T w e n t y S i d e d

I can accept that Marlow Briggs is an American fireman who came back from the dead to fight Mayincatec gods with a three-bladed scythe and the help of a policewoman. I understand that the bad guy has an army of mooks that are willing to die at his command. And I can grudgingly accept the existence of a tank the size of Rhode Island that rolls through the jungle harvesting and refining ore of unknown value or utility. Fine. It’s all part of the genre, and I guess we have to allow for the occasional excesses of the writers.

But I REFUSE to believe that anyone was able to use one of those orange helicopters to travel from one point to another. Yes, it DID explode before reaching its destination, but it was operational for nearly a full minute. Given what the game has shown us so far, that’s completely ridiculous.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Man, thanks to the devs for generous and thorough autosave. If you’re going to do checkpoint saves, this is how you do it. ON THE OTHER HAND, we wouldn’t have needed this kind of granularity in the checkpoints if the “skip cutscene” button hadn’t been one of the standard gameplay buttons.

I love how a videogame has cutscene continuity issues like a low-budget movie, as if this scene was pieced together from several different takes.

Marlow is standing nose-to-nose with Kim.

Kim: I’m the only chance you’ve got to save your little lamb, so how about you lower the harpoon?

Suddenly Marlow is holding his scythe up to her chin.

He wasn’t pointing his weapon at her until after she told him to stop doing it??? And then everyone takes turns holding the blade by the edge. And she spends the whole conversation looking him directly in the pecs. Hey lady, my eyes are up here.

It would have been awesome if just one of the characters had been given the name of an actual archaeologist known for working in this region. Then they could have opened the game with the claim, “BASED ON A TRUE STORY“.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So it looks like the jump button is also the skip cutscene button, which means our bunny-hopping driver is skipping half the cutscenes. I like to think that the bits we skipped are these detailed explanations that would perfectly explain everything we’re seeing.

Also, I love the idea of calling an astrophysicist and asking him random science questions about archaeology, botany, zoology, and anthropology.

Every time I think this game is out of ideas and we’re going to run out of stuff to be incredulous about, it manages to top itself. Like Chris said in a previous episode, this game certainly has a lot of ideas. They’re mostly crazy nonsense, but there are SO MANY of them!

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This episode is two days late because YouTube upload was broken. So that was a great way to waste hours and hours of Josh’s time by making him re-encode and upload a huge video file when the problem wasn’t even on his end. Thanks YouTube!

This game is a poster child for the Quiet Time problem. It looks kind of amusing, but just watching it for an hour is exhausting. It’s a complete sensory overload of flashing lights and roaring explosions and particle effects and flying bodies and spinning platforms. If it wasn’t for moments like the brief block-pushing stuff this would quickly get intolerable. It might not be that bad for those of you watching the game twenty minutes at a time through our show, but I just watched Josh play for an hour and then watched this episode prior to writing this post, and my eyes and ears are sore. I can’t imagine actually playing the game for a couple of hours at a time.

Since none of us have played the game before, and since the story is a hyperactive stream of incongruous destruction, we have no idea where we are. Each week is a mystery. “Will we reach the end this week? Or are we just wrapping up the first act?” No idea!

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.