1Upsmanship: Forspoken

Bounding across the barren video game landscape in search of digital treasure and probably our parents, it’s 1upsmanship! This time our boys take on the recently released and largely panned Playstation exclusive Forspoken in a desperate attempt to add their laundry list of gripes to the pile. But things take a turn toward the celestial as Michael and Adam discuss the value of the Hero’s Journey as a story structure in 2023, the value of a game being made for financial considerations, and how the combat is actually sorta awesome when you finally get all your upgrades. Check it out!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh, nothing. You know, we've never talked about this, Mike,

(00:25):
But if we were to do an episode that was
worst Companions ever, there would be a lot of contenders
this year. Have you noticed that in games this year?
There has been a lot. Yes, there's been so many
bad companions this year. You're gonna have to refresh my memory. Okay,
So one of them is And I don't want to
get too far ahead because I think at some point

(00:46):
we might talk about this game, but Atomic Hearts has
a pretty bad companion. And you can see you're talking
about the sentient glove. Yeah you consider that a companion. Okay, Yeah,
it's a voice in your head that you're dealing with
all time. Decide they have to have a life bar
be able to be killed or did we not decide that?
It's just pretty little with it. And consequently another contender

(01:08):
has to be cuff from this game, right right, I
see where you're going. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this game has
a companion that was quite a choice. And I don't
like to get into editorializing too fast. I mean, if
I can such a striking thing, if I can review
the character in the form of a palindrome fuck cup,

(01:31):
it works. Play that backwards. Thank you. Yeah yeah, yeah,
immortalized that. Put that on my tombstone. Welcome everyone to
one Upsmanship, where we create palindromes and poetic renderings of
all of our video game faults and opinions. I am
one of your hosts, Adam Ganzer, and with me is
my my favorite colleague and escort mission please sir. Yeah,

(01:54):
that's me, Mike Swain. I thought, are you? Yeah? I
think people should write in and determine who's the who's
the PC, and who's the companion. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not
going to claim I just I'm not going to let
you claim it. It's a that's why you let us know.
That's fair. I'm the joker and you're Batman right now,
you know, just just sowing seeds of discord as the

(02:17):
little ventriloquist dummy who's also a gangster. That's me, that guy. Yeah,
I love that guy. Uh. And we've elected to cover
a game this week that was I guess universally panned
is probably maybe that's an overstatement, but a game that
was not well received, but is a gigantic PlayStation exclusive

(02:41):
that we both happened to play. So we decided to
talk about it and that game is for spoken. Yeah,
I think it's I think it's worth talking about. Um yeah,
me too, because it's if you'll cast your minds back
to when the hype train was full steam for the
PS five uh Frey main character and four Spoken and
the four Spoken engine was one of the first tech

(03:04):
demos that they were that Sony really is to push
the PS five and to try and prove that the
next generation looks better than the old generation. And I
got to see this footage of I will say, truly
amazing like cave interiors with many, many, many sounds done,
but many rocks and they all cast an individual shadow,

(03:25):
and it did look very impressive. And this character who
was unnamed at the time, runs through and jumps around
in this way where if you're a if you're a
lifelong gamer, you had yourself asking, as we often do,
is that how you'll actually move when you press X
in the game or is that just a computer graphic
just animation? Yeah, and this is the game so like

(03:45):
I also compare it to like Astro's Playroom. You know,
it's a Sony exclusive designed to show off what PS
five can be. And I think notably it's from Square
Enix or Nix. I never know. I worked at IGNE
and there was still disagreement. Um, but yeah who if
you're unfamiliar, I always forget what's Square Proper and Square Enix.

(04:06):
But they're involved with Square who primarily known for the
Final Fantasy series and games in and Around which are
also tell me out this year's Yeah, so it's a
big year for them. So spoken, So forre spoken, for
Spoken an ip they no doubt, at least hoped and
maybe still will. We're going to make a franchise out
of so I guess it's time then that we pass

(04:28):
our very first checkpoint, Blake and tell everyone, like very
bit exactly what for spoken is. If you do not
hear anything about this game and have not been on
the hype train. You want to do that, Mike, you
want me to do I'll do it, Okay, great, But
first time, if you hear my keyboard, which is allowed keyboard?

(04:48):
What is the definition of for spoken? A good question
because I was really having a hard time seeing the relation.
Uh nothing really Okay. It's an archaic word meaning to
cast a bad spell over or curse to force speak
was like Witches and Salem were accused of force speaking. Okay,
all right, okay, it doesn't so much to do with

(05:10):
the plot of the game, which is about Frey, a
young woman of color, which I mentioned only because of
its relevance in the fact that she's had a rough
life and you feel like she's fallen through the cracks
of the system or not been served. She's out of desperation,
you know, turns to like petty crime, and she's like
a tough street gal in I think New York. I

(05:33):
don't even remember. Maybe Chicago, Yeah, it's it's New York.
She okay, she finds herself her name's like, is it
Freya or anyway, her nicknames Frey because it's part of
her proper name, which I also forget. She finds herself
in and out of court a lot, you know, juvenile court,
in front of the same judge a lot, to the
point that they seem to have something of a relationship.

(05:53):
The judge is trying to be nice or says the
things you would hope a judge would say, or judges
off and say and move. These are stories like this,
which is like I want to let you off the hooker,
like I want you to turn your life around. But
you know, blah blah blah, Like you keep sucking up,
you keep showing up here. So that's our that's our
protag and that's our starting place. Right. She's not in

(06:14):
a good place, or like she seems spunky and like
she's not. She's still got a lot of fight. She's
not depressed or anything, but her life is tough. And then, dude,
I don't even remember why, but she finds this magic cuff.
There was a fire. There was a magic fire in
her apartment that may forced her to run. That's where

(06:34):
I remember running from the fire, which is funny because
it doesn't have any I stood there for a long, long,
long long time, and you never die, like you can
just chill in the fire. But eventually, yeah, you leave
and find a magic golden cuff that starts to talk
to you, and it all makes sense eventually, because this
was all destined to happen. Spoiler but opens up a

(06:55):
portal and you get sucked into an alternate world. I
even forget what the world is called. But there's a
thing going on there called the Break, which is a
you know, like an evil fog. God. I hate I'm
sorry to tip my head. It's not a good story,
but so everything's post apocalyptic. There's no real NPCs. The

(07:17):
open world is just a huge vast area with enemies,
and there's a central hub that's a city where all
the remaining survivors are, and you know, the countrysides covered
with zombies because the break, the people that get cotton
it turn into evil monsters, and there's all kinds of monsters.
And you're a special girl, so you get special powers
from the cuff and from your affinity with this world,

(07:39):
which you're trying to find out more about. At first,
all she wants to do is to get home, but
of course there's I mean, it's post apocalyptic, and it's
apocalyptic because there's these things called the Four Tantas, which
are these four leaders who used to be good, almost
like the triforced goddesses or what have you. They used
to be good, but they went insane when the break happened,
and they're bad now and they rule over like the

(08:01):
lands that you're going to liberate, of course, and you
know it's that old jam like you want to go home,
but you get wrapped up in these epic events and
you see a little kid get killed and it affects
you deeply, so only you can save the world, so
you set aside your personal ambitions to save the world,
which you do buy basically skating around and they call

(08:22):
it magic parkour, but I would compare it to grinding
and Tony Hawk or like the way you know it
in a game called The Pathless if you happen to
play that, or Infamous Second Son, which I think more
people played, or a Sunset Overdrive a bit so like Frey,
she can walk, she does, but also she's very she
can like skate on magic light and zoom around, right

(08:43):
the thing that they tech them always saw promised, So
you can zoom around and you get a grappling hook eventually,
and that's the traversal. And then as far as combat,
you flip around and you unlock different skill trees that
give you different magical abilities that basically boiled down to
a shooty shot one, a slashy slashy one with a
magic red sword, and then like a green one that's

(09:05):
still shooty shooty, but it's it mimics bow and arrow
physics instead of gun physics, and you one by one,
I mean, you meet some people and we'll get into it,
like Aubrey or whatever. Her name is, and her the
guy who can help you get home, but he dies,
and you know, epic stuff happens, but it eventually is
just you go to each realm and kill each boss

(09:27):
and when you do. The twist is I believe that
you're actually the daughter of the Greatest Tanta and you
were left in the human world for safekeeping, and that's
why you've always felt out of place, and you stay
here and you ascend to you were rightful destiny, which
is like being a badass super heroine in this realm,

(09:47):
and you're going to stay in this realm and save
the world from any future threats that Square Unix may
want to like pose And that's it, I believe, Yeah,
that is it. You are right, which I guess mean
it's time for us to pass our very next chest
oats like our very next one. Uh, And that means

(10:08):
it's time for us to get right into hot Takeville us.
Please listen. It's a good place. But it could be
a good podcast episode. You don't know. Yeah, I'm gonna
I'm gonna go ahead and gone on a limb and
say it is going to be a good podcast episode.
I'm not worried about that. At all. Uh. And also
I think there's things to learn from games like this,

(10:28):
of course, right, So say, so you go, first, great,
I really really juicy and engaging and hot. Let's hope
I can. Let's okay, Well, the first thing is Adam
Ganzer player one plugging in. Um, when you finally level
up in this game, it has incredible gameplay physics and loops.
Like the loops themselves once you finally get them all unlocked,

(10:52):
which is, you know, ten hours twelve hours into the
game into a game that's about fifteen hours by the way, UM,
it is ordinarily fun. I think people missed out on that.
They didn't actually have the fun that this game can
be because it was not a well done build up
to that. And so the physics themselves, the loops, the

(11:14):
way it looks and stuff, all that stuff is great
by the time you get all the powers and stuff.
So I want everyone to remember that because the rest
of what I'm going to say is kind of dragging
on the game. But I think if you had earlier
in the game, like I don't know if you'd moved
that moment, let's say eight hours earlier, so that by
three or four hours into the game, you had most

(11:35):
of the basics of your powers. I think people would
have lost their mind over how fun this game is.
That's how good I think it is when it's working.
Here's what happened with for Spoken. In my opinion, for
Spoken seems like a game that believed that if I
just do the tropes, you will feel the feelings. That

(11:55):
is fundamentally what this game believes. In its narrative, it's gameplay, loops,
in its mechanics, in its lore, in every aspect it
believes the only thing that makes something emotionally engaging is
doing the tropes. Right. This is a game that, if
I could put it in a metaphorical sense, believes if
I put together all the elements of a human being,

(12:17):
it will be a conscious person. Right. It won't just
be a meat monster. Right. Or if I was building
a robot and just put all the pieces together, it
would gain sentience. And here we are to learn that
is not true. You cannot just do the tropes and
expect that it will work. Here's an example of how
that's happening. There's a bunch of them, but here they are. So.

(12:37):
The first is this game believes it's more fun for
us to have a playful relationship with our companion a
la Navi and link or something, right, like it's trying
to do Buddy cop. Yeah. Yeah, you and the talking
cup are having like a fun bantery thing that feels
like sort of a remnant from New York that you're

(12:58):
bringing into this magical world or something, and they think
it's funny that you are quibbling with it, and then
they thought it was interesting and profound that spoilers. That's
actually the big bad of the game. The Cuff is
actually the poison that's ruining the world, and you fight
him at the end. That's the last boss. We spoil
these games here, so right that you are Tanta Sinta's daughter, right, Yes,

(13:18):
that is correct. Yes, it's like a movie. I walked
out of the theater and was like, I've immediately forgotten
what happens. My mind was drained. Yeah, So, like it
believes that by doing that banter, like just creating that dynamic,
it will be fun and likable. The problem is they
never grow as characters, and there's no emotional depth. Even

(13:40):
to Frey, who we're spending a lot of time examining,
she doesn't actually grow much. She's in kind of a
stasis period where she just wants to get home and
this place sucks for like ninety percent of this game,
which makes her uninteresting most narratives. At the midpoint, they realize, oh,
I got to refocus us around this new set of

(14:01):
data so that I can you know, achieve my quest.
That's like basic hero's journey stuff. This game made the
mistake of that not really happening emotionally for her until
like right around where the third act happens, which is
way too late. It's just way too late. Another set
of tropes that they just thought they could do and
it would be interesting is the Harry Potter tropes. They

(14:21):
do that. That's the story here. This is Harry Potter.
This woman, this young woman is an orphan. She's in
a world that doesn't care about her for cruel reasons
that feel like they were designed to be somewhat commentary,
and that would have been interesting if they'd carried that through,
but they didn't quite carry it through, so it doesn't
play exactly. And then she's you know, turns out she's

(14:43):
the only one that can beat the Voldemort of this world,
who also, by the way, is her companion, and you
know then she just sort of learns how to be
Harry Potter. That's the whole game, and it's we've just
seen it so many times that we've done videos about
how dumb it is and then done videos about how
we're tired of hearing it at all anywhere, and now

(15:04):
this game is sort of coming in and just doing
the same tropes in a fairly genuine, non satirical way,
and we're just not up for that right now. I
would say, even though I like a lot of things
about the representation of it, like it's a woman of color,
it's mostly female characters, all that is good, this is
just not a good story. Unfortunately. I think they deserve better,

(15:25):
and I think finally it does really feel like they
distilled all the cool stuff down to their basic, most
simplest versions, and they just sort of ran out of time.
Like the powers are all a color, like are they cool? Yeah,
they're kind of cool, but they're also like a color,
which feels very I don't know, like I'm playing. Simon
says or something like there's no nuance or complexity here.

(15:47):
The world is empty because they have a plot reason
that says it should be empty, but it still feels
like an empty video game world because they just did
the tropes. Now. I don't know why that happened. I
do know that they had to reboot entirely in the
middle of development. I've heard that there's a screenwriter interview
who's by the way, he's walked sideways from this as

(16:08):
much as you can from the script where they rebooted
the story entirely from the beginning in the middle of production.
That's not a good sign. Also, the studio that made
for Spoken has been absorbed back into Square Enix. That's
also not a good sign. I would say this is
probably a panicked project where they thought they could just
sort of sketch the outline of a story and you

(16:30):
would fill in the blanks, and they were wrong about that.
That's my rant player too, plugging in. Michael Swaim is
the name of this player. It will be a good
episode because I super disagree with most of the stuff
he said. Oh go, I do agree with the last
thing you said really wholeheartedly, which is this is one

(16:54):
of the So sometimes you see reviews where they say
the team ran out of time, and maybe they know
that because they follow industry news so closely. But I
don't I follow gaming news like what games are coming out,
but I tend to not follow down to the granular level,
like until I worked at IgM, Like I don't know
who Reggie fees on me is or what he does,

(17:16):
like I just played Nintendo games. But that said, I've
never played a game where it was so clear that
they ran out of time. So not to smirch the developers,
that must be a tough situation to be in. But
there's two main things I want to say about the game.
Because they ran out of time, it feels really sterile
and hollow. And I'll break down why I make a

(17:39):
tremendous overabundance of notes for this show, sometimes like twelve
thirteen pages, because as I play the game, I just
make notes every time I have a thought, and if
a game is like thirty hours, it's really long. Like
we only actually scratched the surface in this podcast, which
I mentioned because in this case, I just have like

(18:00):
one hundred and twelve bullet points of gripes. And I
don't think the combat's ever fun at all or remarkable.
I think it's just a junk drawer trash fire of
epic proportions that no one should ever even consider playing
unless they're interested in learning how you screw a game up,

(18:22):
because the other the second leg of my argument is
maybe there's a theoretically fun loop underneath all of that.
As far as the combat goes, it felt a lot
to me like not bad, not bad bad, but like, yeah,
I've played Devil May Cry, and Devil may Cry felt
more connected and dynamic than this, and that was twenty
years ago or whatever, and to a lesser extent, darksiders

(18:49):
those games. Anyway, I totally agree that it's also bizarre
that the ultimate form where it kind of feels fun
comes ninety percent of the way through the game, like
the tech tree is not paced correctly. And yeah, I'll
just wrap up by saying I'm really excited because I
could just this whole episode. I could fill an hour

(19:11):
just blandly going they did this, and that's bad for
this reason. They made this game play choice. It doesn't
work for this reason, and we know that because of
these games. Yeah, I will try to avoid doing that,
although I do think it's kind of fun. How many
concrete things I could go like, that's incorrect, So we'll
get into it. But it all just arrives under the

(19:34):
umbrella of whatever game, whatever promise there once was under
this game, they so consistently made every tiny micro decision
of how like UI and everything incorrectly that it's one
of the worst games I've ever played. It just sucks.
It's just really really bad. Wow. Yeah, that's a hell

(19:56):
of a rant fun stuff. Oh oh sorry, I'll end
on the spiciest take of all. And then we got
a hop To commercial which I do want to get
back and get in game on. But I'll also say
I do think by the fact that it does just
cover tropes and do the basic hero's journey and rip
off Harry Potter essentially, even to the point that a

(20:17):
character says the line I'm quoting, you are the only
hope we have. You are special. By embracing that trope,
I think it falls into the long line of stories
we tell ourselves that are among the most toxic, hurtful,
not useful messages that you could pump into the collective psyche,
which is life is about you. You are special. One

(20:41):
day it'll all just come together for you for no reason.
Because you're special. People actually grow up believing that to
some degree, and it fucks everything up that's not a
way to live your life thinking that. So I actually
hate when stories have that message, or the message that
if you just work hard and have a good heart,
it will eventually happen for you. Guaranteed. I hate that

(21:01):
message too, because it's not true, and we should be
grooming ourselves to deal with how life really is through story.
I love that. I love that because I really want
to get into that. I don't want to get too
far away from for spoken. But can we talk about
that after the break of course it's interesting? Okay, great, well,
then let me hasten to pay the bills, the thing

(21:22):
that keeps the lights on, the purple, green and red
lights on, so that we can continue on the other side,
getting into what kind of stories should we be using
socially to prepare ourselves to the future, looking forward to
that After this we are magic parkouring back into Yes,

(21:50):
we are the other realm that is one upsmanship where
everything is pure game and philosophy. Yeah, this is game
pass another checkpoint. I didn't want to solely devote the
I really think you and I should do a philosophy
podcast someday. But this keeps talking about it, So let
you go through I will also say, I'm not trying

(22:12):
to say that this is an exceptionally egregious or mouth
intended I like that point, right though. Yeah, okay, and
actually the heroes so I agree with you that the
hero's journey has I think it was inspiring and fun
when our culture was not saturated with obvious examples of disappointment,

(22:33):
and when our culture did not value individualized self expression
above all else, which we now value in the modern context,
and we didn't any medial times for example. Right. Well,
but also, I mean, you know, if you go back
and look at stories and antiquity, they had a much
more uh there, there were a lot more stories that
were I think I'm going to use the wrong example,

(22:55):
but sort of Aesop's fables where there was a kind
of element of tragedy or a sort of life being
unpredictable built into storytelling. That is no longer true because
we focus so hard on individualized self actualizing narrative. Yeah,
it's funny you mentioned that, because I am reading original

(23:16):
Grimm's fairy tales right now. Yes, people famously know that
they're more gory than the original versions, but it's not
gory without reason. What's interesting about Grimm's fairy tales is
there's tons of them about how being prudent and virtuous
and having good character will get you through a difficult situation,
and there's an equal number where the virtuous, prudent character

(23:37):
is randomly killed. And the message is that life is
challenging and you can't control everything. And it's so fascinating
to me that over the intervening five hundred years or whatever,
we've groomed all those messages out, and we did we
do all these stories where the good character lives happily
ever after. That's the one we like. There is an
excellent so I rarely recommend other podcasts, but like there

(24:01):
is an actual series of podcasts on this exact subject
by Malcolm Gladwell called Revisionist History. It was one of
the seasons he got into the adaptation of The Little
Mermaid as a launching point for what kinds of stories
are good for us culturally and this exact problem. And
he does a really nice job of it, better than

(24:21):
we're going to do in our Gunslinger way. But I
do agree with you that it's starting to feel hollow
because we don't believe it anymore like our stories. No
longer reflect the way we feel about the world, you know,
and I think that adds to the hollow feeling of
this game well, and my underscore the word we because

(24:43):
keep in mind that I feel like there might be
some aspect of this that's a universal human experience. As
you age, you develop a more complex, nuanced relationship with
life and the universe. So keep in mind that the
reason we can keep doing these tropes over and over
is that, Yeah, but new kids are born and they
don't know any better, and they'll play for spoken and
be like I'm special, you know, like I get when

(25:05):
I was a kid with stories that I consider trite now.
So that's I mean, we certainly we age out of
idealism in some ways, and I don't want to poison
the youth with my forty two year old Sinnisses. Don't
age out of hope or the belief that we can
make things better, but we age out of blind idealism. Yes,
I agree with that, um. But also as part of

(25:25):
this podcast, Malcolm Gladwell does he shows that that actually
when you read a series of these uh stories of
different types to children, they actually respond more emotionally to
the Grimm's chaotic piece than they do to the self
actualized piece, as in, it's a it's a we're actually
like sort of nutrient deficient in terms of chaotic narrative now,

(25:50):
So I hope that at least that's how I took
his podcast, Like the conclusion of it, it must be
mentioned some people are turning away from glad La Lake
because you know, I don't know. Yeah, it has a
lot of pet theories because that's his brand, and he
talks about shit, and some are considered problematic, but sometimes
I think he's spot on. It's a mixed bag with him,
but I agree. I'm not advocating him, but podcast is

(26:13):
exactly the thing we're talking about, and it does connect
to for spoken in that we're trying to identify why
are people so on, Like why do we all agree
the story is unsatisfying? You know? Yeah, well and wrote,
And I think part of it is not just that
the tropes are wrote, but also that the and this

(26:33):
is why I feel like they fell out of time,
ran out of time. We've talked about with this with Fallout,
I call him my Fallout fall Off. Fallout is one
of my favorite franchises, be purely because of the vibe.
I objectively play it and don't think it's the best
game ever, but I would live in that world forever.
And because of that, I actually get kind of a

(26:55):
postpartum depression when I realize I have one hundred percent
at a Fallout game that if I walk around the
world now, people are just gonna say the same thing
to me. For spoken starts in that place, no one
ever has more than two lines. I mean outside of
cut scenes. Anyone you talk to in the hub area
is an mp PC with basically no dialogue tree to

(27:18):
speak of. The most complex it gets is pretty much
one or two and you choose and they say one
more thing, and then the interactions over and all the
interactions are I mean, I wrote some down, but like
there's a part where you have like a yub dub
celebration because you beat the first Tanta and you're walking
through the crowd and people are saying stuff like here
they are, there's our hero, there's the woman of the hour. Wow,

(27:43):
you did a great job, Like wow, come on, guys,
super first draft. Like the world map areas are full
of evocative names like Blessed Planes, Pioneer Planes, Purple Magic Area,
fountain fields and barren plays. These are the names of
the areas you go to in this magic world, like

(28:05):
the Laate the it got ripped on it a lot,
So I want to move past it because I actually
am interested in the game design flaws too. But as
people agreed pretty much, yeah, their writing sucks, like, um,
it's hard. And they had they had esteemed writers on this,
by the way, like one of them, I want to say,
Gary Widdows, his name wrote on Star Wars Rogue one. Oh,

(28:27):
I think he's highly respected, great screenwriter. Yeah, it's just
one of those things where it's like, so obviously the
machine went off the rails here at some point, you
know what I mean, Like obviously there's an internal problem
that created this nightmare. Like there's this one point where
their exposition dump is basically this mission. Oh and one

(28:49):
of the things that killed me the whole point of
the game is that the traversal at least feels fast
and fluid, and somehow eventually they immediately take it away
and do the like you can only walk at the
slow speed in the hub, and there's only particular areas
where you can do that movement. And now that you've

(29:09):
moved really fast and cool, like Sonic the Hedgehog. Let's
have you do this mission where you slowly walk to
a library and you have to read seven books before
you're allowed to leave the library. And there's just an
interchange in that scene that I want to read, where um,
you read something and Cuff says, and she says this

(29:31):
is awful, and Cuff says, I think their subjects would
agree with you. And then she says, I wonder where
they all where the tantas went, And he says, so
do many of their former subjects, and like, do you
hear that? Like I even think non writers would hear
change one of those two lines from Cuff or the
same line twice. That's really monotone and boring. That's not

(29:52):
engaging writing. And it's just that all through like everyone,
everything everyone says is incredibly generic, like there's the Woman
of the Hour f it's so like And also I
think like there's just like a lack of the kind
of polish that makes things feel real, like like again,
scripts get much better in the second, third, fourth draft,

(30:13):
even if you're not changing the beats, just from the
softening of edges. Yeah, just that they get much better,
and this feels like it's missing that pass like for
instance game Yeah, when you when you have conversations with Cuff,
you can't do it while you're moving. You have to
stop and listen to him talking, right, a thing that's like,

(30:36):
bro BioShock fiicted this out years ago. What are we
doing here? When you're talking to Cuff. He doesn't have
an animated speaking like anything speech. You're looking at a
still image of a correct thing. Yeah right, And it's
like you can't do that, Like you gotta make it
feel like we're having a conversation with a thing like
which is a very basic mechanic that all filmmakers under

(31:00):
sand you know. Um and they didn't do that, and
uh just they just didn't have the kinds of touches
that make a thing feel like you're in good hands,
which makes you skeptical about all the things they're doing
that are fine or good even like I think some
of the art direction here, if you take out the
NPC's that are missing, is actually quite good. Oh man, Okay,

(31:23):
I do you hate it well? Comparing to like Horizon
Horizon sure, and I'm not even saying not as good,
but just having that fresh in my mind. Some of
the costume designs of the NPC's fine, um, but I'm
thinking specifically of Tanta Cela, the second one, the one
that looks like the Virgin Mary or like a queen,

(31:43):
like a like a queen. She looks like twenty fucking
stupid things a fourteen year old came up with, piled
on top of each other, Like what if her face
is the drama masks and she has a crown of thorns,
and she carries a scepter that's a snake, and she
talks to herself like gallum and she has split personalities. Um,
it's maybe the dumbest character I've encountered in three playing

(32:06):
video games. Yeah, she put you on trial. She speaks
in rhyme, dude, and the Ryan you're talking about a
game with bad writings, so like they are not up
to the challenge of the character that speaks in rhyme.
She says shit like, um, dude, I have a good one.
Where is it? Uh? Like you fight with the girls

(32:28):
and the boys, but all of it is unseen noisy,
like that's nothing. That's nothing. You just thought of a
word that rhymes and you're like, I gotta get this
shit out. Um. She was the one that made me
think that there was actually a sort of a structural
commentary that was happening, or had at one point been happening,
like and then the time, Yeah, there was a point

(32:49):
that's okay, no, no no, no, no, I love what you're saying.
There was a point where I thought it was at
this point because I was trying so hard to find
meaning in the in the story, in the structure, that
the world of Afia was actually a way of sort
of externalizing the feelings that Frey had about her life
as a woman of color and a justice system that

(33:09):
doesn't care about her like and this justice made me
think maybe they're trying to do that, because I couldn't
figure out why it was unhinged this way otherwise. But
it turned out it turned into this weird Lynchian thing,
and I guess it just never quite congealed. But I
wonder if somewhere along the line they actually were trying

(33:30):
to tell a story like that, And I guess I
feel like they didn't figure out what the feel of
their world even is, Like agreed, So Silos the biggest example,
but here the clearest examples to me that they like
ran out of time and they're just piling a bunch
of shit together, like there's no clear vision of what
this world feels like and no single one yes right

(33:52):
is like the boss before the final boss is just
a generic dragon like Lord of the Rings Dragon, and
you're like, why is there now dragon? Like there's been
nothing like that esthetic in this dragon. And then the
final final boss, Cuff is just a glowing yellow orb
like just a circle. You're fighting a giant circle. It's

(34:14):
like they literally ran out of time and placed a
spherical model. Then there's shit like, um, none of the
environment is breakable, except there's a couple scenes where there's
vases that are breakable, and the vase breaking physics are
really impressive. But you'll notice the vases are identical and
just gray, solid vases, which implies to me, knowing a

(34:36):
little bit about how games are made, that they copy
pasted the generic assets from the console library and they're like,
there's got to be something destructible. We're out of time.
Throw some of those vauses in there. Like there's choices
like that all throughout. That's interesting. The buildings in the
hub area look like the textures aren't finished, like they're
so white and minimalist that they just seem like great blocks.

(34:57):
It has no character. It's I agree. No, I think
you're right. So like I'm gonna bring in this old
chestnut that I it's time for everyone to drink if
they're if they're drinking along with this podcast. Yes, and
he too is fine yep, So here's why it matters facetious. No,
I've did it just to be a bit now. So no,

(35:18):
Uh did you play Lightfall, the expansion that came out
very recently. No, And I'll tell you why. I looked
at the same promail. I looked at the thumbnail and
there's this new character they're pushing that looks like some
weird frogman with googly eyes. I'm not on board. Yeah,
I understand, and I think spoilers, you might be you
might be right. So like they have the same problem.

(35:40):
They have the same problem where they designed this world
that was based on like a very rudimentary, shallow concept
uh in there. In that case, it was like eighties
like post industrial slash retrofuturist sci fi world where there's
not any people in it and it just has this
hollow vibe to it because they didn't have the time

(36:02):
to really deeply explore the thoughts that inspire architecture or space.
And this is from a team that normally does that well. Right,
They normally do that well. I think in like, the
burden of trying to create a brand new space that
has its own sort of like architecture and lore and

(36:23):
vibrant feeling is really heavy. And I don't that doesn't
excuse what the game is. But I think when we
admire something like Horizon Forbidden West, right, it's really about
admiring the depth in which they contemplated the premise of
their game, and the depth to which they like dug
in and designed from the very basic clear narrative concepts

(36:47):
everything about that world and discovering the depth of it
is what makes it such a joyful experience. And in
for Spoken's case, it seems like a lot of those
kind of choices, the ones that feel like they could
have been artistic, we're probably made because of utility. And
that's a that's a tragedy. As a person who's made
utility like videos, videos that were artistic, videos that were

(37:09):
based on utility, I know the feeling of making something
that was based on money and in time and it's like,
you know, you can see everybody feeling disappointed in it,
and that's a real shame because I do think the
premise here could have been cool. Like do you agree that,
like on a basic level the premise could have been
cool of this game? Or is it like nah to wash?

(37:31):
I think Infamous and Pathless are good games and you
could rip off or even being more charitable, you could
be inspired by and innovate on those games and make
a good game totally. It's just I'm like, yeah, but
if you if you have no good ideas, it's very difficult.
So let me can I can I elocute? That's fair?

(37:53):
So can I elocute a little bit on like some
of the late stage combat stuff that I thought was good,
Like just a little bit, and you can disagree with them. Yeah, yeah.
Whenever you're ready for pause, I want to do something,
but you go first, Okay, great, great, Okay, So I
want to defend a little bit what I said about
how the combat is good at the end. So this
is sort of a little explored idea, But basically, once

(38:15):
you get all your powers, they have a kind of
interactivity that allows you to experiment and get rewarded by
combinations and by like varying cool downs and stuff, and
they give you a variety of powers that you start
to get what you might call sort of the mass
effect to effect, which is these sort of two combinate

(38:36):
like combined attacks actually create a cool like unexpled like
unanticipated damage on various enemies and stuff like. So it
does kind of reward a lot of combo mix and matching,
and you do find cool interactivity between the powers, and
once you get good at flipping between the powers, you

(38:57):
really feel like you can destroy anything, even though they're
a lot of spongey stuff in this game, and there
is lots of lots of the bad guys are dumb sponges.
But like you, it does create with a pretty limited
palette of attacks as well. I gotta yeah, that's right,
but not so limited that it feels like they totally
cheated us as a the combat I have to like,

(39:18):
you can suck around with it and it's fine, too good. Yeah, total,
I use I use Mass Effect two because mass Efect
two is actually way more limited in terms of combat
than this game is. And it's your one, your one
character with full freedom of motion and you can zip
anywhere in the map, Like you really can do almost
any attack you want by the time it's over. It

(39:40):
just takes so long that you're no longer interested in
the game. That's really what it boils down to, in
my opinion. Does that feel totally unfair to you about
this or about Mass Effect? Sorry, but either one, but
mostly this, uh, this one, especially because it yes, I
mean I agree completely and I think this even more

(40:02):
than Mass Effects because Mass Effects story did draw me
into a degree and this one sort of repelled me,
which I got to mention something we both said before,
which is for the record, and I think most of
our listeners will totally agree. Good to have black folks
be in media and the media sucks and no one
cares or blames it on the fact that the start
that the protagonist is black, you know, like everyone's allowed

(40:25):
to fail. So I like that about it, But the
but it's a failure, so I think even more so
the mass effect to it. It wears thin quickly, especially
because you mainly only talk to Cuff and Odden. And
one of my other big problems with it is you
meet Cuff and you're, like, Jesus, guy, won't shut up
all he just sucks dispense exposition. Next very next character

(40:48):
you meet is odd and then she goes, let me
explain this world to you, and you're like, cuff fucking
did that. We're gonna do it again now, yeah, yeah,
And then well okay, And then last thing that what
you just said brought up at me is that I
do like this genre. I think it's an underrepresented subgenre,
which is essentially Tony Hawk plus guns or traversing in

(41:10):
a smooth, fluid way where you never slow down, plus
there's enemies and you fight. I love that. I think
actually that hasn't been perfected, not really Infamous is pretty good,
but I still think, yeah, yeah, but um but I
actually think that's an underrepresented gameplay loop like trying to
do sweet tricks and also shooting. That's cool. Pistol Whip

(41:33):
is a little like that the VR game, but not
the style forgive me. They kind of stuck a lot
of bullshit on top of those kind of games in
a way that actually undermines them, Like a really clean
one would be really nice. Yeah, people didn't play it
a lot, but I do recommend the Pathless actually, which
is I need to play that more. Sunset Overdrive is

(41:55):
a game that we almost covered several times, like we've
we've come back to me covering it a few All right, Well,
I'll tell you this. I think they there's a lot
of obfuscation going on in that game to mask an
unfulfilling loop. Oh well, maybe that's too strong. Maybe it's
too strong a loop that's under underbaked, a little bit
half baked, is my opinion. But maybe we can talk

(42:16):
about it, and you might, you might convince me otherwise.
I think what happens is it's actually really hard to
make a game that has the kind of fluidity and
power that you want, and so they sort of pile
all this stuff on top of it to make it
feel like it's really robust. Well wrong, you pull the
classic games with the destiny things. So I'll just say

(42:37):
to me, it is a spiritual successor. And this is
why I stand Sonic the Hedgehog, of the impulse that
began that whole thread of like it's so dumb because
it's Sonics caschhrase. But video games can do a lot
of things. What if we did one where you gotta
go fast? I like that is what they want. No,
but that is what we want here, like and that's

(42:58):
not like they put this. They put this like status
bar or not like a stamina bar, basically on your
ability to parkour park. Yeah, they then eventually retract when
you get more powers. But it's one of those things
where it's like, yeah, if your idea is let's be sonic,
then start by me being able to be sonic, you
know what I mean, Like and like expand from there,

(43:19):
and then you get a grappling hook and I was
immediately thinking, like the Arkham grappling her, like this is
going to be great, This is really gonna open up
the troversal. And then it turns out there's very specific
grapple points and you hit them and they just deliver
you to a very specific point. And it's like I
just played Halo Infinite Dude, Like that game ruled I
can't be the grapple hook. That grapple hook is moot.

(43:41):
Now we're done with that. That's old technology. Or you
gotta do it as good as as that game, Like
you know what I mean, That game did a hell
of a job with that one thing, so like you
gotta match that, and they didn't, and a lot of
games by the way are putting grapple hooks in and
not doing that, Um so shout out just cause of

(44:04):
course apparently just yeah, I've never played that, but I
know that that cause is not great. Across the board
is super janky. But the thing about it that everyone
loves is like you can grapple shot a thousand feet
in the air and then wing suit down and then
you know there's like eighteen kinds of wacky troversal that
was its thing. That feels like that's what this game
wants to be, but it wanted to have more nobility

(44:24):
and achieve and they're like Marvel Spider Man, like we
now have games where you do it like that where
you're like, dude, I'm fucking Nightcrawler, like I'm flipping around
and it's just like we have a higher standard. Yeah,
Spider Man really makes this game look bad. Actually, Like
when you think about that, you're like, that's right, yeah, yeah,
so tight, Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Well that's a shame.

(44:48):
Maybe we need to hit a break so that we
can regain Well, can I wrap up with my thing?
I want to? Yeah? Um, I have simple grapes that
I feel are objective and I want to rattle through.
I was like, okay, I want to say, first people
run out of time. Hey, I'm an artist and I've
tried as hard as I could and not run out
of time and still put turds out there, So like,

(45:10):
of course I'm not a personal but I am now
going to gleefully like cinema sid style though, like this
is all right, right. There is no stealth gameplay in
this game, yet inexplicably in the opening couple hours there's
a sneaking portion and it has no gameplay. You just
follow odd and when she says to follow her, and

(45:30):
then you get through it and it's over and you
never sneak again, and that's not a part of the game.
At the end of most of the cut scenes, you
will hang frozen for so long that I often thought
the game froze or was crashing, and it's just that
the camera just hangs there, hangs there, hangs there. Okay,
control of the character is returned to you, and I

(45:51):
don't understand why it is that way. The sound design
is like shockingly spare, like a giant monster in metal armor.
Will super Hero land from three stories up and there
will be no sound effect. There will be no impact
sound to indicate that it's just I think it's glitchy.
I think that. Yeah, Um the game, if you play it,

(46:13):
you'll know what I mean. It dips to black way
too much, fades. Yeah. On the animation itself is so bad,
Like watching one of these characters pretend to eat an apple,
which they do several times, is like a war crime.
It feels it's just Yeah, it feels unfair. How mad

(46:33):
we were at Mass Effect and Drameda when when this
is next gen and they still can't do it. Yeah, right, Um,
it keeps forcing you to look at the lore archive
over and over, like literally fading to black and bringing
it up when you're like I don't want to look
at this. Um, yeah, you're frozen place. I said that.
The mini games, so you know how it's a big
thing in open world games to have mini games. Now,

(46:54):
the mini game in this is you roll one die
and whatever it comes up on that happen. Like that's it.
That's the strategy of the mini game. You roll the die,
whatever comes up that happens. There's a collectible called Poppets.
They have a whole speech about how poppets are. There
are a thousand of them, and they were each made
to be unique, and they're incredibly diverse and unique, and

(47:15):
each one special and bonds with a person. Then every
time you collect one, it shows you the poppet you collected,
and they're identical. They're the same model every time. They
all look the same different Spirit Spike. The most common
side quest in this game is that you encounter a
cat and you interact with it and you slowly follow
it around and it arrives at a place where there's

(47:36):
an item and you pick up the item. It sucks ass,
it's my chet was so mad that I stopped doing
the cat stuff. I was like, well, you know what
it is. It's like following, it's chasing the meaning, right. Yeah,
every time you pick up a poppet, the tutorial that
teaches you about the poppet system comes up every time.
It's obviously a glitch and no one would do that intentionally,

(47:59):
but yeah, the game frequently says when you try to
fast travel, an error message comes up that says you
cannot fast travel while an events scene is playing, even
though an events scene is not playing. You have to
take a series of picks in order to unlock new
features in photomode, which is such a terrible anti fun

(48:20):
idea that I can't believe anyone ever implemented it. And
to get these photos, you go to particular points and
the game makes you point the camera in an exact
direction and zoom in an exact amount, meaning photo mode,
which is supposed to be a system of individualized expression
in your game. In the photomode, in this game, you
can only take one exact photo that will look identical

(48:43):
to every photo taken by everyone else who ever plays
the game. It's antithetical to what that's for. It has
a soul's like healing system, which makes it feel like
it's going to be challenging. But you start the game
with six health elix. I remember once even felt close
to dying. I never died in this game. I beat
it without dying. O. Every every skill upgrade is so boring.

(49:06):
For example, the the like the copy and one of
the tech tree things is if you upgrade this, it
does more damage over a wider area. Then if you
upgrade it again, it says does even more damage over
an even wider area. That's not good enough, that's not interesting. Um,
there's these towers you have to climb because it's an
open world game. But you cannot magic parkour up the

(49:27):
wall of the towers. They are like slick or whatever. Yeah,
you have to just slowly normal walk speed walk up
the stairs. Then there's no cool way down like how
a LOOI will repel down you walk back right. The
world map is brown and muddy and uniquely like the

(49:48):
most unpleasant world map to look at that I've ever seen.
It's also blend together and or it's actually confusing to
get from what's confusing to tell where you are. The
radicule snaps two points of interes just way too easily.
It's hard to get it to be where you want
it to be. There's chest puzzles in the game. The
chest puzzles were either never in the middle, either laughably easy,

(50:10):
like you press one button and you go, oh, I
got it, or so obtusive that it took me twenty
minutes and then I gave up, and then I was
frustrated because I didn't want to do this. One of
the tutorial messages I got was precision encounters cause a
magic power boost that can now be crafted and upgraded.
I don't know what that means. That's a problem. That's it.

(50:33):
I think. Thank god. I was like, oh my god,
you are evitiating this game. Uh well, I think this
says something about when the game doesn't come together and
doesn't bother to fix quality of life things, it makes
you angry, which is a bummer, because it's ultimately trying
to be fun, you know, like it's trying to trying

(50:53):
to give you a good use of your twelve hours.
It wants to, well, it didn't want to. This felt
a little bit like somebody said, nope, it needs to
make money now, that's it, and we're spending too much
money deliver the game now. Yeah. Yeah, And I and
like that that decision. And again I can't say for sure,

(51:14):
I don't know, but that decision feels like it was
not m it was made by somebody who no longer
or it was made at a point where there was
no joy in this game anymore. Like like they really
seemed like they were willing to to, you know, throw
the baby out with the bathwater when they released this.
I know it would have been a suicide for them

(51:34):
to like, you know, delay again, because they delayed for
a year several times already. But like it still wasn't ready,
you know, like I don't know what to say. It
still wasn't ready, So that's a bummer. I guess to
wash that poor taste out of our mouth from those
intimate recollections, Let's take a quick commercial break, and when
we come back, we'll we will try to wrap up

(51:55):
our experience in Afia and decide whether we'll keep or
delete right after this. You've just been forcewoken. That rhymes
with force spoken. I've been wanting to do that the

(52:16):
whole episode, but I don't know why. I'm so glad
that you had that last bit prepared by us Adam
Ganzy talking talking for spoken, a game that we've tried
to bring as much joy in our evisceration as we could.
Shall we pass our final checkpoint bike and get to

(52:37):
decide if we keep her delete this this bad boy?
Um okay, I'll delay the suspense or dispense with the
suspense and say deleting. Yeah, go ahead. I'm like, I
don't even need to hear your answer. I can talk
over it, like just the trope of it. Turns out
the reason you're special is your secretly the kid of

(53:01):
Gandolf whoever the fuck God, I'm so sick of that kind.
You're the kid of the King, You're the kid of
God or whatever like it. It is just it's just
the Jesus story still echoing through everything. It's nowhere near
as interesting as that or as profound as that. It's
it's just not it's Harry Potter is not as profound
as the Bible, I don't think, but no, me neither.

(53:23):
But but also, uh, it's yeah, whatever, I don't need
to get into that. So I would say I did
kind of feel like the game was leaving open the
possibility of meeting her father, a character we never meet,
who's definitely sort of all but alluded to. And there's
a part of me that thinks that the father is
from New York, Like he's just a person from New York. Yeah,

(53:48):
I don't know if that's true, but it seems like
it might be true. Um, I'm going to miss something.
She'd be like Hercules, she'd be like half divine or whatever. Yeah,
well that's right. So, like I actually kind of feel
like that might have been a more interesting way to
get into this is like doing the opposite of what
they did. Like so normally we do the Harry Potter

(54:09):
version where you meet you're you know, you're a wizard, Harry.
But it might have been more interesting for her to
meet her father who's like, yeah, you're a New York
or Harry, you know what I mean. That might have
been cool. Um well it would have been cool. Or
I agree, do the opposite of what you did, like, um,
like make a video game. Whatever you did. Well, we're

(54:31):
real dicks this, we're real cups this time around, we're
sure real cuffs. Anyway, hopefully you've enjoyed our lifeless not
gonna get my vote, you know, oh please please. I
did not say I'm keeping it out of the hell
out of here here keeping I believe that a full

(54:52):
hard drive, it has to have one where you're like, also,
this is the worst thing ever. Also it can be bad,
Like you should go some art. It is bad. We
aren't perfect, we're humble. Okay, well, you know we sit
down like we need a control case, you know, like
so you can see what it could have been if

(55:13):
we'd done it bad, and you you covered my ass
by deleting it, so I can rest assured that it's not. Yeah,
you're deleting it, right, come on, it bad, it's bad. Yeah,
all right, thank you? Uh God, what a pleasure to
have this conversation with a good pal who I would
never delete. Yeah, this is always a delight, of course,

(55:35):
that's why we do it. But also I do want
to say, you know, it's very popular modern opinion to
hate organized religion. Um, but if you should go so
and I know there's people who are like the Bible's
nonsense because of their feelings about organized religion. Here's why
I'm saying this. If you're someone out there, you're hearing
this and you genuinely felt like if your knee, your

(55:57):
reaction was no, I got more life wisdom out of
Harry Potter than I did out of the Bible, or
ever went out of the Bible. I want to talk
to you. I want to talk to the person who
thinks that Harry Potter is more profound than the Bible.
Do you want to talk to that person? Yeah, all right, yeah, sure,
I'll talk to an insane person from the time. I mean,
I don't I you know, I'm not interested in forcing

(56:18):
people to agree with me. I just would have a
hard time accepting that. But let's see what they say
to you. I would love to hear what they say, yeah,
that'd be interesting. So that's a project for the Internet.
Please feel free to take that one up. Meanwhile, if
you're interested in other smooth, non contentious audio experiences, we
got a billion of them over at our Patreon, which

(56:39):
is patreon dot com, Forward slash, small Beans, where you
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(57:03):
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(57:26):
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That's right, Hopefully you've enjoyed this episode. We got a
great lineup of the next few weeks worth of episodes
are going to be killer. They are all in the
bank now, so we can't wait to show those to you,
so stick around. If you like this, feel free to

(57:47):
like it, subscribe, send a review, share it with your friends.
We'd love to keep doing this until the sun explodes
or those aliens finally do show up. That's it, so
long ship heads, We salute you.