A fish ate my podcasting license…

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re going to be talking about A Short Hike, an indie adventure game and the third game in our deeply important series of bird based games on Pocket. A Short Hike is a very minimalist game, both in style and length, but there is still a good bit to do and explore, even if the game’s world isn’t so big. Part platformer, part adventure game, you spend much of your time in the game collecting items to reach new heights and complete tasks to deepen your relationships with the animal characters who inhabit the camp in which the game takes place. It’s these charming characters that give the game it’s personality. To the point where it feels reductive to refer to doing things for them as “completing tasks,” as the rewards you get for finishing them are much less important than the mostly tiny stories they all have. Combine that with a surprisingly satisfying set of movement mechanics and a dynamic soundtrack, and you get a really focused experience that oscillates between calming exploration and exhilarating flights around the island. We’re going to be talking about the host of different activities available to do in the game’s open world, how the dialogue really sells the game’s light but personal narrative, and how close we are in age to the target demographic for fishing.

Thank you for joining us again this week! This game comes from a half-joking suggestion on our Discord server we got after posting the Unfinished Swan episode, and I’m personally really happy to have been made aware of it. This type of short, calming game is really welcome during stressful times (see, e.g., a global pandemic, playing Resident Evil VII, etc.), so I hope if you decided to play along this week that this game was able to put you in a more relaxed headspace. Next time, we’re going to be talking about Phasmophobia, partly to act as a counterpart to what we’re playing for the main podcast next, and partly as an excuse to screw around online with some friends, so I hope you’ll join us for that!

Your podcast provides you with a certain mindless strength, but such power has its limits.

Welcome back to the podcast! This week, we’re, along with everyone else over the last few months, talking about Hades, Supergiant’s action Roguelite game. One of Hades’ most successful design decisions was to make the game extremely hard to become frustrated with. With an extensive list of unlockable abilities and upgradeable weapons as well as in depth character relationship paths, every time you die in the game you always feel like you’re making some progress. Even more than that, though, you actively look forward to returning to the hub, as each time you set out, you’ll have goals in mind for what to do with the resources you acquire on the run. This takes away the sting of losing a run that dissuades many people from continuing with Roguelike games most of the time, and makes you feel like you are always stronger than the last time you began. And that’s just scratching the surface of why this game has become so popular. Everything from the music to the dialogue to the art is polished and enticing and the mechanics feel like they have been boiled down from the essence of what made Supergiant’s other games as good as they were. We’re going to be talking about how the themes of the game play with the genre and mix to tell a compelling story, how the core gameplay loop keeps you engaged through multiple runs, and who in the game gives off the best himbo vibes.

Thank you for listening this week! With this game in the bag, we can finally focus on actually playing other games for the podcast… But did you get as sucked into Hades as we did? What gods did you favor, and how many runs did it take you to taste sweet victory for the first time? Let us know in the comments, or over on Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Resident Evil 7, as Village is releasing early and we always have too many games we’re excited to play around Halloween time, so we hope you’ll enjoy a slightly out-of-season horror and check us out then.

This podcast was recorded in “Arm Swing” style.

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket, where this week, we’re going to be talking about Downwell, a Rougelike platformer where your goal is just to fall all the way down to the bottom. Obviously this is more difficult to do than it sounds, but even with as difficult as this game is, it’s that simplicity that makes it stand out. You only ever need to move left and right and press a single button, making the game incredible easy to learn and putting you immediately into the loop of getting better, rather than having to take the time to teach you everything you are capable of doing. This also means that the first area of the game never needs to be so easy as to be a tutorial, meaning that your runs begin nearly as intense as the previous one ended. Combined with the short length of most attempts and how quickly you can restart and try again, it makes the game an extremely frantic experience. We’re going to be talking about how the audio and visual elements of the game play into making the mechanics as smooth as possible, how the different powerups and styles affect your decision making, and our overwhelming lack of skill.

Thank you for listening again this week! This is our first Roguelike, though admittedly it’s fairly atypical of the genre mechanically, and it immediately butted up against the idea of how much of a game needs to be played before you can make a judgment on it. For fans of the genre, how much time do you put into a Roguelike before you know you like it? As a genre designed to be difficult from the start in order to make the die and restart flow meaningful, sometimes it’s hard to tell. Let us know in the comments or on Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about A Short Hike, which you could argue is more our speed.

I know it’s selfish, but this is my podcast!

Welcome back! Twenty years after the game’s release and five years of doing this podcast, we are finally going to talk about our first Final Fantasy game. Ten specifically is a game that we have a history with and which has been specifically requested, so we carved out the time to talk about it. FFX is the first Final Fantasy game to be released on the PS2, and made use of the new hardware to create a game that was of an extremely high fidelity for the time, spawning an association between the franchise and high quality visual presentation. Crisp 2001-era graphics aren’t the only innovation though, and FFX also introduced us to the Sphere Grid, an intimidating-looking change to the way leveling was handled that didn’t really get revisited afterward, but is extremely interesting nonetheless. All this set against the typically high-stakes story about saving the world from an ancient evil, now with fully voiced characters portrayed by a professional cast. We’re going to be talking about how the game feels scaled-down from previous games in the series and how this linearity affects everything from mechanics to the plot to the end game content, how complicated the sphere grid really is, and which character is actually an animatronic shark behind the scenes.

Thank you for joining us this week! Doing JRPGs like this always takes us a bit, since they tend to be on the longer side, and that’s probably reflected in the length of this episode. So, I apologize if you prefer us to be a little snappier, but we wanted to give the game its due. Still, it feels like there’s so much involved with this game’s legacy, do you think there’s anything we left out? Were we too hard on Kimahri? Let us know in the comments or on our Discord server! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Supergiant’s Hades, so that I have a reason to stop playing it and do something else with my time, so I hope you’ll join us then.

Underneath your seat, you will find your complimentary Podcast Snap-A-Lot 9000.

Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket. Today, we’re going to be talking about Penko Park, a game that uses unique assets, but is solidly in the very small genre shared by Pokémon Snap. The game’s controls and objectives are largely the same, as you drive around in a self propelled cart and take pictures of the creatures that inhabit the titular park. It’s very interesting to play a game that feels like an intentional refinement of existing game, and we won’t be able to avoid comparing the two throughout our discussion. Where the game sets itself apart from its inspiration is in its tone, which strides the line between horror and humor exceptionally well, never being truly frightening but just unsettling enough to maintain an air of mystery. We’re going to be talking about the application of old, almost nostalgic, mechanics in a new setting, how the audio visual presentation mashes up creepy and joyful in an effective way, and an epic gamer moment.

That’s for joining us again this week! We’re on our way to becoming the predominate Pokémon Snap podcast on the internet, and this game sparked our interest as soon as we heard about it. Next time, though, we’re going to be taking our first steps into the Roguelike genre, taking on Downwell (which may or may not be a sign of things to come, hmmmm?), so I hope you’ll check that out!

The annual awards show everyone isn’t talking about.

Welcome to the NOCLIP Awards 2020, where we decide the best games we played this year in different categories. Our newly moderated debate format will help show the minute distinctions between which games really were the most perfect for the Switch, or what child in games this year most deserves the coveted Burger King birthday crown. And of course, we’ll be celebrating those most tentpole gaming achievements like Game of the Year, unique mechanics, and smashiest balls. So place your bets, or listen to the episode and then place bets with your friends afterwards to take all the rewards for yourself. Just make sure to get a few of them wrong, because plausible deniability is imperative in a grift like this, and if they start to catch on, we’ll have the car running outside.

Thank you for joining us again this year, and I hope this is as fun to listen to as it is to make. We’ll be back with a Pocket episode on Penko Park soon, and after that our full episode on Final Fantasy X, so keep an eye out, and start thinking of which games will win these awards next year!

Coconuts are more valuable than podcast lives!

Welcome back! Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about No More Heroes, a hack’n’slash action game, and likely the game that made Suda51 a name people recognized. A definitely very quirky game with a, uh, we’ll say virile sense of humor, No More Heroes is a game that seems like it tries to make as many choices as it can to stand out and be different from most games released at the time. And I think this wild differentiation is what made it such a remarkable game at the time of its release. The version of the game we played prior to this episode, however, was the Switch port, which notably does not feature the motion controls made so famous by the original. Mechanically translating any game from the Wii is going to cause some hiccups, but without the novelty of masturbating your sword with a physical motion (and maybe some other changes), the blemishes in design really come to the forefront. We’re going to be talking about mechanical strengths and weaknesses both in regular combat and in boss fights, the open world and how it mostly subtracts from the overall quality of the game, and studying the blade.

Thank you for joining us again this week! This was definitely a fun one to talk about, even if there was some disagreement as to whether it was fun to play. One of the side effects of mostly being a retrospective show is that when you put a game like this in a modern context, it makes you think about how far we’ve come and what types of mechanic sets hold up best over the years. Do you think we were too harsh on the game? Not harsh enough? Let us know over on Discord or in the comment section of wherever you’re listening to this, and make sure you join us next time because we’re looking at another game from a lot of years ago in Final Fantasy X.

We Scythians loathe podcasts,

Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, an adventure game originally released on mobile platforms. You’re given a sword and a shield and a quest to go do, but the game takes a very irreverent stance toward all of it, meaning the tone is a lot lighter and more jokey than you would expect from a game of this type. Mechanically, the game is mostly about puzzle solving, with the combat sitting somewhere between Punch Out! and a rhythm game, and honestly not playing much a role in the time you spend with it overall. The game has some very unique ideas, especially for the time it came out, and a genuinely likable attitude about it, but as a whole its biggest issue is just that it might not withstand the test of time. We’re going to be talking about how music was implemented in the game, the relative difficulty of the puzzles and the clarity of instruction, and how every description you give of this game sounds kind of like the lyrics to a folk song.

Thank you for joining us again this week! With this game being re-released on Switch recently, it does raise the question: What games are really perfect for da Switch? If only there was an award show coming up soon where we could give our thoughts on this kind of question…Anyway, next time, we’re going to be talking about Penko Park, a creature photography game which is a genre with very few entries and of which I think we’ve covered all of. So make sure to come back and check that one out as well!

Podcasts don’t always have a tidy beginning.

Welcome back to the podcast! This week we’re joined by Janelle and are going to be talking about Heaven’s Vault, an adventure game with a focus on linguistics that was developed by Inkle. As you can imagine based on that description, this game has a very different way of engaging you mechanically than other games, even within the adventure genre. While the game is designed to deliver on its narrative, the story of an archaeologist exploring ancient ruins within the game’s sci-fi setting to discover details about the civilization that once lived there, one the fulcrum that story is balanced on involves deciphering a surprisingly fleshed out fictional written language. While this element of the game can be engaged with in the style of other puzzles in video games, by finding patterns and using the in-game context to figure out which symbols correspond to which words, it still hits on the critical thinking skills many games’ puzzles fail to stimulate. The result is a game that is surprisingly rewarding and does something that very few other games accomplish: making you feel like you’re actually doing the same thing your character is. We’re going to be talking about the robustness of the translation systems and the overarching impact that language has on the game, the highs and lows of the other more video game-y elements of the game, and by which specialty coffee name you should refer to the state prior to “new game plus.”

Thank you for joining us this week, and thanks again to Janelle for coming on and sharing her comparable expertise on the subject, as I think it really helped open up the dialogue beyond what Andy and I could have mustered on our own. How did this game sit for you? Were you excited to begin recognizing patterns of symbols and take the time to figure out what a “morpheme” is? Did you also think that Aliya moved too damn slow? Was Six your loyal companion and best friend forever, or an unhelpful trash robot? Let us know in the comments or on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about No More Heroes, because we thought the idea of doing two games that shared anything in common in a row absolutely repulsive. So join us then to hear more of what you’re used to from us: games from over ten years ago!

Welcome to NOCLIP!

Do you ever wonder “what is NOCLIP?” Well this episode probably won’t help that much, but hopefully it can provide some helpful examples of the kind of rhetoric you can expect from us in episodes of the show in convenient skit form. And remember, like we always say, or have always said after not saying it for one hundred episodes, NOCLIP is the podcast that’s like a book club for people who don’t think books reward them enough for being good at them.

Thanks for listening!