Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Welcome back to the Game Informer Show, a
weekly podcast covering the video game industry forrin Us every
Thursday for discussion about the latest gaming news, reviews, and
exclusive reveals, alongside Game and Former staff and special guests
from around the industry. I'm one of your hosts today,
joined by Marcus Stewart.
Speaker 3: How you doing, Marcus?
Speaker 2: Good? Feeling spooky? So I gotta talk about a scary
game today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're gonna be talking about Silent Hill f Later
on in the show. You went hands on with the game,
as well as Ninja guid in Rage Bound, which we'll
get into in a bit. But before that, we have
to introduce the newest member of Game Informer, our next
full time hire.
Speaker 3: It's Eric Van Allen. Hello. Hello, no longer a guess,
now permanently a fixture of this Unike those guys and
pirates of the Caribbean that get like barnacled to the ship. Now,
I've been here too long and.
Speaker 2: Were punched enough holes in your membership cards and you
could turn that in for full like employment. That's how
that's a.
Speaker 1: Great membership card, I will say, really good or full
time employment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a little bit of fact about how the
industry works. That's just how you get hired anywhere. We
all have little cards when we guessed on other people's podcasts.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, he finally, he finally cashed in. Well, Eric, welcome.
You are our newest video editor, our second video editor.
It's great to have some company, So welcome officially. Do
you want to kind of like, let's before we get started.
Speaker 3: I didn't.
Speaker 1: I didn't tell you were going to talk about this,
but I figured, you know, why not, Let's give listeners
a little more detail about you. What is it is
the work that you've done in the industry, and then
tell us some of your favorite games and what makes
Eric tick.
Speaker 3: Oh no, I have to talk about me? Oh no, Well,
if this is therapy hour, all right, Yeah, Hi, I'm Eric.
You might know me from Destructoid, from US Gamer. If
you've been following me for a long time, you might
know me from Compete. I kind of started out in
the competitive games realm and then moved my way into
games proper. But I've always kind of been a player
of either competitive games, League of Legends, DODA to stuff
like that, or RPGs, which feels like the Polar opposite
side of the spectrum. Yeah, long time chocolate and vanilla.
Yeah they go great together, well, chocolate and peanut butter
really when you think about it, because what is doda
of not a competitive RPG when you think about it, right,
Like that's the same thing. So yeah. I also am
a co host over on Acts of the Blood God,
an independent RPG podcast with Kat Bailey and Nautia Oxford,
and I also co host norm DFM with Kennis Shepherd,
which is a game club style podcast where we play
back through old games and kind of do critical dissections
of them. We've done everything from Mass Effect, which is
where we got our namesake, up through Final Fantasy ten,
the Last of Us cyberpunk stuff like that. So yeah,
I've kind of been a lot of places. As for
my favorite games, they do kind of hue towards either RPGs.
Final Fantasy ten has always held a very special place
in my heart, Mass Effect, especially the first one, or
I don't know, some like odd ball games, I love Shimmee,
Gammy Tense, Devil Survivor, I love The World Ends with You.
I really really like tactical games of Valkyria Chronicles or
even odd indie games. Sisson Sleeper is a pretty high one,
thirteen Sentinels agis rim. Just anything that feels a little
bit off the beaten path kind of catches my eye.
So yeah, that's with me.
Speaker 1: I feel like you are kind of filling a space
that we've had open for a little while in terms
of some of those those games. So I'm sure listeners
will be happy to have a representative of the sicko,
weirdo games.
Speaker 3: I think it'll be great. The siccos are going to thrive. Yeah,
I mean League of Legends, that's what I do.
Speaker 2: You have a controversial video game take that you can
oh yeah, yeah, let's ge people can share. Yeah, we
need people, just get on it.
Speaker 3: I do have one. I had to rescind recently because
I grew up so obviously RPGs in my life. Final
Fantasy ten was a huge one. When I was young,
I tried playing Final Fancy nine and I did not
vibe with it whatsoever. It was totally not my thing,
and so for eons I was like, oh, Final Fancy nine.
I don't know why anybody likes that one I have.
I recently started to play through, Like I'm talking two
weeks ago, started to play through a Final Fancy nine.
I'm not saying it's like a secret actual best one
it is, but it is pretty good.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 3: It's pretty good. I'll give you all that.
Speaker 2: It's anniversary, I.
Speaker 3: Know, I know. Hey, you asked me for controversy, you
asked me for for heat. It is is better than
I thought it would be. But it is also made
me go back on a previous stance that I used
to take, which was I want to see fewer remakes remasters.
I want to see more spin offs, interesting new ideas
within IP. I rescind that take for Final Fantasy nine,
which absolutely needs a remaster of some kind. I tried
playing it on my switch and it runs like it's
running on the PS one. Man. That needs an update
asapp So if we can get on that, that'd be great.
But yeah, yeah, Final Fantasy nine better than I thought
it was. That's my hot take.
Speaker 2: That used to be the subtitle before they come back?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah was Final Fantasy nine? The was
that our preview that got clipped out on social media
and we called VV like mark or something like yes,
two thousand.
Speaker 2: And one, none of us here, this is none of
us here before our time this is when the game.
Speaker 1: I don't know actually I don't actually know who who
wrote that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was when the game. I don't think it
had come out yet. I think it was.
Speaker 3: No, it didn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we didn't know anything about the characters, and so
some wise ass was it's trying to be funny a
different again, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah we do.
Speaker 1: I just yeah, it was bad, but it made me laugh.
Speaker 3: So shout out to that relic.
Speaker 1: Well, Eric, thank you for joining us on the show today.
We're excited to have you. I think you'll be a
recurring face on the show going forward. So try to
be cool, you know, just try to be chill.
Speaker 3: You know what I mean. I've been doing my whole life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we keep it chill here on the game and
for cool as ice, we say. Listeners just want to
say thank you for the love on recent episodes. Saw
last week that our Bloodlines Too podcast was doing pretty
well on YouTube, so thank you all for your interest
in that. If we have any new listeners from the
reddit or the subreddit rather or other places you might
have found us from that video, thank you and welcome.
We normally have less of a preamble before we get
into the show. Who am a kid, and that's not
true at all, but we're gonna try to get.
Speaker 3: Into it here in a second.
Speaker 1: Just want to say this podcast is brought to you
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Speaker 3: Gets solved and we're on top of it. We are.
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Speaker 1: We're making sure it doesn't happen in the future, but
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thank you for sitting through that spiel. I'll just say
one more time, Game Informer dot com slash subscribe, if
you're interested in getting a magazine, let's get into the
show proper, guys. Marcus, I'm gonna throw it over to you.
You've been playing Ninja Guiden rage Bound. Wesley LeBlanc was
the one who published his review for us, and it
seems like he really liked it. But Wes is over
in China right now for work and can't join us
on the podcast, but I know that he was really
really impressed with it and gave it a nine point five. Actually,
not to kind of color our conversation here like that,
but just for readers, you know, it seems like this
is a pretty good, pretty good entry in that series.
So Marcus, I'll hand it over to you. Tell us
about Ninja Giden rage Bound.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I haven't played nearly as much as Wesley,
so I would definitely encourage listeners to read his review
to get a more sort of like a better idea
of the full scope of what the game has to offer.
I've only started it the night before, Like, I'm currently
in the second act of the game, where I'm playing
as the second protagonist, the Black Spider Clan Woman. But
the idea of the game is that So it's a
new two D Ninja Guiden game, going back to the series.
Roots on nes as part of the Year of the Ninja,
the Year of Ninja Guiden. Really this is the second
of what will be three Ninja Guiden releases this year,
following the Ninja Ga Into Black and at the beginning
of the year and Nina.
Speaker 3: It's kind of hard to keep up with, honestly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like in the Ninja Game four in like October,
and then like separately of those, there's the new Shenobi
game that comes out not too long from now, uh
like pretty soon, I believe. Uh so, yeah, this is
just we just need a Schweider to come back, and
this will like complete the year of the Ninja. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'll take.
Speaker 3: That to kill for a newt shoe.
Speaker 2: I mean, Sakaro is technically a new atten shoe. It
started as a ten shu game before it became Sekaro.
So it's got it's got a little bit of tensu
left in that game.
Speaker 3: It's got some DNA. It's definitely not a.
Speaker 2: Ten I mean you can tell that it was at
one point.
Speaker 1: My favorite one was in the the Headless Ape came
back to kill me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, after after I threw him a pork bun and
then he came back. Yeah. No, yes, Ninja Guid and
rache Mouth so new two D game set in the
the Yes timeline, like I believe, and correct me if
I'm wrong. I want to say it takes place after
Ninja guid In one on ne e s I believe.
Speaker 3: We'll look it up.
Speaker 2: Were you Hyabusa, who you do not play ass he
has to take off to America to basically go play
the sequels adventure? Did you guys? Did you look it up?
Speaker 3: I thought you were going to say to go play volleyball,
because I will tell you that most of my understanding
of Reu Hyabusa is through Dead or Alive, because I
believe that is the debtor alive character. Correct to me,
that is the Dead or Alive character.
Speaker 2: Just upset so many more people.
Speaker 3: I know. I'm sorry, I believe. No from Dead or Alive,
the series of which the Okay, I played Dead or
Alive three and Dead or Alive five quite a bit.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean those are the games.
Speaker 3: I did look it up for you. It's set alongside
the event of the first one.
Speaker 2: Okay, so Ninja Goiden one, so that story is happening
parallel to this one. So when Reno runs off to
go deal with that, you play as sort of an
apprentice of his name Kate Kinji, and you are dealing
with a separate crisis as the Hayabusa village is attacked
by invadant demons and the military gets involved, and you
don't know what is happening, but you've kind of taken
it upon yourself to be like, well, for you, you
go do your stuff, go help your father. I think
I can hold things down here. And this is also
worth noting this is made by the blasphemous developer, oh
the game Kitchen. Yeah, so you know, any blasphemist fans
out there might want to pay attention to this, because
those games are good, the good metro Venas. This is
not a Metrovnia. This is just a straight up traditional
to the action game where yeah, you are running and
slicing demons apart in a way that you would in
a traditional ninja guiding game. It feels good, I will say,
like if he action feels very fluid and fast paced.
You've got a basic sword attack, but you can do
a dodge roll, you can kind of dodge jump, and
kind of one of the central mechanics is that you
have this sort of this double jump move that you
can use, like you can bounce off of projectiles, whether
it's a projectile attack or just maybe like a stage hazard.
But the game plays without a lot where they kind
of tasky, like, hey, get past this gap by maybe
jumping on top of this sure can that this guy's
thrown at you? Maybe time it okay? Or like hey
this this pit is shooting fireballs upwards at you, so
you need to time that so you can just like
kind of like hop across. Will also simultaneously maybe cutting
down a flying threat, whether it's like weird ninjas on
like jet packs or the hawks that Ninja Guidan has
always been notorious for.
Speaker 1: Does it kind of slow down to give you time
to reflect a little bit? Like when you reflect, are
you like you know something like orient the Blind Forest? Right,
there's similar similar projectiles in that that you can kind
of use to kind of reflect off of. Oh no,
are you using them the platform or you're purely reflecting them?
Speaker 2: No, you're using the platform? Like okay, Yeah, so like
time isn't slow at all, Like it's all happening and
I guess real time. Like you can also hit projectiles,
like if someone throws a shriggan atch you, you can hit
it with your sword, but it doesn't send it back
at them. It just sort of knocks it away.
Speaker 3: It just kind of dumpsucks away. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's just like another form of defense if
you can't just dodge it out right. But that seems
to be the crutch of just like how a lot
of the level design is. It's just like having really
deviously designed stages where it's like, Okay, can I how
am I supposed to get past this? There's a lot
of stuff coming at me at the same time, and
it's almost got like in at least from what I
see in these early hours, kind of the inn order
of operations to it, because some enemies you can just
destroy immediately, but then other more powerful enemies that have
this kind of blue glow around them, they can only
be killed with this I forget the name of it,
but it's essentially like a special charge attack, and you
can either attack certain enemies that have the glow that
are smaller, and then when you kill them, you absorb
their energy and your next attack is this charge attack
that can one shot the bigger kind of blue glowy enemies.
You can kill them the old fashion way, it just
takes longer, so it's kind of encouraged. I'm like, Okay,
there's a little floating skull here. He's got a blue glow.
I'm going to kill that guy, absorb the blue glow,
and then I'm going to use that power to kill
this bigger guy that's in my way. But you have
to do it quickly because the glow power fades after
a few seconds, so you kind of just got to
like act and then because of that, there is like
an order of operations like, Okay, there's three guys here.
One of them is a big glowy guy. There's another
smaller glowy thing here. I should probably kill that small
glowy guy first, use the few seconds I have to
kill the big glowy guy immediately, and then go back
and kill the guy that's just a normal enemy that
I can just take out. There's a tutorial in the
beginning with re you that sort of kind of helps
get you in the habit of doing that. Like there's
some like very quick but kind of well done combat
trials where they do pick you against different enemy combinations
and they just like, hey, you know, figure this out.
It's like it's like half puzzle almost because it's like
a time of it too, So that's that's pretty cool.
I like that so far. It sort of encourages you.
It's sort of like within the span of like a
second just quickly analyze the battlefield as you're moving around
and just sort of picking who you're going to attack
and win and what's like the optim way to do that.
On top of all been platforming at the same time too,
so it's got that nes Ninja guid in kind of
like franticness to it. But at the same time, like
the game is challenging, but at least in this the
first couple of acts it has it become like unbearably difficult,
and just reading Wesley's of the review, it doesn't seem
like it gets to that point, Like it seems like
it's hard, but it doesn't become like any as hard. Now,
granted that's that's different for every person. You know, Wes'
is like me, like him and I are kind of
like the two Souls people and staff and that not
that this is a Soul's game, but him and I
both like difficult games basically, so like his bar for
difficulty might be, like it might not be as higher
or as low for him as it is for others
that are a little more sure, yeah, averse to that stuff.
Speaker 1: You're given the tools and it is fairly manageable in
your experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like every time I've died, it's been like a oh,
I took that jump wrong, I time that wrong, or
you know, it's sometimes it's like your pixel off, like
well if I I should have landed a little short
because you have like pretty decent air control, because like, okay,
if I bounce off this projectile and maybe land just
short of this guy and not on top of him,
I take damage because I can't attack downwards. You can
only attack straight ahead. See, you kind of have to
account for all that. And I think the first boss
fight is kind of a good test of sort of
managing your maneuverability on top of your just how quick
you are hitting that sword, because it's like if you
the faster you tap that salt that that attack button,
the more damage you'll do.
Speaker 1: So but it looks it looks great, Like I'm looking
at the I'm watching like a stream on on Steam
above the the product page, and it's just like seeing
some of the character designs on display, like, uh, there's
a really cool like cyborg demon that shoots a giant
eyeball out of his stomach that looks like really fun
to mess with and to.
Speaker 3: Have to dodge.
Speaker 1: And also just like the environments are so detailed, have
you had any like standout biomes that you've really enjoyed
being in or or have you not really had a
chance to kind of see many of them since you're
only uh one act.
Speaker 2: Deep or so yeah, like nothing that stands out yet,
like cetimony on act too, Like like the first actor
kind of just an high aboose of village, Like there
was a prologue, but it's it's in a force that
you eventually revisit in the first act with just like, oh,
it all looks good, but I haven't seen anything that's
like blown my mind yet. The other big thing with
this game is that there's two different protagonists. So there's
Kinji and then there is a woman who is part
of the Black Spider Clan, which is sort of the
rival clan to the Hyabusa clan. So she eventually becomes
your partner. And I only know this part because I
played the next vest demo where to kind of jump
you forward in the game and you get to play
kind of like what is the real game? Yeah, because
she's she kind of just like somehow just gets inside
of Kenji, and so she's just like in you and
almost like a like like in a ghost form for
lack of a better term, where you can kind of
use her power as Kinji and occasionally play as her
during designated sections because you'll hit like an item that
sort of like draws her around and she's like, I
can handle this, you stay back. And differences between them
is that she throws kunai, so she's entirely projectile based.
She can still do the like projectile kind of bounce
thing that Kinji can do, but other than that, as
far as I can tell, like range combat is her speciality.
And she also has the thing of like, oh, if
she attacks certain colored and amazing in her case it's pink,
she'll get like a charge attack for her next attack.
But yeah, I haven't gotten I haven't totally unlocked that
system yet, so I don't know how like deep that
goes in terms of how to gain utilize that.
Speaker 3: So is it like Curse of the Moon, like Bloodstained
Curse of the Moon where you're just kind of like
doing a little poof and then like you swap to
a different character, Like I'm still caught up on the
physical consequences of the character swapping, like is it a
marble tag in or are we like just swapping, Like
are you just kind of like changing on a dime?
Speaker 2: Kind of Yeah, I can only go again from the
demo and it's been months or however long it's been
since I played that demo. As far as I could tell,
her reminded me of like yeah, like like Kenji is
driving the ship and she is in the passenger seat
until you reach a certain area where you hit an item,
and then she takes over, but Kenji is like still
like he's it's not like she takes over his body
or anything. She just kind of comes out and Kenji
stays behind, and she has to do a little section
that only she can do until you get back to Kenji,
like she'll basically open up a path for him.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, So so she is still like corporeal, like
she is still a person that is like going in
and doing stuff.
Speaker 2: I yeah, as far as I can tell, I don't
know the narrative like sort of context for it, because
at the point that I'm at in the game, an
act too. When an introducer, she is still very much
her own person, like she has not met Kenji yet,
so they're kind of setting her up as like, oh,
this is what she's doing over here, and I assume
that's going to end with and then something happened to
her to where she and Kenji or actually they have met,
but then you get like a yeah, yeah, like maybe
she dies or something and she's like, listen, I need
to I need to put my soul in you or
something like that.
Speaker 3: It's like Piccolo and Nail in the namic saga of
Dragon Ball Z. Now I'm winning, fans back, I'm winning.
It's like Piccolo and Nail. Yeah, okay, yeah, trying to
or farm like Piccolo, Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2: Or I wonder if it's even more like if we're
going to keep using anime comparisons, like is it like
a yu gi oh thing of like is she the
pharaoh to Kenji's Yugi and he she takes over during
special times, but otherwise it's Kinji driving.
Speaker 3: The ship or Ugi and Sukina from j j K
something like that. I gotta drop, I gotta drop something
to give people on my side here an yeah, like we're.
Speaker 2: Gonna need We're gonna need anime reference from you in
a second if we want to.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking, is it like in Full Metal Alchemist,
you know how Alphonse's spirit is tied to a suit
of armor, but he is physically not there.
Speaker 3: He is inside it, he's within it, but he does
not have a physical form. Okay, you know what I'm saying.
It's not as terrible as you on the spot.
Speaker 1: Greed Greed was right there, like Greed, and Ling was like, yeah, yeah,
it's like Greed and and the General, you know, first act,
but the General's uh, I don't spoil anything again.
Speaker 2: Like I said, I'm still working my way to get
to the to that point in the game, because once
you get to that point where they are actively working together,
like that is the bread and butter of what Rage
Bound has to offer. So, you know, probably by the
time I finished this act too, we'll probably when the
game will properly sort of start.
Speaker 1: But I enjoyed It's really like a Gundam, you know,
with a pilot inside.
Speaker 3: We're really all we're all the shinji Akari of our
own a Van Gellian. Yeah, if you think about it,
you know. Yeah, we're all the heroes of our own
Gundam Wing.
Speaker 2: She's kind of like your digimond partner and Kanji like
is the tie to her augu malon?
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yeah, I got Where does Chikachu go when
he goes in the pokeba Well, that's the thing he
doesn't though, he doesn't he hates poke balls. Oh, you're right,
you're right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's seeming good reason whatever's on the other side
it is probably not good. Yeah, he's like the pokeball
truth because the other Pokemon or no have no problem
with him. He's the one telling him, like, no, you
don't understand what's actually going on here, you guys, get
like the inside of poke balls is people. You need
to stay out. It's the soiling green of the Pokemon universe.
Speaker 3: Pikachi is posting on like Pika Sky like wake up people, vocabaka.
Speaker 2: It's the most adorable conspiracy theory you've ever heard.
Speaker 3: But yes, it.
Speaker 2: Gets back on track. It is fun so far. I
love to the action games. I'm a big Ninja Guidance
fan and as of now, like I it's it's clicking
the boxes for me, like it plays extremely well, which
I guess shouldn't be surprising because of the pedigree of
the game kitchen, the studio involved, but this seems like
a really fun like it just seems like a fun
sort of retro throwback for the series, because when was
the last two D Ninja guid in, Because you know,
we've been getting the three D ones that Team Ninja
has been made, but hasn't been since the nes since
like like Benja Guiden three.
Speaker 1: Basically, surely there's probably someone game Boy or DS.
Speaker 2: Maybe unless I'm just blanking on any but it's it's
felt refreshing to see the series go back to its roots.
Like I'm enjoying it so far. I think I think
I was like in the mood for something like this.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat, although
I think I'm more in like a Metroidvana mood maybe
than than like traditional like two D platform or kind
of stuff.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I'm in the mood for something that's like
a little more simple.
Speaker 2: Yeah see, I think I'm kind of like that tours,
Like I love metro Venas, but like every two D
actually game tends to be a Metroidvania now, Like I
feel like we don't get that off of just like
side scroller, Like you're allowed to just do a side
scroller and doesn't have to be amaze.
Speaker 3: That it's totally fair. I feel like there's been a
hunger for it since The Messenger. I feel like The
Messenger came out and people were like, oh right, this
was a style of action game that used to exist.
We used to have a lot of them, and we
don't see a lot of them anymore, or they tend
to just be in the Metroidvania bucket because that's a
way of doing that style of game that people are
very accustomed to. But with the rise of things like
Beat them Ups and other older genres kind of getting
new refreshes nowadays, it's been cool to see like this
style of two D action game, specifically Get in Upgrade,
get brought into a new light to new audiences who
maybe didn't grow up with that stuff, who only know
of Reu Hayabusa because of fighting games in a volleyball game.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's kind of like how I feel. I
have similar feelings about the action genre, or it feels
like every action game has to be a Soul's like
and can't be and action games like you guys, we
can just do Devil May Cry or something. You know,
it doesn't always have to be it doesn't not everything
has to have soul like souls like mechanics. Like, just
make an action game. It's it's cool, I'll play it probably. Yeah,
metro Venous. Metro Venus and souls like have been so
in vogue that they tend to They're both very oversaturated
subgenres at this point, so I like going back to
the to the old days, you know, just keeping it simple.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I was.
Speaker 1: I was looking up Marcus just to see if there
were other two D releases. There wasn't a Nintendo DS game,
but it was. It was kind of like a three
D three D graphics Dragon Sword. What was it called again,
Dragon Dragon Sword?
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, that's right. And it kind of had like
on the left.
Speaker 1: Side of the screen was like a top down map
and on the right side is the kind of put
the screen in a funny way.
Speaker 3: Oh did they do the you have to hold it
on it's like vertical or like like up and down,
like like hotel style. It looked I'll have to.
Speaker 1: Look deeper into it, but I was just kind of
like doing a cursory glance.
Speaker 2: Do you want to guess that before you get the
Dragon Sword? Do you want to get or lean dragon Sword?
Do you want to guess the game and former review
score for it?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, let me let me just like take
a look at like some screenshots real quick.
Speaker 3: It was you have to hold it like a book.
I love those DS games. It makes no sense, no
sense for a ninja guy, and they should it this way.
Speaker 2: But they should have poured it in mobile because now
we have those phones that fold out like books, so
you can make it happy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so they did do the book fold How
would you play that?
Speaker 3: Because then, like the control stick is down here and
the buttons are up here. So are you doing this?
If it just stylist?
Speaker 2: You have to play like a ninja, Eric, that's how
ninja's play games.
Speaker 3: You're right, yeah, like books like that works really well
for a Hotel Dusk specifically, but I don't know that
it works for ninja guy.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm going to look up a quick gameplay.
Speaker 2: This wass to be like an all in the spot
like you have to get you're doing research.
Speaker 1: Okay, okay, I'm watching some gameplay.
Speaker 3: I'll put a number in without looking at anything but
two screenshots. I'm going six point twenty five. Okay, I'm
going I'm going to five out of ten.
Speaker 2: Okay, Eric's closer. It was actually a seven point seventy five.
That's not a bad score, you know, like just shy
hi an eight. So it turns out who wrote that review,
so we can chame them. I'm looking at the Wikipedia page.
I don't think they quoted us. I'm looking at the
quotes from other outlets. You probably the search on the website.
Speaker 1: I'll go go through the magazine archive to find it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. That's a good that's a good, uh, you know,
way to to promote the fact that you can read
every issue of Game and Former magazine if you become
a free member on the site.
Speaker 1: Just saying, you know, yep, every issue from nineteen ninety
one to twenty twenty four. Dole for free Game Informer
dot com.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well cool. Yeah, there was a game Boy game,
but it was it was Ninja Got in Shadow.
Speaker 2: Don't know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah that was art looks it looks cool? Is in
we did to release nineteen eighty five. He was a
licensed edit of a proposed Ninja guid in game Boy
port and serves as a pretty cool to the original game,
set in a retro futuristic version of nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 3: Oh sorry, it wasn't released. It was.
Speaker 1: One I saw nineteen eighty five, but that was part
of the story.
Speaker 2: The game is set in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, but uh, thanks Wikipedia, I appreciate you,
and I'm playing Wikipedia. Hey, I donate to Wikipedia. We
need we need Wikipedia as a resource. Uh and in
the age that we are entering. But well, cool, that
was a Ninja Guiden rage bound.
Speaker 3: I think we're walking through that or not today.
Speaker 2: It's out like this week as of we're recording.
Speaker 3: It.
Speaker 2: Might be it's probably already out by the time we're
listening to it, honestly, or listening to us. But yeah,
it's on everything pretty much switch to well I don't think,
I don't say that switched too, but switch. Yeah. It's
out tomorrow, July thirty. First, at the time that we're recording.
Speaker 3: Oh wait, I guess I got to get used to
between the two. It is. It is Joe Joe Juba.
I believe that is a Joe jubiter because he was
the he was the action like stylish action guy. We
were only doing first name bylines on this one, so
I'm gonna have to go all the way back to
the mask to verify there wasn't another Joe. Okay, if
it's your jew, I trust you, Joe.
Speaker 2: In twenty ten, it would have to be Jubo.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is Joe Juba.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I trust Joe Juba. All right, yeah, all right,
I guess we're I guess we won't roast him.
Speaker 2: Somebody else, so my old boss Joju. But we can't
roast them.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: Well cool, let's get into Wildgate, which Eric and I
have been playing. It's a I talked about it a
few months ago on the podcast. I think actually Eric
might have guessed on that episode of the show, but
it is I think, like you know, the Quick, kind
of Quick and Dirty comparison is Sea of Thieves in space.
You are piloting a variety of different ships, so you
can kind of unlock a few of them and kind
of pick before you go into the match. Each of
them have their own kind of quirks and benefits to them,
and they're all a little structurally different, so you kind
of have to get used to where things are placed
in the ships but zooming out.
Speaker 3: It is a PvP V style game where you are.
Speaker 1: Loading into the nebula the the I think they call it.
Speaker 3: There's an actual proper noun for it.
Speaker 1: But you're loaded into like the space along with four
or five other ships, all with like full human teams,
so you are working together with up to three other people,
so four people team, four person teams, and you're all
trying to find something called the Artifact, which is this
cool glowy.
Speaker 3: It looks like the precursor orbs from Jack and Daxter. Oh,
you're right, it looks just like them. I think about
it every time. Yeah, wow, that's a good call.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And you are trying to identify where this artifact
is within the map while all the other ships and
teams are doing the same thing. Identifying it. You have
to sort of get through a go through a gauntlet
that's somewhat challenging and long, and once the artifact has
been found and taken by you, everyone else is alerted
of its whereabouts and so you then have to wait
enough time for the wild gate, which is you.
Speaker 3: Know the namesake. Yeah, in the game.
Speaker 2: Is it weird that every time you say the name
it makes me want I want to hear you say
it in the wild Thing like melody, like wow, Like
I just my brain wants you to say it like that.
Speaker 1: I was thinking where the wild Things are and I
was like, what, there's a is there a quote from
the movie that you really like?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: So the Wildgate is on a timer and sometimes you
can find the artifact and you have to wait a
while for the wildgate to open, and everyone on the
map can. Once you've found the Wildgate, you can kind
of see what the percentage is at before it opens,
and then once the Wildgate is open, it is a
sort of free for all to see who can get
the artifact on their ship and escape to the wild
Gate before they are destroyed. It's an extraction game basically,
behind kind of kind of I don't want that to
scare people off.
Speaker 3: It is, yeah, you can take it away. The thing
that I think while Gay does that's really really smart
is it eschees a lot of the things that other
extraction shooters try to do. One of them is kind
of the in game progression, out of game progression. So
in a game like Tarkov where you get cool stuff
and you extract it and then you can bring it
back into another whatever. The opposite of an extraction is
like an interaction in an incursion, and that's a good word.
That's that's a ten dollars word right there. That's you're
not really doing that. It has more of the cadence
of just kind of a traditional shooter game where you're
picking a character, you're loading in. You have different ships
that you can unlock by choosing your battle you set
like kind of a battle pass progress type thing. I
don't think there is actually a battle pass in this.
Their progression tracks that you earn XP on and get
more skins, more self Valeriant works. Actually, people played Valorous, select.
Speaker 1: A hero and as you prioritize, no matter who you're playing,
you're kind of investing in their progression system, and then
as you go you will unlock items and cosmetics as
you go.
Speaker 3: And that's kind of similar to how Wildgate work, right,
So I stress all that because you're not trying to
get something and get out necessarily, you're trying to either
be the last crew standing or get the artifact and
extract with it. And instead of having it be like, oh,
I'm trying to get my stuff and get out and
deal with players and kind of do that sort of
social side of things in that respect, which can be
cool in its own way, but can also lead to
a lot of griefing, a lot of just trying to
scrounge what you can and get out really fast type
game play. Instead, you are really focused on the action,
and specifically the action that your team is capable of doing,
because they have tried. The team has tried to put
together this set of different skills and abilities and ship
types and weapons that might, you know, incentivize you to
want to play certain ways. Maybe you're running a faster ship,
it's a little bit sneakier, can move a little bit,
has better maneuverability, and so maybe you don't want to
try and be the last crew standing. Maybe you want
to get the artifact and get out before some of
the larger warships can beat you in a straight on fight.
But I think the other cool thing is that while
there is shooting, and the shooting is really fun because
there's a lot of zero g in this game and
a lot of really cool space physics. If you've played
say Outer Wilds, you might get really into the idea
of moving bodies within a zero G environment and the
sort of trajectories and thought process and planning you have
to do in that environment. But also you have these cannons,
and you have piloting the ship, and you have different
systems that you can loot. So when you go into
a POI a point of interest and you clear it,
you do kind of the sub objective in there. Maybe
kill some creeps, take out some eggs, fix some engines,
or repair some things, loop pops out, and you can
get cannons, which are great. They make your ship stronger.
You have better weapons. You can actually get special weapons
that are limited ammos, so maybe like a super powerful
sniper rifle or something like that. But then you also
get little gadgets like a clampjet, which is one of
my favorites, that you can stick on somebody's ship or
on your own ship, and then you shoot it and
it basically fires, and it's like hitting a fire extinguisher
with a handgun, where it just takes off really fast.
And so we were in a fight with a ship
and I was like, hold on, and I grabbed a
clamp jet and I jumped out the air lock, scooted
my way down to the enemy ship, stuck a clamp
jet on the top of it and then shot it,
and it just rocketed them down into an asteroid field,
like out of control, and the whole time they're like,
oh my god, what's happening, what's happening. It's like cool
moments like that that feel very interactive and very different
from what you would expect from a traditional first person
extraction shooter type game. And I think those interactions are
what make this game so interesting is that you're not
just kind of playing a traditional shooter. You have lots
of moments where you're honestly panicking, You're freaking out. There's
two ships coming at you from different directions. The artifacts
been found. You're trying to figure out how you maneuver
through an asteroid field and block cover or get into
a nebula cloud and hide and lay low or repair things.
And it's just constant action. But there's a great rise
and fall to it too, where you have those moments
of looting those areas and bringing stuff back and being like, Okay,
do we feel ready to fight? Do we feel ready
to do stuff? Get on the probes, use these probes
to fly around and scan things and scout people out oh,
I see somebody probing us. They came from that direction.
We need to look out for that, and just so
many cool little things. There was a game I played
a long time ago on Unreal Tournament two thousand and
four that was a modrout two thousand and four where
you were on these hot air balloon zeppelins and they
all had cannons on them, and you had to manually
load the cannons with different AMMO types and then light
the fuse and then aim the cannon and fire it.
And so if you matched up with a good crew
of people, we'd be on voicecomms and like I'd be
manning the cannon and aiming it, and somebody else would
be loading it and lighting the fuse, and I'd be
trying to track it. I'd be like, all right, ready, fire, firefire, Okay,
give me give me the missile round. Stop putting cannonball
in there. Let's do a different round that'll work better
at this distance. And stuff like that. You have to
lead shots because they're moving targets within that space, and
it's it's so interesting because of that. It's so fascinating
because of that, And so I think CEA thieves becomes
the comparison, not just because cause you're in this sort
of survival environment with a crew of people on a ship,
but because it has that feeling of big maneuvering almost
lumbering bodies in a space and that works so well.
Speaker 2: Is this is it? Is it viable or even possible
to play this by yourself like that?
Speaker 3: You can solo cue, But I don't think you can
hop in with a ship just by yourself. Yeah you can,
you can do no phil.
Speaker 1: So I have played with three people actually, as playing
with Leovader and one of our friends, Samir, and we
got a team bonus for only having three people on
our team, and so the game introduced a few So
one of the mechanics in the game, or one of
the systems rather is your ship has a frost. It's
you use you got and collect samples of like these
ice trunks from space and bring them back and deposit
them in your ship's repository, and then you can Every
ship is powered by a reactor, and so the reactor
has two functions. Number one, the enemy team can come
onto your ship or you can go on theirs. And
if you hold down the interact button, you can set
off the enemy team's reactor and it starts a countdown
and the ship will self destruct after I think it's
something like twenty or thirty seconds. And then the other
function that it serves is that when you're losing health
when your ship is being shot, and once they have
penetrated your shields, which recharge over time, they can then
hit your actual hole and if your haul is hit,
you take direct damage. And like every ship has a
health bar, and every I want to say like ten
to fifteen seconds, there's a button on your reactor you
hit and if you have ice in your repository then
it will heal the ship.
Speaker 3: I think like ten points.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And there are some modifiers you can get in
terms of like how much health your ship has. If
you blow up another ship and you go to their
kind of the graveyard of the ship, you can extract
their ship corp and install it in yours for extra health.
I think it's like ten percent more health on your ship.
Speaker 3: And a lot of those, like.
Speaker 1: Dynamics can also be at play mid fight, so you know,
having people board your ship or sending Eric go and
try to steal one of their guns out of their ship.
Speaker 3: I boarded a ship at one point took out the
pilot and two of the gunners and then tore a
cannon off of one of their cannon inmplacements, and you
can use a button to teleport back to your ship
after a short cool down. So I took the canon,
teleport it back, installed it on our gun like arsenal,
and then just started firing on them with their own cannon,
which was so cool and feels like you're kind of
playing this again pirates outlaws. This this sort of no
laws out here. There's no chivalr code that we have
to abide by in the way that we're fighting with
each other while just trying to get the artifact and
get out or be the last crew around. And you
can do so much cool stuff with that, and there's
a lot of roles to fill on the ship.
Speaker 1: There's six or seven different characters that you can you
can play with, and they each have they kind of fulfill.
One of them is more of like a I think
his name is Adrian. He has a jet pack that's
his like core ability that lets him get places like
really quickly, and he can kind of he's like your
explorer guy, like if you need to get if you
want to attack another ship and board them, he can
get there really quickly. There's another character she can do
like a long range teleport.
Speaker 3: There's a go this like.
Speaker 1: Badass looking goat guy, and he's like a ship defender
and he has a lot of perks, so like when
people board your ship, he can see their outline through
the walls. And he also has a couple other when
he's on the ship. So I think if somebody comes
on the ship and the goat guy kills them, he
gets like regenerative health. And there's a lot of different characters.
There's several different characters. One is a robot who doesn't
have to worry about managing oxygen, whereas the other characters there,
you have an oxygen meter you have to worry about.
And so if your ship gets blown up in certain
places and the vacu the seal is broken, you will
no longer have oxygen in your ship until you repair
that part of your ship.
Speaker 3: And so there's a lot of that kind of at play.
Speaker 1: While you'll explore certain pois and there'll be certain challenges that, oh,
this area in the map, you it especially drains your
your oxygen consumption, and so you have to kind of
manage going and completing these objectives while also like, oh,
I need to get to this oxygen event to make
sure that I don't die on this little excursion. And
Eric kind of talked about it. There's a lot of
different there's a lot of variety in the cannons that
you can equip to your ship. Yeah, one of them,
I love the sniper one. It's like super long range.
There's another one that is sort of like a big
charge shot and the further the further you are away
from them, the more damage it does. And so you're
kind of like incentivized to kind of keep distance and
hit these big shots. There's the quad cannon, which is
just kind of like you're kind of almost like a shotgun,
kind of like just like your kind of.
Speaker 3: Mid range short to mid range. It's it's begun too,
you know. If you start with gun one, it's gun too,
and then yeah, it becomes just like a better improvement.
I think my favorite one that I've had so far,
I haven't found it in the release yet, but when
we were playing the beta while back, I had found
one that was you could basically you'd shoot and then
the projectiles you shot would follow your crosshair as you
dragged it on the screen, and so you could kind
of curve shots. So if there was an enemy trying
to like hide behind asteroids or something, you could kind
of curve your shots around there. That's cool.
Speaker 1: It was.
Speaker 3: It was really neat.
Speaker 1: I think my favorite one is the bomb one where
it takes two people. So you should have this big
bomb and it sticks to the ship, and then your
other teammate can be on a different cannon and detonate
the bomb that you hit. And you can kind of
target different systems, so you can target You can shoot
at their turrets to like knock out their turrets. You
can shoot at their engines if you're behind them, and
so they won't be able to accelerate as fast. There's
a lot of different yeah, a lot of different interactions
within and on the exterior of the ships. And all
of the ships have these things called hard points, and
that's where you like kind of lock in your equipment.
So you could get, oh, we have a storm barrier,
so now we can go into the cosmic storm and
we can fight people or hide in there and our
ship won't take damage, whereas without that attachment, you can't
do that. There's another one that like a fire shield,
so we can kind of get close to certain asteroid
clusters that will normally like set fire to your ship.
And there's a lot of like different perks and abilities
that you're kind of equipping and to your ship and
kind of like trading off to I want. This is
what's kind of our strategy this game. What ship do
we spawn in with? What are our pois? Are we
more gadget heavy right now?
Speaker 2: Are we?
Speaker 1: And all these things kind of inform your decision making
to where you're going to go next and whether or
not you want to fight. Do you want to kind
of try to catch somebody by surprise, Do you want
to third or fourth party a big dog fight that's happening.
Speaker 3: Do you want to play more passive?
Speaker 1: It's it's got that like really that back and forth
that you find in a lot of really great competitive games.
Speaker 3: And despite it kind of being this kind of extraction.
Speaker 1: Shooter in in kind of like the multiplayer format, you
don't really have to worry about that stuff. Like Eric said,
like there's no like meta game that you're worrying about.
The meta game is just level after characters and unlocking
new there is a meta and it is laser ra discussion.
Sorry yeah, sorry, I should meta metagame metagame progressions.
Speaker 3: There's a meta and it's called the andaser Look look,
wild Gate Depths. If you're listening. Uh, first of all,
thank you for tuning in. Uh we we we like
your game. But but laser ram is crazy. That thing
goes absolutely bonkers every time I see it.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: That that's the one thing that I'm like, there's something
about that specific weapon, or it's not even a weapon.
I think that's maybe part of it is that it's
a hard point thing and it ends up being this
real game changing attachment. It's a giant laser sword that
just juts out of your ship that you can ram
into people and it does disgusting amounts of damage. It
also makes it really hard to kind of get unstuck
from an opponent because usually kind of the push and
pull that you have is you move slower if your
shields are up, and so dropping your shields is a
potential way to risk taking damage to create more distance. Well,
if you drop your shields when there's a laser ram
inside of your ship killing everyone, it's a bad time.
And if you don't then you're just kind of going
slowly and you might not be able to get away
from something. So that's like the one tiny thing that
I kind of wish. I hope it a future balance
update addresses. But that being said, I think the highest
praise I can give this game, it's a really high
bit of praise, is that the foundation here is just perfect.
It is. It makes so much sense for what any
anywhere the team could want to take wild Game from here.
I think it would work because you have such a good,
solid core idea of ship's crew whose guns I take out,
the artifact and the Wildgate. You could do a deathmatch mode,
you could do sort of a respawning, domination mode, King
of the Hill mode, stuff like that. It would all
work because the core function of these crews and the
ships and the way that they interact with each other
works so well that I could imagine tons of different
things working in this space. And I think that is
the best sign that this has some life in it.
And you know, in an era where live service games
they come and go pretty fast, I would like to
see Wildgate live for a while because I think it's
got a really really strong concept it's putting forward one
that feels different from everything else that's out there right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you say live service game, but it is
like it is a premium problem, Like you pay. It's
like thirty bucks. Like it's not like a free to
play game or anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's like a store and that sort of thing.
Like I think they eventually will I don't know who's
to say where they take it, but it does have
that kind of there is a live service feel in
some ways, like and I think just in general, multiplayer
developers are trying to get that lightning in a bottle
regardless of like the monetization method. But yeah, like you said, Marcus,
it is a premium game, like you're paying money for it.
And the cosmetics are like I will say, like I
wish like some of the baked in cosmetics that you
can unlock in the character tracks, I wish they are
a bit more had some more flair to them. And
so there they have like a store that is like
honestly pretty reasonably priced if you want. I know, like
one character skin was like five bucks. There was a
ship skin that you could get that's ten bucks. And
we'll see how that kind of shakes out. But all
in all like what you're getting for that that full
price is feels really worthwhile.
Speaker 3: I think meaningful and easy comparison point is hell Divers too,
a game that is also you buy into it, but
has been so well supported as a live service game
with constant updates. And if the wild Gade team takes
a similar tack and goes for a same you know
kind of set up and drive, I think it's going
to be pretty successful the way that Hell Divers has
been pretty successful, So I hope that is the route
they take. Yeah, I'm constantly surprised this publisher, Dreamhaven, I believe, Yeah,
which is a lot of ex Blizzard folks and stuff
like that is Mike Morheim. Yeah, they also put out
Sunderfolk earlier this year. There's been some really cool stuff
coming out of that publisher, specifically in a way that
has made me take notice because I do think the
multiplayer space hasn't just needed something like this, It's needed
a publisher that won to kind of push the ideas
forward a little bit rather than kind of look at
what is around and imitate or kind of use blueprints
to build their thing. Instead, we see like a publisher
that's putting out some pretty fresh ideas, some pretty cool ideas,
and I.
Speaker 2: Really like that.
Speaker 3: I'm really excited for it, and both Underfolk and Wildgate
have been huge surprises for me this year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are definitely one to watch going forward. I'm
having a lot of fun with this. I'm trying to
just real quick see which platforms it's on so I
can point people in that direction. I'll say it's cross play.
It's actually cross progression as well, so if you link
your accounts and you want to play on PC or
console or whatever, you can kind of carry your progress over.
It's on Xbox, PS five and Steam for those For
those interested. I'm really enjoying it. I'm going to keep
playing it. I actually kind of want to play some tonight.
I can convince Eric and.
Speaker 3: The squad my arm man coome on. Yeah, but we
will hand it back to you. Marcus.
Speaker 1: You have been playing roughly what five hours of Silent
Hill F.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I about two weeks ago, I took a trip
to Tokyo to visit a Konami's like esports office, which
I didn't realize is the thing that.
Speaker 3: They had Silent Hill E Sports. Let's go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the F stands for.
Speaker 3: Hmmm, faker fakers in this one.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's a guy, right, yeah, yeah, yess sports person.
Speaker 2: Yeah he's a human male, we can confirm. But yes,
I we for a special media event. We got to
play the first five hours of the game, and so yeah,
which is very exciting. I love horror, I love survival horror.
But I'm only a recent Silent Hill. I don't know
if converse the word I'm want to use, because I
suggested I was like had something against the series, but
I was I came to it late. Like I was
always a resident evil guy and there was no like
Shade to Silent Hill. It wasn't like residenteval all the way.
Screw Silent Hill. I just never got around to playing
in the Silent Hill games. You know that happened sometimes.
And there's like two very similar franchises.
Speaker 1: And then you picked up with me with Splinter Celling
metal Gear. I was always a splinter Cell.
Speaker 2: I was the same way, but I was metal Gear.
And I was saying with like I was a rationing
clank kid or not even kid, teenager really by that point.
But like got around to Jacket.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like I played, I was Jack over Ratchet. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: And then the real ones played Slight Cooper, which I
also played.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah, there's like there's a dozen people out there
who took that route. Yeah, Kenny Shepherd, much love.
Speaker 2: To you, very much like a Slight Cooper of the
ninety eighth Degrees to the Battery Boys and in syncram.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So it really wasn't until like, technically my first Silent
Hill game was pt which was originally going to be
Silent Hills, and then but after that, if we want
to count like a full game. Weirdly enough, it was
that free Silent Hill game that came out last year.
Was it the short message the one that they like
shadow dropped during after a Silent Hill transmission? Like I
streamed that entire games. It's like two three hours I
think it takes to get through it. And then I
played Silent Hill two, not the remake, but the original
Silent Hill two last year for the first time ahead
of the remake, because I wanted to play the remake
when informed opinion, and then I sat in, well I
guess then before that I didn't play it, but I
sat in for the entirety of our Silent Hill won
Super replay that we did a couple of years ago,
but Kylon myself, so I've seen everything that happens in
Silent Hill.
Speaker 3: One.
Speaker 2: That is all to say that Silent Hill f is
a great jumping on point if you're like me and
maybe don't have as complete of a Silent Hill history
as maybe like more hardcore fans. Because one, it's set
in the nineteen sixties, so like, wait before anything else
happened really in the series. And also it takes place
in Japan for the first time. It doesn't take place
in Silent Hill the town itself. It is set in
a fictional town that I'm not even going to attempt
to pronounce because it's a it's a mouthful, but it's
basically like it is a small kind of secluded town
out in the countryside, kind of a rural little.
Speaker 3: Village Ibusu Gayoka.
Speaker 2: That's probably correct. That's yeah. It's like I know it
started with an E.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I was like, let's I'll take a stab at
this one. I took Japanese class in high school.
Speaker 2: Okay, nice, well more than me. I I did learn
how to count the ten of Japanese ahead of this trip.
I can do that, oh perfect, Yeah, to be I
didn't get to use it though, But yeah, like we
got to also speak to the We did like group
interviews with kind of the the the inner circle to
the top brass there because you know, this is a
economy publish game of course, but this is developed by Neobards,
which is a separate studio. Is no internal Yeah, Konami
is not developing this internally. They've given us to another studio.
Speaker 3: Huh okay, yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh they worked on some DLC for Resident Evil Resistance. Yes,
they like helped collaborate on some of that. Yeah, which
is a game that I totally completely forgot about.
Speaker 3: I played that thing. It was interesting, if I remember correctly.
Ryukishi O seven is also writing on this one.
Speaker 2: Yes, he's the head writer who is a Are you
familiar with his work because he's kind of like an acclaim.
Speaker 3: Visual novel author. Yeah, time for me to really expose
the sicko stuff. Higurashi when They Cry and umen Eko
are are pretty well known in visual novel spaces, and
that was definitely something that made people take notice when
the first announcement for Silent HILLF went out and Ryukishi's
name was in there. That's Higurashi is a very well
known horror visual novel and umen Eko. I don't. I
haven't played all of umen Eko, so I'm sorry. I'm
maybe like a quarter of the way through it and
I never went back to it. I want to at
some point. It's like the ivan Ho of visual novels.
It's huge, it's massive, or the Ulysses, but it's UH.
I think that was definitely if you look at just
themes ideas and the sort of vibe of previous work. R.
Yukishi has definitely worked in that sort of rural horror
in Japan UH space before UH to success.
Speaker 1: So I think there was You just took me on
a trip, Eric, you said umin Eko. I heard bluemin Echo,
and then my brain went to bluemin Onion.
Speaker 3: I was a different world.
Speaker 1: Wow, bluemin Onion. I was in a different space. I'm
back though, I came back.
Speaker 2: You came from.
Speaker 3: Would you would you go to Silent Hill for a
bluemin Onion. That's that's the real problem. Definitely not. I
wouldn't even order a bloomin Onion at outback.
Speaker 2: Probably have an outback. It is an American town, so
there's probably an outback in there.
Speaker 3: Somewhere, yet I used to work in it.
Speaker 2: Out back, so I've I have served more than my
fair share of bluemin onions.
Speaker 3: Does that mean there's like a cheesecake factory in Silent Hill.
There's gotta be right, there's always one. I feel like
there's a cheesecake factory in all Americas.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Salent Hill f Silent Hill Factory.
Speaker 3: I was going to ask the F. Did you get
confirmation for what the F stands for? Because it looks
like the musical symbol for THEE, and so that's always
what I've thought the implication was.
Speaker 2: So it was definitely asked in the group interview we did,
and unfortunately they are being very tight lipped about it,
like they gave us the vague kind of like, well,
you know, we could mean a lot of things. You're
just gonna have to play the game to see and
maybe interpret it for yourself, but we're gonna we're gonna
pass on that question. So I still don't know what
the F means exactly. But uh, when I did ask
them sort of like what when they looked at previous
Silent Hill games, like what was kind of maybe the
entries that maybe served as the biggest inspirations for this game,
and the creative director over at neobar as al Yang
responded by saying that it was definitely Silent Hill one
and two, which probably isn't super surprising, but then he
also said Silent Hill for the room was a big
inspiration specifically for combat in Silent Hill F So to
set the table, you play as a like high school
teenage girl named uh Heiniko who is a sort of
like rebellious teenager. She's kind of described as being like
very masculine, like kind of a tomboy because she won
her childhood best friend as a boy. She kind of
rebels against sort of the feminine norms of the time,
mainly because she has kind of like a very rough
home life, Like she has an abusive father who who
is always kind of like terrorizing, you know, herself and
her mother, and unfortunately her mother is like very subservient
to their father, Like she doesn't really like Niko resents
her mom like she hates her dad, but resents her
mom because her mom apparently does nothing to sort of
stop their dad from being abusive. And I think that
sort of like forms her sort of like, well, I'm
going to rebella just against the concepts of just like
gender norms pretty much of like you know, the woman
has to just sort of answer to the man no
matter what and put up with all kinds of like
bs and kind of The only person that she likes
in her family is her older sister, Like they sort
of portray her as like, Oh, she's like my hero.
I love her. She's always been there for me. But
unfortunately her sister has been since been married and has
moved out, So she's stuck in this this terrible home
life by herself without that support system anymore, and so
she has to rely on sort of her her friends.
Like I mentioned, she has a best friend named Shu
who she's in friends with childhood, and they have this
very sort of like like ride or die kind of
relationship because he always treated her as an equal of like, oh,
I don't care if you're a girl, like you're my
like his his his big trade is that he keeps
calling her partner, because that was like sort of exemplifies
like no, no, you're not my sidekick, You're you're my partner.
Like we're you know, even Stevens on everything. We're gonna
go take over the world together, and then she has
two other like female friends like like Sokka go well
you might remember in one of the trailers where she
calls uh he to go a trader at one point,
and then another friend named Rinko. And so very quickly
you're you're going into this small town and as you're
hanging out with your friends, all of a sudden, without
really any warning or explanation, a familiar fog rolls through
the town and you see these like crimson red kind
of like vein like vines just kind of snake and
take over everything, and everyone in a town other than
you and your friends is it just vanishes like it's
like early quiet, and then you become separated. Some other
gnarly stuff happens that I won't spoil them, but very
quickly you are thrown into like, oh, the town has
just kind of been shaped into a nightmar's version of yourself,
and you need to go find your other friends who
may or may not be dead, and just kind of
find a way to escape and also figure out like
what is even happening here. So what I like about
the game in terms of the design is that, unlike
like Silent Hill one or two, where you're kind of
exploring the town, which is like really big, wide spaces,
like monsters are roaming around freely, like you got the
weird kind of like fleshy mannequin looking creatures that you've
seen in other Silent Hill games, but any older games.
I always thought that the kind of wide design trivialized
them as a threat because you could easily just kind
of run past them, like very easily, like unless you
were inside of a building, anytime you had to run
outside and get to the next building, it was kind
of just like I'm just gonna run away from this guy,
Ben Hill, Yeah, yeah, and they give up pretty easily.
Where in this game, everything is a lot more narrow
and corda focused because the town is a lot of
like narrow alleyways and streets, so you can't really do
that as well. So a lot of times you'll have
to go down like a pathway and there's a guy
right in front of you, and you're like, I I
have to go past that guy, like there's no other
way around him. And so the way you kind of
circumvent that, like you can fight enemies if you want to.
And going back to Neobar's Silent Hill for inspiration. Apparently
I've not played Silent Hill for but they were saying
how that game had a lot more melee focused action,
and so they took that here where you're never going
to use a gun. There's no range combat at all apparently,
which makes sense because Haniko is just like a kid basically,
So all the combat is melee focus and you're picking
up pipes and bats and knives and weapons also degrade,
so if you use something for too long, it'll bring
You can repair them with like toolkiss that you can find,
but you're always kind of making the decision of Okay,
I've got this bat that's pretty powerful, but do I
want to wear it down on this enemy that's right
in front of me? Or can I try to like
circumvent them in a way because I just don't want
to deal with that. And so if you choose the
escape option, you have a dodge that you can do
to sort of evade attacks, and it's all dictated by
a staminameter that you have, So when you dodge, if
you do like a perfect dodge or like the last second,
you'll automatically replenish the meter. But other than that, it's
just sort of functions as just like a you know, like, oh,
I'm just gonna get out of the way, just a
little dodge there, and it kind of teaches you to
sort of read the enemy movements, which are really quick
and really erratic in a way that is just kind
of like not only challenging from a gameplay perspective, but
just kind of just disturbing, just kind of raises your
hair to just how things animate in the game. The
other meter that you have is sanity, so sanity based
goes it takes hits from psychological damage. And the way
that this works is that you have a ability called focus,
where if you decide to engage in a combat, so
you have light and heavy attacks, and it's very slow
and deliberate and almost clumsy in a way that fits
the character of like she's not a fighter by any stretch.
She's just a girl with a pipe just swinging for
the fences basically, So it feels not is like, it
feels slow and not refined in a way that makes
sense thematically. So you can just smash things on your
own and just sort of like get by, But if
you focus, you can sort of like really lock in
on an enemy and it makes it easier to see
vulnerabilities that you can counterattack in. And the way you
can tell is that during certain animations, the enemy we're
kind of almost like like emit this sort of like glow.
I don't even know if glows the word. It's almost
like a weird, like stuttery little effect, but it's like
really quick, but it is like noticeable, and if you
attack them, when that happens, it like automatically stuns them
and they can't move for like a second, and you
can either whale on them or use it as an escape,
you know, just to run away, but you can only
and if you use focus it makes this opening a
lot more clear and maybe lasts longer. But the longer
you focus, the more you drain your stamina meter. So
you're again you're kind of making a choice of what
like is it worth using this resource on something? And
I guess, like the I think contextually, I guess the
idea is like, oh, you're forcing yourself to stare at
this really scary, disturbing thing, so it's going to freak
you out the more you're looking at it. You also
have a focus attack, which is basically if you hit
the attack button. While you're focusing, you'll do this really
powerful attack, like it's the most powerful version of your attack,
but it costs you chunks of stamina to hit. But
sometimes you can one shot a weaker enemy with it,
or at least severely damage a stronger enemy. But it's
dangerous because if there is like a lined up to it,
and if you get hit while you're doing this focused attack,
not only will you lose sanity, but the sanity bar
itself gets lowered, So now you have less overall stamina
even if you refill it, So you really have to
kind of consider, like do I want to use a
focus attack right now? So this game in almost a
and almost a weirdly souls ish way between that, like
how important it is to read animations and also manage
a stamina meter. It's got a soul's ish kind of
vibe to it that makes it adds to the intensity
and sort of the it like the survival aspect and
a sense of like not only are you managing you know,
health items and weapon repair items in the way that
you would in any other survival horror game, but also
you're managing just sort of like your physical abilities, like okay,
I don't want to run out of stamina. I don't
run a run out of sanity. I need to make
sure these things are all tip top. It's really fascinating,
but I think it it works for the most part.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: I do have a couple of like misgivings with the combat, though,
mainly regarding the stamina meter. I think the stamina recovers
a bit too slowly for how fast the enemies are
compared to your movements. Like, so not only like the stamina,
even if you don't completely drain it, like let's just say,
you know, you just you just use a chunk of it,
there's like a like a good second second and a
half pause before it starts to refill. And that's like
really slow for a staminameter in my opinion, because one
a lot of your movements do take out a drained
stamina meter pretty quickly, and also running drain your stamina.
So if you're just trying to just get away from something,
you are having to watch your stamina meter. And there
were a lot of times where it drains so fast
it takes someone to recover that. I I just was
vulnerable to things, and Hannako is pretty fragile as a character,
like she goes down pretty quick, and so there be
times were like, oh, I took a swing at something
and then just so that you get out of the
way and I need to run pass and like, oh,
I'm out of stamina and I can't move, and then
all of a sudden, this thing retaliates and just cuts
me down immediately, where it like the more it happened
to more it felt like it feels a little unfair,
just because it seems like, if you're going to give
me the option to run away, I feel like this
needs to be a little bit more forgiving to do that,
like I'm running out of breath off it. And also
even just narratively because like I don't know how many
other media people did this, But you have a journal
in the game, it's like Hanako's journal. She fills it out,
that's kind of It's basically serves as like, oh, here's
here's your profile, and all the characters you made, here's
the story thus far, that kind of thing. And she
writes an entry about herself and she mentions that like, yeah,
I used to run track in school, and I'm like,
you should have some fantastic standard why are you running
out of bread doubling over every two seconds?
Speaker 3: She didn't say she was good at running track, to
be fair, she just said she did it.
Speaker 2: That's a good point. I remember say, like I was
winning gold medals left and right. Yeah, though she probably
wouldn't say that because she doesn't have the highest opinion
of herself, like one of her injuries, like the first
sentence that she described herself as something along the lines
of there's nothing extraordinary about me whatsoever, Like she's pretty.
Her self esteem needs some work basically, So maybe she
was great, but she's like, nah.
Speaker 3: It was trash.
Speaker 2: But yeah, her lack of her lack of lungs is
a bit concerning. It's like, man, you should be better
than this. But this, the whole stamina issue definitely came
to a head in a very big boss fight. That
happens that like presentation wise, looks amazing, Like this thing
that you're fighting done, I'm not gonna spoil it looks
just you look at that thing and you're just like,
oh my god, what is that is that? Like, don't
like that? Get that? And they had It's funny because
in the demo room they had a physical model of
it that was just like looming over us the whole time,
just like and I was like right next to it,
so I was like, this is a creepy thing to happen.
Speaker 3: Next to me. Yeah. I dislike those so much. Every
time there was a was it the elden Ring Shadow
of the Earth Tree event where they had a giant
recreation of Mikola's hand coming out of the giant flesh,
remember that, Oh it was? It was Did you touch it?
Speaker 2: I hugged it.
Speaker 3: It's a picture of m Yeah. No, I definitely took
a picture of like next to the arm with like
it like next to my face, being like ah, and
then I was like, oh, this is disgusting. So then
every time I saw it, I was like, at least
that was an arm. This thing is is far worse.
How many how many arms are we talking on this one?
Normal arms?
Speaker 2: But normal let's say it's it looks like a child,
but like the child had its mouth ripped off and
just had like a gaping, fleshy thing and had a
lot of pins, like really sharp pins just sticking out
of it at different places, and its eyes were missing,
and yeah, it just looks like yeah, just just nightmare
fuel pretty so a little like hell Razor esque kind
of little bit, but also a little like angelic too,
because it's wearing like priest robes okay, okay, yeah, and
it's carrying like a big old hammer and that there's
also like covered in.
Speaker 3: Spikes that it swings at you. Oh that seems bad, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So you're fighting this thing later in the game,
and this fight was unbelievably frustrating, and I knew it
wasn't just me because I would look around in other
media people like, you know, it's the journalists and influencers playing,
and everyone was stuck on this fight for a while.
Like it became like and I was talking to people afterwards,
like how long did it take you to beat that
weird demon girl? And they were like, it took me
an hour, and that was like the common like like
the average light it took me like forty tries, and
a lot of the everyone seemed to have the same
thing of like, yeah, I just felt like I just
kept getting tired constantly, like I didn't have the stamdina
because it again, it is a very Soul's esque fight
of like having to dodge attacks in succession, which drained
your stamina, and because it takes forever to recover the
moment you run out, you're just like bone for way
too long. And that thing retaliates so quickly that and
it hits so hard, it's like two hits, you're done.
And you know, so you're trying to dodge like let's
say three attacks in a row and then have enough
to try to get some damage in. And you know,
it was a fight that just dragged on too long,
and it felt like your stamina just could not handle
what was being thrown at you. And by the time
I beat it, it was just like I felt like
I just kind of eked it out a little bit,
like it didn't feel totally like yeah, yeah, I learned
my lesson and got good. It's just like I just
did the best of what I had and then had.
I felt like some degree of luck involved. The only
other things that you can use to sort of like
turn it tide in your favor that you can collect
these equippable charms called a omamori, Like you can only
equip one at a time, but they basically give you
passive like perks of like oh maybe you're I don't know,
you do a little bit more attack damage, or maybe
your stamina at your dodge window is a little wider
like stuff like that. So I was trying to swap
through all the ones I had try to make this
fight a little more bearable. Yeah, it was. It was rough,
and it also sucked because at least in my specific case,
I didn't have all the healing items I could have,
just because I I just entered the fight when I
had run through this already hellish gauntlet to get to it,
and then I had like maybe two heels left, and
it didn't replenish my heels because you just load your
last save instead of just starting the fight from like
like a fresh slate. So I was like, oh, man,
is it if I had no like heels when I've
more or less saved myself into a corner and had
to reload like a away earlier save and then try
to run through a large section again with most of
my items intact, Like that seems like that could potentially
be a problem. So yeah, like that, it almost was
like that's a little maybe two old school survival whore
in that case. But yeah, other than that, when you're
not fighting and running away from stuff, I do like
the like I love the atmospheric to gain, like I
love the level design. I do like that everything's a
little bit more corridor focus because it makes it scary
that you kind of have to throw yourself in front
of things a little more often. There's like cool optional
things that you can find because like in between, like
like you know, you have a big map that kind
of just tells you at all times, like you know, hey,
this is what you need to go to, Like it
does the silent hill two thing of like oh, if
you hit a dead end, it marks like as an
X on the map, and then your objectives always painted
in like a circle or whatever. But in between heading
to wherever you need to go, you can find like
certain buildings that are open and there might be like
side little puzzles or stories. Like I went into like
a doctor's office at one point that had like a
little self contained like puzzle and like enemy that was
in there that like got me an item once I
solved it, and then like little war bits of like
oh what happened to this doctor? Like he's the town doctor.
Everybody knows what who he is, what's up with him?
Is he all right? Like that stuff I love and
whenever you are inside of a building, that is when
it gets the most silent Hillie. Like I there's like
towards the end of my demo, you go to your
old middle school, and that was probably my favorite, and
when I talk to other media people, that seem to
be their favorite parts, because that's when it just becomes like, Okay,
this is like straight up classic silent hill survival whore
of Like you're in this middle school. They're a locked doors,
you're trying to find keys, You're solving these little puzzles
in there. Enemies show up at a certain point, but
in really like creative ways, and it's like, oh yeah,
this school sequence, like it's pretty cool, and there's like
really cool moments outside of that, Like there's a point
where you're like exploring the farm and at like a
farm at some point and dealing with like these these
like scarecrow mannequins and solving a puzzle where you're trying
to find like the correct scarecrow and like a bunch
of them, but they some of them are alive and
you don't know which ones we're alive, and because they
all they all look like they're going to come alive
and kill you, but you don't know which ones they are,
and then if you find the right one, it points
to you in the right direction, because it does like
a Lost Woods kind of thing of like, oh, you're
in a foggy area, if you just run through the
fogg you're gonna wind up back where you were seeming
to find a correct route. Like that stuff is cool,
And all the puzzles I did find, they were all,
for the most part, generally like pretty clever and like
fun to solve. There's only a couple that I was like,
I don't know if I totally understood what I was
supposed to do, and I sort of bumbled my way
through it. But those are definitely at least in the
batch that I played, like the minority. And then this
story stuff seemed interesting, like you do meet up with
your friends eventually, like this isn't a spoiler, like it's
pretty soon, And a lot of the sort of drama
comes with kind of the interpersonal relationships within them, like
your friend Shoe, who is like your best friend, Like
it's implying that he might have a bit of a
crush on you, but Hanniko is seemingly not interested and
then but you have another friend like Rinko who is
like maybe a little obsessed with Shoe and wants to
be in a relationship, and maybe he resents you a
little bit because you're his closest friend and he seemingly
isn't interested in Rinko, but you're not interested in Shoo,
and she's annoyed that, like he likes you but you
don't care, and it's like not fair, you know. So,
which is like another like Silent Hill thing of like
meeting these weird characters that have some like personal hang
ups that seem like, you know, I've only scratched the
surface of what's going on with them, but you can
kind of see a little bit of like, Okay, there's
some there's some stuff here as well as like Hannik's
own like personal trauma.
Speaker 1: I will say this is I I really got stuck
on what the Silent Hill F could mean, and I.
Speaker 3: Have done a van Aiken has been palace.
Speaker 1: And while I don't know what the F stands for,
I did find some really fun facts.
Speaker 2: Is that the stands for fun facts?
Speaker 1: I think in this episode it does. The setting Silent
Hill F, according to Capcom, is drawn the Bisu Gyoka
is inspired by the real town of Kanayama in the
Gifu Prefecture, and there is some they kind of shared
some some screenshots. Is like, oh, that looks really familiar
to the game. So I went and looked up some
stuff about Kanayama and the Gizu Prefecture, and there is
actually a section of the town that is called the
Konkatsu alleyways, and they are if you look up the
Kankantsu alleyways, they look like they could be like screen
grab some silent hill. And I found a travel guide
about Kankatsu and it's visit Gifu dot com. But Kinkantsu,
I'm reading this quote. By the way, quote Kinkantsu is
the loku Kanayama phrase that's used for narrow alleyways that
intertwine so intricately that they resemble the muscles and the
bones of the human body. And I found out that
the kanayama uh sorry that kankatsu the term literally means
sinew and bones, and it's used to refer to the
backstreets of Hia Kanayama. And he's I'm reading from a
Kietsuno Japan dot com, which is a travel blog. These
narrow intertwined backstreets are said to resemble the sinews and
bones of the human body. Nostalgic scenery remain around the
Kanayama Juku rest stop at the Hita Kaido Road, which
is flourished as a post town since the Edo period.
Immerse yourself in a retro feeling. It's like being on
a movie set and enjoy a rustic dining experience at
a Japanese confectionery shop.
Speaker 3: I love that this was the journey that you were
on this entire time, like you were playing hide over here,
like we're we're here, like, oh, Silent Hill, Yeah, let's
talk about that. And you're like, well, if you look
at where Mary Magdalen is sitting in the final well,
I found we could we should the next time we
go to town, I have.
Speaker 1: Like found we got to do a video in this place,
the Konkatsu footpath within Kanayama, inside of the Geekoo Prefecture.
Speaker 3: It's Silent Hill.
Speaker 1: Alf Man because originally it started I was like, Talent Hill,
af could it mean Fuji which is a town in Chizuoka,
which is a seaside town I've been to that I
was looking at and looking at the screenshots from the game,
and I was like, this looks I feel like I've
been here, and then I got let down this this
this path.
Speaker 2: I mean, I wonder if it's like like one of
the big themes with this game that they that would
be I hope not. It's so obvious that it's like, man,
I'd be Silent Hill fog. Yeah, you know this new
idea we're trying, what if there was fog in Silent Hill.
One of the big things with this game they were
talking about, and one of the reasons they said in
Japan was that they they wanted to go back to
like traditional Japanese horror, and they felt like with subsequent
entries over the years, they felt like every time on
Hill since the first one lost a bit of that
because it's said in you know, Western in America. So
they were like one of the big things that sort
of defines Japanese whore is like like basically like grotesque beauty,
where like it's a terrifying looking place, but there's also
something like beautiful about it. Of like like and Silent
Hill I aff has that where like the weird kind
of red growth that takes over everything it like it
looks disgusting, but it looks kind of pretty because it
kind of looks like flower blossoms a bit so like
a lot of the especially like the bigger kind of
like boss zombies. They kind of look like these moving
like yeah, like evil flower things that are like gross,
but they're like covered in like red blossoms and you
kind of look at it like ill. But then also, huh,
you know that's a in a different context. This is
kind of like, I don't know, have pleasants the word
I want to use, but like I could be pretty,
you know, if it wasn't swinging like a giant blade
at me, I could appreciate this.
Speaker 3: You also have the dynamic between the two character that
you mentioned earlier. It could be Silent Hill friend Zone.
You never know that, you know, it could be that.
Speaker 2: True Si still friends we made along the way that
that one doesn't ring truepo No, okay, yeah it's not
friend zone.
Speaker 3: I think it's just Silent Hill Fog. It's Silent Hill Fog. Yeah.
I like Forte, all right. I like when musical influence
arrives in video games. It makes me happy. I'm going
to pretend it's Forte.
Speaker 2: I can't confirm the music I heard very good, but
you know you got composer, you know, long time confers
Akira Yamaoka on it.
Speaker 1: Are we kind of getting like the post rock guitar
vibe of like Silent Hill two.
Speaker 2: No, not really, it's a lot more a little bit
more traditional Japanese or like we were asking him, like,
you know, how he changed the sound design for this game.
He's like, yeah, I kind of have to rethink everywhere
everything one because of a time period and also that
it's just set in Japan proper at this time. So
he's kind of like, you know, I wanted something. I
want the game to sound distinctly Japanese in that way,
but also like that of vote the sixties era, which
you know, their sixties is a lot different than you
know what we think of it of the sixties.
Speaker 3: In the US.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fun fact, they also had a like in the room,
they had snacks that were specifically from the sixties, like
they that we could eat. They were like, Oh, we
want you to kind of like immerse yourself. So here's
all these like traditional like these were the snacks of
the era that still exist today that you can try.
So I tried a little bit of everything I was like, oh,
this is fun. They're like, yeah, you know, this is
what kids were eating back.
Speaker 3: Then, you know, yeah, but it was the best one
was your favorite?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: What what limited edition Oreo flavors did they have back
They had.
Speaker 2: These little mini donuts that were pretty good. I got
like two it. Oh they were like sacks of like
little four mini donuts or kind.
Speaker 1: Of like donuts are my favorite dessert by the way, Really,
I don't think I knew that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, OK, I love donuts.
Speaker 2: It's weird because you can't donut as a dessert, Like
you can't go to a restaurant and say, I have
like a doughnut at the end of this place.
Speaker 3: I think if somebody told me like, name desserts, I
think I would get through a lot of foods before
I got to I.
Speaker 1: Mean, you're in Austin, eric like voodoo doughnuts.
Speaker 3: But that's that's a that's a breakfast item. Yeah, but
if you save them.
Speaker 1: They're also growing up on the East Coast, we had
a lot of We had a Krispy Creams and you
could hit the late night drive through. You could one
twelve twelve am hitting the Krispy Kream.
Speaker 3: It hits man's I mean, yeah, I guess the thing
about a Krispy Creame is it's really good for like
the three minutes after it comes out from the oven,
and then it turns into just sugar bread, like stale
sugar good.
Speaker 2: I mean, you want it hot, but it's still good
when it's like.
Speaker 1: You can make a little bread pudding, put a little
milk in there, put it on the south Back to
Life yourself.
Speaker 3: Reconstituted doughnuts is my favorite dessert. You put on, put
on the bear attire, and now you're acting like Krmie
over here. Ye I constituted Krispy Kreme.
Speaker 2: I'll also add one of the big things that was
revealed during our time here was that the game A
Silent Hill f has multiple endings, you know, in classic
Silent Hill fashion. I believe they said it's five total,
including the classic. Oh yeah, and you added to the
list Silent Hill five endings. Maybe it's five boroughs, who knows,
but also one of the boroughs it's also so one
of the endings is that they're doing the UFO ending again,
which is like a classic like silly sort of like
Silent Hill ending. But what's also interesting is that so
the first playthrough of this game, everyone gets the same ending.
It's not till you beat the game once that you
can then have the ability to get the other endings.
So basically where they they want you like they have.
They were telling a focused story the first time around,
but they're like after that, if you want to replay
the game, then all the things you do in terms
of like I don't know, I don't know what the
decisions are like. There was no choice driven dialogue or
anything like that, like if you played like Silent Hill
two for example. It was a lot more like what
determine how you got the different endings was sort of
like how you engaged with certain puzzles or when you
did certain things. I assume it's like that, so, but
it was hard for me to get a sense in
his first five hours of like things that I did
that I would think, like, oh, in the second play through,
maybe this was like a diverging point, you know what
I mean? But maybe the only thing I could think
of was there was one point where I went to
a location outside of the like the objective, and I
got like a little cutting that play that. Basically, the
characters were like, hey, you're not supposed to be here.
This isn't where we're going, And it was like a
little bespoke moment. I was like, Oh, could I have
not seen this if I didn't just go over here?
And I was talking to other people that are like, oh,
did you go to this place first before you went
to the other place? Like it was like it was
like the home of another of one of your friends
basically yeah, And they're like, yeah, I got that cut
scene too, But I'm trying to find someone that did
the objective first and then went back to that place,
and I didn't find anyone, But I'm wondering if that
could be a point, like having that interaction would maybe
play into one of the endings. But yeah, that's I
think that's a cool idea of the idea of like
I don't have to I'm one of those people that
like can sometimes feel a little not stressed. But when
you know that you're not gonna there isn't like one
true ending, you kind of wonder when you do get
your ending, like did I get shorted? Like is this
a bad ending, especially with Silent Hill, or like have
I missed anything that the game ends sooner than it
could have and I'm just not aware yet until I
see the other endings, you know what I mean. So
it kind of makes you one like second guess the
things that you do. They also made a point of
saying they don't describe the endings as good or bad,
like they're like, none of the endings are like that.
It's all up to interpretation what you make out of them.
So at least don't feel bad about like, oh man
and goes head it got chopped off because I got
the bad ending.
Speaker 3: But it's not about the ending. It's about the silent
hill friends we made along the way. That's what That's
what I was saying.
Speaker 2: You're on you're on board? Yeah, yeah, let us know
chat whether it's YouTube or Spotify whatever, listening.
Speaker 3: What do you think the F stands for?
Speaker 2: I would love to know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can now comment on Spotify.
Speaker 2: By the way, Yeah, I've seen the comments on Spotify.
Shout out to everyone.
Speaker 3: That's the best way to open our Spotify comments is
to tell everybody to post their favorite F four.
Speaker 2: Do you think you have changes at the end? And
it just says I don't know?
Speaker 3: Is actually the whole time? Yeah, I don't know?
Speaker 1: Well cool, I think that's going to bring us to
the end of the show this week. Thanks Marcus for
for uh informing us all about sound Hillah.
Speaker 2: Should mention I have like a more flesh out preview
on the website at this point that you can read
as well.
Speaker 1: Head over to GameInformer dot com for that, and while
you're over there, go to go to Game Informer dot
com slash subscribe lock in a print or a digital
subscription to our magazine. It's a great product. We are
really happy with it and really believe in it, and
hope you do too. Hope you consider supporting us in
that way. Thank you for listening to the show this week.
Of course, you can follow Eric van Allen at C
Moosey s E A M O O s I. On
social media, you can follow Marcus at Marcus Stewart seven,
and you can follow me Alex van Aiken at It's
van Aikin on Blue Sky and Instagram. Of course, while
you're at those places before be sure to follow Game
Informer to keep up to date on everything.
Speaker 3: Going on in our world.
Speaker 1: And until next week, Thanks for listening, thanks for watching,
subscribe if you're watching on YouTube, and have a great week.
Speaker 3: Hi everybody.