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!

There might be two naked podcasters out here.

Thank you for joining us again this week! We’re going to be talking about Firewatch, the first and currently only game from Campo Santo. Firewatch is a walking simulator mystery game set in a open world forest, but that really doesn’t get to the meat of why you should play this game. While the game world is beautifully designed, and it’s fun to explore the forest, the key to the game’s success is in building a relationship between yourself and the game’s other lead character Delilah. Everything from scripting to the voice performances of the lead actors really sells their dynamic and makes the character exploration a real joy to play through, even though the narrative itself is pretty troubling. And that’s the beauty of it. Firewatch does a lot to put you in the headspace of its lead character, making you really focus on the moment to moment little things that are going on, while still being able to explore its big picture themes in the time between conversations. Also, you can adopt a turtle, which is pretty great too. We’re going to be talking about how the A and B plots of the game intermingle and how the tone of each effects how we feel about the game overall, visual style and color, and a hypothetical short film version of Pixar’s Up.

So that’s Firewatch, possibly a couple years late, but it’s been on the list for a while. Did you play this game at release, or at any point over its releases on a bunch of different platforms over the years? Were you aware that they were bought by Valve and if so, are you as sad as we are that their next game seems to have been pretty much shut down because of it? Let us know on our Discord, or in the comments! Next time, we’re going to be tackling another indie game in the form of Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP, so be sure to check us out then.

Oh yeah. Let’s a go.

Welcome back to the podcast! This has been a pretty rough time for the world in general, and to make things worse, now we’re uploading Halloween episodes in mid-November. Today we’re talking about Luigi’s Mansion 3, the Switch’s entry to the franchise that kind of launched the Gamecube. This series is Nintendo’s take on horror, and it has a number of the traits associated with horror adventure games spanning the almost thirty years. The game is focused on exploration and puzzle solving, which serves to make this a fairly slow experience that allows the game to build an atmosphere that, while never really scary, sets the tone for this goofy ghost game. As before, Luigi is tasked with exploring the setting, a hotel this time, and dealing with ghosts with his legally-distinct-from-a-Proton-Pack Poltergust vacuum cleaner. Combat makes up a more sizable portion of the game than it has in past entries, but the use of a number of tools keeps it dynamic, as you have to discover how to defeat each type of enemy or boss. What this ends up as is a surprisingly engaging game that definitely feels “Halloween” but not “horror.” We’re going to be talking about mechanical and thematic pacing, the utter success that is Gooigi, and the inherent differences between mansion games and hotel games.

Thank you for joining us this week! Sorry to extend the spooky themes out into November, but we wanted to get our two episodes in since episode 100 delayed us a bit. Are you a long time Luigi’s Mansion fan? How was Dark Moon? How much of our appreciation for the first game in the series is just nostalgia? Let us know in the comments on YouTube or on Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Heaven’s Vault, a language-based adventure game from the developers of 80 Days, and just really getting back into the swing of playing games you haven’t heard of.

At least Halloween should be fun.

Happy Halloween! Today we’re going to be talking about Fatum Betula, a game that was inspired by Japanese games of the PS1 era, but will probably be most often compared to LSD Dream Emulator. This comparison is not unjust, but truthfully, while there is less going on in this game, it has a much clearer sense of play to it that revolves around puzzle solving and exploration. Overall, this is a wise choice, as the experience of playing this feels very genuine, as opposed to something that is trying to simulate another game’s sense of incomprehensibility. Where the inspiration really sings is in the visuals, and a lot of the design feels extremely faithful to the era it is trying to match. Everything from texture work to UI mimics the time period in aesthetic and functionality, and it gives the game a real sense of place, that place just isn’t here and now. We talk about designing with an eye for the aesthetics of the past, puzzle elements and how they fit into the game, and that cozy autumnal feeling that this game doesn’t exactly provide.

Thank you for joining us for another October of horror games. We covered a variety of styles of games this month (with one more coming in the form of Luigi’s Mansion in November), and this is by far the least traditional among them. Despite that, and despite it’s intentionally obtuse design, this was a lot more puzzle game than it was surreal walking sim, so to follow it up, next time we’re going to be talking about Firewatch, a predominately real walking sim.

Some podcasts mustn’t be forgotten.

It’s Halloween season! Every year we put out our bowl of candy for all our podcast listeners, so thank you for joining us again this year and I’m glad to see so many of you are wearing costumes! For our first Halloween episode here on the main podcast, we’re going to be talking about Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the game that effectively resurrected horror games in terms of public perception. And the expected mechanics of the genre, honestly. Amnesia came out in 2010, and the Resident Evil 4 effect was in full swing, with very few survival horror games releasing and mostly not abiding by the methodical gameplay and anemic resources of genre games of the older generations. Amnesia, however, came from a team who had been making horror games for several years in which you were mostly helpless against those who sought to do you harm, and that ethos, as well as an expanded budget, are what really made this game take off. The game spikes that lack of agency in action with a narrative that by design forces both you and your player character to learn the specifics of your predicament as you go along and creates a cocktail that still manages to be scary even after a decade. We’re going to be talking about preserving fear over the course of the game’s runtime, mechanics by way of object physics and sanity meters, and we somehow fit in a mention for coconut crabs, for what it’s worth.

So that’s Amnesia. I genuinely think this game holds up after so many years, but there have been a million iterations on this formula after this game exploded. Are there games that did it better, or does the original still hold true for you? Have you played the game’s sequel, or the newest entry that we didn’t mention because when we recorded this we didn’t realize it was a thing? Let us know over on our discord. Hope this game has you in a creepy mood (one that lasts for a couple weeks, anyway) because we have one more game planned for the season, and while it may fall outside of October, hopefully you’ll still come back for more next time, when we’re going to be talking about Luigi’s Mansion 3!