NOCLIP Pocket E69 - Run By A Dog - World of Horror

The old god stirs. Click to reveal its podcast.

Welcome back to the podcast and happy Halloween! For our final horror game this year, we’re going to be talking about World of Horror. As a disclaimer, this game is technically still in early access, and we end up discussing it as though it’s a full release, so consider that some of the things we’re talking about may end up changing by the time a version 1.0 comes out. World of Horror is a throwback CRPG reimagined as a Roguelike game, with short replay times and a huge number of random elements. In the game, you are tasked with solving five mysteries to enter a lighthouse and prevent the return of a Lovecraftian old god. “Solving mysteries” in this case meaning surviving a number of random encounters while the story of your mystery solving is told to you by text. Not having to actively solve the case doesn’t mean the game doesn’t take brainpower to get through though. In addition to making some choices that will affect the outcome of the mystery and determine what ending you get for each one, you need to manage resources and make smart decisions (or at least, be ready to remember what decisions led to what outcomes) to survive through the session. While the game mechanically is a callback, the art style also, while rendered in the 1-bit style of old PC games, references manga artist Junji Ito, who proves to be a significant inspiration for both the look and themes of the game, with “cosmic” and “body” being the horrors du jour. All in all it’s a fascinating game to play that may fall just a bit short in the content department at the time, but it embraces community made content and still has some updates ahead that could really elevate it. We’re going to be talking about the slow drip of unlocks that make the game feel a little stale on multiple playthroughs, how the obfuscation of mechanics and the old style aesthetic lend themselves to the mystery inherent to cosmic horror stories, and we discuss the ins and outs of the Clap Bow system.

Thank you for joining us this week and this year for our annual month of scary games. This was, to my mind, a really solid selection for the season with a lot of variation on style and type of horror, proving that things can be frightening in a ton of different ways, and this genre of game is one that I wouldn’t consider at the top of my list for horror. And yet, it ended up being very good anyway. What do you think? Were you drawn in by the Ito-inspired art style to this very strange title? Do you think the game contains enough things to keep you interested for long periods, or better yet, have you delved into the community made content? Let us know in the Discord or down in the comment section! Next time, we’re fulfilling a promise we made last month and actually talking about New Pokémon Snap, and rounding out our discussion of Snap-likes. We hope you’ll join us for that and thanks for listening!

Episode 138 - A Coy Smooch - Realms of the Haunting

I just heard a riveting podcast with my father. Which would be great, except he’s dead.

Welcome back to the most terrifying podcast around! Today, we’re going to be talking about Realms of the Haunting, a 90s FMV adventure game with some FPS mechanics thrown in for good measure. This game falls well into the campier side of old FMV games, and if I was trying to sell you on the game it’s what I’d be focusing on. It is both laugh-out-loud funny and also impressive in almost equal measure between the absurd cutscenes and the level of detail they and other parts of the game contain. The lighting effects in the game are surprisingly good for the time, the voiceover is not terrible and is incredibly expansive, with dialog describing most of the objects in the environment and all your inventory items and things you interact with. That said, it is still an old adventure game and there are going to be some hurdles to overcome to enjoying the game. The level design, while pretty cool aesthetically, can lead to players getting lost and has a bit of an overreliance on that maze-style design of early FPS games (not to mention having several literal mazes in it as well). Where to go next isn’t always clear and using weapons and items isn’t as straightforward we would like, causing some hiccups in the moment to moment gameplay. However, if you can get past all that, or are just used to it because you play a lot of older PC games, this is a strange and interesting one worth checking out. We’re going to be talking about the missed opportunity to emphasize the survival horror elements of this title with meaningful resource management, how the silliness of the story and cutscenes really elevate the experience of playing, and we reveal what is the most metal of outerwear.

Thank you for joining us again this week! We only discovered this game fairly recently and knew almost instantly it was something we wanted to talk about and bring other people’s attention to. I give this game a lot of credit for what it was able to do for the time and for fans of the adventure genre or just campy old horror stuff it hits a sort of sweet spot between being engaging and silly. What did you think? It isn’t the most hidden, but had you heard of this game before today? Do you think the navigation and puzzles are just too obtuse to be fun? Let us know in the comments or over on our DIscord server! We still have one pocket episode to do before the end of Halloween season (and that one will be coming out pretty damn close to the holiday itself), but that’s all she wrote for the main episodes this month. Next time, we’re lightening things up a lot (or a little, depending on how much you buy into the “dark lore” part of the franchise) and are talking about Kirby and the Forgotten Land, so we hope you’ll stop by for that!

NOCLIP Pocket E68 - Jim Jammed - Bendy and the Ink Machine

If you make it out, don't ever return, because the podcast will find you.

Welcome back to the podcast! We’re trucking through Halloween, and today we’re talking about Bendy and the Ink Machine. Bendy is a horror adventure game that was released episodically, and it’s one of those titles that just isn’t satisfied with walking simulator mechanics. This game includes more typical object interaction and puzzle solving as well as combat, boss fights and even a few minigames thrown in. Does all this extra interaction add to the game? At times, it can, but overall the game lacks focus. It has some good things going for it, though. The game has a stellar concept, with the “Ink Machine,” probably the most overshadowed part of a title ever, being a real physical thing in the game, the implications of which are both bizarre and very cool. The art style and theme reflecting generations old cartoons also shows promise, especially in the context of a horror game, corrupting something of childhood innocence, though this concept has been done before. Still, the actual act of playing the game teeters between tedious and disappointingly unfrightening, which holds back a lot of the good ideas this title has. We’re going to be talking about how adding an abundance of mechanics can harm a game holistically, the importance of designing levels and quests in a way that hides their mundane nature from the player, and we have a senior moment and call back to a YouTube channel that hasn’t been relevant in years.

Thank you for joining us again this week! This was a game we had on our minds for a while, probably due to some level of internet word-of-mouth that made it seem like a cool one, but it ultimately let us down a bit. Did you try taking this on for a Halloween present or past, and did you end up feeling similarly? Were you able to dive into the backstory and extract something more valuable than what’s on display in the base game? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Next time, for the final episode of the Halloween season, we’re going to be talking about World of Horror, a manga-inspired throwback game wrapped into a rougelike, which is scary on at least a few levels, so we hope you’ll join us for that.

Episode 137 - Horror Hairdresser - The Evil Within 2

I’m going to stab the podcast out of you!

Welcome back to spooky Halloween! Today, we’re going to be talking about the Evil Within 2, a survival horror title from Tango Gameworks. The Evil Within 2 focuses more on larger areas than the game it’s a sequel to, with a pseudo-open world design, but gives the player an expanded action set to handle this larger space. There is a focus on stealth, and the bigger areas means that running away to hide somewhere else is more feasible than it would be in a more corridor-focused game. That being said, this isn’t really an open world game, with few options for returning to previous areas or completing quests out of sequence, which ends up working well with the survival horror mechanics. A truly huge area risks overwhelming the player and leaving them without any way to defend themselves once their meager supply of ammunition runs out, or alternatively, providing far too many resources for the game to maintain its bite. Sticking with the Big Rooms Game™ approach mitigates these issues, keeping it grounded in the genre, though the design can still be somewhat problematic for players trying to fully complete the game. We’re going to be talking about resource management (on the player side as well as from a design perspective) in a game that features semi regular boss fights, how the sci-fi elements of the plot can get in the way of the splatter horror theme of the overall aesthetic, and we point out several places in the game that could have just been doors.

Thank you for joining us for the first full episode of Halloween this year! We actually played the original Evil Within back before we were even doing the podcast, and a bounced off of it pretty quickly, so playing the sequel after several years mostly comes down to word of mouth about it being more accessible and maybe even a little better in some aspects. We found this to be pretty true, but what did you think? Were we just being baby gamers, unable to handle the masterpiece of the first game? Did you enjoy the more open design of the sequel? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be dipping back pretty far to take on the shooter/point and click adventure game “Realms of the Haunting” so we hope you’ll enjoy whatever it is that ends up being.

Seven Years of NOCLIP - Spacetember in March

Some people say seven is a lucky number. I’m not sure where that comes from, but I’d say this was a pretty lucky year for us. We talked about your suggested games in Fanbruary, found our true niche with hit theme month Ape-ril, and were actually able to talk about a FROM Software game while it was still in the zeitgeist. We also won the lottery, the NOCLIP Awards finally got onto Spike TV to replace their terrible awards show and the film adaptation of the Super Mario Cereal episode is entering the final stages of production.

Okay, half of that is accurate, but we are very happy with the direction the podcast is headed as far as our content goes. This year featured a huge number of really interesting games both new and old, and we unironically think Fanbruary was a great success. Your suggestions have made up an increasingly large number of the games we talk about, and it’s upped the variety and generally rounded out our experience with games overall. So, as NOCLIP Day comes and goes, as it does every year, we reflect on the impact these games made on us, good, bad and sometimes stupid, with this bloopers episode. We’ve got TV show pitches, impromptu song parodies, and our usual technical issues, so if that sounds enjoyable to you, then today is the best day of the year on our podcast. We’re in the month of horror, so the upcoming few episodes will be on some scary games, but as always, I hope this serves as some comic relief and we hope to see you again next year!

NOCLIP Pocket E67 - The Heretic Pages - Games by David Szymanski

The whole podcast is made of a single piece of iron.

Welcome to the spoooookiest month of the year! To kick things off, we’re going to be playing four very short games by the same developer. David Szymanski is probably more well known now for developing “DUSK,” a horror FPS game that specifically harks back to the early days of Id shooters like Doom and Hexen, but his solo efforts, which stretch as far back as 2014 are more appropriate for our purposes here. They tend toward walking simulators in terms of genre, but have a focus that feels demonstrably different than most other horror games. Specifically, they focus on narrative and tension building in a low fidelity setting. These are games that do not go out of their way to wow you with impressive graphics or intricate systems. They are simple, and rely on your understanding of the story, as well as setting and sound to unnerve the player, rather than make them feel in imminent danger. This is true for all four games, though the way they go about it is different, whether through an eerie and oppressive atmosphere (a desolate island in a storm, or a place where the rain hurts you) or a crushing sense of claustrophobia (submarine, underground tunnels). Each game manages to get that creeping dread into the player, assuming you meet them at face value, and all within an hour and a half or less. We’re going to be talking about the difference in production value between each game as time goes on, the use of text and sound to do the heavy lifting in an atmosphere-reliant genre, and for the longtime fans, we touch on another video game character who is ambiguously a motor vehicle.

Thank you for joining us again this week, and for another month of horror titles! We always look forward to this time of year because we collect ideas for October over the course of time and finally get to do all of them at once. It’s very exciting. Were you also sucked into the Szymanski-verse through finding Fingerbones for free or playing Dusk and wondering “what else has this guy done?” or is this the first you’ve heard the name? We do recommend trying these games out due to the extremely low barrier to entry both in cost and time investment, so let us know in the comments or over in our Discord server what you think of them. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Bendy and the Ink Machine, similarly in the adventure genre, but with a much higher emphasis placed on visuals to sell its world, so we hope you’ll join us again for that.

Episode 136 - Ape Arms - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

Alright, I’ll start the podcast from here next time.

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, an action adventure game that was released in 2003 and was one of the biggest triple A titles of the time. Sands of Time is a sort of reboot of a game that was released way back in 1989 on the Apple II and the creator of that original game actually worked on this one. Knowing this, you can see some design philosophies that apply to both in an interesting way. Both feature platforming and combat, with an emphasis on a smooth motion and context sensitive actions, and that smoothness is one of the things that really propelled this game to the heights it achieved at the time of its release. Not a lot of other games looked like Prince of Persia did, with the Prince running across walls and jumping between ledges in a way that felt almost realistic. And that is really the selling point. The platforming is close to movement based puzzle solving: the levels of the game are less likely to be described like playgrounds as you might in other platformers and come off more as prescribed challenges. This is still very fun though, as the Prince is responsive and stages are satisfying to complete. The places the game suffers are in all the other aspects of its design. It contains a lot of systems that developers tended to think were just necessary parts of games at the time, like combat and puzzle solving, and story that never really gets off the ground, even with an interesting setup. This game feels like a relic of the past, and a useful one at that, showing us that for a lot of games, having a focus on what you want to accomplish and cutting the things that don’t work is usually the path to a better game. We’re going to be talking about the game’s movement and camera and how they stack up against other platformers of the time, the combat system and its layers of unnecessary complications, and we debate what types of magic the final boss neglected to learn.

Thank you for joining us again this week! Often when we dip back to this era of games it’s due to a favorite we remembered from our pasts or because something was suggested to us, but in this case it was the game’s reputation. If you played games during the early 2000’s, Prince of Persia was a game you knew about and was considered a tentpole release at the time. Playing it back then would have likely been a different experience for us, but as two first time players, it’s interesting to see how far we’ve come in terms of design and development. Do you think the game holds up? Was the game at the time more palatable, and do you think that it had an influence on other games at the time? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re heading into our favorite month of the year, and beginning our selection of Halloween games! We’re going to be starting off with The Evil Within 2, so be sure to check back in with us then.

NOCLIP Pocket E66 - Old Man Territory - Audiosurf

Ride your podcast.

Welcome back to the podcast! This week, we’re talking about Audiosurf, a procedurally generated rhythm game that uses your music as the seed for all its levels. No need to worry about spoilers on this one, as Audiosurf doesn’t have anything in terms of a plot and all game modes are unlocked right from the start. In fact, that is part of what makes this game feel sort of weird in the overall landscape of games. It feels more like a piece of utility software than a traditional game at times, with it’s function essentially being applying a point system to listening to music. The game was extremely popular among the PC crowd around the time of its release because of its novelty, and there’s a lot of impressive tech going on to make it work, but it’s rhythm game elements are pretty soft. Difficulty can largely be determined in any given song by looking at tempo and the sort of noisiness of the track, and it ends up feeling a bit linear once you understand that. Not that there isn’t merit to what Audiosurf is doing. It’s a way to engage with music in a way that passive listening can’t accomplish, making you think more about the songs before you play them and letting you appreciate the nuances of each one that led to what its track looks like. It’s an extremely cool thing, and the different playable ships bring a ton of varying mechanics giving it a lot of depth in terms of practicing and getting better and it’s well worth checking out if you can get it running on modern hardware. We’re going to be talking about how your musical taste can influence the difficulty, sometimes without you even realizing, why most of the character choices can feel overwhelming, and how the bygone staple of leaderboards can make you feel like a World Famous Gamer(TM).

Thank you for joining us again this week! We’re trying to inject some variety into Pocket in the time leading up to Halloween here, and Audiosurf was a game we’ve had on the list for years and years and just never got around to actually talking about. For us, this is a definite nostalgia pick, something that we played years ago and remembered loving and getting to sit back down with it again did bring back a lot of those positive memories. Do you have any positive memories of Audiosurf, or other rhythm games you played when you were younger? Let us know in the Discord, or down there in the comments! Next time, we’re going to be talking about New Pokémon Snap in our quest to play every rail shooter photography game, so join us then and let us know if there are any others in that genre we’ve missed because this pointless objective is for some reason really important to me.

Episode 135 - The Headful Horseman - Xenoblade Chronicles 3

He is not a podcast, but a concept.

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the most recent release in the series and the game that is supposed to end the story that started in Xenoblade Chronicles. Comparisons to the earlier games in the series are bound to happen, with the two main factions in the game taking their aesthetics and even combat mechanics from each previous title specifically. However, even with many direct calls back to the earlier games, this game manages to be its own unique thing. With 6-7 characters active in combat all at the same time and the ability to freely switch between them, combat is even more active than it ever has been, managing “arts” to maximize damage and keep everyone alive. The world itself is a mashup of the titans featured in XCs 1 and 2, but still feels like a distinct place with an open world design that has an entirely different feel to it. It’s the rare game that has made its prequels a immutable part of its identity, but manages to incorporate them without it feeling like a pile of references and nudges to the player. The game is less noisy in combat, less stupid than the gashapon girl blades of two, and more accessible to the average player. Probably. We’re a bit too deep in at this point to be sure. We’re going to be talking about the feeling of the world and how it feels differently designed to the similar worlds of previous games, the potential and troubles with the class system for the ways we each engaged with it, and how enemies in these games compare to water balloons, or sandbags full of blood.

Thank you for joining us! If Xenoblade isn’t your bag, we’re happy to say that we’re done with it for the time being. This game really took over our lives, and with me playing the second one not that long before, I’ve been livin’ on Alrest for quite some time. If you’ve played it, did this game make you interested in the series, or have you been along for the long and occasionally bumpy ride Monolithsoft have taken us on the past decade? Where does this land in the grand scheme of Xenoblade, and do you think it’s a fitting conclusion to the story? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be reeling it way in and talking about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a pretty classic title that was about as far away from the games we’ve recently covered as we could think of. So we hope your palette will be cleansed then.

Bonus Episode - A Little Bit Tasteful - Xenoblade Chronicles 2

This game makes me feel all blushy-crushy.

Welcome back! Today, on a not-such-a-surprise-if-you-listened-to-the-last-episode episode, we’re going to be “quickly” (by our standards) running through our thoughts on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 in preparation for our upcoming episode on Xenoblade Chronicles 3. As the third game more directly references the previous games than any other entry in the series, we thought it was important to have at least covered the basics of the second game to lay the groundwork. This week we’re going to be giving a summary of the important plot points and then giving our impressions and takeaways. XC2 is an RPG in the same style of its predecessors in the Chronicles series, but with an overhauled combat system and full of complicated interactions with its main differentiating factor, blades. Blades serve the game both as characters and your classes, in a way, with different blades using different weapons and having a different selection of arts to use, which makes your interactions with them meaningful in both a narrative and mechanical way. They are also largely embarrassingly pornographic. There’s a lot of give and take with this game. Your ability to stomach the more juvenile elements will probably be a deciding factor in how much you enjoy the game, and our feelings toward it are complicated to say the least. There is a lot more to the game than we get into today, but it should serve as a decent refresher and lay out what we’re going to be comparing to next time in the sequel’s episode.

Thank you for joining us for this bonus episode this week. We intend to do a full episode on this game at some point in the future, as the sequel being released early sort of quashed our original plan of doing it before that game came out, so take this one with a grain of salt. Emotions ran high and we took it out on the Nopon. Next time we’re going to be going full length on Xenoblade Chronicles 3, so we hope you’ll look forward to that.

NOCLIP Pocket E65 - Goopy Muck Boy - Hylics

Podcast: probably causes enemies to fall asleep.

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about Hylics, the “recreational program with light JRPG elements.” If this game appeals to you at first glance, it will be almost entirely based on its visual style and a promise of something a bit more out of the ordinary. As far as visuals go, it fully meets that expectation. This game has an absurd art style, with a claymation-like aesthetic and designs, both for characters and for props and scenery in the environment, that are colorful, interesting and difficult to parse. Characters lack obvious human qualities, environments look more like someone’s messy desk than traversable locations and in combat actions are punctuated by hand gestures and visual effects that are as beautiful as they are strange. The parts of the game you actually interact with, moving around the world and engaging in combat, are also odd but don’t stand out quite as much. An obvious effort was made to make sure things don’t progress in the way you’d expect them to. You’re rewarded after your first few deaths, traditional leveling systems are absent and combat is pretty unforgiving until you figure out how to gain additional party members (or where to even go to begin this process), and that lack of direction is part of the uneasy feeling this game wants you to have. The combat is more basic, leaning pretty heavily on its aesthetic design to make it feel unique, which it mostly succeeds at doing. Hylics is a game that has earned its reputation and if you think it might be for you, it probably is. We’re going to be talking about the early parts of the game and how confusing and off-putting they can be, the indecipherability of characters and text, and how the game is exactly like Pac-Man.

Thank you for joining us again this week! This one was suggested to us, and falls under that elusive category of “exactly the thing we want to do on Pocket.” It’s short, cheap, and does a lot of things in an unorthodox way, resulting in a something that gives you a lot to chew on. This is one of those games that may not top many people’s favorite games lists, but you do want to go through if you’re interested in things that buck the rules of game design and use the medium in a more freeform way. If you are one of those people, what did you think of Hylics? Did it live up to your expectations? Are you more thoughtful than us and were able to pick out what the game had to say? Let us know over in our Discord server or in the comments below! Next time, we’re going to be talking about one of the earliest indie darlings, Audiosurf, a rhythm game that lets you play on tracks procedurally generated from audio files on your own computer, so be sure to check back in for that!

Episode 134 - Brain Money - Night in the Woods

I believe in a universe that doesn’t care, and a podcast that does.

Welcome back! Today, we’re going to talk about Night in the Woods, and we’re not going to apologize for how late we are covering this. We are late to this, though. Night in the Woods is an indie adventure game with other interactive elements coming in the form of light platforming mechanics and minigames ranging from Guitar Hero style rhythm sections to top down hack-n-slash games. And if you go back through our catalogue, you’ll notice that this is right up our alley. Possibly too far up our alley, because while this is a standout example of the genre, we can’t help but compare it to a half dozen other games we played and talked about on this podcast, some of which came out well after this game and were probably inspired by it. What makes it stand out from the crowd, though? The game’s subject matter focuses squarely on the personal lives of people who are a part of the younger millennial generation living in a world that is explicitly based on our own. They just happen to be like cats and bears and stuff. The way this game faces the struggles of young people attempting to cobble together a life while dealing with economic realities, personal relationships and their own mental health is unique in its bleakness and how closely that bleakness mirrors our own reality. This grounds the characters, with the help of some very strong writing, and makes them relatable to a wide swath of people in their core audience. Oh, and there’s a storyline about a ghost in here as well. We’re going to be talking about how the game handles personal struggle and makes it a main part of its theme, how its mechanics help and hinder the overall experience, and we creatively rename one of the characters in the game and just keep calling them that and don’t look it up.

Thank you for joining us this week! We’re probably going to take some time off from this genre of game because we had a bit of an existential crisis in the middle of this episode because we felt like we might be deeply pigeon-holed. That said, this is still a unique entry in the adventure game genre and one we felt like we needed to cover eventually. Did you play this game when it came out? Maybe even backed it when it was being crowdfunded? Do you feel as strongly about its characters as we do? Did you find a reason to play Demon Tower? Let us know over on our Discord or in the comment section! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Xenoblade Chronicles 3, the recent sequel that supposedly ends the story arc that series has had for almost a decade. And if you need a refresher on how the plot has gone thus far, we intended to do an episode on the second game until the third one got released early, so we’re going to supplement that episode with a bonus on Chronicles 2 that should come out in the next couple weeks, so keep your eyes open for that.

NOCLIP Pocket E64 - Go to Gurt's - Lost Kingdoms

Don’t you have a burly podcast hidden away somewhere?

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about a FROM Software title from the olden days of their catalog, where they would release a game about fighting with cards exclusively on the GameCube. And that game is Lost Kingdoms, an RPG where you collect cards to make a deck to take into levels and serves as the kinds of attacks and spells you can perform. It’s got skeletons. It’s got princesses and dragons. it’s an RPG. But the card system is what takes something that could be kind of rote and boring and turns it into something much more interesting. While probably not the absolute first card based game of this sort, it is one of the earliest and you can feel its mechanics reverberating into more modern takes on this style. And with a release in 2002, for a lot of people of a certain age, it is likely the first they had ever played. And all that above not to say it themes and visuals are bad. It’s a very classic fantasy style, but done very well, especially for the time, and with an almost nostalgic Dungeons and Dragons kind of flavor. We’re going to be talking about how the game negotiated with its card mechanics, winning with some designs and losing with others, the nature of a game that seems like it wants you to lose or intentionally replay content to get the most out of it, and how shocked we are at the number of lizards we each have. It’s a lot of lizards!

Thank you for joining us again this week! This was one on the original list for the podcast that we never got around to for a number of reasons, some good and some stupid. Let us know if this is a game you played back in ye olden days of the Gamecube, or if you became aware of it after FROM’s rise to fame. It definitely stood out to me, but I can see it being forgettable for other people. Let us know what you think in the comments or over on our Discord. Next time, we’re going to be taking things in a more abstract direction and talking about Hylics. Also an RPG, but that’s about where the similarities end, so check us out then.

Episode 133 - Bobblehead Sneak King - Tiny Tina's Wonderlands

The coolest sword in the whole world: the Sword of Podcasts,

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Tiny Tina’s Wonderland, an FPS developed by Gearbox and a spin off of the Borderlands franchise. For a spin off title, the game mechanically plays much the same as any other Borderlands game, but with its priorities flipped around a bit and with a different narrative and theme. Rather than the wasteland-y aesthetic the series is known for, this title (while still existing in that universe) has table top role playing games as its central conceit, with you playing a character in a campaign being run by Tiny Tina from Borderlands 2 (and presumably onward). This RPG theming is more than a coat of paint, but not by too much, which could be a good or bad thing depending on your tastes and how much you like the Borderlands franchise. There’s a lot of fantasy style creatures in the form of wyverns and skeletons and the like, but at its core you are still shooting guns, grenades have been replaced by spells which have similarly varied effects like grenade mods. Class mods are armor, shields have become wards, etc. The mechanics are all still present here, but with a flavor overhaul, and the world and story have been restructured to match the fantasy ideas. If you’re familiar with Borderlands, I can’t explain much more about the mechanics you don’t already know, so jump into the podcast to hear us talk about the RPG systems in the form of skill trees and player customization, voice casting in a triple A game and how that effects how we feel about the dialogue and writing, and we use Comedy Algebra to explain the phenomenon of finding something funny when you’re 18 and ceasing to find it funny at 30.

Thank you for joining us again this week! Borderlands isn’t a game in our typical wheelhouse as far as the podcast goes, but the idea of playing a new shooter seemed like it would satisfy a craving for (one of) us, so here we are. Is this the type of game you’d like to hear us talk more about? Are you a Borderlands fan from way back? Did the writing in this game land for you, and did you engage with the endgame content gear grind? Let us know over in our Discord or in the comments below. Next time, we’re curling back up into a ball and getting cozy under the familiar adventure game blanket to talk about Night in the Woods, so we hope you’ll join us for that!

NOCLIP Pocket E63 - Rusty Playground - Solar Ash

Your podcast is a profanity.

Welcome back! Today on NOCLIP Pocket, we’re going to be talking about Solar Ash, a movement-based 3D platformer which was developed by Heart Machine, the developer of Hyperlight Drifter. While the aesthetic and other stylistic elements of this game relate back to Hyperlight Drifter, this game is very much a departure from the type of thing that that game was, and I think it may be this difference that made it fly so far under the radar of so many people, even those that were fans of their first game. Solar Ash is a platformer that places its emphasis strongly on its movement mechanics. Your character skates around the terrain like they have a pair of rocket-powered Heelys, making use of momentum to jump large gaps and navigate tighter obstacles with a host of context sensitive mechanics like grappling hook points and bouncy surfaces. The game also has a unique approach to boss design, mixing the fluid movement with Shadow of the Colossus-style encounters by forcing you to navigate your way up onto them and then accomplish a timed platforming challenge to deal damage. The weakest part of the game, however tends to be in its level design, though there was much disagreement between us as to what specifically we found good and bad, so we encourage you to give it a try if it seems interesting and make your own decision. We’re going to be talking about how movement mechanics really make this game what it is, our favorite and least favorite levels and why we disagree so much on their quality, and we make a quick note of IKEA’s diminishing influence in this developer’s work.

Thank you for joining us again this week! We love to talk about all kinds of games, but the ones that don’t get much attention hold a special place in our heart. And this was no different. We may have fallen into different camps on this game in the end, but it was still a fascinating experience to have and offers insight into how games like this are designed, especially with how different it is from the developer’s previous work and how well the mechanics came together. Did you play this when it came out, or were you one of the many people who seemed to miss this one? Let us know over in our Discord or in the comments! Next time, we’re going back to the GameCube (which would be more novel if we hadn’t just done Monkey Ball a few months ago) and talking about FROM Software’s card game RPG, Lost Kingdoms, so be sure to join us for that, if only to say how much better it would have fit as the Pocket companion for Inscryption and we just barely missed it.

Episode 132 - Past in Games - Inscryption

It’s been so long since I’ve had a podcast.

Welcome back to the podcast! Today we’re going to be talking about Inscryption, and, before moving on I have to say that I will be crucified for writing anything about Inscryption online that people who haven’t played it can see with their virgin eyes and ruin the experience for themselves. So note that this is one of those kinds of games and proceed with caution if you really don’t want to know anything about it, though I’m going to stay as spoiler free as possible in this description. With that out of the way, Inscryption is a… card game. It’s a game with some twists and maybe even a few turns, but at its mechanical heart it is a deck building card game, and a genuinely good one at that. The game is easy to pick up and understand with a level of mechanical depth that can be imposing at times later in the game, and it meshes thematically with the world the game creates exceedingly well. In fact, a lot of what aids in the grokability of the game is how well it fits within the fiction, sparking curiosity in the player and letting that naturally turn into an investigation of the mechanics. Beyond that, it’s hard to talk about this game’s tone without spoiling some of it, but I’ll say that it does remain interesting throughout and is one of the best things about the game. It pulls off “creepy” better than most traditional horror games do and packs an alarming amount of detail into even its smallest environments. The rest I’ll leave to you to find out for yourself. We’re going to be talking about how figuring this game out while not knowing anything at the outset is more enjoyable than most, the card game mechanics and what they do right and when they get complicated, and we fail to make a poop joke which should come as a big relief to everyone.

Thank you for joining us and also for putting up with that vague description! We really liked this game, for the record, so if you’re on the fence about it and our opinion means anything we’d try pushing you in its direction. If you’ve played it, how much did you know about it before going in? Did you find it mysterious and cool? Are you a card game player and did you pick up on all the references and clap your hands or roll your eyes at them? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! We’re taking a pretty big jump in the style of game we’re talking about next time, and covering Tina Tina’s Wonderland, the Borderland’s spinoff based around fantasy and D&D, which is apparently pretty hot right now, so we hope you’ll join us for that!

NOCLIP Pocket E62 - The Perversion of Pac-Man - Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures

Slow down, Pac-Podcast!

Welcome back NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, which is among the stranger entries in the Pac-Man franchise. In Pac-Man 2, you guide Pac-Man around a world map to accomplish goals, most of which are mundane chores, by shooting at things with a slingshot or directing his attention, making the game a sort of second-person adventure game. You’ll need to identify objects that will help you and avoid the ones that won’t while managing both Pac-Man’s attention as well as his mood. This makes the game fluctuate between being a colorful shooting gallery where you’re often surprised by the results of your actions and a kind of tedious experience once you figure out what needs to be done and just need to make it happen through all the curve balls the game throws at you. Despite this dichotomy, this is still an extremely unique game that uses a familiar character in an extremely unexpected way and is worth taking a look at, particularly if you’re interested in the history of games. We’re going to be talking about the amount of environmental interaction the game encourages with its systems, the strangeness of the concepts and mechanics and we crack into the real Pac-lore this game sheds light on.

Thank you for joining us again this week! This was the game that actually inspired “Fan-bruary” a few months back and we felt like we should definitely do an episode on it even if we didn’t manage to squeeze it in back then. It certainly is an odd one and is appealing in that "you don’t see that very often” kind of way. Have you played this game? Or even heard of it? Let us know in the comments or over on Discord. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Solar Ash, the third-person platformer (kind of?) from the creator of Hyperlight Drifter, so be sure to check back then.

Episode 131 - Dick Holden - Disco Elysium

Maybe we wouldn’t welcome you if you were being chased by men with guns. Or maybe we would, because that’s just the kind of podcast we’ve built.

Welcome back to Mystery May! On June 5th. It happens. For our final mysterious game this month, we’re talking about about Disco Elysium. This is an RPG in the tabletop RPG or CRPG sense where it sets out to mechanically emulate playing a TTRPG with stat checks and many dialog choices, letting you choose where to go and what to do in order to accomplish your goals. Combine this freedom with the massive catalog of stats to increase and you have a game that leans heavily on player choice. As the game checks your stats constantly in the background against a number of possible results, this means that the type of character you choose to play heavily impacts what you end up learning about. A character with many points in Empathy will know more about people while a Motorics based character will learn and interact with many objects, which all play in to your understanding of the world and the case you’re trying to solve. And of course, it wouldn’t be such a good Mystery May game without a case to solve. The world of Disco Elysium is very bleak, and your job as a cop solving a murder isn’t much of a relief from all the darkness around you. This isn’t to say the game doesn’t have levity, it actually has a ton of very well-written jokes, but the overall themes are ones dealing with picking up the pieces of a broken city and a broken mind. This makes a lot of the game feel very heavy, and it can be exhausting to play at times, but it’s worth it to see something unique with a fresh perspective, not just on the RPG genre, but on people and the world they live in as well. We’re going to be talking about how the many stats can be motivating to how you play, how we feel about the mystery contained in this game and its resolution, and we complain about being old and tired and not having time for a game that demands this much of you.

Thank you for joining us this week, and this slow past month of mystery games. As alluded to above, we’ve been very busy personally the last several weeks and it’s impacted our ability to get out episodes at our usual speed, but we’re genuinely really happy with the choices made for this theme this year. This was an, admittedly, kind of expected treat, a game we knew had a lot of hype behind it and seemed up our alley, but the actual contents were still surprising upon playing it. Did you play Disco Elysium when it came out, or when the final cut was released? Is it a game you could see yourself playing for a second time? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord server, where you can also suggest some games for us to play, perhaps for next year’s Mystery May! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Inscryption, a game that is more of a mystery to us than it maybe is in game, but with a trusted recommendation and the assurance you should know as little about it as possible before going in, we’re excited nonetheless.

NOCLIP Pocket E61 - Juice Heads - Gemini Rue

We hope you’ll listen to this podcast so we don’t have to wipe your memory again.

Welcome to Mystery May! This week, we’re going to be talking about Gemini Rue, a detective point and click adventure game with a cyberpunk setting. This game came out during an era that you could call the Adventure game revival period, if you think the genre actually was revived at some point, but the important thing is that it is obvious the design was inspired by classic adventure games. There are several ways to interact with objects in the environment, an inventory system and progress is made by solving puzzles. There are a few wrinkles here, a gunfight mechanic as well as the ability to swap between two playable characters, but these don’t act to really shake up the basic functionality of the genre and the result is something that feels very retro. While the adherence to the old adventure game style is a strength if you are a fan of the genre, the real appeal here is a very competently told story that, yes, contains its fair share of mysteries. It could have done more to work the detective angle and make the player work to figure out the solutions to those mysteries, but watching it unfold is still an entertaining experience. We’re going to be talking about economic use of assets that work from both a design perspective and also fit thematically within the game world itself, voice acting taking the story telling potential of the game to another level, and we construct a food metaphor so deft it will finally get us the recognition we deserve.

Thank you for joining us this week! We’re having a truncated Mystery May this year with only two episodes, but I think the game selection ended up pretty strong nonetheless. Have you played this game before, or were you compelled by this episode to pick it up? Do you find point and click games boring and obtuse, a genre that only appeals to sleepy old men and pedants? Let us know down in the comments or over on Discord! And while you’re over there, drop us a suggestion for a game to play, which I mention because… our next game is the inspiration for Fanbruary (which we’d recommend checking out if you haven’t already), Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures! We hope you’ll join us for that.

Episode 130 - Big Ice Bag - Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

Podcast juice, huh? I have no idea what it is, dude, but it tastes radical!

Welcome back to the podcast and our final episode in Ape-ril! We’re going to be discussing Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. This is a sequel to Donkey Kong Country Returns which is itself a spiritual follow up to the original series of games from the SNES, which puts this in a fairly odd position as a part of the franchise. A lot of the base elements of the game are tied to those original titles as the new series tries to relate back to what made those games so memorable, but then again the mechanics and designs of DKCR are being iterated on to further polish the game and the “tropical freeze” goes much further than a fresh coat of paint. This sequel-to-a-successor status and strong thematic elements make Tropical Freeze actually a very interesting standalone game, despite it’s close ties to its predecessors. We’re going to be talking about level design and the kind of platformer this strives to be, the way its stages tell stories on both a micro and macro level, and we discover the punchline to a joke about Cranky Kong that started over twenty years ago.

Thank you for joining us again and for closing out this mon(key)th with us! What are your feelings on Retro Studio’s take on the Donkey Kong franchise? Do you think these games are great? Are they overhyped? What about, and this is extremely important, what about Rambi? Do you…do you like Rambi? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord server where we talk about the games. Next time, we’re diving into our annual tradition of Mystery May and talking about Disco Elysium, so we hope you’ll join us then!