What if we killed some giant hulking beasts, but felt really bad about it? Shadow of the Colossus is an absolute all-timer, one of those lightning-in-a-bottle moments that can never be replaced or replicated. Even as we approach its 20th birthday, it stands as a high watermark for spectacle, atmosphere, and just overall game design. We were feeling a little too negative with our last episode, so we wanted to spend some time heaping praise on an absolute masterpiece.

But wait, there's more! We also catch up on some recent gaming news, including the phenomenal Doom 1 + 2 Nightdive re-release, the early reviews for Black Myth: Wukong (uhh we recorded this before the weird NDA controversy, yikes), and a handful of promising indie releases. Thanks for listening!

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Liking videogames is a concept that's quickly aging out of relevance. Games, some would argue, are objects of gratification - things to relax with, to wring joy from, forces of pure good put here by smart and dedicated humans hoping to instill a little bit of happiness into the endless slog of human existence. This theory has long since proven antiquated beyond any usefulness, so this week, we posit an alternative: What if games are bad, actually? And what if you should feel bad for liking them?

It's true! All the things people (at least those far less handsome and critically aware than us) enjoy are secretly really, really not good, and any reputation otherwise has been achieved entirely by the wool of mass psychosis being pulled over your eyes. Fear not, though, we have come to rescue you from the hellish bliss of ignorance and share the enlightening gospel of the newly-reformed Church of the Bâstârd Sword: The Last of Us and Red Dead Redemption 2 are kinda mid, actually?

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There was something disturbingly familiar about the episode before me. The description was all pretty fonts. "You are in a Podcast, Bastard Sword." The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. Listener analytics hanging in the air, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. Endless repetition of the act of recording, time slowing down as I fumbled for the right words. The paranoid feel of someone editing my every sentence.

I was in a podcast. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.

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