda, but with a bigger suite of weapons like you might have in a Zelda version of Elden Ring.

• 30:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Little Simon Delma.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  In addition to that, Mina is a little mouse. We haven't even talked about how great the world in this game is, by the way, but she's an adorable little mouse in a world of animals and also people. And it's kind of medieval infused with some science fiction elements. And one of her powers is that she can burrow underground. And so environmental exploring also means sometimes you just try burrowing to see if you can get somewhere. And sometimes it's clear from visuals that you can get somewhere and it's obvious that you should burrow there. And other times there's environmental clues that indicate that maybe you should try burrowing somewhere. And also, when she finishes burrowing underground and goes a short distance, she jumps a little higher or further if she does that. So that is a piece as well.

• 31:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Flying up out of the ground.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:10Kirk Hamilton?

  It's like the game's great mechanical flourish, I think. I love it. Like, the feeling of popping out of the ground is really what this game is all about.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  It's very satisfying.

• 31:18Jason Schreier?

  That's what the whole game is built around, is that mechanic.

• 31:20Kirk Hamilton?

  It's the whole thing. It's like the central thing. It's all hung on.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 31:24Jason Schreier?

  She's a hollower. She hollows into the ground.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  She's hollowing things things out in a way, yes. And so that platforming aspect is very fun to master. However, as Kirk said, every time you fall into a pit, you take damage. And in some of these areas, there's no enemies really, or not enough enemies that you could like, charge back up, for example. And in my case, a lot of times I'd be like, having to do this very complex series of maneuvers to get across several gaps, and then I would die, or I'd be slowly taking damage just to teach myself how to get across all those gaps. And I'd be sent all the way back to somewhere way far back. And I'm like, this isn't even really like a test of my skill. This is simply sapping hours of my life. So one of the first modifiers that I turned on was the one that just doesn't damage me if I fall in a pit.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  And that alone was like life changing for me personally.

• 32:15Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a huge one.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Was that I was just like, I just need to only get sent back to the beginning of this part so that I can just practice this part. So like, that's my my first number one recommendation with these is like, just save yourself the time. But I mean, all of them are great.

• 32:30Jason Schreier?

  Are you using trinkets, Maddie?

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Well, sure. I mean, that's part of the game as well.

• 32:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Jason's about to tell you that it's actually easy.

• 32:37Jason Schreier?

  No, no, no, no. Well, there are trinkets that I, there are trinkets that I found that I just like wouldn't let go of.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Oh, like the frisbee, maybe?

• 32:46Jason Schreier?

  Recommend. No, that's a sidearm that you're thinking of.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, the trinkets.

• 32:50Jason Schreier?

  The sidearms are, you have two kind of different ability categories. The sidearms, which are your sub weapons, like in Castlevania, where you can like throw holy water. And this, it's a whole suite of them, 14 or 15 of them. Trinkets are your accessories that you equip. And so the one that, there are a few that I like couldn't live without. One gave me an extra life. So you die and you come back to life when you use that one. Another one makes it so you can walk on a couple of pits without falling, which like gives you some extra runway to jump a giant gap. There are others too, that just like will make it easier to platform. There's one that gives you an air dash. You just press A and you dash in midair. There's another one that-

• 33:29Kirk Hamilton?

  One is just a huge bicycle.

• 33:31Jason Schreier?

  Well, that's, well, that's, that's another sidearm, not a trinket. I just wanted to be clear here.

• 33:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, sorry.

• 33:37Jason Schreier?

  And then there's another that lets you float. You hold the button and you'll float down. So there's a lot of ways that you can mitigate the platforming without turning on mods. So I just wanted, to be clear-

• 33:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, you have to get that. So, I mean, I've played like 10 hours and I haven't gotten any of those things.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have the floating one.

• 33:52Kirk Hamilton?

  At the beginning is where people are gonna hit the biggest wall, I think.

• 33:54Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, the very beginning, before you get any trinkets. That's where the real difficulty, it's kind of, it's really like here.

• 34:00Kirk Hamilton?

  And even like, I'm saying, I'm very far in and I haven't gotten any of those trinkets you just described. Like, I don't have any trinkets that make platforming easier. They're all like combat trinkets.

• 34:08Jason Schreier?

  Oh, really? Have you been exploring a lot?

• 34:10Kirk Hamilton?

  It's not to say like the, whatever, I mean, I'm just, my point is that there's a lot of stuff-

• 34:14Jason Schreier?

  It is huge.

• 34:16Kirk Hamilton?

  You can, and what's nice about the mods is you can turn them on. And when you find you don't need them anymore, you can turn them off.

• 34:20Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I just wanted to be clear to people out there that there are ways in game to mitigate the difficulty that aren't necessarily menu options.

• 34:29Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. Now, this is some, this is kind of related to, I want to stay on this for a minute. Because this relates to something we talked about with Silksong. And the idea of like the artistic intent of the game and whether the difficulty was kind of accounted for by the developers, which was something that- William Minari, the makers of Silksong, talked about saying, "Well, we gave Hornet all these different tools." And that was frequently, I felt, brought out as a kind of a rebuttal to the idea that the game should have some kind of mods. Because, well, Hornet actually has all these moves, and if you really dig into your toolkit, you can beat the boss without any kind of a difficulty mod. And I would just say, I still am unconvinced by that because of Mina, because of what we're talking about here.

• 35:14Kirk Hamilton?

  That the game, you can turn it on, you can turn it off, you can make the experience what you want it to be, and there are so many smart little granular things that allow for all of these cool abilities you're talking about, and even allow you to go find the trinkets that you need to get more powerful, so that you can turn off the mods you use to get there. I find it so player-friendly. It's the kind of thing I just wish every difficult game did. Because just in the end, difficulty is going to be different for every player, whether it's a matter of ability with the game or disability. There are just so many reasons that each individual player is going to have their own difficulty thresholds, their own relationship with difficulty. So the solution that makes the most sense to me is just giving the players the tools

• 35:59Kirk Hamilton?

  to decide how they want the experience to be, because only the player truly knows where they're coming from. And that way, you don't have to account for everybody. And it doesn't compromise the developer's vision, because that vision is right there. I mean, in Mina, I can see the game that they made, and the intended experience is really cool and probably will be for a lot of players. So it's just a win-win to me. To list a couple of other mods that I've used, there's one that just makes save rooms more frequent. There's one that only makes them more frequent before a boss. So just every time you're going to fight a boss, there's always a save room right there, so you never have to do a boss run back. It's a tiny little thing, but it's just really nice, you know? So they're not all as dramatic as no damage.

• 36:41Kirk Hamilton?

  Or you can just slow the game down, every enemy except Mina, by, I think, the base level is like 2%. So the game runs at 98% speed, so it's just a little bit slower. Or you can make it way slower, so Mina is basically the Flash. There are so- So many settings like that. And I really just like, really, really want to underline that for everything the game does, for every tool the game gives you to make it easier as you go, the existence of the mods and those like in-game assists, those two things are in no way mutually exclusive. And in fact, like each one makes the other thing better.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree.

• 37:15Jason Schreier?

  So, okay, so getting on what you were saying earlier, Kirk, I think so most of the trinkets in this game, you have to really do some digging, literally and figuratively to find. Because this is a game full of secrets and one of the true pleasures of this game is just how many environmental secrets there are. There are every single screen on the map, there's like some little hidden cracked wall that you can smash open, or a little place that you can burrow under that you didn't realize before. Or sometimes the secrets get truly ridiculous and I won't get into specifics, but like if you find a telescope, look into it and just spend a little time looking around and see what you can find.

• 37:54Jason Schreier?

  There's also a central hub, a town where there's a tons of shops and also a ton of secrets to open up shops and like get into different areas and, and find secrets and stuff in there. And I think if you want to play this game and get through it, you really need to be spending a little bit of time doing that kind of secret hunting because that's where you find the upgrades. Both for Mina's like health files and her weapons and stuff, and also the trinkets that I mentioned that will make it easier for you to go. There are 60 trinkets in the game. Again, these are not the sidearms, the weapons that you can equip along with your main weapon. These are the accessories that you equip in your menu screen and you can, you can customize them in whatever ways.

• 38:35Jason Schreier?

  And there, there are a lot of really cool synergies you can do with them. Like one of them makes enemies drop more bones, drop more currency, but then they bounce around a lot, so they're harder to get. But then you can equip that one. And then also another trinket that gives you a magnet.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, the magnet one. I love that one.

• 38:52Jason Schreier?

  The bones and sends them flying to you. So you can maximize, so those two make good synergies and there are a lot of combinations like that. And yeah, just as you're going, it's, it's a really cool design. The entire world is connected in unexpected ways. And there are a lot of really cool shortcuts that you'll find along the way. When I first started, I was a little disconcerted that there was no map. But then I grew to appreciate that, actually, because you really, you really learn the world so much better. And in such a more intuitive way by actually learning it and experiencing the space and finding the shortcut.

• 39:27Kirk Hamilton?

  No map in Dark Souls, is there?

• 39:28Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, exactly. It's very Souls.

• 39:29Kirk Hamilton?

  No map in Bloodborne.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's and you kick, you kick the ladders down or in this game, you kick ropes down and other various shortcuts in much similar way to a Dark Souls or a Soulsborne game, whatever we want to call them. Where you're like, oh, this is connected to that. And it's like, everything's unlocking your mind. That's like the best part of these kinds of games. And there is also eventually like a very zoomed out version of the map, we should say, that kind of shows you like the big versions of the areas that you can go to.

• 39:57Jason Schreier?

  It shows you each region, yeah, essentially, and how they're connected. But even then, like, there might be unexpected connections between one region and another here and there, different pipes that take you to different places. And there are just so many cool secrets, like so many, each, each new region introduces like one or two central mechanics. Like you get to an area called September and it introduces this idea of like lightning shooting down and introduces this idea of like.

• 40:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Great music in September.

• 40:24Jason Schreier?

  Fantastic music.

• 40:25Kirk Hamilton?

  First September music is.

• 40:26Jason Schreier?

  And it introduces these leaf piles that you can't smash, you can only take out by jumping on them. And then it starts playing around with like different secrets you can find by finding ways to do that.

• 40:36Kirk Hamilton?

  It introduces Freddy Krueger.

• 40:38Jason Schreier?

  Well, that's, that's a whole, that's a whole nother experience. And yeah, I really love the way that it adds in secrets. And I think this is the kind of game that really just rewards explorers and just curious players in that way that I truly love about gaming. Where it's just like, oh, I'm going to poke around in this thing. Oh, can I burrow under this? Oh, yep, turns out I can. And there's a secret there waiting for me. It's also a very fun game to 100%, I'll say, as someone who found all of the collectibles in it. Because after you make a certain amount of progress, you can actually buy this, this like skull excessive, like it's not accessible, skull upgrade, essentially.

• 41:16Jason Schreier?

  That does this brilliant thing. Essentially, it changes your UI. So there's a skull on it, and the skull will glow blue when you are next to a room that has a secret in it, and it'll glow red when you are in a room that has a secret in it. So you can scour the entire map and find all the secrets just by using that. You don't actually need any other kind of tools. And then also, what you could do is you get on your map a checklist for each region. So it'll say, "You found 16 out of 16 secrets here. You're good." And it'll give you a little gold star. And so it's a very fun game to go and backcheck and collect all the secrets. And that combination of upgrades, the map and the skull, make it so you can do it in a way that doesn't feel tedious or monotonous, because you have a good idea of what is where and how much you have left to find.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, the secrets have been my favorite thing about the game, too. Just exploring and finding stuff is so fun. I always love that in games like this, but I really love it in this game, because it's so clever and so intentional about where it puts everything and how it tells you about each secret. You know, you'll be, I don't know, I was on the train. When you unlock a train, and then you can ride the train. And instead of just getting on the train, and it's like a loading screen, and then you go to the next, you know, to the next area, you're actually on the train for a while. And actually, things happen on the train, and there are adventures on the train. There are secrets on the train. But you can just talk to NPCs on the train. And, you know, one of them, I can't remember what he said, basically, but he just told me a rumor he heard that if you go a certain direction in a certain area,

• 42:44Kirk Hamilton?

  there's a, you know, a haunted ship, or it's like a sunken ship there. And so that's just kind of nudging me in one direction. Or there are newspapers that Mina can buy.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  I love the newspapers.

• 42:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Beating each chapter. They're so good. And the newspapers, they're very funny. They have little headlines and images that reflect what you're doing. And they also kind of indicate what might be waiting for you in a new area. It's all so well thought out and so, I don't know, handmade feeling. It's all so, I use the word intentional, but it really just feels like people made it, and they thought through everything. There's little jokes everywhere, the little NPC character names. Early on, you go into an orphanage, and there are two little animal orphans kind of. Playing around and okay, I'm gonna try to remember one of them is a kid, but it's like a baby goat. And so his name as an NPC is Kid, but his, you know, his portrait is a goat.

• 43:38Kirk Hamilton?

  But there's just like tons of puns. There's tons of very clever little writing and then a lot of it is also kind of functional writing. It's telling you where to go. It's it's set it playing with your expectations. It's it's giving you nudges.

• 43:50Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, pretty much every secret in the game is hinted in some way by talking to an NPC and there are NPCs walking in town constantly. And if you try, if you stop them and talk to them, they'll give you some hint or little treasure or a little indication of how you could solve a puzzle or what you should be doing.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also just really like this weird world that Mina exists in, and I like how under explained some of it is like we've kind of talked about how from a kind of exploration perspective, it's its own reward. And like, that's like the wonderful part of playing the game is that there kind of is an answer to every question in terms of collecting things and getting an item and understanding what it's for. But in terms of how this world works or how it came to be, I mean, I feel like some of it is mysterious in a in a lovely way where it's like, well, okay, there are all these sort of anthropomorphic animals, but there are also people seemingly, or at least creatures that look human to me. And like, what's what's the situation with that? And

• 44:44Jason Schreier?

  Bojack rules.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. There's kind of, I was thinking of Bojack Horseman and I was like, what would I compare this game to? And I was like, Bojack Horseman, but like comedy wise, it's really not like that at all.

• 44:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Totally not in any way.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  It's family friendly for one thing, but also like it has this sort of whimsical charm and also this undercurrent of doom at points where like, much like in a Zelda game, like the stakes of the world are really clear to you. And like, it's it's clear that Mina really is up against it at various points, but also unlike Zelda, which has very simplistic rules in the sense that it's like, here's the bad guy. Here's the good guy. You know, everything. Off you go. I feel like in this world, I'm, I don't always know everybody's motivations and I appreciate that in a game, like not having every single piece of the world spelled out for me in the story.

• 45:35Kirk Hamilton?

  I love Mina as a protagonist.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Oh, she's great.

• 45:38Kirk Hamilton?

  This game, like a lot of games of this era, you know, it only has occasional, you know, big art portraits of her. Usually when you go to a new area, you get a little cutscene as Mina kind of looks out over whatever the new area is. Her character art is so good. She's just so cool. She's the steampunk inventor. And her whole deal is that she's already known to everybody. People know her, "Oh, Mina, you invented, you know, this incredible invention that gives us all power" and like, gives us so much. So she's already a, like, highly regarded person, which is a fun role to be in in this kind of game, since a lot of these games, you're like a nobody or you're, you know, you're kind of rising up.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  An everyman, perhaps, yeah.

• 46:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. Mina is this established, like, artisan. She's a tradeswoman, basically. She has this one thing she's very good at. And then much of the story is her both reckoning with her own inventions, fixing them at times, and kind of building and problem solving, which is just like a fun thing for a character to do. Like, she's a master fighter and a brilliant, you know, adventurer, but she's an inventor first and foremost. And that's just kind of cool. Like, she puts on reading glasses when she writes in her little notebook. She has a lot of great character animations. And probably my favorite thing that Mina does is that when you beat a boss, you do this kind of grueling tower ascent. Actually, not really my favorite thing in the game. Kind of like, I don't love them, but...

• 46:54Speaker 01

  A necessity.

• 46:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I guess it's like, like Mode 7 style, almost. Like, it goes 3D and I don't know. But then you make it to the... She makes it to the top and she fixes the, the big generator, and then she takes a nap. She just is like...

• 47:05Speaker 01

  She's tired.

• 47:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, man. And she just goes to sleep up there for a little while. And she does it after every boss. And I can totally relate. You do something hard and then you take a nap. Mina is really all of us.

• 47:16Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, we should, we should say that the story of this game is essentially that Mina's been called back to this island, Tenebris, uh, by the Baron Lionel, uh, because...

• 47:25Speaker 01

  He's a lion, get it?

• 47:26Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, he's, he's definitely a lion, because he's a...

• 47:29Kirk Hamilton?

  Maybe, I think maybe that guy isn't on the level. I don't know.

• 47:35Kirk Hamilton?

  No spoilers, to be clear. I'm not that far. It's just a vibe I can-

• 47:38Jason Schreier?

  His former captain of the guard Thorn has gone around destroying these generators that bring power to everybody. And so me and him must go around and fix the generators. And there's six of them. And so there's six main regions of the game to go to. But like I mentioned, I mean, you can, first of all, you can do them all in any order. It might be trickier to do some first than others. And there's kind of an intended way to do them all. You're meant to start with the crypt and then go to the bio, et cetera, et cetera.

• 48:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, that's so funny.

• 48:06Jason Schreier?

  But you could go and do like the astral ori, which is one of the tougher ones first, if you really wanted to. Levels do not scale. So the doing the crypt first is always going to be the recommended way. Otherwise, you might get just destroyed by doing some of the harder ones.

• 48:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I did the crypt second and I did the swamp first and it was very hard.

• 48:24Jason Schreier?

  Oh.

• 48:24Kirk Hamilton?

  And then the crypt was pretty easy. And I was like, oh, nice. Okay, this has gotten easier.

• 48:27Jason Schreier?

  It's funny you did. No wonder you had such a hard time at first if you were doing the swamp first.

• 48:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I think I started going toward the crypt without any mods. And then I added mods and the game just was not as hard. And so it was easier for me to go do this one.

• 48:39Jason Schreier?

  Like Maddy mentioned, the newspapers, those are indicating to you where you should be going next. By like, the crypt is facing all these problems now and stuff. There are a whole lot of bosses, kind of soul style, action bosses, each with their own mechanics. And some of them are super fun. Some of them have really clever ideas. And the dungeons I found to be just incredibly well designed and full of interesting mechanics. It's just they, the designers of this game, this game took six years to make. And there's a whole saga behind it that I'll link my Bloomberg story from last year in the show notes because I told the story behind why it took so long. But the developers at Yacht Club, a small

• 49:21Jason Schreier?

  team, but they stuck so many ideas into this game. And each region just has so many unique mechanics and just bespoke ideas that you learn and then figure out how to master. And it just keeps going. Even by the time you get to the final, final dungeon, you will find that it's like full of unique ideas that you can't find anywhere else, which is just so cool to see. And the way it's designed is just really cool, also full of shortcuts and just cool interlocking levels and mechanics. And man, it is so, it is such a well thought out game and such a meticulously designed game. That's the word that kept coming to mind as I was playing is like, this is so meticulous. It's so well thought out. It feels like the designers just

• 50:05Jason Schreier?

  thought of every possibility in every area. It's so polished. It's so like, things do, things react in ways that you would expect them to. People react when you do things to the areas around them or where you burrow underneath them or to the side of them. They might react in unexpected ways. And yeah, it's just so charming and clever and brilliant. I love this game so.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  It's great.

• 50:27Kirk Hamilton?

  It's amazing. It is. I second all of that.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  It does really feel like they made it with love. And sometimes I think like something that's really meticulously crafted can feel almost overwrought or overthought, not to, not to rhyme, but like in, in a way that's opaque to the player where it's like, oh, you like over created this and there are too many systems here and it's confusing now. It's like the opposite of that almost where it's like, we made a bunch of little surprises and toys for you and we're just excited to lead you through this maze. And the modifiers kind of speak to that to me as well, where it's like, they just really want to make sure that you're here with it along for whatever they wanted to shout. And I just, I'm so appreciative of that design ethos.

• 51:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it's the rare game that's elegant and complex, which a lot of times elegance kind of, it's a kind of simplicity, like a cleanness. And there is a cleanness even to the complexity of this game, but it is quite complex. There's a ton of stuff in it and that's not even considering all the modifiers, but it is also elegant. It's so well made and so carefully considered that, that everything feels in its right place, no matter how many things there are. And that's super rare. And just something I really admire about it in addition to everything else that we've, that we've talked about.

• 51:44Jason Schreier?

  What weapons are you guys using?

• 51:46Speaker 01

  The daggers.

• 51:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, yeah. Interesting. I've used the flail. The flail is so much fun. That's been my main.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 51:51Jason Schreier?

  Do not, do not sleep on the shields.

• 51:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, you were telling me.

• 51:56Jason Schreier?

  Is unexpectedly good and useful.

• 51:58Kirk Hamilton?

  That'll be my next one.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll try that.

• 51:59Jason Schreier?

  And it lets you, there's like a parry mechanic that you can use with it that

• 52:03Speaker 01

  All right, I like a parry.

• 52:05Jason Schreier?

  Can be very effective. Yeah, it's very powerful. And you look at it and you're like, oh, shield, I don't need that nonsense. But it's actually, because it's very short range, but like, it's actually very, very useful, I have found.

• 52:15Kirk Hamilton?

  It's very not Bloodborne, a game that notably only includes a shield as a joke.

• 52:20Jason Schreier?

  Although it's

• 52:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Nina has a good shield.

• 52:22Jason Schreier?

  This is an offensive shield, to be fair. It's like a shield.

• 52:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, yeah, I know.

• 52:25Jason Schreier?

  It's like a coffin with an arm coming out of it. So it's like an offensive shield.

• 52:32Jason Schreier?

  Cool. Well, Mina the Hollower, it's amazing, but it's going to be extremely highly reviewed and will certainly, it's gonna, I suspect it'll be a game of the year candidate and we're gonna see the game of the year, game awards orchestra playing chiptune music, which will be very

• 52:47Speaker 01

  That would be amazing. I would love to see that.

• 52:49Jason Schreier?

  Love to hear it. But we shall see. All right, let's take a break and then we'll be back with one more thing.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  What's more action-packed than prestige television?

• 53:03Speaker 04

  With more continuity than comic books?

• 53:05Speaker 05

  And more reality than reality television?

• 53:11Speaker 03

  It's professional wrestling.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  And to better understand wrestling is the ultimate form of entertainment, you need the Tights and Fights podcast.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  This is the perfect wrestling show with a lot of love, a lack of toxic masculinity.

• 53:30Speaker 05

  And just the right amount of butts, cats, and spandex.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Listen to Tights and Fights every Saturday on Maximum Fun.

• 53:42Jason Schreier?

  You know, we've been doing My Brother, My Brother and Me for 15 years. And Christ! Maybe you stopped listening for a while, maybe you never listen, and you're probably assuming three white guys talking for 15 years, I know where this has ended up. But no, no, you would be wrong. We're as shocked as you are that we have not fallen

• 53:59Speaker 06

  Into some sort of horrific scandal or just turned into a big crypto thing. Yeah, you don't even really know how crypto works.

• 54:08Speaker 07

  The only NFTs I'm into are naughty funny things, which is what we talk about on My Brother, My Brother and Me.

• 54:14Speaker 06

  We serve it up every Monday for you if you're listening. And if not, we just leave it out back until it goes rotten. So check it out on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 54:27Jason Schreier?

  And we are back, Kirk, Maddy. It is time for one more thing. Kirk, start us off.

• 54:33Kirk Hamilton?

  My one more thing is Subnautica 2, a game that I've played kind of a lot of. Didn't expect to play a lot of it, just thought I'd download the early access version that came out a couple of weeks ago and see what's what. And then I just kind of kept playing it because it's really, really good. It's also just really, really Subnautica. And I guess that's maybe my main, the main thing I want people to take away from this one more thing. Is that if you think it sounds interesting and have been seeing all the buzz around it and didn't play the first game, Subnautica, I think you should just go play that because it's not that different. And that's not a bad thing.

• 55:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Subnautica 2 is made by Unknown Worlds Entertainment. It has had quite a fraught development with lawsuits, all kinds of really messy stuff between the game. It's publisher or former publisher, stuff that I've kind of followed. I know that it's a big mess, but at the same time, I I mostly followed with dismay because I loved Subnautica so much and that game just seemed like it just was begging for a sequel. It was so good. I completely fell under its spell and loved it. And just upon finishing it thought, I can't wait for these developers to make another game. Bing. Kirk here. As I'm editing the episode, I'm realizing I didn't mention the fact that the developers did actually make another game.

• 55:53Kirk Hamilton?

  They made this kind of expand alone called Subnautica Below Zero that I at least found kind of disappointing. I think that's a pretty common opinion. It just kind of didn't have the same magic that Subnautica did. It tried some new ideas. There was this truck that you had to drive. Like an underwater truck, though you were actually on land a lot, which was also sort of weird and didn't feel like the thing I liked about Subnautica. So anyways, I just wanted to acknowledge that because that is a chapter in this narrative. And Below Zero wasn't a bad game by any stretch, like it got positive reviews and it's it's still Subnautica, but it's just, it wasn't quite the game I was hoping for, which informs how I've been feeling waiting for Subnautica 2.

• 56:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay, just wanted to mention that. Let's get back to what I was saying about Subnautica 2.

• 56:41Kirk Hamilton?

  And I knew they were working on Subnautica 2 and it just felt like this wonderful promise. And then all of this difficulty surrounding the game and the creative decisions behind it, its direction, people forcing other people out, these battles, and I wasn't even following it that closely. Mostly just feeling like, oh, this sucks. Like, Subnautica 2 should have been a sure thing and I'm worried now about it. So I'm happy to say that Subnautica 2 is, at least in its early access form, really good. It, I believe they say it won't be finished in 1.0 for like two years, so it will be in early access for a while. That said, I know that the early access chunk they released is quite substantial. There's a lot that you can do in it. I have friends who've played like more than 20 hours. They were talking about stuff I haven't even seen yet, parts of the map and

• 57:26Kirk Hamilton?

  giant, you know, subterranean or I guess sub aquatic, giant sub aquatic creatures that I haven't seen. But it uh, it is not the full game. So if you're gonna kind of wait for 1.0 person, you can, you can wait. However, like I said, it's very polished. It feels, there's a lot to do. It's really cool. But then, really, I just want to tell people to play Subnautica 1. If you haven't played Subnautica 1, go play it.

• 57:54Jason Schreier?

  Wait, can I, can I ask something about 2? I, I feel like I've seen, I keep seeing this controversy over like things attacking you, but you not being able to fight back or something. There's like a lot of people complaining that it's nonviolent. Isn't that, is that a story? Is that real?

• 58:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, um, yeah, I guess I've seen that. Uh, so this was true in the first game as well. The games, I think the first game's director actually was, gave a really specific Quote about how there are no guns in Subnautica, I believe because he was like, we were making this game shortly after Sandy Hook. And the school shooting there and I just like, didn't want another game with guns in it. So there are no guns in Subnautica. And there are no guns in Subnautica 2 either, nor is there really any way to like violently respond to a fish that's attacking you. Um, I'm not totally sure like the extent of this controversy. I've seen it floating around. It's sort of funny because people say you can't kill fish in Subnautica.

• 58:49Kirk Hamilton?

  But like you can grab a fish and then you go cook it and eat it. And then I think that kills it. So you can kill some fish.

• 58:55Jason Schreier?

  Well, you never know.

• 58:56Kirk Hamilton?

  But what they're really talking about though are the bigger and the kind of aggressive fish that kind of hound you. There's one really annoying one that like head butts you, another that kind of nibbles at you. It doesn't take a lot of health. But it's like stressful. It makes really loud noise and they're always kind of around. I think this, some of this is like an early access polish thing. I built a base consciously away from all fish that would mess with me. And yet outside my base, I am like constantly being harangued by these stupid like barracuda fish that just bite me. So I'm just outside of the base trying to build new additions to it, my like sea base. And then I'm just getting bit all the time and there's nothing I can do.

• 59:34Kirk Hamilton?

  So the more that happens, the more I'm like, I do kind of wish I could like pull out my Uzi, like press three and pull out my shotgun and like pull these stupid fish away. So I can just get back to like building the satellite that I'm trying to put on my base or whatever. But at the same time, I, I think I generally support the game's ethos of like non-violence. It's not a violent game. You're exploring. You're crafting, you're discovering, and then you're sometimes coming upon huge terrifying creatures that you just have to avoid. Or like cleverly subvert and get around. And that's like the design.

• 1:00:04Jason Schreier?

  I feel like Outer Wilds has forever ruined me on games with giant fish in them because of the angler fish that. Oh, they were scary. It's creeped the hell out of me.

• 1:00:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, so I think actually Outer Wilds is one of my first comparison points for the first game and for the sequel. And if you, people who liked Outer Wilds should play Subnautica. That was actually why I got into it. It was a listener who heard me raving about Outer Wilds with the two of you on the show and wrote me and was like, man, if you like Outer Wilds, you should play Subnautica. It is so similar. And I had thought at the time, I'm sure I've talked about this on the show, I had thought Subnautica was like a procedurally generated Minecraft, like Terraria kind of thing. But it isn't. It's a completely authored world that you gradually explore. And it has survival mechanics. Like, there's a lot of crafting. You're collecting, you know, materials to make

• 1:00:54Kirk Hamilton?

  upgraded oxygen tanks so you can go deeper and stuff. But the world is completely authored. There's a whole story to it. You discover this like amazing environmental story as you work your way through it. It's not a puzzle game exactly, but you do have to solve puzzles in like figuring out how to get to new environments or get around new beasts that you uncover. And so it really is, it's very similar to Outer Wilds. I think the two of you would like love Subnautica one. It's, it's so good. So anyways, I really want to urge people to play that. And then just report back that so far, Subnautica 2 seems to really be on the right track. The story, there is a story, you're kind of uncovering the tale of your sort of fellow corporate indentured colonists and who

• 1:01:37Kirk Hamilton?

  all live in clone bodies with like an artificial intelligence governing what they're doing. There's like a lot of interesting residents with things that are happening today, like critiques of capitalism and artificial intelligence and corporate control. At the same time, it hasn't, like, it doesn't lose track of like what makes the game good, which is just the Subnautica thing. Like, Subnautica 2 has you doing the Subnautica thing right away. It feels very, very similar at the beginning. There are a lot of echoes of the first game. And that's fine, because people loved the first game. All I really wanted was, let me just play Subnautica again for the first time, because you can't really replay it. Once you've played it, you've kind of discovered all the things. And that's what this game's letting me do. And that's really cool. I think that was a great decision.

• 1:02:20Kirk Hamilton?

  First sequel. So I'm so far really optimistic about Subnautica 2. The early access version that exists is very cool for anyone out there who loved the first game and is thinking about the early access. You'll get a lot out of it. And for any of you out there who are looking for something to play that is just a really cool exploration game, who like games like Outer Wilds, love discovering things, maybe overcoming their phobia of the deep, dark ocean like me. Subnautica 1 is still great and great in much the same way as the sequel. So I really recommend giving that one a play as well.

• 1:02:52Jason Schreier?

  Can I just add real quick, beyond the game, the drama surrounding this game is quite, quite worth reading about. I'll throw a couple of links in the show notes, but I mean, essentially, the developers of this game were due a bonus and the CEO of Crafton, the company that bought Subnautica's developer, asked ChatGPT how to get out of paying this bonus. The CEO, he fired the CEO of Unknown Worlds and a judge forced him to reinstate that CEO, Ted Gill, who is currently now the CEO again. Imagine being in those meetings between Crafton and Ted Gill when he was fired and not hired back out of Crafton's own volition, but because a judge forced them to hire him back. I mean, it's a wild story. It's truly wild.

• 1:03:36Kirk Hamilton?

  It's really, and it's a nice sort of, you know, it's, it must be affirming for them that the game is doing really well. It's sold incredibly well and it's great. I mean, people really like it. So that's very nice for the creative folks behind it.

• 1:03:48Jason Schreier?

  Sold more than 4 million copies at this point. So I imagine that Crafton is asking ChatGPT how to stop people from buying a video game. Cause they will trigger that bonus. Yeah, I mean, part of the whole premise, Crafton said that they fired the CEO and the two co-founders last year because Subnautica 2 was not ready for early access. The developers, speaking to me and, and also the, the founders in this lawsuit, all argued, actually, it was ready for early access last August. From the sounds of it, Kirk, we're now, I don't know, nine months past when it would have been in early access? Sounds like it would have 100% been ready for early access.

• 1:04:28Kirk Hamilton?

  It's pretty freaking good. So yeah, I'm inclined to believe. them on that, given what I've played.

• 1:04:32Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, so just a crazy story and worth reading and I will certainly be writing more about it down the road. So

• 1:04:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to your reporting on this. And this is like a great wrinkle in the story that this game is fantastic and so successful so far.

• 1:04:48Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. And I mean, I'm sure the developers are cheering because yeah, they will be getting their bonuses.

• 1:04:53Kirk Hamilton?

  They should be very proud of what they've made so far.

• 1:04:56Jason Schreier?

  Um, Maddy, what's your one more thing?

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Uh, my one more thing is a book. Uh, it's called Doom Guy and it's written by John Romero. So a couple of months ago, I had my one more thing be the 2003 book, Masters of Doom, which is by David Kushner. And it's kind of like a famous video game reporting example where Kushner interviewed Romero and also John Carmack and American McGee and Sandy Peterson and Adrian Carmack, no relation hilariously, like all the original, original Doom team and like tons of other people associated with it. And obviously, you know, did his best to portray what that time was like.

• 1:05:35Jason Schreier?

  The Doom guys.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  The Doom guys, if you will. Uh, guys, plural. Um.

• 1:05:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Doom guys too. Doom guy.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. That's why, that's exactly what their game was called. I think we all remember that correctly. Um, so I, I talked at the time about how the book Masters of Doom kind of has some known flaws. And like, one of them is that Kushner has this propensity for like, fully recreating conversations at a level of detail that I am personally skeptical of. Um, but I did neglect to mention, although I did like tell some jokes about how no one can remember things that well, but I did know this at the time, and I wish I'd mentioned, uh, that John Romero kind of famously has hyperthymesia, which is to say, he is one of those people who can remember every single day of his life, or so he says, uh, with, with accuracy. Um, and so in his case, I think, um,

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  he's, he's someone who's come out and said that he had disputed some of the things in the book. And that was interesting to me, especially because he's since written this memoir that is extraordinarily detailed. Like, it's much longer for starters. And I just, I just want to give you guys a sense of it. So Masters of Doom, if you were to listen to the audiobook, it's 12 hours and 43 minutes, already pretty long, right?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  And Doom Guy is 17 hours long. So like, it's covering a lot of the same ground, but in far, far more detail, which I think is a benefit, but also is something where I'm like, you need to really, really want to hear a lot of detail about this. And I'm personally very interested in it. So I was happy to enjoy every word, but I do think it's like, really worth hammering home that John Romero truly remembers a staggering amount of minutia about the day to day happenings at It Software. Um, I will also say, a big chunk of the book is just his personal life story. And I also thought that was really

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  interesting. He had a pretty troubled childhood, like an abusive alcoholic father and then abusive stepfather. At least I would describe the stepfather as abusive, although later on, they seemed to kind of make up in certain ways. Same with his biological father. And John Romero speaks about that with a lot of candor and compassion. And I think that that part of the book is also really fascinating and at times really heart wrenching. And like speaks a lot to just the kind of person that he became. And I think that is a big part of why he wrote the book. He starts it off by saying that he really feels like he was a product of just where he came up and his childhood and so on. And like, that

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  kind of spoke to the kinds of games that fascinated him and the person that he was later in life. And I think that is insofar as any person telling the story of their own life can do, he does pretty well at painting that picture and illustrating all of that. But I would also say, I would not recommend reading these two books within a two month period, because they are, they go over so many similar events that I did personally start to feel like I was going insane at various points.

• 1:08:45Kirk Hamilton?

  When they released the two Fire Festival documentaries.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a little like that, where like, you start kind of being like, wait, so I did already hear about the sequence of events previously. It was slightly different the first time, but like, now it feels like some sort of weird dream I'm having. This is really just a me problem. But if for some reason you're listening to this and you kind of want to read both books, maybe like split them up by a few years. And as for why you might still want to read Masters of Doom, even though I think it's, it's probably true that there are parts of it that, that aren't entirely accurate, as would be true of any, any book. I mean, people's memories are fallible. If you're not John Romero, I suppose. I will say John Carmack has said that he feels it's accurate. And as far as I know, he has no intention of writing a memoir. And there's

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  a lot of really cool details in the book about his childhood that speak to the kind of person that he became. And those are, as far as I know, only in Masters of Doom and probably any other interviews Carmack's done over the years. So I feel like I'm getting the full picture. But I also don't know that I recommend reading both books back to back because it's a little crazy making.

• 1:09:52Kirk Hamilton?

  If you had to recommend one, like if people listening to this are like, I want to know this story, which one do I read?

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  I would, I would say Doom Guy, in part because it's a more complete picture. It's written more recently, it includes more of Romero's life, and he still includes the full recounting of everything that happened in terms of how they were making Doom and writes in a very accessible way about the development of some really, really exciting gameplay tools. And the fact that John Romero is capable of explaining those things in a way that I can understand as someone who's never written a line of code, I think is a great credit to him. And that many, I mean, we talked to game developers, we know that not all of them are gifted at describing how they make the things that they make. And David Kushner, obviously, when he was writing Masters of Doom, I think also did a pretty

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  good job of like, trying to put that in plain language. But I think it's a real credit to Romero that he's also really capable of doing that. And that, obviously, play games. But since I don't make them, I think it's worth noting that the game was the game. The book was still really easily understandable to me, even though he was describing some pretty heady stuff in terms of what they were building and how significant it was.

• 1:11:06Jason Schreier?

  Nice. Cool. All right. My one more thing is about a sports team that has really taken over the town of New York these days. I don't know if you guys have heard about this. New York, it's funny, New York is not like the most successful sports town. It's not, even though, I mean, it's had a little success, the Giants have won a couple of Super Well, as the Yankees obviously were dominant for for a long time, especially in the 90s. And I've spent a lot of money, but like New York, the Jets and the Mets and the Knicks and the Nets. I mean, all all kind of a joke for a very long time. And now the New York Knicks are in the finals.

• 1:11:49Jason Schreier?

  They they just swept the Cavaliers. They've won, I believe, 13 games in a row. So they are like the hottest team in the NBA playoffs right now. They had a miraculous comeback last week that I I posted this on Blue Sky that if you look at the probability chart, it looks like Ubisoft stock because it spikes all the way up to here for the Cavs and then goes all the way down.

• 1:12:12Kirk Hamilton?

  This is very narrow casted to Jason Schreier's Blue Sky following.

• 1:12:15Jason Schreier?

  That's what I'm here for. Specific jokes, specific humor is what I'm here for. The Cavs had a had a like 99.9 chance of winning and somehow lost. They were up 22 points with seven minutes left and the Knicks came back. And the series was over when that happened, even though it was game one, I think the Knicks just kind of ate their hearts. And yeah, New York is is blowing up right now. It feels like a truly Knicks town. Everyone's you see Knicks gear everywhere you go. Everyone's talking about it. Every time I go to the grocery store, the barber shop, like everywhere I go, bodega, like just people are talking about the Knicks. A lot of people are talking about the Knicks, which would be very exciting if I were a fan of the New York Knicks. Unfortunately, I am a fan of the Brooklyn Nets, which are very are a sad sack team.

• 1:12:58Jason Schreier?

  Whenever you go to a Nets game at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn, probably a solid 75% of fans are there for the other team and are just rooting for the other team the whole time. The Nets are a cursed franchise. They like tanked this last year to try to get a top three pick and wound up with the number six pick in the draft. They're just a mess and a joke of a franchise. And I've always kind of hated the Knicks. And now I don't really know what to do because like part of me wants to root for New York. But then another part of me is like, no, fuck the Knicks. I can't stand that team. They've always been rivals to the Nets. They've always been annoying. Knicks fans are very annoying. I've always had to grow up around surrounded by Knicks fans in high school and stuff. And I've always found them very annoying. So I'm not sure how to feel about this.

• 1:13:43Jason Schreier?

  I guess if it's any solace for me, it's that the Knicks will probably get crushed by the San Antonio Spurs or the Oklahoma City Thunder. Have either of you watched the San Antonio Spurs over the last three years or seen the man named Victor Wembanyama?

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:14:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Nope.

• 1:14:01Jason Schreier?

  Oh, my goodness. Okay. Well, if you get a chance, maybe they'll be in the finals, but you should, you should turn on a Spurs and Thunders game or like, watch a clip on YouTube where Victor Wembanyama is playing because he is roughly eight feet tall and he makes, when he plays with other NBA players.

• 1:14:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Is he really roughly eight feet tall?

• 1:14:19Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, yeah. He, when he plays with other NBA players, it's like a grown up playing with kids on the playground, except the other NBA players are all like six foot six. You just have to watch him and the way he moves and the way he shoots, it's like, people call it, his nickname is the alien because humans shouldn't be like this. Like, nobody should be this big and also this fast and this dominant in every possible way of the sport. But anyway, that's a story for another time. Go watch footage of Victor Wembanyama if you get a chance. Watch a clip or two because it's, it's really, it's really a treasure. But yeah, but the Knicks, I think they'll, they'll probably lose in the finals, but maybe they won't. I don't know. For me, it's kind of a win-win, right? Either I get to watch the Knicks lose and I can make fun of all my annoying Nick fan friends, or I

• 1:15:03Jason Schreier?

  get to watch the Knicks win and it's like, New York will be exciting. Everyone will be happy and the, the, the energy here will be, will be fun to watch. I guess I, I kind of want them to lose. So fuck the Knicks.

• 1:15:15Kirk Hamilton?

  My favorite Knicks, fun fact is that of course Knicks is short for knickerbockers, which is the full name for the team and that a knicker, knickerbockers are shorts. They're like short pants. So they're the New York shorts.

• 1:15:28Jason Schreier?

  I mean, once again, Kirk, I root for the Brooklyn Nets, which are named after the thing you put the basketball into.

• 1:15:35Kirk Hamilton?

  You got the shorts, we got the Nets. We need like the jerseys, like the Staten Island jerseys.

• 1:15:41Kirk Hamilton?

  The Long Island Shoes.

• 1:15:42Speaker 01

  Naming stuff that we can see.

• 1:15:44Jason Schreier?

  I mean, there's some, some out there names. The Cleveland's football team is called the Browns. It's just a color. It's just, I think it's named after the, it's, it's someone's last name. It's named after like the last name of some NFL guy a hundred years ago.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  That's like the worst thing for it to be named after is just like a guy.

• 1:16:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Cause you're like, you know, the New Orleans Jazz, it's actually named for Charles Jazz. He was the first owner of the team. That's not true. I'm just making that up. It is like one of those.

• 1:16:09Jason Schreier?

  It's actually the Utah Jazz. I don't know.

• 1:16:12Kirk Hamilton?

  No, I know they, isn't it in baseball? The, the New Orleans Jazz were traded to Utah where they don't allow music. One of my favorite jokes from that movie.

• 1:16:20Jason Schreier?

  Just a classic. Yeah. The New Orleans team is actually the Pelicans, the New Orleans Pelicans. But the Jazz is of course fitting for, for Utah. But anyway, yeah. New York Knicks have taken over this town and I'm not really that thrilled about it. All right. On that note, it is time for us to say goodbye. I hope everyone out there enjoys Me and the Hollower. Cause I will probably be playing it a third and a fourth and a fifth time. I'm just, the only bummer is that Yacht Club is not making more of it. I mean, unless something changes, maybe if it sells a billion copies, they'll be like, all right, I guess we have to make a sequel. But their plan is to go and now work on 3D shovel night. That's like, they're going to be their next big thing.

• 1:17:02Jason Schreier?

  Cause they put that on pause so everyone could work on Me and the Hollower. So kind of bummed that we won't get more of it, but I love what we got. And I think people out there will really dig it. And on that note, we'll be back next week to talk about another really cool video game that we haven't mentioned this, this week, which is of course 007 First Light. We all got that really late. Review code went out really late, so we will talk about it next week.

• 1:17:27Kirk Hamilton?

  Very short version is where I'm very much enjoying it. So it'll be very fun to talk about another good game.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of good games this year.

• 1:17:33Jason Schreier?

  Bangers.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Good games coming out.

• 1:17:34Jason Schreier?

  All right. Kirk, Manny, see you both next time.

• 1:17:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, see you next week.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:17:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Matty 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. Email us at [email protected] and find links to our merch store and our Discord server in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:18:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you. I'm Kirk Ham-

• 1:18:51Kirk Hamilton?

  I just did the same thing before you.

• 1:18:53Jason Schreier?

  Hello. One, two, three, four. Just had coffee.

• 1:18:58Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I got a little bit of morning voice happening.

• 1:19:01Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 1:19:03Jason Schreier?

  And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello.