Saros Review And More w/ Jesse Vitelli

<v Speaker 1>Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Game and Former Show, a
<v Speaker 1>weekly podcast covering the video game industry. Join us each
<v Speaker 1>and every week for a discussion at the latest gaming news, reviews,
<v Speaker 1>and exclusive reveals with Game and Former staff and special
<v Speaker 1>guests from around the industry. I am your host, Marcus Stewart.
<v Speaker 1>I am joined by Kyle Hilliard.
<v Speaker 2>Hey, I'm here, fresh off a review, ready to talk
<v Speaker 2>about it.
<v Speaker 1>Hell yeah. And also joining us freshly back from a
<v Speaker 1>secret special trip, Eric Van Allen. Hello, super secret ultra
<v Speaker 1>special trip, and I can't talk about it. Give me, like,
<v Speaker 1>I think another two weeks or so and then we
<v Speaker 1>can talk about it. But I'm here to talk about
<v Speaker 1>other things instead. Yes, and join us. Back on the
<v Speaker 1>Game and Former Show. A friend of gi an editor
<v Speaker 1>over at Restart dot Run, Jesse Vittelli.
<v Speaker 3>Hello, man, Hey, thanks for having me. I'm back again.
<v Speaker 3>You're stuck with me, Welcome back.
<v Speaker 2>We get to have It's not stuck, it's pleasant. I
<v Speaker 2>haven't podcasts with you in a while.
<v Speaker 4>I don't. It's been a minute. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>I thought I thought you're gonna go full like Eminem
<v Speaker 1>slim shady for a second, like, I was like, Oh,
<v Speaker 1>he's gonna start. Guess who's back again? I could my
<v Speaker 1>brain was auto completing. It was actually a little bum
<v Speaker 1>that you didn't do it.
<v Speaker 3>All right, I'm sorry to disappoint upfront, but at least
<v Speaker 3>we got the disappointment out of the way. So for
<v Speaker 3>the rest of the episode we can we could stay.
<v Speaker 3>We plateaued, Oh yeah, well, you know not.
<v Speaker 1>What's not disappointing is us Game in Former, the Game
<v Speaker 1>in Former show, Game and Former magazine. We're gonna be
<v Speaker 1>talking about Sorrows today. Kyle Hilliard reviewed it for us.
<v Speaker 1>We're also gonna dive into Diablo fors the latest expansion,
<v Speaker 1>Lord of Hatred. We're gonna talk a bit about Yoshi
<v Speaker 1>and the mysterious book, and we're going to touch a
<v Speaker 1>little bit on Vampire Crawlers, the sort of dungeon crawler
<v Speaker 1>seq well spiritual successor to Vampire Survivors.
<v Speaker 5>They're calling it a blobber is what they're saying. The
<v Speaker 5>streets are saying blobber.
<v Speaker 2>Is it like the same universe as Vampire Survivors. I
<v Speaker 2>know the narrative of Vampire Spiers is like whatever, but okay,
<v Speaker 2>it's it is the world.
<v Speaker 5>Of Vampire Survivors, which is strange because the world of
<v Speaker 5>Vampire Survivors is basically just castle.
<v Speaker 3>Vaded, like the jobber, Is that the same thing?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you get you get blobbed.
<v Speaker 5>I've always known the blob is that thing if you
<v Speaker 5>went to a summer camp and they had the big
<v Speaker 5>inflatable that was in the lake, and like one kid
<v Speaker 5>sits on the end of it, and then somebody else
<v Speaker 5>jumps off a tall platform and lands on the side
<v Speaker 5>and kind of like.
<v Speaker 1>The other kids.
<v Speaker 5>Then yeah, yeah, depending on where you sit, it will
<v Speaker 5>either just launch you a short distance or launch you
<v Speaker 5>an incredibly far distance. As we learned of the blob,
<v Speaker 5>the blob, oh dublob, that's the game?
<v Speaker 3>Is that the game?
<v Speaker 2>You're you're trying to color the world? Isn't that color
<v Speaker 2>on everything?
<v Speaker 3>Just t HQ.
<v Speaker 1>Nordic owns the.
<v Speaker 3>Blob, right, they made a sequel and the Blob too.
<v Speaker 6>Was like fine, Kyle, I walked so concrete Genie could.
<v Speaker 2>Run right, They walked right by it. The blob was like,
<v Speaker 2>it was fine. It was kind of like they were
<v Speaker 2>going for a Katamari thing. That didn't quite hit with me,
<v Speaker 2>but it was interesting. I'm trying something, Yeah, I was
<v Speaker 2>gonna say it walks to that chicken. A color foot
<v Speaker 2>tale could run a coloring game. God, we're going on
<v Speaker 2>a weird tangent, right, This is what happens when you
<v Speaker 2>bring up the blob in twenty twenty six. But before
<v Speaker 2>we get into today's show, of course, as always, if
<v Speaker 2>you would like to support Game Informer, the best way
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<v Speaker 4>That wolf is sick cool.
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<v Speaker 5>We were in the airport of Amsterdam. I can say
<v Speaker 5>that much. I can't tell you where we went after
<v Speaker 5>that or came back from, but I can tell you
<v Speaker 5>that during transit in the airport of Amsterdam, we have
<v Speaker 5>photographic evidence of Brian Jay holding up I believe it
<v Speaker 5>was a double O seven first light cover story in Amsterdam.
<v Speaker 4>That was pretty cool.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I mean you could just tell them that you
<v Speaker 1>guys got a tip that someone claimed that Game Informer
<v Speaker 1>was in the Amsterdam airport, so you and Brian took
<v Speaker 1>it upon yourself to fly out there.
<v Speaker 5>A Yeah, we flew to Amsterdam to confirm that there
<v Speaker 5>was a Game Informer in the airport.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. Yeah. We didn't want to rely on hearsay. We
<v Speaker 1>wanted to get our eyes on it. Ourselves.
<v Speaker 5>So it's it's the drill budget and tweet but about
<v Speaker 5>us spending money on flights for to verify the magazines
<v Speaker 5>or in airports that the budget.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I can't think of a better time to take
<v Speaker 1>frivolous flights. I've heard it. Yeah, it's great right now?
<v Speaker 4>Oh yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Well, Kyle Hilliard, we're gonna throw it to you because
<v Speaker 1>you reviewed Sorrows, the newest game by how Smart, the
<v Speaker 1>not sequel to Returnal, but is also very similar to
<v Speaker 1>Returnal third person action shooter bullet Hell roguelike. I'm super
<v Speaker 1>excited for this. I think a lot of us are
<v Speaker 1>pretty excited for this. Tell us, what did you think
<v Speaker 1>of this game? How does this stack up compared to Returnal?
<v Speaker 2>Uh? It is very good. It is a very good
<v Speaker 2>video game. It was my most anticipated game of the year.
<v Speaker 2>Like there's there's the GTAs of the World, which I
<v Speaker 2>am very excited for. I want to play GTA, but
<v Speaker 2>like I was, uh, I was. I think I was
<v Speaker 2>on midmex We're talking about like if I had a
<v Speaker 2>handful of games like right in front of me, if
<v Speaker 2>I had GTA and Sorrows, Like what would I play first?
<v Speaker 2>And you know, whatever else, I'm excited about it. And
<v Speaker 2>I was like, Sorrows is the one I really want
<v Speaker 2>to get my hands on and try, and like, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>it is. It is for me. I did not disappoint
<v Speaker 2>at all. Really, I think it plays wonderfully, like all
<v Speaker 2>the new sort of mechanics that have been integrated, like
<v Speaker 2>using the shield and how that integrates into like power
<v Speaker 2>weapons and the sort of balancing act you have to
<v Speaker 2>pull of, like you know, do I want to dodge
<v Speaker 2>this or do I want to try to gather this
<v Speaker 2>energy to like power this weapon. And the armor matrix,
<v Speaker 2>which is like the permanent upgrades that you can unlock.
<v Speaker 2>I think really go a long way in just making
<v Speaker 2>the game just more consistently and frequently rewarding sorrows within
<v Speaker 2>the Rogue On certainly did not invent permanent upgrades. That
<v Speaker 2>is a thing that exists in other rogue les rogues
<v Speaker 2>and rogue Likes and rogue legs, but it just I
<v Speaker 2>feel like it's best, it's better implemented here. I don't
<v Speaker 2>know better best. I don't even know if I need
<v Speaker 2>to use those qualifiers, but I just think it's really
<v Speaker 2>well implemented in that, like if you have a good run,
<v Speaker 2>like you could unlock a lot of stuff, and you
<v Speaker 2>can really kind of guide yourself to like how you're
<v Speaker 2>sort of generally playing. Like I wasn't really pairing a
<v Speaker 2>lot over the course of the game. It wasn't until
<v Speaker 2>the end that I really sort of got my feet
<v Speaker 2>under me and started pairing the red sort of attacks
<v Speaker 2>a lot and really enjoying that. But like, you know,
<v Speaker 2>because of that, for the first like sixty percent of
<v Speaker 2>the game, I kind of, you know, didn't really need
<v Speaker 2>to felt like I needed to spend a lot on those,
<v Speaker 2>and I focus more on the elements that I wanted
<v Speaker 2>more of. And it's nice that it lets you do that.
<v Speaker 2>And it's like, like I said, if you have a
<v Speaker 2>good run, you can unlock a lot of stuff all
<v Speaker 2>at once, But if you have a bad run, you
<v Speaker 2>can still unlock a few things. So it's just it's
<v Speaker 2>a much less heartbreaking defeat. You know, like you you
<v Speaker 2>feel good, you know, you feel better then. I'm comparing
<v Speaker 2>it to Returnal, which I don't want to do too
<v Speaker 2>much because even though like they are they are very
<v Speaker 2>similar gameplay wise, they're they're pretty distinct. Well you know what,
<v Speaker 2>actually I don't know that's that's not fair. They are.
<v Speaker 2>They play very similarly, but Sorrows just has like so
<v Speaker 2>many more like additional bells and whistles that just make
<v Speaker 2>everything more manageable. I didn't find it as challenging as Returnal,
<v Speaker 2>but I still found it very rewarding. I really, I
<v Speaker 2>really like Sorrows a lot. I gave it a nine
<v Speaker 2>two five for Game Informer, And it's the kind of
<v Speaker 2>game that, like, you guys know how it is for us,
<v Speaker 2>Like we will review a game and we hit credits
<v Speaker 2>and we write the review, and maybe that's it. Maybe
<v Speaker 2>we just don't go back to it, even if we
<v Speaker 2>really liked it. Maybe if we claim we're going to
<v Speaker 2>go back to it, it's like, yeah, we end up
<v Speaker 2>not just because it's like that part of my life
<v Speaker 2>is done. Sorrows is like I got credits, I wrote
<v Speaker 2>the review, I recorded the v over for the review
<v Speaker 2>eric which is now uploaded, and I'm like already, like
<v Speaker 2>I've immediately like jumped back in and I'm like playing again,
<v Speaker 2>and I'm going after sort of the the sort of
<v Speaker 2>additional endings, and I want to I want to try
<v Speaker 2>to get everything on, you know, all the upgrades and
<v Speaker 2>things like that. It's just like it is one of
<v Speaker 2>those games that has just infected me, you know, I'm
<v Speaker 2>just thinking about it a lot. I don't want to
<v Speaker 2>stop playing. It's really good. If you like Returnal, you will.
<v Speaker 2>You will definitely like Sorrows if you were scared by
<v Speaker 2>Returnal or the genre in general, I would still recommend
<v Speaker 2>Sorrows because I think it is much friendlier to sort
<v Speaker 2>of getting you on board and like getting into the
<v Speaker 2>action and it feeling more fair and still feeling like
<v Speaker 2>you're you have a sense of quality progress even if
<v Speaker 2>you're not doing well. And it also a small thing
<v Speaker 2>which was like a weirdly to me, like a big
<v Speaker 2>complaint about Returnal. It was always odd to me that
<v Speaker 2>this kind of bubbled to the surface. Is the thing
<v Speaker 2>people didn't like about Returnal is like you can turn
<v Speaker 2>off your system in the have a run and come
<v Speaker 2>back to it. Like like I don't think there's some
<v Speaker 2>asterisk with bosses. I think where it's like if you're
<v Speaker 2>in the middle of a boss fight, it sends you
<v Speaker 2>back right. But like if you if you're in the
<v Speaker 2>middle of a run and you need to quit, like
<v Speaker 2>you can, it'll put you back at the beginning of
<v Speaker 2>the level. But it's like it's very sort of friendly
<v Speaker 2>in that way. Jesse. You you've played and beaten it too, right,
<v Speaker 2>like okay, because this is it, because I this is
<v Speaker 2>my first time talking with anybody about it. Really we
<v Speaker 2>have we we silo ourselves a game and former a
<v Speaker 2>lot when it comes to reviews. Like even Matt Miller,
<v Speaker 2>who I think is really enjoying it, was sort of
<v Speaker 2>really if he was asking me questions or anything, it
<v Speaker 2>was very cryptic and never about how do you feel
<v Speaker 2>about it? And the same you know, like, so I'm
<v Speaker 2>curious to hear another perspective like did you like it
<v Speaker 2>as much as me?
<v Speaker 3>Or I will say I am. I think a little
<v Speaker 3>bit lower on it than you are. That being said,
<v Speaker 3>I do think a lot of what you're saying about
<v Speaker 3>the gameplay stuff is like one hundred percent tro I
<v Speaker 3>think this game plays so much better than Reternal. I
<v Speaker 3>think I think a lot of it in terms of
<v Speaker 3>like Doom Eternal in which like your shoulder rocket like
<v Speaker 3>produces AMMO and then your melee produces shield and it
<v Speaker 3>has that sort of like all the systems feed into
<v Speaker 3>one another in really interesting ways, like absorbing with the
<v Speaker 3>shield gives you the power weapon, and then you know
<v Speaker 3>certain upgrades can change that, and then using your power
<v Speaker 3>up and can give you this other thing. And I
<v Speaker 3>think the ways in which that game flows when you're
<v Speaker 3>in a flow state is impeccable. I think it is
<v Speaker 3>some of the best bullet hell you can experience right now.
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely.
<v Speaker 3>I think where Sorrow starts to fall apart for me
<v Speaker 3>a little bit is and it's really interesting because I
<v Speaker 3>think we have opposite perspectives on this is. I think
<v Speaker 3>it's almost like an overcorrection of Returnal, because I really
<v Speaker 3>like how long and drawn out and challenging Returnal is.
<v Speaker 3>Where Sorrow's feels like they've sort of over corrected a
<v Speaker 3>little bit and made everything a little more bite size
<v Speaker 3>and manageable, where every time you finish a level, you
<v Speaker 3>can basically teleport and just start at the next chapter
<v Speaker 3>of that level, and those runs are way shorter, like
<v Speaker 3>like a Returnal run can take you an hour, two hours,
<v Speaker 3>three hours, depending on how long you want to you
<v Speaker 3>want to go for where everything you want to do
<v Speaker 3>in Sorrows, I don't think anything took me longer than
<v Speaker 3>forty minutes once I got once I got it right,
<v Speaker 3>like if I started a level and beat a boss
<v Speaker 3>probably about forty minutes, thirty minutes, but the game never
<v Speaker 3>really pushed me to be like, Okay, you're actually going
<v Speaker 3>to go for a long chunk. Now, You're actually we
<v Speaker 3>actually need you to go back to this level and
<v Speaker 3>you know, go really far. And it feels like a.
<v Speaker 2>Lot to be clear, like that's and it's an option.
<v Speaker 1>It is an option, which.
<v Speaker 2>Which personally I do love that because I am your
<v Speaker 2>patient gamer who doesn't have an hour to like play
<v Speaker 2>on some but yeah, please continue.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, And that's why I think it is like it
<v Speaker 3>is fair for I think there's like both perspectives work
<v Speaker 3>absolutely fine. I think for me, it's just I liked
<v Speaker 3>how what's the word I'm looking for. I just liked
<v Speaker 3>how structurally Returnal worked. Where Sorrows it feels a little
<v Speaker 3>weird to me because you come back to the passage
<v Speaker 3>to talk to your sort of crewmates, and I feel
<v Speaker 3>like there's this conflicting idea of Sorrows as what Housemark
<v Speaker 3>makes is the sort of bullet hell action set piece
<v Speaker 3>game and then you have sort of the prestige third
<v Speaker 3>party Sony Air to some of the interactions in the
<v Speaker 3>hideout where they like want this more cut scene focused
<v Speaker 3>and more story focused, and they want this crew that
<v Speaker 3>maybe they can turn into like a trans media property
<v Speaker 3>down the line and make a TV show or a
<v Speaker 3>movie out.
<v Speaker 4>Of or something.
<v Speaker 3>They just they feel conflicting in that regard where I'm like,
<v Speaker 3>we have this thing that doesn't really coalesce for me,
<v Speaker 3>and then we have like what's else, what else is
<v Speaker 3>going on in that game, and it just it feels
<v Speaker 3>like two different ideas butting heads with each other. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>And I think that's where the story stuff falls.
<v Speaker 1>Apart from me real quick, I was listening to last
<v Speaker 1>week's show when you were talking about Pragmata. Between the
<v Speaker 1>crew and between Hughes crew and Pragmata and the crew
<v Speaker 1>in this game, who is the more forgettable team?
<v Speaker 2>Oh, Pragmata absolutely?
<v Speaker 1>Okay, Yeah, I will.
<v Speaker 2>Say I as I was talking about Sorrows at the
<v Speaker 2>beginning of this podcast, like, uh, check the tape, I
<v Speaker 2>wasn't really talking about the narrative a lot, because yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I'm with you Jesse in that like that is kind
<v Speaker 2>of weak point of the game for me. And I
<v Speaker 2>will say I was trying to I'm trying not to
<v Speaker 2>do too much comparison between Returnal and Sorrows, But even
<v Speaker 2>though they are like intertwined, undoubtedly, I will say I
<v Speaker 2>do think I prefer Returnal between the two. I think
<v Speaker 2>I think Sorrows is kind of like a Breath of
<v Speaker 2>the Wild Tears of the Kingdom situation, where it's like,
<v Speaker 2>once you have those like tools and tiers of the Kingdom,
<v Speaker 2>it's kind of like, I don't know if I could
<v Speaker 2>go back to Breath of the Wild, but like Breath
<v Speaker 2>of the Wild was sort of the undeniable, like first
<v Speaker 2>experience with that kind of game, and that's the case
<v Speaker 2>with the Returnal here. And I do think by a
<v Speaker 2>pretty large margin the Returnal narrative is is better and
<v Speaker 2>more interesting and like plays with the medium of video
<v Speaker 2>games in a way that's really fascinating, and like is
<v Speaker 2>the thing that really pulled me into Returnal when I
<v Speaker 2>was struggling with the difficulty. Like, I think the Returnal
<v Speaker 2>narrative is fascinating and interesting and like really makes you
<v Speaker 2>think and think about video games and think about the
<v Speaker 2>idea of like dying in a video game. Where straightforward
<v Speaker 2>is definitely the wrong word to use with Sorrows, but
<v Speaker 2>it is a little more like, Okay, these are characters
<v Speaker 2>on a planet, where Returnal was kind of like I
<v Speaker 2>don't really know what's going on with her mind? You know, Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>what's the what's.
<v Speaker 1>Like the basic story premise for this, like who are
<v Speaker 1>you playing? And and does the game contextualize the roguelike
<v Speaker 1>structure as well or at all the way Maternal did not.
<v Speaker 2>As strongly as Returnal. I mean it kind of it
<v Speaker 2>makes reference to it, right, It is acknowledged that you
<v Speaker 2>are dying and you are coming back, but it's not
<v Speaker 2>as integral to the plot I would argue as eternal.
<v Speaker 2>But the idea is like you are the fourth group
<v Speaker 2>of astronauts who have been sent to this planet carcosa As,
<v Speaker 2>and they're collecting like you know, this material this lunofilament,
<v Speaker 2>if you will, or maybe this astro phage or unobtainium.
<v Speaker 2>You know, there's all these different like words we can
<v Speaker 2>use to describe this this stuff that they have to collect.
<v Speaker 2>But there you go. Yeah, and and you were you're
<v Speaker 2>the You're the fourth group that's been sent there because
<v Speaker 2>the first three have kind of disappeared and they're not communicating,
<v Speaker 2>and it's like a it's like a one way trip,
<v Speaker 2>like you know, you're going to this planet and you're
<v Speaker 2>not coming back. And then and so the story is
<v Speaker 2>like you're Origin and you are like, I'm a soldier
<v Speaker 2>here among these like scientists, and I'm kind of like
<v Speaker 2>here to save everybody and find these missing people. And
<v Speaker 2>it turns out it's a lot more complicated than that.
<v Speaker 2>It's on a basic level. Yeah, y'all have.
<v Speaker 5>Been saying Carcosa this whole time, and I was like,
<v Speaker 5>that's setting off alarm bells in my mind.
<v Speaker 3>Based on the King and Yellow King Chambers.
<v Speaker 5>Yes, yeah, yeah, okay, okay, And does it play a
<v Speaker 5>lot in that sort of like realm of there's stuff
<v Speaker 5>going on here that's going to be like beyond the pale,
<v Speaker 5>like beyond your like a lot of it's cosmic, existential,
<v Speaker 5>cosmic oy Yeah, and.
<v Speaker 1>Real quick, what is for people like me? What is
<v Speaker 1>the what does the say the King and Yellow or
<v Speaker 1>what is.
<v Speaker 3>The King of Yellow is? So it's it's three things. Really,
<v Speaker 3>it's it's a collection of short stories by Robert Chambers.
<v Speaker 3>It is a play within those short stories about a king. Yell,
<v Speaker 3>it's about it.
<v Speaker 6>People.
<v Speaker 3>A bunch of people who read this book and kind
<v Speaker 3>of go crazy, right, and then the third thing is
<v Speaker 3>the entity the King in Yellow, which is within the play,
<v Speaker 3>within the short stories. It is sort of this this
<v Speaker 3>series of like cosmic cars type things that have gone
<v Speaker 3>on to inspire a lot of other media and have
<v Speaker 3>been inspired by media.
<v Speaker 2>Before it, And like, I'm not super familiar with this.
<v Speaker 2>It was actually Matt Miller who sort of pointed me
<v Speaker 2>towards this and Jesse correct me if I'm wrong, But
<v Speaker 2>like it predates HP Lovecraft, yes, but it's like pulled
<v Speaker 2>into the love Craft mythos.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it is partially inspired by like Dorian Gray from
<v Speaker 3>Oscar Wilde has a lot of King of Yellow stuff,
<v Speaker 3>and then Robert Chambers and stuff, and then sort of
<v Speaker 3>HP love Craft and a lot of other things pull
<v Speaker 3>from that.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I couldn't affirm it is not required yea.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, well yeah, even Krco so like predates a lot
<v Speaker 5>of that was pulled into Chambers work. Like it's a
<v Speaker 5>whole kind of like authors playing off of each other's works,
<v Speaker 5>even like Signalis in indie horror game from while Ago
<v Speaker 5>played a lot in this Realm and stuff like that,
<v Speaker 5>But it's a lot of that. We're not doing the
<v Speaker 5>home Mega first turning off the g I show. But
<v Speaker 5>so is there like a decent amount because Returnal had
<v Speaker 5>some like horror elements to it in terms of the
<v Speaker 5>like stuff it dealt with, especially in when you got
<v Speaker 5>to the secret ending and the additional after story stuff.
<v Speaker 5>I didn't play a ton of Reternal myself, but I
<v Speaker 5>watched friend of the show Jacob Geller's like really excellent
<v Speaker 5>video essay about it and and kind of like leaned
<v Speaker 5>a lot from that. Is it playing in those realms
<v Speaker 5>kind of is it doing that stuff well.
<v Speaker 3>A well? Is a question that's questionable for me personally.
<v Speaker 3>I think it tries to tackle some things, and I
<v Speaker 3>think your mileage maybe on that.
<v Speaker 2>I think it is I mean visually aesthetically absolutely right,
<v Speaker 2>Like I mean, there's there's some tentacal beasts up in
<v Speaker 2>this thing, you know, and there is like it's very
<v Speaker 2>the sort of threat is very existential and in everyone's minds,
<v Speaker 2>and no one quite knows what's happening, and people are
<v Speaker 2>kind of devolving into like sort of you know monologues
<v Speaker 2>that you find where they've recorded audio logus or they're
<v Speaker 2>clearly sort of losing their mind and they're becoming like
<v Speaker 2>incomprehensible like that that's a big part of the game
<v Speaker 2>for sure. And then and as argent, you're kind of
<v Speaker 2>like if you know you're you sort of think maybe
<v Speaker 2>you're maintaining your sanity, but it's never like fully clear
<v Speaker 2>exactly what's happening. And it's like yeah, and I and
<v Speaker 2>I'm it's I don't know that it's wholly successful there.
<v Speaker 2>But like the reason I didn't really focus on too
<v Speaker 2>much of the start of this conversation is because it's
<v Speaker 2>like it's just feels so damn good to play that
<v Speaker 2>It's like it's like if it doesn't really it didn't
<v Speaker 2>grab me in the same way Returnal does in terms
<v Speaker 2>of it's narrative, but it's like, honestly, like it's so good.
<v Speaker 2>If like you stripped all the story out, I still
<v Speaker 2>would have like really recommended this game wholeheartedly. And it's
<v Speaker 2>like and the story stuff is like interesting. There are
<v Speaker 2>mysteries that like I'm still thinking about and that I
<v Speaker 2>want to dive into more. It's not like bad, you know,
<v Speaker 2>it's not like terrible or anything. It's just it's just
<v Speaker 2>didn't It's just not like I didn't really get emotionally
<v Speaker 2>invested in what was happening as much as it was like,
<v Speaker 2>oh this is this is a great sort of uh,
<v Speaker 2>table setting for what is just amazing gameplay.
<v Speaker 3>You know, absolutely, I think it it it suffers from
<v Speaker 3>having rogulack elements and sort of being a run based
<v Speaker 3>thing because the ways in which they have to try
<v Speaker 3>and tell the story around that happening I think sometimes
<v Speaker 3>fall short. I think when it does have its moments
<v Speaker 3>of like hey, we're gonna we're gonna give you some story.
<v Speaker 3>Now we're gonna tell you that, it's like, okay, cool,
<v Speaker 3>I have like a clear picture of what's going on
<v Speaker 3>that this is cool like table setting for the thing
<v Speaker 3>that I'm doing. But I think when it really tries to,
<v Speaker 3>you know, pull it all together, maybe for me doesn't
<v Speaker 3>doesn't come together. But also like it puts you right
<v Speaker 3>back in the action and you're just like, yeah, there's
<v Speaker 3>a fun game. I'm just gonna keep playing it and
<v Speaker 3>I'm not really think too hard about it afterwards.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I mean, Housemark is really good at making like
<v Speaker 1>video game ass video games when it comes down to
<v Speaker 1>just pure gameplay, like yeah, I just want to run
<v Speaker 1>an error and shoot stuff and feel cool and they're
<v Speaker 1>really really good at that. Yeah, they do it.
<v Speaker 2>They'd pull it off here absolutely. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Do you think, as we kind of wrap this up
<v Speaker 1>to you, since they've done Reternal in this and they're
<v Speaker 1>again they're very similar in a lot of ways, do
<v Speaker 1>you think you would want them to do a third
<v Speaker 1>one of these for whatever they do next, or would
<v Speaker 1>you want something completely new from it? Like do you
<v Speaker 1>think they have found like their sweet spot with like
<v Speaker 1>this third person kind of like Roguelike bullet House stuff
<v Speaker 1>and they could just keep churning these out, or do
<v Speaker 1>you want them to mix it up next time? Kind
<v Speaker 1>of like in a similar place with Zelda, like do
<v Speaker 1>they have another breath of a while Tiers the Kingdom?
<v Speaker 1>Or is it time to to flip the script again?
<v Speaker 2>I mean for the developers, and that I follow. I'm
<v Speaker 2>always of the mind, and especially with Zelda, is that
<v Speaker 2>I don't know what I want from it, right, Like
<v Speaker 2>I am never gonna be disappointed in whatever house Mark
<v Speaker 2>does next, or whatever the Zelda team does next, in
<v Speaker 2>the sense that like when they show what it is, like,
<v Speaker 2>I'm just gonna be like, sure, I trust you guys
<v Speaker 2>to make something interesting. Of course, that could all change
<v Speaker 2>when I actually play it, when I actually get my
<v Speaker 2>hands on it, and it's like maybe I like it
<v Speaker 2>or maybe I don't like it, but in terms of
<v Speaker 2>like what I want, but that my reaction is always
<v Speaker 2>going to be like I don't know what I want,
<v Speaker 2>and I would rather be surprised, right Like I don't
<v Speaker 2>I don't want to dictate what they're doing next in
<v Speaker 2>the sense that it's like I don't really think I
<v Speaker 2>need another game like this, but like I would. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I'm sure I would love it once I got my
<v Speaker 2>hands on it, but I also would just love for
<v Speaker 2>something entirely new. The thing that I do hope from
<v Speaker 2>them is that they continue to like integrate narrative into
<v Speaker 2>their arcadie gameplay, because I think that was the sort
<v Speaker 2>of secret sauce of Eternal was that I was like,
<v Speaker 2>they figured out a narrative wrapping to like and they're
<v Speaker 2>sort of arcade sensibilities which are very strong. But like, frankly, personally,
<v Speaker 2>house Mark was not a developer I really was that
<v Speaker 2>interested in up until Returnal. I think what was their
<v Speaker 2>PlayStation four launch game. I mean, like I reviewed Reso
<v Speaker 2>Gun and like I had a good time with it,
<v Speaker 2>and it's like I could play it and acknowledge how
<v Speaker 2>good it feels and things like that, but it's like
<v Speaker 2>without this sort of narrative hook for me, I was
<v Speaker 2>kind of like, Okay, I think I got what I
<v Speaker 2>want out of this. After a little while, it's just
<v Speaker 2>like it's a great arcade thing, you know, but like
<v Speaker 2>I just I really want to like build me a
<v Speaker 2>world and put some crazy arcade mechanics inside of it.
<v Speaker 2>And when I say build a world, I mean like
<v Speaker 2>make it a place that looks like a story is
<v Speaker 2>occurring in you know, which I didn't really get from
<v Speaker 2>like Reso Gun as a point of example.
<v Speaker 4>You know.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, when I played, when I finished Returnal, I
<v Speaker 3>wasn't thinking like, oh, I need them to make another
<v Speaker 3>one of these. I was like, I'm cool. I'm whatever
<v Speaker 3>House Park wants to make next, I'll be there. And
<v Speaker 3>when they showed I was like, cool, they made what
<v Speaker 3>what looks like at surface level the first time we
<v Speaker 3>saw another Returnal. That's cool with me. And when their
<v Speaker 3>next thing comes out, if it's totally different, I'm like cool,
<v Speaker 3>I'm gonna play it anyway. Like there, I'm down for
<v Speaker 3>whatever they want to make, Like they have my trust it's.
<v Speaker 2>Kind of like their their Desperado to their once upon
<v Speaker 2>a time in Mexico or not once upon time in Mexico.
<v Speaker 2>I can't remember what is Robert el Mariachi, thank you,
<v Speaker 2>thank you.
<v Speaker 4>Marcus.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, where it's like, you know, they made this thing
<v Speaker 2>and he like they had the idea and they were like, Okay,
<v Speaker 2>well now we have like some like momentum and probably
<v Speaker 2>some extra money. Like let's kind of like do that again,
<v Speaker 2>but like really do it right.
<v Speaker 1>You know, we're saying we got to make a third
<v Speaker 1>one with Johnny Depp. We gotta get Johnny.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, maybe that is something where I would be disappointed.
<v Speaker 5>That would that would be wild that they're like house
<v Speaker 5>Marks banking a new game and here's Johnny Depp.
<v Speaker 1>He can't figure out why he keeps dying in Reawakening
<v Speaker 1>in the same situation.
<v Speaker 5>He's doing the Jack Sparrow bit for some reason.
<v Speaker 4>And even.
<v Speaker 3>I would like to protract my previous statement. Maybe if
<v Speaker 3>that was to happen, I would not be super excited
<v Speaker 3>about the next next Houseboard game. There are a few
<v Speaker 3>things they can do that would maybe give me pause.
<v Speaker 3>That has maybe one of them.
<v Speaker 2>But I mean, honestly, Jesse. To be fair, though, we'd
<v Speaker 2>be like, oh, Johnny Depp, huh, that's weird. I bet
<v Speaker 2>that game play is real good.
<v Speaker 3>I mean Harry that in that game.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, he's very Jack Jack Perrow.
<v Speaker 4>Jack Jack Parrow.
<v Speaker 3>That's not there's something there.
<v Speaker 2>That's not nothing.
<v Speaker 1>That well, that is Sorrow's. Check out Kyle's review on
<v Speaker 1>Gameformer dot com Right now, Kyle, you got to get
<v Speaker 1>the hell out of here. So I would love to
<v Speaker 1>take Yeah, okay, well I'm glad you don't want to
<v Speaker 1>with us.
<v Speaker 4>I would love to.
<v Speaker 2>I would love to leave you all behind and go
<v Speaker 2>back to Carcos. Uh, I would yeah, yeah, but yeah, no,
<v Speaker 2>Sorrow's an early game that year contender for me personally.
<v Speaker 2>I really loved it a lot.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, I'm excited. I have not started my copies.
<v Speaker 1>I've been living in Diabolo Town, which we'll talk about
<v Speaker 1>in a bit, so I'm that'll probably tonight. Actually it's
<v Speaker 1>finally starting that thing up. But yeah, we're gonna take
<v Speaker 1>a quick break and when we come back, we are
<v Speaker 1>gonna talk about Diablo four, Lord of Hatred, and more.
<v Speaker 1>We'll be right back. Hey, welcome back to the Game
<v Speaker 1>Informer show, and we are going to dive into Diablo
<v Speaker 1>four's latest expansion, Lord of Hatred. I review this game.
<v Speaker 1>You can go read my full thoughts right now into
<v Speaker 1>sight I spoiler alert. I really like this game. It's
<v Speaker 1>a you know, I reviewed Base Diablo four as well
<v Speaker 1>and really enjoyed it, and I think they've in terms
<v Speaker 1>of like I will say right now, like I played
<v Speaker 1>Diablo forward away play any sort of like live game,
<v Speaker 1>and then I really only check in when there's like
<v Speaker 1>a big expansion, Like I don't really keep up with
<v Speaker 1>the seasonal stuff that often just because yea, frankly, I
<v Speaker 1>ain't got time for that. I got so the phase
<v Speaker 1>to play that's like unless it's like a big story thing,
<v Speaker 1>I was like, oh okay, I gotta go see what
<v Speaker 1>that is. But other than that, I kind of use
<v Speaker 1>that as an opportunity to be like, Okay, I've wrapped
<v Speaker 1>up this new story expansion. I cannot think about this
<v Speaker 1>for a while and come back when they make another one.
<v Speaker 5>So so where are we on like the lifetime clock
<v Speaker 5>of Diablo now with Lord of Hatred, because like, what
<v Speaker 5>expansion number is this for it? Because I've not played
<v Speaker 5>Diablo for it all. I've played two and three, but
<v Speaker 5>I did not get into four at all. So this
<v Speaker 5>is a second expansion.
<v Speaker 1>This is the second major expansion they've done, like smaller
<v Speaker 1>like pretty much a seasonal events where they'll bring in
<v Speaker 1>like you know, they'll add new in game content or
<v Speaker 1>dungeons or a boss. But in terms of narrative expansions,
<v Speaker 1>this is the second one. And this is also built
<v Speaker 1>as the finale of the Age of Hatred saga that
<v Speaker 1>started with the original campaign, so this takes this is
<v Speaker 1>pretty much picks up directly after the end of the
<v Speaker 1>kind of cliffhanger ending that Vessel of Hatred had and
<v Speaker 1>just gets right into it. So I mean, I you
<v Speaker 1>can just jump into these expansions without playing either the
<v Speaker 1>campaign or even the previous expansion if you want, which
<v Speaker 1>is nice, and they do a good job in terms
<v Speaker 1>of recapping the story elements that came before it do
<v Speaker 1>these really nice cinematic sort of like here's a story
<v Speaker 1>so far kind of a thing. But I do think
<v Speaker 1>if you if you should probably play those other ones
<v Speaker 1>just to get sort of like the full impact. And
<v Speaker 1>I say that because this game goes pretty buck wild
<v Speaker 1>from the beginning in terms of just some some real
<v Speaker 1>eye widening twist and turns of just whoa, Okay, we're
<v Speaker 1>doing this with this character and I can't believe this
<v Speaker 1>happened to that character. It's a very it's a very
<v Speaker 1>twisty internal expansion in a way that is pretty good,
<v Speaker 1>especially if you're a long time Diablo fan. There's some
<v Speaker 1>some moments that are gonna really knock your socks off
<v Speaker 1>in terms of just unexpected surprises. And it's also it's
<v Speaker 1>a it's a very dark story, which I know it's
<v Speaker 1>like every Diablo game, but I think this one in particular,
<v Speaker 1>like there's some some real grim, some real grim stuff
<v Speaker 1>that happens. So the idea of this game is that Mephisto,
<v Speaker 1>the Lord of Hatred, has returned, playing off again his
<v Speaker 1>kind of resurrection at the end of the last expansion,
<v Speaker 1>and he is running a muck in Sanctuary because he
<v Speaker 1>has possessed the Acarak. Who is this He's basically Diablo
<v Speaker 1>Jesus Like in Diablo, he is this like reververed sort
<v Speaker 1>of like healer prophet that died a long time ago.
<v Speaker 1>Mephisto has possessed his corpse and has resurrected, and so
<v Speaker 1>everyone's like, oh my god, Acharat's back, and he is
<v Speaker 1>using this person's influence to go around and basically win
<v Speaker 1>the hearts and minds of everyone in Skovos, which is
<v Speaker 1>the new region that's introduced in his expansion, and everyone
<v Speaker 1>by doing that, he's just slowly corrupting them. And one
<v Speaker 1>of the things about the story I really like is that,
<v Speaker 1>I this is one of those tropes in fiction that
<v Speaker 1>will always get me sort of not only invested, but
<v Speaker 1>also like riled up. Is anything that deals with like
<v Speaker 1>a a religious leader or a spiritual leader, or and
<v Speaker 1>probably just any leader, but it may be on the
<v Speaker 1>more like spiritual end that sort of like hoodwinks their
<v Speaker 1>followers exactly like that always gets me like particularly fine,
<v Speaker 1>Like I guess maybe because I have so many thoughts
<v Speaker 1>about just like blind faith and just like like following
<v Speaker 1>someone just like I mean, it's a very you know,
<v Speaker 1>make your draw your own conclusions about what is going
<v Speaker 1>on currently in real world events. But this, this expansion
<v Speaker 1>seems like aptly time and way that they probably didn't
<v Speaker 1>plan for. But there's a lot of stuff that made
<v Speaker 1>me feel, things with just how how Mephisto goes about
<v Speaker 1>his uh, his business and mansions.
<v Speaker 4>Ai Mephisto.
<v Speaker 1>Crystal might actually be a little less evil. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I think they handle the frap. They do the false
<v Speaker 1>profit sort of thing very well, to the point where
<v Speaker 1>you're just like, I'm just like genuinely getting angry at
<v Speaker 1>him for what he's doing to these people.
<v Speaker 5>That's interesting to hear because for me, and this is
<v Speaker 5>not a reflection on the quality of any of these
<v Speaker 5>games stories, to be clear, they're they're good. I think
<v Speaker 5>that like Blizzard has traditionally done like a very good
<v Speaker 5>job of designing their characters and their worlds and things
<v Speaker 5>like that. But to me, when I think of Diablo,
<v Speaker 5>I think of like number go up, loot drop, make
<v Speaker 5>new character, run through dungeons, like it is such a
<v Speaker 5>like mechanical thing for me. Of of I love it
<v Speaker 5>for what it is is it is like a number
<v Speaker 5>grinding number go up RPG for me. But would you
<v Speaker 5>say that this would necessarily like change my mind in
<v Speaker 5>any way or is this is it still going to
<v Speaker 5>kind of like fall into the camp of like doing
<v Speaker 5>the things that Diablo has always done very well.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, have you played four at all?
<v Speaker 5>I've not played four, but again I've played three, I've
<v Speaker 5>played two. I think I might have played one a
<v Speaker 5>long time ago and have very faint memories of it.
<v Speaker 5>I think I remember the is Lee oric in that one?
<v Speaker 5>Or is that too that I'm thinking of.
<v Speaker 1>I mean I've only ever really played three, and yeah,
<v Speaker 1>like I got in with three, So you know, feel
<v Speaker 1>free to throw your tomatoes at me now, long time
<v Speaker 1>Diabolo fans. But I didn't grow up with Blizzard as
<v Speaker 1>a kid because I just didn't have a PC, which
<v Speaker 1>is really what it came down to.
<v Speaker 5>He never never bought the battle chests from your local
<v Speaker 5>best Buy and then came home and opened them up
<v Speaker 5>and used the Prima or was it Prima or Brady
<v Speaker 5>that had the pack in guides with the battle chests.
<v Speaker 1>I watched the South Park episode where they made fund
<v Speaker 1>of World of Warcraft, and that was my introduction to body.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah you need you got it all that that taught
<v Speaker 1>us that we should make fun of World of Warcraft.
<v Speaker 1>Absolutely exactly. But no, to answer your question, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>yes it is that will always be the core of
<v Speaker 1>the Yablo is kill thousands of things on screen and
<v Speaker 1>you're waiting for cool down to expire while hitting the
<v Speaker 1>five other ready abilities and or to and just watching
<v Speaker 1>the screen explode in numbers like that is the experience
<v Speaker 1>and that is still fun. I will say with Diablo three,
<v Speaker 1>as someone that generally values story a lot more than
<v Speaker 1>anything else in video games, they really sort of like
<v Speaker 1>took the time to up their production values, which are
<v Speaker 1>always like crazy high. But Diablo four has like some
<v Speaker 1>really great cinematic cut scenes, like a lot of more
<v Speaker 1>voice acting than I think it's got like the most
<v Speaker 1>voice acting and just cinematics than any of the other
<v Speaker 1>Diabolo games. Like they're trying to tell a very directed
<v Speaker 1>cinematic story, and I like the Bass story and Diablo
<v Speaker 1>four quite a bit. Again, I'm someone that I'm lower
<v Speaker 1>onto total poll of like Diablo fandom, and that's just
<v Speaker 1>from like just lack of experience, like you know, not
<v Speaker 1>coming up with Diablo one and two. But for me,
<v Speaker 1>I remember going through that narrative and being like, oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>this is like really compelling, Like I'm liking these characters.
<v Speaker 1>I think, you know, Lilith, who was the main antagonist
<v Speaker 1>of the base campaign, I think she's like with the
<v Speaker 1>flesh cavel flesh Cape. Yeah, that intro cut scene is
<v Speaker 1>still pretty wild.
<v Speaker 5>So mechanically, like then what gets added in in Lord
<v Speaker 5>of Hatred, like there's there's a new class, but I
<v Speaker 5>think that came out like slightly ahead of the expansion
<v Speaker 5>if I remember two new classes.
<v Speaker 3>But is new for this expansion, right, Okay.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, so yeah, so the two new classes Paladin Warlock.
<v Speaker 1>I got to spend a lot of time as both.
<v Speaker 1>They're both fun, Like they're both very different, Like Warlock,
<v Speaker 1>I'm trying I might like a little bit more just
<v Speaker 1>because it like I kind of like the sort of
<v Speaker 1>focus on summoning and spawning demons and just sicking them
<v Speaker 1>on people like you can. There's like fun spills where
<v Speaker 1>you're literally conjuring portals and just throwing demons and ghosts
<v Speaker 1>at people and just like lobbing them like they're like
<v Speaker 1>basketballs and it's so silly, but it also looks like
<v Speaker 1>really bad ass. And there's just like a lot of
<v Speaker 1>fun sort of like range like field manipulation that you
<v Speaker 1>can do with the Warlock. When you really get into
<v Speaker 1>the nitty gritty of like unlocking the different types of abilities,
<v Speaker 1>like they have like shadow bas abilities that kind of
<v Speaker 1>rely on stealth, and then you got the more like demons.
<v Speaker 1>Somebody like I'm gonna make a wall of demons to
<v Speaker 1>protect me, or I'm just gonna summon a giant demon
<v Speaker 1>that just swings the sword and just clears out everyone
<v Speaker 1>in front of me. And you have all these abilities
<v Speaker 1>going off at once, and it just it's a fun
<v Speaker 1>way to just control and clear the battlefield. And on
<v Speaker 1>the other side you have the paladin, who's a more
<v Speaker 1>traditional sort of like sword and shield heavy bearer who
<v Speaker 1>wields hotly attacks and you can either go you know,
<v Speaker 1>two handed melee weapon, but I prefer using sword and
<v Speaker 1>shield because the shield has its own dedicated skill tree
<v Speaker 1>and you can do some fun stuff with the shield.
<v Speaker 1>Best of all, you can do Captain America style, just
<v Speaker 1>like I'm going to throw the shield and watch that
<v Speaker 1>thing ricochet off like ten dudes, and the shield is
<v Speaker 1>bathed in this holy light and it's stunning them or
<v Speaker 1>doing whatever weird effect that you apply to it, and
<v Speaker 1>that stuff is really fun. Like, they're both a lot
<v Speaker 1>of fun to play, ass So I recommend, like, if
<v Speaker 1>you're getting into this, you know, to make a new
<v Speaker 1>character and try out one of these, cause I think
<v Speaker 1>they're both really fun additions not only to this game,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, you can bring them into the base
<v Speaker 1>game and into Vessel of Hatred as well. Skill trees
<v Speaker 1>have been expanded where they've added sort of I forget
<v Speaker 1>what they call them, but they basically have added new
<v Speaker 1>nodes or perks to the existing trees that allows you
<v Speaker 1>to further customize the skills as you have unlocked. So
<v Speaker 1>you know, originally, when you were unlocking a skill, you
<v Speaker 1>get pick. The only other thing you could do with
<v Speaker 1>that outside of umlocking the skill was that you could
<v Speaker 1>choose basically different variants that kind of change how the
<v Speaker 1>skill performed. Of you know, you were shooting, I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>if you've had an ice spell, you could determine like
<v Speaker 1>well maybe I'll have it fire into like a shotgun spread,
<v Speaker 1>or maybe it'll just be an ice beam. But now
<v Speaker 1>on top of that, you can unlock nos that can
<v Speaker 1>do things where like, oh it fires even more projectiles,
<v Speaker 1>or it reduces the cool down time, or it inflicts
<v Speaker 1>a negative status effect on the enemy. So it's like
<v Speaker 1>it's not like a crazy big change, but it allows
<v Speaker 1>you to again further tweak and customize how you want
<v Speaker 1>your skills to sort of behave, and it gives you
<v Speaker 1>some more things to spend your skill points on because
<v Speaker 1>the level cap has been raised to seventy now, which
<v Speaker 1>is great. There's some there's new torment tiers. In fact,
<v Speaker 1>the torment tier has been up to twelve, which is
<v Speaker 1>pretty wild. And the tormentiers, if you don't know eric,
<v Speaker 1>are basically like the difficulty settings that you choose.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, it ratchets up the difficulty and can kind of
<v Speaker 5>be like, you know, to use an analog, it's like
<v Speaker 5>ascension enslave the spire kind of or like heat and
<v Speaker 5>hides a little bit.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah yeah, because I think it's been set to four,
<v Speaker 1>so to jump to twelve is is pretty crazy.
<v Speaker 5>Triple as Triple Torment.
<v Speaker 1>Triple Torment. That's my favorite Final Fantasy card game. And
<v Speaker 1>the other sorry I'm just I threw myself off of
<v Speaker 1>my own dumb Final Fantasy joke, but I.
<v Speaker 4>Think about Triple Triad now, yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Let's go play some Triple Triad. The other big thing
<v Speaker 1>that they've added is they've reworked some of the endgames,
<v Speaker 1>so they've added like the big end game thing that
<v Speaker 1>they've added is a thing called war Plans, where essentially
<v Speaker 1>what I like about it again going back to being
<v Speaker 1>a more casual Diablo fan is that between these two
<v Speaker 1>expansions and just the numerous seasonal updates, they've bolstered the
<v Speaker 1>end game a lot. Like there's a lot of activities
<v Speaker 1>to get into, but it can be a little bit overwhelming,
<v Speaker 1>especially if you just have not kept up with it religiously.
<v Speaker 1>You'll jump in and go like, what are all these
<v Speaker 1>new icons in the map? Like? What is this thing
<v Speaker 1>over here? What is the pit? What are these infernal whares?
<v Speaker 1>What's that?
<v Speaker 3>Like?
<v Speaker 1>What do I get for doing these? And war plans
<v Speaker 1>kind of is like a cool funnel that allows you
<v Speaker 1>to kind of like it takes away the sort of
<v Speaker 1>the guesswork or just having to to figure out what
<v Speaker 1>you want to do, and it basically makes a decision
<v Speaker 1>for you where it kind of looks like a almost
<v Speaker 1>like a roguelike style map, even though that's not what
<v Speaker 1>it is, but it offers you a randomized selection of
<v Speaker 1>in game activities that you complete one after another, and
<v Speaker 1>you get rewards for doing them on top of the
<v Speaker 1>existing rewards that you would already get for doing the activity,
<v Speaker 1>So it you like you would fire up a war
<v Speaker 1>plan and it'll say, hey, here's two things that you
<v Speaker 1>can do. You can do a hell Tide, and then
<v Speaker 1>after you do a hell Tide, you'll travel down the map,
<v Speaker 1>and then you'll do a pit run, and you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>get rewards for doing both, on top of just the
<v Speaker 1>rewards that you wouldn't get inherently for doing those runs.
<v Speaker 5>That makes this is all in the open world, right,
<v Speaker 5>or like the open zone area where you're kind of
<v Speaker 5>running around and doing things, because because the first thing
<v Speaker 5>I immediately thought of that that Jesse will recognize is
<v Speaker 5>like it's kind of like hunts almost like you're doing
<v Speaker 5>a hunt train in a way of like you're it
<v Speaker 5>literally just gives you a tour guide map of here's
<v Speaker 5>like the order in which to do these zones, so
<v Speaker 5>you don't have to like open your map and figure
<v Speaker 5>out the timers and bounce between them. Like you can
<v Speaker 5>just go do this stuff and we will like automate
<v Speaker 5>those processes for you pretty much. I think in my review,
<v Speaker 5>I just, oh, I likened it to like a playlist,
<v Speaker 5>because that's kind of kind am I brand. It's like, oh,
<v Speaker 5>it's like a little playlist stuff. We're not We're just
<v Speaker 5>gonna pick some for you. What's great about it is that.
<v Speaker 1>You don't have to look for them, because like you said,
<v Speaker 1>it'll just warp you to it, which is really great
<v Speaker 1>because the map is so big that sometimes we're like, oh,
<v Speaker 1>I want to see I want to do this, but
<v Speaker 1>like where is it right now? Or is it happening
<v Speaker 1>at this moment. This just says, hey, do you want
<v Speaker 1>to just teleport straight to this? And at the start
<v Speaker 1>it's like yes, please. It also takes away to barrier
<v Speaker 1>for injury for a lot of them, where it's like,
<v Speaker 1>for like Nightmare dungeons in particular, it's like, oh, you
<v Speaker 1>don't need nightmare stigules to access them. If you have
<v Speaker 1>it in a warplane, you can just do it and yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you get just it's like, hey, complete the Nightmare dungeon,
<v Speaker 1>you go and do it. You get the rewards for
<v Speaker 1>doing the Nightmare dungeon, and then when you complete the
<v Speaker 1>warp plan Path, you get another set of rewards for
<v Speaker 1>finishing the series of in game content. And I really
<v Speaker 1>like that, Like it's like I said, it kind of
<v Speaker 1>it takes the guesswork out of figuring out what to do,
<v Speaker 1>and it's just like I'd rather just have the playlists
<v Speaker 1>kind of just roll the dice and see what I
<v Speaker 1>get because it's like, I want to do probably all
<v Speaker 1>of this, but I just you know, I don't. I'm
<v Speaker 1>paralyzed by choice, you know, So I'm just gonna let
<v Speaker 1>them figure it out. You can still freely go do
<v Speaker 1>whatever you want if you want to, but if you
<v Speaker 1>just rather have the game figure it out for you,
<v Speaker 1>then I think war Plans is great for that. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know how, you know, time will tell how much
<v Speaker 1>this would keep me playing beyond the campaign. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>someone that generally sticks around for super duper long after
<v Speaker 1>I roll credits on a story, Like I'll mess around
<v Speaker 1>with enough of the endgame stuff, but like after a while,
<v Speaker 1>it's like I don't really care how much more loot
<v Speaker 1>that I have. I'm so powerful right now, Like what
<v Speaker 1>else could I possibly get that would make me stronger?
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure there's an answer for that, but it's like,
<v Speaker 1>do I care enough to stick along long enough to
<v Speaker 1>find something insane? But I think it helps. And the
<v Speaker 1>other big thing, or actually maybe not big thing, but
<v Speaker 1>a new addition is Echoing Hatreds, which is a new destination.
<v Speaker 1>It's basically a Horde mode. You just go into you
<v Speaker 1>warp into an area and they just throw waves of
<v Speaker 1>enemies at you that get increasingly denser and increasingly harder,
<v Speaker 1>and you're just trying to survive as long as you can,
<v Speaker 1>and the longer you survive, the more rewards you get.
<v Speaker 1>I think the most interesting thing about that, like it's fun,
<v Speaker 1>because it's never not fun to just mow down thousands
<v Speaker 1>of things. But it's kind of a secret mode, which
<v Speaker 1>I was surprised by. It's it's something you really have
<v Speaker 1>to find and it's only available, Like, for one, it's
<v Speaker 1>only available in the higher difficulty tiers. You can't get
<v Speaker 1>it if you're playing like the normal tiers, And it
<v Speaker 1>relies on finding a special item which unlocks a special quest.
<v Speaker 1>But the item that you need to find initiated is
<v Speaker 1>a really really rare drop that you can only get
<v Speaker 1>from defeating certain like really hard bosses or challenges. Like
<v Speaker 1>I only got to play at once during a review period,
<v Speaker 1>and I only got it because we use like a
<v Speaker 1>developer cheat just so we could see what it was.
<v Speaker 5>So they were like, this is like something that you'd
<v Speaker 5>have to grind for to get, Like does it guarantee
<v Speaker 5>some level of loot and stuff like that that that's
<v Speaker 5>like basically a way to end game grind or.
<v Speaker 1>You're talking about for like completing it, Yeah.
<v Speaker 5>For the Echoing Hatred thing, like like like what is
<v Speaker 5>the end goal that you're trying to get out of it?
<v Speaker 1>Loot?
<v Speaker 5>Loot, but like does it guarantee a level of like
<v Speaker 5>super high level loot or.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah that I'm not sure. I like said, I only
<v Speaker 1>got to play one and I lasted a few rounds,
<v Speaker 1>excuse me, and got I did get some legendaries from it,
<v Speaker 1>so you know, that's nice. I don't that's gonna be
<v Speaker 1>something that players are gonna have to like once they
<v Speaker 1>figure out how to access it, how long they can
<v Speaker 1>last see like what is like the what is waiting
<v Speaker 1>at the end of this? Like how far up the
<v Speaker 1>ladder does this go? And and there's something particularly special
<v Speaker 1>at the end. I mean Blizzard was being pretty coy
<v Speaker 1>about that, which makes sense about you know what, what's
<v Speaker 1>at the end of this? But yeah, I think if
<v Speaker 1>you're someone that just enjoys chasing like a big secret mode,
<v Speaker 1>this is like a you know, something to latch onto
<v Speaker 1>that might keep you busy for the next few weeks
<v Speaker 1>or so.
<v Speaker 4>Uh.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, outside of that, I mean they added fishing,
<v Speaker 1>you guys, like fishing.
<v Speaker 4>You love fishing, well, you can fish.
<v Speaker 1>You can fish now. It has no significance to player progression,
<v Speaker 1>But it is funny to go fishing because you can
<v Speaker 1>just cast the line. It's pretty much an emo. You
<v Speaker 1>just throw a line anywhere that there's any fishable water
<v Speaker 1>and then just you know, do the basic fishing thing
<v Speaker 1>and waiting for the right time to reel in, and
<v Speaker 1>depending on how well you time it, you might get
<v Speaker 1>a legendary fish, which in itself is kind of funny
<v Speaker 1>to see a fish that's just glowing orange.
<v Speaker 5>And I'm measuring if I want to say this hot take,
<v Speaker 5>but might as well. I'm on a podcast, That's what
<v Speaker 5>I'm here to do. I feel like fishing has quickly
<v Speaker 5>become the new can you.
<v Speaker 4>Pet the dog? Thing?
<v Speaker 5>Yeah yeah, because like for the longest time, it was
<v Speaker 5>like can you pet the dog? Can you pet the dog?
<v Speaker 5>And every game was like, you can pet the dog
<v Speaker 5>in our game? Yeah, And it's like a whole thing
<v Speaker 5>that they like pin a social media campaign around. It's like, yeah,
<v Speaker 5>you compet the dog in our game. And now it's like,
<v Speaker 5>can you fish in this game? Is there fishing? Is
<v Speaker 5>there fishing? And like some games do have genuinely interesting
<v Speaker 5>fishing mechanics, usually because they are fishing games at their
<v Speaker 5>core and things like that. But I feel like fishing
<v Speaker 5>in general sometimes just like we put something in here,
<v Speaker 5>or you kind of loosely do a version of starduse
<v Speaker 5>fishing and you can get fish and then you can
<v Speaker 5>be like, yeah, I fished, yay, and that's it.
<v Speaker 4>That's the end of it.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. I mean that's pretty much what this amounts to.
<v Speaker 1>Who is like, hey, I can do this now. I
<v Speaker 1>didn't do it a lot because as far as I
<v Speaker 1>can tell, it doesn't leads anything meaningful outside. And you
<v Speaker 1>just add fish to your collection. So if you just
<v Speaker 1>want to be a if you're someone that just wants
<v Speaker 1>to get everything in this game, then this is just
<v Speaker 1>another thing to collect. And like, I gotta try to
<v Speaker 1>get every rare fish. I gotta go to every region
<v Speaker 1>and fish and see what's there.
<v Speaker 3>Culture. This is what it is.
<v Speaker 4>It's fishing. Yeah. And if you.
<v Speaker 5>Could collect the fish and then turn them into a
<v Speaker 5>deck and then play your fish deck against other people's
<v Speaker 5>fish decks, and then it's like it's we've combined Gwent
<v Speaker 5>and fishing into one thing.
<v Speaker 1>I feel like this makes you like, does this just
<v Speaker 1>make you like Mako Tsunami from Yu gi Oh?
<v Speaker 4>But yeah, yeah in this form, just.
<v Speaker 1>Just the fish guy.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, that fish guy.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah.
<v Speaker 5>Why hasn't there been a good open world yukioh game?
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's a great question, Eric, I've been saying
<v Speaker 1>this for.
<v Speaker 5>I yeah, over over on my my other podcast, Acts
<v Speaker 5>of the Blood Gout. I've long said that I want
<v Speaker 5>like the open world uh card game RPG, but one
<v Speaker 5>where you have to do like Shenmu, you have to
<v Speaker 5>work a job and earn money to go buy booster
<v Speaker 5>packs and rip them and then go to tournaments in
<v Speaker 5>other towns and things like that and try and take
<v Speaker 5>down like other people, which I realize is just simulating
<v Speaker 5>something that you could do in real life if you wanted.
<v Speaker 4>That's kind of what video games are.
<v Speaker 1>What has time for that? You know? I actually wrote
<v Speaker 1>a feature years ago for gi pitching a Yu gi
<v Speaker 1>Oh Open World Battle Royale because I was like, you
<v Speaker 1>know that first season like Dualist Kingdom, it's basically a
<v Speaker 1>battle royal. It's like one hundred players and you all
<v Speaker 1>get gradually eliminated and kicked off that island until there's
<v Speaker 1>like one left. So it's like, just do.
<v Speaker 5>That, build a deck, you take a player out, you
<v Speaker 5>get a new booster pack you can monifor your play
<v Speaker 5>against other people. Yeah, I bet your starships. Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 5>Now it's gambling, though with them might get us in
<v Speaker 5>trouble somewhere.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it was always gambling and it was fine.
<v Speaker 4>There's one gun that you can find.
<v Speaker 3>That's it. There's one gold scar from Fortnite, I.
<v Speaker 1>Would says, the gun that Kayla gets pointed at him.
<v Speaker 3>It has no bullet in the US version. Oh, is
<v Speaker 3>that the one where he throws the card and blocks
<v Speaker 3>the the like lock of.
<v Speaker 1>The jams the gun. Yeah, we didn't get that in
<v Speaker 1>the US version. You have to watch the japan That.
<v Speaker 3>Clip one of my favorite things to exist. That is
<v Speaker 3>maybe the funniest clip.
<v Speaker 5>That's like the saw trap from Yu Gi. Oh, the
<v Speaker 5>one that's going to like take off their ankles.
<v Speaker 4>Yeah, something else.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, yeah, it sent a shadow am actually, which some
<v Speaker 1>might say is fate worse than death, who knows. But yeah, anyways,
<v Speaker 1>it is a fun expansion. It's it's the most it
<v Speaker 1>is the most boring thing you can say about an expansion,
<v Speaker 1>but it is just unfortunately true. If you enjoy Diablo
<v Speaker 1>four already. If you like the Vessel of Hatred, I
<v Speaker 1>think you will not even think you will almost certainly
<v Speaker 1>enjoy the Lord of Hatred. It is more of a
<v Speaker 1>game that you already like, with some fun new twists.
<v Speaker 1>The new classes are fun. I think the story is
<v Speaker 1>really strong, and I think also as an end of
<v Speaker 1>a of like a narrative arc, I think it does
<v Speaker 1>stick the landing quite well, which is important. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>like it's like, if you enjoy the story up to
<v Speaker 1>this point, you would be missing out if you skipped
<v Speaker 1>out on Lord of Hatred. Like some some pretty fun
<v Speaker 1>and wild things happens in it, and I had a
<v Speaker 1>great time playing it. I gave it an eight point
<v Speaker 1>five out of ten in my review. And yeah, once
<v Speaker 1>I maybe get over the fatigue of playing this game
<v Speaker 1>at all hours of the day, I will dive back
<v Speaker 1>into the because I don't have my character anymore because
<v Speaker 1>my review character got built. So when the game launches
<v Speaker 1>proper what next week? I think I don't have to
<v Speaker 1>start a new one, but I do. I missed my Warlock.
<v Speaker 1>He was he was pretty rad, did some really fun stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Uh so yeah, check it out. I liked it. We
<v Speaker 1>are jumping next into Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. If
<v Speaker 1>you wanted something that it is, you know, sometimes compared
<v Speaker 1>this game to Diabolo. They're very similar, as we all know.
<v Speaker 1>They both involve, you know, sentient talking a beast because
<v Speaker 1>Yoshi can talk.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, wait, is Yoshi okay?
<v Speaker 1>Is Yoshi's sentient? Is that? Where you're gonna ask?
<v Speaker 5>Is the noise? Because because for me it was always
<v Speaker 5>that Yoshi just makes a noise and phonetically it sounds
<v Speaker 5>to us like Yoshi, and so we call Yoshi Yoshi.
<v Speaker 4>No.
<v Speaker 1>I think I always thought he just says his name
<v Speaker 1>like a Pokemon like. I think that's just he just
<v Speaker 1>says he kind of does like a like. That's well,
<v Speaker 1>sometimes sometimes he does say says Yoshi.
<v Speaker 5>That's even more confusing now because he makes non like
<v Speaker 5>fanatic noises, like he makes non linguistic communication and then
<v Speaker 5>does switch to common linguistics to say Yoshi, and that's it.
<v Speaker 1>He's like a slightly more verbose Pokemon.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, language is always evolving. You can't. You can't put
<v Speaker 3>language in a box and just expect it to stay static.
<v Speaker 3>It's always changing.
<v Speaker 5>I do think it gets uncomfortable then if we know
<v Speaker 5>that Yoshi is like more aware of his surroundings than
<v Speaker 5>we know he is, because there's a lot of Mario
<v Speaker 5>games where you got to dump.
<v Speaker 1>Yoshi in a pit like that's and he's okay with it.
<v Speaker 1>Every time he comes back. He has no hard feelings.
<v Speaker 1>He doesn't say, hey, what what happened last time? What
<v Speaker 1>was that all about?
<v Speaker 4>He's just like, is that the same Yoshi that comes back?
<v Speaker 3>I said, you know it egg symbolizes rebirth, it's the
<v Speaker 3>same Yoshi being reborn.
<v Speaker 1>He's a phoenix. Yeah.
<v Speaker 5>We have the same thing with toad, where for the
<v Speaker 5>longest time it was like toad and then we find
<v Speaker 5>out that toad is actually like a full like species
<v Speaker 5>with their high from kingdom.
<v Speaker 1>But there's like the capital there's capital type yeah might
<v Speaker 1>be yeah, capital t toad, and then there's lowercase te toads,
<v Speaker 1>which are like random toads.
<v Speaker 5>The Last of Us but it's like toads that are
<v Speaker 5>screaming is.
<v Speaker 3>Like that's yeah, toad is just that given life. That's
<v Speaker 3>actually if you played The Last of Us like one
<v Speaker 3>hundred and twelve, when that comes out in four hundred years, uh,
<v Speaker 3>they'll actually get to the point where humanity has gone
<v Speaker 3>so far that they Toad is actually just the last
<v Speaker 3>of us universe five thousand years in the future.
<v Speaker 1>Oh man, if I ever interviewed Met, I want to
<v Speaker 1>ask him that theory of like have you ever had, like,
<v Speaker 1>have you seen the last of us? Have you ever
<v Speaker 1>considered that normal people that were infected with the corps?
<v Speaker 1>Is that what happened?
<v Speaker 5>I just think it's weird that they call room together.
<v Speaker 5>We Toad goes to like compete in Mario Kart. They're
<v Speaker 5>just like, that's Toad. It's like Toad is is a
<v Speaker 5>group of people that's not just like that that Toad
<v Speaker 5>doesn't get a name, Like that's not a person.
<v Speaker 1>At least.
<v Speaker 5>Okay, I have what about you? You're not wrong, You're
<v Speaker 5>not wrong. The Pikachu does not get named by Ash.
<v Speaker 5>So we also got a cancel Ash now. Yeah, well
<v Speaker 5>because he's cool, because only whaying people nickname their Pokemon
<v Speaker 5>just saying also true, also true?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah. Anyway, Yoshi Yoshi in the Death Note?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, how many before I could say it?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah? How many people is he killing this game?
<v Speaker 3>Actually a lot? Okay, So, like I've been like running
<v Speaker 3>around saying that Yoshi in the Death Note for like
<v Speaker 3>a couple of months now because I think that's incredibly funny.
<v Speaker 3>But also what I accidentally like backdoorded my way into
<v Speaker 3>is learning that it is kind of like the Death Note,
<v Speaker 3>because the whole conceit of this game is that you
<v Speaker 3>are jumping in to the book and you're doing different
<v Speaker 3>levels about different creatures the book named mister e get it.
<v Speaker 3>It's like mystery.
<v Speaker 1>Oh, that's what they're going for. And I did not
<v Speaker 1>realize I stood for something.
<v Speaker 3>I mean it might but mystery, you know.
<v Speaker 1>No, that's that's that's way, you know. I had a sorry,
<v Speaker 1>I had a similar sort of like wordplay revelation with
<v Speaker 1>Minish Cap. We Alex and I streamed Zelda the Menish
<v Speaker 1>Cap and someone a chat said, it's supposed to meet
<v Speaker 1>like diminish diminished cap, the Minush Cap. You're supposed to
<v Speaker 1>say it is diminished cap because the cat strinks you. Yes,
<v Speaker 1>and we had the same like, wait, was that that's
<v Speaker 1>what they were going for? Like I've never noticed.
<v Speaker 5>That, like Phoenix down is like a feather, like the
<v Speaker 5>down of a Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>The same thing.
<v Speaker 5>Miles Prower, did you ever see a pup named Scooby Doo?
<v Speaker 4>Yes?
<v Speaker 5>Probably it took me years to figure out that the
<v Speaker 5>kid was named red Herring, not because of his well
<v Speaker 5>because of his red hair, but it was a play
<v Speaker 5>on that he was a red Herring.
<v Speaker 4>They always suspected him.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, so Feir, I watched that when I was like seven,
<v Speaker 5>So I don't think you're supposed to get that when
<v Speaker 5>you're a child.
<v Speaker 1>But yes, mister E, mister E and the RADI.
<v Speaker 3>So you have mister e h and you know all
<v Speaker 3>the different contents of the book or the different chapters
<v Speaker 3>and the different levels you will go through it sort
<v Speaker 3>of like sketched watercolor sort of throughout. And so chapter one,
<v Speaker 3>which is where we got to primarily play in the preview,
<v Speaker 3>was the Wild Woods, and so you know, first level
<v Speaker 3>you go in, there's like a little flower guy and
<v Speaker 3>you put him on your back. And instead of most
<v Speaker 3>Yoshi games are like point A to point B, it's
<v Speaker 3>like just kind of side scrolling level, very chill, very
<v Speaker 3>low stakes. We're vibing, you know, Yoshi Yoshi not a
<v Speaker 3>complicated game. It's not Kaiso Mario. However, Yoshi the Serious
<v Speaker 3>Book it works on more of like a zone, so
<v Speaker 3>it's like a two dimensional zone. So I think vertical
<v Speaker 3>and horizontal. You're not just trying to get from point
<v Speaker 3>A to point B. You are exploring the region to
<v Speaker 3>do a bunch of different stuff. And so there's a
<v Speaker 3>primary goal in every level. So like in the in
<v Speaker 3>the flower level, it's the first level I played, you
<v Speaker 3>throw the flower guy on your back, and he's like
<v Speaker 3>your little pal, and you're getting here basically, and you
<v Speaker 3>get a power anytime you put somebody on your back,
<v Speaker 3>So like each of the different characters will give you
<v Speaker 3>different utility, and so the flower guys, like anytime you
<v Speaker 3>go across certain plants, they will bloom. And so the
<v Speaker 3>conceit of the first level is like, hey, go make
<v Speaker 3>all the flowers bloom. Very simple, very simple task. But
<v Speaker 3>as you were sort of going through this, there will
<v Speaker 3>be other things that start to happen. And it's a
<v Speaker 3>game about discovery. It's what I've been saying is it's
<v Speaker 3>a game about being curious and like rewarding curiosity. And
<v Speaker 3>so I saw like a branch, like a tree brushel rustling,
<v Speaker 3>and so I threw an egg at it, and a
<v Speaker 3>chi guy fell out of the tree. And then I
<v Speaker 3>got a little like stamp next to the tree and
<v Speaker 3>it was like find found shy guy and I got
<v Speaker 3>a star, I got a little trinket for it, a
<v Speaker 3>little goody, and I was like, oh, okay, cool, there's
<v Speaker 3>like little hidden objectives along my way. And then I
<v Speaker 3>found like fifteen of them, and I like, oh, there's
<v Speaker 3>a lot of little objectives, little things going on. And
<v Speaker 3>then when I completed the main sort of objective, I
<v Speaker 3>you know, I made all the flowers bloom along the way,
<v Speaker 3>and it was like, cool, you did it. Here's you know,
<v Speaker 3>you jump into this portal and the level, and then
<v Speaker 3>the book kind of flipped a couple pages and it
<v Speaker 3>was like level one and it started populating with all
<v Speaker 3>the different discoveries that I had made, and then it
<v Speaker 3>let me know that there was a bunch more stuff
<v Speaker 3>I hadn't found. There was probably thirty or forty discoveries
<v Speaker 3>in this one level of just small little interactions that
<v Speaker 3>you can have across the entire level, and you click
<v Speaker 3>tokens throughout a level and you can use those to
<v Speaker 3>purchase hints about other discoveries within that level. So if
<v Speaker 3>you're stuck and you can't really figure out what interactions
<v Speaker 3>you're missing, you can, you know, purchase them with the
<v Speaker 3>with tokens that you get throughout the level and they'll
<v Speaker 3>guide you towards it. And then I, you know, I
<v Speaker 3>completed that level and it moved on a mystery was like, hey,
<v Speaker 3>so we discovered this new creature. What do you want
<v Speaker 3>to call it? And so this is where the death
<v Speaker 3>note comes in because you get to just write a
<v Speaker 3>name in the book. It does not kill the creature,
<v Speaker 3>to be clear, but you do get to name the
<v Speaker 3>creature or whatever you want. So in the example we
<v Speaker 3>saw in the presentation we watched before playing the demo,
<v Speaker 3>they named the Shai guys Hank. They were just like,
<v Speaker 3>it's called Hank in my game, and that is the
<v Speaker 3>species name for shy Guy. Moving forward, in that game,
<v Speaker 3>it will never refer to shy Guy as shy Guy.
<v Speaker 3>It will only refer to them as Hanks throughout the
<v Speaker 3>entirety of the game. In every which way you would
<v Speaker 3>imagine shy Guy would come up, it's called Hanks. So
<v Speaker 3>when it's like find five Hanks instead of five shy Guys,
<v Speaker 3>it'll be like, uh, bake bread with Hank. Like it
<v Speaker 3>just uses that across the board in every option possible.
<v Speaker 1>And so, yeah, is there any sort of like safeguards
<v Speaker 1>for like what I'm getting to.
<v Speaker 3>This is what I'm getting to. I did not try
<v Speaker 3>because I'm sitting next to a Nintendo rep and I'm
<v Speaker 3>not gonna just start hyping away because like I'm I'm
<v Speaker 3>here with the PR person and the Nintendo rep, and
<v Speaker 3>I'm like, I I don't need to do this. But
<v Speaker 3>I didn't.
<v Speaker 5>I did go full blue, but I would like I
<v Speaker 5>would put butt in there or something like that just
<v Speaker 5>to see.
<v Speaker 3>I did, and they were like, yes, there are filters.
<v Speaker 3>They were very good.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, Dick is just short for Richard. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>I did not put it through its paces. I did
<v Speaker 3>not feel like testing this. I did not want to
<v Speaker 3>be the grown man playing the children's game, writing curse
<v Speaker 3>words in the book and coming off that way just
<v Speaker 3>like wasn't wasn't my vibe wasn't There wasn't the vibe
<v Speaker 3>of the preview. But I did ask because I do
<v Speaker 3>think that that is like an incredibly valid question. There's
<v Speaker 3>no like online connectivity to this game. So like if
<v Speaker 3>you're calling your stuff like an obscendity, it's not getting
<v Speaker 3>like sent to another person's switch, you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 3>So there is a level of like, yeah, you don't
<v Speaker 3>want your children doing that. Sure, I get that. I
<v Speaker 3>understand that. Every you know, every parent's got their their rules.
<v Speaker 3>But it's not like it's gonna start infecting like other
<v Speaker 3>people's games the way that like some of these online games,
<v Speaker 3>if you can get things past some filters, like other
<v Speaker 3>people might see them.
<v Speaker 5>I feel like that's been a weird Like I can't
<v Speaker 5>I have no proof of this. I just have vibes
<v Speaker 5>alone to go off of. But ever since Nintendo basically
<v Speaker 5>said like you can't post to Twitter anymore, like a
<v Speaker 5>lot of the share stuff like shared to social media
<v Speaker 5>kind of got pulled out, or there's like an extra
<v Speaker 5>barrier to it where you have to save the screenshot
<v Speaker 5>and then load it to your phone and then put
<v Speaker 5>it on things. And then Tomadaci life just came out
<v Speaker 5>and all of the natural sharing is turned off there.
<v Speaker 5>So you have to have like an Algado hooked up
<v Speaker 5>to your dock or something and able to get that.
<v Speaker 5>This is is Nintendo's answer, like we get to do
<v Speaker 5>whatever we want, but you have to have like a
<v Speaker 5>layer of plausible deniability between all that.
<v Speaker 4>That's the moderation.
<v Speaker 3>I mean, like their their level is just like some
<v Speaker 3>filters because like you can still post screenshots. They don't
<v Speaker 3>have like the screenshot cancel thing, you know, like like
<v Speaker 3>Toma douggas. It's not like this is just like there's
<v Speaker 3>a filter, like so you can't write really obscene things.
<v Speaker 3>I did not ask like the details of the filter,
<v Speaker 3>like what it will and won't filter. I wasn't really
<v Speaker 3>thinking too much about a contrasts, like, hey, you can't
<v Speaker 3>write like certain words in this right, and they're like, yes,
<v Speaker 3>you cannot write certain words in this. I was like, cool,
<v Speaker 3>great that being said, I just kind of let the
<v Speaker 3>game name but whatever it wanted to and it will
<v Speaker 3>when you're like, hey, just make a name for me,
<v Speaker 3>it's just gonna give you the name of the thing.
<v Speaker 3>Little mouser, you know, shy guy, what what it be?
<v Speaker 3>Bugby like or bug Yo? Sorry, Buggy is the other one.
<v Speaker 3>So Yoshi's interesting because it is a game of discovery
<v Speaker 3>and it is they are Nintendo's in this like exploratory
<v Speaker 3>era is what I've been calling it, where like you
<v Speaker 3>have your Breath of the Wild, you have your Mario Odyssey's,
<v Speaker 3>you have your game recently, I can't docy conk Bananza
<v Speaker 3>Mario Kart World, even where you're kind of they're kind
<v Speaker 3>of just giving you, like, just go poke around, just
<v Speaker 3>constantly go try things, and we have systems in play
<v Speaker 3>that will interact with one another, and you will constantly
<v Speaker 3>be given little little trinkets, little sweet treats as you
<v Speaker 3>will for constantly doing this. You know, Core Oxides and
<v Speaker 3>Breasts of the Wild Mario Kart doing the coins and
<v Speaker 3>the little piece switches and stuff like that. But Nanza obviously,
<v Speaker 3>like you just start digging in a direction, you're rewarded
<v Speaker 3>like one hundred times over. They're just like filling your
<v Speaker 3>dopamine receptors with little things. I think with Yoshi, it's
<v Speaker 3>interesting because it's not overly complicated. It doesn't change how
<v Speaker 3>the game controls. The game is still very simple, jump,
<v Speaker 3>throw an egg, eat, run around like base base level,
<v Speaker 3>still very simple. But if you're like a child or
<v Speaker 3>somebody who's playing this and just kind of trying different
<v Speaker 3>things and being curious, you're constantly going to be rewarded
<v Speaker 3>for it. And I think that just feels good. I
<v Speaker 3>think it's an interesting evolution of Yoshi. It doesn't it
<v Speaker 3>can still be the chill, fun, low stakes game, but
<v Speaker 3>you can have a lot more going on. It can
<v Speaker 3>be a lot more dense than it is in its
<v Speaker 3>current state. Like I like Crafted World quite a bit,
<v Speaker 3>but like Crafted World's pretty pretty straightforward, is how I
<v Speaker 3>would describe that game. It doesn't do a lot to
<v Speaker 3>really up the annie. I don't even think you can
<v Speaker 3>get hurt in Yoshi in the Mysterious Book. I didn't
<v Speaker 3>see a health bar the entire time I was there.
<v Speaker 3>I didn't get hit by anything that did damage to me.
<v Speaker 3>I didn't find any any sort of pick up, like
<v Speaker 3>health pickup or anything. This game is very chill, very relaxed.
<v Speaker 3>Looks great. The watercolor aesthetic. You hop into the book
<v Speaker 3>and you know, paints it in front of you. There's
<v Speaker 3>a ton of different power ups. I found a sentient
<v Speaker 3>skateboard that I was writing around that was pretty sick. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>I was like, I don't know a Yoshi and the
<v Speaker 3>Mysterious Book went from a game that I really didn't
<v Speaker 3>care about or even really think about all that often
<v Speaker 3>outside of making dumb jokes about it, to a game
<v Speaker 3>that I'm like, legitimately pretty excited for.
<v Speaker 1>It sounds really because I'm a soccer for games that
<v Speaker 1>like you kind of like catalog things or like scan
<v Speaker 1>and collect things, and it sounds like that's like the
<v Speaker 1>crush of the game. But if you're someone that is
<v Speaker 1>looking for like, oh, I want a new Yoshi p
<v Speaker 1>I want a new Yoshi's Island, I want to use
<v Speaker 1>Yoshi's lily world, is this so much about platforming as
<v Speaker 1>it is about just kind of like poking around the
<v Speaker 1>world and finding.
<v Speaker 3>There is a lot of platforming. I don't want to
<v Speaker 3>discount that. There was a whole level I played where
<v Speaker 3>it was literally a bunch of lily pads that made
<v Speaker 3>you know sounds and you're bouncing on them, and a
<v Speaker 3>lot of the challenges and secrets were hidden behind. Okay,
<v Speaker 3>you actually have to bounce on all these lily pads
<v Speaker 3>in a specific order and like you're doing like lily pad,
<v Speaker 3>lily pad, and then you want a ground pound on
<v Speaker 3>the third one to get up to a higher level
<v Speaker 3>because you can't repeat hitting a lily pad. So there
<v Speaker 3>are like platform challenges and there are like there is
<v Speaker 3>something pretty I don't know if it's difficult, but it
<v Speaker 3>is like you have to think about it. It is
<v Speaker 3>in intentional platforming in Yoshi in the Mysterious Book I
<v Speaker 3>wouldn't say you're finding like super difficult platform at least
<v Speaker 3>in the stuff I've played. Maybe the later levels have
<v Speaker 3>some more stuff. It definitely has a little more focused
<v Speaker 3>on exploration, but you still are platforming to get to
<v Speaker 3>all of these different places. Sure, it's not just like
<v Speaker 3>a static like walking around like you are. You are
<v Speaker 3>jumping and there are platforms that are kind of to reach,
<v Speaker 3>and so maybe you have to find an item that'll
<v Speaker 3>help you get up there, or use the frog ability
<v Speaker 3>to make bubbles you can bounce on the bubbles to
<v Speaker 3>get up there and stuff. So there is I guess
<v Speaker 3>it is not traditional platforming if that's what you're getting.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, Like it's not like an obstacle course that you
<v Speaker 1>got to run through and jump and dodge.
<v Speaker 3>And maybe a level or two, but not that's not
<v Speaker 3>the main primary like verb I would use for or
<v Speaker 3>adjective I would use for Yoshi in the mysterious book.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, interesting, all right, well yeah that comes out when
<v Speaker 1>it's like this summer right or next month.
<v Speaker 3>It's it's like the May something.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's about a month from now. Okay, awesome, Yoshi
<v Speaker 1>and them serious books switch to exclusive correct. Yes, I believe,
<v Speaker 1>just switch to awesome. But yeah, I'm I I like Yoshi.
<v Speaker 1>I feel like every time I play Yoshi game, I'm
<v Speaker 1>still kind of chasing the high of Yoshi's Island then,
<v Speaker 1>and I'm always like, oh, this was no Why did
<v Speaker 1>I Why did I think that these games are? You know,
<v Speaker 1>with all due respect there, they've never really hit that
<v Speaker 1>height again, especially because they've gotten less sort of like
<v Speaker 1>difficult and more just kind of breezy and it just,
<v Speaker 1>like said, more chill and just kind of more laid back.
<v Speaker 1>But I really like Wooly World. That's kind of my
<v Speaker 1>favorite of That's probably my second favorite Yoshi game, behind
<v Speaker 1>uh Yoshi's Island. So but this sounds this sounds cool.
<v Speaker 1>It sounds like, if anything, this is more interesting than
<v Speaker 1>just another Yoshi platform since those have kind of been
<v Speaker 1>middling the last decade for the most part, I'd say, ye,
<v Speaker 1>so yeah, why not mix it up? So I don't
<v Speaker 1>want to hang out with mystery and name a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of dumb put in a bunch of dumb names for
<v Speaker 1>these guys.
<v Speaker 3>Absolutely?
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, can you can you rename Yoshi himself?
<v Speaker 3>Oh that's a good question.
<v Speaker 4>I don't think so.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe that's like the last thing, Like, that's how the
<v Speaker 1>game ends. Like, yeah, name from the book. The only
<v Speaker 1>way to save the book is to erase yourself. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>just typing Donald, goodbye all of Yoshi. Yeah yeah, all right, Eric,
<v Speaker 1>take us home. You have been playing Vampire.
<v Speaker 4>Crawlers, not a lot of it.
<v Speaker 5>I will preface that we'll probably talk more about this
<v Speaker 5>in the coming weeks, so I just want briefly touch
<v Speaker 5>on it because it's the hotness right now. But we
<v Speaker 5>got access to this last week while the aforementioned traveling
<v Speaker 5>was happening, so I can verify that this game plays
<v Speaker 5>very well on a Steam deck. That's awesome, which I.
<v Speaker 1>Think it's important to like a vampire what do we
<v Speaker 1>call the ses? It's a series now do we just
<v Speaker 1>call it ye series?
<v Speaker 5>We tried to name them so many things, Bullet Heavens,
<v Speaker 5>like like reverse shoot them ups, survivor lights. Yeah yeah,
<v Speaker 5>at Auto Battlers I think was the thing, but that
<v Speaker 5>was like getting mixed in with auto chess and things
<v Speaker 5>like that. Vampire Crawlers is the new game from Punkl,
<v Speaker 5>makers of Vampire Survivors, who basically kickstarted in indie genre
<v Speaker 5>overnight the original game very much. I think taking the
<v Speaker 5>concepts of auto battlers and also tower defense games things
<v Speaker 5>like that, and turning it into this never ending Musso
<v Speaker 5>Horde and Diablo. You can pull a lot of different
<v Speaker 5>just things into the pot to what ultimately makes up
<v Speaker 5>Vampire Survivors. It was a very very good game. Everybody
<v Speaker 5>loved it. Vampire Crawlers is a little bit more on
<v Speaker 5>the nose, taking after a specific genre which I referred
<v Speaker 5>to earlier a Blobber, which is a classic first person
<v Speaker 5>dungeon crawl game, and it's taking so much classic inspiration
<v Speaker 5>that you even have the kind of wased movement with
<v Speaker 5>pivoting your facing left or right, which will immediately feel
<v Speaker 5>strange to anybody who has not played one of those games,
<v Speaker 5>But if you played one of those games, it's going to
<v Speaker 5>feel like home. But the idea is you move through
<v Speaker 5>these dungeons at stages and floors kind of and take
<v Speaker 5>on different enemies. You just walk into their squares and
<v Speaker 5>attack them and it starts a combat, and then the
<v Speaker 5>combat plays out very similarly to a Slay the Spire,
<v Speaker 5>where you have a certain amount of energy each turn,
<v Speaker 5>manna whatever like a resource that meters the cards you
<v Speaker 5>can play. You have cards that cost a certain amount,
<v Speaker 5>and the core mechanic of this game is that you
<v Speaker 5>want to try and play your cards in escalating cost
<v Speaker 5>order in order to create combos that will enhance their effects.
<v Speaker 5>So if you play a zero cost card and then
<v Speaker 5>play a one cost card and then play a two
<v Speaker 5>cost card, that will eat up your whole allotment of
<v Speaker 5>three resources for the turn, but it will enhance each
<v Speaker 5>card's effectiveness as you do so. And so a lot
<v Speaker 5>of after you defeat an enemy on on a thing,
<v Speaker 5>you'll get usually a card reward of some kind, either
<v Speaker 5>a way to enhance a card you already have, or
<v Speaker 5>to add a card to your deck that you kind
<v Speaker 5>of draw through as you do these battles, as enemies
<v Speaker 5>kind of hop towards you with each turn, as a
<v Speaker 5>sort of like slowly encroaching three D space fight, as
<v Speaker 5>they like hop on a plane towards you. It sounds weird,
<v Speaker 5>makes a lot of sense once you start playing it.
<v Speaker 5>I think immediately it's going to feel very at home
<v Speaker 5>for a lot of people, because I think the first
<v Speaker 5>ten minutes of this game almost feel like you're autopiloting.
<v Speaker 5>You're kind of just walking around bumping into things, zero
<v Speaker 5>one two, zero one to zero one two.
<v Speaker 4>Okay, cool. And then you keep going.
<v Speaker 5>Where the game starts to open up is when it
<v Speaker 5>starts to give you the options to fuse cards together,
<v Speaker 5>to add those aforementioned upgrades on the cards, to say, hey,
<v Speaker 5>I want this card to fire more projectiles than normally does,
<v Speaker 5>to do double damage, to gain some effect of some kind,
<v Speaker 5>or maybe gain effects when it is played at a
<v Speaker 5>certain point in the combo sequence. And then also the
<v Speaker 5>way you have to think about how the cards you
<v Speaker 5>add are going to affect your combo sequencing. So a
<v Speaker 5>zero cost card could be a really good thing if
<v Speaker 5>that card says every card you play after this in
<v Speaker 5>sequence will have like ten percent extra damage or something
<v Speaker 5>like that. And so you start thinking of it as
<v Speaker 5>like you want to have set up and payoff, or
<v Speaker 5>you want to have some way of having your build
<v Speaker 5>kind of play out the way you want it to
<v Speaker 5>play out. And that is sort of the thing. Like
<v Speaker 5>the step where I'm at right now is trying to
<v Speaker 5>figure out how much of that there is in this game,
<v Speaker 5>because I think that is where the depth is going
<v Speaker 5>to come from. Because Vampire Survivors, I think one of
<v Speaker 5>the benefits of it is that there's a very sleek
<v Speaker 5>and straightforward game to play. You're not controlling a lot
<v Speaker 5>of things. You're not clicking a lot, You're kind of
<v Speaker 5>moving around positioning yourself on the map, maybe moving up, down, left,
<v Speaker 5>right to get your crystals and stuff like that. Reminds
<v Speaker 5>me of the Arcade game Asteroids in a lot of
<v Speaker 5>way if you ever played Asteroids. But ultimately you're just
<v Speaker 5>doing that and then picking something, and then the strategy
<v Speaker 5>comes from how you build over time, how you kind
<v Speaker 5>of manage risk versus reward, and how you figure out Okay,
<v Speaker 5>like I've got a build that's mostly garlic in bibles,
<v Speaker 5>so I need to like kind of keep enemies within
<v Speaker 5>my radius. Or maybe you're trying to go for a
<v Speaker 5>build we're using a lot of the birds that have
<v Speaker 5>kind of this weird shot pattern, and so you have
<v Speaker 5>to position yourself and figure out how you move through
<v Speaker 5>the waves to kind of keep yourself from getting hit
<v Speaker 5>while also keeping enemies in your danger zone and things
<v Speaker 5>like that. Here, it's a bit more Okay, I have
<v Speaker 5>this sequence of attacks that's either going to do a
<v Speaker 5>certain amount of damage or apply status effects or maybe
<v Speaker 5>push enemies back away from me, so they're not getting
<v Speaker 5>too close too fast. How do I get that to
<v Speaker 5>play out? How do I make that work? And I
<v Speaker 5>think the one piece of friction that I'm hitting right
<v Speaker 5>now is that where Vampire Survivors streamlined a lot of
<v Speaker 5>it and made the movement simple, and thus, like the
<v Speaker 5>manipulation and feeling out the technical mastery of higher level
<v Speaker 5>play and higher difficulty play in that game came about
<v Speaker 5>a lot faster here, hopping between different parts of the
<v Speaker 5>map and moving through it. I'm not seeing a lot
<v Speaker 5>of the hallmarks of your classic blobbery yet, where maybe
<v Speaker 5>you have trap tiles, maybe you have certain environmental effects
<v Speaker 5>that you want to play around. Enemies are kind of static.
<v Speaker 5>I've not seen any that chase me or move at all.
<v Speaker 5>They just kind of wait in the squares that they're in.
<v Speaker 5>And granted I've only played through about two biomes right now,
<v Speaker 5>but it kind of feels like there's some degree of
<v Speaker 5>you can find things on the map. You can hit
<v Speaker 5>parts of the map to open up, you know, chicken
<v Speaker 5>in the walls and get upgrades and things like that
<v Speaker 5>and kind of figure out your build crafting from there.
<v Speaker 5>But moving around the map doesn't feel impactful to me
<v Speaker 5>yet and doesn't feel meaningful to me yet, and so
<v Speaker 5>I have a hard time seeing why I'm doing that
<v Speaker 5>versus just like Slay the Spire, where you just kind
<v Speaker 5>of go from room to room to room and just
<v Speaker 5>do the battles in there, and I'm trying to figure
<v Speaker 5>out why the blobbing stuff has to happen in the
<v Speaker 5>first place, versus this just being a deck builder, like
<v Speaker 5>a card building or a card playing deck builder. And
<v Speaker 5>so you know, I'll say, like, I've only spent maybe
<v Speaker 5>about six hours total or something with it, so I'm
<v Speaker 5>not that super deep into it and unlocking characters. It
<v Speaker 5>I okay for normal people, it's a lot Jesse.
<v Speaker 4>Jesse has known me a long time. Jesse, how would
<v Speaker 4>you describe.
<v Speaker 5>The amount of hours that I've spent playing games like
<v Speaker 5>Doda two thousands?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah?
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, it's like a like a Titanic amount. And I
<v Speaker 5>think Slay the Spire too, I already have somewhere in
<v Speaker 5>the vicinity of like sixty hours or something like that
<v Speaker 5>since it came out. Like these sorts of games I
<v Speaker 5>like to when I actually like find them really interesting,
<v Speaker 5>I kind of latch onto them and I dig into
<v Speaker 5>them I really want to like piece them apart and
<v Speaker 5>figure them out, and I'm at the point of trying
<v Speaker 5>to figure out whether Vampire Crawlers is going to be
<v Speaker 5>that for me or not. But all that is to say,
<v Speaker 5>if you like the idea of a first person dungeon
<v Speaker 5>crawler with deck building elements, I think it absolutely does
<v Speaker 5>that very very well. I was very warm on the
<v Speaker 5>Steam Next Fest demo when it came out, and I
<v Speaker 5>think a lot of what they have there right now
<v Speaker 5>seems like a really solid game. I don't know if
<v Speaker 5>it's going to be as genre shifting and like industry
<v Speaker 5>changing as Vampire Survivors. And I'll laugh when, like a
<v Speaker 5>year from now, somebody plays this clip back at me
<v Speaker 5>after we're all playing like the millionth Vampire blobber. But yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 5>mostly I just I see it as an interesting step
<v Speaker 5>for Ponkel in terms of where they decided to go
<v Speaker 5>after making Vampire Survivors. You know, like this is it's
<v Speaker 5>interesting that instead of either kind of doing the same
<v Speaker 5>thing again or just jumping back into the traditional framework
<v Speaker 5>that kind of got them success in the first place,
<v Speaker 5>which granted they were making a lot of Survivor likes
<v Speaker 5>for years after Vampire Survivors came out, but this is
<v Speaker 5>very much like. It feels like somebody on the team
<v Speaker 5>really loves old school games like this and wanted to
<v Speaker 5>make something that rekindled that feeling. And I can see
<v Speaker 5>the love in it. I can see the passion in it,
<v Speaker 5>and that makes me want to spend more time with it.
<v Speaker 5>So I will spend more time with it. I'll report
<v Speaker 5>back later episodes. It does feel like a perfect steam
<v Speaker 5>that game, like if you're commuting or something like that
<v Speaker 5>and you need something that's going to be like quick, fast, easy.
<v Speaker 4>It's funny.
<v Speaker 5>We were talking about Sorrows earlier on here, and I
<v Speaker 5>was thinking about another game that came out earlier this year, Mugenics,
<v Speaker 5>that I kind of bounced off of because of how
<v Speaker 5>long the runs are. I personally think like the sweet
<v Speaker 5>spot for a good Rogue Light is like a twenty
<v Speaker 5>minute run, and I think if you get too far
<v Speaker 5>beyond that, you start to run the risk of like
<v Speaker 5>you have to over invest into something that's supposed to
<v Speaker 5>feel impermanent and supposed to feel like you're building something
<v Speaker 5>and seeing how far you can take it and then
<v Speaker 5>going back to square one again. I think when you
<v Speaker 5>overinvest in that regard, it can kind of ruin the
<v Speaker 5>loop experience for me, and I think the Vampire Crawler's
<v Speaker 5>loop is just the right amount where you get like
<v Speaker 5>a really good investment cycle and then get out and
<v Speaker 5>then go back to town and then venture back out,
<v Speaker 5>and you have permanent upgrades that you're spending your gold on,
<v Speaker 5>so you're always kind of powering up in some way
<v Speaker 5>the same way you were in Survivors, where there's kind
<v Speaker 5>of a gradually escalating floor of things will get easier,
<v Speaker 5>even if you're bumping your head against stuff and getting
<v Speaker 5>frustrated with things, you will gradually accumulate strength.
<v Speaker 4>And get stronger no matter what. So it's a cool game.
<v Speaker 4>I like it.
<v Speaker 1>Yep. It's when I think about this game, I have
<v Speaker 1>not had a chance to play this either, but I'm excited.
<v Speaker 1>I adore Vampire Survivors. But when I think about this game,
<v Speaker 1>I keep comparing Survivors and Crawlers in terms of just
<v Speaker 1>like the how different they are to Bastion and Transistor,
<v Speaker 1>of like the first game being a lot more I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, we'll say mainstream friendly or just a little
<v Speaker 1>bit more straightforward of like what kind of game is is,
<v Speaker 1>and then for their next thing they go wildly different
<v Speaker 1>and do this a little higher kind of like bar
<v Speaker 1>to entry, like like the strategy game, but it's like
<v Speaker 1>a weird strategy game that's gonna turn away probably a
<v Speaker 1>lot of the people that like their other games because
<v Speaker 1>it's such a different and like there's a little bit
<v Speaker 1>more like to kind of have to grasp with this
<v Speaker 1>one as opposed to the yeah, little one.
<v Speaker 5>It's gonna look a little bit more intimidating. I think
<v Speaker 5>because of those things I said earlier, where like the
<v Speaker 5>you have to understand the movement and why you're doing
<v Speaker 5>that stuff, and then also get your head around the
<v Speaker 5>card playing and all that kind of stuff. I think
<v Speaker 5>maybe that's why the movement is so like straightforward and
<v Speaker 5>not really adding a lot to the gameplay at the beginning,
<v Speaker 5>is because could overwhelm a little bit if you were
<v Speaker 5>having to think about like if you go play I
<v Speaker 5>don't know, I'm just gonna name like dungeon crawlers like
<v Speaker 5>an etryan Odyssey or like a Strange Journey or something
<v Speaker 5>like that, and you have to start thinking about like
<v Speaker 5>danger tiles and enemies that hunt you and weird teleporter stuff.
<v Speaker 5>And having to memorize where things are on maps and
<v Speaker 5>stuff like that. That adds another layer that a lot
<v Speaker 5>of people do really like, and I kind of hope
<v Speaker 5>is somewhere in this game because I think that is
<v Speaker 5>a cool layer of dungeon crawlers that would be really
<v Speaker 5>interesting to see explored with the tools that they have
<v Speaker 5>in Vampire Crawlers right now. But a lot of the
<v Speaker 5>early game is just trying to get you accustomed to
<v Speaker 5>this is our card system, this is our power up system.
<v Speaker 5>Here are all the things that you will recognize from
<v Speaker 5>Vampire Survivors. You know again, knives of bibles, the oh
<v Speaker 5>my god, the axes that do the little like flip
<v Speaker 5>you out out and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 1>The Castlevania acts.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, and it's still very much is like, oh, this
<v Speaker 5>feels really Castlevania esque and getting big Castlevania vibes here.
<v Speaker 5>It kind of teaches you how a lot of those
<v Speaker 5>things still have a lot of the same properties that
<v Speaker 5>you would expect them to have from Vampire Survivors. Like
<v Speaker 5>I keep going back to the bibles because they're my
<v Speaker 5>favorite weapon in Vampire Survivors. I also really like them
<v Speaker 5>in Crawlers because I if you give me the option
<v Speaker 5>to have like something that orbits around me and does damage.
<v Speaker 5>I will take it. That's that's just like a cool
<v Speaker 5>video game thing to do, is to have that sort
<v Speaker 5>of rotating drone around you that does damage. And in
<v Speaker 5>Vampire Crawlers, it basically is like it pushes everybody back,
<v Speaker 5>kind of bounces them back a little bit, and so
<v Speaker 5>it lets you play like a control game where you're saying, like, Okay,
<v Speaker 5>I'm not doing as much damage as I maybe could,
<v Speaker 5>but I'm controlling the enemy and keeping them out. I'm
<v Speaker 5>keeping them at arm's length. You get to kind of
<v Speaker 5>zone them out a little bit, and it's a cool thing.
<v Speaker 5>So I really want to see how deep they go
<v Speaker 5>with that. But to your point with Bashan and Transistor,
<v Speaker 5>I do think that's maybe an interesting comparison because I
<v Speaker 5>also think I love Bashian and I would be hard
<v Speaker 5>pressed to not put Bashan on a list of like
<v Speaker 5>my twenty favorite games of all time. But Transistor is
<v Speaker 5>the game that I feel like I think more about
<v Speaker 5>and I spend more time going like that that did
<v Speaker 5>some really cool stuff, that did some if I think
<v Speaker 5>about games I want to go back and replay to
<v Speaker 5>like think about Transistor is pretty high on that list
<v Speaker 5>because it did some really really interesting things.
<v Speaker 1>So good game.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, it's a really good game. It turns out Super
<v Speaker 5>Giant makes really good video games.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, I'm I'm just so curious to see what the
<v Speaker 1>if like the broader game and audience embraces the game,
<v Speaker 1>this game the way they did, Yeah, Survivors, just because again,
<v Speaker 1>there's just more to it. It's not the like I
<v Speaker 1>I got my mom into Vampyres Vivors because it's just
<v Speaker 1>so easy to immediately I think.
<v Speaker 5>This one might you might have some more difficulty bridging
<v Speaker 5>that gap a little bit down.
<v Speaker 1>Teach some cards, you know, how to understand cards.
<v Speaker 5>And that's the funny thing is, like I hate to
<v Speaker 5>pit two really good games against each other, but like
<v Speaker 5>with the context of this game came out around the
<v Speaker 5>release window of Slay the Spire two. Uh, every time
<v Speaker 5>I was booting up Vampire Crawlers in my Steam deck,
<v Speaker 5>I was like, I could do another Slave the Spire run.
<v Speaker 5>And both of them are kind of card games that
<v Speaker 5>are kind of in the same ballpark, and so my
<v Speaker 5>mind was constantly just ricocheting between the two, which is
<v Speaker 5>to say, like, you know, it's never a bad thing
<v Speaker 5>to have two cakes, right until you have a lot
<v Speaker 5>of cake in front of you and you're like, how
<v Speaker 5>am I going to eat this much cake? And I
<v Speaker 5>think with we we have a two much cake scenario
<v Speaker 5>where but maybe if Slay the Spire is not your
<v Speaker 5>jam and you're looking for something a little bit more
<v Speaker 5>vampire survivors like, or you've you've wanted an entrance into
<v Speaker 5>this genre for a while and you haven't known where
<v Speaker 5>to start, you could do worse than vampire crawlers.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, last question, but most important, have you seen
<v Speaker 1>a vampire yet?
<v Speaker 4>Yeah?
<v Speaker 5>I want to say they're in like the second biome
<v Speaker 5>if I remember right. As enemies, I'm like wow, rolling
<v Speaker 5>through the rolodex of enemies in my head because I
<v Speaker 5>feel like most of the ones that I've seen have
<v Speaker 5>been like the plant enemies, the the the bats. Obviously
<v Speaker 5>the bats are everywhere, which I guess a vampire is
<v Speaker 5>a bat if you taxonomically, Yeah, yeah, you never know.
<v Speaker 5>Every bat you see in real life could be a
<v Speaker 5>vampire no way of nowhere. Yeah, yeah, no, I think
<v Speaker 5>I saw at least one vampire as like a boss
<v Speaker 5>or something. I could be misremembering, but yeah, always a
<v Speaker 5>lot of like that. It's it's a lot of the
<v Speaker 5>same sprites and enemies that you saw in Vampire Survivors,
<v Speaker 5>So you'll be doing a lot of the like, Oh,
<v Speaker 5>I remember this weird guy that kind of looks like
<v Speaker 5>Grimer from Pokemon. Yeah, yeah, dude Favor and you just
<v Speaker 5>kind of punch him a little bit and he dies
<v Speaker 5>and you're like yeah, and you do that like twelve
<v Speaker 5>more times than you finish level crawlers. Crawlers, I mean
<v Speaker 5>you're kind of crawling because you do move it like
<v Speaker 5>a snail's pace, you know, you move.
<v Speaker 3>Once to have any of the enemy's been crawling.
<v Speaker 5>And there's some skeletons were crawling. Yeah, these these ones
<v Speaker 5>won't heal because because they're skeletons. I don't think skeletons
<v Speaker 5>can heal.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, well, you know, because if your bone breaks, you
<v Speaker 3>could get it, it'll it'll fuse back.
<v Speaker 1>Have you ever seen a skeleton wear a cast?
<v Speaker 3>Oh you're so, you're so right about Actors don't want
<v Speaker 3>to treat skeletons.
<v Speaker 4>That's the problem.
<v Speaker 3>You need a skeleton doctor to treat another.
<v Speaker 1>Skuy Famously, it has been a big problem.
<v Speaker 4>That's why they call them saw Bones. Yeah exactly.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, the skeleton community being marginalized, and I for one
<v Speaker 1>will not stand for its vampire crawlers. As you said,
<v Speaker 1>we'll probably talk check in on this game over the
<v Speaker 1>next couple of weeks or so as more of us
<v Speaker 1>get our hands on it and get deeper in it.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, everyone, that will make for a show. Thank
<v Speaker 1>you so much for watching and listening. One more time.
<v Speaker 1>If you want to support Game Informer, you gotta go
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<v Speaker 1>Take a picture, tag our social media accounts. Its greatly appreciated. Jesse,
<v Speaker 1>thank you so much for hopping on man once again.
<v Speaker 1>Is there anything you'd like to plug or you want
<v Speaker 1>to let people know where they can keep up with you.
<v Speaker 3>You can camp up with me at Restart dot Run,
<v Speaker 3>where you can find My Sorrow's review, which will be
<v Speaker 3>up at the time of posting this, My Yoshi and
<v Speaker 3>the Mysterious Book preview, which will be up at the time.
<v Speaker 4>Of posting this.
<v Speaker 3>Maybe some fun stuff if you follow our social accounts.
<v Speaker 3>I'm going to Final Fantasy fourteen fan Fest, so when
<v Speaker 3>this is up, I'm actually already there. It's already happening.
<v Speaker 3>I'll be there hanging out on the ground floor checking
<v Speaker 3>out all the new cool stuff from Final Fantasy fourteen.
<v Speaker 3>I'm gonna go eat it a jolly be because they're
<v Speaker 3>doing a collaboration. I'm going to some other stuff, So
<v Speaker 3>check out the Restart down Run socials. You'll probably see
<v Speaker 3>a lot of video from that event. So if you're
<v Speaker 3>Final Fantasy fourteen fan who can't make it to fan fest,
<v Speaker 3>check out our instagratt You'll.
<v Speaker 5>Go from Yoshi and mister E to mister Yoshi p
<v Speaker 5>sure saying.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, yeah, that's so.
<v Speaker 1>It's almost a bar.
<v Speaker 3>That's yeah. It's like I said, Buck Shurler, that's not nothing,
<v Speaker 3>and so yeah, you can check that out. Yeah, follow
<v Speaker 3>our social accounts because that's what keeps me employed.
<v Speaker 1>Yes, absolutely, and if you want to follow us, I'm
<v Speaker 1>at Marcus Stewart seven on Blue Sky. Eric, what is
<v Speaker 1>your social handle?
<v Speaker 5>At C Moosey on the BEASKI yeah, how.
<v Speaker 1>Could I forget? I'm going to name all the shy
<v Speaker 1>guys and Yoshi's Sea Mousey's.
<v Speaker 5>The Sea Moosey's, and the fire Moosies their Earth Moosies.
<v Speaker 5>It all changed when the fire Moosey attacked.
<v Speaker 1>That's what they say every time. Well, thank you guys
<v Speaker 1>so much, and we will see you next week with
<v Speaker 1>another episode of the Game and former show. Until then,
<v Speaker 1>have a good one bye.