Okay, let me just stop you right there, Chris Plant. Every time... Rachel, our lovely editor, who's very, very talented, every single time you say the name, which is already multiple times since I said we weren't going to say it, Rachel's going to have to go in there and put a bleep over the name. Maybe that's

a sign, Russ, that this bit is not meant for us. It's a sign that the universe wants us to say the name of the video game. We're

doing it for fresh. I got it. Anyway, it is a... Here's what I would say.

If I made an independent video game and the people doing the podcast about it said, now the one thing we're not going to do is repeat the name of the game, okay? I think it's good marketing. I was saying, I'm going to find where they live

and burn their houses to the ground. I think it's good marketing because people are going to focus. It's like trying to work your name into your stand-up set, but like making a big deal of it, I think it's going to make people think about it even harder. It's

just like that extremely relatable example. Exactly. is a sci-fi fantasy-esque game that is a massive open world where you are hopping from kind of islands in the sky and at first you hop in and you got like a gun and there are things to shoot you're like oh yeah i'm kind of familiar with this indie shooter i get it and i can move kind of fast and then it's like yeah but what if you had a snowboard that could zip you around at almost light speed and grind straight up the edges of mountains and you're like great i love it and it's like what if you have a pickaxe and you can terraform the environment and carve holes into areas to sneak up on enemies and you're like great i love that too and by the end it's like what if you have a grappling hook multiple jumps you can basically fly uh your grappling hook now works on clouds and you are literally just hopping across entire chasms miles of open air from island to island, collecting unbelievably powerful weapons that just happen to lock right onto enemies in that oh so delicious way. If this game, if suddenly

the environment of this game would melt away and it would be a carpet store and your main character would suddenly become an iron man action figure and you could just see the kid like jumping him around flipping him you know like and then i shoot my grappling hook and then like oh i have my hoverboard and this is purely this feels a hundred percent like a kid playing with a toy and you're like well you can't do that in a video game. There's just too, you're giving him too many powers. It's like, oh yeah, well, I don't know. I've let him Minecraft stuff. I just did it. I just said he could. And you know what? Because he said that, he gets an extra gun. Right, exactly. I'm going to give him, now his pistol is a machine

gun, too. Let me talk about...

You keep waiting for the lightsaber, right? You keep waiting for light... Very you know like it's gonna come so

we've talked a lot about uh sort of some of the stuff you do structurally speaking um you're really just jumping from island to island and you'll have like um kind of defend the point moments where you a wave of enemies and you basically have to kill 25 enemies to progress and unlock a chest and you unlock things with that but the minute to minute is really like the only thing that i think this game like uh it just that's what i think clicks for me is the fact that you have that level of freedom and it's such an extreme representation of a power fantasy that it's like when people talk about why a superman game is impossible to do i think this is checking that box of like having that infinite power the

the defend the point i i get that comparison because yes you go to an island you find a kind of start button you press it in enemy start spotting and they'll say that hey you need to kill like 25 of these things and then we'll give you whatever the reward for the island is i get the kind of comparison to defend the point but for me what it felt like was almost like a multiplayer map that i would find and i would trigger the multiplayer map and it was like okay just just completely dominate this map because it's not really about defending anything. It's just about using the map as your little skate park in whichever way you want. And if you are the sort of person who, like, wants to do a lot of shotgun stuff, you could go down underground into, like, a chamber and kind of wait for things to come for you there. If you want to be, like, balancing hundreds of feet in the air, you can use little balance platforms. If you want to use your skateboard, there's like little ramps for that. It really wants you to use each island as a play space for whatever your style is.

50 foot tall mechs and like giant other things. And those enemies will then have like explosives that carve away into the maps, like using the same destructible terrain stuff that you were using with your pickaxe, such that at the end of one of those encounters, the entire map is like totally

bombed out and destroyed. So I didn't start liking this until I got to those bigger encounters when you started taking on bigger enemies. And this is kind of my problem with the thing overall and why it didn't necessarily, I think, click for me. I really feel like it is tuned to such power, like for you to be so powerful and fast, right? moving that when you have to slow the scale enough to do things like shoot one enemy in front of you or get one orb that you see in one place i feel like it i'm over compensating constantly because i'm not at a scale where i'm taking on like one-on enemies like there's a lot of like i would i would grappling hook and i would be like right underneath the platform and just want to go up a little bit more and can't quite do it it just feels like

it is almost the sonic the hedgehog problem where you're so tuned to like i'm zipping through the world so quickly and then suddenly you have to make a careful platforming move and it's not really designed to do that right

when you're taking on those big when the battles get big enough that you're not even really aiming at specific enemies you're like popping a headshot as you're flying through the air or when you're shooting like a rocket launcher at these gigantic tank like guys and even if you fly across the whole island you can continue to clock that dude That scale started to feel, like, enjoyable to me. But I think I was – it requires a little too much fidelity, I think, early on for taking on those, like, one-on enemies. It feels too fast to just, like, slow down and shoot dudes one-on

I think that's totally fair. I will say a few things that it does to try to accommodate for that which it has a lock-on system so when you do aim if you're like zipping through the sky if you can vaguely aim at a character it will magnetize onto them and it's

a hard lock it's not like a auto

aim it's like are some guns better at that or is that in my it might be a range It might be affected by range.

And once you do that, it does... I love the aiming system, which it locks, but it doesn't guarantee it hits. So if the character is running left, you then have to kind of steer with... Once you're locked, steer the thumbstick a little bit to the left to kind of guide the bullets. So if you're locked, you will be able to shoot them, but you have to still add this little extra touch to kind of get ahead of where a character is going. And it makes you feel like what watching somebody on Twitch playing Call of Duty with a sniper rifle does where they're like, oh, wow, they shot, you know three feet ahead of the character and somehow got a headshot even though the truth is again you're locked on like it's it's pretty easy so

a point of clarification if you're playing on a mouse and keyboard by default there is no lock on which honestly i would not recommend because i i think it makes the game much harder um i think you gotta understand

how little of your screen the enemies are usually taking up. Like you're regularly like a hundred feet in the air, like looking down at them. It's not like you're a noob. It's like, I can't, I need a magnifying glass. Yeah, and

it also like, I think where this game succeeds is when you're, I'm doing a wall run with my fucking snowboard and looking behind me and getting two headshots in a row uh in slow motion and that's stuff that realistically i know i could certainly not do without the generous auto aim that this game provides so i think if you're looking for the power fantasy the best way to play it is on a controller there might be a way to activate mouse keyboard auto aim or lock on but i know for sure it works on a controller did y'all play on a tv or on steam deck i played on steam deck ran great on steam deck for what it's worth i

i did both i will say that some of the things i'm talking about were somewhat alleviated being on a larger screen. Really? I was, even though the performance was fine on Steam Deck, I felt like I was able to, I don't know, like take in more of the environment at once. You know what I mean? Steam Deck is only 800p,

so that alone is going to limit visibility. That's

interesting because I expected the same, but I played it on Steam Deck while I was traveling it, and it was really locked in and once i played it on a tv it was so big and overwhelming that i was kind of getting like almost motion sickness because things were moving so fast which i think is just a personal preference um it is i mean let's talk a bit about the ambition of the game and like all the things you can do in it and how weird it is that it does run on a Steam Deck when so many games that do that look maybe nicer, but do less can't run on a Steam Deck. Like we said, it is a game that has full, huge open world. It has fully

streaming like there's no like load times once you're in it. It's like the whole world is streaming through.

Yes. You can see long distance. You have these massively destructible environments. You can, again, skateboard up hundreds of feet of terrain. And again, like you said, no load or anything like that. The destruction is fantastic, you mentioned, Fresh, that after a battle, the entire area can basically bombarded. But the other thing is you can use that destruction in creative ways. So I actually ended up beating an island that was all about going deep down into the island because I saw it had lava at the bottom and lava is destructible. So I bombed out the lava part of the bottom of the island and then carved up into it um and finished it in like a few seconds yeah that's great that's like that it gives you that creative freedom is exceptional the closest comparison for me is um and i know you all don't love these but the earth defense force games i

was thinking the same thing this is like earth defense force but fun is my i

not entirely unfair it feels like this would be more fun

with edf levels

of enemy density i think yeah like having that kind of like wave bait like that would be a lot of fun actually yes

and it feels like if i think about how this game can be upgraded over the years because i i really hope we get another one of these well

yeah i'll say i say they they this is their second game the studio's second game the studio is called graylock studio and they made a game called severed steel okay um which came out in 2000 uh 2021 um which was a basically the similar in terms of like gun shooting mechanics but much more linear uh like it wasn't an open world it was more like straight levels so i think the studio itself has had like a lot of support and you look at the steam reviews on this it's like 99 with 2 000 reviews like clearly they've found their audience and i know they are planning on future updates for this as well sorry you were saying i interrupt yeah yeah yeah i was

saying that i hope that they go the edf direction which is worry less about ultimate polish yeah and just continue to climb and pick out the ambition and the scale and yes like larger hordes of enemies. The EDF route, I think, is such a healthy route for this sort of game because once you start getting too focused on polish, you end up killing all the things that are special about it. And we've seen that happen to so many games.

I mean, nothing about this game tells me that they prioritize polish.

Listen, I'm sorry. I try to be a respectful co-host, but hearing Plant say that he wants anything to ever follow the EDF path and just like kind of sitting back and letting it happen. I think what if they made just like a real video game would be cool, too, is what I would love. I'm kidding. Of course, this is a but it is a case where like i think for me personally i need a little more romance yeah i need a little more i mean i'm in sitting here trying to think of a less gross way of putting it but the fact is i need to be whined and dined like i love it that you let me triple jump that's perverse i love it but at least give me like a dad that i hate you know what i mean like i just need a

little kiss on the cheek you know did any of you all uh attempt to consume the story i

mean i read read the instructions it seems

maniacal it seems like there are several games happening at once like it's impossible yeah

so the story is delivered uh you'll get to a point and there's just like text boxes that are floating at a specific point and you just read the text boxes and then at the end in the last one it'll be like we gotta check out this facility and then you just get a new waypoint you go there uh but realistically like all you're doing when you go to these points is just, like, progressing whatever the next waypoint is. I

will say, speaking of progressing, and I will say this is something you told me. And I feel like pretty, the game really, I think, could do a better job of communicating this. When I first started playing, it feels like like someone has the field of view turned up too high or something and like the the sensitivity is like off the charts you know that feeling of like yeah oh my god i can barely control it and when you first start playing you're like why is it like that like why is it tuned like this like this is a first person shooter why did they have it why do they make it feel like this yeah and i it wasn't for me until i got like the grappling hook and the the board and the double jump and those like basic maneuverability and then you're like oh okay like that it but you have to just keep pushing for it it is going to seem insane takes about 40 minutes to

get all the tools that's

that's a great point in that you expect it to feel like cod early on right exactly yes you press left and it's like, oh, wow, I'm looking behind.

It feels like you have cheats on. Right. It's that feeling of like somebody turned on no clip. I'm just like falling around this world.

Yeah. No, that's that is a really good note.

It is. It is really funny. think this is a funny video game joke that this game has the ability to you can fall for so long that it pulls up a prompt that's like do you want to push a button to restart and then you land on the ground it's like no i was just falling that entire time i'm okay i know it seems like i was gonna fall forever no, it was actually just 30 seconds of string falling.