We appreciate all the support! Just wanted to drop a quick update here to keep you aware of what's going on - you may have noticed that our schedule has fluctuated a little bit, soo we're taking a few weeks to get ahead of schedule. Check back soon, and thanks for bearing with us!

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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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We're in the anime mech battle zone, hell yeah. We both had some reservations coming into 13 Sentinels, which were promptly proven wrong because this is a total banger of a game. Part JRPG, part visual novel, part tactical mech strategy game, part brain-bending convoluted sci-fi time travel, all bizarrely compelling. It's good stuff!

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If we honour our part of the vow, promise me you'll be my consort. We've finally finished our first playthroughs of Shadow of the Erdtree, and we have thoughts. A lot of thoughts, in fact! In this episode, we give a little bit of our general impressions and a lot of our impressions of the storylines and the (surprisingly huge) lore implications of what happens with Miquella, Leda, and, of course, our main man Igon. Thanks for listening and please be sure to let us know what you think!

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Sometimes games just don't make the impact they should have, either getting overlooked entirely or obtaining "cult classic" status. Those are what we talked about this week, a small selection of some of our favorite under-the-radar games. They're not underrated, mind you - everyone who has played these generally loves them - but they just don't get the attention we feel like they deserved. Drew talks about Hypnospace Outlaw, an awesome early internet simulator/detective game, and Spec Ops: The Line, a surprisingly heady deconstruction of military shooters. Josh brings Risk of Rain 2, a mechanically-rich roguelike shooter, and XCom 2, a deep and phenomenal tactical RTS.

Editor’s Note from Josh: We finally fixed my audio! Also, in my segment about Xcom 2, I mistakenly said The Spokesman was voiced by Peter Cullen (Optimus Prime). It’s actually Jon Bailey of Honest Trailers fame. He also does a great Optimus Prime voice, hence the confusion.

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Those stripped of the Grace of Gold shall all meet death, In the embrace of Messmer's flame. It finally happened! The new Elden Ring DLC has us so hyped we had to jump on a quick call to discuss it for a bit. We're both taking out time with the (full-game-sized) DLC but we already have some opinions we wanted to share, and started to scratch at a little bit of the lore and the theming. There will definitely be more coverage of this as we continue to push through and poke at the edges, so stay tuned and DON'T SPOIL ANYTHING OKAY (and also ps thanks for listening we love you)

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