Do Unto Others | The Forgotten City (Ep. 141) - Pixel Project Radio: A Video Game Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:29):
Welcome back to Pixel Project Radio, the video game discussions
and analysis podcast. My name is Rick, I am your host,
and today is the Tale of the Forgotten City, a
mod turned twenty twenty one narrative adventure game with philosophy, mystery,
and history at its heart. I am extremely excited to
talk about this one. Before we do, as always, I

(00:52):
have to thank the patrons upfront. The patrons are a
wonderful group of folks that believe in the show, and
if you'd like to be like these fine, fine individuals,
you can check out the Patreon page at patreon dot
com slash pixel Project Radio. It is of course never expected,
but always appreciated. You could check out that link, along
with many other links in the episode's description, and speaking

(01:14):
of the episode's description, you can also find links to
my guest's content. First time er on the show. This
has been a long time in the making. I'm very
excited to welcome the dog Faced Gamer as he has
known around here Dog for short, and I am looking
forward to talking about this game with him. Dog what's up?

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Not much? That's me, I'm the dog Face Gamer. We've
been working on this for a while. I think we
were supposed to do a podcast last October and then
I don't remember what happened with it. I don't remember.
I think I was sick or something.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
That's possible. It could have also been on my end.
That may have been around the time I decided to
take a break. I can't quite remember, but it's true.
We have been looking forward to this for a while,
looking forward to working together for a while. Dog is
famous around the discord for having beaten all the Yakaza
games up to like Yakaza seven in like six months.
Just an incredible.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Feat incredible feet. Yes, I just I got sucked into
those games and just couldn't put them down. Not six months,
six weeks. It was a very short period of time.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
I don't blame you. Those games are absolutely incredible. I've
been feeling the itch myself. I stopped. I've played zero,
one and two and then seven, and then both of
the judgments, which lost judgment for me. Was it just
blew me away? I need to get back to three. Yeah,
I don't even dislike three, Like I know we're getting
to a tangent this early. I don't even dislike three

(02:44):
like a lot of people do. I just like I've
put it down three separate times just because of life stuff.
I just got to get back to it. I want
to get back into the swing of things.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, three is a really good game. I think probably
it gets its notoriety from people who went from two
and Yeah, let's go into can your use a Daddy? What?

Speaker 1 (03:04):
I love dad here. But we're gonna have plenty to
talk about Yakuza maybe at a future date. For today,
we are talking about the Forgotten City. If you're a
new listener, first of all, welcome, very happy that you're here.
Here's how the show works. Typically, we have a precursory
discussion around our histories with the game, general things such

(03:24):
as development, thematic ideas, music, mechanics, things like that, before
we get into spoilers. Now, this game is a little
bit different and very appropriate that we're programming this right
after Outer Wilds, which became one of my favorite games
of all time. This game is pretty similar for reasons
we'll get into. This is not going to be an
exhaustive discussion. That is to say, we aren't going to

(03:46):
talk about every single encounter, and that will become clear
as to why once we get into it. But just no, upfront,
there won't be any spoilers until we start talking about
the story. However, once we start talking about the story,
I'm just going to say a blanket spoilers are all
on the table, a y'all come kind of situation. So
if you haven't played the game, maybe tune out. Once

(04:07):
we get to that point, we'll telegraph it for sure.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
So we're not going to be doing an exhaustive discussion
on philosophy and religion throughout history.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
Do you know who you're talking to? We can, we
can before we start, let's talk personal histories with this game. Dog,
I'm gonna kick it to you first. Did you hear
about this as a mod? Did you hear about this
as a game? How did you come to know of this?

Speaker 3 (04:34):
So?

Speaker 2 (04:34):
I initially heard about it as a mod, but I
had no way of playing it at the time that
it came out, And then when I found out that
they were actually releasing the game, I got super excited
about it, and then completely forgot the game existed. And
then I got it for free I think on Epic,
tossed it on and really enjoyed it. It's a great ride.

Speaker 1 (04:57):
Yeah, I totally agree, and I think we've all been
through that cycle, getting excited for something forgetting that it
comes out, especially with how far away they announced things
these days. Man. But I have a similar story. I
had heard of this as a mod. I wasn't really
into modding at that time. I had done some like

(05:18):
light stuff, like with Skyrim, specifically the Thomas the tank
Engine mod for the Dragons where you make that and
it's yeah, it's classic, plays the Thomas theme. Love it,
It's very good. I had never done this that was
not really like. I played Skyrim almost like a comedy
game for a long time, and I it does. I
didn't know anything about this though, Like I hadn't heard

(05:40):
anything about it. The reason the way that it came
onto this show was I did this is maybe, as
some might call this embarrassing, cringey whatever. I typed into
my trusty search engine, Google dot com, which has become useless.
I typed in Philosophical video games it because adding Reddit's

(06:01):
the only way you can get reliable search results anymore.
And this game came up, this game along with some others,
and I had recognized the name because you had recently
talked about it in the Pixel Project radio Discord server
and you wrote a glowing review about it. So I
reached out to you and I said, hey, do you
do you want to do this? And you said, yes,
let's do it. And I am so happy that you

(06:23):
put that review in there and kind of turned me
onto this because this game blew me away. It is
right up my alley. I really liked my time with it,
and it does a lot of things, so well.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
Yeah, it really does. It's especially like I love the
blending that they do with god, what's the word. They
blend one philosophical argument into another as you're playing through
the game, of various moralities and what you think morality
might be, and it's just interesting. I've never known a

(06:57):
game that's done this before.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
Once we start talking about the development, it's going to become,
I think clearer why it works so well In that way,
there are kind of four things at the heart of
this game. Five things if you want to count Skyrim,
which I mean I think we should respect where it's due.
But outside of Skyrim, the other four are history, religion, philosophy,
and Greek mythology Greek and Roman mythology, or let's just

(07:21):
say mythology.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
Why not.

Speaker 1 (07:24):
Now, I listeners to this show know I am. I'm
casually very interested in philosophy and religion. I was just
talking about this on the Outer Wilds episode. I think
I was super into Greek mythology as a kid, very
very much. So I started reading Stephen Fry's book Mythos
about the Greek myths, and I'm really really loving it.

(07:47):
This is it's reigniting my love for this kind of stuff,
and so too has this game. So this this was
like a strike for me, like a like a slam dunk,
a hole in one a strike whatever it choose your
preferred sport method and whatever, whatever helps you win. And
that was this for me. So you just said that
you really love Greek myths too. Another reason that I

(08:11):
was excited to talk this with you is this game
deals a lot with religion, and you have somewhat of
a background with that.

Speaker 2 (08:17):
Somewhat yeah, yeah, So I do have a little bit
of a history with religion. I was a minister for
about ten years, no longer a minister, but I took
a lot from it. And I have also had a
very a great interest in Greek history, Roman history. I

(08:40):
was actually when I started college, I was a history
major and then I switched over to accounting. But I
love mythology, I love philosophy, I love classic philosophy. It
insurests me what they thought, how they thought through their
problems at the time. I'm probably more in line with
modern philosophy the mixture of some of those ideas, because

(09:02):
they were very dead set on their beliefs and that's
not me anymore. But yeah, this was right up my alley,
this game.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
This game was also right up the alley of some
of our discord members, and they wrote in to the
community forum. If you're new to the show, the community
forum is a section of the Discord where I post
about what we're going to be talking about, and members
of the server can write in their thoughts, feelings, reviews, jokes, haikups.
As long as it's succinct somewhat, then I will read it.

(09:31):
And we've got two today. The first is a longtime member,
first time poster. I don't know that Jenny has ever
written in to the community forum, but Jenny did, and
here's what she has to say. I tried playing this
game and was really enjoying it until I figured out
what was going on. I screamed through the controller and
haven't played since. Doctor Who fans will understand. But it

(09:53):
has an intriguing premise and unsettling atmosphere that I still
think about looking forward to someone else playing it for me.
That's what we do here.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
I wonder what that moment was, because there was a
moment when I was playing it that it was just like, oh, okay,
that's where we're going. Okay, I get it now.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
Yeah, I know, I know, like I've watched Doctor Who.
I've watched I started with the revival with the ninth Doctor,
the cool Dad Doctor, and watched up until Matt Smith
or no, did I watch through Matt Smith. I did
watch through Matt Smith. I wasn't wild about Matt Smith
as the Doctor. But which controversial I know, but.

Speaker 2 (10:32):
I liked it.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
I liked it. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if
maybe I should. Maybe I'll talk with Jenny before posting
this episode see if I should cut that out. Very
much looking forward to talking about it, but I also
hope you play it, Jenny. We've also got Dave Jackson
who wrote in Tales from the Backlog, and here's what
Dave has to say. I initially wrote this off thinking
how good can a Skyrim Moud be, but eventually the

(10:55):
reception was too good to ignore, and wouldn't you know it,
I was completely blown away by the store, voice acting
and overall presentation. I won't spoil the story here, that's
our job, Dave, but it was immensely satisfying, including the
final confrontation. Fantastic game and lessons learned. Yeah, absolutely no
notes there. That's kind of my thoughts too.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
We as well. I didn't have much in terms of
expectations when I started the game. It grew from there.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
I did not either. Since there is so much to
talk about within the game, let's talk some hard facts
and figures. This mod was originally released for Skyrim in

(11:51):
October of twenty fifteen. The game itself, The Forgotten City,
released in July of twenty twenty one for PC, PlayStation
in Xbox. Came to switch a few months after that
in Stadia RIP, a year after the initial release. Full
credits you can find those on the wiki, the IMDb,
or you could meet the game of note. This is

(12:12):
developed by Modern Storyteller, published by Deer Villagers, directed, produced, designed,
and written by Nick Pierce. This is almost inn au
tour work, not quite art by John Eyer and composed
by Michael Allen. Now we should talk about Nick for
a second. Nick is kind of the mastermind behind this game,
and he had a very fascinating history leading up to this.

(12:34):
There's a no clip documentary on this which I'll maybe
link in the show notes. I don't have it in
the notes here, but if I remember, i'll link it in.
That goes through a lot of this. Nick originally got
into modding via Fallout New Vegas and started the mod
for Skyram shortly after it released in twenty eleven. Then,
and this is something I just watched and I did

(12:55):
not verify it, but it's in the no clip and
I trust them. In twenty sixteen or twenty sixteen, his boss,
he's a lawyer, Nick Pierce was, and his boss somehow
found out about this mod, and he kind of gave
him an ultimatum that said, you know, if you don't
focus one hundred percent on lawyering, you're not going to
make it. You know, you got to give this up.

(13:15):
So Nick said, okay, and he walked. He quit his
day job because the mod did so so well, Like
review outlets were writing about this mod saying, yeah, this
should be a full game. So he quit his job.
He hired a few developers and formed Modern Storyteller, and
from there work began on the game, and from what
I can understand, it was tireless. Here's a quote from

(13:36):
him in an IGN article which will also be linked.
He says, quote, I've spent the last four and a
half years working eighty hour weeks with no real holiday,
which I guess is about nine years worth of work. Notably,
without giving the impression that he is boasting about it,
It says he continues to be clear that something I
wouldn't encourage anyone to do because it's not healthy or sustainable,

(13:56):
and I certainly would never allow my staff to work
hours like that on I was surprised to discover it's
even physically possible, but it is. That sounds wild. Yeah,
that sounds grueling to me.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
It's putting eighty hours for four and a half years.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
It's kind of the state of game development, though. It's
very rarely do you hear of a game development cycle
for a game that gets a lot of attention and
the teams are like, oh, yeah, you know, it was easy, breezy,
nine to five. You know, get home, take take care
of the cat, go walk the dog. You know, it's
you never hear that because that's not the reality.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
No, it's not the reality. But what's interesting here is
this was him working those eighty hours a week. He
doesn't say that he put his staff through crunch like that.
In fact, he says he wouldn't allow them to do it.
So that's kind of the opposite of what I think
when I think of game culture.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
That's a good point. Yeah, that is a good point.
And you know, the credits only have a few other folks.
And I also didn't write down you know, I never
write down the full credits because like, come on, also,
that's you know, incentive to play the game. But there's
more than just those few folks. There's voice acting throughout this,
some of which is quite good. There's more than just Nick.

(15:09):
But Nick did do the bulk of the work, so
kudos to him. You're right, he did not put other
folks through this. I have one other note, but I
think we already mentioned it. Articles like Kataku were talking
about the mod saying yeah, this should be a game,
and that kind of encouraged him. Aside from that, I
will link the article the interview with him, as well
as the note clip into the show notes. So let's

(15:31):
talk about the game itself. Let's talk visuals. Dog, I
don't know about you, but I love saying that. Dog,
I don't know about you, but this. When I first
saw this, the first thing I thought was, this is
what Skyrim would want Skyrim to look like, you know
what I mean?

Speaker 2 (15:47):
It blew my mind when I saw that in the
show notes, because that was exactly my thought when I
was playing this game, was this is how Skyrim should
have been. This is what they wanted it to feel like.
And for such a small team, they do a wonderful job.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
They really do this. It's very visually impressive. I mean
it's not look. I mean, I've never been one to
be a graphic hound that you know, is really into
the fidelity, fidelity of it all. This isn't going to
compete with like Silent Hill two remake or the Last
of Us two remastered or whatever, but for what it is,

(16:26):
you know, thinking PS four, Xbox one, this is what
this released on. Even running it on PC now, it
looks really stunning. It's just it's it's a beefier, prettier Skyrim.
And you know, with with all of Skyrim's quirks. You
still get some weird facial animations that don't don't quite
look right, but not nearly as many. The water looks normal.

(16:46):
You know, you can't scale cliffs with a horse like
you could could in Skyrim.

Speaker 2 (16:50):
There are some beautiful Skyrimish glitches that you can do,
which is how I got one of my indings. Oh
no kidding, Yeah, completely by accident. I got an ending
in this game. We'll go back. We'll go into that later,
probably in the spoiler section.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
Yeah, I didn't have any glitches. I'm really looking forward
to hearing about that, and I suppose that's something we
could talk about. What did you play this on?

Speaker 2 (17:18):
I played it on my steam deck Okay, it ran
perfectly fine, didn't have any issues with it, looked a
great sounded great on it, absolutely fine.

Speaker 1 (17:30):
I played this on PC as well. I actually I
tried playing this on my Legion Go and this was
the first time I had like severe trouble on my
Legion Go. Not because it couldn't handle it, but there
was I was having a weird aspect ratio issue, And
to be fair, it's not the game's fault. It was
doing this for Paranorma site too, but I didn't play
it at all on the Legion Go just straight up PC.

(17:51):
Looks great, looks amazing. If you could play it on
PC Steam Deck something like that, highly recommend it. It's
going to look beautiful. The architecture gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. You're
you're the setting of this, we should say, is in
a Roman city. You know, that's the Forgotten City referenced
in the title, and you're going to be spending a
lot of time there exploring, which is the prime one

(18:13):
of the primary verb sets of this game. And it
is just really beautiful what they're able to do. Uh,
it's not. It doesn't have any of the washed out
textures like Skyrim has. It doesn't have a lot well,
there is a Skyrim ass dungeon, but it doesn't. It
looks much better. It feels very lived in, and it's

(18:34):
a very pleasant place to spend what is ultimately going
to be what somewhere between ten to twenty hours, depending
on how much you want to do in this game.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
H twenty is maybe a bit high, but I can't
see people playing it much longer than that. By that point,
you've naturally gotten all the endings.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to put a pin in that
for like the next minute or so. There is one
visual thing that I did note there is a quirk
in this game where you're going to be talking to people.
That's not the quirk, that's one of the moves. Primary
verb sets of this game is talking. Talking, and exploring
is what you do here. And every time you speak
to somebody, there's a fade to black and then a

(19:15):
fade in. It's not like a zoom in like oblivion,
thank goodness, but there's like a fade to black fade in.
It shows their you know, their character in profile, but
they always have to do a turn to you, and
it always takes a couple of seconds. I don't know
about it so weird.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
I don't know why it's there.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
It's every time too, and it takes a second. I
am man it towards the end, I was getting a
little bit not aggravated, but I was like, come on,
because sometimes they could take a second too.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Yeah. It's not something that's gonna make or break a
game for you, but it is something where if you're
and without spoiling anything, you're going to be going through
a lot of steps as you're playing this game, and
sometimes you just want to get through that one and
you realize, Okay, turn towards me, let's have this conversation.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
One thing that I that happened to me too, And
I don't know if this is a bug or not,
but if the person I was trying to talk to
was sitting down, they would just never turn to look
at me. They just talked while they were facing forward,
and it felt very felt demeaning. I felt like I
was being talked down to you on mechanics, as I

(20:26):
said two major verbs. That's exploring and talking. This is
a knowledge based game, metroid brainia, as is in the
current discourse, it's not. It's not a metroid brainia. I
haven't tuned into that discourse. I don't know what's got
people so worked up. Is it just that it's sounds.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
I have no idea.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
I think maybe it's just that it sounds silly metroid braining.
It does sound a little silly, it does whatever. Uh,
Outside of one or two areas, you weren't really ever
doing anything more than exploring and talking. You know, you talk,
you solve minor dialogue puzzles, and that's really it. There
are a couple of mandatory combat sections that do feel

(21:07):
pretty tedious. There are gameplay tricks that kind of make
this a little bit easier, but there is some of
that Skyrim combat in here, and it doesn't that's probably
the parts of the game that feel the most. You
start to have those flashbacks of Droger dungeons and Skyrim
where it's just hallway after hallway of Drager after Droger.

(21:28):
It's the same thing. Thankfully, this game does that very little,
but it is in there.

Speaker 2 (21:34):
Yeah, they're not horribly long sections, they are very tedious,
and it is very much super basic SKYRIMSS combat. It's
not combat that you're going to enjoy using ever, I think.
But yeah, at least they're short, and there's not that
many of them, right.

Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yeah, And when we say Skyrim combat, we mean with
a bow. You don't there's not swords and shields, axis
and magic. Well, there are technically two weapons in the game,
a bow and a gun, but we'll talk about that
whenever we get a little farther in. That's really the
core mechanics though. One thing, and I don't think this

(22:16):
is a spoiler because it happens extremely early on, but
if you would rather skip past this maybe fast forward
by about forty five seconds to a minute. This game
uses the mechanic that Outer Wild's does. Insofar as it's
a time loop game. You are going to be doing
loops throughout your playthrough, and that's where the knowledge checks

(22:36):
come in. You will have knowledge that you gained on
a previous loop in your next loop, and that is
going to be essentially how you win the game.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
It does have that. There is a nice kind of
almost say function to the game with one of the
characters you can talk to and they'll quicken your pace.
But yeah, it's very much time low. It's going to
you're going to have to remember where people are who
you need to talk to in a certain order. I

(23:06):
think they did a good job with it.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
Yeah, I completely agree. Okay, spoiler's over. If you're just
tuning back and spoilers are done, it's not really a spoiler,
just a light one. But yeah, that's kind of the
core of the game. If it feels like we're breezing
past the precursory discussion, it's kind of because we are.
Most of the juice of this game. The meat on
the bone is talking about the story stuff, which gets

(23:30):
into the themes of things like religion and philosophy and
how history can alter those. This is a narrative heavy game,
not a lot of mechanics to talk about. There's not
even really any like there's a mechanic that you can do.
You can pick something up and like rotate it and
observe it. And early on there's a mystery somebody's missing,
and I want into that person's room because I got permission,

(23:54):
because that's the kind of guy I am. I don't
barge in like in Links Awakening Final Fantasy one through six,
uh not, I don't know all of the final fantasies.
I get permission before I go into NPC's rooms. But
I went in and I started picking stuff up, and
I was flipping it around with the analog stick, like
observing it, thinking, oh, maybe if I turn this upside down,
something will fall out or there will be a message

(24:16):
on the bottom. No, it's not, it's not that. It's
just kind of there for the world building and if
you want to be a part of this of this world,
which that's not a con but I was kind of
hoping of that sometime, like picking up like a vase
and seeing on the bottom some kind of a message
and you know, solving the mystery that way I did.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
I hoped for that as well. But yeah, it's just
an interesting little look closer at things. That's basically what
it does. You can examine.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, yeah, not a con but it is nice to do.

(25:10):
As for the music and sound, I actually, for once
do not have a lot to say about the composition
for this game. I don't have anything against it, but
it kind of just serves its purpose and steps out
of the way. It's perfectly serviceable, but you know, it's
ultimately forgettable. It does very little more than serve its purpose,

(25:30):
and you know, it dictates the atmosphere of what it's
trying to do well of a peaceful Roman city. Of
the areas that are tense feel pretty tense. There's one
in particular that happens early on the mechanic that we
mentioned in the quote unquote spoiler part a little bit
earlier feels kind of how would you describe that, hazy,

(25:55):
daisy kind of spacey. Maybe it does a fine job,
but I mean, you're not gonna be humming a lot
of this. No.

Speaker 2 (26:03):
I think the music fits the game well, but the
game is much more about the atmosphere and what you're in.
So they do a really good job with sound effects,
and there's a mechanic to the game that we can
talk about later that the game does a good job
at presenting. But the music it's forgettable. It's good when

(26:26):
you're playing it, but it's very forgettable.

Speaker 1 (26:29):
I do agree with you. It serves its purpose well,
it would be it would be pretty inappropriate to have
some of the more like quote unquote epic scoring from
Skyrim here. That would be really really out of place. Yeah,
and you know, Skyrim also has a lot of like
folk instruments, string folk instruments and percussion that kind of

(26:49):
harken back ideas of like medieval quote unquote, you know,
for towns like Riverwood. That wouldn't really be appropriate here either.
And to the composer's credit, this isn't just straight up
like chant music, which would also get kind of tiresome.
I think there's some nice like light chanting in the
or vocalizing I guess would be a better term in

(27:09):
the start screen music, which honestly is probably the most
pleasant music of the game. I think. But yeah, you know,
it's fine, you know, it's fine as usual I was
listening to this ost as I was editing, and after
we recorded, I think I was maybe a little too
harsh on it. I don't think forgettable is a very
fair descriptor. I think it's perfectly fine. There's even some

(27:32):
nice scoring in here. Perhaps the composer is a fan
of French horn. There's some really nice French horn lines
within the orchestra, and it's all very pleasant and scored well.
I didn't want to give the impression that I was
negative on the score, or that I thought less of
it than I do, so I thought I would record
this little insert to put into the episode. Speaking of which,

(27:52):
let's get back to it. I will say the voice
acting surprised me quite a bit. You come into a
game thinking that it takes inspiration from elder scrolls, and
you know, I mean, look, I love Oblivion, but we
all know how the voice acting in Oblivion is right
with like those two people that did it, what do
you want you?

Speaker 4 (28:12):
What do you want you?

Speaker 1 (28:14):
You racked. I had never seen this in the game myself,
but I saw a TikTok or a YouTube short or something.
I guess a character of voice actor like did a
second take and they just left it in the game
where they said something and then they like moved away
and said, let me try that again, just repeated it.

Speaker 5 (28:34):
I heard the thieves broke into the Arcane University, the
Imperial Legion Compound, and the Temple all on the same night.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Wait a minute, let me do that one again.

Speaker 5 (28:43):
I heard the thieves broke into the Arcane University, the
Imperial Legion Compound, and the Temple all on the same night.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
I want to say, that's on the uh like the
Vampire path that you can take in the game. And
it's not the only time it's happened. I think it
happened in Moro when as well with another voice. Oh really, yeah, oh.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
My gosh twice. You can't be doing that older scrolls,
come on, that's crazy. And you know Skyrim's a little
better about that, but you're still going to be hearing
the same voice a lot. Not so here they've got
different voice actors voicing the like I don't have a
count off hand, but there's like fifteen to twenty different
NPCs that are voiced here.

Speaker 2 (29:25):
Ish, yeah, probably fifteen to twenty ish, maybe a handful more.
I think I think maybe there was more than twenty.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. There are some. Some
of them just do an okay job. I mean to
be clear, they all do better than I could, but
some of them stand out more than others. One of
the main folks you meet early on, his name is Sentius.
He's a standout to me. The very next one I
wrote is kind of a spoiler, so I'm gonna skip it. Galerius,

(29:53):
who is like the browest of all bros. And I
mean that positively. He's like just a stand up dude.
I love Glarious. He's a he's a standout voice actor
and there's an assassin that you deal with kind of
early on that I was kind of pleased with his
voice acting performance. I thought he did a great job.

Speaker 2 (30:12):
Glarius is also just the guy that never asks really questions.
He's just like there and you tell him, hey, this
is what's happening, Okay, whatever, I'll go.

Speaker 1 (30:24):
He is such a pure soul. You tell him what's
going on early on, and he's just he's just like, oh,
well that sure does sound improbable, but you don't. I
don't know why you'd lie to me. He's just such
a nice guy and he has that mechanic that you
would alluded to. That is a super super ql qol

(30:44):
timesaver that you know, I think is a good thing.
He's just a good dude. Yeah. Do you do you
know anybody offhand that you might want to shout out
in terms of voice acting that I didn't write down here?

Speaker 2 (30:56):
Oh there. I can't remember the name of the character
and they're inside a cave. I just can't remember the
name of the character that you have to talk to,
but they were pretty stand out. What I like about
this game when it comes to the voice acting is
they decided to include lines where you're asking someone something

(31:18):
out of order and they'll reply to you like, I
don't know how you unknew that we haven't discussed this,
or or things along those lines. It's interesting. I like it.
But the voice acting is I'd say it's above Skyrim.
I mean, there's still gonna be issues, but it's good

(31:38):
voice acting.

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Oh totally, it's absolutely above Skyrim. And you are right,
that is that was a really nice touch. If you
that's kind of part of the mechanic of this game.
You're gonna be talking to people a lot, and if
you do mention something that you know, they aren't sure
how you know it. They're going to call you out
on it and say, well, don't know how you know that,
But okay, I guess we're talking about that now, and

(32:01):
it's really nice. I think a lesser game would breeze
past that and they wouldn't think to cover their bases
from all angles. And it's you know, knowing his background,
this is going to sound weird to say, maybe, but
knowing Nick Pierce's background as a lawyer, it's kind of
not surprising to me that he would look at the
conversation from so many different angles and kind of plot
it out like one plots out a map, right, like

(32:23):
no corridor was left unexplored. And to that end, you know,
the dialogue tree, as as big as it is, is
really well accounted for. It's he did really, really nice
work on the writing.

Speaker 2 (32:36):
I can't think of any moments where I would get
stuck in this game if I was talking to an NPC,
where I couldn't figure out what I wanted to ask
them at any one time. So it's it's your dialogue
choices are very clear. It's not. It's not mass effect
where you think you're doing something nice and you end
up punching some po.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Oh my gosh. Yeah, I can't remember what game I
recently had that. And I feel like I mentioned it
on the show where it's like, you know, say something
understanding and the thing that they said was not understanding
at all, and it's like, oh my god, BioWare and
its consequences please.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
Yeah, and you as a player are just like why
why why did it? It looked it looked so nice.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
I'm glad that you mentioned the idea, the notion of
never feeling lost. That's something that I wasn't quite sure
where to put in this game, but I wanted to
talk about it before we got into the quote unquote spoilers.
This game gets compared to Outer Wilds a lot. It
came out kind of at the same time. It came
out a little after It does a lot of similar things,
and because of that, you know, Outer Wilds was so

(33:41):
monumentally successful that you know, this was it was a
natural point of comparison and a lot of the you know,
sometimes what I like to do, we don't. We kind
of moved away of discussing critical reception on the show.
I just kind of cut that down in favor of,
you know, discussion. But one thing that I did today
was I looked up Reddit threads of folks talking about

(34:03):
this game, and a lot of people were saying that
it underwhelmed them because of how good Outer Wilds is,
and I think I understand where they're coming from. I
love Outer wild so much, but this is a different
kind of game. Outer Wilds is explicitly focused. It does
have a story, it does have an overall message and

(34:24):
a thematic idea, but it's focused on the exploration and
the discovery, the beauty of discovery and the universe. Nick
Beacham Alex Beacham said this explicitly like that was part
of the design philosophy this game. The Forgotten City has
a story that is the driving device in this game.

(34:44):
It is a story. There is a story. You ended
up somewhere, you're trying to get home, and you're trying
to do good in the society you find yourself in.
I used in like five times. I shouldn't have. I'm sorry,
but I mean, this game has a story, and it's
also dealing with its thematic ideas in a different way.

(35:06):
At least to me, Outer Wilds Puts those much more
in the focus, whereas the Forgotten City. I kind of
look at it as you know, it's the vehicle is
the story, and the trappings are the philosophy. The discussions
around religion and world history. Now, are they prominent discussions, Yes, absolutely,

(35:28):
But this game is telling a narrative story first and foremost.
I might be wrong on that. I might even listen
to this when I'm editing and think, oh, you know,
I don't know if I agree with that. But what
do you think? Dog?

Speaker 5 (35:38):
Do you?

Speaker 1 (35:39):
Well? I actually don't know. Have you played Outer Wilds?

Speaker 2 (35:41):
I have not. I've seen other people play it, but
I have not played Outer Wilds yet. I would say
kind of along what you were saying. This game, this
game is the story. It's not about the gameplay itself.
The story is excellent and the gameplay works for it.

(36:02):
But everything about this game is going into discussions of
right and wrong. Who gets to decide what morality is?
But it's just it's story. So this is a narrative
driven game to a t. It is narrative driven. Yeah,
it's not really about exploration. You're gonna see every it's

(36:24):
a very small map. Actually the map is tiny. But
what he's able to do with the map is great.
There's very distinct areas, but yeah, it's not. It's not
an exploration.

Speaker 1 (36:37):
Game, no, definitely not, whereas Outer Wilds is and another
you know, another point of comparison, more to your point
about never getting lost, really is Outer Wilds is very
very vast. It's a big solar system and you can
explore so much, and a lot of the times the

(36:57):
discoveries you make pieces one thread to another one by one.
Very rarely are you going to discover something in Outer
Wilds that unlocks like four different mysteries or pieces together
four different open mysteries. With this, with the Forgotten City,
it very much is that. There is a really great

(37:18):
YouTube video I can't remember the name, but he like
mapped out all of the different conversations and very frequently
one quest is going to either unlock, help, solve, or
elucidate like four other quests. Everything is connected here in
a way that does give it the feeling of kind
of being on rails. You know, if you're coming to

(37:39):
this wanting a detective game experience, I can see how
you might be disappointed. That being said, I think there's
something to say in how focused this is Outer Wilds
as much as I love, it can get frustrating at
times to new players if you don't know where to
go or what to do. It very much, you know.
I think the analogy I used was, it's not bread crumbs,

(38:02):
it's just it gives you puzzle pieces and you have
to figure out where they go. This is very much
more bread crumbing, and I think that focus helps keep
the pace up. I think it helps keep the runtime shorter,
which is a plus to me. It keeps the story moving,
and it keeps the ideas, the philosophical and religious and
historical ideas kind of always turning in your mind. They're

(38:26):
always waiting in the water of your brain, and you're
never forgetting about them because you're always talking about it.
Every time you talk to somebody. You could say, yeah,
what do you think about the Golden Rule? And they'll
talk about it, or you know, so, oh so you're
a Christian, huh, and then they'll talk about that. You're
always thinking about this kind of thing. And you know,

(38:47):
in outer Wild you could go long stretches without thinking
about the ideas of like community or things like that.
You can just turn that part of your brain off,
and here it's focused enough to where I mean, it's
an option, but you probably won't because you're talking about
it so much. I don't know. I don't agree with
those takes that this game is lesser because it's quote

(39:10):
unquote on rails or easier. Is it closer to being
on rails, yes, but I don't think it suffers for it.

Speaker 2 (39:17):
No. And it's not meant to be a hard game.
It's meant to be easy. The developers wanted you to
hear this story. They wanted you to understand the story
by the time you got to completion. It's also it's
not a game that you're going to get a lot
of replay value on. But with that said, what they

(39:39):
do with the small world, with the intertwined tasks, with
everything fitting together is masterful.

Speaker 1 (39:48):
I agree. It's really, really, really well done. I don't
think one should discount this because it's a Skyrim mod.
I don't think one should discount this because like, oh, well,
Outer Wilds is right there. I don't think that's a
fair comparison at all. It really is masterfully done. I
hope Nick Pierce is making more games. I don't know
what Modern Storyteller is up to right now, but if

(40:13):
they decide to make something else. I'll be there, you know.
I maybe not day one, but week one, month one.
You know, I'll be there. They've earned my trust, deaf.

(40:47):
One more thing we should talk about. Generally we do
this kind of thing up top my fault, but one
more thing we'd be remiss not to talk about before
the spoiler section is the idea of the Golden Rule
and the kinds of conversation are going to be having
and thinking about in this game.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
The Golden Rule, not to be confused with what we
would call the Golden rule, do unto others that you
would have them do unto you, kind of kind of there.
It's very strange trying to think of how to describe
it without spoiling I'm trying a loss.

Speaker 1 (41:23):
Yeah, that's the that's the tough part. It's it's based
on the Golden Rule as we know it, do unto
others as you would have them do unto you. It
is based off of that, but it takes a few
steps forward. It skips a few rungs of the latter
L A, D, D, E R into this concept where, Yeah,
I guess this is kind of tough to talk about

(41:43):
without spoilers. Huh, it gets it gets into the nitty
gritty of what is morality? Who gets to decide morality?
And do you think you know better than what the
textbooks or history might tell you. That's a that's we're
really tiptoeing around here, eggshells galore.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
Huh oh yeah. And it deals with outer morality and
inner morality, what people are presenting to the world versus
what they're thinking to themselves. It's going to be interesting,
it is.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
It is going to be interesting. And if you know
anything about you know, Roman or Greek history, you know
that at a time Romans and Romans did not look
too kindly upon Christians. We associate today the Golden Rule
with I think I think it's safe to say we
associate that with a Christian morality lens right do unto others.

(42:37):
Jesus said, treat your neighbor like you would have them
treat you. That is, you know that, that's how we
associate it. And you would be on the right track
if you thought Romans weren't Christians, very true, and that's
that's a part of this history and the rewriting of
history through those by the means of those around Visa VI,

(42:57):
those around that is a key part of this game,
and seeing how cultures will borrow from those that come
before really really major part of this It's again, it's
a little tough to talk about without spoiling anything, and
I want to stay true to that part of the show.
It would be very easy to just throw the spoilers
off and have a conversation, but that's not the format

(43:18):
I've created here, and for better or worse, God damn it,
I've got to stick to it. I'm speaking as a Roman,
so that wasn't taking anybody's name in vain. But we
also mentioned philosophy is a key part of this Greek
philosophy specifically, and there are two schools that are mentioned
and explicitly name dropped here, that is the Stoics and

(43:40):
the Socratics. The Stoics in particular are name dropped quite
a bit. There's one character named Horatius who identifies himself
as a Stoic, and that man is just as well
read as anybody. He could drop quotes from the Masters
all day long. He's as Seneca once said, or as
Cicero once said, as Marcus Aurelius once said. He does
this the whole game it's pretty funny, Like I appreciated it,

(44:04):
but it's pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
And I love ancient Stoic literature, so I have a
copy of the Enchiridian that I read through at least
at least once a year. But I really enjoy Stoic philosophy.

Speaker 1 (44:17):
It's really interesting. I was just watching a video about
how the quote unquote bros have kind of overtaken Stoicism
and sort of misrepresent it sometimes as like broicism is
what I've seen it called. There's a great YouTube channel
called Unsolicited Advice with a British fella named Joe Fawley.
Really really well done work. But one of the cool

(44:39):
things about the Stoic philosophy is that, you know, the
blanket term stoicism isn't always accurate because they didn't necessarily
agree with each other all the time. You know, it
really was I think how Joe puts it is a
group of interconnected people that had similar ideas and kind
of knew each other and interacted with each other. But
just because you like the works of Epictetis, for example,

(44:59):
who was a slave former slave philosopher that dealt a
lot with freedom, doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna vibe with
I don't know, with Cicero or with Marcus Aurelius or whatever.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
Marcus Aurelius was the one that was popping into my
mind with that, because those are two contrasting lives and
they do not agree on all things, and it's interesting
in the ways that they kind of come to the
same conclusion on a lot of stuff, but from very
different backgrounds.

Speaker 1 (45:31):
I admit I have not read really almost any Stoicism.
I have a couple works of Epicteitis and Seneca on
the shelf. I haven't touched it, man. I mean, I
mean the thing with philosophy is even the easier quote
unquote easier stuff like the Stoics, like Plato, the worst
of Plato, the stuff that's digestible, it's still not something

(45:52):
you could speed read, you know. I see folks, and
I'm not listening. I'm not calling anybody out. I think
if you're reading, then you're already doing great. But you know,
I see folks saying like, yeah, I've already read thirty
books this year and it's only April, and it's like,
how deep are you reading? You know, one wonders, And again,
I'm not calling anybody out. But you can't read philosophy

(46:13):
like that, you know, and and well maybe if you're
at a at a very high level, but it's meant
to be chewed on and thought about. So and I'm
a slow reader anyway. So so all this to say, like,
I haven't read a ton of philosophy that or as
much as i'd like to. What I have read is
the second school that is mentioned in this game quite
a bit, and explicitly through the quote unquote Boss battles

(46:36):
the Socratic philosophy. And that's not surprising to me because lawyers,
at least from what I've heard, they actually do study,
you know, Socrates and the Socratics, this area of Greek
philosophy because it's highly it's where logic was born. Logic
in the philosophical sense is written out at times like formulas,

(46:58):
and lawyers deal in this stuff. So it's no wonder
that Nick Pierce, having written this game, was so versed
in this and was able to write things down, you know,
as they were the Socratic dialogues. You know, there's a
joke with the meme with the Socratic Dialogues where it's like,
you know, philosophy should be a conversation, and the conversation

(47:19):
is Socrates, and it's a huge wall of text. It's
so so much text you can't read it. And then
the second person says, yes, Socrates, and then there's just
another wall of text from Socrates, and the next person says,
of course Socrates, and like, to be fair, if you
read the apology from Plato, like the Last Days of Socrates,
the Apology, that's what it is. It's Socrates just going

(47:40):
off and off and off, and everyone's like, well, of
course Socrates.

Speaker 2 (47:44):
Yeah, but you do that.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
That's how the quote unquote boss battles are in this game.
There's one in particular. You speak with a philosopher, a
self described philosopher, and he's like, you know, I just
I haven't got to talk to anybody. I'll tell you
what you want to know. Just have a nice philosophical
conversation with me, and immediately he does a Socrates thing
where he's like, do you think you know the difference
between right and wrong? Immediately and I was like, oh
my god, I love this. This this is straight out

(48:08):
of out of the Last Days. And you have to
go through this sort of dialogue puzzle answering his questions
and like you said, dogs, it's not hard, you know.
And if you pick the wrong thing, he does what
Socrates will do. Well, you think you know right from wrong?
But how can one define such a thing? Is it
your definition or is it mine? What about other cultures?

(48:29):
And it'll just loop you back to the start and
have you choose again. But what did you think of this?
I was grinning the whole time. I love this so much.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
I was doing that's the character I was talking about.
The voice acting for that was a stand up for me.
But it does it just jumps right into the Socratic
method and you can I mean it's you can mess up,
but it doesn't really hurt. It just takes you back
a little bit. But yeah, I really liked that section.

(48:58):
And it goes into what we were talking about before
or what do you what do you call them? Morale? Yeah?
Like what is right from wrong?

Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah? And this game? You know how best to put this?
I'm gonna make a comparison that I might regret, so
don't come at me in the discord. This kind of
reminds me in some ways of like BioShock Infinite or
excuse me not, BioShock Infinite BioShock one where it's not
a political game. It's not a game about politics, but

(49:25):
it uses them quite a bit. This isn't a game
about philosophy, but it uses it quite a bit. And
it's going to challenge you to think about things like,
do I know the difference from right and wrong? Is
what I consider to be a sin truly a sin?
And even if what I consider to be a sin,
even if I am grounded in that fact, can I

(49:47):
look at those who have come before me and see
their point of view? And that is That's a major
part of this game. I mean, you can go through
this without thinking about that, sure, but I think you'd
be missing a lot of what this game has to
offer and a lot of what makes it special. And
it's not hidden. I mean, it's you. I think you
would have to try not to engage with it. It's
not hidden. But that's that's where this game really shines.
Is if you, you know, take a second and say,

(50:09):
do I agree with what my player character is saying?
Or am I just clicking answers to get to the end.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
It's all straight in your face, like nobody is trying
to hide anything. Well, I can't say that but the
arguments that they're making are very straightforward and very easy
to kind of flow along. There's times where if you're
asked a question about morality, well, your your instinct is

(50:35):
to go to this one section. But then you're like,
but let me think about that, because maybe the first
jump is not actually what that should be or what
I even believe morality is.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
There's also I mean, morality comes into play with the
philosophical discussions, like with with the philosopher, but it also
comes into play with an early conversation that I think
it's fine to tease out when your player character is
talking to a guy named Sentius about like, what is
a sin? You can levy all these I don't want

(51:11):
to call them accusations. But you're like, well, didn't the Romans,
you know, give less rights to women? How is that ethical?
And he'll say, well, of course, but you know with
that comes the right to be protected by the husband
and the male family members, the rights to stay home
and not have to put themselves out in the workforce,
like and you know, things like that, Well, I have

(51:33):
it all written down in a little bit. Things that
are priming you to try to think away from your
contemporary lens which every single one of us has a
bias towards by nature of us being alive. You know
that's how that works. And I just eat that shit up. Man,
I really do I love stuff like this. Am I

(51:53):
an amateur at philosophy? Yes? Will I always be? Absolutely?
Is that okay? Yeah? Because even if you only read
like two philosophy books in your life, that's still two
more than a lot of people. And it's still enriching
you to think in a different way and from a
different point of view. I don't know, I don't want
to go off on a huge tangent, but I just

(52:14):
want to say I love it, and then I want
to pass the football to you.

Speaker 2 (52:18):
Well with that, we have to remember that what was
moral to one generation is seen as immoral to the next.
And this conversation that we're having right now, I feel
is completely moral. I feel I'm a fairly moral person.
But in one hundred years someone may come in and

(52:40):
look at this conversation and say, oh my god, those immoral,
awful people had no idea what they were talking about.
And that's not to say that morality has not gotten.
There are strides that we have made in terms of
collective morality. But to look at a past generation and say, oh,

(53:04):
that has to be a moral, this game will then go, well, yeah,
that happens. But this is why, this is why it
fits into the culture of the day, and it's not
seen as a moral to any of them.

Speaker 1 (53:19):
Absolutely, And I think, you know, Outer Wilds does this
a little bit too. I think this game isn't wagging
its finger at you, the player and saying, oh, aren't
you foolish for thinking that you're so moral? I think
it's more so sort of coaxing you into thinking, you know,
we should be reverent of those who have come before,
without whom we would not exist. We borrow from, we

(53:42):
borrow and learn from all who come before us, every
one of us, from the individual to the collective. And
we should be respectful of this and not cast out
the past, but rather learn from it and hold it
in a place of reverence. This is something I've done
a one eight on this. In my life. I did
not used to think this way. I used to think, like,

(54:03):
you know, leave that shit in the past. The future
is now old man, you know, and whatever, whatever, whatever.
Now I really I don't know what triggered it. I
maybe just maybe this is just part of getting older,
But I really think that the past should always be treated,
not gingerly, that's not the word. I think it should

(54:24):
be held in delicate hands and viewed at with a
lens of respect, even if not so respectful things happened.
Does that make sense? Like, I don't feel like I'm
explaining myself very well here, do you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (54:38):
It makes sense to me. I mean I think that
in some ways we've all gone through this period of
time where you hear the story of someone from the
past and you think, Wow, that's a great story, and
then you find out something about that person you're like,
oh my god, I can't believe that I actually respected
that well the idea that you initially read, you respect it,

(55:02):
You didn't respect every single thing that that person was
going to do. And I think when we look at
past morality, there are times where you can say, Okay,
this is definitely a good thing that was done, and
still admit and accept that there were also great evils
happening at the time as well. A person is not

(55:22):
black or white when it comes to moral decisions. An
immoral person can make a moral decision on accident. You know,
it's it's hard to it's it's hard to describe. I
think what we're trying to say here exactly, it's not
accepting that they were moral people, but accepting that they

(55:44):
believed they were moral people, even given their culture of
the time.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
And that morals are ultimately man made. Yes, morals are
created within and decided upon within a society. Going back
to the example of Centius that we'll talk about here
in a few moments, another example that your character can
say is, well, you know, don't you all have slaves?
And he says, well, yes, but prisoners of war would

(56:10):
otherwise be executed. We are allowing them to live, right,
Or don't your people watch blood sports? And he says, well, yes,
but it's entirely voluntary. They're looking for honor. This is
what fulfills them. Of course we would allow this. It's
their choice, you know. And it's highlighting the idea that
our contemporary morals and what we value as being ethical

(56:33):
is only such because we have decided it. And as
you said, not just a few moments ago, in one
hundred years, culture will shift and some of the things
that you and I dog and listeners do or say,
will probably be looked at in a different way, and
it's up to us to decide whether we wish to
hold on to this and refuse to grow with the society,

(56:55):
or in my opinion, do the sensible thing and move
with the societ and say, Okay, the collective ideals have changed,
and so too must die. Fix your hard or die.
As David Lynch rip famously.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
Said, ah that hit hard. I can't believe David Lynch
is gone.

Speaker 1 (57:13):
I know, dude, I know what a singular mind. Well,
on that note, I think it's about time we talk
some stories. So this is where the meat of the
spoilers are going to come into play. This is not
a linear game, so all spoilers are going to be
on the table here. If you're tuning out now, we're
happy that you stuck around. Check out the notes. Check

(57:34):
out the episode notes for links to both of our stuff.
We're going to talk all about that at the end
of the episode. With that, let's hear the Tale of
the Forgotten City. Okay, opening, This is the opening act.

(58:11):
You play as a bodyless POV character except for your
forearms in hands, you've got those, but you awake mysteriously
on a riverbank at night, with no recollection of how
you arrived there. A young woman is the only person
in your sight. It's a stranger to you. She's there
around a campfire. She's thankful to see you. She's thankful

(58:31):
you're okay. She says that she dragged you out of
the river and onto the bank, presumably save in your life.
We are on the Tiber in Italy and there's a
brief getting to know you section where you choose your background,
and you get to choose your player's sex, male or female.
You also get to choose one of four different what

(58:52):
would you call these attributes?

Speaker 2 (58:54):
Yeah, that's probably the best way to describe it.

Speaker 1 (58:57):
Now, these are not as big of a deal as
they seem, but there are four of them. There's archaeologist, soldier, fugitive,
and amnesiac, and each of these get some little buffs.
So what did you pick on your first time around?

Speaker 2 (59:11):
I'm fairly certain I picked archaeologist.

Speaker 1 (59:14):
That's what I did too. The perk of archaeologist it
says that it'll tell you insights about the world. You know,
you can understand Latin before entering the city. You get
certain world building elements within the city, there is not
a lot of these. Not often do you get to
call upon that perk.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
I'm trying to think of a time where I used that. Actually,
it's very rare.

Speaker 1 (59:36):
There's a couple of things you can examine as you're
walking around, and a few conversations where you can like
talk about Rome. But it's and then of course, okay,
of course the beginning too with the whispers. But other
than that, there's really not a lot fugitive. You move
twenty five percent faster, that's pretty standard amnesiac for some reason,
you just forget that you're fragile, so you have more health.

(59:57):
That's pretty cool. This last one, sold Or is what
I started a second playthrough on. You get a gun
that you get to take into this Roman city and
you get ten bullets. You cannot get more. You get
ten for the whole game, but you can shoot people.
This is This is also particularly funny because it replaces

(01:00:18):
your flashlight. The gun just has a flashlight on it,
so as you're walking around the city with a flashlight,
you're pointing your gun everywhere, and it's very it's very funny.

Speaker 2 (01:00:27):
I may have to try another play through with the military.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
It's so silly. You don't even need this throughout the game.
There's no for no reason would you need a gun
as a weapon.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
Yeah, well, I'm thinking of one of the quests that
they give you when it comes to the bow. It
is like, this is just we have to have this bow.
It's it's amazing, and like if you're carrying around a gun,
I don't.

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
This woman who's around this campfire, she you can goat
her into telling you her name. She's very reluctant to
tell you what her name is. She eventually tells you
her name is Karen. Sorry if I sounded cagy, It's
just that I don't always get the best reactions when
I introduced myself.

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
My name's Karen.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
Now, I don't know how you felt. I called exactly
what was happening immediately after this happened, well, actually before
this happened, I looked around and we're on the river.
There's a woman here. She says that she caught us
in her boats and she brought us up onto the shore.
I kind of knew what was going on from the
very beginning, and that was a little that wasn't disappointing.

(01:01:36):
It gets revealed very quickly, which I thought was a
little disappointing, but you're shaking your head. Did you call
this from the start too?

Speaker 2 (01:01:43):
Yeah, as soon as you got her to say her name, yeah, Karen.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
She also she also has some fur away lines. She
says like, sorry, I was reluctant to tell you about that, because,
like my name has a negative connotation, and it's kind
of funny writing the writing in this game you can say,
oh yeah, because of the memes, right, And she's like, yeah, sure.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
And I think I think a lot of people would
think that, Like if you're if you're not well versed,
or not even not well versed, but if you're not
versed in philosophy or Greek mythology more specifically with this,
I wonder if you would catch it at that point.

Speaker 1 (01:02:24):
I think, hmm, that's a good question. After how successful
the game Hades was, I think more people probably caught
this than maybe we're giving them credit for. It could
be I'm trying to imagine my mother playing this. I
don't think she would catch it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
I don't, yeah, I don't. I don't think my dad
or mom would catch this at all.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
She has another line where she says she's stuck in
a dead end job. And at that point I was like, Yeah,
that's this is exactly what's happening.

Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
Oh, there's not much to tell. Feels like I've spent
my whole life in a dead end job with an
endless commute, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1 (01:03:00):
We learned that pretty soon. But what she does is
she says, there's somebody else in these ruins. There are
Roman ruins nearby. You can turn around, you can look.
Somebody's in there. His name is Al. He went in,
he hasn't come out. Can you please go get him?
You know, you can ask your questions. She gets a
little testy if you don't go in right away, but
eventually you do. Perplexingly, as we go into these ruins,

(01:03:20):
we start to hear a whisper It's in Latin, unless
you have the archaeologist perk, in which case you can
hear it. It's generally just coaxing you further and saying
very cryptic things that we don't quite understand. At the
entrance of the ruins, we actually find a note of
Owl's just in case the audio isn't isolated. Well, I'm

(01:03:41):
going to read it if I can't put it in myself.
Here's what Owl's note says. If you're reading this, it
means I've discovered the entrance to an ancient Roman city
hidden deep underground. Its existence is long forgotten, and all
knowledge of it lost, except in the Latin transcription here.
Inscription here it reads, you who wish to enter the city,
step forth and be judged. The virtuous shall be rewarded

(01:04:03):
with eternal life and paradise. The wicked shall find themselves
showered in gold, but in vain, for this shall be
their final resting place. Could an underground city have remained
a secret for all this time? Could people have survived
down here against the odds? It seems there's only one
way to find out. If I'm not back in an hour,
I'm somewhere on the other side, consider this an invitation

(01:04:25):
or a warning. Very ominous.

Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
Yes, ominous in another fashion in that al is one
of the worst voice actors in the game. Oh you
think so, mind, Yeah, I didn't. I did not like
Alice voice acting.

Speaker 1 (01:04:39):
He kind of just sounds like a guy, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:04:41):
Yeah, he doesn't like It's not it's not a memorable voice.
It's just kind of like a guy just talking. But
I do like the the virtuous shall be rewarded with
eternal life and paradise. The wicked shall find themselves showered
in gold, but in vain, for this shall be their
final resting place. I like the idea that people might

(01:05:04):
want to be showered in gold, but that it's not
actually going to lead them where they want to go.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
No, if you know anything about Greek mythology, it is.
If you know anything, you know that they're fucking and
that they are always up to hijinks. They do wordplay
to trick others quite a bit. They're tricky and horny,
but that will come into play.

Speaker 2 (01:05:30):
Horny.

Speaker 1 (01:05:32):
Yeah, there's a lot of incestuous relations in those early
Titans and et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:05:37):
Yeah, it's nice to know that we were helped me
step growing, even all the way back then.

Speaker 1 (01:05:43):
Some things never change. We have become as gods. Speaking
of gold, though golden statues are here everywhere, they're in
various states of panic and unrest. Although some are a
little more casual, some are praying, some are fearing for
their lives. Pretty quickly, you can figure out what's happening here.
When you walk past them, you hear grinding, and if

(01:06:06):
you turn around you can see that they're looking at
you like they're turning their necks. They can't move, but
they will follow you. This might be a bug, but
sometimes if they're in your peripherals, you can watch their
heads move. I don't think that was intended.

Speaker 2 (01:06:19):
But I don't think it was intended. It's definitely creepy.

Speaker 1 (01:06:24):
Oh yeah, we're Oh yeah, this game has like five
percent horror DNA.

Speaker 2 (01:06:29):
Yeah, it's and it makes you wonder like it maybe
I'm getting the Doctor Who referenced from earlier that was said, Mmm, okay,
have you seen the episodes with the weeping angels?

Speaker 1 (01:06:40):
Oh yeah, of course, where if you.

Speaker 2 (01:06:42):
Turn your back on them then they can come at you.

Speaker 1 (01:06:46):
Oh yes, yes, yes, okay, okay, don't blink for those interested.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
Yeah, so maybe that's where the doctor Who connection was
from earlier. But yeah, you always wonder what they're they're doing,
and you hear their voices. So I know that I
chose archaeologists now because I could understand them. I'm not
well versed in Latin or versed at all.

Speaker 1 (01:07:14):
A two dog. Yeah, you, well, you can hear a
voice at this time, it's not really clear what the
deal is. Like you could one character says later, like
everybody sounds the same when they whisper, and I kind
of had a moment where I was like, oh, that's
more true than it than it's not. You know, people

(01:07:34):
do sound pretty similar. You don't really know what the
deal is right now, but you do hear whispering. It's
in Latin unless you chose archaeologist. But you find out eventually.
He's hanging like by a noose. Also, and he's the
only one in regular clothing. That's how you know him.
And he's gilded, his body's turned to gold, and he
has a suicide note that you can pick up. He

(01:07:55):
was very traumatized and at odds with his situation down here.
He says here there are only two options, death or
that god forsaken door to the past. Better to end
it all now than find out what awaits you beyond
that portal. He also talks about like I really tried
to set things right. I really tried. He mentioned something
about over and over again, like a pattern, perhaps not

(01:08:17):
really sure what that means. What we do know is
that we are going to enter that we are going
to find out what awaits beyond that god forsaken portal.
That's where we're going, and when you step into that
portal that's here, there are human remains outside of it.
By the way, it spits you out in a Roman city.
So like, what was your first reaction to this? Were

(01:08:38):
you expecting this? I wasn't.

Speaker 2 (01:08:40):
I wasn't. It's very much a Wizard of Oz type transition.
You go from its ruins. It's just everything's destroyed. There's
the hanging that body. You walk through this portal and
it's this bright, sunny, beautiful city that you see before.
How are you It's pretty jaw dropping the first time you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:03):
Do it, Yes, the first time, you are filled with
wonder just awe. It is awesome in the sense that
it is full of awe, you know, not aw full
some I really got to read linguistics more. Man, If
I'm gonna try and do this shit, I gotta know
what I'm talking about. Instead of just throwing stuff out there,
you get spit out into the shrine of Proserpina. Proserpina

(01:09:26):
is the goddess of uh springtime, and I think one
of them of fertility. I might be wrong. Yeah, quick
thing here, I don't know about you. I am probably
going to go back and forth between the Greek and
the Roman pronunciations. Just because I'm more familiar with the Greek,
this game tends to use the Roman just as a
quick primer. Zeus and Jupiter they're the same. Hades and

(01:09:48):
Pluto they're the same. Proserpina and Persephone, they're the same.
Is that everybody? Hercules and Heracles. That's not too hard
to figure out. I think that's all the main ones.
One thing that's interesting is, at least in the versions
of Hades and Pluto, Pluto is kind of a different
god than Hades, like it's the same or it's the

(01:10:09):
same god, the god of the underworld, but they added
more character and merged other characters with Pluto Hater or Dyspotter,
the god of riches. That's how Pluto is known, whereas Hades.
I don't think Hades has really known. It's very cool.
Read Mythos by Stephen Fry. It's amazing, but let's keep
moving on. You immediately meet this man named Galerius. He's

(01:10:31):
just dressed in a standard like white kind of short toga.
He is a bald guy. He's pretty jovial, and he says,
what are you doing in that shrine? You shouldn't be there.
What's going on? And you know, you could say I'm lost,
you know, I don't know, and he'll he'll kind of
let you through, and he says, hey, I'm going to
do you a solid. Most people are kind of confused
when they get here, and you're like, what does that mean?

(01:10:53):
But he's going to do you a solid. He's going
to show you around town because the magistrate turns out,
wants to see you. We have some things we've got
to explain to you right away. He says, just as
long as you're wary of the Golden Rule, everything will
be okay.

Speaker 3 (01:11:07):
But listen, most folks seem a bit confused when they
get here, but you seem very lost, and in more
ways than one. So let me make this nice and
simple for you. Live by our law here and we'll
all get along just fine. Not laws law. There's just one,

(01:11:33):
the Golden Rule, and the punishment for breaking it's well,
it's kind of horrific. But our magistrate insists we take
all newcomers to see him, so I guess I'll let
him fill you in. So then are you coming?

Speaker 1 (01:11:47):
One thing that I thought was really interesting is that
you can ask hilarious, like how do you understand me?
I don't speak Latin, or like I think you say,
how do you speak English? And he's like, I'm speaking Latin,
and so are you. Even though it's got a weird
accent to it, little thing that I thought was cute.
I like that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
Yeah, you're implianted with one of the uh fish from
Hitchhiker's Guides to the Galaxy when you get there, the
fish in your ear.

Speaker 1 (01:12:15):
You know, I've never read that.

Speaker 2 (01:12:18):
Oh man, I love Hitchhiker's Guides and the Galaxy.

Speaker 1 (01:12:21):
It's one of those things where every so often, kind
of like Hunter Thompson, every so often i'll hear somebody say, like,
you know, if you didn't read it at a certain
time in your life, like at a certain age, it
won't hit as hard. And I always put it off
for that reason.

Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
I think it probably still works. It's juvenile at times,
I would say, Hunter s. Thompson, it's probably much much worse. Yeah, Yeah,
I read some Hunter S. Thompson a while back, and
you can just tell that that guy's living a life
that I would never want to live.

Speaker 1 (01:12:52):
Yeah, I should have read Thompson and Jack Kerouac whenever
I was like mid twenties, I think for now, I
think I'm gonna have to let him go at any rate.
Glarius walks you around. He kind of shows you shows
you around, He shows you the fields, the city. You
get a kind of lay of the land. You don't
have a map, which is something that some folks might
get a little testy about.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
It's confusing at first. It's not bad once you get
the city down.

Speaker 1 (01:13:17):
If you're trying to find a specific person that's not
active in a quest, which might be the case, like
I was looking for somebody named Equitia to start start
an election which we'll talk about that's not marked with
a quest. That gave me a little trouble because they wander,
but it's not a huge sheal. You'll you get the
lay of the land pretty quickly. But he takes you

(01:13:39):
over to the magistrates place, Sentius and Centius is going
to give you a low down of the Golden rule
and why you're here. So we already talked about the
Golden rule, I suppose, so why don't we talk about
it a little more? Like you said, dog, if anybody
sins the collective hole was punished, the many shall suffer
for the sins of the one, as citizens will be

(01:14:01):
turned to gold, just as the citizens of the past
before them. You look around, you see all these golden statues,
and this is when it clicks, like these were real
people that were guilded for their sins and we live
amongst them. How harrowing is that.

Speaker 2 (01:14:15):
It is a mind blowing moment when you realize that
these are actually civilizations that have come before you, and
it just brings into play. How horrifying of world to
live in where you're just told if anybody sins, the
collective hole is punished, So any one of your friends

(01:14:35):
or neighbors could at any point do something that completely
wipes you all out.

Speaker 1 (01:14:41):
And this is part of the philosophy of ethics that
comes into play very early on, because as Centius is
explaining this to you, he says this, He says, consider
the miraculous community we've built here over the last seven months,
seven months, only twenty two complete strangers. You were right,
twenty two twenty two complete strangers. Yeah, I was right,
brought together by the fates, living and working together in

(01:15:03):
our own little paradise. And in all that time, not
a single sin has been committed, no fights, no theft, nothing.
Have you ever witnessed something so extraordinary as a city
without sin? And you start thinking immediately if you're under
that sort of I mean, this is utopia, right, If
they're living in a utopia, If they're living without sin,
everybody's getting along. It's a utopia. Is a utopia worth it?

(01:15:28):
If the threat is the ending of life?

Speaker 2 (01:15:31):
Yeah? And no, no, I.

Speaker 1 (01:15:34):
Was gonna say, I was going to say, please, please elaborate.

Speaker 2 (01:15:40):
No, I do not believe it is.

Speaker 1 (01:15:41):
As just as an example, just as an agent of conversation,
I'm not saying this is the game. Doesn't try to
say this. I'm not saying that. I'm saying this. But
what you could then extrapolate it out to is, how
is that different from how we're living today? There are
certain sects that believe that if you live a life
of sin, you suffer eternal damnation. How different is that

(01:16:02):
really from how they're living here in the Forgotten City?
It's physically different, but is it is it different on
a grand scale?

Speaker 2 (01:16:11):
I think it's different in that it turns the inWORD out.
So what you personally do with with religions religious ideas today,
what you personally, do can send you on that path
to damnation, but your action isn't going to cause your

(01:16:31):
neighbor to go into damnation as well. Whereas this is
if anyone sins, everyone is damned.

Speaker 1 (01:16:40):
Right, It's it's collective. This is it's taking that sort
of idea damnation through sin, through lack of virtue, and
it's it's amplifying it to a point where it's not
parody is not the right word, but it's so exaggerated
because it's trying to make a point on all of this.
And this is also where you can talk with Centius
about the nitty gritty of morality. We kind of already

(01:17:03):
talked about this a little bit. You know, don't you
guys have slaves? Well, yes, but otherwise they'd be executed.
We're giving them life that sort of thing. Don't you
persecute Christians? You can ask him and he says, do
you mean the cult blasphemers that burnt down half of
Rome last year? Yeah? No, wonder people don't like them
very much. That's a particularly interesting bent because that commentary

(01:17:24):
is throughout here, but it's never like highlighted, Like the
point of this game isn't a commentary on Christianity, but
very often they do refer to Christians as cultists that
like do heinous acts like this. It's i mean, historically,
I'm pretty sure it's accurate.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
Yeah, I mean, at the time, Christians were labeled as
kind of the terrorist of the day, and for good
reason in some ways, but also they had a lot
of stuff that was blamed on them that they had
nothing to do with in order to vilify them more.
We do that today. I mean, we have a lot
of that in day's political sphere, where people are villainizing

(01:18:03):
others just to make what they do look better and
to give people an other to hate. That's another thread
that's gone throughout human history.

Speaker 1 (01:18:14):
It's a sort of sub theme of this too. For
as long as we've gone on civilization through civilization, generation
through generation, we're really not so different from those that
came before. This was, you know, the same stuff, the
same follies that we do today has been happening for
a long time. This is why reading is so important
and everybody should do it because you see these patterns

(01:18:36):
and then you look at what's going on on Facebook
in your hometown's free speech group, and you're thinking, oh,
my god.

Speaker 2 (01:18:43):
Yeah, those people aren't reading much of the good things.

Speaker 1 (01:18:48):
So you might be asking why you're here. Scentius tells
you that he brought you here. He says, I believe
somebody is going to break the Golden rule. He never
really elaborates on why. He just says he's heard rumors
and rumblings, but he thinks somebody is going to break
this golden rule. So he cast a ritual. He found
a ritual in the shrine of Persephone, the shrine of
Perserpina that takes the life of the castor you know,

(01:19:10):
it requires a sacrifice. That was the human remains that
you saw outside of the shrine when you came here.
He casts that to open a portal to bring you
back into time. And he's saying that he needs your
help because one he hasn't really made a lot of
friends around here acting as the magistrate, and you know, indeed,
he doesn't think he's going to be re elected at
the election later today. And two he's been thinking about

(01:19:32):
this problem for so long that he's just like he's
diminishing returns. Right, we've all been there. We need a
fresh set of eyes, or a good night's sleep, a
week off something like that. Plus, I mean, you being
a fish out of water gives you the perfect excuse
to go around and ask people to tell you about
themselves and what the heck's going on here? Tell me
about your society, Tell me where did you come from?

(01:19:53):
You know, it gives an in game diegetic excuse to
do that, which good thumbs up.

Speaker 2 (01:19:59):
No tubt out. This game wants you to believe certain
things from the outset. I feel like sometimes they overdo
it a bit and they're foreshadowing. Oh interesting, especially when
you're talking to Galarius and he mentions it's only been
seven and a half months. I think, is what he says.

(01:20:20):
But then he talks about how he's thought about this
problem and tried to work through this problem longer than
he can it's been productive, which you think, if this
civilization has only been around seven and a half months,
what's going on here? How does this guy feel that
he's gone through that much time?

Speaker 1 (01:20:40):
If I want to be charitable, you know, I try
to steal man as much on this show as I can.
If I want to be charitable, the stakes are life
and death. You know, they will die. Yeah, And that's true,
and it's it's kind of getting into that idea that's
been around forever that humans are rooted in call it
what you want, selfishness in whatever. Humans are predisposed to

(01:21:04):
behaving in ways that we might see as immoral. Now
there's a whole discussion about how our concept of morality
comes from a Christian lens. Nietzsche wrote of this and
beyond good and evil. I get it, I get it,
I get it. But for the purposes of this conversation,
you all know what we mean. I think we're being charitable.
We could say that I'm with you, though it is
like they are setting you up. They are placing every

(01:21:27):
stone on this bridge in a way that some people
might find that's a little over forecasted. It worked for me,
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:21:36):
Yeah, I think with me. By the time we got
past Karen, this stuff stuck out more to me when
I was like, okay, well that makes sense. Okay, I'm
kind of getting what you're putting down. Game, but maybe
you didn't have to shove it too much. But yeah,
choosing a Karen at the beginning.

Speaker 1 (01:21:53):
Was so that's the gist, that's why you're here. You
have to help us figure out who's going to break
the golden rule, stop it so nobody gets turned to gold.
And that's it, and Sentius. One thing that this game
does extraordinarily well is it Like you said earlier, it
guides you in a way that you're never lost. You know,
if you follow the quests that you have active, you

(01:22:16):
will complete every single one. It's not a matter of if,
it is a matter of when. And he gives you
the first one. He says, you know, if you don't
want to explore, if you want to just get right
onto it, he says, I would check out the shrine
of Apollo. There's somebody in there named Lucretia. Now, two
things right away. One, you can talk to everybody around town.
Their stories are all kind of similar. They play out

(01:22:37):
the same way. There's some sort of excitement like maybe
a fire, an argument, theft, something, some kind of excitement
like that. They end up blacking out and they wake
up on the river bank. Somebody drags them out of
the river, just like you. Hmm, somebody in a boat
or a ferry hmm, same thing every time. They also mention.
Everybody mentions they can't remember, and and a lot of

(01:23:00):
people mention outright a coin just throwing this out there
because we're going to talk about it. You might also
be thinking, too, if the goal is to prevent the
time loop. Centius will explain that to you. He says,
you know, if you prevent the rule from being broken,
I'll never need to summon you. If I never summon you,
that creates a paradox, you go back to your own time.
I'm thinking, if it creates a paradox, then we all

(01:23:21):
then I die. But you know, my head breaks whenever
it comes to time travel stuff. You might be thinking, Okay,
if the goal is to create a paradox so I
can get back in time, what if I just kill Centius.
If you try to do this, he kind of freaks out.
He's like, what the hell are you doing?

Speaker 2 (01:23:37):
As you would think naturally someone wi Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:23:40):
It forces you to put your weapon down, but you
can try it again. And if you kill him, it
does create a paradox. That's how you get ending number one.
It's the bad ending. It boots you out of the loop.
You tell al about what happens, and he said, okay,
so you created the paradox just so we could both
die here, and he gets very angry with you, kind

(01:24:04):
of a bad ending. Well yeah, I mean literally the
bad ending, not a good ending, though it is the
worst this game from here, it's not linear. You are
going to be doing a series of little quests and
tasks around town to figure out the game. So the
way that I think we should approach this is we're
just going to talk nonlinearly about the different characters and

(01:24:25):
quests that we thought were good. Maybe that we didn't
think we're so good, but it's going to be more
free form. Lucretia is the first one that Centius points

(01:25:11):
us too. We could always start there.

Speaker 2 (01:25:12):
If you'd like, yeah, let's go ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:25:14):
Okay, So Cinthia's you know, says you should check this out.
If you go into the shrine of Apollo, Lucretia is there,
and there's a dead woman named Julia next to her.
We learned that Lucretia is not the actual medic. This
woman named Naivia is, but you know, one day she
up and left. We'll learn more about her soon. This
woman next to us was poisoned and she tried to

(01:25:37):
get a cure. Lucretia did, but the person that had
the cure in the town, Dizius, was price gouging he said,
if you want to save your life, you know, a
thousand dinari. She couldn't afford it. Vizius said, well, that's
the price of business, supplying demand and all that. So
she died. Julia died, and she said, I can't let
this happen again. If it does, I will break the
Golden rule and kill him. I don't know about you, man,

(01:26:00):
but one thing that I thought immediately was, Okay, price
gouging does not fall under sin. Here. Things are maybe
not as we would expect.

Speaker 2 (01:26:08):
Yeah, they're not as clear cut because when you first
hear don't sin and everything's going to be fine, you
think of the big ones. You think of, Well, you
don't murder someone, you don't rob someone, those types of things. Well,
whatn't causing the death of someone by price gouging them
equate to a sin? But no, not in this situation.

Speaker 1 (01:26:32):
This is perhaps more timely than I was expecting. This
is kind of akin to murder. Holding life saving medical
aid from somebody due to cost. Sure sounds like murder
to me.

Speaker 2 (01:26:45):
Yeah, same here, that's what. And that's the first thing
that I thought when I was playing this was, well,
wait a second, if he withheld the cure. Then he
killed the person, he allowed the person to come to
the state of death, So how is that not a sin?

Speaker 1 (01:27:05):
This also kind of rules out suicide too, because you
would assume that that's one of the big ones you
would assume anyway, This kind of gives you your first quest.
You could speak with Dezius. You know, Dezius has the cure.
What did you think of Dzius?

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):
He was very much one of the key actors in
our society today. He's all about, you know what, what
kind of situation? What can I make from this situation?
How can I make this work for me?

Speaker 1 (01:27:34):
He sure does love money.

Speaker 2 (01:27:36):
Yeah, yeah, he's He's very much materialistic and want you
to know it. Wants you to basically, hey, yeah, this
is this is what I'm doing. This is what I
want to do, and you can live with it or not.

Speaker 1 (01:27:52):
If you ask him about his background, he'll tell you
like in his origin story, there was you know, there
was flood and he had to choose between his stuff
or his living slave girl like a human being, and
he chose the stuff. And he's not remorseful about it
at all. He's like, I could always just buy another
He's that kind of scum. He's that kind of scumbag.

(01:28:14):
But he does the same song and dances with you.
You know, if you want the cure a thousand dinari,
that's just supply and demand. Those are the rules, you know.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. And this is
where you hear that whispering voice come back and it
says to steal it. And then you can tell him
like what if I just take it? And he's like, well,
that would break the Golden rule. You're not going to
do that. But the voice says, like whispers to you,
steal it and run. So you do. You grab it,

(01:28:37):
and that's when, or at least for me, that's when
you hear for the first time, the screen goes gray
gray scale and you hear a booming voice say the
many shall suffer of the sins of the water, and
the whispering voice tells you to follow Scentius and your
objective upstates too. The statues. Some of the statues come

(01:28:58):
to life, and they take out arrows and start bows
and arrows and start shooting everybody, including you. They're turning
everybody to gold. This is what happens. At least canon.
You can take a couple hits because it's a video game.
This is what introduces us to the loop. You have
to run back to Centius. He casts the spell, he dies,
he gets vaporized actually, and you jump into the portal

(01:29:20):
and you're right back at the Shrine of Persephone from
the beginning, talking to Glarius. What did you What did
you think about this? I I when I when I
hit this point, I like, I was like, okay this,
I know exactly what to do in this game now.

Speaker 2 (01:29:35):
Yeah, same here, Like you said, Once you steal it,
you get back to Galarius and you figure out that
what you kept on your body you get to take
to the next loop, which is interesting sometimes what you
can grab and just keep in your in your loot.

Speaker 1 (01:29:53):
For Yeah, I don't I don't remember. How does do
you remember how the game tells you about this? I
don't remember how I figured this out.

Speaker 2 (01:30:00):
I think I just checked. I'm not sure. I think
I grabbed the poison and thought I I grabbed it
before I went through the portal, So maybe I still
have it, and I realized then that I did.

Speaker 1 (01:30:13):
I think maybe the quest updates automatically, maybe you just
get new dialogue actions.

Speaker 2 (01:30:19):
Possible, But but you are.

Speaker 1 (01:30:20):
Right, Like anything you take from one loop into will
go into into the next. That's, you know, that's how
you can get a lot of money. You can if
you wanted to get multiple quest items. It's it's an
important mechanic because you're going to be doing that. The
loop happens, you speak the Glarious again and you can
you can tell them, hey, we've had this conversation before.

(01:30:41):
Funny enough, Galarious Like he's kind of incredulous at first, nonplused,
but he he just kind of leaves you. He's like, okay,
like you know, you tell him about the time loop,
and he says, like, you know, you must be like
King Sisyphus or or Ixian, like all these myths of
you know who was it is Hercules, Orpheus, Ioneus and

(01:31:05):
theseus that escaped the underworld. I think those are the five.
And he says you must be like all of them.
And you know what a day you must be having.
But he believes you. He's just a good guy. He
trusts you. He this is where you mentioned that mechanic.
Do you want to talk about the galarious mechanic?

Speaker 2 (01:31:22):
Okay, So Galerius basically saves you so much time in
this game because there are there's a lot of tasks
and you have to complete these tasks in order to
open up new tasks. So you would think I'm going
through a time loop. I'm going to have to do
a bunch of these things again. But no. The great
thing about it is once you get to Galerius and
you explain, hey, I'm in a time loop, you then

(01:31:44):
get options to tell him, like hey, take this cure
to lucretia or to cure the poison, and he's just like, okay,
I'll go do that, and he actually is running around
the map doing these things. You can I did it
a few times where I would send him off to
do something and just follow him. He actually is informing

(01:32:09):
these people that hey, you need this cure.

Speaker 1 (01:32:12):
Yeah, voicelines and everything, like he says to them, what's
going on?

Speaker 2 (01:32:17):
Yeah. So that was really cool. But it saves you
so much time. You can tell him multiple things to
do as well, so it's not like just that one task.
You can tell him to do a set of tasks
which you're going to have to by the end of
the game, and he just goes and does it all
and then you can work on your next little path

(01:32:37):
of your loop.

Speaker 1 (01:32:39):
I'm not going to be the one to do it,
but I can see an argument being made that this
kind of breaks the fiction. I can see it. To me,
it feels more like a positive quality of life improvement.
So you don't have to do the same things over
and over again, because what you will learn eventually probably
is that you are technically on a time limit. Once
evening comes the election is held, one thing that you

(01:33:01):
learn is that Centius is running against somebody named Malleolus,
who is a bit of a scumbag. He's sending a
gladiator his personal guard around town named Dimidius to pressure
people into voting for him, kind of like a thug.
And if Mallolus wins the election, which he will by default,
his first decree is to say the Golden rule is

(01:33:22):
no more, and he immediately has Demidius fight Sentius, and
it immediately breaks the golden rule, like in a gladiator match,
you know, to the death. It breaks the Golden rule,
and the loop starts again. So that's your cue. Like
if the election starts and you haven't figured out how
to get Mallolus to lose, you have to start over, basically,

(01:33:44):
So that's when Galarius. You could just be like, hey,
I don't have a lot of time, but I need
you to do this stuff for me, and he's like,
oh okay, and then you know he does it.

Speaker 2 (01:33:52):
It makes it so much easier. Another one of the
characters that I did want to mention as I was
looking through here, My favorite quest of game was the
assassin quest. Oh okay, I love that one. It just
it made me laugh each time it happened. But you
meet this lady, she grabs your attention and she wants
you to know that there's an assassin at the front gate. Well,

(01:34:15):
you can go to the front gate and this guy's there,
and you're like, hey, if you kill anybody, it's gonna
break the Golden Rule, it's gonna turn everybody into gold. Well,
this guy's an assassin, and he's like, yeah, okay, whatever,
I don't care.

Speaker 1 (01:34:31):
What I love about this guy too is that he's like,
he accuses you all of being in a cult. He's
looking for somebody named Yeah, he's looking for somebody named Quinctus.
On the orders of Emperor Nero of Rome. He has
to kill Quintus. And Quintus is here, and he's like,
I know he's here. He's in that cult, and you
could be like, no, no, no, we're forced to be here,
and if we try to leave, where we all die.

(01:34:52):
And the assassin's like, yeah, that's what a cult is.
You're in a cult.

Speaker 2 (01:34:55):
Yeah, I forgot about that, but that's great. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:35:02):
I like the voice performance too, like he sounds so menacing.

Speaker 6 (01:35:06):
I am here with orders from Emperor Nero himself to
find and execute the cultist Quintius for terrible crimes against
the empire.

Speaker 4 (01:35:17):
So if you tell me the truth, I will allow
you to live. But if you lie to me or
otherwise obstruct the Emperor's business in any way, I will
put this arrow through your chest. Is that understood.

Speaker 2 (01:35:31):
He's one of the really good ones. But yeah, you
have to figure out how to deal with this assassin.

Speaker 1 (01:35:37):
The way that I think you're supposed to is before
you greet him. That woman Claudia that you mentioned, she
runs into a nearby shrine to like hide this out.
She's all shaken up. I mean, of course she is,
because not only will this guy kill people, but it's
gonna kill everybody golden rule. So she hides in a shrine,
the shrine collapses, she dies, a guy, a Greek fellow
named Georgias, who is their best friend, runs out, did

(01:35:58):
you watch You're a little bit older than did you
watch Hey Arnold at all when it was on? Yeah,
Georgia's to me sounds identical to Oscar Kikoshka in a
few scenes, and here he's like, oh no, Claudia, Yeah,
he sounds just like Oskar Kikoshka.

Speaker 3 (01:36:12):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:36:14):
But what happens is, you know, the first time you
meet this assassin, it's going to reset the loop. He's
going to kill you. That's probably what's going to happen.
So then the loop resets, and when he comes again
and says, you know, where's Quinkdus? You don't know anybody
by that name, so you can say, oh, he's up
in the shrine and he walks in. The assassin does
very slowly and it collapses on him and he dies.

(01:36:36):
This is also how you get a bow. You can
loot his belongings, you can get his bounty letter a
couple Dinari and his bow. The bow is really important
because it opens up new quests, like everything is connected
into each other. It's really really well done.

Speaker 2 (01:36:51):
Yeah, it's very connected. This also points out another morality
issue because you're the one who sends the assassin to
his death. You know exactly what's going to happen when
he enters the shrine. How did you not cause it?
How is it not a causal relationship there that you

(01:37:12):
send by sending him?

Speaker 1 (01:37:14):
Is it moral to send to death one that would murder?
That's a big question.

Speaker 2 (01:37:19):
Well, and but if you try killing the assassin, yep,
you break that because yeah, you break the golden roll.
So you're trying to eliminate the harm that the assassin
would bring. So is it okay to kill a murderer?

Speaker 1 (01:37:33):
If you picked the soldier background and have the gun
he threatens to kill you, you can say, like the
dialogue gets a little bit uh what's the word, not quirky,
but it gets a little punchy, and you could say
something like yeah, I don't think you're gonna like this,
or like hey, check this out, and you can pull
out your gun, like you said, if you shoot him,
the golden rule happens and the loop has to be reset.

(01:37:56):
I mean, so that kind of answers that question. I mean,
you can't outright murder a murder, but I guess sending
him to the shrine doesn't count. Hmmmm, fascinating, But that's
how you get the bow. That's the assassin quest. Also,
when this reloops, you can tell Claudia not to go
in there, and she listens to you that time. The
first time, the voice will whisper and say like no,

(01:38:18):
and you can be like did you hear that, Claudia,
and she'll be like no, and then you're like, oh, okay,
that's how she dies. But yeah, So that's that quest.
That bow is important for Dizius's quest. If once he
sees you with that bow, he comes up to you,
And Dizius is a man that lives and breathes Hubris man,
he comes up to you and he's like, hey, I

(01:38:40):
don't know if you've heard about this. Aesop fella. He's
over there right in some fables, A smart guy. He
talks about this golden goose. Have you heard of this?
We could have infinite riches, man, infinite riches, and if
we split it, if you and Meat team up half
of infinite, that's still infinite. He says this very deliberately,
is that he's going to take your bow, wrap it

(01:39:03):
in fake gold and have you go into the shrine.
Of Diana Diana aka Artemis. Artemis, I believe the shrine
of Diana to swap out the bow. Now it's not
theft because you're going to extinguish the fires in the temple,
so it's in the dark so the gods can't see you.

(01:39:25):
This sounds hilarious. It turns out this is spot on
the money, correct, which I love that on a replay.
But he wants to do this because he he has
this hunch that the arrows are what turned people to gold.
He knows mythology. He knows all about this, and you
can't really tell him no, like you can you go
along with this. What ends up happening is you you

(01:39:45):
know you if you try to steal it with the
lights on, you know that's it. You're locked in there.
They kill you. But if you extinguish the lights, you
swap out the bows. He locks you in there and
he says, okay, now slide it under the door. You
know I'm going to take You're just going to stay
in there, and you know he's being a scumbag. And
then he says, no, I never said that I would

(01:40:06):
split it with you. I said, what if it's not
my fault? You can't understand a hypothetical. There's no law
against that. You know, that's your own mistake. Tough luck, pal,
And this is where the voice whispers to you again.
They say, like, shoot the hornet's nest. There's a hornet's
nest above you shoot it, it falls and you get
to go through this underground tunnel that lets you out.
This also gets you the golden bow, which turns things

(01:40:30):
to gold. Turns out, that's a really important mechanic. It
can turn algae on the water into gold. Platforming can
turn vines into gold. Good stuff. It's an important weapon.
You need this.

Speaker 2 (01:40:43):
I found on my play through sometimes turning vines into
gold just was not working.

Speaker 1 (01:40:50):
Oh is this the bug you mentioned?

Speaker 2 (01:40:52):
Is enough? This is one of the bug that I had.
I would shoot at the vines and they just wouldn't turn,
and then I'd move like a foot forward, shoot it
again and it would turn. Oh.

Speaker 1 (01:41:04):
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (01:41:05):
Yeah, I don't know what was going on, if it
was just my game or how I was playing it,
but it wasn't break. It didn't break anything because they
would turn. But it was annoying, fascinating.

Speaker 1 (01:41:18):
I didn't have that happen. I don't think comes down
to finickiness.

Speaker 2 (01:41:22):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:41:22):
Yeah, who do you want to talk about next?

Speaker 2 (01:41:25):
Well, we can go with one of the sections where
I got my glitch, where I accidentally got an ending.

Speaker 1 (01:41:32):
Okay, which section was that?

Speaker 2 (01:41:34):
So there's a section where you have to get into
an underground bunker like area, the basement area, and I
went up to talk to the guard standing in front
of that door, and for some reason, when I went
to talk, I faced through him and ended up in

(01:41:55):
the underground section and was able to get one of
the endings, which was weird.

Speaker 1 (01:42:03):
One of the endings with Centia. Yes, okay, I know
what you're talking about. Yeah, let's let's talk about that.
So right early on, you can talk to Centius's daughter Sentilla.
She'll tell you that Sania has gone missing. Sent Centilla
is a firecracker. She's really mean. Uh you know, she
is in a way that like only young women can be.

(01:42:25):
You know, that's maybe unfair to say she's she's kind
of mean. She's also very pretty, and she'll tell you like, yeah,
my younger daughter, sent Sentilla. No, Centia is missing. Nobody
knows what's happened to her. The Golden rule hasn't been broken.
But she's gone. We don't know what's going on, so
it starts this question where you have to find her.

Speaker 3 (01:42:45):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:42:46):
You can learn that she had a lover, which did
not make Centias very happy. He was you know, Roman rule,
Roman fathers with marry off their daughters. S sent I
am going to get this so mixed up. Centia, the
older sister is really against this. She's like, yeah, no, wonder,
he doesn't care. He just lost like a dowry or whatever.
But you go to look for it turns out she's

(01:43:08):
inside of the cistern, which Sentius will not give you
access to. And that's the door that you phased into.

Speaker 2 (01:43:15):
Yeah, the sistern.

Speaker 1 (01:43:16):
Okay, yes, it's funny you say that. Like if you
try to go into their Demidius the gladiator guard will
talk to you and he'll say, you know, you shouldn't
go in there. There. I saw something in there, something
like some kind of a creature over the body of
a man. You shouldn't go in there. And I told him, okay,
I won't go in there, and then I just immediately

(01:43:37):
went in. He doesn't stop you.

Speaker 2 (01:43:38):
Well, my thing was, I didn't even get that chance,
so I didn't know how much of the game I
missed by just phasing through him and going through it.
But yeah, I didn't even get to talk to him.
I just went up to him, clicked the button to talk,
and here I just passed through him like I was
a ghost.

Speaker 1 (01:43:57):
Yeah, you do learn that she's being kept under there.
I actually did figure this out my first run. I
did not know anything about this. You learn that Scentius
is keeping her down there. I want it. Let's maybe
put a pin in this for just a moment, because
that kind of gets into like why the loop is happening.
Let's let's talk about Equitia real quick. Equitia is the
vestal priestess, and there's a really nice subplot of like

(01:44:21):
Galerius having a crush on her and like she kind
of feels the same way. But she's a priestess and
you have to get a flower for her through the
most insufferable ziplining I have ever tried. It's like zip
lining plus platforming. It sucks. I try. Oh my god,
this took me like a solid fifteen minutes.

Speaker 2 (01:44:38):
Yeah. The amount of time is that you have to
go up to that zip line and go down and
then you just you fall. Oh my god, you don't
where you need to go.

Speaker 1 (01:44:49):
Yeah, yeah, this game shines on dialogue mechanics not so much. No,
but Equitia, you can talk to her. There's a very
funny line where like you she'll you could talk to
her about memes or something. It's it's funny screenshots everywhere.
But you talk to her and you can ask her
about herself and she asks about you and you tell

(01:45:09):
her like, yeah, you know, I came here through a
through a loop. Some woman in a boat dragged me
onto onto the land and she was She goes, huh,
she wearing a hood And you go, well, yeah, how
would you know that she was wearing a hoodie? And
she's like huh, well what was her name? And you
say Karen and she goes, Karen, huh, huh. What do

(01:45:32):
you know about everybody else and how they got here?
And if you if you haven't figured that out, she
tells you to go talk to everybody. You could tell
them like, yeah, everybody came here, they washed up on
the river. They don't remember they had this coin. And
she goes, huh, I think you need to follow me.
She walks you into the baths and she says, take
a look at this mural and it's a mural of
the River Styx and the ferryman Karen c H A

(01:45:55):
R O N. And she's like you, you didn't mishear
the name. It's just a different spell. That's Karen as
in Karen the Ferrymen. I suspect that we're all dead,
and that's the twist of the well, it's one of
the twists of the game is that we are in
the underworld. Everybody here is dead. We've been brought here
by the ferryman Karen. This got revealed to me within

(01:46:17):
the first like twenty five thirty minutes, which I don't know, man.
I felt like that was a little too soon.

Speaker 2 (01:46:23):
Yeah, Like I said, that goes with this game kind
of being overly forceful with the narrative. They want you
to understand these things so you can get in a
situation where it just you figured everything out within the
first half hour and you still have fifteen to twenty
hours left of the game that you have to go through.

Speaker 1 (01:46:43):
Yeah, it's it's hard to call it a con but
it did deflate I don't want to say it deflated
the sales. It was a little jarring, is all. I
expected this to be. Like the ending twist, because, like
we both said, we figured this out pretty quickly. Right,
it's in retrospect, it's a little obvious what they're trying
to do. But I did not expect to figure it

(01:47:04):
out so quickly with so many more quests to go,
you know.

Speaker 2 (01:47:09):
No, I totally get that critique on it. There are
little nuances that they add throughout the game that make
it interesting to keep playing, such as once you realize
this world is built upon another world is built upon
another world going back throughout history. I don't know if
you were ready to talk about that portion of it

(01:47:31):
or not.

Speaker 1 (01:47:32):
Uh yeah, I think I think there are a couple
of other things I wanted to get into before we
jump into that that kind of gets into the end
of a part of the game, just a couple though.
Equitia will tell you all this, and she basically, I mean,
she also tells you a bit about the myths of
you know, theseus and Sisyphus and care on if you're unfamiliar,

(01:47:53):
and she says, you know, there are two ways that
we could get out of this, or that you can
get out of this because you know you're not from here.
You can either go to Persephone for help Proserpina, if
you don't know Persephone and the Greek myth and the
Roman myth Persephone and Proserpina is kidnapped by Hades. She's
stolen from her mother Demeter and taken down to be

(01:48:15):
his bride. He kind of tricks her. He gives her
a pomegranate seed. So then when she goes back to Demeter,
the fact that she ate food of the underworld means
she has to be there a third of her life
or a third of the year. That third of the
year is autumn and winter. So like that's the myth
is that's why the barrenness of winter happens, because when
she's in the underworld, Demeter lets the earth go barren.

(01:48:39):
It's very cool, man. I love this shit, I really do.
But she says Persephone could help. She's not exactly fond
of Hades, and Hades is the one doing this. Hades
is the ruler of the underworld, after all, we could
do it that way, or we can confront him brute force,
like Hercules. It's funny she'll say, like you're no Hercules,
and you're like, yeah, well, Hercules couldn't turn people into gold.

(01:49:01):
And travel through time, and she's like, I don't know
what you mean, but I believe you. Yea, But that
kind of that's going to be how you win the game.
You can either confront Hades or you can use Persephone's
guidance to sort of get out of there. So, going
back to what you had mentioned, you said you glitched

(01:49:22):
into one of those endings. Ending two and three are
achieved the same way when you find Centilla Sentilla. When
you find Sentilla chained up in the cistern, Centius will
come down and he says somehow Centius, being the one
that casts the loop, says that he also regains memory
or retains memories across loops. I don't know about I

(01:49:44):
don't know about you. But when he said that, I
was like, sure, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:49:47):
Yeah, I don't know how that would work, but that's
what I was talking about earlier. They kind of foreshadow
that he is able to that he's able to retain
that knowledge through the lips where everybody else does not.

Speaker 1 (01:50:01):
Yeah, and it's it's fine, you know, he cast it,
so of course he does. Okay, sure, but he's he's
behind this. He wants this to keep happening because he's
grown accustomed to his position of power. He's he's like,
we have it great here. You know, he's the one
that brought Al in previously, and Al was here for
like thousands and thousands of loops. He just wants to

(01:50:21):
keep this up. And he's like, you know, you're not
any different. You're gonna kill yourself too, and then I'll
just bring somebody else in. You know what, what do
you think you can do? He's kind of gone mad
with power.

Speaker 2 (01:50:31):
Oh. I was just gonna say, when it comes to Al,
it's very clear that with how this spoon feeds what
you're supposed to do, Al was very bad at trying
to fix things, very bad. If it took him thousands
of times.

Speaker 1 (01:50:48):
Yeah, yeah, he's he's he's not exactly using the thing
between his ears that God gave him.

Speaker 2 (01:50:55):
No.

Speaker 1 (01:50:56):
But one one way this loop can end is you
or Sentilla can kill Sentius. I let Sentilla do it.
She lights them on fire, it's pretty sweet. Or you
can just untie her like immediately and just get out
of there. Or wait, no, no, no no. You can either
do it that way and the two of you escape,
or you can tell her like, hey, we have to

(01:51:18):
get everybody and round everybody up. I'm gonna come back
in another loop with everybody, and then we're all gonna escape.
The other way to get to the ending is by
confronting Hades, and to do that you have to get
into this temple. The only way to do that is
to gather the four tablets that have been taken off
of the obelisk. This really is functionally only two quests.

(01:51:39):
One of them is not even a quest. One of
them you just find in a hidden Christian shrine. The
Roman tablet you can get in there by platforming with
the Golden Bow. That's pretty much it. The other three,
the Greek, the Egyptian, and the quote unquote other like
mystery tablet, they all come from the same quest, which
I think we can skip for time. The only things

(01:52:00):
that I wanted to mention on it was one it
has a Skyrim ass dungeon that sucks like there's some combat,
But two that philosopher conversation happens down there, which is
a really fascinating little dialogue.

Speaker 2 (01:52:15):
Yeah, and like you said, the combat in this game,
it's awful. It is not good. I never understood why
sometimes it would I would turn something to gold with
one shot, and why sometimes it would take two and
sometimes it would take three. I never understood that because
the enemies you're facing all seem to be roughly the same.

(01:52:39):
So yeah, it's not a good area.

Speaker 1 (01:52:42):
The enemies, by the way, are the golden statues, but
they've been peeled. There's a woman named Navia that we
mentioned briefly who heard the whispers that you hear, but
she kind of falls in love with She mistakes it
for being one statue and falls in love with that statue.
It's really horrific shit, Like this is actually my favorite

(01:53:03):
like quest in the game. You go into the temple
and you see that she's been carrying out experiments on
these on these statues, trying to like wake up this
statue that she's fallen in love with. She's been peeling
the gold off of them, but she realized that it's
fused to their skins. So like you see these half
peeled statues, these bloody skeletons, blood everywhere. It's really really horrific,

(01:53:28):
you know. And she says that she feels like Pygmalion
and galatea Pygmalian, the sculptor who fell in love with
a beautiful statue and who, praying to Aphrodite, discovered that
his beloved Galatea had come to life.

Speaker 2 (01:53:40):
It's it's a really really cool, it's really messed up.

Speaker 1 (01:53:44):
It's very gruesome.

Speaker 2 (01:53:45):
Oh my god, because when you're thinking about it, all
of these statues are alive and she is taking them
and ripping off their outer gold, which is their flesh.
And the enemies they'll they'll fight you, but they want
you to destroy them.

Speaker 1 (01:54:03):
Yeah. They they like will say kill me, or when
you shoot them and turn them to gold, they say
thank you. They attack you basically to be to provoke
you into killing them. They're not like, they're not monsters,
they're just they they crave death so bad.

Speaker 2 (01:54:17):
Yeah, they've been going through this hell. All their flesh
has been removed and just for an experiment, really horrifying.

Speaker 1 (01:54:28):
Yeah, but those are those are the enemies you face.
They're throughout here. You just turn them to gold. And
that's that's kind of it.

Speaker 2 (01:54:35):
And like I said, sometimes it takes one shot, sometimes
it takes multiple and you will never know why.

Speaker 1 (01:54:42):
Yeah, when you're gathering these plaques, though, there's a reason
that one is Roman, one's Egyptian, one is Greek, and
it's because you're going through these ruins of the cities
that the Romans have built over, and what you're learning
is that everybody that has come before one had already
built here, but two had their own myths surrounding these gods.

(01:55:03):
You know, throughout I've been referring to Proserpina and Persephone.
The Romans came after and assign new names and sometimes
new mythology to these gods. They saw Zeus and they
said no Jupiter. They saw Cronus, they said no Saturn.
They saw Hades and they said no Pluto, specifically with Hades.
You see that here you hear about, you know, Pluto,

(01:55:23):
You hear about Hades. You hear about how the Sumerians
called him near Gaul. And that's important because when once
you get all of these plaques and put them back,
you go into the temple, and the only way inside
is to speak the name of the ruler. And depending
on there are four doors, and each door corresponds to
one of the civilizations. So for the Roman civilization, you

(01:55:44):
say Pluto, the god of the underworld. For the Greeks
it's Hades. For the Sumerians it's near Gaul. And I
forget the name of the Egyptians.

Speaker 2 (01:55:55):
Osiris, Yeah, Osiris, And that is a very very cool
action when you got through it. What the when you
talk of speak the names.

Speaker 1 (01:56:05):
It feels very climactic. What I what I was not
expecting is what comes next though, And this is how
you get the cannon ending of the game. Inside it

(01:56:45):
looks like a spaceship, like like white and blue futuristic,
like holographic moving. It's crazy. And in front there are
three people Karen, the hooded now the hooded Ferryman, Persephone,
who is for reasons the myth goes into and what

(01:57:08):
we're gonna learn just in a second is like kind
of suspended. She can speak to you, but only you.
And last but not least, Hades, the god of the underworld,
is here. He is his eyes are kind of glowing
blue the whole time. And this whole last section is
trying to convince him to stop the Golden Rule.

Speaker 2 (01:57:29):
Yeah, you're trying to speak logic to Hades, getting him
to go back on what he's decided. He's basically of
the idea that it works. We're not going to fix it.
It did throw me for a loop when it was
space when I walked through that and it was like, Okay,

(01:57:50):
is this game stargating me? I don't know if you've
ever watched Stargate. I have not, no Stargate, no Hitchhiker's Guide.

Speaker 1 (01:58:02):
I know, I know I'm slacking. It's not so much
that he's saying that things are working. It's that and
some of this is real, real mythology. Some of this
I think is made up for the game. But you
get a lot of exposition here. He'll tell you about
some of the myth Like in the myth Zeus Poseidon
and Hades all take rule of the heavens, the oceans,

(01:58:26):
and the underworld respectively. Hades kid kidnaps Persephone. What's happening here, Persephone?
The gods abandoned humanity because they saw how lawless and
barbaric we acted. Persephone did not agree with this. She
saw potential. Persephonie decided to forsake her godhood, her immortality
and joins the mortals to stay with them. Now, the

(01:58:46):
reason this is a problem is because Hades loves her,
and Zeus is very clear in his judgment that no
mortals can go to Elysium, so she can't go back
with the gods, Hades is going to go back, so
in the trickery fashion of the Greek gods, Zeus decides
to give a wager. He says, okay, I will not
only let her change back into a god, but I

(01:59:06):
will invite all the mortals to Elysium. If the mortals
can go one year without sin. You have to stay
behind and watch them in silent judgment. But one year
without sin, that's what it'll take. And the gist of
it is it never happened. To make it fair, he
distributed Karen's obols randomly, so if you found one, you

(01:59:28):
got brought to the afterlife. Here, no society did it.
Every gold statue is from a previous society with sin.
And this is the last loop. All the coins are
accounted for except for two that coincidentally you and al have.
This is the last loop. Basically, Persephone lost the vet.
Hades is kind of smug about it, but he's saying like,

(01:59:50):
let's just get it over with. Humanity couldn't do it,
you know, And this leads into a final like philosophical
boss battle where you have to persuade him as to
why the Golden rule is in a good thing. This
one isn't like the philosopher. If you mess up here,
he just says, okay, like I'm tired of you, you're dead.
And if that happens, you have to steal the Crown

(02:00:10):
of Persephone and then come back in another loop show
him it, which I didn't get that part because it
surprises him, and he says, how do you have that?
I don't know how he wouldn't know that?

Speaker 2 (02:00:21):
Okay, yeah, that's that's a bit hard to suspend disbelief
there would how yeah, you would think that he would know.

Speaker 1 (02:00:30):
Yeah, I'm not really sure. That's that's you get a
achievement if you bully him into stopping the Golden Rule
rather than persuading him. Pretty cool, But persuading him is interesting.
I mean, you lay out some of the things that
we talked about, like why isn't suicide considered a sin?
And he says, well, it's do unto others as you'd

(02:00:50):
have them do unto you. You're not doing anything unto others,
You're doing it unto yourself, and that's autonomy. That's I
fail to see how that's a sin. You say, okay,
well what about the price gouging? And he like, well,
I mean, I think that's exactly how he would expect
others to do. Unto him, he's playing the game to win,
and how can I find fault in that? And you're like, okay,
what about debt bondsman? There's a person that signs their

(02:01:14):
labor over for thirty years. And he's like, okay, putting
aside your moral superiority, what do people in your time
do to get out of poverty? And you're like, well,
they take out a loan. He said, how long does
that take to pay off? And you can say decades,
sometimes the whole life, And he says, I feel to
see how that's different. Then he's making good points, is
what we're saying.

Speaker 2 (02:01:35):
It's very fun going back and forth with him like
that because, like Rick pointed out, he has some good
answers and they make you think about, well, yeah, why
do I think that's more moral than that situation?

Speaker 1 (02:01:50):
Some of them I don't buy, Like, you know, the
price gouging one, I don't really buy that, but you
know it makes sense in what he's trying to say.

Speaker 2 (02:02:00):
Well, I think the suicide dialogue is pretty interesting because
it kind of goes with a lot of talk today
about should people be able to choose when they go
and how that is autonomy and it should be something
that's it's very personal. So I liked that portion.

Speaker 1 (02:02:22):
I totally agree with you. I'm a I disagree with
that being categorized as a sin, you know, I'm agree.
I agree with Haiti, I agree with the god of
the underworld here. No it is. I mean, do I
think that life is incredibly sacred? Yes, I do, But
that is autonomy and calling that is a calling that
is a sin just really rubs me the wrong way.

(02:02:44):
It always has. Yeah, it also rubs me the wrong
way when you do that and you get arrested for it,
like in the real world, that that's barbaric to me.

Speaker 2 (02:02:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:02:55):
Anyway, whether you bully him out of it or you
talk him out of it, he agrees to let you
out and that kind of ends the loop. And it
takes you out back onto the river bank with Karen
and you can tell her like, hey, I figured out
who you are and she says, okay, yeah, you got it.
You and Al have the last coins, like this is it.
I'm not going to have to ferry people anymore, which

(02:03:16):
is interesting if you think about think about it in
terms of the mythology. But she says, like, yeah, you know,
you guys are the last two. You can ask how
you got here, and she says, like you were murdered,
Like you got jumped and Al was there, he tried
to help, but you both got killed. They had weapons
you didn't, you know, simple as that. And she says,
you know, for everything you've done, like I'm going to

(02:03:37):
take you back. You know, I'm going to give you
another chance. And if you've got the cannon ending, not
only do you go back with Al, but you go
back to contemporary time with everybody you saved in the
in the Roman village, and it's kind of cool. They're
all back in contemporary clothing. Like Horatius the guardsmen, he
went into the National Guard send till or there was

(02:04:01):
a character named Virgil and Rufius who were both homosexual,
which in that time in the Romans wasn't a big deal.
Here there they're together, you know, everybody's integrating into society.
You get to talk to everybody, They all thank you.
You're worshiped as like basically a god. Now you're called
the oracle. And at the very end, a'll shows you

(02:04:21):
that they've built a statue to you. So in addition
to in addition to Theseus and Hercules and Ioneus and
Orpheus and Sisyphus, there's also now you. You have now
escaped the underworld as well, and you're kind of revered
as this god. You know, you're written about. You are
a figure of importance. And that's kind of how it ends.

(02:04:44):
You know, it doesn't end with like any grand statement
about philosophy. You know, again, this has a story, and
this is how it ends. And you know, I it
was a nice ending. It was maybe a little bit
a little too schmultzy, but I liked it.

Speaker 2 (02:04:59):
So I enjoyed the cannon ending. I enjoyed it. But
I found that the museum portion where you're walking along
and talking to everyone that got a bit got a
bit long.

Speaker 1 (02:05:13):
It highlights how many people are in the game.

Speaker 2 (02:05:16):
Yeah yeah, it's like, okay, oh yeah, I remember you
from that time. I passed you a bunch of times.
What's up? And they go on about what they've done
since they left. I think Sintilla becomes like a fashion
something to do with fashion, doesn't she.

Speaker 1 (02:05:34):
Yes, or maybe that's Georgia since he was the tailor.
He goes into fashion too.

Speaker 2 (02:05:40):
Yeah, I'm trying to think any standouts there, Like you
did say there was there's the homosexual couple, which wasn't
a big deal in Roman times, but this game kind
of deals with the section of Roman to Christian. So
there is a quest line in the game that you

(02:06:03):
have to follow to find that out.

Speaker 1 (02:06:05):
It's very interesting the person somebody's harassing Virgil, who is
an openly gay person, and he even says, like, you know,
this isn't like a big deal in anywhere else that
I've lived, but this new cult of Christians, like they're
very against it. And it turns out to be Rufeus,
who's really only harassing him because he has rheumatism and
it's like making his life hell and he's always angry

(02:06:28):
and like that combined with having a crisis of faith,
like being a gay man and a Christian, plus the
rheumatism was just he was lashing out. Once you give
him the cure, he turns into a nice guy.

Speaker 2 (02:06:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:06:39):
It's a total one to eighty.

Speaker 2 (02:06:41):
Yeah, and it's it's a touching moment there.

Speaker 1 (02:06:45):
Oh, totally.

Speaker 2 (02:06:46):
There's a few touching moments in the game, and I
thought they did it well. I just like I said
that the final ending, getting to the end portion where
they tell you that you're up there with Sisyphis and stuff,
that it takes a bit long. It's a long meander
and no one is in a hurry in this game. Yes,
no one is ever in a hurry.

Speaker 1 (02:07:07):
Yes, this ending section, whenever everybody has to take a
second to turn towards the camera, you really start to notice.

Speaker 2 (02:07:13):
It, okay, And I think that's it. I think that's
the why I felt like, oh my god, as I
was going through this ending is and we mentioned it earlier.
Every time you go to talk to him, you have
this fade in and then the moment that they have
to turn to look at the camera. It's not as
obnoxious when it's only happening once in a while as

(02:07:37):
you talk to people. It was very obnoxious when you
were just talking to people in this museum section.

Speaker 1 (02:07:44):
Oh yeah, yeah, it was a bit much. But that
kind of closes out the game. That's the cannon ending.
You've saved everybody. There was one person that I didn't find.
I didn't find Sentilla on my plate through at all.
She does. She still shows up. You just have a
little diologue about how like, I'm sorry that I didn't
find you, but you know, she says, it's all right.

(02:08:04):
Centius isn't there because he was keeping Sentilla down there,
he was keeping her prisoner, so he actually got turned
to gold. He did not make it out, neither did Malleolus.
Or maybe he did. Maybe he did, and then he
just like wound up in a bad situation out here.
I can't quite remember.

Speaker 2 (02:08:22):
I don't remember what they said happened to Malleolus.

Speaker 1 (02:08:25):
He meant he did not meet a good fate. I
just don't remember if it was in the real world
or in the Forgotten City.

Speaker 2 (02:08:32):
I seem to remember that there's like a throwaway line
there about him meeting an unkind fate, but I'm blanking.

Speaker 1 (02:08:42):
Yeah, that's all right, But that closes it out. I mean,
that's the game. It's really fascinating. I had a really
great time with this. I think this will be one
of my favorite games I played this year for sure.

Speaker 2 (02:08:53):
Oh, it's definitely up there for me as well. It's
it's definitely well worth the play. If you like narrative
durban games, you got to check this out.

Speaker 1 (02:09:05):
Yeah, co signed absolutely and it and it sparks these
kinds of conversations about you know, philosophy and history and
you know, looking at how we stand on and overwrite
that which came before. It's it's really fascinating, and you know,
I think those conversations outside of the game are more
important than you know, talking about Sentilla or what happened

(02:09:28):
to Malliola's things like that. But that's the game. Yeah,
easy recommend. It's never expensive, you know, not not going
to be a forty fifty dollars game. It was on
game Pass for a while.

Speaker 2 (02:09:39):
If this had been released, it was a forty fifty
dollars game. I don't know that I would fully recommend,
but it's it's well worth the price that you'll.

Speaker 1 (02:09:47):
Pay, absolutely and do check it out. It's very fun,
very interesting. So with that I got to thank First
of all, I got to thank you Dog for sticking
around and having this conversation with me.

Speaker 2 (02:09:59):
Hey, thanks for having Yeah, of course I appreciate.

Speaker 1 (02:10:01):
It is I love this game. I love this game
a lot. And I got to thank the listeners were
sticking around too. So now, as always, Dog, you are
up to some interesting things on the internet. You don't
have a podcast, I don't have a podcast.

Speaker 2 (02:10:14):
Yet maybe I will at some point. Everyone has to
have one, but I think it's a rule now. But
I may maybe checking into podcasting, but I only I'm
on Twitch. I am on a hiatus right now, but
I do plan on coming back sometime in the near future.

(02:10:35):
I play a wide variety of games. I like horror games,
really like horror games, and that used to be my
emphasis on my channel, but I've I've gone into more
retro and adventure games and various things, so just variety streamer.

Speaker 1 (02:10:51):
Yeah, before we had started, I was checking with you
if your schedule is accurate. I don't use Twitch a
whole lot, but I was checking with you if your
skin was accurate and it had oxen free on it,
which isn't. It's not horror, but it's like thriller kind of.

Speaker 2 (02:11:06):
Yeah that I really enjoy a wide variety of games.
There are games that I tend to want to have
just to myself, like the Yakuza games, where I didn't
want to stream them. But if something hits my fancy,
then I'll play.

Speaker 1 (02:11:22):
It absolutely, and I think folks should check it out.
It's in the episode description you can find that. And
of course Dog also has a blue sky that you
can find and in the episode description, you can also
find links to all of our stuff, all of Pixel
Project Radio's links to the Patreon that's patreon dot com
slash pixel project Radio. If you're a fan of the show,

(02:11:44):
links to our discord server that's free to join our
Blue Sky. The rest of our social media is you
can find all of that inside. I gotta thank Dog
once again for sticking around to talk, and I want
to thank you listeners for sticking around to listen. It's
always a pleasure to have you. Thanks for tuning in.
We're going to sign off for now. My name is Rick.
I am your host. We'll catch you next time. Take

(02:12:05):
care of

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Do Unto Others | The Forgotten City (Ep. 141)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Do Unto Others | The Forgotten City (Ep. 141)