Sins: It spent a long time this week trying to come up with an opener, but no matter what I did, it was a puzzler. Today on hello, everybody. Welcome to another PressBy. To cancel your favorite podcast on a Friday night or a Monday or whenever you listen to it, it's your favorite at that moment today. If you couldn't pick this up from our intro, we're talking about puzzle games. It's a topic we've kind of skirted around, but we've never given a direct episode for it, and it felt like time, so I'm not alone, though. I'm sinister. 77. I'm not alone, though. And joined by two of my favorite people. Jake, how are you?
Jake: It's a Friday and I'm glad it's a Friday, and I'm glad to be here with you guys.
Sins: Awesome. And Wolf. How are you?
Wulff: I'm doing all right. I am not as incapacitated as I've been, which is great. So that's a win.
Sins: We like you being able to get into your office. It helps you show up for these. All right. So a genre that I feel like gets a lot of love but never gets the love it probably deserves because everybody, when they start talking about in particular things like Game Awards, when do you see a puzzle game end up in a high tier class, something like Game of the Year or anything like that. So I feel like it does get a lot of value and a lot of discussion, but I think it has relegated to kind of that world of cozy games or a game I have 15 minutes to play, or whatever. I don't know. What do you guys think?
Jake: Yeah, that's a great point, actually, because for the Game Awards this year, it was action adventure an action game, I think, or adventure game, but nowhere did they say puzzle game or thinking Game of the Year or anything remotely close to that at all.
Sins: Are you listening to us? Game Awards.
Jake: Take out one of those esports categories and throw in a puzle category, please. That's a phenomenal you could even say argue that maybe it could be in a strategy game or something, but it never gets recognition. The closest you get is maybe if it's a puzzley game, it ends up in the indie category. Because I know that's a popular genre with indie game creators.
Sins: Yeah. What were you going to say, Jimmy?
Wulff: I was going to say I don't know if there's actually enough games that fall under the category to warrant the category on a yearly basis, unfortunately, because we generally only think of like maybe two to three a year.
Sins: Right, that's true. I mean, there's kind of the junk category, and I'm not saying junk from a standpoint of, like, it's a bad.
Wulff: Garbage, but your junk drawer, it's where you keep everything that you need, but you don't know where else to put it.
Sins: It's like the Pit Cross games or whatever the term is. For those. There are a lot of releases. In fact, it's funny, I went and looked and there's a bunch on the switch that exist, right?
Jake: Yeah.
Sins: It's a whole franchise, but I never think about them. So it's kind of like I think that's what I mean is it's like that junk drawer game where it's like, oh, I love this game, and I found it at the back of my junk drawer.
Wulff: Yeah.
Sins: So I think there are a lot of releases, but I think the problem is that it's more puzzles in the same game or something like that. Right, right. Yeah. Well, that's an interesting take as well. All right, now, game Devs, are you listening, please? Yeah. And I'm going to try to keep us under the hour because we run long so often. I'm going to try to keep us under that hour today. I'm going to try. I'm going to do my best. So each of us has picked one game to talk about, and I think my honorable mention is one of the other people's games. So that's good. That helps clear up a little extra. Jimmy, it kind of looked like you had a momentary it's an asterisk. Okay, well, then let's get it out of the way. Let's start. Jimmy, what game are you talking about today?
Wulff: Where's Waldo for the NES? No classic. I'm talking about the witness. This game came out on I want to say PS Four, PC and Xbox One, maybe. I don't know if it came out on Xbox One because there's, like a special thanks to Sony in the credits, so I'm not entirely certain. But I know PS Four and Xbox or PS Four and PC for sure. Anyway, this is a game that I tried playing a couple of years back because this game, it came out in, what, 2017, I think.
Jake: I think so it's a few years.
Wulff: Old at this point, and I didn't realize it was that old already. But, yeah, I tried playing through it a few years back and I got really stuck. Like, I just was unable to move anywhere in the game. And then this last week, I've been playing Control lately, and the wife was watching stuff on TV, so I couldn't just play Control on the Steam deck because it's got a lot of voice acting. I want to hear what's going on. So I was like, I'll install the witness. That one shouldn't be too much of an issue. Well, it turned out there was a point where there was an issue because it's got audio puzzles. But I'll come back to that and I couldn't figure out what the problem was until later. I turned up the volume and I was like, but anyway, it's this whole game of puzzles, and I think it was Sinistar that said or maybe it was Jake, it was one of you guys that said this, that it's kind of like what the game missed would be if it were developed nowadays. Right.
Sins: That was okay.
Wulff: And I mean, that's pretty accurate because there's a lot of sort of esotericness going on in the world building itself. Right. It's kind of out there, kind of weird to wrap your head around. And even the ending was kind of like, what is happening? It's very strange where you see this sort of live action wake up from something, and it's all live action film ending from okay, I'll say first person, but it's a GoPro strapped to the guy's head. Right.
Sins: Okay.
Wulff: We know braid Jonathan blow does weird. Fine.
Sins: Is this braid? Is this the guy that did Braid?
Wulff: Yes, it's Jonathan Blow.
Jake: Yeah.
Sins: Oh, okay.
Jake: We should probably just preface with this, that Jonathan Blow is a bit of a dick and an asshole, but we're talking about a game that actually is pretty quite clever despite the guy being a bit of a dick.
Sins: Braid was pretty clever, too.
Wulff: Yeah, Braid was pretty clever. I mean, somehow he managed to make these games that were massive commercial successes and people still love them despite him being kind of a dick. Right.
Jake: Yeah.
Wulff: Phil Fish did not get that, but he leaned into it like he kept doubling down on it. Right. I don't think I've heard anything from Jonathan Blow in years at this point.
Sins: Interesting.
Jake: Yeah. He's pretty mute on social media these days, which is sorry, I didn't want to derail, but I just want to point out the game. And the game is fantastic. I know that from what I've heard about The Witness is that it's one of the best puzzle games that were ever made. It's one of the top ones.
Wulff: I was talking to my brother about it the other day and he was like, yeah, that game seems really hard. I'm like, well, here's a good way to talk about it. The game goes out of its way to teach you all the mechanics. If you go out of your way to find all the tutorials that teach you the mechanics, because you'll get to points in a certain section. Right. The island is sort of split into subsections, and sometimes you'll come across puzzles that you haven't been taught yet. And if you just try and brute force facewall your face. Yeah. Brute force your way through it, it's not going to happen. Most of the time. You need to go find another spot on the island where they teach you how to do that, and then you can proceed through that as long as you're getting those learning situations. Hard puzzles are only hard because of the puzzle and not hard because you don't know what you're doing. But if you don't go do that, it's practically impossible. Go ahead.
Sins: I was going to say, why don't you give a little bit of maybe just a high level what this game entry and how it proceeds and what the puzzles are, right.
Jake: For our audio listeners, right? Because this game is kind of hard to watch unless you explain what it is.
Wulff: So you're dropped into a tunnel, and you're just facing the end of it. So first thing you do is you walk to the end of that tunnel where you see a door, and the only thing on the door is a little screen that's got like a circle with a line sticking out of it. And so the only thing you can do is click and then you click around. If you click on the circle, you'll find that that lights up. And now you're moving and drawing a line within the shape on the door right on the screen. You take that all the way to the end of the line, where it's a sort of rounded end, and the door opens for you. So now you're shown by you doing, hey, if I interact with this and start at the circle and finish at the rounded end of a line, I've solved a puzzle. So you go upstairs and you've got progressively, slightly more elaborate versions of Mazes to get from the circle to the end and activate whatever the screen panel does. It might send electrical charge to a next panel or open another door or whatever have you, right? As you progress, they start throwing more little things in there. Sometimes you have to cross through all the circles. They give you multiple points you can start at, and maybe not all of them will work out because you have to go through every single one of those starting circles and get to an end. And then there's dots that they'll put on the path that you have to go through all of those dots. Sometimes there's little squares in between the lines that you have to separate from each other. So you have to make shapes around them to separate the black squares from the white squares. And then eventually they start adding more colors into that, and eventually they start throwing different colored lights at you which affect what they look like on the screen. So you have to start taking notes as to, okay, what do I need to do? Because I have to figure out what the colors are supposed to be based on the lighting in the room, changing the color of the dots on the screen. And then sometimes you have to make a shape, like a tetramano shape or various things like that. And sometimes you have to purposely make a mistake because they give you a little shape that's like, this will save you from a mistake, but you have to use it. So they do really interesting stuff in this game. By the end of the game, you're finding screens that are glitching out or broken, and you have to solve the puzzle anyway.
Sins: Nice.
Wulff: It's pretty wild.
Jake: Like, you're navigating this island, and all the puzzles are kind of scattered across this island, a lot like mist like you said. But it's not just like they're all interconnected. They're all using the environment in clever ways and whatnot. This is a game where I wish I was smart enough to figure it out.
Wulff: There are puddles that are actually in the environment. So if you find the right, here's a good example that's not too spoilery. Right at the beginning of the game, as soon as you go through that tunnel, if you walk straight to the end of the wall, instead of turning left and going up the stairs, turn around and look behind you and you'll see you've made a circle with a line that runs down the length of the tunnel. So you click on that circle and run down the length of the tunnel and little magic dots fly away to an obelisk somewhere on the island or a column somewhere on the island and lights it up. And there are hidden environment puzzles like that all over the place. Yeah, I'm nowhere near solving those.
Sins: That was one of the things. So I watched a streamer play this a few years ago, and right after it I either told SinSTRESS to buy it or I bought it for SinSTRESS. Anyway, I remember this person climbing on a roof and getting in the exact position, and all of a sudden all the pieces lined up so that he could start at the little circle and draw the lines. But it was one of those things where he ended up moving a boat in the right place and then climbing up on a roof and then blah, blah, blah, and looking angling his camera just the right way.
Wulff: Yeah. And if you're watching on YouTube or with video, you'll see that I just did one with a path. So I showed some of the early ones because there's just so many. There's like 100 or 200 of these things hidden throughout the game. And I think I only found like 30 in my entire playthrough. Oh, wow. There's a ton of them. There's something like 750 puzzles total, but they're counted separately depending on the type, I guess. So at the end of the game, I had like 401 plus 29, I think, or something like that.
Jake: Does it affect the ending if you find them all, would you need to find all of them or are you happy with the ending you got? I mean, I don't want to spoil the ending of the game. I was curious if the ending changes.
Wulff: So there's a whole two achievements in this game. Okay, so fast I got the base ending, which is you go through the game, solve the puzzles the way you probably would the first time, and you get this sort of like Charlie and the chocolate factory glass elevator sequence that leads into the credits and you get an achievement.
Jake: Okay.
Wulff: There is a hidden ending that you probably notice the second time you play through that doesn't give you an achievement. I didn't have seen that.
Sins: Okay.
Wulff: The second achievement is doing every single puzzle and then probably going for the ending after that.
Jake: Okay?
Wulff: There's a lot going on in this game. It's a lot of fun. Now, when you play through this, especially when you see the secret ending, it's really easy to look at this game and think, okay, this game is taking itself way seriously. Well, there's a game inspired by the Witness that's kind of a spoof. Now, the Witness will do a really good job of making you be like, Man, I'm an idiot. Don't get caught up on that. If you're really enjoying the puzzles in the game, like I said, wander find it. Just look around for other puzzles. You'll figure it out. It won't break you.
Sins: Don't lock yourself in. Don't lock yourself in on a puzzle.
Wulff: Don't be locked in on a certain region. Wander find other puzzles. I think there's even a tutorial section I missed completely, and I'm still looking for. But there's this spoof game called The Looker, and it's inspired by the Witness. But it takes the concept of, like, children's mazes on a menu.
Sins: Okay?
Wulff: You draw a line from start to end.
Sins: With your crayon. Right?
Wulff: You can probably skip in, like, a minute because I went the wrong way here to see what there was. And there was, like, a health pickup and something else. Like, it's doom for some reason because it's a spoof.
Jake: Okay, I pulled it up. Yeah, I just saw a crayon. Okay.
Wulff: Here you go. You got the start to end boom. And the mazes, they get more elaborate. There's one that I think going through it is completely unsolvable. You straight up have to draw the line around the maze start to end. And you get you can do that with any of them.
Sins: So you have to do the kid cheat.
Wulff: Yes, it does that.
Sins: Look, I solved it.
Wulff: Great. There's just all these puzzles, and some of them are actually kind of tricky. But for the most part, it's a shorter game. It's a much simpler game. Generally, it's find your way from start to end or S to E. And you'll see this door here right now on screen that says, Stop. Do not come in. Blah, blah, blah. And I had to pause it. I got a phone call here. Sorry. And it's always just find your way from start to end, S to E. Or sometimes they get a little more elaborate toward the end. And I'm not entirely certain how they work. I just kind of brute force those. But that'll tell you something. You can brute force most of the puzzles in this game if you're completely uncertain, not unlike the Witness. But it's a fun game. And it even makes fun of that special ending, that secret ending, live action film footage ending from The Witness when you beat it, poking fun at the kind of things he does in the video. Like he knocks over a stack of coins in the final ending in The Witness. In this, he's, like, takes and taps on it. He's like, you're a good stack of pennies. I would never do anything to hurt you. It's great.
Sins: Okay.
Wulff: It spoofs it so well. I absolutely loved The Looker, and it's free.
Sins: Okay.
Wulff: So if you liked The Witness, if you appreciated the Witness, even if you didn't beat the Witness, go check out The Looker. It's friggin hilarious.
Sins: Congratulations, Chard. We'll talk after the stream.
Jake: It's good to hear. Okay.
Wulff: Chard has goodness.
Sins: Yes.
Jake: So I love that because I've heard similar, that The Witness, maybe a bit pretentious, definitely takes itself too seriously in a very weird, bizarre way. It's funny that somebody out there, another indie developer, just decided to make a parody, in a way, of The Witness, but still looks to be a fun game. Regardless, I love this. I love the idea of the looker. When I saw it pop up on Discord, you're playing The Looker, I'm like, oh, is that related to The Witness? And you're like, laughed at me, kind of.
Wulff: And I mean, some of the puzzles in The Look are kind of obtuse and take a little bit of thinking outside the box, which the Witness does. So it spoofs the Witness really well. But it's like a much more bite sized version, I think. The Witness took me 14 hours to finish. The Looker is like an hour, maybe an hour and a half. So it's just this bite sized, silly Witness. But the witness. I love it for the puzzles. Whatever the story it's trying to tell, I have not a clue. It's really out there. It's like really deep conceptually that I don't know if I'm going to get it because I unlocked a few videos in the game by solving Puzles, and it was like this long, Ted Talk kind of thing in one of them. And I was like, what's happening? And then sometimes you'll find little recorders that are just talking about God or something religious, and I'm like, this is outside of my realm.
Jake: Yeah.
Sins: Got you. Well, as I said, we're going to try to keep this one.
Wulff: Yeah.
Sins: Any other comments to say? Any got you. Moments or surprise moments or anything like that that stand out in your brain?
Wulff: Honestly, it's just when you notice the environment, puzzles, it's like, that's so cool. And sometimes later in the game, toward the very end game of your first finish, it does throw very interesting puzzles that are kind of outside of what you've been doing that really throw a strong curveball at you and make you work to solve them. So even though you've learned all the mechanics, now you're also taking perspective into view or something like that, depending on what's going on. Cool game. Loved the puzzles. Never beat missed. Beat the witness. So there you go.
Sins: Very cool. Awesome. Well, I think our next one is a little bit of a shift. Yeah, definitely a shift, but still definitely a puzzle category. All three of ours tonight are kind of different. I mean, I guess mine is still environment, but it's a very different kind of take on it's.
Jake: Very different, though.
Sins: Yeah, but Jake, why don't you talk.
Jake: About I mean, so mine is the one that would have been your honorable mention, because when you mentioned this offline, I'm like, yes, I love that game. Why have we not talked about that game? Maybe not worth an entire episode, but as part of a puzzle episode, yes, this game definitely counts. As much as I would love to play through the witness, I'm not going to say I'm too stupid for that game. I just lack the patience to get through a game like that. It's one of those games that makes you feel dumb, but once you beat a puzzle, I know how satisfying it could be, but it's definitely a little bit too cerebral for me. As much as I would love to play through it, I'm more of the tetris guy, the luminous guy, those kind of puzzles. And there's one game that came out in 2007, and it was basically at the height of the match, three craze, and that is Puzzle Quest. I fucking love this game. So, 2007, I had just bought an Xbox 360. My wife and I think were in Florida for visiting family and whatnot. We stopped at a Target because we don't have those up in Canada. And I bought an Xbox 360, and I can't even remember the game I bought with it. It doesn't matter because for me, the Xbox 360 live and dies with the Xbox Arcade games. This is basically the start of digital downloading of content online for me and for a lot of people. And there's such an extensive library. But Puzzle Quest is available on that. I want to say $15. It was super cheap and is hands down the game I played the most on the Xbox 360. For those who don't know who have never played this game, you've probably played Bejeweled, right? Where you have a Screen Flow gems on the screen before you, and you have to basically slide pieces around to match three together to break a line or break those pieces, and it kind of collapses down. I was never big on Bejeweled. I always felt it was fun, but I didn't see the challenge or the need to do those stages. But then you look at Puzzle Quest, which is an RPG at least influenced by RPGs, you have a character class, and those character classes each have abilities. But to use those abilities in combat with an enemy, you have to build mana of different colors. How do you get the mana by matching three on this puzzle board? It seems like such an odd, strange idea, but it works so damn well for puzzle quest. So on the screen you have a basic grid of gems. I think it's like eight by eight or whatnot I'm failing to count right down screen. Yeah, you do have a basic physical attack where if you match skulls in the screen, you deal a little bit of damage with the skulls there's. One of the character classes does focus on skull damage. But where it really took off for me was the other character classes. When you advance, when you play, like, I think it's a wizard or a sorcerer, for example, you build up blue mana. And you can use blue mana for, like, ice attacks and ice spells. And some of those spells will stun, make the opponent lose a turn. Or you can use transmutation magic where you can change the color of gems on the grid to match another color that you may want. And every class has at least two colors that they focus on, but they all use all three in some capacity. But you can also pick the abilities to a degree of what you get and you unlock them as you level up. It's a really clever way of doing taking a match three game and expanding it into a much wider game. And again, for the price, you can't go wrong. Right, so I think since you played this one, Wolf, have you played this one?
Sins: Wolf actually walked to his background. That is the exact box that is in the other room.
Wulff: Public.
Sins: Oh, yeah. And this was like perfect DS Fodder because it really was the top screen. You had the little stylus and that was your match four, match three. And the bottom was like all of the statistics and who you were fighting and everything. If I remember right, that was how they split the screen.
Wulff: No, it's the other way because the bottom screen is the touch screen.
Sins: Right, sorry, but yeah, your statistics were on one screen and who you were fighting and then the match set was on the other screen.
Wulff: Yeah. So the stuff that you would see on like a single screen game on the Xbox or the Wi, which I'll talk about the Wi one here in a second too, because I've played that as well. I had that at a point, okay. That you see on the left would be on the top screen or on the right would be on the top screen. And so the bottom screen was all just the match stuff.
Sins: Yeah. So we had this on the DS, SinSTRESS and myself and then just recently, for Sinstress's birthday, I was sitting there going, what should I get her? What can I get know? And I know she loves puzzle games, she likes likes Dreamlight Valley, et cetera. She likes what's the one on switch? That's the little town, animal Crossing. Animal Crossing. But they are great games, but I'm also like she's got 8 billion of these and then I'm like, I saw Puzzle Quest Two and I looked at the reviews and it was awful. It was so bad. And then I'm like, but wait. Puzzle quest one was fantastic. I wonder if it exists. And it's there on steam. So I picked it up for her for her birthday this year. And it's funny because she started playing it and she's like, I'd forgotten how good this game was.
Jake: Yeah, it recently got a remaster, so it was rereleased on Steam and also on Switch. So I also much the same thing. My wife loved this game, too. I think we had it on our iPhones back in the day, the original iPhones, and we played the hell out of it on that as well. So when I picked it up for the Switch, it was almost nostalgia. The game is not that old. I mean, 2007 is not too long ago, so it's not retro. It's not old enough to put on our top 100, unfortunately. But it's definitely when we were playing it, it's just like, this was great. They should have done more of these. They did sequels. There was puzle quest two and there was puzle quest galactic and Marvel Yeah, Galactic. And there's a Magic the Gathering version one. But I'm going to tell you right now, they all suck. None of them captured the same magic as the original, and I don't understand why they just didn't stick with it. Right.
Sins: How do you mess up this formula?
Jake: There was an expansion for the original Puzzle Quest, and the Switch has it by default, and it adds a bunch of classes, and I think it adds another campaign to the game. It's already like 100 hours game worth of story and stuff. Is a story award winning. No, it's not Elden ring, but it's Story. And there's lots of place to explore. There's inventory, and adding additional classes onto it was like a no brainer. And I'm glad they did it for the Switch release, but this is what they should have done for Pulse Request Two. And I think there's a third one coming. But they need to go back to this formula. This is gameplay that would work even today, as it did 20 years ago. It really is quite something else.
Wulff: This is kind of what I think, Puzzle and Dragons is built on this concept.
Jake: I think so. But Puzle and Dragons, I think, is more frantic as you're more quickly matching. There's no turns.
Wulff: It's designed to be fast and have all the freemium game attributes to it, which sort of drag it down. But I mean, Puzzle Quest itself was sort of lightning in a bottle that they've not been able to recapture.
Sins: Yeah.
Wulff: And they succeeded when they were like, okay, this game is huge. They put it on Wi real quick. They put it on DS real quick. Right?
Sins: Yeah.
Wulff: And let's talk about the Wi One for a second.
Jake: I didn't even know. It was on the wi.
Wulff: More frustrating than your wrist accidentally sliding sideways as you're trying to do your thing.
Sins: Oh no. They did the whole Wi moat thing instead of like yeah, you played with the Wi moat.
Jake: That's stupid for this kind of game. This game would work just fine with a DPAD. Why are they adding motion controls to Puzzle Quest?
Wulff: I don't know, but that's why I got rid of it.
Sins: So the starting of the downfall of Puzzle Quest games was puzzle Quest Wi.
Wulff: Yeah, I mean it was the exact same. It was challenge of the warlords, right? It was this one that's got like a billion characters, tons of content for just a puzzle game. The writers must have been in there just as long as the programmers, right?
Sins: Yeah.
Wulff: How much for sure dialogue there is in this game? It's wild. And my brother and his friend would voice act everything. When they would play together, they would read it all and do voices. It was wild.
Sins: That's awesome. If I were to stream it, I'd probably do voices too. I do voices when I stream.
Wulff: If you streamed this, you'd lose your voice if you did that.
Jake: There's so much dialogue, so much talking.
Sins: You weren't there for when I did Dokie Doki Literature Club. When I was doing voices for the women on Doki Doki Literature Club. That killed my voice. Anyway.
Jake: Yeah, I can yeah, you know, this is my pick, puzzle Quest. I mean is it challenging toward the end of the game? Because I did beat this toward the end of the game. Some of the battles are quite challenging if you don't have a certain build. I had to tweak my build at several choke points but I loved every minute of it. So I mean this is a game where challenging but you don't feel stupid. It's more just challenging and that you have to kind of wrap your brain around the method of matching and seeing patterns in a chaotic mess. And that's my kind of Puzle game, I think. And I really love this one. I wish it was 2005 because I would slap it on our top 100 so damn fast.
Sins: Yeah.
Jake: And like you sister said, it's like a game that you don't really think about anymore because they screwed it up with a few of the sequels. But when you hear the name Puzle Quest and you look it up like, oh yeah, I remember that game. That game was good. And playing it now on the switch has just been awesome. It's great.
Sins: That's awesome. Yeah. It reminds me not in the same way of game but in one of those where I don't think about it until either somebody mentions it or there's some other tie to it. But there's a game called Bookworm Adventures that was that way too. I played the hell out of Bookworm Adventures. I love that game. Supposedly there's a demo for a game that's similar on Steam. I'll have to see how it does. But anyway, yeah, this game was great. This game was great. And to me, the DS was the perfect platform for it, but awesome. Cool. Any other thoughts on this?
Wulff: I'm looking at the steam. I wish it said it was Steam deck verified.
Sins: It has to be census. Put it on your Steam deck and validate for us, will you?
Wulff: Yeah.
Jake: Like, this is a game that ran on the iPhone. Like, I'm talking the original iPhone. It's not a powerhouse. Graphically, it looks like a visual novel. To be honest with you, when you mentioned Doki, that's what it looks like.
Sins: She says, I just tried. It says no. Oh, well, we'll look at it probably.
Wulff: Like Proton DP and stuff. You'd probably have to find or Proton GE or whatever it's called.
Sins: Steam's validation is behind. There are so many games that are like, you can probably look at Proton DB. For those that have Steam decks, there is a plugin that you can get that adds the Proton DB labels to every game. Anyway, yeah, cool. Well, any other thoughts or should we go on to my game?
Jake: No, let's hear yours because I also like yours a lot as well.
Sins: Okay, so I gave you two videos. We'll start with the second one, the walkthrough one first. Okay. And then we'll bring up the other one because that's a fun little story. Okay. So my game is portal. And once again, kind of I mean, yes, it's a third person or first person, but kind of like the witness, but it's also a very different concept. This started remind me, I should have looked up more history. This started as, like, a college project.
Wulff: Yes. So this was the senior project for students at DigiPen in Redmond, Washington. Well, it started as that as a game called Narbacular Drop. And that was one that had the Portal concept in it, but you could actually shoot through the portals you made to make portals on the other side of them. So this limited that concept. But Valve was so intrigued by this that they hired on all the kids who were interested in working for them after they graduated DigiPen that year to make this.
Sins: Yeah. All right. So for those that have lived in a cave in the mountains since, like, 2007, whatever year this came out, portal is a game where it's what you describe. You have portals and you move through them or you move things through them. And there are levels. There's an evil computer named Gladys who is amazingly beautifully voiced and scripted. Honestly, one of the greatest things about this game is the dialogue of listening to Gladys just taunt you to no end and all of the funny bits, like she says in this, straight faced or not straight face, but straight voice between every level. You go through this emancipation grid, which is supposed to make sure that you're not carrying anything that you're not supposed to with you. And at one point she says the taste of blood, while not normal, is an occasional side effect of the Emancipation Grid because it's been known to emancipate things like the cubes, the teeth, enamel teeth. Like it just goes into this list, right? And honestly, one of the things I absolutely adore about this game is this game to me, feels like the epitome of what is it? Rational game design. Isn't that the term? Yeah. Like, you start out in a room, you have no fucking clue what you're doing, and you look around and there's things that you can bump into. You can knock a clock off. There's a song, and that song comes in later, but you hear it at the beginning and then you look up and there's a clock and the clock is counting down. And then Gladys comes in and know, portal will open in T minus blah. And the first portal it has, the rational game design is as you're walking out of the portal, you see yourself because of where the portal placement and that honestly, that blew my mind. I was like, what am I doing? Where am I going? And you back up and you move forward and your character like you're doing this like zigzag. And then you finally figure out, oh, okay, I get it. I just walked out and I'm seeing myself because the portal is looking at the room I was in, right?
Jake: Real quick when this game came out, up this point, first person, I mean, shooter games, right? The big tech was mirrors, right? Games where you had a mirror, you could see yourself. If you're playing Deus X, there's a washroom. You can see yourself in the mirror. That was like the cool thing this game was that to the next level, right? Because it was not just a mirror, but literally an actual portal in the map.
Sins: And then as you progress, I'm going to give the first couple of puzzles. The next puzzle, you walk into a room and there's a plate that you can step on that Depresses and a door opens and you're like, great, I'm going to walk toward the door. And the door closes and Gladys says something, I don't remember what. She says, It's probably something offensive to you. And then a little cube falls out of a hole in the ceiling and you realize, I can put the cube on the portal or on the plate. Cool. And you go through, and then the next one, oh, well, there's two plates, but I only get one cube, right? I mean, so all of a sudden it's this rational game design of the puzzles. I know they sound simple at the beginning, they become incredibly complex, but as you go, it gives you everything you need to know. So kind of like the Witness, as long as you look around enough, you will figure it out. It's not that the puzzles are brutally hard, it's that it's trained you. And sometimes you have to think back to where the training was. Right. The dialogue is so good. And there's a moment, once again, if you've been in a cave, there's a moment where the game shifts. You keep hearing this whole thing about once you're done testing, there will be cake. Right? And that's kind of the meme. Everybody's heard it, so I'll say it. But the cake is a lie. Everybody's heard the meme, the cake is a lie. Right.
Wulff: I think this sentence was said in a specific way. Right. Do we want to say it here? I mean, the game is well, I.
Sins: Will say it, but I won't actually give away what it means. But there's a slip of the tongue that Gladys says, and that is, first you will be baked and then there will be cake.
Wulff: Yes.
Sins: And I'm not going to say anything more about gladys never lies to you. Gladys never lies to you.
Wulff: Ellen McLean did such a good job voicing Gladys. It's great. I don't know that any other person really would have given her the sort of honest snark that she has the way Ellen did.
Sins: Well, and then the humor in this game, it's not just Gladys. The turrets have just the most beautiful humor to them. You get turrets later in the game. You have no weapon other than your portal gun, where you can open an orange portal and a blue portal and you can get from one point to the other point. That's your only weapon in the game. And there are turrets that shoot at you. Right? And then I love the description of physics in this game. Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out. It's a joy to play. It's well worth your time. And the second one, I love the first one. The second one expands on it and makes it epic. Like the second one is epic.
Jake: The first one is who's the voice actor in the second one? I'm trying to remember the name. Cave Johnson.
Sins: JK. Simmons.
Jake: JK. Simmons, yeah. I love him and everything he does, from Oz to the lady killers, he's got amazing range as an actor. His voiceover in Portal Two is why I like that one, I think, even more than the first game. And Steven Merchant, steve Merchant is also great in that, too. But for me, when I first played this game, I got the orange box, I think actually for the Xbox 360, if I'm not wrong, and huge value in the orange box because you got Portal and Half Life, too, and I think some other stuff as well. But the atmosphere in this game is what sells it. The puzzles and the mechanic, very unique. You never see this anywhere else, but if it was just the puzzles, I wouldn't have bothered. But with the story, the atmosphere, GLaDOS and it's not even a story. It's just the experience of it with the surrounding, like the sound effects, the rubber padding on the walls, and just the lines they give you. It just feeds so together into this concept that it's just hilarious that this was the first game of students who graduated, and they go to Valve of one of the major game studios at the time and still are. Right. We want you to take what you've made as a project and just go nuts with it. Just make a game like that. We have the source engine. It's got all these great textures, abilities. You look at everything that was done in Half Life Two, and they're like, here's your toolkit. Go nuts. And they did. And this is such a fantastic game. This is one of the best games, I think. Not just puzzle games. This is one of the best games, I think, overall, it's a really great game.
Sins: Well, two asides. First, at the end when you're taking care of business, at the end of the A, there's a voice actor that they brought in as well that you have no concept of. But it's Mike Patton from Faith No More, and all he's doing is growling and screaming and yelling. That's all he's doing. That is Mike Patton.
Wulff: Really?
Sins: Yes, that is Mike Patton.
Jake: Didn't know that. Okay.
Sins: Yeah.
Wulff: That's interesting.
Sins: Yeah. And now if you'll start the second video, I have a quick little bit, a little trivia bit, and we'll put a link in the description if you're willing to I did a stream of this, and it had been years since I'd played it, and I'm trying to figure out one area, and I'm not thinking in portals. In fact, if you watch the video, you'll hear me read a comment while I'm streaming of somebody saying, he's not thinking in portals. And I kind of thought that I needed to stop the fan. And so if you're watching the video, it's me with a fan, and I've taken a chair and I've dropped the chair into the fan, and now the chair sits there and bounces around, and I'm over here going, this is great. This is fun. Well, I go into the room where the chair is bouncing around, and I figured out a good way to kill myself in Portal. The chair went through me. Yeah. So here in a second, you'll see it's bouncing around and I'm like, oh, I finally figured it out. Oh, I'm dead.
Wulff: That's hilarious.
Sins: Yeah.
Wulff: This is one of those games where it's got those kind of AHA moments a lot like the Witness does, where it's doing what it can to teach you everything you need to know. And you hit a wall sometimes where you're like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. And then you feel like an idiot for a little bit until you solve that. And you're like you kind of feel like depending on how simple the concept was. Either you feel like you've just overcome something huge or you face palm. Like, how did I miss that?
Sins: Right? Now, if you do play the second one, I also highly suggest playing multiplayer with someone else because they added a multiplayer section where you're two robots, Atlas and Peabody, and they are puzzles designed so that both players have to play a part.
Wulff: It's a completely different puzzle set and campaign than single player.
Sins: Yeah. And it is epically good. In fact, there's one part that kind of always makes me like I always think it's like a side scrolling mario, but one player is controlling the level, moving up and down, and then the other player actually can't see where they are. All they can see is the box that they're in and you're like, okay, jump this way and jump that way. And then you move the room and it shifts boxes up and down. I love that part. Yeah.
Wulff: It's kind of like Gyromite.
Jake: Yeah, kind of. Yeah.
Sins: But anyway, I love portal. I love Portal too. Yeah. So I think these are all fantastic puzzle games.
Wulff: Yeah. And honestly, if you've never played Narbacular Drop, you can find it for free online. I think it's last I checked, which was like two years ago, it was still available from the website for it to download for free and play. So I don't know if it still works on Windows Ten or eleven, but it's still out there. And it was never a paid project because it was just freely distributed. So if you like Portal and you want to go back and see where it came from and you haven't before.
Jake: Go do that gaming history. Right. It's like going back and playing minecraft alpha Edition, right? Just to compare it to what it is today. It's wildly different to see.
Sins: Yeah. I remember when Minecraft was just a building simulator.
Jake: Yeah.
Sins: Right now it's crazy with skeletons and whatever the exploding guys are creepers. Yeah. Creepers. Thank you. And for those that want to know, Sinstris double checked. Apparently, as long as you install an update to DirectX on your Steam deck, which I guess is part of it, puzzle quest will run on the Steam deck.
Wulff: Very good. GP also asked he requested that we mention Goof Troop for the Super Nintendo, which yeah, I mean, it is a puzzle. Um, I always feel like the game plays like a whole game built around the idea of being inside a Zelda dungeon.
Sins: Okay.
Jake: Like a block pushing game, right?
Wulff: Yeah. It's like block pushing and hook shotting, things like that, and carrying things from one spot to another. You got enemies in the area, so you have to sort of balance. Like Max and Goofy can each equip, like, have one item on them. So you might have one that can do the hook shot and one that has something else. It can be a bell to lure enemies or there's other items. I don't remember what they all are. It's been a long time, but Goof Troop was a really fun one for the Super Nintendo.
Sins: Nice. I'll have to check it out.
Wulff: I do think it's better two player, but it's completely doable. One player, right?
Sins: Nice. Awesome. Yeah. So we have four games, even maybe five if we count Portal Two for people to try out six games because.
Jake: Of the looker here, I'll give you a 7th R1 quick. I can't talk about it because talking about it kind of ruins the whole hook of this game. But I've mentioned it before on the podcast. There's a game called frog fractions. There's a Game of the Year edition on steam. If you have not played Frog Fractions, and I mean really played Frog Fractions, you got to play it all the way through. It opens up into something that is mind boggling cool and hilarious. There's a sequel somewhere on Steam. If you don't know what it is, I won't tell you. But there's a sequel hidden on steam frog fractions Two. And the whole concept is hilarious. And I love it. It used to be a web game, but now you can play it on Steam Frog Fractions. You have to play it, but you have to really play Frog Fractions. Just dismiss it after 5 seconds.
Wulff: Yeah.
Sins: GP mentioned Tetris. GP, I don't want to hear about you playing Tetris.
Jake: Yeah. What you do in Blown in your bedroom is your own business.
Sins: Yeah, you keep that Tetris out of here.
Jake: Tetris is a favorite, though.
Sins: It is.
Jake: I think we all appreciate Tetris, especially when you're playing in a group.
Sins: I've been playing tetris effects connected or whatever on the steam deck. It's a great version of Tetris.
Jake: Play that in VR. The whole atmosphere is amazing in VR.
Wulff: I still just play Game Boy tetris.
Jake: That's too. I'm one cheap away from badging.
Wulff: It on my GBA. I pop in the old Game Boy cartridge and play it there.
Sins: Nice. Oh, I remember doing the connect cable and fighting Tetris with my oh, yeah.
Wulff: I forgot I had awesome.
Sins: Okay, well, this week we are not going to be doing any Top 100 nominees. We are almost at 100, if you're listening. And we'll put this into the discord as well. But if you're listening or watching, please go mention some of your top 100 games. Maybe we've missed or had a blind spot or something. We'd love to add some viewer games to the list. And sometime, probably next year early, we'll start figuring out what we're going to do to call this list and to talk about it in a few episodes. We'll figure it out. We're working on it still.
Jake: Yeah, we have an episode we got to do with GP as well, because he's got a bunch of picks that we're going to catch him up on the list. So we're going to do an episode hopefully within the next month, we'll do that as well.
Sins: And charred, whittling down that list if you're listening. Charred, you need two more.
Jake: Yeah.
Wulff: And I think we should make a channel on discord so that the listeners can provide recommendations. Give everybody one or two recommendations and we can maybe throw them on the list and figure it out from there.
Jake: Yeah, I'll make a public version of the list and I can pin it on discord because that'll be good for people to see and see how wrong we are.
Sins: Hey, it's all member berries, right?
Jake: And if we're wrapping up, I do want to mention that GP did do three playthroughs that are up on the channel now. Mega man, x, one Two, and, uh, it looks like people are really enjoying those. So if you're interested in mega man runs GP, kind of goes through them and gives some commentary. It's a good time. So if you like those games, check us out on YouTube at PressBy to cancel.
Sins: Did them for my birthday. So if people want GP, I take bribes to make GP play games for my birthday. Just saying I take bribes.
Jake: You know what we should do is we should make him play circus Charlie again and put that on the channel. I think people really enjoy a nice long playthrough of circus Charlie. All five minutes of it.
Sins: He probably has that video. We could probably put it up. That was last year.
Jake: That was yeah.
Sins: Awesome. All right, gentlemen, we are coming in under an hour.
Wulff: Yes, we are.
Jake: We did it.
Sins: Yeah. So I appreciate both of you. Anything of note for either of you?
Jake: No, just gave them.
Sins: All right. I am committing to this. I am committing to this. I will finish trigger before December 15. I will finish it before December 15.
Jake: I'll announce that I am not intending to finish Baltos before December 31. I'm going to give another gold college try. But I'm glad at least you're going to finish cruncher, because I want to talk about crunchrigar in an episode. We need to do an episode. So I'm looking forward to you finishing that. That's great.
Sins: All right, gentlemen, I appreciate your time. Listeners like subscribe. Tell your friends. Click the bell so that you're notified. Come join us on discord. Pressbytocancel.com it's where you can find it all.
Wulff: Are you still there's, council?