It's Friday the 13th and we're ready to talk about a bunch of games. Tune in for the exciting conclusion(?) to Matt's Dark Souls saga, a bunch of praise for The Witness, quick takes on Octopath Traveller and Deus Ex, and a lengthy chat about Epic Games's sort-of-terrible and sort-of-amazing game Fortnite.

Before getting into Butterfly Soup - one of my favorite gaming and narrative experiences this year - I want to loosely define a few phrases:

Slice-of-life Slice-of-life, as an idiom, is sort of quaintly useless. Life is broad, and the slices can be generous. Ironically, in gaming, we use the term “vertical slice” to delineate the most exciting parts of a video game.

YA Yesterday on the Chicago L I saw a 50-something-year-old woman with a giant Hunger Games mocking jay tattoo on her neck. She probably wasn’t Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins. I know that for industry/genre enthusiasts YA is a useful term, but it’s also a dumb one.

Visual novel Visual novels are popular in Japan, but not living in Japan I haven’t spent much time with them. I did play the grossly overwritten 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors. It didn’t exactly leave me wanting more.

In visual novels, the player/reader reads text (mostly dialogue), looks at character portraits and makes occasional choices. Some visual novels include slightly more gamified systems, like inventories or stats, but generally they’re even less dynamic than choose-your-own-adventure books.

Okay, now Butterfly Soup:

We pull out all of our trick shots for a rapid fire episode that addresses a whole bunch of games. Bob's beaten Dark Souls, Matt's played Picross, Cuphead is great, and Deus Ex is dumb. Matt even found time to play Thimbleweed Park.

We finally get around to some reader mail, and take a deep dive into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Join us for a very special (and potentially spoiler-ish) episode.  

The first time you play God Hand, you will either hate it or think it's 'okay'. The second time you play it, you will probably have a similar opinion. Somewhere between the second or third time you experience the game, however, a switch will flip in your brain and you'll need to cope with a disturbing reality: As an opportunity to press buttons and see things occur on a screen, this game is perfect. On every other level, it's an indecent example of everything shameful about video games.

Oh well, you can't win 'em all.

There is a time and a place for Uncharted video games; it’s somewhere between 2001 and 2010. Americans needed escapism, heroic gunfights, and they could be forgiven for seeing exotic locales as playgrounds. Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (2007) was an exercise in Indiana Jones fan fiction and photo-realism. The follow-up, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (2009) is generally regarded as the pinnacle of the series. A rare sophomore effort that outstrips the first project without over-reaching. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception (2011) was a lot like Among Thieves but somehow dumb, boring, and poorly titled.

Then, from the same studio, came The Last of Us (2013), an astounding video game. Serious, clever, grounded, powerful - a game that probably made Naughty Dog finally feel weird about being called Naughty Dog. The Last of Us was Uncharted with a tight camera, an appropriate feeling of wonder brought on by the contrast of desperation, and guns that felt like guns.

It's too hot and we can't think straight on this week's episode. Despite the heat, we manage to talk about Destiny 2, The Witness, Absolver, and Butterfly Soup.

When my parents bought me a fat grey Game Boy in 1991, it came with Tetris (1984). I played a lot of Tetris then, and I’ve played a lot since. Tetris may be the platonic ideal of “video game,” insofar as something so absurdly subjective can be said at all. Safer at least, would be to say...

Bob returns from a multitude of weddings and Matt encounters an underwhelming killer clown. After discussing the state of movie award shows, we get down to business with our usual Dark Souls III discussion, follow up on Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, and the exciting conclusion to Bob's journey in Hyrule.