Bounding across the barren video game landscape in search of digital treasure and probably our parents, it’s 1upsmanship! This time our boys take on the recently released and largely panned Playstation exclusive Forspoken in a desperate attempt to add their laundry list of gripes to the pile. But things take a turn toward the celestial as Michael and Adam discuss the value of the Hero’s Journey as a story structure in 2023, the value of a game being made for financial considerations, and how the combat is actually sorta awesome when you finally get all your upgrades. Check it out!
Oh, nothing. You know, we've never talked about this, Mike, But if we were to do an episode that was worst Companions ever, there would be a lot of contenders this year. Have you noticed that in games this year? There has been a lot. Yes, there's been so many bad companions this year. You're gonna have to refresh my memory. Okay, So one of them is And I don't want to get too far ahead because I think at some point we might talk about this game, but Atomic Hearts has a pretty bad companion. And you can see you're talking about the sentient glove. Yeah you consider that a companion. Okay, Yeah, it's a voice in your head that you're dealing with all time. Decide they have to have a life bar be able to be killed or did we not decide that? It's just pretty little with it. And consequently another contender has to be cuff from this game, right right, I see where you're going. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this game has a companion that was quite a choice. And I don't like to get into editorializing too fast. I mean, if I can such a striking thing, if I can review the character in the form of a palindrome fuck cup, it works. Play that backwards. Thank you. Yeah yeah, yeah, immortalized that. Put that on my tombstone. Welcome everyone to one Upsmanship, where we create palindromes and poetic renderings of all of our video game faults and opinions. I am one of your hosts, Adam Ganzer, and with me is my my favorite colleague and escort mission please sir. Yeah, that's me, Mike Swain. I thought, are you? Yeah? I think people should write in and determine who's the who's the PC, and who's the companion. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to claim I just I'm not going to let you claim it. It's a that's why you let us know. That's fair. I'm the joker and you're Batman right now, you know, just just sowing seeds of discord as the little ventriloquist dummy who's also a gangster. That's me, that guy. Yeah, I love that guy. Uh. And we've elected to cover a game this week that was I guess universally panned is probably maybe that's an overstatement, but a game that was not well received, but is a gigantic PlayStation exclusive that we both happened to play. So we decided to talk about it and that game is for spoken. Yeah, I think it's I think it's worth talking about. Um yeah, me too, because it's if you'll cast your minds back to when the hype train was full steam for the PS five uh Frey main character and four Spoken and the four Spoken engine was one of the first tech demos that they were that Sony really is to push the PS five and to try and prove that the next generation looks better than the old generation. And I got to see this footage of I will say, truly amazing like cave interiors with many, many, many sounds done, but many rocks and they all cast an individual shadow, and it did look very impressive. And this character who was unnamed at the time, runs through and jumps around in this way where if you're a if you're a lifelong gamer, you had yourself asking, as we often do, is that how you'll actually move when you press X in the game or is that just a computer graphic just animation? Yeah, and this is the game so like I also compare it to like Astro's Playroom. You know, it's a Sony exclusive designed to show off what PS five can be. And I think notably it's from Square Enix or Nix. I never know. I worked at IGNE and there was still disagreement. Um, but yeah who if you're unfamiliar, I always forget what's Square Proper and Square Enix. But they're involved with Square who primarily known for the Final Fantasy series and games in and Around which are also tell me out this year's Yeah, so it's a big year for them. So spoken, So forre spoken, for Spoken an ip they no doubt, at least hoped and maybe still will. We're going to make a franchise out of so I guess it's time then that we pass our very first checkpoint, Blake and tell everyone, like very bit exactly what for spoken is. If you do not hear anything about this game and have not been on the hype train. You want to do that, Mike, you want me to do I'll do it, Okay, great, But first time, if you hear my keyboard, which is allowed keyboard? What is the definition of for spoken? A good question because I was really having a hard time seeing the relation. Uh nothing really Okay. It's an archaic word meaning to cast a bad spell over or curse to force speak was like Witches and Salem were accused of force speaking. Okay, all right, okay, it doesn't so much to do with the plot of the game, which is about Frey, a young woman of color, which I mentioned only because of its relevance in the fact that she's had a rough life and you feel like she's fallen through the cracks of the system or not been served. She's out of desperation, you know, turns to like petty crime, and she's like a tough street gal in I think New York. I don't even remember. Maybe Chicago, Yeah, it's it's New York. She okay, she finds herself her name's like, is it Freya or anyway, her nicknames Frey because it's part of her proper name, which I also forget. She finds herself in and out of court a lot, you know, juvenile court, in front of the same judge a lot, to the point that they seem to have something of a relationship. The judge is trying to be nice or says the things you would hope a judge would say, or judges off and say and move. These are stories like this, which is like I want to let you off the hooker, like I want you to turn your life around. But you know, blah blah blah, Like you keep sucking up, you keep showing up here. So that's our that's our protag and that's our starting place. Right. She's not in a good place, or like she seems spunky and like she's not. She's still got a lot of fight. She's not depressed or anything, but her life is tough. And then, dude, I don't even remember why, but she finds this magic cuff. There was a fire. There was a magic fire in her apartment that may forced her to run. That's where I remember running from the fire, which is funny because it doesn't have any I stood there for a long, long, long long time, and you never die, like you can just chill in the fire. But eventually, yeah, you leave and find a magic golden cuff that starts to talk to you, and it all makes sense eventually, because this was all destined to happen. Spoiler but opens up a portal and you get sucked into an alternate world. I even forget what the world is called. But there's a thing going on there called the Break, which is a you know, like an evil fog. God. I hate I'm sorry to tip my head. It's not a good story, but so everything's post apocalyptic. There's no real NPCs. The open world is just a huge vast area with enemies, and there's a central hub that's a city where all the remaining survivors are, and you know, the countrysides covered with zombies because the break, the people that get cotton it turn into evil monsters, and there's all kinds of monsters. And you're a special girl, so you get special powers from the cuff and from your affinity with this world, which you're trying to find out more about. At first, all she wants to do is to get home, but of course there's I mean, it's post apocalyptic, and it's apocalyptic because there's these things called the Four Tantas, which are these four leaders who used to be good, almost like the triforced goddesses or what have you. They used to be good, but they went insane when the break happened, and they're bad now and they rule over like the lands that you're going to liberate, of course, and you know it's that old jam like you want to go home, but you get wrapped up in these epic events and you see a little kid get killed and it affects you deeply, so only you can save the world, so you set aside your personal ambitions to save the world, which you do buy basically skating around and they call it magic parkour, but I would compare it to grinding and Tony Hawk or like the way you know it in a game called The Pathless if you happen to play that, or Infamous Second Son, which I think more people played, or a Sunset Overdrive a bit so like Frey, she can walk, she does, but also she's very she can like skate on magic light and zoom around, right the thing that they tech them always saw promised, So you can zoom around and you get a grappling hook eventually, and that's the traversal. And then as far as combat, you flip around and you unlock different skill trees that give you different magical abilities that basically boiled down to a shooty shot one, a slashy slashy one with a magic red sword, and then like a green one that's still shooty shooty, but it's it mimics bow and arrow physics instead of gun physics, and you one by one, I mean, you meet some people and we'll get into it, like Aubrey or whatever. Her name is, and her the guy who can help you get home, but he dies, and you know, epic stuff happens, but it eventually is just you go to each realm and kill each boss and when you do. The twist is I believe that you're actually the daughter of the Greatest Tanta and you were left in the human world for safekeeping, and that's why you've always felt out of place, and you stay here and you ascend to you were rightful destiny, which is like being a badass super heroine in this realm, and you're going to stay in this realm and save the world from any future threats that Square Unix may want to like pose And that's it, I believe, Yeah, that is it. You are right, which I guess mean it's time for us to pass our very next chest oats like our very next one. Uh, And that means it's time for us to get right into hot Takeville us. Please listen. It's a good place. But it could be a good podcast episode. You don't know. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna go ahead and gone on a limb and say it is going to be a good podcast episode. I'm not worried about that. At all. Uh. And also I think there's things to learn from games like this, of course, right, So say, so you go, first, great, I really really juicy and engaging and hot. Let's hope I can. Let's okay, Well, the first thing is Adam Ganzer player one plugging in. Um, when you finally level up in this game, it has incredible gameplay physics and loops. Like the loops themselves once you finally get them all unlocked, which is, you know, ten hours twelve hours into the game into a game that's about fifteen hours by the way, UM, it is ordinarily fun. I think people missed out on that. They didn't actually have the fun that this game can be because it was not a well done build up to that. And so the physics themselves, the loops, the way it looks and stuff, all that stuff is great by the time you get all the powers and stuff. So I want everyone to remember that because the rest of what I'm going to say is kind of dragging on the game. But I think if you had earlier in the game, like I don't know if you'd moved that moment, let's say eight hours earlier, so that by three or four hours into the game, you had most of the basics of your powers. I think people would have lost their mind over how fun this game is. That's how good I think it is when it's working. Here's what happened with for Spoken. In my opinion, for Spoken seems like a game that believed that if I just do the tropes, you will feel the feelings. That is fundamentally what this game believes. In its narrative, it's gameplay, loops, in its mechanics, in its lore, in every aspect it believes the only thing that makes something emotionally engaging is doing the tropes. Right. This is a game that, if I could put it in a metaphorical sense, believes if I put together all the elements of a human being, it will be a conscious person. Right. It won't just be a meat monster. Right. Or if I was building a robot and just put all the pieces together, it would gain sentience. And here we are to learn that is not true. You cannot just do the tropes and expect that it will work. Here's an example of how that's happening. There's a bunch of them, but here they are. So. The first is this game believes it's more fun for us to have a playful relationship with our companion a la Navi and link or something, right, like it's trying to do Buddy cop. Yeah. Yeah, you and the talking cup are having like a fun bantery thing that feels like sort of a remnant from New York that you're bringing into this magical world or something, and they think it's funny that you are quibbling with it, and then they thought it was interesting and profound that spoilers. That's actually the big bad of the game. The Cuff is actually the poison that's ruining the world, and you fight him at the end. That's the last boss. We spoil these games here, so right that you are Tanta Sinta's daughter, right, Yes, that is correct. Yes, it's like a movie. I walked out of the theater and was like, I've immediately forgotten what happens. My mind was drained. Yeah, So, like it believes that by doing that banter, like just creating that dynamic, it will be fun and likable. The problem is they never grow as characters, and there's no emotional depth. Even to Frey, who we're spending a lot of time examining, she doesn't actually grow much. She's in kind of a stasis period where she just wants to get home and this place sucks for like ninety percent of this game, which makes her uninteresting most narratives. At the midpoint, they realize, oh, I got to refocus us around this new set of data so that I can you know, achieve my quest. That's like basic hero's journey stuff. This game made the mistake of that not really happening emotionally for her until like right around where the third act happens, which is way too late. It's just way too late. Another set of tropes that they just thought they could do and it would be interesting is the Harry Potter tropes. They do that. That's the story here. This is Harry Potter. This woman, this young woman is an orphan. She's in a world that doesn't care about her for cruel reasons that feel like they were designed to be somewhat commentary, and that would have been interesting if they'd carried that through, but they didn't quite carry it through, so it doesn't play exactly. And then she's you know, turns out she's the only one that can beat the Voldemort of this world, who also, by the way, is her companion, and you know then she just sort of learns how to be Harry Potter. That's the whole game, and it's we've just seen it so many times that we've done videos about how dumb it is and then done videos about how we're tired of hearing it at all anywhere, and now this game is sort of coming in and just doing the same tropes in a fairly genuine, non satirical way, and we're just not up for that right now. I would say, even though I like a lot of things about the representation of it, like it's a woman of color, it's mostly female characters, all that is good, this is just not a good story. Unfortunately. I think they deserve better, and I think finally it does really feel like they distilled all the cool stuff down to their basic, most simplest versions, and they just sort of ran out of time. Like the powers are all a color, like are they cool? Yeah, they're kind of cool, but they're also like a color, which feels very I don't know, like I'm playing. Simon says or something like there's no nuance or complexity here. The world is empty because they have a plot reason that says it should be empty, but it still feels like an empty video game world because they just did the tropes. Now. I don't know why that happened. I do know that they had to reboot entirely in the middle of development. I've heard that there's a screenwriter interview who's by the way, he's walked sideways from this as much as you can from the script where they rebooted the story entirely from the beginning in the middle of production. That's not a good sign. Also, the studio that made for Spoken has been absorbed back into Square Enix. That's also not a good sign. I would say this is probably a panicked project where they thought they could just sort of sketch the outline of a story and you would fill in the blanks, and they were wrong about that. That's my rant player too, plugging in. Michael Swaim is the name of this player. It will be a good episode because I super disagree with most of the stuff he said. Oh go, I do agree with the last thing you said really wholeheartedly, which is this is one of the So sometimes you see reviews where they say the team ran out of time, and maybe they know that because they follow industry news so closely. But I don't I follow gaming news like what games are coming out, but I tend to not follow down to the granular level, like until I worked at IgM, Like I don't know who Reggie fees on me is or what he does, like I just played Nintendo games. But that said, I've never played a game where it was so clear that they ran out of time. So not to smirch the developers, that must be a tough situation to be in. But there's two main things I want to say about the game. Because they ran out of time, it feels really sterile and hollow. And I'll break down why I make a tremendous overabundance of notes for this show, sometimes like twelve thirteen pages, because as I play the game, I just make notes every time I have a thought, and if a game is like thirty hours, it's really long. Like we only actually scratched the surface in this podcast, which I mentioned because in this case, I just have like one hundred and twelve bullet points of gripes. And I don't think the combat's ever fun at all or remarkable. I think it's just a junk drawer trash fire of epic proportions that no one should ever even consider playing unless they're interested in learning how you screw a game up, because the other the second leg of my argument is maybe there's a theoretically fun loop underneath all of that. As far as the combat goes, it felt a lot to me like not bad, not bad bad, but like, yeah, I've played Devil May Cry, and Devil may Cry felt more connected and dynamic than this, and that was twenty years ago or whatever, and to a lesser extent, darksiders those games. Anyway, I totally agree that it's also bizarre that the ultimate form where it kind of feels fun comes ninety percent of the way through the game, like the tech tree is not paced correctly. And yeah, I'll just wrap up by saying I'm really excited because I could just this whole episode. I could fill an hour just blandly going they did this, and that's bad for this reason. They made this game play choice. It doesn't work for this reason, and we know that because of these games. Yeah, I will try to avoid doing that, although I do think it's kind of fun. How many concrete things I could go like, that's incorrect, So we'll get into it. But it all just arrives under the umbrella of whatever game, whatever promise there once was under this game, they so consistently made every tiny micro decision of how like UI and everything incorrectly that it's one of the worst games I've ever played. It just sucks. It's just really really bad. Wow. Yeah, that's a hell of a rant fun stuff. Oh oh sorry, I'll end on the spiciest take of all. And then we got a hop To commercial which I do want to get back and get in game on. But I'll also say I do think by the fact that it does just cover tropes and do the basic hero's journey and rip off Harry Potter essentially, even to the point that a character says the line I'm quoting, you are the only hope we have. You are special. By embracing that trope, I think it falls into the long line of stories we tell ourselves that are among the most toxic, hurtful, not useful messages that you could pump into the collective psyche, which is life is about you. You are special. One day it'll all just come together for you for no reason. Because you're special. People actually grow up believing that to some degree, and it fucks everything up that's not a way to live your life thinking that. So I actually hate when stories have that message, or the message that if you just work hard and have a good heart, it will eventually happen for you. Guaranteed. I hate that message too, because it's not true, and we should be grooming ourselves to deal with how life really is through story. I love that. I love that because I really want to get into that. I don't want to get too far away from for spoken. But can we talk about that after the break of course it's interesting? Okay, great, well, then let me hasten to pay the bills, the thing that keeps the lights on, the purple, green and red lights on, so that we can continue on the other side, getting into what kind of stories should we be using socially to prepare ourselves to the future, looking forward to that After this we are magic parkouring back into Yes, we are the other realm that is one upsmanship where everything is pure game and philosophy. Yeah, this is game pass another checkpoint. I didn't want to solely devote the I really think you and I should do a philosophy podcast someday. But this keeps talking about it, So let you go through I will also say, I'm not trying to say that this is an exceptionally egregious or mouth intended I like that point, right though. Yeah, okay, and actually the heroes so I agree with you that the hero's journey has I think it was inspiring and fun when our culture was not saturated with obvious examples of disappointment, and when our culture did not value individualized self expression above all else, which we now value in the modern context, and we didn't any medial times for example. Right. Well, but also, I mean, you know, if you go back and look at stories and antiquity, they had a much more uh there, there were a lot more stories that were I think I'm going to use the wrong example, but sort of Aesop's fables where there was a kind of element of tragedy or a sort of life being unpredictable built into storytelling. That is no longer true because we focus so hard on individualized self actualizing narrative. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that, because I am reading original Grimm's fairy tales right now. Yes, people famously know that they're more gory than the original versions, but it's not gory without reason. What's interesting about Grimm's fairy tales is there's tons of them about how being prudent and virtuous and having good character will get you through a difficult situation, and there's an equal number where the virtuous, prudent character is randomly killed. And the message is that life is challenging and you can't control everything. And it's so fascinating to me that over the intervening five hundred years or whatever, we've groomed all those messages out, and we did we do all these stories where the good character lives happily ever after. That's the one we like. There is an excellent so I rarely recommend other podcasts, but like there is an actual series of podcasts on this exact subject by Malcolm Gladwell called Revisionist History. It was one of the seasons he got into the adaptation of The Little Mermaid as a launching point for what kinds of stories are good for us culturally and this exact problem. And he does a really nice job of it, better than we're going to do in our Gunslinger way. But I do agree with you that it's starting to feel hollow because we don't believe it anymore like our stories. No longer reflect the way we feel about the world, you know, and I think that adds to the hollow feeling of this game well, and my underscore the word we because keep in mind that I feel like there might be some aspect of this that's a universal human experience. As you age, you develop a more complex, nuanced relationship with life and the universe. So keep in mind that the reason we can keep doing these tropes over and over is that, Yeah, but new kids are born and they don't know any better, and they'll play for spoken and be like I'm special, you know, like I get when I was a kid with stories that I consider trite now. So that's I mean, we certainly we age out of idealism in some ways, and I don't want to poison the youth with my forty two year old Sinnisses. Don't age out of hope or the belief that we can make things better, but we age out of blind idealism. Yes, I agree with that, um. But also as part of this podcast, Malcolm Gladwell does he shows that that actually when you read a series of these uh stories of different types to children, they actually respond more emotionally to the Grimm's chaotic piece than they do to the self actualized piece, as in, it's a it's a we're actually like sort of nutrient deficient in terms of chaotic narrative now, So I hope that at least that's how I took his podcast, Like the conclusion of it, it must be mentioned some people are turning away from glad La Lake because you know, I don't know. Yeah, it has a lot of pet theories because that's his brand, and he talks about shit, and some are considered problematic, but sometimes I think he's spot on. It's a mixed bag with him, but I agree. I'm not advocating him, but podcast is exactly the thing we're talking about, and it does connect to for spoken in that we're trying to identify why are people so on, Like why do we all agree the story is unsatisfying? You know? Yeah, well and wrote, And I think part of it is not just that the tropes are wrote, but also that the and this is why I feel like they fell out of time, ran out of time. We've talked about with this with Fallout, I call him my Fallout fall Off. Fallout is one of my favorite franchises, be purely because of the vibe. I objectively play it and don't think it's the best game ever, but I would live in that world forever. And because of that, I actually get kind of a postpartum depression when I realize I have one hundred percent at a Fallout game that if I walk around the world now, people are just gonna say the same thing to me. For spoken starts in that place, no one ever has more than two lines. I mean outside of cut scenes. Anyone you talk to in the hub area is an mp PC with basically no dialogue tree to speak of. The most complex it gets is pretty much one or two and you choose and they say one more thing, and then the interactions over and all the interactions are I mean, I wrote some down, but like there's a part where you have like a yub dub celebration because you beat the first Tanta and you're walking through the crowd and people are saying stuff like here they are, there's our hero, there's the woman of the hour. Wow, you did a great job, Like wow, come on, guys, super first draft. Like the world map areas are full of evocative names like Blessed Planes, Pioneer Planes, Purple Magic Area, fountain fields and barren plays. These are the names of the areas you go to in this magic world, like the Laate the it got ripped on it a lot, So I want to move past it because I actually am interested in the game design flaws too. But as people agreed pretty much, yeah, their writing sucks, like, um, it's hard. And they had they had esteemed writers on this, by the way, like one of them, I want to say, Gary Widdows, his name wrote on Star Wars Rogue one. Oh, I think he's highly respected, great screenwriter. Yeah, it's just one of those things where it's like, so obviously the machine went off the rails here at some point, you know what I mean, Like obviously there's an internal problem that created this nightmare. Like there's this one point where their exposition dump is basically this mission. Oh and one of the things that killed me the whole point of the game is that the traversal at least feels fast and fluid, and somehow eventually they immediately take it away and do the like you can only walk at the slow speed in the hub, and there's only particular areas where you can do that movement. And now that you've moved really fast and cool, like Sonic the Hedgehog. Let's have you do this mission where you slowly walk to a library and you have to read seven books before you're allowed to leave the library. And there's just an interchange in that scene that I want to read, where um, you read something and Cuff says, and she says this is awful, and Cuff says, I think their subjects would agree with you. And then she says, I wonder where they all where the tantas went, And he says, so do many of their former subjects, and like, do you hear that? Like I even think non writers would hear change one of those two lines from Cuff or the same line twice. That's really monotone and boring. That's not engaging writing. And it's just that all through like everyone, everything everyone says is incredibly generic, like there's the Woman of the Hour f it's so like And also I think like there's just like a lack of the kind of polish that makes things feel real, like like again, scripts get much better in the second, third, fourth draft, even if you're not changing the beats, just from the softening of edges. Yeah, just that they get much better, and this feels like it's missing that pass like for instance game Yeah, when you when you have conversations with Cuff, you can't do it while you're moving. You have to stop and listen to him talking, right, a thing that's like, bro BioShock fiicted this out years ago. What are we doing here? When you're talking to Cuff. He doesn't have an animated speaking like anything speech. You're looking at a still image of a correct thing. Yeah right, And it's like you can't do that, Like you gotta make it feel like we're having a conversation with a thing like which is a very basic mechanic that all filmmakers under sand you know. Um and they didn't do that, and uh just they just didn't have the kinds of touches that make a thing feel like you're in good hands, which makes you skeptical about all the things they're doing that are fine or good even like I think some of the art direction here, if you take out the NPC's that are missing, is actually quite good. Oh man, Okay, I do you hate it well? Comparing to like Horizon Horizon sure, and I'm not even saying not as good, but just having that fresh in my mind. Some of the costume designs of the NPC's fine, um, but I'm thinking specifically of Tanta Cela, the second one, the one that looks like the Virgin Mary or like a queen, like a like a queen. She looks like twenty fucking stupid things a fourteen year old came up with, piled on top of each other, Like what if her face is the drama masks and she has a crown of thorns, and she carries a scepter that's a snake, and she talks to herself like gallum and she has split personalities. Um, it's maybe the dumbest character I've encountered in three playing video games. Yeah, she put you on trial. She speaks in rhyme, dude, and the Ryan you're talking about a game with bad writings, so like they are not up to the challenge of the character that speaks in rhyme. She says shit like, um, dude, I have a good one. Where is it? Uh? Like you fight with the girls and the boys, but all of it is unseen noisy, like that's nothing. That's nothing. You just thought of a word that rhymes and you're like, I gotta get this shit out. Um. She was the one that made me think that there was actually a sort of a structural commentary that was happening, or had at one point been happening, like and then the time, Yeah, there was a point that's okay, no, no no, no, no, I love what you're saying. There was a point where I thought it was at this point because I was trying so hard to find meaning in the in the story, in the structure, that the world of Afia was actually a way of sort of externalizing the feelings that Frey had about her life as a woman of color and a justice system that doesn't care about her like and this justice made me think maybe they're trying to do that, because I couldn't figure out why it was unhinged this way otherwise. But it turned out it turned into this weird Lynchian thing, and I guess it just never quite congealed. But I wonder if somewhere along the line they actually were trying to tell a story like that, And I guess I feel like they didn't figure out what the feel of their world even is, Like agreed, So Silos the biggest example, but here the clearest examples to me that they like ran out of time and they're just piling a bunch of shit together, like there's no clear vision of what this world feels like and no single one yes right is like the boss before the final boss is just a generic dragon like Lord of the Rings Dragon, and you're like, why is there now dragon? Like there's been nothing like that esthetic in this dragon. And then the final final boss, Cuff is just a glowing yellow orb like just a circle. You're fighting a giant circle. It's like they literally ran out of time and placed a spherical model. Then there's shit like, um, none of the environment is breakable, except there's a couple scenes where there's vases that are breakable, and the vase breaking physics are really impressive. But you'll notice the vases are identical and just gray, solid vases, which implies to me, knowing a little bit about how games are made, that they copy pasted the generic assets from the console library and they're like, there's got to be something destructible. We're out of time. Throw some of those vauses in there. Like there's choices like that all throughout. That's interesting. The buildings in the hub area look like the textures aren't finished, like they're so white and minimalist that they just seem like great blocks. It has no character. It's I agree. No, I think you're right. So like I'm gonna bring in this old chestnut that I it's time for everyone to drink if they're if they're drinking along with this podcast. Yes, and he too is fine yep, So here's why it matters facetious. No, I've did it just to be a bit now. So no, Uh did you play Lightfall, the expansion that came out very recently. No, And I'll tell you why. I looked at the same promail. I looked at the thumbnail and there's this new character they're pushing that looks like some weird frogman with googly eyes. I'm not on board. Yeah, I understand, and I think spoilers, you might be you might be right. So like they have the same problem. They have the same problem where they designed this world that was based on like a very rudimentary, shallow concept uh in there. In that case, it was like eighties like post industrial slash retrofuturist sci fi world where there's not any people in it and it just has this hollow vibe to it because they didn't have the time to really deeply explore the thoughts that inspire architecture or space. And this is from a team that normally does that well. Right, They normally do that well. I think in like, the burden of trying to create a brand new space that has its own sort of like architecture and lore and vibrant feeling is really heavy. And I don't that doesn't excuse what the game is. But I think when we admire something like Horizon Forbidden West, right, it's really about admiring the depth in which they contemplated the premise of their game, and the depth to which they like dug in and designed from the very basic clear narrative concepts everything about that world and discovering the depth of it is what makes it such a joyful experience. And in for Spoken's case, it seems like a lot of those kind of choices, the ones that feel like they could have been artistic, we're probably made because of utility. And that's a that's a tragedy. As a person who's made utility like videos, videos that were artistic, videos that were based on utility, I know the feeling of making something that was based on money and in time and it's like, you know, you can see everybody feeling disappointed in it, and that's a real shame because I do think the premise here could have been cool. Like do you agree that, like on a basic level the premise could have been cool of this game? Or is it like nah to wash? I think Infamous and Pathless are good games and you could rip off or even being more charitable, you could be inspired by and innovate on those games and make a good game totally. It's just I'm like, yeah, but if you if you have no good ideas, it's very difficult. So let me can I can I elocute? That's fair? So can I elocute a little bit on like some of the late stage combat stuff that I thought was good, Like just a little bit, and you can disagree with them. Yeah, yeah. Whenever you're ready for pause, I want to do something, but you go first, Okay, great, great, Okay, So I want to defend a little bit what I said about how the combat is good at the end. So this is sort of a little explored idea, But basically, once you get all your powers, they have a kind of interactivity that allows you to experiment and get rewarded by combinations and by like varying cool downs and stuff, and they give you a variety of powers that you start to get what you might call sort of the mass effect to effect, which is these sort of two combinate like combined attacks actually create a cool like unexpled like unanticipated damage on various enemies and stuff like. So it does kind of reward a lot of combo mix and matching, and you do find cool interactivity between the powers, and once you get good at flipping between the powers, you really feel like you can destroy anything, even though they're a lot of spongey stuff in this game, and there is lots of lots of the bad guys are dumb sponges. But like you, it does create with a pretty limited palette of attacks as well. I gotta yeah, that's right, but not so limited that it feels like they totally cheated us as a the combat I have to like, you can suck around with it and it's fine, too good. Yeah, total, I use I use Mass Effect two because mass Efect two is actually way more limited in terms of combat than this game is. And it's your one, your one character with full freedom of motion and you can zip anywhere in the map, Like you really can do almost any attack you want by the time it's over. It just takes so long that you're no longer interested in the game. That's really what it boils down to, in my opinion. Does that feel totally unfair to you about this or about Mass Effect? Sorry, but either one, but mostly this, uh, this one, especially because it yes, I mean I agree completely and I think this even more than Mass Effects because Mass Effects story did draw me into a degree and this one sort of repelled me, which I got to mention something we both said before, which is for the record, and I think most of our listeners will totally agree. Good to have black folks be in media and the media sucks and no one cares or blames it on the fact that the start that the protagonist is black, you know, like everyone's allowed to fail. So I like that about it, But the but it's a failure, so I think even more so the mass effect to it. It wears thin quickly, especially because you mainly only talk to Cuff and Odden. And one of my other big problems with it is you meet Cuff and you're, like, Jesus, guy, won't shut up all he just sucks dispense exposition. Next very next character you meet is odd and then she goes, let me explain this world to you, and you're like, cuff fucking did that. We're gonna do it again now, yeah, yeah, And then well okay, And then last thing that what you just said brought up at me is that I do like this genre. I think it's an underrepresented subgenre, which is essentially Tony Hawk plus guns or traversing in a smooth, fluid way where you never slow down, plus there's enemies and you fight. I love that. I think actually that hasn't been perfected, not really Infamous is pretty good, but I still think, yeah, yeah, but um but I actually think that's an underrepresented gameplay loop like trying to do sweet tricks and also shooting. That's cool. Pistol Whip is a little like that the VR game, but not the style forgive me. They kind of stuck a lot of bullshit on top of those kind of games in a way that actually undermines them, Like a really clean one would be really nice. Yeah, people didn't play it a lot, but I do recommend the Pathless actually, which is I need to play that more. Sunset Overdrive is a game that we almost covered several times, like we've we've come back to me covering it a few All right, Well, I'll tell you this. I think they there's a lot of obfuscation going on in that game to mask an unfulfilling loop. Oh well, maybe that's too strong. Maybe it's too strong a loop that's under underbaked, a little bit half baked, is my opinion. But maybe we can talk about it, and you might, you might convince me otherwise. I think what happens is it's actually really hard to make a game that has the kind of fluidity and power that you want, and so they sort of pile all this stuff on top of it to make it feel like it's really robust. Well wrong, you pull the classic games with the destiny things. So I'll just say to me, it is a spiritual successor. And this is why I stand Sonic the Hedgehog, of the impulse that began that whole thread of like it's so dumb because it's Sonics caschhrase. But video games can do a lot of things. What if we did one where you gotta go fast? I like that is what they want. No, but that is what we want here, like and that's not like they put this. They put this like status bar or not like a stamina bar, basically on your ability to parkour park. Yeah, they then eventually retract when you get more powers. But it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, if your idea is let's be sonic, then start by me being able to be sonic, you know what I mean, Like and like expand from there, and then you get a grappling hook and I was immediately thinking, like the Arkham grappling her, like this is going to be great, This is really gonna open up the troversal. And then it turns out there's very specific grapple points and you hit them and they just deliver you to a very specific point. And it's like I just played Halo Infinite Dude, Like that game ruled I can't be the grapple hook. That grapple hook is moot. Now we're done with that. That's old technology. Or you gotta do it as good as as that game, Like you know what I mean, That game did a hell of a job with that one thing, so like you gotta match that, and they didn't, and a lot of games by the way are putting grapple hooks in and not doing that, Um so shout out just cause of course apparently just yeah, I've never played that, but I know that that cause is not great. Across the board is super janky. But the thing about it that everyone loves is like you can grapple shot a thousand feet in the air and then wing suit down and then you know there's like eighteen kinds of wacky troversal that was its thing. That feels like that's what this game wants to be, but it wanted to have more nobility and achieve and they're like Marvel Spider Man, like we now have games where you do it like that where you're like, dude, I'm fucking Nightcrawler, like I'm flipping around and it's just like we have a higher standard. Yeah, Spider Man really makes this game look bad. Actually, Like when you think about that, you're like, that's right, yeah, yeah, so tight, Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Well that's a shame. Maybe we need to hit a break so that we can regain Well, can I wrap up with my thing? I want to? Yeah? Um, I have simple grapes that I feel are objective and I want to rattle through. I was like, okay, I want to say, first people run out of time. Hey, I'm an artist and I've tried as hard as I could and not run out of time and still put turds out there, So like, of course I'm not a personal but I am now going to gleefully like cinema sid style though, like this is all right, right. There is no stealth gameplay in this game, yet inexplicably in the opening couple hours there's a sneaking portion and it has no gameplay. You just follow odd and when she says to follow her, and then you get through it and it's over and you never sneak again, and that's not a part of the game. At the end of most of the cut scenes, you will hang frozen for so long that I often thought the game froze or was crashing, and it's just that the camera just hangs there, hangs there, hangs there. Okay, control of the character is returned to you, and I don't understand why it is that way. The sound design is like shockingly spare, like a giant monster in metal armor. Will super Hero land from three stories up and there will be no sound effect. There will be no impact sound to indicate that it's just I think it's glitchy. I think that. Yeah, Um the game, if you play it, you'll know what I mean. It dips to black way too much, fades. Yeah. On the animation itself is so bad, Like watching one of these characters pretend to eat an apple, which they do several times, is like a war crime. It feels it's just Yeah, it feels unfair. How mad we were at Mass Effect and Drameda when when this is next gen and they still can't do it. Yeah, right, Um, it keeps forcing you to look at the lore archive over and over, like literally fading to black and bringing it up when you're like I don't want to look at this. Um, yeah, you're frozen place. I said that. The mini games, so you know how it's a big thing in open world games to have mini games. Now, the mini game in this is you roll one die and whatever it comes up on that happen. Like that's it. That's the strategy of the mini game. You roll the die, whatever comes up that happens. There's a collectible called Poppets. They have a whole speech about how poppets are. There are a thousand of them, and they were each made to be unique, and they're incredibly diverse and unique, and each one special and bonds with a person. Then every time you collect one, it shows you the poppet you collected, and they're identical. They're the same model every time. They all look the same different Spirit Spike. The most common side quest in this game is that you encounter a cat and you interact with it and you slowly follow it around and it arrives at a place where there's an item and you pick up the item. It sucks ass, it's my chet was so mad that I stopped doing the cat stuff. I was like, well, you know what it is. It's like following, it's chasing the meaning, right. Yeah, every time you pick up a poppet, the tutorial that teaches you about the poppet system comes up every time. It's obviously a glitch and no one would do that intentionally, but yeah, the game frequently says when you try to fast travel, an error message comes up that says you cannot fast travel while an events scene is playing, even though an events scene is not playing. You have to take a series of picks in order to unlock new features in photomode, which is such a terrible anti fun idea that I can't believe anyone ever implemented it. And to get these photos, you go to particular points and the game makes you point the camera in an exact direction and zoom in an exact amount, meaning photo mode, which is supposed to be a system of individualized expression in your game. In the photomode, in this game, you can only take one exact photo that will look identical to every photo taken by everyone else who ever plays the game. It's antithetical to what that's for. It has a soul's like healing system, which makes it feel like it's going to be challenging. But you start the game with six health elix. I remember once even felt close to dying. I never died in this game. I beat it without dying. O. Every every skill upgrade is so boring. For example, the the like the copy and one of the tech tree things is if you upgrade this, it does more damage over a wider area. Then if you upgrade it again, it says does even more damage over an even wider area. That's not good enough, that's not interesting. Um, there's these towers you have to climb because it's an open world game. But you cannot magic parkour up the wall of the towers. They are like slick or whatever. Yeah, you have to just slowly normal walk speed walk up the stairs. Then there's no cool way down like how a LOOI will repel down you walk back right. The world map is brown and muddy and uniquely like the most unpleasant world map to look at that I've ever seen. It's also blend together and or it's actually confusing to get from what's confusing to tell where you are. The radicule snaps two points of interes just way too easily. It's hard to get it to be where you want it to be. There's chest puzzles in the game. The chest puzzles were either never in the middle, either laughably easy, like you press one button and you go, oh, I got it, or so obtusive that it took me twenty minutes and then I gave up, and then I was frustrated because I didn't want to do this. One of the tutorial messages I got was precision encounters cause a magic power boost that can now be crafted and upgraded. I don't know what that means. That's a problem. That's it. I think. Thank god. I was like, oh my god, you are evitiating this game. Uh well, I think this says something about when the game doesn't come together and doesn't bother to fix quality of life things, it makes you angry, which is a bummer, because it's ultimately trying to be fun, you know, like it's trying to trying to give you a good use of your twelve hours. It wants to, well, it didn't want to. This felt a little bit like somebody said, nope, it needs to make money now, that's it, and we're spending too much money deliver the game now. Yeah. Yeah, And I and like that that decision. And again I can't say for sure, I don't know, but that decision feels like it was not m it was made by somebody who no longer or it was made at a point where there was no joy in this game anymore. Like like they really seemed like they were willing to to, you know, throw the baby out with the bathwater when they released this. I know it would have been a suicide for them to like, you know, delay again, because they delayed for a year several times already. But like it still wasn't ready, you know, like I don't know what to say. It still wasn't ready, So that's a bummer. I guess to wash that poor taste out of our mouth from those intimate recollections, Let's take a quick commercial break, and when we come back, we'll we will try to wrap up our experience in Afia and decide whether we'll keep or delete right after this. You've just been forcewoken. That rhymes with force spoken. I've been wanting to do that the whole episode, but I don't know why. I'm so glad that you had that last bit prepared by us Adam Ganzy talking talking for spoken, a game that we've tried to bring as much joy in our evisceration as we could. Shall we pass our final checkpoint bike and get to decide if we keep her delete this this bad boy? Um okay, I'll delay the suspense or dispense with the suspense and say deleting. Yeah, go ahead. I'm like, I don't even need to hear your answer. I can talk over it, like just the trope of it. Turns out the reason you're special is your secretly the kid of Gandolf whoever the fuck God, I'm so sick of that kind. You're the kid of the King, You're the kid of God or whatever like it. It is just it's just the Jesus story still echoing through everything. It's nowhere near as interesting as that or as profound as that. It's it's just not it's Harry Potter is not as profound as the Bible, I don't think, but no, me neither. But but also, uh, it's yeah, whatever, I don't need to get into that. So I would say I did kind of feel like the game was leaving open the possibility of meeting her father, a character we never meet, who's definitely sort of all but alluded to. And there's a part of me that thinks that the father is from New York, Like he's just a person from New York. Yeah, I don't know if that's true, but it seems like it might be true. Um, I'm going to miss something. She'd be like Hercules, she'd be like half divine or whatever. Yeah, well that's right. So, like I actually kind of feel like that might have been a more interesting way to get into this is like doing the opposite of what they did. Like so normally we do the Harry Potter version where you meet you're you know, you're a wizard, Harry. But it might have been more interesting for her to meet her father who's like, yeah, you're a New York or Harry, you know what I mean. That might have been cool. Um well it would have been cool. Or I agree, do the opposite of what you did, like, um, like make a video game. Whatever you did. Well, we're real dicks this, we're real cups this time around, we're sure real cuffs. Anyway, hopefully you've enjoyed our lifeless not gonna get my vote, you know, oh please please. I did not say I'm keeping it out of the hell out of here here keeping I believe that a full hard drive, it has to have one where you're like, also, this is the worst thing ever. Also it can be bad, Like you should go some art. It is bad. We aren't perfect, we're humble. Okay, well, you know we sit down like we need a control case, you know, like so you can see what it could have been if we'd done it bad, and you you covered my ass by deleting it, so I can rest assured that it's not. Yeah, you're deleting it, right, come on, it bad, it's bad. Yeah, all right, thank you? Uh God, what a pleasure to have this conversation with a good pal who I would never delete. Yeah, this is always a delight, of course, that's why we do it. But also I do want to say, you know, it's very popular modern opinion to hate organized religion. Um, but if you should go so and I know there's people who are like the Bible's nonsense because of their feelings about organized religion. Here's why I'm saying this. If you're someone out there, you're hearing this and you genuinely felt like if your knee, your reaction was no, I got more life wisdom out of Harry Potter than I did out of the Bible, or ever went out of the Bible. I want to talk to you. I want to talk to the person who thinks that Harry Potter is more profound than the Bible. Do you want to talk to that person? Yeah, all right, yeah, sure, I'll talk to an insane person from the time. I mean, I don't I you know, I'm not interested in forcing people to agree with me. I just would have a hard time accepting that. But let's see what they say to you. I would love to hear what they say, yeah, that'd be interesting. So that's a project for the Internet. Please feel free to take that one up. Meanwhile, if you're interested in other smooth, non contentious audio experiences, we got a billion of them over at our Patreon, which is patreon dot com, Forward slash, small Beans, where you can hear both Mike and I Wax poetic and trash or not trash, various other artworks, like films, like the work of the film director, like the prospect of sharing media with friends, like the multiverse, tons and tons of podcasts that we offer large as we do a Stephen King focus, we do a Cohen Brothers focus, all kinds of shit. If you just search small Beans wherever you get podcasts like the thing you're listening on right now, you'll get about half of them, and then we hope you'll check out the Patreon eventually because for just three dollars a month, you get twice as much and some of the shows are specific to the Patreon, meaning you'll only hear like Escape from the Multi Curse or a Star Trek, the next fut Durama or spiel Boys over there. That's right, Hopefully you've enjoyed this episode. We got a great lineup of the next few weeks worth of episodes are going to be killer. They are all in the bank now, so we can't wait to show those to you, so stick around. If you like this, feel free to like it, subscribe, send a review, share it with your friends. We'd love to keep doing this until the sun explodes or those aliens finally do show up. That's it, so long ship heads, We salute you.