Flow State – Details, episodes & analysis

What this on YouTube at https://youtu.be/wGwtEtuuChM
Read more from Matt at matthorton.live
Support Flow State at ko-fi.com/matthorton

“Is Persona Gay?” by GarfieldKermit - https://youtu.be/37LacI2erq8?si=rEMKHsbLvATmSGRk
Gameplay footage provided by Faz
Read Brendon Bigley's review at Wavelengths - https://wavelengths.online/posts/persona-3-reload-a-review
"Katsura Hashino, directing Persona 5" by Archipel - https://youtu.be/jGb3BNgU7SE?si=O3V4WbM4nu7AchMu
"You should play 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim" by me! - https://youtu.be/O7EhtgGg4pc?si=_ng5V8GvgBWX_Tcw

0:00 - Persona has a problem
0:50 - Love things and critique them
2:05 - Persona 3 Reload is a masterpiece
5:27 - What is Persona 3 Reload?
7:46 - The best parts of Persona 3 Reload
15:02 - Critiquing what I love
24:45 - I want a Persona 6 without problems
28:54 - I recommend Persona 3 Reload (with caveats)

Listen to Flow State on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get podcasts

Support my work at Ko-Fi.com/matthorton

My writing - MattHorton.live
My podcast - cantletitgo.gay
Kim's video game podcast - dotzip.online
Kim's frod podcast - frogpod.online

1000xRESIST by Sunset Visitor - sunsetvisitor.studio
Gameplay footage by @samussonic-plays
Check out the dotzip 1000xRESIST spoilercast at https://share.transistor.fm/s/9180106a

1000xRESIST is not only a game about remembering. It is a game about we carry forward and what we must choose to forget. Holding onto every memory from every person on the entire planet is both impossible and dangerous. Some things just don't fit in the backpack.

Chapters
0:00 - Spoiler Warning
0:29 - Sometimes you just don’t fit in the backpack
3:07 - Making 1000xRESIST
5:02 - Watcher
8:03 - Iris
19:35 - Youngest
23:09 - The Occupants
27:47 - Blue
38:51 - Watcher
42:31 - Iris & Clara
48:20 - Principal
52:39 - Secretary
59:49 - What do we carry forward?

0:00 - A great game
1:50 - The expert
2:59 - What games work on Steam
4:21 - Where Season did well
6:01 - Why talk about Steam?
7:38 - Marketing doesn't mean success
8:20 - DATA
8:44 - A secret formula
9:32 - What games don't work
10:53 - What about Steam Deck?
12:11 - A buzzy game you might know
14:48 - Ways to make a game work
15:36 - What about cozy games?
17:16 - Sports games do bad on Steam
18:22 - Pokémon-likes, on the other hand...
19:38 - Something doesn't add up...
22:11 - This is like software design
23:24 - Twitter is not real life
24:25 - NBZ helps me
26:04 - What people read on a Steam page
28:01 - The false door test

At the end of January, a game released that changed how I think of games completely. Season A Letter to the Future had been building hype through multiple trailers during PlayStation events. Season, at its simplest, is a game about riding a bike, taking pictures, and recording audio. Call it wholesome or cozy, but Season fits nicely into this extremely popular niche of games whose goals are not to best an opponent or kill an enemy. In Season, Estelle's goal is simply to document her world and its culture before that culture comes to an end. Season's first trailer drew a lot of interest. It looked beautiful and contemplative and like a game I was going to devour. It was rather big news when word came out that the game's director and Scavenger Studios co-founder Simon Darvaux had harassed staff working on the game and had a toxic management style. It was a little quieter news when an investigation found that Scavenger Studios had dealt with Darveau's toxicity appropriately and that he would return to the studio in a more isolated role working on a different game. But perhaps the most shocking news came months after Season's release in June, when Scavenger Studios laid off half of their staff due to the game's extremely poor performance. After a strong indie game hype cycle and being featured in multiple PlayStation events, Season only sold around 60,000 copies across PS5 and Steam. The game underperformed what was expected in sales, and very likely, I think, underperformed what was necessary to make up the costs of development. When this news came out, I put a link to the gamesindustry.biz story in a Discord server that I frequent. The series of responses that I got from today's guest are what completely changed how I think about games, or at least how those games are marketed. 

In this video, NBZ walks me through the ways that indie games are marketed and why some great games fail when others don't.

MY LINKS

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🔗 ALL of my links - https://MattHorton.live 

Welcome to Terra Nil, the unique city-builder game that challenges you to restore a barren planet rather than exploit it for resources. In this game, you're not the typical city-builder where you bulldoze forests, pollute rivers and strip-mine mountains to build your metropolis. Instead, you must work with nature to heal the planet and create a thriving ecosystem.

And it's the first game this year to truly blow me away.

0:00 - What is Terra Nil
1:03 - This is Devolver game?
1:24 - How Free Lives make games
2:08 - How I found the game
2:56 - Playing Terra Nil
3:54 - It's a power fantasy
4:47 - Recycling difficulty
5:16 - The first game to grip me this year

🔗 ALL of my links - https://MattHorton.live 

In Papers, Please, you take the role of a citizen of the fictional nation Arstotzka, modeled after Cold War totalitarian Eastern European nations. The government of Arstotzka has just ended a war with the neighboring country of Kolechia, and the player character has been appointed as an immigration inspector as the tensions from that recent war continue.

Papers, Please is also a game that reminded me too much of my real life.

0:00 - This makes me uncomfortable
0:03 - Papers, Please
1:28 - When I finally played it
1:53 - Too close to home
2:55 - No wrong way to be an immigrant
3:46 - I'l never finish this game

While Elden Ring has generated a lot of buzz and excitement, there are other games that interested me more in terms of gameplay, storytelling, and overall enjoyment. I'll be sharing my top picks for the best games of 2022 and explaining why I think they're the ones you should play. If you're a fan of Elden Ring or just want to know what other games to catch up on from this year, you'll find something great to play here.

These are my favorite games of 2022.

0:00 - What games meant to me this year
1:21 - It's a Pokémon game!
4:01 - A puzzle game for mystery lovers
5:12 - This game feels like being a kid again
8:08 - You love superheroes and cards?
13:22 - They made 3 MOVIES for this game
16:43 - The best, ugliest game
17:49 - You still love superheroes and cards?
19:25 - Such a cute little fox
21:08 - The game that made my year

MY LINKS

Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live

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Credits:
Marvel SNAP OST - Chris Alan (https://thechrisalan.com/2022/06/02/who-wrote-the-soundtrack-to-marvel-snap/)
Hero - Martin Garrix and JVKE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5spiMVI9U8)
Hero (Piano Cover) - Jarel Gomes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RWNBmTIGtY)

Links to everything @ https://MattHorton.live

0:00 - I shouldn't love this game
1:20 - What SNAP does right
1:46 - Cards RULE
2:15 - The Marvel of it all
3:01 - Why do the mechanics work?
4:12 - The Snap
4:58 - Is it pay to win?
6:45 - What Marvel SNAP gets wrong
6:56 - Cyber Holiday changed my mind
8:37 - What did it cost?
9:03 - I'd rather buy the physical copy
9:46 - You have to do better, Marvel
10:57 - We've done this before
11:59 - Players want credits
13:12 - You're supposed to enjoy video games
14:01 - Marvel SNAP is great despite everything
14:47 - A silly thing I'm doing

Marvel SNAP is a card battler mobile game featuring a wide array of Marvel Comics characters. Players collect and build decks of cards featuring their favorite heroes and villains, and then engage in simple, strategic matches against other players (and occasionally bots). Each card has its own unique abilities and powers that often map directly to the character's super powers, and players must use those abilities wisely to outmaneuver their opponents and emerge victorious. Marvel SNAP's deckbuilding is approachable. It's game play is simple to understand, and it's characters are loved. 

But it's a genre known for predatory monetization practices, and I personally hate online competitive multiplayer games. But I love Marvel SNAP.

So what does Marvel SNAP get right?

0:00 - Content Warnings
0:45 - Is escape possible?
3:34 - Why Citizen Sleeper hit me this hard
6:55 - Who does YOUR body belong to?
9:26 - Citizen Sleeper's characters
16:12 - The body is not the self
20:42 - Content Warning: Body feelings
22:34 - Who do YOU belong to?
27:00 - Lem & Mina: An uncertain future
40:27 - Content Warning: Death and grief
42:01 - Where do you BELONG?
44:02 - Getting to know Emphis

Citizen Sleeper asks you to decide if escape is possible.

It took several minutes of impasse and tears and not touching my controller, for fear of making a decision before I was ready, for me to know what I thought about that question. Citizen Sleeper gives you several potential answers and in the ones that resonated with me was the kind of deep personal freedom you only find, sure enough, through community. 

Citizen Sleeper is about disability and body dysmorphia and the inevitability of corruption, and it is about the things the grow among and around those things. The antidotes and the byproducts.  

Citizen Sleeper is about collections of people: families, gangs, unions, neighborhoods, corporations, and communes. It is about the individuals that make them up and how their individual needs strengthen or threaten the collective. But for our purposes today, it is about place. Yes the whole of its corporate, colonized space, but also...the aging space station its story takes place on: Erlin's Eye.

The Eye is not exactly a welcoming home, but for a sleeper it is, in many ways, better than what they've come from. In the world of Citizen Sleeper, AI has been outlawed. So as a way of getting around that, the company Essen-Arp pays regular people to emulate their consciousness. It's a way to skirt the rules, but it also relies on there being people desperate enough to participate. These people are asleep in some kind of corporate facility, and their emulated consciousness is downloaded into a constructed body called a Frame. This new person is called a Sleeper, though many in this world would take issue with my calling them a "person." These Sleepers are forced to do some sort of labor for some period of time and when that time is up, the Frame is deactivated, the person whose consciousness they were made from wakes up, and that person gets paid for the work their Sleeper did.

As you might imagine, the Sleeper, an emulated human personality living inside a constructed body and being forced to work their entire life only to benefit another person, might have feelings about this arrangement. So Essen-Arp makes sure that if the Sleeper ever escapes, their Frame, their body, will begin to destabilize. It will break down at an accelerated rate. Death will always come for the Sleeper, either through violence or planned obsolescence.

And this is where the game places you at the start. You are an escaped Sleeper, nearly frozen in a cargo container, just trying to survive long enough to make it to Erlin's Eye. You're not sure where you'll go after that, but you know... well you hope there will be options when you get there.

MY LINKS

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Andrew Shouldice, creator and lead developer of Tunic, was actually heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, a game known for having many secrets that, depending on your perspective, are either genius or obtuse. But Tunic is heavily inspired also by games like Fez, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring. These are all games I have never played.

Tunic got me to love a Soulslike.

0:00 - The conundrum
1:24 - What people actually mean when they compare Tunic to Elden Ring
2:05 - How Tunic gripped me
4:09 - How Tunic makes difficulty fun
6:49 - Tunic is GORGEOUS

MY LINKS

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13 Sentinels pumps out huge reveals, twists and turns that are actually meaningful to its characters rather than being empty fan service, and just super fun story beats every few minutes. And it wears its many sci-fi inspirations on its sleeve. 

13 Sentinels is ostensibly a game about teenagers with secret powers that let them call down giant mechs to protect their city from kaiju attacks. But there's also an alien invasion plot line, a time travel element, and even an 80s high school drama. This game is referential, but its characters love the source material so fervently that reference quickly becomes reverence. It is unapologetic about its love for genre fiction and aims to be the epitome of those kinds of stories in a way only a video game can be.

0:00 - You should play 13 Sentinels
2:05 - This game is the best sci-fi tv show ever
4:48 - A few gripes about 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
6:59 - Who 13 Sentinels is for

MY LINKS

Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live

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