Explore every episode of the podcast Flow State
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Persona has a problem - Persona 3 Reload review | 21 Oct 2024 | 00:30:17 | |
What this on YouTube at https://youtu.be/wGwtEtuuChM “Is Persona Gay?” by GarfieldKermit - https://youtu.be/37LacI2erq8?si=rEMKHsbLvATmSGRk 0:00 - Persona has a problem Listen to Flow State on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, or wherever you get podcasts | |||
| What Should You Leave Behind? - 1000xRESIST Review | 26 Aug 2024 | 01:05:54 | |
Support my work at Ko-Fi.com/matthorton My writing - MattHorton.live 1000xRESIST by Sunset Visitor - sunsetvisitor.studio 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 | |||
| Why Great Games Fail | 15 Aug 2023 | 00:30:04 | |
0:00 - A great game 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 Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD | |||
| Terra Nil is the perfect game for climate anxiety | 05 Apr 2023 | 00:06:00 | |
🔗 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 | |||
| Why I'll never finish Papers, Please | 16 Mar 2023 | 00:04:34 | |
🔗 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 | |||
| The best games of 2022 (other than Elden Ring) | 25 Dec 2022 | 00:23:14 | |
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 MY LINKS Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD | |||
| Marvel Snap is so frustrating | 11 Dec 2022 | 00:15:10 | |
Credits: Links to everything @ https://MattHorton.live 0:00 - I shouldn't love this game 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? | |||
| Citizen Sleeper: How to Escape Dystopia | 20 Nov 2022 | 00:46:52 | |
0:00 - Content Warnings 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 Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD | |||
| Tunic did something Elden Ring could never | 13 Apr 2022 | 00:08:02 | |
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
Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD | |||
| You should play 13 Sentinels- Aegis Rim | 02 Apr 2022 | 00:08:21 | |
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 MY LINKS Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD | |||
| The Forgotten City - Beyond the White Hallway | 17 Oct 2021 | 00:19:45 | |
The Forgotten City has a VERY corny ending, and I LOVE it. I love it so much that I played The Forgotten City for a second time just to tell you why. This isn't a review, and it's not a video about The Forgotten City Skyrim mod. Instead, it's me trying to figure out why the ending to the 2021 worked for me and sharing that with you. I love making these kinds of videos, so please settle in and let me know in the comments if you liked it. @JacobGeller's video about The Forgotten City - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjGBP0E4zEs 0:00 - The White Hallway... | |||
| Abandoned Island - Animal Crossing New Horizons | 13 May 2021 | 00:10:10 | |
I haven't played Animal Crossing in a while. I bet you haven't either. The game does a lot to shame you when you log back in after a long time, and I have my own guilt attached to my abandoned island. I also have a lot of parallel guilt and shame attached to my body and how I treated food when I was originally playing Animal Crossing New Horizons. That connection is what this video is about. Obvious CONTENT WARNING for body image talk, food talk, and honestly just talk about pandemic grief. I have a lot to unpack, and I hope it's helpful for some people. 0:00 - A content warning
Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD | |||
| Don't be stubborn. Use a guide. | 02 Jun 2024 | 00:19:49 | |
It turns out that it's easier and more enjoyable to get things done when you're nicer to yourself. Text version at https://MattHorton.live The IGN review of Animal Well - https://www.ign.com/articles/animal-well-review 0:00 - Something is wrong with me | |||
| Fantasian - Apple Arcade - Review of the first five hours | 06 Apr 2021 | 00:07:19 | |
Hironobu Sakaguchi, Final Fantasy creator, has released a new game EXCLUSIVE to Apple Arcade called Fantasian. It's a throwback to the Square Enix FF7 era, but its setting is entirely made of PHYSICAL DIORAMAS. This is how I feel about the game including the issues with iCloud saves that I encountered trying to play an Apple Arcade game on Mac, iPhone, AND iPad (but not Apple TV). 0:00 - PHYSICAL SETS MY LINKS Find MY Discord, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD | |||
| Hogwarts Legacy Character Creation and J. K. Rowling's Transphobia | 10 Mar 2021 | 00:29:15 | |
In this video, I talk to two trans people about the news that the video game Hogwarts Legacy could have trans options in its character creator. This Hogwarts Legacy news paired with J. K. Rowling's notorious transphobia had my brain flying around, but I didn't want to share my own opinions on Hogwarts Legacy, JK Rowling, and the news surrounding them. I wanted to ask trans folks what they thought. AC's website - https://acfacci.com 0:00 - Why we're here MY LINKS Find my Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and Discord at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD | |||
| GBA In 2021: I built a $250 Game Boy Advance in 2021 | 28 Feb 2021 | 00:10:44 | |
An Internet acquaintance recently showed off his custom Gameboy Advance collection, and I immediately fell down the rabbit hole of retro modding and custom gameboy builds. When my husband asked what I wanted for my birthday, parts for my own build was the only answer. I bought a Gameboy Advance in 2021 and built it exactly the way that I wanted it. This is that custom GBA build. Kyle Starr's IG: https://www.instagram.com/_kylestarr 0:00 - A man of many hobbies MY LINKS Find my Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and Discord at https://matthorton.live MB01XIRFX2S97ZD | |||
| Games That Got Me Through 2020 | 14 Dec 2020 | 00:14:00 | |
Games That Got Me Through 2020 These are my top 5 games of 2020. These are the games that, looking back at 2020, stick with me the most, built the most important memories, and were the most fun. And with everything that went wrong in 2020, these are the games that kept me going. 0:00 - Looking back on 2020 MY LINKS Find my Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, and Discord at https://matthorton.live | |||
| Kentucky Route Zero: A Game You Can't Win | 21 Oct 2020 | 00:34:23 | |
This is a love letter to Kentucky Route Zero. Kentucky Route Zero is a game you can't win. It tells you it's a tragedy. 0:00 - The most important moment of the game Kentucky Route Zero is one of the best games I played this year, and this video is why. Actually, it is a game, but it's really a point and click game, adventure game, visual novel combo. There's a LOT of reading, but it's also one of my favorite Nintendo Switch games of 2020. Magical realism, anti-capitalism, and some serious David Lynch vibes make this one of the best games of 2020 for me. A game ostensibly based in rural Kentucky, you play Conway, on a search for 5 Dogwood Drive. This sends you on a route down the Zero, a mysterious highway in the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky. The game tells you it's a tragedy and that your strategies are useless. It's not the kind of game you win. You can't min-max your way to a good ending. This is my Kentucky Route Zero review. I played the Nintendo Switch version, so all the of the Kentucky Route Zero gameplay you're seeing is from the TV Edition. Included in this video is my cover of a hymn that is included on the Kentucky Route Zero soundtrack. If you'd like to download that yourself, watch all the way to the end for instructions. MY LINKS Thanks to the Kentucky Route Zero unofficial Discord for the assistance. Love Letter icon by Vectors Market and Noun Project. | |||
| This video game changed my life (for real) | 29 Apr 2024 | 00:03:21 | |
Citizen Sleeper changed my life. Did it make it any better? Citizen Sleeper: How to Escape Dystopia - https://youtu.be/Eiyf-4FhdFs 0:00 - Citizen Sleeper changed my life Get Balatro running on iOS - https://old.reddit.com/r/iosgaming/comments/1bnf0zy/tutorial_run_balatro_on_your_ios_device/ | |||
| Stop doing homework! | 30 Mar 2024 | 00:03:19 | |
Read more at https://MattHorton.live 0:00 - X-Men '97 rules (no spoilers) I swear you don't need to watch all of X-Men the Animated Series to start X-Men '97. And you don't need to catch up. I swear. Stop doing homework just to have fun. Just enjoy things! | |||
| I'm embarrassed I never played a Yakuza game | 19 Feb 2024 | 00:04:25 | |
0:00 - Yakuza: Like A Dragon is good More writing at https://MattHorton.live I'll spoil the point up front for you. Yakuza: Like A Dragon rules. It's a great game, and I regret not playing a game in this series until now. You know what I usually hate? Long, overly complex games, over the top, macho violence, and turn based combat. So why did I start Like A Dragon? Because Like A Dragon Infinite Wealth features a famous Hawaiian t-shirt shop that was also featured in the now defunct reality Netflix show Terrace House. That's truly it. Just imagining the vibe of watching Terrace House Aloha State and playing Infinite Wealth at the same time sounded so fun. | |||
| Midnight Suns Deserves a Sequel | 29 Jan 2024 | 00:33:02 | |
This video and more writing at https://MattHorton.live My podcast https://cantletitgo.gay 0:00 - Marvel's Midnight Suns | |||
| The Game Awards Don't Matter | 28 Nov 2023 | 00:09:40 | |
| Broken Games are Good, Actually | 29 Oct 2023 | 00:12:21 | |
0:00 - I love broken games | |||
| Pokémon Needs to Evolve: Cassette Beasts Review | 25 Aug 2023 | 00:20:07 | |
0:00 - Cassette Beasts really works for me 🔗 All my links @ https://matthorton.live Kyle Labriola's Sea of Stars Review - https://cohost.org/kylelabriola/post/2762235-thoughts-on-sea-of-s | |||