NOCLIP Pocket E32 - Non-Non-Euclidean - Fatum Betula

At least Halloween should be fun.

Happy Halloween! Today we’re going to be talking about Fatum Betula, a game that was inspired by Japanese games of the PS1 era, but will probably be most often compared to LSD Dream Emulator. This comparison is not unjust, but truthfully, while there is less going on in this game, it has a much clearer sense of play to it that revolves around puzzle solving and exploration. Overall, this is a wise choice, as the experience of playing this feels very genuine, as opposed to something that is trying to simulate another game’s sense of incomprehensibility. Where the inspiration really sings is in the visuals, and a lot of the design feels extremely faithful to the era it is trying to match. Everything from texture work to UI mimics the time period in aesthetic and functionality, and it gives the game a real sense of place, that place just isn’t here and now. We talk about designing with an eye for the aesthetics of the past, puzzle elements and how they fit into the game, and that cozy autumnal feeling that this game doesn’t exactly provide.

Thank you for joining us for another October of horror games. We covered a variety of styles of games this month (with one more coming in the form of Luigi’s Mansion in November), and this is by far the least traditional among them. Despite that, and despite it’s intentionally obtuse design, this was a lot more puzzle game than it was surreal walking sim, so to follow it up, next time we’re going to be talking about Firewatch, a predominately real walking sim.

Episode 101 - The Chair Scare - Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Some podcasts mustn’t be forgotten.

It’s Halloween season! Every year we put out our bowl of candy for all our podcast listeners, so thank you for joining us again this year and I’m glad to see so many of you are wearing costumes! For our first Halloween episode here on the main podcast, we’re going to be talking about Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the game that effectively resurrected horror games in terms of public perception. And the expected mechanics of the genre, honestly. Amnesia came out in 2010, and the Resident Evil 4 effect was in full swing, with very few survival horror games releasing and mostly not abiding by the methodical gameplay and anemic resources of genre games of the older generations. Amnesia, however, came from a team who had been making horror games for several years in which you were mostly helpless against those who sought to do you harm, and that ethos, as well as an expanded budget, are what really made this game take off. The game spikes that lack of agency in action with a narrative that by design forces both you and your player character to learn the specifics of your predicament as you go along and creates a cocktail that still manages to be scary even after a decade. We’re going to be talking about preserving fear over the course of the game’s runtime, mechanics by way of object physics and sanity meters, and we somehow fit in a mention for coconut crabs, for what it’s worth.

So that’s Amnesia. I genuinely think this game holds up after so many years, but there have been a million iterations on this formula after this game exploded. Are there games that did it better, or does the original still hold true for you? Have you played the game’s sequel, or the newest entry that we didn’t mention because when we recorded this we didn’t realize it was a thing? Let us know over on our discord. Hope this game has you in a creepy mood (one that lasts for a couple weeks, anyway) because we have one more game planned for the season, and while it may fall outside of October, hopefully you’ll still come back for more next time, when we’re going to be talking about Luigi’s Mansion 3!

NOCLIP Pocket E31 - Don't Stab Brad - Man of Medan

Those guys are out panning for Manchurian gold, or whatever they think they’re going to find on this podcast.

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket, and welcome, formally to the start of our Halloween season! We have a hopefully pretty satisfying variety of horror games to talk about this month, but first and foremost we’re going to be looking at one that takes a lot of its inspiration from horror movies, Man of Medan. Developed by Supermassive, Man of Medan is the first part of their ongoing “Dark Pictures” anthology series and plays very similarly to their previous game, Until Dawn. Your interaction is primarily focused around making choices in action and dialogue, with the rest of the mechanics being padded out by simple exploration and quick time events. The twist on what was set up in Until Dawn is that these games are designed to be played in a group of up to five people, with each person making decisions for one of the principle characters. While we didn’t have a full party of five, between the two of us, it did a good job of making you feel like your actions weighed on the other player and led to moments where we were yelling at the other player to try and influence them, which seems like the kind of experience this game was trying to foster. The other elements of the game, however, hold up a lot less positively under scrutiny. We’re going to be talking about game design in a series with so many branches to its story, the role difficulty plays in creating a satisfying multiplayer horror experience, and we learn what kind of fruit Crash Bandicoot picks up in a moment that fits perfectly into the discussion, I swear.

Thank you for joining us this week! We’re going to be pushing out several episodes fairly quickly to try and fit them into the appropriate spooky season, and the next game on our list for Pocket is going to be Fatum Betula, a game we know very little about, but should prove to be about as different from this as you can possibly get. And if you’re still in the mood for some terrifying audio entertainment, we have a playlist on our YouTube channel of all the horror games we’ve covered over the years, so maybe catch up on some of our backlog and play some classic (and not so classic, and sometimes not even real) games to make sure you’re in the spirit.

Episode 100 - Dunking on the Elderly - The Jackbox Party Pack

Six players? I’ll try to podcast slowly because statistically at least one of you is hard of hearing.

Welcome to the 100th episode of NOCLIP! We decided to pull all of our recent guests (and former hosts) together to talk about a game we all routinely play. The Jackbox Party Pack emulates classic board game night games with a slant toward drawing, wordplay and social games in a way that’s easy to set up and get into. The real triumph with this series, though, is that most games allow the players to really take center stage. Unlike a lot of popular board games with the premise of creating comedy, Jackbox games set you up with a prompt, but let your own creativity in your lies, quips, drawings and t-shirt/slogan combinations provide the entertainment. This makes each time you play feel memorable because of the very noticeable part each person plays in making it funny. We’re going to talk about the perils of being forced to draw with your finger on a phone screen when you’re good at drawing in a more normal way, succinct tutorials and presentation, and Cards Against Humanity and why it sucks and is bad.

…and, we’re going to talk about ourselves! It’s been 100 episodes, and that calls for a little navel-gazing. We spend the last 30ish minutes of this already too long episode talking about the podcast and the impact its had on each of us, what we’d like to do with it and our appreciation for each other, those who listen, and the growth it has inspired in us. Thank you all for joining us this week and for the last five years as we played and talked about the games that interested us, hopefully you got something out of it as well. But while this is a landmark episode for us, we’re going to continue our normal October exploration of horror games beginning next time with an episode on Amnesia, the Dark Descent, so please join us then! The happenstance of episode 100 falling in October has pushed our schedule back a bit, but we’re going to continue talking about horror into November, or until we feel good and properly spooked, so keep an eye out!

NOCLIP Pocket E30 - Recessive Lizard Brain - Minit

You took that cursed podcast? Please drop by the factory ASAP.

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! We’re cleaning up everything we needed to do before episode 100, and that means it’s time to play Minit, which was initially supposed to be a fun thematic companion piece to go along with A Hat in Time, but ended up stumbling into October a bit. Either way, this is an adventure game that you play in one minute chunks. You spawn in a fixed location, do as much as you can do in sixty seconds and then die, respawning in the same place unless you found another place to spawn. This does produce a bit of an illusion of depth, as things seem more complicated when you can’t think about them for more than a few seconds at a time, but the game’s overall design is actually really impressive and the illusion is about as good as the real thing. Trying to make the most of your time while traversing the map or solving a puzzle is an interesting challenge and makes each subsequent run feel like a practiced routine. When you’re working on something specific, you will know when something goes wrong and how to optimize your movement and that’s a play pattern that very rarely gets emphasized in the normal experience of playing a game. We’re going to be talking about clever level design to optimize for the consistent time limitation, the use of visuals and sound that call back to an even older era of games than indie games typically do, and, uh, economics?

Thank you for joining us this week! Next time we’re getting into the full swing of Halloween and talking about Man of Medan, the first entry in the “Dark Pictures” series from Supermassive, the developers of Until Dawn. That’s a ton of proper nouns all in a row, but the gist is that it’s a horror game in the modern dialogue-driven adventure game style with the twist that it’s designed to be played with multiple players. We will hopefully have that episode up soon-ish so we can squeeze at least one more horror game out of the month, so check back then to find out what that might be!

Five Years of NOCLIP - The Huns Hate Podcasts

It’s internationally observed and very important holiday NOCLIP Day, meaning it’s time to comb through our old episodes, find the stuff that we didn’t think you would want to listen to then, and have you listen to it now instead! Our festivities this year are twofold, as we are celebrating not only five years of doing this podcast but also hitting 100 episodes. The numbers are lining up, the planets are in alignment, and, just as predicted in the prophecy, we’re probably going to turn into a werewolf or a bear or something. But whichever enchanted mammal we take the form of, we hope that what we’ve produced so far has at least been enjoyable for you. Today’s collection of nonsense notwithstanding.

Thank you all so much for listening! We have a lot of fun with this thing, and the fact we’ve picked up a couple of people along the way who interact with us makes it that much more fulfilling. We’re going to be making some changes in the next year, some of which you’ve already seen, and others that we’ll be experimenting with starting on our next episode. I hope you’ll all join us next time, as we talk about the Jackbox Party Pack with all of our friends and probably generate a noisy mess. Until next time.

Episode 99 - Love That Neck - A Hat in Time

There’s only so many times my voice can handle podcasting like that. You’re taking the experience away from other people.

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about A Hat in Time, a 3D platformer developed by Gears for Breakfast that was largely crowd funded and even published by Humble Bundle. 3D platformers are a novelty in recent years and this type of funding really speaks to how the community that wants them is underserved, and what we got was a game that really wears its inspiration on its sleeve. With a lot of design sensibility taken from other games and references sprinkled throughout, it would be easy to call this game derivative. In reality, though, the game is very earnest and genuinely does a lot to put its own spin on the genre. We’re going to be talking about the different platforming mechanics and where they feel right and wrong, how the player movement in the game informs what level designs work the best, and we try to get Andy a job.

Thank you for listening today, we had wanted to talk about this game for a while and things fell into place this time around, so I’m pretty excited to hear if any of you guys played it as well and what you thought of it, given that the genre has been in retrograde outside of Nintendo for a number of years. Next time…well, next time we’re getting started with a bigger month than we’ve had in a long time. It’s October, so we’re going to be talking about some horror games both here and over on Pocket, but next episode specifically is actually somehow really our 100th episode. We’re going to be getting JJ, Dan, Janelle and Steven back on to talk about The Jackbox Party Pack, collectively, and probably get very sentimental and nostalgic about the podcast. And before that it’s coming up on the 3rd, which, if you didn’t know, is NOCLIP day and our 5th anniversary, so we’ll have a bloopers compilation coming out then as well. And we’ll follow that up with as many horror games as we can fit in the rest of the month and maybe even bleed into November because why not? Anyway, love you all, thank you for listening, hope you have a good weekend. Have some fun.

NOCLIP Pocket E29 - Pooping in the King's Pottery - The Unfinished Swan

We have always been much better at starting podcasts than finishing them.

Welcome to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about The Unfinished Swan, an adventure game from Giant Sparrow, the team behind What Remains of Edith Finch. This is an adventure game that has a very concrete idea and it goes about expanding on that idea in an extremely fluid way. Pun intended. The game revolves around throwing balls of liquid, which change properties throughout the game, to accomplish a variety of things including revealing pathways (the mechanic on which the game markets itself ), interacting with objects and growing plants. This is a double-edged sword because the different ways to interact are all interesting in one way or another, but because of how little time you spend with any one verb, none of them feel fully explored in the way we would like to see them. This isn’t a death sentence by any means, and the accolades this game received are evidence of that, but it leaves a lot of slack to be picked up by the game’s other elements. We’re going to be talking about the implications of the game’s visual design, the experience of playing with the different forms of interaction and about the plants and how they were mushy.

Thank you for checking out the episode! This was a game that got a lot of attention from indie game circles when it was released, so it’s always been something we’ve wanted to go back to. Plus, it was recently released on PC and mobile so it’s easier than ever to play along. Next time, we’re going from a game that was pretty universally appreciated to one with a more mixed reception: Minit. So join us then for what will assuredly be the correct opinion to hold.

Episode 98 - I Don't Wanna Grind That - Tony Hawk's Series Retrospective

Holding on to what I am, pretending I’m a podcast man,

Welcome back to the podcast! With the remastered versions of THPS 1 and 2 releasing, it seemed like the right time to go back and play all of the Tony Hawk games that started this extremely long series. Well, not all of them. The franchise started strong by giving people something I don’t think many people knew they wanted and featured a really iconic licensed soundtrack, which propelled it to household name status among the game playing population in 1999, and this success guaranteed that sequels would come. After over a decade of annual releases, the quality dwindled and the series was taken in directions it really was never meant to go, even if the core mechanics stayed generally the same. This is part of what makes this franchise interesting, not just because it hit on a really enjoyable game play loop from its very first outing, but also as a look at how even great ideas can grow and decay through enough iterations. We’re going to be talking about how level design plays an important part in killing sick lines, how the games’ humor and politics seem to be incongruous with the game’s core demographic and The Bert Slide.

Thank you for joining us this week! This was an extremely nostalgic experience and as THPS 1+2 came out yesterday (at the time of writing), that doesn’t seem to be slowing down much at all. Next time, though, we’re playing a much newer game: A Hat in Time, so be sure to check back if you’re a fan of 3D platformers. On top of that, we’re getting extremely close to episode 100, our fifth year, and Halloween time, so there’s a lot going on around these parts, so keep an eye out and maybe join the Discord to keep up to date with all the things we’re planning for.

NOCLIP Pocket E28 - The Chadegy - Plants vs Zombies

Leave your front door open and your podcast unguarded,

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket this week! Today, we’re going to be talking about Plants vs. Zombies, arguably PopCap’s breakout game, a casual tower defense game with a distinct theme. But I probably don’t need to explain what this game is to you, because statistically you’ve probably played, seen, or at least heard of it before given how crazy popular it was. Revisiting the game after so many years really puts into context what about the game made it popular and how we’ve advanced in design space and that historical context makes up a lot of the discussion this week. We’re going to talk about casual tower defense game design and how the game wants to make you feel good, the attractive visual design and presentation and we go on and on about how free mobile games have become a detestable quagmire of unacceptable advertising.

Thank you for listening to us shatter our nostalgia this week! We’re trying to balance our pocket episodes between smaller titles that don’t take a long time to play and ones that can actually be played on a device that fits in your pocket, and this game is pretty emblematic of the latter. However, next time we’re sampling a little more of the former and talking about The Unfinished Swan, from the developers of What Remains of Edith Finch, so be sure to check back then.

Episode 97 - Sad Poor People - Pyre

Whosoever would oppose our podcast is welcome to try.

Welcome back to the podcast! We’re going to be talking about Supergiant’s Pyre, a fantasy sports RPG, which feels like the description of a very boring game where orcs sit around making roster adjustments on their phones, but I swear to you that isn’t this. Instead, this game follows a growing band of exiles as they participate in “The Rites,” a ritual that makes up the “action” part of this game. The Rites themselves are interesting and can be strategically quite deep, but they are broken up by character-centric segments that help your attachments grow and provide stat boosts and items to aid you as you progress through the game. These two elements create the back and forth loop of Pyre and your enjoyment of these two things will largely determine how much you will like the game overall. We’re going to be talking about developing character stories and how they force you to make hard choices, the depth of the systems we couldn’t hope to fully explore, and we compare a character in this game to the star of a classic nineties adventure game. Which one it is WILL SHOCK YOU.

Thank you for listening this week! We had a grand time playing through this game, despite both having some reservations going in, so I hope your experience was at least as enlightening. Next time, we’re taking on a Superman-worthy endeavor and grinding through as many classic Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games as we can (specifically THPS 1, 2, 3, 4, THUG, THUG2, and THAW if those acronyms mean anything to you) to provide a series retrospective, pitting one host’s extremely long running experience with the franchise against a relative newcomer, so we hope you’ll join us for that.

NOCLIP Pocket E27 - Chewy and Stringy - Dujanah

*Sniff Sniff*, I podcast best when my bladder is full,

Welcome back to the podcast! Today we’re going to be talking about Dujanah, which is a tough game to describe. With an art style predominately defined by claymation, randomized events that mean no two playthroughs of the game are entirely alike, and a sensibility somewhere between jokes and universal emotional truth, the game runs the gamut of moods and tones. The game is far from meaningless, however. The majority of interactions play into the game’s larger themes, and deciphering that is the main puzzle the player is presented with. The idiosyncratic characters and disjointed scenes serve their own purposes and which things you focus on will affect your takeaways from the game. And despite all these art-game pretensions and ruminations on death and consciousness, Dujanah has an understanding of play, and still makes sense as a game, even if what game that is takes a lot of forms over its short runtime. We’ll be discussing the parts of the game that we individually found most effective in communicating its themes, whiplash inducing tonal change, and whether or not we thought the game would show us an anus.

Thank you for joining us this week! We had a good time with this weird game, and it fits well within our range of tastes when it comes to indie titles. But weird games don’t get the clicks, baby, so next time join us as we talk about the original mobile tower defense vegetation sensation, Plants Vs. Zombies.

Episode 96 - The Snail Slide! - The Last of Us Part II

Why don’t you do whatever podcast you’ve got rehearsed and get this over with?

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about The Last of Us Part II, which was the (surprisingly, since we’re talking about it) highly anticipated sequel to one of, if not the most popular game from the PS3. This game is a pretty straightforward followup to the original, picking up where it left off just a few years down the road, and the story has a similarly dark tone. While the original game was mostly driven by it’s characters as well, the state of the world is taken as more of a given here in the sequel, and that bleakness permeates every interaction you have. Underneath the game’s plot, it functions much like it’s predecessor. Arguably too much. It’s a stealth action game where you scavenge items along the way to use to make decisions of what items you want or need in the game’s crafting system and you perform combat where you employ stealth to even the odds against an enemy force that outnumbers you by a significant margin. And all of this is backed up by a signature level of high-fidelity visuals and world design that can be frankly quite breathtaking. We’re going to be talking about controversy surrounding large scale releases, overbearing mechanical similarities, and how your monkey brain feels about whether characters live or die.

Thank you for joining us this week! This was an easy choice for us because our thoughts on the original game were so mixed, the franchise has a really interesting give and take in our minds. What did you think about the game? Did it live up to your expectations? Were you one of the people who thought the game’s plot wasn’t up to snuff? Did you skip the game for one reason or another, and if so, what did listening to the episode make you imagine the game was like? I want to play that game. Imagination games sound nice. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the episode, and be sure to check back in next time, as we’ll be talking about Pyre!

NOCLIP Pocket E26 - Astral Trail of Vomit - Sayonara Wild Hearts

There is no place for me on the podcast of a starway,

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re talking about Sayonara Wild Hearts, the most recent game from Simogo, and it once again feels like nothing they’ve done before. Sayonara takes elements from infinite runners, rhythm games, shoot ‘em ups, and others to create a constantly changing, but smooth, play experience. The real stroke of genius here though is paring it with a dynamic electropop soundtrack that, if it speaks to you, will have you absolutely spellbound when combined with the abstract colorful visuals. It, at times, is an overwhelming sensory experience, but one that is extremely focused. If you can get over the short length, or you’re the type to chase high scores, this comes highly recommended. We’re going to talk about genre conventions in a game that’s hard to define, how music and visuals combine to bring about a flow state, and being accosted by magicians.

Thank you for listening again this week! Going in not knowing much about this game is a real jarring experience, and I hope at least some of you got to have that. And speaking of not knowing much about a game, next time we’re going to be talking about Dujanah, which is a game it’s almost impossible to understand before playing. We hope you’ll join us then.

Episode 95 - Conway West - Kentucky Route Zero

About fifteen percent of patients report a generalized sensation of “podcasts.”

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Kentucky Route Zero, because the whole thing is finally released. Starting with a Kickstarter campaign nearly a decade ago, this game released in “Acts” periodically in the ensuing years and is now available as a complete package along with all the interstitial segments playable as a single experience. Can you tell I’m stalling? This game is hard to talk about. Ostensibly, KR0 is an adventure game, but it’s difficult to draw comparisons to other games in the genre. The central mechanical engagement of the game is in the form of making dialogue choices, but the characters and stories don’t really change based on what your choices are. Largely, these only serve to influence your perspective on the story and the players within it. And that probably sounds highfalutin, but the game resists the kind of analysis we usually use for games and honestly that’s what makes it so unique. We’re going to be talking about natural versus supernatural interpretations of events, character and narrative development across a decade-long timetable, and whether you can identify more with an old-fashioned hipster or one of these newfangled millennial hipsters.

Thank you for joining us this week! For a game we held off on playing for so long, it was a real blast finally getting to experience the entire story from beginning to end. If you played the game, how did it strike you? Is this kind of weird choice based story up your alley, or would you prefer to take a more active role in your video games? If so, I bet you’ve already started playing The Last of Us Part 2, which is good, because next time, we’re going to be talking about The Last of Us Part 2, so please join us then!

NOCLIP Pocket E25 - Well Made Plays - Her Story

So, did you figure out why she did it? Recorded the podcast?

Welcome back! Today, we’re going to be talking about Her Story, Sam Barlow’s desktop simulator mystery game, which has you searching terms in a database of interviews to find clips that each tell small parts of the story, and assembling the answers from those. Of all the games we’ve played for Mystery May (or Nancy June, this year), this game relies the most on your own ability to figure out what’s going on and only rewards your intuition with terms that provide progressively more context. The game doesn’t even have a traditional ending, instead allowing the player to determine when they are satisfied with what they know. All this adds up to one of the most unique games we’ve talked about and one that is actually pretty difficult to analyze in our usual way. We’re going to talk about design in a game where the player has complete freedom within its mechanics, how the premise is sold on aesthetic and great acting, and about a horrible CG lady.

Thank you for listening to NOCLIP Pocket this week, and we hope you’ve enjoyed our choices for mystery games this year. This is one we’ve considered doing for years now, but it’s surprisingly intimidating to talk about a game that we like this much for reasons that are so unusual. Next time we’re going to be talking about Sayonara Wild Hearts, so we hope you’ll check it out then.

Episode 94 - Who Are Ray's Parents? - Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective

Podcasting is a criiiiiiime, baby!

Welcome back to NOCLIP! Today, we’re dusting off our DS to play Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, an underappreciated adventure game by the team responsible for Ace Attorney. As a very narrative-driven game, Ghost Trick comes off as wordy at times, particularly since the game uses no voice acting, but with the dialogue comes a lot of wit and charm that give the game its personality. The counterpoint to these sequences of dialogue are the actual puzzles, which see you manipulating objects in the environment to change the sequences of events leading to someone’s death. Due to your limited range of motion, only being able to jump between objects that are a short distance away, it gives a sense of urgency to the game’s sort-of-timed gameplay segments and creates a mechanical experience that is genuinely unique. The combination of these factors gives you a game that is exceedingly weird coming from a developer like Capcom, but also one that is interesting for all the right reasons. We’re going to be talking about the strange narrative conceit, expressive animation, and why your oral fixation could cause you to lose several DS styluses.

Thank you for joining us today for the first full episode in this year’s Mystery May replacement series Nancy June. We’ll be back at the end of the month, assuming the stars align, with Kentucky Route Zero, a game we’ve been waiting literally years to finish.

NOCLIP Pocket E24 - Miner 49er Death Maze - The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

You’re always in here, writing your weird little podcasts.

Welcome to NOCLIP Pocket! And welcome to “Nancy June,” our Mystery May replacement for the year where everything seems to have gone wrong. Today, we’re going to be talking about The Astronauts’ The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. This is a walking simulator type adventure game, where you play the part of a psychic detective tasked with finding Ethan Carter, a boy who wrote to you and then, well, vanished. The game itself focuses largely around environmental exploration and puzzle solving to uncover the events that led to Ethan’s present circumstance. The beauty of this game is its presentation; set in the woods and with a striking use of visuals, the game succeeds in drawing the player into its world and never putting up quite enough of a speed bump to pull them back out. We’re talking about memorable puzzle set pieces, graphical fidelity lending a sense of atmosphere to an environment, and how this game is seasoned with just a peppering of ancient sci-fi secrets.

Thank you for listening this week, and hopefully you weren’t thinking like “oh man, thank god they dropped that stupid Mystery May garbage. That was the dumbest and worst thing they ever did,” because we’ll be back next time talking about Her Story to cap off this enigmatic month and we’re very excited about it.

Episode 93 - Regenerating Biofoam - Halo: Combat Evolved

Did you sleep well? No thanks to your podcasting, yes.

Welcome back to a moderately special episode of NOCLIP! JJ has returned to discuss Halo: Combat Evolved. The first game in one of the unarguably largest game franchises in history, Halo really brought the first person shooter to consoles in a way that managed to popularize the genre much more universally than had been accomplished in the past. While this growth really hit a fever pitch with the accessibility of online multiplayer through Xbox Live, the single player campaign mode was still an expected and important part of a console game experience, and Halo delivered on that front and was probably most known for its creature design, protagonist and stunning outdoor vistas before the ubiquity of team deathmatch really took hold. And this is what we’re going to be talking about today. How does the campaign hold up under a modern lens, and what elements of design did they get so right to spawn such a monumental series? We’re going to be talking about the game’s presentation of it’s sci-fi plot through visuals and dialogue, the way the game diversifies its encounters with enemy AI and weapon availability, and discuss the existential horror of being caught in a “Womp loop.”

Thank you so much for joining us today. Halo is a game that has been looming as one of the “must talk about” games since the beginning (along with a few others I’m sure you’re thinking of we haven’t covered yet), and I’m really happy with how it turned out. What do you think about Halo? Does it hold up to modern games, or even other entries in the same series? Do you feel like a badass because you have grenades that stick to stuff and have a twenty foot tall vertical leap? Join us in discussing the game on our Discord, or leave us a comment on YouTube, and make sure to subscribe, because we’re heading into Mystery May in June, Nancy June, next time when we talk about Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective.

NOCLIP Pocket E23 - Squinched Face - Zeno Clash

Pig? No, it’s not just a pig. It’s my podcast.

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about Zeno Clash, which is an episode idea that started as legitimate suggestion, to a running joke, and finally to reality. The game is a first person game that switches between shooting and melee combat, but definitely gives the brawling the lion’s share of attention when it comes to depth. And while the combat is interesting, the aesthetic design is what really brings the game together and makes it a unique, weird kind of game we think is worth playing. We’re going to talk about how the game balances between melee and ranged combat, the strength of indie games for unusual and creative designs, and the graphical differences between a sofa and a picture of a sofa.

Thank you for joining us again this week. This is the kind of game I feel like is intriguing when described, so if you did end up playing it, I hope you enjoyed yourself. That intrigue is exactly why it’s stayed in my mind for as long as it has. And speaking of intrigue, we realize that Mystery May is already halfway over and we haven’t done anything explicitly mysterious, but we are correcting that next time when we talk about The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. I hope you’ll tune in for that!