What’s the definition of imaginary? A Podcast that only exists in your mind. Welcome back to the podcast! Our second game titled after a woman’s name that begins with the letter L is Who’s Lila, a pretty bizarre adventure game in which you control your character’s face. The object of the game, at the outset, is to sell your responses in conversations by molding your face, Mario 64 stye, into an expression that will go over well. This adds a layer of complication into an already unsure situation which means that any conversation can have a lot of different possible outcomes. This makes more sense when you realize that the game is meant to be played repeatedly, with many short narrative branches that conclude and intend for you to restart after. Beyond that, there are puzzles to solve that step outside the bounds of the conversation mechanics and, in fact, other bounds, and these might be the highlight of the game for some people. As a complete package, this is a strange and experiential game with a surprisingly intriguing narrative that has a lot to grab onto. We’re going to be talking about the hurdles and strengths of having an unprecedented mechanic set, the complicated nature of exploring the different paths in the game, and the benefits of an eyebrows first approach. Thank you for joining us again this week. There are days when I wish that if every game we talk about could be something like this. I love what this game does to innovate even if the complete package has its issues. Did the theming and odd concept sell you on this game? Let us know in the comments or over on the Discord! Next time, we’re talking about the most recent of the games we’re playing this month with Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, so we hope you’ll join us for that!

The Queen of Podcasts is weak to fire. Welcome back to the podcast, and to the very special “games titled after women's names that start with the letter L” theme! To start us off, we’re going to be talking about Lorelai, a 2D side-scrolling adventure game. Lorelai is the third game in a series that began with Downfall and the Cat Lady, the latter of which is by far the most noted. Not least of which is because we did an episode on it, trendsetters that we are. Lorelai is a not insignificant visual upgrade from Harvester’s previous games, but the themes and narrative beats between the Cat Lady and Lorelai are very similar, just focusing on a different character in the same world. Otherwise the games play about as you’d expect. You collect inventory items to be used in puzzle solving, talk to people and largely just experience the story. The result is two very comparable games and one of them unfortunately comes out on top by most metrics. We’re going to be talking about the narrative and character writing, the big swings taken visually and how they generally made the game more atmospheric and interesting, and we really step up to the plate for step dads for some reason. Thank you for joining us again this week! I’ve been unreasonably excited about this stupid theme, but with one exception: Lorelai was the only game in it that was a known quantity to me. That being said, as a big fan of the previous games by Harvester Games, maybe my expectations were somewhat too high. What did you guys think about this one? Are you a fan of the series and have thoughts on this game, or are you new and wondering why we care so much? Let us know in the comments or over on our discord. Next time, we’re going to talk about Who’s Lila, a mystery game and a game with a mysteriously weird method of interaction, so we hope you’ll join us for that.

Podcast.Mystery(1); wait(31) Welcome back to the podcast, and to, shamefully, our first episode of Mystery May! Quadrilateral Cowboy is a part heist, part desktop simulation game in which you use a portable “deck” to hack into security systems and use gadgets to get into locations in a cyberpunk dystopia. And the thing that really sets this game apart from most other games in this genre is that you actually have to do all the hacking yourself. It’s not quite complicated on the level of something like Hacker Evolution, but the act of creating code yourself and then needing to execute actions in sync with it creates a really creatively expressive environment in which to solve puzzles. The game may add a few more things than were strictly necessary to be a satisfying collection of systems, but each of them is fun to play around with and get a hang of. On top of the strictly mechanical elements of the game, the game builds its world, one of skyscrapers and autoturrets, bombastically while setting up its characters in an exceedingly subtle way. The minimalist art style and lack of any dialogue betray how well the narrative elements are communicated by way of environments, character behaviors and gameplay setup. This is one of those games that, while definitely not being for everyone, shows how games can be used to communicate weirder concepts in ways few other mediums can. We’re going to be talking about how the crunchy mechanics are used to design novel puzzle concepts, issues we had both technical and skill, and we set you up with a DC 17 vibe check. Thank you for joining us again this week! We know it’s been a long time coming on Mystery May, so much so that it is now June (“Mystery Summer Theater” as Andy has taken to calling it), but appropriately, this game has been on our list to play for seven years so it’s been a long time coming as well. Are you a fan of really finnicky mechanic sets like this, or did you look once at this game and say “maybe I’ll play the next one”? Let us know in the comments section or over on our Discord! Next time, Mystery May gives us one of the most “thing that’s not like the others” games on the list with Ecco the Dolphin, so we hope you’ll join us then, or the suffering will almost definitely not have been worth it.

You’re a podcast? Then why didn’t you attack on sight? Welcome back! This month is Fanbruary, which means that we are playing games suggested to us by our audience, and the very first we’ve chosen to cover is Everspace. This is a space combat game with a rougelite framework, seeing you making runs through six different “Sectors” to explore and collect resources and starting from the beginning each time you die. The “lite” part of the genre title comes in the form of credits, the game’s metacurrency which you can spend to upgrade either yourself or your ship, making subsequent runs a little bit easier. And I really can’t stress “a little bit” enough. This is a difficult game, particularly if you don’t have a lot of experience with this type of combat, but it is helped immensely by the shocking amount of fine control you have over your movement, making the actual experience of playing pretty smooth and the fights feel more strategic. Once the game has its hooks in you, it actually is a really compelling experience and it had us engaging with its narrative mysteries as well as its mechanical ones once we got the hang of it. We’re going to be talking about the many layers of systems in the game and how it might be better off explaining more of them a little earlier, the surprisingly solid presentation in the form of audio and visuals all the way up through writing and voice acting, and all the good, flavorful lasers. This is the first episode to come out for “Fanbruary” but we’re pretty deep into the games already and I gotta say I haven’t been this excited about doing some episodes in a while. We were both kind of expecting to get left in the dust by this game and were pleasantly surprised at how captivating we ended up finding it. Have you played this game? Are you a space games kind of person or someone constantly searching for that new roguelike that’s going to grab you? In either case, this is one to at least give a shot to. Let us know on our Discord or down in the comments if it worked as well for you as it did for us. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Arkane’s Prey, a reboot in the loosest sense of the term that puts the Dishonored developer’s immersive sim trademark back on the genre in which it started, the sci-fi FPS, so check it out then.

This sacred podcast is one of the few untouched spots. Welcome back to NOCLIP pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight, which is the fourth game in the Momodora series, but the first one to really take off. This is a Metroidvania game, but one that is surprisingly compact. It’s fairly rare in the genre to have a game this short, and it brings with it some disadvantages but also some surprising advantages. The smaller map makes backtracking and exploration a lot more clear, and encourages the player to explore more thoroughly, and makes your destination more clear due to it being more fresh in your memory without the need of more obvious signposting. The game falls within the Souls-like subgenre, a boon to its coming to prominence at the time of its release, but even so, feels very at home as a Metroidvania and less like copy-paste of Souls mechanics common in the era. The combat system, while simple, feels very satisfying when you’re engaging with it at face value, though there are ways to exploit it. It’s a mixed bag, but one that feels worth your time, as long as you don’t mind a pretty silly looking boob boss. We’re going to be talking about using new abilities to reach areas in a map small enough for you to remember where you should be using them, the balancing of the combat system and difficulty, and a lot more than could have ever been thought necessary about the Swamp Witch. Thank you for joining us this week! We knew little about this game prior to playing it, but it seemed like a decent go-along with Metroid: Dread, and I’m personally pretty satisfied with the experience. As a short indie Metroidvania, it can sometimes highlight the things that really are cool about the genre even though it doesn’t really strike out in too many new directions itself. What did you think about it? Did it hit the right notes of the Soulslike formula for you, or would you have preferred something longer or more complex? Let us know over in the Discord or in the comments! And while you’re there, in the Discord, doing whatever, keep an eye out on the announcements channel, because we’re going to be announcing all the games we chose for Fanbruary, our audience choice theme month, very soon. So check us out then!

You have been stripped of most abilities. You might call it podcast amnesia. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Metroid Dread, the 5th mainline 2D Metroid game, which is admittedly a lot of qualifiers. Dread picks up following the events of Fusion, a game that was nearly 19 years old at Dread’s release, and carries over its story elements as well as some of the design that made Fusion feel different from the games that preceded it. For example, Dread feels like a more linear experience than previous Metroid games, with less of an emphasis on exploration, but it does so much more with its design, guiding players with a much more invisible hand than Fusion was able to do, and making navigation feel much less daunting than in classic Metroidvanias. Instead, Dread shifts its difficulty more into combat, which is more fluid than its ever been, leaning partially on the newer hardware it’s been released on, but also because you are given a host of new abilities both for movement and combat, chief amongst them being the counter, a mechanic developed in the remake of Metroid II on the 3DS, and put to use again here to great effect. This counter mechanic, as well as the speed and fluidity of the combat, shifts the focus of gameplay from careful exploration and resource management into a more run and gun experience, with the exploration being relegated to uncovering upgrades and hidden paths. While some may lament the loss of a more traditional Metroid experience, it does still provide a mix that keeps the feeling of exploring an unknown planet while smoothing out the frustrating experiences and focusing more on player execution. We’re going to be talking about abstraction in level design and how this can better immerse the player in the game, combat difficulty and boss fights, and we discuss how Samus has over time become a cocktail of genetics. Thank you for joining us again this week! Metroid, being one of the genre naming franchises of “Metroidvania” style games, has largely existed on its classic catalogue, with many years between releases and spinoff games and remakes holding down its presence in the gaming landscape, so to get a new game with comparatively little time between announcement and release was a pretty exciting thing for fans, most notably, me. How do you think Dread handled the franchise’s tropes and design sensibilities? Was it what you were looking for, or do you still pine for another game like Super Metroid? Let us know down in the comments or over on our Discord server where we talk about the games. Next time, we’ll be playing… something. We’re opening up the suggestions to the listeners for next month, so check back in to find out what we were recommended, or drop a suggestion of your own in the comment section!

I hope I was able to prove I’m more handy than the average podcast. Welcome back! Our first game of 2022 is going to be Wandersong, the indie adventure game that refused to just be an indie adventure game. In this game, you play a Bard who is clued in to the forthcoming apocalypse and sets out on an adventure to save the world. Carried by an immutable (literally and figuratively) enthusiasm, the Bard overcomes obstacles using a combination of song and some light platforming mechanics. Tonally, this game is delightful, with the bard meeting all comers with a positive attitude and a desire to make peace over all else. It’s a great way to express the game’s philosophy in a way that manages to be heartfelt and funny while feeling appropriately storybook even if it’s a bit on the nose. Mechanically, it’s more of a mixed bag. If you want to see a developer really try everything, this could be the perfect game for you, and you certainly will never get tired of any one thing. However, you can see a bit of a lack of polish across the game’s many unique mechanics and challenges, although you’ll never engage with one of them for more than a few minutes at a time. Put together, this is a game worth giving a shot to if you’re looking for something colorful that isn’t afraid to experiment. We’re going to be talking about focusing your game on a musician and what that means both in presentation and in mechanics, how a simple narrative can work well when you’re priority is getting across an emotion, and we determine whether this game’s McGuffin is better or worse than the Triforce. Thank you for listening to the podcast this week (and this year)! We should be back to releasing more regularly from here on out, but it was nice to have a bit of extra time on this game for the sake of our other responsibilities over the holidays. Let us know what you think of this game in the comments or over on our Discord. Were the rapidly shifting mechanics and simple story a bit too hard for you to take seriously, or did they come off as amusing, entertaining or just a novel experiment? Next time, we’re going to be talking about Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight to coincide with our main episode on Metroid: Dread, so get your Metroidvania brain in gear because we’re going to be lookin’ at maps for the rest of the month.

We’re rolling out the green carpet, and not just to play executive golf. The NOCLIP Awards are our most important annual tradition, and we’re back again this year with a new crop of categories alongside our old favorites. Find out what game did jumping the worst, which game focused the most on its mechanics and least on anything else, and join us as we figure out which host knows the other the best in our own version of the Newlyweds Game. All this and many (or at least some) more will be debated and judged for the enjoyment of your perfunctory NOCLIP Awards house parties I expect all of you to be hosting. Thanks for listening, and I hope you were on the correct side more than not. Do you think we picked correctly here? Was anyone monstrously robbed of their amazing submissions? Did you have a totally different pick for a category, or could you come up with your own list based on the games you personally have played this year? Let us know over on Discord or in the comments below. We’ll be back next time with NOCLIP Pocket focusing on Wondersong and after that a full episode on Metroid: Dread, so we hope you’ll join us in kicking off the new year.

Bah! What a thankless life! Being a podcaster in the age of monsters! Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Life is Strange: True Colors, because we just can’t quit this series apparently. The third game follows the gameplay precedents the series has adhered to thus far, being an adventure game in the “Telltale style” (a term that seems more and more dated since the studio was closed and then reanimated), that focuses on dialog trees and choice-matters narrative branches as opposed to puzzles. It even maintains a lot of the aesthetic and tone set up in the previous games, though notably the plot is now a lot more grounded barring Alex’s power to read and occasionally feel other’s emotions. And that power is probably the closest the series has come to smoothly integrating new mechanics into its overall structure, given how important emotions are to, you know, interfacing with other human beings. If you don’t know the series, everything revolves around its characters and plot, so we’d recommend playing the game first if you’re interested before listening to the episode and I won’t get into anything more spoiler-y here. We’re going to be talking about character building and how the game chooses to focus its emotional energy this time around, the setting of the game and how it succeeds in setting the groundwork for the game’s tone, but may stifle other aspects, and we spoil the true lore of the game which mixes an eldritch death cult and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Thanks for joining us today! If you’ve been listening for a while, you may have caught our episode on Life is Strange 2, which I would say we had…some issues with. Coming off a series low (in our opinion), we wondered if this third game could recapture what made the first game actually good. And it mostly does! We’d love to hear about your views on the trajectory of the franchise and whether you agree with our assessment on this (or any other LiS game). Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going from a game you can mostly play with one hand to a game that feels like you might need three to competently manage in Metroid Dread, so check us out then.

A new podcast has been added to your HikeLady, Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Toem, a photo-taking adventure game from developer Something We Made, and a game that is, well, frankly, sort of squarely in our wheelhouse. In Toem, you are tasked with going from place to place and fulfilling requests, which you do by using your camera and some limited environmental interaction to solve puzzles and obtain items. The camera is definitely the most noteworthy mechanical part of this game, switching from the game’s isometric perspective into a first person one and allowing you to freely move around and take pictures at whatever angle you choose. This is used to good effect, putting things in locations you can barely see without the on-the-ground viewpoint given to you by the camera. It makes the puzzles feel engaging and occasionally challenging, yet the lenient completion requirements allow you to moderate exactly how chill of an experience you want from it. Combine that with the game’s grayscale art style and varied characters, and you have a short, laid back game that scratches that itch for a do nothing night at home that you can play in a single sitting. We’re going to be talking about the unique way this game approaches puzzles, what it does to encourage completing the game at your own pace, and we try to turn the podcast into a news show for some dumb reason. Thank you for joining us again this week! Toem was, to us, a pretty decent follow up to Ocarina of Time, just because it is so short and laid back. There is functionally no pressure in this game and it makes for a really calm experience to sit down and play. Did you find the slow but dense style of this game to work for you, or were you searching for something a little deeper? How did you feel about the presentation, whether it be the simplistic visuals or the acoustic indie soundtrack? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord, and maybe drop a suggestion for what we should play next. Next time, we’re playing a game that no one requested, in the form of Wandersong, which, debatably, is a pretty similar game to to all the indie adventure games we play, but with a more musical bent. It’s certainly a lot more colorful than Toem, so at least that sets it apart. We hope you’ll come back for it next time.

Would you like to hear what I said again? Welcome back! I don’t know how much I really need to say about Ocarina of Time, it’s one of the few axioms of video games that you can just assume people know about and understand. This game accomplished a lot for the industry at the time, making a lasting impact on both games, in the form of how design changed after it came out, and players who would use it as a point of comparison for action adventure games for years to come. But we’re playing it now, in 2021, and want to examine it using our modern lens. What design decisions hold up, and what felt like a limitation of the time or the hardware it was originally released on? How has its impact affected other games in its series and otherwise? How annoying, comparatively, are the different NPCs who talk to you against your will? We try to answer these questions as well as discuss our experiences more in our usual way and hopefully that ends up being an entertaining take on this game that has been talked absolutely to death over the last twenty years. We’re going to be talking about dungeon design and how the 3DS update brought out the best in some of them, the presentation of the game in terms of its world and atmosphere and the effect that had to enrapture players at the time, and the many Unix systems that we should know. Thank you for joining us this week. This game almost feels like a right of passage for content creation, and it’s probably about time we finally talk about it. It certainly has a legacy that is lasting, and coming at it with fresh-ish eyes won’t really change that, but it’s interesting to see what parts of it still work because it really shines a light on the parts of the game that have been emulated by developers over the years. Is this a nostalgic classic for you, or did you get on the boat late? Have you, however impossible it might seem to people, not ever played this? Let us know in the comments, or over on Discord. Next time, we’re going from an all time classic to a newer title in a beloved (by us) franchise with Life is Strange: True Colors, so come back for that if you thought it was weird for us to not be talking about a game mostly about walking around and talking to people.

All hail Podcast John! Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re talking about The Procession to Calvary, a point and click adventure game with an art style composed entirely of renaissance era paintings. If that hasn’t already sold you on the idea, then I don’t really know what your deal is. Comparisons to Monty Python are pretty common in the discourse surrounding this game, and it’s pretty clear why that is, given the art style and the game’s emphasis on humor. To some extent, the game is much more focused on being a comedy than it is a point and click game, and that absolutely works for it. The barebones mechanic set also allows for more of your verbs to be used in these jokes as well, with the ability to punch pretty much anyone and applaud the in-game musicians performing the music you’ll hear throughout the game. Overall, it’s a interesting and pretty strange little title that’s worth trying out if only to see something visually new and outlandish. We’re going to be talking about what made jokes land or not for us, whether or not the puzzles in this game constitute “moon logic", and, somehow, some way, for some reason, Chalk Zone. Thank you for joining us again this week! If you played this one, did the old-ish adventure game mechanics make you feel nostalgic while playing this game, or were they a hurdle to get over? Was this funny to you? Let us know in the comments, or pop over to our Discord to talk about it with us. Starting, well, technically last episode, we’re going to be slowing down releases a bit due to some scheduling concerns, so sorry about that. If this game was up your alley, though, maybe try out some of the other weird games we’ve covered over the years in the meantime. No time like the present, right? Next time, we’re going to be talking about Toem, a recent release which is less on the irreverent humor side and more on the cute photography side of games we talk about on Pocket, so we hope you’ll come back for that.

Name for me this podcast so roughly bearing me o’er the sea! Welcome back to NOCLIP in the not so spooky month of November! Today, we’re going to be talking about Psychonauts 2, the long-awaited sequel from Double Fine. Psychonauts 2 is an action platformer game in much the same way as its predecessor, but with a more ambitious scope that comes from having so many years in between titles. As it picks up briskly from where Rhombus of Ruin ended (which, itself, picks up immediately after the events of the first game), you might be surprised at the depth of the game’s themes. The tone is very much the same, with an emphasis on humor that plays into the game’s outlandish premise, but it spends the time to much more critically examine its characters. The game focuses on the real impact its characters have on each other and their surroundings all the while honing the platforming elements, elevating it from a cult favorite to a pretty genuinely well made game on all fronts. The movement is smooth and your abilities feel more integrated in combat, making everything from level progression to the greatly expanded side content feel natural, exciting and fun. We’re going to be talking about how the levels in this game feel more fleshed out, though maybe less punchy, than in the first, the psy powers and how they’ve been changed and updated, and about Nick Johnsmith’s juicy middle. Thank you for listening! By the nature of us doing the podcast only in recent years, it feels like it hasn’t been that long since we played the original Psychonauts, but as big fans of the original, we couldn’t let this one go without comment. How do you feel about this game and the changes it made? Was it satisfyingly different to you? Not different enough? Did you also wonder why the other intern kids got pretty roughly sidelined for most of the game? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord where you can talk about the game and suggest new games for us to play! Next time, we’re going to be talking about The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which I’m going to say like it’s no big deal, but am actually nervous to have something interesting to say about it after like 25 years and a million think pieces. So I hope you’ll join us in our existential dread then!

Pod bless you, Andreas. Welcome back to the podcast and somehow, despite it being the middle of the month, not our first game of Mystery May! Today, we’re going to be talking about Pentiment, an adventure game in which you play as an artist as he is thrust into the middle of murder mysteries, however unlikely that might be. In each act you collect evidence and talk to the people of the town to gather information and do so in a way that changes the narrative of the game and the other options available to you. One of the most impressive elements is just this, the number of different paths available to you and the often very minor things that can affect a playthrough and flesh out your version of Andreas, as well as the world in which he lives. Given the historical setting of the game, this world building is a major part communicating the themes and helps ease the player in the politics and other messages the game is trying to engage with. And it is really successful at this. You may not learn anything specifically new about the era in which the game takes place, but you will come out with thoughts about the peasants’ complaints against their governance, the relationship between a religious institution and the power of the state, and other pretty heady topics the game broaches surprisingly seamlessly. We’re going to be talking about how the game’s art style attempts to mimic the art that was created during that time period, the game’s surprisingly solid writing and also the length of time we can listen to chickens before we just give up and turn the sound off. Thank you for joining us again this week! We’ll be slowly rolling through our next few episodes due to things happening in our lives outside of the podcast, but we will be moving through four Mystery May games before anything else, and the first of those is coming next week on Pocket. Next main episode, however, will be on Infinifactory, so we hope you’ll join us for that.

Podcast 60% breached. Happy Halloween! For our final game this October, we’re going to become the monster and take on Carrion, a Metroidvania where you play as a big tentacle monster. On its own, that is kind of a lackluster description for the game, but what makes the game successful at its goals is a bit difficult to describe in a short way. What the game really excels at is making the monster you play as feel just right, in a way that the premise doesn’t quite get across. You’ll stalk enemies from just out of sight and attack in a quick and lethal way. Your movement is extremely free, being able to move straight up vertical shafts as if gravity doesn’t exist by propelling yourself up the walls, but also encumbered enough by your sheer mass that getting to some places takes just long enough to create tension. You are extremely powerful, but very fragile. The game may not be particularly scary, exactly, but it does succeed in putting you in the headspace of a monster, which if that isn’t in the Halloween spirit, I don’t know what is. We’re going to be talking about how the level design keeps you moving forward while still keeping the ability-unlock progression system of a Metroidvania, how wrapping your head around the controls and your movement options actually forces you to play the game like the monster should, and we talk about the butchery equipment that was sold to us as kids. Thank you for listening to NOCLIP this week, and for another year of October horror games! We’re pretty happy with the variety we managed this year and will keep an eye out for more of the strange and interesting projects as we plan for next year’s crop. How about you, though? What horror games, if any, did you play to get into the spirit this year? Did we manage to introduce you to something new or at least have you try something you haven’t yet? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord! As we move into November, we want to go in an entirely different direction, and are going to be talking about The Procession to Calvary, so we hope you’ll join us for that!

When people get scared, they’re as likely to turn to podcasts as anything else. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re talking about Outlast, which is one of the classics of the modern horror game community. This is a first person horror adventure game that gives you no way of defending yourself against the things that are coming to kill you (a “haunted house game” in our parlance), but despite coming out when this type of game was decidedly in vogue, it sets itself apart in two big ways. First, it is shockingly fast paced for a game in the genre, with a lot of your time spent running and following a fairly clear path, and less of it spent investigating and exploring the way something like Amnesia would play. And the second, pretty clearly, is its aesthetic. The washed out green atmosphere is a staple of the game’s marketing which carries over into its DLC and sequel as well, but also emphasizes the found-footage style they were going for here. Using your camera as a flashlight and as a way to get collectibles in a kind of token way is the gimmick that the game rides on and it does succeed in generating an identity of its own. We’re going to be talking about how the game holds up after several years and multiple refinements of its genre, the effectiveness of patrolling enemies, and we explore the assumptions created by the “gamer brain.” Thank you for joining us for the last episode of Halloween! On the main podcast, anyway, we still have one more horror title to talk about on Pocket next week, so be sure to check in for that to really round out the month. Did you play Outlast when it came out, or had it recommended while talking about horror titles? Do you think it holds up? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Thank you for listening and I hope your October has been pleasantly spooky, or unpleasantly, or whatever you wanted it to be. As we’re leaving October, next time we’re going to be talking about Psychonauts 2, the newest entry in the list of game sequels that released extremely far apart from their predecessors, so we hope you’ll be back for that.

Once they started calling me that, I figured if I owned the podcast, they couldn’t use it against me. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! It’s the middle of October which means we are right in the middle of horror season, and so today we’re talking about Sally Face. Sally Face is a horror adventure game made by a single person that mashes together so many elements of horror that you might find it surprising that the game actually manages to be surprisingly sentimental. While the game begins with a combination of real world horror and a couple of ghosts, it quickly spirals out of control and adds more and more elements, potentially as a consequence of its episodic release structure, or maybe a desire to fit all the developers ideas into the game, but whether you find this disarming or charming is going to come down to personal preference. It’s a game that has a certain edge to it from its lo-fi production and subject matter, but in the end, if you stick with it, you will become strangely endeared to the characters. We’re going to talk about how tone and atmosphere fit around overall aesthetics, having a mix of different mechanics thrown in for variety and how well it was pulled off, and we discuss this games meets meets meets between Nickelodeon cartoons, video games and collectible cards from the 80s. Thank you for joining us again this week! This game comes from a recommendation from an IRL friend (thanks, btw, if you’re reading this), and we were pretty surprised by how positive we came off on it. Which is a spoiler for the episode, I guess. If you played along, let us know how you felt about it down in the comments or over on Discord! I would imagine for people less entrenched in adventure games this may feel a little mechanics-light, but it hits a sweet spot I think for most audiences with a tolerance for the kind of game this is. We’re going to be wrapping up Halloween on another pocket episode, so be sure to join us while you’re carving your jack-o’-lanterns or eating candy corn or whatever you do for the season as we discuss Carrion next time!

Remember, you can’t save every podcast. Welcome to our first episode for this year’s Halloween! We’re going to be talking about The Medium, a horror adventure game with the hook that you are able to control your character in two different versions of the game world simultaneously; both the real world and the spirit world are accessible due to your status as a “medium.” What this translates to mechanically is that you move around the two versions of the world and need to solve various puzzles in order to get around. It has a little bit more depth than that, with sections having you in only one world or the other, or swapping between the two, but it does mostly consist of traversal obstacles and simple lock-and-key style puzzles. It tends to get by on its visuals, which are genuinely interesting, using color grading and surreal landscapes to really separate the two versions of the game’s world. We’re going to be talking about variety versus depth of mechanics, the importance of considering the non-literal interpretation of your narrative, and we try to figure out how to blink your ears. Thank you for joining us again this week, and this year for another spooky Halloween. This developer, Bloober Team, sort of gained their popularity with “Layers of Fear” and has been steadily growing in budget in their later releases. We haven’t exactly kept up with them, so it was a bit surprising to see a game with more of a mechanical focus than the games we were aware of previously. How did this game sit with you? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord. And stay tuned, as we still have another game (and a couple more Pocket episodes) on horror games this month, and next time we’re talking about Outlast, one of the classic horror titles with a deliberate found footage aesthetic.

Unbelievably, we’ve now been doing this podcast for the length of a US Senator’s term, and that’s weird in at least several ways. We hope we’ve pleased our constituency during that time, though, especially since the other candidates in the upcoming race are likely much more popular than us and we do intend to try skating by on the high incumbency rates of elected officials. This metaphor kinda stopped working immediately. For today’s anniversary celebration though, we’re giving you another selection of outtakes, bloopers and our sound test ramblings culled from this year’s episodes covering topics from how thoroughly we theme our episodes to reality tv dating shows and slogans for fictional companies. We hope you enjoy, and if you don’t, well, I can’t exactly blame you. We want to thank our friends for joining us on several episodes this year, the listeners for showing interest in what we do and validating this particular questionable use of our time, and whoever is out there creating the market for the unique and exceptionally weird games we like to play on Pocket sometimes. More horror titles are coming up for the rest of this month, so keep an eye out for that, and we’ll be back to provide an awful listening experience again next year. See ya then!

What’s your favorite podcast? Welcome to Halloween! To kick off the spooky season, we’re talking about Buddy Simulator 1984, which is a kind of a weird melding between a number of different genres, most of which I won’t want to give away if you haven’t yet played the game. While Buddy Simulator definitely has the look and feel of a horror game, especially in its advertising, that mix of genres is equaled by a mix of tones and the game can be as funny as it is unsettling at times. To avoid giving too much away, this is an experimental indie game with a retro art style, old school musical sensibility, self aware sense of humor (and general themes of self awareness) and a quirky way of blending these things together, and that’s either something you probably know if you’re into or not. We’re going to be talking about games that can be both narratively and mechanically different for different players or playthroughs, comparisons to other games and what this says about this game’s design and what it does to stand out, and how the game handles you asking to bring a sea predator around with you at all times. Thank you for joining us this week! We’re just getting started both as far as our October horror games go and, in fact, episodes we’re releasing today, so be sure to stick around and subscribe for the incoming deluge of episodes. Did you play Buddy Simulator? How do you feel about the infinite comparisons it gets to that certain other black and white indie game? Is it warranted, or does this do enough of its own thing to stand on its own? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Our next episode of Pocket for this month is going to be exploring Sally Face, a hand drawn point and click adventure game with a sort of early 2000’s indie comic aesthetic sense. It’s a bit of an odd one, so we hope you’ll check out the episode!

Raiden something happened to me last Thursday when I was driving home. I had a couple of miles to go - I looked up and saw a glowing orange podcast in the sky, to the east! It was moving very irregularly... suddenly there was intense light all around me - and when I came to, I was home. What do you think happened to me? Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Metal Gear Solid 2, the sequel to Metal Gear Solid and arguably the game that cemented Kojima as a designer with an eye for details who was willing to do some of the strangest things in AAA games. And also made it clear that he really wanted to make movies. Regardless of how you feel about MGS2’s plot, or many of Kojima’s plots generally, the game tells its story through some of the most elaborate cutscenes and lengthiest dialogue ever seen to this point in the industry, and that was debatably among the things most discussed when the game came out. Beyond that though, this game is mechanically a step up from its predecessor as well, and does a lot more with its stealth action framework than people were used to, making use of the new first person aiming mechanics as well as a robust inventory of usable items to force its players to think outside the box (ha ha) to tackle its challenges. The game gained notoriety from the surprises it kept hidden in the lead-up to its release, and even afterward received praise for being inventive and focusing on things games usually didn’t at that time. All that said, it’s been twenty years since it first released, so we have to ask if it held up? Is it still a justifiable favorite MGS2 game even when stacked against its later sequels and prequels? Find out, as we talk about the bizarre twists and questionable plot decisions made in the game, the variety of ways you can deal with the games obstacles, and when the bird crap comes back. Thank you for joining us once again. The spoilers for this game are more or less a known quantity by anyone who plays games these days, but I still don’t want to get too much into them here because they were the type of thing that really intrigued me when I played the game the first time. If you’ve played MGS2, what was your favorite weird thing that happened? Do you think it held up, or is it kind of a nightmare to play these days, or did you always find it kind of pretentious? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Next time, we’re getting into Halloween, our favorite time of year, and we’ll be talking about The Medium, so I hope you’ll join us for that.

Press A to Podcast (I don’t know, there’s no text in this game!) Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about Limbo, which is the first game from Danish developer Playdead, and their breakout hit as well. Something about the game’s simplicity, both in controls and art style really struck a chord with people when it released and it became surprisingly successful in the indie space back in 2010. A lot of the cinematic platformer type gameplay seen here would get refined in their next game, Inside, which we talked about like a million years ago, but there is still something distinctly eerie about Limbo. The game is very quiet and pretty dark, with each failure by the player punctuated by a more grisly animation than you would imagine, and the overall difficulty means you’ll be seeing these deaths fairly often. Whether the trial and error gameplay sits well with you is a matter of personal taste, but you can’t deny the tone it sets or the atmosphere it puts you in. We’re going to be talking about difficulty and how the game ramps up in complexity as it goes on, the intricacies in the detail Playdead packed into the world, and how I am a big hypocrite (or am I?). Thank you for joining us again this week! We felt like this game was an appropriate lead in to the spookiest month of the year, given its dour tone and creepy visual style. What did you think of Inside? Did you play this years ago, or maybe visited it for the first time for this podcast? How did the difficulty of the game strike you, and did you feel it became appropriately complex near the end of the game? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re entering Halloween proper, and for our first Pocket episode, we’ll be talking about Buddy Simulator 1984, so please check us out then… or else! Scary enough for you?!

Mario, this podcast is out of control! I tried to help it but it’s too big and mad. Welcome back to the podcast! It’s been a long time since we’ve talked about a Mario platformer (depending on if you could Mario Maker, it’s been two to three years), so with Nintendo celebrating the 35th anniversary last year and releasing the Switch port of 3D World, it seemed like a good time. So we waited a year and then did it. Our lack of timeliness aside, 3D Word was the Wii U’s entry into the world of 3D Mario platformers, and like the console it was originally on it was, let’s say, differently appreciated. 3D World follows the design sense of Super Mario 3D Land, a game that was on the 3DS and tried to merge the 3D and 2D Mario titles in the way it was presented and designed and this felt normal and pretty good on a handheld console. 3D World, however, puts the spotlight on some of the stranger aspects of this choice now that it sits in the same circle as games like Mario Galaxy or 64. It being different than Mario’s other 3D outings is not inherently a bad thing, though, and the game is still as charming and polished as you’ve come to expect, but whether or not it’s what you’re looking for in a Mario game will be up to you to decide. As an added bonus, we’ll be talking about Bowser’s Fury, a game that is more in the design space of Mario Sunshine et al., which came packed in with the Switch port of 3D World. We’re going to be talking about camera controls and perspective in a game that is trying to be a hybrid of 2D and 3D platformer design, presentation and absolutely nailing the musical interpretation of Mario, a game series that helped create the video game music paradigm, and we try for several minutes to remember the names of some Mario 64 levels. Thank you for joining us again this week! It really has been a startlingly long time since we’ve discussed a Mario game, and despite this being a newer title (in the form of the Switch port), it’s still one of the more off-beat games and one we probably would have gotten around to had the port never released. How did 3D World strike you? Did you think Bowser’s Fury was worth getting the game for, or maybe not think we should have devoted almost half the podcast to it? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! We’ve been going back to some older games recently, and we’ve got one more to go before we hit Halloween hard. Next time we’re going to be talking about Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, a heavily anticipated sequel and one that didn’t do what a lot of people expected, so we hope you’ll join us for that.

POD: By casting this spell, the caster may talk about video games weekly. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Sorcery!, a game based on a series of choose-your-own-adventure books created by Steve Jackson that seek to emulate the experience of a traditional tabletop RPG in a single player format. The task of adapting these books falls to Inkle, the developer of previous podcast game Heaven’s Vault, and it somehow feels so natural I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of these types of books adapted in a similar way. Between the flowery language, some of which was taken directly from the books and others which have been invented for the game, the implementation of the spellcasting system and the beautiful visual presentation of the maps and characters, it really makes you feel like you just hopped on Roll20 with your GM for a weird one-on-one session of an RPG. Not to say that the game doesn’t have its shortcomings, but even as it drags in some places and can feel a little cheap at times (though the pain of getting killed unexpectedly is lessened significantly by the generous retry system), the novelty of it makes it worth checking out anyway. We’re going to be talking about the pushback that your typical player will feel against being able to rewind at any time, how spellcasting works and how it allows for interesting solutions to the game’s problems, and how, if it is in any way, this is like a Jumanji. Thank you for joining us again this week! This game has been out for some time, and the books it’s based on have been around for almost forty years, but we couldn’t help but play it once we heard about it. Are you an RPG-er (a godless servant of the magiks), and does this game tickle the same fancies that playing D&D or whatever flavor of TTRPG you jive with does? Let us know down in the comments or over on our discord! I realize we are hurtling toward October at this point and it represents a big month for us typically, so to get in the mood, let’s talk about a game that falls more on the unsettling side and less as outright horror. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Limbo! (I’m just excited, this game doesn’t also have an exclamation point in its name) Which, of course, is the breakout game from Playdead, whose later game, Inside, we already covered what feels like a million years ago, so we hope you’ll join us then.

I can’t just hide here forever and podcast. Welcome back to the podcast where this week we’re going to be talking about Pseudoregalia! This is a metroidvania platformer that was originally developed as part of a game jam. The game is set in a castle and tasks you with navigating around to discover new abilities and, eventually, keys to end the game. The method by which you do this is some absolutely badass movement tech. I think it’s safe to say that for the majority of people, this movement is the major selling point of the game. You are very fluid, being able to chain different moves together to cover huge distances and scale walls, turning most rooms into something of a puzzle, but one with many interesting solutions. You can string together wall jumps and slides and kicks and et cetera in a number of different ways to traverse the world and it is pretty much always engaging to do. There are certainly ways in which the game doesn’t excel, but it is nonetheless a really fun way to spend a few hours, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to master these kinds of mechanics. We’re going to be talking about the necessity of the map, an addition in an update, to navigate without going completely insane, the game’s interest curve as you progress toward the end, and we codify the misty castle aesthetic. Thank you for joining us again today as we close out our time doing soulslike games with the least soulslike of all. Still a fun time and one that did become strangely popular. How did you hear about this game, if you had at all? Let us know in the comments below or over in our Discord. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Pentament in our constant struggle to make every non-themed game as different as possible from the one we played before. We hope you’ll be back for that!

I should have been the one to fill your podcast with light! Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Devil May Cry, the first game in the DMC series that defined a genre in a way. Character action games of today all have a bit of DNA (the D stands for “Devil” here, presumably) from this game in them, whether that’s in level design, unlockable moves/combos or just the focus on stylish combat, usually with an accompanying rating system, and so going back to see how they were all implemented in the first DMC game was quite an experience. An experience made all the more unexpected by how well the first game manages all these systems. Truly, the level of competency on display here for what is more or less the first try is impressive and makes me question whether this game really was designed that well, or if the genre hasn’t pushed that far forward in the last twenty years. Presentation and questionable voice acting aside, even the game’s visual style with it’s gothic architecture, quietly grotesque enemy design, and the anime sword biker detective himself, Dante, has gone down as nothing short of iconic in the world of games. We’re going to be talking about the strength in simplicity in a combat system, the elements of old-style design that do manage to hold this game back on a modern playthrough, and how we think that castles are…pretty cool. Thank you for joining us again this week. We may have played the remastered version of this game, but it did still feel like the proverbial blast from the past to pick it up again after nearly two decades. How do you feel the game holds up? Is this game your favorite in the series, or was it dethroned by one of its many sequels? Do you want to make some kind of meme about our podcast featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord server where we talk about the games and take suggestions. Next time, we’re going to be taking on another game that’s been remastered in the form of Super Mario 3D World (+ Bowser’s Fury), the Switch port of the Wii U Mario game that presumably very few people ended up actually playing in its original incarnation. We hope you’ll check that one out too.

In the end we all become podcasts, Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Oxenfree, the narrative adventure game about some spooky things that happen on an island at night. The game is extremely focused on its story, so I hesitate to give much more of the plot away from that, but its unique elements come from the way that story is delivered. The primary mechanic of the game is a conversation system that uses fully voice acted dialogue in an attempt to more naturally mimic actual conversations as opposed to more traditional adventure games where you can sit around for thirty minutes before answering someone’s question. Does it always work? Well, no, not always, but it gives a sense of urgency to a system that rarely has one without displaying a hokey timer on the screen. Beyond that, the game’s appeal comes largely from the tone and aesthetic, with a cartoony art style and dreamy synth music all wrapped around a very modern collection of characters who are all written well enough to be believable in a Spielbergian kind of way. We’re going to be talking about how this game fits into the wider genre of adventure games, how the mechanical elements function and help drive the plot forward as well as giving you incentive to act in a reasonable way toward the other characters, and we debate whether the existence of ghosts has any bearing on this fictional narrative. Thank you for joining us this week! What did you think about Oxenfree? I know the game definitely has a following, likely driven by the likeable characters and deeper mysteries it contains, but on a first playthrough, how much of this did you actually engage with? Did this game inspire multiple playthroughs to see what other endings it offered or were you satisfied with letting the story be what it was based on your decisions? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Next time, we’re breaking out our fancy dice and player’s handbooks to play through Sorcery!, a TTRPG simulation game from Inkle, the developer of Heaven’s Vault, a game we played 8 months ago but feels like it was more recent than that because time is an illusion. Anyway, thanks for listening!

This is the strongest podcast ever built! Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about another expansive JRPG in the form of Xenoblade Chronicles. A series that debuted on the Wii, and took off, like several before it, due to its protagonist being included in Super Smash Bros., Xenoblade is an RPG with a subgenre that is really tricky to pin down. The overarching game, with its characters and story, feels like a traditional epic JRPG in the same way that a Final Fantasy game does, but its mechanics between combat and its quest system feel ripped straight out of a more Western MMO. With an emphasis on cooldown management and positioning based attacks, there isn’t much like it in the single-player realm of the genre, though the staple classes of Tank/DPS/Healer are all present here. That isn’t to say there isn’t room for experimentation, and the depth present in the game’s systems are arguably one of the most engaging parts of playing this. And if you aren’t here for the mechanical depth and number crunching, the game makes a pretty significant impression aesthetically as well. With an emphasis on huge vistas (which also translate into a large overall world map) and a soundtrack that kicks way more ass than you would expect, it doesn’t really pull its punches in this area either. Obviously the game has its flaws, and it’s been polarizing if public opinion can be believed, but it’s definitely worth checking out if only for the couple of things it does absolutely incredibly well. We’re going to be talking about the mechanical interactions the game almost hides away behind a probably-too-strong protagonist character, how the game’s emphasis on character plays into it both narratively and mechanically in an extremely satisfying way, and we pitch the movie that the expansion should have been and cast the really underutilized Composite Jason Alexander. Thank you for listening this week! We have been (read: Chad has been) putting off playing this game for a while due to just how long it is, but it was surprisingly easy to sink into the game once it started. What side of the “love it or hate it” spectrum do you fall on? Did Sharla’s incredibly stupid costume design and weird posture make you quit playing this game the second she appeared on screen? Let us know over in our Discord or in the comments! Next time, prepare to have your dark soul filled with light, because we’re going to be playing Devil May Cry (the first one), so we hope you’ll join us for that!

Frontside Varial Podcast Welcome back to the show this week! Today, we’re going to be talking about OlliOlli. This is a skateboarding game from 2014 that approaches the genre in a different way than it’s usually handled. While still definitely showing an arcade style high score type of design, your run will end as soon as you bail, enforcing an almost Meat Boy or Hotline Miami style of iterative gameplay, where you repeat a level over and over until you get that “perfect” run. This means that even the early levels can be an intense experience, and when compounded with the controls, which have you performing tricks by inputting a sequence of directions on the analog stick (not unlike fighting game special moves), the game definitely presents a system that is difficult to master, but satisfying once achieved. Given that, the biggest hurdle for this game to clear is whether or not it contains the breadth of content necessary for most people to want to actually make it to that level. We’re going to be talking about the value the difficulty brings to the game, how music can help motivate players, and lament the fact we were never forced to pull out the claw grip. Thank you for joining us for this episode on a game that is a staggering seven years old at this point. My opinion on this game kinda flipped since first playing it nearer its release, and it feels a lot more interesting these days. How do you feel about this game? Did you make it to the level of mastery we could only speculate on? Do you also think high level play of a pretty simplistic overall game is a cool thing? Does the sequel fix the issues we perceive as being present in this one? Let us know over on our discord or in the comments. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Oxenfree, a narrative adventure game with a focus on puzzles and dialogue, making it about as unrelated to this game as it can be. We hope you’ll join us for that.

Podcasts AND zombies? This is seriously supernatural. Welcome! On this episode of the podcast, we’re going to be talking about TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, a game developed by Free Radicals and and the third and final entry in the TimeSplitters franchise, a console FPS franchise that rode the wave of multiplayer shooters released on consoles during the span of time between when Goldeneye released and when people got sick of them. This particular entry lands on the latter half of that timeline, and is in some ways better and worse for it. Better because there is clearly experience behind the design of this game, with a huge emphasis on variety both in the campaign and multiplayer modes, a bevy of content to unlock, and smaller, arguably more unnecessary, complexities hidden within each of these. And worse because it does feel a bit like a hodgepodge of FPS design philosophies, taking the originality it has in its theme and running with it over that huge amount of content in ways that may stretch it a bit too thin. Either way, if you’re nostalgic for this game, or even just this era of everyone sitting on the couch in the basement, arguing over who gets the good controller and drinking Surge, this game will help you travel back in time to relive that experience. We’re going to be talking about the impact of Rare’s FPS games on the N64 on how the genre, and therefore this game, developed, the aesthetics and theme that place this game somewhere between pastiche and parody to video games’ most favorite media genres, and we discuss which character might be a silly himbo. Thank you for joining us this week, Dan. This episode was an inevitability that we successfully put off for almost six years. The game holds a bit of special place for a subset of our childhood friends and was a preferred game to play in those after-school moments and weekend parties in the suburbs as a tween. But what about the rest of you? Did you play this game when it came out, or, even more unlikely, revisit it recently? Do you think it holds up as well as we did, or were we fully blinded by the heavy tinting of the nostalgia glasses? Let us know over on Discord or in the comments on YouTube. Either way, we hope you enjoyed the episode and join us next time when we talk about Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition!

I suppose there are people who engage more freely with the podcast, and I do prefer it. Welcome to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re talking about Tacoma, the second game from Fullbright, and one that shares a bit in common with its predecessor, Gone Home. The game is a walking-sim type adventure game, set on a space station, with much of your interaction coming in the form of interacting with documents, some environmental items, and a form of digital recording that shows the characters of the game moving about. You can rewind, pause and fast forward this playback at will and interact with each character’s personal terminals while they’re using them in these recordings. This is getting more difficult to explain, so just consider it a sort of forensic adventure game where your overall goal is to salvage the station’s AI, though the majority of the actual adventure takes place tertiarily to that. We’re going to be talking about unique mechanical interactions in a game without a lot of mechanical interaction at all, the legacy of this game both in relation to Gone Home and its wider influences as well, and we discuss the current Subversion Meta in narrative fiction. Thank you for joining us again this week! We waited probably altogether too long to play this game from the time it actually came out, so if you were planning on playing it you probably already have. If not, though, I think our overall takeaway is that it is very good and we recommend trying it out if it seems interesting at all. Next time, we’re going to be talking about indie skateboarding game OlliOlli, so we hope you’ll join us for that!

This podcast is new to me, but I am honored to be a part of it. Welcome back! Today we’re going to be talking about Outer Wilds, the space sim/adventure/exploration game that, for people who connect with it, is an absolute gem. In this game, you fly around from planet to planet, each of which is individually authored with a surprising number of things to find and learn, and try to discover more about an ancient race of aliens who have presumably died off. This is your express goal, anyway. The one that is given to you by the characters, but the game really starts working when it is your own self-motivation driving you to uncover more, to push further into the secrets of each planet and to stop yourself from dying for even one second. Admittedly, this isn’t an easy goal to achieve and the difficulty present in the systems of the game makes this even harder to get into, but if you push past it, and get a handle on the game, what lies beyond is an extremely deep and satisfying experience with a lot to love. We’re going to be talking about spoilers, and what that means for the game and its community, the long journey of mastering the game systems and how you develop personal goals and obsessions, and we reveal the instrument that your player character is proficient in. Thank you for listening this week! Outer Wilds is one of those games that got a lot of press (which, episode spoilers, it was for good reason) but because of a lot of elements we weren’t able to check out right away. I have to thank our Discord server for being very into it and keeping it in the forefront of our minds because I really would have kicked myself if I hadn’t gotten around to it. What did you think about the game? Are we being babies when we say parts of this game felt really difficult? Let us know in the comments, or over on the aforementioned Discord server. Next time, we’re going to be talking about TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, which I could attempt to make some tangential comparisons with this game, but it would be an enormous stretch. We hope you’ll join us then anyway!

More damage to basic podcast enemy, Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! This week, we’re going to be talking about Nanotale: Typing Chronicles, an RPG that uses a (surprise) typing interface and the follow-up to Fishing Cactus’s previous game Epistory, which we talked about way back in 2017. This new game sees them iterating on the concepts that were started in Epistory, with a more dynamic combat system, more expansive exploration features and less of a focus on the Typer Shark style wave based combat. We discover, though, that the effect of all of this comes down to how you felt about those systems before, as the the result is a bigger, less repetitive game, but one that focuses a lot less on skill, in the form of how fast you can type, and more on your ability to think and solve problems using the tools available to you. In a lot of ways, it’s a very different game with the same wrappings. We’re going to be talking about the intricacy and number of puzzles found throughout the game, the implementation of more NPCs and story elements than were done previously, and how me like type fast. Thank you for joining us again this week (a day late, for those of you here on the day of)! Epistory always felt like one of those hidden gem kind of games, so I was particularly excited to see where the developer went with its follow up. I fully expect not everyone to have played this game, given it’s small scale and sort of niche genre, but if you did, how do you feel about the changes made? Do you wish it taxed you more on the actual typing front, or did the game’s more puzzle-centric engagement hit the spot for you? Let us know over on our Discord or in the comments on YouTube. Next time, we’re talking about Tacoma in a real “why haven’t I played this yet” moment for both of us as it has been haunting our backlog for much too long given the quality of game it is, and I hope you’ll join us for that.

You got anymore dead podcasts back there? Welcome back to NOCLIP, and thank you for joining us for the conclusion of Mystery May! To round this month out, we’re going to be talking about one of the most prolific adventure games ever made, Grim Fandango. Grim is one of LucasArts’ adventure games from the heyday of the genre, and the studio’s experience combines with the Tim Schaffer’s stellar writing to create one of the most celebrated adventure games of the era. There is a lot of enjoyment to be found in the characters presented here, and on top of that, the mechanics, while not perfect, make puzzle solving a decidedly more fair task than it has been in past games, with a simple inventory system and little to no pixel hunting, depending on how you define that. As for what makes Grim such a strong entry, we think it boils down to a great sense of worldbuilding and a streamlining of the features that made adventure games sort of an inaccessible genre for many years. We’re going to be talking about why Manny Calavera is a cool character while still being a good one, the puzzles and how many are very readable despite the fact that some still stumped us, and we determine that we are, in fact, big Man Boys. Thank you for joining us again this week, and this year for another Mystery May. Grim was a perfect game to revisit for this month because of its themes, but is also a perennial favorite and we don’t get to talk too much about point and click games these days as the genre has sort of fallen by the wayside. We hope you enjoyed, and you can let us know if you’re an adventure game fan in the comments or over on our Discord! We’ve continued the Mystery May theme for a few years now, probably in spite of our best interests, but do you have any suggestions of what to cover next year? Let us know, but next time we’re heading into June and talking about The Outer Wilds (which could arguably fall into this theme, but whatever)!

I can play saxophone and record a podcast at the same time. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! To continue our celebration of Mystery May, we're going to be discussing Hypnospace Outlaw. This game is a desktop simulator set in the late 90's and revolves around a parody of the early internet that users visit in their sleep... What? You expected us to pick a game that wasn't super weird? We're going to be taking about the games difficulty when compared to more traditional adventure games, the aesthetics and personality that make up this fictional internet, and the immersive qualities that led us to worry about infecting our fictional desktops with viruses. Thank you for joining us for our final pocket episode for this year’s Mystery May! Next time we're going to be dusting off our mechanical keyboards and talking about Nanotale - Typing Chronicles. We hope we'll see you next time!

Grand Covenant’s Fourth Law: A podcast cannot lie. Welcome back to the podcast! Lies of P is definitely a game that turned some heads when it was announced, given that it’s based around Pinnochio. Set in a city overrun by automatons, stylized as puppets, who have broken their safeguards and begun attacking people, Lies of P takes its themes and ideas from Pinnochio, along with some of its characters, but not necessarily its plot. In fact, the way it manages to weave this inspiration into the rest of the game is probably its most impressive narrative feat. This is particularly notable that the thing it’s weaving these elements into is just a Dark Souls game. More so than any other game we’ve played, on- or off-air, this really feels like a FROM designed Souls game, or at least very close to it. The combat takes heavy cues from Sekiro and Bloodborne with the healing mechanics and stats from Dark Souls, you can tell the developers have been taking notes. And this can be both good and bad, because the game feels familiar and also very good to play most of the time, but it does also call attention to elements from the games (upgrade materials, consumable items, a prosthetic) that feel more or less necessary for this game specifically. It’s a strange experience to some extent, but still a very good one if this style of game is something you already enjoyed. Is this game derivative? A little, for sure, but there is still some novelty to be found, particularly in its aesthetics. This and the combat mechanics that combine the weapon variety of Dark Souls (as well as a unique weapon recombination mechanic) with the satisfying defensive options of Sekiro, mean that as much as this makes you think about where its inspirations came from, as weird as the theme of the game is on its face, and as difficult as the game can be at times, it’s still a very good time. We’re going to be talking about the integration of the source material into the mechanical identity of the game, how auxiliary mechanics complicate the game both for good and for bad, and how they really should have just called the game Pinnochio. Thank you for listening this week! As you can probably tell, we’ve been doing a bit of a Soulslike run recently, which we’ll be finishing up on pocket next time, but I think it’s shown just how diverse this subgenre can be. Lies of P stands out less for its own identity but more for its devotion to the identity of the games that inspired it, and it’s a complicated topic to discuss. Do you think this impressive adherence to FROM’s catalog will be a positive change for these types of games going forward, normalizing the base gameplay and allowing for more diversity in how those mechanics are utilized and twisted to fit the game at hand, or do you think this is just one direction for the genre to go, with the other elements taking center stage as in games like Lunacid? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be sprinting as far as we possibly can in the other direction and talking about Pentiment, so we hope you’ll join us then.

If you’re looking for rain, dead bodies and podcasts, you came to the right place. Welcome to Mystery May! This time we’re starting with an arguably pretty contentious (or at the very least pretentious) title in Heavy Rain, a game developed by Quantic Dream. Heavy Rain is essentially an adventure game that is loaded to the brim with quick time events and branching narrative paths. Say what you will about the core engagement present here, but a lot of the story elements are pretty intelligently designed with paths branching and reconvening convincingly around a mystery that actually pulls off its twist elegantly. Other elements of the game don’t age quite as well, with stiff animations and a voice cast that fluctuates wildly between solid performances and laughably inconsistent ones. For these reasons mostly, this is a game we recommend enjoying (responsibly) with a few beers by your side or at least a couple of friends. We’re going to be talking about what the game gains by treating one of its characters mostly as a mechanical punching bag, how QTEs play out as the primary mechanical interaction and when it feels appropriate, and we debate the appropriate time to describe something as “in shambles.” I realize this is the second episode we released this month, but just bear with me. Or pretend that Dragon Age is more mysterious than it probably actually is. Either way, thank you for joining us for our most unlikely of continuing traditions. Did the mystery land with you in this game? Were you able to look past the gameplay itself to find something enjoyable underneath like we did, or does David Cage’s name equate itself to poison in your mind? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! And if you thought QTEs were a dated mechanic, we invite you to brace yourself, because next time we’re going to be talk about the most classic of point and click adventure games: Grim Fandango! We hope you’ll dust out your A drives and plug in the PS/2 connector of your IBM Model M keyboards for it.

Your podcast’s name is NOCLIP? We’re going to need to come up with a better name. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! This time, for our first episode of Mystery May, we’re going to be talking about Telling Lies. This game is a follow up to Sam Barlow’s previous game Her Story, and the two share a lot of the same DNA. Both are desktop simulations that see you searching through a database to find clips of people talking and use those clips to figure out the characters’ stories. If that sounds exactly like Her Story, well, you wouldn’t be wrong. The main difference comes in a higher level of production value and a much different narrative that is less about uncovering the mystery and more about learning about the characters. Which, I know, Mystery May game doesn’t even have much of a mystery, oof, etc. The mystery that is there, though, is interesting and the characters are all extremely well-acted. It’s hard to pin down exactly what it is that makes us feel so differently about this game as compared to Her Story, but that’s what we’re going to be trying to do over the course of this episode. We’re going to be talking about how the game uses its keyword system to create narrative threads to lead you along its story, the new mechanical elements and design of the clips that makes this game feel and play differently to its predecessor, and we uncover the conspiracy that we agree isn’t a conspiracy. Thank you for joining us this week! As Her Story is one of our favorite games from the podcast or otherwise, we were excited to carve out the time to finally play this. If you’re a fan of the original, how do you feel about the direction this game went? Did the inclusion of more notable actors enhance the experience for you or take you out of it? Even after doing the episode I still feel kind of torn. And that uncertainty will be the perfect emotional state for the remainder of Mystery May, as for our next pocket episode we’re going to be talking about Hypnospace Outlaw, so we hope you’ll come back for that!

Dwarven podcasts! Fine Dwarven Podcasts! Direct from Orzammar. Welcome back to the podcast! Today we're going to be taking another dive into the world of CRPGs, which of course means that Chad won't be joining us. Instead, Andy will be joined by special guests Daniel and Janelle to discuss BioWare's 2009 classic, Dragon Age: Origins. We'll be discussing engaging world building, intricate quest design, important narrative decisions, and most importantly, which characters we want to smooch. Thank you for listening to NOCLIP this week! We hope you'll join us next time as we kick of Mystery May with a discussion of Heavy Rain.

This podcast has great tunes and water balloons. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket, where we are making our way through every twee indie game that has made its way to the Switch, apparently. Seriously though, Donut County channels the gameplay energy of Katamari Damacy, or I guess Feeding Frenzy, through a much less chaotic, more relaxed style and into a world that is characterized by clever writing and likeable characters. Well, sometimes the characters are unlikeable, but in a fun way. This writing, which made us realize we may be closer to the nursing home than we had previously assumed, is what brings the game its levity, having less vim and vigor and more of an ironic shoegazy feel with conversations had through text nearly indistinguishable from those had face to face. Along with the games simplistic yet pretty absurd plotline, everything meshes together to create an aesthetic that feels very complete. We’re going to talk about gameplay complexity and how we wished the game would ramp up or maintain its more intricate puzzle elements, how the writing style deviates from the norm in a way that may reveal the path forward rather than stand out as a novelty, and what you can say that could justifiably get you kicked out of a restaurant. Thank you for joining us again this week! Despite coming out a few years ago, this game only recently came to our attention and fit into that nook of things we are confused and intrigued by, and I can’t say we were disappointed. Did the game’s indie charm work for you, or were you curmudgeonly grumbling about it’s frequent use of “lol”? Let us know on Discord or in the comments below! Next time, we’re going to be entering Mystery May, one of the traditions we’ve managed to keep going, and talking about Telling Lies the successor to perennial favorite Her Story, so we hope you’ll join us for that, as well as the other perplexing titles we’re going to be talking about next month.

I’ll say something really teary at the funeral, like “Welcome to NOCLIP!” Welcome to the podcast! This week, we’re going to be talking about Jak and Daxter, which has been on the list for quite some time. Jak was one of the first of the 3D platformers that defined the genre during the PS2 era, and like many of its contemporaries, is one of the games that’s quick to come to mind for a lot of people when talking about the console. Unlike games like Ratchet and Clank or Sly Cooper, though, Jak is light on gimmicks, predominately taking the style of game Naughty Dog established in Crash Bandicoot and expanding it out to offer more freedom and more character. The game’s fairly simple design, mostly revolving around using 3D platforming to get collectables, is what helps it hold up today. We’re going to be talking about world design and the benefits presented by having all the levels exist in a single contiguous map, the cartoony aspects of the game and its characters, and we dissect the true purpose of the bolted shut mine carts in the Volcanic Crater level. Thank you for joining us this week! On occasion, we get to go back to our original list of games we made for the podcast years and years ago and find something that we finally think it’s time to cover, and this was one of those games. Does it hold up? Yes and no, really. It holds up about as well as you could expect given the decades since its original release, but it still feels worth returning to if you haven’t played it before. Do you agree? Let us know in the Discord or in the comments. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Dragon Age: Origins, but without Chad, so I’m sure that will entice all of you to join us for that episode!

The podcast’s name is NOCLIP. Saying it’s name will anger it. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket. We’re a ways off from Halloween, but today, we’re going to be talking about Phasmophobia, with our regular guests Dan, Janelle and Steven. Phasmophobia is a cooperative ghost hunting game where you and (hopefully) your friends use a variety of tools to determine what kind of spirit is occupying a space in the vein of popular ghost hunting TV shows. The game was released last year in early access and drew in a surprising number of players given its pretty janky state. The game is obviously a horror title, but the aforementioned jank also gives the game an (intentionally or not) outlandishly silly tone at times, meaning that emotionally, you’re usually swinging back and forth from laughing and goofing off to running out of a spot where some spooky audio or visual trick happened. All in all, even being kind of unfinished, the game offers a kind of depth and experimental play pattern that does keep it fun and entertaining, especially when you’re playing it with people you like. We’re going to be talking about how the strength of the audio design pulls more than its weight in making this horror game scary, role playing and teamwork in a slow paced horror title and the enviable but occasionally problematic nature of The Guy in the Van. Thank you for listening to NOCLIP Pocket this week! We decided to talk about this game mostly as an excuse for us to get together online and play games. Is it selfish? Nope, it’s content creation, baby! Did you play this game during its big boom? By how far did we miss the boat on this game? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Donut County, a game where you play as a hole in the ground, which is a concept too intriguing for us to pass up.

Try to focus on maintaining the proper podcast! Welcome back to NOCLIP! Today, after many months of preparation, our sweat and tears (but fortunately no blood) have culminated in this episode about Ring Fit Adventure! Ring Fit Adventure is a game about exercising set within in a pretty self-aware RPG. You travel from place to place and fight monsters, yeah, but all of your general movement and attacks are performed by doing simple exercises like squats and leg lifts. And that is ostensibly what we’re going to be talking about today. However, if there was ever a way for a video game podcast to analyze the mechanical feel of working out, we haven’t found it, and the artifice surrounding the actual game systems are so buck wild that they steal a lot of the focus. The “Adventure” part of Ring Fit Adventure centers around a quest to regain your ever-present companion’s powers to stop a comically jacked dragon from wreaking havoc, all of which is nestled in a very forgiving game that reminds you to take breaks at regular intervals and to stay hydrated, far from the concerns of your typical RPG protagonist. These things make Ring Fit both a real novelty in the realms of both fitness games and RPGs and help it to hit a ratio between carrot and stick that actually makes it worth playing. We’re going to be talking about item management and fail states in a game that wants you to keep playing it for your own well-being, characters and voice acting existing where you kind of didn’t even think about them as important elements, and we explore the real and unreal universes lorded over by Tipp, Master of the Space Between. Thank you for joining us again this week! This was a weird one in a lot of ways, and if you didn’t play along, I can’t say you’ll be spoiled exactly. If you did though, how did the game work for you? Did it successfully trick you into doing aerobics in your free time? We were personally surprised how much of an actual workout it was and how little pretense it has for that workout, unlike other games in the genre. Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Next time, we’re jumping back not just from very active games but also to the far flung year of 2001 to talk about Jak and Daxter, so we hope you’ll join us then.

Aw, poor baby! Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket (monsters)! Today, due to some scheduling conflicts, we are not going to be talking about Phasmophobia, but instead the 2000 match 3 puzzle game Pokémon Puzzle League. Puzzle League is a game that both of us played a good bit in our younger years, but wasn’t quite notable enough to really maintain any level of popularity long after its release, coming out as part of the never ending deluge of Pokémon branded content that has existed since the series became popular. And do we think that should be different? Well, at the risk of spoiling parts of the episode, no not really, but it is still a fun game, holding up largely by its nostalgic value and simple mechanics. The game largely follows the same design as Tetris Attack, which is definitely a good game, and by extension this is similarly satisfying to play and get better, which is amplified by the one big twist in the form of 3D mode. We’re going to be talking about the Pokémon coat of paint and what it does for the game, how we think the game could have differentiated itself, and we hypothesize about what a show called “Rocket Mode Today” would be like. Thank you for joining us this week, and sorry we didn’t have the specifically scheduled game ready this time. Did you play this game as a kid, and was it closer to 90 or 100 percent because it had the word Pokémon in the title? And we’d like to know if you enjoyed this episode, because we were able to turn this one out quickly because of our vast experience with the game and there are definitely some other nostalgic hits we could turn out with more of a focus on the emotional experience of a childhood favorite than breaking down why matching colored blocks is fun. Let us know in the comments, or over on Discord! Next time we will almost certainly be talking about Phasmophobia.

He ain’t eatin’ the podcast, Jack! I made that for him! Welcome back to NOCLIP! Today we’re going to be touching on a somewhat out of season horror game, but fear not (or fear yes, in fact), as there is a sequel coming in just a couple of months. Resident Evil VII, which released a few years ago, before the series began remaking its games like it was going out of style, marked what is a long awaited return to form for much of its fanbase. The series had progressed beyond its survival horror roots into something more action focused following the massive success of the fourth game, but after a 5 year hiatus following the most controversial entry, to put it generously, in the series, the shift back to the more limited and slow paced style of horror was a welcome one. RE7 is set entirely in first person, a move that both sheds light on the influence Capcom took from popular games in the genre and allows for a VR mode to be implemented without changing the base mechanics, and contains more resource management and slow methodical exploration. Because of this, and the “large domicile” locale, the game ends up being compared more often to Resident Evil than it does to Resident Evil 6, and that feels like a successfully implemented design to me. We’re going to be talking about inventory space limitations and what it brings to the table, the reinforcement and undermining of character and plot, and we have hidden a personality test in the episode that will tell you if you have a big brain or are an ignorant baby. Thank you for joining us this week! This was a game we’ve wanted to play (both at all and in VR) since it came out, and the buzz surrounding the sequel seemed like a good enough excuse. Not to spoil our thoughts, but we were surprised in a lot of places at how well the game pulls off what it’s going for, and it’s definitely worth playing or revisiting if you’ve been through it before. It may not have a tall lady you want to do frankly confusing but undeniably sexy things to you, but it does have a door you have to put sigils in to unlock, so the sanctity of Resident Evil is safe and sound.

A fish ate my podcasting license… Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about A Short Hike, an indie adventure game and the third game in our deeply important series of bird based games on Pocket. A Short Hike is a very minimalist game, both in style and length, but there is still a good bit to do and explore, even if the game’s world isn’t so big. Part platformer, part adventure game, you spend much of your time in the game collecting items to reach new heights and complete tasks to deepen your relationships with the animal characters who inhabit the camp in which the game takes place. It’s these charming characters that give the game it’s personality. To the point where it feels reductive to refer to doing things for them as “completing tasks,” as the rewards you get for finishing them are much less important than the mostly tiny stories they all have. Combine that with a surprisingly satisfying set of movement mechanics and a dynamic soundtrack, and you get a really focused experience that oscillates between calming exploration and exhilarating flights around the island. We’re going to be talking about the host of different activities available to do in the game’s open world, how the dialogue really sells the game’s light but personal narrative, and how close we are in age to the target demographic for fishing. Thank you for joining us again this week! This game comes from a half-joking suggestion on our Discord server we got after posting the Unfinished Swan episode, and I’m personally really happy to have been made aware of it. This type of short, calming game is really welcome during stressful times (see, e.g., a global pandemic, playing Resident Evil VII, etc.), so I hope if you decided to play along this week that this game was able to put you in a more relaxed headspace. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Phasmophobia, partly to act as a counterpart to what we’re playing for the main podcast next, and partly as an excuse to screw around online with some friends, so I hope you’ll join us for that!

Banished into the depths of the Great Podcast. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re talking about Lunacid, a game that is in its own words, inspired by old FROMSOFTWARE titles like King’s Field and Shadow Tower. And while you can definitely feel the influence, the game does enough to stand out on its own that it’s definitely worth playing. You play as someone cast into the Great Well, essentially an enormous dungeon, with escape being your only goal. This goal is pretty emblematic of the game, as well, as it is extremely vague and leaves the player mostly just exploring each area in hopes of finding clues to help them progress. This is a massive strength in that it preserves the mystery inherent to a lot of FROM’s catalogue while forcing the game’s exploration elements to the forefront, which the design is obviously very focused around. It also results in the game being a bit aimless, which depending on who you are can be a little frustrating, but with enough meaningful rewards to find to keep you playing. Weapons and spells are extremely plentiful, offering a lot of ways to interact with both combat and the world itself, with some specific interactions like unlocking paths as well as more player-driven things like being able to skip some obstacles and reach strange locations. Lunacid is nostalgic, thanks to its aesthetic design, but it is also a captivating world to explore that folds in more recent design trends to make something more transcendent than just a copy of its inspirations. We’re going to be talking about the games by which Lunacid’s design is influenced, the presentational choices from character designs to the music’s genre and style, and we discuss whether we were or were not in “the know.” Thank you for joining us again this week! This was a game I knew I wanted to do pretty much as soon as I’d heard about it, so while we aren’t exactly day and date with its release, it was one we scheduled as soon as possible. Did you play this game in early access or since it’s been out in full? Did you find it to be more or less similar to Dark Souls? Let us know in the comments below or over on our Discord! We’re sort of continuing on a trend for the next episode and we’re going to be talking about Lies of P, the Soulslike that features Pinocchio for some reason, so we hope you’ll join us for that!

Your podcast provides you with a certain mindless strength, but such power has its limits. Welcome back to the podcast! This week, we’re, along with everyone else over the last few months, talking about Hades, Supergiant’s action Roguelite game. One of Hades’ most successful design decisions was to make the game extremely hard to become frustrated with. With an extensive list of unlockable abilities and upgradeable weapons as well as in depth character relationship paths, every time you die in the game you always feel like you’re making some progress. Even more than that, though, you actively look forward to returning to the hub, as each time you set out, you’ll have goals in mind for what to do with the resources you acquire on the run. This takes away the sting of losing a run that dissuades many people from continuing with Roguelike games most of the time, and makes you feel like you are always stronger than the last time you began. And that’s just scratching the surface of why this game has become so popular. Everything from the music to the dialogue to the art is polished and enticing and the mechanics feel like they have been boiled down from the essence of what made Supergiant’s other games as good as they were. We’re going to be talking about how the themes of the game play with the genre and mix to tell a compelling story, how the core gameplay loop keeps you engaged through multiple runs, and who in the game gives off the best himbo vibes. Thank you for listening this week! With this game in the bag, we can finally focus on actually playing other games for the podcast… But did you get as sucked into Hades as we did? What gods did you favor, and how many runs did it take you to taste sweet victory for the first time? Let us know in the comments, or over on Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Resident Evil 7, as Village is releasing early and we always have too many games we’re excited to play around Halloween time, so we hope you’ll enjoy a slightly out-of-season horror and check us out then.

This podcast was recorded in “Arm Swing” style. Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket, where this week, we’re going to be talking about Downwell, a Rougelike platformer where your goal is just to fall all the way down to the bottom. Obviously this is more difficult to do than it sounds, but even with as difficult as this game is, it’s that simplicity that makes it stand out. You only ever need to move left and right and press a single button, making the game incredible easy to learn and putting you immediately into the loop of getting better, rather than having to take the time to teach you everything you are capable of doing. This also means that the first area of the game never needs to be so easy as to be a tutorial, meaning that your runs begin nearly as intense as the previous one ended. Combined with the short length of most attempts and how quickly you can restart and try again, it makes the game an extremely frantic experience. We’re going to be talking about how the audio and visual elements of the game play into making the mechanics as smooth as possible, how the different powerups and styles affect your decision making, and our overwhelming lack of skill. Thank you for listening again this week! This is our first Roguelike, though admittedly it’s fairly atypical of the genre mechanically, and it immediately butted up against the idea of how much of a game needs to be played before you can make a judgment on it. For fans of the genre, how much time do you put into a Roguelike before you know you like it? As a genre designed to be difficult from the start in order to make the die and restart flow meaningful, sometimes it’s hard to tell. Let us know in the comments or on Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about A Short Hike, which you could argue is more our speed.

I know it’s selfish, but this is my podcast! Welcome back! Twenty years after the game’s release and five years of doing this podcast, we are finally going to talk about our first Final Fantasy game. Ten specifically is a game that we have a history with and which has been specifically requested, so we carved out the time to talk about it. FFX is the first Final Fantasy game to be released on the PS2, and made use of the new hardware to create a game that was of an extremely high fidelity for the time, spawning an association between the franchise and high quality visual presentation. Crisp 2001-era graphics aren’t the only innovation though, and FFX also introduced us to the Sphere Grid, an intimidating-looking change to the way leveling was handled that didn’t really get revisited afterward, but is extremely interesting nonetheless. All this set against the typically high-stakes story about saving the world from an ancient evil, now with fully voiced characters portrayed by a professional cast. We’re going to be talking about how the game feels scaled-down from previous games in the series and how this linearity affects everything from mechanics to the plot to the end game content, how complicated the sphere grid really is, and which character is actually an animatronic shark behind the scenes. Thank you for joining us this week! Doing JRPGs like this always takes us a bit, since they tend to be on the longer side, and that’s probably reflected in the length of this episode. So, I apologize if you prefer us to be a little snappier, but we wanted to give the game its due. Still, it feels like there’s so much involved with this game’s legacy, do you think there’s anything we left out? Were we too hard on Kimahri? Let us know in the comments or on our Discord server! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Supergiant’s Hades, so that I have a reason to stop playing it and do something else with my time, so I hope you’ll join us then.