Maverick went to Anime NYC, and he had a nice time all-around! However, he did have some thoughts about the overall evolution of conventions in a more corporate age. Is it possible to still find real connections while being so heavily advertised to? Plus, we all love the Major and Ghost in the Shell, Rose needs an intervention on isekai, and John’s sinking deeper into Digimon.

Our theme song is by Kirsten Carey, who can be found at @kircarey.bsky.social!

Send questions to podcast@gamesline.net, with a subject denoting it’s for URW!

The post Unlimited Rail Works Episode 141: Da Anime of New Yawk Baybee!! appeared first on Gamesline.

Another week another Gamesline Podcast. This week, John and Lorelai are joined by streamer, game designer, and comic book artist Roxy Polk to talk about the stagnation in the farming sim genre, the glory of quality remasters and the lost art of making an incredible demo. We also get into your questions about game systems and what can really make them stand out.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Lorelai, and Red Mage Roxy. You can also find Roxy on her Website, Etsy, and Twitch.

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at http://gamesline.chat!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Editing and Video Production by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 104: Farming Demo Remasters with Roxy Polk appeared first on Gamesline.

Scott played The Duskbloods network test, and Crystal’s here to ask him about it! Learn about some of the unique multiplayer experiments FromSoftware is up to with the multiplayer-focused Duskbloods, such as an urgently ticking clock, incentives to maintain fragile alliances, and a massive reward for finding true love!

Click here to listen to the Sinclair Lore podcast Scott references!

Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/gamesline

Follow us on Bluesky: @gamesline.net
Crystal: @crystal.undertow.cards
Scott: @fkasocks.com

Review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

Send questions to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

Join our Discord channel at gamesline.chat!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Crystal

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 103: The Duskbloods Network Test appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s a new week and a new format for the podcast. This week, Crystal wanted to talk all about the lost art of DVD menus while Lorelai pondered why it is that the third game in a series sometimes loses it’s magic. In the news, we talk about Double Fine and Compulsion Games getting their freedom from Microsoft and being the sole publisher of their games. We also go over some of those mentioned format changes we’re going to see with the podcast moving forward like the games club.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, Crystal, and Lorelai

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at gamesline.chat!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 102: DVD’s Come In Threes. appeared first on Gamesline.

In a sea of games showcasing technological advancement through facial pores and scope creep, this was a surrealist Shoot ‘em Up where you watch all your millions of projectiles bounce around and collide with complex enemies in high-definition space. It was incredibly impressive to see, and had me cheering at what people so often call “next-gen” tech for one of the first few times in my life. 

It’s not the hardest game, nor is it the most interestingly unique mechanical sandbox ever created. At the same time, however, I was consistently drawn in by the mystique the game gradually unwound without ever fully answering. Returnal isn’t a game you solve; it’s an experience you meditate on and engage with as you explore its hostile, impossible alien architecture.

All this prologue is to say that when Saros was unveiled last year, and seemed to be a more mechanically nuanced successor to Returnal, I was incredibly excited! Returnal with parrying, shields, and The King in Yellow? Hell yeah sister, pass me some of that! Expanding upon the established baseline with more dynamic environments and a more considered meta progression seemed like one of the most straightforward slam dunks in gaming.

Unfortunately, even though it succeeds at so many of its goals, Saros disappoints specifically because of how safe it feels, a concept completely antithetical to the uniqueness of its predecessor. 

Saros takes place in a future where a hyper capitalist Earth ruled by Mega Corporations has ventured out to colonize and pillage the rest of the known universe. You play as Arjun Devraj, an enforcer for the Soltari Corporation who’s been sent out to investigate three waves of colonists and research teams that have gone missing on a mysterious planet named Carcosa (one has to assume that The King in Yellow doesn’t exist in this world, or else the old adage about the Torment Nexus has held true). Upon arriving, Arjun and his team quickly realize that the situation is far more dire than they could have imagined, as they face down an ever-changing landscape, horrifying bio-mechanical creatures, and eldritch forces corrupting their bodies and minds. 

If you’ve never read The King in Yellow (which you really should), Saros will probably come across as an incredibly original game, much in the way Returnal’s fooling around with cosmic horror felt fresh and bold. If you have read it, or anything directly inspired by it, you can kind of guess the broad strokes of where Saros’ story will go. There’s corruption, confusion, gestures towards romance and time foolery, so on and so forth.

As one intimately familiar with surrealist horror, The King in Yellow has always stood out to me as a particularly influential work. Yes, of course, the concepts of corruption and paranoia, alongside pivots towards breezier themes, can be found in countless works throughout history. Its specific portrayal of an almost “frame narrative” conceit with its titular play feels so astounding for its time, and has clearly influenced nearly everything like it that’s come after. Think of every creepypasta about a cursed movie, something like The Ring, cursed object narratives; they all take concepts and executions directly from the 1895 collection. It was an incredible breakout hit, and at the time there just wasn’t much like The King in Yellow.

However, it is no longer 1895, and we have access to pretty much every successor you could dream of in the far flung future of 2026, which hurts Saros in ways Returnal never quite had to deal with. 

Returnal is ultimately a story about trauma and loss, and it tells this story not through traditional cutscenes, but with first-person exploration sequences through mundane locations that instantly feel out of place in its setting of an overgrown alien world. Finding a contemporary and perfectly intact house in the middle of the wilderness, going in to slowly explore and experience things in a different perspective…it hits all of my strikezones as someone who pops off at all those times NieR suddenly becomes an isometric Zelda game. The spaceman is fantastic as well, a featureless observer stalking you through the world, adding mystique and ever more questions; effective for a game with exactly one character.

Saros delivers its take on the Returnal narrative quirks via gradually unlocked sequences where you slowly walk through surrealist contemporary environments with light visual storytelling (things like magazines with keywords, or clubs named “The Yellow Club”). The perspective doesn’t shift from the standard third-person method of play, instead slowing you to a crawl as you make your way through alleyways, hotel rooms, and apartments. It all comes across as incredibly banal; something you could find in literally any other big budget game.

Coupled with this, Arjun is not alone on his foray into Carcosa, and works alongside several Soltari employees who he has the option to talk to in between the exploratory runs into the mechanical wastes. These conversations are delivered in the classic style of stilted one-off conversations where rhetoric and quotations are spouted off, and the only back and forth dialogue is half-hearted “stay safe out there”s. Though I appreciate a different direction from the isolation of Returnal, where main character Selene only has herself to talk to (both literally and figuratively), Arjun’s aping of the static NPC interactions from the Horizons and Ghost of Tsushimas of the world doesn’t quite fit for a work so ostensibly absurdist.

But the story is such a minor part of both Returnal and Saros that it feels secondary to the real meat of the experience: its run-based roguelike center. If you played Returnal, you know exactly how Saros is structured. You enter a biome, explore along a Metroid Prime-esque map with side rooms and optional challenges that serve to bolster you with artifacts that can modify your play style, randomized variants of a few different guns, and, if you’re lucky, base stat upgrades that make you stronger as you go on.

To repeat myself: if you’ve played Returnal, you know exactly how Saros is structured. This isn’t just a hit on the same old rocky space Giger-inspired world, but that so many of the game’s procedurally generated rooms are almost 1:1 copies of several found in Returnal. There were countless times where I would walk into a ramped room and immediately flash back to fighting my way through as Selene, letting me predict what enemies will spawn and where with ease. On the surface, this feeds into some ludonarrative resonance with the mystique of just how many times Arjun has been experiencing his cycle of death and rebirth and how much his body remembers versus his mind. But, from a tangible gameplay perspective, it makes me realize just how little Saros has meaningfully evolved from its predecessor.

Which isn’t helped by an inherited problem also suffered in Returnal; rocky ruined terrain is great for making a wide open space a video game takes place in, but it’s not exactly super compelling to look at. The unique biomes in Returnal were a desert, a mechanical forest, and an underwater grotto; the pivot from grey to red to blue worked reasonably well for keeping things fresh. Saros, unfortunately, is less inventive with its biomes, and thwarts its own attempts at colorization. 

The first area of the game is a ruined marble palace on cliffs with lots of red flora peppered around. When you initiate one of the game’s core mechanics (“the eclipse”) to progress further into the level, everything is immediately subdued into a brownish-yellow sludge that removes all pastoral vibrancy. This goes for the areas with more muted colors as well: a mechanical mine glows more sinisterly yellow, a swamp becomes even more brown and yucky, the sea becomes orange and…you get the picture. 

Once again, in terms of thematic resonance this is a great mechanical execution—we see Arjun accept power that dulls the world around him as a means of fitting the role he must—but as players we also unfortunately live in a world of brown and gray sludge games literally everywhere since the advent of 3D titles. Coupled with the level design familiarity for players of Returnal, Saros falls into one of the worst pitfalls of modern big-budget gaming: an experience that quickly becomes samey and uninteresting.

Which is a shame, because a lot has been tangibly improved from Returnal. You no longer rely entirely on the modern action classic of dodging for survival, since Arjun has a shield that allows him to absorb most projectiles (while charging his weapons), and a parry that can be used to negate several attacks. This allows the gameplay to feel more interesting than Returnal in terms of how you engage with each encounter, without sacrificing the speed and impact of what you can do. There’s an illusion in games that shields go hand in hand with a slower and more methodical method of play, but realistically, shields should allow a player to execute on ideas with a speed otherwise not afforded. The best offense is a good defense, as they say.

I also appreciated the guns a lot more than Returnal’s arsenal, though much of it feels comparatively streamlined. You still have your shotguns, pistols, and assault rifles, but the new chakrams and crossbows feel really good to fool around with. Instead of a set of 8 or so traits on a weapon, Saros opts to create 3 core variants of each weapon, with two different sets of passives slotted on top. My favorite of these traits auto-fired my bullets directly at any enemy nearby, letting me focus on dodging and parrying over actually aiming. The way Saros is about quicker levels you deliberately choose to go to rather than the “One Big Run” format of Returnal means that having a greater variety of guns that may prove potentially useful compared to a deluge of Rotgland Lobbers with useless defensive modifiers is incredibly welcome. There are definitely still bad guns, but the ratio of good to bad, and how fast you’ll get them, changes the game substantially. 

Now, more divisively, I have to get into my Rosarie Rant that may or may not alienate you, the reader.

To me, Returnal was an absurdly easy game. I defeated almost every boss on my first attempt, and much of my time spent in the game was on the more repeatable post-launch DLC tower and co-op with friends. That first foray of exploration was intriguing and intoxicating, but it was also over in about 8 hours (with 6 extra for trophy cleanup). There wasn’t much meta-progression, and a lack of modular difficulty options meant I was left pining for the scary Shmup experience that could have been.

Saros is just as easy, if not even easier than Returnal, and the two features I was pining for have done little to mitigate this. 

The improved meta-progression allows you to become significantly stronger as you continue to play the game, meaning that players who are struggling with specific breakpoints can almost “grind” their ways out of frustration, but very little has a meaningful engagement with how you play the game beyond this. When I think of a game like Hades—one that inspires you to progress through interacting with different weapons, different passives, and building up your home base—I can see how people dump hour after hour into such an experience, because things feel increasingly different over time. Saros doesn’t create a meaningfully different experience with its progression, it just makes an easier one.

On the flip side (or perhaps, alongside), the modular difficulty options and sliders we’ve come to see in games like The Last of Us Part II or Doom: The Dark Ages are here in the form of Carcosan modifiers. These modifiers let you make your experience even easier, or more difficult. For the most part, there’s no deep or tangible reward to this, unlike something like the Tales of series’ encouragement to crank up the difficulty while grinding for better drops. There’s a balancing act of sorts where you aren’t allowed to launch into a run if you’ve made the game too easy, but you aren’t really getting anything out of making the game harder other than personal satisfaction.

This would be fine if the imposed challenges were actually interesting, but in practice they’re just making Arjun more fragile, or your enemies beefier. There are a couple more interesting limiters like losing weapons and passives over the course of your run, but those only went so far. I’m glad they tried more with Saros, but it really feels like their focus wasn’t on making unique experiences for players interested in an easier or harder time, but rather catering specifically to a mass production ideal of players. On the surface, modular features for difficulty seem like a no brainer, but in practice, you lose out on the curation of level design and tuning that’s had people trying to 1cc their favorite shmups for decades.

Another problem I have with Saros is, dear God I’m going to say it:

I don’t care about angry men.

I’ve been beating the drum of how dull and insipid the worst parts of Sony’s catalogue have been for the last decade or so, and it just seems to get worse every year. God of War does a “character redemption” by turning Kratos from a parodical avatar of rage into the realistic avatar of rage; your dad. The Last of Us Part II couldn’t stop its cast of mostly female characters from fixating on the past and present futures created by angry men. Ghost of Tsushima is almost entirely about angry men getting mad at you, and Ghost of Yotei threw in your brother just in case you thought you were finally free. Indeed, it’s almost harder to name a Sony game that doesn’t have the stereotypical rage of a masculine force as a major theme, and Saros is no exception. 

Arjun is an interesting character for sure, and gradually eking out this backstory, and the absurd directions things take on the larger scale, has a degree of intrigue to it. Compared to Returnal though? A story about cycles of maternal abuse and self-reflection? Hearing about a guy who’s upset he fumbled his ex-wife is not exactly the most compelling narrative experience for me, especially when it’s wrapped up in the absurdity of a Lovecraftian draping. I get it, a lot of the creatives behind this game are men, and the same goes for much of the medium of game design, as the machinations of Patriarchy and its intersections with Capital collide to consistently exile women from most things. That said, however, was there really nothing more interesting you could have Rahul Kohli do than yell about how he needs to find his ex-wife? Like, that’s the depth of the emotional nuance we get out of him for 95% of the game? 

At the end of the day, the most damning thing I can say about Saros is that you could find its experience almost anywhere. Its blend of high budget and roguelike is still unique, and if you didn’t pick up Returnal, it’s probably still a very distinct experience in a lot of ways compared to the slurry of genericism you’ll find elsewhere in the AAA gaming space. I expected more though, and I will continue to expect more. Housemarque has consistently shown with games like Resogun and Super Stardust that they have the shmup chops and technical know-how to make something really interesting. Seeing something truly compelling like Returnal become just like everything else in its sequel is an unfortunate disappointment. 

The post Don’t Stare at the Sun Too Long – Saros (PS5) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Welcome to a special Game Club episode of The Gamesline Podcast! Crystal, Lily, and John discuss ACE Team’s debut game Zeno Clash, a 2009 PC first-person brawler with brisk pacing, frenetic combat, and a uniquely grotesque art style.

Please note that this is a full-spoilers episode. If you’d like to play Zeno Clash before listening, it’s inexpensive and only 5 hours long!

Click here to read the Zeno Clash postmortem that Lily references!

If you like this Game Club format, let us know! You can voice your feedback and suggestions at our our Discord channel thegamezone.zone or our email podcast@gamesline.net!

Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/gamesline

Follow us on Bluesky: @gamesline.net
Crystal: @crystal.undertow.cards
Lily: @gallowlessdatura.bsky.social
John: @john.gamesline.net

Review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

Send questions to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

Join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Crystal

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 101: Zeno Clash appeared first on Gamesline.

Over the past few generations of video gaming, I have noticed a trend, a fascination which started as a conscious or unconscious desire for more. Games grow bigger, wider, deeper, and yet satiation never seems to come. People dream of infinity; a world that is worlds.

This desire, which I have seen in myself, in others, and in the profit-minded industry, leads to a hunt, a chase for a fleeting, impossible creature. Artists and audience, industry and media, all seem to be hunting for one thing: the Omnigame—a game which encompasses everything.

Lying, in Hope a Truth Falls Out

To better articulate a term I just pulled, in its entirety, from my ass, let me articulate a phenomenon I’ve noticed. Let’s talk about the fantasy of VR.

As Virtual Worlds came to embed themselves in our lives—and in some cases even before—humanity has imagined the departure of the mind to places elsewhere. Immersive VR—Virtual Reality which fully tricks the mind into believing it exists elsewhere, often called full-dive VR—has been an ambition among nerds for a long while now. When VR headsets first hit consumer markets, nerds worldwide rejoiced.

“Finally, an escape from this intractable shithole,” they cheered.

“You can even be a catgirl with RGB light-up ears,” said another demographic.

“I’m going to make a virtual Kmart,” said a third.

Yet, the ambition, the promises of these headsets, didn’t match up with what was experienced—which in most cases was a lot of forehead sweat and motion sickness. But this never stopped anyone from dreaming.

Human beings are creatures of stories, I’ve found. The realms of fiction can be utilized to explore trauma, fears, hopes, and dreams. Speculative fiction can be a way of expressing anxiety about how the world could be. Post-apocalyptic fiction and cyberpunk are all expressions of fear, but they are just as often conduits for hope. Lots of people simmer with excitement and fear both for the promise of something like full-dive VR and the inherent transhumanism lying beyond. In some cases, the initial fear or anxiety expressed in those original stories is expunged all together.

For example, The Matrix, in its original iterations, expressed a terrifying world; a world where you could be completely unaware of the powers that be and their ability to fully control everything. Jacks installed into the body with cables stabbing into the brainstem, sending dreaming humanity to a world which usurps reality. It imagines a setting where one can generate infinite creations, indistinguishable from the real thing. Across several decades, we have seen many dozens of parodies to a point where it has entered a sort of cultural undercurrent of memetics. The Matrix has become bullet-time, black trench coats with designer sunglasses, and the bridge between real and virtual worlds.

The anime .hack//sign similarly features a story where a person is immersed in fantasy, trapped in a virtual world and divested of identity. It is less intrusive, only requiring a headset, but the result is similarly difficult. The main character is reduced to an avatar, forgetting themselves completely. In all their fear and isolation, they are both literally and metaphorically lost in the dissociation of an MMO. 

It is far more common in the modern day to see permutations of the .hack formula. There are dozens of manga and anime which borrow a central conceit of being trapped in an MMO while removing the teeth of the premise for the purposes of comedy, farce, or simple wish fulfillment. Even where there aren’t direct analogues, there are many cases where pieces of media directly borrow the concepts of an MMO or single-player RPG while ascribing it as another world altogether–the Isekai. The video gamey nature is now, at heart, a baked-in part of the fantasy.

Now, many years later, games like Crosscode emerge. Your protagonist, Lea, is trapped in a virtual world, but one decidedly much friendlier than either The Matrix or .hack//sign. It offers a vision of a world where something like a completely immersive MMO can exist and be as banal as a smartphone today. An entire planet is treated as a theme park in the setting, and people log into it through remote-controlled bodies just as easily as World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. Though Lea’s life is complicated by her imprisonment in this technology, it still presents this world in a way which comes across as desirable. If your name is not Lea, within the world of Crosscode, you get to live an impossibly lush fantasy life on an alien planet cultivated to construct your wishes. 

Over the years, many such stories have come to exist. Stories about games, and frequently games about games. Games have become commonplace enough that we can write fantasies about what indulgences they may be in the future, surpassing the scope of what would be possible in our version of reality. We imagine a world like The Matrix but with all the worst parts removed; we imagine a world like .hack//sign but without interpersonal politics and identity loss. The gamer takeaway, despite everything negative in the original stories, is ultimately how cool it would be to be part of something quite so large, so immersive, containing so much, or at least in potential. In a sense, such stories are told in an attempt to one day inspire the creation of their subject.

We have lived through a time where the ambition of capital has attempted to generate such dreams. The embarrassing stumbling steps of something like the Metaverse—a name even evoking its origin point in cyberpunk fiction—were handwaved with promises of what it would eventually become. That is, provided everyone forgets that the origin of cyberpunk is terror at the control of oligarchic corporations.

The dream of the virtual world is, as I described at the onset, the dream of an omnigame. An usurpation of reality, traded for something more favourable. A video game where you can do everything you can imagine and where the limits are basically nonexistent. Genre becomes a thing of the past because the game is a world in of itself; a monolithic effort which, within itself, contains multitudes.

Yet, virtual reality is not the only thing affected by this fantasy. Yes, nerds will continue to dream about the promise of immersive technologies, but I think I’m also fascinated with the underlying thoughts which cause such obsessions. It isn’t truly enough for VR to be immersive or for worlds to be as lush as the real thing. I think, digging deeper, people are obsessed with dreams of “more.” This, I will admit, is an obsession I have also seen within myself.

Ultraviolet Recursive

Once more I must talk about myself, because despite wide sweeping statements about “people” in the abstract, I cannot truly know their hearts. I am not a sociologist; all my notations are anecdotal. Just the same, I can’t help but be fascinated with the trends I see, which at heart are born from obsessions similar to my own. I know this because the fact such media exists to flatter such fancies shows that other people carry the same affliction. 

The affliction in this case is an obsession with expansiveness and depth. As a person with many difficulties, it’s very easy for me to shrug at the material realities of the world around me and slumber in another one for a while. My love for Final Fantasy XIV has been mentioned before but, in so doing, I buffed out the worst of the rough edges. Let me express some of those uncomfortable serrations now.

As I’ve mentioned before, my first experiences playing XIV were coupled with immediate distaste. My disdain here was particularly performative because it was so tightly associated with Final Fantasy, a franchise which has won countless hours of my life. When I finally began to appreciate Final Fantasy XIV, it was because of the unfortunate shape my life had contorted into. Life was awful and I wanted something with uncountable hours of capital C Content to steal my time away.

When it started hitting, it hit hard. I played through every expansion, and every bit of side material I could get my hands on. Final Fantasy XIV came to be the medium through which I experienced life itself. I grinded out relics; I conquered raids; I made zero friends at all. Just the same, I was utterly captivated by the yawning abyss of the world in front of me. One land gave way to the next; one story read after another. Moving from biome to biome, I felt like I had traveled vast stretches of time and space, without physically moving at all. The scope of the project in front of me made it all the more immersive and, without a life of my own, it superseded reality. Yet, as I approached what I knew to be the finite end, I grew frightened. The appropriately named Endwalker was the open palm demanding my attention. The true bounds of the game, and its world, would not allow me to proceed.

“Stop,” it said. “You have reached the limits of creation.”

It was a command I did not have the ability to deny. So, I stopped. This realization, that the world I imagined as infinite was all too finite, was painful in a way I don’t know how to articulate. Drinking from an unending cup only to one day find it empty, makes your throat burn all the drier.

With eyes still bloodshot and an appetite unsatiated, I turned my eyes to greener pastures.

That’s when Elden Ring came out.

Elden Ring is, at this point, a famously capacious game. The first time I was teleported far from where I expected to be by one of the game’s many traps, it was too late. Elden Ring fully had its hooks in me. The map zoomed further and further out, revealing a world so much larger than I could have anticipated. Many others have experienced the same. That moment will be in my memory forever. Provided I don’t have yet another memory-effacing incident. 

Nearing the end of my binge of Final Fantasy XIV, I somehow also made time for a full-time Elden Ring addiction. I played Elden Ring for so long many of my friends began to speculate if my sudden positive mood boost was not, in fact, a bout of mania. Without sleeping, I played Elden Ring for thirty-two uninterrupted hours, stopped only by my eyes’ refusal to focus or unfocus. 

Even after thirty-two hours of consecutive gameplay, I still held onto the experience which had begun in XIV. A world big enough to feel like something real, something I could not hold in my head all at once. I would exit the game world, and people online would speak on the things they had seen and the detail of the world, and I would yet still be shocked they were seeing things I had not yet.

However, at the same time, I was disgusted with this game I desperately wanted to insert myself into. The world seemed to push me into a set of “video gamey” behaviors. What was supposed to be an open world turned into a series of velocities to the same copy-pasted cave to get an item for a build I didn’t give a shit about. The enjoyment has trickled out even further over time. What felt like an impossibly detailed world turned into an arena for violence and backtracking. I saw the borders of a virtual world and recoiled in terror. There was detail, but the depth I was looking for was not there. I dug, even when the realization was too harsh to deny.

I don’t like this game very much. It’s fine if you do, but after 200 hours this shit kinda ass. 

There is a lot to be said about my behavior here. While this is obviously a hyperbolic example born out of abysmal mental health, I still have never forgotten the feeling this period of my life left me with. When I was at my worst, spinning out and unable to control myself, the taste of artificiality lingered on my lips, and I was disgusted. I stood at the borders of two worlds and felt myself wanting for more. Even after everything I have just said, I do not believe this was simply the product of a diseased, consumerist mindset. I think the reason I grind my teeth against the imposed limitations of virtual worlds is because in many ways it reminds me of my own limitations in the real one. There are many limits—either by my own body, society, or elsewhere—imposed upon me. Contrary to observations made of me, I cannot do a full 720 front flip while wielding an ultra greatsword (I’d probably go for a more lithe and elegant weapon, like a scythe or some kind of claw thing.)

TTRPGs called to me for a similar reason. I wanted a world powered by the limitless fields of imagination, a world which imposed no boundaries. If I could imagine it, I could make new worlds, new peoples, new ideas. A play session could go as far away as the ends of the universe, or as close as the nearby room; the depths of either would be whatever I cared to describe. Speaking even more candidly, it was the reason I got into writing fiction in the first place: I just wanted to make something, a story beautiful to someone like me. Everything I wanted, and nothing I didn’t.

When we were younger, based on the memories I can piece together, we were fully smitten by the allure of a multi-disk epic. It wasn’t exactly the length or the sophistication of the mechanics which captured my heart. It was a world with more than I had the avarice to ask for. A place where I could unfocus my eyes a bit and be there. The people contained within the story were those you could walk alongside for many hours, and as they lived beside me, they would begin to become real. The craving I felt—and sometimes still feel now—is the same hunger people have for this “omnigame,” a game which denies them nothing. 

I know how compelling this was, even as an illusion; how bad it was for me to indulge in excess. One should not run through their life utterly addicted to a desire for more. Pleasure is fine, but it should not infringe on your ability to feel future pleasure later; my way of acting was an utter abandonment of the future to glut on the now. 

A Limitless Astroturf Lawn

It’s not just by our own wishes that we think about bigger and better games. It’s the part of the essay where we talk once more about the undue influences of corporations and marketing on preferences. 

As people come to desire more from games, having higher demands of their substance, corporations come with promises of impossible things. It was at this point a readily quoted joke, memetic from the moment of its conception, was spoken:

“If you can see that mountain, you can most certainly climb it.”

While those things have certainly become truer with the advancement of technology, it does not change the fact that corporations benefit from telling lies about the nature of the worlds they produce to better make a sale. Further, they benefit from the inclusion of greater amounts of material in their product. A game packed with hours of content keeps a consumer captivated and justifies the labor that went into making it—especially when such time can provoke post-purchase sales.

In a world where games are expected to make an exponential amount more money than the price of making them, it is—to the financially invested—ideal to have a product which can keep as many eyes captive for as long as possible. Thus, we see a development cycle where expansions to the base material is an expectation. I’ve shit talked Destiny 2 in the past, and this is the reason why; a game which is, on paper, a wonderfully fun time, became a content mill which kicked you off the ride if you ceased to purchase and guzzle down Content. Season passes, character DLC, expansion packs, features added as quality of life or just fan expectation. Yes! You CAN pet the dog; $90 please. The disinterested gacha woman pet raising game can now also be an extraction shooter, tower defense, rhythm game, in-depth mahjong sim roguelike VN.

These additions, while being good for the lifeblood of the game on paper, shape fan expectation. A game must generate a certain amount of Content over time to coerce continuous play from your community, or the game, by the most vocal parts of the fandom, is considered “dead.” It is never that the game simply had a set and met expectation of scope; the game must “live” to placate a fanbase perpetually starved for new content and who stand desperately at the boundaries of the world wanting to push them ever outward. Eventually, with mandatory growth, this creates a game which must be everything to everyone. Keeping players in a world is obviously beneficial to the company who owns the devs who make the game, and on and on the content-production cycle goes, until the game stops making money or the people who own the studio realize they can save 100 percent of their money by just firing everyone.

Even though it is a cynical sentiment, I think it bears articulation because, ultimately, a problem needs to be made visible for a person to see it as a problem. The corporate influence of what a “gamer” desires, ends up influencing and impacting what culture demands. Obviously, there still remains a subset of tightly designed, specific games, but often in the most traditionally marketed and visible works, we see a push for homogenization and broadness. As a game’s scope widens to let everything in, they become infinite in the most capitalistically craven way. A digital Golden Corral—everything for everyone.

As expectations grow, certain demographics get frustrated when a game has a narrowed, intentional focus. They cry out when they feel their needs aren’t being met, fair or not. Such demand most negatively impacts the developers who can least afford to balloon their game’s scope, which says nothing of artists who have something specific and precise they wish to articulate. You can look in the discussion section of just about any indie game–bad idea, never do this–and see people begging for things completely out of scope with what the game even promises. Or complaining about “woke,” either or. Even if I have expressed distaste for something like The Witcher 3 or Elden Ring, neither of those games would benefit from arbitrarily including a farming minigame, gacha system, or seasonal engagement trap.

Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon; people have asked for things they shouldn’t have for as long as speech has existed. The newer change is the massive amount of interconnection between audience and art. An artist can make something they believe in with all their heart, and instantly get feedback, alongside numerous points of comparison of other artists and pieces of art. It is possible to talk about a game entirely in passing, untagged, and somehow the creators will still have it foisted upon them. The industry, as it is, is better equipped than ever to impose a sort of self-regulating state of permanent expectation and discontentment. You can be compared to peers, and people you have literally never met, before your project even so much as has a name.

I don’t want to believe that people are so easily seduced by the machinations of industry, but just the same, I see a rising lack of engagement with art itself, replaced with a cicada-like urge to stripmine a game for content. As long as satiation is prioritized over satisfaction, we will see a trend of expansion without end continuing to proliferate. The content consumption mindset is here, and we’ve all seen the way it insidiously snakes around even our language, until all things are rendered into generic infinite grist.

And the Snake Swallows the Snake

People will always wish for more. Despite everything I’ve just said, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Wishing for something more than is possible, or wishing for something to be easier, or for something never done before, is how we push the limits of what we think is possible.

As we wish for more, it’s only natural that games become larger to encompass the size of the dreams people have. The resultant obsession with the capaciousness of games is an expected byproduct. Just the same, I think the size of a game, in the sense of the things it contains, is on some level an expression of love. Having something be more is justification for the time you spend in something destined to be fleeting and ephemeral. The whim to remove your memory of something, to experience it again, to once more become an audience fascinated and unbothered by the prescribed limits of a game world, is commonplace. I can’t judge them for this, even if it sometimes results in negative outcomes.

It is bad actors who exploit this wanting in us, and resultantly cause people to spend exorbitant amounts of money for a dream. These dreams have monetary and labor ramifications which impact the entire industry, and only play further into the hands of a capitalistic system wanting to turn an art medium into a grocery store decision. From a commercialistic perspective, a family-sized package is the expectation—it costs the most. It’s something to be mindful of.

This is the contradiction born of extremes. At heart, wishing for something bigger, deeper, more expansive, more expressive, more immersive, is how we got to a point where we could start making the technologies we see today. Just the same, it is capitalizing on that desire which creates an industry that cares about content over people. It is capitalism’s greatest strength: to steal people’s desires and sell them back for profit.

Despite the dangers of exploitation, I think people should dream for more. It is where inspiration is born. You see something, something big and beautiful, and even when it satisfies your desires, it sticks with you; it lingers and against even your own interest, you hunger for more. Though you can choose to simply reindulge with diminishing returns, or turn to the AI slop engine which gives you a version of Skyrim that infinitely generates quests for you, I think the dream of more can also be something which inspires new creatives, new creations. The cycle of inspiration and creation is as an ouroboros, continuing so long as people have a desire to make art about the things they care about, and the capacity to be dissatisfied by what has already come.

You can’t truly make a game containing everything without immense cost or compromise. That’s the beauty of creation: you can’t have the whole world, so you must pick and choose what you want as your craving hands leave behind something else, falling from your grasp like grains of sand.

I don’t think we can truly ever capture infinity. But, there’s still nothing wrong with trying.

_{The header image was acquired from Wikimedia Commons, and remixed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Yukterez (Simon Tyran, Vienna). Source material for the Milky way background (also available on Commons): ESO/S.Brunier. Code for the relativistic raytracer and other angles: Yukterez.net/}

_{The video was originally sourced, unedited, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyNQGOo0hsc}

The post Ouroboros: The Game and Everything, Forever appeared first on Gamesline.

Relooted introduces new members of the heist team every few levels, and makes sure that you feel the problems that they’ll solve for you. Trevor, who has the power to open and close doors, did not initially impress me during his tutorial mission. He’s a little slow to activate, he can only keep doors open before the alarm goes off, and he seemed to self-consciously embellish his unimpressive skill by announcing his self-given epithet “The Locksmith!” every time he was activated. I took Trevor for granted and failed to prepare him in the right position before my escape. I scrambled to call on him to open a door as the alarm blared and the timer ticked down, and he smugly highlighted my mistake: “It would have been faster if you had me ready!” I finished the heist in time, but Nomali had to bear the indignity of letting her chuuni little brother embarrass her.

That kind of clever narrative design kept exciting me throughout Relooted. Immediately after a level where an otherwise lightning-fast Nomali must break the momentum of her escape by slowly jogging up and down stairs, she echoed my thoughts in a cutscene: “We have to do something about those stairs.” Then came a tutorial sequence for the acrobat Ndedi, who swings and grapples Nomali across large vertical and horizontal gaps that would otherwise have to be cleared by taking stairs or pushing tables around. I smiled as I felt the dozens of seconds Ndedi was shaving off my run, precisely because Nyamakop made me use the stairs so much in the previous level.

So it is with additional team members Fred the Inventor, whose drone lets you case the joint, Cryptic the Hacker, who neutralizes robotic guards and turrets, and Luso the Muscle, who throws Nomali through glass barriers. Each of them facilitates one of the most fundamental satisfactions of video games: getting from point A to point B in as little time as possible. Even with a perfect plan, the escape sequences require technical execution from the player to maintain Nomali’s top speed, but Relooted never let me forget the value of each team member. Sometimes, a team member will be unavailable for a heist, and I always felt their absence while constructing my well-oiled platforming machine.

Higher difficulty settings decrease the time you have to escape, more severely limit the locations that team members can be assigned to during the prep phase, and reduce the amount of information that Fred’s drone Nunu shows you. The first two features demand even greater appreciation for your teammates and more careful planning, but I preferred to receive detailed information from Nunu, especially the recommended route which shows problem areas that need to be solved. Getting unsolicited advice from my team members made me feel more like part of a team, and not just an omniscient being that orders my pieces around. In real group projects I always cherish when someone takes care of a problem before I even notice it. Who wants to make every decision all the time?

The heists are organized by Nomali’s grandmother Professor Grace and her protégé Etienne, who provide information on what you are actually stealing: African artifacts (and some from other colonized regions) stolen by colonial powers long ago, and kept in museum basements and private collections to avoid an international treaty that demands the repatriation of any publicly displayed artifacts acquired illicitly. Loopholes like these have challenged the Professor’s decades-long campaign to repatriate this stolen cultural heritage with by-the-book methods, and she can’t bear to reach the end of her life having accomplished so little. Thus, she devises a plan to reloot stolen artifacts, and ultimately return them to their proper homes.

Indiana Jones, the fictional archaeologist who the most despicable character in Relooted compares himself to, once said “That belongs in a museum!” Complicating the claim of some reviewers that Relooted is opposed to that maxim, Relooted does believe in the value of the museum. More precisely, it believes in the value of The Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal. That is where the relooted artifacts get dropped off. Yes, the Museum of Black Civilizations will only hold the artifacts temporarily before sending them to their proper homes, but it is the Museum that is trusted to appropriately foster and distribute the cultural heritage of Africa.

In the case of the Akan Drum, its proper home is identified as an African-American History museum. But for the most part, Relooted carefully avoids the complicated question of where exactly the “proper homes” of these artifacts are, which does not necessarily have a straightforward answer in theory or in practice. That’s for the scholars and bureaucrats to figure out. The immediate victory is that those discussions happen in Africa, by Africans, without any conditions imposed by colonial museums. When 90% of the material cultural legacy of sub-Saharan Africa is found outside of the African continent, just getting 64 artifacts to Dakar is a triumph.

The movement to repatriate stolen African artifacts has seen momentum since Felwine Sarr and Bénédict Savoy’s 2018 report, as well as sympathy from popular culture. What sets Relooted apart from other pro-repatriation media is that the targets of your heists aren’t elven artifacts, they’re not from a fictional country, and they weren’t stolen by the Villains’ International League of Evil. Relooted is set in a sci-fi future with comicbooky characters, but the artifacts in the game are digital representations of real, physical objects that were really stolen from real human beings that really breathed air on this Earth. I’m emphasizing this point because it’s so rare to find a video game with a historical perspective that isn’t clouded by metaphor and artistic license. Assassin’s Creed will always bend history to fit its metaplot, Dragon Age will always flatten the complexities of political struggles to better suit a heroic narrative. Relooted’s Africanfuturist storyline is always anchored by real history, and might even spark you to look up more details than its quick art history lectures can give you.

Relooted takes a Pan-African perspective, but takes care to highlight the cultural diversity of Africa: the heist team is audibly multicultural, and artifacts are always traced not just to a general region but to a specific indigenous group. This is in contrast to games like Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil 5 that create fictional African nations as an excuse to deploy stereotypes of Africa as backwards, corrupt, and dangerous. As a bit of cheeky payback, Relooted refers to its late 21st century Europe as The Old World and the United States as The Shiny Place, except when recounting real historical details.

Nyamakop took a “thrones, not teacups” approach to selecting which real artifacts would be represented in Relooted: it’s not just that these artifacts happened to be objects made by African indigenous groups, but that they carry deep meaning to the people they were stolen from. It should be obvious why it’s unacceptable for funerary statues plucked from Mijikenda homes to exist in Andy Warhol’s house, or the skull of anticolonial leader Mangi Meli to sit somewhere in the archives of a German museum.

Despite the scope and cruelty of the colonial looting of Africa, Relooted takes a deliberately soft approach to the issue, and largely maintains a cheery atmosphere where the most destructive thing the heist team does is break a few windows. Without indulging in shocking depictions of violence, Relooted is still capable of clearly communicating colonial injustice and anti-colonial justice. Most importantly, Relooted can be enjoyed by all ages, and is particularly attractive to guardians who want their kid to learn puzzle-solving and history at the same time.

Nyamakop’s first release, Semblance, avoided distinctively African themes in order to appeal to Western markets. This is a common trend for South African games, even as developers elsewhere in the continent, such as Nigeria’s Maliyo Games, Ghana’s Leti Arts, and Cameroon’s Kiro’o Games consciously develop games that are immediately recognizable as African. As for why South African games tend to blend in with Western games, I’ll quote some members of Broforce’s developer Free Lives, from a 2016 Gamedeveloper.com interview:

“As white South Africans, our culture is Western,” says programmer Ruan Rothmann. “It’s not like we have a unique and segregated white South African culture that’s isolated from America or Europe. We watch the same movies, listen to the same music, speak the same language.” Most other South African indies are the same. “South African game development is something like 92 percent white male or something along those lines,” adds studio director Evan Greenwood.

In a 2024 Gamesindustry.biz interview, Nyamakop CEO Ben Myres affirmed the whiteness of the South African game development scene, and shared Nyamakop’s long-term goal of creating a more diverse generation of South African game developers:

“There are a lot of studios in South Africa [but] there are only really six major ones, and all of them are run and owned by white men. And I think that has a large knock-on effect of the inability to take that risk. I’m not going to tell their stories, but a lot of my ability to do Nyamakop is based purely on privilege and generational wealth, and the crazy safety net you have. I think the South African games industry, last time we did a survey, is like [80%] white men.”

Looking at South Africa’s 2022 census, Black Africans represented 81.4% of the population, followed by Coloureds at 8.2%, white people at 7.3%, and Indian/Asian people at 2.7%. The games industry in the country is in a sharp contrast with this reality.

Nyamakop is trying to bring some balance, with Myres estimating that around 80% of the studio is people of colour.

“Our leadership team is very diverse at least,” he says. “If you aren’t able to take the risk to start your own studio, how are we ever going to make the industry more diverse? And the only way you do that is by allowing stable employment for diverse folks to get into the industry. Because really, in the long term, where we need to be is PoC-owned-and-run studios. But if there’s no way for you to enter the industry stably and get good at making games, we can’t just jump there automatically.

“[When] a person of colour leaves Nyamakop to stay in the industry, that makes me happy. We haven’t really had anyone leave and not stay in the industry. It’s very sad to see them go, obviously, but the fact that they leave to stay in the industry means Nyamakop can become a place that’s stable, safe, and fun [for South African people of colour to enter the industry].”

Relooted is the largest single project by team scope, size and budget in Sub-Saharan Africa to date, perhaps only rivaled by Kiro’o Games’ ambitious 2016 RPG Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan. The African games industry is growing, and Relooted will likely be remembered as a milestone in future histories of the growth of African game development. The in-game heist team returns cultural heritage of the past to Africa, but the Nyamakop team is creating new African cultural heritage for the people of 2099 to remember. Perhaps more importantly than the status of Relooted as an individual artifact, it serves as the first project for a new generation of game developers who will go on to make something even better.

The post Relooted Review — Reclaiming the Future appeared first on Gamesline.

John chats with the Brian and Bug, writer and artist of nth Circle Studios, about their breakout mystery visual novel of the Devil. Find out where the inspiration for both Morgan and the world she prowls in came from, how Homestuck caused all of this (as usual), and how real Umineko truly is.

nth Circle’s games can be found on their Linktree here.

of the Devil is available on Steam. You can wishlist Episode 3 here!

Full transcript below

John 

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Starlight Car Gamesline Interview Podcast. My name is John. I’m the host of the regular podcast as well as the editor in chief of the website. And joining me this time are Bug and Brian from nth Circle Games, the artist and writer, respectively. They have done quite a few pieces of visual novel work, including such hits as Marchen Line and Model Employee, but their breakout hit of the Devil will be releasing episode three soonish. They did not give me a release date, if that’s what you’re hoping to hear. 

But they did give me plenty of other very insightful, very fun answers to queries that both I and the community wrote. So, if you’re one of those folks who sent in a question, I’m fairly certain that your question was answered. And otherwise, I think this is a very lovely chat that I had with those folks. They are very, very nice, and I had a great time, and I hope that you can tell that we all had fun on this recording. 

So please go ahead and listen. Let us know how what you think, and check out of the Devil. I’m not just saying this as someone who was like, “Ooh, they’re very nice, and chatted to me.” No, I love this game, and I think if you enjoy mystery visual novels, you’ll love this game too. So thank you very much for your time, and let’s get right into it. 

Hello, all, and welcome to Starlight Car. This is Gamesline’s very irregular video game interview podcast. I’m John. I am editor in chief and general host of Gamesline, and this time I will be speaking to two folks who have done irreparable damage to the minds of many a mystery fan. Now, really, I think that you all have done have instead of been irreparably damaging anybody, you’ve been repairing our hopes and dreams in the indie mystery writing space. With me today are Brian and Bug from nth Circle Games, thank you both for joining me. How are you today, both of you?

Brian 

Thanks for having us. Doing pretty good. Happy to be here and thank you for the high praise. There’s a lot of really exciting indie VNs coming out right now, and just happy to get more eyes on them because people are putting their heart and soul into them.

John 

Yeah, like something that I’ve noticed from you all too is that you all are a real like rising tides kind of group where you know you get your stuff out there and you want to make– there is a lot of ‘hey I played this and I loved it too’, and just from y’all from like your social media and everything, and that is really commendable. I guess I’ll start off with asking about you know since you mentioned a lot of indie VNs are out there, you know I’ll start off by asking about both of your, you know, history with the genre, and maybe if you want to go into a little bit about how nth Circle came to be, for folks that wouldn’t know, please just hit us with the origin story.

Brian 

Well, I guess for me, my first VN was appropriately enough Apollo Justice for the DS. I played a web-based demo that Capcom put out when it first came to the U.S.

John 

God, yeah, they did that. That was that was wild.

Brian 

Pretty smart to put out the first free case of your mystery VN as a demo.

Brian 

I guess getting into Ace Attorney kind of late, relatively speaking, because the original trilogy had been out by then, and you know, at this point, the fandom there is pretty heavily divided between original trilogy and Apollo Justice trilogy and Apollo going down to the backstory vendor and maybe I’m not the most diehard Ace Attorney fan, but I owe a lot to it in all kinds of ways, not just inspiration for the series, but for getting me into VNs in general. Well, I was on Tumblr in 2013, so I probably would have gotten swept up into Danganronpa no matter what. But definitely, I would not have had that gateway drug to it. And I think Danganronpa is our big connective tissue mainspo.

Bug 

For sure. A friend of mine in high school had actually lent me the Apollo Justice games, and I had never had experience with Ace Attorney outside of like the cultural osmosis of like , everyone knows the objection soundbite, and that was kind of the extent of my knowledge. And I gotta, as someone that had not experienced it before, Apollo Justice kind of bounced right off of me. So that was kind of like a rough start with visual novels for me. But yeah, in the same kind of like 2013 wave of Danganronpa fever, I got swept up. And yeah, I mean that’s definitely, like I would say probably where me and Brian’s like strongest shared interest in like specifically like a mystery of a visual novel is. Yeah, I was there for like the like Something Awful let’s plays, and then by the time the second one had actually come to the states I’d already like, you know, let’s played the whole thing.

John 

Oh wow!

Bug 

So it’s kind of a weird history of visual novels for me.

John 

So then, how did enjoying the Ace Attorneys and Danganronpas of the world. How did that lead to creating something in that vein? What sparked your journey towards where we are now?

Brian 

Well, like all great indie games, it starts with a web comic called Homestuck. Our old friend group was into during the aughts and through Homestuck meetups and cosplay and stuff and you know Bug were doing artist alley for a while at that point we met each other through cons and so we had that shared background shared fandoms. I don’t know if we ever did [Danganronpa] v3 cosplay at the same time. I was Rantaro. 

Bug 

Oh yeah, I was Shuichi when we did that.

Brian 

You broke your pants.

Bug 

I was like the only one that did not break my pants. There was like this weird curse on that convention where at least like two or three people had cartoon like ass seam of the pants, just completely failed. Whatever technology they were using to make those back in the day.

John 

Yeah, I mean, do you think it just like people were using the same or buying the same like– I was gonna say model of pants, but I guess you know like the same. I guess. I mean, I don’t know. I would imagine people are just going like Shuichi pants on Google and grabbing something. 

Bug 

Yes, The first one. It’s one of those things that I forget. Isn’t like a universal. Like, there’s no point in Danganronpa where busted pants like comes in. Like, that’s like the one thing. Like, that isn’t touched on at any point in Kodaka’s writing.

John 

That’s true.

Brian 

Starting in v3, there’s a lot of sprites that turn to the side, so we might have been posing.

Bug 

Yeah, a little more aggressively.

Brian 

Yeah.

Bug 

They got that third dimensions.

John 

That does make sense. Yeah, I mean, the only thing that I could think of, like with seeing someone’s underwear, would be like in 2 with like Mikan, right? That’s kind of it, yeah. Huh? That seems like such a classic bit, right? I don’t know, does anyone get a pie to the face in Danganronpa?

Bug 

They do in Hundred Line.

Brian 

Yeah, that’s a important Hundred Line subplot along the comedy route.

John 

Man, yeah, I still haven’t gotten Hundred Line. I know that I need to get to it, I know. I just haven’t gotten around to it. But you know, I have, I have weird opinions about Danganronpa. I don’t know if we want to get into it. That’s not why people are listening.

Bug 

For all my like otaku passion for Danganronpa, I would say like beyond my opinion on the quality of the story, I like Hundred Line quite a bit. Beyond my opinion of the story, it’s a amazing feat that it was made and it came out, and to my knowledge. Nobody died in the dev process. There’s just so much shit in that game. Sorry if I’m cussing.

John 

No, you cuss away. You’re fine. 

Brian 

Someone might have got into like zero brain activity level writing box of blessings route, but…

Bug 

Yes, yeah.

Brian 

For the most part, people were non-vegetative. For nth Circle, we really started after and during the pandemic. I was aimless, and I gave writing a chance. And then after I tried it for like a week, I then spent the majority of COVID just writing my own visual novel, I wrote the original script for all of of the Devil within that year, which is as crazy or as sane as it sounds to you, the listener. I don’t know if it’s a big deal or not.

That came into existence. So I had like the full script, and from there I could come to people like my good friend Bug and say, “Hey, this is not just I want to do, for example, a Fanganronpa with you and let’s start designing characters.” It was, “hey, I have a story I want to tell, and in fact, you can read it right now. You can play this demo I made in Renpy, and I want some friends to work on this with me, and it’s real and it exists this much. However much a barebone script matters to you, that that’s all out there. That all exists.” Fortunately for me and for everybody who enjoys of the Devil, Bug found it interesting.

Bug 

I was actually one of the like second wave of people in our friend group that actually took the time to read it after Brian’s opining to read the short story. So like I was kind of like guiltily reading it, and I was like, “Damn, this shit’s pretty good.” And then I think it took a little time from there for Brian to be talking about, like you know, I’d love to like pursue it a little further, but like you know, can’t draw. You know, who do I know that you know can draw? At first requirement: can draw. Second requirement: it takes a lot of trust and humility to ask for like for that.

Because at that point we weren’t even really– of course we all want to make our hopes and dreams come true, you know, get us the super yacht or whatever the fuck but you know. You can’t like promise someone cash that you don’t have. Sometime after reading it I was like you know here’s my pitch for why you should let me draw for it, and yeah, from there it was just making it.

Brian 

I think you sent me a drawing of Morgan.

Bug 

I did. It was that one sketch. There’s that one like design history that we did. It’s in the concept gallery in of the Devil. Yeah, ponytail Morgan with the pencil skirt. That was my pitch document. 

Bug 

Simpler times.

John 

I do really like that you kept stuff like that and made it like public. You know, like, I don’t recall if you like labeled like ‘this was the first drawing of Morgan’ or whatever, but like the fact that you had it. You know, that’s really cool.

Bug 

Yeah, no, I mean one of my favorite things with stuff like—I have the Danganronpa art books or whatever. I love looking at that stuff where it’s like, okay, how did we get to this character design choice? And like, even if I, you know, I have the Japanese language understanding of like a three-year-old, I can look and see like, okay, this is how we got from initial like, okay, they were pitching this idea to the final product. It’s really interesting to me, so I like sharing it.

John 

Yeah, I personally am someone who does not, you know– I don’t become one of those lost media people that are like “they threw away a napkin that had a sketch on it,” but also like, you know, when they have all that stuff for when it was Distrust instead of Danganronpa, that stuff’s really cool to look at, right? Like I think it’s neat to see the progression, but also, you know, I feel like when people are like, “We need every build of Minecraft’, I’m like, alright, come on.

Bug 

What are you gonna do with it? 

John 

Yeah, what are we doing with this? 

Brian 

We’re not quite ready to divide fans between the premium and vanilla of the Devil servers, but if people keep asking for it, we’ll consider it.

John 

I was gonna say, yeah, you’re gonna like release special hidden versions of the game with like, you know like one dialog option different, make everyone start arguing, you know.

Bug 

What’s the true canon experience for this linear visual novel?

John 

So something that I thought about while I was thinking about things to ask you all was because I noticed how you all have your roles in nth circle, and that all is you know pretty apparent. But I also notice that, it doesn’t seem like it’s something that happens all the time, but just from picking things up on social media, it does seem like you all do sort of reach back and forth into each other’s you know, like cooking areas, as it were, to be like, “oh, you know, here’s an idea I have for this character”, or you know, maybe you designed this character a certain way, Bug, or you read something that was written and then was like, oh, you know, now this will tell me how they’re designed. Like, how does how does that work for you all? Like, how sequestered are you in your development? How communal is it as well?

Brian 

I think that Bug is like a really good actor, and I give Bug characters, and the characters have defined roles and beats they need to hit, but you know sometimes the actor will improv, and it’s really good, and we’ll just keep it in there. In a murder mystery, especially people have roles they need to fulfill, and they have specific lines they need to drop at specific points. 

I’m trying to think what character went through like the biggest left turn. Aidey, but that was a collaborative process because the original adjutant concept was just a robot, essentially. Like if the judge from Ace Attorney was a robot, and they would just like speak up to proceed the court cases along. After we put out the new and improved version of Episode Zero, that had Swag and Class and JoJo coloring and stuff. We just needed way more sauce in the courtroom than that, and so Bug and I spent a long time concocting Homestuckian magics and Kodakaisms and Oda One Piece body types, and we combined that all into Aidey.

Bug 

Distilling it.

John 

And bless you for it.

Brian 

And in getting back to that actor analogy. Like Aidey just has a lot of funny faces, and so if I just had the entire script and I went down and Aidey only did exactly what the original script said, you wouldn’t see those faces so much, but I want to see those faces. They make me laugh, so I will throw in more lines to get to see particular sprites that Bug drew that I like or are funny, or I’ll add an aside or a little something muttered under a person’s breath. I mean, even Morgan is more sassy than she was in the original scripts because Bug draws great side eyes and sarcastic faces and stuff, and Bug does all the bringing to life.

John 

You’re mentioning like Morgan being sassy and all that, like I think a big part of her character, like something that is like essential to her, is that is when she’s not necessarily backed in a corner, but when she just gets in this space where she’s like, I just need to do something to sort of throw the other person off, like that that sprite where she’s like giving that like fake smile, like that upside down A with her mouth, and she’s just like, “Oh, of course!” And she’s like playing a little dumb.

That is like essential to that character, and like just from what you’re saying, like I could tell that it’s like the art and the writing went together to form this entire layered character, instead of it just being like, yeah, you know, she could just be moving from place to place and you know figuring things out and trying to get away with what she needs to get away with, but there’s this extra bit to the character of being like, well, I need to also throw them off and I need to make them think that I’m not as on top of things as I am, and all that, like it’s just– it’s just good. It’s just good writing, good character development. 

I don’t mean to be like kissing y’all’s ass. Like, listen. I know that this is supposed to be the professional game journalist talking to you all, but genuinely, I do just really love this game. Like, I have recommended this to tons of people. I’m not just doing this to be like, you know, kissing ass. I do just genuinely think that this is an all timer.

Bug 

I hope so. We’ll see.

John 

You all, you know, you all are working on of the Devil. Your chapter three is on the way. One thing that you all have also done is you have released other smaller titles, mostly for game jams and the like. Does swapping to other projects help keep you fresh, or is it something that you just need to be like—“I just need to not look at of the Devil for a little bit”, or is it even a purposeful choice? You just like well, this game jam came up and we’re doing it now. You know, like what’s the thought process behind that?

Bug 

We haven’t done a game jam in the past while partially because like now we’re working on of the Devil and it’s like a thing that we’re like, you know, we’re selling a product, we don’t want to leave people hanging on an episode longer than they have to be but those times that we were doing it for me it felt like getting like an extra like… 

Brian 

It’s good exercise.

Bug 

Yeah, you’re about to run a 10k or whatever. You need to start, you know, going extra hard, doing laps and stuff. So we, especially with like a game like Marchen Line, which is just like a ton of content, it was kind of like okay, like let’s see how like big and clean, we can get something in a set amount of time. It’ll be done when it’s done. You know we have a deadline. It’s not going to be like an eternal like side quest thing.

Yeah, for me it’s just like, what can we do? Because before we made model employee, we had gotten like a super bare bones alpha version of of the Devil out on Itch.io, and it was kind of like okay, that’s the we’re adding all this other stuff. We’re adding all like the JoJo cinematography. We’re adding like extra gameplay mechanics and stuff. Let’s like let’s flex those muscles before we like really put that extra power into of the Devil.

Brian 

And you’ve done a bit of stuff with EbiCon since Marchen Line came out, right?

Bug 

Yeah, we got something cooking. And I was definitely like on the sidebar for Butterfly Effect, the first of the EbiCon titles. But yeah, for me I think the non nth Circle endeavors are definitely like, okay. I want to like expand my repertoire a little bit, see what else I’m doing. But again, it’s that balancing act of like of the Devil‘s got to be my number one.

John 

How has introducing the business side of things, how has that influenced the art, as it were? Like you know, like how does that pressure change things for you?

Bug 

I feel like it definitely ups the pressure. I feel the expectation is a little harder. 

Brian 

Yeah, we feel more expectation than financial pressure. You know, we have like a lot of people looking forward to the stories we’re telling.

Bug 

Right, like, I never want to get to the point where we’re like conscientiously like we got to change this major thing that we want to hit because you know someone might get mad at us or whatever. We’re gonna get flamed hardcore style, but yeah, it’s like I feel like a greater like responsibility to like do it right, do it good.

Brian 

More responsibility to other devs. I get guilty about not upping enough people’s games, or I’m a bad critic. I’m a bad word of mouth guy. I wish I was playing more indie games and boosting them on our account and stuff.

Bug 

It’s tough because it’s like, I’m so busy making games. I have so bare time to like play anything. If I’m playing like some big AAA thing, I’m like, why bother when I could be playing my friend’s shit?

John 

Another thing that you all mentioned relatively frequently are your influences. You all wear your influences very openly, and that is something that you know. Sometimes that can be in in in a lot of other pieces of media, it could be a little eye rolling. But so far I’ve found of the Devil just to be like, yeah, you know what? We’ve got we’ve got jokes, we know we know where we come from, and it’s felt more like that. So, how do you amass your inspirations into something new without it feeling like epic Funko Pop two things T-shirts?

Bug 

They said the thing!

John 

I’m sorry, haha.

Brian 

I wonder if the setting helps?

Bug 

Yeah.

Brian 

of the Devil‘s a pretty serious world, a pretty detailed world, and so if we cut away to do like a JoJo line drop, or we have a little Danganronpa reference sprite or whatever, it’s relieves some tension and it’s comedic, but  it’s like one line in a very large, intricate thing. We aren’t borrowing too heavily from any of our inspirations in terms of the plot or the overarching story. You know?

John 

Sure. I mean, yeah, that that that does make sense. What drove you to want to write a story, not just about murder and court cases and all that, but about this specific kind of world, this cyberpunk world that is, you know, not just the flash and the cool kind of Cyberpunk 2077 style stuff. 

Another thing that I do really like about this game is how, like, real it feels. You know, I don’t know if this will this will be how it turns out in however many years, but it’s still very believable throughout. So, like, what brought you to that?

Brian 

Around the time I was writing the early scripts, I believe, was when the Golden State Killer had been caught, famously because some like distant cousin gave their DNA to Ancestry.com or whatever, and so the Golden State Killer himself had never been arrested, or his DNA wasn’t in the system, but he had left DNA behind at crime scenes, and so because some distant relative of him of his put their DNA into a big global database, they were able to from there get back to him. Of course, this all being 30 years later, 40 years later, decades of justice too late.

It got me thinking about future-proofed crimes, or if the sort of big serial killer boom of the 80s and 70s and 90s, where you had sort of like these big cities for the first time, but the technology wasn’t quite there. This fearmongering, changing politics and stuff, and sort of maybe the conditions for serial killers will never be like that again. But what will it look like 60 years from now? Technology is going to keep getting better. The databases are going to keep getting bigger. What kind of personality would you have to have to be a successful serial killer 60 years in the future? You can’t have a big ego. You can’t be writing in letters to the cops in in code. You can’t have a record. You can’t make any mistakes. You have to be perfect, and that sort of was the driving influence behind it. I wanted to see what that sort of character would be like, and I think that’s where Morgan initially came from.

Bug 

Because Morgan’s so perfect~

Brian 

She gets less perfect all the time, and more interesting.

John 

I mean that that does make sense. You approached it from a character angle where it was like here’s the kind of person that would exist in this world, and then you sort of mold the world around her sensibilities and her eccentricities, as it were. That makes a lot of sense.

Brian 

And Bug made her hot.

Bug 

Yeah, that’s right!

Brian 

Now it makes no sense that she could get away with crime.

John 

Yeah, because she’s trying to escape, and everyone’s just– their eyeballs are popping out. They’re you know turning into smokestacks.

Bug 

A lot of foghorns in the city.

Brian 

But it’s better for her.

John 

So visual novels. We love them. But I would like to ask though, for maybe the future or maybe just in general, is there another kind of game that you could imagine your team making, or is there something where it’s like we could take something similar to of the Devil and turn it into a different kind of game, and it would still be interesting? Is that something that you all are interested in in touching on? Or are you just like nah, this is VN Central?

Bug 

of the Devil Kart. of the Devil dancing rhythm game. of the Devil rail shooter? Okay, sorry.

Brian 

To me, rather than thinking about like what genres we would or wouldn’t go into, or like saying we would never make a platformer, we would never make an RPG. I think our sensibilities put us in the 2D, 2.5D space. Not really interested in big open worlds. Definitely interested in heavy focus on story.

I guess if we’re just talking about dreams, or you know, like what is of the Devil lacking? I’ve always kind of wanted to make one of those games that you could just pick up and play on a demo floor, you know, like a Balatro or something. I love of the Devil, but you sit down and you play it for like 15 minutes or an hour or 10 hours, but you don’t play it for 30 seconds at a time on your phone. I think it would be interesting to make a game like that, but it’s not what we are right now.

John 

Okay! All right. And my last question that I have down here is: Are there any specific VNs or just other projects out there that you would like to give a shout out to, like of that that are your contemporaries, or even just hey, I think you should check this out if you like of the Devil or any of your other work.

Brian 

You know, Kodaka would cry if we didn’t bump Rain Detective Archive. He wants everybody to play that ahead of 2×2.

Bug 

Ah… Raincode.

John 

(That’s one I really don’t like.)

Brian 

I really look forward to what’s next in Deltarune. I really look forward to what’s next in Your Turn to Die.

Bug 

I would love to know what happens next in Your Turn to Die. As far as a smaller stuff goes, I’d be remiss not to plug Fairy Chess, which is a short game jam entry and Toxic Yuri VN Jam, which also there’s a ton of really good stuff there. I’m still working through a lot of the log there. Obviously, you know, read all the tags and stuff before you go into anything on that because it can get pretty heavy, pretty quick. 

But if you like the like cinematography angle, the more like movie-like aspects in of the Devil, there’s some really amazing shots in that visual novel. Another smaller one I’ll plug is a WHODUNNIT, which is a furry mystery game on Steam.

It’s just a demo for now. I’m very excited for the full release. They do some really insane stuff in Renpy. Both of those games are Renpy games that made me be like, I had no idea you could do that format. So if you want to be wowed by some crazy UI, WHODUNNIT is very promising.

Brian 

insertdisc5’s up upcoming VN… the name escapes me.

Bug 

Truth Scrapper!

Brian 

Thank you, Truth Scrapper.

Bug 

Yay! Very excited. A lot of exciting stuff out and coming up.

Brian 

It’s a very good time to be playing games. Just not working at AAA studios.

Bug 

Yeah.

John 

Yyyyyeah. Yeah.

Well, your fan base did send in some questions as well. I put out the call. We got a good amount of stuff here. I’m just gonna pick and choose a little bit because you know I don’t wanna keep you here for 300 years.

So thank you all for sending in your questions and thank you all for the support too. You know like t the of the Devil fandom is very kind to me. These past few days, just thank you all for sending in questions. 

First off, we have we have some from one Bran who asks for Bug: When you’re outfitting characters, what kind of things do you have in mind? Are there specific fashion trends or brands within the Devilverse that you try to be mindful of? 

Bug 

Oh man, are there brands? I have a couple recurring visual tropes I like. If I give another character two belts, I need someone to stop me. I’m addicted to two belts. 

So yeah, there’s a couple things I consider. I look at a ton of clothes. I follow a ton of fashion photo collectors, both of like old stuff and like current releasing like fashion house stuff. I follow a lot of streetwear stuff. I go thrifting a lot just to like look at stuff and like I have a folder on my phone that’s just like here’s a cool shoe I saw at like five different angles so that I can draw it later. 

So yeah I have a pretty wide breadth of like inspirations. I do try to try to consider like okay like this is like a fashion like thread that I’m like keeping consistent over a few characters I know with like Creek’s pod I pulled a lot of like Drain Gang concert photos just of like the crowd and like people lining up.

So like I’ll like look at like specific like music scenes and kind of like pull on that. I’m pulling on episode two because it’s the thing that’s freshest in my mind. Because I was just backing up my files recently, and I was like, “Oh, I drew a lot of shit.” A lot of like workwear, a lot of like futuristic-looking old stuff, if that makes sense. There’s a lot of like revival fashion stuff out right now, so it’s mostly I’m looking at like real stuff and like trying to keep it that way.

I sew as a hobby. I mentioned that I used to do cosplay and stuff, so like clothing construction is really interesting to me. So that’s something I’m pretty conscientious of, and yeah, I do a couple like similar visual gags too. Maid Man on Creek’s shirt is like a joke that got out of hand from Model Employee, one of our jam games. So there’s a couple things like that, but they’re mostly kind of like jokes to myself.

Brian 

Have we ever talked about the original concept for Creek’s gang’s fashion?

Bug 

Oh yeah, that was one of the only times that I’ve been like, I cannot I can’t deliver what’s being asked of me. I won’t do it. Brian was like…

Brian 

The concept was a cyberpunk Bancho gang.

Bug 

Yeah, yeah, with like gakurons and like some like bright colors going on there, and I was like… I try to keep it grounded to stuff that I have like some kind of like connection to, just so that I’m not like, I would hate to do that kind of thing, dirty, and it’s like I immediately I pulled out like a doc and I like pasted a bunch of the like Drainer fashion and like old like Euro trash rave culture shots, and I was like, we’re doing this. Ichi the Killer was on there too. It’s like one of the best costumings in cinema, so I was just like, we’re taking it this direction. Brian was like, we’re good, okay.

Brian 

It would have been very messy if we hadn’t changed course, because then you have two rival Japanese-coded gangs going at it

Bug 

Got to right the ship sometimes. That’s some of the collaboration that happens behind the scenes.

Brian 

(Plus, I knew they all died anyway.)

Bug 

MCF was like, we shouldn’t even be like drawing these guys. These guys should be like NPCs or whatever. We have like those little like shadowy guys in the background. And I was like, if these guys aren’t cute, it’s not gonna matter that they get—spoilers! They get their shit rocked.

John 

It makes it so much more of a like an impact because you know you don’t get to know them intimately. I mean, there’s that extra bit that you that you get at the end and all that, but it does hit way harder that they have you know faces and designs, and you can not just like tell a little bit about them from what they say to you, and what what Morgan says to them, but like their designs. They are full fledged people, and I mean Morgan stops that from happening. So you know it’s very good. It’s very interesting. 

I’ll keep with you though. What has been the biggest challenge working on these illustrations? And are there specific characters or assets that have pushed you the furthest out of your comfort zone?

Bug 

I was never someone that drew robots before, so things like Aidey, some of our other AD Android characters.

Brian 

And maybe some things in the future~

Bug 

Yeah. I think I did pretty good on one that’s coming up.

Brian 

Yes.

Bug 

Really stretch my capabilities there. But like I just don’t really fuck with robots. They’re like cool. I have like a ton of respect for it, and like it’s not. I’ve never been the like when people like take commissions or whatever, and they’re like, oh, I don’t draw mechs. I’ve never been that kind of person, but it’s kind of like oh, like I have to like, I do really like organic shapes and stuff. My lines are really loose, so it’s just kind of hard to like when you’re drawing a robot. Like the arm has to look, you have to think very 3D, and I’m very loose with it, so it’s that’s been a challenge for sure.

But I think I’ve adapted. Aidey was like was a good like bridging point of like, okay, I’m starting to think about how like metal and plastic parts can come together, but I’m keeping it in like a humanoid shape, and then I kind of expanded out from there. Thank you, Brian, for writing mostly human-shaped robots.

John 

Now I have one for Brian here. If you could see of the Devil adapted to another form of media, TV, movie, stage play, etc. what would it be and why?

Brian 

Like a really good meaty HBO show. You can have an after the episode interview with the character, which, by the way, is my personal vote for how Umineko should be adapted, because then the first Tea Party would be presented to the audience as if though it’s just an after episode interview, but then it slowly trans– Ah, I got to save that for later.

Bug 

Don’t steal. Do not steal.

Brian 

No, but I think episodic is already a good fit, and you know the 2000s have shown us that you can tell some really amazing, again meaty, well developed stories on TV. A character like Tony Soprano or Walter White, if they were in a movie, it would be more of a morality tale or just the fall from grace, or whatever. But in TV, you really get to marinate with these characters and get into their psychology. So that would excite me.

Bug 

Yeah, I feel like with episodic, I’ve had like other devs be like, “Oh, should I do like the episodic thing?” Like, and it’s like it really depends because it’s like I feel like it’s a story like of the Devil like is built on that kind of like legacy of episodic like crime-dramas you know drama-dramas stuff like that that where you can kind of do that like building overarching story type of thing so that makes a lot of sense. of the Devil on HBO, let’s go.

John 

Are we gonna get any dream castings here, or is that…?

Bug 

I’d have to think about that one.

Brian 

I mean, there’s definitely actors that would excite me, but then I got to think about actually matching the characters’ races, and then I start running out of ideas.

John 

Well, yeah, then that’ll just be up to the casting director. You know. It’s out of your hands. 

Bug 

Leave it to the pros once we’ve got our HBO budget.

John 

Next one is from J, who says in the episodes we currently have now, there isn’t a whole lot that signifies or displays accent, dialect, or language. Some of the few examples that currently exist are some local slang such as mist or copper, Farah using an Indonesian swear in episode one, and vocabulary used by either poorer or wealthier denizens. Will we see any variety in accent, dialects, or even language as a signifier of class or ethnicity?

Brian 

So as people generally notice when they play the game, part of the setting of the Devil is that it’s kind of localization agnostic? I’m not sure what you want to call that? I avoid talking about dollars, U.S. dollars, or I don’t get specific numbers for how much something costs. I won’t say this guy’s speaking Japanese, in walks a Mexican man, because part of the thrust of the story of of the Devil is that the world presented here is a convergence point between state and corporation, and it’s all irrespective of boundaries. With the internet, with the technology, it is not important so much where you’re located geographically, and so there are still countries, but they’re very-they all pretty much look like this.

Bug 

I feel like this comes up in many cyberpunk things, just because it’s the thrust of capitalism or whatever, where there’s this kind of like monoculturalization, flattening.

Brian 

So the characters all have real world races. It’s part of their character. It informs their design, or their name, or how they’re written. I just don’t see many opportunities to bring it up in a way that feels natural and is good writing, you know?

And just like it doesn’t come up much that you introduce yourself to somebody and you talk about my mom is X and my dad is Y and…

Bug 

But I grew up over here…

Brian 

You know, maybe I just lack the confidence, or I have the fear of being like that one famous Klance fanfic. I think it’s Keith accidentally swears in Mexican.

Bug 

Mexican?

Brian 

I probably got that wrong.

Bug 

It’s tough because, like I think one of of the Devil‘s strengths is the fact that like the cast is diverse, like both in like gender composition, racial composition, skin tone, background, etc. But like I feel like kind of like– I don’t want to say cheapens because that’s not what I mean. It’s hard to like talk about it intelligently. 

Like I don’t want I don’t want to present it as like oh this is a diverse story or whatever because one that would be kind of disingenuous, we’re pretty homogeneously made team, and two like it kind of just feels like that’s how it should be. We’re presenting like a you know future metropolitan city like that’s going to look you know like it does.

John 

I was I was gonna say, like you know, you talked about the, you know, the sort of makeup of the environment where, like, it just feels like this is a place where, yeah, a lot of people ended up either on purpose or on accident, and that is reflected by the vast variety of people that you interact with in the story.

Bug 

Totally, totally.

Brian 

So to answer the original question, I guess I’d say this story, this world is more about examining class or politics or economics or power. Race still exists in this world. I wouldn’t call it like a post-racist society or anything like that. Again, I’m trying to make a realistic world 60 years from now.

John 

Okay, we got some we got some slightly sillier ones.

Bug 

I like silly!

John 

We have question from Olivia here who asks, has Serra canonically played Umineko, and does Umineko exist in the of the Devil universe?

Brian 

Well, it’s our fictional setting, and so we get to make a lot of choices. I’ve decided, for example, that like some of the extinct Kemono Friends are still alive 60 years from now, just because I need a little joy in my life. 

Bug 

Right, you’re driving the car. 

Brian 

I absolutely believe that 60 years from now, Umineko will be taught in schools and shit. So yeah, definitely. I do hesitate to give characters the same hobbies as me. All my characters end up sharing my interests in one way or another, or you know they’re all coming from my head, obviously.

But I don’t like putting in a bunch of characters who stay at home all day and play video games and play visual novels because I get enough of that in my daily life, so I don’t know that Serra a hardcore gamer. She might be more interested in Umineko as a literary work.

John 

I like that, honestly. I like that concept where it’s just like, this is a good piece of literature, not just you know, Serra got opinions about the Tsukihime remake versus the original. You know?

Brian 

60 years from now, the Tsukihime remake might be done!

John 

I don’t know about that. This might be too general but people’d like to know, but do y’all have any like big favorites for who you’ve written and/or drawn for? Is there anything that you want to shout out and say like, damn, I’m really proud that I that I that I wrote that character or I that I designed this character real good.

Bug 

Oh man, I got a lot of bangers coming up in episode three.

John 

I remember you talking up, you know, Creek’s gang.

Bug 

Yeah, so maybe I shouldn’t lay a curse on these guys…

John 

No, I mean I was just gonna say like you talked to them up, and I feel like you delivered that like people were pretty immediately. These are my new blorbos now, even though they got eviscerated.

Bug 

Totally, I feel like they’re a good like they were like a good like tone setting for episode two for sure. They were some of the first that got designed just because we knew that we needed them quick so we could you know start showing them off. Creek’s pod, definitely Han. I’m very proud of that. That was one of the times that like I basically got the design in one. Brian said she needs to look like this, and I said, yes, sir, and she was done.

Brian 

Probably Penny for me.

Bug 

Penny is awesome.

Brian 

Penny just because Penny’s short and sweet and self-contained, and you know Morgan’s the narrator. She’s always talking and/or thinking. So, you know, Penny is quiet sometimes, and I think we were able to do a lot with that character and that game and relatively limited dialog.

Bug 

And she’s like a solved problem.

John 

Yeah, Penny from Model Employee? Am I right?

Bug 

Yeah.

John 

Yeah, just making sure. I was like, wait a second, is there a Penny I forgot in of the Devil?

Brian 

There is one fun fact… At one point, you know, London’s a character who has nicknames for people, and he his nickname for Serra was Penny. But then we made Model Employee, and Penny was just a better name for Penny. So that’s one thing that Serra had stolen from her, and that’s why they’ll have beef when they meet in Nth Cross Fighters.

John 

Yes! They’re gonna have such a great like intro dialog, like PlayStation All Stars, you know? They’re gonna have the rivalry cutscene. 

Brian 

NetherRealm styled. But one of them’s DLC, so it doesn’t quite match up with what the other says. 

Bug 

Right. Right. 

Brian 

“Who are you???”

John 

Yeah. Only one of them reacts. …I’m showing my ass to all the of the Devil fans here listening to this by bringing up fucking PlayStation All Stars.

Bug 

That’s fine. That’s fine. 

John 

People are gonna be like, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

Bug 

That’s just one of those, you know, amazing character moments where you get the little bit of backstory.

John 

All right. I got a question just about like pronunciation. Is that something that you all like think about when you create words or like, you know, like places or companies, as it were, because like someone in the Discord here, Nocebo Effect asked what the intended pronunciation of the pharmaceutical company is. Is it Renegen (Ren-Eh-Gen)?

Bug 

I thought it was Ren-Eh-Jen?

Brian 

I always read it as Ren-Eh-Jen, sort of a reference to InGen from Jurassic Park.

John 

Okay!

Brian 

Yeah, we know how like we pronounce characters’ names and the in-game glossary and stuff. More complicated stuff like people ask us like, what are the characters for Makoto’s name? And none of us are fluent in Japanese, so leave that to the, fingers crossed, localization team. And in the meanwhile, encourage our fans to try it for themselves. I guess.

John 

And then I we have one more sort of for Bug here. That might be influences a little bit more. Boxman asks: Was the design of the court shooter in episode two in any way influenced by Gaku from Hundred Line?

Bug 

Absolutely not. No way. We did get a couple comments just because I think the episode two launch window was like lining up when like I was like making a lot of like fan art or whatever, talking about Hundred Line a lot. All of the episode two characters were a done deal before I got the Hundred Line, if I recall correctly.

Brian 

Well, that was a CG only character. I think some Gaku DNA possibly could have leaked in there.

Bug 

I don’t know. I don’t know about that… What about him?

Brian 

He’s got a hat.

Bug 

Ah, hat. Listen. If it warms your heart, maybe I was subconsciously influenced by Gaku particles.

John 

We all are, you know, even if we don’t know it. It’s worldwide.

Bug 

Yeah, yeah, worldwide sensation. Gaku Maruko.

John 

Total global saturation!

I think that does it. I think those are the questions that we got, and that’s what I have. Thank you so much for your time, for real. This is a real treat.

Brian 

Thanks for talking to us.

John 

I don’t know if there’s anything that I mean– I’m not gonna say like, “tell everybody when everything’s coming out!”

Bug 

Release date drops now. We didn’t tell anybody else, including the other two nth Circle guys.

John 

Exactly, exactly. But I mean, you know, if there’s anything that you want to let folks know, I guess now would be the time to say in audio. You know, what do you want to say to the listeners at hand right now to end it off?

Brian 

Thanks. For starters.

Bug 

 Thanks for playing!

Brian 

Thank you. Thank you for witnessing our dream.

Bug 

Yeah. Our of the Devil.

Brian 

We hear you about the merch, and you’re going to be very pleased.

Bug 

Something amazing is going to happen to you.

John 

I’m rubbing my hands together.

Brian 

 You have been waiting for it for an amazing reason.

John 

Excellent, excellent. One of the co-writers here, I think some of y’all might have met him, Maverick? I sent him to pick me up whatever things you had, he still hasn’t sent it to me. I’m so mad. I’m waiting for those keychains. I’m so mad. I’m publicly shaming him. 

Bug 

They’re a precious commodity. We know. We know. We’re working on it.

Brian 

Bit of a chicken and the egg with the phone charms because the first thing we did was make we made the phone 3D.

Bug 

Yes.

Brian 

Then Bug just likes to draw the characters on Post-it notes.

Bug 

Really tiny and fat and cute. 

Brian 

That’s where the first Chibi Morgan came from, and so we started experimenting with phone customization. Give you something to bop.

John 

It’s something that you know isn’t anything too wild and out there, but it’s this nice little bit of flavor where it’s like, yeah, here’s a little keychain doodad. Especially like when you have the characters in their little costumes and stuff too, where it’s just like, yeah, here’s something that wouldn’t quote unquote happen in the game, but also here’s you know Serra in the like poker dealer outfit and all that. 

Bug 

The theater of the mind.

John 

Exactly. So where can people find you online? And also, where are your games available?

Brian 

Well, you want to head over to X the Everything app.

Bug 

Oh yeah, oh yeah. You and I give it your banking information. Yeah, SSN, face scan, pin code.

Brian 

You can find us at nthcircle.studio, which is our website.

Bug 

I don’t think we’ve done the fancy URL yet. Oh, that is our website. Yes.

Brian 

Yes. Of course, you can find us on BlueSky, which is…

Bug 

Nthcircle.bsky.social.

Brian 

Thank you.

Brian 

We are on Tumblr as ofthedevil and ofthedevil2. I reserved that just in case.

Bug 

So don’t think about it.

Brian 

And you can find us on on Itch as well as nth Circle, but mainly, what you want to do is type in “of the Devil” into Google, and it will take you to the Steam page, and you can play our game for free starting right now.

John 

Right, that’s right. Yeah, that whole chapter zero is free, and yeah, I you know again not to kiss too much ass too much, but I just remember playing through that and being like, “Damn, they didn’t charge for this shit? They’re crazy.” But then I was like, no, I got to get chapter one, and that you know, it sold chapter one to me easily. So yeah, y’all knew what you were doing somehow. All part of the plan.

Bug 

It was kind of a crazy idea, but I think it’s worked out pretty nicely.

John 

For sure.

Brian 

Eternally grateful to anybody who’s given their time.

Bug 

Yes, yes!

John 

And do you have your like personal accounts that you would like that you want to share or nah?

Brian 

I stopped using Twitter, I deleted my Facebook. I haven’t updated my Tumblr homepage. But I’m on Bluesky.

Bug 

But you’ve got a pretty good, pretty good Deltarune live play thread going.

John 

That’s so true. You do.

Brian 

I stopped threading it because I’m bad person.

Bug

Dude…

Brian 

brianNth Circleat Bluesky. You can follow me there.

Bug 

And I am evillittlebug on Bluesky. Don’t follow me other places. I don’t want to use more social media. Don’t make me use Instagram, please. I don’t want to.

John 

God, I’ve been debating with myself to ask this dumb joke question, but now I do it. Where’s the big bug?

Bug 

The big bug?

Brian 

You’re evil little bug.

Bug 

Yeah, yeah.

John 

If there’s an evil little bug, is there an evil big bug or good big bug?

Bug 

of the Devil has seen some big bugs.

Brian 

Oh, of the Devil has had some big bugs at times.

Bug 

Yeah, never forget the floating fish.

Brian 

Floating fish in the Ikariya Gardens. The original version that we put out on Itch was searching for the camera on every frame in order to adjust the character’s shadow.

Bug 

Makes it run really good.

Brian 

That was good. The biggest bug is the amount of space that evillittlebug takes up in our hearts.

John 

Aww.

Bug 

Aww. And in your storage space, those sprites are big. 

Brian 

Ah, the storage space. It’s all sprites everybody, all right?

Bug 

It’s my fault. It’s my fault. I did it.

Brian 

Textures take up space, and it’s all sprites.

Bug 

Wait, yeah. Blame it on the ones that aren’t here. It’s the 3D guys’ fault.

Brian 

3D guys. Every time we put in an optimization, they put more underneath the map. There’s just a bunch of mirrors looking at each other.

Bug 

And rippling water.

Brian 

Rippling water and high detail shadows.

Bug 

All that good stuff. 

John 

The official announcement from nth Circle is: we want to just make your computer run so so hot with our indie visual novel. 

Just in case you want to continue to follow us on Gamesline, we are Gamesline.net on the internet as well as on BlueSky. The average following stuff, we got our Discord server and all that stuff. You can find that on the website. And if you think if you thought I was cool, you can follow me on BlueSky at john.gamesline.net. That would be nice.

Bug 

Gamesline is cool. 

John 

Aw, thank you.

Brian 

If you’re in games journalism that isn’t just how to find the Tonberry in FF7 Remake— which is important work, but…

Bug 

You guys were one of the first to write about of the Devil, so if you’re interested in finding more cool shit like of the Devil, should be reading Gamesline.

John 

Thank you, honestly, seriously. That means a lot.

Yes, thank you for your time, and thank you all for listening. We will try to do more interviews soon, and I’m extremely, extremely excited for more from your team and for the rest of the Devil.

Bug 

Ooh, me too!

Brian 

Thank you. Excited to get it out there.

Edited and hosted by John, transcript by Bran

The post Giving ‘of the Devil’ Its Due with nth Circle Studios – Starlight Car Episode 14 appeared first on Gamesline.

It’s another week and another episode of The Gamesline Podcast. This week, John is joined by both Crystal and Lorelai to talk about everything they can. When he’s not playing Hell Maiden John’s been going for those Retro Achievements in Okage: Shadow King and Mega Man Legends while Lorelai played a little more Moonlight Peaks alongside clowning around in the new Final Fantasy XIV content that dropped. Crystal joined friends to play through Kathy Rain, a bunch of DLE’s, Splatoon Raiders, and she completed the base campaign of Final Fantasy XI. In the news, we talk more about Sony and the elimination of discs.

You can support us on our Patreon, and follow us on social media @gamesline.net, John, Crystal and Lorelai

Also, don’t forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about the show!

If you want to send in questions, send them to our email podcast@gamesline.net!

You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

Our theme song is “Crush” by Melt Channel, from the album Magic is Real.

Edited by Lorelai

The post The Gamesline Podcast Episode 100: Shadow Kings and Lords appeared first on Gamesline.