Episode 184 - Bring Me the Cellos - Darkest Dungeon

In time, you will know the tragic extent of my podcast,

Welcome to Fanbruary! For our first listener suggested title this year, we’re talking about Darkest Dungeon, an RPG with Lovecraftian themes and light roguelike elements. Darkest Dungeon is known to be a difficult game, and it sticks to this design ethos with a commendable level of commitment. Depending on who you are, maybe too much commitment. With a large number of random factors affecting everything from what characters you get offered, the results of looting and in-combat effects, playing through the game’s dungeons feels like a Rube Goldberg machine of quirks, diseases, attacks and more triggering in a sequence that is almost always bad for you. This makes the climb for upgrades and ever-higher-leveled characters slow, but (I imagine) rewarding for dedicated players. And if you’re looking to become one of those dedicated players, don’t despair, or do despair, I guess, because the game’s non-gameplay elements do a great job of selling an atmosphere of hopelessness and fear, underscored by a charismatic and slightly shmaltzy narrator. This game has a lot going for it, but your enjoyment is ultimately going to be decided by your level of patience and how much you like turn based combat. We talk about the game’s difficulty and what parts of it we felt we could adequately prepare for, our biggest tribulations, and we discuss how part of the game could have been better if it was more like a pretzel.

Thank you for joining us again this week, and thank you for all your submissions for Fanbruary! I’m sure this is starting to sound like a thing I just say every episode, but as usual, we are running a bit behind this month, but we will get four episodes out for Fanbruary that just might bleed a bit into March. This game tried and successfully defeated us, unfortunately, but I’d be curious to hear from more long-term players if they’ve found consistent strategies or what high level play actually looks like, given that I only exhibited low level play. Let us know in the comments or over on Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Castlevania 64, another game with a bit of a dismal atmosphere, but perhaps lightened by the jank of early 3D games, so we hope you’ll join us then.

Episode 183 - Drive-By Nap - The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

So this is the podcast energy. I’m overflowing with power!

Welcome back to the podcast and to the first full episode this year! We’re back from our now-traditional January break and talking about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. This is the first full game in the series where you play as Zelda herself since the CD-i, which really did need to happen so we could finally stop pointing to The Wand of Gamelon as a standout of anything. This means that while the game hits a lot of the usual Zelda game beats, you interact with the world in a slightly different way. Link’s tools are still available to you in the form of sword, bombs, arrows, but it is tied to a resource meter so you can’t play the whole game in that way. Instead, you have the ability to spawn objects and enemies for a more open-ended approach to combat and puzzle solving. This is objectively cool, allowing you to use clever use of resources to bypass obstacles and come up with clever solutions and makes combat feel differently to other games in the series. However, this does also impact design in a major way with puzzles needing to be more open-ended and generic in order for you to have multiple ways of solving them, and it can get a little samey. How the game strikes the balance between novel, emergent gameplay and satisfying puzzle design is largely going to come down to taste, but it’s at least an interesting thing to have tackled by Nintendo. We’re going to be talking about the similarities between this and other Zelda games (and whether there are too many of them), how the more freeform design impacts dungeons, which are the meat and potatoes of the gameplay, and we test out a few new game design mantras about substituting Bigfoot in for content you couldn’t finish.

Thank you for joining us again this week! We’re back and extremely ready to tackle Fanbruary in the coming weeks, with this game being one of those that came out last year that we just sort of missed. We have taken the longest hiatus from talking about Zelda games we ever have, which is maybe too much of a dedication to the series because it’s only been a bit over a year, but it’s always interesting to see what this particular pillar of the industry is trying to do. Do you agree this game feels like it might be more of a cult hit? Did you find it too similar to other Zelda games and wish they had done more to change it up? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we begin Fanbruary by talking about Darkest Dungeon, the turn based RPG roguelike, but don’t worry if you haven’t gotten a submission in and would like to. We still have a couple slots undecided, so let us know what you’d like to see us play!

The NOCLIP Awards 2024 - Public Intellectuals

The Smashiest balls were the friends we made along the way.

The NOCLIP Awards are back again this year with all their usual prestige. I know you are all waiting with baited breath to see what games are getting the nod, while knowing full well that the games that released this year are of no object when you compare them to the games that we chose to play this year, which are the real contenders. When it is finally realized that we should be the true arbiters of taste, these awards will defeat all others in the public consciousness and weird new Elden Ring games will be announced on our podcast. This is the world I truly want to live in.

One thing you will learn after listening this year though, is that this was quite a varied year. Which admittedly, we do try to do, but it comes out in the variety of games represented. It’s a thing that always makes me feel good looking back through all the episodes we did and seeing the different experiences we had this year and both how the medium is changing as well as the wealth of games from the past that are still unique and worth revisiting. I hope we’ve influenced you to check out something out of your usual comfort zone, and that this show can make you reflect on the experiences that you had.

Thank you, as always for joining us for another year of NOCLIP and our dumb awards thing. We’re taking a short break, but will be back mid-to-late January with an episode on The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. And please don’t forget to get submissions in, through whatever channel you want (Discord, comments, email, twitter, whatever), for Fanbruary!