Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to the gaming Backlog book club. Hope it’s been a good gaming week for you. You play much else this week, Alex, or just focus on Death Stranding?

[00:00:08] Speaker B: Mainly on Death Stranding. Played another couple hour two hours of Legend of Mana Remastered on PS4, PS5, but other than that, not much else. Kind of just focused a bit more on Death Stranding.

[00:00:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess I put an hour or two into Persona 5 Royal just to advance a little bit there. And I played a couple hours of demos from Steam as they’re going through a sale right now and decided to check some things out to see if I wanted to buy anything. But I’ll hold off for now, maybe in the future with those. Those games. Laika, which is a 2D side scrolling motorcycle game. It feels kind of like Mad Max. Interesting concept, pretty difficult, but yeah. And there’s another one called Chance of Sennaar which is like a Tower of Babel language translation puzzle game which is very highly praised but mostly just focused on desktrending.

Yeah, there’s obviously multiple sales going on right now. There’s a Steam Sale and PlayStation Days of Play. Is there anything you’re planning on adding to your backlog, Alex?

[00:01:09] Speaker B: Yeah, there’s probably a couple games. I haven’t looked through the Steam sale so I could add more. But for the PlayStation days of play I did look through it. I’m probably going to buy Outer Wilds along with the Outer Wilds DLC because buying them separately is cheaper than buying the combined package. Since the combined ones, I love it.

[00:01:31] Speaker A: How they do that.

[00:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah. So I’ll buy those. I’m also going to buy the. The Metro Exodus Metro bundle of the three Metro games because I saw it was on sale for like 11 bucks.

[00:01:43] Speaker A: Those are good.

[00:01:45] Speaker B: Yeah. And for the third one you get the. I think was the Gold edition. So you get all the DLC and everything that came through it. So I thought I had them, but I don’t. I will. Yeah, that’s probably one.

I think it’s like 1112 bucks that I will be solid purchase up here. Yeah, yeah, that’s. Those ones are the main ones.

[00:02:02] Speaker A: The only one that I’ve looked at is Armored Core 6. As a fan and also someone who watched Gundam Wing way back in the early 2000s. Something about that mech type combat. It might scratch niche at some point. So we’ll see about that.

[00:02:18] Speaker B: Games. My favorite mech games back in the day were the MechWarrior games and I really haven’t played a bunch of other.

[00:02:22] Speaker A: Mech games other than those play MechWarrior 2 a little bit and MechWarrior 4 on the original Xbox, which was a good time. I don’t think I’ve actually played an Armored Core game. I might have watched someone play it, but I’m definitely curious. And the secret level episode about Armored Core was pretty interesting. Keanu Reeves was in it, of all things.

Obviously that’s a short and not attached to the story of the game, but looks fun.

Well, this will be a shorter episode than I expected. There were only two delivery orders in this section, so I assume the remaining ones will be significantly longer if the game really is quite as long as we’ve read about. And they’re called Episodes, not chapters, so we’ll move forward with that. But what are your first thoughts? I think my first thought is, I know we heard about Walking Simulator, but it seems more like a balance simulator. More like your hiking while carrying something on your back.

[00:03:19] Speaker B: That was. That’s literally my first point under Prologue is keeping balance, because that seems to be the trend of however much. Obviously, the more you pick up, the heavier your cargo gets, the more that you lose your balance. And it was a lot of R2L2 keeping my balance, pressing them both together to stay balanced or to stop myself if I was running and everything.

[00:03:42] Speaker A: So, yeah, that definitely seems like a matter of pick your battles between running and walking. Obviously, you want to get somewhere faster, but I think part of this is like the meditative experience of just trudging through and walking and keeping your balance.

[00:03:55] Speaker B: I’m definitely trying to find more just flat paths instead of going over hills.

[00:04:01] Speaker A: Flat paths are useful. I think they’re probably gonna funnel you into having not having that as an option at some point, though, so take advantage while you can.

[00:04:09] Speaker B: Oh, I’m sure. Yes, I’m sure they will.

[00:04:12] Speaker A: The early introduction of eating bugs to keep the time fall away was kind of unusual, too. And they were floating larvae type things. Not the most appealing, but I guess that’s what you got to do in this world.

[00:04:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I noticed that when I was walking around and I’d see their nests, I just grab them. But I noticed I’d grab them, but then I was like, I don’t know where they go in my inventory, and I need to figure that out.

[00:04:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I’m pretty sure what I saw was that if you have. If you’ve taken any damage at all, it just instantly heals you however much it can. And then once you’re fully healed, I think you can actually pick them up and store them.

I didn’t double check that, but I think the prompt, when you hit I think it’s the square button ends up switching from eat to pick up or store or something like that. So I guess you just need to farm and scavenge all of the.

All of the bugs that you can get as you walk along and hike outside.

[00:05:08] Speaker B: Yeah, so I’ve stored a few. So I have to find where to store them, which I’ll look at more here once we start. Once I start up episode two of the game. Also, I did notice that from the prologue and chapter one, that and why I was trying to stay more on flat ground is if you fell, your cargo is damaged and it actually docks you a little bit. Like you’re not reading at the scoring.

[00:05:31] Speaker A: Thing at the rating of each sort of delivery. Right. Yeah, I saw that too. And you know, the tutorial prompts popped up saying like, it’ll change from color and flash red or whatever. And I don’t know how much, like I haven’t. I don’t think I’ve reached the point where the delivery is broken and undeliverable. But it was definitely like I’d see the red flash and then I’d realize, oh, it wasn’t actually that damaged. It seems to be. Okay. You’d want to avoid falling.

[00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I only fell like once.

[00:05:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I did. I did have some trouble, like when I was.

Had not too many packages, so I was able to sprint without falling. But then I was like trying to grab a rope at the end of a path to go down a short cliff and the reaction of the stick or I don’t know how you actually stop yourself from running yet. Because I hit X. I don’t think it registered and I fell off the cliff and damaged the package I’ve seen.

[00:06:23] Speaker B: So I think to stop, I think it’s L2R. I think it prompts with I think L2 or R2. At some point it will say stop balance. Yeah.

[00:06:30] Speaker A: Okay.

[00:06:31] Speaker B: And it will literally healed. Like kind of just go, go from.

[00:06:35] Speaker A: A straight heels in and try.

[00:06:37] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:06:38] Speaker A: Good to know.

[00:06:39] Speaker B: I had a couple times because I almost had a time too where I was slightly sprinting and then almost went off a cliff. And I was able to stop just because he was starting to stumble and I was like, please stop, Please stop.

[00:06:49] Speaker A: Wow.

[00:06:49] Speaker B: Before you fall off.

[00:06:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I definitely fell multiple times coming out of a quick run. Always a good time falling over when you’re running. You know, it’s like you’re learning how to Walk all over again.

[00:07:01] Speaker B: Yeah. But for the prologue mainly, I mean there wasn’t too much in just the prologue. We had had that where you’d pick up the package and then right at the start kind of there’s the. Quite a big cutscene where Leah Seydoux was who is introduced as a character called Fragile.

[00:07:17] Speaker A: They definitely introduced. And I think she. That was an interesting thing. She seems to have some sort of teleport ability because you almost run her over on the motorcycle and then your motorcycle flies off the cliff and then. And then she ends up popping up to save you in the cave. And they’re definitely setting this up as strong horror type vibes. Whenever the BTs are around number one, they’re invisible. You just see their palm prints. Absolutely. Kind of some frightening stuff going on there.

[00:07:42] Speaker B: Yeah. That was another point of mine was BT’s question. Question. Because obviously they haven’t said what. I don’t know if. If they’re just called BTS or if.

[00:07:51] Speaker A: What does that stand for?

[00:07:52] Speaker B: Their initials. What does it stand for? Yeah, we’ll find out later on in the game, I think. I guess they were quite terrifying with the palm prints.

[00:08:01] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:08:01] Speaker B: Holding your breath and everything. Yeah.

[00:08:04] Speaker A: The other curious thing too is the. The ones that have shown up in the cutscenes so far have all been like those. They have large footprint and then the footprint nails extend the second that palm hits the ground. But then all of the kind of the invisible floating. You know, they say they’re BTS forms that are in the sky occasionally are more human shaped. So they don’t really have that monstrous type form. So I’m curious, is there an evolutionary phase through early BT to late BT stages and what’s going on there? I guess we’ll find out.

[00:08:33] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:08:33] Speaker A: It’s also interesting. Yeah, go ahead.

[00:08:36] Speaker B: No, I was gonna say. Yeah. I think. Hopefully. I’m sure we will just. We’ll find out later on in the story. It’s just kind of keeping us intrigued and. Yeah. In the dark and intrigued on what all this is and how it came about.

[00:08:52] Speaker A: There will more than likely be a lore dump at some point. So I fully expect that. And we’ll come back to this conversation knowing a whole lot more. It’s also interesting that whenever someone dies, you need to burn them as soon as possible.

[00:09:05] Speaker B: Yes. That was.

So to get back for the prologue, there wasn’t. It was a pretty shorter chapter I picked up.

I’ve just ended up like kind of walking around and scanning with the scanner and picked up like. I don’t know, probably about four or five other packages before walking back to the town, to the city, and then basically ending the prologue there.

[00:09:27] Speaker A: And then I. Yeah, I only stopped off like one, but I didn’t want to run into anything.

[00:09:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it was a pretty short prologue, but it just gave a little bit of an introduction to the character. Character and everything. And it was. It was fun. They kind of just get you used to the controls, which was good.

[00:09:42] Speaker A: Yeah, the whole. I think especially the scene when you’re working with corpse disposal was, you know, it switched the first person and you would just watch all this stuff happen and the guy gets floated up into the air and the other guy is trapped under the vehicle, gets rained on, and ends up having his face basically melted into old age. Kind of really unusual stuff, but, you know, and then it moves on from there. And once you’re in episode one, it brings you through and you meet your mother, who’s the president. And.

[00:10:10] Speaker B: Yeah, she’s the last of. The last president of, I guess what would be considered the United States of America by the sounds of it.

[00:10:16] Speaker A: United Cities of America. It seems like in here.

[00:10:18] Speaker B: Yeah, she’s a last. Yeah.

[00:10:21] Speaker A: And, yeah, I mean, that. That’s a curiosity, like.

But, you know, he’s carrying his mother, who he clearly had a falling out with after she dies and got to go burner and the incinerator and kind of odd choice, but I guess there’s people with dooms, which is another acronym we don’t understand. Obviously. It’s that ability to either see or sense. The BTS comes in handy. So. But definitely that.

[00:10:44] Speaker B: Yeah, you’re right. Or I think he definitely had a fallout with his mom because listening to it and listening, like, closely, the conversation where he kept saying like, oh, that’s not my name, or what. I think when his name is actually Sam Porter. Bridges. I think it’s Sam Bridges. Porter. I’m not sure which way it is, but I basically, I think his name is saying is my name’s SA but his job is like, he works for Bridges and he’s a Porter and that he’s just used it as his name.

[00:11:08] Speaker A: That’s definitely what I’ve gathered and was going to mention too. There’s something going on with the names of the characters. Yeah, Sam Porter. Bridges. Porter is the package delivery profession. It seems like Bridges is the name of the organization that we don’t know much about yet, but we just know it’s his employer. Also that the fact that rebuilding is the reason that rebuilding, I guess the United Cities is the reason the bridges exist in the first place.

The other name thing that I caught on to is his mom is President Strand.

So there’s death stranding.

Kojima’s called it a strand game. Also, at some point in that scene, really quickly they show there’s some writing on that photo that Sam carries around that says be stranded in love. So my guess is this Amelie person is either his some significant other or sister or something like that. It was a photo of the three of them, but his name is Sam Porter Bridges. Her name is President Strand.

There’s clearly some weird naming things happening. I’m sure we’ll learn more about that too.

[00:12:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I definitely, as you said, he tends to do a lore dump. So we’ll. I’m sure we will learn.

Learn more about that here in the next coming episodes.

Another thing I noticed. Yeah as you said from like from chapter one from dropping off the body of the incinerator is they mentioned something on if you void out if you die.

But yet it’ll incur another. I think incurring a stranding where basically it’s a giant explosion of the area.

[00:12:32] Speaker A: Yes. Just like in that. That cutscene with the original corpse disposal team. It sounds like whenever whatever it is that happens happens that. Yeah. It creates the explosion in the crater and destroys everything. But Sam, he said what was the reintegrating or something where. Or repatriate I think is what the terminology was by Guillermo the Dodo’s character. Dead man was. Yeah.

[00:12:54] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:12:55] Speaker A: That. That’s basically just a way to explain how he can respawn in, you know, in game terminology. And. And for sure. So he would survive, but whatever the area he was would explode. So they want to avoid that at all costs.

[00:13:08] Speaker B: Yeah. I was.

I was a little afraid I was gonna die after. So after dropping off my. Your mom at the incinerator, Obviously all those BTs come out and the baby starts going like ballistic.

[00:13:24] Speaker A: I had to.

[00:13:24] Speaker B: I had to turn because I was playing a little later at night. I had to turn down my controller microphone, the volume coming out of that because it was quite a loud cry.

[00:13:33] Speaker A: Yep. So I was playing on headphones. So I was also turning the volume down and not have that crying in the ear.

[00:13:40] Speaker B: But it was going nuts. And I was trying like I was crouched and I was holding my breath as much as I could. And I was like. Holding your breath takes up stamina. Yep. So you can’t do it forever. And so I was like trying to go around them as. But it was not the easiest.

[00:13:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And it seemed like, I think that the first time I was doing the hole in the breath thing, I was seeing how long it can take because it says once you run out, you pass out. And also that at some point, if you get too low, you end up having a big kind of gasp for air. And so I did have a gasp for air. And I think it’s. It looks like, at least at the beginning in this current episode one, you’re. I don’t know if it grows, but the stamina bar for the holding breath is only four squares. And once you get to that fourth one, start. The fourth one, I think, is when you start the gasping. So release the hold breath. Once you’re.

Once you’re getting close to that, it’s. It’s freaky. Which route did you take to the. To the incinerator? From the city to the incinerator?

[00:14:36] Speaker B: I went. Which way did I go? Oh, I went. So if you’re coming from the city, I went to the far left. So I took the waterfall.

[00:14:43] Speaker A: The river waterfall route?

[00:14:44] Speaker B: Yeah, the river waterfall route.

[00:14:46] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:14:46] Speaker B: That was one.

[00:14:47] Speaker A: I. Yeah, I was thinking, okay, you know, I know this game has a lot of hiking and walking around. I might as well get used to the controls as fast as I can. So I took the river route and then went on to the mountain route, expecting this, like, major intense climb. And then the guy that. The guy Igor, I think his name was, that died in that previous corpse disposal scene had left a number of ladders and ropes and things there. So the mountain route wasn’t so bad on the way there and then, yeah, like, after watching some of the scenes, I was like, I don’t know if I’m ready to go all out against some BTs right now. So I took the lowest, the easiest route back that kind of just skirted around them and went down that river waterfall route to get home.

[00:15:29] Speaker B: Was that on the way back? Yeah, on the way back. So if you’re looking back at the sea, I took the. It would be to your left.

[00:15:36] Speaker A: Okay. That was the one that went through all the BTs.

[00:15:38] Speaker B: Oh, I went.

I went all the way left. And I will say at one point for the bts, like, I was holding my breath and crouching and I had to let go of my breath and they heard me for a sec. And then you can see the handprints come down or their paw prints, whatever, come down. And it came down next to me and I slightly moved to try and get away, and then it touched me and I was like, oh, and all of a sudden, like, all this, like, what. I’m not sure what it, like black goo, like, comes around.

Comes around my feet and everything. And I’m trying to, like, sprint out of it and there’s like, there’s corpses or whatever. There’s people like trying to grab you from there. Luckily it wasn’t massively big. I didn’t have too far to go and I was able to get out. I took a little bit of damage, but not too much, but I was able to get out of it. And then I kind of sprinted away. And then a couple more beat show and I had to hold my breath and crouch again. And then a little further after that, once I got through those, it was just clear sailing back. But I did get touched by one.

[00:16:37] Speaker A: Oh, damn. Okay, you had an exciting experience then.

[00:16:40] Speaker B: Yeah. So, yes, if you get touched there. Yeah, this like black goo again. I’m sure we’ll know more of the terminology later. But it like, comes up all around you and there’s like people as if it’s like the underworld, like, grabbing out at your feet, trying to pull you down, pull you in one. Kind of like we saw in the cutscene for the body disposal guy.

[00:16:58] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. Okay.

[00:17:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So. But I was able to run out of that. You kind of have to trudge out of that. And then I just ran after that.

[00:17:06] Speaker A: Well, hot tip. And I think I saw it as like one of those tutorial pop ups was if you open your map when you know BTs are around, it provides you with like a couple of suggested options and it tells you how, like, it actually has, like a difficulty level attached to it. And also I think there’s a difficulty for the hiking part and there’s a difficulty for how many BTs there are.

And so it gives you a number of options to get back and says, like, okay, you’re going to be.

So you can really plot out that map to get.

If you want the crazy experience, you can take it. And if you want to in that particular moment, or you ran out of bugs to eat and heal up, or you’re just worried about it, then you can go the easy way. Something to try out in case you didn’t before.

[00:17:49] Speaker B: I will check tent next time. Yeah. With the map. And yeah, I’ll check that all out next time. Because I think obviously, I’m sure. I think later on, I’m not sure. I think you do maybe get like a gun or, well, some type of weapon, I believe later on.

[00:18:02] Speaker A: I have to assume so.

[00:18:04] Speaker B: And then obviously upgrading Your character. Yeah, upgrading your character a little more, and then maybe I’ll feel a little bit better on.

[00:18:11] Speaker A: I’m sure that’s coming soon. It seems like we’re still in tutorial mode for the most part, with a little bit of lower exposure and. Yeah, I mean, it seems like. So I’m curious about Bridges. It seems like as an organization, apparently it depends on the president being alive. They keep repeating that, but so does, you know, America as a country, but the president’s dead. You know, are they gonna use, like a ghost president or are they gonna pull someone else in? They keep telling, talking about your mom as the last one. Like, I have no idea where that’s going. Maybe this Amelie person is gonna be the new president. That’s my guess so far, but yeah.

[00:18:42] Speaker B: That’S what I would. I would guess too, but we’ll see where that goes.

[00:18:46] Speaker A: The other thing that I kind of gathered from playing through this first couple hours was that I found the music to be pretty calming.

You know, the idea of pulling the camera far back from where you are when you get out of the cities into the wild area, are kind of methodically meditatively hiking while they pipe in music with vocals really seems to echo that. Those film aspirations that Kojima has. In most other games, that type of moment would be highlighted by ambient music or just nature sounds. And here they’re, okay, we’re putting a mood on and you’re gonna enjoy it.

[00:19:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that was a point I had, actually. It was nice, actually. I really. I enjoyed that. Just. Yeah. The original. Just start of your walk coming out. The music, I thought them. It was great. Taste in, like, taste in music to put out there is definitely more relaxing. I was like, oh, okay, I can. I can do this.

[00:19:41] Speaker A: It seemed to fit. Yeah. It calms you down before you get thrust into something more intense. So I’m sure though, it sounds like there’s three. Two or three bands that are involved in this game, so I think they’re gonna keep putting out new songs as you go through, along with whatever ambient sound they do have.

[00:20:02] Speaker B: Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I so far enjoying the soundtrack. I enjoyed those two songs. I think it was like just mainly two songs, so.

[00:20:09] Speaker A: And. And visually it’s amazing. I think that the rain itself looks.

Looks great. I think the visuals overall are awesome. You know, we mentioned the Decima engine last time, and I think if they’re doing a good job of pulling what they want to. Out of out of the engine, it.

[00:20:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Yes, I agree. It looks incredible. That was the one thing I like when, yeah, when they do start playing the music and it pulls out like just seeing everything. I was like, this looks so nice. It looks really. Good job.

[00:20:39] Speaker A: You get a true sense of each of those little rocks that you need to step over without tripping.

[00:20:45] Speaker B: So you do.

[00:20:46] Speaker A: It’s. Imagine playing this game on a PS1.

[00:20:49] Speaker B: Oh God. That would know. It’s all just be like, watch out next.

[00:20:53] Speaker A: Next. They’re gonna.

[00:20:56] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:20:59] Speaker A: So yeah, I mean on my end I, you know, I was really. I’m very intrigued. I’ll say I’m curious to keep going. I’d actually say it’s been tough holding off on continuing to play until now. So we’re able to. To jump back and get to episode two today. But it’s.

It’s something that I’ve been, you know, pulling myself into other things or other games to occupy the time because I want to get back into Death Stranding asap.

[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yeah, same. I’ve been wanting to get back into it too because I am very intrigued by the story and where it’s going to go and everything. Yeah, I’m definitely. I probably start playing it playing episode two here today because I think, I think episode two is definitely longer than the prologue and episode one combined. So.

[00:21:46] Speaker A: I found a spoiler free list of orders, delivery orders per episode. And it looks like episode two has seven required story advancing orders and the rest are side quests. So depending on how much time you have, feel free to knock out side quests as you see fit.

But judging by the few hours it took for episode one or prologue in episode one, I would budget a bit longer this week than you did last week. It took me less than two hours to get through the prologue and then the two orders of episode one. I’m probably going to put in three to five, but who knows, I might need more than that. I guess we’ll judge as we go along.

[00:22:22] Speaker B: Yeah, that’s. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I think you’re right. I think I’m at about two hours or less between the prologue and episode one. Yeah, I think episode two itself is going to be, as you said, about three to three to five hours probably of gameplay with the orders.

[00:22:37] Speaker A: Well, we’ll join back once everyone hits the beginning of episode three.

[00:22:42] Speaker B: Yeah. So everybody please enjoy episode two of Death Stranding and play along with us. And we’ll be back in a week to discuss everything that took place in that episode in detail.

And again, thanks for joining us for this week’s episode of the gaming backlog. Book Club.

If you want to follow along with our playthrough of Death Stranding, please don’t forget to subscribe to the Gaming Backlog Book Club. Thanks for watching.