Episode 017 - Brothers A Tale of Two Sons

The speaker talks about their experience staying in hotel rooms with locked HDMI ports for the TVs. They also discuss their dislike for feather pillows and daylight saving time. They mention the game "Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons" and its connection to the game "It Takes Two". Oh, something else I got to tell you about. So I'm still on the road, right? Yep. I've been telling you a couple of times where the hotel rooms, the TVs, they lock the HDMI ports. Yeah. But what's going on? Are you printing something? No, dude. No, it's just my printer's been making noise for 30 minutes. It did print the paper that I asked it to print a while ago, but it just started grinding over there. So see, a lot of these hotel rooms, they have these beautiful HDTVs, sometimes 4K TVs, but they block the HDMI ports. They're physically present. But they, no, they're just like, they take the back panels off of these TVs and disconnect it and make it unusable. So weird. So I lucked out this week and I got one that works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right now you're using the hell out of it. It's so good. I mean, I don't know if it's a 4K, but it's high res, it's great. Incognito mode has never looked better. Three, two, one. God Lord. I've been waiting like a week to say that exact joke. At first when you said it, I was like, you didn't mean it like that. And then I was like, he wouldn't. That's fucking funny, dude. Yeah. Don't get a blacklight. Yeah, the room's got carpet and I always wonder what I'm stepping on. I should probably be wearing socks. There is a series on YouTube, Dan Bell's Hotel Series. I don't want to. They go to the Baltimore area and they check into shady hotels and they have a guy who used to be like a health inspector go with them. It's not good. It's not good. Yeah, I stayed in the Super 8 for all of 12 minutes. I was on the road for a couple hours. I was in there long enough to carefully urinate and then call my travel agency and be like, get me the fuck out of here. It was disgusting. There were burn holes in every cloth surface in the room, which is just crazy. My brother has stayed at a lot of hotels, a lot of shitty hotels because he used to travel for music and he said that there was like one, I can't remember where he said it was, but he said it was so bad that he grabbed like a folding chair out of his truck and put it on the front porch area and slept out there. The hotel was paid for. He didn't pay for it, but he said it felt so bad that that's what he did, which is pretty terrifying. Yeah. Luckily, for the majority of my travel, I've only ever had to like have them change my room like two or three times for genuine reasons, but most of the time I'm able to stay at places that have kind of a standard. The Super 8 situation, that was the closest place by 30 minutes to where I was in the middle of nowhere and I ended up having to stay at a hotel that was an hour away from where I was working. Yeah, geez. Just to not stay at a Super 8. Anyway. That sucks. The Super 8, you just picked it because it was close? Yeah. It was the closest thing and the closest thing was 30 minutes. What's your favorite hotel chain, DoubleTree? All my points are with IHG, which is Holiday Inn. Oh, I have my little card. So these are the hotels that I favor. Yeah. Six Senses, Regent, Intercontinental, Vignette, Kempton, apparently are gorgeous. Hotel Indigo, really, really nice. Voco, a word I can't pronounce. Even Hotels, Crown Plaza, where I am today. Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Holiday Inn Vacation Club, Avid, Staybridge, Candlewood Suites, and Atwell Suites. Yeah, I think Holiday Inn might be where we stay the most in retro. You want to know why I picked IHG the most? Why I started getting my points there? Yeah, I'd love to know. The pillows. Okay. Can you buy them? You know, I haven't tried. The one I have at home, it's easy to get them outside of a hotel. So the problem I have is every hotel that's ever existed, and anyone who is in hotel admin and has hotels and shit, understand this. I'm very passionate. Feather pillows are the worst fucking thing that's ever been invented. They're flat, man. I have like an 80-pound fucking head, okay? And it's so flat and flaccid, I go through the fucking pillow, and I'm getting stuck with quills all fucking night. And they're hot. There's no reason. Yeah, it's the dumbest. I don't understand anybody who likes feather pillows. Come at me. I think they last longer. I don't know, dude. Fuck that. I don't know. Fuck that. Give me a real bird to sleep on, dude. No? A pigeon? Well... Picture, dude, I once picked up a duck, and it was the softest thing I've ever touched. Heck yeah, dude. Heck yeah, dude. Give me a duck to sleep on. The feather bit's fine. It's the quills, man. They poke through the fucking pillow. It's the worst. I hate it. How are we ever going to get back on track? I'm equally passionate. I don't know. about how much I hate feather pillows as I hate the concept of daylight savings time. Sorry, daylight savings time. We're trying to phase out both of them currently. Well, the thing I'm hearing now is that there's certain parts of the country that want to stay in daylight savings and other parts that don't want to stay. So now we've got ones that want to go shift the hour and ones that don't. And nobody can fucking agree. You need to remove it. Do they do it everywhere? Do they do? No. Do they do it? No. It's only in the U.S.? So here's the thing. Like 95% of the world has gotten rid of it, if they even have ever started. And part of the U.S. doesn't even do it. There are like whole states. Arizona doesn't do daylight savings. Weird. Very weird. It's so stupid. I bet you Florida will never stop doing it. Conceptually, it doesn't make sense. You want to know why it doesn't make sense? Guess what? Take the idea of a clock out of it. If there are 10 hours of sunlight, guess what? It doesn't matter what a clock says. There are 10 hours of sunlight. My wife says, oh, well, yeah, but I think I said, you know, if you operate around daylight hours, when the daylight hours, the length of daylight changes throughout the year, adjust your hours. And she says, well, you can't just go and change the whole clock for everybody. That's what we're doing. That's the whole point. Am I killing the mood of this podcast? It's so infuriating. When is daylight savings time? Who cares? Sorry. My blood pressure's up. I need to calm down. You get a little ways before the worst day of your fucking life comes around. Oh, hold on. When is this episode coming out? You might be in it right now. Remember? Well, yeah, we are in it right now. Yeah. But yeah. So would you rather be in it or out of it? I don't care. No, I mean, you have to pick. You got to pick. There's no fucking. Just remove. But when you remove it, now or later, do you want it to be darker a year? Sorry. Daylight savings is a condition we put on our existing clock. So I want to remove the condition. Okay. But depending on what time do you want it to be right now? I don't care. No, but you have to pick. This is important because Jesus is listening. What do you want to do, Alec? I want. Okay, hold on. It is. Okay, man. It is. It is 11. It is November 13th. No, it's 11. It's 11. It's November 13th. On November 5th. On on. Hold on, because I'm getting confused. On November 5th, 2023. Is daylight savings starting or is it? It ends. It ends. I would like it to stay ended. Stay ended. So you want it to be. Okay, so we're not falling back. I don't want to fall anywhere. I don't want to spring up. I want to stay dead and flaccid. I want to be done. Okay. I think we've come to a conclusion. You love daylight savings time. Welcome back to 321 Backlog, the video game podcast where we've talked about video games from our backlog. We don't do segues here. Nope. That was a great banter section. Let me tell you, that was. I think that it got good. I think it got there. The energy was positive the whole way through. Yeah, you were not hateful. I wasn't angry at anyone. Yeah. At all. You having a good night? Yeah, it's probably the best night of my life. How's the energy level doing? I feel pretty good. I actually have more caffeine here still. More? I mean, I didn't get more. I just haven't completed what I started. Okay. That's looking good. I still also have some cottage cheese, but I think we're past that. That's probably a little. A little more cottage. You've been talking for a bit. Yeah. I'd still eat it. I'm not a savage. The cottage is dilapidated by now. Yeah. Cottage is done. Condemned, they say. It ain't easy. Thanks so much for listening. All right. Let's get on track. We are here to talk about. Episode 17. 17. Damn. Wait. Hold on. Technically, it's 18, but we're going to call it episode. Why is it technically 18? Because our first episode was episode zero. Episode 17. Brothers, a tale of two sons. Two brothers going on a journey, not knowing how to speak a real language. That's right. Oh, no. Another edition of why bother with a fucking voice actor. A tale of two sons. Guide two brothers on an epic fairy tale journey. From visionary Sweden film director, Joseph Fares, and top tier developer, Starbreeze Studios. $15 on Steam. Perfect fucking game. Sorry for cussing. Game came out 2013. It's apparently multiplayer on Nintendo Switch. I guess maybe you pop the Joy-Cons off. That would be the option. Oh, yeah. Couch co-op. Yeah. That would be kind of neat. But it's otherwise a primarily single player game. It's been on every platform. Windows Phone. It was on Windows Phone. Amazon Luna. Did you ever have a Windows Phone? No, but I kind of wanted one for a short time. They were terrible. My dad got one, and it was... Yeah. Anyway. Sorry. Continue. You got history with this franchise? This type of game? No, no. This was no history, but I'll be surprised with this little surprise. I don't know if you knew, but it's made by the same company that made It Takes Two. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Does it make sense? It does. It does. I thought that was kind of neat. Huh. Did you start changing your rating numbers? No. I can appreciate It Takes Two more. I backed myself into it. I did something really stupid. I didn't know if it was single player or not. I was playing this at home on my PC, and I started using the keyboard. Then I had to move the big brother with WASD and the little brother with the directional pad. Then control and space bar for their interact, and keep all that in my head. I did not think for a moment, maybe I should get a controller. That's disgusting. I played the whole game on the keyboard. I messed up the key lighting so badly. Really? Yeah. That is atrocious. Here's the thing. I'm playing like this with my hands out, right? If the big brother that's supposed to be over here moves over here, I start trying to control them with the other side. That happened to me. You get a controller, too, a little bit. I can see that would probably happen, too. I feel like a controller would be so much easier to manage. That would be a controller-designed game, for sure. Yeah. Without a doubt. No doubt. Yeah. If you haven't played it yet, get your damn controller. My only notes around gameplay and mechanics for our standing things to look at is just, fuck me, because I backed myself into a stupid corner with this game. I feel like that's a challenge run, a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Why did you do that to yourself? I don't know. This game felt like it could... I was sitting in the office, playing through this. I have an internal monologue with myself. I'm like, is this supposed to be multiplayer? Then I stopped, and I went and looked it up. I'm like, no, it's a single player. Even the fact that I went and looked it up after starting it, it didn't clue me in to maybe I should plug a controller in. I think if you hit controls, it brings up a controller. Are you serious? I think so. In the menu setting, if you spawn... I don't think I ever had to look at a menu. You should have. I, for no reason at all, made the controls more difficult, but they were still simple enough that I didn't really have to ever look at anything in the menus. I'm appalled. Yeah. I'm upset with myself. Not going to lie. This was your pick. Why did you pick it initially? Well, dude, I mean... Because we're brothers? We're brothers. That's part of it. The story is basically following the chronicles of our lives. We're both sons. We both have dads. A dad, a single dad. I don't know why. Man, I don't know. It kind of seemed like a good game to come off of spookiness with and get into the fall setting, I guess. I don't know. I didn't know too much about this game. I knew it was a little puzzly. I kind of felt like I wanted an easy game for once. My last game was heavy on the action, kind of. Yeah. So I wanted something a little more relaxed. And it's on my backlog. I own the game. I don't know if I bought it or if I got it for free. I don't remember, but it was on my backlog. For me, it was free on Epic a while back, so I already happened to have it. I played it on... Which was super low. What a fucking segue. I played it on Steam. So I owned the game on a separate platform. I don't know if I got it for free or if I bought it. I don't know. Neither would surprise me. Yeah. Because it sounds like something I would buy, and it also seems like a game that would go well with not costing any money. Yeah, man. So you played it on your PC. We discussed that. I used the Steam Deck. I played with an Xbox controller when I played it on my TV, but I initially started playing it just handheld mode. Nice, nice. Translated well. Yeah. Since you played it with a controller, aside from maybe getting the controllers mixed up, it's like the characters moved on the screen. Were they simple enough to control? Yeah, dude. I mean, it was analog stick left and right, and then the trigger was the control slash space bar. So because I was using a keyboard, I only had four directions. Or excuse me, I had eight directions. So if I held two keys, it would go in diagonal. Did the joystick give you more points, or did it lock like the old Pokemon? It didn't lock. No, I had a much better experience. It was smooth? Yeah, you could run in like a circle. Yeah, it was very analog stick friendly. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, play with a controller. Yeah, I fucked up hard. Yeah. So just running through my stuff, just to get my easy stuff out of the way. Graphics and art, I think the art side was better than the graphics. It was low graphics, but I think it did okay. Sound quality was fine. I, again, have the same issue that we've mentioned over and over again about the voice acting. Yeah. So I did look this one up ahead of time before making the following comments. I found that all of the in-game dialogue is spoken in a fictional language based on Lebanese Arabic. Thus, the story is conveyed through actions, gestures, and expressions. So I didn't know about the Lebanese Arabic part. I don't speak that particular language, so I'm not sure what it sounds like, but it sounded more like they were doing what traditional Zelda would do, where it's just grunts and weird noises rather than trying to convey a language. I think it was like a weird in-between of submerged and Zelda. I think the same people voice acted for Submerged, Hidden Depths. Again, always, always, always, whoever was making the noises sounds fine. It's just a weird choice to not actually go through the process of, if you're going to hire somebody to do a voice, speak something that's real. If they spoke real Lebanese Arabic, I'd be fine with that. I don't know if that's an archaic language or still in use. Maybe. I'm playing through another game that we're going to talk about in a couple weeks, but it is a five-hour game, and they are not speaking English. They're speaking another language, but they're actually speaking the language, and they took the time. It's weird how you can just tell it's a real language. Yeah. It's in a language that I don't understand, nor do I speak it. But you know it's a real language. But yeah, you know it's real, and it made that particular play experience so much better to me. So I can't wait till we talk about that one because anyhow. I give the voice acting a zero out of 10. I'm holding no punches. Okay. It's a zero for me. Man. There wasn't a single thing about the voice acting that I can even say I enjoyed, honestly. I particularly hated, there's a part where you're hang gliding, and they're like, and they even just, they even sounded like they had a made-up dialogue, dialect during that. Like when they laughed, they're like, and no one laughs like that. You know? It was, yeah. Sound quality, six out of 10. I don't know, man. I don't remember sound. I don't. I only remember dialogue. It was, yeah, it was like atmospheric. Yeah, cool. Fire crackling, yeah. I'll bump that up to a fucking seven. Yeah. I remember that. Sound in general was better than dialogue choices and the voice acting and stuff. Graphics, you gave it a six. You thought the voice acting was better than the graphics. I think because I'm coming at it voice acting-wise of like, so I'm trying to think about it logically, right? So a studio, most likely, looked for someone to record a voice and said, okay, I want you to, they scribbled some bullshit on a piece of paper and said, I want you to say this, right? And that person took that piece of paper and did it. They took a hot bite of soup, burned their tongue, and went to town. Right? Right. And so that, I'm trying to differentiate, like the person that took the time to do what they were told for the voice, though it was a bad thing to happen. That was very nice of you. They did an okay job. Right? So that's the distinction I'm making. As far as like the person that said, yeah, we're going to make them do this language and they're going to sound like this, blah, blah, blah, that person needs to be let go and not be in this business. I don't agree with anything Alex just said. You get a fucking zero. I didn't, I don't know. It was bad. I didn't like it. I'm tired of it now. I'm sick of it. I'm done. I don't know if it was a time period thing. I'm not. I'm done with it. I think this is going to be a standing thing because we've been, we have been doing a lot of smaller games. Yeah. And maybe that's it. Maybe it's a small studio. On the podcast. And I feel like smaller games. But I still, I still think if you needed a voice and you wanted to have some language behind it, put the game designers behind the mic. Like the guys that are, that are coding. Like you just need a person to speak. Another thing too. Like it can't be that hard. If this game was developed by a Swedish developer or filmmaker or something, I think Swedish would have sounded fine. I feel like the setting of this game with the snowy areas and everything else, it would have been fine. I can only assume that Swedish filmmakers speak Swedish. I don't know if you. And has access to a microphone. Fucking just say something, use, use the stuff you're given. Oh, I gave the graphics. I mean, I'm going to hop. I gave the graphics an eight out of 10. I thought the game looked really good, man. I don't know. I bumped it up on my steam deck. I'm not sure why I gave it such a low score. I don't know either, man. I bumped it up on my steam deck to 1080p instead of 720p. And it looked really good, man. Like the environments were, it was every bit of the game was beautiful. Really? Why did you? I, I, I wonder if I started these notes when you were drunk, as I was like, struggling to, to do the mechanics. I, I, I, I sometimes do my notes a little too early. Yeah. I wonder, I wonder if I was jumping the gun on that. Cause no, I, I agree because, because that was one of the things I meant to call out, you know, as you're going through some of these levels, there are moments where you can pause. There's like a bench or something by a cliff and you can pause and have one of your characters sit down. And it looks at the greater world that you're in and gets very cinematic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the little benches you could sit down on. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, I think I might've been, I don't know. I think I might've been salty when I wrote some of these notes, but I stand by everything I've said so far. I've never changed my mind. I noticed that you didn't have, you didn't have this. It says it's not compatible with the steam deck. It was, it was perfectly compatible. Everything worked. I don't know why. Just get it verified. It'll yeah. The beginning of the game. I want to touch on a little bit. I don't know. I don't know why the kid let his mom drown in the beginning. She was right there, dude. That was on purpose. She was at the edge of the boat and he's just like, my hands are too slippery. Or I don't know. That was my impression of his like accent, but he just let her drown. He didn't have the strength. He was the strong one. I think it was a strong boy. I, I blanked, I blanked out. I think I was like, I don't know. They're both strong boys. They're big, strong boys. The dad is also very sick. All of a sudden mom drowns and the dad has the whooping cough or something. And you, the little tutorial to figure out how the controls work is you grab this cart and you roll the dad up the Hill with the cart while he coughs at a rate of 39 coughs per minute. It was the same. Yeah. It was the same three coughs on a three, I guess honestly like a three, four second loop and I didn't care, but it was, I zoned out hard on it because it was not a difficult little tutorial to figure it out. But the, uh, yeah, that was kind of insane. They should have put a dialect on the cough just to change it up a little bit. And then I, and then I realized my dream came true that the dialogue, it was a fake language. And I was like, yes. And I thought that was why you didn't want to tell me anything about the game. I was like, this is what Alec was withholding. No, it was the keyboard. It was the key. I was like, Oh, I had such a hard time. James is obviously going to use a PC too. And it wasn't until like a couple of days, like after I finished it and like started texting, I was like, no, he's probably going to play on a fucking controller. Like I just, I don't know what I was thinking. Master race PC. So, so ridiculous. You know what's funny? You said the game took three to four hours. It took me two and a half. Yeah. Really? Yeah. You added 90 minutes to your playtime because you're not ambidextrous enough. You don't have finger dexterity like I do. Oh my God. That's pretty funny. I can't right now. Oh Lord. Okay. I mean, yeah, so fuck you. Oh God. Dude, this game was cool, man. I liked this game. I didn't like, I didn't like the voice acting, but I liked the game. You should run it by me, dude. You should, if you're ever playing something and you think this seems fucked up, just run it by me. We're, we're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. 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We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. We're close. It was confusing because you come up to the village with this now girl escort, this girl that is escorting you to the village. Outside the main gate, there's like tons of bodies. Yeah. They froze to death out there. Yeah. So you puzzle, get into the village, and you're still seeing frozen to death statues of people. And the screen starts shaking, and there's like this giant walking around, but he's invisible and all you see are the footprints. And the puzzle portion of this game, which isn't much of a puzzle because the girl that's with you kind of like gives you the answer. You have to go behind one of the frozen statues and like pose and like pretend you're behind it. Pretty easy. And then you move on. Yeah, that one, it was, I don't know, it was, it was, it was cool to look at, but it was fairly simple. None of the puzzles were super difficult. No. I say that, but the next section I got confused, so. You know, actually, I do want to, I'm not sure if this happened. I feel like this, yeah, okay, so what I'm thinking happened a little bit before this, but I thoroughly did enjoy the parts after the hang gliding section. This, I can't remember. Isn't that the one where you had to swing? Yeah, dude, with the little rope where you, cause it was like same characters, completely new mechanic because of a piece of rope. So again, anybody that didn't play, the two brothers tied a rope between the two of them and like one could hang and the other one could swing on the rope and get some momentum and be able to like reach a ledge that was further away that he wouldn't normally be able to get to. And then they could kind of piggyback, like leapfrog each other using this rope. And it was cool because again, you're halfway through the game at this point and you get a new mechanic just because of that. I don't know where the rope came from, doesn't matter. I don't know where it fucking went, doesn't matter. You rescue a baby griffin, kind of matter. Yes. It was like a griffin, but it was like an owl instead of an eagle. It was a nighttime griffin, dude, a nocturnal griffin. And then in my notes at this point, I decided to put brothers, a tale of two sons and some dumb bitch. Because suddenly you have a female companion with you who just unique characteristics of being able to jump very far. Yes. Well, no, that was, that was, that was before the, the, the swinging bit. No, that had to have been after I was, I was no, well the, the girl was with you for the invisible giant. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so the swinging part, that's why I backed up a little bit on that or I, I attempted to. Gotcha. I think that happened maybe after the, or before the troll giant battlefield thing. I don't know. Yeah. It happened before the giant battlefield. No, no. Cause it was, it, yeah, it was, it was, it had to have happened right before it because the girl was not on the hangar. Farmer's dog, sheep, troll, and then giant battlefield. Yeah. So giant battlefield, a ritual girl, frozen area, and then hang glider, which then took you took yet. And then that, the hang glider took you to the thing that you hang glider, reverse leapfrogged Alec. Think of how this story happens. You don't go hang gliding without that girl or you don't go hang gliding. You don't. When you like the girl is not in the game yet when you're hang gliding, right? No, it was after you don't, you, you don't stay with her the whole time. You, you, uh, well, okay. You might be having a little bit of keyboard PTSD. The hang gliding I'm okay. Just hear me out. I think you hang glide down to the giant battlefield area. And the reason I also believe this is because you are doing the unique mechanic thing in and, and then you end up in that gigantic room. There's like a bed that's like 50 times the size of you and you climb books that are humongous to get on top of the bed to then release the nocturnal Griffin owl bird who then flies you down, who flies you down, maybe to what, to the battlefield of giants. You don't hang out with the girl, but the girl is present in this game for a long time. I don't think she is, man. I think, I think this is great content. I think I, how I remember it is giant battlefield. It's three hours. You get, you get, I took like four days. You, you, you get to the end of the invisible giant. He rips the roof off of the thing that you guys run and then the bridge collapses giants gone. And then you invisible, you get up to this like sciency guy. You get up to this guy that's like, dude, I'm telling you, you get up to this guy. That's like, got a bunch of like gears and tools around. You get to that by riding goats. She, I, man, where does a lot of awards, dude, where, okay. So hold on, hold on, hold on. Let's just progress the story a little bit more and then you'll realize I'm right. What happens after you end up with, uh, you, you save, you get away from this invisible giant monster. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm getting, I'm getting a webpage up. I am. And dude, just, just hear me out. What then happens immediately after that? Immediately? Where does the girl go? Where does the girl go? I don't know. She is a spider. Oh, that's right. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. She's a spider. One of the best, one of the best fights. Okay. Do you, she, Wendy, where do you go after the spider towards very rapidly the end of the game? Because she's, that's it like the end. Yeah. But you don't lower, you don't like leave the girl Hank go hang gliding miles away. And then she's like, Oh yeah, I'm here. Yeah. So you hang glide down to the giant long before the girl. I think I might've said that. Not, I just had that. When you're editing, you're going to fuck this up, boy. I know you are. You're going to mess me up with this. Okay. So man, we got ahead. So, uh, uh, so we get, uh, okay. Where were we? What are we talking about? We are that dude. We're done with the hang glider. Yeah. Leapfrog was a cool mechanic. I liked it. We're currently now talking about brothers, a tale of two sons and some dumb bitch. Okay. Real quick. Remember I was talking about, uh, I said something along the lines of, uh, most of these mechanics were pretty easy. The puzzles were pretty fine. I got stuck and turn the game off for a day because I couldn't figure out the reverse leapfrog with the rope. I bet that would have been, it took me like 10 minutes to finally figure out what I was supposed to do because like, okay. So I got my directional pad control and space bar. I had to like hold the interact down, but then let go. It was the worst. It was the worst. How much cooler it would have felt so often. I fell so often. Yeah. Off that, off that ledge. So then the girl hugs the guy, she, and they embrace a little bit and, uh, oh my God. Then they kind of lead you into the, she, she like opens up, she like moves her rock and it's like, oh, we're going in here. And the little brother's like, no, no, no bros, literal bros before hoes. We're not fucking doing this right now. And he's like, yo, it's cool. I know what I'm doing. I've seen a lot. I've met a lot of ladies. I know this is going to go well. So they go crawling into this hole and it starts getting kind of bad. Quick. There's definite signs of spiders and I didn't really expect the big twist of this, but the girl happened to be like a, a big, like half spider. Half girl is a drider for any D and D. Oh, cool. Okay. I didn't know that was a, uh, like a thing, but though she's not a drought. She's just like a human, a human drider. There you go. It's a half, half spider. Half person. Yeah. She's like a centaur spider for anybody that likes centaurs. You know what I'm talking about? For anybody that doesn't play D and D she's a spider centaur. Yeah. Half horse, half spider. Am I, am I hitting our target audience? Half horse, half spider. So yeah, then you get another little boss fight and it's against the spider thing. And that kind of reminded me of, uh, limbo a little bit. How you're like, you're defeating a spider by ripping its legs. Oh yeah. And then he gets the older brother gets stabbed with what kind of looked like a venomous thing. Cause it was like blue gets punctured right through the tummy. As the spider lady is dying from being, I don't know, dissected dismembered dismembered is a good way to put it. And then the brother kind of limps up and they're basically at their destination at this point. Yeah. You like, did you see, were you saying you liked that boss fight? I did. Yeah. It was cool. It was easy, but I guess it wouldn't be hard. Yeah, it was easy, but it was giving you. It was breaking away from what you've been doing. You're actually like having a form of combat. Your, your playable area is a little bigger. Cause it zoomed out a bit. And you're, you're a little, the guy, the little boy was in a, a web ball for protection. Using it kind of like zooming around. Yeah. Like a, like a, like a rolling cannonball. Yeah. Cause the edges of the, of the arena, we'll call it, were like kind of raised up like a sick half pipe and you were able to kind of get more momentum and hit the spider girl. It's done her a little bit. And then the older brother was able to like, we'll run up and pull a leg off of her. So you do that sick. It was a spider layer meets a bay blade arena. Meets Tony Hawk's pro skater meets rocket league. Dungeons and dragons. Rocket league dungeons and dragons and centaurs. Yeah. So the brother gets stabbed, he's mortally wounded. It would seem, but this tree of life is very close. So they walk, they, they limp up to the tree of life. And then the, uh, the, uh, younger brother has to ascend the tree by himself. I'm laughing because of my notes. So then the, the younger brother gets like a, some, some of the water from this tree, like the do from this tree in a bag. And then he comes back down the tree and it's, uh, the brother is, is laying there on his back. And then, uh, the little brother pours water down this guy's mouth and he definitely aspirates and gets pneumonia because he's just pouring water down a half conscious guy's fucking mouth. And then it starts raining. So he gets super pneumonia cause of death. So I want to point out some things because, because you, you meant you, you've mentioned this a few times. The perspective I take is something you typically don't think of. Maybe you have whatever. So a couple of things I noticed throughout the whole game, the brothers are walking light jogging, maybe like they have a steady pace, right? Go through the whole thing. Little brother, the weaker one leaning on his older brother very heavily through a lot of the different portions. Anytime they have to swim, you know, he's, he's like afraid of water. Can't swim. It's a, it's a big thing, right? Get to the tree of life. His lifeline is in danger, potentially dying, right? Getting up to the top of the tree, the little kid, your movement speed like increased. He was like running desperately trying to get up there by himself, not knowing what's up there, not having his lifeline to lean on and then getting what he needs coming down and failing it to do it quick enough. After what he went through with his mom, now he's holding his now dead brother in his arms because what, because his brother, well, he wasn't dead until he drowned his own brother. He, he, the tree of life, his brother dying from him trying to save him from the spider. If he wasn't trying to be a better brother and be protected, he would have been fine. It I'm trying to be real bad. Like it's rough. Yeah. So yeah, it sucks. Yeah. What's the treat for, what's the treatment for pneumonia? Vancomycin. So he's got, uh, sorry to take over and kill the mood, but that's no dude. What mood? Oh, sorry to keep the mood, to keep where this game was going to, to hit the story beat as being something with weight and impact games will make you do things that are like varying, like menial tasks where you're just clicking a button here, press F to pay respect, like that shit, right? Where it's, it's, it's making you do a thing, but it's, it's a thing that's so like simple that it's like, well, why are you making me do it? And they did this with burying the brother. So your little kid takes the time to take the time away from getting the treatment for his dad. Not knowing if his dad is, is still there. Take the time to dig a grave. You have to go up to your brother, brother's body, drag it into the grave, and then go through the process of filling it in with all these plays, these piles of stuff. So the game pauses a moment to make you go through those things that are that would, if you were having to do it, be excruciating to do. And it was, it was, it was unclear. Yes, it's, it's, it's one of those things where the, if you take it at, at face value of like a game, having you move some dirt or drag an object, like it's just silly stuff. But with the story behind it, it was, it had, it had a real heavy impact that I think was done. Had, it was done very well in this game that is supposed to be, you know, fun and, you know, sort of lighthearted in portions. It definitely went from being fun to lighthearted to being kind of tragic. You imagine getting this for a kid because it's like, like a lighthearted, fun game. And then you get rivers of blood, shooting giants in the head, and then that, and then the whole thing about pneumonia. I'm sorry. Sorry to bring you down, but I wanted, I wanted us to, to portray it appropriately. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I, I have, I've noticed, and as everybody probably has, I have a tendency to make things a little bit lighthearted and not take, not take things seriously enough. Life sucks. And then you die. From fucking pneumonia. Oh Lord. I don't know, dude. Try drinking water, laying flat on your back and then lay in the rain. See what happens. I'm doing it right now. So then it becomes Orphan's Tale of Son. I love, I love the structure of your notes. Thank you. I feel like they're really what I, where I shine here. And then you, yeah, so then that is basically the, well, there's a part where you, the boy has to swim on his own. So he goes out and then he like sees a vision of his mom. And then he goes, I, this part kind of held me up a little bit because I couldn't figure out why the boy wouldn't just go in the damn water. But you have to activate the left trigger that would be used by having the older brother, because normally the older brother is what allowed you to swim. So he's not there, but you, I guess, find your inner strength or whatever, and then you're able to swim. And it wasn't just with the swimming either. Yeah. Basically the tasks that required two people due to something other than strength, I guess, or, you know, whatever. But you're able to get through some obstacles that the little brother was not able to do before. And he does that by kind of summoning the strength, but it's also utilizing the left trigger on a controller that would normally, as if the brother was still there. So for anybody that can't keep up, yeah, for anybody that's having a hard time keeping up, the older brother dies. And then, yeah, so you, you do a little, a very light traversing and then the owl thing comes back for you and it takes you basically back home, kind of down the bottom of your hill. But that was cool because again, that wouldn't have happened if you didn't rescue this, this griffon owl thing. And it comes back to you. And then it shows kind of a sad scene where the, actually, I mean, it's pretty fucking pathetic. It was pretty sad because it's just the younger brother and the dad who does survive because he, the young boy brings back the tree of life water, helps save the dad. And then it's just the son and the father standing in front of two gravestones. And then the dad just like starts sobbing and then the credits roll. It's like, fuck man. And then it takes you back to the title screen, which I looked, I watched the YouTube video. It's the same title screen when you start up, but it's just the one younger brother. So they completely give away that there's only one brother surviving, but you wouldn't know that. You wouldn't think that. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't notice that the first time, like when we played through, I saw the title screen just long enough for you to hit, like, continue. Yeah. But that's kind of like, I've noticed, like, again, in, in Limbo and in, well, we'll just say in Limbo, it, the title screen is also the end screen, kind of, they did that in Limbo as well. And it's just not, not by the same, you know, developer. Right, right. It's kind of the, the idea of like the, the, the very simple video game version of how they, um, how they would set up like Romeo and Juliet. You know, they, they could, they, they would come out and say what this story is ahead of time. So you get to hear the ending effectively. Right. Right. Yeah. They come in and say, this is a story about love, tragedy and death and, and all that. And they kind of, they give you a lot of, um, a lot of information about how the story ends. Right. Before the story even starts. So, so these video games are doing that in a more like a visual way with their screens. And I know those, these two games aren't the only ones to do it. I'm sure there's other ones. But it's, um, it was a nice touch because I noticed that as well. Did you like this game? I feel like we've been on a little bit of a streak where we didn't necessarily like some games. We didn't have a mutual feeling for them. Did you like this game? I did like this game. I, I, I did enjoy it. Would you, if you were, if it was 2014, would you give it a fucking BAFTA award? That's for anybody that doesn't know. That's everybody knows it's a British Academy games award. What? Wait, what's the tea? I mean, you're from Britain, right? It's the tea in British. Is it like tea? Get it? Like, you know, I don't know, man. I, I saw, I saw the awards whilst still believing I was playing it appropriately and I was very confused at why this game got so many awards with these stupid controls, but that wasn't the case. Well, dude, even then I do feel like, okay, so you've, have you played GTA five? This was, you, you put in the note here specifically, and I did want to bring this up. I have never played GTA five. Okay. So this game was in competition with, uh, GTA five, tomb Raider, the reboot and Bioshock infinite, which is created one, the award for best Xbox game at the game award show. That's that is surprising to me. It is kind of weird, but I think maybe it has to do with accessibility. Anybody can pick the best true play. That's true. And it doesn't matter. The language doesn't matter. Obviously at all. And those were three games that I think were pretty well revered, well respected, but I think they're not necessarily accessible. I think Grand Theft Auto was a very violent game. Yeah. Tomb Raider was a little bit of violence, but it's not, I don't think it was necessarily accessible. Yeah. That was that reboot that, uh, it, it didn't play around on the, on the tomb Raider. And then the, and Bioshock infinite. I mean, I don't know. I know it's, I know how Bioshock the first one was. And I think, so I would imagine the third installment would be kind of like, even, even with everything we've talked about so far, I wouldn't necessarily like for, for like, if, if my son wanted to play this game, it, for the most part, it's not too terribly inappropriate. No, I don't think anything for me. I mean, as a non father, I would say go for it. Kiddo GTA five for four year olds. The only questionable thing honestly would be the, the little, like the blood and stuff, which I mean, in, in, in the, just the, the show, the, the depiction of, of death with the giants would be the only thing to cause pause. But other than that, it, it, yeah, you're right. Accessible game, not just with like platforms, but rating for age groups. Yeah. Opens it up. Right. Yeah. And I also think it was a much cheaper game. It was probably, I mean, look at how many consoles it was on alone. It was on all of them. It was on everything. Yeah. If you had a windows phone, you could play this game. If you had a Nokia windows phone, you had unlimited access to this game. Yeah. Did you get any achievements, Alec? Did you get any of the weird achievements in this game? Did you do anything that you felt? Did you blow the big horn? I did that once. Wow. I think so. Yeah. What did I say? I played it in the field of giants. Okay. Yeah. I found it was like in the field of giants. There was like a giant horn. You were able to blow it. Did you save somebody trying to commit suicide? Yes, I did. You saved them and made them feel better? I saved them. And then I saw a chest off like a hanging thing. So I went over there and got it. And I gave it to him. Yeah. Yeah. So I did that. It said, make someone sad, feel better. Those were the two achievements I got. There were some other ones. I guess you could have like made the old crazy guy with the hang glider, a piano or something like that. Yeah. There were some other kind of weird achievements, but those were the two that I got. And I think from what I saw, those were the most common ones that people got too. Yeah. It took me three hours and five minutes to play this game. Okay. So you added 30 minutes with your keyboard. I also did, I actually fell asleep playing this game for a very short time, which is, I know I'm old. The part where... Where are the achievements? I'm trying to find the achievements. I don't know. Maybe it's only in Steam. I might be able to... Normally I can see it. Brothers, a tale of two sons. Okay. Call of the Giants and a sad tune. Here are a few achievements. Bunny buddies. There were bunnies. You could make the bunnies play nice. There was the turtle thing. I guess there were baby turtles you could have saved. Remember the turtle thing in the snow area and the icy area? There were like baby turtles you could have helped get to those. See. Oh, I don't think I know. Oh, make the inventor dance. The whale song you practice singing. I don't know what that was. Oh, yeah. I guess there was a lot more that I didn't... Yeah, but I got the two we talked about. So I got those two. Yeah. There was a black sheep, I guess, maybe in that group. Maybe I'm guessing when you had to pick a sheep up, if you would have grabbed the black one, maybe instead of one of the white ones. You took a break from adventuring. I don't know what that is. Reunited the two lovebirds. I don't know. So we got the same achievement. Yes. That's man. And it seems like the ones that I got and you got were the most common ones that I saw. So I enjoyed the game. Is there anything else you want to add about it? I don't think so. I think this was a good one. I'm glad we added this. It was a good game. Thanks. You're welcome. Well, before we wrap up, it is that time to talk about our next game. Yeah. So I'm picking because it's going to be around... We left spooky time. Now we're going to get into overeating time. We are going to be playing together and then discussing Overcooked. I'm looking forward to this. I'm real excited. How I have this in my head is because I've got access to both, one and two. And I think three is coming out. What I think we're going to do is you and I are going to play together. We can do Steam or... What do you have it on? I have it on Epic. Okay. So I should probably acquire it on Epic. I'll open it up and see if it's like a game session or how it performs. I don't know if it has to be the same platform or if we can cross play. But anyway, plan is I would like to sit down and play maybe like an hour of one and then switch over to two and maybe we can compare them and also get some of the... And then get the discussion on kind of like, you know, similarities, differences. Is there a story? I think there's zombie bread at some point. But anyway, I think it's a good time. So we're going to play Overcooked one and two. I have played these before. Okay. But they are super fun, but I've never like sat and really like discussed it. So it'll be a good refresher. If you haven't played it, Couch Co-op is the best option. It is so, so fun. It's going to infuriate you to no end in a good way. So add that to y'all's backlogs. Get it in your carts. That's what we're going to be playing for our next episode. All right. Yep. And I'm very excited about that because I love me some co-op. Fantastic. So that's going to do it for us, guys. Thank you much. Bye, guys.