0:00:18 Intro
0:02:10 News - Valve Employee Levels and Pay Revealed
0:12:34 News - Sony Marketing Director Winges About Being Outspent
0:16:08 News - Dong Doom
0:19:46 News - Ubisoft Continues to Ruin Art
0:24:47 What Playing - Baldur's Gate 3
0:28:37 What Playing - Teardown
0:39:26 What Playing - Mafia Definitive Edition
0:44:45 What Playing - Dear Esther - Spoilers
1:07:23 Emails for Tom from other peoples podcasts
1:14:30 What Playing - Indika - Spoilers
1:48:54 Time Machine Review: 2014 Dear Esther Review
Transcript
Tom: On three, one, two, three.
Tom: Hello and welcome to episode of The Game Under Podcast.
Tom: I'm your host Tom Towers, and I'm joined as ever by Phil Fogg.
Phil: Hey, everyone, Phil Fogg, PC gamer.
Phil: Glad to be back.
Tom: Are you a politically correct gamer or someone who predominantly plays games on a personal computer?
Phil: Still loving the gaming PC, so much so that the games in my Steam library are now starting to look meager, and I'm trying to figure out how to get my itch games to work on it.
Phil: Because I think that's the itch I need to scratch.
Phil: I didn't even mean to say that.
Phil: But yeah, I'm there.
Phil: It's happening.
Phil: It's real.
Phil: Oh, Amazon games.
Phil: Yeah, I could go play those.
Phil: So, but unless there's anything else, we'll just jump straight in the news.
Phil: We've got a big show today.
Phil: We're going to be talking about Indica.
Phil: We have a spoiler cast at the end of this show.
Phil: Indica is a game that came out this year that is a must play in my consideration because of its uniqueness.
Phil: It's I-N-D-I-K-A.
Phil: It's available on pretty much everything, I'm sure.
Phil: We'll also be talking about Teardown, you'll give us a Bald-Eight, a Bald-Eight?
Phil: A Bald-Gate, what's it called?
Phil: Baldur's Gate update, as long as you've been playing Mafia Definitive Edition, I understand.
Tom: That's correct.
Phil: And I've gone back and played Dear Esther.
Phil: So I thought I hadn't played it before.
Phil: More on that later.
Phil: I finished it.
Phil: And at the end of this show, we're going to have a very special re-broadcast of our Dear Esther impressions from episode where you'll hear a much faster talking and younger Phil Fogg and Tom Towers.
Phil: Much faster thinking as well.
Phil: But on to the news.
Phil: Story number one, credit goes to Eurogamer.
Phil: Steam is massive, but far fewer people work at Valve than you might think.
Phil: How many people do you think work at Valve?
Tom: I would actually, I mean, I imagine that the Valve office just consists of a bunch of people sitting around doing absolutely nothing.
Tom: So I would actually expect them to not have many staff.
Phil: Now remember from our review of a desk job or whatever it was called, Aperture Desk Job, we, I guess there'd be about to people working there because I figured they put everyone in the credits, including the janitor, which is fine.
Phil: I'd do the same thing.
Phil: Well, they're being sued and they're being sued by Humble Bundle over the company's % cut from store purchases.
Phil: And so these court documents have revealed detailed employment statistics.
Phil: It not only revealed the number of people working there, but also what each division gets paid, right?
Phil: So how many people work at the world's most used PC game store and launcher?
Tom: I'm gonna guess people.
Phil: This is the Steam division, obviously.
Tom: I'm gonna say the entire company, people.
Phil: What, the entire company?
Phil: No, you're mistaken.
Phil: Steam has people working for them, which sounds under resourced, but if you recall back deep into Valve's history, every time they bring someone new on, it's like a committee decision whether they're gonna bring someone on because every time they bring someone on, it decreases their pay.
Phil: Because they split the pay up evenly to some extent.
Phil: Now, Valve's hardware team, keeping in mind what Valve's made, they made the Valve controller and the deck thingy.
Tom: Five.
Phil: Five, no, now you're just joking me.
Phil: people, which sounds like a lot.
Tom: So half the number of people that work for the only functional part of Steam, which is the Steam division.
Phil: Of Valve, yeah.
Tom: Works at the essentially non-existent hardware division.
Phil: The thing that churns out a few things occasionally.
Phil: Now they did do the VR thing though.
Tom: Arguably, actually, the hardware department of Steam is the most productive.
Phil: Yeah, I mean, well, this comes up to the next team.
Phil: The games team, right?
Phil: Which brings out a game every, I'm gonna say on average, every five years.
Phil: They had that failed card game.
Phil: They obviously have Dota.
Phil: They had the failed card game.
Phil: They had the Alex VR game.
Phil: They had the Aperture Desk Job game.
Phil: I mean, seriously, I'm not exaggerating when I'm saying they bring out a game once every five years.
Phil: Anyway, they employ.
Tom: I'm gonna guess
Phil: You wanna guess?
Phil: people.
Phil: people.
Tom: Takes a lot of people to draw Steam cards.
Phil: Yes, I guess so.
Phil: Well, no, I think those people would be working in the Steam division.
Phil: You think so?
Phil: You know.
Phil: A further staff would describe.
Tom: It takes a lot of people to draw Team Fortress hats.
Phil: Yes.
Phil: A further staff were described as being employed in admin roles, which will become interesting in just a moment.
Phil: So that's a total of people, and this is numbers, right?
Phil: And the company is believed to bring in $billion of revenue a year, which is a lot of money.
Phil: So that's a lot of money per human, right?
Phil: Now, EA generates the same amount of revenue, $billion annually.
Phil: Do you want to guess what their staff is?
Phil: So Steam, oh sorry, Valve, people for billion.
Phil: EA makes the same money.
Phil: How many staff?
Tom:
Phil: That's not even a serious guess.
Phil: Give me a serious guess.
Phil: I'll go with staff.
Phil: To make what?
Tom: A sports, multiple sports games every year that are just copy and pasting the previous one.
Phil: That is disgusting.
Phil: They need to cut.
Phil: I'm not saying they need to have less than people, but if they had people, I mean, they should go with my guess.
Phil: Imagine what the Christmas cards cost alone.
Phil: So Valve's staff working on Steam were paid a combined $million a year.
Phil: So the people working on Steam get paid on average a million dollars a year, $
Phil: The hardware team was paid basically $million a year.
Phil: And so the hardware team is earning $
Tom: So the only people doing any work are earning the least.
Tom: That sounds about right.
Phil: Well, I think it's proportionate.
Phil: I think it's going to be...
Phil: The way Gabe would run his dictatorship over there, everyone gets an equal amount, and according to the number of people you have, which keeps your team small.
Phil: And then number two, the pay that you guys get is going to be based on your revenue.
Phil: So if, you know, Steam is obviously the big money maker, so they will make a million bucks a year.
Phil: I find it hard to believe how I would keep motivated after three years if I was making a million dollars a year.
Tom: I'm surprised that the hardware section is generating any revenue whatsoever.
Phil: Oh, well, but you know, those poor bastards are only making half a million dollars a year.
Phil: I don't know how they get by.
Phil: So finally, Valve's games team were paid a total of $million a year, so they're also taking home a million each.
Phil: However, the admin staff are paid significantly more.
Phil: The admin staff are paid, You wouldn't expect that.
Phil: Yes, there's only of them, and they average $million each per year.
Phil: Which makes me wonder, is this perhaps the team that Gabe Newell is in?
Phil: Bringing up that average.
Tom: I thought he might actually be in his own team of one.
Phil: Yeah.
Tom: Can I just ask, what exactly is the role of an admin team in a cooperative structure?
Tom: That sounds like a position that shouldn't actually exist.
Phil: They'd order lunch, they'd do photocopies, filing, accountants, important tax information.
Phil: I remember years ago, they hired an economist to figure out how to make the most out of steam.
Tom: Yanis Varoufakis.
Phil: Is that what his name was?
Phil: Wow, why do you know that?
Tom: He was the Greek finance minister.
Tom: And he was at, I think, Sydney University for a number of years.
Tom: So he's something of a minor public figure in Australia.
Tom: And in Greece as well.
Tom: Yanis Varoufakis.
Phil: Oh, I loved him in The Hangover.
Phil: He was fantastic.
Phil: That guy, he's so funny.
Phil: And The Hangover was funny, even though people say it was just the same movie again.
Phil: But yeah, no, I love that guy.
Phil: Zach, whatever his name is.
Phil: Yeah, so there you go.
Tom: I have read a book by him, but I would not recommend the article he wrote about how Steam functioned.
Phil: Okay, Zach Galifianakis or this guy.
Phil: He knows nothing about Steam.
Phil: Okay, so basically, let's get to the bottom line.
Phil: There's people working over there.
Phil: The people in games and on Steam make a million each.
Phil: The hardware people make half a million each, and the people in admin make four and a half million dollars each, which is good on them.
Tom: I think the other thing we learned from this article is if the Steam team is that small, clearly, the majority of work that actually occurs on Steam is being contracted out.
Phil: Yeah, perhaps.
Phil: But they do do a fair bit, I guess.
Phil: But a lot of it has to be automated at this point where they put it back on the developer.
Phil: Like, you're going to submit a game, you do all the work, and it sort of goes through.
Tom: That's even better than contracting.
Phil: Yeah, yeah.
Phil: That's how I think it would work, now that I'm working with major companies.
Phil: Like, there's no human involvement whatsoever.
Phil: But when you see the end result, it all works fantastically.
Tom: That's why they've hired you, because there's no human involvement whatsoever.
Phil: Whatsoever, yep.
Phil: The other big thing to come out of this story is that EA, who makes the same amount of money, has staff.
Phil: Like, if you ask me how much staff Boeing had, I would have guessed
Tom: Do we know how many people work for Boeing?
Phil: No, but I can find out.
Tom: Let's find that out.
Phil: We'll go on.
Phil: We need to know now.
Tom: Yep, that's why people come here.
Tom: For this level of detail and research.
Phil: Okay, wow.
Phil: Oh, boy.
Phil: Do you want to guess?
Tom: Well, my EA guess was
Tom: So I'm going to guess
Phil: You're very close.
Phil: employees.
Tom: That was pretty close.
Phil: That is, how do you even do that?
Phil: Imagine going there for a charity drive and you just ask everyone for one dollar, you know?
Tom: Are we going to get any court documents where they can divide things into sections such as number of saboteurs, hitmen, that sort of detail?
Phil: Well, you are up on the news.
Phil: You heard about that poor fellow who had his lunch, then committed suicide, as you always do.
Tom: You got to have a last meal.
Phil: You can't shoot yourself in the back of the head with two bullets on an empty stomach.
Phil: Of course not.
Phil: Story number two, onto lighter news.
Phil: And again, at The Game Under Podcast, we always give you a twist on news.
Phil: I would be surprised if anyone listening to this had heard these stories on other shows.
Phil: There's other news that's going on, like Shadows of the Dam being re-released.
Phil: That's pretty good.
Tom: That's not bad.
Phil: You love that game.
Phil: Oh, you're kidding me.
Tom: No.
Phil: That's a Suda McCartney joint.
Phil: It's absolutely fantastic.
Phil: Okay, I'm going to find a way to get it to you, even if I have to buy it on Steam or whatever.
Phil: If it is on Steam, maybe I should wait for the remaster.
Tom: I think Arnie may actually have it on Steam.
Phil: Okay, well, let's do more online research.
Tom: No, he doesn't.
Phil: Ah, well, the listeners are shaking their heads, sadly.
Phil: This next story comes to us with credit to Marketing Week.
Phil: What was Phil Fogg doing reading Marketing Week?
Phil: Who knows?
Phil: Xbox Marketing Director complains that their competition, Sony, outspends them.
Phil: Despite being owned by one of the biggest businesses in the world, Xbox's marketing boss says the brand needs to be quite scrappy when it comes to securing marketing investment.
Phil: And this is why you read industry rags, because that's where the truth comes out.
Phil: Quote, this is their marketing director.
Phil: From a funding point of view, we need to work really hard against our competition, said Michael Flat.
Phil: Sony's PlayStation is the biggest brand competitor in the console market.
Phil: And quote, regrettably, they outspend us.
Phil: He's in charge of marketing, and he's out there saying our competition outspends us.
Phil: They're blessed with marketing funds that we're not able to enjoy.
Phil: But that's totally fine.
Phil: We adopt what I would call a more fiscally responsible approach to media investments.
Phil: We're not blessed with huge media budgets, so we have to be quite scrappy, really.
Phil: And tenacious and fight for funds that would probably go somewhere else, he tells Marketing Week.
Phil: What are you doing?
Phil: What is it?
Phil: Okay, regrettably, they outspend us.
Phil: They're blessed with marketing funds that we're just not able to enjoy.
Phil: But that's totally fine.
Phil: We adopt a more fiscally responsible approach to media investments.
Phil: We're not blessed with huge media budgets, so we have to be scrappy and fight for funds that would probably go somewhere else, like trying to sell Excel or Copilot or something like that.
Phil: What is your takeaway from that?
Phil: Okay, you tell me what your takeaway is from that.
Tom: I'm just fascinated and utterly perplexed.
Phil: It's loser talk is what it is.
Phil: It's basically saying, Oh, yeah, we can't sell.
Phil: We're getting out some of the Xbox to because we don't get the marketing money that Copilot does.
Tom: But why is he saying it?
Phil: Because he's talking to an industry rag.
Phil: It's the same thing that people do when they get on podcasts.
Phil: They say way too much, you know, because they think no one's listening.
Phil: He thinks he's just talking to a journalist, hey, marketing week, you know, this is just marketing talk.
Phil: But like, mate, you work for a video game company.
Phil: There is no such thing as, you know, you doing something and it not being picked up and carried across the nation, across the world, you know.
Phil: Blows my mind, blows my mind.
Phil: I don't think that guy's going to be around for long.
Tom: Maybe he's already received his marching orders and he's going out with a bang.
Phil: Well, we'll look up Michael Flat next week and see, look up his LinkedIn and see where he's ended up.
Phil: He might end up in the same place as Dan Mattress or whatever his name was.
Phil: Story number three.
Phil: This is our final story for this week.
Phil: Doom.
Phil: Now, Doom is famous for being able to run on anything.
Phil: The original first-person shooter for the PC back from the s.
Phil: Runs on calculators, runs on Teslas.
Phil: Doom is now running on a sex toy.
Phil: Goes to Destructoid, of course, the gutter press.
Phil: It's a...
Phil: Dong Doom, as the maker calls it, uses a device called a Tifo Run.
Phil: And the device buttons are used for forward, backward, and sideward movements, with the last button firing your gun.
Phil: Each shot causes a vibration from the built-in motor, and killing enemies triggers the product's main feature.
Phil: If you know what I mean.
Phil: Dong Doom even has audio, but the most impressive feature is the game's tangible haptic feedback.
Phil: So if you're desperate to get your hands on one of these devices, you can check Christopher's video description, because he's included a direct link to it on AliExpress, which we'll link in the show notes.
Phil: So he's also put Doom on an electric toothbrush, which was probably the inspiration for this.
Tom: I'm highly disappointed with this version of the game's control method.
Phil: Well, you've got left, right, up and down, and then if you kill someone, it...
Tom: I believe you said that it had thumbsticks that were involved.
Phil: Yes, it does.
Tom: I had an entirely different control scheme in mind when I heard this story.
Phil: Oh, really?
Phil: How would you think it would work?
Tom: Well, I presumed that you'll be using a different appendage to your thumbs to directly control the game.
Phil: Oh, no, no, no.
Phil: No, it's not like that.
Phil: This thing, by the way, a dong doom, it's a thing that you put over the mail.
Phil: You know, I don't want to get too graphic.
Tom: That's my point entirely.
Phil: Yes, I...
Tom: This should have been the control method.
Phil: Yes.
Phil: Yes, it should have been.
Phil: This reminds me of a quote from Angus Young, the guitarist in a little Australian band called ACDC.
Phil: He was asked what his...
Phil: Like, if he could design the best guitar or what is the best guitar you could possibly own?
Phil: I don't know.
Phil: Have you heard this quote?
Tom: I don't think so.
Phil: And I'm going to keep this family friendly in case someone's listening to this in the car with the kids.
Phil: But he basically said that the best guitar he could ever design would have female genitalia on the back of it so that he could enjoy, you know, the moment while he was playing the guitar.
Tom: Would it affect the timbre of the notes or anything?
Phil: It's an interesting question.
Phil: I'm not a musician, so...
Tom: Because it sounds like maybe he did not have the level of imagination that I think is required to truly innovate in this sphere, just like the creator of Dong Doom.
Phil: Dong Doom, yep.
Phil: So look it up, Dong Doom.
Phil: Obviously, this guy is a hobbyist.
Phil: I mean, if he's got this thing running on a toothbrush, it's an obvious next step to get this operating on this sort of apparatus as well.
Phil: Anything with a screen, that's the goal.
Phil: I just don't understand what drives someone to try and get Doom to run on anything with a screen.
Phil: I guess it's for attention.
Phil: And I guess hobbyists, I guess.
Tom: I think it's for the pleasure of creating something new.
Phil: Yes, possibly.
Phil: Just one last half story.
Phil: We talked about how Ubisoft and Elon Musk got into it in our last episode about their upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows game, which is set in feudal Japan and features a black samurai and a female protagonist, which of course is completely respectful to the Japanese history and heritage.
Phil: And Elon Musk said this is a DEI game, it's ruining art.
Phil: And they said, oh no, we do not believe Elon.
Phil: Our game will be nothing like he said, which apparently...
Tom: I just finally understood exactly what Elon Musk said.
Tom: So normally, if you're from a western country and you're making work of art that depicts another culture, you're not meant to be accurate in any way towards that culture.
Tom: So I finally understood his point.
Tom: It is diversity, equity and inclusion because having a black samurai and a female ninja is respectful of the Japanese arts, where there's a strong tradition of female ninjas and Japanese history with its black samurai.
Tom: So we were a little perplexed as to his reasoning before, but I just figured it out.
Phil: Well, I'm glad you did.
Phil: So since then, however, Ubisoft has now come back down off their high horse to apologize.
Phil: No one quite knows what their apology is for.
Phil: I read different stories, it all said basically the same thing.
Phil: However, I thought their response was funny.
Phil: They focused on, well, first of all, they had to apologize to some group for using their logo that they shouldn't have used.
Phil: You know, it could have been the Japanese version of the clan for all I know.
Phil: I don't know, but they apologize for using that logo and said it will never happen again.
Phil: This, then they went on, after explaining what they weren't apologizing for, they said this, well, Yusake, who is the black samurai, is depicted as a samurai in our game.
Phil: We acknowledge that this is a matter of debate and discussion.
Phil: We have woven this carefully into our narrative with our other lead character, a Japanese shinobi, who is equally important in the game.
Phil: Our dual protagonists provide players with different gameplay styles.
Phil: They go on to say that they use numerous external consultants and historians, and then say that these external consultants were, quote, in no way responsible for the decisions that are taken by the creative team.
Phil: Criticism, therefore, should not be directed at collaborators, both internal and external.
Phil: Collaborators, both internal and external.
Phil: Ubisoft closed their media release by encouraging fans to continue sharing their feedback respectfully.
Phil: They're weird, man.
Phil: They go, I mean, because they go, oh, this guy, Yusaki, this black guy, he was really a samurai.
Phil: Well, apparently what they're apologizing for is it turns out that he wasn't really a samurai.
Phil: Who knows what he was.
Phil: Then they say, oh, he may have been a samurai.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: And then they do their whole, oh, you know, we use lots of consultants, but oh, but don't, don't, you know, these, they call, then they go on to call their consultants collaborators, which I think is probably just a translation thing, because no one uses the word collaborator, because the only thing that it conjures up is...
Tom: Particularly not in France.
Phil: Exactly right.
Phil: You know, it conjures up, you know, French collaborators with the Nazis during World War II.
Phil: And they said therefore, I can't do a German accent anymore, criticism therefore should not be directed at collaborators both internal and external.
Phil: And I'm like, OK, I get...
Phil: They're basically saying, don't go harass our external collaborators.
Phil: What's an internal collaborator?
Phil: And then...
Tom: The external collaborator, so maybe the Dutch?
Phil: And then they close it out by telling fans how they should react to this, trying to preempt the response that they're going to get on the internet by saying, hey, you know, we're not going to cop some shit for this, but, you know, please be respectful.
Phil: Anyway, I won't be buying the game.
Phil: Strong protest against this sort of behavior.
Tom: Strong protest against collaborating with Nazis.
Phil: Yes, and cultural appropriation inaccurately depicted somehow.
Phil: I think actually the best way to do cultural appropriation would be to be have respectful cultural misappropriation, which would be doing it incorrectly, because then you're not misappropriating it.
Phil: I hope I've made myself perfectly clear.
Phil: With that, we'll close this.
Tom: Clearer than Ubisoft made themselves.
Phil: Certainly.
Phil: We're going to close this out and talk about what we've been playing.
Phil: So do you want to give us a ballgate update?
Tom: Yep.
Tom: So I'm now down to, I think, two or three big fights remaining, depending on if I do one of them.
Tom: I think I can now reach a pretty solid conclusion on the combat in the game.
Tom: And at its best, it is excellent.
Tom: The sorts of strategies you can employ and use and the interesting ways they arrange enemies and combine them makes it into as much of a turn-based strategy game as an RPG.
Tom: But simultaneously, the same problem that was there early in the game of them artificially inflating the difficulty of encounters by just shoving as many enemies into the area as possible or ridiculously bloating an enemy with HP and buffs remains.
Tom: And when you encounter, when I've encountered some of these battles, I've looked up strategies on the internet and it's clearly not just a deficiency in my ability to figure out a correct strategy for these battles because generally speaking, you look it up and if it's a strategy guide, they will sort of um and err about how to deal with it.
Tom: They'll always be playing on a lower difficulty setting.
Tom: If you look up people who are playing the game on reddit or whatever, their strategy will usually consist of figuring out a way how to cheese it or cheat.
Tom: Or they'll come up with a strategy that they don't really consider to be cheesing or cheating, but essentially boils down to exploiting a ridiculously overpowered combination of specific magic or something to that extent.
Tom: And in the game itself, there is essentially what is a cheat code for just such occasions, which are speed potions, which basically double the number of turns you get.
Tom: So I think when it comes to the game trying to give you a challenge, which is pretty consistent with the important battles at the end of the game, they run out of ideas at least half the time, which I think is a little disappointing given how excellent the difficulty is in some of the battles.
Tom: It's really uneven.
Phil: I think you've been...
Phil: Have you been uniformly disappointed with the bosses in this game?
Tom: No, not uniformly.
Tom: I would say % of them, once you get further into the game and they start increasing the difficulty, are a little bit annoying or not so great an experience.
Tom: Of the remainder, I would say % are really interestingly designed battles and the other % are too much in the opposite direction where they're a bit of a pushover.
Phil: So, I mean, has this game been a grind?
Phil: I mean, you've been playing it for quite some time now.
Phil: Is it because you're dragging it out because you're enjoying it or is it just because it's not enjoyable enough and you can only play it in small increments?
Tom: Well, I can only play it in small increments, so that would be the main reason it has taken so long.
Tom: But I think the other reason is not that I'm dragging it out, but that it's been interesting enough that I've been exploring everywhere I can.
Phil: Excellent.
Phil: Well, thanks for that update.
Phil: Next, we're going to be talking about Teardown.
Phil: We've both been playing it on PC.
Phil: It's available for PlayStation Xbox and PC.
Phil: Produced and published and developed by one and the same, a company called Tuxedo Labs.
Phil: As far as I know, this is their only game, though I could be completely wrong about that.
Phil: I watched the credits, and I think there's about to people that worked on the game.
Phil: But there's a single person who was both the director, designer, programmer and writer, and that's Dennis Gustafson.
Phil: So it's, you know, I mean, it's a small game, but it's also a game that's, I think, well made.
Phil: To describe it, well, it's voxel-based.
Phil: So think Minecraft or D.Heroes for you old people out there.
Phil: And you are a person who is involved in demolition.
Phil: And so basically you get these messages on your computer for people who are asking you to do various things.
Phil: You go to the stage.
Phil: Some of them are timed, some of them are not.
Phil: And using various equipment, ranging from a sledgehammer through to a crane or bulldozer or a front-end loader or forklift, you have to basically try and accomplish the goal that you've been given.
Phil: All of these things are criminal, so they're done under the cover of night.
Phil: Usually they're asking you to...
Phil: Well, one of the missions is to knock down a building because you want to build something there.
Phil: And as a part of that, you might have to also steal the property owner document so they can never prove that they actually owned it.
Phil: So you've only played the first mission, is that right?
Tom: That's correct.
Phil: And what was involved in that first mission?
Tom: I believe you had to also knock down a building.
Tom: Well, I would just presume that's what the majority of the missions consist of.
Phil: Given the name of the game is Tear Down, and the demolition, because it is a voxel-based game, I found it richly rewarding and physics-based.
Phil: Though, like LEGOs, I think some of the equipment that you're using is a bit fragile and will break a little too easy.
Phil: But yeah, this is a game that does require some graphical push.
Phil: It's quite a technical game, and there are obviously little sandboxes.
Phil: Each little place that you have to go, each setting has about four or five missions, from what I can tell.
Phil: So yeah, what are your first impressions of the game?
Tom: Well, I was wondering what the hook would be in the campaign, because it looked like a game that was very much just sandbox-based.
Tom: I didn't even know that it had a campaign before I started it.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: No, the campaign is what it's all about, because you get different missions at increasing complexity and different locations.
Phil: And there's a little bit of story behind it, too.
Phil: There's some double-crossing where some of the people that were your victim in the last level are now contacting you, unknowing that you were the one that perpetrated the crime, but asking you to do something to the person they suspect had the job done sort of thing.
Phil: It has a nice soundtrack.
Phil: It's got sort of a bluesy, not bluesy, it's got a jazz-type soundtrack that, you know, has saxes in it.
Phil: So think of the theme song to Grand Theft Auto and lots of TV crime shows, you know, sort of a melancholy jazz beat.
Phil: And yeah, so the campaign is fantastic because basically they give you a mission.
Phil: And the mission might be you have to get these three...
Phil: Well, the first one's pretty straightforward because you've just got to knock something down.
Phil: Okay, so you've got to figure out how to knock it down and get out of there.
Phil: I don't think that one's timed, but maybe.
Phil: The second one, they email you a request to go and extricate these three very important valuables from this site.
Phil: And so I'm thinking, oh, okay, so this has got stealth mode in it.
Phil: It's not just all going to be smashing stuff up.
Phil: But then you go to the site and you're like, okay, because the second you take the first thing, it's going to set off an alarm.
Phil: And from the time that alarm is set, you now have seconds to get the other two things and get to the escape vehicle.
Phil: So it really does come down to preparation.
Phil: So you have to basically walk the site, check out how you're going to do the job, scope it out, and then you can do as much destruction as you want, as long as you don't activate the alarms.
Phil: So you can bulldoze things out of the way.
Phil: You can cut holes in walls.
Phil: You can do all this stuff so that you can get it perfectly timed from the time you grab that first thing.
Phil: You now know you have to perfectly execute getting to the second and then to the third.
Phil: But because it's a physics-based game, things can go horribly wrong.
Phil: So then you learn from that and you apply it to the next run.
Phil: So in that way, it's a rogue-like as well, though you don't...
Phil: It's probably actually a real rogue, because you don't get to keep anything.
Phil: You have to go back to the start and do it again.
Phil: And the only thing you get to keep is your experience from having done the first run.
Phil: So yeah, I've been finding it delicious.
Phil: It's a sort of game that you might beat a level and then go into the second one and not beat it.
Phil: And you're like, okay, well, that's enough for tonight.
Phil: I'm turning it off.
Phil: But then the next day, all through the day, you're thinking about how you could be doing that job.
Phil: Like, how am I going to pull off this heist?
Phil: Yeah, so it really is a heist game more than anything else, but with the creative addition of it being a physics-based destruction game.
Phil: And let's not put value in the fact that it's just fun to knock things down.
Phil: I haven't touched the sandbox element of it.
Phil: Did you only go into the sandbox?
Tom: No, I played the first mission and I went into the sandbox.
Phil: Okay, good.
Phil: So, yeah, I would encourage you to plow ahead with it and maybe we can give some further impressions down the road.
Tom: The only thing I would add is in the mission, at least, my one criticism of the physics is the gravity seemed a little bit weak because in demolishing this building, they must have used some super powered mortar because I ended up with a brick structure that was essentially a few bricks on the bottom holding up the majority of a wall.
Tom: And when I saw that did not cause it to collapse, I had to start demolishing it from the top.
Tom: Even though I would suggest that logically destroying it from the bottom should have been the more efficient method.
Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Phil: That is the thing that you will learn as you go, that you do have to...
Phil: Well, there's different ways.
Phil: So, for example, in one level, I had to knock down a building and get some valuables out from out of it.
Phil: So I start the level.
Phil: I go, oh, there's the valuables.
Phil: Excellent.
Phil: That must be the place I have to knock down.
Phil: I'll get the valuables out first, which is not an easy process, right?
Phil: It involved ripping holes through walls, getting in a forklift, dragging this thing around because it was a heavy safe, and then pushing it into the water, which was not easy at all.
Phil: Then I was like, okay, now I can just leisurely destroy this house.
Phil: So you can destroy, it's about the percentage of the place that's destroyed.
Phil: So if you just say, okay, I'm going to destroy all of the walls, but there's still one thing over in the corner holding up the roof, then that's not going to fall down.
Phil: You would logically think that it would fall down.
Phil: So structural physics, I don't think are applied to this, which is a shame, but it doesn't make it any less enjoyable.
Phil: I then spent the next minutes destroying this house, completely destroying it.
Phil: And I'm like, why isn't it saying, I've now used pretty much everything in the whole game, every vehicle I can find to destroy this thing, I've been hammering it with a sledgehammer.
Phil: Why isn't it this?
Phil: So I go back and read the instructions again, and they describe the building that I'm supposed to be knocking down, which is a completely different one.
Phil: And so I go to the end of the marina, and it's a small cabin, which is the size of a bedroom.
Phil: So if you jump in the water, and then using your sledgehammer, smash the eight pillars that are under it, it sinks in about seven seconds.
Phil: So my lesson was learned.
Phil: But it was, hey, I got a story out of it, and it was still enjoyable.
Phil: And you can find valuables and collectibles in pretty much every setting that you go into.
Phil: So yeah, look, I think this, I would urge you to push on and give it an additional go, because you won't quite get it from just playing the first level.
Phil: It does build over time.
Phil: And yeah, it's basically, I guess if you had to describe it as a sandbox game with puzzle elements, that's played in the first person perspective.
Phil: And so, yeah, everyone's obviously already heard about this game.
Phil: It was released in, well, probably
Phil: It must have been, must have had an early beta or something.
Tom: Yeah, it was in early access for a long time.
Tom: I think during early access was when it had the most hype.
Phil: Yeah, well, it came out on Windows in and then came to the current generation of consoles in November.
Phil: But yeah, it had a lot of hype, so I'm totally enjoying it.
Phil: I hope you persist with it so that we can talk about it another time.
Phil: Other impressions?
Phil: It's your turn.
Phil: What else have you been playing?
Tom: I've also started and played it even less than Teardown Mafia Definitive Edition, and it has been an interesting, if frustrating, experience so far.
Tom: I installed it, and on starting up the game, I was greeted by...
Tom: No, not even before, sorry.
Tom: I installed it, and before installing it, I had to sign an end loser.
Tom: End loser.
Tom: That's the way of doing it.
Tom: End user license agreement before installing the game.
Phil: End loser.
Phil: E-L...
Phil: End loser license agreement.
Phil: Ella, okay.
Tom: Perfect.
Phil: Yep, so I don't get it, man.
Phil: Definitive Edition, is it a collection of all three Fantastic Mafia games?
Tom: No, I think it's a remake of the original Mafia.
Phil: Get out!
Phil: Really?
Tom: You hadn't heard of this?
Phil: Well, I mean, looking it up, I mean, it came out four years ago.
Phil: So yeah, four years ago, I probably did hear about it.
Phil: Why would they remake the original?
Tom: Because it's the best one.
Phil: Okay, so what?
Phil: You got to ride around town going km an hour?
Tom: With an excellent physics model.
Tom: It could have been a racing game.
Phil: Yeah, it could have been.
Phil: Hey, look, we both love Mafia.
Phil: We've reviewed it on this website.
Phil: So I just thought that if it was going to be the Mafia Definitive Edition, it would have been all three games remastered.
Phil: But I thought it was a recent one.
Tom: I think there's remasters of Two Now as well.
Phil: So this came out on PlayStation Windows.
Phil: I assume you're playing it on Windows.
Tom: That's correct.
Phil: And did you get it through Steam or what other platform?
Tom: I got it on Humble Choice, and it's a Steam Key from Humble Choice.
Phil: You're old friends at Humble Choice, so you still...
Tom: One of their Steam Keys that worked.
Phil: So you're a long-suffering user of their servers, and if people don't know, go back and listen to episode
Phil: You're sticking with them, though?
Tom: For the moment, we'll see.
Phil: Okay.
Tom: I think they're the people who should be being sued.
Tom: Maybe I can get a bunch of other disgruntled people together and start a joint committee decision.
Tom: Joint action.
Phil: Joint committee decision.
Phil: That escalated fast.
Phil: When's the execution?
Phil: Her towers.
Phil: Okay.
Phil: So, Mafia definitive edition.
Phil: All right.
Phil: So, you installed it and loved it.
Tom: So, I signed the end, the hour.
Tom: I saw the game.
Tom: I opened the game.
Tom: Signing to take two to play the game.
Tom: I wasn't sure if I had a take two account or not.
Tom: So, I decided to see if I could skip it and said no.
Tom: To my surprise, it went to the main menu.
Tom: Didn't just close the game or anything.
Tom: I moved the mouse towards new game, at which point the game crashed.
Phil: Just crashed.
Phil: So, did you go back and try again with having created a K loser account?
Tom: No, I immediately uninstalled it.
Phil: Well, this is short impressions.
Phil: Holy cow.
Phil: I thought about it.
Tom: I'm going to give it a rating if I can find the diagest.
Phil: It's okay.
Phil: I'll lock it in.
Phil: But you do need to diagest to make the actual determination.
Phil: So, while you're doing that, I'm looking up Mafia when we've talked about it before, if it was on this podcast or the one that came before it, while you get your dice.
Phil: We talked about Mafia on episode
Phil: We talked about Mafia on episode
Tom: Which I believe you were a fan of, and I was definitely not a fan.
Phil: Oh, I was a big fan.
Phil: Now, episode we did a review of Mafia
Phil: Episode we did a review of Mafia
Phil: Yeah, so it's all over the place.
Phil: Episode
Tom: Mafia I'm still yet to play.
Phil: All right, so in the scores archive, you gave Mafia a out of
Tom: That must have been a dice roll.
Phil: And someone wrote a review of it.
Phil: So, yeah, that's cool.
Phil: Okay, someone, meaning either me or you.
Phil: Okido, have you found the die of destiny?
Tom: I've not found the die of destiny.
Phil: Oh, Jesus Christ.
Phil: Okay, all right.
Tom: So we're going to go for a random number generator.
Phil: Oh, good.
Phil: That won't take much time at all.
Phil: Efficiency, that's what we're known for, The Game Under Podcast, Australia's longest running video game podcast.
Phil: We've been doing this for about...
Tom: Here we go.
Tom: our experience of Mafia Definitive Edition gets a out of
Tom: So it's officially better than Mafia which I think is actually fair enough.
Phil: I think that's a pretty good score.
Phil: We're going to get into a game now that I was very surprised to know that I had played it before because I thought I had not played it before.
Phil: Now, this is an old game, but it's a notable game, and I think it's worth talking about still.
Phil: We gave a full review of this in episode at about the hour and minute mark.
Phil: If listeners want to go back and listen to it.
Phil: Actually, you know what?
Phil: I'm just going to include it at the end of this show so you can hear that.
Phil: So, Dear Esther was made by The China Room, I believe.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: And again, this was a game that was developed, I read the credits, by about or people.
Phil: I was interested to see that Kelly Santiago got a credit on this one.
Phil: Do you know who Kelly Santiago is?
Tom: I should.
Phil: You should.
Phil: I'll jostle your memory.
Tom: I definitely recognize the name.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: I'll jostle your memory.
Phil: She, along with Jenova Chen, she was one of the chief creative leads over at The People That Make Your Favorite Game.
Phil: That game company.
Phil: Yeah, exactly.
Phil: So, I was surprised to see her name on there.
Phil: And now, I originally...
Tom: I think there is...
Tom: If I can remember the name of the YouTube channel correctly, an excellent interview with her by, I think it's called SUP Homes.
Phil: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Phil: You recommended that to me.
Phil: You, yeah, SUP Homes.
Phil: S-U-P Homes like Sherlock Holmes.
Tom: Sherlock.
Phil: Yep.
Tom: Yep.
Phil: Now, Dear Esther was released back in for a PC.
Phil: And I thought I had never played it.
Phil: But now that I've got this gaming PC, I was looking at my Steam library.
Phil: I'm like, well, I know that Tom speaks highly of Dear Esther.
Phil: I should probably give it a go.
Phil: And so I started playing it.
Tom: I thought you had already played it.
Phil: Well, OK.
Phil: Well, this is the story, man.
Phil: And so I start playing it.
Phil: I'm like, yeah, I remember I probably only played like one second of this and then I hated it.
Phil: And then that was it.
Phil: If you go back and listen to Episode I absolutely hated the game.
Phil: I played it and I hated it.
Phil: And then you also agreed that you hated it.
Phil: I'm like, what's going on here?
Phil: Because like the revisionist history of The Game Under Podcast is that you actually think this game's all right.
Tom: So I think it's great that there's two Dear Estes.
Tom: Yes, there's the original Dear Esther.
Tom: And then there's Dear Esther, the remake.
Phil: It's a mod, right?
Phil: Because you hated it as well.
Phil: So here we go.
Phil: We're going through this review and about minutes into it, like, yeah, this game's horrible.
Phil: We both hate it.
Phil: Then you're all, you pull your Tom Towers.
Phil: But then I played a mod of the game.
Phil: And this game is the best game I've ever played in my life.
Phil: That's my Tom Towers impression.
Phil: Not very good.
Tom: It's officially the sixth best game of the decade.
Phil: Okay, we'll get to that, though, right?
Phil: So you go on and sing its praises.
Phil: Now, you still had criticism of it, but the mod and its graphical flourish somehow, and you can probably speak to this, somehow elevated the game in a way for you that the original did not.
Phil: Now, the game that I'm playing is the basically director's version, right?
Phil: So this is the one where they've come back and they've redone a lot of stuff, and they admit that in the thing.
Phil: They say, hey, look, you know, someone modded the game, and we went back and we incorporated a lot of the stuff that they suggested because it just made sense and it made it a better game.
Phil: So that's the game I believe that I played this time.
Tom: So you played the retail version, not the mod?
Phil: This is the collect collector's edition.
Phil: So I've got the original one, and that's a different steam listing from the game that I played.
Phil: So the game I played is called whatever it's called.
Phil: And yeah, so I played it.
Phil: And then this time around, I actually landmark edition.
Phil: So I don't know what it's called, but it was it was.
Phil: Yeah, I don't know what it was called, but it's actually it's the one that's got the developers commentary.
Phil: So after I beat the landmark edition.
Tom: So what we discovered is I need to play it a third time.
Tom: Landmark edition is apparently a remake in the Unity engine.
Phil: Yeah.
Tom: Whereas I believe the original was the source engine.
Phil: Yeah, that's correct.
Phil: Yeah, I know that the original was the source.
Phil: Yes.
Phil: And you're right.
Phil: The landmark edition is in Unity.
Phil: And I enjoyed it this time through, or at least, you know, as much as I can enjoy a walking simulator because the gameplay in Dear Esther is minimal.
Phil: It is a first-person, quote, adventure game.
Phil: And all you do is walk and discover.
Phil: And if you think about like one of my favorite parts of Half-Life I'm going to say my single most favorite part of Half-Life was the part where you're walking up the coast through the heather of a coastal North Atlantic country.
Phil: And it just gave you time to sort of just take in nature and all the rest of it.
Phil: This game was obviously heavily influenced by that spark.
Phil: Now, they took it in other places, which we'll get to.
Phil: The game is only, I played it in minutes, -
Phil: And it was so surprisingly short.
Phil: So I went back and played the last chapter.
Phil: I think there are four chapters or maybe five.
Phil: I went back and played the last chapter with the commentary on.
Phil: And I'd encourage you to do the same as well.
Phil: It was, yeah, it was really interesting.
Phil: But I'll just let you run for a while with Dear Esther, because I'm still confused, because at the end of the episode you were still happy to give it quite a low score without using The Dive of Destiny.
Phil: And I just don't, and I went to look, you haven't reviewed it on our site.
Phil: It wasn't in your top games of the s.
Tom: That's incorrect.
Tom: It's, no, maybe it wasn't in my personal ones.
Phil: It was mentioned, but it wasn't.
Tom: No, it is officially the sixth best game of the s.
Phil: Okay.
Phil: Well, you're going to have to...
Tom: That's the, I think, the ones we agreed on together.
Phil: Okay.
Phil: Oh, the one we agreed on together.
Phil: Yeah, you didn't use it in your personal list, though.
Tom: That's right.
Phil: Why is that?
Phil: You said it was...
Tom: I just want to quote from the...
Tom: Because I can't remember.
Tom: So I'm just going to read my own words to see if I've jogged my memory.
Phil: You know this...
Phil: Wait, wait.
Phil: You know where this is heading, this whole Game Under project, because now Apple is perfectly transcribing our podcasts.
Phil: You can go listen to any of our podcasts.
Phil: They're perfectly transcribing it.
Phil: All you need for an AI-generated voice is minutes of someone talking just by themselves, which we have several thousand hours of.
Phil: Here you are saying you don't know what you wrote.
Phil: You don't know what you think, but you're just going to read what you wrote.
Phil: You know where this podcast is heading.
Tom: That's how you know that I'm not yet AI, because if I was AI, I would have just lied.
Phil: Yeah, that's right.
Phil: And you'd have seven fingers.
Phil: Okay, you are correct.
Phil: So I think maybe if we were going to include a game in our collective top it must have excluded it from being included in our personal ones.
Phil: So yeah, because I don't see my favorite game of all time, Papers, Please, in our collective top
Phil: Because remember, our top now I remember.
Tom: That's based on what is the most influential.
Phil: Yeah, and you saved Dear Esther for that list.
Tom: But reading through it, reading through it, I think that I must have had positive feelings, even for the remake, the original remake, because I write and I quote, Ultimately, the experiment was undeniable success, commercially and critically, and for me personally.
Tom: And it does say down the bottom, this was written by Tom Towers, so I presume it must have been written by me.
Tom: The retail version is a beautiful little jaunt through the English countryside, even more enjoyable than Fable, for instance, because it allowed you the time to wander freely and enjoy the scenery, which could also be rendered in much greater detail due to not having to dilute its visual and architectural design to fit more complicated gameplay mechanisms.
Tom: And the original mod with its simple audio design and musical accompaniment, as well as its starker, darker visual design, which allowed for one's imagination to complement its aesthetic, just as this disjointed, incomplete writing style allowed for the imagination to complement its narrative, is a masterpiece of video game lyricism and atmosphere, even greater than the retail version.
Tom: But alas, this is the original version.
Tom: It came out last decade, so it cannot make the list.
Phil: You know, I was going to say, what makes Dear Esther inarguably the greatest experimental game of all time and arguably the greatest indie game of all time, is that regardless of whether your answer is yes or no, you are participating in the experience yourself, the experiment yourself.
Phil: You take on the merits of Dear Esther is the answer to the question Dear Esther asks.
Phil: That's, you know, just something that left to mind.
Phil: Or I was reading your review.
Tom: So I would also add, I would also add, just so we can have even more Tom Towers, Dear Esther content.
Tom: The other reason I think it made the list is, and I quote, the original Dear Esther was part of a Ph.D.
Tom: project, end quote.
Tom: So I think the fact that we've got a game here that was literally someone's Ph.D.
Tom: project says a lot about that era of indie games that came about.
Phil: When you go back and listen to episode we actually have, it's funny because we did a walking game-a-thon.
Phil: In that one episode, we did reviews for Gone Home and The Stanley Parable and Dear Esther.
Phil: Like, that's a lot of content.
Phil: So, but anyway, please join the dots.
Phil: The last time we talked about this game in episode you were lukewarm on it, and then it's come into the sixth best game of the decade.
Phil: What happened?
Phil: What changed?
Tom: Did you actually listen to the audio portion of Dear Esther content?
Phil: Yes.
Tom: Because I'm sure that I enjoyed the original mod a lot.
Phil: You enjoyed the graphics of it, but you still couldn't get over the acting.
Phil: But you said it wasn't the actor's fault, it was the writer's fault.
Tom: The writing, yes.
Phil: And actually in episode you did a lot of Dear Esther impersonations, which I put the music behind.
Phil: Things like this person turned opaque, you know, and you were making fun of the language and poor writing of it.
Tom: Which explains a lot about what I wrote in the top list.
Phil: Yes, yeah.
Tom: But I think my memories of the Dear Esther experience was finding the writing unintentionally very amusing.
Tom: But I do, even in the remake version, I remember quite enjoying just wandering around the environment.
Tom: It was like taking a walk through a park or something like that.
Tom: It didn't, and that's, I think, why I was let down by the writing, because it strips away so much, yet it also has that element to it.
Phil: Okay, this is a game that's years old.
Phil: We will talk about spoilers here.
Phil: I'm going to tell you what I think the game is about.
Phil: I start playing the game completely cold, and I'm like, okay, this is interesting.
Phil: And I'm like, I'm walking through this environment.
Phil: Is that a license plate that's really, really obscured?
Phil: Is that a steering wheel that's really, really obscured?
Phil: That's weird.
Phil: And then later on in the game, I come across some shipping containers that look not like shipping containers at all, but I'm like, oh, these artists have never even seen a shipping container.
Phil: You know, this is way too wide, way too big.
Phil: Oh, a ship is wrecked.
Phil: There's a shipwreck here.
Phil: Oh, and there's parts of cars everywhere.
Phil: Okay, so there was a shipwreck, and then they must have been carrying cars, and then people stole the parts, and that's what I thought all these car parts about.
Phil: Meanwhile, this guy is...
Tom: I was going to say, this sounds like issues with the source engine, which always has a slightly weird sense of scale to it, but then I realized you're playing the Unity version.
Phil: Yep, yep.
Phil: And then at the very start, you don't know why you're on this island.
Phil: You think perhaps at first it's because you're trying to find...
Phil: Your father left some journals and he said to go to this place, and now you've gone to this island and you're exploring it because your dead father has told you to do this.
Phil: That's what I thought was going on at the start of the game.
Phil: Is that a fair assumption for a player to make?
Tom: Well, naturally, I remember the narrative perfectly.
Phil: Yeah, so I was like, okay, so I'm on this island.
Phil: You go into this hut and there's this paint sort of splashed everywhere and you're like, oh, this is kind of weird.
Phil: Okay, am I going to get attacked?
Phil: Because you're playing a video game, you're expecting a confrontation.
Phil: You're expecting conflict at some point, especially in a first person game from this era.
Phil: So you walk around, you walk around, you explore, and then all of a sudden you're hearing what you think is your father's name, I assumed was to be my father, talking about this, that, and the other.
Phil: And Dear Esther, you know, I really, you know, it's just really sad and things are bad.
Phil: You're opaque and, ah, the guy, you know, never knew.
Phil: So, you know, this guy chimes in from time to time as you're walking around this setting in first person.
Phil: And, you know, as the listener, I basically go on, oh, okay, I'm dead, my dad was driving the car, but this drunk shepherd crashed into us, and that's why, you know, this Donnelly fella's a bad fella.
Phil: And then the next chapter is called Donnelly.
Phil: You go through this whole thing, and then it turns out that, no, you know, somewhere along the line, Donnelly wasn't drunk at all, and he wasn't to blame for the crash.
Phil: And then I'm thinking, oh, okay, well, this is weird.
Phil: So I'm definitely not going to interact with anyone in this thing, but now I'm just trying to figure out why my dad, you know, what he did.
Phil: And apparently you're thinking, oh, this guy, my dad came to this island because he was so morose that he had to write all these diaries about how, you know, I died and he's trying to settle, deal with the grief of it.
Phil: First blaming Donnelly, but then, you know, it's his own fault.
Phil: And then ultimately, from me, again, the listener's perspective, I'm thinking, oh, okay, well, the dad actually was responsible for your car crash, but then at the very end, it sounds more like he's not your dad at all, that he's actually your boyfriend or husband or partner.
Phil: And that this guy ultimately killed himself because he couldn't reconcile with the guilt of having been responsible for your death.
Phil: That's what I got from it.
Tom: I think that sounds about right.
Phil: Okay.
Tom: I remember the whole car crash thing.
Tom: I think my impression was always that it was a partner rather than a parent.
Phil: Yeah, yeah.
Phil: And that's just my...
Phil: I was just thinking that probably because of my personal experience, I was thinking that this was a younger person who's trying to explore why their parent has died because you don't immediately jump to your partner dying unless you're playing that cancer game.
Phil: But yeah, so I listened to the audio commentary of the last one and she was saying, this is the co-creator.
Phil: And she's like, oh yeah, me and the dude that made this game, we'd done other things together before, but not video games.
Phil: We'd made other things together before, but not video games.
Phil: And I think like what?
Phil: Like cakes?
Phil: What do you mean you've made other things before?
Phil: Children, possibly.
Phil: Interesting, and this is why I'd encourage you to go and play this game with The Common.
Tom: I think for the record, the woman was a musician, I think.
Tom: She's the one who did the music for it.
Phil: Yeah, very much.
Phil: And that's what she was talking about.
Tom: Yeah, I think they were collaborating on music in some fashion.
Phil: The side benefit of listening to it or playing it with the audio commentary on, and I played it through first before doing this, but when I replayed the last level, basically you see these little chat icon type things.
Phil: So the benefit of it is you know exactly where to go because it's like breadcrumbs leading you through the thing so you can listen to the commentary.
Phil: So you can get through a level that may have taken minutes or minutes before in about minutes because you can see exactly where you're supposed to go.
Phil: Interesting, that music that plays in the final chapter is actually playing, I'm not a musician, chords or strings that in Morse code spell Esther.
Phil: So, which is kind of weird.
Phil: But again, she was a musician, so I thought that was creative.
Phil: It's not something I would have thought of.
Phil: When you hear it say it aloud, it sounds like a cheap gimmick.
Phil: But I thought that was really interesting because you're just listening to a song, you're not going like, oh, is that Morse code?
Phil: Even without the commentary, I found the experience, fortunately, short, only an hour and ten minutes.
Phil: I thought it was pretty good for what it was.
Phil: Like you said, it was enjoyable walking through the countryside and, you know, trying to figure out this puzzle.
Tom: And I think that's...
Tom: I think the criticism of the lack of interactivity in it, as I actually did mention in my expertly written top ten Games of the Decade segment for it, is you can say it's lacking in interactivity in terms of the gameplay, but the way the narrative is designed is essentially as a puzzle.
Tom: So there is a form of interactivity that is just as engaging and I think just as occupying as interactivity in terms of gameplay in another game throughout the whole of the experience.
Phil: And if I could say in a sort of weird way, just by simplifying the gameplay to walking and looking, what that forces is the same thing.
Phil: All the gameplay happens in your mind because you're figuring out what's going on.
Phil: That part of your brain that's usually engaged when you're playing a game that takes your full focus is more like when you're reading a book.
Phil: So now your mind is freed up to...
Phil: The gameplay is your mind being let free to sort of try and figure out what's going on here and where do I need to go next.
Phil: So, you know, I've said a lot of derogatory things, probably every derogatory thing that can be said about walking simulators in the past.
Phil: But I think that what Dear Esther pulled off and probably mastered was doing exactly that, giving you enough things to pay attention to in the world, but freeing up your mind to focus and use your imagination to create an even bigger and bigger world that expands and expands and expands the more information it's given.
Phil: So, you know, like you, I initially hated the game, and on the second playthrough, I thought quite highly of it.
Phil: And it would fall into that category of being, like Indica, a game that I would say must be played based on its uniqueness.
Phil: Not to say it's a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly a game I'd probably give a out of to.
Phil: If not a out of this version that I played, because I wouldn't change a thing about it and I think it's highly effective.
Phil: Now, had it been two hours long, or three hours long, or four hours long, and outlived its welcome, that's a completely different story.
Phil: But, you know, like a perfectly made pastry or petit four, it was a small, delectable thing to be enjoyed, and it didn't outlive its welcome.
Tom: You're feeling very French today.
Phil: I guess so.
Phil: I don't know why.
Tom: I would just add on Dear Esther, I think the other reason it made the top ten list, it's definitely a game that has stuck in my memory all these years later.
Phil: Yeah, yeah.
Tom: Which can't be said for a lot of games that at the time I may have spoken more highly of, but have not become a permanent or semi-permanent part of my consciousness.
Phil: Yeah, and I think it's because of that part of engaging your imagination perhaps.
Phil: Okay, so, well, that will make sense later.
Phil: We're going to go into Phil's questions for Tom from other people's podcasts.
Phil: I think we've got time for maybe one this week, because we do have to get into Indica Spoiler territory before we close out the podcast.
Tom: Go ahead.
Phil: Okay, so, Matty writes, what Nintendo franchise would benefit most from a mature title rating or even an AO rating?
Phil: So while you think about that, there have been some AO games that have come out on Switch, I'm sorry, on Nintendo platforms before.
Phil: I believe, what was the Rockstar game where you killed people?
Tom: Man Hunt?
Phil: Man Hunt came out on the Wii.
Phil: I think that, no, it wouldn't have had an AO rating because no AO rating ever gets released in America.
Phil: But if you were to take a Nintendo franchise and give it a mature title rating, what would you do?
Tom: Smash Brothers.
Phil: Smash Brothers?
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: You're going for quantum?
Tom: Far more gore.
Phil: You're going for, oh, go Mortal Kombat.
Phil: Exactly.
Phil: That's a good answer.
Phil: That's a good answer.
Phil: Or would you go with Zelda and make it more Witcher, more Witcher quality?
Tom: Or Zelda and play up the Zelda Link romance angle.
Phil: Yeah, yeah.
Phil: A bit more TNA, just like in Witcher
Phil: So yeah, I guess for me, you know, you could go Metroid and make it more like Aliens, you know, like make it really gory, grainy and gritty.
Phil: From a mature title writing, yeah, so it would have to be violent and have swears.
Phil: I would leave Mario out of that entirely.
Phil: That doesn't suit him or his universe.
Phil: I think it definitely...
Tom: I think there's a much darker romance story there.
Phil: With Mario and Peach.
Tom: But Bowser and Peach.
Phil: Oh, OK, well, Mario is just a simp for Peach, right?
Tom: We're adding bestiality to the mix here.
Phil: Oh, come on now.
Phil: And Peach obviously knows what she's got.
Phil: And she's not giving Mario any of it.
Phil: And then you've got, you know, she gets kidnapped an awful lot.
Phil: Yeah, I just wouldn't want to touch that subject matter, I'm afraid.
Phil: I think Metroid would be the best one to go for a mature title rating.
Phil: Yeah, and I'll leave my answer at that.
Tom: I think my original answer is still the one I'll go with.
Phil: Alright, well I'm going to give you that there was a quickie.
Phil: We'll do one more.
Phil: Damon writes, What would you ask a future gamer from ten years from now, pertinent to gaming?
Tom: Is there a better version of Sex Toy Doom?
Phil: Okay, I thought you were going to ask has Dear Edith been remastered again?
Phil: Dear Edith in VR is a gimme, surely?
Tom: Dear Esther?
Phil: What did I say?
Tom: Dear Edith.
Phil: Oh yeah, What Remains of Dear Edith Finch.
Phil: You played What Remains of Edith Finch, didn't you?
Tom: Yes, I did.
Phil: That was a good...
Phil: I don't know what you remember of it, but anyway, that's not what we're talking about.
Phil: Seriously though, what would you ask a future gamer from years from now?
Tom: That's my question.
Tom: Or, alternatively, does the Xbox marketing team have a budget they can work with yet?
Phil: I don't know what I'd ask them.
Phil: I'd probably ask them...
Phil: Well, we know that there's not going to be consoles in years, right?
Phil: It's all going to be like Netflix services over, delivered over internet.
Tom: Maybe not, if the Xbox marketing team doesn't get enough to keep Game Pass going.
Phil: I think that there won't be consoles, that's for sure.
Phil: I might ask, who are the major publishers?
Phil: Is Microsoft still making games?
Phil: But then I honestly wouldn't care if Microsoft's still playing games.
Phil: If they're just a publisher with a streaming service, I'd be fine with that.
Phil: Nintendo's obviously still going to be around.
Phil: I guess I'd be curious if Sony still sticks in it?
Phil: As physical things become...
Phil: Like if there's no console, and Sony's an electronics marketer and manufacturer, would Sony stick around?
Phil: And if you look at what they've done in the movie space, even though they own a lot of studios and whatever, they haven't stuck around for streaming.
Phil: To get them excited, they've got to have a piece of hardware in the game.
Phil: So if anyone was going to fall out, I'd say Microsoft is a services company, Nintendo is their own thing.
Phil: And when I say is there going to be a console in ten years, I think if anyone's going to have a console in ten years, it's going to be Nintendo, because kids are still going to want to hold something in their hand, and parents are still going to want to pass something to a kid in the back seat to play.
Phil: So...
Tom: So you are playing the role here of the gamer from ten years in the future.
Phil: I guess I am.
Phil: I'm trying to figure out...
Tom: So where are my answers?
Phil: Okay, ask me any question.
Phil: I'll be the...
Tom: I already asked you two, and I'm yet to receive an answer.
Phil: Okay, first one.
Tom: The first one was...
Phil: Dong Doom.
Tom: Is there a better version of the Doom sex toy?
Phil: No, because no one knows what Doom is anymore.
Tom: I find that hard to believe.
Phil: All the old people are dead.
Phil: We don't care what Doom is.
Phil: It may as well be Pong, which we also don't know what it is.
Phil: Next question.
Tom: The next question was...
Tom: Does the Xbox marketing team have a budget they can work with?
Phil: Yes, they certainly do, because they will be preeminent in the game streaming field.
Phil: Okay, so in we'll go back to this episode of The Game Under Podcast and replay these predictions.
Phil: Come on, give us a prediction for ten years from now.
Phil: You'll be still a young person.
Tom: Ten years from now.
Phil: In you'll still be a young person.
Phil: And I'll still be podcasting with or without you.
Tom: I think...
Tom: Let me see.
Tom: I think people are going to work for Boeing.
Tom: I think for EAA.
Phil: EAA won't be around.
Phil: All these stupid companies are going to get gobbled up by the streaming service.
Tom: I think there's going to be one person working for Valve.
Phil: Gabe Newell, robot head.
Tom: As the admin team, and everyone else will have been replaced by AI.
Phil: I think Gabe's AI will live forever running Valve.
Phil: Friends and foes, we are now going to go into spoiler territory.
Phil: So if you don't want to be spoiled for Indica, I would indicate that you shouldn't, because you should go out and play it and buy it.
Phil: We talked about enough in the last episode that you should know that you should be playing this because it's a completely unique experience.
Phil: So we're just going to talk about it.
Phil: So with that, if you don't want to be spoiled, thanks for listening to The Game Under Podcast.
Phil: And we'll see you next time.
Phil: Okay, so...
Tom: Before they go, let's give it a score.
Phil: Okay.
Tom: Let's spoil our impressions with a score.
Phil: Okay, I'm giving it a real score.
Phil: Are you giving it a Die of Destiny score?
Tom: I'm giving it...
Tom: For this episode, we've replaced the Die of Destiny with the AI version, so I'm going to give it another randomly generated score.
Phil: Okay, I'm going to give it a out of
Tom: I'm going to give it a out of
Phil: So, Indica, tell me what you think the story...
Phil: Tell me what you think just the story, not the meaning, what the story is of Indica.
Tom: What do you mean the story?
Phil: The story.
Tom: What literally happens in the story?
Phil: The plot.
Tom: The plot.
Tom: So, a nun is or believes she's possessed by the devil, which is causing her to come across as a very incompetent nun, who none of the other nuns like.
Tom: So, they fire her.
Tom: She's sent off to deliver her own notice, declaring to the church that she's been fired.
Tom: Along the way, she meets a fugitive who has a gangrenous arm that for potentially real, potentially unreal divine intervention has not yet atrophied to the point...
Tom: Sorry, has not yet developed to the point where he's died.
Tom: She goes along with him in an attempt to escape.
Phil: Or is she still trying to deliver the note, though?
Tom: Yeah, until she reads the note, that is.
Tom: So, she continues with him to try and deliver the note, then reads the note, at which point she suffers a crisis of faith.
Tom: And he also suffers a crisis of faith when they reach this...
Tom: What is it?
Tom: The...
Tom: Is it a sensor?
Phil: Factory?
Tom: No, they're looking for a divine object.
Phil: Oh, the kudits.
Tom: Yeah, the kudits, yes.
Tom: So, they're going to get this kudits, which is going to remove her possession and possibly give back the gangrenous man's arm, but certainly help them both in their religious crisis.
Tom: They get to this kibits, it fails.
Phil: Kudits, kudits, K-U-D-E-T-S, not kibits.
Phil: Not kibits.
Tom: We've been talking too much about cooperatives this episode.
Tom: The kudits.
Tom: So, they get to this kudits.
Tom: The kudits fails to achieve either purpose.
Phil: Now, the kudits is a religious artifact.
Tom: That's right, yes.
Tom: The kudits fails to achieve either purpose.
Tom: So, he becomes worldly and sells the kudits.
Tom: And she loses her faith.
Phil: And that's the end of the story?
Phil: Okay, so the way I see the narrative was that she was a young lady.
Phil: She was seeing a...
Phil: She was engaged romantically with a...
Phil: Not engaged like Mary, but she was interacting with a...
Phil: Okay, she's the daughter of a bicycle shop owner.
Phil: And he's a bicycle thief.
Tom: That's the back story.
Phil: And he's a bicycle thief.
Phil: He's stealing from them.
Phil: He convinces her to try and steal money from the safe.
Phil: When the father finds out that they're stealing money from the safe, she says she doesn't know who he is, which results in her father killing her boyfriend.
Phil: She is then sent away to a nunnery to pay penance and try and get rid of this evilness of her.
Phil: And she has this guilt that's over her.
Phil: She starts to see hallucinations.
Phil: They try to give her confession, and she smashes away the bread and won't take the body of Christ into her.
Phil: This prompts the chief nun, whatever they're called, to then give her a letter to deliver to...
Tom: Mother Superior.
Phil: Mother Superior says, go deliver this letter to the bosses over in this other town.
Phil: And you just go.
Phil: Now, she doesn't feel...
Tom: She's essentially getting kicked out of the kibbutz.
Phil: Kicked out of the nunnery.
Phil: Now, she doesn't know this.
Phil: She's like, oh, well, this is a change of tone.
Phil: At least I'll get out of here.
Phil: She's been hallucinating, and she hears the voice that turns out to be what she thinks is the devil.
Phil: Perhaps.
Phil: On the way there, she interacts with an accident, which results in her finding a fugitive.
Phil: She has some level of medical training, and she finds some medicine that helps soothe his pain.
Phil: And basically, while they're travelling, he's helping her.
Tom: Before we move on...
Phil: Well, this is my narrative.
Tom: Yeah.
Phil: But go ahead.
Tom: What did you think of the train crash scene?
Phil: I thought it was good.
Phil: I didn't think it was realistic, but I thought it was really good.
Phil: The killing of the soldiers who were maimed, with the proud grandstanding by the dude who was in charge of them, or the doctor who was trying to put them down, you know, and give them peace.
Phil: I thought it was really, really visceral.
Phil: And yeah, I thought it was gritty.
Tom: I thought it was definitely, it was a highlight for me.
Tom: I found the whole scene very much the epitome of dark Russian humour.
Phil: Yeah, and we've got to say...
Tom: With the soldiers being given morphine as they're dying, and the train locomotive simultaneously sinking while they're on it.
Tom: Yeah, I thought it was great.
Phil: It was fantastic.
Phil: Again, this is a third person game, just so people can keep that in mind as well.
Phil: So she basically steals the morphine and the medicine kit.
Phil: The fugitive helps her escape.
Phil: Now they're on a different path.
Phil: So she basically keeps him drugged up the whole time through this, while still talking to the demons inside her head or the actual devil.
Phil: He believes that he's had a religious epiphany, and that is what is causing his gangrenous arm not to kill him.
Phil: I think perhaps his timeline is adjusted, and so he's not actually had it as long as he has, and he is dying on a normal timeline, but he now is deeply religious while she's questioning her faith.
Phil: As they travel through the country, various puzzles appear.
Phil: I find the puzzles to be cumbersome in terms of the game itself.
Tom: That's a very important part of the story.
Phil: But a very important part of the story, which we'll elaborate on later.
Phil: They finally get to the boss of the nuns.
Phil: He gets shot in an altercation because they want to see the coup d'etat.
Phil: You can't see the coup d'etat.
Phil: Dude ends up getting shot because security shoots him accidentally, or maybe the one-armed man, which is funny.
Tom: I think the one-armed man uses him as a human shield.
Phil: Did we joke about the Harrison Ford thing last episode?
Phil: Because he's the fugitive, he's got one arm, he's the one-armed man.
Phil: Maybe we didn't make that connection.
Tom: Actually, I think we did.
Phil: Okay, well, I just made it.
Phil: So, you know, now they're in trouble and they're on the run.
Phil: They go to the coup d'etat, the coup d'etat neither.
Phil: Now, I didn't know about the whole letter.
Phil: I never know that the letter was opened.
Phil: I thought he opened the letter, but he never let her see the content of the letter.
Phil: Now, the letter, of course, was a letter from the nun telling the boss of the nuns that this girl is fired, she refused communion, do whatever you want with her, but she's not coming back to the nunnery.
Phil: So that wasn't clear to me.
Phil: I knew that he had read it and knew the truth, but I didn't know that she had found out the truth.
Phil: Anyway, back to the story.
Phil: The coup d'etat doesn't work.
Phil: She somewhere along the line cuts off his arm to save his life, because that way the gangrenous stuff doesn't spread to his body.
Phil: He tries to join the arm back on while praying in front of the coup d'etat, truly believing it's going to work.
Phil: It doesn't.
Phil: From there, he becomes disillusioned.
Tom: We should add that she, in the factory area, had to cut off his arm.
Phil: Yep, and we'll get back to the factory too.
Phil: So disillusioned, they both escape with the coup d'etat.
Phil: He then becomes disconsolate, ultimately pawns the coup d'etat for four or five rubles, and then spends it all on alcohol.
Phil: She is on the run because of this murder situation, gets caught, allows herself to be...
Phil: goes to jail, allows herself to be raped in return for being released.
Phil: Isn't released because she knocks a shelf on top of him that effectively incapacitates him, though we're thought to believe that maybe the devil did this because he's helping her out the whole way.
Phil: Or maybe it's just a shelf.
Phil: She then flees, runs into the fellow...
Tom: Maybe it was the shelf that helped her out.
Phil: Maybe.
Phil: She ran back to the fellow who sold the coup d'ets, and I don't remember what happened after that.
Tom: I think she goes to the pawn shop.
Phil: Oh, yes.
Tom: Yes.
Phil: Goes and tries to retrieve the coup d'ets, sees herself in the mirror, and in fact, instead of seeing her reflection, realises that there's...
Phil: realising there's no religious value or spiritual value to the coup d'ets, sees...
Phil: looks into the mirror and no longer sees herself, but sees the devil.
Phil: And then I don't remember what happens.
Tom: That's...
Tom: I think it ends there.
Tom: She then leaves without the kittits.
Phil: Yep.
Tom: And wanders off.
Tom: And I think he comes back because he's bought a trumpet.
Tom: He used to be a musician.
Phil: Yep.
Tom: And can no longer play.
Tom: I think it was guitar or some other...
Phil: Yeah...
Tom: .
Tom: two-handed instrument.
Phil: Yeah, he was a guitar player.
Tom: So he bought a trumpet.
Phil: Yep.
Tom: But the trumpet is broken, so he returns to the pawn shop to try and return it, and she leaves, I believe.
Phil: And his name is Ilya, or Ilya, I-L-Y-A, just for the record.
Phil: And her name is Indica.
Phil: So that's pretty much the game.
Phil: Now, in between there, what I didn't talk about were some of the puzzle elements.
Phil: You mentioned the factory, for example.
Tom: That's right.
Phil: Anything notable about the factory?
Tom: I think actually the most notable puzzle, I don't think it was in the factory, but it was certainly near it, was one where you are navigating an area where the perspective changes depending on which pathway you take.
Tom: And you have to figure out how to fall through a hole and land on another surface rather than fall through a hole to your death.
Phil: Yep, that was after the factory.
Phil: So yeah, it took a while to figure that one out.
Phil: It was actually a lot like, well, it was like Portal, the Valve game.
Tom: Exactly.
Tom: And I think that was a highlight for two reasons.
Tom: One, it was quite interesting figuring out, seeing how things changed based on where you moved.
Tom: And it was a visually very impressive experience.
Tom: And also, you've got the devil walking around the area as you're going around.
Tom: And if I remember correctly, he's actually giving you the solution to the parallel.
Tom: If you follow him, and I maybe remember this incorrectly, but from my memory, if you follow him, that is actually the correct way to go to be able to fall to the right perspective.
Phil: Yes, and I was kind of lost in that for like the first probably seconds.
Phil: I was like, hang on, what's going on here?
Phil: Because you fall through the...
Phil: It doesn't look like a portal.
Phil: You go through the...
Phil: Oh, I'll just jump down there, and then you end up on the ceiling or on the wall.
Phil: But you don't realize that it's the same room that you were just in.
Phil: And so you ultimately have to figure it out.
Phil: I didn't follow the demon.
Phil: I never saw the demon.
Phil: But, you know, I'm not saying to be wrong.
Phil: I'm just saying, you know...
Tom: You're not saying I'm hallucinating.
Phil: No, no, no, not at all.
Phil: And like Super Mario Galaxy, there are platforming puzzles, and they repeat some of them, like the use of a crane is pretty consistent about throughout the game.
Phil: There's three instances where you use a crane, but you're using it differently each time.
Phil: They give you these little quirky puzzle type things to figure out, but they're never quite the same.
Phil: I don't like puzzles in my game, so I'll just say that.
Phil: So discount whatever I'm going to say, but I didn't really appreciate those ones.
Phil: I thought some of them, but they were all interesting.
Phil: And we've got to say that this game, while we've described it, sounds like a certain type of game, it's actually quite surreal.
Phil: So the puzzles that you're doing are surreal.
Phil: When you go into the factory, I never figured out what the hell was going on there.
Phil: They had these giant fish and these giant caviar tins, these tins which are about half the size of a human.
Phil: So let's say they're about three feet tall and about three feet wide that you have to platform over.
Tom: Technically, the fish weren't that big.
Tom: They looked a bit like shoe nuts.
Phil: No, no, the big fish that were coming through the side, remember getting pulled on those big chains?
Phil: Yeah, they were like the height of a person.
Phil: No, no, you missed something.
Tom: Where were the whale ones?
Phil: They had fish in there that looked like...
Tom: Well, whales do exist.
Phil: They looked like cod.
Phil: They had scales.
Phil: And they were being dragged through on a drag chain, these huge fish.
Phil: It was weird, and that never got addressed.
Phil: So that's the narrative.
Phil: My thing on it is that I think that the fugitive, Ilja, was a sincere and true character, and everything that you saw on screen was true in what was actually happening.
Phil: I think that his epiphany was brought about by the physical pain in his body.
Phil: Like he was basically...
Phil: Whatever he thought was happening because of hallucinations, because of medical implications.
Phil: I think Indica...
Phil: I don't think the devil existed in this game.
Phil: I think it's all in her head.
Phil: I think that when the devil is talking to her, that's just her dealing with the guilt of killing her boyfriend by denouncing him, like Judas.
Phil: And I think she's just fighting her own personal battles.
Phil: She's a girl or a young woman who's just in doubt of her faith.
Phil: And this is the mechanism for her to figure out what's going on.
Phil: So that's my whole take on the whole thing.
Phil: I think the sexual element of the game is also quite interesting.
Phil: There's lots of allusions to her being attracted to elements of Ilya.
Phil: And the devil taunts her in that fashion and says, Oh, you like his tanned arms and you want this and you want that.
Phil: And I think the fact that she became a nun, not by choice but by punishment, she's a normal young person.
Phil: Obviously, she's going to have a sexual interest.
Tom: I think one of the most interesting parts of that, which again is very Russian, and could be controversial, but I don't think anyone seemed to notice it, because of what perspective it came from.
Tom: But one of the most interesting scenes from that perspective is, this is all taking place during some form of civil war.
Tom: And when she meets Ilya, she goes into a house, and there's a soldier in there, who is about to rape someone, or so we think.
Tom: And she gets rescued by Ilya, and the devil is saying, wouldn't you have liked that to happen to you, or something along those lines, bearing in mind that she is a heterosexual woman, who has been stuck in nunnery for X number of years.
Phil: Right.
Phil: And then I think also the, quote, you know, rape scene, where she basically says, hey, there's got to be something I can do to you, do for you, to the guard at the end of the game, hey, you know, maybe there's something I can do for you, that you'll let me out of here.
Phil: So, you know, in that way, I don't think that was necessarily a rape.
Phil: It was certainly a male figure taking advantage of his authority position, which is abusive, but, you know, she was the one, not that he wasn't already thinking it, but she was the one that said, hey, you know, like, maybe if there's something I can do for you, and you'll let me out of here.
Phil: And then after the act, where he's doing up his belt and everything, she's like, okay, well, now you're going to let me out, right?
Phil: And when he said no, that's when, quote the devil, that's when the wardrobe got involved and crushed him.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: So I think that was like a really complex type theme that I haven't seen in any video game at all.
Phil: You talk about a mature game.
Phil: Like, you know, this is like really good storytelling in my perspective.
Tom: I think another example of that, which one might argue had sexual undertones to it or not, depending on whether it's a reference to No More Heroes or not.
Tom: Something, another mechanic in the game is, as you're going through the world, you are, if you come across religious icons, you get experience and you get to level up.
Tom: And there's like this money currency, coins jingling sort of sound accompanying it, which reminded me very much of the sound effects in No More Heroes, where Travis Touchdown is healing himself by masturbating.
Tom: And in what I think is brilliant, at the end of the game, when she is reaching her anti-religious epiphany, you get to the final religious icon you encounter, the most important of them all.
Tom: Yep, exactly.
Tom: And you can level up as much as you want by button mashing, essentially.
Tom: Again, very much like No More Heroes.
Tom: And given it is, I think, very clearly a story about losing your faith, I thought that was...
Tom: Let's just go with the No More Heroes theory.
Tom: One, it was absolutely hilarious way of doing this.
Tom: But two, I think it was presenting, I think, prayer as a masturbatory coping mechanism, essentially.
Phil: I think that, you know, there's plenty of symbolism that can be taken from this game.
Phil: You know, I could probably write a thousand essays saying, oh, well, this means this and this means that, which would also be a masturbatory philosophical exercise.
Phil: But, you know, I think that's...
Phil: We talked about the gameplay in the last episode.
Phil: Certainly, you should...
Tom: Yeah, don't misunderstand.
Tom: Here at The Game Under Podcast, we're % pro-masturbation.
Phil: Yes, let it all out.
Tom: And might I just add, particularly in the age of OnlyFans, I'm pretty sure that, I mean, masturbation is presented as a metaphor as something that is only for yourself, that other people are not interested in.
Phil: Right.
Tom: It's essentially criticising you for being too personal.
Phil: Is it not?
Tom: And therefore isolating yourself from society.
Phil: Well, there you go.
Phil: You've gone and done the symbolism for us.
Tom: But I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure that people enjoy watching other people masturbate.
Phil: We talked about gameplay in the last episode, and we didn't go into spoiler territory about that.
Phil: We've talked about the story, obviously, a fair bit in this.
Phil: I don't want to go on to spoiler territory for the gameplay.
Phil: I don't know that we necessarily need to talk about the gameplay in terms of spoilers.
Phil: I think, unless you just...
Tom: I think we already did with the scene we were just talking about.
Phil: Yeah, yeah.
Phil: And then, of course, the scores mean, the points mean nothing, which, you know, I think is a metaphor for, you know, all the good deeds you do throughout life, thinking that it's going to give you some sort of religious score in heaven isn't worth anything.
Phil: And they even say early on in the game that the points don't mean anything.
Phil: It's a waste of time.
Phil: But even so, I did light the candle every time I saw a religious artifact.
Phil: I lit the candle and the sign of the cross and prayed.
Phil: Did you go and...
Phil: Did you see the one time where you lit a cross or lit a candle and did this...
Phil: and didn't get a reward?
Tom: When was that?
Phil: So in the factory, if you go off onto the side a little bit, there is a candle and you light it.
Phil: And instead of being a religious depiction...
Tom: Karl Marx.
Phil: Yeah, exactly.
Phil: It's Karl Marx.
Phil: And you get no points for that.
Phil: It's a wonderful...
Phil: I don't know.
Phil: You are always critical of writing, so I'm not going to say it was a wonderfully written game, but I'm going to say that the story in this game is...
Phil: the storytelling in this game is fantastic.
Phil: And when I say storytelling, I'm not talking about the words or the plot necessarily.
Phil: I'm also talking about the actions that you do, some of which we talked about in the last episode.
Tom: I think the writing in it was excellent.
Phil: Great.
Phil: That's good to hear.
Phil: Do you think that the devil actually exists in this game, or do you buy into my thing that it's all in the head?
Tom: I think very obviously the devil is her own thoughts.
Phil: The developer described the character as a combination of mature intellect and sometimes childish simplicity and naivety.
Tom: I would say that's a description of the character.
Tom: It's definitely a description of the character.
Phil: Did he describe Ilya?
Phil: I don't have that in front of me.
Phil: Now, again, we talked about the D elements of this game and the D elements of the game in the last episode.
Phil: What do you think that was about thematically?
Phil: Why do you think those D elements were in the game?
Phil: Is it part of the iconography of this form of religion?
Phil: Or am I reading too much?
Tom: I think it was a way of breaking up the game play.
Tom: But also, I would say that's the main reason.
Tom: I think probably also as a way of aesthetically giving events from the past a retro sort of feel.
Phil: Yeah, I was thinking maybe more mythic, because when you think back on your memories, they're not quite photoperfect.
Phil: I mean, mine are, but maybe also all of those D levels were really difficult and required leaps of faith.
Phil: The Frog one required a leap of faith.
Phil: There was other ones.
Phil: The original platformer required leaps of faith, you know, jumping on platforms that didn't yet exist.
Phil: And that was repeated back in the pond level as well.
Phil: The driving game, I didn't think added much to it at all, but perhaps what it was saying there is that you think you're in control, but you don't actually have much control.
Tom: I don't know.
Tom: I didn't have any issues with the controls.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: So there's got to be something in there.
Phil: But obviously the leaps of faith are quite, you know, for someone who doesn't speak English as their first language, Dimitri Svetlov, you know, that's too easy of a thing not to use in a D platformer.
Phil: And for it to repeat itself in two different of those D stages was obvious.
Phil: And so, yeah, I think...
Tom: Before we move on from the story, we were in the previous segment on Indica talking about some of the marketing of the game and some of the classic commentary on the Steam forum and in reviews.
Tom: And I think it holds up to the likes of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.
Tom: It's not really...
Tom: It may be influenced in some ways by both of them, perhaps aesthetically by Dostoevsky, perhaps on a surface level by Nietzsche in terms of the way the devil is presented and the part of Indica's psyche that she represents.
Tom: But I think unlike both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, it's really just a simple story of two people, not just Indica, but I think Ilya as well, who lose their faith...
Tom: Actually, I'll correct that.
Tom: I think the interesting thing about it is, you've got two characters, one of whom loses their faith, and one of them who does not.
Tom: Because Ilya loses his religious faith, but as we heard from the beginning, his main thing in life is that he is a musician.
Tom: And in the end, what does he do?
Tom: He sells the religious artifact to be able to buy an instrument.
Tom: And at the end, when the instrument does not work, he's still trying to solve that problem.
Tom: Whereas Indica, who has lost her faith, is essentially left in sort of like a blank state, where we don't know what's going to happen to her next, or what she's going to do.
Tom: Whereas Ilya is essentially still in the same position.
Tom: So I thought it was as a story of losing your faith with the opposite occurring, where someone is essentially continuing on with an obsession as their way to cope with the world, and ends up stuck essentially in the same place.
Tom: I thought it was very interesting.
Phil: I think so too.
Phil: You know, Indica did some less than good things, and so did Ilya.
Phil: And she was full of doubts, and obviously Ilya's moral compass was, you know, not pointing to due north.
Phil: Perhaps neither of them were worthy of a miracle.
Phil: And because neither one of them showed repentance at the end.
Phil: Like, did Indica ever take on her responsibility for the death of a former romantic, you know, we'll call her, call him a lover?
Tom: North of the victim of the wardrobe.
Phil: Right.
Phil: So like, in a way, it's like, maybe the credits didn't work because these guys, well, you know, like in Christian faith, it's not about, it's not about deeds, right?
Phil: So maybe if their faith should have, under the modern philosophy of Christianity, their faith should have been enough.
Phil: It's not by actions, it's by, what do they say?
Phil: It's not by deeds, it's by faith, right?
Phil: So in this case, if it...
Tom: Well, they would be orthodox Christians, so would they not?
Phil: Right.
Phil: Yeah, definitely.
Phil: But I'm saying if Ilya, Ilya was delivering all the faith, and that wasn't rewarded at all.
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: Indica had no faith, but had plenty of actions and plenty of deeds.
Phil: You know, she's taking care of this guy.
Phil: She's caring for him.
Phil: She did all the work that nuns asked her to do without complaint.
Phil: But she didn't have faith at all.
Phil: So I think perhaps, like if you wanted to do this through the current Christian philosophy, you know, Ilya would have been rewarded at the end for demonstrating his faith with no evidence.
Phil: No evidence.
Phil: Like he's putting this dead arm up to his arm trying to connect it like I think four times in total before he gives up.
Phil: You know, he was definitely showing blind faith.
Phil: But you know, even though his prior deeds were probably more criminal than Indica, but Indica did all the deeds but had no faith.
Phil: So I don't think that there was a satisfactory payoff at the end of the game if you wanted to satisfy that traditional Christian view.
Phil: But like I'm...
Tom: I think it's trying to do the opposite.
Tom: Like I said, I think the main thrust of the story is losing faith.
Tom: Not within a Christian context, but within an atheist context.
Tom: It's going from being a believer to no longer being a believer.
Phil: I don't know that Indica ever believed.
Tom: I think she believed in an attempt to deal with what occurred.
Phil: Yeah, but I don't think she believed.
Phil: I don't think she did.
Phil: And when you think about the fact that at the start of the game, the devil jumps out of the nun's mouth to knock the body of Christ, the bread, from her hands.
Phil: And obviously...
Tom: Sorry, what I mean is, I think she attempted to believe.
Phil: Yeah, I do too.
Tom: Hence why the devil is there, as her psyche, telling her not to.
Tom: Because it's not what she truly believes.
Phil: Let's say the hallucination at the start of the game, with the nun thing, running out of the nun's mouth and knocking the body of Christ out of her hand.
Phil: Let's say that didn't exist, which is what a normal, human, reasonable person would say, because obviously that couldn't have existed in our understanding of how things work.
Phil: Which means she actually did just physically reject confession.
Phil: Yep.
Phil: Which is like a death sentence, basically, for a nun.
Phil: Like, we have to assume that she did that, consciously or not.
Phil: The depiction in the game is that it wasn't a choice of hers, that this is something that happened to hers.
Phil: But, you know, she's making herself a victim for an action that she elected to take on.
Phil: You know, I just don't think she's a person of faith.
Phil: I don't.
Tom: By the same token, we could say, to our understanding, this could not have occurred.
Tom: To a believer, it could have occurred.
Phil: Yeah, I don't think so.
Phil: I think she's a bad person.
Phil: I mean, she stole from her father.
Phil: When she got caught, she pinned it on her lover.
Phil: Her lover got shot because she denied who he was.
Phil: She could have said, Dad, hey, I know this guy.
Phil: This isn't what it looks like.
Phil: Please, don't do anything rash.
Phil: And it would have been saved.
Phil: I think she's a bad seed from the start to finish.
Phil: And all the good things she does is just deeds without faith.
Phil: But here's to more Russian games.
Phil: The bottom line is we want more video games from Russians.
Tom: I agree.
Phil: Anything else?
Tom: I think that pretty much covers it.
Phil: Well, we've gone a little bit long here, and it's going to go even longer once I include part of episode
Phil: So thanks for listening to The Game Under Podcast.
Phil: We've been doing this since so there's a lot of resources covering games from that time to now at our website, gameunder.net.
Phil: If you'd like to submit a question, use our comments section from our homepage underneath the story for this episode.
Phil: Thanks again for listening to episode of The Game Under Podcast.
Phil: I'm Phil Fogg.
Tom: I'm Tom Towers.
Tom: And don't forget to masturbate while you play Doom.
Phil: Well, with that, we're gonna continue on with our indie game, March, a game that we've both played, Dear Esther, right?
Phil: Yeah, well, the setting, everything about this game is melodramatic.
Phil: You know, the setting, the acting.
Phil: So I didn't find that to be out of place.
Phil: I didn't find it enjoyable.
Tom: It, but the base level of melodrama with the narration is fine.
Tom: That's in tune with the rest of it, I would say.
Tom: But when it gets to an emotional moment in the writing, a more dramatic moment in the writing, he then goes completely over the top and does start attempting to genuinely act.
Tom: And it's just incredibly bad.
Tom: And it's not only incredibly badly done because the acting is awful and the writing isn't written to be read in that way aloud.
Tom: But on top of that, it doesn't fit with the tone of the rest of the game.
Tom: The comparable thing to what it would be, actually, where it might fit and have a direct comparison to something in the game, is the rather overwrought and much like some parts of Golem hitting you over the head with a shovel where you're moving through the environment and not the graffiti, but where they've got like, say, a tire stuck on the ground completely incongruously.
Tom: That's basically the equivalent in the performance of the narrator, which once again in the environment, that takes the melodrama a little bit too far and is way too overstated.
Tom: Whereas in the writing, if you actually listen to what he's being said, there's a very small range to the amount of drama and all the peaks that it reaches are generally built up very slowly too.
Tom: It's not some sort of obvious over the top, here's a tire stuck in a fucking rock face.
Tom: What do you think this means type thing?
Phil: Right, right.
Tom: Now-
Phil: Yeah, I'm sorry, but I mean, I'm listening to you and I mean, we just talked about Gone Home earlier in the show.
Phil: Stanley Parable we've given a great deal of time to.
Phil: It seems like these indie, these small teams, for a while there, they were stuck on D platformers with a unique art style, right?
Phil: And now you look in the course of one year, you've got the Stanley Parable, Gone Home and Dear Esther, all games that are first-person action games or first-person exploration games, more importantly.
Tom: Or first-person puzzle.
Phil: Yeah, first-person puzzle games.
Phil: And I don't think they've really, on the D platforming side, they never really achieved great platforming with the exception of Super Meat Boy.
Phil: Right, I mean, they were always leaning on their art style or their story or, oh my God, you know, sort of stuff.
Phil: And with this first-person puzzle exploration genre, with Stanley Parable and Gone Home and Dear Esther, they really haven't added anything at all.
Phil: And they get so much critical praise all three of these games.
Phil: And to me, it's completely inexplicable.
Phil: And it's only because I think there's a whole two generations of gamers at this point that have been brought up on first-person shooters being the preeminent genre.
Tom: Yep.
Phil: And the very fact that someone is doing something different with that first-person genre.
Phil: So rather than giving credence to a game like Mirror's Edge, which is a game that, you know, or Breakdown, you know, games that revolutionarily challenge the first-person notion, it's these games.
Tom: Or Anti-Chamber.
Phil: Or Anti-Chamber, indeed.
Phil: Or Portal, right?
Phil: So give credit where credits do, but these three games are completely unspectacular.
Phil: The best of them is The Stanley Parable because of its humor.
Phil: Gone Home is a fucking mess.
Phil: And this game, when I played it, just to give my impressions of it, it was incomprehensibly horrible.
Phil: It was just mind-numbingly incomprehensibly horrible.
Phil: And I was disgusted with myself that I had paid any sort of money to play it.
Phil: It gave me nothing at all.
Tom: Do you think this also might have something to do with adventure games having, as far as the general consciousness, completely disappeared?
Tom: Because if you look at Dear Esther, Gone Home and Stanley Parable, all of them are doing, they're not really doing anything new within the first person perspective full stop anyway, because first person perspective games, first person perspective adventure games like this have always existed.
Tom: Not always, but for a very long time.
Tom: Would you put mist in that category?
Phil: Would you put mist in that category?
Tom: I would.
Tom: You can always consider it something different given that it's not a full motion thing where you're literally walking around, you've got to click on the like.
Tom: But even within this sort of very artsy thing, But even within this sort of very artsy thing, if you look back a few years further back than this, for something that is basically exactly the same style of thing, and it might be terrible, I haven't played it, but you've then got The Void as well, which is once again, and probably more of an adventure game than these two, but once again a very artsy first person game where you just go around walking around looking stuff, but I believe The Void does have some puzzles in it, but I'm not sure about that.
Tom: So it's not as if they're even actually doing anything new or innovative or exciting at all, because when you look at Portal or Antichamber, the great thing about them and even Portal isn't necessarily that they're just doing puzzles in first person, it's what they're doing with those puzzles that is great and notable about both of them.
Tom: And the fact that these games are in first person isn't really relevant because they're not really doing anything with that.
Phil: With that, we should probably describe the mechanics of Dear Esther.
Phil: You're basically walking around in first person, first person exploring, first person exploring and you know, it reminded me greatly of the game that came out in the Xbox generation, Call of Cthulhu, which was a first person exploration game with some very light shooter elements to it, which was also lauded by those who had a great appreciation for video games, but otherwise pretty much ignored.
Tom: Yep, and just one other game that Dear Esther brings to mind is Proteus, which I would put above all Dear Esther, Gone Home, Stanley Power, which is perhaps not saying a lot, but it actually deserves, I would say, the credit for doing something slightly different, at least within the sphere of mainstream gaming, because there are a huge amount of art games from years gone by that have done the same exact sort of thing as Proteus.
Phil: Is Proteus a juice game?
Tom: Juice?
Phil: Juice Van Dongen?
Tom: No, no, no, that's prune.
Phil: Prune, prune.
Tom: That's a racing game, that's nothing like these words.
Tom: That's a genuine, proper great game.
Phil: Yeah, is it a first person racing game, though?
Tom: No.
Tom: It's a ball on a tube racing game.
Phil: Ball on tube.
Phil: Oh, it's a, yeah, okay, tubes glider, yeah.
Tom: Exactly, so Proteus, which we did talk about on an old episode, what sets that apart from all these three games, which are pretty much going, at least within the world, for the exact same thing, is the only thing in Proteus is the world.
Tom: You walk around the world, that is literally it.
Tom: And it doesn't attempt or say it is anything more than that whatsoever.
Tom: Despite, in theory, being incredibly pretentious, all the pretenses that it puts forth, it succeeds in because it never says that it is more than what it actually is.
Tom: And it does all the things that Dear Esther, Stanley Parable, minus the humor, obviously, but in terms of the world, and Gone Home Do, but it doesn't dilute that pure, interesting feeling of exploring a world.
Tom: So that it then is a relatively unique experience because that is literally all there is in the game.
Tom: Whereas in Dear Esther, the world, there isn't just the world.
Tom: And you've also got the narration, which is applying a narrative to the world, open as it is, it's still adding another element to it in a very overt manner.
Tom: And then within the world as well, it's attempting to present, to add to the narrative as well with the really stupid stuff like sticking tires and crap like that everywhere.
Tom: And in Gone Home, of course, it's got an overt narrative as well.
Tom: Yet, they're still attempting to present the world in many ways in exactly the same way as Proteus, which I don't think necessarily works.
Tom: If you're going to make a game where all you do is walk, and that's basically the only game mechanic as it is in all three of those games.
Tom: And the other elements are gonna be pretty flimsy.
Tom: And the humor allows Stanley Powell to get away with this a lot.
Tom: So it's not as much a problem with Stanley Powell.
Tom: But if you're doing that, then I think if you're sticking in extraneous stuff, it then takes away with what you're immediately interacting in with the game, which is the world itself.
Tom: So it then makes it harder for you to immediately engage with what is the crux of the game play and your interaction with the game.
Tom: Yep, so the reason the writing is so terrible is first of all, is the language, which is really, really badly written to be let aloud because the word choice generally goes for obscure ways to describe simple actions, which results in some really, really jagged and jarring language so that the narrator, for all his flaws, had absolutely no hope whatsoever to read aloud what was written and make it sound at all good whatsoever.
Tom: For % of it.
Tom: The language is just absolutely awful.
Tom: And the second problem is, of course, the obscure content.
Tom: And the third major problem with Dear Esther, and I'm basing all this on my first attempt to playing this, which was last year when I was attempting to get through a lot of games quickly.
Tom: The major problem with Dear Esther, though, is in fact related directly to the basic gameplay mechanics, and that is how unbelievably slowly you move in the game.
Tom: Because once again, if you're, Don.
Phil: No, you're absolutely right.
Tom: If you're attempting to engage with what is genuinely brilliantly illustrated world, the folly, the movement of the folly, the degree of movement is just brilliant in all the plant life.
Tom: The colors are great, and not only the colors are great, there's a consistent change in colors as you go over the entire game that flows from one thing to the next so brilliantly.
Tom: And within those individual basic colors, there's always a really great amount of detail and changes like at the start of the game where you're in a mainly area full of vegetation, sand and rocks where it's mostly greens and grays and dull sort of colors.
Tom: Here and there, you come across details like flowers and stuff which prevents that from becoming just over the top and boring and later on, when you're in the caves and it's predominantly blue, you then come across interesting yellows and things like that.
Tom: The word itself is if you took that word by itself visually, it is a brilliant work of Kitsch art, Kitsch visual art where it's completely and utterly meaningless and artistically uninteresting.
Tom: But at the same time, if Kitsch art is genuine art and great art, what the fuck does that matter because it's still inherently enjoyable to look at, right?
Phil: Well, yeah, they do the whole punch list thing.
Phil: They, it's almost on the level of the black velvet painting kind of thing.
Phil: But I mean, okay, so that's fine.
Phil: Without a good game behind it, this is first-
Tom: And this is what I'm saying, this is what I'm saying.
Tom: So the world is beautiful.
Tom: But then unlike in Proteus, they're sticking a game on top of it.
Tom: So in Proteus, you move really slowly as well.
Tom: But because the only object is to just look around the environment and see what you can find and enjoy it until the game ends after minutes or whenever it automatically stops, it doesn't matter.
Tom: Here, you're attempting to go somewhere, right?
Tom: So if you wander around the island, exploring it and enjoying it because it looks so nice, and you then end up in a corner, you look back, you've just looked through there, right?
Tom: So you're then thinking, I've now got to spend fucking minutes walking meters through the same thing, which might not be as bad if all you're doing is just enjoying the scenery.
Tom: Because if you go for a walk, walking back home is never that, it's still enjoyable, right?
Tom: It's part of the journey.
Tom: But if you then got it at the back of your mind, well, actually the game wants me to go here.
Tom: It completely changes what you're then gonna think of if you've walked into a corner and that's not where you were meant to go.
Tom: You're then gonna be fucking pissed off.
Tom: And I remember, I got up to the part with the shipwrecks and where you're then meant to go is up a hill, so it's not immediately obvious.
Tom: And I ended up walking around that area like three times or something.
Tom: Each time becoming more and more pissed off so the likelihood of me finding the correct path decreased every single time.
Tom: And just think to myself, if there was a fucking sprint button here, not only would have I found where the fuck I meant to be going minutes ago, this game would not be nearly as fucking annoying as it actually is, right?
Phil: Yeah, and the fact of the matter is, whatever they were trying to say with this game, people do sprint in real life.
Tom: Yep.
Phil: I mean, particularly if you're in a spooky scenario like this where you're racing to get to the truth, you're not gonna casually stroll along.
Phil: You're gonna be racing.
Phil: You're gonna be grabbing at rocks.
Phil: You're gonna be climbing up desperately to see this thing that you're trying to find, you know?
Tom: And think about this, because at one stage-
Phil: It would add to the tension.
Tom: Yep, and think about this, because near the end, the narrator, and this is perhaps a spoiler, breaks his leg.
Tom: So imagine if you'd be able to run up to that point where he breaks his leg, and from then on, you had to walk.
Tom: You might have become then engaged in the world and the story so that it didn't matter.
Tom: But even if it became a huge pain in the ass, which probably still would have, at least there's some narrative reason and explanation for that being the case, that is gonna then draw you further into the story, right?
Phil: Right, it's the old Gears of War thing where they make you walk slow with your finger to your ear while they load the next level, you know?
Phil: You know you're not doing it for any reason other than for them to load the level, so you're not actually listening to whatever they're telling you because you're just like, oh, this is cheesy.
Phil: You know?
Phil: So with this game, yeah, what else do you have to say about it?
Phil: I mean, to me, this game was the most pointless game I've ever attempted to try and beat.
Phil: It was just a complete and utter waste of time.
Tom: Yep, well, as I was gonna say, those were my first impressions when I originally played it, right?
Tom: Yep, so then I came back to it recently to finish it after that famous moment of getting lost, which was previously mentioned, and immediately figured out where I was wanting to go.
Tom: And my opinion on the game actually began to change, which pretty much blew my mind, I have to say, because at this stage, when I went back to it, I fucking despised the game, right?
Tom: Exactly as you did.
Tom: But then when I started to play it again, and just thought, well, fuck this, I'm not really gonna care about the story, because it is pretty much a load of bullshit anyway.
Tom: Or the world itself, because the movement gets in the way of enjoying the world.
Tom: So I'm just gonna enjoy it as a walk through something that looks pretty, right?
Tom: So the first thing I noticed was two notable things about the writing.
Tom: The first is three actually, notable things about the writing.
Tom: The first is the language isn't actually as bad as it appears at first.
Tom: Certainly as language written to be read aloud, it is still a failure.
Tom: But if you're reading it as prose, it's actually successful, because there is a reason for the choice of words, not simply for the sake of obscurity, but to create a certain feeling, because what's illustrating is when they describe something like someone dying as being rendered opaque, which is, I'm not saying that's a particularly good thing, but it is justified, because what it is illustrating is the protagonist, who is probably not actually the protagonist, disassociating his grief.
Tom: So all the moments where he's talking about, and we're gonna be going to spoiler at this stage, all the moments where he's talking about his killing of Esther, except in a very, very few brief moments, the language is completely in the vein of disassociation, where, which you might find done in many, many different ways.
Tom: Like for example, we were talking about it with the Call of Duty drone scene, right?
Tom: Where people were using disassociating language, right?
Tom: So this is exactly the same thing here, which is, once again, pretty impressive for writing in a game.
Tom: The second thing is, the rhythm of the writing is exceptionally good, which doesn't come across in the narration.
Tom: One, because the word choice just stands out as sounding like utter shit.
Tom: And two, it's a flaw in the narrator, because reading through bits of the script, that should really be easy to read aloud and make sound sound okay apart from the word choice.
Tom: But certainly in terms of rhythm and cadence, it's written perfectly fine.
Tom: But thirdly, the most shocking thing about the writing that I discovered was, it contains genuine voice in the writing, which frankly, I can't think of a single game that I've played containing.
Tom: And most games, it's hard for there to be a voice in writing because it's just a script.
Tom: And scripts are deliberately voiceless because they're attempting to create character voice, which doesn't usually actually work, and is almost never achieved in any medium.
Tom: But nevertheless, they're deliberately avoiding having any voice within the script.
Tom: Here, the writing, and it is mangled very much by the narrator, but the writing actually has genuine voice to it, which creates a genuine momenting and flow to the writing, and illustrates the characters, the two characters, surprisingly well given what they're working with, and given the presentation, I should say, where it's using very small narrative snippets of stream of consciousness.
Phil: Would it be worth it to play the game just for that?
Tom: I wouldn't say, it's definitely not worth it to play this version of Dear Esther just for that, absolutely not.
Tom: But, I mean, that's pretty fucking shocking to me, at least.
Tom: As I say, I cannot think of a single game with writing which contains a genuine voice in it.
Phil: Hmm, I'd really have to think about that.
Phil: There surely should be some other instance.
Tom: Well, it wouldn't be surprising if there isn't, because genuine voice in writing that is a completely genuine thing, straight out of the author, whether it's illustrating the characters or the author themselves, is incredibly rare in any form of writing.
Tom: It's not just in video games.
Tom: In the vast majority of article writing, even if the writing is genuinely great or brilliant, writing actually has no voice beyond what is being constructed in the writing by the pros.
Tom: Pros, construction and voice are two separate entities.
Tom: And the genius of voice, and to me why voice is the only mark of genuine talent in writing, is because what voice is, is managing to convey information or feeling through writing, not through the pros or the poetry.
Tom: Which means you could construct, you could have two people construct a section of pros and do it technically exactly the same.
Tom: And the person with genuine voice would be able to create something completely and utterly different.
Tom: It's similar to the sort of thing that Hemingway goes on and on about, but never does in his own writing because he is a talentless hack, where he's saying a great writer can deliberately remove information from writing and still have it conveyed to the reader if the author was great and knew it was there.
Tom: Whereas a bad writer removes the information they're ignorant of, right?
Phil: Right, right, right, yep.
Tom: Which is the prose way of looking at it, which you can deliberately do that in prose, but it becomes an artificial feeling.
Tom: And it's a different experience when you're reading something that's done that deliberately by someone who is a skillful writer and has learned this skill, to when you're reading it by someone who's talented and does it effortlessly and naturally and automatically.
Phil: Do you think the first-person perspective adds to that or underscores the use of voice?
Tom: Well, we're gonna get to this now because I'm gonna move into talking about the mod a bit, which where this is relevant because the big difference between the mod and the actual game is the fidelity of the world.
Tom: In the mod, the mastering at first appears absolutely terrible, not just visually, but aurally as well.
Tom: The music is way, way too loud.
Tom: The narration is too quiet.
Tom: The sound effects are louder than both of them.
Tom: It's really poorly mastered at an audio level.
Tom: And visually, it is as well, but maybe this is deliberate because why the mod version of Dear Esther succeeds and the remake fails is the lack of fidelity in the world.
Tom: So in the mod, a lot of the game is pretty much a silhouette.
Tom: When you're outdoors or in a cave, what was that?
Phil: Oh, I'm just surprised by that.
Tom: Yep.
Tom: You can basically see almost nothing.
Tom: Everything is really dark.
Tom: It's hardly detailed at all.
Tom: If you're moving to an environment and a torch gets turned on, then you can see things perfectly clear.
Tom: So it's not just that I had my brightness too low, obviously.
Tom: So when you're walking down, for example, say a ravine with trees growing up into the sky that's lighter than the ground, when you're looking up at those trees, they're literally a silhouette.
Tom: They're just black against a dark background.
Tom: Whereas in the game, they're perfectly detailed and %.
Tom: You know, you can see everything perfectly clearly.
Tom: So what this allows the writing to then do is to add all the emotion and narrative context and feeling to the world, so that then the world and the writing complement each other, rather than basically being two completely clear and obvious things that may as well be completely unrelated to the other.
Tom: So because the world is so rudimentary and simple, then the writing absolutely benefits the world so much.
Tom: And while the world in the mod version of Dear Esther is completely ugly and uninteresting, if you were to look at it in terms of detail, when you then combine the two with the really simple details, then they both complement one another.
Tom: And then because the world provides a really simple base for the writing, then the terrible language of the writing isn't as jarring either, because you've then got something that is already really, really garish, which is basically a mixture of contrast, which is what silhouettes are, so that the two completely complement each other perfectly in an exactly the same manner.
Phil: So the mod, is it difficult to obtain?
Phil: Is this something that you have to tweak your computer for, or install other engines, or is this now available?
Tom: The only issue with the mod is having to put up with Steam's bullshit modding system, which required me to re-download Steam SDK, despite having installed, which was about gigabytes or something.
Phil: Holy cow, yeah.
Tom: So apart from the bullshit valve modding system, you can just go to ModDB and download it with no problems whatsoever.
Phil: And the audio, does it remain poor throughout?
Tom: Absolutely, and I think the best two reasons to play Dear Esther is the actual, the remake is simply because it looks pretty and the music is very good as well.
Tom: And the music, I would say is much better in the sequel.
Tom: It is a lot more complex and subtle in the mod, apart from the terrible mastering, it's a lot more of percussive pianos and more obvious horror music and that sort of thing.
Tom: But once again, it fits perfectly with the mod.
Tom: If you're only to be master better because the mod is very much about stark contrast.
Tom: Whereas the main game is all about meanless subtlety that never actually comes together.
Tom: But if you were to listen, I would say it's not worth, you wouldn't wanna play the remake over the original for the music, but I would say you might wanna listen to the soundtrack on Bandcamp or something.
Phil: Okay, so I mean, that's a pretty good synopsis of not only the full game, but also the mod.
Phil: I've obviously already given you my opinion of it.
Phil: I'd give the game probably a in that it did not crash my computer, but it did take up some of my bandwidth cap.
Tom: Didn't Gone Home get a one for not crashing your computer?
Phil: It got a one, but it also had the good audio, which gave it a .
Phil: So this one just gets a because it was a complete waste of time.
Phil: I would have been better off spending my money going to the store and buying a garden gnome.
Phil: And then, because at least then I'd have the satisfaction of smashing it against the pavement on my way out of the store.
Phil: This game provided no satisfaction whatsoever.
Phil: It made me hate video games slightly more.
Phil: And since I love video games, it had hardly any impact on me whatsoever.
Phil: So do you have a score for this one?
Tom: So you're not a fan of garden gnomes?
Phil: Well, no, I don't like the cheeky way they look at you.
Tom: So does this stem from some childhood trauma?
Phil: No, no, not at all.
Phil: Not at all.
Phil: I just don't like them.
Phil: I don't like their attitude.
Phil: I don't like the way they dress.
Phil: I don't like the way they put their noses up in the air.
Phil: And they pretend to be the common man, like, oh, we're good around the garden and everything.
Phil: But all they do is stand there, but they don't do anything at all.
Phil: They're mere perfunctuaries.
Tom: And you complain about me with America.
Phil: I do.
Phil: You know, I mean, it's about time we got onto this gnomes.
Phil: The gnomes, man.
Phil: Someone's gotta do something.
Phil: Exactly.
Phil: So this game is worse than smashing a garden gnome.
Tom: Well, smashing a garden gnome is pretty good.
Phil: Yeah, pretty satisfactory.
Phil: So.
Tom: Yeah, so I'm now gonna give it a score and giving it a score is hard because the second time through, probably, gone.
Phil: My prediction is two.
Tom: You're saying a two?
Tom: Yep.
Tom: It's hard to score for me because probably I enjoyed going back to it more than I enjoyed the Stanley Parable at times, I must say.
Tom: Because the Stanley Parable's humor does only go so far.
Tom: And the world in Dear Esther at least looks consistently good apart from shoving car tires into your face.
Tom: Now, the final thing, the stupidest fucking part of Dear Esther is the end where you don't even get to climb the fucking tower yourself.
Tom: What the fuck is that?
Phil: Yeah.
Phil: I don't.
Tom: I mean, the whole game is get into that fucking tower and climbing the fucking tower, right?
Phil: Yep.
Tom: You get to the goddamn tower, that's your fucking-
Phil: Yeah.
Tom: Go on.
Phil: It has to be some artistic point, which makes it even worse, quite frankly.
Tom: Yeah, it's just so fucking stupid.
Tom: I mean, surely that could have let you climb that goddamn tower.
Phil: They're making some sort of artistic choice, man.
Phil: I mean, I guarantee they're taking control away from you because at this point, you would have no control.
Phil: You know, whatever.
Phil: So give it a score.
Tom: I am, and that made slightly more sense in the ending of the mod, at least.
Tom: But the score, as I said, it's hard to score, given that I'm so tempted to give it a higher score than the Stanley Parable, but I gave that a six, right?
Tom: So that's impossible, obviously.
Tom: Obviously.
Tom: What, I gave Gone Home what?
Phil: You gave Gone Home a three.
Phil: A two, yeah.
Phil: I gave it a one, you gave it a two.
Tom: Well, that's easy, and I'm giving it a four.
Tom: It is twice as good as Gone Home because the music is better and it looks better.
Tom: Because while Gone Home used music well, fuck s feminist punk.
Tom: Fuck that shitty music to hell.
Phil: All right, well, if you're not gonna take this exercise seriously, we'll accept your four out of which is almost mediocre.
Tom: That's right.
Tom: Can I give this sequel a score?
Tom: Yes, yeah.
Tom: The mod, I mean, and I forgot to say, Gargondyp Singh's prediction for Dear Esther was a one.
Phil: Right, right on.
Tom: So, it was close.
Phil: Yep, closer to me than you.
Tom: Yep, close.
Tom: I'm going to give the mod version a which I can, in good conscience, rate higher than the Stanley Parable.
Phil: Okay.
Phil: Well, good for you, mate.
Tom: Yep.
Tom: And trust me, I wanted to hate it, just as you did.
Tom: Believe me, I tried my best.
Phil: Well, with that, we bring this episode of The Game Under Show.
Tom: No, we don't, technically.
Tom: No.
Phil: You can follow me at GameUnderPhil on Twitter, or you can go to gameunder.net, where you can leave a comment about this show.
Phil: But we want to hear about your opinions of what we've said and also your opinions on the games.
Phil: And the easiest way to do that is just to tweet me at GameUnderPhil on Twitter.