Burrowing Mechanics and Level Design

For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters . Tremphya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremphaia is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Trimphya, proper training is required. Tremphia is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis, serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Trimfaya today. Call 1-800- 526-7736 to learn more or visit Tremfa Radio dot com . This episode is brought to you by Weather Tech. Everyone knows winter is the MVP and make it a mess. You don't need WeatherTechor flo liners in the summer unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner or road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those Weather Tech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably gonna step into the summer. You don't need weather tech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit WeatherTech.com today. Hello, and welcome into the Ringerverse, your Nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Lindburg, Ben Lindburg, Button Mash host. With me today is the Ringer's deputy art lead, the Matt with the Golden Gun. Matt James. Hi, Matt. Hey, Ben . Matt with the golden pun. Even. I don't know. Rounding out our trio is a ringer senior audio producer and a member of the Midnight Boys. Castivo Royale, Steve Allman. Hello, Steve. I'm always shaken and never stirred. Well look, fellas, we have a lot to talk about. Last week I mentioned that there was a game that had set a new high score on Metacritic for 2026, but Forza Horizon's reign was brief. Forza was so last week, and now a new game is entering its initials on that leaderboard. We're talking about two heavy hitters this week. One indie throwback , one triple A with all the bells and whistles, both the products of several years of development, both delivering 20 hours or more of meaty, good gameplay. That's right, we will be discussing 0007 First Light and Mina the Hollower. What a pairing. Gamers are eating good right now, but not all gamers. And that's where we'll begin with two patch notes news items : the discontinuation of Destiny and the Steam Deck's price increase. So, Bungie is ending development of its 2017 massively multiplayer online live service sci-fi shooter Destiny 2. It's not dead, but it's dying. It's sunsetting. It is the end of an era for Destiny. And really, for gaming, there will be one last update on June 9th, and then the game will live on. They're not shutting it down, so that's nice. It's not going the way of Concord or Highgard, but they will not be making more new destiny. And we got an email about this that could get us started from a butt mesh listener and uh Google Stadia player in the wild, Estela Benavides, who writes, I was writing to ask if you would be covering the news about destiny I got a founders controller for Stadia and everything. After they shut down, I kind of stopped playing because My first gamer friends across the world were through Destiny 2. Would love to hear what you think. Thank you for the email, which was sent, of course to ringerverse gaming at gmail.com where we welcome all your correspondence. And Estella, I'm sure, is one of many people who got into gaming via destiny. So what was your reaction? I I guess the writing has been on the wall for this game and this franchise for some time, but it was still somewhat shocking to see this happen given that we're just about a year removed from Bungie saying it was entering a new phase of Destiny 2, the fate saga. And I guess the fate was for the game to be more or less ended. So they were supposed to include four expansions. A couple of them came out, but then some of them disappeared from the roadmap and now the game has run out of road. So Matt, what do you make of the quasi-ending of Destiny 2? Yeah, I think as you said the writing was on the wall, but uh but it it also is kind of ending pretty unceremoniously for a game as important as Destiny Two you would have hoped that that they could complete the the roadmap so to speak and and go out with a bang and this is much more of a whimper , but you know, no one I don't think anyone is surprised about this, especially with Marathon Bungie's other game, the newer Bungie game that um has been released to critical acclaim and slowly diminishing player counts. Yes. I don't think that's a surprise to anyone. It's a sad day for for people who are fans of Destiny and especially knowing that they are no plans right now to make a Destiny three and uh rumors bouncing around on the internet that layoffs are indeed coming for Bungie yet again. Again. Yeah. Mm-hmm. It is a rough, rough time. Steve . Your eulogy for destiny? I mean, I I would say that uh you know, appreciate the living while they're alive and not so much when they pass. It's sad to see a game like this go, of course, because it was very well played and I wouldn't say well beloved, because mainly for the fact that people are complaining now for the fact that it is dying and that it has gone away and we've invested so many so much time and money and hours into a game like this. But I recall for a lot of the time, at least for the several years that were leading up to its departure , that people were mostly complaining about it and mostly not happy with the direction that it was going in, only to know that it is now sunsetting and then we're now sad that it's gone. Right. Which is I I guess, you know, the time and memoriam types of sentiment that goes around with the online gaming communities anyway. But to not so much appreciate it now that it's gone and the fact that Bungie doesn't have like a solid gold-plated hit on their hands to transition us out of Destiny 2, I think, is the bit a bit more of the egg-on-our face bungee moment that on the eve of assured layoffs, that is going to be coming with the less than stellar release of Marathon, that's going to be the real legacy that Destiny goes out under. Is that it is going to be sacrificed to a perceived lesser game. Yeah, I imagine that there's some Destiny Super fans who are saying, wait, we just wanted to grouse about this game. We didn't want you to kill it. We wanted to continue to complain about it. This is an overreaction. But it's been years since I have been a destiny player and and I go back to the that wizard came from the moon days of destiny, all the way back. But I fell off at some point, as many people did, most people did. And I can't even blame that on bungee slash Sony mismanagement. I think the destiny phase of my life just ended because I I tend to stop playing games. I I am not so much live service brained. Even if I like a game, I'm not necessarily gonna be playing it for a decade. I may just move on. So Destiny released the final shape. That was a couple of years ago, right? And then that was not the final shape. But for a lot of people it was because that was a good time to walk away. It was acclaimed the that big DLC that brought to a conclusion that light and darkness saga. And then they kept it going. And yes, I think part of the fact that the way that they rolled out Destiny 2 content with new DLC and then would gate the old DLC and retire that so that you could no longer play it. That was always kind of awkward in my mind. I understand why they did it. But between that and just the general fatigue that often afflicts live service, yes, I think a lot of people had sort of soured on the game, and the player counts told that story, and they don't tell an encouraging story about Bungie writ large, really, because Sony sort of threw Bungie under the bus earlier this year, right? And announced publicly that essentially Bungie is now worth a lot less than Sony paid for it, you know, 3.6 billion or whatever it was. And they took uh, you know, 700 something million dollar write down and and said that it had declined in value essentially and whether that is partly Sony's fault or not, that seems to be the fact and there's nothing really coming. Not only is there no new destiny game in the works, you know, there are people reportedly pitching new destiny ideas internally, but there's no destiny 3 in the works. There was a Destiny game sort, of a related spin-off that was in development that was axed at some point years ago. Maybe if they had just done Destiny 3, I would have been more likely to jump back on board, because that would have been a more natural starting point or rejoining point, maybe, than just the latest in a long, long line of expansions, many of which were inaccessible after a while. So I don't know whether you think that is part of the story here that maybe they should not have uh continued to keep Destiny 2 going. Maybe they should have had a sequel. But then again, I guess that's sort of what Blizzard tried to do with Overwatch, and then they said, wait, no, it's Overwatch again. It's not Overwatch 2. But maybe that never felt like a true sequel. Yeah, it's hard to keep a live service game going for years and years and years. I mean, even Fortnite now is sort of panicking with some player drop off the Fortnite, which which seemed to be just a a juggernaut that would never go away. You're you're starting to think like could could we see the end of Fortnite in the next three three years? Yeah, Destiny two seemed to try to channel the spirit of Fortnite by just doing a Star Wars expansion and being like, What if Destiny but Star Wars? um Yeah, but Goku isn't it yet, so it's not really gonna be in the Fortnite territory yet. I just saying the idea that Fortnite could end honestly feels impossible right now. Like that's that's an idea of like a c I wouldn't say a cultural apex, but like a cultural crossroads of like everything that is either gaming and popular culture short of like Roblox and Minecraft. And those two, those three things just seem like kind of ubiquitous with what gam ing is right now. And to think that even the destinies of the world, which were extremely well played, if not well liked, which is occasional at best, to think that we detransition from the live service model that Bungie seems to want to make its bread and butter from and with the I'll say complete and utter mismanagement of the reading of the market by Sony, a la The Concords of the World, and every other live service game that they just can't seem to let go of. I just got an email from my PSN account saying that uh All-Star Destruction live is gonna be going away. So I was like, oh wow, I can't I got thought about it. Destruction all-stars. Wow. Yes. Yeah. Great. Can't wait to can't wait to sunset that. I don't know. I I like I think that seeing that just happened to coincide with Marathon going free to play for a week, just a week, we promise, nothing more, please God, it really doesn't show any good signs. Like it's gonna be all bummers around and bef by the time we get to the Steam Deck, I'm gonna outright like rage at the status of the world right now. But then we'll talk about double O seven first sight and Mina and our faith will be restored, hopefully. Yeah, a game that's also about AI ruining the world. Great. Timely topical. Yeah. Well, look, I think part of it is just that Destiny Two entered a very different world than the one we're in right now, and it was a lot less crowded in the quote unquote live service space . And that space really got taken over by a bunch of games that follow in in Destiny 2's footsteps and took a lot of its players away. So part of it is just I think that it was an early adopter , a first mover, and now it's a much more competitive time. And I think it might be tough for people at Bungie to pitch a Destiny 3 that's anything like Destiny 2 because those games aren't getting greenlit now because so many of them have failed, which we have lamented that live service pivot. I think companies are finally realizing, yeah, this is extremely risky and we will start to see that manifest several years down the road because that's how long it takes to make games. But it is sort of sad as someone who spent many how happy hours playing the destinies. And and now Marathon, I think we pretty much pegged in our pot about it, which is hey, there's a good game here , but it is not the mainstream appeal game that Bungie or certainly Sony were hoping for here. And the player counts have declined. Everyone's been watching that spiral on Steam DB down to about 10,000 or so concurrent players on Steam. And there's still more people playing Destiny 2 than Marathon now, actually, even before this little dead cat bounce that happened after people realized that, oh, right, Destiny 2 still exists. I should probably play that while I still can. And we kind of thought, hey, there's a good game here that a lot of people will like, but it's not for everyone. And if you're trying to make a live service game like this, it's supposed to be for everyone. And so this game has not met sales expectations. And for now, at least Bungie and Sony seem to be committed to it. Season two is starting, as you mentioned, there's this open week , and also they're teasing new modes and they're trying to make it more approachable for people. So maybe that can work. Maybe they can change the narrative and reputation around that game, but it's tough to do once that's established, and now all of Bungie's eggs are in that marathon basket. I actually I asked former ButtonMash guest Simon Carlos at Game Discover Co. what his data said about whether marathon may have cannibalized Destiny 2's remaining audience because you got to figure there's a lot of overlap among bungee shooter fans. And he said that 73% of Marathon players also played Destiny 2 at some point on Steam, so naturally a lot of overlook there. But as I also noted looking at the graphs, it's not as if Marathon came out and suddenly everyone abandoned Destiny 2. It doesn't seem as if there was any discernible permanent decrease that coincided with the launch of Marathon. So those do seem to be somewhat separate trends. But uh yeah, I guess contrary to Paul McCartney's theme song for the franchise. There is no hope for the future of Destiny, at least not in the near future. And that is sort of sad to see. Also sad to see Steam Deck getting way pricier. Although, congrats to you two as Steam Deck owners, your assets just appreciated. Oh my god, my portfolio is stacked right now. I know. Imagine if we had invested our life savings in consoles just say a year ago, suddenly our our net worth would be skyrocketing because every console costs way more than it used to. And Steam Deck is the latest to join this trend. And this is not a small price hike. This is not switch two going up 50 bucks. This is the one terabyte edition of Steam Deck going from $6 50 to $950, while the $512 gigabyte OLED model goes up more than $200 . So, I mean, I guess it's maybe better to rip the band-aid off and do one big price hike instead of death by a thousand cuts. We're raising it repeatedly. At least you only have one bad press cycle out of this. But that is some serious sticker shock. If you do not already have a Steam Deck, it's about to be extremely expensive to get one if you can even find one, which is not refurbished. So, Matt, you've been a big Steam Deck lover. So what do you think this will do to the reach of this system and also just to gaming hardware writ large. Well it just doesn't make sense really to get a Steam Deck anymore, which is you know, the meme has been just get a Steam Deck for yeah for years now. Whenever anyone's asked yeah, you know, what what's a good entry point to to this kind of PC non console gaming? Steam Deck has been the answer and there have been a lot of you know pricier competitors. But now you're looking at the landscape and and you know the the what you say the one terabyte OLED is nine fifty now? Is that right? Is that what you said? Because you you have the famously bel ovedly named ROG Xbox Ally X . Not enough X is in there for my liking. We almost right off the tongue. I'm sure they'll work on that. Oshasharma's gonna fix that. But that's a thousand dollars now. That's fifty dollars more. And it's a much more powerful piece of hardware. It's not necessarily as easy to use as a Steam Deck, but you could also buy an ROG Xbox Ally X boy I'm nailing it today for fifty dollars more and install Bazite on that thing and have it functionally be a more performant Steam Deck. So it's really a terrible turn of events here, and it continues this trend of gaming hardware becoming so expensive that we're at the risk of an entire generation just not having an experience of playing video games with controllers. Yeah, that's what I I worry about. We're just gonna lose a lot of people who will not be brought into this ec osystem and and that applies to console gaming, which the reach has sort of stagnated and the audience has gotten older. It's never been an inexpensive habit, but now it's it's gett ing cost prohibitive really. Yeah. There aren't enough lawns in the neighborhood to mow for a child to be able to get into console gaming uh in twenty twenty six. Rarely does uh like the increase of a single item makes something feel as existential as the death of console gaming, but this really does do it. Because for a company like Valve that has proclaimed itself to be as accessible and as consumer-minded as any company that I have known in my entire time in this hobby to dramatically and wildly increase their price because of the landscape of the world itself. Like I'm not mad at Valve for doing this because it's been happening everywhere and this is the status of the world that we live in. And yes, like it's annoying to hear like three guys to feel like at least for me, like more politically motivated to like think about change in the status of the world when they're little gaming consoles go up by $300 . But aspects of these consequences in the world will be coming for every part of our lives. And the status quo is not guaranteed. The fact that we can and should be making this change, because this is just the beginning. We don't know if the Steam Deck A is gonna exist ever again, but B won't go up in price again. To know that every single console that we've ever had this this coming generation has gone up in some capacity, this is the biggest tell of it so far. And for the like consumer and hobbyist level of personal computing , it's quickly going away. And it is quickly becoming not only cost prohibitive, but like a way that it makes it actually inaccessible for anybody. And as conspiratorial as I'll be about like the landscape of streaming gaming and why that's getting pushed on us very hard right now, I am really, really miffed at like this got me thinking about the entire picture. I was like, okay, so the Straits closed and our lakes are running dry because of data centers, and now I'm thinking about like what my kids are going to be drinking as far as like, is it going to be Coke Zero or is it going to be filtered water? Now for the rest of my life. And this thing did it. Congrats. Like I'm thinking about the entire world now. Well, that's a real Steam Deck crash out there, Steve. Well it's warranted. I mean in NVIDIA has pretty much openly you know told us so much is that they don't want to sell us GPUs anymore. They don't want us to have the hardware. They want you to lease , you know, over over the cloud hardware and pay for it every month. And, you know, this is the reality that we're we're dealing with here. The corporation like NVIDIA doesn't doesn't care about gamers anymore. They they want to build their AI data centers. All the stock is swallowed up by the data centers. No one will think of the hobbyists , the people who just want to turn up the settings on the graphics so that they can play their games. And it used to be that even if you weren't inclined to or couldn't afford to buy a console on day one, you could get in the door years later when prices fell. And now that's not an option available to anyone because in complete opposition to every other console generation, prices keep rising the older the stuff gets. And in theory, the closer we get to the next console generation, though really, that's another takeaway here, because that's going to continue to be a moving target too, because there's no real outlook for this to change in the short or medium term future. Obviously, what does this portend for the Steam machine? Which ostensibly is still coming at some point this year, but no release date, no price has been announ ced. And before people were fretting about, oh, this thing's gonna be a thousand bucks and thus it won't expand the umbrella of potential players. It'll only be committed people who are willing to pay that for a gaming machine, this thing's not gonna be a thousand bucks, right? If it comes out as all, if the Steam Deck years old is selling for essentially that, they're gonna have to hike the price still unannounced on the Steam Machine too. You gotta figure that whatever their internal price for that thing has been, it has already been hiked multiple times. And so if they even have the stock to launch it, then it's gonna be priced at a price point that is really going to be a turnoff to anyone who otherwise might have said, Ooh, okay, PC in my living room sounds good to me. Certainly sounds good to me personally. I want my steam machine, but now there's going to be some serious sticker shock there. And as for the next console generation, I mean, we're at about the point where we would be looking at, okay, we're probably a year away from PlayStation 6, Project Helix. Do you think that's gonna happen now? I don't. It shouldn't, right? It can't. I mean, there's not enough RAM, right? That's what I'm saying. Like, Matt, when you dropped this in Slack, you said that the Steam Machine may as well not happen. And there's a pretty good chance, there's a not zero chance that the C machine doesn't happen. With the with the current specs that that that they announced, it was already kind of skating a line where it was it was gonna come out the gate and only have like a few years of of being able to keep up with you know new triple A game releases. It it had you know they announced it has like I, think like eight gigabytes of VRAM when really it should be at least 16 in in the modern era. And that at the time, with you know a price point somewhere between 500 and 800 speculated, seemed like all right, maybe, but now as the clock keeps on ticking and that number that cost rises higher and it becomes less and less relevant, they either are going to not do it or they're going to have to bump some of the specs up by the time it actually comes out. Yeah, I just I don't know what you do if you're Valve. I really don't. And and maybe this Steam Deck price increase is is sort of a way of saying like giving a hint of like, hey, everyone needs to change your expectations about this steam machine. They have too much invested in it, I think, to to not release it in in some capacity. But uh man, that is a real thing. And that's the thing, like to to who? Because I I know immediately how this is going to go. Let's just say it costs fifteen hundred dollars, which is a conservative estimate now. It will sell out instantly. You will see almost every single copy go up on eBay for 10x that price. And then that will be over. That will be like the only run that they go for because knowing that what the Steam Deck has now been increased to, it's certainly not like they're gonna make any others. And by the way, making it prohibitively expensive, as of now, it is still sold out on the Steam page. It they the all of that stock that with the new price increase has been bought out. And it's not going to go anywhere. At least you can get a controller. If not a steam machine. Maybe you might not be able to find those either, but don't need as much room for that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, seven years is the typical console generation. No PlayStation has ever been released more than seven years after the predecessor PlayStation, PS5 and Xbox series are turning six this fall. So you'd be looking at next year. We haven't gone longer than the eight years between Switch and Switch 2 or Xbox 360, Xbox One. We're gonna be pushing these things to twenty-eight, twenty-nine, because all the projections are saying it's not gonna get easier to obtain this this hardware, these components, right? If anything, it might get harder. So it's a little different from when this console generation started and, it has a slow start for various reasons, but partly because of the pandemic and the supply chain disruptions. That was clearly temporary, though. That was something that could be overcome. Whereas this is just starting to seem like the new normal and that it's not actually going to improve. So on the one hand, okay, even though these consoles are five plus years old, it it feels like they got a slow start. We're just getting to the first year that Call of Duty isn't coming to last gen consoles, right? Modern Warfare 4 just announced is coming to Switch 2, but no longer PS4 Xbox One. So there was a slow changeover there, but I think we're going to be living with these systems for quite some time if we were lucky enough to get one before the price doubled. I think it is good news for Switch 2 potentially, just because, you know, there is a two-year gap between the Switch 2 coming out and then the current gen PlayStation and Xbox platforms. If those had come out, if we had had a PS6 and Project Helix coming out in you know two years after Switch 2, let's say, it was three years, I guess, between switch one and those coming out. And switch one was struggling hardware-wise by the end of its life cycle, which was long, but nonetheless. Now maybe there's a little more life there beforeit Swch g2ets clearly outclassed and is unable to run a lot of third-party games. So I guess that's good if you're Nintendo. But I see a lot of people now actively rooting for the AI bubble to burst so that they can get g ames, get gaming hardware again. But I've got news for you. That that's gonna hurt too in the short term. You know? It's not gonna make uh the economy better when the AI bubble bursts for a while until everything adjusts, right? So it's gonna, it's gonna be a tough period of transition one way or another. But whether people can afford to play games, that is, that is one question. But there are great games out there if you have the hardware. So that's the good news. Also with GTA six on the horizon, like it's the other thing. GTA six, like, you know, I I haven't been like the most excited for a new Grandft The Auto, but I have this new this new lens that I'm looking at it through, which is like GTA six as the last hope of of indoctrinating uh kids into console gaming. Yeah. Like if GTA six comes out and there's no one even talking about it on Roblox, then we're in trouble. We're in big trouble. The day GTA six drops, we need to monitor Roblox columns. Yeah. Day much. Yeah. And I think there's a good chance that it it it doesn't make even a ripple amongst, you know, kids who are who are used to only playing games on their iPad, on their iPhone, not paying for g ames aside from the harmful monetization uh forms within those free games. That's such an interesting take because this is at a very interesting apex of people getting quote unquote priced out of what they think Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to cost, which it doesn't matter, people will pay it if they have the hardware to play it. But to know that a lot of younger gamers aren't that typically on like those consoles to actually play this game to get like FOMO for that one game to actually get to play because they know that it's gonna be the ubiquitous party game, it's going to be everything that's gone Twitch for the better part of a year, it's gonna be everything and everyone's only obsession when it comes to gaming for the ones that do afford it, to indoctrinate that to have this be like the arbiter of please preserve this economy of accessible hardware, I think is a good idea. But I'm curious to see who actually buys this game and who keeps playing it. Because it you think it's gonna be everybody, but it might not be. It will be a lot of people. It will be me. Yes, yes, it will be us for sure. There's nothing about the Grand Theft Auto Formula that I think speaks to the younger generation who play free to play games as a you know, as a social experience with their friends. Like uh just playing a narrative game alone is is a little bit foreign to the n to to the youngest generation of gamers. And and I don't think Grand Theft Auto has you know, i is going to have evolved in any way that that, you know, onboards those kids. It's not an easy ramp from what they've been playing to GTA six. But I don't know, maybe if it's a big enough game, maybe it has a big enough impact it can actually c sort of crack in and and and have kids try this form of gaming that they've never tried before. Because I'm really worried about the landscape of video games twenty years from now, when you know, people just aren't used to playing with the controller. What will happen to our hobby? Kids these days. Won't anyone think of the children? Okay. Hopefully GTA will actually come out this year, and then we can talk about that at length. For now, just go get your nine hundred dollar PS5 Pro to prepare. Okay. All right. Well, let's uh let's talk about happier thoughts and subjects here because we do a lot of uh hand wringing in culture coverage these days, whether it's the state of streaming, the state of the box office, the state of specific franchises, what's wrong with the MCU, what's wrong with Star Wars. And we've just done that version of this for gaming, and there's good ground s to do that. However, there is no need to worry about whether the games are good. That is the saving grace of gaming, because the games are great and this month alone shows that. So we'll pivot here from Bungie, a giant that dates back to the 90s, that uh now is facing another round of layoffs and declining expansion sales. And can you even have a company that is uh based in B ellevue and full of long-tenured employees who make good money and develop games on the cycles that it takes to make games these days. Let's talk about another 90s great and pivot to IO Interactive, which has developed and published Double O seven First Light. Out now. It's a game that we have been playing at great length, at least a couple of us have finished in its entirety. You can go get it for most systems, PS5, Windows, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch at some point later in the year. I have played through this whole game. We have been crawling through vents, swiping passes and key cards, seducing various vixens. This is big news for Bond because it's a fallow period for this franchise, both on the big screen and in gaming until now. This is the first new major original James Bond game for PC and console, at least, since 007 Legends, which came out before GTA 5 in 2000 12. That's how long it's been. Plus, we are in an interlude between big screen bonds here. It's been five years since No Time to Die, and no new bond has even been announced. We don't know when bond 26 will be covering or who will be playing James. And so into that void, 007, First Light enters, and we get an original Bond here. And this is the first time really that we've had a Bond game who has not been mapped onto any particular James Bond who exists in the movies since gosh, I think Agent Under Fire, which was twenty-five years ago. So now Bond is Patrick Gibson from the OA and Shadow and Bone and my fave Dexter original Sin canceled too soon after a single season. Now he steps into the shoes of Yungo Bond , who is just making his bones as a double O agent, who is earning his license to kill. We've got ourselves an origin story, folks. And the pitch here is uncharted meets hitman meets bond, which on the surface at least, that's a pretty compelling formula. But does it gel? Or do those things end up being sometimes an awkward sort of synthes is. I have thoughts. But Matt, I think you are probably high man on this game among the three of us, though we have all played it and liked it. You loved it. So tell us what you loved about First Life. That tends to be I I love games, guys. I love this game. This game I had some pretty high expectations because Io Interactive has has been a real hit factory for me in the past. And I think that they've executed this idea almost flawlessly the idea of of a James Bond game that borrows a lot from what they've learned with the Hitman franchise and, you know, weaves in some hand to hand combat that's like Arkham, some driving here and there, all of that put together in in a really cinematic form with a story that I think is great and with performances that add a lot, even on top of that great story . I really feel like this is firing on all cylinders and and you know, it's tough to make a good game that is made out of several different forms of gameplay. That's really not an easy thing to do. And in my experience with this game, I think that they have nailed every single element of that. I think the driving is, you know, there isn't a lot of depth to it, but it it it it's also not, you know, one of the more prominent forms of gameplay in it. Right. But but I I think, you know, that's an example to me of of how like they've they've in my opinion gotten the balance of all of those different forms of gameplay right and just weaving it with the pacing of the story well I I just for me it's everything that I wanted a an I.O. interactive James Bond game to be and I love it. It nails a lot of what you want, which is a playable movie, right? Which is what people always say about Uncharted, and in this case it's specifically a playable Bond movie . I will say that my opinion and and Steve, I think you're with me on this, shifted dramatically over the course of this game. Because the three of us had a Slack exchange after Matt finished it, and I was a little more than halfway through and I had some serious reservations at that stage, and Steve, you had some too, and Matt was raving about it. And I was thinking, did we play the same game here? And then in the second half of the game, it really does find its stride and it is sort of firing on all cylinders, but it does take some time to get there. And and not everything clicked for me. How about you, Steve? Okay . So I have to start by saying that when I when I heard that IO Interactive was doing a 007 game, I could not have been more happy because I thought that that was a match made in heaven for that property and what this studio is great at. And I think for the most part, I agree with Matt that they executed on honestly far more than I thought they were capable of when it came to making an uncharted-esque type of scenario where this is a far more narrative-driven linear story that is guided along a path that is like an uncharted to the point where gameplay sections are very stagnated, where like the game kind of flips a switch and you're in a gunplay sequence, and flips a switch and you're in a stealth sequence, or you're in a driving sequence. There isn't exactly like a marriage or blend of all three of those. Yeah. And occasionally it was unclear to me when we had shifted from one mode to the next, because Bond is not an indiscriminate killer, right? He's always gonna try to incapacitate you rather than run and gun. But there are some sequences that are explicitly run and gun, where the screen will say license to kill, right? And so then okay, I can go to town and I'm just wasting guys. But sometimes you're shifting from having license to kill to not having license to kill and suddenly we,'re in more of a stealth-oriented section where you can do takedowns and stuff, but you can't actually shoot anyone. And it was kind of arbitrary at times, I felt like it's like they're still trying to kill me, but suddenly I am muzzled. Why why is my safety not off at this stage? So and this is where I think I'm taking crazy pills in comparison to the rest of the internet when it comes to this game, because I was actually kind of infuriated with the tutorialization that this game gives you in the beginning. Because it's very cinematic. It's very staccato in a way is that is shot like a training montage in a movie where you do something once and then it immediately cuts to like a different like set of months where Bond is in training and he is learning something different. He's learning how to use his focus, he uses his gun, he learns how to use stealth takedowns. And I think the thing that makes at, least the things that I'm used to with what makes a good tutorial, is that there's a repetition and there's like a gradually inclining sort of progression with the things that you learn to do in sequence. This game it teaches you something once and it's like once you do it once, you're probably not gonna see it for like another hour until you actually do it in practice. And that got me so disoriented when it came time to me thinking like, okay, I'm like three hours into this, and I would like to go on a spy mission, please, so that I can use all of these things in sequence. And when I stopped to actually get more patient with myself and to know that the game actually gets going with that, it's beautiful. It's actually wonderful. Because knowing the things that made Hitman World of Assassination so magnificent was the fact that it allowed you to fuck up certain stealth sequences and certain ways to infiltrate a scenario. And you can still figure things out. Ways of inquiry or like sort of paths in which you can get information that leads you to certain points in these labyrinthian style levels are always open to you. And this making that sequence more linear and more narrative-driven is disorienting for somebody like me who loves the hitman games. But in a game like this, I needed to know that that worked. And it absolutely did. And I'm sure that Ben, as this went on, it it it it's it rang true for you as well. Oh yes. Yes. And so there is initial frustration because there is a long okay we're just we're learning everything we're learning the ropes here we're on Malta we're at double o boot camp and and I did like the montage style okay here's one skill here's another skill rapid fire, but it does take a long time before the game just lets the leash off and introduces you to the full-on gameplay. And, you know, I don't mind so much that it's an origin story. I think that's actually kind of appropriate because even though Bond is such a long-established character, we haven't really gotten that in cinema with Bond. It's not like Spidey or Batman, where we have seen that and played that so many times that now it's better to skip it. With bonds, you haven't really seen that other than maybe briefly in Casino Royale, but I don't see this as sort of a, you know, surf Dracula to invoke the meme where it's like, can't we just be Bond? Why do I want to be 20-something Bond who's not good at stuff yet? We haven't really seen this sort of origin story for this character. And I kind of enjoyed learning along with him, but it is a grower. It is a slow starter because of that. And it's not a short game. So, you know, it's it's longer than a lot of games of this type that are kind of like cinematic arcadey. And so maybe it takes a little too long to get to the great stuff, but it does, I think, lay some groundwork that pays off for the story at least a little later. But my main complaint probably, and again, I liked it a lot on the whole in the end and had fun and was propelled through this whole game in what, a week? Less than a week. They didn't send the codes out very early. So but you know, it's kind of this mashup of all these different genres and I felt that each of them was slightly underbaked, some more than others, because it's not the core focus. And so I felt like the game was I guess a little less than the sum of its parts because if you want the stealth spy gameplay, if you want hitman, you're getting a semblance of that. But it's sort of hitman light, which is maybe fine for some folks, but it doesn't really lean into that sort of spy simulator. And then it's also sort of you're taking the hitman engine and you're applying it to running and gunning in some sequences, and it's a little awkward just in terms of the movement and the c over system and all of that never felt fully natural. But there are moments late in the game when everything clicks and suddenly the full potential of all these different systems is realized because you're in a combat situation and you can do this sort of simplistic Arkham-based hand-to-hand takedowns, or you can use your gadgets and your Q watch, or you can pull a gun and you can headshot someone, or this or that. And suddenly it felt more like almost an immersive sim and oh, I can play the way I want to, but it didn't feel that way for the most part. And I I felt that certain aspects of each style of gameplay were just a bit dated in my mind. But Matt, tell me why I'm wrong. I think that you know, Hitman has evolved to be very much a game for fans of Hitman and the it there's a definitely a level of depth to it that I think would be a bit intimidating for a wide audience. And I think that this game is intended for a wide audience. It's more accessible for sure. Absolutely. And I think that it it would have been a lot easier to make a version of this game where the stealth sections are not even as deep as they are now in this game. And I think that they've done a good job of refining that for a wide audience. For example, when you are in a stealth section and you have uh drawn the attention of some enemies, let's say, and y they are in combat with you, and you're sort of worried, like, oh no, it like I'm fighting these two guys in a room now, does that mean I'm gonna have to fight everyone in this level? And you take those two guys in the room out and the game explicitly tells you, boom, situation contained. Yeah. Right. There's there's a no there's a notification that like this this this will not in fact spread to the entire and and that sort of d decisive like re like telling of information there yes is made for a wide audience and it it is it is very helpful to anyone who hasn't maybe spent a ton of time in in stealth games or or you know has just been introduced recently to stealth through Lego Batman where uh the people can't see you until you are directly in front of them waving at them. I think that that it it does a really good job of being a game for a wide audience. There's there's a blockbuster feel to this through not only you know the the the movie nature of the game, but also that that adaptability to to players from all genres. And I think that uh they've done a they've it's way deeper than it could be. Than it could have been . This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business. Fast, reliable internet means everything for your business, and even this podcast. That's why I trust Spectrum Business. They keep companies of all sizes connected with internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, mobile services, plus 24-7 US-based support. Millions of business owners already trust Spectrum Business. So visit spectrum.com/slash business to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Sweet Cream. The day doesn't ask for permission. Lunch window? Gone before you saw it coming. You deserve a break that actually satisfies. Sweet greens, new wraps have got you. Real ingredients, zero shortcuts. Everything you love in one hand. Think green goddess chicken. Garlic aioli. Crumbled bacon. Corn salsa, 40 grams of protein, made to keep up with whatever comes next. New sweet green wraps hit different. Order now at order.sweetgreen.com . This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. Spring is here, so celebrate it with fresh, juicy, seasonal produce and some very tasty limited time flavors. New Whole Foods, Market Peach, Apricot Rose, Italian soda. Perfect for a picnic or brunch, as is their trending mango Yuzu Chantilly cake. But if you're on the go, new 365 strawberry pretzels make a great sweet snack. That sounds delicious. Get savings with yellow sales signs store wide and everyday low prices on 365 brand items. Enjoy the fresh flavors of spring. Save at Whole Foods Market . I think you're absolutely right. And I think that the reasoning behind making this accessible to as broad of an audience as they can is actually done quite masterfully because of the fact that as much as I would have wanted something a lot either deeper, more leaning more towards the like immersive sim level s that Hitman would be. I would also say that, hey, if you really like the stealth sequences in this game, boy have I got a game for you, and it's called Hitman. And I think that the evolution of the stealth sequences here are really kind of something that I've found very refreshing in a mainstream stealth game before because it actually I I don't know if any other game has done this yet where I have like incapacitated somebody and their body is like lifeless on the ground, and another guard has seen them. And I have just like made a uh vacuum cleaner go off or a pipe burst in front of them, and they actively say, I'm ignoring this to focus on the dead body in front of me. And I like for that I was like, oh no, they're really thinking on on another level here because that's the type of thing that I've always wanted to see. And like the attention to detail that I O is so well executing on for all of their games, but especially here, I think is wildly impressive. And I I still can't actually sing enough high enough praises about the story in this game because it is the actual kind of like pitch perfect note of serious, silly, humorous, and dour that I've kind of always wanted in the James Bond like movie. Yeah. I don't think I've I've seen a movie quite like this in the James Bond era that is actually kind of unburdened by not having a mainstay actor or franchise to buoy it. Like if this were the Daniel Craig Bond, it completely doesn't make sense. It definitely owes a debt to the Daniel Craig era Bond movies. I mean, it's almost like if you take Skyfall and No Time to Die Inspector and you kind of extract elements of each of those stories and put them all in one story, it's sort of like that. So there is more of a serious, you know, latter-day Bond aspect to the story. But then even though it it doesn't really lean into the pre-Craig camp, there is an aspect of that. There's a lot of humor and comedy. And also, I guess just pairing that more serious story and the, you know, it's kind of the classic spy trope of, oh, does it even make sense in the post-Cold War world to do all this human intelligence, you know, is the double O program in danger? Is AI running everything? Right. And so you take that, but you also have segments where you are slaughtering dozens of henchmen and lackeys. And so maybe that makes for an awkward pairing at times, but I think it's kind of nice that different eras of Bond are represented here. And I I I guess it's kind of a compliment, but also a critique. There is so much story in this g ame that if anything, there was maybe scope creep here because there's like two or three games worth of plot in this game, I think. And I'm not complaining because it's at least a 20-hour game. But there are so many villains and romance uh just like who come and go over the course of this game. And by the end of it, I won't spoil specific aspects, but there are characters you're supposed to be emotionally attached to and what happens to them is supposed to be meaningful to you and there will be a reference to them at the end of the game and it's like, oh right, I forgot about them entirely, because that was so many twists and turns ago, and I haven't seen them for hours. But the core of the game is really the older agent who is uh you know reluctantly taking bond under his wing and then yes greenway played excellently by Lenny James who people might remember from Walking Dead and many other things. Yeah, he's great. It's great. And and that kind of you know will they learn to get along this almost you know odd couple pairing of these two that's the core of the game and and that works I think better than any of the Bond girl aspects or the kind of colleagues, you know, because Bond's ultimately he's sort of a lone wolf, you know, rogue agent almost. And so yeah, the John Greenway pairing with Bond is great. But there are so many villains, animals, Myster X and red herrings, and you think, oh, this is the big bad. Nope. Okay. I guess not. There's another bigger bad here. And apologies to the Lenny Kravitz fans out there. Again, no specific But hey, but like listen, Ben, here's the great things that I find ridiculous on paper, but in the game they make sense. Ridiculously Norwegian looking evil twins. Yes. And a man with an actual golden face. Yes. Or guess what? You got a James Bond movie. Yeah, no, the big Bond beats are all here. It's true. And you know, you all the iconography and the theme song and all the rest of it, right? The original theme song, the classic theme song, uh everything you expect from a it's it's the full cinematic treatment in a game. Jet setting to different locales. Yes. Yes. Being a big part. As soon as you're kind of like feeling like you've been in a place for a while , they will kick it to a new varied location. And and some of these locations feel like revelatory. Like sometimes you are just in uh, you know, an office building or or a you know the Q lab or whatever and it can be, you know, or you're outside somewhere in the nondescript place. But like there are show piece locations in this game, a nightclub, like a you know, a uh big old manor, like these social events that you go to. Like the there are settings in here that feel so different from each other and so fully realized. That coupled with those performances really make this game successful. Like you mentioned Lenny James's John Greenway. That relationship that Greenway has with Bond as it develops through the game, to me that was that was the single most you know well realiz ed part of this whole game. Those two Lenny James more than makes up for the lack of Lenny Kravitz I was worried it would be the big bad as well. I like Lenny Kravitz. You don't generally have a good feeling about Lenny Kravitz. Our producer Dev and I have talked extensively about Lenny Kravitz's diet and exercise routine. I I his body is on my vision board, all right. Patrick Gibson as Bond. I I think you know, at the beginning of the game I wasn't fully sold on the Bond casting. And I think whenever you have a bond property, and and as you said, Ben, this is this is like the first time we're we're encountering a bond that we haven't really like seen cinematically for a long time and that's a tough sell to to people I think especially through a video game where like you know it can it can really easily feel like we have bonded home, you know, like and and throughout the course of this game, I think that Patrick Gibson really owns the role and and becomes his own form of bond that very much feels like bond, but very much feels like his own sort of spin on it. And when the credits hit in this game, I was just immediately ready for another Bond adventure. Maybe, you know, it doesn't have to be 20 plus hours like this one. I do think that you had some good criticisms, Ben, of it, maybe feeling potentially a little overlong, but I understand that as a game studio like to charge seventy dollars for a game in twenty twenty six you go get if you don't hit twenty hours, yeah, you're gonna you're gonna see some people complaining. You're gonna see people waiting for sales, right? You can get Mina the Hollower for nineteen ninety nine. So you gotta you gotta provide something compelling here. So yeah, it's uh I think that you know sometimes the individual gameplay aspects feel a little dated to me. I know that there's uh there's nothing more hackney ed than complaining about explosive barrels in twenty twenty six, but maybe the only thing more cliche than that is having this egregious I'm yellow paint gamer. I don't care. Right. So driving, it's very on rails, very abbreviated. Shooting. Man, that shit is just go forward. I'm not even gonna be able to be harder than that. It's just go forward, man. The driving is is disappointing. It's sparing, but it's disappointing. And then yes, you have your climbing and your jumping, and it is very yellow clean, yellow paint kind of gameplay. And then you have your your , I would say lacklus ter boss fights for the most part, which are largely almost quick time event-based or gadget-based. There's a lot of quick time events in this game. You know, I don't I don't mind a quick time event here or there, but it just it you know, between that and I I've honestly I can't remember seeing this many explosive barrels in a shoot in a shooter in this decade. It's they got barrels next to tanks of uh materials. Barrels in office buildings. Like I get when we're outside in a construction site uh maybe, but like I'm uh in the office. Why is there an explosive barrel? Everything is explosive. I I played video games before. I get it. You are complaining about video game tropes in a property that has probably the most tropes in all of cinema. It's true. I like th this is where they belong. And frankly, I I'm gonna say this like to free your minds a little bit. We're in twenty twenty six. I'm sick of QTEs. We got settings. Just turn that on autocomplete. You won't even see 'em. It's just part of a s it's just part of a a cutscene at that point. That's an option. I I actually uh push back on the boss fights actually. I think that some of them are actually quite inspired. Not to spoil like an entire encounter, but there's a boss fight that's entirely uh somebody has a gun on you, and you don't have a gun, and you've just got to use your gadgets to outsmart and beat this person. Yeah. And I thought that was relatively like inspired. And I I think that the ways in which that they can play with that formula to make a quote unquote boss battle like they have in James Bond movies where like the ridiculous henchman has one advantage over Bond that he's gotta overcome. I think this is done incredibly well. Yeah. It's hard to have a boss fight in a Bond game that's not something like that. Yeah. Right. It's usually just a guy who's uh sinister in some way. There were other things that, you know, I don't know if you guys ran into technical issues. It's always tough to know whether this is just 'cause we're playing pre-release and pre patches potentially. But I had some some some hard locks, some crashes. I had some repeated dialogue. I had some sort of awkward timing with scripted sound bites. Like maybe this is a product of the fact that you can approach different levels in various ways, but I'd say take out a bunch of guys from afar and then advance and everyone's dead and bond will be like, There's an army of them. And there's no one left because I killed them all already. But clearly he was just sort of programmed to say that when I got to a certain spot in the level, that sort of thing. And you know, I like I I guess that if you are used to Hitman, as you said with Arc with uh Batman, with Lego Batman, Steve, it's sort of Baby's first Arkham game. And this isn't Baby's first stealth spy game, I guess, but it's, you know, toddlers first , maybe. So if you're used to Hitman, maybe that's harsh, but if you're used to Hitman, some of the stuff that happens here, I think, you know, you're used to video games, but again, it's like there's one level where you're trying to enter this restricted space and you so you have to steal a press pass and then you just get by no questions asked, even though you're still wearing the chauffeur uniform that you were wearing. So you're like a journalist wearing a chauffeur uniform and they're just like, sure, come on in. Or a lot of the times where you know you'll use your gadget on a guard or something and you'll shoot a laser in his eye or something. And then there's kind of a recovery time. And then after that recovery time is done, oh, okay, he's back at his post and and everything's fine again. And you know, you can use the one to sort of make the guard sick, but then if you get spotted, they're suddenly not sick. Like I think on the whole, the enemy intelligence is actually pretty impressive in the stealth sections at least. But in the spy sections, eh, you know, it's uh a little dicey, but I guess that's to be expected, perhaps. But on the whole, I think they achieved what they were going for here. There's just a little bit of ah, I wish there were a little more polish here potentially. That extends to the graphics too, I think, which in many cases are quite impressive, and then in other cases are not at all, I thought. Like in the indoor sequences, I thought it looked great. But then when you're outdoors, I thought there were these weird sort of pre-rendered backgrounds that were almost like am I in the Truman show or something where they were just totally static and looked really weird because it it was almost as if like the the playable space would meet this wall that was painted on to the rest of the world in a way. And, you know, like water didn't look good and fire didn't look good. Like faces and bodies I thought didn't look good, but the environments, like offices and gadgets and stuff, looked great in a lot of cases. So there was a strange sort of discordance there. Like hair was weird. I don't know whether you had that experience. Strangest bald spots I've ever seen in a video game in Double O seven first light . But uh I don't think I noticed this stuff that you're talking about, Ben. Like I I played on base PS5. Did we all play on base PS5? I did too. Base PS5, yeah. Kind of long loading time cards. Loading times are tough. We're spoiled these days with loading times, but these were lengthy. It did feel like a throwback in that sense. The loading times being long. Some frame rate stutters here and there but yeah not not terrible and great great quips and great banter I thought that was the strongest aspect of the writing uh other than the greenway bond relationship is just when bond's kind of talking to himself or talking to Money Penny or M on the radio. I don't know man. I sa I saw a bad guy get impaled and Bond didn't say stick around and I'm I was about ready to call this a zero out of ten. I honestly think I might want to pick this up on my I guess now valued at what $10,000 PC to see how this game really looks because I I I think that uh occasionally it's gorgeous and I I I think that IO is really really, good at making, again, like you said, like these either urban dense or like these big very big grand spaces, like hotels, ballrooms, uh nightclubs, stuff like that. And their exteriors, I like there have been a couple of desert locations, there's some jungle locations. Those look like fairly run of the mill, I guess I'll say, but like nothing offensive to the eye for me. I think that for the most part, where it counts, it looks very good. And the things that you need to be playing the most of, it looks great. Yeah. Okay. Well, I I think we're all fairly high. I'm kind of the low man, Matt's the high man, but we're all recommending and saying, mash, don't pass. This is definitely worth playing. Absolutely. I will always remember because there's a lot of uh NPC shouts and barks. You know, they're constantly saying stuff as you're going around the level. And my favorite, I think, is when one of the henchmen says , No way I'm going down like this one millisecond before I shoot him in the head. He does indeed go down like that. He did indeed go down like that. Narrator. He did. He died. So a lot of good stuff here. There were some sequences where like I got stuck and I had to manually restart in one case. I don't think this was user error, but it was just like I had to get a key card from a guy at a certain point and I advanced to this point where I could no longer get back to get that key card, but I thought there was a different way through the level, and it turned out there wasn't and I couldn't get back to it. So sometimes whatever freedom it allows you comes back to bite you, and sometimes the freedom is is not liberated enough for me as a a hitman fan. But on the whole, you know, fairly well paced, especially in the back half of the game, sometimes strange transitions from one mode of gameplay to another, but does it feel like a big budget bond game? It sure does. And it does a whole lot of stuff well here. And even if I had some reservations, I couldn't really put it down for the 20 hours or so that I was playing this thing, even though it it started slow. So yeah, good game. And you know, sort of uh know what you're gonna get going in. There's no skill tree here. There's no currency. There's like light interaction when you're, you know, in a market, you can click on stuff, but you can't really do anything other than maybe talk to someone sometimes. I did learn that the key to spy craft though is to stand near people who are having a conversation and just stare at your phone and then that works everyone. What a better way to eat I I guarantee all of us have eavesdropped on somebody while we're looking at our phones. That's literally all of Spycraft. Yeah. And I like how British it is, too, at least, you know, from my American perspective. I know IO is a a Danish studio, but it it felt very true to Bond. But these MI f MI6 folks having a lot of indiscreet conversations around headquarters is all I'm saying. Maybe because it's an open plan office. Not a lot of private privacy, which seems like a strange fit for MI6 . All right. Let us talk about the other big game, though a very different kind of big game, that came out this week, and that is Mina the Hollower, developed and published by Yacht Club Games, which is the the autours known for Shovel Knight and the various games in the Shovel Knight franchise. This game has been in the works for quite a while and has been hotly anticipated. As I mentioned, it's 20 bucks and it is out for all platforms. And I mean all platforms, even you macOS and Linux players, Mina the Hollower is there for you. And this is a throwback. This is an old school synthesis of a lot of great games, and you will definitely pick up on the references here. But it also puts a fresh spin on those games. And this has been the best reviewed critic ally game of 2026. And I don't disagree. I think this is this is really a a masterful kind of retro but not too overly faithful and copycat spin on a genre of, you know, I guess the the most obvious comp is The Legend of Zelda, right? But it's not just the Legend of Zelda. It's The Legend of Zelda meets Castlevania , meets From Soft Games, meets Silksong. There's a lot in here, and it's all done extremely well. And so Matt, were you as big a fan of Mina the Hollower as I was and seemingly everyone else was? I am a huge fan of Mina the Hollower. I like games, as we talked about. Although I will say that, you know, I'm seeing like the critical acclaim on this is sort of way, way, way, way, way, way high up there. Yeah, I was like, whoa, whoa, okay. I didn't know like we were thinking like this. It's definitely the the leader in the clubhouse, like take heart haters of mixtape, because there's a new new favorite for indie game of the year. Was it was this more so an emotional response to like no, we gotta give a real video game a ten out of ten. Yeah. It has fail states. It's interactive. Very rare. Although IGN I think did give it a ten. A ten as well. Yep. Not that you know revolves around IGN. Yeah. But yeah, I I I felt like if I were reviewing this , you know, I would probably give it like a nine out of ten. Uh I think it's a wonderful, wonderful game. I do think it has a few flaws. So it wouldn't be a ten out of 10 for me, but you know, it's just weird for me to to feel like slightly lower than the general consensus on the game I think So that's my own thing to worry about. But uh no, I I think it's a fantastic video game. And I think that with it getting such high scores , you know, we're gonna have a similar thing happen here as I think happened with Silksong, where this is a game that reviewers are going to absolutely love and it's gonna bring in a whole like set of people who normally wouldn't play a game like this and they're gonna try it and they're gonna fall off it almost instantaneously. Could not agree more. Because I think that you already I think it is a tall ask for a lot of people to put twenty five hours into a two D video game. And I think that this game in particular has a bit of an uphill battle. It the the difficulty at the start I think is probably the point in the game where the difficulty is the highest. At least that's how I found it. You know, this this sort of way it works where, you know, it's similar to Souls games, uh, if you can die and lose all of your bones that you've picked up The bones are their money in this. The bones are their money, as they should be. Yeah. But yeah, I I just think that I I could just imagine so many people like losing all of the bones they've worked for in the past hour or two hours and saying, Nope, not for me, really. Now the game does as you progress, like you get more orbs. If you ha if you have no orbs and you die, you lose all your bones, right? And you have one orb at the start, I believe. So eventually you get, you know, more health and more orbs and I don't think I like actually lost any significant amount of bones in the last half of the game at any point because between that health bar and the orbs and and being able to like convert your bones into a saveable form as you can often do in from software games. Like that element of the game that was so present at the beginning, that stress of worrying about losing bones was like completely gone by the time I was at the end of this game. So that was that's one thing I think everyone needs to be aware of if they're playing this game, if they're jumping in and they're they're not like a veteran of this of of of the very two D indie hard game space like stick with it and if you're having some trouble they have more difficult y modifiers in this game than any game I have ever come across in my life. There are you can modify everything you could possibly think of in this game to tune it to a more palatable experience for you if you'd like. I'm a person who plays games on default settings, yeah, almost religiously. And if I have to change them to make them harder or easier, I get kind of annoyed by that personally. But yeah. Interesting. I personally have freed myself from that, obviously with my QTE take uh and philosophy. So I I was welcomed to this game to know that there's so many things about this that you can change, but I still walked away from this being like, hey, do you like Souls Light? Do you like Link's Awakening DX? Because you better . Otherwise, this is gonna be a really tough sell for you. And the ways in which I think that this game can be beautiful, joyous, a very fun to play on site. I think you'll know if if this is for you or not. And I'm not gonna say that this game is inaccessible and that it's not worth trying, but again, you'll know pretty soon whether or not you're going to like it. Yeah. And I think that's kind of gonna be the harder thing for me. Did I personally like it that much? I did enough, but I certainly can't argue with the love and care that Yacht Club has put into this because they bleed for these types of games. They absolutely know where the sweet spot is for all of these influences to make a perfect marriage of all of them to work. Yeah, and you use the phrase on site, and the first impression this game makes just visually, you comped it to Link's Awakening, and I think that's right. It it is a Link's Awakening or Oracle of Ages slash seasons era Zelda look. I've seen a lot of people comp this to Link to the Past and say it's S N E S style. It's not. It's it's not a sixteen bit look. It's an eight-bit look no it is older school than that and that is gonna be off putting to some people because initially I had a hard time because look it's one thing to play an eight bit game on a Game Boy color screen. It's another to play not to screen size rag, but to you know play on a giant L C D TV screen in 2026. This guy, yeah, like uh not everyone has a giant L C D screen, but screen size screen Ben Lindbergh over here. It's true. It's true. I'm a shower when it comes to my TV size. But but like it's tough even to kind of make out the game world at first. There's a a real ad adjustment period there because it appears so pixelated. I was trying to, you know, I have my couch against a wall. I can't move back any farther, but I wanted to because Matt's advice was like, yeah, just move back. I can't, there's a wall in the way but like i felt myself kind of moving my neck back as i was playing just to get an additional you know few inches of perspective so that it would be clear what was happening because it it was and if you've ever hooked up an uh old console to a new TV via some device, you know what I'm talking about here. So yeah. It it's it's tough. And there were times where that would kind of affect the gameplay because I literally couldn't recognize where to go because like a key block, for instance, didn't really look like a key block or didn't really look any different from any other block, which is challenging because this is a game that is stuffed with secrets. It's always about is there some hidden part? Is there a crack in this wall? Is there you gotta discern pixels? You do this. And with and when you when it's blown up on a giant TV, or by any means a normal TV, it's hard to tell. So play it on Steam Deck if you have a thing. Yeah. But it does nail that look and it's it's very colorful. I mean it's good looking. It's just obviously it's a tribute to a certain era of gaming and you know, for better or worse. And it was really interesting because I was going back and forth between Nina and Bond, and these are both good games, but boy, they couldn't be any different. Any more different in terms of appearance and just like budget and you know, Mita the Hollower is is less than a gigabyte file size. I was like, okay, I'm downloading bond, I'll sit and wait for a couple minutes, meet up, oh , it's done. You know, which is kind of nice. But boy, it's and I'm glad that gaming has room for both of these experiences. I I would never want to say, oh, sure, Mina offers more bang for the buck, but first light offers more, you know, bang in terms of explosions and graphics and stuff. So I'm glad that we can have both of these and that they can both be games that we enjoy and that there is at least still some room in the gaming development world to make games like this. And honestly, you know, ping-ponging back and forth between these two games, there was an adjustment period after I went back to Mina or when I started MENA, but not that long an adjustment period, you acclimate to that quite quickly, which I think just goes to show how important graphics are in the grand scheme of things. I mean, you know, if it's like Crimson Desert and it's blowing your mind, that can be a real differentiator. But for the most part, it it's gameplay. It always has come down to gameplay and it always will come down to gameplay. And so you can get great gameplay in an eight-bit package and you can get great gameplay in a triple A experience bells and whistles package and both have their virtues. But I think you might bounce off it if you're not used to that kind of game. I actually I didn't bounce off this game the way that I ultimately did with Silksong, and I played a ton of Silksong, but it just frustrated me to no end. And this game didn't to the same degree, even though it it is similarly challenging in some respects. You know, like there's a lot of silksong in I think the the healing system where you have to attack enemies to recover health. And then there's the From Soft aspect of, yeah, when you die, you lose stuff and you have to go back and get it before you die again or you lose it forever. But also you don't usually have to go that far to get back to that point. You know, usually there's a checkpoint, a save point that's not too distant. And there's so much customization here, as you said, Matt. And you, you know, discover all these trinkets and you can equip trinkets, and then you have your secondary weapon, which is very Castlevania. There's a lot of Castlevania, like the sort of gothic setting, the soundtrack , which is fantastic, by the way. Amazing. Yeah. And so you put all these things together and there was enough sort of uh okay, I can build craft my way to success yeah in this game , that that was the redeeming factor. And even though we're copying it to Legend of Zelda, as everyone is, Mina is much more nimble than Link was in those games, because this is a game where the movement is much more satisfying than when you're walking around as eight-bit link, because the core mechanic, the hook here of hollowing, which is burrowing basically, is so good, you know? And so I think going underground has really been underserved historically in video games because it's all about jumping. It's all about going up and not so much about going down. I mean sure there's dig dug and everything, but just that seemingly simplistic mechanic of Mina being a hollower who can burrow underground. And the key is that you actually I don't know how the physics of this makes sense, but you move a little bit faster when you're underground than when you're walking on the surface. And so even as you're just traipsing around, you just want to keep burrowing and hollowing because you're also invulnerable when you're underground. That's it. Yeah. And it becomes a a key aspect of the combat because it's all about yeah, I'm I can reposition myself while because I can't be hit. And then it's it's such a core part of the puzzles and it's repurposed in so many clever ways over the course of the game where it's this one simple thing. I can go underground for a few seconds, but they then unlock that in in so many ways. It's really impressive. It's just this kind of gift that keeps giving. Yeah, that burrowing is is is the big solve of this game for like how do you take Zelda like overhead combat and make it dynamic and make it interesting and make it challenging because that burrowing that like invulnerability and speed boat boost that you get from burrowing just changes the entire dynamic of what a 2D overhead fight can be. And when you combine that with the number of weapons that you have and the number of sub-weapons , the trinkets and and and everything, like it's really satisfying 2D overhead combat in a way that I think is it's a huge step forward that we haven't seen in in like you know 30, 40 years of this 2D overhead combat. They're doing something that feels entirely fresh and and unique and and deep. It's it's really something to be praised that that build in the combat interactions. It's ambitious. I I don't know that Yacht Club has failed to make a good game yet, but this is going from the Mega Man inspired Shovel Knight, which is sort of you know side-scroller, this is top down, but it's open world instead of discrete levels. It's extremely nonlinear. There are extremely yeah, there are six dungeons in the game, really. There, you know, you can go to most of them. You can go pretty much anywhere in this world from the jump. Yeah, and we probably had entirely different paths through the game. Yeah, oh definitely. Yeah. Yeah. Which is different from Bond. And it's, you know, much longer than than previous yacht club games. And so even though you unlock stuff as you go and you do so much exploring and you you upgrades, you can get kind of anywhere and go anywhere from the beginning. And it's it's really impressive that they made that work. And it feels like they just kept refining the burrowing as you go. It was almost like split fiction. Remember when we played split fiction last year, Matt, and you know, you had this great co-op gameplay, and it felt like only at the end or toward the end did they fully unlock the potential of that and it really peaks and you feel like, oh yes, this is what they were really going for. Maybe they figured it out as they were developing this, or maybe they just saved the best for last. But I think that also applies to Mina too, because the way that the burrowing is used as you get deeper into the game. It it just like there's so many layers to it. It's yeah the more systems they add on throughout this game, the more depth it adds. And it it by the end of the game, you're right. It it really is just an incredible series of systems. And you know, the game that I kept thinking about while I was exploring this world was Metroid Prime 4, because we had a big discussion about how you, know you, get the through intro Metroid Prime 4 and they're like, here's the open world. All right, go do anything. And then you try. And it's like, actually, you should do this world first, and then you're gonna go to the world. Yeah, but now that you failed gloriously at that, how about Yeah. And also there's nothing in the open world and it's all a big desert. Yeah. And it was very linear levels, actually. Whereas in Mina, like the the the uh the ability to go to any of those biomes at the jump, as well as one that you know, if you figure out how to get there, you you could go to it pretty much right away. This game just has so many secrets and if you're like a person who enjoys like finding secrets on a map and uncovering things and discovering things like it is such a joy. In in a in a I know the comp arisons that we often have for for this d to From Software around you know the bones and and losing your experience and everything. But I think there's also like a direct tie into From Software from the way that there are there is world discovery where they are not holding your hand at all. And you can just sort of find obscure secrets that, you know, they would have been perfectly happy for you to miss like completely missable sections of this game. That FromSoft is exp like uh influence is is definitely felt in that regard. But the one the one area of that sort of exploration that I felt a little let down by was that there is a map in this game, but it is only accessible sort of in your recurring like home base. Yes. Right. And there is no kind of overhead tile to tile and no map dungeon map sort of thing. Yeah. So I did, you know, my playtime on this is probably twenty-five hours , I think I said. But I I I know that I'm gonna say at least three to four of those hours at least was me just kind of stumbling around the map being like, you know, I have X I miss I basically have almost all of these biomes unlocked and I'm trying to get to the one or two that I haven't been to yet. And I'm just going all over the map looking for how to access that and I cannot find it. And of course we are playing pre-release. Right. And uh, you know, I I guess I could have like gone onto the the review Discord and and really asked someone, but I I didn't feel like I wanted to. So I ended up, you know, exploring the world looking for those biomes. And it I eventually did find them. It took a lot of wandering around. And in that process I found a lot of cool secrets and stuff so I wasn't too upset about it. But just having a single map that I could have looked at, I would have I would have found where I wanted to go almost instantaneously. Agreed. And and I'm not a new game plus guy generally, but if you are, then this is the game for you. Oh wow. Because you can play this thing several times and it'll be a different experience each time. I'll also say that the exploration is fun just because of how compelling a lot of the characters in the world are. You know, it's sort of like Silksung in that respect. Mina herself is not particularly compelling. I mean, the conceit of the game, Mina's this sort of genius inventor and mouse who is part of this Hollowing Guild, you know, studies the earth and and uh invents this technology, this spark technology. And so she's going to this world to figure out why the the spark technology has ceased to work. And she's sort of, you know, blank slate for the most part, which is not uncommon with the kind of games that this is modeled on. But the characters you encounter, a lot of character in those characters and a lot of strange settings, a lot of variety, a lot of just weird, almost sort of disturbing kind of characters who really will make an impression on you. So I do like wandering around this world. There's just a lot of personality that was injected into this thing and clearly a lot of care that was taken to make it. So yeah, uh whether it's as great as all the raves, I don't know. Your mileage may vary, but it's an excellent game. And if you're into this type of game, you're gonna get what you want, which I guess applies to Bond as well, as different as these games actually are. Yeah. I just want to say that like the developer here has done such an incredible job of making Mina like a celebration of the entire history of video games. Like it's incredible to see them pull inspiration from modern games like FromSoft Games, and then go all the way back to stuff like Chrono Trigger. Like there are like very deliberate homages to games across the entire history of games that like if you're a gamer and you have been like there's just so much in Mina , so many hat tips, so much inspiration. It's it's it just feels like a a really heartfelt celebr Aaron Powell To me, it's the it's the difference between the terms reheating somebody's nachos and a tribute act. And this is a this is a tribute act of the highest order because it's genu inely somebody who like loves and appreciates all of this source material and wants to do it justice, not only by making its own spin on it, but to like honoring the spirit of all of the exercises that are put forth in all of these games. At no point in in any of these like systems and art styles and themes that they iterate on do I feel like this couldn't have fit in 1992. Does that make sense? Like the i there's never a thing that's like overly advanced or inherently way too modern about this , but still reinvents itself in a way that is true to everything that came before it. And it's really, really beautiful. Mm-hmm. And there's a little bit of that in Bond too, just because there's so many callbacks and references to famous Bond moments. And yet it does feel like it's not paint by numbers bond. It feels like it's trying to chart its own course and well or unchart uncharted its own course and, you know, do its own thing, strike off it's in its own direction. So it's not quite like a Lego Batman let's play the hits and remember this and remember that. As great as that can be too in the Lego Batman context. It is uh sort of an original, but clearly standing on the shoulders of giants here. And I did want to pay one more compliment to Bond before we end, just because I was the main nitpicker on this game. And uh I didn't even mention all my nitpicks. Did you guys keep getting a message that said like you've been disconnected from the internet and it positive I'm playing a single player campaign here. I don't care if I'm connected to the internet. Why is my game being stopped so that I can reconnect? Like continuing to get the same tips, you know, I'm eighteen hours into this game and it's like you can grab and throw this guy. I know that. Stop negging me. I'm not brawling well enough for you. You can take a tour in that setting. I promise you you can turn off those tutorials. I could turn that off too, it's true. And also there are like batteries everywhere in the level. Every table has like, you know, 'cause you have to power up your your gadgets. Which I I love that. No, I can t I I love the idea of of a international man of mystery just like touching everybody's smartphones on the table. It does make sense there are a lot of smartphones. How much hand sanitizer do you have here? I need to r repower my poison by collecting all the hand sanitizer somehow. But you have nothing to say at all about getting stronger in Mean of the Hollower by collecting bones. Well, that's true.. Yeah And all of a sudden somebody keeps their hands clean and that's a useful in-game resource. Yeah. The gadgets were great, by the way, in Bund, even though I used the same for the entire time pretty much. Oh, in certain A real month for gadgets and video games. Oh yeah. Yeah. But I meant to pay a compliment to Bund, which is that even though the the graphics were a mixed bag for me, this was maybe the best game ever in terms of reflecting the protagonist in mirrors. The mirrors. But like it's a really good detail just to be like Huh Yeah. Right because you know like in video games you're used to you go into the bathroom and what, eight times out of ten the mirror doesn't work for some reason? Like it's streaked or cleared. It's either broken or yeah yeah which okay I get it it's probably you know it uses up a lot of resources to reflect the environment in real time or whatever but in this game it's really a flex because every reflective surface you walk by you can see yourself even like a computer screen or something so they just I think they stuck more mirrors in this game so that they could show off. Ooh look I can actually see myself. Pretty impressive. Yeah all right.ames G are great. Maybe, maybe gaming is broken in some deep-seated ways, but boy, our game's great. So go get Bond . Go uh pick up your refurbished Steam Deck, maybe if you can find one. You can uh maybe uh you know, go play Destiny 2 on on PS Plus, where most of it is now, while you still can , and go get Mina the Hollower for a mere nineteen ninety-nine. There is much value to be had, and I hope there is value for you all in button mash as well. And thank you to you two as always for joining me on this adventure. Oh happy to be here, Ben. And and as you s as you mentioned about Mina the Hollower on PS5, like if you can play this on on PC or Steam Deck or you know, because I played a lot on PC and you can make it a smaller window. So just be wary of that. We can't recommend this enough. Exactly. And I have one more parting recommendation for everyone lost in the Onslaught of big high-profile releases here is a new game that I have been playing with my daughter, and it has been delightful. And that is Bluey's Quest for the Gold Pen. So for any parents out there in the audience who are looking for something, you can play with your kids. Not that my daughter didn't also watch me play double O seven first light, which perhaps was not age appropriate. I don't know. She's four, but nonetheless, that ship has sailed at this point. But Bluey's quest for the gold pen, Bluey, super popular in my household, in all households. It's the most popular show on streaming. And this game came out late last year and early this year for mobile platforms . And so you might think, oh, the Bluey Mobile game? Is that going to be any good? Well, now it's out for Switch and Switch 2 and PS4 and PS5 and Windows and Xbox Series and everything. This is like the fourth Bluey game, but it's a true Bluey g ame, which was written by the series creator. Not a pretender. This is authentic Bluey action. This is like playing, you know, an episodes of the show, but many episodes of the show. Because it was written by the series creator. It's voiced by the original cast. It's the true blue bluey experience. And it's also a a great introduction to gaming because it's also kind of like a Zelda like, you know, but for for kids. And so uh this will be the gateway drug to me of the hollower, maybe for my four-year-old. Play Bluey's quest for the gold pen. So you can pick this up, but you know, don't be dissuaded by the fact that it's a mobile game or that it's for kids. I mean it clearly is for kids, but much like Bluey the show, if you're a parent playing with your kids, you will be charmed and entertained. And it's it's a great introduction, I think, to gaming conventions. So I wanted to just make a recommendation. You know, we don't do a lot of uh parenting content here on Button Mesh necessarily, but you're looking for something to play with your kid, Blueie's quest for the gold pens. Thank you to Devon Melnado for producing this episode to a vacationing Arjuna Ram Gopel in absentia, still guiding us from afar. And stay tuned because the three of us will be back on Button Mesh in about 10 days, as if we haven't been busy enough talking about the games that are already out. We are about to get wowed by all the games that are about to be out someday, because we are entering summer showcase season, and we will be back